Forum tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1 2010-03-12T04:04:39Z Movable Type 3.34 A Thriving Department tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.3514 2010-03-12T03:48:21Z 2010-03-12T04:04:39Z John Derbyshire, a frequent contributor to National Review, has made a surprising discovery: San Francisco State University has a department of Raza studies, and the department has thirteen full-time faculty members. Derbyshire writes on NRO's The Corner: What goes on... John Leo National Review, has made a surprising discovery: San Francisco State University has a department of Raza studies, and the department has thirteen full-time faculty members. Derbyshire writes on NRO's The Corner:
What goes on in a Raza Studies Department? Let them tell us. "Roberto [Rivera] is presently finishing a book on Liberation Discourse which examines the semantics of counter-hegemony in the philosophies of Gustavo Gutierrez and Paulo Freire." [Prof. Tomas Almaguer] is currently completing work on a book manuscript entitled Border Men: Gender and Sexuality in the Life Histories of Chicano Gay Men, which will be published by the University of California Press. [Prof. Teresa Carrillo]'s teaching and research interests reflect her fascination with Latinos as political actors in a constant interaction with local, national and transnational political forces ... In Systems of Elections, Latino Representation, and Student Outcomes in Central California and Faculty, Managers, and Administrators in the University of California, 1996 to 2002,[Assistant Professor Belinda] Reyes explores ethnic diversity in higher ed and k-12 and the potential consequences of under-representation. [Writing Specialist Alejandro Murguia]'s memoir The Medicine of Memory: A Mexica Clan in California, University of Texas Press, has been nominated for the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. [Dr. Nancy Raquel Mirabal] teaches courses in the history of Latina/os, Caribbean diasporas, Afro-Latina/o diasporas, theory and methods, gender and sexuality, and oral history.]]> Publications by [the aforementioned Asst. Prof.] Martinez include: ... "Real Women and Their Curves: Letters to the Editor and a Magazine's Celebration of the 'Latina body'" in Latina/o Communication Studies Today, Ed. Angharad N. Valdivia (2008) ... Felix [Kury] is Program Director and Faculty Advisor for Clinica Martin-Baro SFSU-UCSF ... a student-organized free clinic operating Saturdays out of CARECEN (Centro de Recursos Centroamericanos) in the Mission District of San Francisco ... Clinica's model is based on Liberation Theology ... [Velia Garcia] teaches Raza 485 --- Criminalize Raza Youth, Introduction to Raza Studies, La Raza Women, Issues in Political Economy, Race, Crime and Justice, Sociological Perspectives and Step-to-College ... Currently, [Brigitte Davila's] area of focus is law and public policy, with an emphasis on community activism. [Jose Cuellar's] recent publications include: "Chicanismo" in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures (2001); "El Saxofon in Tejano and Norteno Music" in Puro Conjunto! An Album in Words and Pictures. U of Texas Press (2001); "Cesar E. Chavez" and "Farm Labor" in Pollution --- A toZ ..." [Prof. Carlos Cordova] presently teaches Raza 280 Acculturation Issues of La Raza; Raza 320 Raza Art History; Raza 460: Central Americans in the U.S.; Raza 450: Indigenismo: Indigenous Cultures and Personality; and Raza 440: Caribbean Cultures and Spirituality.
Derbyshire notes that California and its public university system are going through the worst financial crisis in their history, but he confidently predicts that SFSU's bulging department of Raza (our race) studies will not have to worry about losing faculty. He writes: "The departments of Medicine, Business, and Engineering will be closed down first."]]> Do We Need More College Graduates? tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.3510 2010-03-11T16:51:41Z 2010-03-11T16:52:28Z A February 26 debate on the subject is online here. The event was sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. Former secretary of education Margaret Spellings and Michael Lomax, president and C.E.O. of the... John Leo here. The event was sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. Former secretary of education Margaret Spellings and Michael Lomax, president and C.E.O. of the United Negro College Fund, are on the pro side of the topic, "To remain a world-class economic power, the U.S. workforce needs more college graduates." On the anti side are Richard Vedder, economics professor at Ohio University and director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, and George Leef of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. The moderator is PBS correspondent Paul Solomon. ]]> People Who Never Got a College Degree tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.3513 2010-03-11T15:56:08Z 2010-03-11T20:57:11Z Edward Albee, Woody Allen, Maya Angelou, Wally Amos, Jane Austen, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Joan Baez, Warren Beatty, David Ben-Gurion, Sonny Bono, Rick Bragg, Richard Branson, Albert Brooks, David Byrne, James Cameron, Raymond Chandler, Coco Chanel,... John Leo The Faster Times]]> Ideals and Realities in Student Protests tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.3504 2010-03-10T16:22:54Z 2010-03-10T16:31:00Z On March 5th in the Wall Street Journal, Peter Robinson penned an op-ed on the California higher education budget crisis entitled "The Golden State's Me Generation". Robinson begins not with the finances behind the tuition hikes and protests, but rather... Mark Bauerlein Wall Street Journal, Peter Robinson penned an op-ed on the California higher education budget crisis entitled "The Golden State's Me Generation". Robinson begins not with the finances behind the tuition hikes and protests, but rather with the framing of the reaction. He cites participants in the "Strike and Day of Action to Defend Education" casting their efforts in terms of "Freedom Riders," "farmworkers," and the fight for justice in the 60s and 70s. Berkeley urban studies professor Ananya Roy provided a racial angle as well, announcing "We have all become students of color now." "Evoking protests against the Vietnam War," Robinson observes, "one banner carried by students at San Francisco State University read, 'Shut It Down like '68.' 