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June 30, 2009
We're looking for any upcoming or recent accounts of freshman orientation from those who've undergone the process or shortly will. PC skits, "white privilege" games, and the like, we're interested in all of this. Any stories are welcome and encouraged. Write us or urge anyone you know who might be going through the process to write us at editor@campusmind.org
June 29, 2009
The National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) seems finally to have perceived what was in plain view to many people: that most of America's ed schools are mediocre at best, offering curricula that mix lightweight courses, ivory-tower ideology, and minimal clinical exposure of student teachers to real-life classrooms.
NCATE has revised upwards the standards that the 632 college and graduate-level education programs it accredits---a little more than half of the nation's 1,200-odd teacher-training courses of study-- must meet in order to maintain their accreditations. Currently only a few of those schools meet NCATE's highest levels of achievement, and many rate as merely "acceptable"---the lowest level an ed school can meet and still qualify for accreditation. Now, NCATE says, institutions must not be acceptable but "demonstrate continuous improvement toward excellence."
Ed school critics have complained for years that the curricula at many education programs skimp on content knowledge (many history teachers don't know much about history, and many math teachers can barely add or subtract, let alone help youngsters learn those operations). The programs also waste credit hours and ed students' time on trendy theories (Marxism, feminism, and the "pedagogy of the oppressed," just to name a few) and teaching techniques that are light on proven usefulness but heavy on academic fashionableness, whether it's having high-schoolers make a poster in English class instead of writing an essay, so as to cater to "multiple intelligences," or having middle-schoolers who misbehave participate in a "talking circle" instead of having to leave the classroom, all in the name of "restorative justice," one of the latest trends in school discipline.
Continue reading "Are Ed Schools Failing?" »
High schools appear to be steadily dumbing down summer reading assignments, if this Boston Globe report is any indication. One teacher:
..created a cheeky list with titles like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith and Our Dumb World by The Onion. The former is a spoof on the Jane Austen classic that has the Bennet daughters more concerned with self-defense than marriage, and the latter pokes fun at Americans and, well, everything.
Unfortunate, but not really any surprise, if you've paid any attention to college summer reading assignments lately.
June 25, 2009
June 22, 2009
Those who suspect that "Middle Eastern studies" is actually a code word for anti-Israel advocacy have some new evidence to support their position: an entire academic conference scheduled for this week at York University in Toronto that appears to be entirely devoted to the idea of erasing the state of Israel from the map. The conference, scheduled to run from June 22 through June 24, is titled "Israel/Palestine: Mapping Models of Statehood and Prospects for Peace."
Yet the overwhelming majority of the 44 speakers scheduled to read papers, many of whom are not professional scholars (and of those who are, many are not experts in the Middle East but rather in law, film, medicine, and other fields) have only one "model of statehood" in mind for the lands between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean: a single, putatively secular political entity that would encompass all of Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights and in which Jews would be vastly outnumbered by Muslim Arabs and the Jewish identity of the land in which they live would be annihilated. The conference is jointly sponsored by York, Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, and a Canadian government entity, the Social Sciences and Humanities Council, which helped fund the conference with a grant of nearly $20,000.
To get an idea of the one-sided ideological thrust of the conference, you need only click to its website, which prominently features two maps, on neither of which the state of Israel (or any other political entity west of the Jordan) is demarcated or otherwise identified. One of the maps features a zipper, presumably a symbol of a successful effort to stitch up the boundaries of the various contested lands, but it functions visually in a different way: to portray Israel as visually swallowed up.
Continue reading "Erasing Israel At York University" »
June 18, 2009
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June 15, 2009
Two weeks ago a state district judge in Denver issued a ruling that makes it next to impossible for a college in the Colorado state system to revise its faculty handbook so as to make it easier to lay off tenured faculty members in the event of a reduction in employment force, even when state law and the previous version of the faculty handbook itself allow the college to make the revisions.
Denver District Judge Norman D. Haglund's June 8 order, in the case of Saxe vs. Board of Trustees of Metropolitan State College of Denver, which has spent at least five years in the Colorado court system, including an appeal, stated that the "public interest" in the academic freedom of tenured faculty outweighs any public interest that a financially stretched public college might have in preserving flexibility in hiring and firing tenured professors so as to serve its student body more effectively. As Inside Higher Education reported, Haglund effectively said that "not only is tenure a good thing for the professors who enjoy it, it is valuable to the public."
As Inside Higher Ed also reported, the Saxe case is "much more important" than the specific issues at play, which involved the efforts of the trustees of Metro State, a 21,500-student, heavily Hispanic four-year public college in one of Denver's oldest urban neighborhoods, to put into effect a revised faculty handbook in 2003 that rescinded a provision in the previous handbook, issued in 1994, generally requiring that non-tenured faculty be laid off before the jobs of tenured faculty members be touched. The 1994 handbook also required that that college first attempt to place affected tenured professors in other campus jobs, a requirement that the trustees rescinded in 2003. Haglund ruled that the changes amounted to a deprivation of the "vested rights" of tenured Metro State professors.
Continue reading "Does Tenure Mean You Can't Be Laid Off?" »
June 10, 2009
June 8, 2009
Even the dark cloud of the current recession has some silver linings. One of them seems to be an unexpected up-tick in the number of college students majoring in engineering, an academic field that actually leads to production of useful things, such as bridges and medical devices, in contrast to, say, women's studies, which produces mostly angry women. The American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) recently released a report indicating that enrollment in undergraduate engineering rose 4.5 percent in 2008 over 2007, and enrollment in master's-level programs grew by. 5.4 percent. The nearly 93,000 students enrolled in master's engineering programs marked an all-time high.
That's good news on several fronts. One of them, as Andrew Gillen of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor Esther Duflo have noted in different forums, more young people choosing engineering as a career likely means fewer among the brightest of them choosing investment banking, a career that has taken severe hits in the collapse of the exotic instrument-based mortgage market and its related financial crisis
In an October 2008 post on the Vox economics website Duflo took note of the "Harvard and Beyond" survey, a 2006 report sponsored by the Harvard economics department on the career choices and earnings of Harvard graduates over the decades. The survey showed that, thanks to the outsize rewards available to bankers during the boom years of the mid-2000s, "in 2006 those who worked in finance earned almost 3 times more (195%) than other [Harvard graduates], after controlling for grades in college, standardized scores at entry, choice of major, year of graduation, etc.," as Duflo wrote. She added, "What the crisis has made bluntly apparent is that all this intelligence is not employed in a particularly productive way."
Continue reading "A Benefit From The Recession?" »
June 3, 2009
"Should America Tax University Sports?" Read the piece, and an interesting comments thread.
June 1, 2009
Take a look at brief state-by-state overview of student loan forgiveness programs, from the New York Times.
The good news: A survey from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) announcing that "distribution requirements" in undergraduate education are out and "general education" is back.
Translated, that means---or ought to mean---that colleges are reinstating the idea of a core curriculum of essential courses, conveying essential knowledge, that every well-rounded college graduate ought to have under his or her belt. Core curricula, which typically required undergraduates to enroll in one- or two-year sequences of basic courses in history, literature, science, mathematics, foreign languages, and English composition, fell by the wayside during the 1970s and 1980s, on the theory that the traditional core courses were overly Western-centric (a survey course in Western civilization was usually at their heart), and that what students learned wasn't so important as the methodology of the various disciplines involved. Why be forced to take a year-long history survey that covered Egyptian pyramids, classical Greece, and the rise of the modern nation-state when you could learn how historians think by choosing any two history courses from a smorgasbord of historical offerings that might include everything from meso-American civilization to women during World War II? Thus began the "cafeteria" approach to undergraduate requirements that has been the prevailing academic model for at least 30 years, in which students must obtain a specified number of credits in, say, the humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences but are free to decide which individual courses in those fields are to their liking (or are easy or meet at convenient times).
