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September 1, 2010
My home institution, Brooklyn College, has been receiving some bad press as of late, after the dean and the English Department required that all incoming and transfer students read Moustafa Bayoumi's How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America. Jewish Week quoted from one of the courageous voices on the faculty, Jonathan Helfand, who noted that the "book is problematic if given without an alternative vision." The New York Daily News reported that one BC alumnus, Bruce Kessler, has withdrawn a "significant bequest" to the school from his will. And in the New York Post, Ron Radosh accused the school of trying to "force feed" freshmen one (extreme) point of view on contemporary Middle Eastern matters.
Bayoumi's book couples vignettes about several Arab-American youth (the book offers no guidance on how, or if, the author considers his subjects representative of the broader Arab-American community) with an extremist critique of Israeli national security policy and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Regardless of the merits of Bayoumi's portrayal of his subjects, it's hard to see U.S. policy toward Israel as the prime mover in how Arab-Americans are treated in the United States.
At one level, the Bayoumi selection is wholly unsurprising. The process through which colleges and universities select mandated books for incoming freshmen too often provides a perfect illustration of Cass Sunstein's law of group polarization---that is, when people with common beliefs deliberate together, the tendency is toward a decision that reflects an extreme version of the common beliefs. In the typical English Department (the body that made the selection at BC), intellectual diversity is in short supply, while an emphasis on race, class, gender, and victimization is common fare. These sorts of things just don't happen at BC---take the example of common reading selections at UNC in 2002 or 2005.
Continue reading "Brooklyn College Assigns a Book" »
August 30, 2010
It has dramatically increased the number of white women (and girls; surely women even today remain girls until some point in their K-12 school years) playing on sports teams, but "most of those teams, especially those at the college level, have remained overwhelmingly white."
Title IX, it turns out, hasn't benefited female athletes of color nearly as much as it has their white teammates. And the resulting gap, says one legal scholar in a newly published book, poses a challenge for those who rally passionately around the law.
This news comes from yet another report of yet another "gap" we have to worry about, with its inevitably accompanying "disparities," in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Narrowing the Gap, which features a new book, Getting in the Game: Title IX and the Women's Sports Revolution, by Deborah Brake, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
"Title IX did not introduce problems of racial inequality into our nation's school system," Prof. Brake acknowledges. "The problem is," she argues, "Title IX doesn't do anything about it, either."
Continue reading "Title IX Has A Disparate Impact--for Black Women" »
August 28, 2010
In The Weekly Standard, James Seaton has a review of the new edition of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism that illuminates a basic mistake the discipline of literary studies committed many years ago. Here is the second paragraph of Seaton's review:
Despite its length, the new NATC is most revealing in its omissions, the most significant of which occurs in the title. The NATC claims to deal with 'theory,' not with 'literary theory' and with 'criticism,' not 'literary criticism.' One cannot help but be impressed by the effrontery expressed by the deletion of the qualifying adjective. The strategic omission of 'literary' intimates (without explicitly declaring) that English professors who use the NATC are equipped to provide guidance to all those who employ any sort of theory, presumably including their colleagues in the social sciences, and even in physics and chemistry. Such pretension has not been seen since the heyday of the Hegelian system, which claimed the intellectual authority to give the law to every particular science and discipline, from physics to history and everything in between. 'Theory' with a capital 'T' deserted philosophy with the demise of Hegelian idealism early in the 20th century, but it seems to have reappeared in the unlikely precincts of the English department.'
The point gets to the heart of how literary studies changed over the course of the 1980s and 90s. In a word, much of the field stopped being "literary"---or at least it claimed such. English professors branched out into media, cultural studies, popular and mass culture domains, and several other non-literary fields, and they pursued non-literary themes of race, sexuality, imperialism, the environment, etc.
Continue reading "The Suicide of English" »
August 26, 2010
Public acknowledgement of affirmative action within the university is rare. Cornell, however, has defied the rule, and gone one step further: it recently posted its guidelines for the preferential hiring of women and minorities online. In so doing, Cornell has confirmed our worst fears about preferential treatment programs and, more generally, the modern university's unending quest for "diversity."
Some background: ADVANCE is a 5-year, $3.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation aimed at increasing the representation of female faculty in each of the 44 science and engineering (S&E) departments to at least 20%." (In 2006, about half of S&E departments fell below 20%). The grant, intended to combat the troubling lack of "gender diversity...that affects the quality of our enterprise", funds four programs: Faculty Development, which creates mentorship programs for all S&E faculty as well as workshops, professional development grants, and research-initiation grants for women faculty; a Climate Initiative, which establishes a department chair, search committee, and faculty workshops on "diversity issues"; an Evaluation Initiative, which tracks the careers of women S&E faculty; and a Recruitment Initiative, which will develop strategies for recruiting women, provide interview support for female candidates, and give placement support and funding for the spouses of female faculty.
Cornell has taken meaningful steps to monitor ADVANCE's progress. It directed staff from its Office of Institutional Research and Planning to devote half of their time evaluating the program. Additionally, it solicited from each of its colleges an ADVANCE liaison, who would "share best practices, report on progress within the college, and suggest new programming and events."
Continue reading "Cornell's Dubious Plan for Women" »
August 25, 2010
In his seminal article analyzing the "groupthink" that pervades the modern academy, my colleague Mark Bauerlein described the effects of the Common Assumption ("that all the strangers in the room at professional gatherings are liberals"), creating an academy in which "members may speak their minds without worrying about justifying basic beliefs or curbing emotions." Alas, the Common Assumption has its "argumentative hazards": "academics with too much confidence in their audience utter debatable propositions as received wisdom . . . a lone dissenter disrupts the process and, merely by posing a question, can show just how cheap such a pat consensus actually is."
Two recent events involving Penn professor Tom Sugrue illustrate the perils of the Common Assumption; and, more broadly, the manner in which groupthink (unintentionally) limits the ability of "mainstream" academics to influence public discourse. Sugrue's website lists multiple, prestigious fellowships. His first book, Origins of the Urban Crisis, justifiably won numerous awards; it's one of the three or four best books currently in print on 20th century American political culture.
Sugrue, in short, is hardly an academic crank, or a caricature of a "tenured radical." He's a serious scholar, producing first-class work on important topics.
Continue reading "More Groupthink Perils" »
August 19, 2010
I've often heard professors complain about a curious inverse pattern taking place on their campuses. Classrooms and office spaces for teachers seem to be getting harder to obtain, while administrative offices and buildings keep proliferating.
An important report by Jay Greene sheds light on it. It bears the title "Administrative Bloat at American Universities: The Real Reason for High Costs in Higher Education." Greene collected data from the U.S. Department of Education on enrollments, costs, and personnel, including figures for employees who fall under the category "Administration."
The major findings begin with costs and the student population:
Continue reading "Why So Many Administrators?" »
August 18, 2010
The recent flurry of debate about tenure's value has featured a revival of sorts for Harvard Education School professor Cathy Trower. The New York Times' "Room for Debate" section included a contribution from Trower, in which she proposed a "constitutional convention" selected through a kind of quota system---"selected to mirror the diversity the academy presumably desires"---to redefine tenure. Writing in Slate, Christopher Beam glowingly quoted Trower arguing that "the current system may actually be scaring talented young people away from academia. 'This one-size-fits-all, rigid six-year up-and-out tenure system isn't working well,' she says . . . Don't abolish tenure altogether, says Trower. Just rework it. Create a tenure track that explicitly rewards teaching. Give interdisciplinary centers the authority to produce tenured professors. Allow for breaks in the tenure track if a professor needs to take time off. Offer the option of part-time tenure, a lower-cost alternative for professors who want to hold other jobs. In other words, make tenure flexible rather than a monolithic, in-or-out club." Beam cited Evergreen State College, a far-left, AAC&U-oriented institution (best-known nationally as the institution that produced the late anti-Israel "activist" Rachel Corrie), as the model for his and Trower's vision.