'Today we strike!' shouted a Berkeley student, 'Today we march! Today we show solidarity with the workers!'" This is the vocabulary of the peace movement and civil rights and labor protections of migrant workers. It demonstrates, among other things, the continuing moral authority of those causes, even though they took place 40 and 50 years ago. But there is a giant problem with invoking the movements: if you want to align yourself with the Selma marchers, Cesar Chavez et al, then you better experience some of the same sufferings and indignities that they did. If not, then the citation of such honored and sometimes martyred precursors starts to look a lot more like vanity than politics. This is, indeed, Robinson's conclusion: "Yet what did the protesters demand? Peace? Human rights? No. Money. And for whom? For the downtrodden and oppressed? No. For themselves."]]> Wall Street Journal, an editorial today that advised students in the state, “Look at what the legislature has done!" The editorial notes that the UC system lost out on $800 million dollars alone this year after the state diverted $3 billion to cover rising government worker pension costs. The skyrocketing costs the editors attribute to a 1999 bill in which state legislators refigured pension benefits on the assumption that "investment returns would grow at a 8.25% rate in perpetuity." Among other things, the bill refigured benefits for public-safety employees according to a dangerous formula: you could retire at age 50 and receive 3% of your final year's pay times number of years on the job. "If a firefighter started working at the age of 20," the Journal calculates, "he could retire at 50 and earn 90% of his final salary, in perpetuity." One fire chief in the state enjoys a yearly pension of $284,000. More than 15,000 people in the state have annual pensions greater than $100,000. If students really want to "make a difference," they should heed the old formula "follow the money," set up camp out in Capitol Park in Sacramento, identify state legislators who've flushed state finances down the sewer, and publicize their dereliction. ]]> The ''Pay Cut'' Crisis tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.3501 2010-03-09T16:45:38Z 2010-03-09T16:51:17Z Both the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed have reported on a newly-released study regarding faculty salaries from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. Both articles highlight how, in the past year, around a third... KC Johnson Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed have reported on a newly-released study regarding faculty salaries from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. Both articles highlight how, in the past year, around a third of professors around the country have seen their salaries reduced. (Only at private, research universities has the average professor enjoyed a salary increase in the past year.) Both articles also suggest that the decline might last for some time, because higher education tends to lag behind the economy in reviving from recessions. It seems to me that both articles buried the lede. We live in a time of nearly-double digit unemployment. Nearly 20 percent of Americans are underemployed. Yet higher education has been all but immune from faculty layoffs. That, of course, should come as little surprise: though faculty salaries (especially in the humanities and social sciences) might not be as high as many professors would like, job security is higher for the professoriate than for just about any other profession. It's almost impossible to fire a tenured professor (unless he or she commits the type of massive research conduct associated with the likes of Ward Churchill), and only a college that wants to sacrifice all pretense of academic quality will dismiss untenured assistant or associate professors during economic downturns. The AAUP, however, views the new figures as cause for grave concern. As the Chronicle reports, "University officials should seek faculty input on pay cuts, and state officials must chose priorities correctly, Mr. [AAUP director of research and public policy John W.] Curtis, said. 'I do think we're at a pretty critical juncture at looking at higher education as a public good and as a resource that contributes something to society. Unfortunately, a lot of governors and legislators are looking at higher education as only an expense.'"]]