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May 14, 2008
Chancellor G. P. Peterson of the University of Colorado, Boulder, plans to raise $9 million to endow a visiting chair in conservative thought and policy, on grounds that intellectual diversity is a good thing. Like all radical ideas, having an unorthodox professor on campus sounds a bit risky, maybe even startling, but after some reflection, there might be a few benefits to go with the shock. First, students will learn that conservative professors look very much like the 800 conventional liberal ones that the university has been collecting since the 1950's. This in itself is a plus. Soon many students will realize that the average conservative professor has only one head, and shares a remarkable 98 percent of the conventional liberal professor's genes. In addition most have opposable thumbs and are perfectly able to shake hands and smile readily at strangers.
Still, the idea of hiring a conservative teacher should give us pause, for several reasons.
1) Conservatives are prone to mysterious outbursts of unaccountable mirth. This can occur at any time, for instance immediately after someone suggests attending a convention of the Modern Language Association, or when a professor points out that studying Madonna is just as good as studying Shakespeare.
2) Conservatives often go months without using the word "marginalized," which clearly puts a damper on faculty conversation.
3)Though they speak fairly well, conservatives are notoriously weak in diversity-speak and postmodern expression, as if these crucial campus tongues were some sort of impenetrable jargon. As Judith Butler once quipped, inducing a burst of appreciative laughter from her audience, "right-wingers lack libidinal multiplicity and melancholic structure, very likely because they are so sadly saddled by the binary frame and univocal signification." Indeed, who among us can disagree?
4) How do we know that conservatives will rest content with just one professor on each campus? It's true that Harvard has Harvey Mansfield, Yale has Donald Kagan and Princeton has Robby George. This arrangement has long seemed stable, but the generous allowance of a token member often feeds the appetite for more. Rumor has it that as many as two or three other conservatives have infiltrated Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Is this true, and if so, where does it end? What happens when an open-borders policy inundates the academy and changes our culture? They are not like us. Won't they cause disagreement and dissent?
No, one conservative professor on campus is way too many. Let's drop the idea.
- Ilya Somin at Volokh Conspiracy wonders why some prominent universities don't have law schools - Princeton, Brown, Johns Hopkins, Rice, and Tufts are law-school-less. As is Brandeis, ironic as he notes, "for a prominent university named after a Supreme Court justice."
He's surprised they haven't made the leap. Take a look.
- Harvard's new Gen Ed curriculum seems fairly promising, at first glance, with an introductory humanities colloquium, and classes on the novel in Europe, globalization, and American healthcare policy. Flaw? These courses can only enroll a small number of students. Hopefully we'll see more in the future, but there's really no telling what they'll look like.
- And Margaret Soltan, on the University of Colorado - Boulder, home of the new 'conservative professor':
And you know, therefore, that the proposed endowed chair there in Conservative Thought and Policy - essentially an effort to import a high-profile conservative thinker - doesn't represent an alien imposition on a quiet mountain monoculture.
The main reality of campus life at Boulder is a hard-drinking, right-leaning, anti-intellectual, and politically indifferent basketball and football culture dominated by dumb frat guys and an athletics department so corrupt it generated the largest national university sports scandal of them all not long ago.
May 8, 2008
Will Shortz, the famous crossword puzzle editor for the New York Times, gave the commencement address last week at his alma mater, the University of Indiana. Using his trademark cleverness and brain-taxing ambiguity, Shortz has brilliantly transformed the modern crossword. Early in the week, his Times puzzles are fairly easy (Monday, Tuesday) but each day's puzzle gets a bit harder, and by Friday and Saturday, the crosswords are maddeningly hard. Here are three of my favorite Shortz clues: "rural strip" (answer: Lil Abner, "digital monitor" (answer: manicurist) and "They include M, L and X L" ( the answer was Roman numerals). After listing some famous Indiana graduates (Jane Pauley, Kevin Kline, Dick Enberg, Tavis Smiley, Robert Gates, Wendell Willkie) Shortz quizzed the new graduates about prominent former students.
Here is his commencement quiz:
1) Hoagy Carmichael -- composer, pianist; best known for writing the melody to "Stardust," graduated from IU in 1926 with a degree in what?
a. Mathematics
b. American Literature
c. Music Education
d. Law
2) Robert James Waller Jr. -- author of the best-selling novel The Bridges of Madison County, graduated in 1968 with a degree in what?
a. Business
b. Engineering
c. Dentistry
d. Art History
Continue reading "Indiana: The Return Of The Puzzler" »
KC Johnson continues to pay indefatigable attention to the Group of 88 at Durham-in-Wonderland. We missed a post two weeks ago, but it's certainly worth a look:
Waheena Lubiano, the famously prolific Duke professor, recently co-authored a piece in Social Text (along with fellow group member Michael Hardt, and another professor) on the trials of the Group of 88. What's the issue? They were victimized by bloggers and outsiders.
