Originalstag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2008:/originals//62008-05-14T17:23:43ZMovable Type 3.34What Does 'Sustainability' Have to Do With Student Loans?tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2008:/originals//6.15172008-05-14T22:34:02Z2008-05-14T17:23:43ZBy Peter Wood The student loan crisis - or near crisis; narrowly-averted crisis ; or postponed crisis - no one is sure - comes co-incidentally at a moment when many colleges and universities are once again repackaging their basic programs....Anthony Paletta
By Peter Wood
The student loan crisis - or near crisis; narrowly-averted crisis ; or postponed crisis - no one is sure - comes co-incidentally at a moment when many colleges and universities are once again repackaging their basic programs. The new buzzword, as John Leo has pointed out is "sustainability." I also recently tried my hand at unpacking this polyvalent idea. "Sustainability" sounds to the uninitiated as though it is about environmentalism, but it is much more. As I wrote in Inside Higher Education, many of the advocates of "sustainability" see it as an encompassing concept. It includes science, economics, and the social structure. And for many in the movement, the focus on social order is the basis for far-reaching attempts to advance "social justice" policies.
I doubt this development has come into focus for many parents or people outside the campus. The campus left learned with its promotion of the concept of "diversity" the advantages of packaging hard-core ideology in bland, feel-good terminology. Sustainability is another venture in this direction. No one can really be against sustainability (definition 1) - prudent use of resources with the needs of future generations in mind. But while most of us hear the word in that sense, campus ideologues are busy rearranging the curriculum and student life around "sustainability" (definition 2) - a condition that arises when capitalism and hierarchy are abolished; individuals are made to see themselves as "citizens of the world;" and a new order materializes on the basis of eco-friendliness, social justice, and new forms of economic distribution.
Sustainability (2) is an amalgam of environmental extremism, shards of Marxism, romantic utopianism, and identity group politics. It doesn't have a significant political following in America outside college campuses, and in that sense it is a fringe movement. But on campus it's everywhere. Hundreds of campuses now have sustainability officers, courses that promote the ideology, and most ominously, "co-curricular" programs run through student life and residence halls that attempt to "educate" students about their mistaken "worldviews" and bring them aboard this new ideological ark.]]>
here. CCRAA slashed the incentives for lenders, some of whom quickly announced that they would leave the student loan business as unprofitable. This trend has continued.
The other development, quick on the heels of the first, was market resistance to student loan-backed bonds. It turned out that the student loan industry, like the home mortgage industry, had succumbed to the allure of securitization. Rather than keep their own loans, lenders would sell them to a third party, which in turn bundled them together into giant bonds and sold them to the public. The bonds would include good debt (the kind that gets repaid) as well as more dubious loans (from the kind of students who are likely to default.) As the sub-prime mortgage crisis convinced millions of investors that pig-in-the-poke bonds weren't such a good idea, the student-loan-piglet bonds suddenly found themselves unloved and unwanted too. The turning point came in October, when First Marblehead, the premier re-packager of student loans offered $1.1 billion of student loan bonds, and found no buyers.
In late April, The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators released a white paper, The Student Loan Credit Crunch, in which it cites only the second of these developments. My guess is that too many of NASFAA's members were implicated in the kick-back scandal for the organization to acknowledge that side of the problem. But NASFAA's white paper offers a good account of how the mortgage crisis spilled into student loans. It also provides a good scale to consider how far the crisis has extended. "Up to 60 lenders have been forced to discontinue lending, while others continue to make loans at a loss, all the while indicating they may need to halt operations in the near future."
This week, Congress attempted to preempt the crisis with a bill - immediately signed by President Bush - that authorizes the Secretary of Education to buy up the loans of lenders who have not been able to sell them to anyone else. The New York Times declared that the President showed "good sense" and urges as a longer term solution the migration of a much larger percentage of student loans into direct government loans. (Currently 22 percent of the federal loans are of this type.)
There is an audible sigh of relief in student-loan world over this development. In the Times' view, "There was no real danger of students being left high and dry." Perhaps not. But there was and still is the prospect that colleges and universities will have to re-think some of their business assumptions. The issue is, to grab a familiar word, a matter of sustainability. The federal government cannot bail out improvident lenders indefinitely. The Education Department estimates that 7 million student borrowers (out of about 18 million college students) will need to borrow "more than $68 billion in federal loans this academic year."
Add to this the now famous "moral hazard" problem behind government bailouts. The improvident lenders now will have less incentive than ever to ensure that they are lending to students who are good credit risks. The federal government will pick up their loan portfolios, good, bad, and indifferent.
Perhaps this is just an election-year bailout and we will see the restoration of a more sustainable student loan system next year. But in truth, the student loan system is beginning to look threadbare. For generations we have been conjuring all sorts of reasons to convince more and more young people to forego every other opportunity and plunge themselves into debt in order to get a college degree. Generally these appeals are more carrot than stick, more "get a good education to get a good job" than "If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq," as John Kerry put it in October 2006 - a remark recently echoed by Stephen King. The go-to-college ethic has been a powerful force for generations, to the point where now almost 70 percent of high school graduates pursue college, at least for a while.
The advantages of attending college are, according to some analysts, exaggerated. Charles Miller recently challenged The College Board on this point. The College Board frequently issues an updated report, Education Pays: The Benefits of Higher Education for Individuals and Society (Sandy Baum and Jennifer Ma, 2007). Harvard economist Susan Dynarski weighs in on the side that attending college is a good financial bet.
Let's stand aside from the grand debate. Clearly attending college serves some students extremely well when it comes to getting well-paying jobs, boosting lifetime earnings, and building satisfying careers. Just as clearly, it serves other students poorly. They emerge with few marketable skills, self-defeating attitudes, cynicism, and an insupportable burden of debt on their student loans.
Let's close the loop. When colleges and universities transform themselves into enterprises centered on "sustainability," which students are they serving? Are students assuming these burdens of debt (average balance over $19,000; a quarter of students owing nearly $25,000) willingly paying a premium to be indoctrinated in some resident hall director's theory of social justice?
Over half of the employees of colleges are administrative staff of some sort, not faculty members. A slice of that high-interest $19,000 debt goes to service sustainability czars, diversity vice-provosts, and the rest of the ever-widening "service" oriented bureaucrats whose job is, in effect, actively to hinder the real education of students.
What would happen if students had a choice of a "Plan B" - the same educational program, minus the ideological frills, and priced at a prorated discount? It seems unlikely that many of our colleges and universities would dare to offer such a Plan B for fear of discovering just how unpopular the full-loaded option has become. But it is a clarifying idea. The student loan credit crunch points to a future where parents will find it much more difficult to finance the children's college education. When that happens, they will become more discerning consumers, who are both less content to pay a premium for "sustainability" indoctrination, and more concerned that the children enroll in programs that provide a substantive education that leads somewhere.
We are at an interesting moment, where two visions of sustainability are about to collide. The shortage of capital is focusing the minds of students and parents on being good stewards of their educational opportunities. But at the same time, higher education is being swept with enthusiasm for an ideology opposed to economic growth, capitalist investment, and traditional intellectual ideals.
I have waded into two complicated topics here and further complicated them by suggesting they are connected. To be clear, I don't wish financial calamity on colleges and universities, and I do think that higher education can constructively address "sustainability," including questions about the changing social order. But we need to distinguish. The student loan crisis has roots in doubtful practices: misbehavior on the part of lenders and campus officials; poorly conceived financial instruments that mingled good and bad debt in ways that made it impossible for investors to discern what they were buying; and the over-selling of college degree programs to students for whom a college degree offers little prospect of personal prosperity. The student loan crisis represents the triumph of effective marketing over common sense. Something similar has happened with sustainability. It is a wholesome idea in its original form and may well provide the basis for some sturdy academic programs. But the concept has been captured on many campuses by people whose strong beliefs about how they would reform society are running unchecked by the need for reasoned debate, scrupulous cross-examination of the evidence, or even ordinary skepticism.
We are, in other words, spending too much on too little. This phase of the student loan crisis is a collective declaration by the markets that a college education in its prevailing form is overvalued and overpriced. The next phase may be a harsher judgment on the institutions that fail to heed the warning. And any college or university that is now licensing the sustainability zealots to indoctrinate students in the residence halls or the classrooms is making a doubtful guess about its future.