> This statement is dubious in at least two respects. First, what sort of "input" does Curtis want? Should colleges and universities put pay cuts up for a faculty vote? Perhaps the faculty could offer a list of positions---"traditional" U.S. history, Great Books, physics---whose professors should be first to receive pay cuts? If shared governance means anything, it means that just as administrators shouldn't intrude on faculty responsibilities, so too should faculty not intrude on the responsibilities of administrators (and trustees). And the last I looked, the financial well-being of the university wasn't a primary responsibility of the professoriate. Second, Curtis complains---not incorrectly---that "a lot of governors and legislators are looking at higher education as only an expense." Why might that be? Even if, as is perfectly clear, most members of the contemporary academy care little if at all about ensuring pedagogical or intellectual diversity on their campuses, self-interest should dictate at least token moves in that direction, if only to maintain needed political support. If, on the other hand, colleges and universities insist on offering curricula dominated by extremist ideas and based on a race/class/gender agenda that would fall way to the left of the contemporary Democratic Party, why should anyone be surprised that, in times of crisis, politicians of both parties look on education as an expense rather than "a resource that contributes something to society." The Tortured Logic of BAMN tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.3475 2010-03-02T19:29:08Z 2010-03-02T19:30:33Z People who have followed the effort to put initiatives on state ballots eliminating racial preferences from college admissions might remember this advertisement from 2008, which set Ward Connerly in Klan regalia. Two years before, a group called Think Progress posted... Mark Bauerlein this advertisement from 2008, which set Ward Connerly in Klan regalia. Two years before, a group called Think Progress posted a video on its web page under the headline "Leader of Michigan Initiative To End Affirmative Action Welcomes Ku Klux Klan Support." Those are revolting examples. Not much less so are the occasions when Connerly has been shouted down and booed while speaking against racial preferences and supporting various ballot measures across the nation (see here for Connerly leaving the podium after repeated interruptions in Omaha). Now, according to this story by Peter Schmidt in the Chronicle of Higher Education , the pro-affirmative action group Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary (BAMN) has filed a lawsuit against California's ban, Proposition 209, and their target is Connerly himself and the organization he started, the American Civil Rights Institute. Challenges to 209 have been attempted before and failed, but BAMN believes that 209 nonetheless "violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution by placing a distinct set of legal hurdles in front of minority groups seeking to increase their representation on the university system's campuses." It takes some tortured logic to reach that conclusion, and here are some of the statements in the actual complaint (which appears here). ]]> "Proposition 209 passed in 1996 simply and solely because the white majority electorate overrode the overwhelming opposition of the Latina/o, black, Native American and Asian voters." ". . . Proposition 209 also violates the Equal Protection Clause because it was specifically intended to decrease or hold down Latina/o, black and Native American enrollment (a) by substantively prohibiting the UC from pursuing racial integration and diversity---while allowing it to pursue every other form of integration and diversity, (b) by prohibiting the UC from taking account in admissions of the massive educational inequality due to race---while allowing it to take account of every lesser form of educational inequality; and (c) by legally requiring the University to apply its existing admission criteria in rigid ways that reflect and magnify de facto segregation and inequality in elementary and secondary education." And then this one about Connerly himself:
"Indeed, Ward Connerly, the prime sponsor of Proposition 209, has finally admitted under oath that his goal was that Proposition 209 would administer the "tough love" that minority students supposedly needed in order to force them to work hard enough order to secure admission on "their own merits"---that is, according to merit as determined by a system that Connerly himself admits both incorporates and magnifies the unequal nature of elementary and secondary education."
The statement reflects BAMN's fixation on Connerly, which is magnified on BAMN's web page which bears the banner: "Stop Ward Connerly! Defend Affirmative Action & Integration!" (see here). Read more of BAMN's statements and you see it's a personal thing. Later on in the Chronicle article, George B. Washington, BAMN's lead attorney in the effort, explains that the legal challenge isn't aimed so much to change state law, but rather "to throw a wrench into campaigns on behalf of similar measures being mounted by the American Civil Rights Institute." That statement is Schmidt's paraphrase of Washington's claim. Two paragraphs later we get Washington's own words on the tactic, and they're worse: "The coalition needs to defeat Proposition 209, Mr. Washington said, because otherwise the American Civil Rights Institute is "going to go and play bully boy with minorities in states like Utah and Arizona." Think about that rhetoric. It sounds not like a serious legal mind at work, but rather a cheap politician taking lessons from Saul Alinsky, author of the famed Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. One of Alinsky's tactics is "Pick a target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." That's what Connerly has had to endure for more than a dozen years now, and one can only wonder at how he maintains the energy and composure to press on. ]]> The Times Does San Diego tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.3470 2010-03-02T02:44:16Z 2010-03-02T19:09:17Z Regulars at FIRE's must-read blog, The Torch, already know the ugly details of events at California-San Diego. A fraternity held an off-campus party that was at best tasteless and at worst racist. Appearing on a student-run TV station (which is... KC Johnson noted, "that many persons on campus found highly offensive." The university response, however, was nothing short of extraordinary. UCSD president Marye Anne Fox---acting under pressure from various California state legislators---has threatened disciplinary actions against the students involved in planning the party. (That Fox's administration has elected to use a judicial code that was modified because its overly broad nature appears not to have worried the UCSD powers that be.) Even more incredibly, the student government president---working in concert with the university's counsel and other university administrators---has frozen funding to all student media organizations. This assault on the First Amendment drew public rebuke from both FIRE and the ACLU, but appears not to have troubled either Fox or her defenders. The general outlines of the UCSD case should come as little surprise to close observers of contemporary higher education. Regardless of how offensive the student conduct was (and, in this case, it was pretty offensive), the abusive reaction of those with power at the university is far, far more troubling. In the name of promoting "diversity," Fox and her administration seem intent on massively violating due process for her own institution's students and ignoring the requirements that the First Amendment imposes on any public college or university. Saturday, the New York Times brought its attention to events at the San Diego campus. The First Amendment issue received one sentence in reporter Randal Archibold's article: "The student association has suspended financing to all campus media while it studies what to do about the program about the party." The article ignored the protests against this draconian action. Likewise the Times saw fit to gloss over the civil liberties angle, blandly observing, "The administration is still investigating the Compton Cookout, and whether students can or should be sanctioned."]]> Times' decision to focus on---unsurprisingly---diversity. Archibold's article provides such quotes as this one from Fox: "I think we would all like to believe that racism was a thing of the '60s, that it's now passed us. These incidents suggest it's not." The article provides no context through which to interpret this ahistorical assertion. Instead, Archibold implies that a lack of minority representation at the UCSD campus---caused by the pernicious effects of Ward Connerly and Prop 209---explains its students' apparently pervasive racism. Here's how Archibold explains the problem: "But more than a decade after a state ballot proposition barred the use of race and ethnicity in admissions decisions, the University of California continues to struggle to diversify its campuses. Black and Latino undergraduate enrollment systemwide plummeted and, although gains have been made in the numbers of minority students since then, the proportion of white (30.5 percent) and Asian (39.8 percent) students enrolled last year far exceeded that of blacks (3.8 percent) and Latinos (20.4 percent)." Neither Archibold nor any of the story's editors appear to have found anything unusual in the Times' assertion that Asian enrollees are not "minority students." For those in the reality-based community, however, it's not clear what rationale exists for the paper's remarkable claim. Asians are, obviously, a minority of California's population (12.5 percent of the state's people, as of 2008, a smaller percentage of California than Hispanics, who comprise 36.6 percent of the state's population). And Asians certainly have experienced the effects of state-sponsored discrimination---to a greater extent than Hispanics. Nor can the Times' "diversity" description apply to "underrepresented" racial or ethnic groups. It's true that in the University of California system, both blacks and Hispanics are underrepresented, at least if utilizing the blunt comparison to their percentages of the statewide population. But so too are whites: though non-Hispanic whites were 42.3 percent of California's population in 2008, they provided, as the Times noted, only 30.5 percent of the system's student population. Do these figures testify to the persistence of the 1960s-style racism that President Fox has so confidently discerned? The Times, so obsessed with "diversity" that it is unconcerned with either civil liberties or suppression of the media---even to the effect of writing the ACLU out of its story? It seems as if the paper has reverted to the discredited agenda it employed in the Duke lacrosse case. ]]> Double Standards: Fresno and Columbia tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.3463 2010-02-25T18:28:08Z 2010-02-25T21:22:56Z Early February featured an interesting development from Fresno. Students of Bradley Lopez, a health instructor at Fresno Community College, claimed that Lopez was using class time to spread his personal anti-gay views. Lopez denies the allegation, asserting that all of... KC Johnson asserting that all of his comments fell "within the scope of health science." The students' concerns attracted the attention of the local ACLU branch. In a six-page letter to FCC administrators, ACLU staff attorney Elizabeth Gill criticized Lopez for presenting "as 'fact' and 'science' inaccurate information that reflects his own highly discriminatory