By Jackson Toby

This is an excerpt from Professor Toby's new book,
The Lowering of Higher Education in America (Praeger).

The balance between the pursuit of education and the pursuit of fun varies from college to college. Students in selective colleges and universities are less likely to goof off than in unselective institutions for at least two reasons. First, the selective colleges admit high-achieving high school graduates, the bulk of whom have the ability to meet high standards of academic performance. Second, a large proportion of their students are not content merely to graduate; they intend to pursue graduate work in academic disciplines or in professional schools.

When students in an undergraduate course are not motivated to do their reading assignments, whether it is a selective college or not, their professor can do little about it. Theoretically he could flunk half the class. In practice, however, the professor would fail only a few of them. (Failing half of the students in a class would be a public-relations disaster for the professor.) Thus, even in selective colleges, standards depend on what students are willing to learn as well as on what professors believe they ought to learn. The students in a class and the professor set the standards of academic performance by an implicit process of collective negotiation.

In the unselective colleges there is an additional complication: some students are so badly underprepared for college-level work that they cannot perform well even if they were motivated to do so. Here the negotiation process is affected by professorial resignation to the limitations of their clientele. Furthermore, some professors have ideological objections to failing students who have performed very poorly. Some believe that positive and negative sanctions (grades) do not work.

Continue reading "Goofing Off At College" »

By Charlotte Allen

College investments dropped 23 percent in 2009, the most disastrous year since the National Association of College and University Business Officers began compiling investment statistics in 1971. Two observations can be made about NACUBO's report, issued last week:

One is: The richer the institution, the harder the fall, generally speaking. Harvard, the nation's wealthiest university ($26 billion at the end of fiscal year 2009), lost the most: nearly 30 percent. Yale, second wealthiest ($16 billion), lost almost as much as Harvard: almost 29 percent. It was a dreadful investing year for nearly every college endowment manager in the country, what with the deep recession and the twin collapses of the stock market and credit markets in the fall of 2008. According to the NACUBO study, co-sponsored by Commonfund, U.S. colleges and universities lost a total of $93 billion in endowment value during fiscal year 2009. The average loss was 18.7 percent; in 1974, the second-worst year, endowments lost only 11.4 percent. Not one of the nation's five wealthiest universities, a group that included, besides Harvard and Yale, Stanford, Princeton, and the University of Texas System, bested that 18.7 percent figure (Princeton emerged at the top of the five, with its $13 billion endowment losing only 23 percent of its value in fiscal 2009, while Stanford lost nearly 27 percent and Texas nearly 25 percent).

According to a Jan. 28 article by Inside Higher Education's Jack Stripling, smaller colleges with lower endowments fared better than their super-rich cousins only---or at least mostly--because their endowments' relatively modest sizes barred them from either participating in the riskier investments such as hedge funds and private equity funds and also kept those schools from hiring the kind of sophisticated endowment managers who gambled their way into disaster. They were stuck, so to speak, with portfolios heavy on unadventurous investments in fixed-income securities and cash, which happened to be the only ones performing relatively well last fiscal year. After all, as Stripling's article points out, the wealthy elite institutions that lost the most remained just as wealthy and elite, comparatively speaking, as they had been before the rolling economic crash that began in 2007---in part because their high-risk investments had paid off royally during the boom years. They thus outpaced their smaller poorer cousins over the long run despite the devastating blows to the rich universities' endowments during the last two years. "Colleges with endowments over $1 billion have an average 10-year return of 6.1 percent, compared with 3.9 percent for the least wealthy," Stripling wrote---even though the 52 institutions that fell into that category suffered higher-than average endowment shrinkages of 20.5 percent during FY 2009, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Continue reading "Is an Endowment a Nest Egg or a Gambler's Stake?" »

By Peter D. Salins

Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University is a short, provocative book that raises many more questions than it answers. Its greatest contribution is that it clearly delineates the development of the American university from its origins in the late 19th century to the many absurdities that characterize it today.

Menand's exposition of the various key events and trends that have shaped the contemporary American university runs like a stream throughout the book's occasionally disjointed sections and chapters (the book is largely a compilation of lectures he gave at the University of Virginia). What we learn is that, for the most part, all of the key features of the American university as we know it today emerged full-blown in a burst of academic gestation over a single generation - approximately 1870 to 1900 - largely through the efforts of one man, Charles Eliot, Harvard University's president from 1869 to 1909. Although Menand reviews the important ways in which the American university has changed since then, describing some of the key twists and turns along the way, he stresses that much has remained the same - often for no particularly good reason.

Menand divides the American university's historical evolution into three distinct phases: a formative period running from its launch in 1870 under the influence of Harvard's Eliot through its institutional maturation in the 20th century up to the onset World War II; a "golden age" of rapid expansion in enrollment, funding and prestige that lasted from 1945 to 1970, a product of post-war population and economic growth and the cold war, heavily influenced by another Harvard president, James Bryant Conant; and a post-golden age phase taking us from 1970 to the present, that Frederick Hess (but not Menand) has aptly dubbed the "politically correct" university.

Continue reading "How the Universities Got This Way" »

By Ron Radosh

Howard Zinn's death yesterday affords us the opportunity to evaluate the remarkable influence he has had on the American public's understanding of our nation's past. His book A People's History of the United States, published in 1980 with a first printing of 5000 copies, went on to sell over two million. To this day some 128,000 new copies are sold each year. That alone made Zinn perhaps the single most influential historian whose works have reached multitudes of Americans. Indeed, Zinn found that his book was regularly adopted as a text in high schools and most surprisingly, in many colleges and universities.

One can easily summarize the argument Zinn makes in that book, as well as on his recent television special on The History Channel and soon to be released DVD, called "The People Speak." America, he charges, was guilty of waging war on those who really made the American nation: Native Americans, African-Americans, the working-class, the poor, and women. American history, as Zinn saw it, was that of a history of "genocide: brutally and purposefully waged by our rulers in the name of progress. He claimed that these truths were buried "in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth."

Zinn was aided in getting his book attention by two youthful neighbors, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. When both became movie stars, they used their celebrity to popularize Zinn's work and to help bring it to a wide audience. As Damon told the press recently, Zinn's message showed that what our ancestors rebelled "against oftentimes are exactly the same things we're up against now." Zinn himself added a few weeks ago that his hope was that his work will spread new rebellion, and "lead into a larger movement for economic justice."

Continue reading "America the Awful---Howard Zinn's History" »

By Daniel B. Klein

Two researchers offer a new twist on an old question---why do college professors overwhelmingly lean to the left? Bias against conservatives is not the main reason, nor are the allegedly higher IQs of liberals, say Neil Gross of the University of British Columbia and Ethan Fosse of Harvard. Instead they suggest a theory of "path dependence" --few conservatives are attracted to work in scholarly fields dominated by the left, just as few males want to be nurses in a traditionally female field. People tend to giggle when a man wants to become a nurse, they say, and conservatives tend to feel similar embarrassment in entering leftist academe.

This giggle theory underrates what leftist domination does to faculties. In the recent book The Politically Correct University: Problems, Scope and Reforms, Charlotta Stern and I discuss groupthink mechanisms. The majoritarian procedure of each department means that once a majority leans left, the department will tend toward leftist uniformity. The pyramidal structure of each discipline means that publication, awards, grants, recommendations will follow the pyramid's apex, and if the apex goes left it tends to sweep leftists/neuters into job posts throughout the pyramid.

If leftists have a lock on many fields, it means that non-left applicants will tend to be screened out. Awareness of that feeds back to the non-left student's thoughts about the future. Self-selection is a function of the screening.

Continue reading "Why So Few Conservative And Libertarian Professors?" »

By Mary Grabar

"Who are you kidding?" I wanted to get up and ask the English professor who was giving a talk at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association convention in November. He was analyzing a graphic novel, the spaces between panels, the line widths of the panels, the lettering inside the "speech bubbles."

Maybe he was trying to keep his job in a field that by job postings indicates increasing irrelevance. Students are leaving English departments in droves. "This is a profession that is losing its will to live," proclaimed William Deresiewicz, former English professor himself, in 2008 in the pages of the Nation, no less.

It's been a death by slow suicide. The reference to "spaces" coming from the podium was the same kind of self-abusive parsing, I had seen applied by deconstructionists in the 1990s when I was a graduate student. The depressed patient, failing to see any worth in his work, had leveled the greatest works to "texts." Reading between the lines of "text" has evolved into reading the gaps between panels: "Lots of stuff happens in that silent space," said the professor.

Continue reading "Death by Suicide: The End of English Departments and Literacy" »

By Cathy Young

The death of feminist philosopher, theologian and former Boston College professor Mary Daly earlier this month at the age of 81 received fairly little notice in the media. What attention Daly did receive, however, was almost entirely of the positive kind. Time magazine ran a short obituary by fellow radical feminist Robin Morgan, who eulogized Daly as "a fierce intellectual, an intrepid scholar, a wicked wit and an uncompromising radical" as well as "a central figure in contemporary feminist thought." A Boston Globe editorial called Daly "a fighter" as well as "a vital figure in feminism and in the recent history of Catholicism in America," while acknowledging that her radicalism was at times excessive.