Continue reading "Is The Core Curriculum Really Coming Back?" »
May 26, 2009
Liberty University made a mistake in revoking recognition of its student Democratic club. But the argument put forth by the conservative Christian institution had some substance to it. Mathew Staver, dean of the university, and John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute both argued that religious freedom trumps questions of political balance. That's true. A religious institution is certainly allowed to define its own mission and to promote or reject messages in accordance with that mission. Notre Dame would have been within its rights to decide against giving an abortion-approving president a platform. And no one should be surprised if a Quaker institution rejects a gung-ho militaristic club, or if a Catholic university took a dim view of a Peter Singer infanticide club that reflects the Princeton ethicist's belief that parents should legally have at least 30 days to kill their newborns if they wish. At a public university, almost all clubs and associations should be approved. Religious institutions can and should exert greater control. The Democratic club at Liberty has not been disbanded. But it cannot use the Liberty name and will likely not be eligible for university funding
The problem is that Liberty moved against its Democratic club, not because that club promoted a cause out of sync with the university's religious message, but because club members supported some pro-choice politicians. But not all Democrats approve abortion, and Liberty's message here is, in effect, that there is no point in Democratic students working with Democratic politicians to change their minds on abortion or to work on other causes of common interest. Apparently Republicans are the only party Liberty students should be working with and perhaps voting for. This stance comes close to announcing that Liberty is a permanent appendage of the Republican party.
Another consideration: the campuses have been so battered by censorship and violations of free expression - drowning out of speakers, theft of campus newspapers, the creation of "free speech zones" to confine student demonstrators to tiny and obscure areas - that administrators should bend over backward to give the edge to freedom of expression.
Also, it's worth noting in passing that Republican and conservative clubs on campus are regularly quashed or defunded, often with one or two citations on Google or none at all. Liberty's decision drew more the 300 Google comments and reports. You would almost think that the press and the campuses are less interested in the general issue of free expression than in the question of whether the ox on the left is being gored.
Two years ago, I pointed out that UCLA seemed to be having trouble coping with its many identity-group graduations. Crowded into a single weekend, these ceremonies tend to overlap, though the good news was that multiple graduations were possible: a few students were eligible to graduate four or five times in three days. For instance, a gay student with a Native American father and a Filipino mother could attend the Asian, Filipino and American Indian ceremonies, plus the mainstream graduation and the Lavender event for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered students.
Many websites linked to the article, causing some heartburn at UCLA and bringing about some change. Not the elimination of segregated graduations, of course, since identity-group dorms, clubs, courses, freshmen orientations and graduations are considered important on the modern campus. No, UCLA simply changed the word "graduation" to "celebration," and said the events were simply parties. Now graduating students can attend several tribal commencement events in one weekend, but can graduate only once. Not all groups got the message, though. The official UCLA commencement site refers to a MEChA de UCLA "celebration," but the Latino site calls it a graduation.
These tribal ceremonies are common in California, rarer elsewhere. Lavender graduations are held at Princeton, Duke, Michigan, the University of Chicago and more than a hundred other colleges and universities. Princeton and Harvard sponsor Latino graduation and Princeton holds a Pan-African graduation as well. UCLA staged an Iranian graduation a decade ago, but dropped it. The University of Arizona features a Southeast Asian graduation and Cal State, Long Beach has a Cambodian graduation celebration.
Since separatism is a way of life on campus, chances are identity-group graduations will keep splintering. Caribbean and African students may tire of being lumped with American blacks. Muslims may yearn for their own graduations and Pacific Islanders, a susbstantial population on some California campuses, could decide they have little in common with Vietnamese and Filipinos. There is a natural brake on this proliferation, however. The number of students attending can be small. The University of Michigan, which invented Lavender graduations has more than 36,000 undergrads, but only 40 students attended the tenth annual event in 2004. Cal State, Long Beach, expected only 20 this year.
May 20, 2009
If you thought last fall's staggering endowment drops were the end of collegiate financial troubles, you haven't been paying attention. Another minefield awaited - application season. It wasn't simply colleges that were feeling a pinch, so were their future customers. After decades of tuition increases that failed to dent application numbers, colleges were suddenly forced to contemplate declining enrollment as parents wondered whether $40,000-a-year for only-average colleges was really worth it. So profilgate universities would lose students to thriftier (and cheaper) peers? Well, partically. The issue is complicated - take a look at the developments that lead up to this application cycle. .
A number of elite institutions, in the last two years, have undertaken significant expansions of already-generous financial aid for lower and middle income students that have not been scaled back, and in fact loom even more attractive for a certain demographic of less-affluent applicant, for whom elite colleges are in fact likely to be cheaper than all but the most affordable public institutions.
One casualty of declining endowments has been a scaling back of financial aid at some colleges, or the tacit statement that the ability to pay full tuition can increase an applicant's chances. This no doubt influenced some choices - improved chances of admission in paying for a full-ride? Bowdoin, a "need-blind" institution, has expanded its class by 50 over the next five years - slots imagined for transfer and foreign students - who do not receive "need blind" consideration. As Robert Sevier, an enrollment consultant, told the New York Times, "If you are a student of means or ability, or both, there has never been a better year."
Continue reading "Colleges: Who Had The Money To Apply?" »
May 13, 2009
May 12, 2009
Last week the Wall Street Journal asked several college Presidents to answer an essay question from their own application. Presidents from Barnard to Wesleyan participated. Take a look at their entries. Would you admit these students?
May 7, 2009
Donald Downs appeared here in New York at an event co-sponsored by the Pope Center and the Manhattan Institute on academic freedom, presenting his fascinating new paper "Academic Freedom: What It Is, What It Isn't, and How to Tell the Difference."
Listen to John Leo interviewing Donald Downs in a new podcast.
May 6, 2009
Last Friday, a 6-hour conference at the City University of New York (CUNY) graduate center examined "rightist efforts, from fiscally or socially conservative movements to hate groups." It apparently raised no eyebrows, though if the meeting had set out to examine "leftist efforts, from fiscally and socially liberal movements to the Unabomber and animal rights terrorists," people might have wondered if it was a legitimate academic meeting or a highly partisan event posing as just another academic seminar.
No need to wonder. The title of the conference reveals the all-out partisanship: "The Right in These Times: Understanding and Combating Contemporary Shifts to the Right." So does the cast of characters. They include David Harvey, a Marxist geographer at CUNY; Columbia University assistant professor of anthropology Nicholas DeGenova (notorious for wanting to see "a million Mogadishus," i.e., the slaughter of tens of millions of U.S. troops); Attorney Eunice C. Lee, a fellow at the ACLU working on immigrant issues; and Ellen Gertzog, listed as "affiliate security," whatever that might be, at Planned Parenthood. Apparently no one on the right, or even the center, was on the program.
Also attending was Lawrence Rosenthal, executive director of the Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements at Berkeley, the subject of a long and glowing news article six weeks ago in the New York Times. The article stressed that the center was a purely academic one, quoting one professor as saying, "we really like to think of ourselves as scholars in the academy," working on evaluating these groups without any agendas. "We're not a political organization." Yet here was the Lawrence, the executive director, lending a hand to a meeting that clearly had a political agenda.