I first encountered Trower in 2003, when Brooklyn College's then-provost, Roberta ("teaching is a political act") Matthews invited her to address all of the college's 31 departmental personnel committees. The event was an eye-opener. Among other things, Trower proclaimed that "merit is socially constructed by a dominant coalition," and "even if we don't think we are biased, there's a good chance that we are"; she suggested that opponents of affirmative action will ignore all evidence contrary to their beliefs and just gather all evidence to support their view. As part of her call for new personnel standards, she recommended white male job candidates demonstrate a commitment to "furthering diversity on campus" before being hired; redefining expectations for scholarly excellence to demand projects that achieved "improvement of society as well as advancement of knowledge"; and reorienting tenure standards to address the "accumulated disadvantage" for faculty of color that their teaching and scholarship don't meet the requirements for tenure.
Continue reading "Trower's Tenure Troubles" »
ACTA's new, expanded survey of college general education requirements has earned justified praise. Here's Pulitzer Prize winner Kathleen Parker, from her column this Sunday: "The study and Web site do fill a gap so that parents and students can make better choices. As a consequence, colleges and universities may be forced to examine their own responsibility in molding an educated, well-informed citizenry."
ACTA's guide is so significant because it provides an easy-to-use, easy-to-compare, and easily accessible portal of the general education requirements at 700 institutions. This information should be the starting point for parents as they consider where to send their sons or daughters---and it also should be a prime piece of data for alumni and trustees as they evaluate the state of their institutions. Sure, this information was previously available. But too often colleges and universities go out of their way to bury curricular material in ways to frustrate those eager for sunlight on college campuses.
A good sign of the importance of ACTA's work comes in the fury that the study has aroused from defenders of the academic status quo. In particular, the AAC&U, the organization that has distinguished itself for its relentless assault on quality---in the name of "diversity"---in higher education, belittled ACTA's efforts.
Continue reading "ACTA & Its Critics" »
August 17, 2010
Last week both the Chronicle of Higher Education ("Reports Highlight Disparities in Graduation Rates Among White and Minority Students") and Inside Higher Ed ("'Gaps Are Not Inevitable'") reported on two large studies by The Education Trust of the graduation rate gap between white and African-American students and betweenwhites and Hispanics. Even aside from the fact that the Asian gap was apparently not studied, there is a Big Gap in both gap studies.
Noting in its press release that "60 percent of whites but only 49 percent of Latinos and 40 percent of African Americans who start college hold bachelor's degrees six years later," The Education Trust said their studies "dig beneath national college-graduation averages and examine disaggregated six-year graduation rates at hundreds of the nation's public and private institutions." That deep digging produced evidence --- hold your hat!---that minorities do better at some institutions than others.
We identify public and private four-year institutions that appear to serve their black and white students equally well---that is, where both groups graduate at similar rates. We also identify public and private institutions that have a lot of work to do to catch up: Their graduation rate gaps are among the largest in the country.
Continue reading "Big Gaps In Two Big Gap Studies" »
August 13, 2010
Forbes has issued its 3rd annual College Rankings, delivering its crown to Williams College. Comparison to the U.S. News and World Report list is inevitable so let's not delay in getting to it; this result, and most of the top 20 rankings on the Forbes list aren't that dissimilar from the similar U.S. News list (when accounting for the fact that Forbes elides the distinction between the "liberal arts college" and "university" categories). This is unsurprising; a number of the factors in their ranking formula are not much dissimilar from the US News and World Report list; student debt, loan default rates, four-year degree completion rates, and the like. Any sensible list would feature these factors, and it's a testament to the objective value of certain colleges that they place highly on multiple lists.
The Forbes list is distinctive, however, for its focus on results; its "ends-oriented" ranking, despite its similarities with U.S. News at the top of the scale, seems worlds different once venturing lower in the listing. On this list Whitman College in Washington and Centre College in Kentucky outrank Dartmouth; Colgate University stands many spots above Brown. It is a different measure with clearly different results.
Forbes' initial formula two years ago proved the results-focused ranking simpler said than done; in granting a quarter of its weight respectively to an enrollment adjusted appearance of graduates in "Who's Who in America" and to aggregated RateMyProfessor rankings, Forbes deserved the numerous accusations of rankings ham-handedness it received. Happily, their worthy goal has acquired a more substantial statistical foundation in this iteration.
Continue reading "Not Just Another College Ranking" »
August 12, 2010
Awhile back, I wrote about Dean Martha Minow of Harvard Law School, highlighting (with Peter Bercowitz's help) her misrepresentations of a student email that raised questions about racial differences in intelligence. There, I concluded that Minow "disregarded what may be the first principle of academic discussion: to represent the words and ideas of others accurately and fairly."
In the Boston Globe on August 8, once again addressing a racial issue, Minow committed the same dishonesty. It's an op-ed on the Elena Kagan confirmation hearings, and it chides Republicans for attacking Justice Thurgood Marshall and hints that "some want to appeal to and perhaps feed anxieties of some whites about desegregation."
Continue reading "Dean Minow's Superiority" »
August 11, 2010
Recently my colleague Mark Bauerlein commented on the interesting debate regarding the continued merits---or lack thereof---for tenure. The basic critique of tenure is a powerful one: as Freakonomics put it, "What does tenure do? It distorts people's effort so that they face strong incentives early in their career (and presumably work very hard early on as a consequence) and very weak incentives forever after (and presumably work much less hard on average as a consequence)."
Indeed, I'm sure most professors can point to one or two (or more) cases from personal knowledge that don't even meet this standard---of professors who produced little or nothing as untenured faculty but received tenure anyway, and continued their commitment to mediocrity for the next 30 years.
It's hard to doubt this critique, especially since the traditional argument for tenure---it's necessary to protect academic freedom---is now almost laughable, for two reasons. First, as Alan Charles Kors has long held, the path to tenure encourages timidity. A professor who spends seven years as a junior faculty member worrying about speaking out is very unlikely to suddenly reverse course once he or she receives tenure. The pattern of behavior simply has become too ingrained.
Continue reading "A Small-c Conservative (Lukewarm) Defense of Tenure" »
August 10, 2010
The hysterical reaction of some professors at Texas's public universities to a new state law requiring them to post their resumes and course syllabi online says more about the paranoia and elitism of the professoriate than about the supposed witch-hunting mentality behind the new law.
The law, Texas House Bill 2504, passed in May 2009, requires all instructors at state universities, starting this fall, to post online the syllabi for the courses they'll be teaching; their curricula vitae a list of their published works, and their salaries. The universities' per-student attendance costs and departmental budgets must also be posted. The information must be searchable, accessible without a user name and password, and no more than three clicks away from the school's home page.
The stated aim of the new law is transparency. It is one of several measures recently enacted by the Texas legislature designed to give state residents accurate information about the cost and activities of government, including the pay of state employees. Other states have similar transparency laws, although Texas is the only state so far to include institutions of higher learning in its transparency mandate.
Continue reading "McCarthyism or Simple Transparency?" »
August 9, 2010
George Leef so thoroughly dismantled Help Wanted Thursday and Friday that there's not much for me to do but poke around the rubble.
Let me take up two collateral points that are too little discussed. First, the assumption that a college degree means that the student has learned much of anything, let alone how to deal with complexity and adapt to changing job requirements, is a joke. I exempt those who major in math, engineering, and the hard sciences. But otherwise, I think the stereotype of the hard-partying, class-skipping, unmotivated undergraduate applies far more widely than most people realize. Hundreds of thousands of the children of upper-middle class parents are in college because their parents are paying for it and it's expected of them. They treat college as a four-year vacation before they have to think about dealing with the real world. I cannot be more precise because it is one of those topics that hasn't received as much systematic scrutiny as it deserves. But a recent report on trends in studying among college students concludes that study time for full-time students at four-year colleges fell from 24 hours per week in 1960 to 14 hours per week in 2003. That's a very big drop to a very low level. And I know that the reaction I got from college professors and administrators---and students too---after I criticized today's college education in Real Education was overwhelmingly of the "You don't know the half of it" variety.
