Forum tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1 2010-09-01T23:37:00Z Movable Type 3.34 Brooklyn College Assigns a Book tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.4065 2010-09-01T23:26:16Z 2010-09-01T23:37:00Z 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... KC Johnson 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 The New York Daily News reported that one BC alumnus, Bruce Kessler, has withdrawn a "significant bequest" to the school from his will.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.]]> That said, it would be hard to argue that Brooklyn doesn't deserve some criticism for its choice. The college has been opaque, to put it mildly, regarding the specific process and criteria that the committee of English Department faculty used to select this book. What is it, in short, that led BC faculty to decide that this book, more so than any other current publication, should be a common read for all students? More broadly, since conclusion of Bayoumi's book involves a critique of U.S. foreign policy, how are English professors the most competent people to judge the academic quality of a book on such a topic? The college hasn't said, nor has it indicated what other books the committee considered. More problematically, Dean Donna Wilson has responded to critics by linking the book to the college's alleged respect for "tolerance, diversity, and respect for differing points of view." Those are fine words---and, certainly, the current Brooklyn president and provost shouldn't in any way be held responsible for their predecessors' failure to live up to this ideal. Nonetheless, let's take Wilson at her word: the selection committee wanted to choose a book that would demonstrate "respect for differing points of view." Bayoumi's discussion of the treatment of Arab-Americans in contemporary society and (to, perhaps a slightly lesser extent) his wild denunciations of Israeli security policy almost certainly represent majority opinion among the current Brooklyn College faculty. How, then, will the college foster "respect for differing points of view" by assigning a book whose message Brooklyn students will receive over and over again during the course of their undergraduate careers? Moreover, the alleged celebration for "tolerance, diversity, and respect for differing points of view" rings a bit hollow. Imagine the opposite of Bayoumi's publication---a story of a handful of Jewish immigrants to Brooklyn, which concluded with a diatribe against President Obama for not recognizing the fundamental evils of Hamas and for not doing enough to support Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria (and used those inflammatory terms, just as Bayoumi uses inflammatory language on the other side). Does anyone believe that such a book would even be considered for a common-reading selection, must less survive the process and ultimately be chosen? Title IX Has A Disparate Impact--for Black Women tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.4054 2010-08-30T16:21:49Z 2010-08-30T03:12:46Z 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,... John Rosenberg 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."]]> If proponents of gender equity want to achieve Title IX's goals for women of all races, Brake writes, they'll need "a dose of social-justice feminism" to broaden their advocacy beyond the letter of the law. Otherwise, she says, racial disparities that are deeply rooted in the K-12 educational system---where sports offerings in urban and low-income areas are scant for boys, and even more limited for girls---will continue to thwart female athletes' access to sports at the college level.... In a section about Title IX's impact on minority women, Brake argues that the status quo in gender-equity advocacy won't do much to fix cracks in the pipeline to women's collegiate teams. The problem with Title IX, which deals with gender equity in sports, appears to be that it focuses too narrowly on ... gender and sports. Brake told the CHE author, Jenny Sander, that two problems explain the "shortfall" of minority women:
"One is that Title IX itself focuses on gender in isolation. The second is that Title IX advocacy has really focused on sports in isolation," she says. "When we use Title IX to try to push for gender equality in sports, unless we're going to also incorporate strategies of racial justice, we're going to end up benefiting the most-privileged girls."
In short, to Prof. Brake, as to virtually (probably literally) all of the authors of studies and reports about various racial "gaps" and "disparities" (and now "shortfalls"), "racial justice" no longer has anything to do with an absence of racial discrimination. Now it means racial proportionality. Prof. Brake's book is yet another example of something I noted on Minding The Campus back in June ("'Gender Gap' Mania"):
the American higher education establishment and those who report on it and write about 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."
Who would have thought, however, at least before Prof. Brake, that the gender gap-closing Title IX would create increasing "disparities" between the sports participation of black and white women? At the core of what might rudely be called the black woman jock gap, i.e., the increasing "shortfall" of black women athletes in school and college, lies the troubling fact that black women's choice of sport is not diverse enough for Prof. Brake, who wants pressure brought to bear on K-12 education to offer "a diverse range of sports."