and religiously-based views." According to Gill's letter, students in Lopez's class reported him using a slide asserted that counseling or "hormonal therapy" were the "recommended treatment" for homosexuality. Neither academic freedom nor the 1st amendment, the ACLU letter maintained, applied to professors who present "factually inaccurate information." The Gill letter also suggested that Lopez's inaccurate remarks might create a "hostile environment" for gay and lesbian students on campus. The ACLU's "hostile environment" claim strikes me as very troubling. There's no evidence that Lopez punished any gay or lesbian students, or that he retaliated against students who failed to accept his anti-gay views. There's no evidence, in fact, that Lopez ever did anything inappropriate to any student. Surely, for instance, the ACLU wouldn't suggest that a professor opposing racial preferences in admissions produced a "hostile environment"?]]> Fresno Bee that "academic freedom isn't the right to say anything you want." This common-sense definition of academic freedom, however, doesn't exist on one major campus. Indeed, the basic outline of what occurred at Fresno---students complaining about a professor who used class time to spout factual inaccuracies that conformed to his worldview, and eventually were aided by sympathetic outside defenders of academic freedom---occurred a few years ago at Columbia. Only there, the factual inaccuracies involved not anti-gay comments (hardly a popular view among the professoriate) but anti-Israel classroom comments. And at Columbia, the public voice of the faculty, led by former provost Jonathan Cole, the message was clear: outside and interest-group criticism of faculty misconduct in the classroom is little more than a renewed McCarthyism. As Cole wildly charged at the time, "We are witnessing a rising tide of anti-intellectualism," entering into "another era of intolerance and repression." Dozens of Columbia professors signed a public letter organized by Cole signed a public letter demanding that the university's president, Lee Bollinger, publicly defend the "academic freedom" rights of such anti-Israel zealots as Professor Joseph Massad---not on the grounds that what Massad was accurate in telling his class that, for instance, Israelis originated the tactic of hijacking airplanes in the Middle East; or that early Zionists allied with anti-Semites to drive Jews from Europe. Instead, the Cole group contended, the criticism of Massad was, by its very nature, improper, since it came, in part, from off campus. Bollinger didn't make such a public statement, but Columbia essentially accepted the Cole group's demand---a special committee whose majority had pro-Massad conflicts of interest produced a whitewashed investigation, and Columbia gave Massad tenure (on his second try, no less). So will Cole and his ideological comrades go to the barricades for Prof. Lopez, suggesting that "academic freedom" gives Lopez the same right as Massad---to use class time to make wild, erroneous assertions that forward his political agenda? Somehow, I suspect that the Columbia faculty won't be applying the Massad standard to Prof. Lopez. ]]> Wesleyan's Anti-Hate Campaign tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.3461 2010-02-25T18:09:48Z 2010-02-25T18:11:23Z A graduate of Wesleyan sent word that his alma mater now has a "Campus Climate Log" to chronicle "hate incidents and acts of intolerance" and help move "the entire campus towards a hate-free learning environment." The project, wrapped in conventional... John Leo A graduate of Wesleyan sent word that his alma mater now has a "Campus Climate Log" to chronicle "hate incidents and acts of intolerance" and help move "the entire campus towards a hate-free learning environment." The project, wrapped in conventional diversity rhetoric, is overseen by the Dean of Diversity and Student Engagement as well as the Vice President for Diversity and Strategic Partnerships. The Log can be accessed on on-campus computers, including public ones, but it not available elsewhere. The reports range from the obviously hateful ("kill fags and Jews" scrawled on a bathroom wall) to the banal (suggestive comments from a passing car) and a postmodern graffiti by a student uncomfortable with the belief that a man is a man and a woman is a woman ("f---gender binaries"). To their credit, the Log committeepersons wonder about the point of major publicity for minor stupidities ("Would it cause more incidents by demonstrating how a single act received so much attention?") Judging by the scarcity of complaints, either students don't care much or the campus is already pretty much hate-free: the log for this school year shows only seven reports from last fall, and one since January 1. The 10 Youngest College Graduates In U.S. History tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.3450 2010-02-24T16:28:43Z 2010-02-24T16:34:09Z In these days of 6-year degrees and students graduating at 25 if at all, it's encouraging to see stories of far more intrepid matriculation - consider "The 10 Youngest College Graduates in U.S. History" at Online Degree. Number 1, Michael... Anthony Paletta "The 10 Youngest College Graduates in U.S. History" at Online Degree. Number 1, Michael Keany, current holder of the Guinness World Record for "Youngest University Graduate." "At the age of 8, the homeschooled prodigy completed an Associate of Science degree in geology while at Santa Rosa Junior College. He would then go on to graduate with a bachelor's degree in anthropology from University of South Alabama at 10, a master's in biochemistry from Middle