According to the Lubiano Trio, "the most extreme marginalization was reserved for the faculty whose professional expertise made them most competent to engage the discourses on race and gender unleashed by the inaugurating incident - scholars of African American and women's studies. Instead, administrators, like the bloggers themselves, operated under the assumption that everyone was an expert on matters of race and gender, while actually existing academic expertise was recast as either bias or a commitment to preconceived notions about the legal case. Some faculty thus found themselves in the unenviable position of being the targets of public discourse (and disparaged for their expertise on race and gender) without being legitimate participants in it.
Horrors. What other indignities did these innocents (speaking truth to power) go through? KC reports:
Blogs, according to the Lubiano Trio, used "powerful tactics of harassment" against members of the Group. "Typically we [Group members] should... work as maids for the players' families [or] return to the slave quarters." Group members "have also been found guilty of numerous crimes, including treason, sedition, and tax evasion(!)."
Although the Lubiano Trio's article does contain footnotes, the Group members elected to supply not even one citation for any of these outlandish claims. It doesn't take a Ph.D. to figure out why.
What does the inclusion of these unsourced ramblings say about the editorial policies of the Duke University Press journal Social Text?
Oh come now, we all know the Social Text editorial policies are ironclad!
It's an astonishingly risible piece. Read more.
May 7, 2008
Confirming what college administrators have known for years, Education Sector has released a report based on U.S. Department of Education figures detailing huge gaps between the college graduation rates of white students and those of blacks. The gap (measured by failure to graduate within six years from a four-year institution) averages about 20 percent, although it can soar in excess of 40 percent in a few cases.
These are dispiriting figures, but they need to be approached in context. First of all, as the report notes, only slightly over half - 57 percent - of students of any race who enroll in four-year colleges manage to make it to graduation within six years. This figure suggest that a traditional-style uninterrupted college education isn't for everyone - and in fact many dropouts (although their numbers aren't tracked in the Education Sector report) finish their degrees part-time or after several years in the work-force, as the burgeoning number of institutions devoted to part-time education indicates). White students do fare better in traditional education, according to a study published last year in the journal Blacks in Higher Education: 63 percent of whites graduate in six years, compared to only 43 percent of blacks (although the percentage of graduating black students has been ticking upwards over the past few years, the study noted).
Blacks who attend elite private universities - Harvard et al., - have extremely high graduation rates that approach those of whites, but that is probably to be expected, because those schools have highly selective admissions standards for all their students and typically graduate more than 90 percent of them. And it is safe to say that the blacks at the top private schools are strongly motivated academically and have few distracting financial worries thanks to scholarships or their upper-middle-class families.
Continue reading "Black Success, Black Failure" »
Substantial opposition to the proposed new version of the University of Delaware indoctrination program turned up at Monday's meeting of the faculty senate. That's the good news. The bad news is that the senate will take up the issue again next week and the indoctrinators may still
win.
Professor Jan Blits of the Delaware affiliate of the National Association of Scholars writes: "Things went much better than I had expected. The discussion will be continued next Monday. Most of the people who spoke (and there was a large number) were on our side. Students were very helpful. They will return next week. Everything seemed to fall into place. The odds are still against us, but not nearly as long as I originally thought."
Both students and faculty spoke with some passion against the Residential Life proposal. Both argued vehemently that the concept of "sustainability" running through the voluminous ResLife prose has little to do with the environment and a great deal to so with imposing political dogmas.
A genuine howler came from Professor Matt Robinson, chairman of the faculty senate student life committee who presented the ResLife plan. "The concept of sustainability, that's only speaking in terms of (the) environmental," he said. Apparently he is not familiar with the
ResLife program's listed goals for 2008-200. In these goals, no environmental concern is mentioned; everything revolves around the social plan behind the "sustainability" codeword -changing the beliefs and attitudes of students.
Adam Kissel of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) wrote a Monday open letter to the university faculty, saying "I strongly believe that ResLife is attempting to use the faculty to restore its highly politicized and unabashedly coercive 'sustainability' curriculum. It is intended to be indoctrination into an ideology. The proposal offers on meager, halting respect for the private conscience of UD students." Kissel, a graduate of the University of Delaware, wrote that the ResLife officials took every opportunity - one-on-one sessions, bulletin boards, parties, etc. - to pressure students.
