My home institution, Brooklyn College, has been receiving some bad press as of late, after the dean and the English Department required that all incoming and transfer students read Moustafa Bayoumi's How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America. Jewish Week quoted from one of the courageous voices on the faculty, Jonathan Helfand, who noted that the "book is problematic if given without an alternative vision." The New York Daily News reported that one BC alumnus, Bruce Kessler, has withdrawn a "significant bequest" to the school from his will. And in the New York Post, Ron Radosh accused the school of trying to "force feed" freshmen one (extreme) point of view on contemporary Middle Eastern matters.

Bayoumi's book couples vignettes about several Arab-American youth (the book offers no guidance on how, or if, the author considers his subjects representative of the broader Arab-American community) with an extremist critique of Israeli national security policy and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Regardless of the merits of Bayoumi's portrayal of his subjects, it's hard to see U.S. policy toward Israel as the prime mover in how Arab-Americans are treated in the United States.

At one level, the Bayoumi selection is wholly unsurprising. The process through which colleges and universities select mandated books for incoming freshmen too often provides a perfect illustration of Cass Sunstein's law of group polarization---that is, when people with common beliefs deliberate together, the tendency is toward a decision that reflects an extreme version of the common beliefs. In the typical English Department (the body that made the selection at BC), intellectual diversity is in short supply, while an emphasis on race, class, gender, and victimization is common fare. These sorts of things just don't happen at BC---take the example of common reading selections at UNC in 2002 or 2005.

Continue reading "Brooklyn College Assigns a Book" »

It has dramatically increased the number of white women (and girls; surely women even today remain girls until some point in their K-12 school years) playing on sports teams, but "most of those teams, especially those at the college level, have remained overwhelmingly white."

Title IX, it turns out, hasn't benefited female athletes of color nearly as much as it has their white teammates. And the resulting gap, says one legal scholar in a newly published book, poses a challenge for those who rally passionately around the law.

This news comes from yet another report of yet another "gap" we have to worry about, with its inevitably accompanying "disparities," in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Narrowing the Gap, which features a new book, Getting in the Game: Title IX and the Women's Sports Revolution, by Deborah Brake, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

"Title IX did not introduce problems of racial inequality into our nation's school system," Prof. Brake acknowledges. "The problem is," she argues, "Title IX doesn't do anything about it, either."

Continue reading "Title IX Has A Disparate Impact--for Black Women" »

In The Weekly Standard, James Seaton has a review of the new edition of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism that illuminates a basic mistake the discipline of literary studies committed many years ago. Here is the second paragraph of Seaton's review:

Despite its length, the new NATC is most revealing in its omissions, the most significant of which occurs in the title. The NATC claims to deal with 'theory,' not with 'literary theory' and with 'criticism,' not 'literary criticism.' One cannot help but be impressed by the effrontery expressed by the deletion of the qualifying adjective. The strategic omission of 'literary' intimates (without explicitly declaring) that English professors who use the NATC are equipped to provide guidance to all those who employ any sort of theory, presumably including their colleagues in the social sciences, and even in physics and chemistry. Such pretension has not been seen since the heyday of the Hegelian system, which claimed the intellectual authority to give the law to every particular science and discipline, from physics to history and everything in between. 'Theory' with a capital 'T' deserted philosophy with the demise of Hegelian idealism early in the 20th century, but it seems to have reappeared in the unlikely precincts of the English department.'

The point gets to the heart of how literary studies changed over the course of the 1980s and 90s. In a word, much of the field stopped being "literary"---or at least it claimed such. English professors branched out into media, cultural studies, popular and mass culture domains, and several other non-literary fields, and they pursued non-literary themes of race, sexuality, imperialism, the environment, etc.

Continue reading "The Suicide of English" »

Public acknowledgement of affirmative action within the university is rare. Cornell, however, has defied the rule, and gone one step further: it recently posted its guidelines for the preferential hiring of women and minorities online. In so doing, Cornell has confirmed our worst fears about preferential treatment programs and, more generally, the modern university's unending quest for "diversity."

