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February 8, 2010
The AAUP recently produced a new journal devoted to exploring the state of academic freedom on today's college campuses. As customary with anything from the AAUP in recent years, the publication was as notable for what it didn't contain as what it did, in that it offered no mention of the internal threat to academic freedom coming from the ideological and pedagogical majority on most college campuses.
That said, the essays did provide an occasional surprise. As Erica Goldberg at The Torch pointed out, the article by Delaware professor Jan Blits (who opposed the university's infamous residence hall indoctrination program) provided an example of an area in which all friends of academic freedom should agree---that increasing the power of administrators, especially residential life administrators, over curricular and other academic matters poses a grave threat to academic freedom.
The other essays in the journal, alas, didn't rise to Blits' level. Robert Engvall produced a screed against merit pay---even as he conceded that "some people oppose merit pay because they aren't that good at what they do." Nonetheless, he illogically maintained, "opposing merit pay in the university setting is absolutely vital to protecting the essence and quality of that setting." We should go to the barricades, apparently, for the tenured radical who, upon receiving tenure, stops producing any scholarship.
Continue reading "The AAUP Strikes Out . . . Again" »
February 4, 2010
The headline in the East Bay Express a few weeks back probably didn't surprise people in California, bracing as they have been for funding shortfalls in government services, including education: "Berkeley High May Cut Out Science Labs". The first few words of the story delivered the distressing news that the School Governance Council had decided "to eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them."
The science labs under review take place before and after school, allowing science teachers in regular periods to devote more time to academic instruction. All students in science classes have to take one of the labs, while AP students take two of them. The results have been impressive. According to this Los Angeles Times story, "In the last school year, 82% of Berkeley's AP chemistry students passed the rigorous exam, which gives college credit for high school work. The national passing rate is 55.2%. The school's AP biology and physics students are even more successful."
Another Golden State fiscal casualty? Not this time. If people read on, they learned the actual reason for the decision, for the Council didn't plan to kill science labs because of budget problems. They did so because not enough black and Latino students were enrolled in them. Because of a wide achievement gap, a parent representative on the Council explained, "the science labs were largely classes for white students." As a result, the members of the Council, a body made up of parents, teachers, and students charged with redesigning the very "structure" of the school, voted nearly unanimously to shut down the labs and redirect resources to "struggling students." The labs are, indeed, open to those low-performing students, but according to this article from the San Francisco Chronicle, they "don't always attend the extra labs---and ultimately fail the class." (Curiously, the Chronicle story doesn' mention a word about the racial achievement gap, while the LA Times highlights the racial side of the story.)
Continue reading "Identity Politics Beyond Reason" »
February 2, 2010
Last December, I wrote in these pages about allegations of racial discrimination in tenure denial at Emerson College, which had prompted the school to set up a three-person commission charged with reviewing those allegations. The panel's report has just been released, and the good news is that the panelists "noticed no overtly racist or prejudiced attitudes toward African Americans." But, alas, there is also bad news: "There are to be found at Emerson unexamined and powerful assumptions and biases about the superiority, preferability, and normativeness of European-American culture, intellectual pursuits, academic discourse, leadership, and so on." (Emphasis in original.) Left unexamined, these biases result in the "disproportionate undervaluing of African Americans and the disproportionate overvaluing of European Americans." You can read the entire report here, and I urge you to do so, if you like self-parody.
Barack Obama might be the most academia-friendly President since the development of modern higher education in the early 20th century. But anyone wondering why so few professors (and virtually none outside of law or economics) have been appointed to his administration should consider the case of Chai Feldblum. Nominated for a post at EEOC, Feldblum came under attack for signing an only-in-academia petition endorsing recognition for "households in which there is more than one conjugal partner." Faced with a choice between continuing to favor polygamy or pleading incompetence, the professor used her Senate confirmation hearing to claim that she had made a "mistake" in signing the petition, suggesting that she had done so at the urging of an unnamed academic associate.
Feldblum's nomination cleared committee and is currently pending in the full Senate. But her experience reveals how academic groupthink---quite beyond its effects on higher education---also reduces any impact that professors might hope to have in the public policy arena. As Mark Bauerlein's seminal essay on the topic observed, one element of campus groupthink is the law of group polarization, or "when like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts toward extreme versions of their common beliefs . . . Group Polarization happens so smoothly on campuses that those involved lose all sense of the range of legitimate opinion." Once outside of the academy, however, adherents of such positions are easily, and correctly, labeled as extremists.
The recently concluded testimony in the federal trial challenging California's Proposition 8 provided another example of how the pedagogical and ideological imbalance in most humanities and social sciences departments helps diminish the impact professors can have on public policy. Attorneys Ted Olson and David Boies approached the trial with the model of the Brown v. Board of Education cases in mind---using academics to demonstrate the pernicious effects of discrimination.
Continue reading "Prop 8 and the Academy on Trial" »
January 28, 2010
10. Justice O'Connor now suggests that the social-science evidence on which it was based is shaky.
9. The social-science evidence on which it was based is getting shakier, as more and more disinterested research is done.
8. There should not be a social-science exception to the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause anyhow.
7. In a variety of ways, using racial and ethnic preferences actually aggravates the achievement disparities that prompted Justice O'Connor to allow preferences in the first place.
6. America is becoming increasingly multiethnic and multiracial, and in such a nation it is untenable to have a legal regime that sorts people on the basis of their skin color and what country their ancestors came from.
5. Individual Americans are becoming increasingly multiethnic and multiracial, too, which makes racial and ethnic preferences even more unwieldy and untenable.
4. Justice Alito is more likely to get it right than Justice O'Connor was.
3. Who knows when one of the dissenters in Grutter will be replaced by an Obama appointee?
2. Twenty-five years is too long to leave on the books a bad decision that affects thousands of students every year.
1. The Equal Protection Clause makes it illegal to "deny to any person... the equal protection of the laws."
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In yesterday's Commentary section, we listed a discussion by George Leef of Justice O'Connor's second thoughts on Grutter v. Bollinger--her 2003 opinion that upheld racial and ethnic admission preferences at the University of Michigan law school. O'Connor also said she "expected" that in 25 years preferences would no longer be needed.
At several universities this summer, hope will float and perestroika will pay. At the end of August, Princeton, Harvard, Smith, Stanford, and Yale are taking the currying of favor with wealthier alumni seabound. For the fifth straight year, Princeton and other sponsoring universities are joining forces with a for-profit, West-coast speakers and travel bureau, this time offering a new five-star "post-perestroika" cruise along the Black Sea.
The 15-day voyage from August 30 to September 15th along the shores of Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, and Turkey features three Perestroika superstars -- President Bush's former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Defense Secretary William Perry and Russia's own Mikhail Gorbachev as guest speakers. Only one of the "distinguished world leaders," as the Princeton brochure advertizing the cruise calls them, will keep company with the alumni aboard ship for the entire cruise, mind you. The brochure notes, and a spokesman for Princeton's alumni relations office confirms, that Ms. Rice will be aboard ship for only three days, and Mr. Gorbachev for only one. Indeed, Ms. Rice and Mr. Gorbachev will not even overlap. But when the three foreign policy celebrities are not on board, passengers will be hearing from other expert speakers - among them, James H. Billington, a former history professor at Princeton and the Librarian of Congress since 1987, Marvin Kalb, the former chief diplomatic reporter for NBC and professor emeritus at Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center, and Vinton G. Cerf, vice president and chief Internet promoter for Google, widely regarded as one of the "fathers of the Internet."
The brochure says that this floating faculty at sea, including the Perestroika superstars, will lead fellow passengers in discussions of such topics as "Russia's relations with Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan" and "how the West can best engage Russia and the former Soviet republics in facing global challenges such as nuclear proliferation, increasingly scare energy resources, and economic decline."
Alumni in personal economic decline, however, might hesitate signing up for the voyage. Education aboard the Silver Wind, a small luxury cruise liner owned by an Italian company that the travel company charters, is pricey. The ship's least expensive of its 149 cabins, the "Vista Suite," which features a 240-square foot bedroom and a picture window, goes for $23,990 per person in a two-person cabin, or $39,990 for a single passenger. Its luxury bookend, the Grand Suite, 1,019 square feet of space with a teak veranda and floor-to-ceiling doors, costs $39,990. That is not counting the airfare to Moscow, where the program originates - a round-trip $1,558 per person (economy) ticket, or $3,658 per person for business class seats.