My second under-discussed point is that many young people who could profit from a college education are more likely to do so if they don't go straight to college from high school. My wife, who formerly taught English literature at Rutgers, was just the first of many college faculty to bring this to my attention. The students who have come to college after a hitch in the military or working for a few years know why they are in college, why they are taking a particular course, and what they want out of it, in ways that kids fresh out of high school seldom do. Apart from that, quoting my wife, "Henry James wasn't writing for nineteen-year-olds." Neither were Aristotle, Milton, or Adam Smith. One of the best things we could do to improve the college experience for students and faculty alike is to persuade a new generation of high school graduates that they ought to get the hell out of the educational system for a few years and thereby learn something about themselves.
August 6, 2010
Here is what Andrew Hacker, co-author of Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do About It , says about tenure in a recent interview in Atlantic Monthly:
Here's what happens. Academics typically don't get tenured until the age of 40. This means that from their years as graduate students and then assistant professors, from age 25 through 38 or 39, they have to toe the line. They have to do things in the accepted way that their elders and superiors require. They can't be controversial and all the rest. So tenure is, in fact, the enemy of spontaneity, the enemy of intellectual freedom. We've seen this again and again. And even people who get tenure really don't change. They keep on following the disciplinary mode they've been trained to follow.
What bothers us, too, is that over 300,000 professors have it. That's a tremendous number. What that means is these people never leave. There's hardly any turnover in the senior ranks---not just at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford but at small colleges in Kentucky, everywhere. You go to a campus and over two thirds of the faculty have been there at least 25 years. They begin to stagnate. In many ways, they become infantilized, embroiled in ideological issues like faculty parking.
Continue reading "The Safe and Secure Professoriate" »
August 2, 2010
On July 12th Russell Nieli reminded readers of Minding the Campus what critics of racial preference policies (widely known by the euphemism "affirmative action") have long known --- that when university administrators talk about "diversity," what they really mean is blacks ... and to a lesser degree Hispanics. "Most elite universities," he pointed out,
seem to have little interest in diversifying their student bodies when it comes to the numbers of born-again Christians from the Bible belt, students from Appalachia and other rural and small-town areas, people who have served in the U.S. military, those who have grown up on farms or ranches, Mormons, Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses, lower-middle-class Catholics, working class "white ethnics," social and political conservatives, wheelchair users, married students, married students with children, or older students first starting out in college after raising children or spending several years in the workforce.
Continue reading "Prof. Espenshade Runs From His Own Research" »
July 29, 2010
The New York Times Room for Debate page hosted a forum last week entitled "What If College Tenure Dies?" As the preamble rightly notes, the question follows from an increasing shift in university personnel away tenure and tenure-track lines and toward adjuncts and lecturers hired on temporary contracts. The numbers are stark:
In 1975, 57 percent of all college professors had tenure or were on a tenure track. In 2007, that number had fallen to 31 percent, and a new federal report, to be released in the fall, is expected to show another decline for 2009 . . .
What will happen when the rate slides into a non-critical mass (less than 20 percent)?, the Times asks.
Continue reading "Tenure Is Fading--Is that Really So Bad?" »
July 28, 2010
If damaging evidence against affirmative action turns up in a pro-affirmative action book, the author often explains it away as misunderstood or exaggerated. This has happened once again, this time to a book that made no splash when it was published last October, but drew attention here at Minding the Campus in criticism that spread to Ross Douthat's column in The New York Times, Pat Buchanan's syndicated column and now Time magazine.
The book is No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, a careful study of admission practices at eight unnamed elite colleges by Princeton sociologist Thomas J. Espenshade and a research associate, Alexandria Walton Radford. Writing here on July 12th in an article headlined, "How Diversity Punishes Asians, Poor Whites and Lots of Others," Russell K. Nieli of Princeton wrote that the book reported an immense admissions disadvantage to Asians (because admissions officers think there are already too many in the best colleges) and poor whites, who are penalized by favoritism, not only for blacks and Hispanics, but also for whites with middle-class and upper-class backgrounds. None of the criticism that greeted Nieli's article has focused on the anti-Asian bias. All of it has dealt with the slim chances of poor whites at the most selective colleges.
Time magazine this week interviewed Espenshade about Douthat's charges that elite education seems inclined to exclude the poor of red-state America. (The book does not mention red-state America at all.) Espenshade said this:
What I think he did was take a relatively minor finding and push an interpretation that goes beyond the bounds of available evidence. We have this finding that if students held leadership positions or won awards in career-oriented extracurricular activities when they were in high school, there was a slightly negative impact on their chances of being admitted to one of these top private schools. Now, what are these career-oriented activities? Douthat mentions as possibilities, and I don't deny it, that it could be participating in a 4-H club or Future Farmers of America, but those aren't the only types of activities that might fall into that broader category. It could include Junior ROTC. It could include co-op work programs. It could include a host of things. And these aren't necessarily rural types of activities. My interpretation is that [having leadership positions or winning awards in career-oriented activities] suggests to admission deans that these folks are somewhat ambivalent about their academic future.
Espenshade is right that his critics missed the book's clear point that membership in 4-H clubs, the Future Farmers of America and high school ROTC was not enough to harm the chances of applicants to the elite colleges---the problem is holding high office in these groups (as Senator Sam Brownback did by the way in FFA) or winning group awards, because admissions officers think that such achievements might indicate a lack of seriousness about higher education. But Espenshade goes too far in saying that "there was a slightly negative impact on their chances." His book says on page 126 that "Excelling in career-oriented activities is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission," which seem more like crippling damage rather than a "slightly negative impact." As Nieli wrote: "The lower-class whites proved to be all-around losers... Having money in the family greatly improved a white applicant's admissions chances, lack of money greatly reduced it." If you read the whole book, the prejudice of the elite schools against poor whites seems clear. As a political issue, this is a sure bet to gain ground.
The Education Department's boom has finally fallen on for-profit colleges, much-criticized for their high rates of default on their students' education loans, loans that U.S. taxpayayers have to repay when graduates of proprietary schools can't find jobs either because the jobs don't exist or because the training for which the students have paid doesn't strike prospective employers as adequate.
If a set of proposed rules issued last week by Education Secretary Arne Duncan goes into binding effect; a majority of programs at for-profit colleges would be subject to restrictions on availability of federal loan funds, and about 5 percent of those schools programs would lose access to federal loan dollars altogether. Since for-profit colleges typically derive close to 90 percent of their income from government- guaranteed loans to their students, the Education Department's rules threaten to curtail their operations and even put some investor-owned schools out of business altogether.
Administrators of for-profit schools and their allies are crying foul. They argue that the government should also crack down on loan funding for programs at non-profit colleges, many of which also depend heavily on student-loan proceeds for income and many of whose graduates--say, art-history or women's-studies majors--find themselves unemployed and perhaps unemployable after graduation. The current proposed rules, for-profit advocates contend, discriminate against low-income students who choose career colleges instead of the liberal-arts schools that middle-class young people tend to select. The advocates may have a point--but isn't there a larger point? Should the government be in the business of providing money to everyone who wants to go to college in the first place? And if so, to what extent? If a $100,000 bachelor's degree in English literature from a liberal-arts college and a $14,000 career-college certificate as a medical assistant--training that many medical assistants obtain for free on the job--don't do much to improve their recipients' employment prospects, why are taxpayers underwriting the cost of supplying either? What public good is served?
Continue reading "Government Meddling and For-Profit Colleges" »
July 23, 2010
Russell K. Nieli's recent article, "How Diversity Punishes Asians, Poor Whites and Lots of Others," drew a lot of attention, including a mention in Ross Douthat's New York Times column. Referring to the book, No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, a 2009 study of elite college admissions, Nieli wrote that the authors, Thomas J. Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, found that a student's chances of gaining admission to an elite college dropped by 60 to 65 percent if they were involved in ROTC, 4H Clubs, Future Farmers of America "and other activities that suggest that students are somewhat undecided about their academic futures." Several readers, irritated by the implication that future farmers are Red State rubes, sent in lists of important people who have been FFA members. The noted members included Jimmy Carter, Sam Brownback, Nicholas Kristof, Willie Nelson, Taylor Swift, Tim McGraw, Lyle Lovett, Don Henley of the Eagles and Jim Davis, creator of Garfield.