Another troubling factor is that three of the five sponsors of the conference were departments of CUNY, a public institution that presumably shouldn't be pursuing partisan "combat" on or off its own premises. The CUNY sponsors, joined by Planned Parenthood and People for the American way, were the CUNY graduate center Ph.D program in anthropology, the CUNY Center for the Humanities and the CUNY Center for Place, Culture and Politics.
Continue reading "An Academic(?) Conference to Combat the Right" »
Newspapers are folding right and left---the Rocky Mountain News in February, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in March, the Boston Globe any day now, it would seem---and, according to the American Journalism Review, some 15 percent of the newsroom jobs, about 5,000 of them, last year (with another 7,500 vanishing so far this year) at newspapers across the country assaulted by an Internet that has gobbled up not only their readers but their advertisers.
Still, until just recently---this year, to be exact---at many of the nation's journalism schools you'd think it was still 1973. That was the year the Watergate reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for the Washington Post helped topple a sitting president. Back then every college English major in the country wanted to work for a big-city print newspaper like the Post and become a celebrity investigative reporter like Woodward and Bernstein, nemeses of Richard Nixon, who resigned in 1974 during the Watergate scandal. Now, however, even Rick Redfern, the bearded, insufferable Woodward-Bernstein clone in "Doonesbury," has lost his job, the movie State of Play, starring Russell Crowe as yet another old-school investigative reporter doing homage to Woodward and Bernstein, tanked at the box office, and newspapers are hoping for a government bailout (so far resisted by the Obama administration) on the theory that they perform a public service that taxpayers ought to subsidize. Journalism schools, which once cultivated the mystique of the pure-of-heart reporter speaking truth to power, are hastily revamping their antiquated curricula to conform to a completely different business model---part of which seems to be recognizing for the first time that journalism is a business, not a priest-like calling.
It's amazing how long it took for the changes to come. At the Columbia School of Journalism, the nation's flagship J-school, Reporting and Writing 1, the entry level course required of everyone who goes through Columbia's graduate-level program, has scarcely changed its intensively print-focused content since Columbia instituted the course in 1971, around the time that Woodward and Bernstein went to work for the Washington Post. Only this coming fall term, under Bill Grueskin, a former managing editor at WSJ.com who is new dean of academic affairs, will Columbia be completely overhauling Reporting and Writing to emphasize blogging, slideshows, and other multimedia skills. According to a New York magazine blog, Columbia underwent an "existential crisis" when the Times announced last winter that its New York City-focused blog "The Local" would be assisted primarily by journalism students from the City University of New York (which has an intensive new-media curriculum and no longer requires its students to specialize in any particular journalistic format), not the venerable Columbia.
Continue reading "J-Schools Struggle To Cope" »
May 4, 2009
Every few weeks or so a new marginalized group is discovered on campus, requiring new bursts of emotional inclusion and sometimes a demand for special housing and curriculum change as well. At Cornell the latest people revealed to be suffering discomfort are transfer students. "Study Finds Transfers Feel Marginalized on Campus," said the headline in the Cornell Sun. As is often the case in marginalization reports, evidence is scant. Cornell, for some reason, once grouped all transfers together in one house, but now this form of transfer togetherness is gone and the constituency is scattered. A survey of transfer students who never lived in the special housing shows that 63.3 percent feel positive or somewhat positive about their first year at Cornell and 27.9 percent feel negative or somewhat negative. This is probably close to the positive-negative experiences of most freshmen on most campuses. Even so, many students at Cornell think there is a serious issue here, with snobbish and privileged non-transfers looking down on transfers as second-class citizens. Surely, they think, it is time for subtle, institutionalized transfer bias to be addressed.
Atheists are also an emerging marginalized group on campus. An article last month in the Chronicle of Higher Education, by Kathleen Goodman and John Mueller, depicted campus atheists as cringing and fearful, reluctant to talk about their non-belief and in great need of help from college administrations. In fact, atheism today is a militant and confident movement, producing a series of best-selling books and creating many argumentative Web sites including Secular Left and Secular Right. But marginalization status on campus requires a more defensive and beleaguered profile. Goodman and Mueller make the conventional recommendations for therapeutic intervention in marginalization cases. They call for administrations to create a welcoming environment, urge colleges to include atheism in student programming, ensure that atheists are able to explore their inner development, and, of course, "create safe spaces that are 'atheists only' for students." This must mean some sort of atheist student center or housing where nonbelievers can relax in safety with their own kind, without having to mix with all those bullying Christians, Muslims and Jews. Cornell set up a transfer house, so why not an atheist house, or even a transferring-atheists house? But Secular Discrimination Report an atheist Web site, sees dark days ahead: "Unfortunately, it is likely that any institutionalized attempts to make atheists feel the least bit welcome on campus will be fought tooth and nail by those with an irrational hatred and fear of those who do not share their beliefs, or any beliefs." This is a standard view on campus these days-- separatist, victim-oriented and sure that religious and mainstream Americans are bigots at heart. It's time for students and administrators alike to acknowledge that not all groups needs to be coddled and protected in order to thrive. Quivering sensitivity may play well in campus politics, but it surely infantilizes many and ill prepares them for the real world.
April 27, 2009
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill finally got it right. Instead of letting radical protesters chase an invited conservative speaker out of his lecture hall--as they did with former U.S. Congressman Tom Tancredo on April 14-- when the radicals tried the same stunt a little over a week later, on April 22, against another conservative former congressman, Virgil Goode, UNC-Chapel Hill had enough campus police in place to make prompt arrests of six protesters who tried to drown out Goode's speech, forestalling further disruption.
The university had also moved the venue of Goode's speech from the crowded lecture hall where Tancredo had appeared to a large auditorium in the student union that allowed some physical distance (along with a lectern) between Goode and his antagonists. According to Jay Schalin, who reported on Goode's speech for the American Thinker, Goode, who served as Republican congressman from Virginia from 1997 to 2009, was able to finish his speech setting forth his opposition to illegal immigration and racial preferences and even win the respect of some non-protesting students in the audience who said they didn't agree with most of Goode's views but disapproved of the rudeness of the radicals who disrupted his talk.
Both Goode and Tancredo, a former Colorado congressman who briefly ran for the GOP presidential nomination in 2007 on an anti-illegal immigration platform, had been invited to the UNC-Chapel Hill campus by a new conservative student group, Youth for Western Civilization (YWC), which currently has chapters on seven college campuses. YWC opposes both racial preferences and multiculturalism, which means that it has been branded as racist and white-supremacist by several left-of-center organizations, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, which put the group on its "Hatewatch" list as an alleged ally of white nationalists. Regarding YWC's stated commitment to America's Western heritage, Frank Dobson Jr., director of a black cultural center at Vanderbilt, where a YWC chapter protested the university's failure to include Western culture in its Multicultural Awareness Month celebration in March, told the Nashville Tennessean, "When I hear a statement like that, I have to wonder---is it a euphemism for white civilization?"
Continue reading "How To Prevent Speech From Being Suppressed" »
April 24, 2009
Don't miss this video on the notorious freshman indoctrination program at the University of Delaware. It was produced by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and is in the running to make the top ten most-watched videos of the month. It includes the program's leading hits, including mandatory hatred of America, the importance of talking with marshmellows in your mouth and the teaching that all whites are racist. Also check out this prize-winning article on the program by Adam Kissel of FIRE: "Please Report to Your Resident Assistant to Discuss Your Sexual Identity---It's Mandatory!" and my own Minding the Campus article on the subject "Brainwashing 101".
