Originalstag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2009:/originals//62009-06-30T19:05:56ZMovable Type 3.34The Ominous Rise Of The Adjunctstag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2009:/originals//6.27692009-06-29T20:40:25Z2009-06-30T19:05:56ZBy Maurice Black & Erin O'Connor Review of John C. Cross and Edie Goldenberg's Off-Track Profs: Nontenured Teachers in Higher Education. (Cambridge: MIT Press): 2009. According to the AAUP, 48 percent of faculty are part-timers, and 68 percent of all...Anthony Paletta
By Maurice Black & Erin O'Connor
Review of John C. Cross and Edie Goldenberg's Off-Track Profs: Nontenured Teachers in Higher Education. (Cambridge: MIT Press): 2009.
According to the AAUP, 48 percent of faculty are part-timers, and 68 percent of all faculty appointments take place off the tenure track. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) cites comparable numbers, reporting that a mere 27 percent of postsecondary instructors hold fulltime, tenure-track positions. Such figures are the familiar touchstones of debates about the nature and future of academic work, undergraduate education, and academic freedom. They anchor official statements and form the basis of movements. Adjunct faculty are unionizing, and the AFT has launched a campaign to increase the proportion of undergraduate courses taught by fulltime and tenure-track professors to 75 percent.
Surrounded by statistics, activism, and commentary, the adjunct faculty member is never far from discussions about higher ed reform. "There is no subject so painful and so ubiquitous as the role of adjuncts in higher ed," writes Louisiana State University English professor Emily Toth, the Chronicle of Higher Education's "Ms Mentor." Nor, perhaps, is there an academic subject so thoroughly stylized. The underpaid, uninsured, and underappreciated "freeway flyer" has become a tragic figure, a poster prof for the moral, economic, and ethical failings of modern-day academia. Hardly a month goes by without another scandal in which someone fires---or fails to renew---an "invisible adjunct" who has expressed controversial views. Such cases---and the anger they evoke---have become the standardized set pieces of an academia that has yet to reckon with the fact that its modes of employment have undergone a seismic shift.
The supporting casts in these set pieces are as stylized as their non-tenure-track stars. There is the bean-counting administrator, an anti-intellectual corporate drone who sees adjunct faculty as a handy way to reduce overhead. And there is the smug tenured professor who sits idly by while a corps of shamelessly exploited workers enables his light teaching load, his leisurely sabbaticals, and his inflated salary. Together, these characters facilitate two structures of blame. The first focuses on putatively deliberate actions, assuming that the rise of adjuncts is an intended consequence of a specific, crass economic plan; the second focuses on passive inaction, assuming that tenured professors have made a Faustian bargain to secure their own comfort at the expense of tenure and academic freedom for future generations. ]]>
ff-Track Profs: Nontenured Teachers in Higher Education, this is a situation that no one set out to create and that no one actively maintains. They find that the growing numbers of non-tenure-track college teachers are, instead, the cumulative, unanticipated result of decades of disconnected, dispersed decision-making by administrators, deans, department chairs, and staff members working within a decentralized system where planning, assessment, communication, accountability, and adjustment are all exceptionally challenging endeavors.
A devastating correlative fact is that no one actually knows what the facts about adjunct labor in academe actually are. Take the statistics propagated by the AAUP, the AFT, and others---the ones that underwrite the academic labor movement and that fuel debate about what the rise in adjunct faculty means for the quality of undergraduate education, for academic freedom, for tenure, and for a host of related issues. These, Cross and Goldenberg note, are often drawn from statistics published by the U.S. Department of Education, which collects them from colleges and universities. But---and this is the appalling discovery at the heart of the book---colleges and universities do not themselves track this information. When called upon to report figures, they throw something together. But they don't actually know what's happening on their campuses. The "data" they report is largely guesswork done to produce what the authors call "fictitious precision."
When Cross and Goldenberg visited the ten elite public and private schools around which their study is based, they encountered deans, provosts, and presidents who were not aware of the extent or nature of non-tenure-track teaching on their campus. They encountered department chairs and unit-level staff who were aware of their own local, ad hoc patterns of appointing non-tenure-track faculty, but were ignorant of the broader context or aggregate impact of those decisions. They even found that the language used to describe non-tenure-track personnel---whose titles and job descriptions vary from position to position, department to department, and school to school---conspired, on campus after campus, to blur important distinctions among instructors, researchers, post-docs, graduate students, assistant professors, visiting professors, and even staff. In other words, they found that across the board, non-tenure-track faculty are retained "without meaningful administrative oversight."
What created the problem? The sources are many and varied. Ill-conceived budgets and measures aimed at cost effectiveness play a predictable role, as do the expense and inflexibility of tenure-track positions. Non-tenure-track-teachers typically do most of the remedial education on campus, and they are vital stopgaps when enrollments spike. Then there is the ever-escalating competition for higher rankings, greater visibility, and more prestige. The authors find that the modern university competes with its peers on almost every conceivable front---the success of varsity sports teams; the size and luxuriousness of dormitories, cafeterias, recreational centers, and other amenities; the success of fundraising campaigns and endowment investment strategies; even the number of iPods among the student body.
Because academic rankings are at the forefront of institutional prestige---the authors met with one department chair whose very first words were "We're number one!"---schools and departments compete vigorously for the most distinguished faculty in their fields. Aggressive recruiting pushes up salaries, draining budgets even as it reduces the number and size of classes that tenured faculty actually teach (light teaching loads and the promise of small, specialized classes have become crucial bargaining chips in the recruitment game). The tenure-track teaching load has halved over the past forty years, the authors find, while the number of tenure-track faculty has remained relatively constant. Meanwhile, the undergraduate population has exploded. Today tenure-track faculty teach less than half of the lower division arts and science credit hours offered at elite universities. So who does teach them? Enter the adjunct.
No one decided to create this perfect storm of pressures---but resolving the unwieldy and complex situation that those pressures created is not easy. As Cross and Goldenberg note, universities occasionally attempt to boost their prestige by shifting en masse from non-tenure-track to tenure-track faculty. But such a move requires millions and might only happen once in a generation. To cite a couple of salient examples: the University of Virginia plans to hire three hundred tenure-track faculty at an estimated cost of $130,000 each in annual salary and benefits; Michigan plans to hire one hundred tenure-track junior faculty at an annual cost of $100,000 each, plus a one time start-up cost of $20 million. For schools without such resources, redistributing salaries and teaching loads would reduce their ability to compete for prestige-enhancing academic superstars. Rankings hang in the balance.
The authors are blunt about what this means in practice: when it comes to non-tenure-track teachers, they write, "we necessarily confront the question of who is minding the store." Most of the time, they conclude, the answer is "No one." Universities usually only address the issue when they must---when adjunct faculty mobilize to form a union, for example, or when scandal erupts. Along the way, the reactive, "damage control" model of adjunct management has ensured that there is little meaningful, constructive study or discussion---within or across universities---of what the rise in adjunct faculty actually means for educational quality, academic freedom, or governance.
For example, some say adjuncts are better teachers than research-oriented tenure-track professors; others say they are forced to secure their popularity---and thus their job security---by pleasing students with artificially inflated grades. But lack of information renders the debate largely speculative. The same sort of impasse arises with academic freedom. Is it possible to ensure academic freedom without tenure? If not, what will become of free inquiry in the age of the adjunct? If so, what will become of tenure? There are impassioned opinions on all sides. But the discussion is mired in misinformation and the selective argumentation of advocacy-driven campaigns.
When it comes to governance, things are no better. At the department level, there is confusion and inconsistency about whether adjunct faculty should participate in shared governance. At the institutional level, things have not even progressed to the point of confusion: presidents, provosts, and trustees have, for the most part, failed to ensure that this growing corps of college teachers is properly understood and properly managed.
Cross and Goldenberg stress that non-tenure-track faculty are here to stay. This segment of the professoriate is no longer "adjunct" or "contingent" to the tenure-track standing faculty, despite the language commonly used to describe it. Consequently, they argue, academia should address the complex constellation of issues non-tenure-track teachers raise---from employment conditions to academic freedom to educational quality to governance to the costs of competing for status and rank---in a systematic, institutionally coherent manner. Presidents, provosts, and trustees must make sure that their institutions are actually gathering the data they need to make informed, wise decisions about whether, when, and how to employ adjunct faculty.
Such self-study, Cross and Goldenberg observe, might reveal some surprising things. Among them: the numbers of non-tenure-track teachers may in fact be even higher than those currently reported. And yet, the authors suggest, it's also possible that the pervasive image of the impoverished, exploited freeway flyer might require some updating. Cross and Goldenberg find that, contrary to prevailing mythology, many adjuncts do have benefits, offices, and a reasonable degree of job security, at least at elite schools. At Duke, dedicated non-tenure-track teachers may be appointed as professors of practice (POP). POPs begin with a three-year contract at the assistant level and advance to associate and full professors of practice, with contracts extending up to ten years. Full-time POPs receive full faculty benefits, may serve on the academic council, and may compete for paid leave. At Northwestern, non-tenure-track faculty may climb a similar ladder, from lecturer to senior lecturer to college lecturer. At Washington University, lecturers become senior lecturers after five years, at which time they receive tuition benefits for their children.
Readers may wonder what all this means for less prestigious, less wealthy schools. One suspects that at many colleges, public universities, and community colleges, the rise in adjunct teachers is a lot less tied to the rankings game and a lot more tied to economic bottom lines. In such settings, the solutions developed by Duke, Washington, and others may be fiscally impossible---particularly at a time when even billion-dollar systems such as the University of California are proposing substantial pay cuts for standing faculty.
Still, Off-Track Profs presents a refreshingly sober, evenhanded examination of a volatile, increasingly pressing subject. Focused on the careful gathering of facts and the comprehensive analysis of causes, it models how administrators across the country might begin to study what non-tenure-track teachers are doing on their campuses---and to formulate policy grounded in a knowledgeable understanding of the role such teachers play in their particular institutional culture. Cutting through the stereotypes and the confrontational stances that tend to dominate discussions of non-tenure-track teachers, Off-Track Profs charts a way forward that stresses institutional accountability and procedural clarity. As such, the book may actually be laying the groundwork for win-win solutions that benefit faculty (tenured and not), students, and administrators alike.
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Maurice Black and Erin O'Connor are research fellows at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.]]>
Standpoint Theory Arrives At The Courttag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2009:/originals//6.27432009-06-23T20:10:12Z2009-06-23T13:46:37ZBy Daphne Patai One of the key contributions of second-wave feminism to the academy is what is known as "standpoint theory," which asserts that members of oppressed groups have special "ways of knowing" based on their group's unique experiences. The...Anthony Paletta
By Daphne Patai
One of the key contributions of second-wave feminism to the academy is what is known as "standpoint theory," which asserts that members of oppressed groups have special "ways of knowing" based on their group's unique experiences. The problem standpoint theory attempted to address is how to respond to the apparent monopoly of knowledge and power held by men (usually called "white men" in these discussions). Since women were for centuries excluded from education and professional activities, how could they gain traction for their views and rapidly enhance their present status?
The easiest way to deal with this problem is to consider the source of an idea an adequate gauge of its validity and significance. This is known as the "genetic fallacy," a form of ad hominem or ad feminam argument. Valorizing the viewpoints of hitherto marginalized groups is an obvious instance of this fallacy. It also discourages challenges to one's point of view, since any challenge can be represented as an attempt to demean that group's experience, out of which it presumably speaks.
In the more academic-sounding form of "standpoint epistemology," by which one's racial or sexual identity provides a person with experiences that define how he or she thinks, deference is routinely paid to the special perspectives of minorities. While not wanting to get embroiled in biological essentialism or in the view that acquired experiences are inherited (or transmitted through some sort of collective unconscious), proponents of standpoint theory have turned it into a staple of feminism over the last few decades, and it has been of great utility as well to other identity groups. Its objective, as feminist scholar Sandra Harding, one of the founders of feminist standpoint theory, puts it, is to unearth the special powers that women's lived experience can offer, the special knowledge that they can thus claim.
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Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays is filled with challenges to the notion that a perspective rooted in group identity strengthens intellectual work. Haack considers that "[t]he rubric 'feminist epistemology' is incongruous on its face, in somewhat the way of, say, 'Republican epistemology.'" She explains:
The profusion of incompatible themes proposed as "feminist epistemology" itself speaks against the idea of a distinctively female cognitive style. But even if there were such a thing, the case for feminist epistemology would require further argument to show that women's "ways of knowing" . . . represent better procedures of inquiry or subtler standards of justification than the male. And, sure enough, we are told that insights into the theory of knowledge are available to women which are not available, or not easily available to men.