Kissel reports ResLife, which removed some potentially embarrassing material from its site last fall, has now removed yet another document. In the missing document, a diversity official under the plan is held responsible for "resource development" covering oppression, prejudice reduction, heterosexism, ageism, racism, HIV/AIDS awareness and "multicultural jeopardy," whatever that is.
- Richard Vedder marvels at the obdurate defense of embattled University Presidents - something much like a defacto system of Giving Presidents Tenure
- Jay Greene offers an analysis of gifts to U.S. Universities originating in Middle Eastern states. They're massive, as you might imagine. As Greene comments:
To put the magnitude of those gifts in perspective, the Arabian Gulf states from which the money came have economies that represent less than 2% of global GDP (excluding the US). So, their share of foreign gifts to US universities is eight times as large as their foreign share of global wealth production.
- The APSA is entertaining concerns about the location of their professional conference, namely that "states with Constitutional restrictions on rights afforded recognized same-sex unions and partnerships may create an unwelcoming environment for our members in cities where we might meet." Read more, from Joe Knippenberg.
- Students at Ashland University are protesting, with an unusual aim - the right to take ancient Greek to fulfill language requirements. Imagine that.
May 6, 2008
Look to the latest New Criterion, focused on liberal education, for some incisive writing on the modern academy and its afflictions:
Our own Jim Piereson, reviewing Education's End, in "Liberalism vs. humanism"
Alan Charles Kors' fascinating and depressing account of his long experiences in the academy in "On the sadness of higher education"
Charles Murray on our extravagant educational expectations in "The age of educational romanticism"
more also from Victor Davis Hanson, Robert Paquette, and Roger Kimball. Take a look.
May 5, 2008
Columbia University enhanced its Israel-hating reputation by naming John Coatsworth as the new dean of its School of International and Public Affairs. The university has so many full-time detractors of Israel on its payroll that one would think an opportunity to name at least a moderate to the deanship would be overwhelming.
Coatsworth signed a petition in 2002 calling on Harvard and MIT to divest from Israel and from American companies selling arms to Israel. Columbia's disappointing president, Lee Bollinger, called the divestment movement "grotesque," but apparently he does not regard it as grotesque enough to appoint a better dean than Coatsworth. It was Coatsworth who played the major role in inviting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak at Columbia, a move that Bollinger supported and then finessed by delivering a coarse attack on the Iranian before he had a chance to speak. This allowed Bollinger to place himself where he very much likes to be - on both sides of a controversial issue. Coatsworth, on the other hand, bulls straight ahead whenever he can. Defending the invitation to Ahmadinejad, he foolishly went on television to announce that he would have invited Hitler to speak at Columbia too.
Like most America-hating Americans, Coatsworth has been a strong fan of Fidel Castro, insisting that Cuba has been a mostly benign nation under his leadership, although it "prosecutes and harasses some dissenters." That would include journalists, librarians and more than 100,000 others. Columbia gets worse and worse under its weak president.
Priya Venkatesan will go down in history as the Dartmouth professor who decided to sue her students because they gave her lousy course evaluations. A few days later Venkatesan, who was hired by Dartmouth in 2005 to teach four sections of Writing 5, the semester-long standard freshman-composition class, told reporters she was withdrawing her planned lawsuit, largely because, as the New York Post reported, she couldn't find a lawyer to take her case, in which she intended to charge students in her fall and winter classes this year (and also Dartmouth itself) with violations of federal civil rights laws banning discrimination on the basis of gender and ethnicity. Vetnkatesan also sent e-mails to some of her students, accusing the 18- and 19-year-old Dartmouth freshmen of "harassment" and advising them that their responses would be "used against" them in "a court of law."
Venkatesan was quickly dropped from the Dartmouth writing program's teaching roster, and she has recently taken a teaching position at Northwestern, which evidently hired her before the news broke about her student-suing propensities. But the question is: why did Dartmouth (or Northwestern, for that matter) hire her to teach writing in the first place. From all evidence Venkatesan hasn't a clue as to construct a clear English sentence. She does, however, have a Ph.D. in "literature," which means that she plowed through and regurgitated the piles of French postmodernist theory expressed in incomprehensible jargon that are the standard course fare nowadays in literary studies. Here, for example is the Amazon description of Vanketsan's undoubtedly dissertation-based book, Molecular Biology in Narrative Form (the 39-year-old Venkatesan also has a master's degree in genetics):
Molecular Biology in Narrative Form is a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary study that shows a connection between molecular biology and French narrative theory, and, from a unique perspective, bridges the gap between two disciplines that seem mutually exclusive. With many new insights on the link between science (in the form of DNA, a set of codes) and literature (in the form of language, another set of codes), this book looks at modern experimental science within the framework of semiotics. Priya Venkatesan reveals the extraordinary parallel between the work of scientists and the work of narratologists who develop narrative paradigms and analyze literary texts.