April 23, 2009
This is a letter to the editor of the Cornell Daily Sun, responding to a Sun report today about a campus Christian group apparently violating anti-discrimination rules by not allowing a gay student to become a leader.
To the Editor:
Alex Berg ("Outcry Erupts from Alleged Homophobia" April 23) seems to think the Chris Donohoe case is simply a matter of bias and homophobia. Actually it isn't. Both anti-discrimination rules and freedom of religion are important, but you should know that religious groups hold the trump cards here and have been winning most of these clashes on campuses around the country. The reason is that no court, no political official, certain no university or student panel, can tell a religious group what to believe or insist that someone who does not accept the group's belief system be accepted as a leader.
The first time I noticed this kind of dispute was at Tufts in 2000 in a case very similar to the one at Cornell today. A female student, running for office in a campus Evangelical group, said she had been struggling with her sexuality, faced the fact that she was bisexual and had come to the conclusion that Christian belief is compatible with a homosexual life. The Group said she could stay as a member--in fact they said they loved her-- but couldn't become an officer. The Christian group was de-funded, de-recognized, not even allowed to use bulletin boards. Tufts backed down quickly when the concept of religious freedom was explained and a few lawyers for the Evangelicals showed up. Conservative Christian groups may be wrong about homosexuality, but every group based on a set of beliefs is entitled to control its own message. Now the pattern is for universities to allow loopholes in anti-bias rules for "sincerely held religious beliefs" (Ohio State's wording).
And it's not just religious organizations. If every student is eligible to join and rise in any group, what would prevent a hundred or so Republicans flooding into a Democratic club and reversing the group's message? Do we really think that Hillel is bound to accept Holocaust-deniers or that a science club must allow flat-earth officers?
John Leo
Editor, MindingtheCampus.com
April 17, 2009
Yesterday, our own John McWhorter participated in a debate on Affirmative Action hosted by the Miller Center. Other participants included Julian Bond and Lee Bollinger. You can watch it here.
April 15, 2009
The flap over the New School occupation last Friday continues apace this week, with a letter from New School President Bob Kerrey to the New York Times, pointing out omissions in their reporting.
Your account of what happened at the New School on Friday glossed over some very critical information that puts the whole event in context.
The 30 protesters (not all of whom were New School students) broke into a locked building. Wearing ski masks and carrying crowbars, bolt-cutters, Mace, paint, hundreds of feet of security chains, duct tape, Kryptonite locks and rope, they frightened and stole from a maintenance worker in the early morning. They injured a security guard. They vandalized property...
If you hadn't noticed, last Friday morning, a number of students, mainly from the New School, occupied and barricaded themselves in a New School building cafeteria. In marked contrast to the lengthy initial demands of the New York University protesters in February, their requirements were seemingly simple. According to their blog, theirs was "an occupation without a list of demands, besides the obvious. Kerry and [Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer James] Murtha need to go. After that a news system needs to be set that accounts for student authority over how our money is spent and how our school is operated." A fuller account later in their statement suggested a more expansive mandate:
The most important demand from that occupation [a previous effort] was not met. Bob Kerry and Jim Murtha did not resign - in fact, they were able to save some face by agreeing to some of the demands. Unfortunately, Kerrey is trying to dodge these commitments. One example: the creation of the Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) committee, which will make the New School's investments public with the ability to override what the school supports financially (Iraq contractors, the military, etc) is being intentionally dragged through bureaucratic red tape. Kerrey is resorting to a tactic that he has used for years: letting students graduate before they can get anything done. We need a structural change at the New School so the we can have authority over the space we use to learn, study, socialize, and live.
Continue reading "More On The New School Occupation" »
April 14, 2009
Virginia Tech has backed down from its attempt to force a diversity loyalty oath on its faculty. The credit goes to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the National Association of Scholars (NAS), with a strong assist from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). Under proposed guidelines, Virginia Tech faculty members would have put promotion, tenure and merit raises at risk by not accepting and promoting a diversity political agenda, a clear violation of academic freedom and freedom of conscience.
An account on FIRE's site says, "In March, Virginia Tech's College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences (CLAHS) concluded voting on new rules for faculty merit raises, promotion, and tenure that would require faculty to demonstrate fealty to a highly politicized definition of diversity in their research, teaching, and personal enrichment activities. The results of the vote have not been made public.In an e-mail today, however, (April 14) Steger wrote that this proposal is "no longer under consideration." A Virginia Tech spokesman confirmed that "the provost has asked the college to rework its proposed guidelines."
A search of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) turned up no protest of the coercive Virginia Tech plan.
This morning Todd Zywicki briefly noted at the Volokh Conspiracy, that he had been denied a second term on the Dartmouth Board of Trustees. It's difficult not to conclude that Dartmouth is pruning board dissenters. Zywicki's personal statement about the decision on his website provides a history of the source of his removal:
..From 1891 to 1990, Dartmouth's alumni held the right to reelect their Trustees based on their performance during their first term. A fair process. But in 1990 a small group of alumni insiders transferred that power from the alumni to the Board itself. The date is not a coincidence: the tenure of Dr. John Steel '54, the first petition trustee elected to the Board, expired that year. The new regime---that the Board sits in judgment of itself---was adopted precisely so that any future petition Trustees could be removed after one term.
Since then, the prospect of removal at the end of their elected term is held over Trustees' heads from their first day on the Board. Even those elected by the alumni specifically to provide an independent voice are aware that they must toe the party line or risk expulsion at the end of their first term.
Zywicki pointedly did not toe that party line during his term. He mentions "harsh language and judgments" that he offered during a speech two years ago at the John William Pope Center (and apologized for) yet there's little doubt that his open and oppositional status was far greater a problem to the university, and to his chances for re-selection. He was elected as an insurgent petition candidate, arguing for a focus on undergraduate education at odds with the research and expansion plans of the administration and prior trustees (read more from 2007). He opposed the administration's (eventually successful) plan to reduce, proportionally, the number of elected members (by means of doubling the number of appointed trustees).
He supported a lawsuit filed by the Dartmouth Association of Alumni that alleged that the college had abrogated its contractual arrangement with alumni by altering the composition of the Board of Trustees. When a slate of candidates was run against the Association leadership that pledged to end the lawsuit, he argued directly against them (here and here). Zywicki was an inconvenient trustee; it's little wonder that the Board refused to reelect him, and why they would provide no explanation. The years 2004-2007 saw four successful petition candidates with ideas at odds with those of the college administration elected to the Dartmouth Board. Not content with packing that body with extra members, the college seems now intent on quashing any remainders of these years of dissent.
In the early 90s we noticed that Brown and Yale were conducting separate freshman orientations for non-white students. Since then this casual segregation of new students has spread widely and has come to be seen as normal. Typically minority students arrive a week early and are instructed on how to cope with a historically white institution before the whites appear. The theory seems to be that arriving minority students need special protection and a thorough race-based analysis of themselves and American culture before facing Caucasian classmates. By the time the whites show up, minority students have bonded with one another, thus reinforcing for yet another college class the identity politics and separatism so dominant on the campuses today.