Trained as a Roman Catholic theologian, Daly eventually became a self-proclaimed 'post-Christian' whose vitriolic anti-Catholicism went far beyond liberal demands for reform. She wrote, notably, that 'a woman's asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person's demanding equality in the Ku Klux Klan.' She continued, nonetheless, to teach at Catholic Boston College for more than 30 years, despite openly deriding that school as 'a laboratory for patriarchal tricks.'

Daly's most notorious moment came in 1999, when she became embroiled in a controversy about her policy of barring men from her "Introduction to Feminist Ethics" course. A Boston College senior, Duane Naquin, complained. Since Daly's practices were a clear violation of one of the feminists' favorite laws, Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments - which forbids educational institutions that benefit from any federal funds to discriminate on the basis of gender, except for single-sex schools - the college ordered her to admit Naquin into the class. Daly discontinued the class instead. After a prolonged squabble, she either she either resigned (according to the college) or was kicked out (according to her).

Continue reading "The Death of a Radical" »

By Donald Downs

Cary Nelson, current president of the American Association of University Professors, has a new book dealing with academic freedom and its relationship to broader structural problems in higher education. No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom is interesting and important, but also frustrating. It provides remedies to the problems confronting academic freedom at the same time that it reflects some of the problems it purports to remedy. Nelson is compelled to criticize the nation's faculty members for their lackadaisical support of academic freedom at the same time that he feels obliged to vehemently defend higher education from critics who attack higher education for this very reason. Balancing these positions makes sense if one carefully distinguishes valid and invalid attacks, and Nelson often succeeds in doing so. But too often his defenses of higher education come across as special pleading for the professoriate as a class, thereby weakening his claims.

Once upon a time the AAUP was the nation's leading supporter of academic freedom. In recent decades, however, its prestige has slipped. A couple of years ago the Chronicle of Higher Education featured articles on this reversal of fortune, citing such matters as the AAUP's bureaucratic inertia, the association's perceived complacency about the chilling effects of political correctness, and broader trends in higher education that have made faculty members less knowledgeable and appreciative of the organization's efforts. Leaner and meaner, FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, founded in 2000 in Philadelphia) has replaced the AAUP as the nation's most vibrant fighter for academic freedom. FIRE is conscientiously non-ideological, but its eagerness to take on the policies of political correctness that suppress freedom has made it a favorite of the right in addition to the civil libertarian left.

Nelson's ascendancy to the presidency of the AAUP represents the organization's effort to regain its past glory. He is a prolifically published, self-proclaimed "radical" (for academic freedom and other causes), a claim that makes him a left-wing answer to FIRE in terms of commitment. Among Nelson's impressive list of publications we find Manifesto of a Tenured Radical and Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left. Nelson's left-wing legacy is important to his arguments because his approach to academic freedom is steeped in a broader leftist framework.

Continue reading "What Is The AAUP Up To?" »

By Charlotte Allen

Why do our for-profit colleges seem so disappointing? Why are they plagued by high levels of student debt, high loan-default percentages, dismal graduation rates, and third-rate reputations that lead some employers to reject their graduates automatically? Sure, back in the old days there were plenty of commercial schools whose sole raison d'etre was apparently to separate students from their money: those correspondence law schools that advertised on matchbooks and the art academies that would accept you if you could doodle a stick figure onto a restaurant napkin. But today the situation seems exponentially worse. Commercial colleges, which enroll 2 million out of America's 17 million college students, now seem to be not so much diploma mills as non-diploma mills, where the vast majority of enrollees pay tuition bills comparable to those at four-year public universities but never manage to graduate. Katherine Gibbs, for example, limped along for decades trying to offer alternate career training after the market for private secretaries dried up during the 1970s, then permanently shut its doors in 2009 amid complaints to state regulatory agencies about unqualified faculty members, shoddy and inadequate course offerings, and four-year schools unwilling to accept Gibbs transfer credits. The chain's redoubtable foundress must be turning over in her grave.

What happened? How did a for-profit college model morph into today's basement-reputation for-profit model, exemplified by Saturday Night Live's fictional "University of Westfield," where the students mainly learn how to fudge the fact that their degree are from the University of Westfield? I blame the corrupting influence of federal money, the easily available Pell grants and guaranteed loans that began to flow with the passage of the Higher Education Act of 1965. Easy federal money has contributed to a vast growth in enrollments at both non-profit and commercial institutions, a ballooning of tuition costs, and, in the for-profit sector, a focus not on the academic outcomes that might build a school's reputation as a selling point but upon getting as many bodies as possible into their classrooms.

Let's take the enormous---and vastly profitable--University of Phoenix, with its nearly 400,000 students in 39 states as well as online. Phoenix is regarded as one of the more reputable commercial schools, and it has gained respect over the last two years for issuing fairly candid reports about its strengths and shortcomings. Still, Phoenix and its parent company, Apollo Group, have had their troubles during the last decade---and recently entered into a $78.5 million settlement regarding allegations that Phoenix illegally paid cash bonuses and other gifts to recruiters based on the number of young people they signed up for classes. Phoenix derives an ever-increasing amount---more than three quarters during its 2008 fiscal year, according to a March article in Business Week--of its $3 billion-plus annual revenue from federal student aid. Ii's the biggest recipient of Pell grants in the nation. Yet Phoenix's graduation rates seem abysmal. According to the U.S. Education Department, only 4 percent of Phoenix's students who entered four-year-programs as freshmen graduated within six years, compared with 55 percent of students at non-profit four-year schools. And an executive-search company specializing in financial services told Business Week that a Phoenix degree didn't "add any value" to a graduate's resume.

Continue reading "The Failure Of For-Profit Schools" »

By Frank J. Macchiarola and Michael C. Macchiarola

Why do law schools charge higher and higher tuitions that keep outrunning the cost of living? In the two decades ending in 2007, according to the American Bar Association, the cost of attending the average private law school (including tuition and fees) more than tripled--increasing from $8,911 a year to $32,367. Unsurprisingly, the average amount borrowed by law students has risen just as dramatically. Last year's average private law student graduated with more than $87,000 in law school debt.

In trying to understand this phenomenon, many have blamed the American Bar Association's Standards for Law Schools. The ABA accredits 200 American law schools that adhere to the Standards and, by doing so, permit their graduates to sit for the bar examination in every state. These standards govern student's course of study, the law school's administration, the faculty's rights and obligations and the adequacy of the physical plant. Among other things, law schools are reviewed in a comprehensive three-day site visit with several visitors every seven years to maintain their accreditation.

Others, particularly law school deans, who face competitive pressures from other law schools, have blamed the U.S. News and World Report rankings of law schools. These critics believe the rankings spark a tournament of law schools to compete on the magazine's terms, often at great costs and at the expense of more student-centered activities. In a December 2009 report to the Congress, the General Accounting Office dealt, in part, with concerns that have been raised about how some of the accreditation standards of the ABA may affect the cost of law school.

Continue reading "Does U.S. News Make Law Schools More Expensive?" »

By Roger Clegg

Should universities weigh race and ethnicity in deciding whom to hire for their science departments?

The American Association for the Advancement of Science thinks so, according to a recent National Journal article. "Science and engineering should look like the rest of the population," says AAAS's Daryl Chubin, and if hiring decisions don't yield the right numbers, "somebody needs to pull the plug and say this has not been an open and fair search."

Taking steps to ensure that the best possible individuals apply and are hired is fine---indeed, that's precisely what the whole process should be about. Casting your recruiting net far and wide is a good idea, as is reassessing your recruiting policies to make sure that you are not overlooking good sources of candidates. Reevaluating selection criteria from time to time is, likewise, unobjectionable; if some criteria are weighed too heavily or not heavily enough, with the result that the best individuals are not selected, then that needs to be fixed. And, of course, everyone involved in the selection process, from beginning to end, needs to be told that the best individuals, regardless of skin color or national origin, are to be picked.

But it's clear that nondiscrimination is exactly what AAAS does not have in mind. The National Journal article says that it wants to "allocate additional slots to U.S. racial and ethnic minorities" and to protect universities from "likely lawsuits by groups seeking color-blind admissions policies." As the quotes above suggest, it is demanding that schools get their numbers right. It wants quotas, it wants race and ethnicity to be weighed when hiring decisions are made.

Continue reading "Another Bad Idea: ''Diversifying'' Science Faculties" »

By Charlotte Allen

Shortly after his inauguration in January President Obama announced a proposal to get rid of a 44-year-old program known as the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program. In the FFEL system, the federal government guarantees loans to students from private banks and similar institutions under a variety of programs (the best known is the so-called "Stafford" loan) to help pay for the students' education, whether at the undergraduate or postgraduate level. The idea behind FFEL, part of a massive piece of 1965 legislation designed to make higher education more attainable and affordable to larger numbers of Americans, is to encourage private lenders to extend credit for college to a cohort of society that would otherwise not qualify for loans that these days can total tens of thousands of dollars a year. In return for guaranteeing student loans against their borrowers' default, the U.S. Education Department charges the lenders modest fees and sets maximum allowable interest rates.

Under Obama's plan all students needing higher-education loans would instead obtain them through the William D. Ford Federal Direct Student Loan Program (Direct Loan for short), a Clinton administration creation of 1993 in which the U.S. Education Department itself lends money for post-secondary education. The only role that private banks and other institutions such as Sallie Mae (the formerly government-backed but, since 2004, completely private entity that currently originates about a fourth of all FFEL loans) would continue to play in student lending would be to service some of the loans under contract with the department.