And here is an excerpt from a 2006 article by Venkatesan:
Continue reading "Students Ungrateful? Sue Them." »
May 2, 2008
The creators of the notorious indoctrination program at the University of Delaware are back with a new version of their astonishingly coercive plan. Call it Indoctrination II. This time around, they pose as respectful and hovering parental substitutes, promising to do something about student homesickness, offering helpful advice on how to study for final exams, sponsoring video game tournaments and even planning a show-and-tell day (Residents will be asked to bring one of their favorite material possessions to floor meeting and will have the opportunity to discuss what it means to them...). The idea that students might prefer to be left alone in their dorms, not regimented into a pseudo-educational program run by residential assistants and assorted bureaucrats (with no input from faculty) does not seem to occur to the busy indoctrinators.
In the original residential life program, attendance was mandatory, with penalties for missing a training session made clear, though the bureaucrats later claimed that the program had been voluntary all along. Now, with niceness as its watchword, the office of residential life says "Students will not face penalties, perceived or real, for failing to engage in residential activities and programs." The proposed new program, which will be accepted or rejected by the faculty senate on May 5th, seems very much like the old one, with cosmetic changes to make it more palatable. The old one frankly pressured students into accepting the values that the university wanted them to have. (Sample: "students will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression.") The new version is a bit more subtle and vague enough to deflect some criticism ("Exploring concepts of citizenship is a meaningless activity in the residence halls in the absence of solid strategies for the development of residential communities.") The topic "Gay Marriage & Civil Unions" was changed to "How do you define love?"
Heavy emphasis is still placed on "sustainability," the deliberately vague term that masks a liberal-to-radical cultural and social program that the residential life officials clearly believe should be accepted in toto by students. Adam Kissel, who analyzes the Delaware program for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) does not believe the new program will be open or optional. He writes: "Simply calling the indoctrination 'optional' does not absolve ResLife (and ultimately UD and its faculty) of responsibility for the coercive pressure on students to conform to a highly specific set of view on a wide variety of social and political issues. ResLife can no longer be trusted on such matters." The Delaware Association of Scholars has weighed in too, arguing that the program usurps the faculty's historic prerogative to oversee education at the university. A statement by the association called the new version "little more than a re-tread" of the old one. "The proposed program still tries to change students' 'thoughts, values, beliefs and actions,' while focusing on 'student learning outcomes.' (It) simply hides the original program's intent in different language. Old program, new words."
"...Middle Eastern studies programs have been distorted by "a degree of thought control and limitations of freedom of expression without parallel in the Western world since the 18th century, and in some areas longer than that... It seems to me it's a very dangerous situation, because it makes any kind of scholarly discussion of Islam, to say the least, dangerous. Islam and Islamic values now have a level of immunity from comment and criticism in the Western world that Christianity has lost and Judaism has never had."
- Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University, delivering the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa. As reported in Congressional Quarterly, April 27, 2008.
May 1, 2008
Jay Greene has compiled a list of political donations from the employees of the top ten U.S. News and World report universities. What did he find?
The most "balanced" university in terms of donations was Duke, where 84% of donations and 81% of the overall dollar value went to Democratic candidates. How about the fabled "conservative" University of Chicago? 96% of overall donations and 96% of the total dollar value to Democratic candidates. The rest vary between this range. This is the moderating professoriate?
Read Greene's post for additional analysis.
April 30, 2008
Another vital chance to opine on the Dartmouth trustee-packing scheme has arisen. The Dartmouth Association of Alumni is now holding elections for their Executive Committee. The contest revolves centrally around the Alumni Association's ongoing suit against Dartmouth's alteration of the college's board. Two slates of candidates are competing: one, Dartmouth Undying, which vows to end to suit against Dartmouth, and another, Dartmouth Parity, that vows to continue it. You're likely familiar with the issue; if not, a simple comparison of how each side presents the issue might be informative.