It's not that Title IX has left minority female athletes behind completely, Brake points out. They now have far more athletic opportunities than in the pre-Title IX era. The sports they play, however, reveal a narrow scope of participation, she says: Nine out of 10 black women who play college sports, for instance, compete in either basketball or track.... In the meantime, the increasing prevalence of what Brake calls the "country-club sports" in college programs --- rowing, soccer, lacrosse, and swimming, to name a few---has also largely bypassed nonwhite female athletes. At the high-school level, those sports are popular among girls in affluent suburbs, but not in urban areas or at cash-strapped public schools with limited athletic programs. In fact, many of those sports are not offered in high schools at all, only in private club programs. Of the 10 college sports for women that experienced the most growth from 1995 to 2004, Brake writes, only two --- softball and volleyball --- had rosters that were more than 10 percent minority. All the rest, which included some of the fastest-growing sports for women, like soccer and lacrosse, had minimal participation from minority groups.
The problem of black girls and women choosing --- or, if you prefer, being channeled by active or passive bias or otherwise blocked from participation in alternatives by "structural" barriers --- a more diverse collection of sports is strikingly similar to the incessantly lamented "shortfall" of women in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, math). At the core of the "disparities" in the STEM fields, as on the playing fields, is that women's own choices do not result in proportional representation everywhere. In an excellent article on this site April 5, "On Women, STEM and Hidden Bias", Susan Pinker convincingly pointed out how a typical recent lament about the "underrepresentation" of women in STEM fields implicitly denigrated the choices many women freely make. And on that same day in the same place, in "The Misguided Push for STEM Diversity", I discussed a number of other examples of officious handwringing over gender "disparities" in science that reflected a disrespect for the choices women themselves made. In a particularly egregious example, I noted that
feminists and friends were up in arms about a "controversial" report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that endorses surveying women's interest in sports in determining compliance with Title IX. The commission's report argues that "since female students are fully capable of expressing interest in athletics, or lack thereof, advocates for particular views on Title IX compliance should not devalue or dismiss their perspectives." Determining what women actually want is "controversial," however, because it might impede the preferentialists' desire to impose their version of "equity," i.e., proportional representation in sports, whether or not the desire and interests of the students is proportional.
Alas, I am not the only one to notice the similarity between gender "gaps" in STEM fields and on the playing fields, which has led to a misguided effort to "diversify" science education with the heavy hand of Title IX enforcement. Even our current Educator in Chief, back when he was a Senator, praised the success of Title IX in increasing female participation in sports and added that "Title IX has the potential to make similar, striking advances in the opportunities that girls have in the STEM disciplines." (Quoted in a statement by Abigail Thernstrom, Vice Chair of the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights, included in the Commission's report, Title IX Athletics: Accommodating Interests and Abilities.) As Christina Hoff Sommers noted in 2008 ("Why Can't A Woman Be More Like A Man?"), this "title-nining" of science education would be a disaster. Unless the choices women make of what sport to play (including the choice not to play) are the result of discrimination of some sort, why should the fact that black women choose more often than Prof. Brake would like to play softball or basketball be a federal case? Exactly why, that is, do we need a critical mass of black women rowing or playing lacrosse or soccer? Why should it be a concern of the federal government, via Title IX, to create a "pipeline to women's collegiate teams" --- and not just the teams they currently choose but a sufficiently "diverse" collection of teams to satisfy those who idea of "equity" and "racial justice" is proportional representation? Title IX, lest we forget, is designed to enforce civil rights, not promote social engineering. It was passed in 1972 as part of the Civil Rights Act, which in turn was passed in 1964 to prohibit discrimination. Its operative content states:
No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance....