Continue reading "Sail with Condi And Gorby For $40,000 Or So" »
January 26, 2010
The New York Times reports today on a new marketing gimmick for colleges seeking to boost applications during this recession-plagued time when every tuition-paying body in a classroom counts: the fast-track application form that allows some high school seniors seeking admission to bypass the usual fees of $50 or so, the tedious filling out of information, and perhaps most significantly, the dreaded college essay.
Taking a lead from credit-card marketers, the express forms, typically packaged in a brightly colored envelope marked "Exclusive Scholar Applications," "Distinctive Candidate Application" or something similar, come already filled in with the student's name and other information (bought from College Board lists) so that all the applicant need do is affix a signature and head for a mailbox. Most of the application packets are produced and designed by the same firm, Royall & Company of Richmond, whose founder, Bill Royall, led direct-mail campaigns to potential donors to President Clinton. High-school counselors tend to hate the short-cut forms, which they say take advantage of "teenagers who don't know what they want" from a college, as a counselor told New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg, and cynics complain that the mass mailings to tens of thousands of young people when the college actually has only a few hundred freshman slots to fill, is an effort to game the U.S. News and World Report college rankings, which are in part based on "selectivity" (the ratio of admissions to applications) and the relative SAT scores of applicants. And although some well-known universities, such as Marquette and the University of Minnesota, have used the express application forms to claimed success, it's clear that the nation's most elite schools---the Harvards, Stanfords, and so forth---don't need to bother with them in order to generate hundreds of applications per freshman slot, and that fast-track forms are yet another sign of the growing gap between the top tier of universities that have the luxury of being genuinely selective and the great mass of lesser-ranked institutions that don't have that luxury and must scramble for students these days.
Continue reading "Are You an ''Exclusive Scholar''? Just Sign Here" »
Sometimes people who don't work in academia wonder why colleges are often the object of debates over free speech. Sure, some observers know that campuses are liberal enclaves, and they regard professors and administrators as easily intimidated by identity politics. But most people remember their college days as pretty much apolitical, and they continue to put the ideological elements in a small box.
That's why it's important to go back to the sources and hold them up to public scrutiny. Take campus speech codes. They have a bad name in public life, but they stand firm in student handbooks and campus policies in black and white. Here is a list of some of them, all taken from the list assembled by Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (www.thefire.org). (Some of them may have been altered by now, but the fact that they ever existed is sufficient cause for response.)
At Ohio University we have this definition of harassment: "Nonsexual verbal or physical conduct that denigrates or shows hostility toward another because of the person's gender can be the basis for a hostile, offensive, or intimidating environment claim. Gender based conduct can take the form of abusive written or graphic material; epithets; sexist slurs; negative stereotyping; jokes; or threatening, intimidating, or hostile acts."
Continue reading "Why Free Speech Advocates Are Angry" »
January 25, 2010
Roger Clegg writes on a shocking new University of Massachusetts set-aside program over at Phi Beta Cons:
The Boston Globe reports that the University of Massachusetts is setting up a med-school set-aside program: "Under an initiative set to be finalized today, the state's only public medical school [i.e., at UMass] will partner with UMass campuses in Boston, Amherst, Lowell, and Dartmouth to create a joint baccalaureate-MD program that would ensure admission for aspiring doctors from underrepresented ethnic and socioeconomic groups. . . . The medical school will set aside 12 slots in its 125-student, first-year class for qualified students from groups underrepresented among Massachusetts doctors. Those groups include African-Americans, Hispanics, certain Southeast Asians, and Cape Verdeans, Brazilians, and other Portuguese speakers. Students of any ethnic background from low-income families or those among the first in their families to attend college would also qualify."
I won't make the usual and obvious points about why discrimination on the basis of skin color and national orgin is unfair, divisive, and stupid. All that aside, this seems to me to be almost certainly illegal. To be sure, this isn't exactly like the race/ethnicity set-aside program that was struck down in Bakke, since here the slots are also (in theory at least) going to be open to applications from members of disfavored racial and ethnic groups, so long as they are low-income or the first in their families to attend college. But this is still a very mechanical use of race, like the point system struck down in Gratz v. Bollinger. And the justification given for the racially discriminatory program by UMass president Jack Wilson is the need for "role models" --- which has also been rejected by the Supreme Court (in Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education, in 1986).
January 21, 2010
The New York Times' "The Choice" blog is running a helpful question and answer series on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Take a look if you're puzzling through the process of filling the thing out.
January 14, 2010
Candace de Russy's January 7 post here, "Hate-America Sociology," understandably attracted a lot of attention. It cited a 10-question Soc 101 quiz at an unnamed eastern college, complete with accusatory leftish questions and some simple-minded answers by a student who drew a mark of 100 for agreeing with the politics of his professor.
A few readers, and many more at other sites that linked to us, asked if the test and answers are authentic. I am satisfied that they are. The material came with assurances from Dr. de Russy, a former professor and trustee at the State University of New York. I know the college involved and have a copy of the test with answers filled in. I talked with the source for the story, who cannot be identified because of privacy concerns and fear of retaliation.
The blog Progressive Scholar saw nothing wrong with the test ("I don't understand, what is the problem with this exam?") Dr. de Russy replied, stressing what she saw as the "unremitting bias" of the test. Its point of view, she wrote, is "entirely anti-capitalist, anti-white, anti-male. No other perspective is included, even as a hypothetical."
Readers who come across other politically loaded exams should send them to us at editor@campusmind.org or Minding the Campus, the Manhattan Institute, 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017.
Apologies to Time education correspondent Gilbert Cruz, who is not the author of the quote, "I'm, pretty sure you'd have to shoot somebody not to graduate from Harvard." That line came from Kevin Carey, policy director of the think tank Education Sector, in an interview with Cruz.
January 13, 2010
At the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, students can minor in social and economic justice without taking a single economics course.---Reported by E. Frank Stephenson on the Division of Labor blog.
January 12, 2010
A Chicago study on "Assessing the Impact of Eliminating Affirmative Action in Higher Education" comes to this conclusion: black and Hispanic representation at all 4-year colleges is predicted to decline modestly---by 2%---if race-neutral college admissions policies are mandated nationwide. However, race-neutral admissions are predicted to decrease minority representation at the most selective 4-year institutions by 10%.
Now, my question is this: Is it worth it?
That is, the systematic discrimination on the basis of skin color and national origin might have the benefit of increasing the political correctness of universities' racial and ethnic mix by this, let's face, trivial amount. And, we are then told, this trivial amount might (since the social scientists are not in agreement) have some marginal improvement in some areas of what students learn.
On the other hand, here are some of the costs of this discrimination: It is personally unfair, passes over better qualified students, and sets a disturbing legal, political, and moral precedent in allowing racial discrimination; it creates resentment; it stigmatizes the so-called beneficiaries in the eyes of their classmates, teachers, and themselves, as well as future employers, clients, and patients; it fosters a victim mindset, removes the incentive for academic excellence, and encourages separatism; it compromises the academic mission of the university and lowers the overall academic quality of the student body; it creates pressure to discriminate in grading and graduation; it breeds hypocrisy within the school; it encourages a scofflaw attitude among college officials; it mismatches students and institutions, guaranteeing failure for many of the former; it papers over the real social problem of why so many African Americans and Latinos are academically uncompetitive; and it gets states and schools involved in unsavory activities like deciding which racial and ethnic minorities will be favored and which ones not, and how much blood is needed to establish group membership.
Pencils down. The correct answer is, no, it is not worth it.
By and large, Christine Quinn has done a commendable job as New York City Council speaker, working cooperatively with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and constraining the more extreme members of her caucus, which is no easy task in a city like New York. Yet she now has a decision that will help define her legacy---whether to reappoint Charles Barron as chair of the Council's Higher Education Committee. (In New York, the Speaker has authority on appointing committee chairs; there is no seniority system.)
As a professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), I have a higher stake than most in Quinn's decision. In most cities, a "higher education committee" for a City Council would seem to make little sense, given that funding for public universities usually flows from state governments. But in a somewhat arcane scheme, government money for CUNY's budget comes from both the state and New York City. So the City Council has appropriate oversight authority over CUNY.
Given that government revenues are plunging, CUNY almost certainly will have to tighten its belt over the next few years. Having a responsible chair of the Higher Ed Committee who will work cooperatively with the CUNY administration---rather than someone intent on grandstanding or demagoguery---is therefore doubly important.