Over the years, separate orientations have gradually come to be seen as analogous to separate water fountains. So the new trend is to blur the enforced segregation a bit. Mount Holyoke has just announced a new plan: a special orientation for whites. This fall whites and non-whites will have parallel orientation programs, meeting separately and "exploring their own racial identity and thinking about power and privilege," said Elizabeth Braun, dean of student at Mount Holyoke, then coming together as an "inclusive" group discussing (white) power and privilege. Braun said the college will look for white freshmen "with an interest in anti-racism," as if that were a hard -to-find hobby on an elite campus today. According to Inside Higher Ed, "she said she viewed this as a valuable alternative to eliminating special orientations for minority students." This means that even on a relentlessly PC campus like Mount Holyoke, pressure is rising against segregating freshmen along racial lines. That's a good sign. A better sign would be a move away from freshman race-and-gender indoctrination and just have a normal orientation.
April 13, 2009
Here's a sign of colleges' desperate need for tuition cash to make up for shrunken endowments and less generous donors in today's economic downturn: many institutions are slinking away from their vaunted "need-blind" admissions policies that admits applicants deemed qualified regardless of their ability to pay and makes up any shortfalls with scholarships and other aid.
One of the first to announce a partial suspension of need-blind as the April college-acceptance season approached was Tufts University. Tufts, in Medford, Mass., is a highly selective private university, but as at most private universities, the costs of attending Tufts are steep: nearly $39,000 a year in undergraduate tuition alone. In years past, according to the Princeton Review, Tufts has lived up to its need-blind policy by giving some form of financial aid to 41 percent of its undergrads.
This year Tufts, also like many private universities affected by a recession-induced scramble by potential students and their parents to enroll in cheaper public or close-to-home institutions, suffered a drop in applications for its 2009-2010 entering freshman class (the decline was 4 percent in Tufts' case), but it accepted nearly as many applicants as it did last year (the decline in acceptances was less than 1 percent, Tufts reported). That was one sign that Tufts was willing to relax its tough admissions standards, if only slightly, in the interest of maintaining its entering class size of about 1,300 students with its attendant cash flow. Then, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Lee Coffin told the Tufts Daily that the university's admissions committee had jettisoned its need-blind policy in considering the final 850 applications---about 5 percent of the 15,038 total. Coffin told the daily that Tufts had simply run out of scholarship money. As might be expected, part of the reason for the change in policy was that applicants' recession-strapped families were requesting larger amounts of aid. Nonetheless, Tufts' concomitant willingness to dip farther down into its applicant pool in order to maintain the same number of entering freshmen as last year indicates that Tufts needs tuition dollars as much as some of its students need scholarships.
Continue reading ""Need Blind" Admissions In Trouble" »
April 10, 2009
Students occupied a New School building early this morning and police have now entered, with the evident aim of removing the occupants, the New York Times reports.
They seem to have followed the lead of February's NYU protesters in advancing a list of highly disparate demands:
The students adopted a list of eight demands including a greater student voice in university affairs and the resignations of Mr. Kerrey, a former senator from Nebraska; James Murtha, the executive vice president; and Robert Millard, treasurer of the board of trustees, who students said was connected to a private security company working in Iraq.
It seems clear that these will not be met.
April 8, 2009
The nine-campus University of California system is reducing the number of freshman admissions because of the financial crisis. But "underrepresented groups"---non-Asian-American minorities---shouldn't worry at all. Apparently all the cuts will come from white and Asian-American applicants. Down in the ninth paragraph of a 13-paragraph Associated Press story in the San Jose Mercury News, we learn this: "Admission offers to California residents increased 2 percent for African-Americans, 4 percent for Latinos and 21 percent for American Indians. Offers remained relatively unchanged for Asian-Americans and declined 6 percent for whites."
In raw numbers, compared with fall of 2008, admission offers for this fall are +59 for Latinos, +71 for American Indians, +73 for Pacific Islanders, +290 for African-Americans - 241 for Asian-Americans and -1236 for whites. The category of "other" is - 220, and those who "declined to state" race or ethnicity, believed to be mostly whites who don't want to play the racial game, is - 861. How can the system get away with these selective racial and ethnic cuts? Doesn't California's Proposition 209 make affirmative action in public college admissions illegal? Good questions.
April 6, 2009
Finally, it would seem, colleges are doing something realistic to cut costs in this era of tight budgets and shrunken endowments: they're scaling back or declining to expand their Ph.D. programs. Inside Higher Education reported last week that a range of institutions, including Emory, Columbia, Brown, New York University, and the University of South Carolina plan to reduce---by as much as 40 percent at Emory--the number of students they will admit this coming fall into their doctoral programs in arts and sciences. All those colleges cite recession-mandated budget cuts as the chief reason for the planned shrinkage.
Doctoral programs are expensive in every way you can think of. Unlike undergraduates and students enrolled in professional programs aimed at imparting specific career skills, nearly all of whom pay full tuition freight for their schooling (or have their tuition paid by parents, employers, or loans), Ph.D. candidates are typically subsidized by the universities that enroll them. Those subsidies can range from a few years of free tuition at the poorest institutions to living stipends that can exceed $30,000 a year at top research universities. (Universities recoup some of this by employing graduate students as a minimum-wage labor force, filling slots as teaching and research assistants.)
Those are the direct costs. The chief indirect cost is professors' time. Salaried professors are paid the same, use up about the same amount of campus overhead, and receive the same credit toward their three-course-a-semester teaching loads for overseeing a tiny, highly specialized graduate-level seminar as for a large lecture course that might draw hundreds of undergraduates with their attendant academic problems. As Kevin Carey of Education Sector has pointed out, lower-level lecture courses are campus cash cows when you multiply enrollment by tuition, and the steep opportunity costs of having five students in your class when you could have 200 can make a doctoral program look like luxury a college can live without during hard times. Added to that are decades' worth of vast overproduction of Ph.D.'s, especially in the humanities, in relation to the academic job market for their services. William Pannapacker, an English professor at Hope College in Holland, Mich., who writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education under the pseudonym Thomas H. Benton, extrapolated data from the Modern Language Association (MLA) 2000 newsletter to conclude that for every five people who enter a Ph.D. program in literature, only two emerge with doctorates after the long slog of five to ten years that the process can take. Of those two, only one finds a tenure-track teaching job at a college. The other one typically hacks together a subsistence living as a $3,000-a-course adjunct or a $10,000-a-semester visiting lecturer for a few years, then gives up, unable to compete for a permanent placement with the cohorts of fresher-minted (although equally marginally employable) Ph.D.s emerging from doctoral programs every June.
Continue reading "Pruning Ph.D's" »
April 3, 2009
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) took its customary bystander role in the Ward Churchill case, as it regularly does when academic integrity is the issue and the evidence of malfeasance is obvious. But among the many mealy-mouthed statements by AAUP president Cary Nelson, one was surely true: "Colorado knew what it was getting when they hired him."
Nelson would not say so, but his statement can be translated as follows: if you hire, purely for diversity reasons, an unprepared, erratic, ideologue with no sense of fairness and no academic credentials except a BA in communications, you should not be surprised by what you get. Churchill's main claim to a teaching post and tenure at the University of Colorado was a claim of Indian blood---no evidence for that, though---with the claims of various fractions of such blood shifting from interview to interview.
A jury in Denver ruled yesterday that the university had fired Churchill for his political views, not for his hideous and embarrassing "scholarship." It is surely true, as Churchill claimed, that the university finally began to investigate Churchill's work after his 2001 denunciation of 9/11 victims as "little Eichmann's" drew wide attention in speech four years later at Hamilton College in upstate New York. If the university had been only mildly alert to the hoax-scholarship Churchill was churning out during his nearly three decades on the faculty, it would now not be saddled with the prospect of having to take an egregious falsifier and plagiarist back on campus.