At the risk of sounding naive or radical, or both, wouldn't it be nice if our anti-discrimination laws could be restricted to their original purpose of combating discrimination? ]]> The Suicide of English tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.4055 2010-08-28T18:13:23Z 2010-08-29T18:19:02Z 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... Mark Bauerlein 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.]]> It was a suicidal move. The resulting courses they taught and books they wrote may have had their surface appeal, incorporating lively materials and controversial topics into their work. But academic disciplines have a higher bar to hurdle than liveliness and topicality. They have to meet canons of inquiry and argument that presume lengthy and rigorous training of people accredited to practice in the field. People who have undergone that training don't respect, and don't like, others broaching their materials but lacking the training to do so responsibly. Film scholars disdain English professors who write about film but don't know much about the technology of filmmaking circa 1930 and 1940 and 1950. Sociologists who study mass culture disdain English professors who write about advertising but don't know anything about the finances of it. In a word, English professors who expanded their focus came off as dilettantes. Once they dropped literary matters from the center of their aim, they lost their disciplinary grounding. Whatever thrills they gained by relinquishing those been-there-done-that canonical literary works and sallying into video and empire and the like, their standing on campus plummeted. Thirty years ago, no university could claim top status without a top English department. That is no longer true. Cornell's Dubious Plan for Women tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.4051 2010-08-26T06:25:17Z 2010-08-26T06:40:23Z 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... Judah Bellin "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." ]]> report, however, noted limited success. Though the authors praised the successful networking and mentoring programs, they lamented the abiding gender discrepancies within the faculty. Comparing 2008-2009 figures against a baseline figure from the academic years 2004-05, 2005-06 & 2006-07, researchers found that women professors remained "under-represented" at all ranks; however, women were "better represented at the Full and Associate ranks" than in previous years, though at only slightly higher levels. ADVANCE's objectives, the authors indicated, were far from being realized. It is hard to fault any program that more effectively mentors and supports junior faculty---be they male or female, minority or otherwise. Certainly, it is in any university's interest to retain high-quality instructors. Cornell's strategies for recruiting female and minority faculty, however, are highly questionable. These strategies were listed in internal university documents recently posted on the ADVANCE web site. One document from Cornell's College of Veterinary Medicine urges the creation of a "Faculty Affirmative Action Committee" that would monitor and review the school's efforts to "recruit, admit, and support" women and minority faculty. Another, from the College of Engineering, establishes a "Faculty Recruitment and Diversity Committee" that would supervise and guide all faculty search committees so that the college can reach its objective of increasing female faculty from 12% to 20% and minority faculty from 4% to 7%. Furthermore, if the initial findings of a search committee do not produce any female or minority candidates, the search committee must provide "compelling" reasons to justify moving ahead with the process. These guidelines are standard fare for today's universities. However, as another Cornell directive demonstrates, this thinking can in practice lead to denial of individual merit outside the framework of these groups. The directive, "Recommended Guidelines for Serving on Academic Search Committees," outlines the protocol for members of Affirmative Action Committees during the recruitment and interviewing phases of the search process. Most of the recommendations---such as ensuring "inclusiveness in the search project" as well as "a broad advertising... consistent with the description of position"---are harmless. But the directive also requires interviewers to "keep statistics of the applicants stratified by group." In other words, women are not to be compared with men, and minorities are not to be compared with non-minorities. Their merit exists solely as a function of their membership within the group. Therefore, successful female and minority candidates are not the "best candidates," but rather, in the language of Stephen L. Carter, the "best woman" or the "best minority." The ugly presumption is that they can never truly compete with white males. This negative outcome of the diversity ideology was noted by Justice Clarence Thomas, himself an unhappy "beneficiary" of preferential treatment. In a lecture to the Federalist Society, he argued that "the idea that whole groups or classes are victims robs individuals of an independent spirit--they are just moving along with the 'herd' of other victims." His comments resonate. Indeed, within Cornell's system of preferential hiring, achievement can only occur within the narrow framework of group identity. The irony is unavoidable: Spurred by the desire to lift individuals up from historical oppression, "diversity" proponents have confined them to very same categories at the root of that oppression. Nevertheless, Cornell will claim success if "a third of our S&E faculty be women by 2015." But it won't represent true success for the women hired. Their accomplishments will be of secondary importance to their group affiliation, as they will be prized as component parts of a percentage--not as distinguished scientists. Sadly, the "diversity" ideology demands little more from them. ]]> More Groupthink Perils tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.4048 2010-08-25T15:03:46Z 2010-08-25T19:52:40Z 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... KC Johnson 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.]]