Originals tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6 2010-03-15T01:07:02Z Movable Type 3.34 Recapturing the University: The Hybrid Alternative tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.3518 2010-03-15T16:47:19Z 2010-03-15T01:07:02Z By Robert Weissberg In the contemporary battle within the social sciences between free market think tanks and liberal- dominated universities, the former labor under a huge disadvantage: they lack students. Think-tank based scholars may daily issue erudite policy analyses, write... Anthony Paletta By Robert Weissberg In the contemporary battle within the social sciences between free market think tanks and liberal- dominated universities, the former labor under a huge disadvantage: they lack students. Think-tank based scholars may daily issue erudite policy analyses, write incisive op-ed columns galore, dominate talk radio, publish in widely admired magazines like City Journal but the half-life of these missives seldom exceeds a few days. By contrast, a professor typically has fifteen weeks, two to three times per week, for usually 50 minutes, to expound his or her views to a captive audience, two to four courses per semester, and over a thirty-five plus year career. Of the utmost importance, professors can compel students to read stuff and insist on minimal familiarity, a power unimaginable to even the most professional think tank PR department. That these students are of an impressionable age---the pedagogical equivalent of droit de seigneur-- and are hardly in a position to argue, only adds to this built in indoctrination advantage. In graduate education the propagating-the-faith advantage multiplies, since most Ph.D. students will become tomorrow's teachers. Ideological domination can persist for decades, regardless of events. So, to use a depressing example, the Marxist analyses that first filtered into America's college classrooms in the 1960s are still going strong a half century later and can only continue on as the torch is passed from professor to Ph.D. advisees. Perhaps only centuries from now will Marxism go inert and like spent weapons-grade Plutonium, the last lead-brained but still radioactive Marxist professor will be entombed in a deep Nevada salt mine. And it may require additional centuries for him to be joined by ideologically exhausted feminists, deconstructionists, ethnic studies experts and all the rest. This monopoly of early access cannot be overcome by think tanks churning out more reports, better public relations, or ensuring that every "important opinion leaders" receives a free copy of their sponsored research (which may not even be read). And keep in mind that professors get to students first (the droit de seigneur), so the glories of free markets, low taxes, and limited government etc. etc. must overcome years of prior exposure. It is no wonder that many free-market think tank scholars must feel like they are trying to push boulder up a mountain. They are---the professors got there first and designed the obstacle course terrain.]]> A Possible Solution Leveling the ideologically playing field requires gaining access to undergraduate and graduate students. To some extent this is already being accomplished in what I have previously called the "Monastery approach" where donors establish semi-independent academic centers on campus (e.g., the James Madison Program at Princeton, among others). Though an important step in reaching students otherwise immersed in campus liberalism, these are, to be frank, only a tiny drop in the bucket and undoubtedly very costly per classroom instruction hour (and their survival is always iffy given liberal faculty aversion). Far more is required---contrary messages must be brought to thousands, even tens of thousands of students, per semester and in ways that do not require establishing donor-funded legal entities that often battle entrenched liberalism. This subversive goal is hardly beyond reach. Let's call this a hybrid solution, a combination of regular university and free market think tanks. In a nutshell, students would interact with think tank-based scholars in regularly scheduled for-credit classes over several years depending on the degree but receive their degrees from the university, not, say, Heritage, Cato or the American Enterprise Institute. This could be excellent synergy. Academically ambitious schools would gain off-the-shelf graduate program (particularly an MA program in public policy with specialties in fields like health care, taxation, education, and environmental policy), faculty and administrative structure included, versus building from scratch. Graduate students might also find employment as research assistants. Financial costs for hosting colleges would be modest---college tuition-paying enrollees would just take seminars from "free" think tank scholars, participate in colloquia and otherwise use newly accessible intellectual resources. That schools ultimately control the relationship is critical (and, on the other side, the think tank can also leave if things falter). The college would set degree requirements, dictate teaching credentials and administer the usual details of campus life plus attend to accreditation. Conceivably, groups of like-minded think tanks could share students and resources so while the degree would be awarded by a single school, course work would have occurred at multiple institutions (a think tank consortium to use academic jargon). Physical separation could be handled by the familiar "year in..." or even distance learning via the Internet. If the aim is merely exposing undergraduates or MA students to ideas typically neglected on contemporary campuses, the awaiting problems are quite manageable. At the graduate level, however, the obstacles are more formidable. It is one thing to have schools award MA's in public policy with think tank input, but it is quite another to bestow Ph.D.s to those who will teach thousands over a career. A "hybrid" doctorate must satisfy stricter standards if the recipient is to be employable and without graduates landing good teaching jobs, re-taking the university will fail. This last requirement raises awkward issues, but they must be addressed. I'll be blunt: if a freshly minted Ph.D.s from hybrid degree programs is viewed as an ideological advocate, no recruitment committee will take the application seriously. Few universities will knowingly hire a "Cato" professor but they might be enticed to hire a Ph.D. from a regular university who studied with Cato's experts. Forget abstract fairness. It makes no differences that Ph.D.s from even prestigious departments are often ideological zealots or that some of these degree-holders reflect affirmative action obligations. As with all novel products fighting for market share, the hybrid scholar must be better, probably a lot better, than his or her rival from traditional schools that currently fill professorial position. Think Japanese cars initially competing against Fords and Chevys. Though a think tank may have a clear ideological mission, and those who gravitate to these programs may share this worldview, hybrid programs cannot impose ideological litmus tests if it is be taken seriously. A second potential obstacle concerns hybrid faculty certification. Under current university rules, only Ph.D.'s can turn out Ph.D.s, a potential problem if think tank instructors lack this degree. There is also the "academic gravitas" issue when judging job applicants. A standard hiring question is "Who was the advisor?" and it is essential to have an advisor and committee who have their academic bona fides in order. Here again, a potential conflict, i.e., think tanks are about skilled policy analysis, not hiring people adroit at building "academic" records that may consist of turgid journal articles having nothing to do with anything. These obstacles are, however, readily solvable. Think tanks might recruit bona fide university-based scholars for a year to two who would lend the names and expertise to the certification process. In is inconceivable, for example, that somebody's doctorate would be disparaged if the dissertation committee included such well known (and think tank friendly) academics as James Q. Wilson, Harvey C. Mansfield, Richard J. Epstein or countless others with a reputation for honest, quality scholarship. Some like AEI already have scholars in residence whose credentials are academically kosher. Indeed, for many respected academics a year or two as a senior scholar at a hybrid university would be a great career opportunity. In exchange for occasional graduate advising they would receive a reduced teaching load and access professional, career-enhancing networks. Nor must current scholars who lack the Ph.D. be put out to pasture. Knowledge and degree are not synonymous. It is easy to imagine, say, a year long colloquium on economic regulation drawing on experts without doctorates but provided the supervising instructor has, to use university terminology, "graduate school standing," everything will pass muster for the enrollee's transcript. Actually, the parade-of-expert-visitor formula is a familiar one in many graduate seminars and provided the readings and course requirements are sufficiently academic, few would challenge the idea of having non-Ph.D.s speak to graduate students. The non-credit colloquium is also a familiar feature of top graduate programs and a wonderful tactic to expose young scholars to leading experts and their ideas. Make no mistake, this alternative universe to the current system cannot overthrow the contemporary liberal-dominated university. It will not supplant top prestige university departments since they obviously have no need for parallel degree-granting departments, let alone rivals offering antithetical perspectives to their orthodoxy. These elite institutions will also continue to hire each other's Ph.D. students, not job candidates from lesser schools relying on think tank resources. The aim here is to fill positions in "teaching schools" and while they lack the glamour of Harvard or Princeton, they collectively graduate tens of thousands of students per year (far, far more than the elite schools). That these instructors usually teach four courses per semester (versus one or two per semester at research-oriented schools) only multiplies access impact. This hybrid approach is designed to expand intellectual diversity, not train conservative missionaries to preach Milton Friedman to the multitude. A few hybrid graduates may even "go native" and fall into the academy's dominant liberal orthodoxy despite earlier intellectual exposure. But, unlike nearly all of today's university trained Ph.D.s in the social sciences they will have at least been exposed to ideas that have seemingly vanished from the academic landscape. ------------------------------------- Robert Weissberg is Professor of Political Science, Emeritus at the University of Illinois-Urbana, and occasionally teaches in the NYU Politics Department MA Program. ]]> How the Campuses Helped Ruin California's Economy tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.3505 2010-03-11T19:14:20Z 2010-03-11T04:47:16Z By John Ellis All across the country there were demonstrations on March 4 by students (and some faculty) against cuts in higher education funding, but inevitably attention focused on California, where the modern genre originated in 1964. I joined the... Anthony Paletta By John Ellis 4409800624_179a583cf6.jpgAll across the country there were demonstrations on March 4 by students (and some faculty) against cuts in higher education funding, but inevitably attention focused on California, where the modern genre originated in 1964. I joined the University of California faculty in 1966 and so have watched a good many of them, but have never seen one less impressive that this year's. In 1964 there was focus and clarity. This one was brain-dead. The former idealism and sense of purpose had degenerated into a self-serving demand for more money at a time when both state and university are broke, and one in eight California workers is unemployed. The elite intellectuals of the university community might have been expected to offer us insight into how this problem arose, and realistic measures for dealing with it. But all that was on offer was this: get more money and give it to us. Californians witnessing this must have wondered whether the money they were already providing was well spent where there was so little evidence of productive thought. The content vacuum with filled with the standby language of past demonstrations, and so there was much talk of "the struggle," and of "oppression," and---of course---of racism. "We are all students of color now" said Berkeley's Professor Ananya Roy, and a student proclaimed that this crisis represented "structural racism." (Why not global warming too?) Berkeley's Chancellor Birgeneau called the demonstrations "the best of our tradition of effective civil action." Neither Chancellors nor demonstrations are what they used to be. The nostalgia for the good old days surfaced again in efforts to shut the campus down by blocking the entrance of UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. It didn't seem to occur to anyone that the old "shut it down" cry was somewhat misplaced when keeping it fully open was what the present demonstration was about, but then this was not an occasion when anyone seemed to have any idea of what they were trying to achieve. One group at UCLA stumbled into the truth, though it was a truth they did not understand. At Bruin Plaza a crowd chanted "Who's got the power? We've got the power." In its context this was just another slogan of a mindless day, but the reality is that those people do indeed have the power, and routinely use it in a way that makes them the author of their own troubles. Let me explain.]]