July 22, 2010
Jennifer Keeton, age 24, is a student in the graduate counselor education program at Augusta State University, Georgia. Faculty members at ASU have informed Ms. Keeton that she will be dismissed if she does not rid herself of beliefs that the school opposes. She holds traditional Christian views about sexuality and gender, and believes homosexuality is a "lifestyle," not a "state of being," as her school teaches. She agrees with her faculty that counselors should never impose their views on clients, and is not accused of saying or believing that she should. She also says she affirms the inherent dignity of all persons, regardless of their views or sexual behavior.
That wasn't good enough for ASU. The school ordered Keeton to attend a "remediation program" in multicultural re-education and sensitivity training. An assistant professor suggested she attend the Gay Pride parade in Augusta, and she was told to file written reports on how she is moving toward the sexual belief system her school requires. She reluctantly agreed to accept the remediation, then backed out, saying in an email to faculty members, "I understand the need to reflect client's goals and to allow them to work toward their own solutions, and I know I can do that... (but) I can't alter my biblical beliefs, and I will not affirm the morality of those behaviors in a counseling situation." She says she was told by two assistant professors that "it was a life and death matter to not affirm a client's sexual decision, and that failure to do so has led and could lead to suicides by clients who are not affirmed in their sexual preferences."
On Keeton's behalf, the Alliance Defense Fund filed suit yesterday against teachers, deans and regents of ASU, charging violations of freedom of speech and religion.
July 21, 2010
Fiscally beleaguered presidents of public universities around the country like to wisecrack: "public universities used to be publicly funded, then they were publicly assisted, now they are publicly named." While easy to dismiss as a self-serving whine, there is something to their complaint, at least as it applies to the two public university systems in New York, CUNY, the City University of New York, and SUNY, the State University of New York. Looking just at SUNY's budget, for instance, out of a total annual system-wide expenditure of $11 billion, only $3.5 billion - or 32 percent - actually comes from New York State's taxpayers. The other 68 percent comes from students, research foundations, users of SUNY facilities, and generous donors. The CUNY proportions are roughly comparable. In other words, to quote a top SUNY financial official, New York State today "is only a minority shareholder" in its public universities.
The problem is that New York's legislators treat all of this non-taxpayer money as if it were actually theirs to collect and to disburse. They not only insist on setting the level of university tuition and then "appropriating" it so that it can be spent, they even want to control the disposition of externally provided research and philanthropy dollars. To add insult to injury, as external funding has gone up, legislators have reduced the state's tax levy allocation - often by an even greater amount. Understandably, this infuriates the public universities' primary financial backers - students, research grantors and philanthropists - who see their contributions being used not to enhance the state's colleges but to indirectly underwrite other state expenditures.
This travesty might finally end (or at least be curtailed) under a proposal now being debated in Albany that is so controversial that its resolution is holding up approval of the 2011 state budget. Called The Public Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act (PHEEIA, pronounced "fee-ah") - supported by Governor David Paterson and the state senate but strenuously resisted by the assembly - this legislation would allow both CUNY and SUNY to set their tuition levels without the legislature's prior approval and keep all the resulting tuition revenue, accept and retain all funds from research grants and philanthropic gifts, more easily enter into contracts with private vendors and enterprise partners, streamline hospital operations (mainly an issue concerning SUNY's three hospitals), fast-track campus facility construction, and lease portions of their campuses to other parties for purposes consistent with their academic mission. Naturally, all of these new operational freedoms are hemmed in by myriad restrictions: tuition increases would kept under the higher education price index, all expenditures and contracts would still be subject to state financial accounting rules, land leases and contracts would be tightly overseen by newly established state boards, just to mention a few of the bill's many constraints.
Continue reading "Unfettering New York's Public Universities" »
July 20, 2010
Speaking to the NAACP convention in Kansas City on Monday (July 12), Michelle Obama said that because of "stubborn inequalities" that "still persist --- in education and health, in income and wealth --- "the NAACP's founders "would urge us to increase our intensity."
The White House, for some reason, appears to have heard her call, for on Tuesday, reported the Chronicle of Higher Education, "White House Official Says Civil-Rights Office Will Enforce Fair State Spending for Black Colleges."
John S. Wilson Jr., executive director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities, said on Tuesday that the Education Department was looking into which states continue to shortchange public black colleges and how the federal government can make sure appropriations are more equitable among public institutions.
Continue reading "White House to Impose "Fairness" on Education Spending" »
Carolyn Rouse, a Princeton cultural anthropologist and gender specialist, has an unusual classroom procedure. In her course on "Race and Medicine," she invites black students to leave class ten minutes early because blacks have a shorter life expectancy than whites. According to the university news service, "Through this startling offer, typically not acted upon by her students, Rouse initiates a discussion about racial disparities in health care, a topic that is just one conduit to her core intellectual and personal interest: social inequality."
There is much to ponder here. To be consistent about departures based on life expectancy, Rouse would presumably need to usher out morbidly obese students and three-pack-a-day smokers about two minutes into her class, followed by reckless drivers and enthusiastic consumers of exotic chemical compounds. Besides, inviting blacks to cut out early does not appear to be a surefire way to promote equality. Taking courses whose titles begin with the words "Race and..." doesn't look like a positive idea either. They are usually classes in grievance production. Come to think of it, though, leaving a class in grievances ten minutes early may help a bit, though probably not as much as skipping the class entirely.
July 19, 2010
By KC Johnson
As part of its more general---and oft-expressed---commitment to academic freedom, CUNY's Board of Trustees has a student complaint policy that appropriately balances the faculty's academic freedom with a recognition that students, too, have the right not to be punished for disagreeing with their professor's political or ideological agenda.
To ensure that student "activists" don't abuse the policy, the Board recently noted that the process existed only to hear complaints from students actually enrolled in a professor's class---since a professor's in-class behavior can, by its very nature, only affect the academic freedom of students in the class.
It seems that they do things differently in Urbana. At the end of the spring semester, a student's "friend" brought a rather unusual e-mail to the attention of the Religion Department chairman. Adjunct professor Kenneth Howell had sent the e-mail, much of which passed along a natural-law critique of homosexuality, to his spring 2010 class, Introduction to Catholicism. (The e-mail sought to help students prepare for their final exam; the natural law section was clearly relevant to the course content.) If this episode had occurred at CUNY, the Religion chair would have thanked the student for his concerns, but noted that only students in the class, nor their friends or associates, could file complaints.
But the University of Illinois hasn't imitated CUNY's policy, costing the school its first opportunity to refuse the controversy. A second chance was lost through the behavior of Religion Dept. chairman Robert McKim. Having decided to entertain the complaint against Howell, the Religion Department could have handled the issue quickly and quietly, by McKim suggesting that, in the future, Howell not pepper exam-prep e-mails with his unrelated and ill-informed insights about public health (see below). Instead, the chair involved diversity-obsessed bureaucrats, who made clear the 'desire not to retain Howell, given that "the e-mails sent by Dr. Howell violate university standards of inclusivity."
Continue reading "The Curious Case of Dr. Howell" »
July 14, 2010
I started UCLA in 1977, having won admission with only a 3.1 GPA (but with decent SAT scores). When I got there my brother and I moved into Sproul Hall dormitory just above the track stadium. I came to campus thinking, "Yeah! Party time."
There was certainly a fair number of loud ones every Friday and Saturday throughout De Neve Drive and along Fraternity Row, plus a few mid-week open doors with beer flowing inside. But something else, too. About half the guys I met spent three or four hours a night in University Research Library (URL---we called it "Urinal"). They rose around 8 or 9am, grabbed a quick breakfast in the dorm cafeteria, speeded down the hill to classes before and after lunch (it was the quarter system, with classes meeting four hours a week), then spent the late afternoon shooting hoops or throwing a football, then dinner at 6, then a trip to the library by 7. If you arrived after 8, you couldn't find a seat. Each night, sitting in a carrel, I heard the tardy ones sidle by searching for spots and wandering floor to floor.
