Originalstag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//62010-09-02T01:15:11ZMovable Type 3.34The Underperformance Problemtag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.40612010-09-02T20:59:21Z2010-09-02T01:15:11ZBy Russell K. Nieli On average black students do much worse on the SAT and many other standardized tests than whites. While encouraging progress was made in the 1970s and early 1980s in improving black SAT scores and reducing the...Anthony Paletta
By Russell K. Nieli
On average black students do much worse on the SAT and many other standardized tests than whites. While encouraging progress was made in the 1970s and early 1980s in improving black SAT scores and reducing the black/white test score gap, progress in this direction came to a halt by the early 1990s, and today the gap stands pretty much where it was twenty years ago. Whereas whites and Asians today average a little over 500 on the math and reading portions of the SAT, blacks score only a little over 400 -- in statistical metric a gap of a full standard deviation. Only about one in six blacks does as well on the SAT as the average white or Asian.
This state of affairs is well known uncomfortable though it may be to bring up in public. Less well known is what in the scholarly literature is called "the underperformance problem." Once in college blacks with the same entering SAT scores as whites and Asians earn substantially lower grades over their college careers and wind up with substantially lower class rankings. This gap in grade performance, moreover, is not reduced by adding high school grades or socio-economic status to the criteria for matching students. Blacks equally matched with whites or Asians in terms of their entering scholastic credentials and socio-economic backgrounds simply do not perform as well as their Asian and white counterparts in college. And the degree of underperformance is often very substantial.
This is contrary to what many people have been led to believe. Standardized tests are "culturally biased," it is said, and do not fairly indicate the abilities or promise of racial minorities growing up outside the dominant white, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon culture. Often this claim is bolstered by reciting items on long outdated verbal tests asking for the meaning of words like "regatta" or "cotillion" that only upper-class whites are likely to know. The implication is usually that those from minority cultures will do better in college in terms of grades than their test scores would predict. The "cultural bias" argument, however, is not only questionable on its face -- since the clearly non-Anglo Saxon Asians do better than whites on most standardized tests of mathematical abilities including the SAT, while the equally non-Anglo Saxon Ashkenazic Jews outperform everyone else on tests of English verbal ability -- but fails to account for the fact that in terms of grade performance blacks in college consistently do worse, not better, than their standardized test scores would predict. Standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT overpredict, not underpredict, how well blacks will do in college, and in this sense the tests are predictively biased in favor of blacks, not against them.]]>
The Shape of the River (1998) -- the highly influential defense of racial preference policies at elite universities by former presidents of Princeton and Harvard. It was an important topic, too, in the two subsequent River Books sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation -- The Source of the River (2003), by Douglas Massey and his colleagues, and Taming the River (2009), by Camille Charles and her colleagues.
The scope of the underperformance problem is suggested in The Shape of the River. Using the College and Beyond (C&B) database consisting of detailed statistics on students at 28 highly selective liberal arts colleges and research universities, the authors found that blacks and whites were separated by a rank-in-class gap of 30 percentile points -- white students averaged at the 53d percentile, blacks at the 23d. However, less than half of this rank-in-class gap (14 points) could be explained in a complex regression analysis by factors such as the blacks' lower entering SAT scores, their lower high school grades, and numerous other relevant background characteristics. The remaining gap (16 points) had to be chalked up to "underperformance" -- i.e., to the fact that blacks simply didn't do as well as whites even when their many differences in entering characteristics were closely controlled for statistically. This same pattern, Bowen and Bok went on to explain, "holds within each group of C&B schools considered separately, whether the schools are classified solely by their degree of selectivity, by their status as a college or university, or as a public or private institution. At the various sets of schools, the adjusted black-white gap in class rank that remains after controlling for other variables ranges from 15 to 21 points." "This unmistakable pattern," Bowen and Bok add, "is found not only in the C&B colleges but in professional schools as well."
Stereotype Threat
Explanations for the underperformance problem have been elusive. The most frequently discussed idea is psychologist Claude Steele's theory of "stereotype threat." Much of the problem that black college students encounter in achieving grades commensurate with their proven abilities, Steele believes, is due to their tendency to internalize the image of black intellectual inferiority projected by the wider culture. As a result of this internalization, blacks often experience heightened test anxiety, Steele says, and do more poorly on college exams than would be the case in the absence of such a race-linked handicap. Steele and other researchers have shown within laboratory settings that black students do considerably worse on tests if they are told that the test is designed to determine their intellectual abilities than if the test is presented in a less threatening manner as a simple exercise in showing the mechanics of problem solving. (While Steele will only say so when pushed, our current system of racial preferences that places blacks in institutions where they must compete with whites and Asians who have usually gained entrance under more exacting standards almost surely contributes to this stereotype vulnerability.)
The stereotype threat theory, however, is at best only a partial explanation of the underperformance conundrum. Two salient and undisputed facts limit its explanatory power. First, the problem of underperformance has been shown to extend far beyond the kinds of majors where test-taking is a central part of a student's overall evaluation. In many humanities, social science, and history courses written assignments and term papers -- not timed, in-class exams -- are the basis of a student's academic assessment but the underperformance of blacks has been shown to be an across-the-board phenomenon that is found even among black students majoring in these areas. Though there is some evidence that the underperformance problem may be more serious in test-taking courses, especially those in the natural sciences, there surely is more at work here in depressing black grades than test-taking anxiety.
An even more serious problem with the stereotype threat explanation is the fact that the greatest gap in college grades between blacks and whites with similar SAT scores and high school grades is found among those students with the highest measures of these background characteristics. Blacks with the highest SAT scores and high school GPAs, many of whom have scores higher than the typical white or Asian student at the colleges they attend -- and thus have good reason to feel intellectually superior, not inferior, to most of their classmates -- are those underperforming the most. Those least likely to be troubled by feelings of intellectual inferiority or lack of academic self-confidence show the greatest performance gap when matched with whites and Asians of equivalently high SAT scores and high school grades.
Stereotype threat theory cannot explain any of this. The problem is laid out most succinctly by William Bowen and Frederick Vars in a widely read study of blacks and whites at 11 highly competitive colleges and universities (Bowen and Vars use a subset of the same College and Beyond database used by Bowen and Bok in The Shape of the River). Summing up their study's findings, they write: "At every level of SAT score blacks earn lower grades than their white counterparts, and this remains true after controlling for other variables, including high school grades and socioeconomic status. ... African-American students have lower GPAs than one would predict on the basis of SAT scores and high school grades. In our analysis this overprediction ... is present among both males and females, and in both colleges and universities. While it is most pronounced in the sciences, it exists in all major fields of study. ... Most sobering of all, the performance gap is greatest for the black students with the highest SATs. ... In selective colleges and universities, black students at the highest levels of SAT score are especially likely to underperform relative to white classmates with similar scores and characteristics." Bowen and Vars highlight their analysis by saying that "the reasons for this gap are not well understood."
The Disincentives of the Affirmative Action System
While acknowledging the probable effect of "stereotype threat," authors like Bowen and Vars realize that such an explanation goes only so far and cannot explain why blacks in all college subfields do worse than comparable whites and Asians, nor why it is the smartest blacks who underperform the most. The underperformance problem, however, is not nearly as enigmatic as these and other writers contend. Its most fundamental cause has been well explained in the past by critics of affirmative action in a manner that anyone with common sense can easily grasp. The real culprit here in discouraging black students to do their best and perform up to their potential, these critics explain, is the all-pervasive system of racial preferences that makes it much easier for black high school students to get into good colleges, and for black college students to gain access to good graduate schools, professional schools, and corporate sector jobs. The black students know that they don't have to do nearly as well in school as their white and Asian classmates to reach the same level of acceptance and achievement
The Manhattan Institute scholar John McWhorter, a linguist by training, explains the situation in its most cogent terms drawing from both his own experience as a black high school student in a mixed-race Philadelphia private school and from his many years of teaching black college students at Berkeley. "I can attest," McWhorter writes, "that in secondary school I quite deliberately refrained from working to my highest potential because I knew that I would be accepted to even top universities without doing so. Almost any black child knows from an early age that there is something called affirmative action which means that black students are admitted to schools under lower standards than white; I was aware of this [from] at least the age of ten. And so I was quite satisfied to make B+'s and A-'s rather than the A's and A+'s I could have made with a little extra time and effort. Granted, having the knack for school that I did, I was lucky that my less-than-optimum efforts still put me within reach of fine schools. However, there is no reason that the same sentiment would not operate even in black students who happen to be less nerdy than I was. ... In general, one could think of few better ways to depress a race's propensity for pushing itself to do its best in school than a policy ensuring that less-than-best efforts will have disproportionately high yield."
McWhorter sees a similar dynamic at work with black college students as with black high school students since they know they will be given a huge boost over their white and Asian classmates when the time comes to apply for jobs and places in graduate and professional schools. When the huge boosts that blacks receive under the reigning affirmative action system are combined with what McWhorter calls the "cultural disconnect" that he believes leads many black youth to hold schoolwork "at half an arm's length," the inevitable result is a huge racial gap in achievement.
Shelby Steele, another prominent black critic of affirmative action, makes the same claim even more pithily. Racial preferences, says Steele, send out the message to black students that "mediocrity will win for them what only excellence wins for others." In view of this message, for many black students the most attractive strategy becomes one of sitting back in class, taking it easy in school in terms of studying and hard work, and letting the whites and Asians toil away to get their good grades. The black students, says Steele, know that they don't have to perform at nearly the same level as their white and Asian schoolmates to advance along a similar career path. They can make up through race what they lack in performance.
"The top quartile of black American students," Steele writes, who often come "from two-parent families with six-figure incomes and private school educations," is precisely the group "that has been most aggressively pursued for the last thirty years with affirmative action preferences." "Infusing the atmosphere of their education from early childhood," he continues, "is not the idea that they will have to steel themselves to face stiff competition but that they will receive a racial preference. ... Out of deference, elite universities have offered the license not to compete to the most privileged segment of black youth."
Other prominent black critics of affirmative action, including economist Walter Williams, Vanderbilt law professor Carol Swain, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas have offered similar observations. Like McWhorter and Steele they all present what might be called a "preference disincentive theory" to explain the seemingly inexplicable phenomenon of black underperformance. And this is the only theory out there that can explain why underperformance is observed across the entire spectrum of black talent including among those least likely to experience "stereotype threat." It is also the only theory that can explain the fact that it is those blacks with the highest SAT scores who underperform the most.
The high-SAT blacks, who are often the most intellectually gifted and have the highest IQs, know that professional schools and graduate schools look high and low for black students of their intellectual caliber and will admit them with much lower grades than their white and Asian counterparts. Since it is the most competitive graduate and professional schools that extend the greatest affirmative action boost to black applicants, it is not surprising that it is the best and brightest blacks who underperform the most. They know they need not get grades in college that come anywhere close to those of their white and Asian classmates to gain places in the most prestigious graduate institutions and in the most sought after corporations and law firms. While some students are internally driven to achieve at their maximum regardless of external rewards, and others receive relentless grade pressure from home, this is not how typical American students behave, and certainly not typical black students. (Participant observer studies have shown just how half-heartedly many black teen subcultures support academic striving even when there is no overt subcultural hostility of the kind that would stigmatize getting good grades as "acting white.").
A Threatening Truth
Despite its common sense appeal and the testimony of many prominent black commentators, the "preference disincentive theory" is rarely taken up by proponents of affirmative action. It appears to be too threatening to their policy preferences even to be considered very seriously lest it turn out to be true. In The Shape of the River the theory is discussed on just one page (of a 400 page book), though the discussion is superficial and concludes with Bowen and Bok saying "we know of no way to test this hypothesis." In the Bowen and Vars study the theory is taken up -- and dismissed -- in a single, two-sentence footnote. "While some commentators have argued that affirmative action in the workplace weakens incentives for black students to perform academically," they write, "even if affirmative action were to shift upward career prospects for black [college] graduates, the marginal payoffs to academic achievement should remain constant."
This last statement is true, of course, in the sense that it is almost always to the advantage of black college students in terms of their careers to get better grades even if they know they will be given various post-college racial boosts. Marginal grade improvements will almost always pay off careerwise. And if black college students were always single-mindedly focused on getting into the best professional schools, or landing the most prestigious positions in the corporate world, affirmative action would have no effect on how hard they work in college. But black students must not to be confused with profit-maximizing business firms, nor are they analogous to Max Weber's inner-worldly Puritan ascetics restlessly striving to prove themselves before God through their abstemiousness and tireless labor.
Academic work in college is often arduous and demanding and surely less attractive for most young people than the alternatives of socializing with friends, listening to music, playing sports, and the like. Trade-offs will be made, and if black students are told that they can advance just as fast and go just as far in their career trajectory as similarly talented white or Asian students while doing much less demanding academic work than these other students, it is a deal many black students will readily accept. In social science terminology, they will "satisfice" rather than "maximize" their academic and career potential. Like John McWhorter in his Philadelphia high school, they will accept decent or mediocre grades even though by means of more diligent work they could have achieved -- and been additionally rewarded for achieving -- substantially better grades. This is what causes black underperformance.
None of what I have said here is rocket science or string theory. The failure of the academic establishment to acknowledge the obvious here in understanding the underperformance phenomenon can only be chalked up to a fear of discrediting the affirmative action policies they have long championed.
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Russell K. Nieli is a Senior Preceptor in the Executive Precept Program of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, and a Lecturer in Princeton's Politics Department. His new book, Wounds that Will Not Heal: Affirmative Action and Our Continuing Racial Divide, will be published next year by Encounter Books.
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An Open Letter to New Professorstag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.40392010-08-23T19:28:48Z2010-08-23T02:53:19ZBy J. M. Anderson Dear Assistant Professor: Congratulations on your new job! Whether you're a visiting professor or on the tenure-track, consider yourself among of the lucky. As someone who ran the academic treadmill for eight years---I taught at a...Anthony Paletta
By J. M. Anderson
Dear Assistant Professor:
Congratulations on your new job! Whether you're a visiting professor or on the tenure-track, consider yourself among of the lucky. As someone who ran the academic treadmill for eight years---I taught at a community college, at two four-year liberal arts colleges, and at a state university until I landed a permanent position at a private university, where I am also Director of General Studies---I can appreciate your accomplishment more than most. Like many in the profession, I went to graduate school bushy-eyed and idealistic (a real-life Mr. Smith goes to Washington) so that I could become a professor and continue thinking about important questions. I wanted to inspire others to think about big ideas and to experience the transformative power of liberal education, as my professors had done for me.
Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that teaching is not that important. It won't get you a job, and it certainly won't get you tenure or promoted, even at most so-called "teaching colleges." Chances are that it will not be as intellectually stimulating as you expect, and that after doing it for a few years you will become frustrated if not disillusioned or burnt out. Most college students believe that education is an entitlement and only care about grades and getting a degree. They are indifferent to courses that don't bear on their majors or won't help them get a job or into graduate or professional school. Having been coddled by parents at home and by teachers in grade school and high school, they are demanding, think they have a right to your total attention, and believe that you must always be there for them.
Most of your colleagues will see undergraduate teaching as a burden to escape from whenever possible, but one that must be endured because it's their bread and butter, their meal ticket to do research, which is what they really care about. Research leads to publications, and publications to tenure and promotion and to advancement and recognition in the profession. No one ever gets rich or famous being a teacher. So they exploit the system and resent their students for not taking their courses seriously and interfering with their work. No college or university today, let alone any department, would proclaim what the University of Chicago proudly proclaimed at the beginning of last century: "We come to teach." Professors who come to teach today do so at their peril.
Unfortunately academics don't seem to care how this attitude affects undergraduate teaching and liberal education as a whole. It was, I think, William James who first warned about its corrosive effect more than a hundred years ago. In his essay, "The PhD Octopus," James describes how a brilliant student of Philosophy in the Harvard Graduate School took a job as a teacher of English Literature at a sister-college. When the governors of the college discovered that he didn't have his PhD, he was told that he must get the degree or the appointment would be revoked. The quality of the man and his ability to teach literature meant nothing to the school; the PhD meant everything. The college wanted to see those three magical letters behind the young professor's name. James understood that the PhD, relatively new in his day, was created to stimulate original research and scholarship proper; but he also understood that the fetish for this "sacred appendage" was a "Mandarin disease" that would lead to "academic snobbery" in the profession. "Will any one pretend that its possessor will be successful as a teacher?" The whole thing, he adds, "is a sham, a bauble, a dodge whereby to decorate the catalogues of schools and colleges."]]>
The PhD - Not Enough
James's warning has been echoed by, among others, Woodrow Wilson, Lawrence Lowell, Harold Laski, Robert Nisbet, Morris Kline, Jacques Barzun, and Anthony Grafton, but now even the PhD is not enough and there's a new snobbery in the profession. The obsession is research and the bauble publications. As Grafton writes in The New Yorker Magazine (October 2006): "Why, when most of our graduate students are going to work as teachers, do we make them spend years grinding out massive, specialized dissertations, which, when revised and published, may reach a readership that numbers in the high two figures? These activities seem both bizarre and disconnected, from one another and from modern life, and it's no wonder that they often provoke irritation, not only in professional pundits but also in parents, potential donors, and academic administrators." Think about how many MAs and ABDs currently teach at colleges and universities or are hired as adjuncts, thus showing their ability to do the job.
Although the status of the PhD is not as inflated as that of the BA and the MA, not yet anyway, it is no longer proof of competence in one's field; peer-reviewed books and articles demonstrate what the PhD once did, and departmental colleagues and administrators increasingly defer to publishers to determine a professor's value in the academic marketplace (see Lindsay Waters's Enemies of Promise and Mark Bauerlein's "Professors on the Production Line, Students on Their Own"). The important thing, especially for an untenured professor, is that your name appears in print, preferably in recognized journals or with a reputable university press. Never mind that most scholarship merely ekes out information and is the kind of fact-grubbing that Kingsley Amis satirizes in the novel Lucky Jim.
Jim wrote the perfect article with the perfect title, which "crystallized the article's niggling mindlessness, its funeral parade of yam-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems. Dixon had read, or begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worse than most in its air of being convinced of its own usefulness and significance." To get a hearing in the marketplace of ideas academics must pump up the value of their work. Every article challenges current assumptions, every book is revolutionary, when in truth few are the result of long thought and discovery, and even fewer advance knowledge. Most academics publish for the sake of credentialing; that is to say, most publish for the sake of job security and recognition from colleagues and administrators. The profession calls this "scholarship" and thinks that by changing the name of the condition it has changed the condition.
Is it so surprising, then, that most published matter has a short shelf life? That it is mediocre at best---in language, thought, and aim---and hardly read? Cyril Connolly once defined literature as "the art of writing something that will be read twice," but most academics are lucky if others read through their books or articles at least once. Even book reviewers rarely read academic books from cover to cover but usually confine themselves to the Introduction and the Conclusion and to whatever seems suitable in between. I knew a scholar who read academic books by their footnotes, saving himself the trouble of actually reading the text! But what's the point? Why write text at all if other academics don't actually read books but only take from them what they need so that they can write books which in turn few people will read? Why not simply catalogue our information or findings and list bibliographies?
We all know the little secrets of "scholarship" too, such as using others' work rather than doing the work for ourselves, and taking credit for it; citing sources without having read them; lifting citations and quotations and sometimes translations from secondary sources without acknowledging the secondary sources from which they came. It is re-search, and not much different from what Francis Bacon observed in his day: "if one turns from workshops to libraries and marvels at the enormous variety of books one sees there, on examining and looking more carefully into the subject matter and contents of those books, one will surely marvel the other way; for seeing the endless repetitions, and how men keep doing and saying the same things, one will pass from admiration of variety to wonder at the poverty and scarcity of those things that have up to now possessed and occupied the minds of men." This is still why most "scholarship" doesn't last. It is new bottles for old wine.
I'm not disparaging genuine scholarship. As Montaigne said, "I love and honor learning as much as those who have it; and in its true use it is man's most noble and powerful acquisition." I revere great scholars like Aquinas and Scaliger, Bentley and Gibbon. I'm humbled by the massive erudition of a Mommsen who, as Mark Twain said, carried "the Roman world and all the Caesars in his hospitable skull" as easily as "that other luminous vault, the skull of the universe, carries the Milky Way and the constellations." I'm awestruck by the great learning and output of C. S. Lewis, Harold Bloom, and Anthony Grafton.
Not the "Scholar" You Knew
A scholar used to invoke the image of the bookworm who amassed learning and worked on big problems and questions of great importance for years on end, writes Jacques Barzun, and the "true scholar might devote a lifetime to a large subject and publish on the brink of the grave." Wittgenstein published only one book in his lifetime, and Arnaldo Momigliano never published a monograph at all, yet both (long dead) are still considered great scholars in their fields. Now every PhD must be a scholar and give ample proof of fecundity and sit on committees and perform all the other duties expected of modern academics and find time for course preparation, grading, mentoring, and actually teaching students.