Tennessee State University at 14, and another master's - this time in computer science - from Vanderbilt at 17." If those aren't accomplishments enough, how about Kathleen Holtz, number 8 on the list, who graduated from California State University at 15, immediately entered law school and, at 18 became the "youngest law student to ever pass the bar in California - if not the United States." She quickly tried several successful cases as an attorney. Take a look at the list for several more inspiring examples of early talent. ]]> Out Of Her Depth? tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.3437 2010-02-21T18:18:01Z 2010-02-23T21:23:19Z Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University, quit the board of directors of Goldman Sachs, citing the "increasing time requirements associated with her position as President." What she didn't cite were the two or three weeks of steady criticism from financial... John Leo an interview with the Brown Daily Herald, Simmons, the only African-American on the Goldman board and one of only two women, stressed that as a director on several boards, her goal was "to make certain fields more accessible to women and minorities," and implied that that she served on boards to learn something about economics. The interview, which preceded the Simmons resignation, immediately drew strong criticism from Felix Salmon, a blogger at Thomson Reuters Corp. who called for a change in the composition of Goldman Sachs's board because he said some of Simmons's comments indicate that she lacks the business sophistication to challenge management.]]> he wrote in the Herald "to pile another column on her Goldman Sachs nightmare, writing about why serving simultaneously as a director on the board of the most infamous investment bank and as president of a university that keeps is investments secret from everyone might be something of an ethical problem." So far the broader issue of whether college president should serve on corporate boards hasn't attracted much attention. Todd Zywicki, former member of Dartmouth's board, wrote that serving on corporate boards is now seen as just another perks for presidents, particularly presidents of elite colleges and universities. He "wonders whether these close relationships between Wall Strreet and elite academia can actually be good for the academic mission in the long run."]]> Binghamton's Diversity "Experiment" tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.3430 2010-02-19T14:42:43Z 2010-02-19T15:01:33Z Anyone who follows college sports knows the basic outlines of the fiasco that befell Binghamton University's men's basketball team. A few years after making the transition to Division I and building a new arena, Binghamton hired a new coach, Kevin... KC Johnson report from Kaye---who, after all, is hardly a card-carrying right-winger, and who provided the required paean to the university's "admirable" commitment to admitting "disadvantaged youths" who needed "second (or more) chances"---nonetheless declared, "we have noted the suggestions of 'racism' that have at times been raised to resist questioning, and expressions of concern, about various aspects of the program." (All of Broadus' problem recruits appear to have been minorities.)]]> College of Community and Public Affairs, that isn't exactly an academic powerhouse: it gives undergraduate degrees in "human development," and graduate degrees in social work. Nonetheless, even in these non-rigorous classes, basketball players performed very poorly. In one of the most damning lines from the affair, an official from the Athletics Department pressed admissions officers: "Why do you care if we take six players who don't attend classes?" Kaye's report makes clear that race-baiting was a favorite tactic to neutralize skeptics about waiving academic standards to admit Broadus' recruits. The college's affirmative action officer, Valerie Hampton, violated established procedure and "weighed in on the admissions process" of one academically unqualified minority candidate. On another occasion, the admissions office (and we're talking about SUNY here: its admissions offices have a reputation as obsessed with diversity) raised questions about the abysmal academic qualifications of some of the people Broadus had recruited. An admissions officer was then summoned to a meeting with the university president. The president expressed concerns that admissions officers "were making decisions on basketball player-applicants based on race." And on still another occasion, when other conference members started pressing Binghamton on how the admissions of such underqualified students violated the mission of the conference, Binghamton administrators suggested (falsely, as it turned out) that the basketball players had been admitted through one of the school's special "diversity" admissions initiatives. The use of "diversity" to excuse the admission of underqualified basketball players was, of course, the height of cynicism. But in the contemporary college environment, the Athletic Department's strategy is understandable. A basic premise of the "diversity" movement in higher education is that academic qualifications need to take a back seat to the prospective student's "diversity" qualifications. In this respect, the Binghamton story simply took the "diversity" argument to its logical, if absurd, extreme. By the way, Broadus still doesn't think he did anything wrong, either substantively or tactically. Even now, as his performance has been wholly discredited, Broadus continues to play the race card: his attorney told the New York Times that the coach made "no apologies" for