> scheme to pay graduate students and younger professors to produce "research" that conformed to the Wolfers' political agenda. Then came this assertion, at Ta-Neishi Coates' Atlantic blog: "And more recently, the Roberts Court has struck down even voluntary school integration plans. All but the most hardcore advocates of Jim Crow from the Brown v. Board days would be pleased." Though he didn't link to the decision, Sugrue presumably was referring to Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, in which the Roberts Court struck down a Seattle school-assignment scheme (which the school board had voluntarily adopted; parents, of course, had no choice but to participate); and a companion case from Kentucky, Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education. Roberts' opinion in the Seattle case included one of his most famous lines as Chief Justice: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." People of good faith can, and do, disagree on the merits of the Parents Involved decision. It was, after all, decided by a 5-4 vote, with Justice Kennedy siding with the majority but also penning a narrower opinion than Roberts'. But could any fair-minded observer seriously maintain that the decision would satisfy "all but the most hardcore advocates from the Brown v. Board days"? The decision upheld the use of racial classifications to overcome past instances of discrimination---an outcome that presumably any "advocate of Jim Crow" (and not just those of a hard-core variety) and lots of other people from the Jim Crow era would have vehemently opposed. And the decision paid lip service to Grutter v. Bollinger, which allowed the continued use of racial preferences in college and university admissions, even as it explained why the conclusions of Grutter didn't apply to a public school assignment plan. Sugrue's comment about the Roberts Court, in short, perfectly illustrates how "academics with too much confidence in their audience utter debatable propositions as received wisdom," oblivious to "just how cheap such a pat consensus actually is." The irony is that as noncontroversial as branding the Roberts Court with a Jim Crow brush might be in most humanities department, Sugrue's extraordinarily charged rhetoric all but ensured that any neutral reader would recoil from his overall conclusions. ]]> Why So Many Administrators? tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.4035 2010-08-20T04:11:30Z 2010-08-24T19:28:39Z 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... Mark Bauerlein "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:]]> -----From 1993 to 2007, the price of (inflation-adjusted) tuition climbed by 66.7 percent at the top 198 universities. -----During the same years, enrollments in them grew by 14.5 percent (3.64 million to 4.17 million). They conclude with changes in university personnel broken down by those working in administrative jobs and those engaged in teaching, research, and service. -----From 1993 to 2007, "the number of full-time administrators per 100 students . . . increased by 39.3 percent" (6.8 administrators per 100 students to 9.4 administrators per 100 students) -----During the same years, "the number of employees engaged in teaching, research or service only increased by 17.6 percent" (6 per 100 students to 7 per 100 students) In sum, Greene writes, "most leading universities are increasing their administrative employment and expenditures much faster than instructional employment or expenditures." Indeed, while instruction has seen expenditures rise 39.3 percent (per student), administration has seen expenditures rise 61.2 percent (per student). At UC-Davis, for example, the number of full-time administrators jumped 318 percent, while "the university actually reduced its full-time instructional, research, and service staff by 4.5 percent." Overall, only 13 universities reduced administrative spending per student (Greene salutes Michigan as a "model for how to stem bloat"), while two dozen more than doubled administrative spending. The report singles out a primary cause for the rising inefficiency of the system: government subsidies. "We need to stop feeding the beast," he urges, arguing that the only way to bring costs closer to the efficient delivery of education is to stop the "vicious cycle" of tuitions rising, government support rising, tuition rising, government support rising . . . Trower's Tenure Troubles tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.4029 2010-08-18T22:00:00Z 2010-08-18T22:06:15Z 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... KC Johnson 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.]]> broader reorientation of personnel policy: "In order to make significant progress in creating a more diverse faculty and a campus that truly embraces diversity, the advancement of diversity must be established as a primary indicator of quality." Resistance from politicians who and trustees who oversaw the university helped water down the plans. Now, Trower is back. However severe the current problems are in academia, I think I'd prefer the status quo over the tenure schemes promoted by Trower. ]]> ACTA & Its Critics tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.4026 2010-08-18T15:20:08Z 2010-08-18T20:58:40Z 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... KC Johnson 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.]]> the AAC&U's Debra Humphreys mused (without mentioning from which "employers" she was "hearing"), "that they want more from college graduates. But I would not say that we're hearing that they want a more traditional, old-fashioned kind of core curriculum." Meanwhile, AAC&U head Carole Geary Schneider suggested that ACTA was merely offering a 1950s model, ignoring how "there's a huge amount of energy in higher education devoted to revitalizing a content-rich general-education program that is highly focused both on the knowledge students need and the skills they need for a 21st century competence." The AAC&U screeds reveal the follow core at the heart of the organization's philosophy. Take the remark from Humphreys. Is the AAC&U really suggesting that colleges and universities should orient their universities around what they're "hearing" from "employers"? What of the ideal of a liberal education? Or the obligation of public colleges and universities to train future citizens capable of participating in the nation's civic life? Apparently a vocational education is acceptable for the kind of non-Ivy League students that the AAC&U targets. I also suspect that these unnamed "employers" that have criticized ACTA's approach to Debra Humphreys are also telling the AAC&U that colleges and universities should reorient their curricula to focus exclusively on "diversity." For the sake of argument, however, assume that the AAC&U is correct, and college gen-ed curricula should reflect that "employers" want. What employer (outside of the music industry) could possibly want prospective workers to have no exposure to a U.S. survey course beyond high school (which Schneider suggests to the Christian Science Monitor is no problem) and who instead have fulfilled their college U.S. history requirement through "The History of Rock and Roll." The California State University-Monterey Bay course surveys "United States social and cultural history of the 20th century as analyzed through some of its popular music," with "special emphasis . . . on the experiences of communities of color." How many parents would be satisfied with such a general education requirement? ]]> Big Gaps In Two Big Gap Studies tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.4023 2010-08-17T14:00:00Z 2010-08-17T13:46:33Z 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... John Rosenberg 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.