Haack does not hesitate to dismiss "the egregious assumption that one thinks with one's skin or one's sex organs," and points out that "this form of argument, when applied to the concepts of evidence, truth, etc., is not only fallacious; it is also pragmatically self-undermining. . . . For if there were no genuine inquiry, no objective evidence, we couldn't know what theories are such that their being accepted would conduce to women's interests, nor what women's interests are." But as Haack notes, "the politicization of inquiry, . . . whether in the interests of good political values or bad, is always epistemologically unsound."
Furthermore, as I have argued in the past, without some general principles that rest outside of particular identity politics, no minority group could ever hope to win the support of the majority If the majority acted as the minority seeks to, and used merely the same standards, the minority would always lose out. For unless minority group politics stay fixated at the level of blackmail and coercion, they can succeed in the long-term only by appealing to non-identity-based arguments.
In the end, then, identity groups have no choice but to rest their case on universalist notions of evidence and logic, as well as values of justice, fairness, and accountability not defined according to the limits of identity politics. Without such overarching principles, what we can expect is precisely what one finds in the world of identity politics: an endless division of groups into smaller and smaller identity units, depending on a few shared characteristics that are always in danger of dissolving. No one, in short, has an unassailable identity.
And so we come to Judge Sonia Sotomayor. When President Obama focused on empathy and lived experience as crucial to his nominee for the Supreme Court, academic ideologues must have rejoiced. For an emphasis on "the authority of experience" tirelessly elaborated in identity politics, has been a staple of feminist pedagogy for decades now, along with the assumption that "caring" is somehow specific to women, especially to minority women. The only thing that's new is the appearance of this mode of thinking at the level of the White House. And when the president's nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, is found to have repeatedly stated her own expectation that a wise woman, especially a wise Latina woman, would no doubt arrive at better legal decisions than a wise male judge, she, too, is merely voicing a view commonly held in the contemporary academy and embraced also in some law schools under the name of "critical legal theory" and its offshoot "critical race theory."
Real time and energy are required to respond to the specifics of an argument or perspective in a rational and thoughtful manner. How much more economical it is to be able to dismiss positions held by one's opponents simply by referring to their identity, while asserting the superiority of one's own perspective, rooted in personal experience. But while seeming to depend on personal experience, standpoint theory further shields itself from serious scrutiny by magnifying that experience and drawing on the ancestral or "community" history lurking behind it. The individual who utilizes standpoint theory rests her claims for a superior perspective on her ability to speak "as a" member of a particular identity group, just as Sonia Sotomayor has done.
In an essay published in 1950, Bertrand Russell referred rather scathingly to the belief in what he called "the superior virtue of the oppressed" - never, in his view, a sound basis for a claim to equality. And yet that is indeed the underlying belief still prevalent today whenever identity politics is played. The appeal to group identity is useful as a shorthand way of affirming the claims of the oppressed - or formerly oppressed. It is what drives the unseemly competition for most-oppressed status.
In practice, however, standpoint theory is applied opportunistically, which reveals that, at heart, it is merely a political weapon, not a philosophically coherent position. Clarence Thomas, for example, was not afforded the protections of standpoint theory. His identity and personal experience as a member of an oppressed minority were readily discarded by his critics, who cared only whether or not he was on "their side" politically. Nor have standpoint theories done much for Condoleezza Rice.
Perhaps Judge Sotomayor's legal decisions will be neither enhanced nor hampered by her status as a self-identified "wise Latina woman." But these words of hers are by no means a personal quirk, coming out of nowhere. She is, in fact, merely piggy-backing on a notion commonly found in the academy today.
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Daphne Patai teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author, most recently, of What Price Utopia? Essays on Ideological Policing, Feminism, and Academic Affairs (2008).
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The Cambridge Empire Strikes Backtag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2009:/originals//6.27272009-06-16T21:34:29Z2009-06-16T21:53:27ZBy Harvey Silverglate With Kyle Smeallie Harvard University may be losing money like a hard-luck high-roller, but the Vegas tagline (what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas) certainly does not apply: what happens at Harvard reaches well beyond the Cambridge...Anthony Paletta
By Harvey Silverglate With Kyle Smeallie
Harvard University may be losing money like a hard-luck high-roller, but the Vegas tagline (what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas) certainly does not apply: what happens at Harvard reaches well beyond the Cambridge confines. For better or for worse, many schools follow in Harvard's footsteps. What better place, then, to effect change in American higher education than a place where other schools---at least until the recent economic meltdown---have been green with Crimson envy?
Such was the premise behind my insurgent campaign for a seat on the Board of Overseers, one of Harvard's two governing boards. Dismayed by the lack of principled oversight (a key reason, I suspect, for Harvard's recent financial woes) and the general illiberal culture of his alma mater, I spent months trying to convince alumni to elect me to the board. In early June, however, Harvard officials informed me that my bid for a six-year term on the 30-member board came up a bit short.
In defeat, I learned the very same lesson that Harvard Law School alum Barack H. Obama (Law School class of 1991) learned when he ran as a petition candidate in the 1991 Overseers election: Input from outsiders---those unwilling to place collegiality over candor---is unwanted.]]>
The Harvard Law Record, as well as by the undergraduate daily, The Harvard Crimson. The Boston Globe praised the "shake-things-up campaign" in an April 26 editorial, and the petition candidates appeared by themselves---Harvard, although invited, would not send a representative---on the regional television news program "Greater Boston with Emily Rooney." Word began to get around.
Then suddenly (although, in retrospect, predictably) the pre-election issue of the university's main alumni magazine, Harvard Magazine, appeared with a full-page color ad. "VOTE For the HARVARD ALUMNI ASSOCIATION SLATE for Board of Overseers," it read. A little research discovered that such an advertisement, paid for by former HAA President Charles Egan, ran some $18,360. Further, Roger Ferguson, the outgoing President of the Overseers, sent an email to Harvard alumni, praising the "remarkable mix of candor and collegiality" with which the board functioned.
Ferguson's message seemed to Freedman and me, as well as our supporters, to be a slightly-veiled admonition that alumni should vote for candidates on the official HAA slate. I sent an email to Ferguson asking that Freedman and I be allowed to send our own message to alumni via the official university-maintained email list. In typical banal bureaucratese, the request was denied.
In the end, some 30,383 alumni voted. I garnered 11,700 votes, falling 1,646 votes short of ganing a seat, while Freedman got 10,174. What the empire may not realize, however, is the effect of watering down its elections. While Harvard's power brokers insist on keeping the board full of insiders, the electorate---approximately 330,000 degree-holders---have, by and large, tuned out. Crunch the numbers: the turn-out was less than ten percent of eligible voters. And the numbers have stayed consistently flat for at least the past decade.
The prevailing wisdom among most Harvard alums is to toss out the ballot---they perhaps figure it's another request to cut a check. For those who bother to open the envelope, they are essentially choosing who will rubber stamp the administration's decisions. Freedman and I explained we would resist such "collegiality" if elected, but it's a good guess that few people even read their respective 250-word candidacy statements.
As decision-making has gone unquestioned, Harvard's problems have persisted and even gotten worse. The portfolio suffered an officially reported loss of 22 percent in the last four months of 2008, with further steep losses rumored for the beginning of 2009, along with some questions raised as to the prudence of its investment strategies and tactics. A parallel question naturally arises as to whether the governing bodies exercised their duty to follow and question the university administration.
Harvard's Administrative Board continued to punish students for arguable non-violations of university rules, or for violations of vague rules, via procedures that would be deemed unfair, even outrageous, by most people outside of the ivy gates. A scandal involving the shooting-death of a local alleged marijuana dealer in one of the undergraduate dorms, and Harvard's unexplained (to its community and the public, at least) decision to bar two seniors allegedly connected to the event from graduating, raised the question of whether the university treated its accused students fairly or instead worried only about quashing challenges to its own public relations agenda. "In the end," I told the Boston Globe, "Harvard is interested in protecting itself."
Harvard's path, and its insistence on hearing from only pat-on-the-back insiders, is analogous to the Star Wars trilogy. For the first few hundred years, it's Star Wars, the establishment of greatness. But the institution, perhaps inevitably, begins to decay and give way to institutional corruption, at which time reformers try to step in. But then The Empire Strikes Back. One can only hope that, in the end, we see The Return of the Jedi.
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Harvey Silverglate, lawyer and writer, is co-author of The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses, and is currently Chairman of the Board of Directors of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (www.thefire.org). Kyle Smeallie, a former news editor of the Boston College Heights, is Silverglate's research assistant and served as his campaign manager for the 2009 Harvard Board of Overseers election.]]>
The Illinois Admissions Scandaltag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2009:/originals//6.27172009-06-11T20:24:40Z2009-06-11T02:01:59ZBy Richard D. Kahlenberg Illinois, the state where Senate seats are sometimes sold, has now scandalized higher education with the revelation that hundreds of applicants to the University of Illinois were placed on a special "clout" list, many receiving favorable...Anthony Paletta
By Richard D. Kahlenberg
Illinois, the state where Senate seats are sometimes sold, has now scandalized higher education with the revelation that hundreds of applicants to the University of Illinois were placed on a special "clout" list, many receiving favorable treatment. According to a series of investigative reports by The Chicago Tribune, state legislators, university trustees, and former Gov. Rod Blagojevich successfully pressured University of Illinois officials to admit less qualified applicants, including a relative of influence peddler Antoin (Tony) Rezko.
Examining email correspondence obtained through the state Freedom of Information Act, the Tribune found that decisions to deny admissions were reversed through a secret appeals process following intervention by top officials. In some cases, notification of admissions for "clouted" candidates with dubious credentials were delayed until the end of the school year in order to minimize attention from more qualified classmates who were denied admissions. In the wake of the publicity, the university has temporarily suspended the clout list and Governor Pat Quinn established an independent panel to investigate the practice.
Illinois state legislators are not the first to push for special treatment in university admissions for favored candidates. In the 1990s, a Los Angeles Timesinvestigation revealed that then-California governor Pete Wilson, and other state officials and prominent citizens made requests on behalf of applicants to institutions such as UCLA and U.C. Berkeley. These applicants, who were placed on a special "VIP" list, had a significantly higher rate of acceptance than regular applicants. Indeed, between 1980 and 1996, more than 200 VIP students were admitted after initially being rejected.
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Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden detailed the systematic preferences provided to applicants whose parents were wealthy alumni, potential donors, or simply famous, in his riveting book, The Price of Admission. A Notre Dame official told Golden, "the poor schmuck who has to get in on his own has to walk on water."
Clout admissions at public universities, however, are even more outrageous than these other preferences. A rich alumnus who threatens to withhold donations if his son is not admitted to a private university is bad enough. But a legislator, who holds the purse strings for a public university, betrays the public trust when he uses that power to push particular candidates for admissions at taxpayer-funded institutions. In one case, Illinois legislators seeking favorable treatment for a student who was rejected said they were considering drafting legislation to require "automatic admissions standards for the university," a requirement university officials feared. The decision to reject the student was reversed in a clear abuse of public power. Significantly, requests for special treatment were often funneled through University of Illinois lobbyists, the very people who sought university funding from legislators.
In response to the crisis, the University of Illinois President, B. Joseph White - who had personally passed on Gov. Blagojevich's support for Rezko's relative - flatly declared, "all admissions to the University of Illinois should be based on merit." The sentiment, though dubious as a description of reality, is, in fact, what the American people appear to want in college admissions and what universities should strive to achieve in practice.
The commitment to merit, quaint as it may seem to sophisticated university officials, helps explain strong public opposition to racial preferences in higher education. Affirmative action - back in the news again as U.S. Senators seek to examine Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's views on the question - remains highly unpopular, according to a new Quinnipiac Poll. The survey found that by a 55%-36% margin, Americans believe affirmative action programs that give minorities a preference in hiring, promotion and college admissions, should be abolished.
By contrast, polls have consistently shown that by a 2:1 margin, Americans favor giving a preference in admissions to low-income students of all races, presumably because such consideration is not seen as a deviation from merit but rather a better fulfillment of it. Considering what obstacles a low-income student has faced combined with consideration of her academic record, is to many Americans a better indicator of a student's long-run potential than SAT scores and grades divorced of context.