> John Ellis is President of the California Association of Scholars, and a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz ]]> Is the Campus 45 Times as Dangerous as Detroit? tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.3498 2010-03-09T23:52:36Z 2010-03-09T00:04:30Z By Charflotte Allen It's back: the "campus rape crisis." The latest all-hands-on-deck alarm comes from the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), a nonprofit foundation based in Washington and specializing in what it describes as "investigative journalism about issues of public... Anthony Paletta By Charflotte Allen It's back: the "campus rape crisis." The latest all-hands-on-deck alarm comes from the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), a nonprofit foundation based in Washington and specializing in what it describes as "investigative journalism about issues of public interest," which teamed up with the investigative unit of National Public Radio (NPR) to issue a report in late February pointing out---yet again--that "roughly one in five women who attend college" can expect to be a victim of rape or attempted rape by the time she graduates. This extraordinarily high number, which translates into about 240,000 out of the 6 million or so women enrolled in four-year colleges during any given year, has been knocking around since 1987 (as Heather Mac Donald pointed out in a 2008 article for City Journal), when a University of Arizona Health professor, Mary Koss, first published a version of the statistic that was picked up in a Department of Justice study filed during the waning months of the Clinton administration. In other words, as KC Johnson pointed out in a post for Minding the Campus this past December, the average college campus is supposedly 45 times as dangerous for women as the city of Detroit, the highest-crime city in America, where the rape rate is only .06 percent. Another problem with the CPI-NPR numbers: No police department or local prosecutor's office has reported a two-decade-long epidemic of rapes or attempted rapes on nearby college campuses. The rape-crisis people's explanation for this is simple: The vast majority of rapes and attempted rapes at colleges are never reported even to campus authorities, much less law enforcement---because the victims themselves are unaware that what happened to them was rape. The Justice Department's 2000 report maintained that 65 percent of college women who suffered sexual assault remain silent, a figure that the CPI inflated to "more than 95 percent" in its report. The CPI---and NPR---attributed the low reporting rates to the "failure" (as NPR writer Joseph Shapiro wrote) of schools and the U.S. Education Department to take significant steps to prevent, ferret out, or punish campus rape.]]> report of 2005 advocated the "anonymous reporting" of alleged sexual assaults---which would mean that an accused student-rapist could find it almost impossible to prepare a defense. Other rape-crisis people want the Education Department to exact heavier monetary penalties against colleges deemed not sufficiently aggressive in disciplining alleged rapists (or reporting more sexual assaults under the federal Clery Act), as an incentive for the institutions to relax evidentiary standards and secure more expulsions and other sanctions. The one thing that the rape-crisis people do not want to do is to discourage unrestricted liquor-fueled sexual activity on the part of college students, especially females. That would be prudish and patriarchal. In a Sept. 9 article for the online American Prospect, Jaclyn Friedman, co-editor of the anthology Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape (2008), argued that colleges should stop (as if they ever started!) "telling girls to mind their liquor so they don't 'get themselves' raped.'" Any hints that female students might want to dress more modestly, avoid drinking to excess, and not stay out too late was anathema to Friedman. She instead advocated placing all the burden on male students of determining when consent to sex is "freely and enthusiastically given"---and woe to the young man who misgauges his partner's enthusiasm. And just to make that burden heavier---and to absolve young women of all moral responsibility for their actions---let's define rape down even further. ]]> Why The Student Protesters Are Wrong tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.3488 2010-03-05T16:48:30Z 2010-03-05T18:31:39Z By Daniel Bennett Thousands of students on more than a hundred college campuses joined together symbolically yesterday to protest sharp tuition hikes. The students pointed the finger at hard-pressed state and local governments. That was a mistake. State and local... Anthony Paletta By Daniel Bennett Thousands of students on more than a hundred college campuses joined together symbolically yesterday to protest sharp tuition hikes. The students pointed the finger at hard-pressed state and local governments. That was a mistake. State and local subsidies to public colleges and universities increased by 44% in real (inflation-adjusted) dollars during the 25-year period between 1982 and 2007. Had colleges managed to hold their cost increases to the level of inflation over this period, real tuition prices would be slightly less today than they were 25 years ago. Why weren't the colleges able to do this? First, colleges are rewarded for fiscal irresponsibility and punished for not keeping up with Joneses. Because we collect very little information from colleges about student learning and educational outcomes, we know nothing about the actual value of the education taking place. So we are left to rely on arbitrary indicators such as price and prestige to decide which institutions are of the highest quality. College administrators understand this and are known to make decisions based on how it will impact their institution's prestige. The things that boost prestige (fancy dorms, state-of-the-art fitness centers, elaborate student centers, etc.) cost lots of money and do little or nothing to increase the quality of education. The colleges that avoid such elaborate upgrades in lieu of keeping costs down are perceived to be lower -class institutions. Call this the college arms race. Next, there has been very little, if any, gain in productivity in higher education over the past few decades. Some evidence suggests that there has actually been a drop in productivity, while the information technology age has boosted productivity in nearly every other economic sector. Part of this is explained by the bureaucratic bloat on college campuses. Between 1987 and 2007, the number of senior administrators and professional support staff at public two- and four-year colleges increased by 84 percent, while student enrollment grew by only 37 percent. In this sense, administrative productivity dropped by more than 25 percent during this 20 year period, as the student-to-administrator ratio dropped from 24:1 to 18:1. Meanwhile, faculty teaching loads have diminished by a factor of up to two over the past two decades, while salaries have increased by at least the rate of inflation, not accounting for rising health care costs, retirement contributions and other forms of non-wage compensation. Rather than using technology to cut labor costs and improve employee productivity, colleges have expanded their staffs and seemingly ask less of each employee. Call this diminishing productivity.]]> tuition bubble. Students have a right to be upset over the upward spiraling costs of a college education, and I'm pleased to see that they are being active in demonstrating their frustration across the nation. With that being said, they are pointing their fingers at the wrong culprit. State and local governments have been very generous with taxpayer money over the years, subsidizing public institutions to provide affordable access to the state's citizens. Of course, appropriations have been subject to the economic cycle, with increased spending during the good times and decreased during the bad. Yet it is the colleges that have not lived up to their end of the deal, choosing to engage in a reckless academic arms race and to promote productivity losses. Intervention by the federal government has exacerbated the problem. It is time for students to recognize that the problem is not the so-called decline of state government subsidies, but rather the fiscally irresponsible behavior of the colleges and the enabling efforts of the federal government that have inflated the tuition bubble. ------------------------------------------------------------- Daniel L. Bennett is administrative director and a research and policy analyst at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, an independent higher education think tank in Washington DC. ]]> Anti-Apartheid Week - 2 tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.3480 2010-03-03T21:27:10Z 2010-03-04T17:35:24Z Growing Anti-Semitism On The Campus By Ron Radosh The sad evidence that American campuses have been the site of rising anti-Semitism is truly an alarming phenomenon. Anti-Semitism has come from various sources: African-American student organizations; the Muslim Student Association at... Anthony Paletta Growing Anti-Semitism On The Campus By Ron Radosh The sad evidence that American campuses have been the site of rising anti-Semitism is truly an alarming phenomenon. Anti-Semitism has come from various sources: African-American student organizations; the Muslim Student Association at various colleges and universities, and the widespread movement on behalf of disinvestment in Israel, whose sponsors regularly compares Israel to South Africa, and advocate treating Israel today as the anti-apartheid movement treated South Africa decades ago. But even more disturbing is the growing evidence that Jewish students are having a most confused response to this development. One has to look only at the announcement by J-Street- the self-described left of center antidote to AIPAC- that it would not call its campus chapters "pro-Israel" because that would limit their ability to gain members among Jewish students, as proof for how support of Israel is seen by many campus Jews as a position they do not wish to be identified with. The question that arises is what has happened to produce such sentiment? Jewish students, like their non-Jewish counterparts, have grown up in a largely left-wing culture, in which the education they have received in high schools throughout the country, especially in the area of history or what used to be called civics, has been taught to them by teachers whose degrees are from left-leaning education schools. Or, perhaps, their teachers have been influenced by the view that the United States is the most evil nation in the world, which they in turn learned from people like Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky. It is therefore not surprising to find the names of familiar left-wing Jewish figures on the nation's campuses playing a prominent part especially in the disinvestment campaign. As Dennis MacShane, A Labour member of Parliament, put it in a 2007 Washington Post op-ed, "American universities have provided a base for Noam Chomsky and the late Edward Said, among others, to launch campaigns of criticism against Israel, and the bulk of the West's university intelligentsia remains hostile to the Jewish state."]]> bona fides as good leftists respected than to be accused of being a Zionist. I dub it the Michael Lerner Tikkun syndrome. To liberal and left-wing Jewish students (one suspects many of the Jewish students in the elite universities in particular come from these families,) the Jewish tradition demands support by Jews for those who are most oppressed, and the list of groups that come first extend from blacks at home to gays fighting for rights against the supposed theocratic forces of the Christian evangelical right-wing, to Arab and Muslim students who are hostile because their sympathies lie with the Palestinians whose land has been occupied by Israel since the 1967 war, and whom Jews should support because they too must be "anti-imperialist." It is, in other words, yet another example of reflexive anti-Western leftism. Compounding the problem is confusion over the meaning of the First Amendment. Even if some Jewish students are shocked and horrified by the growing anti-Semitism, their belief in free speech as guaranteed in The Bill of Rights leads many to say that opposing events such as Israel Apartheid Week, the disinvestment campaign, or even ads arguing on behalf of Holocaust denial, puts them in a position of standing against a basic American Constitutional right. In fact, as is the case with the many ads taken in college papers by Holocaust deniers over the past few years, or the ads in favor of disinvestment in Israel, free speech was never in jeopardy. A newspaper has a right to reject any ad submitted to it as inappropriate; the First Amendment does not guarantee the right to have one's views printed wherever they seek to place it. Supporters of a controversial view have a perfect right to print their own leaflet, distribute it and submit it where they wish, no matter how reprehensible their argument. They have a right to publish and disseminate their own views in their own organ of opinion. Yet some editors readily published ads submitted by Holocaust deniers, out of fear that to reject it would violate First Amendment rights. Indeed, the left on the campuses managed to suppress ads a few years ago by the conservative activist David Horowitz, who sought unsuccessfully to place full page ads opposed to the then popular campaign among some African-American groups on behalf of reparations for slavery. Yet today, these same groups raise the false issue of freedom of speech when editors of student papers are asked to reject anti-Israel ads. Clearly, their different responses have more to do with their opposition to the anti-reparation campaign and their support for attempts to delegitimize Israel. One last problem exists, and it is meant by the sponsors of Israel Apartheid Week to sow confusion, especially among liberal Jewish students. Their event, they claim is, not meant to oppose Israel's existence as a state, or to delegitimize it. They support boycott of Israel, sanctions against the state, and disinvestment, only for the purpose getting Israel to act properly and not as an oppressor. Thus one Dax D'Orazio, leader of the group at Carleton University in Canada, "added that in terms of the diplomatic process, the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign... 