---------------------------
Peter Wood Is Executive Director of the National Association Of Scholars]]>
Unsustainable? A Defense Of ResLife At Delawaretag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2008:/originals//6.15102008-05-12T15:24:37Z2008-05-14T17:21:02ZBy John K. Wilson The Faculty Senate at the University of Delaware is meeting later today to discuss approving the controversial Residence Life (ResLife) proposal for educational programming in the residence halls. The faculty should approve the proposal, partly because...Anthony Paletta
By John K. Wilson
The Faculty Senate at the University of Delaware is meeting later today to discuss approving the controversial Residence Life (ResLife) proposal for educational programming in the residence halls. The faculty should approve the proposal, partly because it's a good idea, but primarily because academic freedom is endangered whenever voluntary educational programs are banned. Conservative critics of the program are demanding censorship of ideas they dislike, and the Faculty Senate at a free university must not participate in such repression.
The only relevant question is whether the ResLife program violates the rights of students by compelling them to participate or censoring their views. There is not even a shred of evidence that this is the case, and the program explicitly says otherwise. There is no compulsion to participate or agree, there is no grading, there is no threat at all to a student's academic progress or to a student's ability to remain in a residence hall. In terms of compulsion, there is no there there, and no amount of hyperbolic fantasizing about what might happen can change this fact. The fact that in the past there were some minor issues about intrusive questions being asked of students by RAs is irrelevant to the consideration of this current program.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) claims, "Saying that the programming will be optional is hard to swallow. After all, how can a freshman, first day on campus, opt out at a time of great social pressure to do the activities everyone else is doing, and without full knowledge of what the program really entails?" Easy: stay in your room, hang out with other people, and ignore what the ResLife staff does.
FIRE is infantilizing college students, treating them like dumb puppies who will follow administrators mindlessly if any programming is allowed in residence hall. This is demeaning and insulting to all students, since it presumes that students would be better off with nothing to do rather than running the "risk" of being pressured to attend an event.
It is the liberal content of the program that FIRE and other conservative critics object to. FIRE argues that ResLife's proposal is "soaked in a highly politicized social and political agenda." I agree. It is a politicized agenda. Virtually all intellectual activity has a politicized agenda, because important ideas are political. ResLife promotes social justice and civic engagement, and these are political values (albeit not very radical ones). I think these are good political values, and conservatives disagree, but that doesn't matter. If ResLife was proposing to promote abstinence and other conservative values, I might disagree with them, but I would never seek to ban any of their activities. Instead, I would express my views and organize activities that reflect my values. So why won't these conservative groups try counterspeech instead of suppression?
]]>
here]
------------------------------
John K. Wilson is the founder of the Institute for College Freedom (collegefreedom.org) and the author of Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies (Paradigm Publishers, 2008).
]]>
Unsustainable? No, Wilson Is Wrongtag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2008:/originals//6.15122008-05-12T14:55:23Z2008-05-14T17:20:47ZBy Adam Kissel [Read John K. Wilson's defense of Delaware ResLife here] The University of Delaware Office of Residence Life has tricked another outsider, John K. Wilson, into believing that its proposal to run a highly politicized indoctrination program for...Anthony Paletta
By Adam Kissel
[Read John K. Wilson's defense of Delaware ResLife here]
The University of Delaware Office of Residence Life has tricked another outsider, John K. Wilson, into believing that its proposal to run a highly politicized indoctrination program for over 7,000 students in the school's residence halls is actually just a free exploration of diverse views in a spirit of open debate. Anyone who knows the facts on the ground knows that this is not so.
For Wilson, "The only relevant question is whether the ResLife program violates the rights of students by compelling them to participate or censoring their views. There is not even a shred of evidence that this is the case." Not only is this dead wrong (there is plenty of evidence that students were compelled to participate and even had reports filed against them when they did not "correctly" participate), Wilson fundamentally misrepresents the proposal, last year's program, and the critics. The problem for his argument is that the evidence for indoctrination and mandatory participation is everywhere.
The ResLife directors are the same people who did everything they could to make students aware it was mandatory, while claiming to their superiors it was not. RAs were instructed to tell students that the programming was mandatory. RAs wrote, for instance, about floor meetings, "Not to scare anyone or anything, but these are MANDATORY!" Last year's 500 pages of documentation contain many strong assertions that every student "must" be reached with ResLife's agenda. ResLife advertised an "every-student" model as opposed to the traditional model of residence hall programming. Can ResLife now be trusted with highly politicized educational programming in the very place where students live, socialize, do work, and sleep?]]>
shame students with "incorrect" views in front of their peers. They are the same people who thought they should coerce students to act out the worst possible stereotypes they could think of in a bizarre attempt to force students to show their own alleged bigotry. I have no doubt that some of last year's activities are in store for students again this year - and I suspect, once again, ResLife will be finding ways to make students believe it all is mandatory while telling outsiders and their superiors it isn't.
To the extent that encouraging the Faculty Senate to reject the proposal is an issue of academic freedom, it is about the Faculty Senate's academic freedom to oversee educational programming at the university, just as it does with a wide variety of academic programs, with as much knowledge as possible about the programs it condones.
Nobody (except ResLife itself) is trying to ban any ideas from the residence halls. What the proposal's critics object to are ResLife's unrelenting efforts to violate the academic freedom and freedom of conscience of University of Delaware students by trying to make them into "allies," persons who fit ResLife's specific, politicized views and hold ResLife's specific, politicized agenda. FIRE would object to the method of indoctrination regardless of whether the politicization of the program came from the left, the right, or elsewhere. FIRE is simply not a right-wing or even a right-leaning organization, and the evidence proves it. We can say with great confidence that FIRE has fought more cases defending the rights of liberal professors than any other organization over the last ten years.
Outsiders who have come late to the University of Delaware debate, which began last fall, must do their homework to put the proposal in its proper context on campus. ResLife has taken great pains to hide its indoctrination even from the faculty, as it reportedly has admitted. The result is a document that requires some intelligent deconstructing. I have engaged in this analysis in several posts on the website of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, where I serve as director of FIRE's Individual Rights Defense Program.
A careful reader of the proposal will see problems that lead the reader out of the proposal and into its context on campus. For instance, the "program goals" advertised in the proposal are elsewhere called "learning outcomes." Does ResLife intend to run an educational program or not? If it is to be educational, why would the faculty simply give the program a pass in the name of academic freedom? Why hide the "learning outcomes" with vague language if the program is supposed to be transparent enough for the Faculty Senate to know what it is debating?
Some of the vague language involves what ResLife has called "citizenship values" or "citizenship responsibilities." Indeed, when ResLife refers to learning outcomes, it turns out that these are politicized outcomes. ResLife already knows what good citizens think, believe, feel, and do. The entire program begins with outcomes that have been presumed by ResLife. These are not method-oriented outcomes like being able to write a research paper; they are content-oriented outcomes. When ResLife offers to help students "explore" their thoughts, values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, ResLife does so with a very clear idea of the expected results of those so-called explorations. This is not an exploration in the marketplace of ideas worthy of a liberal education; it is compelled speech, dogma, and indoctrination.
How can a reader know this? The context makes it perfectly clear. ResLife directors Kathleen Kerr and James Tweedy, who are the same people who envisioned and ran last year's discredited program, have shown their hand in published papers, at conferences, in their instructions to lower-level ResLife officials, in conversations with others on campus, and everywhere in the 500 pages of documentation on last year's "curriculum." A reader does not have access to the conversations, but the documentation is all available on FIRE's website, and people can judge for themselves.
ResLife and its defenders pretty much conceded that the program is unacceptably politicized when they tried to fix up the proposal by inserting the word "environmental" every time the word "sustainability" appears. This is not simply a clarification. Instead, it is an admission of guilt, an acknowledgment that ResLife had been trying to sneak through a political and social agenda without the faculty noticing. But changing the words on paper doesn't change the fact that the activities still promote ResLife's agenda, not just once or twice but practically all the time, all year. The career counseling events are geared to promote "sustainability" careers rather than the full diversity of student interests in a variety of careers. Parties are to include signs on the party materials that identify the economic and environmental impact of the items - what a fun party! The entire program is still all about the "citizenship" (don't be fooled - read "sustainability" here) learning outcomes, and it still aims to reform students' thoughts, beliefs, values, attitudes, and behaviors in ways that students cannot reasonably opt out of.
And changing the words on paper doesn't change the fact that the same ResLife directors are to be in charge. Again, outside observers need to do only a small amount of homework to read last year's curriculum documents. As suggested above, these are the same people who, for instance, thought necessary to have RAs (students themselves) ask students about their sexual awakening and their citizenship values in private one-on-one sessions. The RA sessions are now called "RA conversations," and ResLife is still in charge. Will RAs again be asked to identify (by name and room number) their "best" and "worst" students? Under last year's program, an RA even wrote up a student for peacefully resisting the indoctrination. How will the faculty be able to monitor the education being delivered in these private sessions by people who hold positions of power over student residents? The RAs have power to punish and power to teach, but they have nothing like the training and education of the regular faculty.