Of course, this type of reasoning hardly justifies clout or legacy preferences, which tend to help the most advantaged. Not surprisingly, a 2004 Chronicle of Higher Education polls found that 75% of Americans oppose legacy preferences in college admissions.
One question conservatives in particular must ask themselves is why so many voice strong opposition to affirmative action and (presumably) to clout admissions, but not to legacy preferences? There are exceptions, like the Reason Foundation's Shikha Dalmia, but as Dalmia points out, most conservatives are either supportive or silent on the issue. More than a hundred books have been written on affirmative action (including one by me) but not a single volume is devoted solely to legacy admissions - a vacuum that The Century Foundation hopes to fill next year when it will publish a book of essays on this practice.
It is significant to note that all three sets of preferences - clout admissions, legacy preferences and affirmative action - ultimately subordinate the interests of individual applicants to the larger interests of the university. Clout preferences may help sustain higher levels of public funding for universities; alumni preferences claim to boost private funding; and affirmative action provides a racially diverse learning environment. Under this world view, students are admitted not because there is anything intrinsically worthy about them but because they fit the needs of the university at a particular point in time. Some might argue that these are reasonable real-world compromises, but such considerations are strikingly out of touch with deeply held and important beliefs about the American Dream. Most Americans seem to see college admissions as rewarding talent and hard work and justifiably believe certain students deserve to be admitted over others.
If any good is to come out of the University of Illinois's tawdry clout list, it may be that public outrage will help university leaders to recognize that President White's statement - that "merit" should be the basis of university admissions - shouldn't be dismissed as a naive platitude. Rather, it is a value to which the public may and should demand adherence with increasingly intensity.
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Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, is author of The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action, and editor of a forthcoming Century Foundation volume on legacy preferences.]]>
The Murder At Harvardtag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2009:/originals//6.26902009-06-04T20:10:35Z2009-06-03T22:24:48ZBy John McWhorter A few weeks ago a teenaged pot dealer was shot dead in a Harvard dormitory. That alone was depressing enough. However, Harvard suspects a black senior, Chanequa Campbell, of an association with the pot dealer -- Justin...Anthony Paletta
By John McWhorter
A few weeks ago a teenaged pot dealer was shot dead in a Harvard dormitory.
That alone was depressing enough. However, Harvard suspects a black senior, Chanequa Campbell, of an association with the pot dealer -- Justin Cosby, also black -- and last week was barred from her dormitory and prevented from graduating. Campbell grew up in the depressed Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, but was a star student, a product of elite prep school Packer Collegiate Institiute, and four years ago was celebrated for her achievement.
The details have yet to be released. But one of the three men who planned the murder, and a suspect in the shooting itself, Jabrai Copney, is a songwriter from New York who was dating another Harvard undergrad named Brittany Smith who also grew up in Brooklyn. Copney and Smith are black.]]>
Boston Globe that "there needs to be a lot of work thinking about how you help kids manage the transition in a setting where you're going to be rubbing shoulders with really wealthy people."
But what does that mean? How would Harvard teach black students from poor neighborhoods how to "manage the transition" to an environment full of affluent white kids any more than they do now?
What, precisely, is there to teach? What wine goes with chicken? Dialect coaching? Unlikely, given that Campbell is clearly well-spoken. A six-week music appreciation program on white groups like Coldplay? What about that these days even affluent white students love the same hip hop Campbell does?
To what, then, is Jacqueline Rivers or anyone who says anything similar referring? Nothing real. It's a statement typical of the "dance" Shelby Steele eloquently writes about, in which it is eternally whites' job to seek redemption for America's racist past while for blacks, as Steele put it in a recent Wall Street Journal piece, "the feeling of being aggrieved by American bigotry is far more a matter of identity than of actual aggrievement."
What, for example, do we make of Campbell's claim that she has been targeted because "I'm black and I'm poor and I'm from New York and I walk a certain way and I keep my clothes a certain way"? Brittany Smith, after all, is black and from Brooklyn too, and I will venture, especially if she was dating someone of Copney's, shall we say, demographic, that she is no Malia Obama, overlapping to some relevant extent with Campbell in the kinds of traits Campbell was referring or alluding to.
The idea that Harvard was at fault becomes even harder to process when we consider the conflict between teaching students like Campbell to "manage the transition" and the noble idea that students like her contribute "diversity" to the campus. There would be a fine line between teaching students like Campbell how to "manage" the differences between them and Caitlin and Justin and teaching them how to be like Caitlin and Justin.
Last time I checked, the idea was that Caitlin and Justin were the ones who were supposed to do the "managing," with taking in the "diversity" of students like Campbell as a key component of a liberal arts education.
"Students of all kinds should work together in managing the cultural differences between them" would be the administrator-speak answer - which looks great in print, but again, what, precisely would this mean in practice? What programs could be set in place to do better than the current situation at Harvard, where Campbell was apparently valued by non-black students for a warm, outgoing personality despite her "background" and, for the record, was not prosecuted for a case of check fraud during her first year (perhaps allowing for the "diversity" of her background)?
Chanequa Campbell (and Brittany Smith, of whom we will likely hear more later) demonstrate not that Harvard has an under-the-board problem with racism, but that cultural legacies die hard for all of our good intentions. Campbell is clearly a star, as likely is Smith. However, they remain to some extent culturally rooted in the neighborhoods they grew up in, where activity on the wrong side of the law is, sadly, a familiar sight to all.
There's no need to assail either woman as criminals themselves, and the comment board chatter along the lines of "You can take the ****** out of the neighborhood, but ..." are contemptible. Yet, the fact is that Campbell and Smith lacked the basic sense of recoil from people of shady inclinations that most Harvard students have. The typical Harvard undergrad knows no one who gives the slightest indication of being capable of casual murder, or even of owning a weapon. A person in Bedford-Stuyvesant is much more likely to know such people. For Campbell and Smith, four years in Cambridge did not change that.
The case is reminiscent of the one in New York in 1985 where Edmund Perry, black, 17, fresh from Exeter and on his way to Stanford, was shot dead by an off-duty policeman he tried to rob with his brother, a sophomore engineer at Cornell who fled. Robbing a passerby on impulse was not as foreign a concept to these Harlem brothers despite their promising futures. "We got a D.T.!" Edmund's brother Jonah yelled as he ran away, as familiar with the local slang for "detective" as someone who had stayed behind on the corners.
Edmund Perry himself harbored the idea that whites were in some way responsible for adjusting to his blackness, having stated in the Exeter yearbook "It's a pity that we part on less than a friendly basis. Work to adjust yourself to a changing world, as will I." But whatever he expected those Exeter scions to do by way of adjustment, it would appear that neither he nor Chanequa Campbell and Brittany Smith managed to do their share of "adjustment."
The simple truth is that any meaningful "transition management" will entail teaching Harvard's students of poor background out of a sense of identity that includes hanging out with questionable characters from home. Harvard's black studies department is named after W.E.B. DuBois, celebrated for his plangent exploration of black people's "double consciousness" between American and Negro, "two warring ideals in one dark body." Okay, but Du Bois wouldn't think twice about associating with riffraff.
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John McWhorter is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute
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"Study, Study, Study" - A Bad Career Movetag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2009:/originals//6.26812009-06-02T21:16:10Z2009-06-02T04:00:30ZBy Ward Connerly About five years ago, shortly before my term ended as a Regent of the University of California (UC), I was having a casual conversation with a very high-ranking UC administrator about a proposal that he was developing...Anthony Paletta
By Ward Connerly
About five years ago, shortly before my term ended as a Regent of the University of California (UC), I was having a casual conversation with a very high-ranking UC administrator about a proposal that he was developing to increase "diversity" at UC in a manner that would comply with the dictates of California's Constitution and the prohibition against race, gender and ethnic preferences.
As I listened to his proposal, I asked him why he considered it important to tinker with admissions instead of just letting the chips fall where they may. In an unguarded moment, he told me that unless the university took steps to "guide" admissions decisions, UC would be dominated by Asians. When I asked, "What would be wrong with that?" I got an answer that speaks volumes about the underlying philosophy at many universities with regard to Asian enrollment.
The UC administrator told me that Asians are "too dull - they study, study, study." He then said, "If you ever say I said this, I will have to deny it." I won't betray the individual's anonymity because to do so would put him in a world of trouble - and he would, indeed, deny having said it. Yet, it is time to confront the not-so-subtle hand of discrimination against Asians that masquerades as "building diversity" at many elite college campuses.]]>
Ward Connerly is president of the American Civil Rights Institute and a former Regent of the University of California.
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On The Right In The Land Of The Tenured Lefttag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2009:/originals//6.26692009-05-28T19:15:25Z2009-05-28T13:59:10ZBy Harry Stein What acid rain is to our irreplaceable forests, lakes and streams, leftist dogma is to American higher education. In every corner of the land, it has turned once-flourishing departments of English and history into barren wastelands where...Anthony Paletta
By Harry Stein
What acid rain is to our irreplaceable forests, lakes and streams, leftist dogma is to American higher education. In every corner of the land, it has turned once-flourishing departments of English and history into barren wastelands where only the academic equivalent of cockroaches can thrive. Its corrosive poison - infantile anti-Americanism, hatred of capitalism, scorn for ideological pluralism - spreads far beyond the narrow confines of its source, polluting popular culture, public education, the very laws under which we live. Absorbed in sufficiently high doses, it is morally and intellectually fatal.
While the mind-boggling damage done to higher education by multicultural activists, diversity-mongers, and all-around leftist jerks is a subject very much on the minds of conservatives, liberals seem truly not to care. More precisely, they actually regard it as progress. Shakespeare elbowed aside by Maya Angelou? Hey, education's got to change with the times, just like the Constitution. Mandatory sensitivity training for incoming freshmen to instill appreciation of transgendered persons? What kind of monster has a problem with sensitivity? Conservative students getting charged with hate speech for daring to take on affirmative action or women's studies zealots? Exactly - that kind of monster. Even the occasional report in the mainstream press of epidemic ideological conformity on the nation's campuses fails to elicit a reaction. So what if, as the Washington Post reports, 80 percent of faculty in America's English literature, philosophy, and political science departments describe themselves as liberal and a mere 5 percent as conservative - with ratios of eighteen to one at Brown, twenty-six to one at Cornell, and sixteen to one at UCLA - or that a study after the 2004 election showed that the Harvard faculty gave John Kerry thirty-one dollars for every dollar donated to George Bush, with the ratios rising to forty-three to one at MIT and three hundred to one at Princeton? (And you think when someone gets around to a comprehensive analysis of the 2008 campaign donations, that will be any less lopsided?) For liberals, the only important question remains what it's always been: How can I get my kid into one of those places?
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naivete. "The corruption argument never gets you anywhere. Either they're so ideological they genuinely don't see it, or they're so cynical they don't care. It's like thinking you're going to embarrass Claude Rains in Casablanca. Not that he hadn't been warned.
His old advisor from Yale, herself a committed feminist, "yelled at me on the phone. 'Don't contest this,' she said. 'If you know what's good for you, you'll just withdraw and walk away.' I mean, there was this implied Mafioso threat. But she was right. I got a reputation as a troublemaker." He pauses. "The fact is, if I'd been a woman and lodged such an accusation, it would've scared them to death. Even if I'd been totally wrong, they'd have either given me the job or a fat settlement. But as a white male, and a known conservative, I was dead." Nor, obviously, was he helped by his choice of specialty, eighteenth-century European art. "It's not exactly trendy. There's not much room there to get in gay theory." He laughs. "Though I suppose there are those who would try."
After that, there were a string of one-year visiting professorships - at the University of Delaware, Brown, and Princeton, plus a year in Lyon, teaching in French - but never another tenure track job. "I kept applying," he says, "but I kept getting aced out by a woman or a minority. The system is medieval, a culture of powerful, interwoven alliances - gays and lesbians and straight Marxists and feminists - and they do the recruiting and hiring. They'll find a zillion excuses to obscure the real reasons: 'the scholarship's a little flimsy,' 'it's not a good fit,' or whatever they want. There's no alliance of straight conservatives, or even old-fashioned, open-minded liberals."
Along the way, he saw fools and incompetents getting ahead by the boatload, and cronyism that would have embarrassed Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall, as well as more fear than he saw as a Marine back in Vietnam. "In my field, in particular, there was open contempt for straight people - they'd be off handedly referred to as 'breeders.' This is the milieu you're in as a conservative - or just as a reasonable person. It was like being in the old Soviet Union. You had to be constantly vigilant about what you said and to whom you said it. The only way to express yourself honestly was by samizdat."