The administration argues that eliminating private financial institutions as middlemen (until the administration embarked on its anti-bank stance Sallie Mae and other private entities accounted for 80 percent of the $92 billion federally subsidized loan market, and it continues to issue about 58 percent of those loans), would save the government $87 billion over the next 10 years in default payouts and interest subsidies to institutions that lend to students who demonstrate financial need. (For subsidized loans, the government pays the interest until the student leaves school; for unsubsidized loans, the interest accumulates, but the student is not obliged to make payments before leaving school, and there is also a variety of repayment and forgiveness plans geared to income levels after graduation.) Under Obama's proposal the government would use part of the anticipated savings to put another $40 million into beefing up funding for Pell grants, yet another federal aid program for college students launched in 1973 and named (in 1980) after the recently deceased Democratic Sen. Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island. Under the Pell program, which costs the government $18 billion annually, about 7 million low-income college students (the ceiling family income is $40,000) receive outright grants from the government (the current annual maximum is $5,350), to help pay for their college educations.

Continue reading "Waste And Folly In Student Loans" »

By Matt Shaffer

As the senior class of Yale College prepares for its final semester and reflects on the Bright College Years so swiftly gliding by, I have heard one phrase repeated with surprising frequency: "I wish I had done Directed Studies." It's a statement that doesn't accord with the stereotype of Yale seniors as either careerists shaking hands toward Wall Street or activists uninterested in the intellectual foundations of their slogans.

Directed Studies is a full year, freshmen-only Great Books program. The very short, very intense introduction to the Western Canon consists of three courses per semester--one in Literature, Philosophy, and History & Political Thought each. All students together attend lectures by professors like Harold Bloom, Dave Kastan, Donald Kagan, Charles Hill, and others less famous but equally revered by their students. Afterward, students break out into smaller discussion seminars.

The program has a reputation for being demanding, and a quick look at the syllabus shows why. The spring semester in Literature alone includes Don Quijote, War and Peace, Swann in Love, Paradise Lost, Faust, and more. The fall semester in History and Political Thought covers Thucydides' and Herodotus' histories, The Republic, Aristotle's Politics, Livy, Tacitus and Augustine! And both are just one out of three for the semester.

Continue reading "Yearning For Great Books" »

By Sally Satel

Imagine you are a sophomore in college. The semester has been academically overwhelming, and your girlfriend recently dumped you. One night it reaches crisis level and you go to campus mental health worried you might harm yourself. You volunteer to enter the hospital and are released a few days later feeling more hopeful.

Then your college tells you to leave school. Period. No formal evaluation of your mental health condition. No discussion with you. Just out.

According to a newly released report from the State of New Jersey called College Students in Crisis: Preventing Campus Suicides and Protecting Civil Rights, policies which allow or require removal based solely on the existence of suicidal thoughts or behavior may be increasing. They are premised on the need to remove the student from the stresses of student life and to motivate them to get the care they need.

In the wake of tragedies such as the self-immolation of a sophomore at M.I.T. in 2000 and the shooting spree at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 2007, concerns among administrators took on urgency. But lawyers argue that such blanket involuntary removal policies infringe upon a student's civil rights.

Continue reading "Expel Students Who Might Kill Themselves?" »

By Roger Clegg

Allegations of tenure discrimination have recently been leveled against Emerson College on grounds of race and against DePaul University on grounds of sex.

At Emerson, two black scholars were denied tenure, the local chapter of the NAACP became involved, and an investigation has been launched by the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination. The school has agreed to give one of the professors another shot next year, in exchange for dropping his complaint with the Commission.

Four women are challenging DePaul's tenure denial. They have a lawyer, have unsuccessfully appealed the denial to the school's president, and have now indicated that they plan to take DePaul to court.

In neither case has direct evidence of discriminatory intent been alleged, such as racist or sexist comments. Instead, statistical disparities of one sort or another are cited.

So, is there anything to these allegations?

Continue reading "Discrimination In Granting Tenure?" »

By Peter D. Salins

The Obama administration - along with many in the opinion elite - is looking to the nation's two-year community colleges as the primary vehicle to ramp up future Americans' level of post-secondary educational attainment. A down payment in this direction are the billions of dollars of direct and indirect community college aid included in the administration's "stimulus bill." However, before we get carried away with enthusiasm for community colleges as the best place to extend the frontier of higher education, there's a question to consider: how well have these institutions actually succeeded in their mission to provide an inexpensive but effective college education to our millions of academically under-prepared high school graduates?

A cursory look at the data is not encouraging. Although 41 percent of America's college-bound students enter community colleges each year , only 28 percent of this cohort actually complete their studies and earn a degree , an even more dismal outcome than that displayed at the nation's baccalaureate colleges, where 56 percent manage to graduate . These depressing statistics haven't dampened the general consensus favoring support of community colleges because proponents appear to believe that college "access" trumps successful college completion and that "some college is better than none." Refuting the latter point, U.S. community college non-graduates have only marginally higher earnings and lower unemployment rates than high school graduates and do far less well than their counterparts that manage to complete their studies .

The disappointing outcomes at community colleges are to some extent hard-wired into four aspects of their design. These institutions are proudly and aggressively "open admissions" which means that there are no academic criteria to get in except, in most places, a high school diploma. They are indifferent to the extent to which their students are diverted from their studies by work or other outside obligations, convinced that such distractions are an unavoidable and immutable aspect of "nontraditional" student profiles. Their abundant array of courses (including ones for English and math remediation that a majority of their students test into and often fail) are taught primarily by low-paid part-time faculty who have little time for interaction with students beyond classroom hours. Finally, community colleges view their mission in strictly vocational terms. They offer majors geared to every occupation that their "environmental scanning" process identifies as having job openings, while slighting the kind of general education offered by baccalaureate institutions that may contribute more to post-collegiate success than narrow (and quickly obsolete) occupational skill sets. While educators and the media tend to be scornful of the academic pretensions of proprietary, often on-line, "universities" like Phoenix and DeVry, the public community colleges are not operationally very different or in their academic results any more successful.

Continue reading "A New Kind of Community College" »

By Ward Connerly

As a regent of the University of California (UC), I voted against "fee" increases proposed by the administration as often as I voted for them, but with each vote I realized that UC was slowly moving toward the day when basic decisions would have to be made about how the university is financed, who can attend it, and what the public should expect from the institution. Well, that day has come; and the public can either dodge the issues or face them and try to craft a new relationship with UC.

Several days ago, the regents voted to increase fees by a whopping 32% - that's right, 32% - starting in the fall of 2010. Notwithstanding the predictable assertions about "quality" being threatened and the prospect of a "faculty exodus," with a loud voice, I would have voted against this increase. Not because the university isn't justified in raising fees to some extent, but because the economy is in the tank, many students' parents are unemployed and no business in its right mind raises its prices 32% under such a set of circumstances.

The operative word above is "business." The University of California IS a business that likes to operate as if it were merely a public service enterprise. It doing so, it gets to have the best of both worlds. As a business, UC chooses to compete with other businesses for talent - and seeks to compensate them accordingly. As a public service enterprise, the university expects to be subsidized heavily by the taxpayers - when we can afford it - and to have all of the protections and perquisites of a public corporation.

Continue reading "The Money Problem at U Cal" »

By Sandra Stotsky and Ze'ev Wurman

Every year seems to produce a burst of attention to a particular crisis in education. In 2009, the most publicized crisis is likely the staggering number of post-secondary students with severe debilities in reading and math. Estimates of those needing remedial classes before taking credit courses range from 30% of entering students to 40% of traditional undergraduates. According to a 2008 report by the CUNY Council of Math Chairs, 90% of 200 City University of New York students tested couldn't solve a simple algebra problem in their first class at a four-year college.

A 2004 U.S. Department of Education study reports that 42% of freshmen in public two-year institutions need remediation. While there are many adult (non-traditional) students in remedial classes, those 21 or younger make up approximately 80% of remedial class enrollment, according to a 2009 policy brief from the Charles Houston Center for the Study of the Black Experience in Education.

More than half of all college students will not earn a degree or credential, according to a 2009 Gates Foundation report drawing on national education statistics. For community college and low-income students, it notes, the numbers are much worse. Only about one-quarter of the African-American students who enrolled in a community college in 2004 graduated within three years. Immediate enrollment in credit courses that accumulate rapidly towards completion of a degree program is not possible for under-qualified young adults who need to spend at least part-time on remedial courses.

Continue reading "College Students Who Can't Do Math Or Read Well" »

By Barry Strauss

If there's anything uniting faculty on different sides of the aisle nowadays it's disapproval of large lecture courses. To the Left, lectures are authoritarian; to the Right, they are lowbrow. Better the egalitarian or members-only atmosphere of the seminar, they say. To anyone who is just "agin' the guv'ment," lecture courses suffer the stigma of administrative approval, because deans and provosts love lectures as cheap and efficient ways to deliver information.

That is, if the courses succeed: many alumni remember only the professor's yellowing notes or the students' back-row shenanigans and not any actual learning. Nor is the future of lecturing bright, according to some experts, who say that nothing so prehistoric as a lecturer's voice could possibly penetrate the digital habits of Generation Net.