Barron has a well-deserved reputation as a racial demagogue in a city that has known more than its share of such figures. A former Black Panther who is quick to denounce those who disagree with him as racists, Barron has launched unsuccessful bids for Congress, New York City mayor, and Brooklyn borough president. He remains stuck on the City Council.
Last month, Barron embarrassed both himself and the City Council by behaving---in the words of CUNY Trustee Jeff Wiesenfeld---like a "thug" at the groundbreaking ceremony for Fiterman Hall, a Borough of Manhattan Community College building badly damaged on 9/11. Barron, incredibly, objected to the seating arrangement at the ceremony, complaining that he hadn't been given a prominent enough seat. Last week, he disgracefully excused the behavior of his supporters as he lost 48-1 for Speaker.
Continue reading "The Embarrassing Barron of New York" »
January 7, 2010
Recently, a colleague forwarded to me a copy of an exam from an introductory sociology class found lying in a room at a public college in the east. It was graded 100%. The exam deserves to be quoted at length, as parts of it are virtually indistinguishable from the old Soviet agitprop of the Fifties:
Question: How does the United States "steal" the resources of other (third world) [sic] countries?
Answer: We steal through exploitation. Our multinationals are aware that indigenous people in developing nations have been coaxed off their plots and forced into slums. Because it is lucrative, our multinationals offer them extremely low wage labor (sic) that cannot be turned down.
Question: Why is the U.S. on shaky moral ground when it comes to preventing illegal immigration?
Answer: Some say that it is wrong of the United States to prevent illegal immigration because the same people we are denying entry to, (sic) we have exploited for the purpose of keeping the American wheel spinning.
Question: Why is it necessary to examine the theory of cumulative advantage when it comes to affirmative action?
Answer: Because it is unfair to discredit the many members of minority groups that have (sic) been offered more life chances through the program.
Question: What is the interactionist approach to gender?
Answer: The majority of multi-gender encounters are male-dominated. for (sic) example, while involved in conversation, the male is much more likely to interrupt. Most likely because the male believes the female's expressed thoughts are inferior to his own.
Question: Please briefly explain the matrix of domination.
Answer: the (sic) belief that domination has more than one dimension. For example, Males (sic) are dominant over females, whites over blacks, and affluent over impoverished.
This exam was part of the curriculum in a for-credit class at an accredited degree-granting institution. Introductory sociology courses like this one are frequently required, even for non-majors. A student who matriculates in this field of study will have nothing in the way of useful skills, but will be convinced that his country is rotten to the core, and that whites and males are evil.
China encourages its brightest students to study mathematics and engineering. India has become known as a hotbed of tech-savvy computer programmers. Meanwhile, the U.S. spends billions to teach postmodern, left-wing misinformation as objective "fact."
It seems rather foolish to remain optimistic about the future of this nation when millions of its most "educated" are systematically being taught to loathe it.
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A former member of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York (SUNY), Dr. de Russy writes on educational and cultural issues. She also serves on the boards of several distinguished organizations dedicated to higher education and other institutional reform.
January 6, 2010
In an unintentional, if powerful, commentary on the grip that groupthink has on some quarters of the economy, LeMoyne professor Dolores Byrnes informed readers of the NEA's Thought & Action that "some professors of education recently told me during a department retreat: 'We are all Marxist, it doesn't even need to be said.'"
No wonder Education schools---from Minnesota to the aggressive practitioners of the "dispositions" criterion---have proven so eager to purge from their ranks those with dissenting opinions. And no wonder LeMoyne's Ed School was sued for dismissing a student because of his (non-Marxist, naturally) political beliefs. Byrnes' anecdote also shows just how out of touch the higher education establishment has become---and how the nation's colleges and universities have suffered as a result.
Essay after essay in the NEA's annual higher-education publication complains about how professors lack respect from the public, without ever pausing to consider how the image of colleges and universities as the bastion of out-of-touch ideologues might have caused the problem.
Continue reading "We Are All Marxists Now" »
January 5, 2010
KC Johnson beat me to the punch in registering doubts and concerns about the letter University of Minnesota General Counsel Mark B. Rotenberg has written to Adam Kissel at FIRE regarding the education department's review of the curriculum. Kissel and FIRE are to be praised for having wrought out of the university a letter assuring that the university will never "mandate any particular beliefs, or screen out people with 'wrong beliefs' from the University." But, as KC observes, other statements in Rotenberg's response cloud that pledge. As with ed school dean Jean Quam's explanation of the review process a few weeks ago in the Star-Tribune, Rotenberg's letter recasts several coercive and biased opinions about race, class, etc. into liberal, open-ended, broad-minded explorations of those matters.
The conversion happens in Rotenberg's description of the process. Whereas the Task Group for Race, Culture, Class, and Gender offered a set of tendentious "Outcomes" such as "Future teachers will recognize & demonstrate understanding of white privilege," and asked students to engage in "self-discovery" assignments in which they were to reveal attitudes they hold that damage other groups and identities, Rotenberg pictures a group of "creative thinking" faculty members "re-exploring the designs of our teacher education programs." For support, he cites Dean Quan chractertizing the process as "faculty brainstorming." In his version, the demands of the task force turn into a marketplace-of-ideas climate in which nothing is prescribed but everything is entertained.
KC cites the sentence that follows Rotenberg's assurance that the university will not mandate beliefs ("To the contrary . . ."). The following sentence is equally misleading, and deserves attention as well. It says that the ed school's "commitment" to liberal education "was recognized by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education in its 2006 evaluation of the College, which praised CEHD for 'exposing candidates to a diversity of ideas and viewpoints,' and for 'respecting the variability of race/ethnicity, nationality, culture, language, religion, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, disability status, and human potential.'"
Note, once again, the mendacious softening of language. Rotenberg defends the process as one aimed merely at "exposing" students to diverse viewpoints, and for teaching them to "respect" human variations. Would anybody reading the task group's recommendations conclude that they allow students who have been exposed to "white privilege" argument to dispute them? Does the group allow students to read about "institutional racism" and decide that it isn't all that important to the algebra classroom?
Continue reading "Further Thoughts on the Rotenberg Letter" »
Matthew Levinton, a student at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote us with some encouraging news about a new book club at that school, which he currently serves as President. Read his account:
Last fall at the University of Texas at Austin, a new great books program began its mission to realize Thomas Jefferson's vision of educating citizens and leaders to understand the meaning of liberty and to exercise it wisely. In the spirit of this charge, the Center's new book club, which began last spring with a reading of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, was formally organized as the "Jefferson Book Club," and opened the fall semester with a reading and discussion of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote.
The book club's events, which have included the discussion of such things as Leo Strauss' essay "What is Liberal Education", will continue with Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography when classes resume in the Spring. Plans for the new semester also include readings and discussions of Rousseau, Shakespeare, St. Augustine, Solzhenitsyn, and a viewing of the classic Spartacus. The film event will compliment the Center's lecture to be held in March on Spartacus by Classical historian Barry Strauss.
Events organized by the Jefferson Book Club serve the Thomas Jefferson Center as an informal gathering place for students and faculty, and provide opportunities for those who realize and appreciate the value of great books to come together and learn from each other. Furthermore, the club has caught the interest of students from outside of the liberal arts as well, and provides individuals from other colleges that may not formally study the great books in class with an opportunity to become involved in discussions that may otherwise be absent from their studies.
The book club is establishing a blog to use for communication among club participants regarding suggestions for readings, and ideas for when discussions may take place. I am serving as the book club's president, and the process of working with the Center's directors and faculty to bring the club together, and to help make it something for students to enjoy and learn from has been a very meaningful experience for me. I look forward to our plans for the New Year. When I explain the book club to my professors, or talk with those who are involved with it, they are always very supportive of the club and the opportunity it presents to students to learn from meaningful discussions outside of the classroom. The events held last semester have generated much interest among students and faculty, and I expect the Jefferson Book Club to become a strong part of the great opportunities to learn at the University of Texas at Austin, and I am honored to be a part of it.
Andrew Gillen of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity wrote this note to Charlotte Allen to clarify comments of his in Allen's article today on student loans:
Charlotte, I saw your article on student loans is up at Minding The Campus. I liked it, but at the very end, you have a long quote from me that is problematic.