his behavior, and that his treatment of his players reflected his "responsibility as a coach and an African-American man." ]]> The Part-Time College Job tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.3421 2010-02-16T16:49:32Z 2010-02-16T16:52:42Z One often hears about stressed and stretched and over-scheduled college students, but every survey I've seen, including those issued by National Survey of Student Engagement (Indiana University) and the Higher Education Research Institute (at UCLA) shows dismayingly low levels of... Mark Bauerlein here. The survey received more than 63,000 completed questionnaires (a response rate of 39 percent) that showed how students spend their time in an average week. Its 48 pages document, among other things, yet another body of evidence against the notion of the six-hours-of-homework-per-day-student. Here is the summary of time use breakdowns:]]> "Overall, respondents reported spending the more time on various social and leisure activities (41 hours/week) than academic activities, including attending and preparing for class (28 hours/week). Work and family obligations (12 hours/ week) and co-curricular activities (6 hours/week) take up less time. Although work and family obligations are often thought to interfere with academic pursuits, they account for only about a third of the time each week that the average student devotes to social and leisure activities." If we break "attending and preparing for class down," we get an average of 15.5 hours of in-class (or in-lab) time, leaving only 12.8 hours of "Academic activities outside of class"---homework, library research, take-home tests, etc. There were some divisions by field. Kids in the humanities/arts logged only 11.9 hours, while physical science and engineering students came in at 15.1 hours. Social science students came in last with 11.5 hours per week. So, an English major taking a regular load of courses (and no labs) puts in around 26 hours per week listening to teacher and hitting the books--three-and-a-half hours per day. Call it a part-time job. For people who think that the UC student also has to hold down a real part-time job, the total of "Work Obligations" in the survey tallied only 7.6 hours per week. That's not the most troubling aspect of the report, however. It is, rather, that there doesn't seem to be much difference, in general, between study time and academic outcomes. When the researchers compared study time to grades, low-performing students studied pretty much the same amount as high-performing students. Students with grades below 2.8, between 2.8 and 3.2, and between 3.2 and 3.6 all devoted a little less than 12 hours per week to homework. And those with 3.6 and higher rose only one hour to around 13 hours per week. In other words, as the report put it, "There is a surprisingly modest relationship between UC GPA and reported hours studying." What does that say about instruction in the UC system? Well, one thing is that professors are not designing syllabi and assignments that provide grading distinctions based on the quantity of labor students put in. It also implies that the UC environment doesn't impart well the message to students that they must consider their undergraduate years a full-time job. Instead, students believe something else, namely, that they are doing just fine: "Students from all backgrounds reported that their analytical and critical thinking skills increased dramatically between their freshmen and senior years," and "Women and men reported very good or excellent analytical and critical thinking abilities by their senior year." Remember the Eastern European joke about wages under communism, "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us"? Perhaps there is an undergraduate counterpart: "We pretend to study and they pretend to grade us." New Civic Literacy Report tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.3408 2010-02-12T15:21:06Z 2010-02-12T22:44:03Z Take a look at ISI's latest civic literacy survey "The Shaping of the American Mind: The Diverging Influences of the College Degree & Civic Learning on American Beliefs." One finding: more than half of students polled did not know the... Anthony Paletta "The Shaping of the American Mind: The Diverging Influences of the College Degree & Civic Learning on American Beliefs." One finding: more than half of students polled did not know the three branches of the federal government. ]]> You Don't Have To Be A Professor tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/forum//1.3403 2010-02-11T20:40:27Z 2010-02-11T20:41:07Z Given that it's been 30 years since I left graduate studies in English Lit, I don't spend much time reading up on the field. Still, when I saw the provocative headline, "The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind,'"... Steve Malanga "The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind,'" on a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education I knew immediately that this was a piece about the employment woes that Ph.D.'s in the humanities face. The author, William Pannapacker (writing under the pen name Thomas H. Benton), is an associate professor of English at Hope College in Holland, Mich. He has taken it upon himself to try dissuading a generation of would-be English and other humanities graduate students from wasting years pursuing doctorates unless they have "no need to earn a living for themselves or anyone else, they are rich or connected (or partnered with someone who is), or they are earning a credential for a job they already hold." That message, Pannapacker writes, is not something that undergrads are