But that's not been my experience. Course evaluations--and I've read more than a few--show that students love pointed, provocative well-delivered lectures. They appreciate and respect a master narrative (the Left's bugaboo), if only to give them something to rebel against. They can see through a professor's bias and they don't even mind it, as long as the professor acknowledges it. They appreciate common touches such as references to popular culture (the bane of the Right) as long as they are up-to-date. They want their electronic images, but not without a commanding voice behind them.

Continue reading "Big Is Beautiful" »

By KC Johnson

Thanks to the efforts of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education---and a rare, if welcome, instance of Congress standing up for students' rights in higher education---the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) abandoned its de facto "social justice" criterion. Yet while the development made it harder for Education schools to use "social justice" and "diversity" to demand ideological fidelity from students, the ideologues that populate such programs have hardly ceased their efforts. Only now they must take accountability for their actions.

A good example of the continuing problem is the renewed emphasis on "cultural competence"---a term, much like "dispositions," which is meaningless to anyone outside the academy but has a specific, and ideologically charged, designation to those familiar with Education code. Take, for instance, the Education Department at the University of Minnesota whose activities were exposed by Katherine Kersten in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Kersten uncovered a report prepared as part of the Teacher Education Redesign Initiative, which is reorienting the U of M's teacher-training curriculum.

The intellectual interests of the report's authors not only preview the group's recommendations but also give a sense of what passes for the ideological mainstream in Education departments on the nation's college campuses. The work of Professor Tim Lensmire, who says that he uses the classroom to promote "radical democracy" through embracing "various progressive, feminist, and critical pedagogies," sets the ideological tone: Lensmire notes that his "current research and writing focus on race and education, and especially on how white people learn to be white in our white supremacist society." The report's other authors include Bic Ngo, whose research examines "the ways in which the education of immigrant students are shaped by dynamic power relations as they play out at the intersection(s) of race, ethnicity, class and gender" using "critical, cultural and feminist theories" to explicate "the role(s) of critical multicultural education"; committee chair Michael Goh, whose research explores "multicultural counseling"; and two non-tenure track figures, Mary Beth Kelley and Carole Gupton.

Continue reading "Decoding Teacher Training" »

By Naomi Schaefer Riley

Earlier this month a Maine parole commission accomplished what pleas from citizens and the governor of Massachusetts could not, in preventing the speech of a convicted terrorist at the University of Massachusetts. Widespread protest greeted an invitation by professors to Raymond Luc Levasseur, the leader of United Freedom Front, a violent anti-government group linked to some 20 bombings and the slaying of a New Jersey State trooper. What these protests could not stop, Levasseur's parole commission did. What was the University administration's catch-all defense of the event? Academic Freedom. The professors who invited Levasseur were entitled to host whomever they wanted in the name of "academic freedom and free speech."

We've seen this show before, of course. When a speech at the University of Nebraska by Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers was canceled last year, professors rose up crying that it was a violation of academic freedom. Of course, it's not only when visitors come that professors become interested in academic freedom. Ward "little Eichmanns" Churchill and Nicholas "a thousand Mogadishus" De Genova were also only exercising their academic freedom when they made their outrageous pronouncements. Arthur Butz, author of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry, has been teaching at Northwestern University for more than 30 years, regularly exercising his academic freedom, for instance by congratulating Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his Holocaust denying views.

Despite what seems like some pretty wide latitude for faculty, the American Association of University Professors is up in arms about recent attacks on academic freedom. They announced last week that they are launching a campaign to fight back. "The right of faculty members at public colleges and universities to speak freely without fear of retribution is endangered as never before," the AAUP said in a newsletter called "Speak Up, Speak Out: Protect the Faculty Voice on Campus." The newsletter urged faculty and administrators to adopt policies that would protect faculty who speak up (and out) on academic matters, university governance, teaching, research, and, of course, issues that have nothing whatsoever to do with higher education at all. Cary Nelson, the AAUP president, told the Chronicle of Higher Education, breathlessly, "One is only willing to play Russian roulette with a certain number of the chambers filled."

Continue reading "What Speech Is Protected?" »

By Adam Kissel

The University of Chicago met widespread national opposition ten years ago after it instituted a new, less demanding core curriculum to make way for more electives. It was part of a plan to make the curriculum significantly less demanding (more "fun") to attract more students and improve the school's bottom line. Instead of 21 required courses (in the quarter system), there became 15: six in the sciences, three in the social sciences, and six divided among the humanities and civilization studies. The changes were bitterly opposed when they became public, but too late. Over the past ten years, the university's curriculum has slouched farther toward mediocrity.

After 1999, a student could forgo the modern era in the humanities as well as one third of the education in a civilization that used to be required for a bachelor's degree worthy of Chicago's name. While students need not avoid such courses, they may, and many do. In the first year of the new curriculum, only about 20 percent of students chose not to complete the third quarter of their humanities sequences, and it was argued that most Chicago students could be trusted to take their education into their own hands. The situation today is not so rosy.

In 2007-2008, for instance, nearly 47 percent of students chose to abandon their humanities core sequence to study something else. Maybe they were leaving room for more electives or were making hard choices as they tried to fit the core into study abroad and early graduation. But the fact is that half of Chicago's undergraduates now choose to forgo a year-long sequence, which at its best weaves multiple common themes through various changes across the centuries, in favor of a piecemeal education. Some of the humanities sequences have shrunk on the presumption that they can only maintain about 22 weeks' worth of undergraduate attention. Why keep up an integrated three-quarter sequence if students treat the third quarter as an elective?

Continue reading "The University Of Chicago - What's Been Lost" »

By Judith Miller

An intense controversy has erupted over the efforts of Northwestern University journalism students to discover the truth about a 1978 murder case. The government is attempting to wrest sensitive information from the former students. At the heart of that contentious legal move is a deceptively simple question: were the 30 students who spent three years studying whether a man was wrongfully convicted of the murder acting as journalists or investigators?

If the students were acting as working journalists, as Northwestern University and their professor, David Protess, who directs the Medill Innocence Project, assert, they would be covered by Illinois's media shield law, which would bar the state from forcing them to reveal confidential sources or produce working notes and documents relating to their inquiries. But if they were "criminal investigators", as Cook County prosecutors maintain, they would not be covered by the state's shield law, and Protess and the college could be held in contempt of court if they do not acquiesce to the government's sweeping subpoenas for any and all unpublished student videos of their interviews with witnesses, interviews, notes and emails relating to their investigation, their former students' grades, grading criteria, performance reports, class syllabus, and expense reports.

Vowing to resist the subpoena, Northwestern and Prof. Protess, backed by many media groups, have decried what they see as the government's unwarranted "fishing expedition" into their students' sources and efforts to secure information about them that might violate their privacy under Federal law.

Continue reading "Were The Students Journalists Or Advocates?" »

By Charlotte Allen

In May the Illinois State's Attorney's office issued a stunningly unusual subpoena. It asked for the student grades, grading criteria, class syllabi, expense reports, and even e-mail messages of undergraduates taking an investigative reporting class at Northwestern University. The class tied into the Medill Innocence Project, a program administered by Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism that gathers evidence aimed at overturning wrongful criminal convictions. Over the following months the journalistic world has seethed with outrage at what seemed to be a best a fishing expedition and at worst an act of retaliation against the students for coming up with evidence that could free 49-year-old Anthony McKinney, convicted by a jury of first-degree murder and serving a life sentence without parole for shooting a security guard named Donald Lundahl in the face during the course of a 1978 armed robbery in Harvey, Ill., a Chicago suburb. An Oct. 31 editorial in the Washington Post stated: "These subpoenas -- and the stunning overreach they represent -- should be quashed."

Perhaps they should---although on Nov. 10 the state's attorney's office filed a 54-page document, complete with signed investigative reports, in which the office alleged that the Northwestern students gave money to two of the witnesses they interviewed (for a reporter to pay sources is regarded as highly unprofessional), including $40 to buy crack cocaine to a man named Tony Drakes in exchange for a videotaped confession to the murder in 2004. The reports also stated that students had flirted with several male witnesses (including Drakes) who then gladly told them what they wanted to hear; and that the Medill school refused to give prosecutors access to much of the students' notes and tapes, including all records pertaining to student interviews with a second man, Robert Magruder. According to Drakes's videotape, Magruder was supposed to have fired the fatal shot at Lundahl. (Both Drakes and Magruder denied involvement with the murder in more recent interviews with state's attorney's investigators.) The state's attorneys argue that the students enrolled in the course weren't functioning as reporters gathering news but as investigators for their professor, David Protess, who also happens to run the Medill Innocence Project. The tapes and notes they produced didn't result in the students' writing any news stories, even for Northwestern's student paper, the state's attorneys say, but rather, went straight to lawyers affiliated with Northwestern's law school who are representing McKinney in his quest for a reopening of his conviction.

Furthermore, accompanying the students during the 2004 interview with Drakes (and apparently in charge of the interview, according to the state's attorney's office) was a private detective, Sergio Serritella, whose LinkedIn page describes him as the CEO of Tactical Solutions Group, a private-investigations firm in Chicago specializing in criminal cases. (The Medill school says that Serritella, who works on and off for the institution, was along only to provide security, as Drakes had served time for a different murder.) In short, says the state's attorney's office, the students, even though they were enrolled in a journalism class, weren't entitled to invoke the protection of Illinois's shield law, which allows reporters to keep their notes and sources confidential.