The quotation says: "I think that having a federally run program makes some sense, as long as the government is limited to determining eligibility and setting interest rates. Get rid of lender subsidies, let interest rates vary, and let the government subsidize students directly if it wants to. The problem with the private loans was that they happened because federal loan limits got mazed out. So drop the cumulative loan limit and let people borrow what you can pay back. Drop the non-dischargeability, but let lenders pursue borrowers to a limit of, say, $200,000 or $300,000."
This is sort of a merging my views on both gov and private loans, but it's not clear from the quote which program I was talking about when. You probably wrote it down correctly, since I tend to be all over the place when talking, but as it is, it could be misinterpreted very easily. Probably the easiest thing to do would be to replace it with this "I think that having a federally run program makes some sense, as long as the government is limited to determining need based eligibility and setting the loan limits. Get rid of lender subsidies, let interest rates vary, and let the government subsidize students interest payments directly if it wants to. For private loans, drop the non-dischargeability and let the market determine the terms of lending."
Thanks,
Andrew
January 4, 2010
The National Education Association has just published its annual higher education journal, Thought & Action, whose 2009 edition contains a special focus: "A New Progressive Era for Higher Education." The essays (which are not yet available on-line) lament the declining government support for public institutions---all while providing (unintentional) examples of why the public might doubt the wisdom of pouring more money into higher education.
Take, for instance, the tale told by Max Page, a professor in the University of Massachusetts-Amherst's department of art, and sociology professor Dan Clawson, whose recent publications include such only-in-academia topics as "Class Struggle in Higher Education" and "Neoliberalism Guarantees the Future of Social Movement Unionism." Page and Clawson relate how a small group of UMass professors---mostly from "Labor Studies and Sociology, with long activist resumes"---formed a group called Save UMass, to protest the education funding priorities of the Massachusetts state government.
The activist professors encouraged colleagues to take time from class to criticize the state legislature for not giving UMass more money. Page and Clawson rejoice that around 40 percent of faculty spent a half-hour of class time doing so. The "activist" duo appears unaware of how their colleagues' behavior violated the AAUP's 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure.
Continue reading "Saving U Mass From Its Faculty" »
December 28, 2009
Just before Christmas, FIRE issued a press release appropriately celebrating a letter from the University of Minnesota general counsel declaring GET. The letter was good news not for its contents but for its existence. It's hard to imagine that a public university's chief attorney would sign off on anything approximating what the U of M's Education School proposed regarding the teaching of "cultural competence"---and the existence of the letter strongly suggests that the Education curricula will now be reviewed by the general counsel's office.
That said, other passages in General Counsel Mark Rotenberg's letter are deeply troubling. "No University policy or practice ever will mandate any particular beliefs, or screen out people with 'wrong beliefs' from the University," he encouragingly wrote. But then, in his next sentence, Rothenberg stated, "To the contrary, as Dean [Jean] Quam repeatedly has emphasized, an essential component of CEHD's curriculum initiative will be to expand -- not restrict - the horizons of future teachers."
Those two sentences are mutually irreconcilable given the facts of the case. FIRE's letter (and, of course, additional coverage of the Minnesota fiasco) made perfectly clear that the Education faculty sought to "expand" (a wonderfully euphemistic verb) the "horizons of future teachers" through mandating "particular beliefs" and screening "out people with 'wrong beliefs' from the University." Does Rothenberg see anything wrong with the behavior of his university's faculty? If so, he 'say.
Indeed, Rothenberg goes out of his way to defend the Education professors' performance. He accuses FIRE of having based its letter on "an unfortunate misunderstanding of the facts." (Unfortunately, he doesn't reveal what those misunderstood "facts" were.) He hails the Education process as indicative of the "creative thinking of many faculty members charged with exploring ideas to improve P-12 education and student achievement." Under his own signature, he repeats Dean Jean Quam's absurd description of a formal task force report as nothing more than "faculty brainstorming"---as if the professors sat around a table over high tea, exchanging ideas off the top of their heads.
Continue reading "More Troubling News From Minnesota" »
Thanks for reading and check back in with us in the new year for more coverage of pressing academic questions.
December 23, 2009
At InsideHigherEd.com, Richard Whitmire has an interesting discussion entitled "Soon-to-Be Open Secret" on the delicacies of the "boy problem" on college campuses. The problem itself is simple. An achievement gap between male and female high school students has opened, and it's pushing college enrollments nationally toward 60-40 proportions (in many schools and systems, women already make up more than 60 percent of the population). Girls get better grades, take more AP courses, do more homework, participate in more extra-curricular activities, and have fewer behavioral problems. Admissions officers can't help but admit them in higher numbers.
Colleges want to keep the ratio as even as possible, however, for a variety of reasons. One is that when one sex significantly outnumbers the other, sexual rivalries and competitions set in. When we head toward a two-thirds majority (remember the Jan and Dean line, "Two girls for every boooooyyyyyyyyyyy"), the sexual gamesmanshiip of social life goes up. Added to that, admissions people worry that strong female students won't want to go to school where the number of men is low.
And so, Whitmire writes, "favoring men is an open secret at private, four-year college, where there's no legal penalty for helping men. Actually, it's even done by some public colleges willing to roll the dice in the hope they won't get sued."
Why, he wonders, haven't more people talked about the problem? Why isn't affirmative action for boys as controversial as affirmative action for African Americans and Hispanics?
Continue reading "The Problem with the "Boy Problem"" »
December 22, 2009
Kara Miller, who teaches rhetoric and history at Babson College, is the latest professor to decry the laziness of American college students. You can read her Boston Globe op-ed here.
Miller is careful to say that some native-born students work hard, but the gap she sees between American and international students is large. She says her foreign students, chiefly from China, India, Thailand and Latin America, work hard, excel on exams and contribute in class, while her American students are generally disengaged and account for almost all of her "C," "D" and "F" students this semester. Among the leading activities of the American students are texting during class, declining to take notes, and staying up late logging hours of video games.
Many critics of the college scene have made the same general observation, , including two who write for this site, Mark Bauerlein (The Dumbest Generation) and Peter Sacks (Generation X Goes to College.) Why the lackadaisical approach to college? Many point to a sense of entitlement, the impact of the self-esteem movement and the generally inept curricula of the public schools, which increasingly stress diversity, equality and feelings rather than actual learning. Then too, many colleges are gearing courses to the declining level of student readiness and energy---not just all the courses that end in the words "studies," but also impossible-to-fail courses about American entertainment that seem like rainy-day activities at summer camp. A common argument in defense of slackers is that they understand that college is a time for fun, drugs and sex, and the time to get going doesn't arrive until graduation. A sophisticated version of this explanation--that softness and indulgence peel away as Americans leave their school years behind, is found in Michael Barone's book, Hard America, Soft America.
Still, it's hard to overcome lifelong habits of indifference and disengagement. In a globalizing economy, Miller writes, "Americans' inability to stay focused and work hard could prove to be a serious problem."
December 16, 2009
The Gates Foundation has just released a report "With Their Whole Lives Ahead of Them" on why students fail to finish college, which might seem a timely topic amidst recent hand-wringing about our persistent failure to actually get students to a diploma. The problem, as with about all studies on this topic, is that it shows little information of any real evaluative use.
We find that "most students leave college because they are working to support themselves and going to school at the same time." 54% of the students who left school cited "I needed to go to work and make money." They also reported problems with textbook costs and other fees greater than their peers who graduated as well. Simple enough.
Also unsurprisingly, those who did not have financial support from their parents were far more likely not to graduate, at a rate of 58% dropping out as opposed to 38% graduating. Similarly, those without scholarships or loans were far more likely to drop out.
And yet, when we venture into reasons why students selected their schools, 41% of those who indicated that financial aid or a scholarship was a major reason for choosing their school did not graduate. Perhaps these had additional insurmountable financial difficulties, yet it not, there are clearly larger problems at hand.
What's left? Well, in keeping with prior indications, students who did not graduate were far more likely to choose colleges based on proximity to where they lived or worked, and to seek a class schedule that worked with my schedule (the students who graduated seemed to have far fewer prior commitments).
What is there to say, based on this sample of 614 students? Well, not much. Clearly, financial problems are at the root of numerous decisions to leave college before completion. Whether graduated or not, most students were supportive of the idea of cutting the cost of college by a quarter (who wouldn't? and why only a quarter? How about half?). One interesting, and very-much neglected idea was "making part-time attendance more viable by giving those students better access to loans, tuition assistance and health care - benefits and services that are frequently available only to full-time students." Otherwise, given the data in this report, it seems that there's very little that can be done. Financial problems are intractable, and in an age where tuition restraint is an absent quantity and increasing federal support never seems to cut the actual price of education, this report is a series of points that fail to add up to anything resembling an answer.. Now if the Gates Foundation pledged to pay for all these shortcomings, that might make a difference. As it is, all we have is just another thick stack of paper.