The other half of the guys I met had other plans. They weren't much interested in college, or they dealt drugs, or they played sports all day, or they were just plain screw-ups. The diligent ones recognized them as such, and even though we enjoyed them there was no cachet of "cool" given to them. (Freshman and sophomore year I drifted perilously toward the latter group now and then.) Those who studied hard didn't consider themselves superior, nor did they fit the nerd mold. They played high school football and drank Henry Weinhard. But they studied hard without groaning or crowing, taking their 20 or so hours a week as customary.
Continue reading ""Back-When-I-Was-in-School" Remembrance." »
July 13, 2010
The University of Michigan's education school has released statistics breaking down the percentages of women and ethnic minorities enrolled in its undergraduate and graduate-level programs, and as Roger Clegg of National Review's Phi Beta Cons points out, there's one group that seems to be conspicuously missing: white males. Actually, males in general seem to be mostly missing from the student bodies at Michigan's ed school and elsewhere. A Washington Post article published in May lamented the near-absence of black male teachers in Washington-area schools---a sad fact because the presence of strong, smart African-American role models among teachers may be the best hope that schools have of reversing the endemically high dropout rates among black male students.
The Michigan statistics are as follows: Among the ed school's 510 students enrolled in graduate-level programs (usually aimed at producing faculty for high schools and middle schools), 68 percent are female and 22 percent minority. The 257 students enrolled in undergraduate programs at Michigan (typically aimed at producing elementary-school teachers) are 73 percent female and 16 percent minority. Michigan doesn't say whether there is overlap between the women and minority-group populations, but it's almost a sure bet that the overwhelming number of minority students in education programs at Michigan are women. According to the Washington Post story, only 2 percent of America's 4.8 million teachers are black men.
The Michigan statistics bear themselves out in figures released by other education programs. The University of Illinois-Chicago doesn't include a gender breakdown of its enrollment but notes that only 40.4 percent of its ed-school students are non-Latino whites. A photo on Boston University's education-school website shows a handful of men sharing a classroom with a sea of women. Men simply aren't going into K-12 teaching, it would seem. A 2008 survey by the National Education Association (NEA) revealed that just 24.4 of the nation's teachers are male.
Continue reading "White Men Don't Go to Ed School" »
July 12, 2010
Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education on July 4 ("Who Gets to Define Ethnic Studies?"), Kenneth P. Monteiro, dean of the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State, criticizes what he calls "a piece of legislative hubris from Arizona that purports to ban ethnic studies in public schools."
Monteiro was referring to Arizona House Bill 2281, passed in May, a month after Arizona's controversial immigration legislation. It prohibits school districts or charter schools in the state from offering any classes that
1. Promote the overthrow of the united states government.
2. Promote resentment toward a race or class of people.
3. Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.
4. Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.
Continue reading "Ethnic Studies: ''White Studies'' in Black and Brown?" »
July 8, 2010
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a story this week by Robin Wilson entitled "Tenure, RIP: What the Vanishing Status Means for the Future of Education". It announces a study by the U.S. Dept of Education due out in the fall covering employment in higher education. Its findings regarding tenure are dire:
Over just three decades, the proportion of college instructors who are tenured or on the tenure track plummeted: from 57 percent in 1975 to 31 percent in 2007. The new report is expected to show that that proportion fell even further in 2009. If you add graduate teaching assistants to the mix, those with some kind of tenure status represent a mere quarter of all instructors.
In fact, at many for-profit institutions and two-year colleges, tenure is "a completely foreign concept." Generally, the decline of tenure hasn't happened through direct edict, but rather through a slow process of personnel change. As tenured faculty members have retired, they haven't been replaced. As schools and departments have grown, they have hired adjuncts and graduate students to handle crowded classrooms, not new tenure-track professors.
Continue reading "The End of Tenure and the Fate of Dissent" »
July 7, 2010
Those of you in the New York City area may be interested in an upcoming Manhattan Institute event featuring Ben Wildavsky, author of The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities are Reshaping the World and Senior Fellow at the Ewing Marion Kaufman Foundation. Introductory remarks will be provided by John Leo, MindingtheCampus editor.
If you are interested in attending please contact Barb Golecki at 646-839-3317
July 6, 2010
A revealing window into the mind of modern liberalism (keep snarky comments about looking into a dark, empty room to yourself) is nicely provided by noting what the press, especially the press covering higher educations, regards as controversial.
A case in point: On July 2 both Inside Higher Ed ("Controversial Choice for Virginia Tech Board") and the Chronicle of Higher Education ("Controversial Lawyer Is Reappointed to Virginia Tech's Governing Board") responded identically to Gov. Bob McDonnell's recent appointment of Roanoke lawyer John Rocovich to another term on the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors.
I do not mean to imply that there was no controversy around aspects of Rocovich's prior service. Both Inside Higher Ed and Chronicle link to the Roanoke Times, which described a couple of the controversies:
Continue reading "The Uses of the Word ''Controversial''" »
July 1, 2010
This is a U.S. News column I wrote a decade ago about the first highly publicized attempt by gays and their allies to use anti-discrimination regulations to "derecognize" (i.e., eliminate) campus religious groups that oppose non-marital sex, including homosexuality. The Christian Fellowship at Tufts said it supported gay rights and welcomed gay members, but drew the line at candidates for leadership who denied the group's theology. The decision to derecognize was a student decision, overturned quickly after a burst of publicity and vague threats to sue. I assumed at the time that if cases like this at public universities (Tufts is private) ever got to the Supreme Court, the result would be a no-brainer 9-0 decision in favor of three rather important First Amendment concerns---freedom of religion, freedom of assembly and freedom of speech. How naive.
Tufts University in Medford, Mass., is punishing a campus evangelical group for refusing to allow practicing homosexuals into its leadership positions.
A student tribunal, the Tufts Community Union Judiciary, voted to "derecognize" the Tufts Christian Fellowship. This means that the evangelicals will have trouble functioning on campus. They will not be able to reserve rooms for meetings, publicize events in campus listings, or even use bulletin boards. They are forbidden to use the Tufts name, and they will lose their share of student-activity money doled out to all student groups, some $5,700 a year. One administrator was quoted as telling the group, "I don't mean to get dramatic or anything, but essentially, on the Tufts campus, you do not exist."
Continue reading "Long Before Hastings There Was Tufts" »
The Supreme Court's Christian Legal Society v. Martinez ruling has received a good deal of high-quality commentary: FIRE and David French criticized the ruling; Eugene Volokh argued that the Court got the decision right.
Anne Neal has correctly noted that trustees should respond to the ruling by going slow, especially since the "all-comers" policy employed by Hastings is rare. That said, it seems more than likely that more and more universities will imitate the Hastings policy, whether from a desire to inoculate themselves from lawsuits or on behalf of what Justice Alito termed a campus agenda of political correctness.
The "all-comers" policy has satisfied the Supreme Court. But from an educational standpoint, does it make any sense? What purpose is served by a college or university creating an official Democratic club whose membership is open to unabashed defenders of George W. Bush? Or creating an official Jewish students organization that must admit Arab students who deny Israel's right to exist? Not only does such a policy undermine freedom of association, but the resulting organizations are essentially useless.
Continue reading "What Now After CLS?" »
June 29, 2010
Inside Higher Ed had a brief notice yesterday, "Worldwide Gender Gap in Academic Salaries in Science," that, though accurate as far as it goes, is revealingly, almost humorously, incomplete and misleading.
Here is the IHE piece in its entirety:
A worldwide analysis by Nature of the salaries of men and women in academic science has found that men's salaries were 18 to 40 percent higher in countries for which there were significant sample sizes --- Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Spain and the United States. The general pattern was for salary gaps to grow over the course of careers, with men's salaries starting to gain relative to women in the three-to-five year period after the start of a career in Europe and after six years in North America.