Freshmen will not have adequate understanding of the programming they are expected to be allowed opt out of. RAs work for ResLife and have every incentive to pressure students to attend events. RAs have power to punish. In addition, I have argued on FIRE's website that freshmen feel tremendous social pressure to attend events with their new friends in the residence halls. University of Delaware freshmen will be put in the position where they must make a choice between attending the politicized pizza party or hiding out in their rooms, alone. Given ResLife's history, staff, and stated goals, the idea that students will be able to opt out cannot be taken seriously.
As we saw when we visited the University of Delaware, ResLife eroded trust and inspired resentment between students and ResLife, besides badly violating the rights of students. That was what ResLife did last year, and almost certainly will do so again through a program like the current proposed one.
The Faculty Senate has had only three days, including the weekend, to consider the proposed revised draft. The Faculty Senate should reject the proposal or at least send it back to committee to give everyone a chance to get it right. The University of Delaware students deserve no less.
-----------------------------------------
Adam Kissel is director of FIRE's Individual Rights Defense Program]]>
Still Forgotten: Low Income Students At Selective Collegestag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2008:/originals//6.14922008-05-08T20:51:26Z2008-05-14T17:19:57ZBy Richard D. Kahlenberg Despite a great flurry of activity to expand financial aid at selective colleges over the past several years, a new study by the Chronicle of Higher Education reported this gloomy bottom line: "Top Colleges Admit Fewer...Anthony Paletta
By Richard D. Kahlenberg
Despite a great flurry of activity to expand financial aid at selective colleges over the past several years, a new study by the Chronicle of Higher Education reported this gloomy bottom line: "Top Colleges Admit Fewer Low-Income Students." As someone who has worked for more than a decade to push colleges to enroll more economically disadvantaged kids of all races, the news was disappointing, though not altogether surprising. For years, elite colleges have assembled freshmen classes that include upper-middle class and wealthy students of all races and declared themselves to be diverse. New financial aid policies alone were unlikely to change that pattern.
The Chronicle study found that the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants declined at the wealthiest 75 private and 39 public colleges and universities between the 2004-05 and 2006-07 academic years. In the 75 private institutions with the largest endowments, 13.1% of undergraduates in 2006-07 received Pell Grants, which typically go to students from families earning less than $40,000 a year, down from 14.3% two years earlier. In 39 public institutions with endowments of $500 million or more, 18% were Pell Grant recipients in 2006-07compared with 19.6% two years earlier.
The news is particularly troubling given the high profile efforts announced in recent years by some 40 top colleges and universities to provide more generous financial aid to struggling families. Why did less, rather than more, economic diversity follow? The primary reason is that aid policies are only part of what drives enrollment. In order to receive aid, low-income and working class students must first be admitted. Because such students often attend lousy schools, even highly talented and hard working students - who have tremendous potential - don't look as good on paper as their more privileged colleagues. Research finds that while colleges and universities give substantial preferences to under-represented minorities (blacks, Latinos and Native Americans) and other groups, they give basically no preference to economically disadvantaged students, despite claims to the contrary. ]]>
US News & World Report rankings), but enrolling low-income white and black students adds no more racial diversity points than having a comparable number of upper-income whites and blacks. And enrolling less advantaged students cost colleges a whole lot more in financial aid. So it is not surprising that admissions officers allow to perpetuate a lack of class diversity which they would never tolerate with respect to race.
On this issue, universities are strikingly out of touch with the American public. By about 2:1 Americans oppose racial preferences, but by 2:1 they support preferences for low income applicants of all races. The broader public cares about fairness - and thinks that low income students who have overcome obstacles deserve a break, while wealthier students of any race don't.
What will spur universities to care about economic diversity? Some leaders, like Amherst president Anthony Marx, and former Harvard president Lawrence Summers, have shown a genuine commitment to the issue. But there is some evidence to suggest that university leaders may become most interested in economic diversity when they are unable to use race-conscious admissions and instead seek low-income students as a way of providing racial diversity indirectly, given the correlation between race and class in American society.
One fascinating finding from the Chronicle's research is that public universities in states where affirmative action has been banned tend to have substantial amounts of economic diversity. In California and Washington, voters eliminated race-based affirmative action programs at public universities by ballot initiative in the 1990s. In Texas, the legislature adopted a plan to provide automatic admissions to students in the top 10% of their high school class after a Circuit court struck down race-based affirmative action. And in Florida, race-based preferences were banned by executive order. (Michigan also eliminated affirmative action in November 2006, but the move came too late to be reflected in the data examined by the Chronicle.) In the ranking of 39 public institutions, half (six of the top 12) of the most economically diverse universities are located in California, Florida, Texas and Washington. State demographic factors surely play into the relative economic diversity at leading public universities, but it seems likely that officials are also more likely to pay attention to economic diversity when they cannot easily make university classes racially diverse by admitting upper middle class students of color.
If properly structured to reflect the variety of obstacles students face, a class-based affirmative action program can produce substantial racial diversity as a byproduct. Carnevale and Rose's study found that using factors such as parental income, education and occupation, along with school level poverty, would boost the proportion of African American and Latino students from 4% under an admissions system relying solely on grades and test scores to 10%, somewhat shy of the current 12% representation at the most selective 146 institutions. On average, however, black and Latino students face additional obstacles that are fair to consider - growing up in a single parent family, a family with low or negative net worth, or a neighborhood with concentrated poverty - that should boost representation further.
Moving forward, is it possible to forge a new bargain between liberals and conservatives on the issue of economic diversity? In his recent debate with Hillary Clinton in Philadelphia, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama declared that his own privileged daughters do not deserve affirmative action preferences, and that low-income white and minority student do. This statement represented an extraordinary shift from the traditional Democratic position on racial preferences.
But conservatives need to give ground too. A few years ago, I was asked to speak at a conference sponsored by the Bush Administration on race-neutral alternatives to affirmative action. There was strong support from the audience for the concept of class-based affirmative action, but when I pointed out that it would take more federal resources to provide aid to low-income students, there was silence in the room.
Should Obama be elected and follow through on his support for class-based affirmative action, conservatives would need to support more financial aid to make the bargain work. So my question to my conservative friends is: Deal or no deal?
If conservatives and liberals don't come together on this issue, it's likely that the next Chronicle analysis on low-income students will be just as disappointing.
---------------------------------------------
Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, is author of "Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race and Democracy" (2007) and "The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action" (1996).]]>
Columbia's 68 Celebration: Only Radicals Need Applytag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2008:/originals//6.14602008-05-02T19:45:26Z2008-05-14T17:22:26ZBy Donald Downs This past weekend Columbia University held a commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the 1968 Student Strike that shook Columbia and all of higher education. For a week, student activists occupied five buildings in protest of several...Anthony Paletta
By Donald Downs
This past weekend Columbia University held a commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the 1968 Student Strike that shook Columbia and all of higher education. For a week, student activists occupied five buildings in protest of several policies, including ROTC's presence on campus, the university's relationship to the Department of Defense and the war in Vietnam, the intrusion of a new gymnasium into the neighboring African-American community, and a host of student power issues. After violent clashes between police and students brought the university to the precipice, the students won virtually all of their demands. Columbia and higher education in general have never been the same since those climactic events.
The actions of 1968 were of profound importance, calling for a thorough, critical examination in the light of the intervening forty years. Unfortunately, the panels and events over the weekend appear to have fallen short of this hope. Critical viewpoints were not showcased, and a feeling of nostalgia often held sway. Interestingly, this result was as American as apple pie.
We Americans are known for our penchant for nostalgia. We make fun of this sentiment all the time, but few of us are immune to its lures. It's a peculiarly American trait because it is the logical product of combining non-tragic (or anti-tragic) liberal sentimentality with the unavoidable interest in the past. We care about the past, but not enough to let it drag us down with the weight of tragedy. Reinhold Niebuhr, the renowned theologian and foreign policy thinker who taught at Columbia University's Union Theological Seminary from 1930 to 1960 (he even has a street named after him on the campus), captured better than anyone the American peoples' difficulty in fathoming tragedy and evil - including the tragedy and evil in their own hearts. In addressing the Cold War and the drive for social justice, Niebuhr called for a mentality that could face good and evil in oneself and in others, and tragedy and hope, without caving into either naive optimism or dismissive cynicism and Machiavellianism. He called the acolytes of the former mentality the "children of light," the latter the "children of darkness." Charting a middle course, Niebuhr advocated a more enlightened sense of balance that amounted to a more responsible form of civic education.]]>
Columbia Spectator, in a report in January, "Those spearheading the plans emphasized the need to convey a personal and multi-angled image of the events that forever altered the University... the four alumni wrote in their letter to Bollinger."