So why did he put himself through it for so long? "What can I tell you?" he offers rather sheepishly. "I love teaching, even if doing it means climbing into a playpen full of angry, infantile narcissists."
The Cold War historian Ron Radosh started on the opposite end of the political spectrum from Garry, but he too was done in, and far more publicly, by what, on the modern campus, is that most dangerous of traits: intellectual honesty. Having come of age on the left, he was persuaded by extensive research that iconic victim Julius Rosenberg was in fact guilty of the espionage for which he'd been executed, and said as much in a 1983 book, The Rosenberg File, that he co-authored. He expected a vigorous dialogue on the subject; instead, he found himself almost universally condemned by his colleagues for daring to write such a thing at all. "They'd have nothing to do with me," he says. "I wasn't an honest researcher. I was a traitor to the cause. I was at a conference not long afterward and Paul Buell, a leftist historian I'd known for years, walked away when I went to say hello. Later that night, I saw him in the empty lobby, and he said, 'Now I can say hello to you, because nobody's watching. But, seriously, you are a running dog of imperialism.'" Radosh laughs. "There was this other woman from Hofstra, Carolyn Eisenberg, who came up to me and said, 'I just want you to know you used to be one of our heroes and models, but you've betrayed us all; what you did was horrible.' At that, she started crying."
To these and innumerable others in his field, Radosh has remained a pariah ever since: "It never ends. They don't forget. As a result of that, I was blackballed, could never get any other really good job." He cites one episode as especially telling, an interview with the entire history faculty at George Washington University. "They didn't even bother to pretend. There was no discussion of my credentials as an historian, or my writing, just my politics. It was: 'Why are you right-wing?' and 'Why do you write these books saying these victims of McCarthyism were guilty?' Around the table they went, one after another condemning me for my politics.I ended up getting two votes from the whole department." Moreover, says Radosh, surveying the academic scene, he sees no prospect of things getting better any time soon. "I was looking recently at the annual catalogue of the Organization of American Historians, the branch that specializes in U.S. history, and it was like reading the names of the Communist Party annual conference. One hundred percent left-wing and anti-American. Every paper was about class and gender and the oppression of women by the patriarchy."
Stephen H. Balch, president emeritus of the National Association of Scholars, a group of conservatives in academia who came together in the Eighties to fight the scourge of political correctness on the nation's campuses, confirms that assessment. "We imagined," he writes of the group's founding, "that the grown-ups on campus only needed to be reminded of their responsibilities to put things right. After all, how could serious scholars permit higher education to descend into speech codes, racial quotas, and political indoctrination? Or preside over the trashing of the core curriculum, Western civilization, and the American founding? "Boy, were we naive! Today we have Ward Churchill, Sami Al- Arian, the Duke 88, as well as entirely 'postmodernized' academic programs and university requirements, devoted to ensuring that students, who may know little else, know loads about diversity, feminism, global warming, the failures of capitalism, and the hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson."
So the horror stories keep on coming, only now the protagonists are a new generation of conservatives. "I really never believed it could be this bad," admits a young conservative historian named Mark Moyar, on the job market for five years and still looking. A summa cum laude graduate of Harvard, with a doctorate from Cambridge and a highly regarded book to his credit, at this writing he has been turned down for nearly two hundred tenure-track jobs. "I mean, I figured there'd at least be jobs for the token conservative, so that if I worked hard and did a really exceptional job, I'd slip in. At this point, it's just bizarre - especially seeing the caliber of people who are getting hired. In place after place, the Baby Boomers in senior positions demand total and absolute ideological conformity and, if anything, the younger scholars who came up under their tutelage are even worse."
It is surely a vast understatement to say that Moyar's book hasn't exactly helped. Entitled Triumph Forsaken, it argues that the Vietnam war was not only winnable, but should have been won. Then again, who knows?
How do the tenured radicals who run liberal arts departments justify this state of affairs? "We try to hire the best, smartest people available," explains Robert Brandon, the chairman of Duke's philosophy department. "If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire."
Can this sinking ship be turned around? Probably the most reckless bookie wouldn't take that bet. Still, if anything’s worth that old college try. . .
Recent years have seen at least one encouraging development: the success of the James Madison Program in American Ideals at Princeton. Created in 2000, under the direction of Robert George, the school's McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence (and presumably the one in that three hundred to one ratio), the Madison Program focuses on American constitutional law and Western political tradition. As Stanley Kurtz observes, with the University of Chicago having lately dropped the ball, "Princeton is rapidly becoming the key quality alternative for producing a new generation of conservative intellectuals."
What's key is that George raises independent funding for the program, insulating it from the pressures that the well-organized campus left would surely otherwise bring to bear to undermine it. In this sense and others, Madison has been a model for conservatives at other institutions seeking to establish similar free-thought zones. To date, no fewer than ten such oases of intellectual pluralism are either going concerns or in the works, at such schools as Brown, Georgetown, NYU, Boston College, and the University of Colorado; the conservative Manhattan Institute, through its Veritas Fund, has given $2,500,000 to help them along. True, it doesn't sound like much -- not in contrast to the hundreds of schools turning out graduates who've never met a liberal dogma they didn't like; or, more to the point, thought to question. But if there is to be a rebirth of academic freedom, look for those programs -- and new ones to come -- to produce its leaders.
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This is a modified chapter from Harry Stein's book, "I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican", due June 22nd from Encounter Books. Stein, an author and journalist, is a contributing editor at City Journal.
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War Over A Trojan Horsetag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2009:/originals//6.26622009-05-26T23:28:16Z2009-05-25T23:41:33ZBy Robert L. Paquette A few weeks ago, the Delta Phi fraternity at Hamilton College distributed on campus fliers welcoming students to attend "the 53rd annual Mexican Night" party. The invitation, which was intended to be symbolic of spring-break excursions...Anthony Paletta
By Robert L. Paquette
A few weeks ago, the Delta Phi fraternity at Hamilton College distributed on campus fliers welcoming students to attend "the 53rd annual Mexican Night" party. The invitation, which was intended to be symbolic of spring-break excursions to Cancun and other vacation spots south of the border, contained the image of a Trojan Horse in the shape of a Mexican pinata towering over an armed guard in front of a stout U. S. border fence. The words "Proper Documentation Required," a spoof of the usual language for proper identification at parties that serve alcohol, ran to the left of the image. In a flash, student activists and their faculty allies had mobilized in ginned-up outrage to protest this latest alleged example of institutionalized racism and to demand action by the administration and trustees on a laundry list of particulars that includes a speech code (masked as a "social honor code"), mandatory diversity courses, and the establishment of a multi-million dollar cultural education center to provide "safe spaces" for aggrieved student groups. Administrators competed with each other to see how artistically they could grovel to protesting students. Acting President Joseph Urgo and the college's "diversity ombudsman" called the fraternity to account and pressured its leaders to cancel the party. In an all-campus email, Urgo claimed to have extracted from the contrite fraternity leadership an expansive confession that the image not only "hurt and offended many members of the Hamilton community," but that it "trivializes a contemporary political crisis and reduces the complex history and culture of Mexico to a simple stereotype."
Urgo and other administrators then joined protesting faculty and protesting students in holding a candlelight vigil. Speeches, poetry, and spiritual songs of the Kumbaya variety expressed feelings of solidarity with the disrespected, vulnerable, and marginalized on campus and around the world. Fraternity leaders rained apologies from all directions to no avail. The dean of students, standing in like a kind of sacrificial lamb, bleated enough mea culpas to elicit God's forgiveness of a rash of mortal sins. Unforgiving students, however, led by a group called the Social Justice Initiative, followed by commandeering another faculty meeting. Looking anything but vulnerable and threatened, they seized the microphone and threateningly wagged the finger of blame at college officials for their "lack of response" and "lack of action" to the fraternity's benightedness. Dozens of sympathetic faculty, including leaders of the Diversity and Social Justice Project, signed on to a proposed resolution that would signal to posterity "Our profound appreciation and affection... for our international students and students of color who may have felt marginalized by recent events on campus." The faculty eventually passed overwhelmingly a resolution that supported the creation of a cultural education center on campus, that urged---Hamilton College's recently imposed open curriculum notwithstanding---mandatory "educational and programmatic initiatives" to intensify diversity training, and that directed administrators to expand the powers of existing harassment and grievance boards to "raise critical awareness of different forms of harassment." Stay tuned, for the full extent of the concessions by the guilt-stricken have yet to be determined. ]]>
Road to Serfdom (1944) should make for particularly good bed-time reading these days, declared that "the prevailing belief in 'social justice' is at present probably the gravest threat to most other values in a free society." Indeed, the mantra-like recitation of this "quasi-religious" term to enlist public support for one or another program of statist wealth redistribution so disturbed him that he promised as a personal mission to make fellow members of the clerisy "thoroughly ashamed" every time they deployed "social justice" in speech or publication. The very concept of social justice, as Hayek pointed out, invariably leads to frequent displays of "sloppy thinking and even dishonesty," not exactly the kind of values that readily comport with the typical college's mission statement.
Activists rarely define the term with any degree of precision, for, in truth, social justice masks a totalitarian impulse behind a utopian enticement. Every totalitarian movement of the twentieth century waved the banner of social justice in ascending to power. The concept, as Hayek insisted, has no meaningful measure in a society comprised of free individuals. Policies invoked in the name of social justice boil down to demands for public submission to the claims of particularly powerful interest groups, what economists call rent-seekers. Human beings, according to social-justice thinkers, exist as so much infinitely malleable clay to be reshaped by statist power. Grow Leviathan; demolish protective mediating institutions between the state and the individual; reconfigure the arrangements of society; and let statist bureaucrats engineer the remains into the New Man.
Hayek's brilliant contemporary, the French political theorist Bertrand de Jouvenel, pointed to the absurdity of such thinking. Not only do the premises of social justice deny the existence of a human nature, the logical outcome of this deadly illusion of the engineered society is that "everything would be arranged justly" so that "no one would have to be just." In fact, social justice thinking eviscerates the older notion of individual, restorative justice--suum cuique (to each his own)-- by creating a nation of free-riders. To the extent that private property weakens and the state socializes externalities, human beings increasingly fail to bear the full consequences of their own actions, making it less likely that they will discriminate between liberty and licentiousness, what is properly their own and what properly belongs to someone else. George Will is not alone in noticing that Team Obama's extension of a command economy to a degree that would have made Adolf Berle and Rexford Tugwell wince has come "cloaked in the raiment of 'economic planning' and 'social justice.'" Is there a connection between campus and beltway cultures? Well, from little acorns, we now know, mighty ACORN grows.
With increasing frequency the term social justice crops up in academic job announcements; a commitment to it, like the possession of an advanced degree, certifies the applicant's bona fides. For classroom use, the University of California at Berkeley held a major social-justice conference in 2008 that showcased the thinking of law professors on such topics as teaching for "social change," teaching for "transformative change," and "How to put Activism into Your Course." Administrators, whether in sympathy with the social-justice agenda or under pressure from its acolytes to embrace it, continue to reallocate resources to fund a broad array of social-justice programs and positions. Administrative "diversity" watch-dogs have as part of their portfolio the construction of social-justice events and programming. Money for these positions often comes at the expense of established courses. At my own institution, Hamilton College, a lavishly funded Diversity and Social Justice Project, complete with its own administrative staff, offers not only more programming than any discipline on campus, but also fellowships to undergraduates "to conduct social justice internships." Such money might underwrite student activity that, say, aids illegal immigrants, secures foot soldiers for Amnesty International, or promotes the agenda of Planned Parenthood. That's what happens when Diversity people are in charge.
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Robert L. Paquette, who teaches history at Hamilton College, is co-founder of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization
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Should The Unemployed Go Back To School?tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2009:/originals//6.26432009-05-20T02:18:35Z2009-05-19T21:32:46ZBy George Leef The last time President Obama gave a speech dealing with education (his address to Congress on February 24), he misrepresented government data to make his case that the country needs to put a significantly higher percentage of...Anthony Paletta
By George Leef
The last time President Obama gave a speech dealing with education (his address to Congress on February 24), he misrepresented government data to make his case that the country needs to put a significantly higher percentage of people through college. (I wrote about his fudging of the figures here)
For that reason, Americans would be wise to look skeptically on his policy pronouncements regarding education. Last week the president gave another speech this time extolling college and especially community college programs as a good path for unemployed people who want to prepare for new and better jobs. He gave a couple of nice anecdotes about people who had greatly improved their lives by taking vocational training courses and he wants to make it easy for unemployed workers to get federal money for education and career training.