'don't deal with the issue of Israel being a Jewish state, or whether there should be a one-state, or two-state, or three-state solution. What they advocate is boycott, divestment, and sanctions to pressure Israel to abide by international law.'" The argument by Mr. D'Orazio, of course, is thoroughly disingenuous. Everyone realizes that in fact, what his group is trying to accomplish is nothing but to gather popular sentiment on behalf of the destruction of Israel, and to gather support for an Arab narrative that seeks to isolate Israel and lead to its condemnation by the entire world. But to some students, Jewish and non-Jewish, his argument seems to hold credibility. Who, of course, does not want any nation to act responsibly and respect human rights? Again, the forces opposed to Israel try to paint their program in the most benign way possible, while in reality doing all they can to promote Israel's isolation and collapse. Given the well known attempt a few weeks ago to disrupt Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren's address at UC-Irvine in California, it is clear that campus authorities have to do more than they are to curb real attempts to suppress free speech by Israel's opponents, and to protect the rights of those Jewish students who seek through peaceful means to bring a pro-Israel viewpoint to the campus. The tough response by UC-Irvine's president, who made it clear that his campus will not tolerate such interruptions and blatant anti-Semitism, is a good sign that perhaps others will follow his example. It is certainly about time. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Ronald Radosh, Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute and Prof. Emeritus of History at CUNY, writes regularly for Pajamas Media.com. ]]> Anti-Apartheid Week - 1 tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.3477 2010-03-03T19:43:03Z 2010-03-03T21:29:17Z How About A Real Campaign Against Abuses? By Alan M. Dershowitz Every year at about this time, radical Islamic students---aided by radical anti-Israel professors---hold an event they call "Israel Apartheid Week." During this week, they try to persuade students on... Anthony Paletta How About A Real Campaign Against Abuses? By Alan M. Dershowitz IAW_2010poster_Toronto.jpgEvery year at about this time, radical Islamic students---aided by radical anti-Israel professors---hold an event they call "Israel Apartheid Week." During this week, they try to persuade students on campuses around the world to demonize Israel as an apartheid regime. Most students seem to ignore the rantings of these extremists, but some naive students seem to take them seriously. Some pro-Israel and Jewish students claim that they are intimidated when they try to respond to these untruths. As one who strongly opposes any censorship, my solution is to fight bad speech with good speech, lies with truth and educational malpractice with real education. Accordingly, I support a "Middle East Apartheid Education Week" to be held at universities throughout the world. It would be based on the universally accepted human rights principle of "the worst first." In other words, the worst forms of apartheid being practiced by Middle East nations and entities would be studied and exposed first. Then the apartheid practices of other countries would be studied in order of their seriousness and impact on vulnerable minorities. Under this principle, the first country studied would be Saudi Arabia. That tyrannical kingdom practices gender apartheid to an extreme, relegating women to an extremely low status. Indeed, a prominent Saudi Imam recently issued a fatwa declaring that anyone who advocates women working alongside men or otherwise compromises with absolute gender apartheid is subject to execution. The Saudis also practice apartheid based on sexual orientation, executing and imprisoning gay and lesbian Saudis. Finally, Saudi Arabia openly practices religious apartheid. It has special roads for "Muslims only." It discriminates against Christians, refusing them the right to practice their religion openly. And needless to say, it doesn't allow Jews the right to live in Saudi Arabia, to own property or even (with limited exceptions) to enter the country. Now that's apartheid with a vengeance. ]]> "[Applying the word "Apartheid" to Israel] does not serve the cause of peace, and the use of it against the Jewish people in particular, who have been victims of the worst kind of discrimination, discrimination resulting in death, is offensive and wrong." The current "Israel Apartheid Week" on universities around the world, by focusing only on the imperfections of the Middle East's sole democracy, is carefully designed to cover up far more serious problems of real apartheid in Arab and Muslim nations. The question is why do so many students identify with regimes that denigrate women, gays, non-Muslims, dissenters, environmentalists and human rights advocates, while demonizing a democratic regime that grants equal rights to women (the chief justice and speaker of the Parliament of Israel are women), gays (there are openly gay generals in the Israeli Army), non-Jews (Muslims and Christians serve in high positions in Israel) and dissenters, (virtually all Israelis dissent about something). Israel has the best environmental record in the Middle East, it exports more life saving medical technology than any country in the region and it has sacrificed more for peace than any country in the Middle East. Yet on many college campuses democratic, egalitarian Israel is a pariah, while sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, terrorist Hamas is a champion. There is something very wrong with this picture. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard University. ]]> Those Disastrous Student Loans tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.3466 2010-03-01T16:36:17Z 2010-03-02T19:07:02Z By Charlotte Allen Alan Michael Collinge is back in his gadfly role agitating against the student loan industry. Collinge is the author of last year's The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt in U.S. History---and How We Can Fight... Anthony Paletta By Charlotte Allen Alan Michael Collinge is back in his gadfly role agitating against the student loan industry. Collinge is the author of last year's The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt in U.S. History---and How We Can Fight Back (Beacon Press) and founder of the website studentloanjustice.org, dedicated to, among other things restoring the bankruptcy protection for student loans that Congress removed for all but the most hardship-hit borrowers in 2005. Writing for the New York Times blog "The Choice," which deals with college admissions and financial aid, Collinge calls the federally guaranteed student-loan system "a predatory lending scheme" and argues that Congress should curb the Education Department's power (also granted in a 2005 law) to "extort not just the original principal and interest from borrowers, but also a massive amount in penalties fees and collection costs." Collinge wrote his book from his own 20-odd years of disastrous experiences with student loans. He graduated from the University of Southern California in 1988 with three degrees in engineering and $38,000 in loan debt, an amount that ballooned to $100,000---still mostly unpaid two decades later---when he fell behind on monthly repayments after consolidating his loans with Sallie Mae (the nation's leading buyer of student debt) and penalties, back interest, and collection fees began to accrue with lightening speed. Loan consolidation often (although not always) means that graduates can lock in lower interest rates than they might otherwise pay, but it can also entail stretching out the life of the loan to as long as 30 years (the tradeoff is lower monthly payments). Collinge's New York Times blog dovetails with the Obama administration's goal of eliminating private lenders (banks, credit unions, and Sallie Mae) from the federal student-loan system and requiring all student borrowing to come directly from the government itself. It's difficult to say whether Collinge, who, with his engineering degrees could expect decently paying employment, actually got a bad deal from the federally guaranteed system. For one thing, he took out his loans long before the 2005 law went into effect, although as early as 1976 Congress had placed some limits on using bankruptcy to get rid of student debt. One might also ask whether it was prudent for Collinge, if he was strapped for college money, to choose to attend an expensive private university such as USC rather than a cheaper state school where he would not incur so much debt. Furthermore, students who borrow from private financial institutions under the federally guaranteed system enjoy below-market interest rates (the Department of Education sets annual caps), a nine-month grace period after graduaton during which no payments are due, and an array of forgiveness and deferment arrangements if economic hardship forces borrowers to fall behind. For example, the going interest rate (according to Sallie Mae) on Stafford loans, products of one of the most widely used federal loan programs, is 6.8 percent, and the going rate for PLUS loans (products of another popular program) is 9 percent (the rates are even lower for students whose income qualifies them for a federal interest subsidy). Compare that to the 17.28 percent annual rate on credit-card debt, and the interest rate that Collinge agreed to pay on his consolidated loans (it's currently capped at 8.25 percent) could hardly be considered "predatory." It should be remembered, too, that student loans are unsecured loans (no mortgaged house, no car or other collateral) to unemployed or partially employed people who can be as young as 18. In other words, the loans are ipso facto risky, which is why government guarantees are an integral part of private student lending. A government guarantee means that taxpayers pick up the tab when a loan goes into default---so it is perhaps not surprising that Congress has made it difficult to cancel the loans in bankruptcy court. ]]> his review of Collinge's book last year, genuine abuses exist in the public-private partnership that is the federally guaranteed system. For one thing, many lenders have entered into all-too-cozy arrangements with the colleges they service. In many cases the schools themselves make the loans, then flip the debt to financial institutions for a premium---essentially a cut of the profits on the loan. Perks for college financial officers such as parties and trips have helped sweeten the relationships. Furthermore Sallie Mae, which began life during the 1970s as a government-sponsored enterprise along the lines of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the mortgage market but has since privatized, has used its clout on Capitol Hill, as have other big lenders, not only to all-but-eliminate bankruptcy protection where student loans are concerned, but to forbid graduates to consolidate their loans more than once, so they're barred from moving to another lender that offers a lower interest rate. Private lenders can own the collection agencies that deal with borrowers in default (in return for a cut of the proceeds), and that gives lenders "the perverse incentive to to let loans go into default rather than trying to collect them" in timely fashion, VerBruggen noted. "It's also worth noting that in the student-loan industry, whre bankruptcy is not a threat and collection powers include wage garnishment, defaulted loans are actually profitable on balance," he wrote. Collinge, besides advocating a relaxation of the current draconian bankruptcy restrictions, urges an end to government involvement with private lenders in favor of direct federal aid to schools and students. This is essentially the position of the Obama administration, which hopes to use savings from cutting out lender middlemen to boost federal Pell grants to low-income students. VerBruggen, concerned with the perverse effects of handing free money to young people---namely the temptation on the part of colleges to raise tuition so as to cash in on the handouts---proffers an alternative proposal: Requiring students to give up a percentage of their income after graduation rather than make loan payments. This would keep private lenders in the system but give them an incentive "to pick the students who would stick with college and benefit from it." That would be a good start. In his New York Times blogpost, Collinge cites a 2003 study by the Education Department's inspector general estimating that that the true lifetime defaults on education loans (in contrast to the two- and three-year default rates that the department has been issuing) were 25 percent for nonprofit four-year institutions, 35 percent for nonprofit two-year institutions, and 45 percent for for-profit institutions. That's about one out of every three student borrowers (and two-thirds of college students these days graduate with debt). Those high default rates are a near-certain indication that large numbers of those who enroll in college these days have gotten nothing worthwhile out of college in terms of improving their earning prospects. It's likely that most of them should never have enrolled in college in the first place. Among the 137 comments on Collinge's New York Times blog-post, this one stands out:
I am a 35 year old mother of six that works 80+ hours a week, at two jobs, to pay for my return to school. I do qualify for some grant money but that doesn't completely cover the expenses. I won't borrow because I did that my first trip to college. I borrowed around $12,000 and it now has turned into close to $60,000 I think. I quit checking the statements because it causes me to get very depressed. Even though I'm in school full time, I can't get the interest stopped because my loans are consolidated. You know, the paper you can sign that is going to save you so much money. Well it cost me thousands! I am now responsible for my ex-husbands loans because my name is on the loan first. They haven't even once went (sic) after him. He told me it's my problem but yet (sic) when I need a forebearance or deferment, I have to get his approval. How fair is that?
It's hard to know where to start in assessing this sad story, but its sub-college-level command of English grammar is as good a place as any. Who told this woman that she was college material, much less encouraged her to borrow to finance a degree that she stands no hope of obtaining for many years, if ever? Other parts of her comment indicate that she is currently employed as a paramedic. The median annual salary for that occupation is $39,000, not great for someone trying to support six children but not too far below the national median household income of $46,000 a year (and she likely earns a few thousand dollars more from her second job). The worst thing that happened to this woman (putting aside her choice of a ne'er-do-well for a husband) was that the government made it easy for her to borrow a substantial sum of money to enroll in an institution of higher learning for which she was not qualified. The second worst thing was that the government gave---and continues to give---money to her that enables her to continue pursuing that hopeless goal. Wouldn't she be better off focusing on working her two jobs and devoting her spare energies to raising her children to succeed in college or elsewhere? Collinge's proposal that bankruptcy laws be modified so as to make it easier to discharge student-loan debt under genuine hardship conditions sounds humane. His proposals, seconded by VerBruggen, to make lenders in the federally aided system more accountable to borrowers and taxpayers sounds only just, given that lenders benefit from federal largesse. But the best way to benefit taxpayers---and young people contemplating college themselves in the long run---might be to stanch the free flow of federal tuition-assistance funds in the first place. ]]> Why Do Anthropologists Have Their Own Foreign Policy? tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.3452 2010-02-24T21:42:48Z 2010-03-03T21:24:57Z By Anthony Paletta Should the American Anthropological Association "denounce the current human rights violations in Honduras" and "support Hondurans that... continue to resist the June 28, 2009 military coup in their country"? This question, put to a vote of AAA... Anthony Paletta By Anthony Paletta newaaacentlogo.jpgShould the American Anthropological Association "denounce the current human rights violations in Honduras" and "support Hondurans that... continue to resist the June 28, 2009 military coup in their country"? This question, put to a vote of AAA members, passed by a margin of 656-166 in online voting that ended last Friday. Taking a stand on a Central American coup may seem like an odd topic of concern for an academic organization. Increasingly it seems that no such organization is complete without a foreign policy of is own; from Iraq to Afghanistan to nuclear disarmament. Organizations based on academic disciplines, traditionally balanced and detached from politics, have been sliding toward political advocacy since the 1960s. The American Anthropological Association was founded in 1902 to "promote the science of anthropology, to stimulate and coordinate the efforts of American anthropologists, to foster local and other societies devoted to anthropology, to serve as a bond among American anthropologists and anthropologic[al] organizations present and prospective, and to publish and encourage the publication of matter pertaining to anthropology". The relation of Honduran policy to this purpose remains unclear. In 2006 the American Historical Association passed a resolution urging members to "do whatever they can to bring the Iraq was to a speedy conclusion." The resolution declared that "interrogation techniques at Guantanamo," "the re-classification of government documents" and other practices, were "inextricably linked to the war." It passed by a margin of 75% to 24%. The resolution flatly identified the war as a danger to the historical profession itself, asserting that the conflict and the Bush administration's related policies imperiled "the unfettered intellectual inquiry essential to the practice of historical research, writing, and teaching." On questions from the Iraq war to affirmative action to statehood for the District of Columbia and same-sex marriage, academic associations now regularly issue partisan resolutions that present opinions on contentious political issues as professional certainties. ]]> The AHA Iraq resolution is a prime example of how easily political zeal tramples routine standards of argument in the most distinguished academic organizations. Many historians objected to the logical foundation of the resolution, damning a war on the basis of several tenuously-related Bush administration policies. As Martin Wiener, a Professor of History at Rice University observed in a comment at Inside Higher Ed.com, "the level of argument linking the two would surely have been given a failing grade if submitted by an undergraduate." On similar grounds, you might think that Japanese internment would have decisively invalidated World War II. Others wondered how the war posed an evident danger to an organization incorporated "for the promotion of historical studies, the collection and preservation of historical documents and artifacts, and the dissemination of historical research." An astonishingly succinct example of the mindset behind this politicking appeared in "The Neoliberal Challenge," an essay by Frances Fox Piven in the Summer 2007 edition of Contexts, a journal of the American Sociological Association intended for a non-academic audience. Piven, then President of the American Sociological Association and a pioneer in "public sociology" efforts to wed advocacy to scholarship, offered the following revealing thought:
"..neoliberalism [i.e., modern conservatism] is not only an attack on 20th-century social democratic policies and culture. Although we were slow to recognize it, Thatcher and the neoliberal project she championed declared war on the basic tenets of the sociological enterprise. To be sure, we also study individuals and families, but the sociological enterprise rejects the radical individualism of Thatcher and the personal responsibility plank of the Republican "Contract with America."
Piven is a famed academic radical, yet suppositions of exactly this sort that now guide numerous academic organizations. It's not clear how Margaret Thatcher or the Contract with America directly threatened "the scientific study of society," as sociology is most commonly defined, but many academics no longer seem to admit any distinction between their prescriptive beliefs and the objective interests of a discipline. Jonathan Imber, professor of sociology at Wellesley College, commented that "the sheer vagueness of her accusations suggests that she rejects anything like a scientific, indeed, empirical, understanding of society." He confessed himself "mystified" by the term "sociological enterprise" wondering if Piven didn't "conceive of sociology as a kind of political party without mandate." The American Sociological Association took many of Piven's presumptions to heart; passing resolutions against the Iraq War and the Federal Marriage Amendment. asoca.gifThe ASA rejected the marriage amendment on grounds that "sociological research has repeatedly shown that systems of inequality are detrimental to the public good." As recent political processes show, this definition of marriage as a system of inequality commands less than full agreement nationally. Yet the ASA advances its position as a definitive statement on the issue for an entire discipline. In 2004, the Anthropological Association also endorsed same-sex marriage, asserting that "the results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures, and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution." Peter Wood, an association member for more than 25 years, labeled this statement "a breathless lie." In fact, he wrote at National Review Online, "some 250 years of systematic inquiry by anthropologists leaves little doubt that heterosexual marriage is found in nearly every human society and almost always as a pivotal institution. Homosexual marriage outside contemporary Western societies is exceedingly rare and never the basis of 'viable social order." That might sound like a still-vibrant debate, but the Anthropological Association has declared the matter settled. Jonathan Imber and Irving Louis Horowitz called attention to the AAA's fondness for political declamation in a 1999 Society magazine essay "Ferment in Professional Associations." The organization had called for District of Columbia statehood and an end to pre-war U.S. sanctions against Iraq. Imber and Horowitz commented "that such resolutions are only remotely connected to the operations of the association, or that they lack any support resembling a broad national consensus, is deemed irrelevant." Just a lot of fusty academics talking to themselves? Not quite. Academic organizations don't stop at press releases; they're happy to suggest their opinions to courts and politicians. In 2007 the AAA filed an amicus brief supporting the City of San Francisco's effort to strike down the California same-sex marriage ban. The only surprise is that it wasn't joined by more of its colleagues. The American Anthropological Association, American Sociological Association, and the American Psychological Association all filed amicus briefs in support of the University of Michigan in the Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger cases. Each argued that, from the perspectives of their respective disciplines, affirmative action was essential. Sandra Day O'Connor seemed convinced; she cited the contributions of amici in the Grutter decision, in pointing "to the educational benefits that flow from student body diversity" and showing that "student body diversity promotes learning outcomes and better prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce and society." The Road to Activism It's a long road from Congressional charters to arguments before the Supreme Court. How did we get here? Sociologist C. Wright Mills spearheaded a theory of academic activism in 1959's The Sociological Imagination, describing "grand theory" and "abstract empiricism" as tools of the ruling classes. His arguments for a "critical sociology" demanded a more active political dimension to sociology. Such criticism was soon joined by criticism of the anthropological establishment as a tool of U.S. militarism in South America and Southeast Asia. A new school of "action anthropology" became increasingly popular, foregrounding work with communities to identify their goals and aid their achievement as the foremost aim of Anthropology. The late 1960s saw these new political perspectives reach a critical mass as numerous academics began to define their studies as inherently political. The American Anthropological Association passed a resolution against U.S. military practices in Vietnam in 1966. They also demarcated a strict line of division between anthropology and government service, stating "Except in the event of a declaration of war by Congress, academic institutions should not undertake activities or accept contracts in anthropology that are not related to their normal functions of teaching, research, and public service." Some organizations resisted the political drift, for a time. The American Sociological Association and the American Historical Association both rejected, by large margins, resolutions against the Vietnam War. Eugene Genovese, an avowed Viet Cong supporter at the time, spoke strongly against the AHA anti-War resolution, labeling it a "totalitarian" measure. The majority arguments, upheld by Genovese, that such resolutions were outside the proper sphere of their organizations, were rapidly becoming historical artifacts. But the politicizing tide was too strong. Sociologist Martin Nicolaus, responding to an address by then-Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Wilbur Cohen, denounced professional sociology as "an exercise in intellectual servility" and depicted the typical sociologist as a "white intellectual Uncle Tom." The ASA passed a resolution moving future conventions from Chicago, in opposition to the treatment of Democratic convention protesters there. In 1969, activists interrupted a speech by the organization's President to hold a memorial service for Ho Chi Minh. The regular conference proceedings were forced to move elsewhere. Most organized radical activity subsided with the end of the Vietnam War, but the following decades saw the establishment of most of the dissenters' demands. "Public sociology," a term devised in 1988 by Herbert Gans, is an open effort to increase the engagement of sociology with political processes; the ASA now has a "Task Force to Institutionalize Public Sociology." We All Agree; It Can't Be Wrong Academic conferences routinely feature panels devoted to the formulation of "strategy" or the express facilitation of activism. Why bother with debate when all of the panelists already agree? Better to move on to implementation. If you spend time at these conferences, the organizational resolutions