]]> The average black student, we know, leaves high school with a weaker academic record than the average white graduate, so where's the mystery? Until somebody fixes the high school problem, there's not much colleges and universities can do. Or is there? For the past several months, we've been digging beneath the averages and looking at data from individual institutions in our College Results Online database. We've found that some institutions have horrendous graduation-rate gaps between white and black students---well above the national average. And it turns out that other institutions have no gaps at all. Indeed, in dozens of colleges, black students graduate at rates equal to or higher than their white counterparts. In other words, it's not entirely about preparation, and wide gaps in the graduation rates of white and black students are not inevitable. Our analysis strongly suggests that what colleges do with and for the students they admit matters a great deal. And:
It's true that lower college-going rates among Hispanics cause part of the attainment gap. But a significant portion also results from low graduation rates among those who do enter college. Currently, fewer than half of Hispanic students who enter four-year colleges and universities graduate within six years, compared with about 60 percent of white students. To improve degree attainment among Hispanic students, colleges and universities simply must enroll more of them. But it's just as important that these institutions also boost their graduation rates and close graduation-rate gaps.
In short, the institutions themselves deserve either praise or blame for the graduation rates of their students, and The Education Trust liberally ladles out both, its press release for example announcing that its reports found both "smashing success" and "shocking irresponsibility."
Using several years of data from College Results Online --- a unique Web-based tool that allows the public to view college graduation rates by race, ethnicity, and gender for four-year institutions across the country---these reports highlight institutions that are doing well and expose those that are missing the mark on graduation equity, some of them by miles.
Note well that term graduation equity. The clear message here is that if all racial and ethnic groups don't graduate at the same rate, their institution is inequitable, in effect discriminating against those falling behind in the graduation race. It is an article of faith in higher education circles these days that "equity" demands preferential treatment of minorities, such as lowering the admissions bar for them. Query: if admissions equity requires lowering admissions standards for minorities, does "graduation equity" require lowering graduation standards for them? In order to support the charge that differential graduation rates can be (usually are?) evidence of inequitable treatment, the Education Trust studies purport to compare comparable institutions with comparable students but with wildly varying graduation rates. From the press release:
The new reports demonstrate that similarities between schools do not necessarily result in similarities in minority graduation rates. At peer institutions---schools with comparable institutional and student characteristics---the gaps for minority student groups run the gamut from abysmal to exemplary. At the University of Illinois at Chicago, a 22 percentage-point gap in success rates separates white and African-American students, who graduate at 52 percent and 30 percent, respectively. But at a peer institution, University of North Carolina-Greensboro, the graduation rates among black students are dramatically different. On average, 56 percent of African-American students at UNC-Greensboro graduate within six years, compared with 51 percent of white students....