likely to hear from their professors. Asking about job prospects in academe, these students are too often told, "there are always jobs for good people" and "don't worry, massive retirements are coming soon, and then there will be plenty of positions available." Too many of these students find out only too late that professors in the humanities have been telling undergraduates this for years while fewer and fewer who head to graduate programs wind up finding employment that can sustain them. Worse, perhaps, the unemployed Ph.D.s ultimately discover that they aren't valued in the rest of the job market, that "graduate school in the humanities is a trap" which is "designed that way" by universities who refuse to reduce admissions, even as job prospects go from desperate to whatever is worse than desperate. As compelling as I found Pannapacker's pieces, what astonished me the most about them is how little things have changed in 30 years. Virtually everything he says is shockingly similar to the warnings of Darcy O'Brien, a novelist and English professor whose 1979 article, "A Generation of Lost Scholars" in the New York Times magazine observed that, "a profession that traditionally prided itself on its gentility and immunity from the raw practices of the marketplace now finds itself unable to employ more than one in three humanities Ph.D.s." This was no accident, O'Brien recounted, because even as universities of the day "question their degree programs," they continued them, while "students, some of them either ignorant or misled, pursue courses of study that may enlighten the mind but will likely lead to unemployment." More than thirty years ago, O'Brien portrayed this as "a system out of step with social and economic realities" wasting the energies and time of "many of our brightest, most intellectually energetic students."]]> Most troubling, perhaps, is that Pannapacker repeats an accusation that O'Brien made in 1979, which is that graduate programs and humanities professional organizations cook their employment statistics intentionally to mislead would-be graduate students. They do this by counting as employed every graduate who is working in the field--including low-paying adjunct teaching positions and non-tenure jobs that are dead ends--without making distinctions. Pannapacker sums up the deception by observing that, "there is still almost no way...for students to gather some of the most crucial information about graduate programs: the rate of attrition, the average amount of debt at graduation, and, most important, the placement of graduates (differentiating between adjunct, lecturer, visiting, tenure-track positions, and nonacademic positions)." Were he still writing on the subject, O'Brien might observe that thirty years is a long time to be keeping this vital information from students. Pannapacker is best at explaining why some students allow themselves to be taken in by these feints, even after so many years. They hear repeatedly as undergraduates that the life of the mind is somehow superior and worth sacrificing for. Some are more willing than others to accept this because "the world outside school seems so unstructured, ambiguous, difficult to navigate, and frightening." Even worse, no one in the outside world will be impressed by their knowledge of Jane Austen. By contrast, college is an idealized life and graduate school is a way to "continue that romantic experience and enable [themselves] to stay in college forever as teacher-scholars." Pannapacker has diagnosed much of the problem. But I would add one more thing which misleads so many humanities graduate students, which is that they are too quick to swallow the notion that the only way to pursue a 'life of the mind' is by toiling in a graduate program reading obscure texts, then teaching and publishing papers and books on these works to secure a future in the academy. By contrast, when I left graduate school to begin a career in journalism (starting at the absolute bottom by working at community newspapers) I found it liberating to be freed from my professors' reading lists. For 30 years both in and out of my professional life I have met numerous people who grappled with the monumental works of Western civilization while also doing something as prosaic as earning a living, the way Wallace Stevens earned one as a lawyer for an insurance company, or William Carlos Williams as a pediatrician. Indeed, if there is one quick and easy way to explain the dreadful state of much of modern American literature it is by observing that many of its practitioners today spend their entire lives in the hermetically sealed world of academe. More than that I learned that the 'life of the mind' is not reserved for those studying the humanities---an observation that seems so apparent that it needn't even be made except to a humanities student. Over the years I've met (and often written about) people pursuing gratifying intellectual lives in fields ranging from the pure sciences to applied technology to finance to the study of human behavior in economics and sociology and public policy. Many of these people even pursued such a life while working at businesses (the horror!) which took their ideas and insights and turned them into profits (a double horror!). I suspect that no professor will deliver that message to a potential humanities grad student not merely because it's not in his department's best interests, but also because most members of the professoriate simply have no idea. They seem to view most careers outside of the university as crass, superficial and intellectually unsatisfying. They don't know what they are missing.