Here's Dartmouth Parity on the question:
Since 1891 alumni have elected half the members of the Board of Trustees, and, in doing so, they have kept Dartmouth on an even keel - and ensured that the College has remained a college, rather than becoming a university. Now, after losses in four consecutive trustee elections and the constitution referendum, the Board of Trustees has announced a plan to marginalize alumni, doubling the number of unelected trustees. Under this radical plan, trustees elected by the alumni would be outnumbered on the Board by a margin of two to one.
Aside from a few potentially disputable adjectives ("radical"), it's an objectively accurate depiction of what has happened - and why a lawsuit has been filed.
Here's Dartmouth Undying's encapsulation of their candidates' sentiments about the suit:
They are of one mind about ending the divisive, expensive lawsuit that their opponents support. Not only is this lawsuit diverting money and resources from undergraduate education, it is creating instability and disunity, which will hamper Dartmouth's ability to attract the best candidates in the upcoming search for its next President. It is also disturbing to students who deserve better from their alumni.
Continue reading "Some Dartmouth Alumni Happy With Less Influence" »
April 29, 2008
One of the curiosities that bored college editors survey every few years is the topic of men pursuing women's studies. Three such pieces appeared in the last month, in the Chicago Maroon today, in the Duke Chronicle yesterday, and in the Yale Daily News on April 2; all stressed the accessibility and relevance of women's studies to all potential takers, yet, like all previous reports, will undoubtedly convince most men to stay far away from the field.
Just how many men are pursuing women's studies? There are three male majors, respectively, at Yale and the University of Chicago, and three males earning minors at Duke. All persons interviewed on the topic for each paper - mainly students, but some administrators, praised the programs, and encouraged more male participation. Yale Dean Peter Salovey commented that given that "the name of the major features women's studies so prominently" men may "think superficially that the major is not relevant to issues of interest to them." What does he think? "Of course it is." Jonathan Feinberg, a Duke Student, was lured by a class titled "Sex, Money, and Power", "three great things" as he described to the Duke Chronicle. The cosmetic discussion of the subject's potential wide appeal to men (who wouldn't be interested in a Yale class nicknamed "Porn in the Morn", noted for its "famously explicit subject matter"?) reveals, typically, far different, and narrower emphases than romping gender and sexuality.
A large number of the students interviewed are frank about pursuing the study because of their sexual orientation, or avowed activist interests, or, as in the case of Daniel Klein, a student at the University of Chicago, both:
Continue reading "Where Are The Men For Women's Studies?" »
April 25, 2008
The New York Times is not known for delivering sharp blows to people engaged in countercultural preening, but it delivered a nice one this morning. As the nostalgic veterans of the 1968 Columbia University protests (or uprising, or riots) gathered on their old campus to celebrate the wonder of their 40-year-old disturbance, Susan Dominus of the Times produced a report on a police officer injured during the student occupation of campus buildings. One proud student veteran of the old unpleasantness wrote yesterday that "the bloody riot" was a police riot: most students occupying building engaged in Gandhian passive resistance." But of course, Gandhi never jumped from a second-story window onto the back of a police officer, as one maddened Columbia student did to Frank Gucciardi in 1968.
The day after the buildings were cleared, the students were still acting up, and Gucciardi, then 34, was one of ten officers sent to cope with the continuing disorder. As soon as they went through the Columbia gates, students attacked with tree limbs. Various objects, including books, waste baskets and glue, were thrown from windows. A student knocked Gucciardi's hat off, and as he stooped to retrieve it, another student jumped from a second-story window onto his back, crushing part of his spine. The damage was permanent. After three grueling operations, he cannot walk more than a hundred feet without stopping to rest. He never sued Columbia and is not bitter about the students who attacked his group. He told the Times: "I don't think they were out to hurt anybody seriously, but it's unfortunate it happened."
Incidentally, the reunion, described as a conference, does have panel discussions, but so far as we know, none of those panels includes anyone who dissents from the veterans' view that their protests (or acting out, or group temper tantrum) was a memorable achievement.
April 24, 2008
There is a substantial academic performance gap between black and white high school graduates. Most who study education readily acknowledge this fact. Institutions of higher education are presumed to be places where students come to the campus reasonably prepared to compete with others who are similarly prepared. For decades, colleges and universities have sought to close the black/white academic achievement gap largely by ignoring it and using race preferences to paper over it.
Now, along comes a report, "Graduation Rate Watch: Making Minority Student Success a Priority," which comes to the startling conclusion that if institutions of higher education expend enough resources on remedial education and "outreach" for those students who come to the university less prepared than necessary, the academic achievement gap can be significantly closed by the time a sufficient number of "minority" students reach the point of graduation. Duh!!!