But here's the skinny. If you care about teaching, you will be forced to choose between it and scholarship because you won't have adequate time for both class preparation and research. Something has to give, and invariably it will be your teaching because publications are the currency of the academic world. The more peer-reviewed books and articles you have, the more valuable you will appear to colleagues and administrators. You'll be told that there isn't a conflict between research and teaching, and that research informs teaching, but that's simply not true. Few undergraduate courses are based primarily on a teacher's original research, and very rarely does the kind of scholarship that gets published make its way into the classroom. You are trained as a specialist, you publish as a specialist, but you will be expected to teach more than your narrow specialty.
The obsession with research and the fetish for publishing has created two tiers in academic world, those who research and those who teach, with teachers on the bottom tier. Since teaching is secondary, most professors eschew the accolade of teacher, even if they are excellent teachers. Having demonstrated the ability to master a subject by obtaining the PhD, and perhaps even turned their dissertation into a book, they prefer to be recognized as scholars, when they might not be gifted as true scholars. Still they believe they are contributing to scholarship. They write book reviews and articles. They attend conferences, which gives the impression on the home front that they are keeping up with the latest research.
At a conference they might even present a paper during a session with half a dozen or so participants, including the commentator and other presenters. (Colleagues and administrators back home will never know, and they can add it to their CV.) Even better, they rub elbows with other academics and vie for the attention of the genuine scholars, who might give it to them, until someone more important comes along. At conferences, you'll soon find out, if you haven't already, you are a name tag. People don't first look at you but at your name and institution. The next best thing to being recognized as an important scholar is to be affiliated with an institution that others have heard of. All this generates feelings of inferiority and a great deal of anxiety within the profession. Let's face it, academics are just as status-conscious as other Americans (see the chapter on American intellectual life in Paul Fussell's shrewdly perceptive book, Class).
Expectations of You? Going Up
The top tier of the academic world, like Marx's bourgeoisie, control access to the means of production. They decide who gets jobs and tenure and promoted, how to allocate resources from salaries to research funds, and who gets published, as they are often reviewers and editors of journals. Like shopkeepers they possess a taxpayer mentality and demand tangible results, even when they have stopped being productive themselves. They might have a few reviews or articles to their names, but that's usually because they've been in the game longer, not because they are necessarily genuine or better scholars. Most are one book wonders. They published their dissertation but haven't been able to produce another book since graduate school.
Now they have the power to judge you, and it is usually by a higher standard of productivity. We "have an obviously unfair situation," writes Lindsay Waters, "where people with few publications are in a position to demand from young 'colleagues' achievements they never managed." During a job interview the chairman of a department admitted as much to me, and a former colleague serving on a hiring committee once candidly remarked that he wouldn’t be considered for the job for which he was interviewing candidates. "Hyping professional responsibility," adds Waters, "is a mask for the fear of elders," what Nietzsche saw as a vice of modern intellectuals. "The only justification the aged have for doing so is that they can, which is maddening because raising the bar has nothing intrinsic to do with academic inquiry."
In the current environment Socrates, who wrote nothing, wouldn't get a job, let alone tenure. Plato and Descartes---the subjects of many a doctoral dissertation - wouldn't be awarded the PhD for their works, which display great and original thinking but not scholarship. Thoreau, Whitman, and Nietzsche wouldn't get tenure because they had to pay to get some of their books published---and yet their writings are studied by scholars in a profession that typically looks down upon those who pay to get their work in print, even with respectable academic presses. (Don't even think about publishing your manuscript with a so-called vanity press.)
Here's more of the skinny. You will be expected to do original research and produce scholarship based on your findings, but you won't get adequate funding to do it. True, most colleges and universities give faculty some money for professional development, but the amount typically ranges from $500 to $1500 a year, hardly enough to pay for yearly research trips and the conferences you are expected to attend. Other research grants and fellowships are out there, but their numbers are dwindling, and those you can apply for are competitive and not guaranteed. You can pay for research trips yourself, but as a young professional just getting started with other financial obligations, including repaying student loans, you probably won't make enough money to do this. For this reason you might find yourself in the position of many other young professors who are forced to look for some other source of income.
Writing textbooks can be lucrative, but that can take years, and besides, the privilege is reserved for the recognized scholars in your field. Forget about trying earn money by making your work accessible and publishing with a trade press; popularized books don't typically qualify as "scholarship" and are usually pooh-poohed by the profession---although I can't imagine any academic who wouldn't love to be a New York Times bestselling author. Like most other young professors you'll probably opt to teach overloads or summer courses, but remember that this uses up time and energy that should be devoted to research and publishing, which is how you will get tenure.
Older professors, comfortable and secure, will remind you that we don't do this for the money, and that it is difficult for any young professional to get started these days. I agree. It is also true that assistant professors typically draw salaries above the national median and receive other generous benefits like health insurance and pension plans at little or no cost to themselves. I know from experience that after living for years on a meager graduate student's stipend, the salary and benefits of a first job seem like a windfall.
But none of this erases the fact that starting salaries for new PhDs in colleges and universities are well below the salaries of other professionals with similar education and training, or less in some cases (I'm thinking of the MBA). Despite entering the middle class, new professors still live in what in what Harold Laski once called a "shabby gentility" and Gilbert Highet a "genteel poverty." Tuition has risen astronomically over the past twenty years but that hasn't meant salaries for professors commensurate with their levels of education and training. Nor has it guaranteed them funding to do the kind of original research they are expected to do. You have the tenure gun pointed at your head, but teaching is not enough to get tenure; you are expected to do original research and publish, but you will have inadequate funding and time to do it. Be prepared for the conundrum.
The Creeping Professionalism
In his excellent book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Joseph Pieper reminds us that the word scholarship itself is derived from leisure, which in Greek is skole, in Latin scola, the English for "school" i.e. the place where we educate and teach. Culture itself depends on leisure, and leisure is not possible unless it is linked with culture. In this sense leisure means cultivating the intellect, which is the essence of scholarship---and of liberal education. "Thinking, too, has a time for ploughing and a time for gathering the harvest," says Wittgenstein, who believed that philosophers should greet each other by saying, "Take your time." One should not write a book or an article until one is quite certain of what one wants to say and that it will not produce more glut. "One should speak," says Nietzsche, "only where one must not be silent."
But to take the time that is necessary to investigate a big problem; to think about questions of great importance deeply and clearly and try to answer them thoroughly; to write up your findings in plain, simple and direct prose; above all else, to take teaching seriously and devote time to developing your own methods and style---all this is difficult, if not impossible, for new and untenured professors in the current academic climate. Colleagues and administrators want tangible and practical results---i.e. publications---because, as one former colleague said to me, they want to make sure they haven't hired a lemon. "To say, when you are at work, 'Let's have done with it now,' is a physical need for human beings," says Wittgenstein; but it is absolutely necessary "to go on thinking in the face of this need that makes it such strenuous work." The administrator or colleague with the taxpayer mentality doesn't understand this. He is used to finitude and expects everything to be done with quickly and to see the results. He is derisive of the thinker who takes his time. It's bad enough when the general public, ignorant of what we do, sneer at us for not "working for a living" or producing "practical" results, but it's worse when the same vulgar perception becomes part of the academic mindset.
All this has created a new kind of professionalism that is increasingly prevalent in the academic world. In Representations of the Intellectual, Edward Said appropriately defines professionalism as "thinking of your work as an intellectual as something you do for a living, between the hours of nine and five with one eye to the clock, and another cocked at what is considered to be proper, professional behavior---not rocking the boat, not straying outside accepted paradigms or limits, making yourself marketable and above all presentable." Leisure now means being free from the job and having time for entertainment---the day's work done, even professors want to go home and turn on the TV.
Even worse, professionalism promotes conformity because it inhibits the willingness of new and untenured professors to stand firm and alone. Let's face it, genuine academic freedom cannot exists in an environment that forces you to think small, to constrict your research and thinking, to specialize. Overly specialized research topics are practical because they are more manageable and easier to publish: never mind that young scholars become like brick-layers filling mortar between bricks: never mind that overspecialization severely narrows the mind and outlook by impairing their ability to investigate really big themes and use their discoveries to illuminate and expound entire subjects. This affects not only what we teach but how we teach. It wastes time and energy because, forced to devote our research to the narrow confines and minutiae of overly specialized topics, we produce scholarship that is out of sync with broad instruction in the liberal arts and what we actually do as teachers in the classroom. It also curbs enthusiasm and controversy in the classroom because tenure and promotion and job security are at stake.
You might say I'm exaggerating, but why, then, do so many untenured professors refuse to speak up in faculty senate or express contrarian opinions in departmental meetings? Why do so many essayists writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education use pseudonyms? They aren't keeping silent or hiding their identity because they believe in the mission of the university or the ideals of liberal education, but because they fear that a colleague or administrator might not like what they say and blackball them when it comes time for tenure or promotion. Even teachers "who really do confront students, who provide significant challenges to what they believe," writes veteran professor Mark Edmundson of the University of Virginia, often "generate more than a little trouble for themselves. A controversial teacher can send students hurrying to the deans and counselors, claiming to have been offended." So much for the duty of the intellectual to tell the truth and have the courage and readiness to carry on rational inquiry wherever it may lead, as Paul Baran famously put it.
In closing, let me add that I have written this letter, not to be officious or patronizing, but to share with you some of the things I have learned since graduate school that no one told me about. It is not, however, cause for resignation, but a call to action. I believe that as the next generation of scholar-teachers we must refuse to throw up our hands and surrender to those who promote conformity in scholarship, the curriculum, and the classroom. We can, of course, play the game and go about our business as usual, or we can try to do something about it. "Those who have wanted to attain some greater excellence," says the wise Montaigne, "have not been content to await the rigors of Fortune in shelter and repose, for fear she might surprise them inexperienced and new to the combat; rather they have gone forth to meet her and have flung themselves deliberately into the test of difficulties." It is up to us restore the idea of the university and show what liberal education can do. I wish you all the best in the upcoming year.
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J. M. Anderson received his Ph.D. in history from Syracuse University. He is the author of The Honorable Burden of Public Office: English Humanists and Tudor Politics in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 2010), and a manuscript in search of a publisher, Why Can't Professors Teach? Why Liberal Education Has Failed and What Modern Educators Must Do To Save It.
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Why Remediation in College Doesn't Worktag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.40302010-08-20T00:53:38Z2010-08-19T01:45:20Z By Jackson Toby In his recent speech at the University of Texas in Austin, President Obama expressed deep unhappiness that the United States is no longer the country with the highest percentage of college graduates in the 25 to...Anthony Paletta
By Jackson Toby
In his recent speech at the University of Texas in Austin, President Obama expressed deep unhappiness that the United States is no longer the country with the highest percentage of college graduates in the 25 to 34 age bracket. By 2020 he wants us to regain the top position we enjoyed ten years ago before South Korea, Canada, and Russia forged ahead of us. According to the latest report of the College Board, the United States is now 12th among the 36 developed nations whose college graduation rates the Board tabulated. Should the President have been unhappy? Only if he believes that our lower rate of college graduation reflects a lower rate of genuine educational achievement. If President Obama simply wants bragging rights, the United States can become first very quickly. All that is needed is to reduce graduation requirements or to increase grading inflation in college courses. (Or to give a college degree to every baby born in the United States along with a birth certificate.) The issue is what students with a college degree should know, not whether they have a piece of paper in exchange for all the time and money spent on a campus. It is troubling that only 40 per cent of Americans 25 to 44 have college degrees. It is even more troubling that of the 70 per cent of our high school graduates who enroll in college, only 57 per cent graduate within six years. One rather remote possibility - given studies that show how little American college graduates know - is that American colleges are maintaining high standards and that these high standards necessarily produce higher dropout rates and lower rates of college completion than President Obama would like. Unfortunately high standards do not appear to be the explanation.
Here is how one reader of the Wall Street Journal reacted to an article reporting the President's call for more American college graduates:]]>
I have one more year to go in a chemistry PhD and see people around me who do not have an understanding of basic chemistry... how did they get around me?
Why were they not screened out of the educational system? They are going to do huge amounts of damage if they are hired into the workforce as a [sic] chemist!
While a multitude of possible explanations exist for a high college dropout rate - family problems, illness, financial difficulties, alcohol abuse - one obvious possibility is that some youngsters graduate from high school without having learned enough in primary and secondary schools to do college-level work. They leave college without graduating because they realize they are not learning anything much; they are bored. Underlying their boredom is lack of the preparation they should have received in primary school and high school. Compatible with this interpretation are two facts: the dropout rate is very low in selective colleges despite their enormous tuitions; persistence to graduation decreases with the selectivity of the college.
Well, why aren't American high school graduates better prepared for college? Weren't they interested in attending college? They certainly were; they say so in polls of primary and secondary school students, and 70 per cent of high school graduates actually enroll in a college within two years of graduating from high school. But the emphasis of American society is on access to college, not on preparation for college. An unintended consequence of making access to college an entitlement readily available to all high school graduates is that serious study in the lower grades has become optional even for those intending to apply for college admission. Without an incentive to study diligently, many students are disengaged in high school and, as a result, underprepared for higher education. Some freshmen arrive at college thinking that having fun is the main reason they are at college and that the pursuit of knowledge should be available for when they have nothing better to do. In short, most of the responsibility for the relatively low rate of college graduation compared with enrollment is a result of misleading students and their parents into thinking that merely attending college will lead to well-paid and interesting jobs without pointing out that mere attendance is not enough. Students need to learn something at college.
Making Financial Aid an Incentive, Not an Entitlement
That is not the only perverse incentive now in place. Financial aid policies have been established that imply entitlement to higher education. The U. S. Department of Education gives billions of dollars in Pell grants -- more than six million youngsters received Pell grants in 2008-2009 - to financially needy enrolled students, regardless of their academic performance. Since grants are usually not able to cover fully college tuition and expenses, the Department of Education also provides federally subsidized loans, like grants without academic requirements. Thus, student grants and loans do not utilize the leverage that they could have if they were structured as rewards for good academic performance in pre-college schools and continuing good academic performance in college. The empirical research of Harvard psychology professor B. F. Skinner a half century ago demonstrated that pigeons respond to incentives. Students are obviously more complex animals than pigeons. Nevertheless, students may be as responsive to properly targeted incentives and disincentives as pigeons are.
As one example of the failure to utilize incentives to promote studiousness at the college level, consider that according to tests of the entering freshmen at American colleges, about a third require assignment to remedial courses to overcome their deficiencies in reading, writing, or mathematics, sometimes in more than one subject. (A higher proportion of students at two-year colleges need remediation in these fields and a lower proportion in four-year colleges.) In many colleges students receive no college credit for taking remedial courses and, if they do not pass, are required to take the remedial courses again. Apparently, however, the expensive remediation efforts of colleges to enable initially underprepared students overcome their handicaps are not very successful. Data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics suggest that college remediation is insufficient for the task, judging by the number of students who require remediation and, after getting it, do not complete their college programs. The more remedial courses students need to take at college, the less likely they are to complete college and obtain a degree. Thus, among 1992 twelfth graders who enrolled in postsecondary education and were followed for ten years, 57 percent of students who needed no remedial courses at college obtained at least a college degree within eight years of high school graduation whereas only 19 percent of students who had to enroll in three or four remedial courses obtained a college degree within eight years. Students required to take remedial courses in reading were most likely to drop out of college, not a surprising finding in view of the need to understand reading assignments in most college courses.
The crucial question is why remediation does not work. My hypothesis is that there are inadequate incentives for students who arrive without sufficient preparation to take seriously that that have deficiencies requiring remediation. Without incentives to put in the enormously difficult task of learning in a course or two how to read and write effectively, a task they should have learned gradually over many years, they simply go through the motions. The colleges go through the motions also. In egregious cases they make students repeat remedial courses once or twice. But what if students are so underprepared that they need five or six repetitions of remedial course work to show substantial results? No college would dare to require this, and no underprepared student would stand for it.
Money - A Real Incentive
My suggestion is better incentives for students, incentives that begin in primary and secondary schools and continue throughout college. The best incentive I can think of is student financial aid. It should continue to be targeted to students from low-income families who cannot help them financially to pay for college but good academic performance should also be required for federally guaranteed loans, although not for Pell grants. Let me explain the reasoning behind making this distinction between grant student aid and loan student aid. It is true that, logically, grants without academic requirements violate the principle that higher education should not be an entitlement, only an opportunity, just as much as such loans do. On a strictly logical level, perhaps they do. However, for pragmatic reasons a stronger case can be made for continuing student grants without academic prerequisites than student loans. Grants do not present the same dangers either to students or to the economy as do loans; they do not burden students with debts that they may not be able to repay and they do not burden the economy with complex financial instruments that can produce a credit crisis. Moreover, student grants that ignore academic merit are appealing as an expression of society's interest in making higher education available even to students who have not done well in high school. Giving Pell Grants is a societal bet that mediocre students can do better scholastically in the future, not that mediocrity is valuable in itself. Maybe they are late bloomers. Of course, mediocre students are only part of the population of Pell grant recipients. Scholastically excellent students from low-income families also receive Pell grants; they are exactly the kinds of people Congress had in mind when authorizing financial aid to students.
The remediation problem arises when students who are needy economically and want to go to college are academically subpar. What the Department of Education now does is simply give them loans as well as grants. What the Department of Education ought to do is to accompany the grants for such students with (1) a warning that in the light of their records, success in college is problematical and (2) an offer to provide programs to improve their chances of doing well at the college they wish to attend. They are free to reject this offer of what is in fact remediation, although it should not be called that, and no doubt many will reject such an offer. The symbolic point of the offer is to call attention to the fact that a grant does not ignore lack of preparedness; it offers a second chance to succeed academically. Getting the grant should not be grounds for complacency. Congress would have to appropriate funds to the Department of Education for establishing these remedial programs for underprepared grant students on more than three thousand college campuses. Given the unfortunate facts (1) that the United States and indeed the world is currently in a recession and (2) President Obama is urging a
stimulus for the economy, such remedial programs might be as useful an investment as infrastructure repair.
Why should the Department of Education establish remedial programs for grant recipients with academic deficiencies when colleges already have remedial programs aimed at all of their students with academic deficiencies, programs that seem to work poorly? For several reasons. First, giving grants to academically underprepared students to attend college and not helping them survive academically is callous; it is programming some Pell grant recipients for failure and dropping out before completing college, which certainly is not what Congress intended in establishing education grants for needy students. Second, a voluntary program has a self-selected clientele. Unlike college-mandated remedial programs, these programs would be designed for students whose previous academic records do not justify federal education loans. They are on warning that getting a Pell grant does not mean that they are fully prepared to succeed. Students who sincerely accept the offer of help are much more likely to succeed. Third, the financial burden of remediation is beyond the resources of many colleges. As a result, their efforts to repair deficiencies of student preparation are genuflections toward remediation but not demonstrably effective. Setting up separate programs for federal grant recipients with academic deficiencies would relieve colleges of part of their immediate remedial burdens and help them financially to deal with their other students with remediation problems more effectively. Finally, the emphasis of these federally supported programs, tied as they would be to grants to needy students, is success in college, not merely the repair of past deficiencies. Although the money will come from the Department of Education, the program itself will be designed individually at each college under contract with the Department, thus providing an opportunity for comparing programs that work better with programs that are not as effective.
Getting the Details Right
What about underprepared students who receive need-based grants to attend college but refuse the offer to participate in such special programs? Denial of deficiencies is common. As an incentive, the Department of Education holds a trump card. Grants for needy students are usually not sufficient to finance college without additional sources of funds. They also need loans, and the Department offers subsidized loans. Federal loans can be allocated quite differently from grants. A condition for receiving these loans might be to participate in programs that address academic deficiencies or to show by improved grades that those deficiencies have been addressed. Students who cannot receive loans but who do receive grants surely receive the message that they have to do better academically to receive federally guaranteed loans. This line of reasoning suggests that grants can ignore academic merit without necessarily undermining the incentives for stronger student performance.
My hypothesis is that such changes in the way Department of Education grants and loans are allocated will be effective incentives for studious behavior at all levels of the American educational system. Even primary school students? Yes, even primary school students. Unlike pigeons and mice, human beings, even young human beings anticipate the remote future and modify their behavior accordingly. If students wish to attend college and know that studious behavior is necessary to make this feasible, many of them will study more diligently. How many? That is an empirical question that will have to be investigated. But children are not free spirits growing up in the woods, nurtured only by wild animals. Most have parents who want them to take advantage of the opportunities that college education can make possible for a better life. How else can the overwhelming response of low-income parents in Washington, D.C. to the lottery process for charter schools be explained?
My hope is that properly targeted incentives can improve not only remediation programs for underprepared college students but also can reduce the number of underprepared college students enrolled in American colleges and universities. Impossible dream?
________________________________________________________
Jackson Toby is professor of sociology emeritus at Rutgers
University and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His book, The Lowering of Higher Education in America: Why Student Loans Should Be Based on Student Performance, was published by Praeger Publishers.