Churchill has been investigated by several panels of academics. The findings were clear: he was guilty of repeated and intentional academic misconduct, including appropriating and distorting the work of others, and citing himself (under an assumed name) as an outside source supporting his work. Churchill has proven that he shouldn't be teaching anywhere. He is a disgrace, but so is the university for letting the diversity ethic force him on campus.
April 1, 2009
We belatedly came across two free-speech articles this morning, one a year old, the other a week old. The year-old story is vaguely similar to the current Obama-at-Notre-Dame issue. John Corvino, a gay ex-Catholic who teaches philosophy at Wayne State, was invited to speak on gay rights at Aquinas College, a Catholic institution in Grand Rapids, Michigan. On the morning of the long-planned event, Corvino got a phone call from the college postponing his talk. A week later the talk was canceled. The president of the college said, "We want to explore the issue from an academic perspective, not from the perspective of an antagonistic attack to core Catholic values." But Corvino had not sounded antagonistic, and professed deep respect for the Catholic faith, though he no longer believes much of it. "Homosexuality is an issue on which many thoughtful and decent people still disagree," he said. "Ignoring this disagreement won't make it go away, so instead let's strive for productive dialogue." The dialogue occurred off-campus. Students found a site and Corvino delivered his talk, thus saving the honor of the college.
The week-old article, which we put up in our Commentary section today, appeared on the Philadelphia Inquirer site, headlined---sensibly enough---"Colleges Can Handle Controversy Without Squelching Free Speech." In the article, Charles Mitchell, program director of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, congratulated Millersville University for not canceling a speech by William Ayers, the ex-Weatherman. The university's invitation to Ayers touched off an uproar of protest, some of it from state legislators. To its great credit, Indiana University of Pennsylvania also refused to withdraw a speaking invitation, this one to Ward Churchill. Mitchell wrote that no college is obliged to invite Ayers or Ward Churchill, but once invited, they can't be disinvited for fear of controversy.
Exactly so. Most of the speakers disinvited by colleges and universities are on the right, given the politics of our campuses, but conservatives who speak up for their own should make clear that they stand for free speech across the spectrum. That happened when a political move to fire Edwin Chemerinsky as dean of the new law school at the University of California, Irvine. Many of Chemerinsky's loudest defenders were conservatives and libertarians who don't much like his politics.
One the problems with colleges lecture programs is that faculty and students often tend to ignore balance, often because the intellectual currents on campus flow only one way. At Columbia University, for example, it's a sure bet that any speaker canceled or shouted down is either on the right or in disfavor with the left. The Minutemen leaders, instance, were invited, shouted down and canceled, then re-invited a year later and canceled again, all without a peep of protest from the left. Mitchell suggests that faculty and students submit a lit of proposed speakers well in advance, so administrations can make sure a range of perspectives is considered. That sounds right. Uproars are less likely if a genuine variety of speakers is approved and listed for all to see.
March 25, 2009
Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) is attempting to force faculty to take an ideological oath to "diversity." Promotion and tenure will depend on a willingness to embrace the vague but militant ideology dear to the left side of the political spectrum. Peter Wood broke this astonishing story on the National Association of Scholars site, and today the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education called on Virginia Tech President Charles W. Steger to abandon the plan as a clear violation of academic freedom and the constitutional right to freedom of conscience. Peter Wood's article says the diversity message from Virginia Tech is "Get in your group and stay there." He wrote: "We---the race experts, the disability advocates, the heads of women's centers, and LGBTQ 'safe space' allies, the folks who are making careers out of convincing you that you are a victim and need our advocacy---we will look out for you. And part of looking out for you is that we will browbeat the faculty into going along with our spiel. If they don't go along, it will cost them their jobs or their promotions." Now let's hear from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and faculty around the country.
March 23, 2009
This past February about 50 disability activists, many of them in wheelchairs, held a demonstration at the Beverly Hills headquarters of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The object of the protest was the humanitarian award to be given at the Academy Awards ceremony on Feb. 22 to comedian Jerry Lewis for his 42 years of Labor Day fund-raising telethons on behalf of the Muscular Dystrophy Association. The protesters sang satirical songs denigrating the "pity" for the disabled they claimed the telethons represent, waved posters bearing such slogans as "Jerry Lewis---No Oscar," and bantered with the receptionists, security guards, and Beverly Hills police officers who tried to persuade them to leave the premises without any bad publicity-generating arrests.
The protest---along with similar nano-scale demonstrations in other U.S. cities---barely registered on the frontal cortexes of most Americans. The 82-year-old Lewis got his award, and the entertainment press devoted most of its attention to the possibility of a catfight between Brad Pitt's serial consorts Jennifer Anniston and Angelina Jolie, both of whom were present in dishy evening gowns at the ceremony. Those who did catch the protests on television might have asked themselves, "Huh? Why are these guys protesting against a guy who raises millions of dollars to cure what they've got?" Nonetheless, "The Trouble With Jerry," as the movement's advocates call it, is currently being touted as a public-relations triumph for the field of "disability studies," an academic discipline that is less than 20 years old but has already generated hundreds of college courses, dozens of textbooks, doctoral programs at Syracuse University and elsewhere, and its own scholarly journal, the Disability Studies Quarterly.
At the Conference on College Composition and Communication in mid-March, Margaret Price, an assistant professor of English and disability-studies specialist at Spelman College, pointed out (according to Inside Higher Education) that disabilities-studies scholars, at universities and elsewhere, had helped full-time disability-rights activists put together the Lewis protests in Beverly Hills and elsewhere. "[I]if we are not willing to get a little messier in the ways that we engage with our potential audiences in national arenas, what we say may end up smelling of bulls---t," Price declared in language not usually associated with academia.
Continue reading "The Latest PC Fad - "Disability Studies"" »
March 18, 2009
Years ago, assigned to cover a national meeting of sociologists for a major newspaper, I asked the convention press office to get me a copy of every paper to be delivered. The press officer looked thunderstruck but complied, handing over several hundred papers in a stack more than three feet high. I read them all at warp speed, but not one seemed interesting enough to write about. The main reason is that papers prepared for an academic convention are usually dashed off quickly in a simple effort to justify travel expenses. They rarely attract attention and even more rarely are intended to.
On the other hand, papers written for academic journals, which count toward hiring, promotion and tenure, are generally treated with more respect. But not always. Back in the late 70s and early 80s, one researcher churned out 50 to 60 academic papers, using the time-saving method of copying a paper from one obscure journal and sending it to another as his own work. The success of this unique form of recycling depends on a small, inattentive readership and the realization that a lot of academic writing has more to do with personal career-building than with communicating new insights to fellow professionals.
Mark Bauerlein of Emory University, who writes frequently for this site, thinks academics in his field (literature) short-change their students by devoting far more effort to the mandate of "publish or perish" than to interaction with students. His argument is succinctly summarized in the title of his new article, "Professors on the Production Line, Students on Their Own" (from the American Enterprise Institute's American Education Project). Not everyone will agree with his broad premise that students are disengaged because their teachers spend too much time researching and typing. A long series of books and papers on the widespread lack of student achievement and attentiveness---the most dazzling of which is Peter Sacks's 1996 book, "Generation X Goes to College"---generally argue that today's students are fully capable of achieving disengagement on their own..