The abovementioned report also seeks to make a backdoor case for race preferences: "Ward Connerly and other prominent critics of affirmative action have frequently cited low graduation rates of minority students as evidence that some are being admitted to institutions where they may not succeed - and they have argued that these students would benefit from attending institutions where their academic preparation is aligned with student expectations." The author of the report "strongly disputes" the anti-preference argument.
Far from effectively refuting the argument that race preferences often contribute to low graduation rates for the beneficiaries of such preferences, because such students are mismatched at institutions for which they are inadequately prepared, the report simply identifies a path for closing the gap.
I am an enormous advocate of university-sponsored academic outreach programs to assist in preparing and retaining students once they are enrolled. I strongly supported the expansion of such programs while I served as a Regent of the University of California. However, university-sponsored outreach is not an effective substitute for radically improving preparation at the K-12 level. In addition, extreme care must be exercised to avoid the appearance that academic preparation is the responsibility and the priority of higher education. Shifting this responsibility from K-12 to the university helps a small number of minority students, but contributes little to the overwhelming need for massive reform of the K-12 system itself.
April 23, 2008
The one thing that can be said about Aliza Shvarts, the Yale art major who either did or did not give herself a series of artificial inseminations followed by abortions as part of her senior project, is that she is only about 22 years old. That might explain her apparent unawareness of the health hazards to herself and others inherent in repeatedly inducing miscarriages and using the blood from those miscarriages as a medium for an art installation - and also the incoherent but postmodernistically pretentious description of her proposed artwork, a plastic-sheeting cube displaying blood, Vaseline, and videotaped images of four supposed self-induced abortions: "[T]he piece exists only in its telling. This telling can take textual, visual, spatial, temporal and performative forms . copies of copies of which there is no original." Come again? Shvarts may be crazy, silly, or in the grip of a late-stage feminist protest against all that is "patriarchal" and "heteronormative," as she puts it, but she does have her youth and her obviously limited exposure to the real world outside Yale to excuse her.
The same can't be said, however, for the other person involved in the creation of Shvarts's project, which Yale has refused to install unless and until Schvarts admits (which she won't) that it is a "creative fiction," not a record of actual abortions, and that it doesn't involve the use of human blood: That other person is Shvarts's faculty adviser, Pia Lindman, a Finnish-born, New York-based self-styled performance artist who was hired as an art instructor at Yale in the fall of 2007 and has shepherded Shvarts's project since the beginning of the school year. Born in 1965 and thus well into her 40s (old enough to know better, in short), Lindman had served as an art instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the 2004-2005 academic year. You would think that as an experienced faculty member at a prestigious Ivy League university such as Yale, Lindman would have had the presence of mind to realize that the seeming trivialization of abortion would offend even the most staunchly pro-choice, and that blood is usually classified as biohazardous waste matter. Not to mention the artistic judgment to question whether plastic sheeting and videotapes of a naked undergraduate flaunting her presumed miscarriages add up to a work of art.
Continue reading "Don't Forget The Abortion Art Advisor" »
A Wall Street Journal Editorial today draws attention to the Olin Foundation's final bequest, to our very own VERITAS fund.
Here's the Journal's description:
..Using as a model Princeton's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, Veritas looks for professors with ideas for bringing intellectual diversity to campus. Veritas has already disbursed $2.5 million to programs like Boston College's Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy, the University of Colorado's Center for Western Civilization, and Cornell's Center for the Foundations of Free Societies.
The money that Veritas is getting from Olin comes in the form of a "matching gift," meant to encourage other donors to keep up the good work. The late John Olin - who amassed a fortune in metals, rocket fuel, paper and pharmaceuticals - started pouring money (almost $150 million, all told) into the foundation in 1969, shortly after armed students took over the administration building at his alma mater, Cornell University.
If you'd like to help achieve this matching gift, look directly to VERITAS.
Does a radical and viciously anti-Semitic professor deserve to get an award named for the great Lionel Trilling? Columbia University apparently thinks so. Its 2008 Trilling award will go to associate professor Joseph Massad for his book, Desiring Arabs. Trilling was an outstanding scholar known for his humanity and his liberalism. Massad is a hater who once claimed in class, according to a student witness, that the slaughter of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics had been perpetrated by the Israelis.