December 15, 2009
KC Johnson has spoken well of the Minnesota teacher education initiative, and his analysis of the op-ed by the dean of the College of Education, Jean Quam, identified the thorough disregard of claims of indoctrination made by columnist Katherine Kersten in the Star-Tribune. Quam's defense is so feeble and misleading, in fact, that it deserves more scrutiny.
Just compare her summary statements about the initiative's "diversity awareness" aims with actual statements made in the "Race, Class, Culture, Gender" report posted on the Minnesota blog on September 14th.
Regarding the focus on "issues of race, class, culture, and gender," Quam says, "Our belief is that acknowledging these issues is essential to teacher and student success and that ignoring them will not make them go away." Note the reasonable word "acknowledging," an action that doesn't prescribe how you acknowledge the issues and what judgments you make about them.
But one "OUTCOME" of the "Race, Class, Culture, Gender" report extends far beyond acknowledgement:
"Our future teachers will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression."
In case anyone believes that "drawing on notions of white privilege etc." leaves open the possibility that one might conclude that "white privilege" is a mistaken, tendentious, errant, or irrelevant notion, another "OUTCOME" allows no such answer:
"Future teachers will recognize & demonstrate understanding of white privilege."
Continue reading "The Minnesota Case---An Institutional Diagnosis" »
December 9, 2009
Last Sunday, the New York Times' "Ethicist" column featured a letter from a lawyer loath to hire internship applicants that belonged to the Federalist society. Randy Cohen, the "Ethicist" suggested that disqualification on the grounds of their membership was unfair. The lawyer went ahead and rejected all applicants who were members anyway.
Ilya Somin, at the Volokh Conspiracy notes that, while this case is blatantly unfair, the legal world seems to feature little political discrimination against applicants. Not so in other fields, he continues:
By contrast, both liberal and conservative law professors warned me not to put the Fed Soc on my CV for the academic job market, where ideological discrimination is likely to be greater because the academia is far more ideologically homogenous than the law firm world, (see also here), there is little or no equivalent to the constraint imposed by the profit motive, and academics tend to care about politics far more than practicing lawyers do.
These personal experiences aren't necessarily typical. Only systematic data can really settle the issue. But they are similar to those of other Fed Soc members I know in the law firm and academic worlds (and I know a great many in both). It's not unusual for people to put Fed Soc membership on their law firm resumes, while the conventional wisdom is strongly against doing so on academic CVs.
December 8, 2009
The Center for Public Integrity has launched a major new investigative series on the dangers of unpunished sexual assault on the nation's college and university campuses. The basic thesis of the series: "One national study funded by the Justice Department found that one in five women who attend college will become the victim of a rape or an attempted rape by the time she graduates. But students reporting sexual assault routinely say they face a host of institutional barriers in pursuing the on-campus remedies meant to keep colleges and universities safe, according to a nine-month investigation by the Center for Public Integrity. The result, say experts, is a widespread feeling that justice isn't being served, and may not even be worth pursuing."
This isn't investigative reporting: it's advocacy journalism at its most blatant. The series uncritically accepts the finding of the (unnamed) "national study funded by the Justice Department" (of which the CPI website does not provide a copy) claiming that one in five women are victims of a violent crime (either rape or attempted rape) during their four years on campus.
To provide some perspective on the dubious nature of this figure: as of 2005, 57% of all college students were women. If 20% of them are victims of violent crime by the time they graduate, that means over a four-year period, around 11.5 percent of all students on the typical college campus will be victims of rape or attempted rape. On an annual basis, the figure would be around 2.7% of students.
Continue reading "College Rape Stats---Cutting-Edge Modern Fiction" »
December 7, 2009
December 4, 2009
Our friend Patrick Deneen of Georgetown posted an evocative comment today on an Inside Higher Ed item concerning the President's hopes for higher education as a source of job creation. It's very much worth a read.
The nation's universities have already implicitly justified their existence - and expense - to a generation or more of students that the main reason for attending university is to attain the necessary credential for potential employers. Universities uniformly have one devoted office or center that is dedicated to helping students make the transition into post-graduate life, namely and inevitably a "Career Services Center" (by contrast, there is no "Family Preparation" or "Transition to Being a Citizen and Neighbor" centers). Understanding well this implicit promise, alumni have begun suing their alma maters when their post-graduate job search has proven unsuccessful, and many believe such lawsuits to be anything but unjustified or frivolous.
The President is doing great damage in his constant reiteration of the view that our universities and colleges should be seen solely as places of job preparation. This can only deepen the pervasive careerism that pervades our institutions of higher education.
Our universities and colleges were once devoted to the ideals of the "liberal arts." The liberal arts were oriented to teaching its students the art of being free, the art of attaining liberty. That art is above all the art of self-government, the art of learning the bounds of what is appropriate for human beings. Moreover, necessarily such an undertaking was an education in citizenship, the hallmark of the person educated for liberty (not bondage). By necessity, such an education oriented its charges toward res publica, toward public dedications that transcended narrowly private interest.
The current emphasis on "career preparation" is a profound betrayal of this ideal of the liberal arts. This emphasis elicits in two simultaneous dispositions among students: a utilitarian worldview that views all aspects of education as means for one purpose - a job, or more narrowly, "money-making" - and the transformation of the object of education of one devoted to commonweal to narrowly private interest.
The President has spoken on occasion in tones of moral condemnation over the behavior that precipitated the economic crisis, yet out of the other side of his mouth further promotes the mindset - and an educational emphasis - that would only deepen the preconditions that led to the economic crisis. A people formed with dedicated devotion to utilitarian and narrowly financial calculation, combined with extreme privatism of orientation, is the fertile ground from which just such financial chicanery and irresponsible indebtedness arises. Does he not have a sensible and liberally educated advisor in his circle that help him come to this realization? Given how many of his advisors come from our "elite" institutions - the Princetons, Harvards and Yales of the nation - and how deeply the orientation of these institutions has for a long time been precisely guided by such narrowly and perversely utilitarian and careerist aims, there can be little hope that he can be dissuaded from his mission of further destroying our institutions of higher learning. Perhaps it's time for him to tap someone from a St. John's College in order at least to provide a somewhat different take on matters, for a change.
December 3, 2009
An unusually bitter academic argument of 2000 came up again at the American Anthropological Association annual convention in Philadelphia. At issue was the long and famous (critics would say, notorious) work of Napoleon Chagnon among the Yanomamo Indians of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil and Venezuela. The Yanomomi are not among the most endearing of what used to be called primitive cultures. They acquire women by raiding nearby villages. In the process, the victors kill all the men, bash the brains of babies out on rocks, then gang-rape the women over and over and cart them home as spoils of war. A 1988 article in Science by Chagnon provoked praise and controversy, but the anger reached its peak in 2000 with the publication of Darkness in El Dorado, a vehemently anti-Chagnon book by journalist Patrick Tierney.
The book argued that Chagnon had exaggerated the violence of the Yanomami, staged some fights, and collaborated with his late colleague, geneticist James Neel, in starting a measles epidemic by vaccinating some members of the tribe.(The name Josef Mengele surfaced among critics of Chagnon and Neel.) In a syndicated column at the time, I suggested that the uproar over Chagnon was a shadow war over other issues---the noble savage myth versus the reality of the Yanomami, the sociobiological approach versus the blank-slate theory, and respect for traditional field work versus the post-Sixties politicized view that anthropology is little more than a destructive form of colonialism. The AAA censured Chagnon, an astounding act by a professional academic group. To the amazement to many, myself included, the association later revoked the censure and did it with unusually blunt language: "The task force compromised its objectivity by merging its investigation with a political agenda, in that its mission in conducting the investigation was intended to challenge 'Western elites,' and 'interrupt regimes of knowledge and power."
Jean Quam, a professor of social work who is dean of the University of Minnesota's College of Education and Human Development, has wholeheartedly defended her school's proposed "cultural competence" curricular redesign---in an op-ed for the Star-Tribune that provides a glaringly misleading description of the critics' argument.