In the end, however, the eventful weekend appears to have fallen well short of this aspiration. Organizers apparently made some effort to include a fuller spectrum of viewpoints - though people with whom I spoke harbored different views of just how conscientious this effort was. But the events and panels were dominated by activists who remained sympathetic to 1968, and who combined one-sided analysis with sentimental recollection. According to a New York Times report of the weekend, "Of the roughly 1,100 students who took part in the occupation of the five campus buildings, about 500 attended the reunion, said Nancy Biberman, one of the organizers. At the time, the campus was divided, with a conservative group, calling itself the Majority Coalition and composed partly of athletes, opposing the strike and building takeovers. They were not represented."
Email correspondence among the event planners to which I had access reveals an interesting debate over the looming lack of inclusiveness, as well as commentary about the number of neutral or skeptical faculty members who did not plan to show up. Part of the problem may have been based on self-selection. But given the importance of what happened in 1968 and Columbia's pedagogical obligations to the nation, organizers should have pulled out all the stops to ensure the presence of sharply dissenting views. Instead, the public was left with a lack of true intellectual diversity that is all too symptomatic of elite academic institutions today.
The class of 1968 at Columbia and elsewhere considers itself one of the most important classes in American history. But leaders of Columbia's present undergraduate body appear to have a better idea of what a university is for. In an editorial published on April 24 entitled "Both Sides Now," the editors of the Spectator called for the spirit of critical inquiry at the upcoming commemoration: "perhaps because the reunion was organized mostly by people sympathetic to the protests, the events slotted for April 26 and 27 seem self-congratulatory in light of the decidedly mixed views toward these protesters. Whereas the more nuanced of the scheduled gatherings aim to provide valuable historical perspective, events commemorating the protesters might succumb to the assumption that 1968 had only positive effects on balance. Those in attendance should work to appreciate the complexity of the historical consequences of spring 1968."
In addition to showing that radicals of the 1960s are as prone to American character traits as anyone else, Columbia's 1968 reunion illustrates how students today are often better prepared to defend the university's classic mission - especially under heat - than the university's erstwhile leaders. The Spectator's editors are the proper heirs of Niebuhr and the other great minds that Columbia has produced over the decades.
---------------------------------------
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.]]>
Columbia's 68 Celebration: Amidst The Radicalstag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2008:/originals//6.14672008-05-02T16:07:47Z2008-05-14T17:22:51ZBy Chris Kulawik If you closed your eyes it sounded like any other college reunion. Men clamored and women shrieked as old faces called to them from the growing crowd. They were old friends and classmates some four decades removed....Anthony Paletta
By Chris Kulawik
If you closed your eyes it sounded like any other college reunion.
Men clamored and women shrieked as old faces called to them from the growing crowd. They were old friends and classmates some four decades removed.
"I can't believe," echoed the voices of the baby-boomer crowd, "it was exactly a hundred years ago today. It's been so long"
"I know," replied one, mechanically, as if she had answered that call so many times before, "everyone changes."
They spoke of lost love and life, "summering spots" in Southampton, top twenty law schools for their kids, stock options and investments. More than one bragged about the new family sedan.
But as you opened your eyes the room changed. As the graying crowd ebbed towards the laughably bourgeoisie wine and cheese bar, name tags flashed against their crisply tailored pink shirts and retro-chic blouses:
"Tom Hurwitz, Math, Planning Committee"
"Jeff Bush, Fayerweather"
The list went on. Few included their year, but not all. There was no need to. This strange coterie of aged radicals had developed their own nomenclature.
Math, Philosophy, Fayerweather, Hamilton, Low.
These were not majors or dorms; they were occupied buildings. ]]>
Chris Kulawik is a student at Columbia College and a weekly columnist for the Columbia Spectator
]]>
The Worst Campus Codewordtag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2008:/originals//6.14432008-04-29T21:42:53Z2008-05-14T17:21:39ZBy John Leo The academic left is fond of buzzwords that sound harmless but function in a highly ideological way. Many schools of education and social work require students to have a good "disposition." In practice this means that conservatives...Anthony Paletta
By John Leo
The academic left is fond of buzzwords that sound harmless but function in a highly ideological way. Many schools of education and social work require students to have a good "disposition." In practice this means that conservatives need not apply, as highly publicized attempts to penalize right-wing students at Brooklyn College and Washington State University revealed. "Social justice" is an even more useful codeword. Who can oppose it? But some schools made the mistake of spelling out that it means advocacy for causes of the left, including support for gay marriage and adoption, also opposition to "institutional racism," heterosexism, classism and ableism. Students at Teachers College, Columbia, are required to acknowledge that belief in "merit, social mobility and individual responsibility" often produce and perpetuate social inequalities. Even in its mildest form "social justice" puts schools in a position of judging the acceptability of students' political and social opinions.
Now the left is organizing around its most powerful codeword yet: sustainability. Dozens of universities now have sustainability programs. Arizona State is bulking up its curriculum and seems to be emerging as the strongest sustainability campus. UCLA has a housing floor devoted to sustainability. The American College Personnel Association (ACPA) has a sustainability task force and has joined eight other education associations to form a sustainability consortium. Pushed by the cultural left, UNESCO has declared the United Nation's Decade of Education for Sustainable Development 2005-2014, featuring the now ubiquitous symbol of the sustainability movement - three overlapping circles representing environmental, economic and social reform (i.e., ecology is only a third of what the movement is about).
Only recently have the goals and institutionalization of the movement become clear. The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability is Higher Education (AASHE) says it "defines sustainability is an inclusive way, encompassing human and ecological health, social justice, secure livelihoods and a better world for all generations." When the residential life program at the University of Delaware - possibly the most appalling indoctrination program ever to appear on an American campus - was presented, Res Life director Kathleen Kerr packaged it as a sustainability program. Since suspended, possibly only temporarily, the program discussed mandatory sessions for students as "treatments" and insisted that whites acknowledge their role as racists. It also required students to achieve certain competencies including "students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society." At a conference, Kerr explained "the social justice aspects of sustainability education," referring to "environmental racism," "domestic partnerships" and "gender equity." ]]>
Peter Wood, executive director of the National Association of Scholars (NAS) says, "It turns out that virtually the entire agenda of the progressive left can be fit inside the word 'sustainability." Adam Kissel of the educational watchdog group the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) wrote: "Documents written or promoted by residential life officials demonstrate that sustainability is a highly politicized comprehensive agenda including positions of such topics as affirmative action, gay marriage, abortions, corporations and worldwide distribution of wealth." In addition, the movement apparently features codewords within the master codeword "sustainability." "Secure livelihoods" and "strong economies" seem to mean redistribution of existing wealth, not economic development to create new wealth
The sustainability ideology obviously comes with many problems attached. It is semi-covert. Though institutions such as UNESCO and AASHE acknowledge that environmental concern is only part of the program, most people have no idea what they are buying when they support sustainability. The program contains conventional liberal ideas, but it has a strong streak of hate-America radicalism, as well as contempt for free markets and traditional values. It is not an educational program at all. The social and economic nostrums are pre-packaged, with nothing in the literature about reaching out for discussion and analysis of nostrums the movement doesn't already hold. Like many schools of social work and education, the movement has lost sight of the distinction between instruction and indoctrination. The leaders don't want to discuss. They have doctrines they want to impose.
A Citizen's Guide To Disciplining John Yootag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2008:/originals//6.14172008-04-23T17:58:07Z2008-04-23T19:33:36ZBy Harvey Silverglate The punditocracy has offered up a wide range of answers to the question of what should be done about former Department of Justice legal counsel and author of the infamous "torture memos," John Yoo. Suggestions have included...Anthony Paletta
By Harvey Silverglate
The punditocracy has offered up a wide range of answers to the question of what should be done about former Department of Justice legal counsel and author of the infamous "torture memos," John Yoo. Suggestions have included indictment, professional discipline or even disbarment, and termination from his tenured position at the University of California-Berkeley's Boalt Hall Law School.
Many of these proposed punishments of Yoo have more to do with partisan politics than legal reality, perhaps because it is nearly impossible to address the Yoo issue without betraying one's visceral reaction to the "War on Terror" as a whole and, more particularly, some of the tactics that have been adopted by the administration in that struggle, often with the explicit approval of the lawyers.
I've been following this story closely as both a criminal defense lawyer, with a vested interest in ensuring that a fellow member of the bar is dealt with fairly, and as a frequent critic of higher education's often evident contempt for academic freedom. So, for the understandably perplexed, here's one lawyer's guide to what sanctions, if any, Yoo might - or perhaps should - actually face.