In one case, a woman in Maine who had lost her job as a receptionist decided to take courses in nursing, and now makes a good living as a registered nurse. Without question, that's a success story, but it's never a good idea to make government policy on the basis of some individual success stories. That's because policy changes usually have hidden costs. To get a few success stories, we often have a greater number of failure stories.
Before looking at the president's proposed changes, we should examine the broad vision he articulated. Here are his key sentences. "Now is the time to put a new foundation for growth in place - to rebuild our economy, to retrain our workforce, and re-equip the American people. And now is the time to change unemployment from a period of 'wait and see' to a chance for our workers to train and seek the next opportunity..."
That sounds quite uplifting. It sounds obvious and simple. But is it realistic?]]>
George Leef is Director of Research at the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.]]>
When Campuses Became Dysfunctionaltag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2009:/originals//6.26082009-05-13T20:00:01Z2009-05-13T17:03:33ZBy Patrick J. Deneen In recent years the stakes for entrance to the nation's most prestigious colleges and universities have risen to absurd heights, with students (or, their families) not only now paying significant sums for private school tuitions (or...Anthony Paletta
By Patrick J. Deneen
In recent years the stakes for entrance to the nation's most prestigious colleges and universities have risen to absurd heights, with students (or, their families) not only now paying significant sums for private school tuitions (or the entry cost into good school districts, namely expensive housing), SAT training, and coaching for application writing, but increasingly specialized services such as student "branding" - in which students (or, their families) hire "branding" professionals to develop a marketing strategy for "selling" a student to the top universities - and even such morally damnable practices as anonymously informing schools about the reprehensible qualities of competitors who apply to the same university. Clearly things have gotten out of control, but there are very few people - whether inside or outside the university system - who are willing or even desire to rock the boat by pointing out the absurdity of the current state of affairs.
The reason for this conspiracy of silence is that the current system benefits those who are best positioned to take advantage of the root causes for these absurdities: namely, families with the background, wherewithal and education to know how to "game" the system, and the elite colleges and universities whose denizens benefit in all sorts of financial and professional ways from their placement at these exceedingly small number of desirable schools. A confluence of interest bonds these financial and cultural elites in their ambition to maintain the current arrangement, namely a desperation on the parts of the families to put their children in a position to succeed, and the desperation on the parts of these elite institutions to be the exclusive grantors of the imprimatur for such success. In our profoundly competitive world order, in which increasingly few people can hope to emerge as the "winners" in a system that ruthlessly winnows out those who will not join the small club of the international elite - financial, political and cultural - all stops must be removed, all measures pursued, all efforts expended.
In compensation for their success, students are privileged to join an elite group of similarly-situated peers who harbor the same ambitions of worldly success and achievement. They are simultaneously thrown together as colleagues and competitors, a condition that will continue to define their relationships throughout their college years and beyond. The elite institutions are populated by star professors and a steady stream of noteworthy dignitaries, intellectuals, artists, public intellectuals, and so on: exposure to this class - as well as to the future incarnation of these winners in the form of their classmates - constitutes a considerable share of the education that takes place on today's campuses, namely a socialization in success, the learned capacity to emulate their predecessors who have successfully navigated the shoals of hyper-competitive globalization and emerged as its leaders and beneficiaries. ]]>
U.S. News and World Report rankings while tut-tutting the flawed nature of the measurement, declaring that what matters more is a kind of excellence that cannot be defined nor measured. One major contributor to that ranking is the percentage of rejected applicants, which leads elite colleges and universities to advertise their high ranking, publicize the success of their students, and trumpet the huge numbers of annual applicants, all in the effort to stoke more demand, and thus more rejection, resulting in the retention of a high ranking that in turn ensures huge numbers of applicants. Thus an unbreakable cycle is engendered that ensures a permanently high ranking. Admissions personnel decry the manipulation that is evident on every page of every application they receive, announcing that they will strive to grant admission to "authentic" students who occasionally misspell a word or betray some naivete - thus knowingly prompting the creation of a new industry devoted to fostering the image of authenticity among college applicants. Administrators worry endlessly about how they should "brand" their product, how they can continue to stoke demand, how they can increase their pool of applicants increasingly by looking overseas for a new and large pool of potential competitors in the global sweepstakes. The universities appear to exist to maintain (or achieve) prestige, an aim that comports with the ambitions of America's most talented and well-placed students to collect various marks of approval.
Our current universities no longer undertake what they were designed to achieve, and hence have become largely dysfunctional institutions whose activity - classical liberal education - exists in profound tension with their role - conveyors in the global meritocratic marketplace. It should be recognized that a vast chasm has arisen between what today's colleges and universities are for - the bestowal of credentials - and what they were designed to achieve - a liberal education. The truth is that our colleges and universities are palimpsests - a helpful word that describes a kind of recycled medieval parchment, so rare that it was used and re-used, with old writing often being removed for new and more updated text. Our institutions of higher education are most visibly palimpsests in their buildings: the ancient gothic structures recall a form of education that stressed religious training and vocation, just as the names of the offices of the university - professors (those who "profess faith"), deans (short for "deacon") and provosts (once, a high-ranking church official) - point to the older roles that were once religious and traditional. It is easy to deceive oneself that the universities have not fundamentally changed when one concentrates on the remnants of an eviscerated culture, but the truth is that the old writing has been erased and a new text determines the course of modern education.
Traditionalists and conservatives may decry the decline of liberal education at the heart of the modern university - and its replacement by a Left-wing agenda - but the deeper truth is that liberal education has been more fundamentally and powerfully displaced by demands of global competition. While traditionalists and conservatives might wish to apportion blame to the vast Left-wing conspiracy - particularly those increasingly irrelevant faculty whose postmodernism has become a form of stale institutional orthodoxy - the truth is that the rise of the Left faculty was a response to conditions that were already making liberal education irrelevant, a sort of pathetic and ultimately self-destructive effort to make the humanities relevant and "up to date." These purported radicals - mostly bourgeois middle-class former hippies - were not agents of liberation, but a deeper reflection of the reality of the irrelevance and neglect of the liberal arts in a dawning new age of global competition.
Still, it should be acknowledged that their initial instincts were not altogether damnable. The first student protests of the 1960s arose in response to Clark Kerr's 1963 Godkin Lectures - eventually expanded and published as The Uses of the University - in which Kerr declared that the old ideal of liberal education within the college or university was officially defunct and was in the process of being replaced by a new form of the "multiversity." The aim of the new "multiversity" was to advance the great Baconian project of human dominion over the world. He declared that "the multiversity was central to the further industrialization of the nation, to spectacular increases in productivity with affluence following, to the substantial extension of human life, and to worldwide military and scientific supremacy" (199). The first student protests on the Berkeley campus - often forgotten - were in response to these lectures and its implications for the neglect of undergraduate education in the name of research and "the creation of knowledge." Allan Bloom acknowledged his initial sympathy with the protesters in an overlooked passage of The Closing of the American Mind, though he rightly noted that the protests quickly morphed into a general anti-authoritarian sentiment defined by the ambition for personal liberation. Worth noting is that both Kerr and the liberationist protesters - antecedents of the modern Right and the modern Left - agreed on the fundamental point that what was desirable was the dismantling of the classical liberal arts tradition. Both ultimately came to share the belief that the object of the university was human liberation from old restraints - whether material (to be solved through science and modern economics) or moral (to be overthrown by Left campus radicals). Today's university faculties are largely populated by denizens of the liberationist Left in the form of the faculty, while the administration remains dominated by technocratic professionals who largely evince allegiance to Kerr's declared ambition to pursue the aims of the multiversity. An unholy alliance exists in which both sides pursue their agendas separately but utterly compatibly, both in profound agreement that what is most fundamentally undesired is a return to liberal education. For both, a liberal education represents a restriction on the aims of the modern university. Both seek liberation, but on terms that would be unrecognizable to the original definition of "liberal" in the term "liberal education."
A liberal education - most often pursued in the context of a religiously-affiliated college or land-grant university - was originally an education in self-governance, moral restraint, and acknowledgment of the limits of human power and preparation for life in a family and a community. When we think of "liberal arts" more concretely, we rightly picture a numerous variety of different institutions, most (at least once) religiously-affiliated and variously situated. Most were formed with some relationship to the communities in which they were formed - whether their religious traditions, attentiveness to the sorts of career prospects that the local economy would sustain, a close connection to the "elders" of the locality, a strong identification with place and the likelihood of a student body drawn from nearby. Most understood liberal education not as the effort to liberate its students from place and the traditions that a student brought from home (this is the implicit aim of the modern devotion to the teaching of "critical thinking"), but that in fact educated them deeply in the tradition from which they came, deepening their knowledge of the sources of their beliefs, confirming - not confronting - their faith, and seeking to return them to the communities from which they were drawn where it was expected they would contribute to its future well-being and continuity.
Above all, liberal education did not so much "liberate" students from the limits of their backgrounds as it reinforced a basic teaching embedded deeply within their own cultural tradition, namely an education in limits. Often this conception of limits - conceived most often as based in morality or virtue - was drawn from the religious traditions of the particular institution. Most classical liberal arts institutions founded within a religious tradition required not only knowledge of the great texts of the tradition - including and especially the Bible - but corresponding behavior that constituted a kind of "habituation" in the virtues learned in the classroom. Compulsory attendance at chapel or Mass, parietal rules, adult-supervised extra-curricular activities, and required courses in moral philosophy (often taught by the president of the respective college) sought to integrate the humanistic and religious studies of the classroom with the daily lives of the students.
Such a form of "liberal education" would be objectionable across the board in today's society - by faculty, administrators, students and even parents. To the extent that it would neglect the education in success - the formation of a character that is capable of living anywhere and doing nearly anything demanded by the competitive global marketplace (even economically eviscerating the very sorts of communities from which a student originally came), it would fail to provide the sort of result that is demanded by the global society and by the consumers and providers within the elite institutions. A school that insisted that the mark of success would be achieved by students who returned to their home communities where they sought to contribute the benefits of their education, or who understood that a good life was constituted by the formation of sound families in settled communities, would certainly be regarded as some kind of fantastical and risible institution. Students at the schools where I have taught - Princeton and Georgetown - uniformly have absorbed the belief that a mark of failure would be to return to their home State or town upon graduation (unless that happened to be one of five or so large American or international cities). Almost certainly demand would decrease, jeopardizing a school's rankings and all the attendant benefits that come from such prestige.
Debates over the "culture wars" - whether or not there should be more conservative or traditionalist professors on the faculty, whether one or several core courses should be required, whether great books are being assigned - are ultimately of little relevance in light of the more fundamental structural forces that have redefined the university for the past half-century (if not more). Unless conservatives and traditionalists - and, for that matter, intelligent critics on the Left - are able to articulate and develop a persuasive critique of these deeper and more profound forces, there is very little prospect for a revival of the liberal arts, and every reason to believe that they will continue to fall into irrelevance and neglect. The one thing needful in our time - an education in self-restraint, limits and tradition, the lessons our colleges and universities were designed to reinforce - is the one thing that our great universities are no longer well-designed to provide since our elders generally agree such an education is undesirable. We need great readers of palimpsests to draw to the surface the older writings and recall the purpose of the buildings, the names and roles of the university's officers, and the great teachings and goals of the university tradition. How such a forgotten art will be restored, however, is a problem without a good or easy solution.
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Patrick J. Deneen is the Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University, and is the Founding Director of The Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy. ]]>
Obama's Loan Plan - Scary Stufftag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2009:/originals//6.26122009-05-06T22:05:09Z2009-05-08T15:42:09ZBy Richard Vedder Like Caesar's Gaul, President Obama's plan for higher education is divided into three parts: 1) Every American should have postsecondary educational training, and within a few years we should again lead the world in the proportion of...Anthony Paletta
By Richard Vedder
Like Caesar's Gaul, President Obama's plan for higher education is divided into three parts:
1) Every American should have postsecondary educational training, and within a few years we should again lead the world in the proportion of young graduates with bachelor's degrees;
2) Federal financial assistance to pay for college should become an entitlement like Social Security or Medicare, available to all in need;
3) The private provision of loans to students should end and the Federal Government should become the provider of student loans.