Continue reading "Should J-Students Work For The Defense?" »

By Russell Nieli

Grade inflation is one of those realities of the post-60s academic world that most college teachers bemoan but feel powerless to do anything about. It is virtually impossible for any single faculty member to do much to stem the tide of ever rising grade distributions. If a faculty member refuses to go along with the upward shift in grades and gives his students lower grades than they would have received for comparable work in other courses, students will rightfully complain that to those reading their official transcript it will falsely appear as if they have done lesser work or achieved at a lower level in the hold-out grader's course than in other courses. Such faculty members will find many fewer students taking their courses -- including many conscientious and competitive students whom the teacher does not want to scare away. Worse still, since tenure and promotion decisions are often partially based on student evaluations and student enrollments that frequently reflect past satisfaction with a professor's grading policy, university teachers today pay a heavy price for bucking the inflationary trend.

Perhaps the best that a lone academic can do is represented by Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield. Mansfield can remember a time when the average GPA at Harvard College was around 2.5 on a 4.0 scale -- today it is about 3.5. The transition from C+ to B+ as the average grade has produced the ludicrous result that in some years nine in ten Harvard seniors graduated with official honors. For Mansfield the idea that grades should mean what grading keys still often say they mean -- i.e., that an A means "Excellent," "Truly Outstanding," a B "Very Good," "Above Average," and a C "Average" -- carries a good deal of weight. But implementing such a grading policy is impossible in a grading environment in which C grades have practically disappeared from most humanities and social science courses (representing less than 5 percent of the grades in some departments), and more than half of students in many Harvard courses receive A range grades. Mansfield came up with a creative solution that enabled him to avoid what would have been a bitter and ultimately futile struggle against the inflationary flood waters of the times without having to sing praises to the river gods. Mansfield has for many years now given his students two sets of grades, one for the official Harvard transcript, the other representing what the students really deserve on a non-inflated grading scale.

Does It Really Exist?

Some deny that grade inflation exists. According to these people -- usually students or their parents -- students are simply getting smarter these days, especially at the most prestigious colleges and universities which draw from a huge talent pool. The higher grades obtained at such places reflect genuinely higher achievement, these people say, just as the superior performance in track and field events at the Olympics represent genuine advances over earlier competitors, not changes in the evaluation metric.

But no college teacher with hands-on experience of the rising grades at the better colleges over the past several decades can take such claims seriously. Term papers of a quality that would have received a B or B+ in former times are now routinely given an A-, and with the near elimination of C range grades in many humanities and social science courses (except for failing or near-failing work), the B and B- grades have come to absorb everything that previously would have been awarded a C or even a D. To anyone with knowledge of an earlier period, it is clear that there has been both protracted grade inflation (higher grades overall for work no better than in an earlier period), and grade compression (almost all grades compressed into the A+ to B- range).

Continue reading "Princeton's Victory Over Grade Inflation" »

The president of the University of Chicago, Robert J. Zimmer, spoke at Columbia University on October 21st on the topic, "What Is Academic Freedom For?"

Minding the Campus invited several academics and other observers of the campus scene to post brief reactions to President Zimmer's remarks. The comments are from Peter Sacks, Erin O'Connor and Maurice Black, Adam Kissel, John K. Wilson and Candace de Russy.

Continue reading "Is Academic Freedom In Trouble?" »

By Peter Wood

(This is a response to Robert Weissberg's "Rescuing The University")

Professor Weissberg's "Rescuing the University" offers a compact assessment of the frailties of the movement to restore higher education to light and sanity. He also urges the merits of another, he supposes, untried approach. "Guerilla warfare" and "monastery construction" are the unflattering labels he affixes to some of the efforts he thinks futile. His dismissals strike me as too breezy. FIRE and the Center for Individual Rights, which he cites as among the guerilla forces, have some pretty substantial victories to their credit. Were it not for them, our nation's universities would be far more strangled by speech codes and systems of racial preferences than they are. It is easy to take their victories for granted or to sleight their accomplishments as falling far short of a re-conquest of the university for wholesome respect of academic principles, but I think Professor Weissberg's gloom gets the better of him here. Things could be worse. Much worse. Those organizations that pursue tactics based on challenging specific transgressions at specific universities have achieved not only tactical victories but have also kept alive ideals that were in danger of being smothered under the academic left's self-proclaimed "consensus."

Professor Weissberg cites Princeton's Madison Center and the Veritas Center as examples of "monastery construction." He could easily have expanded the list. (Here's NAS's count: There are now about 40 campus centers around the country that aim to keep the study of Western civilization and other major ideas disfavored by the establishment left alive during the dark-ish and still darkening age we inhabit. The National Association of Scholars has had a hand in founding many of them. Are they monasteries, holding out against the barbarian horde? We prefer to think of them as beachheads for faculty members and points of embarkation for students, who might never otherwise glimpse what the life of the mind is really all about.

Professor Weissberg dismisses these centers as weak, vulnerable to leftist take-over, and intrinsically unable to "restore the Enlightenment." Surely there is some truth to all three criticisms. But there is also something blinkered in the attitude. Many of the centers are thriving and are in fact lifelines to thousands of students. I wouldn't lightly brush aside the University of Colorado, Boulder's Center for Western Civilization, right there in the heart of Ward Churchill country. The Center for Political and Economic Thought at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania shows that a well-focused program can transform a whole college. Even centers that have hit rough sledding, such as the Hamilton Institute that had to set itself up off-campus near the uber-PC Hamilton College in upstate New York, have proven to be nimble in creating important debates in the face of complacent and self-satisfied orthodoxy.

Continue reading "Responding To Weissberg" »

By Robert Weissberg

Part II, The Solution

(The first part of this essay can be found here.)

Restoring good sense to universities means allowing levelheaded academics to compete with radical imposters who proliferate by printing up their bogus currency. In a phrase: restore the gold standard of discovering and imparting truth. It is unnecessary to re-write university regulations to stop Ward Churchills or stipulate "good" and "bad" scholarship (which, in any case, is legally impossible and futile). The radicals have created a huge infrastructure, everything from journals to foundations, which, together with skilled back scratching, permits them to multiply virtually unchecked. A well-funded counter-weight is necessary. This is not about re-stocking the university with right-wing professors. The aim is encouraging non-ideological, unbiased let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may research. To paraphrase Orwell, victory will be announced when a professor can stand before his class and say, without fear, 2 +2=4.

Research requires money, often relatively small sums, and these are often difficult to obtain for those with the "wrong" views. University research boards, the traditional sources of seed money, are often controlled by PC forces. My own personal experiences here was that no hare-brained leftish proposal, no matter how technically flawed, was denied, even when damned by reviewers. If endangered species faculty are denied support, they will be enticed away by rivals, so it is better to give $10,000 to study cross-dressing Latina truck drivers than recruit a hard-to-find replacement for the "unappreciated" scholar. This is just supply and demand. As for the legitimate researcher seeking funds, a single impassioned rejection is sufficient no matter how ideologically motivated.

Similar obstacles are encountered when appealing to large foundations---requests to fund project that might "offend" politically protected groups are probably DOA, and so unlikely to be submitted in the first place. More generally, and this certainly includes nearly all "right wing" foundations, few foundations favor small grants or small projects---processing is just too labor intensive. Better to give a million to a single program than tediously scrutinize hundreds of requests for $25,000 or less. The Olin Foundation's $25,000 for Allen Bloom's Closing of the American Mind is a rare exception but one worth emulating (even Olin favored large scale, institution-building investment, however). To my knowledge, the only conservative benefactor that currently plays this seed money role is the Earhart Foundation, but their resources are modest and, I am told, like Olin, they are about shut down voluntarily (Disclosure---I have received several Earhart grants).

Continue reading "Rescuing The University" »

By Robert Weissberg

Part I, The Problem

How is the university, specifically the humanities and social sciences, with its rampant anti-Americanism, anti-intellectualism, muddle-brained identity politics, hostility to the unvarnished truth and all the rest to be re-conquered and restored to sanity? As one who has spent four decades in the belly of the beast, half of which was resisting this pernicious stupidity, let me offer some observations and suggestions. They are especially directed to non-academics who badly want to help, willingly put their money where their mouth is, but, alas, are clueless. To cut to the chase, universities are the faculty, and without bringing in fresh blood or helping sympathizers already there, all else is ephemeral. To paraphrase the familiar real estate adage, its people, people, people. Warning: some readers sharing my views may find my remarks a bit upsetting.

Reform currently has three main elements, two of which thrive but, unfortunately, are unlikely to succeed; a third might be victorious but remains largely untried. I'll call them (1) guerilla warfare; (2) monastery construction; and (3) CIA-style covert funding.