Federal Indictment
Like many other legal observers, I consider some of the legal analyses Yoo (and in some instances his cohorts) provided for President Bush to be laughable. But just because this advice was, to many, ludicrous, doesn't mean it was criminal.]]>
Disbarment
The Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) at the Justice Department is conducting an internal ethics probe, but this investigation is likely more symbolic than substantial. Yoo is no longer employed by the DOJ, and hence the Department is powerless to impose any direct sanction. Besides, it would take action by the disciplinary committees of the bar associations in Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia, where Yoo is licensed, to actually affect Yoo's status as a lawyer. There is a provision in the OPR's "Policies and Procedures" that states that "OPR ordinarily advised bar disciplinary authorities in the jurisdiction where the attorney is licensed of its finding," and a bar disciplinary and licensing body could well be influenced by an adverse DOJ ethics finding against Yoo.
If these bodies were to find Yoo's advice to his client - nominally the President, but arguably the entire executive branch - to be significantly below the level of competence expected of licensed lawyers, Yoo might find himself in professional trouble. He could presumably be put on probation, suspended, or even disbarred from practicing law. As a practical matter, however, the severe sanction of disbarment would likely be reserved only if there were evidence that Yoo knew his advice was frivolous or erroneous when he rendered it, but that he did so in order to enable and give legal cover to agents conducting unlawful interrogations out in the field.
Academic Termination
Professors, by contrast, are not required to formally buy into an established ethical code as a prerequisite for entry into the profession, although adherence to academic ethical precepts is typically required by university teaching contracts, including for tenured faculty at Boalt Hall. . There is no licensing body that could bar Yoo from teaching - indeed, any such concept would run right up against not only academic freedom, but the First Amendment as well, since he teaches at a public institution.
There is also the contractual issue of tenure. Tenured professors are rarely dismissed, and then only for the most serious violations of his or her contract. Boalt Hall has set an extraordinarily high bar to justify dismissal: to be fired, a tenured professor would have to be found guilty of the "commission of a criminal act which has led to conviction in a court of law and which clearly demonstrates unfitness to continue as a member of the faculty." There is some chatter in the blogosphere that Yoo was complicit in the commission of war crimes (torture and the like), but the chances for a successful criminal prosecution of the lawyer who wrote a legal opinion is, as any practicing lawyer recognizes, very remote, even if one believes it would be deserved.
Some have raised the question of whether Yoo being found guilty of an ethics violation, but not of a crime, might increase the likelihood of his being fired from teaching. In Yoo's contract, according to Dean Christopher Edley, the ground for dismissal is a criminal conviction. If Edley is correct, a mere bar disciplinary matter, without a simultaneous criminal conviction, would not likely result in Yoo's losing his job. Edley is rightly focused on the academic freedom issue, explained in his recently issued memo to the faculty: "Assuming one believes as I do that Professor Yoo offered bad ideas and even worse advice during his government service," Dean Edley wrote to his faculty, "that judgment alone would not warrant dismissal or even a potentially chilling inquiry." Dean Edley's protection of academic freedom in the case of Professor Yoo is particularly noteworthy - and praiseworthy - because Edley's politics are decidedly to the left of center.
On the other hand, one may argue that Dean Edley may be reading Boalt Hall's disciplinary guidelines a bit too narrowly. Another provision reserves the right of the university to discipline, or even dismiss, a tenured professor for "other types of serious misconduct, not specifically enumerated herein." Included in the policy's listing of "types of unacceptable conduct" is "violation of canons of intellectual honesty, such as research misconduct," along with "serious violation of University policies... applying to research [and] outside professional activities." However, this standard is considerably more vague than the standard based on a criminal conviction, and any investigation into the "intellectual honesty" of Yoo's torture memos almost certainly would be vulnerable to attack for its own intellectual honesty and suspected political motives. It would be a can of worms that Edley seems uneager to open.
Having the ability to look at the contentious and emotional "torture memos" debate in a fair and rational manner does help. It would be interesting, for example, to contrast the publicly stated views of various academics concerning Yoo with their views on the tenure dispute surrounding University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill. Professor Churchill, it will be recalled, became the target of many outside calls for his firing when it was discovered that shortly after the attacks of September 11th, he published an essay in which he appeared, to some, to trivialize and even mock the victims who died in that attack as "little Eichmanns". Enough supporters of academic freedom came to his aid - and correctly so - to prevent his dismissal. However, the university administration then conducted a subsequent investigation into his scholarship, as a result of complaints received, and the university decided to dismiss him for asserted plagiarism and other shoddiness discovered in his academic work. Suddenly those who came to his rescue earlier were faced with the question of whether to continue to defend Churchill now that the charge against him was one for which dismissal is, in fact, appropriate. Some withdrew their support, but others did not, demonstrating, perhaps, that the latters' support for Churchill had all along been based upon ideology rather than facts and principles.
*******
In conclusion, only a no-holds-barred factual criminal investigation by the appropriate Department of Justice division, federal grand jury, or, perhaps congressional committee can determine whether John Yoo violated federal law. Such an investigation would require delving into documents, correspondence, and other records certain to provoke myriad objections ranging from "executive privilege" to "attorney-client privilege of confidentiality." And this assumes, of course, that any such communications have not long ago been shredded or deleted. After all, when proceedings in the criminal arena are contemplated, the level of proof must be quite high before indictment, much less conviction. And for both professional and political reasons, don't bet such an investigation will occur anytime soon, if ever.
So as a practical matter, the only realistic investigation, possibly resulting in an even moderate sanction, would be a state-level ethics probe into Yoo's advice, perhaps commenced independently by such a body, or perhaps suggested by a referral by the DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility.. Other lawyers are subject to such probes when their work is deemed below the standard expected of a member of the bar. Such an investigation of Yoo might help clear the air, if sufficient evidence is still available and if the probe were deemed credible, fair and objective. But would a non-politicized investigation into his ethics be possible, let alone likely, even if conducted by an independent authorized state body? Stay tuned.
---------------------------------------
Harvey A. Silverglate is a Boston-based criminal defense and civil liberties lawyer and writer. He is the co-author (with Alan Charles Kors) of The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses (HarperPerennial paperback, 1999), and is currently writing a book on how the Department of Justice abuses vague criminal statutes in questionable prosecutions.]]>
Review: "Feminists Say The Darndest Things"tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2008:/originals//6.13852008-04-16T19:04:18Z2008-04-16T02:14:29ZBy Anthony Paletta Feminists Say The Darndest Things Mike Adams, Sentinel, February 2008 Mike Adams, Professor of Criminology at the University of North Carolina - Wilmington, is nothing if not a provocateur; few other impulses can explain a book entitled...Anthony Paletta
By Anthony Paletta
Feminists Say The Darndest Things
Mike Adams, Sentinel, February 2008
Mike Adams, Professor of Criminology at the University of North Carolina - Wilmington, is nothing if not a provocateur; few other impulses can explain a book entitled Feminists Say The Darndest Things. Adams, as the title amply demonstrates, has an eristic disposition massively ill-suited for the modern academy; this is why the average reader is fortunate that Adams perseveres in his profession, and writes about it. Feminists Say The Darndest Things is a selection of Adams' correspondence to colleagues that furnishes an illuminating portrait of pious academic feminism that's not merely thin-skinned but actively censorious and relentlessly proselytizing.
Adams writes a lot of letters, and given what goes on around him, you can understand why. He wrote to question the tolerance of a colleague who commented, about a faculty candidate: "This guy went to West Point. He may be too conservative to teach here." He wrote another colleague who stormed out when he questioned allegations of sexual harassment leveled against his department chair. She declared, in response to his comment "I will not sit here and listen to a police interrogation." He wrote a colleague who believed that a student who lodged a fake rape accusation (to get out of an exam) should suffer no punishment. And those are just the people with whom he works. Missives also go out to the Northern Kentucky University professor who encouraged her students to destroy an anti-abortion display on that campus, and the Duke Professor who resigned from her committee assignments in indignation at the re-admittance of the falsely-accused Duke Lacrosse players.
That's just a sampling; there are 61 letters in the book (one, to Abigail Adams, presumably went unread). Most aren't as consequential as the examples I noted above, but point out both a reflexive hostility to criticism on the part of their targets, and a relentless presumption that the academy should reflect their own values in even the most trivial cases. It's good to see, gathered in one volume, stories from a professor canceling classes to protest the Iraq War and offering extra credit to her students to protest, to Adams' removal from a faculty senate email list after he complained about political discrimination on the campus (see, Adams was completely wrong!). Stories about the political character of the academy are often dismissed as mere anecdotes; Adams' dossier makes clear that they're common responses from an entrenched academic community intensely jealous of any threats to the primacy of their worldview. ]]>
Adams' wide range is the greatest strength of the book, offering a surfeit of evidence about campus lunacy; unfortunately, it also raises questions about Adams' seriousness. Does it really build his case to suggest that a professor shouldn't kiss her partner (a former student) in the university hallway? Or to include a letter criticizing a professor based upon RateMyProfessor.com indications that she talked about sex in class? Or a letter observing that some simpering females were slavish friends of gay males? Or the letter asking why a colleague thought that "marriage is a better deal for men than it is for women." With so many ripe targets in evidence, it's frustrating that Adams tarries on comparative distractions.