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The Mess of Mandatory Volunteerismtag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.40172010-08-16T02:34:33Z2010-08-16T02:40:48ZBy Charlotte Allen Only a federal bureaucrat could come up with an oxymoron this laughable: "Feasibility of Including a Volunteer Requirement for Receipt of Federal Education Tax Credits." A "volunteer requirement"? Come again? But that's what the Treasury Department said...Anthony Paletta
By Charlotte Allen
Only a federal bureaucrat could come up with an oxymoron this laughable: "Feasibility of Including a Volunteer Requirement for Receipt of Federal Education Tax Credits." A "volunteer requirement"? Come again? But that's what the Treasury Department said in a call for comments issued this spring on the idea of making community service--volunteer work for charity--mandatory for college students seeking to qualify for a higher-education tax credit made part of the $800 billion economic stimulus bill that Congress passed in 2009.
Fortunately, it turns out grammatical sticklers aren't the only ones who hate the notion of mandatory community service at the post-secondary level. So do many college administrators, who approve of community service and welcome the tax credits that may make their institutions more affordable but adamantly oppose combining the two. The problem is that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 requires the Treasury and Education departments to study the feasibility of forging exactly such a link.
The tax credit in question works like this: Students enrolled in college or some other form of post-secondary training can receive a credit for up to 100 percent of tuition, fees, and course materials up to $2,000 plus 25 percent of the next $2,000, for a maximum credit of $2,500 for each of four years of education. For those students who are too poor to pay income taxes, 40 percent of the credit is refundable. There is a phaseout of the credit for students whose adjusted gross income exceeds $80,000 ($160,000 for married couples).]]>
New York Times recently reported) with counselors, diversity officers, "green" co-ordinators, and other non-teaching personnel, to hire even more administrators to oversee the new requirement.
-- Colleges should devote their resources to teaching, not monitoring extra-curricular projects for their students. Forcing institutions to underwrite activities unrelated to the classroom undermines their core mission of providing an education.
-- The potential for interfering with particular colleges' religious and moral visions is vast. Should a Catholic college be obliged to give community-service credit to a student who volunteers for Planned Parenthood? Conversely, how would the politically liberal professors and deans at secular colleges feel about their students' working for an organization opposed to same-sex marriage? Allowing college adminstrators or federal regulators to draw up lists of which volunteer activities are acceptable and which are not would create serious constitutional and other legal problems.
-- Volunteer work isn't the only kind of work that can build students' character and ultimately benefit society. Working to help pay college expenses can help even middle-class young people develop a sense of independence and personal responsibility as adults--not to mention cutting the cost of their education and freeing them from crushing student loans.
-- Similarly, many students might benefit more from other equally worthwhile extra-curricular activities--reporting for the college newspaper, joining the debate team, playing in the school orchestra--than from volunteering. Do we really want to force students into one particular use of their free time?
-- Fraud and boondoggling will be inevitable. Remember the repellent Hoyt Thorpe in Tom Wolfe's campus novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons--who gets into an elite university by organizing a supposed do-gooder group that does little more than pose for photo-ops with homeless people? Expect Hoyt Thorpes to proliferate once community service becomes mandatory.
The most cogent argument, however, against removing the volunariness from volunteer work is that it undercuts the very idea of volunteering: the free gift of one's time and service to benefit the community as a whole. Volunteering is a good thing--and increasing numbers of college students agree. As Molly Corbett pointed out in her letter, 6.7 million college students volunteered in 2008, up from 4.2 million in 2000. But volunteering isn't for everyone, certainly not for low-income students with family responsibilities and perhaps not for many middle-income students as well. Nonetheless, making community service mandatory as a condition for graduation is currently a trend at high schools, and it's clear that many members of Congress think mandatory community service might be good for college students as well. The Treasury and Education departments have the power to say no to this bad idea, however, and they should listen to the college administrators and others who oppose it.]]>
Is This Book Invisible?tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.40072010-08-12T16:42:48Z2010-08-12T01:32:16ZBy Stefan Kanfer In full-page newspaper ads, the Kindle displays the first page of an e-book. Its opening is famous: "I am an invisible man." Or is it famous anymore? How many high school seniors---or for that matter college undergraduates---can...Anthony Paletta
By Stefan Kanfer
In full-page newspaper ads, the Kindle displays the first page of an e-book. Its opening is famous: "I am an invisible man." Or is it famous anymore? How many high school seniors---or for that matter college undergraduates---can identify Ralph Ellison's novel? True, the author was an African-American, but he was a male African-American, hence of lesser importance than, say, Maya Angelou or Alice Walker in the PC world of American education. Say the words "invisible man," to most students, and odds are that they'll speak of H. G. Wells's fantasy, or even more likely, that perennial TV favorite, The Invisible Man, a 1933 movie starring Claude Rains in the title role. Or its cinematic sequels, The Invisible Man Returns (1940), The Invisible Woman, (1940), Invisible Agent (1942), The Invisible Man's Revenge (1944) or Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992).
This ignorance is part of a general myth, aided by programs like "Mad Men" and such twisted accounts as Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. According to these shows and books, the 1950's was a decade of American rapacity, sexism, war-mongering, profiteering and mindlessness. In fact, that decade saw a flowering of literary talents that has not been equaled since. J.D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Philip Roth, John Updike published important books in the 1950's, and in 1952 Ellison put himself on the map with his own Invisible Man, a powerful narrative delivered by a black man who calls himself invisible because he walks unnoticed through the white world. ]]>
Invisible Man, those pages, for instance, in which an incestuous Negro farmer tells his tale to a white New England philanthropist, comes through very powerfully; it is tragi-comic, poetic, the tone of the very strongest sort of creative intelligence."
That kind of creative intelligence was rare enough in the mid-20th century. Today it is almost impossible to find amid the distractions of talk show yammering, the op-ed screeds that pass for wisdom, the inflammatory racial rhetoric that threatens rational debate. It is to Kindle's credit that it presents page one of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, daring readers to find out more about it, reviving a great work in a dark time. At a point in history when books are under fire---the Barnes & Noble chain, for example, is currently up for sale---the classics need all the help they can get.
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Stefan Kanfer is a contributing editor for City Journal and author of Somebody, a biography of Marlon Brando. ]]>
Who Pays the Hidden Cost of University Research?tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.39832010-08-09T08:47:12Z2010-08-09T12:55:17ZBy Charles Schwartz Higher education in America is in financial crisis. In constant dollars, the average cost of tuition and fees at public colleges has risen almost 300 percent since 1980. Our best public research universities, like my own University...Anthony Paletta
By Charles Schwartz
Higher education in America is in financial crisis. In constant dollars, the average cost of tuition and fees at public colleges has risen almost 300 percent since 1980. Our best public research universities, like my own University of California (UC), are wracked with doubt: will they be able to continue their historic role as institutions with a vital public mission, or will they become "privatized," demanding ever higher tuition and therefore inevitably serving a more elite clientele?
Let me note some pointed comments by citizens outside the campus. A letter to the editor in the San Francisco Chronicle last March 9th said: "What the public college students (and their parents) in this state must understand is that the days of the taxpayers subsidizing their higher education are over, sad as that may be. ...The costs at all colleges and universities have risen dramatically over the last few years (much higher than the cost-of-living-index). ... Those of us in California who are taxpayers are having a difficult enough time paying our mortgages and for the education of our own children. It simply is not sustainable to expect that there will be free or substantially below-cost education provided on the backs of the state's increasingly dwindling number of taxpayers. ..."
A similar complaint is voiced in an article published by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, July 5, 2010: "As California faces an unprecedented budget crisis, students at California colleges have been asked to pay a greater share of the total cost of their education, most of which is still borne by taxpayers. ...[T]axpayers pay 60-70% of the cost of ... UC students' education, without even counting financial aid."]]>
The University Budget
There are two great missions of a first-rank public research university:
-to provide top quality undergraduate education for all qualified students, exposing them to great ideas from all over, imparting high-level skills for the job market, and making them capable citizens and leaders.
-to provide top quality academic research, and related graduate student programs, in the pursuit of basic knowledge across the spectrum of human endeavor.
Who should pay for these two important functions? It used to be that the State of California paid for both through generous taxpayer funding for faculty salaries, departmental staff, and the institutional infrastructure of buildings, laboratories, libraries and so forth. It was called the "I&R Budget" (Instruction and Research).
As the research mission expanded over time, a significant proportion of the cost came to be paid for by external sources, especially grants from the federal government. Such "sponsored research" is well-monitored and accounted for. But it does not cover all research activity, by any means. The state still covers the rest and it is buried in the "core academic budget".
The search for new knowledge is an expensive business. Yet it is unequivocally a public good, the advances in knowledge being of great value for both the economy and the progress of modern civilization. The research mission of the university can, therefore, only be viewed as something that should be paid for by the whole of society, for the benefit of the whole of society.
What about undergraduate education? Is it a public good or a private gain? There are sharp differences of opinion on this. To many people, UC students are a privileged group who are gaining a private benefit through their access to higher education. Therefore, the argument goes, they should bear the cost, rather than having the general taxpayer shoulder the burden.
But this raises a fundamental question: what is the actual cost of an undergraduate education in the University of California? That turns out to be a more difficult thing to answer than one might suppose.
Who Pays for What?
How much of the core budget at UC is presently spent for undergraduate education and how much for faculty research and its related graduate programs, and do students pay their fair share of the costs?
The official accounting by the UC administration concludes that student fees now cover 30% to 40% of the average cost of education (this is the source of the numbers quoted by the Howard Jarvis group, above). But the official calculation includes the full cost of faculty research throughout the academic year. It is, therefore, a badly distorted figure.
To correct this, one must disaggregate the accounting reports according to the two basic functions of the university. This idea raises the hackles of administrators and faculty alike, not just at UC, but at research universities across the country. The common practice is to hide all of the cost of faculty research not covered by sponsored research grants under the misleading heading of expenditures for "Instruction."
My own calculations, separating those cost components by using data from a faculty time-use study, lead to the conclusion that, as of 2007, undergraduate student fees at UC had reached 100% of the actual cost of providing their education. And fees have since risen by 30 percent!
There is a sharp conflict here to be resolved. If the administration's number is accepted, then taxpayers might well be right to complain that they are subsidizing UC students. If my number is more correct, then undergraduates (and their families) are already paying the full cost (or more) for their UC education. This is true whether or not we agree on the public good of a UC education.
If I am right, then it is up to the state government and taxpayers to assume full responsibility for funding the university's research mission and to stop pushing the cost of that research - which is a benefit to all - onto the tuition bills of students. This is a direct challenge to the Board of Regents and their hired executives.
Follow the Money
What happens to the money that the university takes in from undergraduate tuition and fees? This is the largest pot of discretionary revenue that our administrators collect, but there is no way to find out how they spend most of it. I have made repeated requests for data, but no one has an answer. It turns out that tuition money at UC is thrown into the mix with state appropriations, and it is spent without regard to its relation to undergraduate teaching. One recent controversy surrounds the practice of pledging student fee revenue as collateral whenever the university sells bonds to finance construction projects on the campuses.
We, as a public university, have an obligation to come clean about how we use our money, the people's and the students'. With last year's budget cuts of roughly 20% of state funding, a cry has gone up for greater transparency from the administration, yet those with top-level financial authority are closed-mouthed and their reports opaque when it comes to many vital questions about income and spending.
Escalating Costs
The allocation of university funds between research and instruction is only part of the problem we face at the university. Another is the sharply rising administrative overhead, which pushes costs upward - as noted by the letter writer to the Chronicle.
Administrative bureaucracy has grown at an alarming rate. I collected data from official UC sources and found that over a recent decade student enrollment had increased by 33%, university employment had expanded by 31%, and the ranks of management had more than doubled, up by 118%. This excess represents an added cost of roughly $600 million to the university's budget. When presented with this data, top officials have failed to give any credible response. This bureaucratic bloat is likely the result of administrators feathering their own nests with too many vice-chancellors and deputy assistants. To faculty, it certainly appears that there is too much staff and glitter at the top, while the core of academic departments are left to starve.
Moreover, executive compensation at the university has been a never-ending scandal. While the total amount of money involved here is not so large, the practice of treating university administrators like corporate executives has outraged many people both inside and outside of academia. Even within the faculty there has been a scramble for higher salaries by playing the game of soliciting offers from wealthy private institutions. This siphons off money from basic needs and creates internal tension, especially with poorly paid junior faculty. For my generation, the old practice of uniform salary scales and steady promotion on merit was instrumental in making UC one of the world's great centers of learning.
Who is to Blame?
An unrelenting chorus of obeisance to the gods of "the market" has seriously eroded the time-honored virtues of the university. Universities are not corporations operating for a profit, putting out products called "science", "innovation" or "degrees." They are collegial bodies of faculty pursuing knowledge and teaching under the watchful eye of their peers. They are communities of the young seeking to learn from the wisdom of teachers before they go out into the world. They are motivated by a remarkable (if always imperfect) degree of selfless pursuit of ideas for their own sake and for the good of humankind.
The assault on the university from the minions of the market starts at the top with our Board of Regents. This quaint body is given complete control over the university, even though its members are simply successful business people who have done favors for the governor who appoints them.
Take the issue of executive compensation. To "captains of industry" it is natural that top executives are responsible for the success of any enterprise and therefore deserve large monetary rewards. But a university is not like that. Presidents and Chancellors do not decide what courses to teach and how to teach them; they do not decide what research projects to pursue and how to do that. It is the thousands of professors operating independently and in concert with their peers, who make those decisions. The role of university administrators is to keep the plumbing in working order and to see that the bank accounts are well-managed - necessary work, but not deserving of extravagant salaries.
Take the issue of student fees. Members of the Board of Regents are quite wealthy, so the cost of paying for their own children's educations is no great burden. Moreover, they are supremely successful individuals who have a hard time seeing the collective purpose of public education in serving the merely talented.
But that is not the whole story. There has been a failure of leadership within the universities themselves. Where are the college Presidents and Chancellors who will stand up to those Regents and defend public education and the higher purposes of the university? I see too many managerial place-holders and ambitious self-promoters who have lost touch with the rest of the faculty, much less the undergraduates.
Our great public universities are in need of serious reform at the top. It starts with the call for a full and honest accounting of how the money is handled. It adds a call for distancing academic work and values from the dominant corporate culture outside our campuses. It requires a rededication to the public good and service to a democratic society. Such a reformation requires new leadership. Where will that come from?
The Higher Learning
There are two fundamental reasons for defending public universities against the corrosions of market logic and erosion of state funding. The first, following our greatest thinkers, from Thomas Jefferson to John Dewey, is that a well-educated citizenry is vital for good government. It is a public good America cannot do without. Money making cannot be the only order of business for a democracy.
The second purpose of public education is to provide opportunity to all qualified students regardless of background and financial status. For generations, our great public universities have been an antidote to the poison of an immanent aristocracy, by providing broad avenues to advancement for our most talented youngsters. The great danger today is the growing gap between a wealthy elite and the rest of us, whether through excessive executive compensation, Wall Street bonuses, or stock speculations.
If these public universities are choked off - either by becoming mediocre schools or by becoming more and more exclusive - then we will have lost a major counterweight to the rule of privilege and a principal foundation for the future of the Republic.
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Charles Schwartz is Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He maintains an academic web site at http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~schwrtz and a blog at http://UniversityProbe.org]]>
The Endless War Against 209tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.39882010-08-05T14:36:55Z2010-08-06T15:57:06ZBy Ward Connerly More than thirteen years ago the people of California voted to end discrimination and "preferential treatment" on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity and national origin, in the public arenas of contracting, education and employment. The...Anthony Paletta
By Ward Connerly
More than thirteen years ago the people of California voted to end discrimination and "preferential treatment" on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity and national origin, in the public arenas of contracting, education and employment. The margin of the vote on the ballot initiative (Proposition 209) that enshrined the principle of equal treatment in the California Constitution was not a squeaker; it was a decisive 55%-45% margin.
In the years since that vote, most Californians have accepted the verdict of the majority and have adapted to a life of equal treatment without preferences for anyone. That is as it should be in a nation for which the principle of equal treatment is the centerpiece of our civic values system, and for which the "rule of law" is one of our most valued ideals. But, there are some who refuse to take "no" for an answer. Instead, they have used every means at their disposal to bureaucratically circumvent, legally challenge, or flat-out disregard the initiative's simple command of equality.
This week the California Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the law, 6-1, in a response to a lawsuit by white contractors against the city of San Francisco. Along the way, the court noted and dismissed various stratagems employed by the city to avoid the clear meaning of the law. ]]>
Connerly v. Schwarzenegger, two other cases have been under consideration for several months - one involving higher education and the other relating to public contracting.
The case that has drawn the most attention was brought by the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Immigrant Rights and Integration and to Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN). True to its name, BAMN does, indeed, use "any means necessary," including factual distortions, fabricated incidents and even violence to achieve its objectives.
The principal arguments in the instant case are that by placing emphasis on standardized tests, UC has adopted a system that uniquely disadvantages "minorities." Moreover, BAMN argues that 209 was enacted by a white majority that was disrespectful of minorities and has placed a burden on them that that can only be altered by a vote of the people. This burden of having to alter the California Constitution to restore preferential treatment, argues BAMN, discriminates against "minorities" and, thus, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The logical conclusions of the BAMN case - often expressed explicitly by BAMN itself - are frighteningly racist. First, is the assertion that academic institutions should not use academic achievement as the yardstick for admissions to higher education, because minorities cannot perform at the same level as Asians and whites. Second, BAMN claims that majority-white populations should not be allowed to vote on issues such as "affirmative action" because of their inherent bias against minorities
The pursuit of "diversity" by the government, at all levels, has become one of the most corrosive and divisive activities of our time. It is this pursuit that causes many elected officials to betray their oath of office to protect and defend the constitutions of their states At a time when the State of California is swimming in red ink, and suffering a host of other fiscally-related problems, it is a gross waste of resources for members of the California Legislature and UC to engage in activities that run the risk of visiting legal action against them for violating the California Constitution by undertaking racially preferential treatment.
It is abundantly clear that the colorblind ideal that is represented by 209, and which has been inviolate since the 1960s, is facing a direct and forceful challenge by those who favor the pursuit of diversity by official government action. If the threats to 209 are successful, the character of our nation will be changed forever more.
There is considerable reason for optimism, however. As this was being written, the California Supreme Court handed down a 6-1 decision that upheld the constitutionality of 209. In question was the issue of whether 209 violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The case that prompted the above decision involved a contractor (Coral Construction) who challenged the City and County of San Francisco, because of its open defiance of Proposition 209 since its passage by continuing its minority preference program. The Court has struck a major blow for the "rule of law" and for the colorblind principle. Let us hope that the rest of the nation takes note of this decision.
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Ward Connerly is president of the American Civil Rights Institute and a former Regent of the University of California.
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Those Accountability Rules for Student Loanstag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.39712010-08-01T16:20:22Z2010-08-04T04:23:50ZBy Andrew Kelly This past Monday, the Department of Education proposed "gainful employment" rules that will regulate postsecondary vocational programs, primarily those offered by for-profit colleges, on the basis of their graduates' ability to pay back their federal student loans....Anthony Paletta
By Andrew Kelly
This past Monday, the Department of Education proposed "gainful employment" rules that will regulate postsecondary vocational programs, primarily those offered by for-profit colleges, on the basis of their graduates' ability to pay back their federal student loans. Proponents of higher education reform should welcome this move, but not because it targets unscrupulous actors in the for-profit sector. More importantly, the initiative makes a rhetorically significant shift: it places postsecondary institutions and the economic value of the education that they provide at the center of discussions about student loans and college costs. It also adds a new and necessary dimension to the outcome data that the federal government can link directly to individual institutions of higher education.
The problem is not, as some critics would have it, that the gainful employment regulations overreach, but that they do not reach far enough. The current proposal singles out one set of postsecondary institutions for intense scrutiny and leaves the rest to operate as they have, feeding on federal loan dollars without having to show much in return, other than keeping their two or three-year default rate under a certain threshold. For these institutions, students who carry excessive debt and/or default after a three-year window are mainly the government's problem, not theirs. As a result, prospective students looking to choose a college do not have access to even the most basic facts about how their future income or debt burden may vary depending on the institution that they choose. To change that, federal and state governments should embark on a broader effort to link students' post-graduation success to the institutions that they attend, to make that information public and accessible, and to attach institution-level sanctions and rewards to performance on these indicators.