Bauerlein agues that the enormous production of academic writing---it rose three times faster that the rapidly rising number of students and professors from 1959 to 1979---is in large part unnecessary. Once the work of Whitman and Melville's was underanalyzed, but now those authors have been done to death and we live in a period of pointless production. He writes: "Nobody off-campus declared, 'We don’t have enough books on Walt Whitman---we need more!'" Demand for academic books is low, he writes, and getting lower all the time. Many, perhaps most, sell only 200 or 300 copies. But most academic work is never meant to excite demand among the general public. And writing about an established author is not just piling on or working a common theme to death. Insights change as more material is found and as reputations rise and fall---the refurbishing of John Donne and the relative eclipse of Rudyard Kipling are examples. New material on Yeats and Frost has enhanced their reputations, though work on them had already been considerable.
Bauerlein wants colleges and universities to lower the demand for research productivity and encourage more time spent with students. He wants foundations to shift some grants toward teaching, and colleges to stop demanding an academic book as a price for gaining tenure. He writes, "We need honest and open public acknowledgement that the scholarly enterprise has lost its rationale, that central parts of the humanities are in real trouble, and that the surest way to restoration lies in a renewed commitment to the undergraduate student." Most of us would agree with that, so long as scholarly writing is not seen as a primary cause of student disengagement.
Philanthropy profiles the VERITAS Fund, among other organizations, in a look at new efforts to revive civic education on American campuses. Take a look.
The Daily Beast offers several interesting features on "Getting In."
Read "How Obama's College Plan Hurts My Generation" on rising college costs, "The Year to Bribe Your Way In" on this year's increased efficacy of donation as an admissions (ahem) tool, and other stories on cheap colleges and application strategies.
March 16, 2009
Whenever you read the words "for the 21st century" in connection with some educational topic, you know it's time to run for cover. That's because "21st century" is edu-speak for "letting your students mess around on computers instead of teaching them something substantive." The latest manifestation of this seems to be a report released at the March 11-14 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in San Francisco that called on English teachers, including those who teach freshman comp, to quit emphasizing the essays and formal papers that are the traditional mainstays of academic writing in favor of whatever's au courant online. Five years ago, that meant blogging, e-mailing, and maybe setting up your own personal website. Nowadays it means texting, twittering, and Facebook. As the posted announcement of the report by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) stated, "students don't recognize their self-directed, often online, out-of-school writing as writing that counts as much as the writing they do in school."
As Emory University English professor and frequent Minding the Campus contributor Mark Bauerlein wrote on March 9 in his blog for the Chronicle of Higher Education, "NCTE...aims to ennoble leisure writing, to set it on the same level of academic writing," even though, as Bauerlein points out, the text-messages and twitters "aren't graded, they don't require research, they don't observe grammar and punctuation and spelling, and they address peers, not adults." Bauerlein is especially critical of the report's recommendation "that teachers bring 21st-century writing habits (texting etc.) into the classroom."
Bauerlein's blog-post elicited a riposte from Kathleen Yancey, an English professor at Florida State Univesity who had written the previous NCTE report, titled "Writing in the 21st Century," in which she outlined a "call to action" that would have English teachers "support all forms of 21st century literacies, inside schools and outside of schools." In her response to Bauerlein, Yancey asserted that "all texts"---including the texts that texting produces---"observe grammar by definition" (she might have been referring to this Lolcats posting), and she scolded Bauerlein for daring to "privilege...writing to adults" as "more valuable than writing to peers." After all, Yancey said, Martin Luther King Jr. didn't write his famously eloquent "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" as a classroom assignment that he hoped might win him an "A" in freshman English. Yancey suggested that schools create "new pedagogies" that would accommodate the latest in texting and Facebook page-updating.
Continue reading "Teaching Twittering?" »
March 11, 2009
Many people think the colleges and universities are overreacting to the sharp drop in their endowments. Lynne Munson, former deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, is one of these critics. In a letter (subscription only) to the Chronicle of Higher Education, she argues that higher ed endowments haven't lost much value if you put the recent drop in context of the astonishing gains of the last few years.
She writes: "College and university endowments increased, on average, 17.2 percent in the 2007 fiscal year and 10.7 percent in 2006. Taking compounded gains into account, these funds went up more than 26 percent just in the two years preceding their recent decline. And endowment increases at wealthy schools soared far past those averages. Harvard and Yale Universities increased the size of their endowments 45 percent from 2005 to 2007.
"So how concerned should we be that higher-education endowments have suffered a dramatic loss? The answer is: not very. Today college and university endowments are basically worth what they were in 2005. In other words, they're massive....Being concerned about the value of college and university endowments today is a little like worrying about whether Warren Buffett still has enough inheritance to share among his children."
The real problem, Munson argues, is that colleges will cite their recent losses to justify cutting endowment spending. Before the market drop, the colleges had come under heavy pressure from Congress and the public to spend at least the minimum payout required of private foundations--five percent.
In a recent survey, 27 percent of colleges and universities said they would decrease endowment spending while only 1 percent planned an increase. Munson writes: "This is the absolute reverse of the reaction they should be having at a time when students and families need help --- particularly since colleges still have plenty to share."
Munson currently studies college and university endowments for the Institute for Jewish and Community Research.
A new book of essays, Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University (SUNY, 2009), celebrates the current president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). The book's cover says, "This collection brings together distinguished and rising cultural studies scholars to explore the ways in which Cary Nelson's work unites scholarship and activism, demonstrating the need for radical engagement in order to democratize the academy and the production of knowledge in and about American culture."
Question: is that an ordinary book blurb or a mission statement for politicizing the university?
This piece was co-authored by Maurice Black
With the global economy enduring its worst downturn in decades, a nervous public anxious to know what might happen next, and economics professors becoming media celebrities in their own right, it's no surprise that more college students are gravitating toward economics classes. The Oberlin College economics department reports that course enrollment is up 25 percent so far this year. Other schools are seeing similar trends, as students flock to lectures on macroeconomics, monetary policy, and behavioral economics. Economics 101 is wait-listed around the country. In a time of budgetary cutbacks and hiring freezes, some economics departments have even taken on extra faculty to cope with the burden.
But explaining economics' surging popularity wholly as a side effect of the global financial crises would be a mistake says David Colander, chair of the economics department at Middlebury College. In his recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, "Economics is the 'Just Right' Liberal-Arts Major," he notes that the discipline's popularity has quietly been on the increase for years. Those who believe that economics has merely become the liberal arts proxy for business school also turn out to be wrong. When questioned about their career plans, only 36 percent of economics majors said they planned to enter the business world.
Instead, Colander proposes that liberal arts students behave a bit like Goldilocks when choosing their majors. They sample courses from across the curriculum, searching for a "just right" blend of intellectual rigor, cutting-edge ideas, core skills, and broader understanding of the world. Increasingly, they are finding that ideal blend in the economics department. Prospective employers are happy to hire economics majors, who can think creatively and innovatively, communicate effectively, and handle quantitative analysis with ease.
In the parlance of game theory, economics would seem to have become a win-win proposition for all.