Guerilla warfare is waged by groups outside the university. Some like FIRE and Center for Individual Rights combat legal abuses and rescue victims of egregious PC. Others like David Horowitz's Front Page, Campus Watch and Minding the Campus are of the sunlight-is-the-best-disinfectant school: expose the rascals in the hope that the chastised will repent. These hit-and-run tactics are absolutely vital, can be great though depressing fun, but will not restore reason since they leave faculty composition untouched, and without refurbishment, the abuses will grow only slightly less obvious. Nefarious deans will just become more media savvy and advise the local Ward Churchills not to put it in writing lest the dreaded Horowitz-the-Horrible (not to be confused with Leo-the-Impaler) discover it. And, sadly, many miscreants are often immune to the disinfectant, and not even being linked to Islamic terrorism embarrasses them.

The monastery approach creates campus sanctuaries promoting solid, traditional education, e.g., Princeton's Madison Center. This is what the Veritas Center is all about. Hopefully, a few hundred students a year now escape mumbo-jumbo PC and learn that Western Civilization had a virtue or two. As an "alternative university" (to use the left's 60s vocabulary) it is a wonderful (though frightfully expensive) enterprise but, here too, it will not alter faculty composition. These Centers cannot hire new faculty or award tenure to assistant professors. Today's PC universities would never allow such back-door conversion regardless of financial enticements. Radical faculty would be outraged at not having a finger in the pie and, rest assured, if they were consulted, the Monastery would be forcefully diversified and made multicultural. At most, university administrators will graciously permit wealthy benefactors "the opportunity" to donate a few million for an endowed chair for an already distinguished conservative tenured faculty member, so nothing new intellectually is added. At the margins newly created sanctuaries permit a few tenured professors to burnish resumes or gain some release time. But, at day's end, the PC fortress barely notices and if things got tough financially, radicals would shamelessly just confiscate everything. Sanctuaries may help survive the Dark Ages but they will not restore the Enlightenment.

Continue reading "Rescuing the University" »

By Charlotte Allen

Does a black professor deserve tenure because his college hasn't granted tenure to very many black professors in the past? To provide a role model for black students? To help the school achieve ethnic diversity faster than it otherwise might? To ensure that the proportion of black professors matches the proportion of black college students?

These are some of the issues raised by the supporters of Pierre Desir, a cinematographer and assistant professor of film at Emerson College in downtown Boston who was denied tenure in 2008. Emerson, founded in 1880 and with 3,200 full-time undergraduates and 900 graduate students, specializes in teaching communications and the performing arts (graduates of Emerson include Jay Leno and Norman Lear). Desir was one of two blacks up for tenure in 2008 after six years of teaching. Neither he nor the other black scholar, journalism professor Roger House, received tenure, although three white professors who were up at the same time did. As is the rule with tenure denials, both Desir and House were allowed to teach for a seventh academic year at Emerson (2008-2009) while presumably looking for other academic jobs. Both filed complaints charging Emerson with racial discrimination with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination this past May. Over the summer Emerson offered both men a second shot at tenure in 201l in exchange for dropping their complaints. House took up the offer and is back teaching at Emerson this fall. Desir refused and is currently living on unemployment.

Emerson won't discuss Desir's case, but it seems that the main reason his tenure bid was rejected by Emerson's arts dean, Grafton Nunes, and vice president of academic affairs, Linda Moore, was Desir's thin creative production---the equivalent of scholarly production for humanities professors--during his six years on the faculty. Over that time Desir completed a single 17-minute arty documentary about Thelonious Monk in 2006. He did, however, do the cinematography, his academic specialty, on four feature films, and he complained that it was unfair for Moore to ignore that work, which his tenure committee had considered sufficient enough to recommend the tenure that Nunes and Moore vetoed.

Continue reading "Tenure And Diversity" »

By Edward B. Fiske

The Times Higher Education Supplement has now come out with its sixth annual listing of the world's top universities. Harvard continues to top the list, followed by the denizen of that other Cambridge across the Pond, which has now edged out Yale. The big news this year: the number of North American universities in the top 100 dropped from 42 to 36 from last year, while Asian universities are coming on strong.

I typically react to such news items in three stages. First, OMG, American higher education is tanking. Then I begin to fear that U.S. News & World Report copy-cats are taking over the world. Then the left side of my brain checks in and I ask myself whether such international comparisons are worth the bother.

Let's take these reactions one at a time, not necessarily in chronological order.

Continue reading "The Rankings Go Global" »

By Donald Downs

"Student engagement" is a movement and a cause that has made steady progress on our campuses. According to Inside Higher Education, it has reached a "critical mass" of participants, though many in the world of colleges and universities are only half-aware, or perhaps unaware, of what the movement is all about. The National Survey of Student Engagement, an organization driving the cause, is at least partly a product of both a nation-wide administrative push and the nation's education schools. Student engagement activities, ranging from community service to deeper involvement in more academically-oriented concerns, are gaining more official status with the passage of each year. Last year, for example, leaders of the University of Wisconsin system declared their intention to require students to maintain a "second transcript" that tracks students' extra-curricular activities. Students would not be required to do anything, but such supplementary transcripts would become part of their record alongside the traditional academic transcript. Such pressure no doubt would compel many more students to enhance (or pad) their resumes, for better or for worse. (I raised many questions about this program here last year.) As far as I know, the program has yet to be instituted.

Robert Morris University, a private school of 4700 students in Pittsburgh, pioneered the next stage of development last month by establishing the nation's first known deanship to oversee the school's new Student Engagement Transcript program. According to another recent story in Inside Higher Education, the program "tracks and certifies a student's participation in faculty-sponsored extracurricular and co-curricular activities. Activities must fall in one of seven areas: arts, culture and creativity; "transcultural/global" experiences, which include studying abroad; research; community service; leadership; professional experience; and independent study projects." In addition to completing the requirements for traditional majors, Robert Morris University will now require freshmen students to "demonstrate participation in at least two of the seven categories in order to graduate."

Continue reading "The Problem With Student Engagement" »

By Sean McKitrick

President Obama's call for an increase in college graduation rates and the establishment of a $2.5 billion college completion fund begins to address a vexing issue for those of us employed in higher education, namely, how do we make the United States more economically competitive in a world that demands a well-trained, college-educated workforce? The president's call is welcome. Graduation rates need to increase, especially among under-represented groups and first-generation college students. If we want more Americans to become more competitive in a smaller and smaller "world village," we must pay attention not only to those who traditionally pursue higher education, but also to those who do not have such a tradition. No doubt, "a high tide lifts all boats."

However, this insistence on increasing the numbers of college graduates appears to overshadow a more overarching but simpler objective of higher education---to educate rather than graduate students. Consider two statements common in higher education, both of which I have heard in conversation, one with a student, the other with a faculty member (thankfully, not at my current institution, which clearly does focus on educating rather than graduating students).

The first conversation was with a paralegal student I advised when I was an academic dean at a two-year for-profit institution in the western U.S. The conversation went something like:

Continue reading "Be Careful What You Wish For" »

By Richard Vedder

Less than 60 percent of students at our four-year colleges complete their studies and graduate. That depressing statistic has drawn many critics, and now it has occasioned a book, Crossing the Finish Line, by three well-connected members of the academic establishment--William Bowen, Matthew Chingos, and Michael McPherson (hereafter, BCM). The authors obtained some data on individual student performance unavailable to most researchers, uncovered some interesting facts and made some worthwhile observations. The question is, how much light has this effort produced.

BCM base their conclusions largely on a sample of data from a few dozen public universities. Since they are writing about public education, it would have been useful if at least one of the authors had some experience, either as a student or professor, in such an institution at some point in their eight decades of accumulative academic lifetime. Unfortunately, none studied or taught at a public university, meaning that they are not likely fully conversant with the cultural differences between, say, the Ivy League vs. the California State university system. Interestingly, with one exception, even all the announced authors' book receptions are being held at such private establishment enclaves as Harvard or the Brookings Institution.

At the book's beginning, BCM talk about the importance of higher college graduation rates to America's continued economic and educational leadership. We learn that increasing graduation rates is critical in achieving the objective of much larger rates of higher education attainment. BCM give a lot of attention to what they term the "undermatching" of high quality students with lower quality institutions. According to them, in North Carolina alone in 1999 there were about 2,500 undermatched high school seniors. These undermatched students went to lower quality schools than their capabilities suggested were feasible (or to no school at all), and tended to have graduation rates that were perhaps 15 points lower than similarly qualified students going to top-flight public schools (adjusting for other characteristics such as socioeconomic status, the gap was typically closer to 10 points). Assuming the North Carolina numbers are representative of the nation, what these results suggest is that ending undermatching could raise the national graduation rate by something less than one percentage point (e.g.., from about 55 to perhaps 56 percent), a relatively trivial movement.

Continue reading "Why Don't More Graduate" »

By John McWhorter

While this year has become best known as the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock, it was also forty years ago that the first African-American Studies department was established, at San Francisco State University.

Forty-one fall semesters later, there are hundreds of such departments. Has what they teach evolved with the march of time? What should the mission of a truly modern African-American Studies department be?

The answer common in such departments is that the principal mission is to teach students about the eternal power of racism past and present. Certainly it should be part of a liberal arts education to learn that racism is more than face-to-face abuse, and that social inequality is endemic to American society. However, too often the curriculum of African-American Studies departments gives the impression that racism and disadvantage are the most important things to note and study about being black.