begin to make perverse sense. You'd be hard-pressed to find a panelist who didn't think that the Iraq war, the federal marriage amendment, and anti-affirmative action measures were objectively and professionally wrong. In fact, it's easier to find apologists for female circumcision - the Anthropological Association featured two of those at their 2007 conference. header_logo.jpgIn some disciplines, members, tiring of the wholesale embrace of tendentious advocacy, have left to found new organizations. Eugene Genovese and historians who objected to the AHA's "imposed ideological line" founded the Historical Society in 1998. The Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, founded in 1995, represented a similar flight from dominant, often politicized, theoretical presumptions of the Modern Language Association. Most recently, Fouad Ajami and Bernard Lewis' Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa seeks to provide a "dispassionate" alternative to the heavily politicized Middle Eastern Studies Association. Critics have been quick to allege, in each case, that "dispassionate" simply stands as code for "conservative." Whatever the merits of these arguments, most established academic organizations abandoned any pretense at balance long ago. At the American Sociological Association conference in 2007 I witnessed a panelist argue against "balance" on the grounds that "we cannot reduce all ideas to equality, sidestepping content." The AAA for one, in its resolution condemning the participation of anthropologists in military operations in Afghanistan, first declares aid to the government a "problematic application of anthropological expertise" but then asserts that anthropology is "obliged to help improve U.S. government policies" and that anthropology "can legitimately and effectively help guide U.S. policy to serve the humane causes of global peace and social justice." David Vine, a member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education in November, offered a lengthy argument against anthropological work with the military, followed directly by an encouragement to "advocate work proposing new directions in foreign and military policy to end such wars and to protect the lives of U.S. troops and peoples around the world." In the airtight logic of contemporary anthropology, work with the U.S. government is professionally impermissible, but boundless activism in pursuit of other political goals is an obligation. The politicization of academic organizations shows no sign of slowing down. It took the American Historical Association 114 years to condemn a war, it's doubtful it will wait that long to do so again. The overwhelming problem isn't that many professors share the same opinions, it's that they're happy to reify these opinions, in any form possible, through the very organizations traditionally dedicated to preserving professional standards of disinterested research and inquiry. It may not make much of a difference to the broader polity, but it seems a crisis for the modern academy. It's been apparent for many years that humanities and social science departments are highly left-wing; academic organizations have clarified the matter; now the budding historian, sociologist, or anthropologist needn't undertake a bit of research to find out what he should believe, they'll simply tell him. ]]> How Corrupted Language Moved from Campus to the Real World tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.3439 2010-02-23T18:20:37Z 2010-02-23T02:40:02Z By Harvey A. Silverglate In some quarters I'm viewed as a lawyer with a professional identity problem: I've spent half of my time representing students and professors struggling with administrators over issues like free speech, academic freedom, due process and... Anthony Paletta By Harvey A. Silverglate the_shadow_university.jpg In some quarters I'm viewed as a lawyer with a professional identity problem: I've spent half of my time representing students and professors struggling with administrators over issues like free speech, academic freedom, due process and fair disciplinary procedures. The other half I've spent representing individuals (and on occasion organizations and companies) in the criminal justice system. These two seemingly disparate halves of my professional life are, in fact, quite closely related: The respective cultures of the college campus and of the federal government have each thrived on the notion that language is meant not to express one's true thoughts, intentions and expectations, but, instead, to cover them up. As a result, the tyrannies that I began to encounter in the mid-1980s in both academia and the federal criminal courts shared this major characteristic: It was impossible to know when one was transgressing the rules, because the rules were suddenly being expressed in language that no one could understand. In his 1946 linguistic critique, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote that one must "let meaning choose the word, not the other way around." By largely ignoring this truism, administrators and legislators who craft imprecise regulations have given their particular enforcement arms---campus disciplinary staff and federal government prosecutors---enormous and grotesquely unfair power. ]]> Professor Alan Charles Kors) The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses. In that book, Kors and I detailed the absurd and decidedly anti-intellectual spread of campus speech codes---student guidelines often cloaked in harassment vernacular like "emotional harm" or "demeaning effect"---that essentially conflate words and conduct. These codes, by their own terms, claim to protect "vulnerable" or "historically disadvantaged" students (and even faculty and staff members) from feeling insulted, harassed or marginalized by having to listen to words that, to someone's sensibilities, wound. (That some college administrator in 2010 sees these measures as the solution, rather than as a part of the problem, is deeply disappointing to one who saw firsthand the drawbacks of a Princeton Class of 1964 with no women and a single American-born black student. I am startled that, so many years after my own graduation from college, such a demeaning attitude toward students in minority groups is so prevalent in higher education, as if they need special protection from words and ideas.) My most recent book examines an analogous phenomenon in the criminal justice system: vagueness of federal law. The U.S. Department of Justice began prosecuting people, around the mid-1980s, under statutes and regulations that even I could not understand; what's worse, federal courts seemed not to recognize this obvious unfairness and convicted people of serious crimes carrying harsh sentences. Years ago I told my law firm colleagues, half-serious and half-sarcastic, that an average citizen could commit several federal crimes in any given day without even realizing it. Two decades later, with this problem exponentially worse, my book on the subject is titled Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent (Encounter Books). Punishing Student Speech on Campus First, let me examine how vague provisions that punish student speech threaten a cornerstone of American higher education: the free and uninhibited expression of ideas. Mind you - I would not approve of speech codes on campuses even if they were clear in specifying the language that could get a student tossed out of school, and even if the disciplinary hearings were fair and rational. But at least clear codes would have the benefit of giving students notice of what could get them disciplined or expelled. The combination of outlawing speech, doing so in terms that even an educated person could not understand, and trying the charge before a tribunal worthy of the court of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, is a particularly insidious stew. Consider, for example, some of the speech codes described in Chapter Seven of The Shadow University:
In New England, "harassment" has included, within recent times, jokes and ways of telling stories, "experienced by others as harassing" (Bowdoin College); "verbal behavior" that produces "feelings of impotence," "anger," or "disenfranchisement," whether "intentional or unintentional" (Brown University); speech that causes loss of "self-esteem [or] a vague sense of danger" (Colby College); or even "inappropriately directed laughter," "inconsiderate jokes," and "stereotyping" (University of Connecticut). The student code of the University of Vermont demands that its students not only not offend each other, but that they appreciate each other: "Each of us must assume responsibility for becoming educated about racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia/heterosexism, and other forms of oppression so that we may respond to other community members in an understanding and appreciative manner."
You get the point: With such formulations, it's likely that every twentieth sentence out of a student"s (or professor's) mouth---even an untimely chuckle or unfortunate glance---could expose him or her to serious discipline or even expulsion. Campus parodists, in particular, poke fun at their own peril. Kafkaesque campus disciplinary tribunals, devoid of crucially important rights for the accused, make it exceedingly easy to convict any and all of those charged. Lest the reader think that I'm exaggerating, I urge you to browse the website of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE; www.thefire.org), a non-profit organization co-founded by Professor Kors and me a year after publication of The Shadow University. We were so overwhelmed with students and teachers who sought our aid and advice that we decided to take up the cause in an activist fashion; we simply could not assist so many people without an organization behind us. While the language of the speech codes discussed above has morphed in the intervening decade since FIRE's inception---partly as a result of successful litigation brought by students and test cases engineered by FIRE, and partly because of the discomfort caused to college administrators by widespread exposes in the news media and on blogs---the essence of this mode of campus censorship remains a reality at the vast majority of American colleges and universities. In the February 2010 issue of REASON magazine, FIRE President Greg Lukianoff debunks the popular misconception that the speech code zeitgeist has come and gone. As Lukianoff writes, "P.C. Never Died." Prosecuting Citizens with Vague Statutes With FIRE's continued success at combating the illiberal campus trends detailed in The Shadow University, I'm hoping that Three Felonies a Day can catalyze something similar: A nonpartisan movement that raises awareness to this phenomenon in the federal criminal justice system and actively works to protect citizens from such government abuses. With regulatory agencies promising ramped-up prosecutions in response to the current economic downturn (many of which, I'm sure, will be created out of whole cloth), and a quite visible recent rise in judicial resistance to questionable prosecutorial tactics, now may be perhaps the best time in recent history for such a movement to take root. Central to this potential movement should be its nonpartisan aims. The abuses described in Three Felonies a Day have been steadily worsening under every administration, Democrat and Republican, since the 1980s. (The current Justice Department shows little hope of reversing course.) While the statute books have expanded, and the statutory language remains hopelessly malleable, every aspect of civil society---doctors, artists, activists, and businessmen, to name a few---has been unfairly targeted. Even the feds' pursuit of supposedly corrupt politicians, almost always met with applause from the press corps and the political opposition, cuts across ideological bounds. Take, for instance, the Justice Department's pursuit of public officials and private businessmen who did not violate any specific law or regulation, state or federal, but whose conduct at some visceral level seemed "wrong" to a federal agent or prosecutor. There is a federal statute that makes it a felony to use the "means of wire, radio, or television communication" in a "scheme or artifice to defraud." (This is known as "wire fraud", the "mail fraud" statute similarly governs such transactions utilizing the mail system.) For a time in the 1980s, the feds would prosecute public officials or private businessmen, under these quite general statutes, for committing fraud by virtue of depriving "another of the intangible right of honest services." When the Supreme Court finally had enough and declared this particular prosecutorial strategy unlawful because the fraud statute did not appear to authorize such prosecutions, the Department of Justice got the ever-pliant Congress in 1988 to add the 28 words that the prosecutors had for years been using in indictments, as if parroting these words suddenly clarified one's legal obligations and the statutory requirements: For the purposes of this chapter, the term "scheme or artifice to defraud" includes a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services. With this species of "fraud" codified in the criminal law, federal prosecutors continued (and, indeed, still continue) to indict public officials and private businessmen for depriving either their political constituents, or their companies or shareholders, of the "honest services" to which they were entitled. It did not matter if a state senator violated not a single state criminal statute or ethics rule. It did not matter that a business executive did not transgress any state or local law or corporate by-law, or did not enrich himself by even a single penny. It did not matter that no particular federal law or regulation was transgressed. If a federal prosecutor felt in his gut that the individual had somehow deprived the voters or the corporation