The American higher education establishment, and apparently those who report on it, suffer from gap mania. Everywhere they look there is some "gap" to be corrected, and some uncorrected, often hidden (read "structural") discrimination causing it. To see that attitude at work here, I encourage you take a look at the Nature article linked above. If you do, you will see that it is not "a worldwide analysis ... of the salaries of men and women in academic science" at all. Entitled "For Love And Money," the Nature article begins by noting, in bold, that "[t]he self-reported contentment of researchers with their chosen profession depends on more than just salaries, according to the results of our international career survey."
The purpose of the survey, in short, was only incidentally to examine men's and women's salaries. Rather, it aimed "to track contentment with one's job by region or by job attributes such as health care, the degree of independence or mentoring potential," and it was not limited to "academic science."
Continue reading "''Gender Gap'' Mania" »
June 28, 2010
Ponder this: According to the most current Supreme Court authority, a group of students can form a local chapter of a violent national organization, refuse to promise that they won't disrupt the campus, and still have a right to be recognized by the university. At the same time, however, if the university has a certain, peculiar kind of policy on its books, it can refuse to recognize a small group of religious students who merely want to conduct Bible studies led by members of their own faith.
In 1972, the Supreme Court decided Healy v. James, a landmark case that granted a Connecticut chapter of Students for a Democratic Society the right to exist on a public campus in spite of the fact that SDS chapters nationwide had seized and vandalized buildings, destroyed scholarly research, started fires, and caused campus disruptions that had shut down all university instruction for extended periods. When university officials pointedly asked if the local SDS chapter would disrupt its own campus, they replied that their "action would have to be dependent upon each issue."
Faced with possible violence, the university refused to recognize the SDS. The students sued, and the Supreme Court issued a ringing opinion upholding student rights on campus. Specifically, the Court found that students had a freedom of association interest in student group recognition:
There can be no doubt that denial of official recognition, without justification, to college organizations burdens or abridges that associational right. The primary impediment to free association flowing from nonrecognition is the denial of use of campus facilities for meetings and other appropriate purposes.
Fast-forward to 2010. This year the court heard yet another university student organization case, this one involving not a potentially violent group, but its opposite: a small group of students who wanted to host Bible studies on campus. The Christian Legal Society was denied recognition at Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. But CLS's sin was very different from SDS's: CLS simply wanted its voting members and leaders to share the group's faith and live accordingly.
Continue reading "CLS v. Martinez: A Curious and Mistaken Decision" »
My last post looked at the latest troubling educational initiative from the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U). The organization is especially pernicious not simply because of its agenda---which is, after all, quite mainstream in the contemporary academy. What distinguishes the AAC&U is its contempt toward students at non-elite schools, its belief that such students can't flourish in an education stepped in the liberal arts. Instead, the AAC&U contends that only a presentist education will do for such students. It terms this approach "interdisciplinary," but "nondisciplinary" is a more appropriate term.
The AAC&U touts its "General Education for a Global Century" project as "innovative" partly because it employs "social networking." (The internet---how innovative!) The group's social networking site provides a sense of the topics that, according to the AAC&U, deserve more attention in general education curricula.
What demonstrates "a need for the deep, interdisciplinary education that global learning offers"? According to project coordinator Chad Anderson, "the deliberate plane crash into the IRS building in Austin, Texas," which "must raise complex questions about politics, the economy, and domestic terrorism." Really? This would be a little bit like a cranky conservative professor demanding that Columbia, in 1970, reorient its gen-ed curriculum around to focus on the explosion of the Weathermen townhouse in Greenwich Village.
Continue reading "Building a Curriculum Around a Plane Crash" »
June 24, 2010
Few higher education groups have as pernicious an agenda as the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). The diversity-obsessed organization combines an unrelenting campaign against quality---especially at schools whose student bodies are more middle- or working-class---with an Orwellian tendency to use words to describe their opposite.
Beyond this pattern, AAC&U initiatives tend to have several common themes:
- a refusal to describe the United States as a "democracy"---"diverse democracy" or "multicultural democracy" are the preferred terms;
- a call for "global" learning, which amounts to demands not for ensuring that students have foreign language capabilities or extensive knowledge of foreign cultures but instead a code word for reorienting college curricula around the apparently global principles of race, class, and gender;
-a relentless emphasis on "skills" over course content
- a hostility to disciplinary learning, and equally robust praise for interdisciplinary studies.
The latter two items might seem banal, but for the AAC&U they're critical: a public emphasis on skills means that course content can be molded to fit any agenda (in the AAC&U's case, one-sided, present-oriented agenda), as long as the course theoretically teaches the desired skills. Abandoning disciplines, meanwhile, removes a potential obstacle to course content that amounts to little more than propaganda, on the grounds that such content can be deemed "interdisciplinary" and critical for a "21st century"education.
Continue reading "A War on the Quality of Higher Education" »
June 21, 2010
The U.S. soccer team surprised most viewers by tying its first-round World Cup game with soccer-powerhouse England 1-1---and then tied Slovenia 2-2 in a match that many said the Americans should have won except for a bad referee call. Furthermore, the US.-U.K game, televised on ABC, drew 14.5 million viewers, a record for a first-round World Cup contest (the U.S.-Slovenia game, at 10 a.m. EDT on ESPN, attracted 3.9 million). Yet at the very same time that both the quality of and interest in U.S. men's soccer is surging, U.S. colleges' support for the men's soccer teams and their players---the next generation of World Cup contenders---is in seemingly inexorable decline, thanks to the Education Department's draconian rules for enforcing Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in higher education..
On the eve of the U.S.-U.K match the College Sports Council (CSC) released an analysis of what it called a "tremendous disparity of opportunity between male and female soccer players" in NCAA Divison I schools, the schools that invest the most in student athletics and thus usually attract the best student athletes. The analysis of the NCAA's own published data for the 2008-09 academic year revealed that a combination of gender quotas imposed by the Education Department and NCAA rules favoring women over men in awarding college athletic scholarships have resulted in drastically reduced opportunities for college men to play on soccer teams and even fewer opportunities for them to receive scholarships for doing so.
In 1996 the Education Department issued a set of safe-harbor standards that colleges could follow in order to be deemed in compliance with Title IX and thus avoid expensive lawsuits over disparities in athletic spending. The easiest standard, chosen by the overwhelming majority of institutions, was "proportionality": spending on athletics proportional to the ratio of males to females attending the college in question. Proportionality might have seemed fair in 1996---even though women tend to be less interested in the costly team sports that attract men---because only 52 percent of college students were female back then. Now the female-favoring gender disparity is much bigger: 57 percent to 43 percent.
Continue reading "Why U.S. Men's Soccer Will Now Decline" »
June 17, 2010
To continue the commentary on the Cry Wolf project . . .
In the final sentences of the story on the project at InsideHigherEd.com, Peter Dreier offers this remarkable defense of the plan: "'This is legitimate work,' he said, and the essays will be scrutinized for accuracy." In other words, the results will undergo careful review and, if necessary, correction.
The statement clashes, however, with this sentence from Dreier's letter: "We therefore need to construct a counter narrative that demonstrates the falsity or exaggeration of such claims so that the first reaction of millions of people as well as opinion leaders will be 'there they go again!'"
The project findings claim "accuracy," but the "narrative form" in which they are constructed suggests something else, namely, myth-making to counter (presumably) the myth-making of the right. This is not to say that the findings are false, or that myths are false, but rather that the narrative form will inevitably filter and shape and re-arrange and color the facts. Some distortion is bound to occur.
Continue reading "The Wolfers Forget Their Foucault" »
The review board of the UC Berkeley campus police has issued a 128-page report on the violent student protests of last November, criticizing actions by campus police and the University administration. The introduction and summary are here and the full report is here. Coverage of the report by the AP and The Daily Cal are here and here.