In short, policymakers should take the pro-accountability ideas underlying "gainful employment" and super-size them. Extending the effort to cover all colleges and universities that receive federal student loans would provide consumers with much-needed information about institutional quality and return on investment. The question is whether the latest foray into "gainful employment" regulations will remain a shortsighted attempt to bring greater accountability to one small sector of the postsecondary world. If the past is a guide, it could prove to be the proverbial camel's nose under the tent flap that accountability proponents have been looking for. ]]>
Assessing Gainful Employment... But Only For Some
The proposed "gainful employment" reforms represent something of a crescendo in a long-simmering debate about funneling student loan dollars to institutions of dubious quality that prepare students for a given occupation. The idea is relatively simple, though its implementation is more complicated: federal regulators will collect debt-to-income ratios (aggregate and discretionary income) and repayment rate information for graduates of programs designed to prepare people for a "recognized occupation." The debt-to-income ratio serves as a proxy for whether graduates were able to land a good job upon completing the program. Those programs that fail to reach federally-mandated thresholds on all three of these measures will be ineligible to receive federal loan dollars; those that meet the minimal standard on one metric will be forced to restrict their enrollments until their record improves. Importantly, the proposal calls on the Department of Education to work with an "unspecified government agency" to link student-level earnings data to information furnished by the institutions about completion dates and loan debt.
While the new rules would apply to a subset of programs offered at public and non-profit two-year colleges, almost all for-profit programs would fall under the regulation. Indeed, the proposed rule explicitly singles out for-profit colleges as the catalyst for the regulation, arguing that "there are reasons for concern that some students attending for-profit colleges have not been well-served" (see page 14). (For excellent coverage of the notice of proposed rulemaking, see Jennifer Epstein's piece in Inside Higher Education.)
Because for-profits are quite expensive, serve many low-income and minority students, and generate a profit, they may be a logical place to start in an effort to hold schools accountable for the success of their graduates. It is certainly a politically prudent place to begin. But this should not be the end of the line. The labor market success of graduates must be a central concern for all institutions of higher education, not just those with a profit motive and not only for vocational programs. Moreover, this information should be made available to prospective students, who can then shop around for the school that has a track record of producing a high percentage of employable graduates at an affordable cost.
At present, consumers know next to nothing about what kind of post-graduation outcomes they can expect if they attend a particular postsecondary institution versus another. Colleges simply do not collect or make such data public, and federal and state governments have not yet gotten into the business of linking employment and wage data to particular postsecondary institutions.
As a result, outside of the so-called cohort default rate that the Department of Education currently calculates for postsecondary institutions (which tracks the percentage of students that default on their federal loans two years after entering repayment), there is little incentive for colleges and universities to pay much attention to what happens to their students, and their loans, after they leave school. Those who represent colleges and universities---for-profit and non-profit alike---even resist any effort to suggest that high default rates may be a commentary on the poor quality of education provided at some institutions. In a recent report on default rates in the Chronicle of Higher Education, for example, the senior vice president for government relations of the American Association of Community Colleges argued that default rates are a "crude proxy" for quality, particularly because relatively few students at community colleges borrow to attend. When asked who was to blame for increasing default rates, if not colleges, the AACC official responded, "I don't know how to answer that question . . . But whoever is ultimately responsible, it seems like it's a really severe problem."
Unfortunately, the current regulatory regime that governs most postsecondary institutions enables this refusal to accept responsibility, and students and taxpayers are worse off because of it.
The move to measure gainful employment could change all that, but only if policymakers treat this recent proposal as the opening salvo in a broader battle to collect and link information on earnings and debt loads to particular postsecondary institutions. The new regulation places these elusive pieces of outcome data directly under the scrutiny of federal regulators and, potentially, the consumers they are trying to protect. In its current form, it will also set a precedent for linking individual-level income data from another federal agency to the postsecondary institution those individuals attended. Shouldn't this kind of data be available to prospective students of any college or university? How can we expect students to make such a consequential investment decision without it? And shouldn't we use these metrics to determine institutional eligibility for participation in Title IV loan programs?
The canard that only for-profit colleges and universities that offer vocational programs are "overpromising and under-delivering" is ultimately untenable. As Dominic Brewer and William Tierney, professors at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education, wrote recently:
Presumably philosophy majors who graduate from a public university might have similar, if not greater, issues with regard to debt load relative to earnings potential, but the traditional institutions are exempted from this proposed regulation.
Expanding a proposed rule intended to cover a minority of postsecondary institutions to the entire sector might seem like a long shot. Before we lose hope, however, it is worth recalling that the most commonly cited postsecondary outcome---the standard six-year graduation rate first required under the Student Right to Know Act of 1990---came into existence as a propitious side-effect of Senator Bill Bradley's desire to measure the rate at which scholarship athletes were graduating from college. As we know now, before long the graduation-rate measure covered all first-time, full-time students at Title IV institutions. The current push to measure debt-to-income ratio for a subsection of the postsecondary world could represent another opportunity to create more meaningful accountability for all institutions downstream. If policymakers have the foresight to collect and publicize "gainful employment" information for all postsecondary institutions, there is plenty of reason to believe that the benefits to students, graduates, and the government would be far-reaching indeed.
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Andrew P. Kelly is a research fellow in education policy at the American Enterprise Institute ]]>
How to Fight for Free Speech on Our 'Sensitive' Campusestag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.39632010-07-28T19:00:51Z2010-07-29T14:15:47ZBy Daphne Patai About fifty undergraduates from around the country gathered outside of Philadelphia, on the campus of Bryn Mawr College, between July 15 and 17th, to discuss the struggle for free speech on American campuses. The event was the...Anthony Paletta
By Daphne Patai
About fifty undergraduates from around the country gathered outside of Philadelphia, on the campus of Bryn Mawr College, between July 15 and 17th, to discuss the struggle for free speech on American campuses. The event was the third annual Campus Freedom Network (CFN) conference organized by FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
Teaching as I do at the University of Massachusetts flagship campus in Amherst, affectionately known by some as the People's Republic of Amherst, I considered it a rare treat to encounter in one place so many impassioned and curious young people eager to defend their First Amendment rights against the encroachment of overzealous college administrators and others. Horror stories were recounted (about which more anon), but laughter, outrage, smart comebacks, and strategizing were in ample supply.
Since FIRE's founding in 1999 by Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate, co-authors of the 1998 book The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses, the non-partisan non-profit organization has battled speech codes and other assaults on First Amendment rights on campuses from coast to coast. More interested in suasion than in litigation (which, when necessary, is done by FIRE's many lawyer friends and allies), FIRE is by now a well-established outfit with headquarters in Philadelphia, a satellite office in Manhattan, and a total staff of 17. It has been remarkably successful in bringing sunlight and good sense to blinkered administrators, as can readily be attested by a glance at its website, which archives the organization's activities, including its blog, The Torch, its constantly growing list of schools whose speech codes and policies FIRE has rigorously analyzed and classified, and offers free downloads of its five short "Guides to Student Rights on Campus" -- each book focusing on one crucial area: free speech, religious freedom, due process, student fees, and first-year orientation/thought reform efforts on campus]]>
website. In a sublime irony, Bryn Mawr College had received this honor in May 2010, as a result of a sweeping harassment policy that prohibited "negative or offensive comments, jokes, or suggestions" on an array of subjects. As FIRE's Director of Speech Code Research, lawyer Samantha Harris, noted, Bryn Mawr, like many other private colleges, advertises itself as offering students "a climate of open and vigorous debate"-- a promise clearly incompatible with its broad policy of threatening disciplinary action against students who engaged in controversial speech. As a result of FIRE's communication with Bryn Mawr president Jane McAuliffe in early June, the college revised its code to conform with current law, adding language clarifying that the offending behavior had to be "severe, offensive, and occur repeatedly, unless a single instance is so severe that it warrants immediate action" (see here).
While routinely fighting such battles, Harvey Silverglate, FIRE co-founder and current chairman of the Board of Directors, has long argued that in addition to its case-by-case approach, FIRE needs to make deeper efforts to change the campus culture of political correctness, itself the driving force behind the decline of free speech on campus. As a result, in 2008 FIRE inaugurated a yearly conference for college students -- those in the trenches who are fighting these battles at their own colleges and universities, often with little overt support from their cowering colleagues. At the moment, the Campus Freedom Network has about 4,000 members, but the yearly conference is intentionally kept small, so that dialogue is encouraged and information shared in a more personal setting. Unable to attend the conference in person, Silverglate gave a live-streamed address to the conference. He noted that the number of campus administrators continues steadily to rise, above all the number of campus PR people hired precisely to control the message, the better to mislead the public whose tuition dollars schools constantly compete for. Silverglate then discussed two recent cases of the degradation of modern academic culture, both involving prestigious private schools, Harvard and Yale, which, like Bryn Mawr, advertise their commitment to free expression while censoring it in practice. For their efforts, Silverglate bestowed on them the 13th annual Muzzle Awards (see his June 30, 2010 column in the Boston Phoenix) .
FIRE president Greg Lukianoff followed with an analysis of how speech codes around the country have created a misunderstanding of the law. One result is that many students believe that "hate" or "offensive" speech is illegal. They fail to realize that not only must there be no censorship of speech, but that people have to be able to defend their beliefs, regardless of whether those beliefs are currently popular or despised. The aim of higher education, Lukianoff repeated, is not to train people to be nice or to be comfortable, and the chilling effect of speech codes (usually thinly disguised these days as "harassment" policies) is in itself a violation of protected speech.
A subsequent panel discussion explored the philosophical and practical underpinnings of academic liberty, ranging from the ideas of John Stuart Mill to the importance of studying rhetoric and understanding how to argue effectively. Will Creeley, FIRE's director of Legal and Public Advocacy, then provided an overview of more than fifty years of American legislation, highlighting key legal decisions affecting free expression at public universities. Despite the clear tendency of courts to throw out campus policies restricting speech, colleges and universities today continue to disregard these precedents, as ignorant General Counsel insist on controlling certain speech, often in the name of misguided notions of "civility" and "social justice." But perhaps a more powerful motive for General Counsel to advise colleges to enact speech codes is the lawyers' obsession with "risk reduction." They argue that since "offended" students are more likely to sue than are students whose First Amendment rights are denied, "risk reduction" implies that a college comes out ahead financially if it prevents the sort of situations from arising that might make the thin-skinned sue for "harassment." Hence college administrators' uncritical embrace of censorship on campus is a reasonable approach -- if finances are the preeminent concern. Of course, if this analysis is correct, one possible response from campus defenders of the First Amendment is to generate more lawsuits whenever their rights are illegally abridged, thus equalizing the college's risks and perhaps leading to more appropriate policies.
FIRE's Samantha Harris then presented a concise explanation of how students can learn when their First Amendment rights are being violated, and how they can find and identify speech codes in their various guises (whether as "free speech zones," policies regarding posters, gatherings, internet use, expressions of bias, incivility, residence hall regulations, and so on) -- which often engage explicitly in content-based discrimination, a clear violation of students' free-speech rights. Harris pointed out that merely labeling some language "hate speech" in no way makes that speech illegal unless it falls under one of the specific categories that restrict First Amendment rights (for example, true threats, incitement to imminent violence and "content-neutral" rules). A hands-on series of small workshops on speech codes concluded the afternoon sessions.
A highlight of this year's CFN conference was the keynote address on July 16th delivered by Jonathan Rauch, author of the important early-warning volume Kindly Inquisitors (1993). As a counterpoint to the conference's many workshops and sessions about the specifics of First Amendment law and how to defend it, Rauch offered an impassioned philosophical and pragmatic defense of freedom of speech and of inquiry, regardless of the discomfort or offense these might cause. It's not just that curtailment of free speech on campus, certainly in public universities and in many private ones as well, is an infringement of basic rights, he argued. Equally important is recognition that without free speech the very possibility of inquiry and exploration declines and progress in knowledge is endangered. Quoting Karl Popper, Rauch explained that Liberal Science (Rauch's term) -- that is, the method of trial and error, by which falsification leads to improved hypotheses -- "consists in letting our hypotheses die in our stead." In other words, a basic principle of the pursuit of knowledge -- which must rely on free inquiry rather than sensitivity training -- is that we kill our hypotheses rather than each other. And despite the current climate in academe, progress, Rauch insisted, does occur as vigorous debate causes bad ideas to give way to better ones. Speaking as a newly-married gay man, he said, he cannot deny that freely pursued arguments exposing unjustified beliefs and sheer prejudice can indeed lead to important social change. For his trouble, Rauch was treated to a standing ovation.
On the conference's final day, following a workshop on video and technology led by Joe Stramowski, FIRE's Sweidy Stata Video Fellow, and Luke Sheehan, indefatigable director of FIRE's Campus Freedom Network, three former students recounted their thoroughly outrageous experiences of censorship and ostracism at three different schools. Chris Lee, an alumnus of Washington State University, told the story of his 2005 play, Passion of the Musical, a parody of Mel Gibson's controversial film. Designed to offend absolutely everyone, the play was disrupted by angry students (paid for and trained by the university administration!) shouting threats of physical violence, while campus security stood by and refused to act (see the video here), and indeed the president of the university himself praised the mob censorship as a "very responsible" exercise of free speech . With the help of FIRE, Chris Lee eventually got the university to apologize and. more important, update its student handbook, so that disrupting a show is not allowed. This required some revision of the administration's belief that it was the protestors alone whose free speech needed protection (see http://www.thefire.org/case/683.html).
Michele Kerr encountered similar double standards about whose speech a school was prepared to defend. In her mid-40s she decided to go back to school and obtain a Master's degree in teaching. Her extremely high GRE scores and excellent qualifications led to her acceptance into Stanford’s School of Education, but when the school became aware that Kerr did not share their progressive views (views that more and more education programs now feel free or even in some weird sense obliged to prescribe to their students), they repeatedly tried to get rid of her. She was, they said, "unsuited for the practice of teaching." The evidence? After all, she supported "tracking", i.e., honors classes, which schools devoted to "progressive education" consider undesirable, and she even dared to have a blog in which she expressed her views (see here).
Finally, Braum Katz spoke of his work at the College of William and Mary. After interning in FIRE's Philadelphia office three summers ago, Katz returned to school determined to establish a student government position specifically dedicated to protecting and defending students' speech rights. Through laborious efforts at building alliances and outwitting his opponents, his efforts resulted in an extensive revision of the college's handbook (see here), and FIRE changed the school's classification from "red light" -- the designation FIRE bestows on schools having at least one policy that clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech -- to "green," i.e., a school that has no policy that seriously imperils free speech (see here).
All three speakers made it abundantly clear that their stories were far more amusing in the telling than they had been as they unfolded. A tremendous amount of creativity, energy, resourcefulness, and outside help was necessary to deal with campus censors and vigilantes, whether in the form of administrators or fellow students. As Katz and his fellow panelists argued: Always remember that red-light schools are violating the law; look carefully at their codes of conduct and other policies, and consider rewriting these for them. Highlight the absurd results of existing speech codes (e.g., the ban on anonymous literature at Katz's college would have made it impossible for Thomas Paine to distribute his famous 1776 pamphlet "Common Sense"). Build coalitions. Work with student government. Find allies in the campus media. Realize that journalists are your friends. Make your efforts visible. Write Op Eds. Know your audience. Argue with each constituency in terms it will understand: To administrators: help them achieve what ought to be their true goals; recognize that they borrow policies from other schools and often don't even understand the implications of those policies; point out legal liabilities. To students: stress that they're too smart for these codes and that their interests are not truly served by them. Use the FIOA and FERPA. Keep good notes. Go multimedia. Use blogs. Get a domain name. Be flexible. As Kerr mentioned, when Stanford made her shut down her blog, instead of wasting energy fighting them on this particular issue -- though she knew she would win since they had no policy against blogging -- she simply changed the blog name from "Surviving Stanford" to "Hating Dewey." Stanford continued to seek access to her password-protected blog. She refused to grant it to them. Follow up with the administration; be firm but unrelenting in your conviction that these are your rights. Especially at public universities, know that your victory is inevitable.
After this remarkable and amusing session -- impossible to know whether to laugh or cry -- the conference closed with another set of individual action workshops on free speech and how to fight for it on campus.
Those wishing to know more can find FIRE's five brief but indispensable Guides to Students' Rights on Campus at FIRE's website: http://www.thefire.org/guides/.
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Daphne Patai is a member of FIRE's Board of Directors. She teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and is the author, most recently, of "What Price Utopia?": Essays on ideological Policing, Feminism, and Academic Affairs (2008). Her keynote address at the CFN on July 15th was on dystopian satire as a means of highlighting the idiocy of attempting to impose comfort and justice.
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The Sad Transformation of the American Universitytag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.39502010-07-26T19:50:48Z2010-07-28T20:07:56ZBy Herbert I. London This is the slightly edited introduction to the author's new collection of essays, Decline and Revival in Higher Education ( Transaction Publishers ). Dr. London is president of the Hudson Institute, one of the founders of...Anthony Paletta
By Herbert I. London
This is the slightly edited introduction to the author's new collection of essays, Decline and Revival in Higher Education ( Transaction Publishers ). Dr. London is president of the Hudson Institute, one of the founders of the National Association of Scholars, and the former John M. Olin Professor of the Humanities at New York University. When I entered Columbia College in 1956, the college had a deep commitment to liberal opinion. Father and son Van Doren (Mark and Charles), the recently appointed Dan Bell, my adviser named Sam Huntington, the legendary Lionel Trilling, and a brilliant lecturer named Amitai Etzioni graced the campus and, more or less, leaned left at the time, albeit over the years several had their political orientation change. Yet there was one constant: These professors eschewed orthodoxies, notwithstanding the fact that in a poll of faculty members Adlai Stevenson won the 1956 presidential sweepstakes hands down.
Different views were welcome. Controversy was invited. "Political correctness" had not yet entered the academic vocabulary, nor had it insinuated itself into debate and chastened nonconformists. I was intoxicated by the sheer variety of thought. For me this smorgasbord of ideas had delectable morsels at each setting. It was at some moment in my senior year that I became enchanted with the idea of an academic career.]]>
Magic Mountain.
Most of my students didn't want to read. In this new age, they simply wanted to express themselves. Each spring from 1967 to 1973 brought blossoms to Washington Square Park, the start of the baseball season, and demonstrations. Classes were invariably suspended and bacchanalia was in season. I grew despondent about my chosen profession.
At a commencement exercise in 1970 the president of the university delivered an address in which he said, "Seated before you is a graduating class endowed with the talent and knowledge to solve the problems of war and peace, urban woe, income disparity, and third world deprivation." I sat there with a smirk on my face.
As I left the exercise, I ran headlong into the president and couldn't resist blurting out, "You mean to say that these students are prepared to solve the problems you listed when you can't be sure they've even read a serious book?" "What are you getting at?", he asked. I made it abundantly clear that these students were not prepared to balance a checkbook much less deal with the platitudinous goals outlined in the speech.
To his credit, he said, "What would you do to address this matter?" Needless to say, I was baffled by the question, but the conversation lead to my appointment on a newly created Commission on Undergraduate Education. It was on that body that I devised a plan to create a new "experimental" college devoted to the study of great books and removing the barriers that militated against cross-college enrollment. Why, I asked, shouldn't an undergraduate take a law school course if he meets the criteria for admission?
The key to winning acceptance for this college was to call it experimental. To some degree, it was since cross-school enrollment was limited by financial concerns. But the curriculum of eighty-seven great books including the Bible, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Aeschylus, Euripides, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Marx, Dostoyevsky, Freud, etc. are hardly readings one would describe as experimental.
But as I noted at the time, when commencement rolls around I'll be able to tell the president my students have read serious books even if I cannot be sure they'll solve the problem of urban woe.
Now the question that arose was even if my plan made sense, would the faculty council approve it. I received a call from the chairman of this body, Sidney Hook, the eminent philosopher, who gave me the time and place of the hearing.
Professor Hook arrived with five colleagues, but he proceeded to ask the first question. "Tell me Professor London, can you name a great man who attended an external degree program?" By my lights, this was a most peculiar question. It was obvious that Professor Hook misunderstood my proposal. I had no intention of inaugurating an external degree program. Moreover, at that moment I couldn't think of a great person who graduated from a conventional degree program. But as I hastily rummaged through the rolodex in my mind, I remembered that Lenin attended the University of Moscow Extension Division.
With that in mind, I said if I can change the words "great man" to "influential man," I have an answer for you. Hooked nodded and I blurted out Lenin. A strange look crossed his face. "How did you know that?" he inquired. When I provided a source for my reply, Professor Hook noted that further questions were unnecessary. He spoke for the council and said the program is approved. Thus was born a new division at the university based on a path I had anticipated years earlier at Columbia.
Deciding what to call this entity wasn't easy. As fate would have it, I was browsing in the library stacks when I came upon the papers of Albert Gallatin, Jefferson's Secretary of the Treasury and coincidentally founder of NYU. At the time of founding, Gallatin was asked why New York needed another college. After all, Kings College (later Columbia) was in place uptown. Gallatin noted that Kings College was organized for the children of clergymen; he was intent on creating a college for the children of New York's emerging merchant class.