Continue reading "The Rise Of The Economics Major" »
March 9, 2009
Harvard University, trying to trim its operating budget in the face of a projected 30 percent decline in the value of its endowment stemming from the current financial meltdown, announced its intention to cut 13 of the 27 janitors who service its medical school and an unspecified number of custodial workers elsewhere at Harvard residential facilities. The result: two student protest rallies on March 5, including a march to the office of university president Drew Gilpin Faust during which Harvard students joined union organizers and labor activists in chanting such slogans as "Hey, Harvard, you've got cash, why do you treat your workers like trash?" The affected employees don't even work for Harvard; they collect their paychecks from a pair of independent firms to which Harvard subcontracts some of its custodial work. Nonetheless, Harvard undergraduate, law, and medical students turned out to support the protest, declaring (as one medical student told the Harvard Crimson) that they had the "power" to force the university to reconsider the planned personnel reductions.
The Harvard protests---in the name of protecting the jobs of perhaps a few dozen people who aren't even on the Harvard payroll---exemplified the thorny political problems that college and university administrators face as they try to cut costs during this economic turndown without feeding bad publicity-garnering campus showdowns. Their job isn't enviable. The University of California's Berkeley campus, for example, decided that one way to cope with a projected reduction of $65 to $75 million in subsidies from the nearly insolvent state of California would be to halve the size of its physical education program, which offers academic credit to students who enroll in such courses as team sports, aquatics, and dance. Since educating minds, not bodies, is presumably the primary mission of a university, UC-Berkeley's effort to save $250,000 nest fall semester by trimming a peripheral department and putting some of its full-time faculty on part-time status ought to be non-controversial. Not so. Students and phys-ed faculty at Berkeley have launched a letter-writing campaign and Facebook protest to preserve the department at full strength.
Continue reading "The Trouble With Cutting College Costs" »
March 5, 2009
What kind of mark does NYU deserve for its handling of its student occupation? Let's give the university a "B-plus" or even an "A" for a performance marred only by a poor end game---immediately reinstating the suspended perpetrators of the sandbox revolution, thus letting them claim that they had won. ("We did it", said the Take Back NYU web site. "You made our cry heard around the world and it worked!!")
The University of Rochester deserves a "D-minus" for caving in last month to an SDS sit-in only nine hours after it started. The university did not yield to the occupiers' major demand---divestment in Israel---but it promised economic and humanitarian aid, including scholarships for Gaza students. Universities and colleges would do well to plan ahead for more anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian occupations by the hard left. More than 20 student occupations have been mounted in Britain and sponsors want to inspire similar actions across the pond.
In preparing for such occupations, American administrations should take a look at a model response from the 1960s, possibly the only "A-plus" in the student occupatrion sweepstakes. It took place at the University of Chicago, drew little publicity at the time and is recalled by few today. The Chicago Maroon, the university newspaper, wrote recently that "awareness of this story is mostly limited to its eyewitnesses" and is "nearly absent from the collective memories passed down to each new generation of students."
The central figure in the story is the late Edward Levi, president of the university, later to be the attorney general (under President Ford) who cleaned up the justice department after the Watergate mess. He faced a far more serious threat than NYU did last month. NYU had a handful of comic protesters, who explained that they wanted to "consense" (they meant form a consensus), screamed about brutality without being touched, and bitterly accused the employees who evicted them of drinking "corporate water." Then there was the demand that NYU reconsider the lifting of its ban on selling Coca Cola. The administration disarmed protesters by offering food, even vegetarian options. It's always hard to hate oppressors who care about the vegan menu. In contrast, the Chicago protesters were sophisticated and experienced. Some were members of Students for a Democratic Society and many went on to join the terrorist Weather Underground.
Levi had taken office at a tense time, only a few months after the upheaval at the 1968 Democratic national convention. On January 30th, more than 400 students took over the administration building, the third occupation of a campus building in four years. Vietnam and anger at "the system" were obvious issues. So was resentment that students played no role in university governance. But the excuse for the takeover was the sociology department's decision not to rehire Marlene Dixon, an eccentric Marxist and radical feminist who had drawn attention by chanting "Work, study, get ahead, kill!" to students during Levi's inaugural procession.
Despite heavy pressure to call in police, Levi refused to do so. No police meant no photos of abused students and therefore no dramatic storyline. "The whole thing builds to the police raid," said classics professor James Redfield, decribing the ideal conditions for a successful student takeover. "That's the big scene and when that doesn't happen, they don't quite know what to do."
Levi refused to capitulate or negotiate. Students generally supported the administration. Faculty was split, and on the seventh day, Milton Friedman held a press conference vehemently opposing amnesty. Left alone for 16 days, the protesters grew weary and left the building. After the 1966 sit-in, a faculty body had recommended "appropriate disciplinary action, not excluding expulsion" if another takeover occurred. That's what happened in 1969. Levi called 165 students in for hearings, suspended 81 and expelled 42. Students who convincingly expressed remorse got off the hook. In statements afterward, Levi talked about the integrity and civility of the university, its mission to pursue truth and the need to resist coercion. He said, "There are values to be maintained. We are not bought and sold and transformed by that kind of pressure."
During the takeover, a bomb threat was called in and someone threw a typewriter during a confrontation among students. During an SDS-sponsored rally against the disciplinary committee, student kicked in the door of Levi's house. But the tumult that burst forth on other campuses subsided at the University of Chicago. This success in Chicago in the 60s and NYU today should lead other colleges and universities to take note. The low key, no-police, no-negotiation strategy works.
March 4, 2009
Some reading for the day:
- Advice on improving scholarly journals at The Monkey Cage (part one and part two)
-Richard Vedder on innovations at the University of Toledo. Contracting out for online education? Imagine that?
-The Epicurean Dealmaker on college expenditures.
"In short, private education in America spends money like a drunken sailor with Warren Buffett's credit card."
Actually a thoughtful piece. Take a look.
Continue reading "In The Blogs" »
March 2, 2009
These are always fun. Samples: "Philosophy and Star Trek", "Cyberporn and Society", and "The Simpsons and Philosophy."
February 24, 2009
Take a look at some hilarious footage of the end of the NYU building occupation, courtesy of Gawker. You won't regret the nine minutes spent watching this.
"I don't think they want water bottles. They probably drink corporate water."
-Protester
February 23, 2009
New York University students, or at least a few dozen of them, have just set several records for student occupations of a campus building: fewest occupiers, shortest occupation (3 days) , least support among the student body and longest list of demands. Surely the strange litany of demands had much to so with the adventure's quick collapse. The protesters wanted public disclosure of NYU's endowment and operating budget, a student on the university board of trustees collective bargaining for TAs and student workers, tuition kept at or below the rate of inflation, access to the library for the general public, and priority for student groups in building owned or leased by NYU. After his list, the demands got showier: 13 scholarships for Gaza students, extra NYU supplies sent to rebuild Gaza University, amnesty for all occupiers and---perhaps to guard against the possibility that the occupation would be taken seriously-- a serious reconsideration of the lifting of the campus ban against Coca-Cola. Nothing about a longed-for reduction of salt in cafeteria French fries, however.
Noam Chomsky, clearly dodging the Coca-Cola issue, put out a statement supporting the protesters' call for "universities to end their participation in the brutal oppression of Palestinians." The New York Daily News published an editorial making fun of the occupiers as weeneies and wusses, and mocked their slogan, "Take Back the University." Who took the university, the News asked. "Was it the Klingons?" Two NYU alumni set up a web site, "Fake Back NYU" explaining that the protesters may seem laughable, "largely because they speak a language of knee-jerk-faux-liberal-college-speak." The Washington Square News said it had interviewed thirty NYU students and not one of them fully supported the list of demands. Maybe the occupiers, 18 of them now under suspension, just got their timing wrong. Takeovers and non-negotiable demands seem to work better in the spring and fall, when the weather is better.
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