The American higher education establishment has mostly endorsed this sweeping proposal. As is so often the case, they are wrong. On every count, this proposal is an Obamination - a perverse set of policies that will raise costs to taxpayers and, surprisingly, also to many college students and families.]]>
Every American Should Go to College
The President believes too few persons go to college. At least a compelling a case can be made that, in reality, too many attend. More than 40 percent of those currently enrolled do not graduate within traditional time frames (three years for community college, six years for baccalaureate programs). Contrary to the President's assertion,, financial problems are not the dominant reason for this attrition. Many persons are intellectually, emotionally or temperamentally ill-equipped for college work. Increasing the pool of enrollees will mean increasing the proportion of students with poor high school records and/or with very low cognitive abilities. Does the President seriously believe the teen-age children my wife helps who are developmentally disabled but cannot tell time or read should truly be college students some day? More generally, what about the 30 percent or so of kids that fail to graduate from high school?
The only way to quickly increase college attendance without worsening an already horrendous attrition problem is by vastly lowering standards and student expectations. In other words, make American colleges more like high school. Already, Europeans can graduate from college in far less time than Americans, on average (indeed, the three year bachelor's degree is the norm under the Bologna process governing European Union higher education policies), precisely because they come to college better prepared. The President does not address this problem at all, perhaps afraid of criticizing his teacher union allies who believe, with some reason, that they control primary and secondary education.
But even if somehow this problem went away, who is going to hire all the college graduates? There is growing evidence that we may be overinvested in higher education - more and more college graduates are taking relatively low skilled jobs unrelated to their college training -e.g., 12 percent of mail carriers now have a college degree, and a five digit number of beauticians have post-graduate degrees. The college/high school earnings differential among women is smaller today than 20 years ago.
Federal Financial Aid As An Entitlement
The President wants to convert Pell Grants, that now go to roughly 30 percent of college baccalaureate students, into an entitlement, theoretically available to all but, almost certainly, not available to upper-middle income individuals and above.. My colleague Andrew Gillen has shown that federal student loans, generally have the impact of raising tuition charges - demand for college rises relative to supply. Thus it is likely that the president's proposal will worsen the tuition price explosion. The administration's answer to that is to tie provision of funds to college performance as measured by indicators like graduation rates. That, in turn, either will lead to a lowering in academic quality (as grade inflation, already a scandal, worsens), or, alternatively, to a tightening of standards as schools try to minimize potential dropouts by reducing the proportion of students who have a high probability of failure, disproportionately low income individuals, minorities, and immigrants. In other words, the policy might inadvertently hurt those that it is most designed to help.
Moreover, how is all of this going to be financed? Using honest (e.g., non-governmental) accounting, the unfunded liabilities of the nation from Medicare and Social Security now approximate 50 trillion dollars - the entire value of our nation's stock of physical capital. The President wants to add to that liability. It is the height of fiscal irresponsibility, perhaps not surprising for an Administration that the Congressional Budget Office tells us is going to give us nine trillion dollars in budget deficits (more debt) over the next decade. This is an immoral burden on non-voting members of future generations that will bear the burden of the presidential/congressional irresponsible conduct long after Obama et al have retired from the political scene.
Ending Private Student Loans
I am saving the worst for last. The president's overtly socialist tendencies are manifest - look at what has happened to Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, AIG, Citigroup (over 30 percent government owned), Chrysler, GM, etc (admittedly, George Bush is partly guilty for this as well). The apparent reluctance to let banks retire their government owned preferred stock and accompanying common stock warrants is further evidence of the Fed's desire to control private forms of resource allocation that have worked well for literally centuries. The President does not like or trust the private sector, one reason why the Dow-Jones Industrial Average at this writing is 1,200 points below what it was on Election Day.
Economists of almost every persuasion agree monopolies are bad. Do we want to turn over the provision of a majority of the financial assistance of college students to a monopoly - indeed, the folks that run the Post Office? At least the Post Office has competition - email, text messaging, Federal Express, United Parcel Service, etc. This is a genuinely awful idea. Moreover, again, there is the financial issue. Who is going to finance all these loans? The federal government? It will turn around and borrow the money, often from participants in volatile international markets.
Enough is enough. I have made my point. Far from insuring the achievement of the American Dream, the Obama proposals will cause angst and frustration among those who try college and fail, will raise costs to middle class American college students (via higher tuition charges) who will be the backbone of the nation's future, and will further compromise the fiscal integrity and financial leadership of our nation.
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Richard Vedder directs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, is Distinguished Professor of Economics at Ohio University, and is an Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Be Fair, Harvardtag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2009:/originals//6.25832009-04-28T03:37:34Z2009-04-27T04:14:04ZBy Harvey A. Silverglate In theory, e-mail should make it easier to organize for social and political change. But, as recent events in my campaign as a petition candidate for Harvard's Board of Overseers have shown, new means of communication...Anthony Paletta
By Harvey A. Silverglate
In theory, e-mail should make it easier to organize for social and political change. But, as recent events in my campaign as a petition candidate for Harvard's Board of Overseers have shown, new means of communication can be used to relegate would-be reformers of the academy to dead-ends, and to keep the outsiders outside. If I might make a rough analogy to the familiar Star Wars trilogy: My initial undertaking of my petition candidacy, along with my fellow petition candidate Robert Freedman, has been followed by the second phase of the trilogy, namely The Empire Strikes Back. Freedman and I are now working to get to the third installment, Return of the Jedi. But I'm getting a bit ahead of the story.
I should not feel like an outsider - much less a barbarian knocking on Harvard's gates, seeking a place at the table - but I can't help feeling that I'm being treated like one. After all, I came to Cambridge in 1964, attended my law school classes with due attention (especially given the fact that I had to work full-time to support myself, my mother and younger brother after the sudden death of my father while I was a senior at Princeton), received my LL.B. in 1967, and remained in Cambridge to marry and live and to practice law in Boston. During that time, I became a legal affiliate-in-law at one of Harvard College's undergraduate houses, where I still give unpaid "pre-law table" discussions once each semester. I've judged moot court arguments at Harvard Law School. I taught a course at the law school during a sabbatical-from-practice that I took in the mid-1980s. I've lectured to many an undergraduate class. And I continue to advise Harvard students, and even an occasional faculty member, when they get into trouble (with Harvard, as well as with the outside "real world"). Now, I'm running as a petition candidate for Harvard's Board of Overseers, the university's second most powerful governing body.
So why do I feel like an outsider?]]>
The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses (paperback from HarperPerennial, 1999), after which we co-founded The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).
But recently I have endured yet another example - and another lesson - in how the entrenched leadership of our colleges and universities uses whatever tools are at their disposal to contain criticism from those who dissent from the reigning orthodoxies. The tool of which I speak is the administration's control over the email lists by which anyone can, rapidly and with minimal expense, communicate with virtually an entire alumni body. It is a tool containing vast reform (if not outright subversive) potential, but also the potential for increased institutional control.
For a couple of years, I have had the honor and pleasure to represent Thurman J. "T.J." Rodgers, a prominent and successful businessman (and libertarian) who undertook a run as an alumni-nominated petition candidate for Dartmouth's Board of Trustees. I will not recount here the full, sad saga of the war that the entrenched Dartmouth administration and majority of its Board of Trustees have waged - largely successfully so far - against the presence, on Dartmouth's Board, of independent-minded "alumni petition trustees". But, briefly stated: For over a century, there had been in place a contractual agreement guaranteeing Dartmouth's alumni the power to elect half of the college's Board of Trustees. But through a series of deft maneuvers, that agreement has recently been severely undermined, and the administration, along with the pro-administration group of "charter trustees" (a self-perpetuating body, not nominated by the alumni), has wrested complete, unfettered control over the college. The majority's dismissal in early April of an alumni-elected member of the Board, Professor Todd J. Zywicki, was recently recounted by Rodgers, who remains on the Board as one of that body's dwindling contingent of independent voices of the alumni. (Caveat: I speak for myself in this article, not for my client Rodgers.)
Inspired by T.J., I joined with Harvard College (Class of 1962) alumnus Robert L. Freedman of Philadelphia, and we - one political liberal and one political conservative - launched a joint run as petition candidates for Harvard's Board of Overseers. The Board is one of Harvard's governing bodies, second in power only to the President and Fellows of Harvard College, a self-perpetuating body of six lifetime members plus the president of the University. (In an oddity of history, the Board of Overseers, although an older body than the President and Fellows, is less powerful.)
Freedman and I secured the signatures of over 250 alumni on our respective nominating petitions and, according to the clear rules, we had to be, and were, placed on the Overseers ballots. Mailed in early April to Harvard's approximately 340,000 living alumni, the ballot contained a total of eight officially nominated (by the Administration-friendly Harvard Alumni Association) candidates, plus Freedman and me, for six places open on the 30-member Board.
Unlike Dartmouth before its Board's machinations to change the rules, petition candidates have not fared well in Harvard's recent history. In fact, two decades have passed since a petition candidate last gained an Overseers seat. South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu undertook a petition candidate's run in 1989 on a platform calling for Harvard to divest from securities of companies that did business with South Africa, then governed by an all-white apartheid government. He won a seat. Two years later, a recent Harvard Law School grad named Barack Obama secured a petition place on the ballot, also on a divestment platform. By then, however, the university had changed the election rules ever so slightly... but importantly. When the ballot appeared, all of the officially named Alumni Association-nominated candidates were listed at the top of the ballot, and Obama was listed at the very end, in the "petition candidate" category. Alumni in a hurry would not likely get to the end of the ballot before exercising their allowed number of votes. Obama lost. (Presumably, a decade and a half later, Obama had learned how to protect himself from ballot manipulation by entrenched authority! Harvard, it seems, offered useful lessons for later dealing with Chicago-style politics!)
Already at a disadvantage because of ballot placement, Freedman and I had to work even harder. We launched a real campaign, gaining some attention in the university press and in the nationalpress. We thought we were effectively getting our message of reform across, even without access to the alumni email addresses that were maintained by the university but not made available to outsiders.
Two weeks ago, however, I - and apparently every other Harvard-degree holder - received an email from the President of the current Board of Overseers, Roger W. Ferguson, Jr. In his April 15 message, he praised the HAA's "efforts to keep Harvard's hundreds of thousands of alumni engaged with the University." He also urged all alumni to vote:
The Board functions with a remarkable mix of candor and collegiality that is rare in my experience. Its discussions feature a combination of persistent probing and deep concern for Harvard's long-term well-being that makes it an invaluable resource for the University. Especially at a moment of unusual challenge for universities, in view of the global economic crisis, I hope you will cast your ballot.
Embedded in Ferguson's message was a plea for "collegiality" and, it seemed to me and some others who read it, a subtle request that alumni vote for the official HAA candidates rather than the upstart petition candidates. But I could not be certain that Ferguson was in fact seeking to put his thumb on the scale, and so I responded directly. I suggested that his message was a bit one-sided, and I asked for access to the same email list he had used, and I went on to explain:
I read your email to all alumni and alumnae with great interest. I've been an alumnus of the Law School since 1967, and I cannot recall ever receiving another such message, much less from the president of the Overseers. I note with even greater interest your emphasis on a "mix of candor and collegiality." I wonder if perhaps in recent years the latter has overwhelmed the former, and whether some of the university's problems (and problems in other institutions of higher education) have been exacerbated by the reluctance of those in positions of influence and authority to be entirely candid about the direction the university has been taking. In short, has a crimped definition of "fiduciary duty" emphasized withholding public criticism and dissent, and promoted "going along in order to get along"?
Ferguson's reply made it clear to me that he and his cohorts, including the entrenched Harvard Administration, were adamant about maintaining their control over the means of communication with alumni:
I appreciate your question about having a message from you sent to alumni by way of the University's e-mail list. That is not an avenue made available to any of the candidates for Overseer or HAA elected director, whether running as nominees of the HAA nominating committee or by petition. All candidates have the opportunity to present themselves through 250-word statements accompanying the ballot, and those statements have also been posted at http://www.harvard.edu/alumni/candidates_overseers.php.