Continue reading "What African-American Studies Could Be" »

By Edward Blum

As the saying goes, "fuzzy law begets controversy", and nothing has proven this maxim better than the Supreme Court's 2003 landmark ruling on "diversity" in higher education. Lacking clarity, the ruling has left individual institutions to interpret how to achieve diversity on their campuses, stoking never-ending conflict over race and admissions. However, a new lawsuit from Texas that is working its way up the appellate ladder---the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals took the case this week--- may compel the justices to clarify---and limit---how race and ethnicity may be used in the admissions process.

Some background is in order. Six years ago, the high court handed down a decision from a University of Michigan case that addressed the use of race as a factor in university admissions. In Grutter v. Bollinger, a challenge to Michigan's law school admissions practices, the justices ended a debate that had bedeviled college administrators for decades by permitting institutions of higher education to employ racial and ethnic preferences in order to create a "diverse" student body.

The Grutter opinion was significant in that it held that the creation of a racially diverse student body was so beneficial to the educational experience of everyone that there was a "compelling state interest" to lower the admissions bar for some applicants, and raise it for others.

Continue reading "Deciphering Grutter V. Bollinger" »

By Judith Miller

Fourteen Columbia professors are protesting the university's apparent decision to award tenure to Joseph A. Massad, a controversial anti-Israel professor of Arab studies.

The professors are from the schools of law, business and public health. They expressed their concern in a five-page letter to the incoming Provost, Claude M. Steele. The letter asserts that the university's decision to guarantee Massad a life-time teaching post "appears to have violated" Columbia's own rules, thus raising profound questions about the university's academic integrity. The university's administration, weirdly, still refuses to confirm or deny that Massad won tenure, but yesterday the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department let the cat out of the bag---it announced a beginning-of-term party next week congratulating Massad on gaining tenure.

This week Provost Steele belatedly issued a polite, noncommittal response. In a four-paragraph "Dear Colleagues" letter to the fourteen professors, Steele, a former Stanford psychologist, says he would "welcome" a meeting to discuss their concerns. After he learns more about Columbia's tenure process, Steele writes, he may "want to make some changes in our procedures." But nowhere does he state that Massad has, in fact, been awarded tenure. Nor does he acknowledge that the professors raise deeply troubling concerns, that if true, go to the heart of what many regard as the core of a university's integrity.

Continue reading "Massad Got Tenure (Don't Tell Anyone)" »

By Edward B. Fiske

Test prep pioneer Stanley H. Kaplan, who died this week at the ripe old age of 90, was a living embodiment of the roller coaster changes that have roared through the college admissions scene over the last three decades. He also set the stage for students, and later colleges and universities, to game the system.

Kaplan began his career intent on showing how the SAT, designed in such as way as to preserve the elitist nature of U.S. higher education, could become a vehicle for broadening access. In doing so he helped unleash forces leading to the current situation in which working the system is the norm for both institutions and applicants alike. Stanley Kaplan got the car rolling, climbed aboard and had one heck of a ride.

I first met Stanley Kaplan at an academic conference in the 1980s. He was the last person I would have picked out of the crowd as a test prep baron whose name was anathema to college admissions officers. He was short, gentle and avuncular in manner and, as I recall, dressed in what seemed to be battle fatigues. He was a born educator who wrote in his autobiography that "while other children played doctor, I played teacher." It was Stanley Kaplan the teacher who began tutoring students for the New York State Regents exams in the basement of his Brooklyn apartment and giving them a shot at higher education.

Continue reading "Gaming The College Rankings" »

By Charlotte Allen

Cuyahoga Community College expects to see nearly 30,000 students enrolled for credit on its three campuses in Cleveland when it opens for the fall semester late in August, with an additional 30,000 taking non-credit courses for job-training "personal enrichment" (instruction in art, photography, and other hobbies). According to campus officials, the 30,000-strong for-credit student population represents an all-time high: about 20 percent more than the 24,311 for-credit students whom the college reported as enrolled last spring. The projected 6,000-student increase is unprecedented, too; in the spring of 2009, college records show, there were only about 800 more students attending Tri-C, as Clevelanders call their community college, than were on the rolls for the spring of 2008. Chalk up the current surge to the recession, which has suddenly made the $25,000-a-year-tuition typical of U.S. private four-year-colleges look unaffordable to many families (private colleges nationwide have reported lower-than-usual freshman acceptance rates for this fall). Annual tuition at Tri-C is a tenth of that: $2,418. That's a bargain even compared with tuition costs at Ohio's public four-year colleges, which charge $8,583 annually on average to state residents.

So it's perhaps only logical that President Obama, in a July 14 speech at Macomb Community College in Warren, Mich., announced a proposal to invest $12 billion in federal spending in the nation's community college system, all with the aim of helping an additional 5 million Americans earn degrees and certificates from community colleges over the next 10 years. The president called community colleges the under-appreciated "stepchild of the higher education system" and declared that the money would help workers learn "the skills they need to fill the jobs of the future." His message seemed designed as a boost to Warren, a recession-battered suburb of Detroit with a 20 percent unemployment rate, but also to millions of other American young people desperate to cut the cost of attending college.

Continue reading "Community Colleges Are Bulging, But..." »

By Richard Vedder

Of every 100 kids who enter American high schools, only about 20 obtain a bachelor's degree within a decade. That is why the proportion of adult Americans with baccalaureate degrees is rising relatively slowly, and why the U.S. has fallen behind a number of other nations in the proportion of young adults with college degrees.

There are three points of attrition that keep new high school students from becoming college graduates. Some do not make it through high school. Some high school graduates never go to college. But the largest rate of attrition is seldom discussed: 40-50 percent of those who matriculate in colleges and universities do not obtain a degree within six years of entering college. And a majority of new freshman does not get a college degree in the four years that most of them expect to acquire it.

All of this must change, and radically, if President Obama's goal of America regaining its leadership in the world in degree attainment is to be achieved. A lot of attention has gone into the second area of attrition -failure to continue on to college, but less attention has been paid at the college level to the third factor -college drop-outs.

Continue reading "Why Are Graduation Rates So Low?" »

By Mark Bauerlein

In a recent interview with Mars Hill Audio Magazine (see http://www.marshillaudio.org/), Stanley Fish insists on a distinction bound to vex his colleagues. Professors must remember, he says, the difference between academic judgment and political judgment. In a classroom situation, academic judgment is the application of academic training to materials within the purview of a discipline, for instance, an English professor deciding whether Satan is or is not the hero of Paradise Lost (Fish's example). A political judgment is the application of a professor's political values to, well, anything, such that a "conclusion about action in the world could be immediately drawn."

I don't know of any distinction held in higher disregard back in the swirling culture wars days of the late-80s and early-90s. There was no such thing, the wisdom of the moment declared, as non-political academic judgment. I remember a graduate seminar at UCLA around 1987 when the teacher inched through a Derridean reading of a Wallace Stevens poem while a couple of students fidgeted uncomfortably. (At this time, deconstruction was considered an abstract endeavor that refused the ideological nature of language and the politics of academic labor.) They finally spoke up, stating that Steven's Romantic expressions about imagination and reality were, in fact, a case of suppression. Stevens merely engaged in "reification," converting social and political phenomena into interesting-sounding abstractions. That's the job of intellectuals, they noted, to cloak messy and inequitable human matters in the garments of beauty, truth, ideas, and theories.

"But what political facts does Stevens hide here?" the professor asked.

Continue reading "We Should Applaud Stanley Fish" »

By KC Johnson

AAUP president Cary Nelson recently e-mailed his membership about an important new venture for the academic union. Proclaiming "this is not your grandparents' AAUP," Nelson celebrated the work of the "Department of Organizing and Services," which had discovered "a faculty band from Ohio performing original songs about the ironies of current academic life."

Perhaps Nelson should spend less time thinking about new songs and focus more on the central task of "your grandparents' AAUP"---upholding the principle of academic freedom. In two recent, high-profile controversies, the self-described "tenured radical" has seemed intent on transforming the AAUP from an organization devoted to promoting academic freedom into a battering ram to perpetuate the groupthink that dominates so many quarters of the contemporary academy.

The first episode occurred in July, after NYU extended a visiting professorship in human rights law to Thio Li-ann, a professor at the National University of Singapore. The appointment generated understandable controversy after revelations that Li-ann, while a member of the Singapore parliament (a body not known for its commitment to human rights in any event), had wanted to continue criminalizing gay sex acts, on the grounds that "diversity is not license for perversity." Li-ann eventually decided not to come to NYU, using as an excuse the poor enrollment of her courses.

As the controversy brewed, Inside Higher Ed's Scott Jaschik drew from Nelson a highly unusual conception of academic freedom:

Nelson also said that in a tenure decision, he would judge a candidate---however offensive his or her views on unrelated subjects---only on a question of whether the person's scholarship and teaching in his or her discipline met appropriate standards. But in a hiring decision (whether for a visiting or permanent position), he said, it is appropriate to consider other factors, and . . . professors can appropriately ask prior to appointments, [Nelson] said, whether hiring someone whose views on certain subjects are "poisonous" could limit "the department's ability to do its business."

Continue reading "Not Your Grandparents' AAUP" »

By Matt Shaffer

My freshman orientation at Yale was disillusioning. I thought I would learn something about the kind of education I could expect over the next four years, but I was sorely disappointed.