The prize, bestowed by the Columbia College student council and the Academic Awards Committee, honors a book "deemed to best exhibit the standards of intellect and scholarship found in Lionel Trilling's work." Like many awards, this one is a very political act aimed at restoring some lost luster to an idolized radical who has come under justified fire.
Nat Hentoff called Massad "one of the more fervently biased professors in the Middle East studies department," a keenly competed for designation at Columbia. Massad is one of the professors accused of demanding of one Israeli student, "How many Palestinians did you kill today?" At a Columbia forum in 2005, he used the phrase "racist Israeli state" more than two dozen times and argued that Arafat was in effect an Israeli collaborator for even talking about compromise. Massad was the central figure in the 2005 controversy over student charges of anti-Israel bias and intimidation by pro-Palestinian professors in their classes. The students produced Columbia Unbecoming, a film about the behavior of middle eastern professors. Makers of the film said individual professors were "using their positions to promote a narrow political agenda that clashes with free and open inquiry." A committee named to investigate the charges turned out a bland report hailed as "thoughtful and comprehensive" by Columbia president Lee Bollinger, but dismissed as a political whitewash by Hentoff, among others. This prize is yet another setback for seriousness at Columbia.
April 22, 2008
Don't miss Peter Wood's remarkable speech on the crisis in the universities, delivered April 19 to the National Association of Scholars affiliate in Minnesota. The speech is featured above in commentary. Wood, NAS executive director, neatly encapsulates the crisis in a single sentence, discussing "how higher education one ordered by a small number of abiding principles has, within a few decades, fragmented into a million little multiculturalisms, vanished into the Cheshire Cat grin of postmodernism, erupted into truth-denying relativism; spread its ideological fog of race, gender and class reductionism, dynamited the very basis of rational inquiry through deconstruction and other anti-foundational pseudo-philosophies and transformed the university from a steward of civilization to its spendthrift."
Citing the work of chaos theorist Edward Lorenz, who died a week ago, Wood speaks of attempts to face the chaos of the campuses in terms of either Phylum A - try to begin the reform of existing campuses by establishing beachheads on their alien soil - and Phylum B, acknowledge that reform of the ideologically committed universities is a hopeless cause: let them decline in their folly and build new institutions to replace them. Wood thinks Phylum B, though obviously emotionally satisfying, will not work. Among the beachheads of Phylum A: Robby George's Madison Institute at Princeton, Patrick Deneen's Toqueville Center at Georgetown, Robert Koons's Center for Western Civilization at the University of Texas, Dan Lowenstein's Center for Liberal Arts and Free Institutions at UCLA and John Tomasi's Political Theory Project at Brown.
Wood favors Phylum A and includes in its description parallel organizations set up to counter existing ones, including the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), the Association of Literary Scholars and the Historical Society. The Federalist Society doesn't quite fit in this category, but it is a counter to the American Bar Association. Wood discusses many Phylum A projects and warns that reforming higher education will bring some chaos of its own.
April 17, 2008
The Harvard English Department appears on the verge of changing its official name, from the "Department of English and American Literature and Language" to the "English Department." This sounds like a good thing, a bucking of a trend that started nearly 30 years ago toward renaming university English departments in order to make them appear more hip and relevant (in 1981, for example, the Georgia Institute of Technology restyled its English department a "School of Literature, Communication, and Culture"). A recent editorial in Harvard's student newspaper, the Crimson, praised the proposed new name as promoting the precision of diction that George Orwell (not to mention countless freshman English teachers) had pinpointed as crucial if a language is to preserve its meaning. "The Department of English and American Literature and Language is not actually in the business of teaching English and American literature and language," the Crimson editorialist noted. "Rather, it teaches about the structure and works of the English language." Anyone who has read the novels of James Joyce or Joseph Conrad - two masters of English prose style who were neither English nor American by origin - would have to agree
Nonetheless, the decision of Harvard's English faculty to give their department a more succinct and accurate name may deserve only two cheers instead of three. Harvard's move may actually signal a desperate effort to entice more undergraduates to major in English by expanding the curriculum to include just about everything except the study of works of English literature. The name "English Department" is on many campuses nowadays a catchall home for courses in gender studies, "postcolonialism," movies, television shows, and whatever else seems trendy or likely to induce young people who would rather not plow through Ulysses to sign up. The number of English majors at U.S. colleges and university has been in a state of free-fall since the 1960s, and now, according to the Department of Education, only 1.6 percent of the nation's 19 million undergraduates choose English as their major."