Most of Quam's op-ed consists of little more than administrative boilerplate---the sort of jargon that appears on any university website anywhere in the country. Her department's curriculum "will be a national model for preparing teachers for the real challenges of a 21st-century classroom." "Now is a critical time to address barriers to student achievement and to give teachers and administrators the tools they need to be effective." "We value diversity and encourage exploration of all viewpoints and ideologies."
The key point of Quam's op-ed came when she dismissed the argument made by columnist Katherine Kersten, who first exposed the U of M's plan to enforce personnel and curricular bias in its Education program. "Kersten's primary concern," claimed Quam, "is that the initiative addresses the reality of how issues of race, class, culture and gender play out in classrooms and affect student achievement. Her position is that discussion of these issues equates to indoctrination."
I have read Kersten's column; I encourage you to do so as well. Nowhere does it articulate a position that discussion of issues of race, class, and gender "equates to indoctrination." Nowhere does it even come close to such a position.
Continue reading "A Dean Who Can't Read?" »
December 2, 2009
At the Volokh Conspiracy, Todd Zywicki outlines the latest in the Dartmouth alumni suit against Dartmouth College.
The current case, like the previous case, arises from the 1891 Agreement between the Dartmouth Trustees and the alumni of the College, acting through the Association of Alumni, that gave the alumni the right to elect half of the non-ex officio members of the Board of Trustees. At the time, the Board was comprised of 12 members, of which 2 served ex officio (the Governor of New Hampshire and the Dartmouth president). Upon striking the agreement, over the next two years, 5 of the appointed trustees resigned and were replaced with elected trustees. Over time, the size of the board expanded, and by the time I was elected a trustee in 2005 there were 8 elected Alumni Trustees, 8 appointed Charter Trustees, and the Governor and College president as ex officio members. As I have discussed in detail elsewhere, the 1891 Agreement was the culmination of decades of negotiations between the trustees and college administration on one hand and the alumni on the other.
In 2007 after a string of petition trustees were elected to the Board, a majority of trustees voted to impose a board-packing plan, which added 8 new appointed seats to the board, making 16 appointed and 8 elected trustees. I won't rehash that here, except to point interested readers to my earlier discussions as well as the Court's excellent opinion which held that the plaintiffs in that case stated valid claims both on contract and promissory estoppel theories. Importantly, the Court also held that the Association of Alumni had standing to sue and capacity to contract in that case, as well as to provide valid consideration, such as administering the Alumni Trustee elections. For purposes of analysis on the current summary judgment motion, I am going to take it as given that the underlying contract claim is valid.
In Spring 2008, however, the alumni leaders who brought the suit had to stand for reelection and were voted out of office. The winning slate of alumni loyal to the trustees and administration dismissed the suit. Their campaign position had been that the alumni should have "negotiated" more with the trustees before bringing suit. As the current plaintiffs note in their most recent brief, it thus came as quite a surprise when the suit was dismissed with prejudice, with the deliberate intent to try to foreclose a future lawsuit if negotiations broke down (it doesn't actually work, as will be discussed below). After all I've seen over the past few years, I thought that I was beyond being shocked by the sort of behavior described in the plaintiffs' brief, but I confess that this surprised even me. The College has not contested any of the claims in the briefs of the current plaintiffs with respect to the collusive behavior of the AoA leadership in settling the prior case. Read the first 10 pages of so of the plaintiffs' brief if you want to get a flavor of what happened.
Read on for a fascinating outline of the legal questions involved.
A recent report by American Council of Trustees and Alumni entitled "What Will They Learn?" makes clear that the steady deterioriation of general education at the best colleges continues apace. The report studied general education requirements at 100 top schools and found that "Topics like U.S. government or history, literature, mathematics, and economics have become mere options on far too many campuses." Indeed, my own university dropped its U.S. history requirement a year ago, replacing it with a watery "History, Society, Culture" that allows just about everything to count.
The upshot is that one can no longer rely on the ordinary curriculum to ensure a solid liberal education for all students. This is one reason why we need special undergraduate programs, centers, and institutes that emphasize broad learning in civics and history, and provide students a forum for the discussion of ideas and ideologies. I highlighted one of them awhile back, the Alexander Hamilton Institute in Clinton, NY, run by Bob Paquette and providing students a home for the reasoned and critical study of Western civilization.
Another one is the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville. It was established back in 1991 by Senator Mitch McConnell, who graduated from Louisville 27 years earlier. The goal of the center is to educate students to become engaged and informed citizens, and so it hosts luncheons, seminars, panel discussions, and lectures with undergraduates as full participants. Gary Gregg, the Director, holds the Mitch McConnell Chair in Leadership at the university, and his writings The Presidential Republic, Patriot Sage: George Washington and the American Political Tradition and Securing Democracy---Why We Have an Electoral College.
The curriculum of the Center emphasizes civics education, and it developed expressly as a response to "the national problem of declining classroom emphasis on American history and civics education, abysmal student knowledge of the American Constitution and political processes, and a growing detachment of young people from the political process." The programs and events the Center organizes remedy the knowledge deficit by offering scholarships to young people interested in a broad education in political science and the liberal arts, along with internships that give them direct exposure to U.S. politics in action.
Continue reading "Another Success Story" »
December 1, 2009
My article yesterday on this site, "Decoding Teacher Training," discussed the efforts of the University of Minnesota's Education Department to purge prospective public school teachers deemed politically incorrect on "diversity" matters.
A report stresses the seemingly banal concept of "cultural competence," which people from outside the Ivory Tower might suspect is simply making students and prospective teachers aware of the diverse country and world in which we now live.
That, of course, is not how the concept is defined in the groupthink world of Education Departments, where "cultural competence" are codewords that the general public is not supposed to understand.
In its report, the Minnesota department recommended that all Education students be required to perform the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI), "which measures five of the six major stages of the "Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity"; and the "360-degree" analysis of Cultural Intelligence (CQ), "a theoretical extension of existing facet models anchored on the theory of multiple intelligences."
Continue reading "More Minnesota Madness" »
November 30, 2009
"Trustees Approve Free Speech Policy," said the November 30th headline in the Tufts student newspaper. This purports to be good news, but this is Tufts, a university addicted to bragging about free expression on campus while introducing yet another version of its long-discredited speech code.
The one-page "Declaration on Freedom of Expression at Tufts University" contains many nice sentiments on the value of free speech (as do most speech codes), but than veers into the importance of respecting "community values" and "the need to exercise freedom of expression and inquiry in ways that respect the human dignity of others."
"Human dignity" strikes us as a new entry in the speech code business. Normally the campus censors warn against hurt feelings, teasing and causing discomfort. To demand respect for "the human dignity of others" sounds positive and harmless, but almost any passionate argument or satirical comment on campus can easily be construed as harmful to someone's dignity.
Tufts has spent almost three years trying to disentangle itself from the mess it created in trying to pacify the diversity lobby over two satires published by the conservative campus journal, The Primary Source. One was a quite crude satirical carol, "Come All Ye Black Folk", making fun of affirmative action. The other cited factual material about some Muslim beliefs and practices as a way of criticizing Islamic Awareness Week on campus.
Tufts announced that the journalists would be punished and banned anonymous articles in any campus publication. In response to howls of protest from free-speech advocates, the administration decided not to punish the students and eliminated the no-anonymity rule. But it refused to lift the harassment judgment against the students. As a result, it is one of the "red light" campuses on the anti-free-speech list maintained by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).
The new Tufts statement does not call for punishing speech but it does say that "Members of the university community, including academic and administrative leaders, must hold accountable those who do not respect (community) values." Hold accountable? A better way to put it is that those who are offended by speech should give up trying to punish and simply engage in some free speech of their own.
November 23, 2009
It was a "win for students," the New York Times headline announced last week. Russell Athletic, a leading manufacturer of college-logo sportswear, had agreed to rehire 1,200 Honduran workers who lost their jobs when Russell closed one of its eight factories in Honduras in 2008 after negotiations over a collective-bargaining agreement reached a stalemate.
Students---U.S. students--were in the picture because an organization called United Students Against Sweatshops had persuaded nearly 100 colleges and universities, including such prestigious institutions as Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, and Michigan, to sever or suspend their licensing agreements with Russell, a unit of Fruit of the Loom, that allowed Russell to put their logos onto T-shirts, sweatshirts, and other clothing items. All the universities were members of the Worker Rights Consortium, an organization that monitors factories with university contracts for violations of the coalition's code of conduct regarding labor conditions and relations. United Students had engineered the formation of the coalition---and its financing via subsidies by its participating universities---over 10 years' worth of sit-ins and hunger strikes on the 170 or so campuses where the organization has chapters The coalition had determined that Russell's shutdown of its plant in Choloma, Honduras, violated workers' rights by blocking unionization.