Well, said one trustee, if the students at Kings College are obliged to study Greek and Latin, what will students at this new college study. Gallatin thought for an extended moment as a colleague shouted out, "English." Upon hearing that, Gallatin the Swiss born, but true patriot said, "No, in my college students will study 'American.'" The college, my college, now had a name, "The Gallatin School."
Based on my instincts and background, the curriculum was easily determined. At first, I offered seminars on the Bible and Plato. But, in time, I hired faculty members from other colleges. In fact, I "cherry picked," lining up those colleagues I most admired and "buying," in effect, a portion of their time.
To my astonishment the 55 students who joined the program escalated in number to 130 in the second year and, for the first time, I felt confident this school would meet its financial goals.
This newly constituted "experimental" college was considered the progeny of the early 1970s zeitgeist. In reality, it was a throwback, an assertion of Newman's definition of a classical college. However, I went along with the misleading claims. On several occasions I was invited to address the so-called higher education experimental consortium, a group of colleges devoted to innovative approaches.
After several of these meetings all that I could attest to is the looniness that accompanied higher education innovation. On one occasion I was encouraged to push "energy balls" across the Roger Williams College campus. At another meeting I was chastised for insisting that students read the work of dead, white, European males. I responded by noting I would happy to assign alive, black, Zulu, female authors if appropriate great books can be identified. This didn't go over so well with my newfound colleagues.
As a consequence of founding a college, I was given the status of dean, a title, I soon learned, that means very little except that the dean is a metaphorical hydrant on whom those above and those below choose to urinate.
However, decanal status offered two privileges: attendance at university senate meetings and participation in the deans' council. Both of these privileges were transmogrified into headaches. The deans met weekly with the university president. While I assumed educational priorities would be discussed, the primary focus was financial. One meeting after another was devoted to this matter. Feeling thoroughly frustrated, I finally spoke up, asking if we would ever discuss educational issues. The president replied: "Any other questions or comments?"
I got the message. When I mentioned my frustration to a seasoned colleague who had attended these meetings for years, he said, "I love the Deans' Council; since virtually nothing is at stake, it is the only time during my busy week when I can daydream."
Senate meetings weren't much better. Each one seemed to confirm the Kissingerian view that expression was exaggerated because so little was at stake. When an important issue did emerge, such as divestment of the university's assets in South Africa, left-wing opinion was mobilized and contrary views given short shrift.
It became apparent by the 1980s that Gramschiites had come to dominate university life---hiring and tenure decisions were meant to exclude those skeptical of the campus orthodoxy. I remained devoted to my students and committed to the college I helped to create, but the signs of change in a most unwelcome direction produced dismay.
In the mid-1980s I spent interesting meetings with three resourceful professors, Peter Shaw, who taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook; Steve Balch who had an appointment at John Jay College; and Barry Gross, who was teaching at York College. We shared a common concern about developments in higher education and agreed that a new organization was needed, one that would promote the free and open exchange of opinion in the academy. Initially we called it the Campus Coalition for Democracy, but in time this title with activist implications was changed to the National Association of Scholars. Steve Balch became its president and I was named chairman and editor of its publication, Academic Questions.
Since our goal transcended political matters, even though detractors didn't believe that contention, we attracted to our membership C. Vann Woodward, former president of the ADA, and Sidney Hook, self-proclaimed socialist and, yes, the same person who was chairman of the faculty council at NYU. In time, of course, an academic public came to believe we were intent on imposing our conservative principles on an unwary professoriate. This was and is a grotesque description of our goals, but it persists.
My personal fortunes also changed. In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, I pursued a role in politics running first for Mayor of New York City in 1989, Governor of New York State in 1990, and Comptroller of New York in 1994. After my gubernatorial run, I retired as dean and assumed the John M. Olin Humanities Chair at the university. Due to the beneficence of the Olin Foundation, I was able to maintain a university affiliation and still pursue my political ambitions.
What I didn't understand at the time is John O'Sullivan's First Law: "All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing." One successor as dean maintained that "great books" is an ambiguous phrase that does not take into account the extraordinary contributions of minorities. The great books list I assembled was soon transformed into an affirmative action list. At a meeting with a New York Times reporter she noted, "It is more important for students to read Toni Morrison than William Shakespeare." I couldn't believe what my ears had heard. Soon after this episode, I wrote a letter to the president asking him to remove my portrait from the college since I no longer wanted to be associated with the school to which I gave birth.
For me the capture of the institution was complete. From Duke to Berkeley and the many stops along the way, university life was transformed. An ethos of radical sentiment was ensconced. So complete was the victory that university professors hardly noticed. It was simply assumed this state of affairs was the norm. What was once leftist became conventional. Political correctness was correct in the sense that it was a view consistent with the prevailing sentiment on campus and correct in the sense that it was normal, what was in the ideological air one breathes at the university.
In my almost forty-year involvement in higher education I witnessed the complete transformation of the academic enterprise, from my inspired Columbia experience to my dismay with politicization. It was hardly surprising that when asked by reporters why I would leave university life for political office, I responded as Woodrow Wilson did when he left Princeton to run for governor of New Jersey: "I wanted to get out of politics."
The articles in this book follow not only my personal evolution, but the evolution of the university from the 1960s to 1990s. At one point, the dismay I mentioned led me to the conclusion that the death of the university may not be far off. That claim seems exaggerated, but surely the dramatic transformation of the academy cannot be denied and the perversion of the soft sciences and humanities into forms of relativism and solipsism has moved with alacrity in this four-decade period.
Clearly, the reader will have to determine whether the many articles in this book constitute a valid critique of university life or are merely a personal cri de coeur. But as I see it, these musings describe much about the transformation and the present state of affairs in the halls of ivy.
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Copyright 2010 by Transaction Publishers, Reprinted by permission of the publisher.]]>
The Short-Selling of For-Profit Educationtag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.39432010-07-22T20:43:47Z2010-07-22T01:31:28ZBy Charlotte Allen The letter, dated June 17 and addressed to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, made serious allegations of wrongdoing in the already controversial for-profit education sector: that representatives of career colleges were trolling for students at homeless shelters,...Anthony Paletta
By Charlotte Allen
The letter, dated June 17 and addressed to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, made serious allegations of wrongdoing in the already controversial for-profit education sector: that representatives of career colleges were trolling for students at homeless shelters, loading education debt onto a problem-beset population with poor prospects for academic success in order to funnel federal loan funds into for-profit coffers. Now it turns out that the letter was orchestrated by, and its very language prepared by a Dallas woman, Johnette McConnell Early, who was being paid to investigate for-profit colleges by an investment firm that might be hoping to turn its own profits by short-selling the colleges' securities.
Signed by Neil J. Donovan, president of the National Coalition for the Homeless, and 19 administrators of homeless shelters across the country, many of them church-affiliated, the June 17 letter contained strong language essentially urging Duncan to tighten its regulation of the for-profit sector (the department has been considering severe restrictions on federal loans to career-college students that would peg total debt to the average entry-level earnings in the job for which the students are training). The wording of the letter was ominous: It described recruiting at shelters as "a growing problem." It continued: "For-profit trade schools and career colleges are systematically preying on our clients," the letter continued, accusing the schools of "predatory conduct" in enticing shelter residents to run up un-repayable debt that ruined their credit ratings, turned off potential employers, and rendered the defaulting debtors ineligible for further federal student aid. The 20 signers pledged their "unequivocal support" for heavier government regulation of career colleges. Exactly one week later, on June 24, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee held the first of several planned hearings on the for-profit sector, which receives 23 percent of federal student loan funds although it enrolls only 10 percent of the nation's college students, and has been marked by high levels of loan default and relatively low graduation rates.
The letter to Duncan from the shelter administrators, which circulated widely and was posted on the PBS show Frontline's website, seemed yet more red meat for a Democratic Congress and presidential administration that already seems to regard with suspicion the idea of making a profit from higher education.]]>
results of interviews with several of the signers of the June 17 letter. Some of them told ProPublica that Early, who had visited their shelters personally in order to collect signatures, had concealed from them the fact that she was being paid by an investment firm. According to the administrators, she told them variously that she was working for Bloomberg Businessweek (which published a story about proprietary colleges' recruiting at homeless shelters on April 30), for a think tank, for a Dallas research company, and on a book she was writing. Donovan, in particular, expressed outrage that the shelters and their residents were being used as "pawns" by people misrepresenting their real interest in exposing improper recruitment techniques. Several shelter executives told ProPublica what they would not have signed the letter had they known that Early was working for an investment firm, and a spokesman for Frontline similarly declared that the shows producers would have "absolutely not" posted the letter had they known its true provenance.
Furthermore, the letter itself might have exaggerated, or at least led readers to exaggerate, the extent to which recruiting at homeless shelters is actually a widespread practice. Some of the letter's signers told ProPublica that they knew personally about recruitment efforts at their shelters, while others said they had merely heard stories or read news reports about the practice.
The Bloomberg Businessweek story confirms that such abuses really have taken place. (Early said she had "connected" a Bloomberg reporter with sources for alleged incidents, but Bloomberg maintains that it conducted its own independent investigation.) The April 30 story, titled "Homeless High School Dropouts Lured by For-Profit Colleges," told hair-raising tales: a barely literate, AA-attending Cleveland man who got a hard sell from a recruiter for the University of Phoenix; a decades-long drug addict who enrolled at Phoenix to the tune of $10,000 a year but whose brain was so scrambled that she promptly failed a basic course; a privately held business college in Newark, N.J., that paid $350 a week to shelter residents for attending its medical-assistant classes (and now may face revocation of its accreditation); a recovering crack-cocaine addict with a criminal record who splurged $700 of her $4,000 in federal loans and grants for attending Capella College on expensive Christmas presents for her son. These are depressing anecdotes, but it is difficult to say whether they represent a "growing problem," as the June 17 letter to Duncan declares. Capella and Phoenix insist, for example, that intentionally recruiting homeless people violates corporate policy, and a third for-profit institution, Chancellor University in Cleveland, says it got out of the homeless-recruiting business after its presentations at shelters last year netted only a few sign-ups.
Early would not say which investment firm had hired her to gather signatures, and she terminated her interview with ProPublica when a reporter asked her whether the firm she worked for had drafted the letter to Duncan (the letter contains a detailed history of scandals in proprietary higher education). Nonetheless, it is common knowledge that several such firms have taken short positions in the securities of publicly traded proprietary colleges, essentially betting that prices would fall with tightened regulation and possible limits on their federal-loan income (for-profits' share prices have indeed drifted downward over the past few months).
One of the most prominent likely short-sellers is FrontPoint Partners, a hedge fund operated by Steven Eisman, who predicted early that the sub-prime mortgage bubble of the mid-2000s would eventually burst and made a killing by shorting the inscrutably elaborate financial instruments that accompanied the housing run-up. Eisman became the hero of Michael Lewis's best-selling The Big Short, where Lewis idolized him not only as a shrewd and prescient investor but as a lone voice of morality in a Wall Street run amok with greed. "Eisman is a character I fell in love with," Lewis gushed in a 2008 interview. Eisman duly played his part as Jeremiah, thundering regularly about the evils of the collateralized debt obligations that had actually made him rich, and he became a hero to congressional Democrats seeking tougher regulation of the financial industry. He has been reprising that role lately with respect to career colleges. For example, Eisman was the star witness at this year's June 24 Senate committee hearing hearing, where he declared that the proprietary college industry was "as socially destructive as the sub-prime mortgage industry." The stock prices of such for-profit behemoths as Apollo (Phoenix's parent company), ITT Educational Services, and Career Education duly slid after his testimony. Eisman later admitted that he had a financial interest in several of the for-profit educational institutions he had denounced.
Whether any investment firm did anything legally wrong---that is, anything that would violate federal securities laws---in commissioning and securing signatures for the letter---is an open question. "If you intentionally disseminate false information while you have a short position, that's fraud," Stephen Bainbridge, professor of corporate law at UCLA's law school, explained in a telephone interview. "But if the information is true, there is no prohibition about making the information available as long as it's not confidential or proprietary."
But even if the firm in question acted perfectly legally, some pro-regulatory foes of for-profit education have questioned whether Eisman or any other professional short-seller should be publicly positioning himself as the moral scourge of the University of Phoenix and its ilk. Tom Mattzie, chairman of Accountable America, wrote for the Huffington Post, "While [Eisman] is free to invest how he sees fit, the U.S. Senate HELP Committee shouldn't set the stage to help him cheer declining stock prices. Neither should any other part of the U.S government."
The June 17 letter to Duncan, with its faux-dudgeon papering over financial interest, certainly won short-sellers little praise even among Eisman's erstwhile fans once its history became public (Minding the Campus's efforts to reach Eisman for comment by phone and fax were unsuccessful.) The for-profit sector of higher education, what with allegations of abuse in recruiting coupled with its rates of loan default that trouble even its most ardent defenders, has a tough time finding friends---but that letter may have won it a few allies.
]]>
Seeing Academic Repression Everywheretag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.39262010-07-19T20:06:50Z2010-07-21T16:06:13ZBy Anthony Paletta In the epilogue of a new compendium volume, Mark Bousquet notes that, "In July 2007, the American Sociological Association reported that one-third of its members felt their academic freedoms were threatened, a significantly higher figure than the...Anthony Paletta
By Anthony Paletta
In the epilogue of a new compendium volume, Mark Bousquet notes that, "In July 2007, the American Sociological Association reported that one-third of its members felt their academic freedoms were threatened, a significantly higher figure than the one-fifth ratio recorded during the McCarthy years." Sounds dire, doesn't it? Well not if you've spent the prior 500 pages learning just how fantastical the contributors' conceptions of academic freedom are.
The book is Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex, edited by Anthony J. Nocella, II, Steven Best, and Peter McLaren. It's a bad sign when the appearance of Bill Ayers, Ward Churchill, and Howard Zinn as contributors on a book cover leaves one still unprepared for how unfathomable its premises are. Academic Repression purports to demonstrate how corporatization and right-wing assaults have marginalized academic freedom and genuine liberal thinking at our universities. Really?
It's not at all unusual to see hand-wringing from the left over the state of academic freedom; it is unusual to see an essay collection that "asks whether the concept of academic freedom still exists at all in the American University system"(itals mine). ]]>
from politically motivated intimidation tactics and punitive actions and freedom to speak, write, teach, and act as one chooses."
Let's start with the "from." The author makes clear he's not merely talking about punitive administrative tactics, which are fair cause for concern. He's discussing any pressures. In the ludicrously thin-skinned world of this volume, any contemporary criticism of the professoriate seems --- if not tantamount to --- at least a preface to a pink slip, the sound of jackboots, or worse. The preface intones that "the more scholars raise questions about the vexing issues of our day, the more roadblocks they find in the way of their career advancement and even, quite possibly, their very existence as non-persecuted or free citizens." In the world of this volume, "where the attention of the culture wars has focused on professors allegedly harassing students, it is more often the case that conservative students are harassing their professors." And in the world of this volume, the greatest threats to academic freedom appear to be ones that you don't have to bother to prove.
Thus academic repression occurs when the state, political groups, or the university administration attempts to muzzle the outspoken through punitive actions, but it also occurs---all too effectively---when fearful, self-concerned professors censor themselves for purposes of career advancement. Furthermore, one need not be demoted, non-promoted, or fired for academic repression to manifest, it is enough to be marginalized or treated with disdain. It does not require the actual exercise of power, it operates on the mere hint, suggestion, or threat of slapdown, and it thrives in the chilling afterglow of its prior victims whom the state, university administrators, and political assassins uphold to say: "Be careful, or the head on this stake could be yours."
The idea that a climate of fear is so pervasive as to strangle genuine expression in its cradle and leave left-wing professors quivering like jelly is dumbfounding in this age of political scholarship. Has no one told the Group of 88? Or the assorted schools that continue to hire and promote them even after a firestorm of criticism? Bill Ayers appears to have come out on top; as has his wife Bernadine Dohrn. Have the authors seen a single academic conference lately? What of the Peace Studies departments? Social justice pledges at teacher's colleges? How about the whole range of identity studies departments - the "political assassins" seem to be very faulty marksmen.
Here let's return to the other side of the introduction's definition of academic freedom, the freedom "to" - to "speak, write, teach, and act as one chooses." In this particular it soon becomes apparent that, on average, as "one chooses" doesn't seem to be nearly political enough for the authors.
Take a look at some practical hopes for the profession:
While I would like to see US academics, as a class, take a leading role in movements to assert radical humanistic values that have the possibility of transforming society, I don't believe that such change is likely, or even possible, in the near future.
And another:
It is urgent that more scholars use the openings they have to challenge the hierarchical organization of society and the exploitative and unsustainable operations of the capitalist economy, and that they do so in organized and consorted ways.
And another:
..the sad reality is that academic intellectuals have, for the most part, failed to meet the moral and political responsibility to speak out against barbarism. As US imperial power expands and the leading military force poses new threats to world peace, liberal and "progressive" academics have either adapted to this universe or suffered their protest in silence---exactly the type of marginalization process universities want to impose on different professors.
And more of the same:
The challenge of progressive educators is vigorous and varied and difficult to itemize. Most liberals, of course, unhesitatingly embraced a concern to bring about social justice. This is certainly to be applauded. However, too often such a struggle is antiseptically cleaved from the project of transforming capitalist social relations.
Goals such as "to challenge the meritocratic foundation of public policy that purportedly is politically neutral and racially color-blind, to create teacher-generated narratives as a way of analyzing teaching from a 'transformational' perspective, to improve academic achievement in culturally diverse schools, to affirm and utilized multiple perspectives and ways of teaching and learning, to re-deify the curriculum and expose meta-narratives of exclusion" are praised but ultimately dismissed as insufficient, as they "do not go far enough, and in the end, support the exiting status quo social order."
One assistant professor writing in the volume is incredulous when a poster promoting a 9-11 teach-in she circulated including the phrases "Faculty: Send your students" and "Students: Walk out" was "interpreted as my disrespect of fellow faculty members rather than as a contribution to the work and traditions of the university and the faculty." If the traditions of her university and faculty was understood as activism and not teaching, then she was surely correct; otherwise, her surprise suggests a breathtaking arrogance and a feckless faith in activism as pedagogical duty that infects nearly all of the essays in this collection.
Academic Repression schizophrenically raises the specter of an age of widespread persecution of leftist scholars and then proceeds to demand repeatedly and shrilly even more political instruction, leaving no meaningful sense of the right of students to avoid indoctrination, and virtually no sense of the acceptable limits of political proselytizing in the classroom and the professoriate. No, references to students in the volume generally dismiss their objections wholesale: as Henry Giroux states, "Because students disagree with an unsettling idea does not mean that they should have the authority, expertise, education, or power to dictate for all their classmates what should be stated, discussed, or taught in a classroom." By contrast, many of the authors in this volume seem to reserve the absolute privilege of the professor to set these bounds however they please.
There are a few rare moments of dissent. One professor stands up for the dissenting students that others seem to regard as paid informants, wondering, refreshingly, "is it accurate and/or strategic to describe the presence of a student in your class, even one there to keep tabs on any hint of professional failure, as being under surveillance, given that the term carries a connotation of being shadowed by law enforcement?" Two contributors question the worth of the ubiquitous McCarthyism parallels.
Otherwise, though, the book's combination of paranoia and activist tract makes sympathetic interpretation impossible. There's not a moment of broader perspective present. The authors appear doggedly convinced that every trend in modern higher education is a right-wing/corporatist ideological plot designed to exclude and marginalize leftists, despite the continued expansion of programs and departments dear to their concerns.
The book sees leftist employment under threat, with familiar cases from Sami Al-Arian to Ward Churchill to Angela Davis (ignoring or dismissing any complicating factors in each of these cases). These are advanced as evidence of the muzzling of left-wing dissent; as Henry Giroux writes, "Faculty are still advised to think twice about voicing controversial politico-economic perspectives." Oh really? A quick glance at the syllabi of the average Sociology or Anthropology department, not to mention Hispanic Studies, Peace Studies, or Community Studies, would suggest that leftist politico-economic perspectives are not merely safe but are thriving. And how are controversial gender perspectives doing? Ask Larry Summers.
In sum, it would be difficult to find a portrait of the academy with a more dizzying lack of perspective than Academic Repression. The contributors stand convinced that universities, despite their steady expansion of left-minded departments, actually hope to muzzle the left. They stand convinced that universities are either actually right-wing or profoundly susceptible to right-wing pressure, despite the near-complete absence of conservative faculty. They stand convinced that the rise of tenure is a right-wing scheme to purge the academic left, even as surveys of faculty opinion reveal enduringly pervasive progressive sentiments in the professoriate (and no rise in conservative or libertarian views). It's useful that the contributors are so strongly convinced, because the chances of anyone else being so are distinctly small. ]]>
Your College President Is Your Paltag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.39222010-07-15T20:41:28Z2010-07-21T16:05:33ZBy Frank J. Macchiarola Tales of the modern-day college president were reported by the Washington Post in a July 12th article, "College Presidents Taste Life Outside Their Offices," by James Johnson and Daniel de Vise. The president, we were told,...Anthony Paletta
By Frank J. Macchiarola
Tales of the modern-day college president were reported by the Washington Post in a July 12th article, "College Presidents Taste Life Outside Their Offices," by James Johnson and Daniel de Vise. The president, we were told, is more accessible and easy to talk to, less formal and willing to do things with students unheard of just a few years ago, including joining in a student snowball fight on campus. Many of them have transformed themselves from authority figures to buddies and big siblings as they show their human side. It is something that many parents and students have come to expect as they pony up tuitions that continue to grow even as their resources do not. The presidents want to show their respective publics that they know their students and their needs and will make a great effort to satisfy them.