Surveying advertised job openings at universities for holders of Ph.D.'s in English in his widely publicized article in The Nation about the moribund state of literary studies, Yale English professor William Deresiewicz wrote, "There have always been trends in literary criticism, but the major trend now is trendiness itself, trendism, the desperate search for anything sexy. Contemporary lit, global lit, ethnic American lit; creative writing, film, ecocriticism - whatever. There are postings here for positions in science fiction, in fantasy literature, in children's literature, even in something called '"digital humanities.'" (Yale itself is a case in point of declining student interest coupled with faculty flailing; the number of English majors at Yale fell from 238 in 2001 to 157 in 2007.)
Continue reading "How English Is Your Department?" »
The Wall Street Journal reports on college savings plans. Take a look, save (more).
April 16, 2008
Among today's postings is an article asking whether hiring professors strictly by excellence isn't a way to guarantee that Catholic colleges will, in time, lose their Catholic character and become secular. The article, "Academic Excellence Is Not an Excellent Criterion", is by Georgetown University associate professor of government Patrick Deneen and it appeared in the campus publication The Hoya. Deneen serves as director of the Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy. If affirmative action allows veering away from excellence to raise the number of women and minorities on campus, he asks, how is it wrong to actively and consciously recruit Catholic faculty to safeguard Georgetown's religious tradition? Reader reactions to Deneen are worth reading too.
They call me in droves, recently minted PhD recipients often very talented, seeking employment at a think tank. In another more open period in our history, these same people would energically be seeking positions in the Academy.
Why, after all, should they be in the think tank business? As I see it there are two overarching reasons.
One, the tenure system along with the elimination of forced retirement for professors (Can Senator Moynihan ever be forgiven for his stand on this matter?) militate against the opening of positions. There aren't jobs available. After all, why should someone give up the world's best welfare program [four hours of teaching a week, two hours of advisement, 3 months vacation, all on a full time and generous salary].
Second, and perhaps most noteworthy, PhD recipients are eager to leave the political hothouse the university has become. According to many, these former students had to hold their nose and accede to the left wing agenda in order to get their advanced degrees. Now they want to be liberated.
That reminds me of a story from our national history. When Woodrow Wilson left Princeton where he served as president to run for governor of New Jersey, a reporter asked, "Why would you leave the comforts of university life for the turmoil of the governor's position? Wilson thought for a moment and said, "Because I want to get out of politics." Keep in mind that was roughly a century ago.
Conditions have certainly magnified since then with tenured radicals using academic space as the launching pad for reformist activity. Notions of objectivity having been relegated to the ash heap of history. Is it any wonder that serious scholars are turning away from their own breeding ground?
As a job applicant said to me recently, "there is simply more openness and fairness in a think tank, than any major university." Moreover, think tanks advertise their ideological agenda if they have one while universities conceal theirs behind fluorid rhetoric.
I shouldn't be surprised by the expression of frustration, but I am disappointed that an institution predicated on the free exchange of opinion has now become the purveyor of a political orthodoxy that drives likely professorial candidates from the campus.
April 15, 2008
Last night the Manhattan Institute sponsored a screening of Evan Coyne Maloney's brilliant documentary, Indoctrinate U. Some 400-500 people attended, laughing in all the right places. (It's hard to explain why a film about campus repression is so funny, but it is.)
Not one campus administrator (on or off camera) even tries to answer any of Maloney's questions about campus policy. Instead the normal reaction from a normal university bureaucrat is to call the cops. The lesson here, a familiar one to those who follow the issue, is that the people who run the universities are not willing to defend in public what they do in private. Instead, they are deeply affronted and want the ever-polite Maloney carted away for asking questions.
Indoctrinate U undercuts the usual reaction to complaints about campus repression—that anti-PC commentary relies solely on a few endlessly recycled anecdotes. Not so. Maloney makes clear that censorship and indoctrination run from coast to coast, from public to Catholic colleges, from elite universities like Yale to California's Foothill College.
One memorable tale is the saga of Republican student Steve Hinkle, who was subject to vast pressure and abuse for trying to post, in a Cal Polytechnic multicultural center, a flier announcing a speech by black conservative C. Mason Weaver, author of It's OK to Leave the Plantation. Maloney is too kind to mention the president of Cal Poly who presided over the mess that cost taxpayers $40,000 in a prolonged effort to punish Hinkle, but his name is Warren Baker, co-winner of my 2003 Sheldon award given annually to the worst college president in America.
A week ago, Indoctrinate U. went on sale as a DVD. It's available from the Indoctrinate U website for $21.99.
April 14, 2008
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