But are the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro really "comparable institutions" with "comparable ... student characteristics"? The students at UNCG are 20.8% black, 66% white, and only 2.6% Latino and 3.4% Asian. The University of Illinois at Chicago students are 8.7% black; 44.6% white, 16.2% Latino, and 23.5% Asian. Moreover, I would imagine a large number of the Illinois students come from Chicago, a city of nearly 3 million people while Greensboro is under 225,000, although the UNC-G students probably come from all over North Carolina. More important than their skin color, however, are the actual qualifications of the students. Are they "comparable"? Can't tell from these reports. The biggest gap in these two gap studies is the absence of information about the relative qualifications of the students. It is simply impossible to conclude that one institution has been a "smashing success" with its minority students while another has demonstrated "shocking irresponsibility" without presenting data about the relative qualifications of its black, Hispanic, white (and Asian) students. In short, when The Education Trust concludes confidently (Black Gap, p. 1) that "[i]nstitutions that have demonstrated the capacity to graduate white students at high rates should be able to serve black students equally well," without regard to the qualifications of its black and white students, it is not analyzing data but preaching political correctness. ]]> Not Just Another College Ranking tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.4015 2010-08-13T19:23:56Z 2010-08-13T06:32:12Z 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... Anthony Paletta 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.]]> U.S. News' infamous reputational survey. With this ranking can you now finally set aside the others? No, of course not. The appropriate approach to college rankings will always appropriately be pantheistic, but with a more finely-honed formula the Forbes ranking now offers a list well worth a check. Take a look at this list, the Washington Monthly list, and the U.S. News list, and take whatever seems best to you from the combination. ]]> Dean Minow's Superiority tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.4008 2010-08-12T16:50:25Z 2010-08-12T01:32:41Z 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... Mark Bauerlein 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."]]> During the hearings, Minow claims, Republican senators repeatedly criticized Marshall. In the confirmation process, she writes, "Republican Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama questioned Marshall's concern for 'the little guy.' Senator John Cornyn of Texas labeled him 'a judicial activist.' Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa announced that Marshall's legal views 'do not comport with the proper role of a judge or judicial method.'" Note Minow's reply. In essence it is a bien pensant rejoinder, an assertion of mannered indignation. "How times have changed. It is almost inconceivable to try to tar the most recent Supreme Court nominee by association with the iconic civil rights lawyer who successfully argued Brown v. Board of Education, widely viewed as the finest modern moment of the Supreme Court." Minow proceeds to outline the momentousness of Brown. This is not only an annoying assertion of pique. It also misrepresents the object of the Republicans' statements. I listened to the hearings for hours, and I don't recall any Republican questioning Marshall's work as an NAACP lawyer or attacking the ruling of Brown. Instead, Sessions and others questioned Marshall's jurisprudence after he joined the Court. Does Minow believe that because Marshall did genuinely heroic work as an attorney his subsequent years on the Court are beyond criticism? Apparently so, for she cites Dana Milbank's judgment about the senators' strategy: "Did Republicans think it would help their cause to criticize the first African American on the Supreme Court, a revered figure who has been celebrated with an airport, a postage stamp and a Broadway show? The guy is a saint . . . " Minow agrees, and so, faced with the saintliness of Marshall she can only judge the senators oppositely as subtle demons or cynics playing upon white worries about "black men in power." This is the denial of critical thinking and open-mindedness. By the time one reaches the end of Minow's op-ed, where she declares, "It's time for a deep breath and a rejection of ignorance and distortion," one recognizes that her statement is not an expression of legal or political argument. It is, rather, an expression of character, an Ivy League dean claiming the enlightened pedestal for herself and the blinding muck for the wrong-minded. A Small-c Conservative (Lukewarm) Defense of Tenure tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.3995 2010-08-11T07:51:20Z 2010-08-11T01:44:13Z 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... KC Johnson 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.]]> As Mark has noted, in this respect tenure can have the effect of encouraging intellectual staleness among the faculty. But it can also preserve needed subdisciplines that have run afoul of the paragons of political correctness. For instance, without tenure, military history---now all but dead---would probably have perished (outside of the service academies and a handful of Southern schools) in the 1980s, once history departments nationally began lurching to the left. But the existence of tenure allowed military historians already on staff to finish out their careers unscathed, even if they almost never were replaced. A similar situation exists now for those who teach political or diplomatic history. Without tenure, almost all such positions would be eliminated or revised beyond recognition in the race/class/gender-dominated academy. Alas, 15-20 years down the road, as the final generation