This was not the first time I'd noticed the importance, to the administration, of its control over the means of communication to alumni (and even to students). I had written a November 2006 article that referenced the Harvard Law School administration's successful efforts to replace the student-edited Harvard Law Record with the administration-edited Harvard Law School Bulletin. This, I said, was a sign of the "corporatization of the academy." Little did I know then that I was understating the case. Even on a matter as important as the alumni elections for the Board of Overseers, the administration - not the candidates - are alone privy to direct communication with voters. And, interestingly, at Dartmouth, none of the petition alumni candidates for the Board of Trustees was ever allowed use of Dartmouth's email list of alumni so as to send out their campaign messages to the electorate, all the while the entrenched powers-that-be used the list to communicate their own messages favoring the establishment.
As goes Dartmouth, so goes Harvard. And elsewhere in the academic world the same picture prevails. Alumni, students, parents, and the general public are barraged with fund-raising and self-congratulatory propaganda, but are unable to employ these same modes of inexpensive mass communication in order to mobilize for change - or send out any other mass message, for that matter - at their respective institutions.
And just as I completed the first draft of this blog entry, I received in the mail my May-June 2009 issue of Harvard Magazine, the university's self-proclaimed independent bi-monthly for alumni. I turned to the "John Harvard's Journal" feature that appears in every issue. There I found a "Cast Your Vote" admonition, followed by a note that "the official candidates' names appear in ballot order below, as determined by lot." And, indeed, all of the official Harvard Alumni Association nominees are listed. Then there is the afterthought: "In addition, two alumni have qualified to run as petition candidates," and Freedman and I are listed. Suffering the same treatment accorded Obama, we were not included in the lottery that determined the order in which the official candidates were listed; we followed at the end of the bus.
Even more startling, however, was a full-page color advertisement that appeared on page 21 of the issue. "VOTE For the HARVARD ALUMNI ASSOCIATION SLATE for Board of Overseers," commanded the ad text. The eight official candidates were then listed. Nowhere in sight were the names of the two petition candidates. At the bottom, was a notation that "this advertisement was paid for by Charles J. Egan Jr., '54, President of the Harvard Alumni Association, 1989-1990; co-chair of the Harvard College Fund, 2000-2003." I asked my research assistant Kyle to ascertain the cost of a full-page color ad in Harvard Magazine. He informed me that the listed cost is a hefty $18,360! (I wonder if Mr. Egan was given a courtesy discount!)
Bob Freedman's and my campaign for the Harvard Board of Oversees thus remains an uphill, but eminently worthwhile battle. I have already informed Board President Ferguson - by email, of course - that if I'm elected to the Board, one of the first issues I plan to raise is the monopoly maintained by the Harvard establishment over the messages sent out to alumni via the email list.
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(Harvey A. Silverglate, a Boston and Cambridge-based criminal defense and civil liberties lawyer and writer, is the co-author (with Alan Charles Kors) of "The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses" (HarperPerennial paperback, 1999), and, most recently, "Three Felonies a day: How the Feds Target the Innocent" (forthcoming from Encounter Books in September). He is the co-founder and current Chairman of the Board of Directors of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (www.thefire.org). The views expressed in this article are his own.)
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Stanford '89, A Happier Takeovertag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2009:/originals//6.25712009-04-23T21:52:29Z2009-04-23T04:52:46ZBy John McWhorter Debra Dickerson said of the Cornell students who took over Willard Straight Hall at Cornell in 1969, "What they actually wanted was beyond the white man's power to bestow." Even after they were granted a Black Studies...Anthony Paletta
By John McWhorter
Debra Dickerson said of the Cornell students who took over Willard Straight Hall at Cornell in 1969, "What they actually wanted was beyond the white man's power to bestow." Even after they were granted a Black Studies department as they demanded, a core of black students remained infuriated at Cornell as still "fundamentally" racist.
As we mark the fortieth anniversary of that day, I am reminded of one twenty springs later in May, 1989, when 60 Stanford students took over the university president's building and were arrested. Because 1989 was such a different America racially from that of 1969, such that Stanford had a healthy body of black students of middle-class provenance and above, what went down in the annals as "Takeover 89" was fundamentally a happy event. It was symbolic of a general detour in race ideology in America, and the memory has never left me.
The idea was that in not acceding to certain demands regarding minority issues, the administration had revealed itself to be racist. Interesting, though, what the "demands" were. This time there was already a Black Studies program, plus a student association, and a theme house. So instead, the main demands were four: a Native American Studies department, an Asian-American Studies department (despite there being an Asian-themed dormitory and university-funded Asian students' association), an assistant dean for Chicano affairs (despite a Chicano student center), and a vague demand for "more" black professors. After all, if black professors are not 13% of the faculty when black people are 13% of the American population, then you know what that's all about. ]]>
John McWhorter is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute
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Cornell '69 And What It Didtag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2009:/originals//6.25602009-04-20T20:07:44Z2009-04-22T19:40:13ZBy Donald Downs Forty years ago this week, an armed student insurrection erupted on the Cornell campus. I was a sophomore on campus at the time and later wrote a book on the events, Cornell '69: Liberalism and the Crisis...Anthony Paletta
By Donald Downs
Forty years ago this week, an armed student insurrection erupted on the Cornell campus. I was a sophomore on campus at the time and later wrote a book on the events, Cornell '69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. To some the drama represented a triumph of social justice, paving the way for a new model of the university based on the ideals of identity politics, diversity, and the university as a transformer of society. To others, it fatefully propelled Cornell, and later much of American higher education, away from the traditional principles of academic freedom, reason, and individual excellence. "Cornell," wrote the famous constitutional scholar Walter Berns, who resigned from Cornell during the denouement of the conflict, "was the prototype of the university as we know it today, having jettisoned every vestige of academic integrity."
In the wee hours of Friday, April 19, 1969, twenty-some members of Cornell's Afro-American Society took over the student center, Willard Straight Hall, removing parents (sometimes forcefully) from their accommodations on the eve of Parents Weekend. The takeover was the culmination of a year-long series of confrontations, during which the AAS had deployed hardball tactics to pressure the administration of President James Perkins into making concessions to their demands. The Perkins administration and many faculty members had made claims of race-based identity politics and social justice leading priorities for the university, marginalizing the traditional missions of truth-seeking and academic freedom.
Two concerns precipitated the takeover: AAS agitation for the establishment of a radical black studies program; and demands of amnesty for some AAS students, who had just been found guilty by the university judicial board of violating university rules. These concerns were linked, for, according to the students, the university lacked the moral authority to judge minority students. They declared that Cornell was no longer a university, but rather an institution divided by racial identities. ]]>
Newsweek account, "The president did not refer to the guns, the building seizure or the racial tensions directly; he simply asked everyone to approach the situation as 'humane men.' Many students were angry. 'I wanted to yell, 'Say something already', said one junior."
Perkins' abdication of leadership hurtled Cornell toward chaos. Central authority palpably vanished before everyone's eyes, leaving what one noted professor called a "Hobbesian state of nature" in its wake. What was once unthinkable started becoming thinkable. A revolutionary situation was at hand.
Amnesty required faculty assent; and at an extraordinary meeting on Monday following Perkins' speech, a solid majority of the faculty refused to ratify the agreement. They insisted that support of the agreement---especially under the coercive circumstances---would be contrary to the fundamental principles of the university, which included a commitment to ordered liberty, deliberative reason, and the equal application of rules.
To force the faculty to reconsider its vote, SDS led several thousand students in a takeover of Barton Hall. Meanwhile, over a hundred local sheriff deputies assembled downtown. An administrator acting on Perkins' behalf gave them the green light to enter campus in the event the "Barton Hall Community" decided to seize another building. Interviews with the deputies revealed that many were aching to charge up the hill, guns at their ready.
Late Tuesday night, an AAS leader, Tom Jones---destined later in life to be absorbed into the establishment as CEO of Smith Barney and a leading member of the Cornell Board of Trustees---announced in a speech on the university radio station that Cornell "had three hours to live" if the faculty did not budge from its intransigence. WVBR replayed Jones' speech repeatedly throughout the night, virtually everybody on campus and in town tuning in. With guns and the promise of violence already haunting the campus, Jones's speech pushed Cornell to the brink. Hotels and motels all around Ithaca filled up to "no vacancy" as citizens of Cornell's city on the hill fled the campus to avoid potential violence.
Back at Barton, the assembly decided after explosive debate to wait and see what the faculty did when it met again the next day to reconsider its Monday vote. Everything now hung on the faculty's shoulders. Would they uphold the principles they had defended on Monday? Or would the Barton Community, now reveling in its new-found power, prevail instead? At stake was what kind of university Cornell would become.
The next morning, the faculty reversed its Monday vote in what no doubt remains the most intense and momentous debate in Cornell's history. With this vote to grant the students' demands, the true power in the university was instantly transferred to Barton and the AAS. President Perkins made a humiliating trip to Barton to ritualistically congratulate the assembly. On the stage, an SDS leader took a conspicuous sip out of Perkins' can of Coke---a symbolic gesture noted and understood by all. (Perkins would be gone from Cornell by mid-summer.)
Among other things, the student victory at Barton authorized the new black studies program, as well as a significant restructuring of the university to include students in decision-making. Within a few years, however, the latter spoil of victory died of natural causes as student indifference to such matters returned. With the radicalized black studies program retreating to the outskirts of campus, Cornell eventually returned to normalcy, at least on the surface.
But the faculty surrender inevitably had profound implications. On the positive side was the further commitment of Cornell and higher education to the inclusion of students from minority and other backgrounds. On the negative side were the means by which this further opening came about, and the new philosophy of the university under which it took place: the university as an agent for social justice and identity politics (today reconfigured as "diversity") rather than as an institution dedicated primarily to free inquiry, robust intellectual diversity and debate, and common standards of justice and reason.
By surrendering authority under the circumstances that prevailed in 1969---in the face of coercion and threats of violence, and the widespread intolerance of those who disagreed with the AAS and Barton positions---Cornell leaders failed to defend the core principles that define liberal education, and which make enlightened citizenship and politics possible. Social justice unaccompanied by respect for basic order, freedom of thought, intellectual honesty, and the rights of all individuals is a recipe for tyranny of the majority (or of the activists), not justice. (Indeed, the many minority students at Cornell who opposed the AAS methods and message were targets of threatening abuse. Future Republican presidential candidate, Alan Keyes, a graduate student in political thought, fled to France to get away from death threats targeted at him because of his politics and his relationship with a white woman.).
Though they became the targets of threats and other intimidations, a few professors took courageous stands by publicly protesting the faculty reversal. This group included historians Walter LeFeber, George Kahan, Fred Somkin, James John, Joel Silbey, and Donald Kagan, and government professors Walter Berns, Allan Sindler, and Allan Bloom. (The latter three resigned on the spot.) These individuals understood the principles at stake, and grasped the existential fact that fortitude is needed to defend institutions when things get rough. Trained to embody the peaceable attributes of scholarship, most professors were unable or unwilling to take serious risks to defend academic principles in the face of intimidation---a fact that Tom Jones derisively emphasized in his haunting speech on WVBR.
Many years after the events of 1969, Tom Jones wrote a letter to James Perkins, apologizing for the pain the student rebels had caused the man who had striven to be so understanding and accommodating to their demands. Perkins wrote back, accepting the apology. Jones later wrote a similar letter to Walter Berns, who had been one of Jones’ intellectual mentors before his rebel turn. Still smarting from the death threats he received and from what the revolt had wrought, Berns did not deign to reply.
To be sure, many faculty members (and even administrators) believed in these principles, but reversed their vote out of a sense of necessity. Given the potential of mass violence in the event of continued faculty resistance, concerns for life and limb might have justified concession. But given what was at stake, this group (the largest of any faction) could have followed their vote with a meaningful protest, such as resigning, going on strike, or taking leaves of absence to emphasize their disdain. Yet no such collective symbolic action took place.
Three other reasons for the faculty reversal stood out. Some faculty members simply agreed with the new mission of the university, while others had become uncertain of what the university stands for in the face of dramatic social and political upheaval. A last group simply surrendered to their own fears. At its core, Cornell '69 was about such basic matters as courage and conviction.
Since 1969, Cornell has continued to struggle with the dilemmas of a post-liberal university, witnessing threats to free speech, periodic conflicts over race-based dorms and programs, and related problems. More importantly, Cornell `69 was a harbinger of the politics of political correctness (later reconfigured as "diversity"), which involves elevating social justice claims and identity politics over the principles and practices of free inquiry and intellectual conscience. During the last twenty years, universities and colleges across the land have compromised the principles of liberal education by instituting such policies as speech codes, overly broad harassment rules, one-dimensional identity-based programs and departments, and ideologically-slanted orientation and campus life programs—all in the name of promoting social justice as defined by campus leaders who are beholden (consciously or not) to the goals represented by Cornell `69.