June 16, 2010
The "Cry Wolf" project, launched by a group of academics, plans to pay for research papers useful for liberal causes. That sounds harmless, but as KC Johnson argued in his posts here on the project, it boils down to commissioning scholarly work meant to reach a pre-determined result. Before any evidence is gathered, both the sponsors and the paid researchers know how these efforts are going to come out.
Advocacy lightly disguised as scholarship is a continuing problem on campus and at academic meetings. Robert Holland, a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, has a fascinating letter on the subject in the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. He writes about the American Education Research Association. AERA is supposed to be politically neutral but predictably comes down on the left side of contested political issues, strongly opposing, for example, Arizona's anti-illegal-immigration law. (It says, cryptically, that Arizona's "policy, on the face of it, does not take into consideration sustained sound bodies of science.") In clearer English, it has no plans for objective research on the effects of the measure, but instead promises to "disseminate research on the negative effects of the law."
Holland's letter points out the politicized nature of AERA's annual meeting: it had 136 sessions on "social justice," 96 on "diversity," 52 on "critical race theory," and 28 on "feminist theory." This list pretty much exhausts the political obsessions of the cultural left. But it hasn't much to do with real educational research.
June 14, 2010
President Botstein's portrait of Bard College's summer reading assignments in the context of the college's curriculum and larger educational aims is winsome and compelling. The college leads its students astutely into reading important books. It attends to the order in which such books should be read---Virgil before Dante. It is mindful of the need to challenge students with books that demand their full attention.
The reasons Botstein offers for colleges to offer summer reading programs, however, don't track very closely with what most of the colleges in the NAS survey say they are doing. According to Botstein, these programs are founded on the need to rouse high school grads from their summer torpor; to introduce them to general education; and for the institution to make a good first impression on its sometimes skittish and prone-to-transfer new students.
But the colleges we surveyed say something else. Many of them say some version of the idea that they want to "build community" on campus by giving students a "shared intellectual experience." Kalamazoo College, which we quoted in the report, says its:
Continue reading "Amen to Bard's Reading Program, but..." »
June 11, 2010
Every ideology has its factual holes. The press of ideas and values highlights certain facts and obscures others, and when the ideology grows in force in local settings, those obscured facts disappear entirely, or even turn into outright falsehoods in the eyes of the "ideologues."
George Mason economics professor Daniel Klein and Zogby International researcher Zelija Buturovic have analyzed the findings of a Zogby survey that reveals the dangers of excessive ideological conformity.
Zogby posed to nearly 4,835 American adults eight assertions about basic economics and asked them to agree or disagree. The prompts included "Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services," "Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago," and "Rent control leads to housing shortages."
The survey also broke the respondents down into six ideological groups, "Very conservative," "Libertarian," "Conservative," "Moderate," "Liberal," "Progressive/very liberal." It also asked respondents for their political party affiliation.
Here are the researchers' conclusions as recounted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Klein this week: "Americans in the first three categories do reasonably well. But the left has trouble squaring economic thinking with their political psychology, morals and aesthetics." For instance, "On the question about living standards, the portion of progressive/very liberals answering incorrectly (61%) was more than four times that of conservatives (13%) and almost three times that of libertarians (21%)."
Furthermore, "Those responding Democratic averaged 4.59 incorrect answers. Republicans averaged 1.61 incorrect, and Libertarians 1.26 incorrect."
This is to say that possession of certain economic facts varied by ideology. The right performed better, much better. This is not to say that the left would not perform better in other areas. I think it likely that it would. But the survey does support the notion of factual blind spots, and we may infer that in more or less closed bodies such as academic departments in which one ideology reigns, the blind spots can dilate, progressively turning into accepted wisdom. Add to that the complacency that follows and you have a formula for intellectual weakness.
June 10, 2010
Academic freedom carries with it rights as well as responsibilities. The concept derives from the belief that academics, because of specialized training in their subject matter, have earned the right to teach their areas of expertise and to follow their research questions as the evidence dictates---free from political pressure from the government. Indeed, only through a guarantee of such freedom can academics engage in a search for truth.
A corresponding responsibility, of course, is that academics will actually seek to pursue the truth. If professors' research methods imitate the likes of James Carville or Karl Rove, then what purpose exists to safeguard the academy from the government? Indeed, at public universities, if the professoriate functions as partisan hacks, selectively plucking items to advance a political agenda, what's to stop legislative demands that the faculty mirror the partisan breakdown of the state, to ensure proportionate representation to all political viewpoints?
A newly announced project called "Crying Wolf," organized out of the Center on Policy Initiatives, seems blithely unconcerned with any requirements associated with academic freedom. As John has noted, project coordinators Peter Dreier (a distinguished professor of politics at Occidental College), Nelson Lichtenstein (a historian of 20th century U.S. history at UC Santa Barbara who directs the university's Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy), and Donald Cohen, CPI executive director, are recruiting professors and graduate students (in "history, sociology, economics, political science, planning, public health, and public policy") to perform "paid academic research" that can "serve in the battle with conservative ideas."
Continue reading "The Wolfers and Bastardizing Academic Freedom" »
June 9, 2010
The indispensable Erin O'Connor, writing this morning on her web site, Critical Mass, discusses an astonishing memo from Peter Dreier of Occidental College and two other progressives seeking "paid academic research" that can "serve in the battle with conservative ideas." The project, sponsored by the Center on Policy Initiatives in San Diego, will pay fifty cents a word to professors and graduate students in history, sociology, economics, political science, planning, public health, and public policy. The "Cry Wolf Project," as it is called, lists as its coordinators, Dreier; Nelson Lichtenstein, a historian at UC Santa Barbara and Donald Cohen, executive director of the Center on Policy Initiatives. The title of the project reflects the belief that conservatives control political narratives by predicting disaster if progressive policies are pursued. The briefs are supposed to be scrupulously accurate, but obviously prepared to pursue a pre-determined agenda to be spread through the mainstream media.
O'Connor writes: "Grad students can now make fifty cents a word to scramble the difference between disinterested scholarship and agenda-driven advocacy work." She argues that the project "explicitly supports the arguments of those who would say that large swaths of academia are little more than publicly funded mechanisms for disseminating and producing an ideologically-driven world view."
We will investigate this ethically dubious project in coming days.
June 8, 2010
Sparks were few at this season's commencement speeches, and so were remarks inspiring much enthusiasm or objection. Protests arose, as they always do, whether of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie at Monmouth College (for state Education budget cuts), Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at Brandeis (for assorted Israeli actions), or Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs (for sub-prime lending and assorted financial misdeeds), but most remarks have been tame. Yet the speeches are almost besides the point - you don't have to have done anything objectionable to draw a protest this year; sins of omission seem just as powerful inspiration for petitions as real deeds on campus this year.
Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, drew pickets from pro-immigration activists. Their ire was partially directed at the department's continuation of a Bush administration policy which permitted the cross-checking of arrestees' fingerprints with a federal immigration database, but most of the protest appeared to be directed at the Arizona immigration law - which, last anyone checked, Napolitano had nothing to do with. Typical of this was a seech given by Emilio Amaya, executive director of the San Bernardino Community Services Center, who urged that: "Secretary Napolitano must take legal action against oppressive local and state immigration policies, including Arizona's SB1070, immediately. Secretary Napolitano can show the leadership that we need to stop racial profiling, stop the separation of families, and end the criminalization of immigrant workers," said Amaya. The Los Angeles Times reported:
As Napolitano spoke to the graduating class, the demonstrators gathered on the steps of the Andrew Carnegie building, chanting "Si, se puede!" (Yes, we can) and "Obama escucha, estamos en la lucha" (Obama, listen, we're in the struggle). The protesters were also waving signs that read "Alto AZ" (Stop Arizona) and "No mas racista" (No more racism).
Continue reading "Protesting the Blameless---A New Trend at Commencement Speeches" »
June 3, 2010
What books do colleges and universities ask incoming freshmen to read over the summer? "Beach Books," a study by the National Association of Scholars, has an answer: it turned up 180 books at 290 institutions and concluded that the book choices are unchallenging, heavily pitched to themes of alienation and oppression, and overwhelmingly reflect liberal themes and the sensibilities of the academic left.