Regrettably, Adams' tone cements the impression of a lack of discernment in his topic. Insouciance pervades the book from the first page, and generally all the better to puncture his humorless feminist targets (with chapter headlines such as "Not All Feminists Are Dogs") but Adams' tone slips beyond cheek into rash derision on a number of occasions. References to a student worker as "the one who never wears a bra to work" or other low-blow jabs about unshavencolleagues add nothing to the volume's force. Other observations, however jestingly offered, seem questionable or tasteless; is the reason for the obsequious behavior of some females towards gay males really that "gays have a tendency to break down emotionally at the slightest hint of disapproval"? Is suggesting that a student's advocacy of sex toys is a good thing because "playing with fake sex organs will impede [her] ability to spread sexually transmitted diseases to unsuspecting partners" any advance in improving the campus climate of thought? Is the repeated use of a dog symbol really useful in order to coyly use "[bitch]-slapped" as a chapter title? You can imagine what the cat symbol represents.
Given how vital much of what Adams has to relate is, and how worthily most of his subjects deserve exposure, it's keenly disappointing to see the book's energies dissipated in scattershot tangents and pointless aspersions. I'd recommend the book to anyone concerned about the state of the modern university, but I'd understand why many would put it down. Adams has written a book that seems destined to be read only by those convinced that he's right; with some temperate changes, he could have offered a far more useful expose.
Columbia's Rebel Reuniontag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2008:/originals//6.13702008-04-11T04:17:29Z2008-05-06T16:11:46ZBy John Leo Columbia University is warily approaching the 40th anniversary of its greatest disaster, the 1968 student uprising and occupation of five buildings, which vigorous and sometimes brutal New York City police eventually ended. A three-day conference looking back...Anthony Paletta
By John Leo
Columbia University is warily approaching the 40th anniversary of its greatest disaster, the 1968 student uprising and occupation of five buildings, which vigorous and sometimes brutal New York City police eventually ended. A three-day conference looking back at the unrest begins on April 24 and describes itself as an "event," not a celebration or even a commemoration. The conference is being staged "at" Columbia, not "by" it. The university administration is not funding, sponsoring, or organizing the conference. But university president Lee Bollinger is scheduled for two appearances, which would seem to undercut the administration's arm's-length posture. Further, the university is allowing the group of former protesters organizing the event to use several campus buildings, and two Columbia centers are officially listed as sponsors of individual conference events.
The conference program on the sponsors' website promises to air a "wide range of viewpoints" on what happened and why, but the list of speakers shows no range at all - everyone seems to be a proud ex-protester or at least a familiar partisan of the Left. While Todd Gitlin (formerly the president of Students for a Democratic Society, now at Columbia's journalism school) is a sober and reflective thinker, most of his fellow speakers are far from that standard. They include Kathleen Cleaver, Eldridge Cleaver's widow and a former Black Panther official; veteran activist Tom Hayden; several former members of the Weather Underground; and Ti-Grace Atkinson, a radical feminist from the 1960s who opposes all sexual intercourse. Not one member of the Columbia faculty from 1968 is participating. Event sponsors say that voices of non - leftists will be included in a "multi-media narrative," the details of which are not clear; what is clear, so far anyway, is that the panels represent only one point of view.
It isn't as though the event's organizers didn't know whom to invite. Columbia sociology professor Allan Silver, who was a member of a faculty group in 1968 that tried to work out a compromise before police cleared the occupied buildings, suggested that the conference include speakers from a broad range of groups, including the Majority Coalition, which opposed the strike; New York City police officials; aides to then-mayor John Lindsay; reporters who covered the events; current or recent Columbia students in ROTC programs; and "others, NOT from the left." The conference timetable that the organizers issued in mid-March lists representatives of none of these groups. Nor does it include any of the organized "moderates" of '68, such as the members of Students for a Restructured University (SRU), which helped create the University Senate after the traumatic events of that spring. "It's going to be an all-Bolshevik conference," said Neal Hurwitz, a 1967 Columbia graduate, former member of Silver's faculty group, and SRU leader.]]>
Commentary on another of the sponsors' websites expresses bitter resentment about the term "student riots." The protest veterans still believe that in occupying Columbia buildings, they behaved well. Critics argue, however, that the aging strikers need to acknowledge some of their shameful deeds - holding a dean captive for many hours, trashing a conservative professor's office and setting it on fire, and hurling paving stones down at police. Their hooliganism enraged the cops, setting the stage for confrontation and eventually leading to serious injuries to some protesters.
"This conference is the first time that Columbia is actually attempting to come to terms with what happened, to overcome denial and a type of institutional post-traumatic stress disorder," writes one of the event’s organizers, author Hilton Obenzinger. "It's hard for me to believe the university is ready to put up a monument or some other kind of marker, at least not yet, but if it does, it may be one of the results of this effort." Hurwitz offers a different, more compelling view: "This was a strike reunion from the start." Someday, we may see a forum in which voices from all sides discuss the impact of the 1968 eruption. But this isn't it.
Tenure And The Litigation Culturetag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2008:/originals//6.13622008-04-10T22:33:29Z2008-04-15T18:34:24ZBy Robert Weissberg In the spring of 2008 Baylor University denied tenure to a larger than usual number of Assistant Professors up for promotion, including two-thirds of the women, and while tenure denial is normal at Baylor, the carnage uptick...Anthony Paletta
By Robert Weissberg
In the spring of 2008 Baylor University denied tenure to a larger than usual number of Assistant Professors up for promotion, including two-thirds of the women, and while tenure denial is normal at Baylor, the carnage uptick - from 10% to 40% in a single year - drew national attention and outcries of unfairness. No doubt, outsiders may find that awarding life-time employment to 60% of those eligible is a fantastic deal in today's economy where corporations routinely shed entire divisions and even CEO's get the ax. Surely no rational firm could guarantee tenure to 90%, even 60s%, of those initially hired. That harsh economic fact understood, why the sudden indignation? Is something seriously rotten at Baylor? As a veteran spending four decades passing among the natives (I speak fluent numbo-jumbo, passable gibberish, I should add), let me try to explain why what is typical in the "real world" outrages so many academics.
The place to begin is to recognize that winning tenure is customary at American colleges save elite, research-oriented institutions. In fact in a few top departments almost no junior faculty wins tenure, so the review process resembles the annual clubbing of baby seals. Given that rejection runs counter to widespread expectations, it is naturally a bitter pill to swallow. It is not a matter of initial screening being so astute that no mid-course corrections are necessary. Rather, the pathways to tenure abound, standards are pliable, and the ever-present threat of litigation shields protected endangered species faculty, so in many instances a negative outcomes is genuinely surprising, if not shocking.
Truth be told, all the transparency and fairness talk is largely irrelevant administrative boilerplate. Subjectivity is everywhere; as in judging pornography, fuzziness is inherent, and this applies equally to Harvard or Okefenokee Tech. "Original research" or "excellent teaching" are rubber yardsticks far distant from cars sold per month. Apprehensive junior faculty speculate endlessly about thresholds - One or two books? Are five articles enough? How many research grants and of what size? Can mediocre teaching be overcome by outstanding outside letters? - but universities justifiably never operate on piece-work, and it is preposterous to insist that bean counting is even possible. On-the-bubble candidates scrutinized past decisions with Talmudic attentiveness, but the outcomes are always murky - Assistant Professor Alphonse is now an Associate despite his weak publication record while Professor Gaston who followed was booted notwithstanding an outstanding resume. Stories of unexpected failures are told and re-told, embellished and deconstructed, but these hardly calm jangled nerves. In the final analysis, tenure judgments resemble the College of Cardinals electing the Pope - there are usually solid reasons but they may be forever obscure and, critically, no senior faculty is obligated to explain his or her vote. It is a mystery wrapped in a sheepskin encased in a 9 x 12 manila envelop. Up or down reasons can be petty, wrong-headed, misinformed and otherwise flawed, but truth is unknowable. The most vicious personal blackball can be "explained" with "his Bush-as-Hitler research just did not meet the standards for the Benedict Arnold Program in American Studies." Nothing more had to be said. This uncertainty, the knowledge that one's life can be decided by whim, is truly frightening. ]]>
Robert Weissberg is Professor of Political Science, Emeritus at The University of Illinois-Urbana, and occasionally teaches in the NYU Politics Department MA Program.