Unlike 1969, today's campuses seldom witness violence (or its threat), as this agenda has become part of the established order. If political correctness seems less of a problem today than it did in the 1990s, this might be only because it has metastasized. Meanwhile, many students and faculty members remain committed to the principles of liberal education, but we seldom read of meaningful faculty-led movements to resist this establishment. If the Cornell president and faculty had behaved responsibly in 1969, our campuses might be dramatically different today.
--------------------------------------
Donald Downs is a professor of political science, law, and journalism at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He specializes in issues involving law, politics, and society, as well as political thought, and has recently published Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus
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The Situation at the New Schooltag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2009:/originals//6.25422009-04-14T20:00:21Z2009-04-22T19:39:10ZBy James Miller This is the text of an open letter about the student occupation and police intervention last weekend at the New School in New York City. It was sent to members of the New School community by James...Anthony Paletta
By James Miller
This is the text of an open letter about the student occupation and police intervention last weekend at the New School in New York City. It was sent to members of the New School community by James Miller, professor of political science and liberal studies at the school. Miller is a former member of Students for a Democratic Society and author of several books, including "Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy" and "Democracy in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago." - John Leo
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New York Post, it was President [Robert] Kerrey who took charge: "I called the NYPD and said there are people who have broken into our building and I want them removed.... If they do it again, I'll call again.... We still remember 9/11 around here."
I can understand why a frightened security supervisor might call the police.
But I can't forget that the New School was a community first founded by pacifists. It is hard to see how our core values were served by the extraordinary scale of the police action - or by several documented incidents which suggest that individual officers may have used excessive force against some protesters, bystanders, and videographers. It is also hard to see how President Kerrey's belligerent tone in the Post piece is helpful.
Under the circumstances, I hope we as a community will find some way to gather and investigate various student and faculty allegations of police misconduct. It is important, given our shared founding ethos, for us to set the record straight about what happened, and why, on April 10.
At the same time, we as a community have an obligation to take seriously the avowed aims of the tiny handful of people who singlehandedly - and despite widespread opposition to their tactics - provoked this melee. To that end, and to help initiate a full and frank discussion of the political principles at stake, I am attaching copies of the two key manifestoes and one recent email communique. I urge all of you to read these documents, and to judge for yourself whether or not they uphold - or rather subvert - the core values of our community.
I believe we also have an obligation to renounce more publicly, and firmly, the recent acts of vandalism and threats of violence against President Kerrey and his family. For such threats - renewed by some protesters in recent days - also violate core values of our community.
I certainly support the rights of students and faculty to protest vigorously - but I personally condemn these recurrent threats of violence. The University in Exile was, after all, founded by refugees who were fleeing, in part, gangs of political thugs. It shocks and saddens me to see self-styled anarchist posses trying to resurrect such threatening tactics.
When the senior faculty expressed their lack of confidence in President Kerrey on December 10, 2008, we did so by holding a meeting. I chaired that meeting, and I helped draft the motions of no confidence we passed. At that meeting, we also expressed confidence in our deans. Since then, deans, faculty and students have made progress on a number of important reforms, working together in a civil and collaborative spirit.
Still, it has been very hard in recent weeks to keep our collective focus on constructive initiatives, in part because it has been very hard to know how best to counter the looming threat that a handful of people would break and enter a University building. A number of us collectively chose to refrain from publicly criticizing those who proposed a new occupation, for fear it would have the unintended consequence of increasing the chances of a violent confrontation. Perhaps we were mistaken to exercise such restraint.
Later this month, the Provost, Deans, Faculty Senate and Student Senate, in cooperation with all interested student groups, will convene a public forum to reflect on the events of the past five months, from the first vote of no confidence to the most recent occupation of 65 Fifth Avenue. At that time, we hope to discuss some of the different ways that students and faculty can work towards constructive democratic change at the New School. I hope that everyone with an interest in the future of the University will join us at that time for an open conversation about our core values, and how best to expand the scope of free speech, shared faculty governance, and student rights. ]]>
Forty years ago this week, an armed student insurrection erupted on the Cornell campus. I was a sophomore on campus at the time and later wrote a book on the events, Cornell '69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. To some the drama represented a triumph of social justice, paving the way for a new model of the university based on the ideals of identity politics, diversity, and the university as a transformer of society. To others, it fatefully propelled Cornell, and later much of American higher education, away from the traditional principles of academic freedom, reason, and individual excellence. "Cornell," wrote the famous constitutional scholar Walter Berns, who resigned from Cornell during the denouement of the conflict, "was the prototype of the university as we know it today, having jettisoned every vestige of academic integrity."
In the wee hours of Friday, April 19, 1969, twenty-some members of Cornell's Afro-American Society took over the student center, Willard Straight Hall, removing parents (sometimes forcefully) from their accommodations on the eve of Parents Weekend. The takeover was the culmination of a year-long series of confrontations, during which the AAS had deployed hardball tactics to pressure the administration of President James Perkins into making concessions to their demands. The Perkins administration and many faculty members had made claims of race-based identity politics and social justice leading priorities for the university, marginalizing the traditional missions of truth-seeking and academic freedom.
Two concerns precipitated the takeover: AAS agitation for the establishment of a radical black studies program; and demands of amnesty for some AAS students, who had just been found guilty by the university judicial board of violating university rules. These concerns were linked, for, according to the students, the university lacked the moral authority to judge minority students. They declared that Cornell was no longer a university, but rather an institution divided by racial identities. ]]>
Newsweek account, "The president did not refer to the guns, the building seizure or the racial tensions directly; he simply asked everyone to approach the situation as 'humane men.' Many students were angry. 'I wanted to yell, 'Say something already', said one junior."
Perkins' abdication of leadership hurtled Cornell toward chaos. Central authority palpably vanished before everyone's eyes, leaving what one noted professor called a "Hobbesian state of nature" in its wake. What was once unthinkable started becoming thinkable. A revolutionary situation was at hand.
Amnesty required faculty assent; and at an extraordinary meeting on Monday following Perkins' speech, a solid majority of the faculty refused to ratify the agreement. They insisted that support of the agreement---especially under the coercive circumstances---would be contrary to the fundamental principles of the university, which included a commitment to ordered liberty, deliberative reason, and the equal application of rules.
To force the faculty to reconsider its vote, SDS led several thousand students in a takeover of Barton Hall. Meanwhile, over a hundred local sheriff deputies assembled downtown. An administrator acting on Perkins' behalf gave them the green light to enter campus in the event the "Barton Hall Community" decided to seize another building. Interviews with the deputies revealed that many were aching to charge up the hill, guns at their ready.
Late Tuesday night, an AAS leader, Tom Jones---destined later in life to be absorbed into the establishment as CEO of Smith Barney and a leading member of the Cornell Board of Trustees---announced in a speech on the university radio station that Cornell "had three hours to live" if the faculty did not budge from its intransigence. WVBR replayed Jones' speech repeatedly throughout the night, virtually everybody on campus and in town tuning in. With guns and the promise of violence already haunting the campus, Jones's speech pushed Cornell to the brink. Hotels and motels all around Ithaca filled up to "no vacancy" as citizens of Cornell's city on the hill fled the campus to avoid potential violence.
Back at Barton, the assembly decided after explosive debate to wait and see what the faculty did when it met again the next day to reconsider its Monday vote. Everything now hung on the faculty's shoulders. Would they uphold the principles they had defended on Monday? Or would the Barton Community, now reveling in its new-found power, prevail instead? At stake was what kind of university Cornell would become.
The next morning, the faculty reversed its Monday vote in what no doubt remains the most intense and momentous debate in Cornell's history. With this vote to grant the students' demands, the true power in the university was instantly transferred to Barton and the AAS. President Perkins made a humiliating trip to Barton to ritualistically congratulate the assembly. On the stage, an SDS leader took a conspicuous sip out of Perkins' can of Coke---a symbolic gesture noted and understood by all. (Perkins would be gone from Cornell by mid-summer.)
Among other things, the student victory at Barton authorized the new black studies program, as well as a significant restructuring of the university to include students in decision-making. Within a few years, however, the latter spoil of victory died of natural causes as student indifference to such matters returned. With the radicalized black studies program retreating to the outskirts of campus, Cornell eventually returned to normalcy, at least on the surface.
But the faculty surrender inevitably had profound implications. On the positive side was the further commitment of Cornell and higher education to the inclusion of students from minority and other backgrounds. On the negative side were the means by which this further opening came about, and the new philosophy of the university under which it took place: the university as an agent for social justice and identity politics (today reconfigured as "diversity") rather than as an institution dedicated primarily to free inquiry, robust intellectual diversity and debate, and common standards of justice and reason.
By surrendering authority under the circumstances that prevailed in 1969---in the face of coercion and threats of violence, and the widespread intolerance of those who disagreed with the AAS and Barton positions---Cornell leaders failed to defend the core principles that define liberal education, and which make enlightened citizenship and politics possible. Social justice unaccompanied by respect for basic order, freedom of thought, intellectual honesty, and the rights of all individuals is a recipe for tyranny of the majority (or of the activists), not justice. (Indeed, the many minority students at Cornell who opposed the AAS methods and message were targets of threatening abuse. Future Republican presidential candidate, Alan Keyes, a graduate student in political thought, fled to France to get away from death threats targeted at him because of his politics and his relationship with a white woman.).
Though they became the targets of threats and other intimidations, a few professors took courageous stands by publicly protesting the faculty reversal. This group included historians Walter LeFeber, George Kahan, Fred Somkin, James John, Joel Silbey, and Donald Kagan, and government professors Walter Berns, Allan Sindler, and Allan Bloom. (The latter three resigned on the spot.) These individuals understood the principles at stake, and grasped the existential fact that fortitude is needed to defend institutions when things get rough. Trained to embody the peaceable attributes of scholarship, most professors were unable or unwilling to take serious risks to defend academic principles in the face of intimidation---a fact that Tom Jones derisively emphasized in his haunting speech on WVBR.
Many years after the events of 1969, Tom Jones wrote a letter to James Perkins, apologizing for the pain the student rebels had caused the man who had striven to be so understanding and accommodating to their demands. Perkins wrote back, accepting the apology. Jones later wrote a similar letter to Walter Berns, who had been one of Jones’ intellectual mentors before his rebel turn. Still smarting from the death threats he received and from what the revolt had wrought, Berns did not deign to reply.
To be sure, many faculty members (and even administrators) believed in these principles, but reversed their vote out of a sense of necessity. Given the potential of mass violence in the event of continued faculty resistance, concerns for life and limb might have justified concession. But given what was at stake, this group (the largest of any faction) could have followed their vote with a meaningful protest, such as resigning, going on strike, or taking leaves of absence to emphasize their disdain. Yet no such collective symbolic action took place.
Three other reasons for the faculty reversal stood out. Some faculty members simply agreed with the new mission of the university, while others had become uncertain of what the university stands for in the face of dramatic social and political upheaval. A last group simply surrendered to their own fears. At its core, Cornell '69 was about such basic matters as courage and conviction.
Since 1969, Cornell has continued to struggle with the dilemmas of a post-liberal university, witnessing threats to free speech, periodic conflicts over race-based dorms and programs, and related problems. More importantly, Cornell `69 was a harbinger of the politics of political correctness (later reconfigured as "diversity"), which involves elevating social justice claims and identity politics over the principles and practices of free inquiry and intellectual conscience. During the last twenty years, universities and colleges across the land have compromised the principles of liberal education by instituting such policies as speech codes, overly broad harassment rules, one-dimensional identity-based programs and departments, and ideologically-slanted orientation and campus life programs—all in the name of promoting social justice as defined by campus leaders who are beholden (consciously or not) to the goals represented by Cornell `69.
Unlike 1969, today's campuses seldom witness violence (or its threat), as this agenda has become part of the established order. If political correctness seems less of a problem today than it did in the 1990s, this might be only because it has metastasized. Meanwhile, many students and faculty members remain committed to the principles of liberal education, but we seldom read of meaningful faculty-led movements to resist this establishment. If the Cornell president and faculty had behaved responsibly in 1969, our campuses might be dramatically different today.
--------------------------------------
Donald Downs is a professor of political science, law, and journalism at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He specializes in issues involving law, politics, and society, as well as political thought, and has recently published Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus
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