The selections are mostly books published in the last decade and "generally pitched at an intellectual level well below what should be expected of college freshmen.... It is hard to find anything on the list that poses even a modest intellectual challenge to the average reader." The chosen books tend to be "short, caffeinated and emotional" and seem grounded on the premises of Oprah's Book Club.
Many colleges say the selections are intended to start conversations and engage new students in intellectual reflection. But assignments based on this goal seem to betray some unstated anxieties, among them that "students are so lacking in shared intellectual experience as to have little to talk about with one another---or little beyond television, music and sports." The "present-ism" of the selections, the report concludes, reflects an underestimation of the students' ability to discover connections between the past and the contemporary world. Colleges ought to push students toward making such connections rather than assume that students won't get it."
The report wonders whether the colleges are aware of the political slant and triviality of the books pushed on freshmen. It tentatively concludes: "Our guess is that they do not." Sixty of the 290 colleges selected books in what the report calls the multiculturalism/immigration/racism category. Other totals are environmentalism/animal rights/food (36 colleges), the Islamic world (27), new age/spiritual philosophy (25) and holocaust/genocide/war/disaster (25). On the whole, the books offer a distinctly disaffected view of American society and Western civilization. On the left-right spectrum the reports says that 70% of the books lean liberal, 28% neutral and 2% conservative.
June 2, 2010
In a recent article for Career College Central, I discuss the negative implications of the Department of Education's (ED) proposal to alter the gainful employment rule to restrict the amount of money that a student could borrow by program of study and expected entry level occupational earnings. I identified three major flaws with the proposal. First, it would severely limit the ability of for-profit colleges to offer bachelor's degree programs, and other non career-specific fields of study. Next, it fails to account for total compensation, regional variations in compensation, and the possibility that workers will receive a promotion or pay increase over time. Finally, the rule could result in a reduction of educational options and access for those most in need, and a shortage of qualified employees to meet the demands of the labor force.
I also analyzed the effect that the rule would have on 10 occupations that are expected to produce more than 2.6 million additional jobs by 2018, finding that for most of the occupations, students would have been able to borrow less (after adjusting for inflation) to pursue training in them in 2008 than in 2003. ED's arbitrary gainful employment metric would hamper the ability of colleges to offer occupational training in fields that the market demands by exerting what amounts to government price controls. A better solution to protect the interests of both students and taxpayers would be to ensure that colleges provide prospective students with sufficient information (such as job and income data, and debt and default levels) to make wise education decisions, prior to their enrolling and paying a dime of tuition.
May 28, 2010
The controversy at Harvard Law School over last month's email about racial intelligence seems to have died down. The basic facts of the case are these: a Harvard law student who is an editor of the Harvard Law Review sent an email to two friends as a follow-up to an earlier conversation. In it she wrote: "I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African-Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent." The email circulated among the students after one of the friends turned against her and passed it along to damage her reputation. The message infuriated the Black Law Students Association and compelled Dean Martha Minow to issue a denunciation of the statement. The original author apologized profusely.
John Leo wrote about the affair here, among other things highlighting the background of the author. (She was a sociology major at Princeton, where she studied how the campus atmosphere affects different racial groups.) John also pointed out the disproportionate nature of the consequence: a private email to friends turns into a public humiliation of a graduate student.
There is another aspect of the story worth pondering further. It comes up in a recent summary of the affair by Peter Berkowitz at The Weekly Standard.
Berkowitz focuses on the words of Dean Minow. Yes, we all have seen how swiftly university administrators respond to racial incidents, how frantically they wish to demonstrate that they will, indeed, tolerate no hate speech and honor all peoples. But this action was somewhat different. Minow delivered a judgment of a text written by a student. The student was not brought forward on any charges, and no disciplinary procedure was in play. It was the student's words that mattered, and Minow's words would oppose them.
Here's the problem, in Berkowitz's rendering: "Dean Minow's statement, moreover, failed to honor the scholar's duty to restate accurately a view one is criticizing. According to Minow, the student's email 'suggested that black people are genetically inferior to white people.' That's an incendiary revision."
In truth, the email was much more tentative and hypothetical. She wrote that she couldn't "rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent." This is the posture of the scientist, not the racist, the latter of whom would assert inferiority without hesitation. Indeed, the fact that Minow scrambled the student's words indicates that the words themselves weren't enough to justify Minow's denunciation.
That isn't the dean's only crime. She also neglected the rest of the email, which further belies the charge of racism. Berkowitz again:
in the very next sentence, [the student] entertained the possibility that there is no genetic variation in intelligence between the races: 'I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances.' The student went on to speculate that 'cultural differences' are probably 'the most important sources of disparate test scores.' And the student elaborated at length an argument from Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy that in the student's judgment deftly showed, despite the absence of 'quantifiable data,' that racial disparities for violent crimes were rooted in culture. In sum, the student clearly expressed the desire to set aside conclusions of the heart, and instead examine the scientific data and consider reasoned analysis concerning the genetic basis of intelligence.
This is a reasonable discussion, and while the history of social science into intelligence contains some awful episodes of racism, it is still proper to inquire into racial differences in cultural, geographical, and other terms, including genetic ones.
Not in the dean's office. Not only did Minow violate the student's privacy and encourage the rest of Harvard to "regard the student as a pariah," as Berkowitz notes. Not only did Minow encourage students who feel aggrieved or offended to run to authorities and complain. She also demonstrated little understanding of the norms of scientific inquiry. And worse, perhaps, she disregarded what may be the first principle of academic discussion: to represent the words and ideas of others accurately and fairly.
May 27, 2010
Professor Sandra K. Soto's commencement speech at the University of Arizona caused national commotion---she bitterly attacked the new Arizona immigration law---but not much discussion about whether controversial issues are appropriate in such talks. One common opinion, raised repeatedly in Professor Soto's case, is that invited speakers should not impose their politics on a captive audience. Another is that invited speakers should not be expected to steer around their deeply held beliefs and just stick to the usual dreadful cliches---climb very mountain, today is the first day of the rest of your life, etc. The strongest reason for inviting any speaker is often that he or she stands for something and carries the message that conviction is important.
But there are rules, or should be. Much of a good commencement talk should be about the graduates, and speakers should remember that they are a minor act on a program about student success. Professor Soto passed this test easily. She talked at length about and to the new graduates. But on another test, she did not do nearly so well: speakers who take controversial stances should frame the issue fairly, and leave room for graduates and parents in the audience to disagree without being considered backward or bigoted. Her remark that the law "is considered the strictest anti-immigration legislation in the country" overlooks the fact that the measure is no stricter than existing federal law, and that the measure is anti-illegal immigration, not anti-immigration. Soto's comment that "racial discord is being provoked not solved" is a bit much for a law not yet put into effect, and supported by three out of four Arizonans who have an opinion (72% in favor, 24% opposed, 6% no opinion--Rasmussen). It may be that the professor was misled by the "faculty-lounge effect"--- as a group, college professors are so sure the law is terrible that when emerging from the academic cocoon, they often fail to notice that a huge majority is on the opposite side.
A good deal of soul-searching followed the commencement debacle in 2003 at Rockford College in Illinois. Anti-war activist and New York Times reporter Chris Hedges essentially ignored the graduates and launched into an unusually grating speech on America's faults and how pleased he was that the U.S. had lost in Vietnam. The enraged crowd screamed in protest and twice someone pulled the plug on the sound system. Perhaps fearing a riot, the president of the college stepped in and stopped the speech. So it's fair to say that the speaker, the audience and the president all behaved badly. The popular blogger James Lileks wrote that there's nothing wrong with an anti-war speech, "but such a speech needs to persuade. It needs to draw the audience close, make eye contact. Crack a joke, wax colloquial, opine a bit, then bring it all back to the grads." Most of all, controversial speeches need basic civility and an awareness that the day is about the students.
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