of political and diplomatic historians retires, they almost certainly will be replaced by figures who adhere to a race/class/gender approach to teaching. But until then, students at some institutions at least will have the opportunity to be exposed to a more pedagogically diverse approach to the American past. A similar description could apply to fields like English, philosophy, or anthropology. Whether giving today's students a brief window of access to a more pedagogically diverse academy that is rapidly passing us by is worth the economic and intellectual costs of tenure is a difficult question to answer. In any event, I agree with Mark that "in fields in which salaries are fixed and employment guaranteed for decades, tenure will decline into negligibility a generation from today, and all the talk about generational values and academic freedom and rigorous instruction won't preserve it." Finally, two points of dissent to points raised in the blogosphere's tenure debate. 1) From Orin Kerr, a possible defense of tenure: "Academics are the best judges of who is a good academic, and tenure is necessary to ensure that a group of academics will hire the best person to fill an open faculty slot. This argument is made in detail in H. Lorne Carmichael, Incentives in Academics: Why Is There Tenure?, 96 Journal of Political Economy 453 (1988). The basic idea is that tenure is a necessary evil because faculties vote on who to let join them: If professors know that their own jobs will be in jeopardy if they hire someone better than themselves, they will make sure that they only hire incompetent new people." This explanation strikes me as plausible at first blush but inaccurate in reality. As one of my mentors, Paula Sutter Fichtner, used to remark, first-class departments hire first-class professors; second-class departments hire third-class professors. In most instances, mediocrities aren't so dull as to not recognize their own mediocrity; whether or not their job is on the line from new hires, they have little incentive to want to staff their department with people more accomplished than themselves. In this respect, the hiring (or tenuring) of even one or two mediocrities can have long-lasting ill effects. 2) From Freakonomics, discounting the prospect of academic freedom violations: "If one institution fires an academic primarily because they don't like his or her politics or approach, there will be other schools happy to make the hire." This claim might be true for Steven Levitt's field of Economics, but it certainly doesn't apply in the humanities and most social sciences. Given the groupthink uniformity that exists, it's highly doubtful that "there will be other schools happy to make the hire" of a professor drummed out of his or her previous institution for challenging the ideological or pedagogical status quo. ]]> McCarthyism or Simple Transparency? tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.3992 2010-08-10T15:05:35Z 2010-08-10T01:43:18Z 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... Charlotte Allen 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.]]> Dallas Morning News--you would think that HB 2504 had been rammed through the legislature by the ghost of Joe McCarthy. The Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors, in a demand to have the law repealed, called it a costly "unfunded mandate" that would have a chilling effect on classroom discussion of controversial subjects. In a newsletter quoted by the Morning News the conference declared, "As far as any of us can tell, this is an attempt by cultural conservatives to identify course content they might view as undesirable, and is thus clearly an attack on academic freedom." Mary Leaf, speaker of the faculty senate at the University of Texas-Dallas, took a How Dare the Great Unwashed? stance, telling the Morning News that requring professors to put their resumes online implies that they're not qualified to teach their classes--"an insulting mistrust of higher education faculty." Peer review, not the general public should decide who is qualified to teach at a university, she said. "Faculty in the United States decide the curriculum," Leaf said. "The people behind this are opposed to that and are trying to undermine it. The law really isn't primarily about giving students better information, but about giving people who want to attack higher education better information. We're not against transparency. We're against being attacked by our enemies." Such objections don't seem reality-based, to say the least. For one thing, although HB 2504 had a Republican (hence potentially conservative) sponsor, State Rep. Lois Kolkhurst, whose district includes Austin, home of the University of Texas's flagship campus, it passed the state legislature on a unanimous vote that reflected bipartisan support. Second, Texas taxpayers--and students and parents of students in particular--certainly have a right to know how money is being spent by institutions supported by their tax dollars. On the issue of posting faculty salaries, for example, the Texas Public Policy Foundation points out that the state of Texas spends more than a half-billion dollars a year to pay the bulk of faculty salaries in the public system--and that other state employee salaries are a matter of public record. (Kolkhorst told the Dallas Morning News that professors who want to keep their pay confidential should be working for private, not public universities.) As for posting departmental budgets, the Texas Public Policy Foundation notes that average operating costs at Texas public universities have risen by $3,853 per student over the past eight years even though state appropriations have remained constant. Furthermore, many universities and their faculty already use the Internet to post voluntarily the very information that Texas now requires to be placed online. Click onto the websites of elite institutions such as Duke or