The trend toward more effective marketing of the campus leader comes at the same time that colleges are offering greater creature comforts to their students - health clubs, new labs and classroom buildings, better appointed living quarters and increasing variety in campus dining. Thus, the accessible college president is like the concierge in a first-class vacation resort. In addition, the college can make contacts for students off campus - internships, study abroad programs, joint degree programs, new majors, distance learning and enhanced placement services for graduates. It strives to be "the college for all seasons."
Although the article did not suggest it, the reality is that colleges are falling in line with other institutions in a transformation of major parts of American culture. They are putting extraordinary emphasis on what the consumer would like to have. In some significant ways, the institutions are becoming what the market expects of them. Their actual mission statement begins to describe what will sell. These institutions surrender the sense of self and the understanding of core values that traditionally represented who they were and what they were doing. In many respects they believe that their survival requires them to cast their lot with the future rather than the old past. In this way the accessible, genial, folksy college president is a beloved figure. In many respects, the new college president represents an improvement over the indifferent and aloof administrator. But if all we have is a change in style then we are not offered much in terms of what really matters. Indeed, the cost of satisfying more of what the public wants rather than what it needs is, in the long run, unsustainable. In the universities, these creature comforts mean higher tuitions and increased student debt to meet the costs of attendance. There is a real limit to this kind of accommodation as tuitions and fees consistently exceed cost of living indicators for other needs as the cost-benefit analysis piles up heaps of benefits, some of them unnecessary. A day of reckoning may soon be at hand.]]>
Frank J. Macchiarola is the Chancellor of St. Francis College and the former Dean of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.]]>
How Diversity Punishes Asians, Poor Whites and Lots of Otherstag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.39072010-07-12T22:10:40Z2010-07-21T16:04:47ZBy Russell K. Nieli When college presidents and academic administrators pay their usual obeisance to "diversity" you know they are talking first and foremost about race. More specifically, they are talking about blacks. A diverse college campus is understood as...Anthony Paletta
By Russell K. Nieli
When college presidents and academic administrators pay their usual obeisance to "diversity" you know they are talking first and foremost about race. More specifically, they are talking about blacks. A diverse college campus is understood as one that has a student body that -- at a minimum -- is 5 to 7 percent black (i.e., equivalent to roughly half the proportion of blacks in the general population). A college or university that is only one, two, or three percent black would not be considered "diverse" by college administrators regardless of how demographically diverse its student body might be in other ways. The blacks in question need not be African Americans -- indeed at many of the most competitive colleges today, including many Ivy League schools, an estimated 40-50 percent of those categorized as black are Afro-Caribbean or African immigrants, or the children of such immigrants.
As a secondary meaning "diversity" can also encompass Hispanics, who together with blacks are often subsumed by college administrators and admissions officers under the single race category "underrepresented minorities." Most colleges and universities seeking "diversity" seek a similar proportion of Hispanics in their student body as blacks (since blacks and Hispanics are about equal in number in the general population), though meeting the black diversity goal usually has a much higher priority than meeting the Hispanic one.
Asians, unlike blacks and Hispanics, receive no boost in admissions. Indeed, the opposite is often the case, as the quota-like mentality that leads college administrators to conclude they may have "too many" Asians. Despite the much lower number of Asians in the general high-school population, high-achieving Asian students -- those, for instance, with SAT scores in the high 700s -- are much more numerous than comparably high-achieving blacks and Hispanics, often by a factor of ten or more. Thinking as they do in racial balancing and racial quota terms, college admissions officers at the most competitive institutions almost always set the bar for admitting Asians far above that for Hispanics and even farther above that for admitting blacks. ]]>
raison d'etre for race-specific affirmative action programs," Dershowitz writes, "has simply never been diversity for the sake of education. The checkered history of 'diversity' demonstrates that it was designed largely as a cover to achieve other legally, morally, and politically controversial goals. In recent years, it has been invoked -- especially in the professional schools -- as a clever post facto justification for increasing the number of minority group students in the student body."
While almost all college administrators and college admissions officers at the most elite institutions think in racial balancing and racial quota-like terms when they assemble their student body, they almost always deny this publically in a blizzard of rhetoric about a more far-flung "diversity." Indeed, there is probably no other area where college administrators are more likely to lie or conceal the truth of what they are doing than in the area of admissions and race.
Most elite universities seem to have little interest in diversifying their student bodies when it comes to the numbers of born-again Christians from the Bible belt, students from Appalachia and other rural and small-town areas, people who have served in the U.S. military, those who have grown up on farms or ranches, Mormons, Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses, lower-middle-class Catholics, working class "white ethnics," social and political conservatives, wheelchair users, married students, married students with children, or older students first starting out in college after raising children or spending several years in the workforce. Students in these categories are often very rare at the more competitive colleges, especially the Ivy League. While these kinds of people would surely add to the diverse viewpoints and life-experiences represented on college campuses, in practice "diversity" on campus is largely a code word for the presence of a substantial proportion of those in the "underrepresented" racial minority groups.
The Diversity Colleges WantA new study by Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and his colleague Alexandria Radford is a real eye-opener in revealing just what sorts of students highly competitive colleges want -- or don't want -- on their campuses and how they structure their admissions policies to get the kind of "diversity" they seek. The Espenshade/Radford study draws from a new data set, the National Study of College Experience (NSCE), which was gathered from eight highly competitive public and private colleges and universities (entering freshmen SAT scores: 1360). Data was collected on over 245,000 applicants from three separate application years, and over 9,000 enrolled students filled out extensive questionnaires. Because of confidentiality agreements Espenshade and Radford could not name the institutions but they assure us that their statistical profile shows they fit nicely within the top 50 colleges and universities listed in the U.S. News & World Report ratings.
Consistent with other studies, though in much greater detail, Espenshade and Radford show the substantial admissions boost, particularly at the private colleges in their study, which Hispanic students get over whites, and the enormous advantage over whites given to blacks. They also show how Asians must do substantially better than whites in order to reap the same probabilities of acceptance to these same highly competitive private colleges. On an "other things equal basis," where adjustments are made for a variety of background factors, being Hispanic conferred an admissions boost over being white (for those who applied in 1997) equivalent to 130 SAT points (out of 1600), while being black rather than white conferred a 310 SAT point advantage. Asians, however, suffered an admissions penalty compared to whites equivalent to 140 SAT points.
The box students checked off on the racial question on their application was thus shown to have an extraordinary effect on a student's chances of gaining admission to the highly competitive private schools in the NSCE database. To have the same chances of gaining admission as a black student with an SAT score of 1100, an Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have a 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550. Here the Espenshade/Radford results are consistent with other studies, including those of William Bowen and Derek Bok in their book The Shape of the River, though they go beyond this influential study in showing both the substantial Hispanic admissions advantage and the huge admissions penalty suffered by Asian applicants. Although all highly competitive colleges and universities will deny that they have racial quotas -- either minimum quotas or ceiling quotas -- the huge boosts they give to the lower-achieving black and Hispanic applicants, and the admissions penalties they extract from their higher-achieving Asian applicants, clearly suggest otherwise.
Espenshade and Radford also take up very thoroughly the question of "class based preferences" and what they find clearly shows a general disregard for improving the admission chances of poor and otherwise disadvantaged whites. Other studies, including a 2005 analysis of nineteen highly selective public and private universities by William Bowen, Martin Kurzweil, and Eugene Tobin, in their 2003 book, Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education, found very little if any advantage in the admissions process accorded to whites from economically or educationally disadvantaged families compared to whites from wealthier or better educated homes. Espenshade and Radford cite this study and summarize it as follows: "These researchers find that, for non-minority [i.e., white] applicants with the same SAT scores, there is no perceptible difference in admission chances between applicants from families in the bottom income quartile, applicants who would be the first in their families to attend college, and all other (non-minority) applicants from families at higher levels of socioeconomic status. When controls are added for other student and institutional characteristics, these authors find that “on an other-things-equal basis, [white] applicants from low-SES backgrounds, whether defined by family income or parental education, get essentially no break in the admissions process; they fare neither better nor worse than other [white] applicants."
Distressing as many might consider this to be -- since the same institutions that give no special consideration to poor white applicants boast about their commitment to "diversity" and give enormous admissions breaks to blacks, even to those from relatively affluent homes -- Espenshade and Radford in their survey found the actual situation to be much more troubling. At the private institutions in their study whites from lower-class backgrounds incurred a huge admissions disadvantage not only in comparison to lower-class minority students, but compared to whites from middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds as well. The lower-class whites proved to be all-around losers. When equally matched for background factors (including SAT scores and high school GPAs), the better-off whites were more than three times as likely to be accepted as the poorest whites (.28 vs. .08 admissions probability). Having money in the family greatly improved a white applicant's admissions chances, lack of money greatly reduced it. The opposite class trend was seen among non-whites, where the poorer the applicant the greater the probability of acceptance when all other factors are taken into account. Class-based affirmative action does exist within the three non-white ethno-racial groupings, but among the whites the groups advanced are those with money.
When lower-class whites are matched with lower-class blacks and other non-whites the degree of the non-white advantage becomes astronomical: lower-class Asian applicants are seven times as likely to be accepted to the competitive private institutions as similarly qualified whites, lower-class Hispanic applicants eight times as likely, and lower-class blacks ten times as likely. These are enormous differences and reflect the fact that lower-class whites were rarely accepted to the private institutions Espenshade and Radford surveyed. Their diversity-enhancement value was obviously rated very low.
Poor Non-White Students: "Counting Twice"
The enormous disadvantage incurred by lower-class whites in comparison to non-whites and wealthier whites is partially explained by Espenshade and Radford as a result of the fact that, except for the very wealthiest institutions like Harvard and Princeton, private colleges and universities are reluctant to admit students who cannot afford their high tuitions. And since they have a limited amount of money to give out for scholarship aid, they reserve this money to lure those who can be counted in their enrollment statistics as diversity-enhancing "racial minorities." Poor whites are apparently given little weight as enhancers of campus diversity, while poor non-whites count twice in the diversity tally, once as racial minorities and a second time as socio-economically deprived. Private institutions, Espenshade and Radford suggest, "intentionally save their scarce financial aid dollars for students who will help them look good on their numbers of minority students." Quoting a study by NYU researcher Mitchell Stevens, they write: "ultimate evaluative preference for members of disadvantaged groups was reserved for applicants who could be counted in the college's multicultural statistics. This caused some admissions officers no small amount of ethical dismay."
There are problems, however, with this explanation. While it explains why scarce financial aid dollars might be reserved for minority "twofers," it cannot explain why well-qualified lower-class whites are not at least offered admission without financial aid. The mere offer of admission is costless, and at least a few among the poor whites accepted would probably be able to come up with outside scholarship aid. But even if they couldn't, knowing they did well enough in their high school studies to get accepted to a competitive private college would surely sit well with most of them even if they couldn't afford the high tuition. Espenshade and Radford do not address this conundrum but the answer is easy to discern. The ugly truth is that most colleges, especially the more competitive private ones, are fiercely concerned with their ratings by rating organizations like U.S. News & World Report. And an important part of those ratings consist of a numerical acceptance rate (the ratio of applicants received to those accepted) and a yield score (the ratio of those accepted to those who enroll). The lower the acceptance rate and the higher the yield score the more favorably colleges are looked upon. In extending admissions to well-qualified but financially strapped whites who are unlikely to enroll, a college would be driving both its acceptance rate and its yield score in the wrong direction. Academic bureaucrats rarely act against either their own or their organization's best interests (as they perceive them), and while their treatment of lower-class whites may for some be a source of "no small amount of ethical dismay," that's just how it goes. Some of the private colleges Espenshade and Radford describe would do well to come clean with their act and admit the truth: "Poor Whites Need Not Apply!"
Besides the bias against lower-class whites, the private colleges in the Espenshade/Radford study seem to display what might be called an urban/Blue State bias against rural and Red State occupations and values. This is most clearly shown in a little remarked statistic in the study's treatment of the admissions advantage of participation in various high school extra-curricular activities. In the competitive private schools surveyed participation in many types of extra-curricular activities -- including community service activities, performing arts activities, and "cultural diversity" activities -- conferred a substantial improvement in an applicant's chances of admission. The admissions advantage was usually greatest for those who held leadership positions or who received awards or honors associated with their activities. No surprise here -- every student applying to competitive colleges knows about the importance of extracurriculars.
But what Espenshade and Radford found in regard to what they call "career-oriented activities" was truly shocking even to this hardened veteran of the campus ideological and cultural wars. Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student's chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. "Being an officer or winning awards" for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, "has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions." Excelling in these activities "is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission."
Espenshade and Radford don't have much of an explanation for this find, which seems to place the private colleges even more at variance with their stated commitment to broadly based campus diversity. In his Bakke ruling Lewis Powell was impressed by the argument Harvard College offered defending the educational value of a demographically diverse student body: "A farm boy from Idaho can bring something to Harvard College that a Bostonian cannot offer. Similarly, a black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer." The Espenshade/Radford study suggests that those farm boys from Idaho would do well to stay out of their local 4-H clubs or FFA organizations -- or if they do join, they had better not list their membership on their college application forms. This is especially true if they were officers in any of these organizations. Future farmers of America don't seem to count in the diversity-enhancement game played out at some of our more competitive private colleges, and are not only not recruited, but seem to be actually shunned. It is hard to explain this development other than as a case of ideological and cultural bias.
This same kind of bias seems to lurk behind the negative association found between acceptance odds and holding leadership positions in high school ROTC. This is most troubling because a divorce between the campus culture of its universities and its military is poisonous for any society, and doesn't do the military or the civilian society any good. The lack of comfort with many military commanders that our current president is said to have seems to be due not only to his own lack of military experience but to the fact of having spent so many of his formative years on university campuses like Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago, where people with military experience are largely absent and the campus culture is often hostile to military values and military personnel.
In an attempt to find out what kind of diversity exists -- or doesn't exist -- on the Princeton University campus, I once asked students in a ten-member discussion group to raise their hands if they knew one or more Princeton undergraduates who had served a year or more on active military duty (in the late 1940s or early 1950s, of course, undergraduates at Princeton would have encountered legions of such people coming back from WWII and the Korean War). I made it plain that I wasn't asking if the students had a close friend or roommate who was a veteran, just a single person with military experience that they had at sometime encountered during their Princeton undergraduate careers. Only one student -- a female -- raised her hand: this student once met someone who had served in the Israeli military. On a second occasion I asked this question to a larger group and again only one hand went up -- this student once met a Princeton undergraduate who had served in the Turkish military.
Many universities, including Princeton, are interested in enrolling foreign students, along with students from disparate regions of the U.S. But the more competitive private universities seem to have little interest in diversifying their student bodies when it comes to people who have served in the American military or people who intend to make a career out of military service. Even if they don't shun such people, or hold their military service or aspirations against them, they clearly don't seek them out or court them the way they do "underrepresented" racial minorities. And while many universities host college-level ROTC programs (often for financial reasons), the military/civilian relationship on campus is usually far from amicable.
Military veterans and aspiring military officers, like poor whites and future American farmers, are clearly not what most competitive private colleges have in mind when they speak of the need for "diversity". If nothing else the new Espenshade/Radford study helps to document what knowledgeable observers have long known: "diversity" at competitive colleges today involves a politically engineered stew of different groups. drawn from the ingredients selected by reigning campus ideology. Since that ideology is mainly dictated by the Left, it is no surprise that the diversity achieved is what the larger American landscape looks like when it is viewed through a leftist lens. I suggest a different approach: elite colleges should get out of the diversity business altogether and focus on enrolling students who are the most academically talented and the most eager to learn. These students should make up the bulk of their entering classes. Call it the Cal Tech Model since the California Institute of Technology seems to be the only elite institution that comes close to realizing such an ideal. Or call it the U.S. Olympic Team Model, or the Major League All-Stars Model, since it is based on the same strict merit-selection principle governing our Olympic sports teams and our major league baseball all-star teams. Let the diversity chips fall where they may and focus on recruiting the most intelligent, most creative, and most energetiic of the rising generation of young people. In my naive way this is what I always thought elite universities were supposed to be about.
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Russell K. Nieli received his Ph.D. in political philosophy from Princeton University and currently works for Princeton's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He has been a lecturer in Princeton's Politics Department and for ten years was an academic adviser to Princeton freshmen.]]>
What Happened at Berkeley in Novembertag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.39002010-07-08T06:21:27Z2010-07-21T16:04:02ZBy Donald A. Downs We now have a long and fascinating report by the campus police review board on last fall's disruptive protests at the University of California, Berkeley. The 128-page document, entitled "November 20, 2009: Review, Reflection, and Recommendations,"...Anthony Paletta
By Donald A. Downs
We now have a long and fascinating report by the campus police review board on last fall's disruptive protests at the University of California, Berkeley.
The 128-page document, entitled "November 20, 2009: Review,
Reflection, and Recommendations," released in mid-June, is the product of months of yeoman work garnering volumes of evidence. It chronicles and evaluates responses to the events sparked by resentment over tuition increases and cutbacks in the wake of California's financial debacle.
Berkeley deserves credit for thoroughly investigating the situation. And the report is worth reading for many reasons, one of which is because it casts light on a dilemma that Berkeley and many other schools have been unable to resolve since the famous Berkeley "Free Speech Movement" of 1964 launched decades of illegal student protest: how to balance students' passions for social justice (and sometimes other motives) with the rule of law.
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L.A. Times story, "Eight people were under arrest today after several dozen protesters shouting 'no justice, no peace' attacked Chancellor Robert Birgeneau's home on the campus of UC Berkeley, smashing windows, lights and planters as well as throwing torches at the home and police vehicles, authorities said." Pronouncing the demonstrators "criminals, not activists," the chancellor said that he and his wife feared for their lives.
Last April, the Daily Californian, Berkeley's student newspaper, pointed with welcome student irony to the costs the demonstrations have exacted. "Student protests at UC Berkeley aiming to save public higher education may lead to further cuts to campus services, administrators say." Indeed, the estimated cost of the November protests alone was $50,541: $21,530 to repair damage inflicted on campus buildings and $29,011 to pay for the police response to the students outside of Wheeler. After further protests, the university has depleted its $211,000 "protest fund," and will have to draw additional money from regular campus funds and "any available reserves or through cuts to programs such as human resources, finance or police services."
The demonstrations unveil deep problems in higher education, ranging from legitimate student and societal concerns about the escalating costs of already over-priced universities in an era of economic woe and deflation, to equally legitimate distress at many students' self-righteous disregard of the rights of others and the rules of free speech. (Some critics have also pointed out that students are failing to target the real culprit: a state that has lost control of its finances, necessitating cuts in everything under the sun except its generous public pensions, the funds of which, in turn, have been harmed by the low interest rates mandated by the Federal Reserve Bank.) One insightful blogger contends that the situation has aroused revaluations of "what a university is for." Does it exist to serve the expensive careers of faculty and administration, or rather for the benefit of students and the public? Or, more plausibly, do we need to find a better way to rethink and balance these and other interests? Similar important concerns about the nature of the university inspired FSM and a good deal of the student protest of the '60s. Indeed, just how sustainable is the present model of higher education?
The Report devotes considerable space to discussing the pros and cons of the administrative and law enforcement responses. Police and the administration were dealt a bad hand, but their own actions and inactions sometimes poured fuel on the fire. But another issue unfortunately given less attention merits further consideration: how Berkeley's traditional way of dealing with illegal protest may have contributed to the problem of illegal behavior that now besets the university.
The crux of this matter boils down to the Report's discussion of "The Berkeley experience." The Report alludes to Berkeley's dedication to encouraging students to speak out with emotion and intensity. So far, so good, as this encouragement has contributed to a vibrant, challenging environment. "In the minds of some students and faculty, these facts are an essential component of what it means to attend Berkeley. As some students have told us, one reason they joined the rally outside Wheeler on the 20th was their desire to have what they considered ‘the Berkeley experience.'"
Unfortunately, the Berkeley Experience also involves blurring the line between normal robust First Amendment conduct, which operates within the law, and lawless expressive conduct, which can range from respectful civil disobedience to forceful or even violent conduct that disrespects the rights of others. The Berkeley Experience "builds expectations about how demonstrators will be treated. It also tends to dilute, generally, attention to rules---and to obscure from the vision of some people how significantly some violations of some rules can affect the rights and the legitimate interests of other people."