and shareholders of the "honest services" that were, in the prosecutor's sole discretion, due, the defendant could end up serving a decades-long prison sentence. To my mind, it was rather like prosecuting, convicting and imprisoning a citizen for being "a bad person," with the government defining badness. Zealous federal prosecutors pursuing what they subjectively view as morally corrupt (albeit not clearly criminal) activity "may in fact be doing God's work, but they are not doing Jefferson's work or Hamilton's work or Madison's work or the work of the other founders of our secular nation and Constitution," Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz wrote in the Foreword to Three Felonies a Day. The Fifth Amendment's guarantee of "due process of law" requires clarity in the criminal law so that citizens are given clear and fair notice, in advance, of what conduct is prohibited on pain of prosecution and punishment. Without such clarity and fair notice, government tyranny becomes dangerously easy: Anyone can be prosecuted for anything that the powers-that-be retroactively announce is a crime. Fortunately, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in December 2009 in a case challenging the "honest services" statute as being constitutionally infirm for failure to give clear notice of what conduct was being criminalized, and other related defects. Similar vagueness challenges will be raised in a Supreme Court case, to be argued today, that tests the limits of the federal ban on "material support" to "terrorist" organizations, as designated by the U.S government. Hopefully, these cases are the beginning of a counter-revolution to the trend of citizens being prosecuted and imprisoned for activities that neither they, nor experienced lawyers for that matter, could have predicted would be deemed criminal by a prosecutor and even by a court. The Give and Take between Campus Codes and Federal Laws While speech codes and modern laws exist in distinct arenas but share the common trait of vagueness, there are instances where these arenas intersect. Many campus speech codes borrow language from federal "hostile environment" regulations, promulgated for the workplace by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Common among these codes are, for example, prohibitions against "offensive environments for working or learning." Even if fitting for a workplace, these types of restrictions are particularly pernicious on a campus because they severely limit the ability of students and faculty to speak their minds. Yet some administrators have gone so far as to claim that they would be breaking the law if they didn't enact such guidelines. This rests on two very misguided notions: (1) that federal guidelines for workplace discrimination by employers are applicable, in their entirety, to college and university students and faculty, and (2) that the words of students and faculty can be considered harassment and equated, essentially, with physical misconduct. With that rationale, administrators assert that if they do not act on allegations of verbal harassment or discrimination, they could lose federal funds under provisions of Title IX. This couldn't be further from the truth. Well-established Supreme Court jurisprudence makes clear that campuses of higher education must have a much higher deference for First Amendment freedoms than is the case in workplace environments. Nonetheless, this thinking pervades the risk-averse mindset of American higher education. As federal guidelines shape speech restrictions, a related trend---that of campus groupthink spreading to the real world---has developed. It goes without saying that tomorrow's leaders are molded on today's campuses, so it should come as no surprise that political leaders, many of whom were educated in the 1980s when speech codes began to become all the rage, show little compunction about enacting and enforcing dangerously malleable laws. Perhaps this explains the current disrepute into which the idea of clarity of legal requirements, an important aspect of "due process of law," has fallen: Students have been taught by example that precision of language is best to be avoided. Vagueness, after all, can serve a number of purposes---none of them salutary. 72929925_68621d598f.jpgThe demise of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm is one of the clearest examples of prosecutors twisting vague federal obstruction of justice statutes to achieve their ends well before the case had closed. The government believed that the Andersen firm enabled its client, Enron Corporation, to report financial transactions in a way that would incorrectly inflate earnings. In a case where reasonable and intelligent accountants might differ over the correct treatment and reporting of a transaction, the government nonetheless viewed Andersen's conduct as intentional criminal activity. But the Department of Justice did not prosecute Andersen for certifying Enron's financial statements. Rather, Andersen was prosecuted for following its own routine procedures for handling internal documents. This was because a raft of federal obstruction of justice statutes makes it very dangerous for accountants to operate normally; in the Andersen case, the firm stumbled when it proceeded to obey its own long-standing and unremarkable (and, indeed, quite widespread) policy governing the destruction of old and obsolete documents generated during the course of a client audit. The Andersen firm, in other words, got indicted and convicted even though it acted in a manner common for the industry and seemingly not in violation of any discernable law. So it was that one of the "Big Five" national accounting firms collapsed without so much as an adjudication that it had illegally destroyed documents, much less that it had helped its client cook the books. In June 2005, after Andersen had been destroyed by the indictment and conviction, the Supreme Court unanimously knocked down the feds' use of vague obstruction charges to prosecute the giant accounting firm. The high court recognized that even though the mere prosecution of Arthur Andersen brought about its downfall, no criminal conduct had taken place. But it was too late to save the firm; it had been intentionally destroyed by the Department of Justice in order to prevent the firm from testifying at the criminal trials of Enron officers and providing them with a defense of reliance upon the reasonable professional advice of the company's auditors. KPMG, another large accounting firm, having learned the lesson of the Arthur Andersen debacle, admitted wrongdoing (regarding tax shelters developed and sold by the firm's client) in an attempt to ensure that the mere charges that had destroyed Arthur Andersen wouldn't be levied against KPMG as a firm. In all of this, the matter of factual truth played a decidedly secondary role. For the Justice Department, the ruins of Arthur Andersen served as instruction: Rather than resisting vague fraud and obstruction of justice allegations from federal authorities, KPMG quickly capitulated to the DOJ's demands in order to save itself from certain destruction. It's not all that different, really, than the "chilling effect" instilled on student speech by vaguely worded campus speech codes. And the fairness of both campus disciplinary tribunals and federal courts leaves much to be desired. On our campuses, inquiring minds, taught that discretion is the better part of valor, learn to self-censor rather than face charges of "verbal harassment." Outside in the "real world," citizens and corporations learn that, when accused, it's better to turn on former colleagues as a cooperating witness and---in the words of Professor Dershowitz---to learn from the feds not only how to sing, but, alas, also how to compose. The corruption of the campuses as well as that of the federal criminal justice system must both be addressed urgently, for the lessons learned in today's college classrooms and quads are quickly becoming our nation's values and even its laws. "One ought to recognize," Orwell wrote, "that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end." It is for this reason that some of us who are battling to end the tyranny of speech codes and kangaroo courts in American higher education are also working in the cause of reforming the federal criminal justice system. Orwell would be horrified, but not terribly surprised, by the corruption that has beset both. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Harvey A. Silverglate, is a criminal defense and civil liberties lawyer in Boston. He wishes to acknowledge with gratitude his research assistants, Kyle Smeallie and Maria Romero, for their help in the preparation of this essay. ]]> Why Tuition Goes Up Every Year tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.3429 2010-02-19T13:53:29Z 2010-02-19T17:24:15Z By Richard Vedder Middlebury College is expected to announce a plan to hold the annual rise of tuition to one percentage point above the inflation rate. This announcement will likely be greeted with praise. But why? Costs may be held... Anthony Paletta By Richard Vedder Middlebury College is expected to announce a plan to hold the annual rise of tuition to one percentage point above the inflation rate. This announcement will likely be greeted with praise. But why? Costs may be held down in comparison with other colleges, but the bedrock assumption here is a familiar one: tuition must go up each year; it's just a matter of how much. In hard times, other businesses cut costs and live within their means. Colleges and universities don't? And now we hear more calls for government to do something about it. Like most economists, I do not like attempts of politicians and government bureaucrats to interfere in decisions of buyers and sellers by limiting changes in market-determined prices --minimum wage laws, rent controls and other intrusions into market processes inevitably lead to unintended consequences: higher unemployment, less housing and housing of poorer quality, etc. Thus I start out predisposed to oppose tuition fee caps such as introduced in many states. But my opposition to these caps has been reduced by the fact that higher education markets are hardly free of interferences to begin with, and government has contributed to tuition price explosion through its numerous ways of increasing the demand and reducing the supply for higher education services. Tuition caps at least temporarily force some universities to slow down a bit their inexorable tendency to increase spending, much of it on things at best tangentially related to the true mission of universities---disseminating and creating knowledge (e.g., the number of sustainability coordinators, public relations specialists, associate provosts for international affairs, etc. has grown dramatically in recent years). Even these legally imposed temporary restraints on university desires to raise prices are often thwarted by various strategies - requiring kids to eat and sleep in university facilities and then raising room and board rates dramatically, or creating new fees (technology fees, lab fees, recreational center fees, parking fees, even charging more to buy soft drinks out of campus machines, etc.) But a recent article on "Inside Higher Education" suggests that tuition caps themselves are at best temporary----after periods of capping tuition, deals are cut to end the cap, and then fees tend to explode, reaching levels equal to what they would have been had there never been a tuition freeze. It is almost as if tuition fees are going to rise 3 percentage points more than the inflation rate, and nothing can change that. Call it the natural rate of higher education inflation.]]> Journal of Last Resort or whatever. Each year, 2,000,000 journal articles are published I am told, and my guess is that fewer than 10 percent of them are read by as many as 1,000 persons. In a world where the staff claims ownership rights, but where legally the operation is non-profit in nature and owned by a distant group of university trustees, key university officials gain little in the way of wealth, income or prestige by reducing costs or even improving the quality of the product. That is particularly true since third parties, especially government, pay many of the bills, and the public knows little about the outcomes and input usage of colleges because of a concerted effort on their part to not provide useful information to consumers, donors, and taxpayers. However, despite the lack of market-based financial incentives prevalent in the private corporate sector, university staffs can use university resources to better the quality of their work lives. They are better off when more staff is hired, reducing workloads and increasing power. The staff derives benefits from having fancy offices, liberal travel to exotic locales, and other cost-enhancing amenities of campus life. Low teaching loads in the name of "research" enhance the good life. There is little to be gained, and much to be lost, by trying to emulate the efficient private enterprise model of cost reductions and quality improvements stimulated by competitive market forces. I increasingly believe small, incremental reforms and policy moves such as imposing tuition caps, restricting tenure, or easing credit transfer between schools are not likely to have much impact. It is going to take a major transformation of the higher education environment, in particular a change in the incentive system that influences behavior. This is not the place to elaborate an incentive scheme that might work to moderate the tuition explosion. Two things would help hugely, though. First, if the market driven, for-profit sector continues to grow dramatically amidst a decline in the traditional 18 to 22 year old population base, a larger proportion of higher education would become market oriented with properly aligned incentives, and pressures would grow on the traditional