Everyone hates sweatshops, right? So Russell's Nov. 14 announcement that it would rehire the laid-off workers, set up a new, unionized plant in Choloma, and halt its anti-unionization efforts at its seven other Honduran factories that employ nearly 10,000 people, seems like a win-win situation. The workers get their jobs back, Russell presumably gets its university-logo business back (some of the licensing agreements are worth more than $1 million in sales), and Fruit of the Loom, a subsidiary of Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway empire whose sales are reported to have declined during the current recession, gets a needed boost. Plus, United Students received a pat on the head from New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse for their "idealism and energy." (They had persuaded 65 members of Congress to sign a letter in May protesting the Choloma plant shutdown.)
Continue reading "The Sweatshop Protests" »
In early October, Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn proposed prohibiting the National Science Foundation from "wasting any federal research funding on political science projects," citing the heavy emphasis that the funded projects had placed on quantitative research projects. Such methodology is currently much in fashion among political scientists, even though the research usually yields findings so arcane to be of little use to anyone outside certain segments of political science departments.
Coburn is, perhaps, the upper chamber's most passionate opponent of all non-defense federal spending, so in one respect his criticism of the political science funding came as little surprise. But the merits of Coburn's criticism are also difficult to dismiss. If the goal of government funding is to produce material relevant for contemporary policy debates, why would anyone expect such insight to come from most quarters of contemporary academia?
Barack Obama is a president more attractive to professors than any chief executive since FDR. Obama's campaign, of course, received overwhelming support (both in votes and donations) from the nation's professoriate. As president, he has demonstrated a cerebral style that suggests openness to internal debate and dissenting ideas. Perhaps most important, Obama is of the academy himself: he spent several years teaching at the University of Chicago Law School and was a published author before entering national politics.
Continue reading "Celebrating Academics' Irrelevance" »
November 18, 2009
One of the more heroic acts in the recent annals of American higher education came from NYU president John Sexton, who stood up to the faculty radicals within his midst and (thus far successfully) fought creation of a graduate student "union" on his campus. There are lots of reasons why academic unionization is problematic, but the concept of graduate student unionization is ridiculous. That the movement is often promoted as a fight against the "corporate agenda" in higher education is even stranger, since the idea that graduate students are "laborers" who need to "unionize" reflects a vision of the academy that should repel anyone opposed to the "corporatization" of higher education.
The dangers of graduate student "unionization" are currently on full display at the University of Illinois. Betraying the undergraduates that they teach, Illinois graduate students went out on strike Monday, demanding that the university guarantee tuition waivers for out-of-state students. In a statement that offers a sense of how much the "union" activists value the students they teach, Kerry Pimblott, lead negotiator for the graduate student "union," proclaimed, "We control this campus; we decide if they have instruction on this campus."
Why should Illinois taxpayers accommodate the strikers' demands? Amber Cooper, a leader of the University of Michigan's graduate student union who joined the strikers, offered an articulate rationale: the university's position was "freaking ridiculous."
Any good Ph.D. program will offer tuition waivers---they're the only way to recruit talented graduate students. But the Illinois administration, for perfectly understandable reasons, has proved reluctant to place what amounts to an academic decision into a contract. Moreover, if the current economic downturn continues, Illinois, like all public universities, will come under increasing pressure to cut costs and raise additional revenue. There's no particular reason why automatic tuition waivers should be exempt from consideration in such a budget crisis.
Meanwhile, the strikers don't appear to be experiencing any particular hardship. The Illinois provost sent out a mass e-mail indicating that no current graduate student would see his or her tuition waiver adjusted. And though they walked out on their students, it appears as if the graduate students will not see their stipends reduced for the time they spend on the picket line instead of the classroom.
Undergraduates---as so often is the case on campus political matters---offered the most sensible response. Senior Alisha Janssen, astutely noted, "It's not really fair that we have to pay for an education, and they are complaining about getting paid for getting an education." And James Liu told the Chicago Tribune, "It's not that hard to cross a picket line. I don't feel guilty about it. I don't feel like I should sacrifice my credit because this is between the grad students and the university."
Liu and Janssen, of course, are correct. While the Illinois administration appears ready to cave to the "union" extremists, the university should do more to look after the undergraduates it teaches, and do less to accommodate the demands of graduate student activists.
November 17, 2009
Santa Cruz, Ca.--As California works to plug an epic budget shortfall, severe budget cuts are threatening the twin qualities -- excellence and access -- that have defined the University of California as the world's leading public research university. At UC Santa Cruz, faculty, students, and staff worry about the impact the state's financial meltdown is having on the campus, and will have on the social and economic health of the state..." The repercussions of California's $26.3 billion budget gap are being felt campuswide. For example, the University Library has reduced hours and staffing and is canceling almost $800,000 worth of serial subscriptions, among other measures, according to University Librarian Ginny Steel. "We're down to core services at this point," Steel said....
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Santa Cruz, Ca. -- UC Santa Cruz's Academic Senate voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to condemn a major student fee hike and furloughs for full-time employees whose annual salary is $40,000 or less... A 13 percent state funding cut to the UC system during the past two years has translated into $50 million in slashing at UCSC. The campus has seen staff and instructor layoffs, course cuts and the elimination of more than 50 unfilled faculty positions....
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Online job notice
The University Library of the University of California, Santa Cruz, seeks an enterprising, creative, and service-oriented archivist to join the staff of Special Collections & Archives (SC&A) as Archivist for the Grateful Dead Archive. This is a potential career status position. The Archivist will be part of a dynamic, collegial, and highly motivated department dedicated to building, preserving, promoting, and providing maximum access both physically and virtually to one of the Library's most exciting and unique collections, The Grateful Dead Archive (GDA)… Appointment Range: Associate Librarian III - Librarian I, with an approximate salary range of $52,860 - $68,892, commensurate with qualifications and experience....
November 16, 2009
Spend some time among humanities researchers and it won't be long before you hear complaints about lack of support. They grumble that while the sciences have countless sources and billions of dollars pouring into their labs and clinics and field work, the humanities have NEH, a smattering of foundations giving fellowships, a handful of humanities centers on campuses around the country, some post-docs that give a year of salary . . . It's a scramble to get a course reduction, pay for travel to archives, attend a conference to share recent findings, and just clear a few weeks to do nothing but read and write. The money just isn't there, they say.
What they forget is that every tenured and tenure-track faculty member at a research university is paid every month out of regular salary and benefits to do the very research they claim is unsupported. At schools that emphasize teaching over research, or don't count research at all, regular teachers have to manage three or four courses per semester. At schools that require research, the teaching duty drops to two courses per semester. Universities expect professors to fill the hours it takes to run those lost one or two courses precisely to research inquiries.
And they pay them accordingly. The customary formula for the humanities at research institutions is one-third, one-third, one-third. In an average week of 40 hours of labor, professors devote 13+ hours to teaching, 13+ hours to administrative service (committee work, writing letters of recommendation, reviewing job candidates, etc.), and 13+ hours to research. On that model, one-third of a professor's salary and benefits support research. If a professor makes $60,000 a year in gross salary and another $15,000 in benefits, then the university pays $25,000 a year to subsidize research.
If we translate that into the research product, if that $60K-per-year professor spends four years researching and writing a book on the novel, the university paid $100,000 to see it through. This doesn't include the cost of producing the book once it leaves the professor's hands--a press editing, publishing, distributing, and marketing the book, plus academic libraries purchasing the book (library purchases make up around 70 percent of unit sales of books in literary studies).
That amounts to a pretty strong network of support for one branch of humanities scholarship.
November 13, 2009
The indispensible FIRE---the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education---bestows a regular mock honor on some offending college or university: the Speech Code of the Month. So far this year, the winners have included New York University (which bans, among other things, inappropriate jokes and teasing), the University of Idaho (no "insensitive" actions or communications), Northern Illinois University (no annoying or embarrassing anyone through "intentional and wrongful use of words, gestures and actions"), Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (no "demeaning depictions" of anyone---signing up to be an editorial cartoonist there may be as risky as in Denmark) Rhode Island College (for the thought-control policy that forbids racially-based "attitudes"), and San Jose State University (no "publicly telling offensive jokes").Three institutions on this year's list--SUNY Buffalo, Idaho and James Madison University--have revised their speech/harassment policies in response to FIRE's criticism.