Some background: ADVANCE is a 5-year, $3.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation aimed at increasing the representation of female faculty in each of the 44 science and engineering (S&E) departments to at least 20%." (In 2006, about half of S&E departments fell below 20%). The grant, intended to combat the troubling lack of "gender diversity...that affects the quality of our enterprise", funds four programs: Faculty Development, which creates mentorship programs for all S&E faculty as well as workshops, professional development grants, and research-initiation grants for women faculty; a Climate Initiative, which establishes a department chair, search committee, and faculty workshops on "diversity issues"; an Evaluation Initiative, which tracks the careers of women S&E faculty; and a Recruitment Initiative, which will develop strategies for recruiting women, provide interview support for female candidates, and give placement support and funding for the spouses of female faculty.

Cornell has taken meaningful steps to monitor ADVANCE's progress. It directed staff from its Office of Institutional Research and Planning to devote half of their time evaluating the program. Additionally, it solicited from each of its colleges an ADVANCE liaison, who would "share best practices, report on progress within the college, and suggest new programming and events."

Continue reading "Cornell's Dubious Plan for Women" »

In his seminal article analyzing the "groupthink" that pervades the modern academy, my colleague Mark Bauerlein described the effects of the Common Assumption ("that all the strangers in the room at professional gatherings are liberals"), creating an academy in which "members may speak their minds without worrying about justifying basic beliefs or curbing emotions." Alas, the Common Assumption has its "argumentative hazards": "academics with too much confidence in their audience utter debatable propositions as received wisdom . . . a lone dissenter disrupts the process and, merely by posing a question, can show just how cheap such a pat consensus actually is."

Two recent events involving Penn professor Tom Sugrue illustrate the perils of the Common Assumption; and, more broadly, the manner in which groupthink (unintentionally) limits the ability of "mainstream" academics to influence public discourse. Sugrue's website lists multiple, prestigious fellowships. His first book, Origins of the Urban Crisis, justifiably won numerous awards; it's one of the three or four best books currently in print on 20th century American political culture.

Sugrue, in short, is hardly an academic crank, or a caricature of a "tenured radical." He's a serious scholar, producing first-class work on important topics.

Continue reading "More Groupthink Perils" »

I've often heard professors complain about a curious inverse pattern taking place on their campuses. Classrooms and office spaces for teachers seem to be getting harder to obtain, while administrative offices and buildings keep proliferating.

An important report by Jay Greene sheds light on it. It bears the title "Administrative Bloat at American Universities: The Real Reason for High Costs in Higher Education." Greene collected data from the U.S. Department of Education on enrollments, costs, and personnel, including figures for employees who fall under the category "Administration."

The major findings begin with costs and the student population:

Continue reading "Why So Many Administrators?" »

The recent flurry of debate about tenure's value has featured a revival of sorts for Harvard Education School professor Cathy Trower. The New York Times' "Room for Debate" section included a contribution from Trower, in which she proposed a "constitutional convention" selected through a kind of quota system---"selected to mirror the diversity the academy presumably desires"---to redefine tenure. Writing in Slate, Christopher Beam glowingly quoted Trower arguing that "the current system may actually be scaring talented young people away from academia. 'This one-size-fits-all, rigid six-year up-and-out tenure system isn't working well,' she says . . . Don't abolish tenure altogether, says Trower. Just rework it. Create a tenure track that explicitly rewards teaching. Give interdisciplinary centers the authority to produce tenured professors. Allow for breaks in the tenure track if a professor needs to take time off. Offer the option of part-time tenure, a lower-cost alternative for professors who want to hold other jobs. In other words, make tenure flexible rather than a monolithic, in-or-out club." Beam cited Evergreen State College, a far-left, AAC&U-oriented institution (best-known nationally as the institution that produced the late anti-Israel "activist" Rachel Corrie), as the model for his and Trower's vision.

I first encountered Trower in 2003, when Brooklyn College's then-provost, Roberta ("teaching is a political act") Matthews invited her to address all of the college's 31 departmental personnel committees. The event was an eye-opener. Among other things, Trower proclaimed that "merit is socially constructed by a dominant coalition," and "even if we don't think we are biased, there's a good chance that we are"; she suggested that opponents of affirmative action will ignore all evidence contrary to their beliefs and just gather all evidence to support their view. As part of her call for new personnel standards, she recommended white male job candidates demonstrate a commitment to "furthering diversity on campus" before being hired; redefining expectations for scholarly excellence to demand projects that achieved "improvement of society as well as advancement of knowledge"; and reorienting tenure standards to address the "accumulated disadvantage" for faculty of color that their teaching and scholarship don't meet the requirements for tenure.

Continue reading "Trower's Tenure Troubles" »