Universities often strive to tailor rules, procedures, and expectations to their distinctive institutional missions, which are educational. They operate as semi-autonomous realms entitled by constitutional law to define their own destinies, within fairly broad limits. But there are normative and legal limits to this leeway, as exemplified by the recent events at Berkeley and its sister California schools. By failing to respect and enforce these limits, Berkeley---however well intentioned---appears to have failed in its educational mission in the realm of free speech; for a truly free system of speech cannot exist unless the rights of all citizens---demonstrators, those opposed to the demonstrators, and those who simply don't care---are respected and protected. In the absence of such universal protection and respect, political bullies can run roughshod over the rights of others, making a mockery of the free flow of ideas.
First Amendment law protects the most controversial and provocative forms of speech, as the Supreme Court has reiterated in a long line of famous cases. It is also bound by laws that prohibit trespass, destruction of property, obstruction of the liberty of others, and the silencing of other voices. Legal scholar Alexander Bickel once wrote that modern First Amendment protections, in effect, legalize some forms of speech that were once considered illegally provocative, thereby placing a higher, though not insurmountable, burden on those engaged in unlawful civil disobedience to morally justify their conduct. In other words, First Amendment law provides ample room for powerful displays of viewpoints and emotions, while simultaneously requiring passionate demonstrators to respect the rights of others.
To be sure, history has presented times when a moral cause calls for violence, as in situations of true tyranny or just war. (I write this essay over the Fourth of July weekend.) But even war is bounded by rules, however much its impulses push against them. And who with even a modicum of judgment would place the University of California's financial predicament in these exceptional categories?
The limits on free speech predicated on rule of law (which exist in the very name of free speech) serve three important purposes. First, such limits establish relatively clear guidelines as to what is permitted and what is not. By blurring the line between law and disobedience, the Berkeley Experience opens the door to uncertainty and unprincipled administrative discretion, which can readily leak into unethical and unedifying permissiveness and political favoritism. Second, in the university context, these limits assume that students should possess the same rights as adults, which also means that they bear the same responsibilities. They are free to make their own decisions, but they are also responsible for the consequences of their actions. We tend to forget that the student revolts of the '60s were first preoccupied with the elimination of in loco parentis, which treated students as pre-adults, not the young adults that they are. Did it occur to the advocates of the Berkeley Experience that its policy of partial tolerance toward lawlessness might amount to treating its students like children?
Third, these limits require protesters to restrain their moral passions out of respect for two things: for the rights of those outside of their cause; and for the fallibility principle, which anchors the pursuit of truth in liberal democracy: the protesters, themselves, might be wrong. (Moral passions and moral certitudes are among our fiercest passions, as Reinhold Niebuhr, Sigmund Freud, and others have taught us so tellingly.) This restraint is among the most important lessons a citizen can learn in a liberal democracy, for it is what makes living together in a regime of equal rights possible. Tocqueville called these restraints on passion and self-interest the "forms of liberty," and maintained that these manners are necessary preconditions for the mental health of democratic orders. Such conscientious practitioners of civil disobedience as Martin Luther King and Gandhi paid tribute to the forms of liberty by accepting their punishments and by breaking particular laws in a way that nonetheless showed due respect for others and the rule of law in general. Education in the forms of liberty is especially appropriate at universities, whose moral charters are premised on the dedication to reason; but have Berkeley students been so educated?
The confusions epitomized by the Berkeley Experience have had consequences at Berkeley and elsewhere. In the decades following FSM, Berkeley has witnessed numerous cases of speakers being shouted down or stifled in the public forum who did not conform to the progressive ideology that dominates student life there. (Ask the Daily Californian how many times entire runs of its paper have been stolen from stands because of articles or editorials deemed politically incorrect.) Equally importantly, failure to respect the legal obligations implicit in the systemic exercise of free speech no doubt contributed to the widespread violations of free thought and due process that have accompanied the imposition of speech codes, overly-broad harassment codes, and related policies in higher education in recent decades. What Alan Kors and Harvey Silverglate called the "betrayal of liberty on America's campuses" in The Shadow University (1998) was, at least in part, the consequence of the misunderstanding lying at the heart of the Berkeley Experience and its adherents nation-wide. Why worry about the rights of others when an important political cause is at stake?
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Donald A. Downs is the Meiklejohn Professor of Political Science, Law, and Journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California-Berkeley in 1983. His book, Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus includes a chapter on free speech problems at Berkeley.
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As one example of the failure to utilize incentives to promote studiousness at the college level, consider that according to tests of the entering freshmen at American colleges, about a third require assignment to remedial courses to overcome their deficiencies in reading, writing, or mathematics, sometimes in more than one subject. (A higher proportion of students at two-year colleges need remediation in these fields and a lower proportion in four-year colleges.) In many colleges students receive no college credit for taking remedial courses and, if they do not pass, are required to take the remedial courses again. Apparently, however, the expensive remediation efforts of colleges to enable initially underprepared students overcome their handicaps are not very successful. Data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics suggest that college remediation is insufficient for the task, judging by the number of students who require remediation and, after getting it, do not complete their college programs. The more remedial courses students need to take at college, the less likely they are to complete college and obtain a degree. Thus, among 1992 twelfth graders who enrolled in postsecondary education and were followed for ten years, 57 percent of students who needed no remedial courses at college obtained at least a college degree within eight years of high school graduation whereas only 19 percent of students who had to enroll in three or four remedial courses obtained a college degree within eight years. Students required to take remedial courses in reading were most likely to drop out of college, not a surprising finding in view of the need to understand reading assignments in most college courses.
The crucial question is why remediation does not work. My hypothesis is that there are inadequate incentives for students who arrive without sufficient preparation to take seriously that that have deficiencies requiring remediation. Without incentives to put in the enormously difficult task of learning in a course or two how to read and write effectively, a task they should have learned gradually over many years, they simply go through the motions. The colleges go through the motions also. In egregious cases they make students repeat remedial courses once or twice. But what if students are so underprepared that they need five or six repetitions of remedial course work to show substantial results? No college would dare to require this, and no underprepared student would stand for it.
Money - A Real Incentive
My suggestion is better incentives for students, incentives that begin in primary and secondary schools and continue throughout college. The best incentive I can think of is student financial aid. It should continue to be targeted to students from low-income families who cannot help them financially to pay for college but good academic performance should also be required for federally guaranteed loans, although not for Pell grants. Let me explain the reasoning behind making this distinction between grant student aid and loan student aid. It is true that, logically, grants without academic requirements violate the principle that higher education should not be an entitlement, only an opportunity, just as much as such loans do. On a strictly logical level, perhaps they do. However, for pragmatic reasons a stronger case can be made for continuing student grants without academic prerequisites than student loans. Grants do not present the same dangers either to students or to the economy as do loans; they do not burden students with debts that they may not be able to repay and they do not burden the economy with complex financial instruments that can produce a credit crisis. Moreover, student grants that ignore academic merit are appealing as an expression of society's interest in making higher education available even to students who have not done well in high school. Giving Pell Grants is a societal bet that mediocre students can do better scholastically in the future, not that mediocrity is valuable in itself. Maybe they are late bloomers. Of course, mediocre students are only part of the population of Pell grant recipients. Scholastically excellent students from low-income families also receive Pell grants; they are exactly the kinds of people Congress had in mind when authorizing financial aid to students.
The remediation problem arises when students who are needy economically and want to go to college are academically subpar. What the Department of Education now does is simply give them loans as well as grants. What the Department of Education ought to do is to accompany the grants for such students with (1) a warning that in the light of their records, success in college is problematical and (2) an offer to provide programs to improve their chances of doing well at the college they wish to attend. They are free to reject this offer of what is in fact remediation, although it should not be called that, and no doubt many will reject such an offer. The symbolic point of the offer is to call attention to the fact that a grant does not ignore lack of preparedness; it offers a second chance to succeed academically. Getting the grant should not be grounds for complacency. Congress would have to appropriate funds to the Department of Education for establishing these remedial programs for underprepared grant students on more than three thousand college campuses. Given the unfortunate facts (1) that the United States and indeed the world is currently in a recession and (2) President Obama is urging a
stimulus for the economy, such remedial programs might be as useful an investment as infrastructure repair.
Why should the Department of Education establish remedial programs for grant recipients with academic deficiencies when colleges already have remedial programs aimed at all of their students with academic deficiencies, programs that seem to work poorly? For several reasons. First, giving grants to academically underprepared students to attend college and not helping them survive academically is callous; it is programming some Pell grant recipients for failure and dropping out before completing college, which certainly is not what Congress intended in establishing education grants for needy students. Second, a voluntary program has a self-selected clientele. Unlike college-mandated remedial programs, these programs would be designed for students whose previous academic records do not justify federal education loans. They are on warning that getting a Pell grant does not mean that they are fully prepared to succeed. Students who sincerely accept the offer of help are much more likely to succeed. Third, the financial burden of remediation is beyond the resources of many colleges. As a result, their efforts to repair deficiencies of student preparation are genuflections toward remediation but not demonstrably effective. Setting up separate programs for federal grant recipients with academic deficiencies would relieve colleges of part of their immediate remedial burdens and help them financially to deal with their other students with remediation problems more effectively. Finally, the emphasis of these federally supported programs, tied as they would be to grants to needy students, is success in college, not merely the repair of past deficiencies. Although the money will come from the Department of Education, the program itself will be designed individually at each college under contract with the Department, thus providing an opportunity for comparing programs that work better with programs that are not as effective.
Getting the Details Right
What about underprepared students who receive need-based grants to attend college but refuse the offer to participate in such special programs? Denial of deficiencies is common. As an incentive, the Department of Education holds a trump card. Grants for needy students are usually not sufficient to finance college without additional sources of funds. They also need loans, and the Department offers subsidized loans. Federal loans can be allocated quite differently from grants. A condition for receiving these loans might be to participate in programs that address academic deficiencies or to show by improved grades that those deficiencies have been addressed. Students who cannot receive loans but who do receive grants surely receive the message that they have to do better academically to receive federally guaranteed loans. This line of reasoning suggests that grants can ignore academic merit without necessarily undermining the incentives for stronger student performance.
My hypothesis is that such changes in the way Department of Education grants and loans are allocated will be effective incentives for studious behavior at all levels of the American educational system. Even primary school students? Yes, even primary school students. Unlike pigeons and mice, human beings, even young human beings anticipate the remote future and modify their behavior accordingly. If students wish to attend college and know that studious behavior is necessary to make this feasible, many of them will study more diligently. How many? That is an empirical question that will have to be investigated. But children are not free spirits growing up in the woods, nurtured only by wild animals. Most have parents who want them to take advantage of the opportunities that college education can make possible for a better life. How else can the overwhelming response of low-income parents in Washington, D.C. to the lottery process for charter schools be explained?
My hope is that properly targeted incentives can improve not only remediation programs for underprepared college students but also can reduce the number of underprepared college students enrolled in American colleges and universities. Impossible dream?
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Jackson Toby is professor of sociology emeritus at Rutgers
University and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His book, The Lowering of Higher Education in America: Why Student Loans Should Be Based on Student Performance, was published by Praeger Publishers.
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When I entered Columbia College in 1956, the college had a deep commitment to liberal opinion. Father and son Van Doren (Mark and Charles), the recently appointed Dan Bell, my adviser named Sam Huntington, the legendary Lionel Trilling, and a brilliant lecturer named Amitai Etzioni graced the campus and, more or less, leaned left at the time, albeit over the years several had their political orientation change. Yet there was one constant: These professors eschewed orthodoxies, notwithstanding the fact that in a poll of faculty members Adlai Stevenson won the 1956 presidential sweepstakes hands down.
Different views were welcome. Controversy was invited. "Political correctness" had not yet entered the academic vocabulary, nor had it insinuated itself into debate and chastened nonconformists. I was intoxicated by the sheer variety of thought. For me this smorgasbord of ideas had delectable morsels at each setting. It was at some moment in my senior year that I became enchanted with the idea of an academic career.]]>
Magic Mountain.
Most of my students didn't want to read. In this new age, they simply wanted to express themselves. Each spring from 1967 to 1973 brought blossoms to Washington Square Park, the start of the baseball season, and demonstrations. Classes were invariably suspended and bacchanalia was in season. I grew despondent about my chosen profession.
At a commencement exercise in 1970 the president of the university delivered an address in which he said, "Seated before you is a graduating class endowed with the talent and knowledge to solve the problems of war and peace, urban woe, income disparity, and third world deprivation." I sat there with a smirk on my face.
As I left the exercise, I ran headlong into the president and couldn't resist blurting out, "You mean to say that these students are prepared to solve the problems you listed when you can't be sure they've even read a serious book?" "What are you getting at?", he asked. I made it abundantly clear that these students were not prepared to balance a checkbook much less deal with the platitudinous goals outlined in the speech.
To his credit, he said, "What would you do to address this matter?" Needless to say, I was baffled by the question, but the conversation lead to my appointment on a newly created Commission on Undergraduate Education. It was on that body that I devised a plan to create a new "experimental" college devoted to the study of great books and removing the barriers that militated against cross-college enrollment. Why, I asked, shouldn't an undergraduate take a law school course if he meets the criteria for admission?
The key to winning acceptance for this college was to call it experimental. To some degree, it was since cross-school enrollment was limited by financial concerns. But the curriculum of eighty-seven great books including the Bible, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Aeschylus, Euripides, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Marx, Dostoyevsky, Freud, etc. are hardly readings one would describe as experimental.
But as I noted at the time, when commencement rolls around I'll be able to tell the president my students have read serious books even if I cannot be sure they'll solve the problem of urban woe.
Now the question that arose was even if my plan made sense, would the faculty council approve it. I received a call from the chairman of this body, Sidney Hook, the eminent philosopher, who gave me the time and place of the hearing.
Professor Hook arrived with five colleagues, but he proceeded to ask the first question. "Tell me Professor London, can you name a great man who attended an external degree program?" By my lights, this was a most peculiar question. It was obvious that Professor Hook misunderstood my proposal. I had no intention of inaugurating an external degree program. Moreover, at that moment I couldn't think of a great person who graduated from a conventional degree program. But as I hastily rummaged through the rolodex in my mind, I remembered that Lenin attended the University of Moscow Extension Division.
With that in mind, I said if I can change the words "great man" to "influential man," I have an answer for you. Hooked nodded and I blurted out Lenin. A strange look crossed his face. "How did you know that?" he inquired. When I provided a source for my reply, Professor Hook noted that further questions were unnecessary. He spoke for the council and said the program is approved. Thus was born a new division at the university based on a path I had anticipated years earlier at Columbia.
Deciding what to call this entity wasn't easy. As fate would have it, I was browsing in the library stacks when I came upon the papers of Albert Gallatin, Jefferson's Secretary of the Treasury and coincidentally founder of NYU. At the time of founding, Gallatin was asked why New York needed another college. After all, Kings College (later Columbia) was in place uptown. Gallatin noted that Kings College was organized for the children of clergymen; he was intent on creating a college for the children of New York's emerging merchant class.
Well, said one trustee, if the students at Kings College are obliged to study Greek and Latin, what will students at this new college study. Gallatin thought for an extended moment as a colleague shouted out, "English." Upon hearing that, Gallatin the Swiss born, but true patriot said, "No, in my college students will study 'American.'" The college, my college, now had a name, "The Gallatin School."
Based on my instincts and background, the curriculum was easily determined. At first, I offered seminars on the Bible and Plato. But, in time, I hired faculty members from other colleges. In fact, I "cherry picked," lining up those colleagues I most admired and "buying," in effect, a portion of their time.
To my astonishment the 55 students who joined the program escalated in number to 130 in the second year and, for the first time, I felt confident this school would meet its financial goals.
This newly constituted "experimental" college was considered the progeny of the early 1970s zeitgeist. In reality, it was a throwback, an assertion of Newman's definition of a classical college. However, I went along with the misleading claims. On several occasions I was invited to address the so-called higher education experimental consortium, a group of colleges devoted to innovative approaches.
After several of these meetings all that I could attest to is the looniness that accompanied higher education innovation. On one occasion I was encouraged to push "energy balls" across the Roger Williams College campus. At another meeting I was chastised for insisting that students read the work of dead, white, European males. I responded by noting I would happy to assign alive, black, Zulu, female authors if appropriate great books can be identified. This didn't go over so well with my newfound colleagues.
As a consequence of founding a college, I was given the status of dean, a title, I soon learned, that means very little except that the dean is a metaphorical hydrant on whom those above and those below choose to urinate.
However, decanal status offered two privileges: attendance at university senate meetings and participation in the deans' council. Both of these privileges were transmogrified into headaches. The deans met weekly with the university president. While I assumed educational priorities would be discussed, the primary focus was financial. One meeting after another was devoted to this matter. Feeling thoroughly frustrated, I finally spoke up, asking if we would ever discuss educational issues. The president replied: "Any other questions or comments?"
I got the message. When I mentioned my frustration to a seasoned colleague who had attended these meetings for years, he said, "I love the Deans' Council; since virtually nothing is at stake, it is the only time during my busy week when I can daydream."
Senate meetings weren't much better. Each one seemed to confirm the Kissingerian view that expression was exaggerated because so little was at stake. When an important issue did emerge, such as divestment of the university's assets in South Africa, left-wing opinion was mobilized and contrary views given short shrift.
It became apparent by the 1980s that Gramschiites had come to dominate university life---hiring and tenure decisions were meant to exclude those skeptical of the campus orthodoxy. I remained devoted to my students and committed to the college I helped to create, but the signs of change in a most unwelcome direction produced dismay.
In the mid-1980s I spent interesting meetings with three resourceful professors, Peter Shaw, who taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook; Steve Balch who had an appointment at John Jay College; and Barry Gross, who was teaching at York College. We shared a common concern about developments in higher education and agreed that a new organization was needed, one that would promote the free and open exchange of opinion in the academy. Initially we called it the Campus Coalition for Democracy, but in time this title with activist implications was changed to the National Association of Scholars. Steve Balch became its president and I was named chairman and editor of its publication, Academic Questions.
Since our goal transcended political matters, even though detractors didn't believe that contention, we attracted to our membership C. Vann Woodward, former president of the ADA, and Sidney Hook, self-proclaimed socialist and, yes, the same person who was chairman of the faculty council at NYU. In time, of course, an academic public came to believe we were intent on imposing our conservative principles on an unwary professoriate. This was and is a grotesque description of our goals, but it persists.
My personal fortunes also changed. In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, I pursued a role in politics running first for Mayor of New York City in 1989, Governor of New York State in 1990, and Comptroller of New York in 1994. After my gubernatorial run, I retired as dean and assumed the John M. Olin Humanities Chair at the university. Due to the beneficence of the Olin Foundation, I was able to maintain a university affiliation and still pursue my political ambitions.
What I didn't understand at the time is John O'Sullivan's First Law: "All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing." One successor as dean maintained that "great books" is an ambiguous phrase that does not take into account the extraordinary contributions of minorities. The great books list I assembled was soon transformed into an affirmative action list. At a meeting with a New York Times reporter she noted, "It is more important for students to read Toni Morrison than William Shakespeare." I couldn't believe what my ears had heard. Soon after this episode, I wrote a letter to the president asking him to remove my portrait from the college since I no longer wanted to be associated with the school to which I gave birth.
For me the capture of the institution was complete. From Duke to Berkeley and the many stops along the way, university life was transformed. An ethos of radical sentiment was ensconced. So complete was the victory that university professors hardly noticed. It was simply assumed this state of affairs was the norm. What was once leftist became conventional. Political correctness was correct in the sense that it was a view consistent with the prevailing sentiment on campus and correct in the sense that it was normal, what was in the ideological air one breathes at the university.
In my almost forty-year involvement in higher education I witnessed the complete transformation of the academic enterprise, from my inspired Columbia experience to my dismay with politicization. It was hardly surprising that when asked by reporters why I would leave university life for political office, I responded as Woodrow Wilson did when he left Princeton to run for governor of New Jersey: "I wanted to get out of politics."
The articles in this book follow not only my personal evolution, but the evolution of the university from the 1960s to 1990s. At one point, the dismay I mentioned led me to the conclusion that the death of the university may not be far off. That claim seems exaggerated, but surely the dramatic transformation of the academy cannot be denied and the perversion of the soft sciences and humanities into forms of relativism and solipsism has moved with alacrity in this four-decade period.
Clearly, the reader will have to determine whether the many articles in this book constitute a valid critique of university life or are merely a personal cri de coeur. But as I see it, these musings describe much about the transformation and the present state of affairs in the halls of ivy.
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Copyright 2010 by Transaction Publishers, Reprinted by permission of the publisher.]]>
In the epilogue of a new compendium volume, Mark Bousquet notes that, "In July 2007, the American Sociological Association reported that one-third of its members felt their academic freedoms were threatened, a significantly higher figure than the one-fifth ratio recorded during the McCarthy years." Sounds dire, doesn't it? Well not if you've spent the prior 500 pages learning just how fantastical the contributors' conceptions of academic freedom are.