Orientation featured addresses by the President, the Dean, and one keynote speaker. President Richard C. Levin stressed our need to interact with other cultures, in order to prepare for global citizenship, while then-Dean Peter Salovey drew on his expertise as a psychologist to provide examples of the ways in which people from different cultures think differently, and told us how much we could benefit from the diversity of our class. Dean Salovey said, "We will help you learn how to think rather than tell you what to think." The unifying theme of these two speeches was diversity and open-mindedness, things which are as inoffensive as they are uninspiring and insubstantial.

But with one speech to go, I hoped that perhaps this keynote speaker, as an academic, rather than an administrator, might say something bold about what it truly mean to be an educated person. But the speaker, law professor Kenji Yoshino, was evidently saved for last precisely because he was the least oriented towards education, and the most overtly political. His speech said nothing about education; instead, he discussed his book, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights. He painted a grim picture of the lives of gays and Muslims in America, asserting that they were subject to near constant oppression and forced into silence about their differences and persecuted in ways that the rest of us don't notice.

Continue reading "Disorientation At Yale" »

By Stephen Zelnick

Last semester, in an unguarded moment, I did what literature teachers should never do. I told a student her interpretation of a poem was wrong. From that moment I was regarded as an enemy to freedom.

I invited my students to engage with me in online debate on whether an interpretation could be wrong. What follows is their side of the argument. My arguments failed to dent their belief that a poem means whatever a reader thinks.

The debate erupted with Robert Browning's "Fra Lippo Lippi," where Browning, impersonating a Renaissance painter and with much complexity, presents his artist's credo.

My students resolved that complexity by leaping to conclusions. One young woman found the poem disgusting because the wayward monk enjoys a night out with the ladies. For her, this poem was just another male pleasantry purchased at women's expense. That was her personal feeling, and therefore, the class argued, a perfectly acceptable account of Browning's poem.

Another student, who disliked religion, saw Browning's objective to expose the monk's hypocrisy. Religion - he was ecumenical in his contempt - was a lie, and Browning showed how true this was.

Continue reading "The Poetry Wars" »

By Ward Connerly

During my twelve-year term as a Regent of the University of California (UC), I served for several of those years as Chairman of the Committee on Finance, which has jurisdiction over the budget of the UC system.

Adopting a budget was among the most complex and painful tasks that confronted the Board. For me, the "teachable moment" from that experience was that fewer things are more complicated and mysterious than a multi-billion dollar budget of a university that has numerous sources of public and private funding - restricted and unrestricted, that respects "shared governance," and which allocates budget authority to its campuses and other operational units. I always doubted that the Central Intelligence Agency could unravel the mystery of a UC budget.

While many in the nation are focusing for the first time on the serious fiscal dilemma of the State of California, UC has had to deal with cycles of financial shortages for much of the past two decades. In fact, belt-tightening has become the norm rather than the exception at UC. It is because of this experience that the current State budget "shortfall" is not hitting UC with the same effects as might otherwise have been the case.

To place matters in context, there are several salient features that must be acknowledged. First, UC is a vast enterprise with multiple sources of funding. This fact serves to cushion the university from the consequences that would be devastating to other universities faced with similar circumstances. Second, instead of just cutting costs to match revenues, the UC Regents and the administration have always sought to have nearly all its constituent parts share the pain during harsh budgetary times. For example, during the current UC budget year, in addition to staff furloughs - which are expected to achieve roughly 25% of the almost $1 billion "hit" on the UC budget from the State, and a 9.3% fee (tuition) increase, the university is looking at fewer course offerings, deferral of salary increases for most UC employees, layoffs, fewer faculty hires, fewer teaching assistants and elimination of a 2.5% increase in freshman enrollment that is a part of the Higher Education Compact between the State of California and the university. This approach will result in all segments of the UC community - students, faculty and staff - experiencing some degree of economic harm.

Continue reading "No Recession For Bonuses Or "Diversity"" »

By Mark Bauerlein

In the Critical Theory Archives at UC-Irvine, deep in a file of the Stanley Fish Papers, is a statement on Duke University letterhead by Fish when he was Executive Director of Duke University Press. The statement isn't dated, but we can assign it to the year 1996, appearing as it does in response to the infamous Sokal Hoax.

Probably most Minding the Campus readers recall the episode. Alan Sokal, a physicist at NYU, objected to theoretical and postmodern critiques of science coming out of the humanities ("science studies"), and he wanted to test the actual scientific and mathematical knowledge of the critics. He submitted a paper to the editors of Social Text with the title "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," and he filled it with tendentious assertions such as:

The content and methodology of postmodern science thus provide powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project, understood in its broadest sense: the transgressing of boundaries, the breaking down of barriers, the radical democratization of all aspects of social, economic, political, and cultural life.

Continue reading "It Was Just Blather" »

By Frederick Fico

The trajectory of my career changed in late 2006, although I could never have recognized it at the time. I am a tenured full professor of journalism at Michigan State University. I was sitting in my office when a student dropped by and identified himself as the chairman of the MSU College Republicans. They needed a faculty advisor.

I had no problem giving the young man an enthusiastic "yes" to his request. And all I had to do was sign a paper.

By the fall of 2007, I was being investigated by the campus Office for Inclusion, charged with harassment and discrimination against students because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, national origin, political persuasion and weight (!).

What happened?

Continue reading "Beware the Sensitivity Gestapo" »

By Donald Downs

Labor unions have suffered a number of defeats in recent years, but they hope to regain momentum by gaining passage of the so-called Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier to secure votes for unionization, mainly through a mechanism called "card check." Card check would replace the traditional method of unionization by eliminating secret ballots when employees vote for or against unionization. "Card check" would allow the signing of cards without the benefit of secrecy, perhaps even in the presence of pro-union activists. Will employees actually make free, unfettered choices in the face of union organizers who present them with cards? Or is the "Free Choice Act" but the latest historical incarnation of Newspeak?

Card check is in some trouble in Washington, but similar policies are having more success at the state level. A prominent example is Wisconsin, which has recently enacted such legislation regarding the University of Wisconsin. The policy is part of a larger pro-union package in the state.

Recently Governor Jim Doyle signed the state's 2009-2011 biennial budget, which includes a provision that gives collective bargaining rights to over 20,000 UW System faculty, academic staff, and research assistants. As of this writing, the faculty members of all UW System schools except UW-Madison have passed resolutions favoring the right to decide on unionization. Madison will no doubt deal with this issue in the fall; but even if Madison faculty members vote to have the right to decide, it is not evident that they will ultimately vote to unionize, for reasoned arguments exist on both sides of this question.

Continue reading "Card Check Comes To Campus" »

By John McWhorter

"If I couldn't study something that's about myself then I wouldn't want to be here," the black sophomore once told me, explaining how crucial to him it was to be able to major in African-American Studies.

It always stuck with me.

The African-American Studies department he was a major in was one of about 300 nationwide; this year is, in fact, the fortieth anniversary of the foundation of the first one at San Fracisco State University in 1969. I have never had a problem with such departments in themselves. After all, despite that we hear this so often it has become a cliche, the story of black people is, to a considerable extent, the story of America.

Slavery helped drive the colonial economy and sparked the Civil War. The Civil Rights revolution was a moral advance unprecedented in the history of the species. Today American popular culture is deeply stamped brown and, in that form, has taken over the world, from hiphop through the worldwide superstar status of actors like Will Smith. The swelling numbers of African immigrants are giving the African diaspora to the New World a whole new meaning. The campaign and election of Barack Obama distilled all of this so profoundly that courses could be taught on it alone - and surely will be, nationwide, starting in the fall.

Continue reading "What Black Studies Can Do" »

By Barbara Moeller

Last November, Rob Koons, director of the Program in Western Civilization and American Institutions at the University of Texas, was abruptly fired from that position. In swift succession, the name of the program and its leadership was changed to conform more closely to the ideological tastes of the faculty of the College of Liberal Arts. It was reminiscent of the fiasco at Hamilton College, recounted by Roger Kimball here. The common elements are a tenured, leftist faculty who are ferocious in their pursuit of intellectual homogeneity and the blithe betrayal of donors, alumni, and students.

The College of Liberal Arts (CoLA) at the University of Texas has all of the problems that plague higher education in America, only more, bigger, and with a better football team. It forms its own self-contained and self-referential world of all varieties of leftist thought, with only the occasional intrusion of voices from the right side of the intellectual dial. It's a place where it's assumed that if you are a middle-aged woman, you voted for Hillary Clinton, and would be forgiven, because you were motivated by a sense of solidarity. It's a place where a professor can say, in all seriousness that some of his best friends are liberals, but they are "politically unreliable" because they aren't far enough left. And where Dana Cloud, associate professor of communications, can, without a hint of irony, assert on national radio that there are many conservatives at UT- just look in Aerospace Engineering!

Needless to say, this kind of intellectual conformity, enforced by political correctness isn't good for education generally. It is buttressed by hyper-specialization, so that even at a university as big as UT, a top tier research institution, there are no survey courses in European history, to name but one gaping hole in the course offering. Likewise, the requirements for graduation from CoLA are a Luby's buffet of choices, where your course in "India's Non-Conformist Thinkers" counts toward your general culture requirement, but a survey course on the world's major religions does not, because there is no such course.

Continue reading "The Texas Mugging Of Western Civ" »