]]>
Why I Am Running For Harvard's Board Of Overseerstag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2008:/originals//6.13392008-04-08T22:23:55Z2008-04-15T18:32:17ZBy Robert L. Freedman A.B. '62 I am running as a petition candidate for Harvard's Board of Overseers to help Harvard College improve itself. I have been interested in higher education - and in particular in what is taught and...Anthony Paletta
By Robert L. Freedman A.B. '62
I am running as a petition candidate for Harvard's Board of Overseers to help Harvard College improve itself.
I have been interested in higher education - and in particular in what is taught and how it is taught - since graduating from the College in 1962. I have the time, the interest and the energy to try to make a difference.
There is ferment in the world of higher education. When a former Harvard College Dean publishes a book about Harvard subtitled How a Great University Forgot Education, and when a former Harvard President publishes a book about colleges subtitled A Candid Look At How Much Students Learn And Why They Should Be Learning More, you know it's time to get involved.
College is when people are most open to learning. Afterwards their intellectual horizons narrow. It is a major loss if part of those key four years is wasted in a class with a poor teacher or in a subject of only ephemeral importance.
Harvard has two governing boards. The Harvard Corporation (officially the President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a Massachusetts non-profit corporation with seven members. Vacancies are filled by the remaining members. So it is a self-perpetuating board - as are most non-profit boards.
The second governing board is the Overseers (officially the Board of Overseers of Harvard College). Despite their official name, their writ covers the entire University. They have been elected by all the alums since 1921. In April of each year Harvard mails ballots to all one-third of a million Harvard degree holders (except faculty members). Five alums are elected every year for 6 year terms, for a total of 30 Overseers.
The alumni association annually solicits names of possible candidates from the alums, and then nominates eight candidates for the five positions. The eight candidates generally are diverse in terms of occupation, geographical location, gender, ethnicity and race.
These elections are usually non-events. Typically ninety percent of the alums do not bother to vote, perhaps because they believe who is elected makes no difference.
But every once in a while something different happens, because any alum can become a petition candidate upon obtaining the signatures of about 250 alums on official Harvard ballots (that is what I did). Nineteen years ago, when divestiture of South African securities from the endowment was a hot issue, Barack Obama ran as a petition candidate. He lost. The handful of petition candidates over the years believed, like Obama, that certain important issues were not being properly addressed by the powers-that-be. In my case those issues are educational: teaching methods, the curriculum, the quality of student life and the high costs of college.
Harvard is aware of these issues and has made some important progress. But the Overseers have not been in the forefront of pushing for changes. I am running as a petition candidate because, as former Harvard President Derek Bok - in a most careful and thoughtful critique of colleges - recently wrote, reform is too difficult to accomplish solely from within. A push from outside is needed. And a push from a friend is much better than waiting until a crisis develops and an unfriendly heavy hand intrudes.
A more active Board of Overseers should make it its business to understand students' views. As our college experience recedes into the past, most of us lose touch with exactly how we felt and what we thought then. A good sign is that recently, apparently for the first time in living memory, a group of Overseers actually met with a group of students. That modest and long overdue first step could be the beginning of a process to acquaint the Overseers with the college's "customers".
There is lots to be done. Change is in the air. As a recent President said, If not now, when? If not us, who? Together we can make a difference. Let's do so.
---------------------------------------
Robert L. Freedman is a senior partner of the international law firm, Dechert LLP. He is a 1962 graduate of Harvard College. His campaign site can be found here. ]]>
Why Do Textbooks Cost So Much?tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2008:/originals//6.13382008-04-04T20:17:35Z2008-04-15T18:30:12ZBy Charlotte Allen You've just started your freshman year in college, so one of your first stops is the campus bookstore to pick up your textbooks. You signed up for Econ 101, where your professor has assigned one of the...Anthony Paletta
By Charlotte Allen
You've just started your freshman year in college, so one of your first stops is the campus bookstore to pick up your textbooks. You signed up for Econ 101, where your professor has assigned one of the top-selling basic textbooks in the field: Harvard professor N. Gregory Mankiw's 936-page Principles of Economics (South-Western/Thomson), now in its fourth edition. The price: $175.95, or if you want to throw in a study guide to help you ace the course, $209.90.
Wow, that's steep for just one book - but you've only just started. Next class: the first semester of your college's world history survey course, spanning the period from 1 million B.C. to 1500 A.D. In that class the prof is having you read the first volume of Traditions & Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past (McGraw-Hill), the ever-so-politically correct overview by Jerry H. Bentley and Herbert F. Ziegler that devotes only 28 of its 600 pages to ancient Greece. The sticker price for Traditions and Encounters, now in its second edition: $89.69. Next, chemistry class, where the assigned textbook is Karen C. Timberlake's Chemistry: An Introduction to General, Organic, and Biological Chemistry (Prentice-Hall), now in its ninth edition. The price here is $148.80 for 736 pages plus a CD-ROM, and another $64.90 if you want a study guide. The bargain on your textbook list, if you can call it that, is Lynn Bloom's The Essay Connection (Houghton-Mifflin), the required anthology for your freshman English class, and "only" $61.16 for 656 pages. The Essay Connection is in its eighth edition, an improvement over the seventh edition, its blurb promises, because the book now includes essays by David Sedaris (can't you read him at home in your parents' New Yorker?), a photo collection on the horrors of war (guess what non-English-related political point that's trying to make), and cartoons and other illustrations for students who learn better by looking at pictures.
Your textbook-bill total for the semester is now $475.60 for just four books, more than a fourth of the average $2,315 in tuition and fees for a semester at a U.S. state college, according to figures for 2004 from the U.S. Education Department) - and that doesn't include optional study guides, the lab manual you might need for chem class, or the photocopied handout packet your English teacher says she'll be passing out at your expense. Why the sky-high prices for basic textbooks? After all, the brand-new, critically acclaimed translation of Tolstoy's War and Peace by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Knopf) lists at only $37 for 1,273 pages in handsomely designed hardback. If Knopf, a trade publisher, can bring in a lengthy volume with a scholarly apparatus of notes and bibliography for less than $40, why can't textbook publishers, serving a market of generally cash-strapped young people, do something similar?]]>
War and Peace, the latest diet guide or whatever), acquires it, and pays for it, so that price points and competition are crucial. What the textbook market resembles most is the market for health care, in which one entity (the physician/the professor) desires - that is, assigns or prescribes - the product, a second entity (the patient/the student) consumes it, and a third set of entities (insurance companies/parents) foot the bill. Spiraling prices for textbooks, like spiraling medical costs, seem to be the inevitable result. A General Accounting Office report in 2005 noted that textbook prices rose 186 percent in the U.S. from 1986 to 2004, compared to only a 3 percent rise in other prices over the same period and a 7 percent rise in average college tuition and fees. The seemingly out-of-control price increases have prompted laws in six states and pending bills in at least four others - plus a measure passed by the House of Representatives on Feb. 7 - that aim to regulate the way in which textbooks are marketed so as to lower costs to students.
In September 2006 an advisory committee to the U.S. Education Department issued a lengthy analysis of the economic forces that possibly lead to high textbook prices. They included inelastic demand (student who want to pass their courses have to buy the books); an oligopolistic supply market in which only a handful of publishers (including Thomson, McGraw-Hill, Prentice Hall, and Houghton-Mifflin) dominate, high production costs that create barriers to entry by possible competitors with the Big Four; the fact that college bookstores, which typically charge some of the highest retail prices, tend to be profit centers for their universities; the fact that professors typically receive free comp copies of the books they assign their classes and thus often don't know how much the books cost; and the further fact that the professors who author textbooks have a financial stake via royalties in assigning the books to their captive classes. The Harvard Crimson recently reported that Mankiw has made his Principles of Economics required reading for the nearly 2,300 students who have passed through the beginning economics course he teaches at Harvard. Furthermore, multiple editions of a textbook (Principles of Economics has gone through four in the nine years since its first edition in 1998) tend not to reflect rapid developments in the field (how much does the law of supply and demand change?) so much as the desire of publishers, and in many cases authors, to render older editions obsolete, discouraging students from buying cheaper used copies.
Perhaps inevitably, textbook pricing has become a pet project of U.S. PIRG, the nationwide alliance of Ralph Nader-inspired state public interest research groups, or PIRGS, that tackle perceived consumer issues. U.S. PIRG has about 100 campus affiliates, often funded by contributions from mandatory student activity fees. The PIRGS and their national parent have been the main instigators of the price-regulation legislation. The House bill, strongly supported by U.S. PIRG, would require publishers to provide college faculty with extensive pricing and related information about every book the instructor is considering using, including its wholesale price, the copyright dates of every previous edition over the past 10 years, substantial changes between editions, and the availability (with prices) of alternative formats for the book, including e-books and coverless no-frills versions that can be loaded into a three-ring binder. The information would presumably spur professors to assign cheaper versions or older editions that could be bought used. The House bill - like many of the state measures, including a bill passed by the Colorado state legislature in March - would also require the "unbundling" of CD-ROMs and other supplementary items that are often shrink-wrapped into a package with the textbook itself; those extra items would be required to be sold separately. Finally, the House bill would prohibit instructors from selling their free copies of textbooks to used-bookstores for treat-your-spouse-to-dinner money - a common practice well known to book reviewers (including the author of this article).