FIRE puts out an annual report on campus speech policies. The 2009 report found that 270 of 364 institutions surveyed---74 percent---restrict speech that would otherwise be protected by the First Amendment. Last month FIRE published a very polite guide to "Correcting Common Mistakes in Speech Policies," aimed at college presidents and administrators who do not allow, and often do not understand, the principle of free speech.
November 12, 2009
A convicted terror bomber, Raymond Luc Levasseur, invited by a far left center to speak at the University of Massachusetts. Amherst, was disinvited after pressure from police groups and Governor Deval Partrick, then reinvited when the university president Jack Wilson intervened. Levasseur is a former leader of the United Freedom Front a radical group responsible for bank robberies, blowing up buildings , injuring many and murdering a state trooper. Wilson was right to allow the speech.. Levasseur is a loathsome character, but what would free speech on campus amount to if politicians and outsiders could decide who can or can't address students?
Still, a powerful aroma of hypocrisy surrounds Wilson and UMass on the censorship issue. Few American campuses have such a long and tortured record of doing so little to protect free speech. Some of the university's many tramplings of free expression are discussed here and here. The problem, a common one, is that UMass is not terribly interested in free speech unless the speaker targeted is on the left.
November 10, 2009
Some happy news via Eugene Volokh at the Volokh Conspiracy - Duke University's Voltair Press is not only printing a book on the Danish Mohammed cartoon controversy that features the cartoons (imagine that!) but also includes a Statement of Principle that decries Yale University's censorship of the cartoons in their own volume on the matter. Here's a sample:
The incident at Yale provides an opportunity to re-examine our commitment to free expression. When an academic institution of such standing asserts the need to suppress scholarly work because of a theoretical possibility of violence somewhere in the world, it grants legitimacy to censorship and casts serious doubt on their, and our, commitment to freedom of expression in general, and academic freedom in particular.
The failure to stand up for free expression emboldens those who would attack and undermine it. It is time for colleges and universities in particular to exercise moral and intellectual leadership. It is incumbent on those responsible for the education of the next generation of leaders to stand up for certain basic principles: that the free exchange of ideas is essential to liberal democracy; that each person is entitled to hold and express his or her own views without fear of bodily harm; and that the suppression of ideas is a form of repression used by authoritarian regimes around the world to control and dehumanize their citizens and squelch opposition.
In the 1950s, Hamilton College, where I now teach, had no marketing arm to speak of, but the New York Times provided a good deal of favorable coverage. A few years ago I stumbled upon one such item in a June 1950 issue. The headline said "Hamilton Program: College Curriculum Is Revised to Provide the Basic Musts." The article reported that the Hamilton faculty, led by President Robert McEwen, had completed an intensive five-year study to answer a rather obvious but nonetheless vital question to a liberal arts college: "What basic musts in the way of intellectual and moral equipment should a college give its students to prepare them for effective living during the next fifty years." Led by President McEwen, the Hamilton faculty determined that forty-five percent of the class time of every student would be devoted to foundational courses that would provide undergraduates with what was called basic intellectual equipment to reach six objectives: 1. written and oral command of English; 2. fluency in a foreign language; 3. a command of logic and its application to the understanding of the natural world; 4. understanding and enjoyment of the creative arts; 5. knowledge of the principal ways human beings have constructed and interacted with society; and 6. "an understanding of the intellectual bases of ethical judgment." Bracing stuff that.
Now let's turn the clock ahead almost sixty years and create for consideration an imaginary liberal arts college shaped by what seem to be fashionable trends. It's no longer a shining little village on the hill, but an academic cauldron. I'll stir the pot. The imaginary campus costs more than $50,000 a year to attend. Grade inflation is so bad that an average of eighty-five would rank a student in the bottom fourth of the class; an average of eighty would plant you pretty much in the root cellar, like Mr. Inconsequential, the last man drafted in the seventh round by an NFL team. The college not only doesn't require one course in Shakespeare for graduation, it doesn't require one course in English, or in any other discipline for that matter. Recent valedictorians receive awards without ever having taken during their four years of matriculation a single course in English and history. Many students who depart the place after four years possess a far greater understanding of the intricacies of sex toys than of the complexities of the Constitution. Because of the adverse incentive provided by an open curriculum--that is, a curriculum with no disciplinary or core requirements--the number of double majors, once almost non-existent in the early 1980s, has soared. Indeed, the evidence from recent crops of Phi Beta Kappas, the canaries in the mine at this imaginary college, reveals that the number of double majors in this class of the so-called best and brightest more than doubles the average for members of the junior and senior classes as a whole. Many students are graduated with transcripts so manicured that seventy percent and more of all their courses are taken in only two disciplines, which could be as closely allied as math and economics, or English and creative writing. In some cases students avoid entire realms of knowledge because they prefer to play toward perceived academic strengths or to attend an increasing number of soft courses in programs created to satisfy academic fashion. Student tour guides who work for the admissions office openly tout the open curriculum in avoiding difficult classes as a way to lure high school students to the college.
The college has a "Great Names" series, richly endowed, but uses the money to import a comedian who charges more than $100,000 for his performance, a fee that exceeds that charged by former presidents of the United States who have spoken at the college. On this imaginary campus, a college official who lauds the satire of this comedian and who anonymously lends his prose to a student publication that regularly derides Catholics, berates a fraternity as unthinking and insensitive for using a satirical image created by that very comedian.
Continue reading "The Modern Academic Cauldron" »
November 9, 2009
I have the print copy of the October 2009 Modern Language Association Job List, the annual publication in which English departments in research universities and major liberal arts colleges publicize open positions. It doesn't contain every job opening in English literature at every institution of higher learning, but it is the main source for people looking for tenure-track openings. For graduate students, lecturers, and adjuncts in the traditional fields of English literature defined by historical periods, it's a depressing document. Thousands of AbDs and recent PhDs long for a tenure-track post, or even a renewable lectureship in Old English, Medieval, Renaissance, and so on up to 20th-century British literature. Last year, the entire MLA Job List postings dropped 21 percent from the previous year, "the steepest annual decline in its 34-year history," InsideHigherEd.com reported. This year looks no better. In particular, if candidates wrote a dissertation on Milton, Dickens, even Shakespeare, the odds of getting an interview look bad.
Here is the breakdown of all jobs across the entire country in the following areas:
-----Old English 1 position
-----Medieval 8 positions
-----Renaissance (or Early Modern or Shakespeare) 14 positions
-----17th Century 1 positions
-----18th Century 7 positions
-----Romanticism 6 positions
-----19th Century 7 positions
-----20th Century 11 positions
Think of what this means. For the whole field of Old English, Beowulf and the rest, United States universities offer a single open slot, as they do for 17th-century English literature. Indeed, for the entire history of English literature (not including drama or American and Anglophone literature), we have a total of 55 positions advertised in the MLA Job List. How many thousands of graduate students and non-tenure-track teachers and independent scholars crave a shot at one of those plums?
Continue reading "English Lit's Poor Job Market" »
November 5, 2009
Congratulations to Minding the Campus for its forum on academic freedom. Saying something constructive about academic freedom doesn't look all that difficult. It is one of the core doctrines of higher education. It has an abundant history, full of colorful characters, eloquent declarations, incisive legal arguments, and enlivening controversies. Yet somehow University of Chicago president Robert Zimmer managed to turn these ingredients into rhetorical sludge and draw disdain from left, right, and middle.
Peter Sacks faults Zimmer for hypocrisy. Zimmer promotes the principle of academic freedom the way The Museum of Modern Art promotes a niftily designed egg-beater: as something to gaze at under glass, not as a tool for frothing eggs. Academic freedom in actual use, says Sacks, is just a pretext for private universities to remain exclusive.
O'Connor and Black spot the Big Silence in Zimmer's account of academic freedom: he says nothing about the duties that faculty members must shoulder if they assume the "right" to academic freedom. High on that list of duties is the need for disciplines to enforce tough professional ethics. Because these days, that enforcement has withered, and academic freedom in the true sense is pretty much a dead letter---just another rationale for privileged people to do whatever the hell they want.
Continue reading "Our Academic Freedom Forum" »
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