Stanford--not to mention hundreds of other colleges and universities public and private--and you will find detailed web pages for each faculty member, including publications, awards, and lists of courses taught. The University of Texas-Arlington, for example, has been posting professor-profiles since 2005. Many professors also place their course syllabi online for public consumption. It is thus hard to take seriously the claims of some Texas professors that the new mandate places an unfair or particularly expensive burden on them or their institutions. In fact; it is hard to see how the public posting of course content and professors' backgrounds can be anything but helpful. If your interest is, say, Brazilian literature, you'd want to enroll in courses and on campuses where the professors have proven expertise on the subject. Conversely, you might not want to sign up for a course that purports to cover ancient history but whose syllabus indicates that most classroom hours will be spent watching sword-and-sandals movies. Furthermore, as the Pope Center's Jay Schalin recently noted, universities also benefit from the public posting of information about courses. Professors can use each others' syllabi as models for improving their own pedagogy, and such postings can "make comparisons between classes at different universities easier for the determination of transfer credits." There is one legitimately questionable feature of the new Texas law (although it has not received much attention from the McCarthyism-fixated AAUP): the mandatory posting of student evaluations of professors. Since college students are notorious for their preference for instructors with colorful personalities who are relatively easy graders, online evaluations "may not be the most accurate way to gauge instruction," as Michael Moore, senior vice provost at UT-Arlington, told the Pope Center last October. Since such evaluations function as personnel records, which are typically confidential, posting them on the web may be overly intrusive. Still, although HB 2504 may not be perfect, it seems overall an important step toward giving students, parents, and taxpayers in Texas the information they need in shaping their educations and monitoring the use of their education dollars. The currently crying witch hunt and calling for the law's repeal sound not only shrill, silly, and snobbish but remarkably ill-informed about the law's content and context. ]]> Two More Reasons Why College Isn't All It's Cracked Up To Be tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.3998 2010-08-09T14:04:46Z 2010-08-09T14:09:46Z 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... Charles Murray 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. ]]> The Safe and Secure Professoriate tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.3990 2010-08-06T05:23:51Z 2010-08-06T05:34:00Z 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.... Mark Bauerlein 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.
]]> The first paragraph is a nice capsule summary of the pattern, setting the tenure moment in light of the 15 years that preceded it. We sometimes regard the awarding of tenure as a broad intellectual judgment about the intellectual quality of the candidate's work. Is it well-researched? Is the evidence handled carefully? Are the conclusions warranted? These questions come into play, to be sure, but other questions do as well. Is the work "recognized"? Is it topical, up-to-date, relevant, cutting-edge, "positioned" within current debates, engaged with leading figures in the field . . .? These are professional judgments, more a measure of a candidate's professionalization than of his or her integrity, rigor, and intelligence. They place the institution of the field ahead of the epistemology of the work. But tenured colleagues often set those criteria ahead of intellectual values, perhaps because they're easier to apply (asking whether a thesis has "currency" is easier than reading a whole book and assessing the demonstration of the thesis). This explains the truth of Hacker's contention about tenure being a "line-toeing" process. Most of the time, those 15 years do not mark the opening of an innovating line of inquiry. They mark an acculturation of a young mind to academic trend. Hacker's second paragraph raises a problem that has affected disciplines with a tight job market for a long time, but has not often been remarked. Lots of disciplines underwent tremendous growth during the 60s and 70s when Boomers swelled college enrollments and the number of campuses around the country grew accordingly. Colleges hired young scholars and teachers right out of graduate school or even before they had finished their PhDs. The hiring then slowed down, drastically so in some fields. But most of those circa-1970 hires obtained tenure and settled in to a lengthy career among the safe and secure professoriate. Few tenured openings were to be found in the 1980s and 90s in English, History, foreign languages, philosophy, and many other fields except in a few exotic and trendy subspecialties that enjoyed a brief cachet (such as post-colonial literature in the early-90s). There was no place else to go. This means, as Hacker says, that a majority of department members are tenured and have been in place for 25 years. Professors have occupied offices alongside one another in the same hallway, attended hundreds of meetings together, formed and dissolved department factions and cliques, remembered slights for years, jockeyed and competed for perks, took turns serving as chairman, and slipped into "infantile" conflicts over tiny injustices. That freezing of professors into one place, with all its consequent behaviors, is one of the outcomes of the tenure system. When tenure promises people a paycheck for several decades to come, the whole employment picture solidifies. In fields that thrive on intellectual freshness, it's a disaster.