Not surprisingly, textbook publishers resists such measures - and for good reason. As they point out, students are willing to spend up to $400 for an iPod - so why not $200 for a chemistry book? Furthermore, many textbooks are genuinely more expensive to produce than trade books, not only fatter and sturdier but often filled with graphs, charts, maps, illustrations, and reproductions of works of art that all cost money to make. Requiring publishers to provide detailed pricing and related information for every edition of a textbook every format whenever a professor expresses interest in it would only add an additional cost that would have to be passed on to someone, and that someone would probably a student. Such regulation's effect on smaller publishers seeking to break into the textbook market could be devastating, having the ironic effect of preserving the perceived oligopoly of market dominance that consumer advocates decry.
Bruce Hildebrand, higher education spokesman for the American Association of Publishers, argues that one main reason textbook prices are escalating - and being increasingly sold in conjunction with software and other products - is that cost-conscious colleges are cutting back on their traditional human and bricks-and-mortars educational support systems: teaching assistants, graders, language labs, and even science laboratories in some basic courses. In their place are CD-ROMs, e-tutors, and guided online homework, all especially useful to the vast majority of college students these days who are not quite college-ready, but all representing educational costs that colleges have quietly shifted from themselves to their students. "Faculty like the software" [bundled into text books] nowadays," says Hildebrand. "You can build a custom book. You can strip out the graphics and the other stuff and sell it cheaper. Georgia Tech tried that with a chemistry book published by Houghton-Mifflin. The cheaper book didn't sell. The students didn't want it." Furthermore, says Hildebrand, unbundling mandates, besides raising the price of extras for those who can benefit from them, interfere with the First Amendment rights of textbook authors and publishers to produce a package of materials that fits their idea, not some legislature's, of the learning experience they want the students who use them to have.
"Honestly, the faculty member is the one who has to make the decision [regarding which edition or format of a textbook to use," says George Priest, antitrust law professor at Yale. "The faculty member is the best monitor of what is in the students' best interest."
For example, says Priest, he personally monitors the law casebooks he assigns his Yale classes to find the cheapest edition for his students. "I teach a class on capitalism," he says, "and I found a $7.95 edition of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, in contrast to the $12.95 edition I had been using. It took me more than four hours to correlate the passages in the two versions I wanted to assign - all to save the students $5."
Trusting in professors' dedication to their students' interests, which is, after all, part of any college teacher's job, might be a more effective route than punitive regulation of publishers' practices if the goal is lowering textbook costs. In California, for example, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last October vetoed a bill passed by the state senate that closely resembled the federal House bill, instead signing a measure that mandates price disclosure only on an instructor's request and told professors to consider cost in assigning textbooks, but did not require them to assign any particular version.
Better yet, would-be textbook-price regulators might simply trust students themselves to figure out ways to make their learning materials cheaper. Many already bypass the premium prices prevailing at their campus bookstores for the rich used-book market on Amazon.com, where Principles of Economics can be had for $93 and The Essay Connection for as little as $8.10. Numerous other websites, such as textbooks.com, half.com, ecampus.com, and campusbooks.com compete to allow students to comparison-shop for books as well as buy and resell them at low prices. Other enterprising students, and even a few commercial entities, have discovered that many popular textbooks sell for less - sometimes a lot less - in licensed versions in foreign countries; they re-import the international editions from abroad and sell them for considerably less than their U.S. prices to classmates and other willing buyers. Of course, such maneuvers can violate U.S. trademark laws and subject sellers to liability for damages, warns James Grimmelman, professor of intellectual property law at New York Law School. "The [trademark] law basically enables price discrimination," says Grimmelman.
That may be, but the pressure on textbook prices by the combined strategies of enterprising students and used-book websites is likely in the long run to bring those prices down without government intervention. Eventually some publisher, major or minor, will figure out ways to give students and their professors exactly what they need for far less money - and at that point the textbook market will move quickly to correct itself, all by itself.
----------------------------------------
Charlotte Allen is a contributing editor for MindingTheCampus]]>
School Daze: The Best Novels About The Campustag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2008:/originals//6.13282008-04-02T21:12:39Z2008-04-15T18:29:32ZBy Stefan Kanfer "I expect you'll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That's what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behavior." - Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall, 1928 Those were the days. A novelist could...Anthony Paletta
By Stefan Kanfer
"I expect you'll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That's what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behavior."
- Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall, 1928
Those were the days. A novelist could teach for a year or two and emerge with enough satire to fill a library. Alas, the Academy has grown more ludicrous and exaggerated with each succeeding generation and is now almost beyond parody. Today, all a smart writer has to do, in Emily Dickinson's memorable phrase, is tell the truth but tell it slant.
This melancholy observation was brought to mind by Roger Rosenblatt's comic tale Beet, the story of a professor who fatuously assumes that college is a place for colloquy and intellectual adventure. Instead, he finds an arena rife with faculty politics and political correctness, with courses like Little People of Color and Postcolonial Women's Sports. The administration is even worse than the staff: eyeing the Internet, the chairman of the board of trustees demands, "Why couldn't we run the whole college online? From one building? From a Quonset hut! From a lean-to, for Chrissake! An outhouse!"
Funny stuff. But the fact is that colleges are falling all over themselves to hustle dollars from the Net. Google has more than six million references to courses you can take without bothering to enter a classroom. As for PC, the very real Occidental College offers The Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie?; Oberlin has a seminar called She Works Hard for the Money: Women, Work and the Persistence of Inequality; and UCLA makes much of Queer Musicology, exploring the ways in which "sexual differences and complex gender identities in music and among musicians have incited productive consternation" during the 1990s. I could cite hundreds more. ]]>
Lucky Jim, in print for more than 50 years. Amis, an Oxonian who found himself stuck in a backwater college in Wales, sent up postwar British education with this infuriated piece of comic art.
The title character is Jim Dixon, a young lecturer anxious for tenure. In a publish-or-perish environment, he coldly appraises his own work: "It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article's niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw on non problems... 'In considering this strangely neglected topic,' it began. This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what? His thinking all this without having defiled and set fire to the typescript only made him appear to himself as more of a hypocrite and fool. Let's see.. oh yes; The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485."
Surrounded by professorial charlatans, under the thumb of an inane department head, Dixon seeks refuge in love affairs and booze. These culminate in a drunken spree and the disheartening hangover: "a dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad." The aspiring professor will feel no better in the days to come. But the reader will.
In the U.S., poet Randall Jarrell co-founded the Academic novel industry at about the same time. His only work of fiction, Pictures at an Institution, elegantly lambasted a place called Benton College, which bore an odd similarity to the progressive Sarah Lawrence College where he had taught. Though the place exalts Creativity with a capital C, says the narrator, "If you had given a Benton student a pencil and a piece of paper, and asked her to draw something, she would have looked at you in helpless astonishment: if would have been plain to her that you knew nothing about art." One student hands in a story about a bug that goes to bed and wakes up as a man. The writer acknowledges that yes, she has been slightly "influenced by Kafka." Plagiarism? Never heard of it.
Diversity-for-diversity's-sake is already beginning to creep through the ivy, and Jarrell derives a great deal of amusement recounting the foolishness that will soon overtake higher learning. But Pictures is also a satire of a satirist - novelist/critic/contrarian Mary McCarthy, here called Gertrude Johnson. ("As a writer Gertrude had one fault more radical than all the rest; she did not know - or rather, did not believe - what it was like to be a human being. She was one, intermittently, but while she wasn't she did not remember what it had felt like to be one...") Johnson comes to campus as a lecturer but her real purpose is to write her own roman a clef, and that's exactly what McCarthy did. Her novel is entitled Groves of Academe. Hers is bitchier; Jarrell's is livelier; both belong in your library.
Some fifteen years later a new humorist, Malcolm Bradbury, emerged from Academia with a novel entitled The History Man. Like Amis, the author was a teacher based in one of Britain's new "red brick" universities. His anti-hero, Howard Kirk, is a Marxist hustler who takes advantage of the poor (in this case graduate students), dismisses a decent, gentlemanly undergrad whose opinions differ from his own as a "heavy, anal type," and teaches the softest pseudoscience in the catalogue: sociology. Kirk attempts to seduce any female within reach, a penchant which mi