The book is Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex, edited by Anthony J. Nocella, II, Steven Best, and Peter McLaren. It's a bad sign when the appearance of Bill Ayers, Ward Churchill, and Howard Zinn as contributors on a book cover leaves one still unprepared for how unfathomable its premises are. Academic Repression purports to demonstrate how corporatization and right-wing assaults have marginalized academic freedom and genuine liberal thinking at our universities. Really?
It's not at all unusual to see hand-wringing from the left over the state of academic freedom; it is unusual to see an essay collection that "asks whether the concept of academic freedom still exists at all in the American University system"(itals mine). ]]>
from politically motivated intimidation tactics and punitive actions and freedom to speak, write, teach, and act as one chooses."
Let's start with the "from." The author makes clear he's not merely talking about punitive administrative tactics, which are fair cause for concern. He's discussing any pressures. In the ludicrously thin-skinned world of this volume, any contemporary criticism of the professoriate seems --- if not tantamount to --- at least a preface to a pink slip, the sound of jackboots, or worse. The preface intones that "the more scholars raise questions about the vexing issues of our day, the more roadblocks they find in the way of their career advancement and even, quite possibly, their very existence as non-persecuted or free citizens." In the world of this volume, "where the attention of the culture wars has focused on professors allegedly harassing students, it is more often the case that conservative students are harassing their professors." And in the world of this volume, the greatest threats to academic freedom appear to be ones that you don't have to bother to prove.
A new study by Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and his colleague Alexandria Radford is a real eye-opener in revealing just what sorts of students highly competitive colleges want -- or don't want -- on their campuses and how they structure their admissions policies to get the kind of "diversity" they seek. The Espenshade/Radford study draws from a new data set, the National Study of College Experience (NSCE), which was gathered from eight highly competitive public and private colleges and universities (entering freshmen SAT scores: 1360). Data was collected on over 245,000 applicants from three separate application years, and over 9,000 enrolled students filled out extensive questionnaires. Because of confidentiality agreements Espenshade and Radford could not name the institutions but they assure us that their statistical profile shows they fit nicely within the top 50 colleges and universities listed in the U.S. News & World Report ratings.
Consistent with other studies, though in much greater detail, Espenshade and Radford show the substantial admissions boost, particularly at the private colleges in their study, which Hispanic students get over whites, and the enormous advantage over whites given to blacks. They also show how Asians must do substantially better than whites in order to reap the same probabilities of acceptance to these same highly competitive private colleges. On an "other things equal basis," where adjustments are made for a variety of background factors, being Hispanic conferred an admissions boost over being white (for those who applied in 1997) equivalent to 130 SAT points (out of 1600), while being black rather than white conferred a 310 SAT point advantage. Asians, however, suffered an admissions penalty compared to whites equivalent to 140 SAT points.
The box students checked off on the racial question on their application was thus shown to have an extraordinary effect on a student's chances of gaining admission to the highly competitive private schools in the NSCE database. To have the same chances of gaining admission as a black student with an SAT score of 1100, an Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have a 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550. Here the Espenshade/Radford results are consistent with other studies, including those of William Bowen and Derek Bok in their book The Shape of the River, though they go beyond this influential study in showing both the substantial Hispanic admissions advantage and the huge admissions penalty suffered by Asian applicants. Although all highly competitive colleges and universities will deny that they have racial quotas -- either minimum quotas or ceiling quotas -- the huge boosts they give to the lower-achieving black and Hispanic applicants, and the admissions penalties they extract from their higher-achieving Asian applicants, clearly suggest otherwise.
Espenshade and Radford also take up very thoroughly the question of "class based preferences" and what they find clearly shows a general disregard for improving the admission chances of poor and otherwise disadvantaged whites. Other studies, including a 2005 analysis of nineteen highly selective public and private universities by William Bowen, Martin Kurzweil, and Eugene Tobin, in their 2003 book, Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education, found very little if any advantage in the admissions process accorded to whites from economically or educationally disadvantaged families compared to whites from wealthier or better educated homes. Espenshade and Radford cite this study and summarize it as follows: "These researchers find that, for non-minority [i.e., white] applicants with the same SAT scores, there is no perceptible difference in admission chances between applicants from families in the bottom income quartile, applicants who would be the first in their families to attend college, and all other (non-minority) applicants from families at higher levels of socioeconomic status. When controls are added for other student and institutional characteristics, these authors find that “on an other-things-equal basis, [white] applicants from low-SES backgrounds, whether defined by family income or parental education, get essentially no break in the admissions process; they fare neither better nor worse than other [white] applicants."
Distressing as many might consider this to be -- since the same institutions that give no special consideration to poor white applicants boast about their commitment to "diversity" and give enormous admissions breaks to blacks, even to those from relatively affluent homes -- Espenshade and Radford in their survey found the actual situation to be much more troubling. At the private institutions in their study whites from lower-class backgrounds incurred a huge admissions disadvantage not only in comparison to lower-class minority students, but compared to whites from middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds as well. The lower-class whites proved to be all-around losers. When equally matched for background factors (including SAT scores and high school GPAs), the better-off whites were more than three times as likely to be accepted as the poorest whites (.28 vs. .08 admissions probability). Having money in the family greatly improved a white applicant's admissions chances, lack of money greatly reduced it. The opposite class trend was seen among non-whites, where the poorer the applicant the greater the probability of acceptance when all other factors are taken into account. Class-based affirmative action does exist within the three non-white ethno-racial groupings, but among the whites the groups advanced are those with money.
When lower-class whites are matched with lower-class blacks and other non-whites the degree of the non-white advantage becomes astronomical: lower-class Asian applicants are seven times as likely to be accepted to the competitive private institutions as similarly qualified whites, lower-class Hispanic applicants eight times as likely, and lower-class blacks ten times as likely. These are enormous differences and reflect the fact that lower-class whites were rarely accepted to the private institutions Espenshade and Radford surveyed. Their diversity-enhancement value was obviously rated very low.
Poor Non-White Students: "Counting Twice"
The enormous disadvantage incurred by lower-class whites in comparison to non-whites and wealthier whites is partially explained by Espenshade and Radford as a result of the fact that, except for the very wealthiest institutions like Harvard and Princeton, private colleges and universities are reluctant to admit students who cannot afford their high tuitions. And since they have a limited amount of money to give out for scholarship aid, they reserve this money to lure those who can be counted in their enrollment statistics as diversity-enhancing "racial minorities." Poor whites are apparently given little weight as enhancers of campus diversity, while poor non-whites count twice in the diversity tally, once as racial minorities and a second time as socio-economically deprived. Private institutions, Espenshade and Radford suggest, "intentionally save their scarce financial aid dollars for students who will help them look good on their numbers of minority students." Quoting a study by NYU researcher Mitchell Stevens, they write: "ultimate evaluative preference for members of disadvantaged groups was reserved for applicants who could be counted in the college's multicultural statistics. This caused some admissions officers no small amount of ethical dismay."
There are problems, however, with this explanation. While it explains why scarce financial aid dollars might be reserved for minority "twofers," it cannot explain why well-qualified lower-class whites are not at least offered admission without financial aid. The mere offer of admission is costless, and at least a few among the poor whites accepted would probably be able to come up with outside scholarship aid. But even if they couldn't, knowing they did well enough in their high school studies to get accepted to a competitive private college would surely sit well with most of them even if they couldn't afford the high tuition. Espenshade and Radford do not address this conundrum but the answer is easy to discern. The ugly truth is that most colleges, especially the more competitive private ones, are fiercely concerned with their ratings by rating organizations like U.S. News & World Report. And an important part of those ratings consist of a numerical acceptance rate (the ratio of applicants received to those accepted) and a yield score (the ratio of those accepted to those who enroll). The lower the acceptance rate and the higher the yield score the more favorably colleges are looked upon. In extending admissions to well-qualified but financially strapped whites who are unlikely to enroll, a college would be driving both its acceptance rate and its yield score in the wrong direction. Academic bureaucrats rarely act against either their own or their organization's best interests (as they perceive them), and while their treatment of lower-class whites may for some be a source of "no small amount of ethical dismay," that's just how it goes. Some of the private colleges Espenshade and Radford describe would do well to come clean with their act and admit the truth: "Poor Whites Need Not Apply!"
Besides the bias against lower-class whites, the private colleges in the Espenshade/Radford study seem to display what might be called an urban/Blue State bias against rural and Red State occupations and values. This is most clearly shown in a little remarked statistic in the study's treatment of the admissions advantage of participation in various high school extra-curricular activities. In the competitive private schools surveyed participation in many types of extra-curricular activities -- including community service activities, performing arts activities, and "cultural diversity" activities -- conferred a substantial improvement in an applicant's chances of admission. The admissions advantage was usually greatest for those who held leadership positions or who received awards or honors associated with their activities. No surprise here -- every student applying to competitive colleges knows about the importance of extracurriculars.
But what Espenshade and Radford found in regard to what they call "career-oriented activities" was truly shocking even to this hardened veteran of the campus ideological and cultural wars. Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student's chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. "Being an officer or winning awards" for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, "has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions." Excelling in these activities "is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission."
Espenshade and Radford don't have much of an explanation for this find, which seems to place the private colleges even more at variance with their stated commitment to broadly based campus diversity. In his Bakke ruling Lewis Powell was impressed by the argument Harvard College offered defending the educational value of a demographically diverse student body: "A farm boy from Idaho can bring something to Harvard College that a Bostonian cannot offer. Similarly, a black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer." The Espenshade/Radford study suggests that those farm boys from Idaho would do well to stay out of their local 4-H clubs or FFA organizations -- or if they do join, they had better not list their membership on their college application forms. This is especially true if they were officers in any of these organizations. Future farmers of America don't seem to count in the diversity-enhancement game played out at some of our more competitive private colleges, and are not only not recruited, but seem to be actually shunned. It is hard to explain this development other than as a case of ideological and cultural bias.
This same kind of bias seems to lurk behind the negative association found between acceptance odds and holding leadership positions in high school ROTC. This is most troubling because a divorce between the campus culture of its universities and its military is poisonous for any society, and doesn't do the military or the civilian society any good. The lack of comfort with many military commanders that our current president is said to have seems to be due not only to his own lack of military experience but to the fact of having spent so many of his formative years on university campuses like Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago, where people with military experience are largely absent and the campus culture is often hostile to military values and military personnel.
In an attempt to find out what kind of diversity exists -- or doesn't exist -- on the Princeton University campus, I once asked students in a ten-member discussion group to raise their hands if they knew one or more Princeton undergraduates who had served a year or more on active military duty (in the late 1940s or early 1950s, of course, undergraduates at Princeton would have encountered legions of such people coming back from WWII and the Korean War). I made it plain that I wasn't asking if the students had a close friend or roommate who was a veteran, just a single person with military experience that they had at sometime encountered during their Princeton undergraduate careers. Only one student -- a female -- raised her hand: this student once met someone who had served in the Israeli military. On a second occasion I asked this question to a larger group and again only one hand went up -- this student once met a Princeton undergraduate who had served in the Turkish military.
Many universities, including Princeton, are interested in enrolling foreign students, along with students from disparate regions of the U.S. But the more competitive private universities seem to have little interest in diversifying their student bodies when it comes to people who have served in the American military or people who intend to make a career out of military service. Even if they don't shun such people, or hold their military service or aspirations against them, they clearly don't seek them out or court them the way they do "underrepresented" racial minorities. And while many universities host college-level ROTC programs (often for financial reasons), the military/civilian relationship on campus is usually far from amicable.
Military veterans and aspiring military officers, like poor whites and future American farmers, are clearly not what most competitive private colleges have in mind when they speak of the need for "diversity". If nothing else the new Espenshade/Radford study helps to document what knowledgeable observers have long known: "diversity" at competitive colleges today involves a politically engineered stew of different groups. drawn from the ingredients selected by reigning campus ideology. Since that ideology is mainly dictated by the Left, it is no surprise that the diversity achieved is what the larger American landscape looks like when it is viewed through a leftist lens. I suggest a different approach: elite colleges should get out of the diversity business altogether and focus on enrolling students who are the most academically talented and the most eager to learn. These students should make up the bulk of their entering classes. Call it the Cal Tech Model since the California Institute of Technology seems to be the only elite institution that comes close to realizing such an ideal. Or call it the U.S. Olympic Team Model, or the Major League All-Stars Model, since it is based on the same strict merit-selection principle governing our Olympic sports teams and our major league baseball all-star teams. Let the diversity chips fall where they may and focus on recruiting the most intelligent, most creative, and most energetiic of the rising generation of young people. In my naive way this is what I always thought elite universities were supposed to be about.
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Russell K. Nieli received his Ph.D. in political philosophy from Princeton University and currently works for Princeton's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He has been a lecturer in Princeton's Politics Department and for ten years was an academic adviser to Princeton freshmen.]]>
We now have a long and fascinating report by the campus police review board on last fall's disruptive protests at the University of California, Berkeley.
The 128-page document, entitled "November 20, 2009: Review,
Reflection, and Recommendations," released in mid-June, is the product of months of yeoman work garnering volumes of evidence. It chronicles and evaluates responses to the events sparked by resentment over tuition increases and cutbacks in the wake of California's financial debacle.
Berkeley deserves credit for thoroughly investigating the situation. And the report is worth reading for many reasons, one of which is because it casts light on a dilemma that Berkeley and many other schools have been unable to resolve since the famous Berkeley "Free Speech Movement" of 1964 launched decades of illegal student protest: how to balance students' passions for social justice (and sometimes other motives) with the rule of law.
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L.A. Times story, "Eight people were under arrest today after several dozen protesters shouting 'no justice, no peace' attacked Chancellor Robert Birgeneau's home on the campus of UC Berkeley, smashing windows, lights and planters as well as throwing torches at the home and police vehicles, authorities said." Pronouncing the demonstrators "criminals, not activists," the chancellor said that he and his wife feared for their lives.
Last April, the Daily Californian, Berkeley's student newspaper, pointed with welcome student irony to the costs the demonstrations have exacted. "Student protests at UC Berkeley aiming to save public higher education may lead to further cuts to campus services, administrators say." Indeed, the estimated cost of the November protests alone was $50,541: $21,530 to repair damage inflicted on campus buildings and $29,011 to pay for the police response to the students outside of Wheeler. After further protests, the university has depleted its $211,000 "protest fund," and will have to draw additional money from regular campus funds and "any available reserves or through cuts to programs such as human resources, finance or police services."
The demonstrations unveil deep problems in higher education, ranging from legitimate student and societal concerns about the escalating costs of already over-priced universities in an era of economic woe and deflation, to equally legitimate distress at many students' self-righteous disregard of the rights of others and the rules of free speech. (Some critics have also pointed out that students are failing to target the real culprit: a state that has lost control of its finances, necessitating cuts in everything under the sun except its generous public pensions, the funds of which, in turn, have been harmed by the low interest rates mandated by the Federal Reserve Bank.) One insightful blogger contends that the situation has aroused revaluations of "what a university is for." Does it exist to serve the expensive careers of faculty and administration, or rather for the benefit of students and the public? Or, more plausibly, do we need to find a better way to rethink and balance these and other interests? Similar important concerns about the nature of the university inspired FSM and a good deal of the student protest of the '60s. Indeed, just how sustainable is the present model of higher education?
The Report devotes considerable space to discussing the pros and cons of the administrative and law enforcement responses. Police and the administration were dealt a bad hand, but their own actions and inactions sometimes poured fuel on the fire. But another issue unfortunately given less attention merits further consideration: how Berkeley's traditional way of dealing with illegal protest may have contributed to the problem of illegal behavior that now besets the university.
The crux of this matter boils down to the Report's discussion of "The Berkeley experience." The Report alludes to Berkeley's dedication to encouraging students to speak out with emotion and intensity. So far, so good, as this encouragement has contributed to a vibrant, challenging environment. "In the minds of some students and faculty, these facts are an essential component of what it means to attend Berkeley. As some students have told us, one reason they joined the rally outside Wheeler on the 20th was their desire to have what they considered ‘the Berkeley experience.'"
Unfortunately, the Berkeley Experience also involves blurring the line between normal robust First Amendment conduct, which operates within the law, and lawless expressive conduct, which can range from respectful civil disobedience to forceful or even violent conduct that disrespects the rights of others. The Berkeley Experience "builds expectations about how demonstrators will be treated. It also tends to dilute, generally, attention to rules---and to obscure from the vision of some people how significantly some violations of some rules can affect the rights and the legitimate interests of other people."
Universities often strive to tailor rules, procedures, and expectations to their distinctive institutional missions, which are educational. They operate as semi-autonomous realms entitled by constitutional law to define their own destinies, within fairly broad limits. But there are normative and legal limits to this leeway, as exemplified by the recent events at Berkeley and its sister California schools. By failing to respect and enforce these limits, Berkeley---however well intentioned---appears to have failed in its educational mission in the realm of free speech; for a truly free system of speech cannot exist unless the rights of all citizens---demonstrators, those opposed to the demonstrators, and those who simply don't care---are respected and protected. In the absence of such universal protection and respect, political bullies can run roughshod over the rights of others, making a mockery of the free flow of ideas.
First Amendment law protects the most controversial and provocative forms of speech, as the Supreme Court has reiterated in a long line of famous cases. It is also bound by laws that prohibit trespass, destruction of property, obstruction of the liberty of others, and the silencing of other voices. Legal scholar Alexander Bickel once wrote that modern First Amendment protections, in effect, legalize some forms of speech that were once considered illegally provocative, thereby placing a higher, though not insurmountable, burden on those engaged in unlawful civil disobedience to morally justify their conduct. In other words, First Amendment law provides ample room for powerful displays of viewpoints and emotions, while simultaneously requiring passionate demonstrators to respect the rights of others.
To be sure, history has presented times when a moral cause calls for violence, as in situations of true tyranny or just war. (I write this essay over the Fourth of July weekend.) But even war is bounded by rules, however much its impulses push against them. And who with even a modicum of judgment would place the University of California's financial predicament in these exceptional categories?
The limits on free speech predicated on rule of law (which exist in the very name of free speech) serve three important purposes. First, such limits establish relatively clear guidelines as to what is permitted and what is not. By blurring the line between law and disobedience, the Berkeley Experience opens the door to uncertainty and unprincipled administrative discretion, which can readily leak into unethical and unedifying permissiveness and political favoritism. Second, in the university context, these limits assume that students should possess the same rights as adults, which also means that they bear the same responsibilities. They are free to make their own decisions, but they are also responsible for the consequences of their actions. We tend to forget that the student revolts of the '60s were first preoccupied with the elimination of in loco parentis, which treated students as pre-adults, not the young adults that they are. Did it occur to the advocates of the Berkeley Experience that its policy of partial tolerance toward lawlessness might amount to treating its students like children?
Third, these limits require protesters to restrain their moral passions out of respect for two things: for the rights of those outside of their cause; and for the fallibility principle, which anchors the pursuit of truth in liberal democracy: the protesters, themselves, might be wrong. (Moral passions and moral certitudes are among our fiercest passions, as Reinhold Niebuhr, Sigmund Freud, and others have taught us so tellingly.) This restraint is among the most important lessons a citizen can learn in a liberal democracy, for it is what makes living together in a regime of equal rights possible. Tocqueville called these restraints on passion and self-interest the "forms of liberty," and maintained that these manners are necessary preconditions for the mental health of democratic orders. Such conscientious practitioners of civil disobedience as Martin Luther King and Gandhi paid tribute to the forms of liberty by accepting their punishments and by breaking particular laws in a way that nonetheless showed due respect for others and the rule of law in general. Education in the forms of liberty is especially appropriate at universities, whose moral charters are premised on the dedication to reason; but have Berkeley students been so educated?
The confusions epitomized by the Berkeley Experience have had consequences at Berkeley and elsewhere. In the decades following FSM, Berkeley has witnessed numerous cases of speakers being shouted down or stifled in the public forum who did not conform to the progressive ideology that dominates student life there. (Ask the Daily Californian how many times entire runs of its paper have been stolen from stands because of articles or editorials deemed politically incorrect.) Equally importantly, failure to respect the legal obligations implicit in the systemic exercise of free speech no doubt contributed to the widespread violations of free thought and due process that have accompanied the imposition of speech codes, overly-broad harassment codes, and related policies in higher education in recent decades. What Alan Kors and Harvey Silverglate called the "betrayal of liberty on America's campuses" in The Shadow University (1998) was, at least in part, the consequence of the misunderstanding lying at the heart of the Berkeley Experience and its adherents nation-wide. Why worry about the rights of others when an important political cause is at stake?
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Donald A. Downs is the Meiklejohn Professor of Political Science, Law, and Journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California-Berkeley in 1983. His book, Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus includes a chapter on free speech problems at Berkeley.
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