schools to radically reform, which might even include some privatizing of state universities (the Universities of Michigan, Virginia and Colorado would be good early candidates). More struggling high cost weak not-for-profit institutions might literally sell themselves to for profit providers. Second, if government would dramatically reduce direct subsidies to higher education, tuition fees would become more important and push schools into a more market-driven approach. A first step in that direction would be to convert institutional grants from governments, particularly for the state universities, into student scholarships (vouchers). Given state budget exigencies, this is both politically feasible potentially politically attractive. Maybe even more radical experiments - converting state schools to for profit status, converting government support to student vouchers, and giving staff stock in the schools based on seniority, salary and experience-- would work. Tuition fees are soaring because schools can get away with it, not mainly because of a lack of governmentally imposed price constraints. Indeed government is part of the problem, not the solution: governmental funding has made customers extremely insensitive to price in making college choices ---the elasticity of demand was recently estimated to be a very low -0.10, meaning a 10 percent increase in fees lowers the number of college applicants by a paltry one percent. By pushing more funding responsibility off on consumers directly, they become more price conscious, reducing the ability of colleges to charge whatever the traffic will bear. --------------------------------------- Richard Vedder is Distinguished Professor of Economics at Ohio University, directs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, and is a Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. ]]> Should Pell Grants Be Entitlements? tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.3423 2010-02-18T21:39:21Z 2010-02-18T02:11:38Z By Charlotte Allen President Obama has made reforming federal assistance to college students---with the aim of making it financially easier for more of them to obtain their degrees----a centerpiece of his administration's goals. In his State of the Union address... Anthony Paletta By Charlotte Allen President Obama has made reforming federal assistance to college students---with the aim of making it financially easier for more of them to obtain their degrees----a centerpiece of his administration's goals. In his State of the Union address on Jan. 27 he called for expanding the Pell grant program that currently serves about 7 million low-income college students, both by raising the maximum annual amount of the grants, currently $5,500, to $6,900 by 2019, and by turning the Pell program into a Social Security-style entitlement that would require Congress to allocate funds automatically to cover every student who qualified. The rationale that Obama gave to Congress for the huge proposed boost in the size of Pell grants, outstripping inflation and accounting for a major portion of the president's proposed $77.8 billion in Education Department spending for fiscal 2011 (a 31 percent increase over fiscal 2010) is that "no one should go broke because they choose to go to college." That's a worthy sentiment, but it raises an important question: What exactly will a massive additional transfer of federal funds to college students accomplish? The Pell program already costs the government $18 billion a year (Obama's proposed changes would raise that amount to $30 billion), and another $92 billion goes to support the federal student loan program. Yet there's evidence that, while the cash infusions from the government, which date back to President Johnson's Great Society initiatives of the 1960s, have certainly boosted college enrollments, they have also contributed to skyrocketing college tuitions (a 500 percent increase since 1980, far outpacing inflation), along with generally dismal graduation rates indicating that for nearly half of all young people who enroll in college these days, the years they spend there are a waste of time and money, much of it taxpayers' money in the form of grants and loan assistance. Yet the Obama administration seems determined to throw good higher-education money after bad, so to speak. In his State of the Union address, Obama also proposed making it easier for college graduates with low-paying jobs to pay off their federal loans. Their monthly payments would be limited to no more than 10 percent of their "discretionary income" (adjusted gross income that exceeds 150 percent of the poverty line), and after 20 years (10 years if they work in public service), all federal loan balances would be forgiven. Under current law (enacted by Congress in 2007) student borrowers already have a pretty good repayment deal in the federal loan system: Monthly payments can't total more than 15 percent of discretionary income, and loan balances are forgiven after 25 years. Obama's proposals would make the deal even sweeter, and also more expensive for taxpayers. ]]> Democracy, Kevin Carey, policy director for the think tank Education Sector, observed that it is exactly in those low-performing schools that the vast majority of Pell grant recipients are enrolled. Although a progressive who generally supports federal aid to education, Carey pronounced the Pell program, created in 1973, a "failure." Jackson Toby, a retired sociology professor at Rutgers University, pinpoints the problem in his new book The Lowering of Higher Education: that the federal government, far from not being generous enough to young people aspiring to college as the Obama administration assumes, has been far too generous. That is, Toby argues, the vast pool of readily available aid from the government has submerged what used to the chief basis for giving money to needy students: academic merit. Before the federal government got into the student-assistance business during the 1960), states, private foundations, and universities themselves awarded scholarships to low-income young people strictly on the basis of their having proved themselves by earning good grades in high school or scoring high on standardized tests. (The one exception was the limited program of aid to veterans under the G.I. Bill.) Those criteria not only provided an incentive to study hard in high school but tended to assure all concerned that the money would not be wasted. Chief among those assured, Toby points out, were the scholarship students themselves. They would not be wasting valuable earning years taking courses for which they were not prepared academically or intellectually, then dropping out with feelings of bitterness and, in many cases, crippling loans they were legally bound to repay even though they could not get the jobs for which a college degree was supposed to prepare them. Merit and academic ability play no role whatsoever in the current $100 billion-a-year federal student-aid system, where the only criterion for obtaining funds is need. The concentration of Pell recipients in what are essentially open-admissions institutions where the majority of students never graduate is implicit evidence that most low-income Pell students, whether because of poor secondary education or lack of aptitude and study skills, shouldn't be wasting their time in college classrooms. Toby writes, "[G]iving grants to academically underprepared students and not helping them survive academically is...programming them for failure." Toby proposes that if Congress wants to continue the strictly need-based Pell program (which is politically popular because it appeals to notions of equal opportunity), the Education Department at the very least ought to offer remediation programs to the unqualified, which would serve as a warning that their chances of succeeding in college are slim, and add a merit component of extra cash that would reward a top tier of high-achieving college freshmen and sophomores who pursued a rigorous academic curriculum while in high school. As for federally guaranteed or subsidized student loans, Toby advocates pegging all government lending to merit---the student's demonstrated academic success both in high school and college. Partially restoring the old merit-based criteria to government education aid would not only ease taxpayers' burden in covering defaults, but would free many young people both from an unbearable load of debt and from frittering away time in college that could be better spent working productively. Perhaps most important, it would give young people an incentive to study instead of partying away their high school and college years. Toby writes, "Ideology to the contrary, if college is not useful for everybody seeking well-paid jobs, not every high school graduate should be encouraged to attend college." Yet the Obama administration wants to reform the federal student-assistance system by doing more of the same: handing more students even more no-strings-attached money that is certain to be wasted. Wouldn't it better, if the administration is truly committed to education reform, to rethink the whole idea of student grants and loans--better for the taxpayers and better for the students themselves? ]]> How Is Yiddish Doing? tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.3410 2010-02-16T20:32:21Z 2010-02-15T20:32:36Z By Ruth R. Wisse On 2 December 2009 the curtain of Harvard's famed Agassiz Theater rose on a production of Avrom Goldfaden's Shulamis, one of the most famous plays in the Yiddish repertoire. An operetta set in the Land of... Anthony Paletta By Ruth R. Wisse fiddler_on_the_roof_fiddler.jpg On 2 December 2009 the curtain of Harvard's famed Agassiz Theater rose on a production of Avrom Goldfaden's Shulamis, one of the most famous plays in the Yiddish repertoire. An operetta set in the Land of Israel in late biblical times, it was last performed in Warsaw in 1939, and forcibly shut down by the German invasion of September 1. To stage the current production its co-directors, Debra Caplan, a Harvard graduate student of Yiddish and Cecilia Raker, an undergraduate concentrator in drama, assembled a cast willing to learn their parts in a language most of them had never heard. The directors kept all the musical numbers in the original Yiddish and used a new English translation for the dialogue, adding dancers to the production to compensate for the verbal delights an English audience would miss. Of the dozen plays I had studied with these students in a course on Yiddish drama, Shulamis was by no means the most obviously appealing to contemporary taste. Its theme is trustworthiness: a young man Absolom neglects the vow of marriage he made to the rustic Shulamis, who endures bitter years of waiting until he repents the alliance he made instead and returns to her. Beneath the intricacies of the love story throbs the Jewish national motif of keeping faith with covenant. What most intrigued the student-directors was the moral and psychological fallout of such faithfulness: How do we account for the suffering of the woman Absolom marries, and for the death of their two infant children in apparent retribution for his sin? When Absolom leaves his wife and fulfils his promise, can an audience forgive him as fully as Shulamis does, and is the reconciliation at the final curtain really meant to erase the effects of those intervening years? The excitement generated by such questions among cast, musicians, technical crew, and among scholars and graduate students invited to participate in an intercollegiate symposium on the play seemed to bear out the website's claim for "a resurgence of interest in Yiddish among young people." Much of that interest is currently stimulated by institutions of higher learning, like Columbia, NYU, the Jewish Theological Seminary, Stanford, Emory, Brandeis, and universities of Indiana, Michigan, Albany, and Texas, all of which offer programs in Yiddish. Harvard's current cohort of eight PhD candidates in Yiddish is its largest and liveliest since the inception of the program in 1993. Yet the field of Yiddish is hardly stable. The University of Maryland has just announced that it may drop its Yiddish position as a cost-saving device, sacrificing an apparently marginal subject---one unlikely to figure prominently in the college ratings of US News and World Report. The news from Baltimore generated anxiety in what had until recently been the expanding sphere of Yiddish studies. Comings and goings of faculty sometimes determine the status of the language, since many university positions in Jewish Studies are open ended, and shift their priorities according to the specialty of the person hired. ]]> How much poorer English would be without the schlemiel and his bagel, without the chutzpah to kvell, kibitz and kvetch. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A mere century ago the majority of Jews, who then numbered over seventeen million (to today's fewer than thirteen million), spoke Yiddish, read Yiddish, and raised their children in Yiddish. But this was rapidly changing. Wherever they were offered citizenship, most Jews encouraged their children to advance in the local language. The pace of acculturation varied with local levels of toleration. Yiddish dissolved quickly in America, more slowly in Poland, and fitfully in Russia, where the Soviet government tried to use the language as an instrument of indoctrination. Some Jewish leaders regretted the low esteem in which Yiddish was held by even its speakers. The public intellectual Chaim Zhitlowsky (1865-1943) ruefully compared the fortunes of Yiddish to those of the Jewish people. "Both are required to prove that they are genuine: the Jews that they are really a nation and Yiddish that it is really a language.... They always have to carry a passport that sets out all their identifying marks, and if God forbid, one attribute is missing---they are considered fake." In eerie confirmation of this appraisal, the suspect world of Yiddish was extinguished with its speakers during the Second World War. Nowadays, everyday life in Yiddish is confined to tight communities of Jews who want to remain separate from secular society. When I first determined to introduce courses on Yiddish language and literature at McGill University in Montreal in the late 1960s, there were as yet no other courses in Jewish Studies anywhere in the curriculum. But as higher education was then in an expansion mode, responsive to the claims of foreign cultures, I argued that the academy was failing its duty to western civilization, let alone to the world beyond it, by excluding its constituent cultures, emphatically including Jewish culture. Since I was then in the English Department, I had to persuade its faculty of what Yiddish could bring to the English curriculum and to its newest offshoot, American literature. My strongest claim was the body of literature that had been created in North America by Yiddish poets, dramatists, and novelists, and by Jewish writers in the English language who were also fluent in Yiddish. I was helped by the fact that two local greats---the native Montrealer Saul Bellow and A.M. Klein, one of Canada's leading poets---translated and drew heavily from their native Yiddish. Interface between Yiddish and English was my second line of argument. The influx of Yiddish into London and New York at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries, initially so alarming to protectionists like Henry James and Henry Adams, was soon welcomed by stylists like H.L. Mencken. How much poorer English would be without the schlemiel and his bagel, without the chutzpah to kvell, kibitz and kvetch. By that time, the enlivening effects of Yiddish had inspired the 1960s motto, "Dress British, think Yiddish." Professional comedy was then about 75% Jewish, driving Yiddish ironies into the mainstream, and at culture's other extreme, the Holocaust was penetrating historical consciousness, with Yiddish as its major language of witness. The relatively large number of Yiddish speakers in Montreal, including Holocaust survivors and their children, was a major point in favor of its local relevance. 146.jpgOnly my presence in a department of English literature dictated those particular reasons for the inclusion of Yiddish in its curriculum. When a colleague asked about the logic of Yiddish/Jewish studies starting up in the English Department, I was needlessly defensive: "Where else should I go?" I asked, "To the German Department?" The Second World War was still fresh enough in everyone's mind to support my sarcasm, yet the semantic affinity between Yiddish and German made that a not unreasonable alternative. I ought to have said that I could have made the case for Yiddish equally well in most areas of the Humanities and Social Sciences. - Linguistics provided the first academic home for Yiddish in America, finding rich comparative material in the history and spread of the language. The extension of Yiddish across much of Europe between the 13th and 20th centuries and its fusion of Jewish and non-Jewish languages made it exceptionally useful to the study of "languages in contact"---the title of an influential book in the field. - Anthropologists were intrigued by the discovery that Yiddish-speaking Jews in communities from westernmost Hungary to easternmost Russia had more in common with one another than with their Christian neighbors. Folklorists took an interest in Yiddish songs, tales, jokes, recipes, and customs, some of which continue in contemporary forms. - Historians at every turn came up against the Jews, who stood in the path of empires from the Seleucids and Romans through the Christians and Muslims to the Fascists and Communists. Yiddish-speaking communities took the brunt of attack from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries. Hitler's Final Solution was aimed primarily at the Yiddish population of Europe. What was it about this pacific civilization that elicited such hostility? Then again, Yiddish culture exemplified the resourcefulness of a people that prospers and thrives wherever it is allowed to do so. The study of history could benefit from more such examples. - Religious Studies and Divinity Schools had allowed Biblical Hebrew into their curriculum when all other aspects of Jewishness were expunged. But once Judaism was granted legitimacy as part of the study of religions, Yiddish earned its inclusion alongside Hebrew as a language of modern religious experience. Hasidism, one of the youngest religious movements within Judaism, functioned largely in Yiddish, and continues to do so today in far-flung Hasidic communities. Jewish folk religion flourished in Yiddish. Modern women's prayer emerged in Yiddish, which also generated a post-war liturgy in Yiddish. - Philosophy and Political Theory may be curiously handicapped by their neglect of a tradition of thought that resists grand explanations and holds apparent contradictions in delicate balance. I sometimes wonder what would happen if students of Hegel and Marx were simultaneously required to study the humbling cadences of Sholem Aleichem, or if the Jews who once flocked into German universities had taken their Yiddish in with them rather than deferring to the Ubersprache. The assumed inferiority of Yiddish to German not only fueled contemptuous disregard for another culture, but ignored what by other standards are ethically and intellectually stronger ideas than those emerging from German Enlightenment. The penetration of Yiddish into these disciplines has yet to be achieved. - Yiddish literature---the field currently best integrated into universities--richly repays the student who acquires the language in order to read it. The evidence lies in lists of Yiddish novels, plays, poems, and essays, and short stories that constitute reading exams for doctoral candidates in the field. Courses on Yiddish literature may be organized chronologically to demonstrate the development within little over a century of modern Yiddish fiction from modest satires to the Nobel Prize winning work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, or they may feature competing literary approaches (realism, symbolism, impressionism, etc.), literary themes (faith and reason, diaspora and homeland, literature of destruction, etc.), or considerations of gender (vide Janet Hadda's study of "passionate women, passive men"). Yiddish is a rich field for the study of translation: some of the best Yiddish writers translated from other languages and its works are increasingly known through translation. Comparative courses (The Yiddish Novel under Tsars and Stripes; The Comic Tradition in Jewish Culture) study the fortunes of Yiddish in various socio-political contexts, or in tandem with coterritorial literatures. - The kind of arguments I once made for the relevance of Yiddish to an English Department have since swayed other language and literature departments. The study of Old Yiddish (c. 1250-1500) and Middle Yiddish (1500-1700) is most advanced in German Universities, whose scholars compare, for example, early Bible translations and versions of epic poems that survive in both Yiddish and German. The end of the Soviet Union, which opened the Russian archives and allowed freer travel to Eastern Europe, stimulated research into historical questions ranging from comparative rates of divorce and conversion to the Jewish presence in Soviet theater and film. The Iran-sponsored 1994 bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires destroyed much of its Yiddish archive, but a simultaneous rise of interest in Spanish-Jewish studies has resulted in the inclusion of Yiddish culture in Central and South America Studies. There is also emerging parallel interest in Ladino---the language of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula and their descendants---that triggers comparative studies of Ladino and Yiddish. - Israel Studies, until lately neglected in North America, are traditionally contrasted with Yiddish studies. This is because ideological rivalries of the early twentieth century pitted Zionist proponents of Hebrew against Yiddish promoters of Diaspora, creating the simplistic association of Hebrew with statehood and of Yiddish with life outside Israel. This split continues to serve some ideologically-driven scholarship today, particularly among Leftists who seek in Yiddish an alternative to a putatively "militaristic" Jewish state. However, Yiddish actually played a prominent role in both pre-modern and modern varieties of Zionism, and some Yiddish writers and poets celebrated the creation of Israel more enthusiastically than some of their Hebrew counterparts. If there is a "resurgent interest in Yiddish" among young people in North America, this is no less true for young people in Israel, who thanks to their native Hebrew already know its alphabet, and thanks to living in a Jewish state are already familiar with Jewish aspects of its culture. 092.jpgThis thumbnail sketch of academic "uses" of Yiddish scarcely does justice to the civilization that flourished for seven centuries in Europe, nor to the curiosity it still awakens. When the late Isaac Bashevis Singer was asked how it felt to write in a "dying language," he joked that legions of graduate students would some day be writing dissertations on his books. This year two visiting professors from China were at Harvard doing just that, but once they began studying the literature more broadly, they moved on to other Yiddish writers as well. These visitors complained that I and my department were not doing enough to promote Yiddish---and Jewish Studies--in China. I should have sent them to the administration of the University of Maryland to make the case for its retention there! The unanticipated appeal of Shulamis over the social dramas that until recently attracted the lion's share of attention reminds us that education and culture do not always follow the most plausible path. The famous Yiddish "Tale of the Seven Beggars" by Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav makes a related point. Nahman inverts all our expectations to show that the blind man is the most insightful, the deaf man most alert, the eldest, most youthful, the handicapped, most complete, and so forth. He invites us to recognize through the power of a story--in its telling as much as in its moral--the reality of the spiritual life over the material one in which we place our trust. I am tempted to apply the point to Yiddish. Often mistaken for a "minor" language, it contains the experience of a people that burned and burned and was not consumed. Its value may have grown as its speakers declined. -------------------------------------------- Ruth R. Wisse is the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University ]]> Is Education Just Training? tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.3404 2010-02-11T22:32:59Z 2010-02-12T04:20:36Z By Frank Macchiarola When talking with prospective students who are thinking about attending college, I often engage in a bit of "bait and switch." Many of them are interested in jobs that will come for them after college and so... Anthony Paletta By Frank Macchiarola When talking with prospective students who are thinking about attending college, I often engage in a bit of "bait and switch." Many of them are interested in jobs that will come for them after college and so they look at what college is about in almost functional terms. "What job will I be able to get, and how much money will I be able to make?" More than 45 years of teaching at the college and graduate school levels have taught me that they are really asking questions that are less important to them than questions they should be asking. Getting them jobs is not going to be the principal function of their college education. They need to obtain more than "training." They need to secure an education. And the job they work at after graduation is less important than the things they will learn about life itself during their course of study. At one point in time the distinction between the question they asked and the response I gave was well understood by those of us in the academy. The good life that the students were seeking had to have room in it for reflection and understanding about themselves. The liberal arts provided that framework for their study. Now during this so called "jobless" recovery, with jobs being lost at an accelerating pace, the prospect of failure confronts these graduates who have believed that their worth has to be measured in terms of their capacity to work and to earn a livelihood. Jobs are not unimportant things, but they are not the complete picture. They do not tell the story of what the college graduates need to be successful. And if the capacity to obtain work is critical to their sense of self, then we are going to see many unhappy people in the country during what will be a protracted period of massive unemployment.]]> Frank J. Macchiarola is the Chancellor of St. Francis College and the former Dean of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law]]> Goofing Off At College tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.3391 2010-02-08T17:54:12Z 2010-02-09T14:08:19Z By Jackson Toby This is an excerpt from Professor Toby's new book, The Lowering of Higher Education in America (Praeger). The balance between the pursuit of education and the pursuit of fun varies from college to college. Students in selective... Anthony Paletta By Jackson Toby alcohol.jpg This is an excerpt from Professor Toby's new book, The Lowering of Higher Education in America (Praeger). The balance between the pursuit of education and the pursuit of fun varies from college to college. Students in selective colleges and universities are less likely to goof off than in unselective institutions for at least two reasons. First, the selective colleges admit high-achieving high school graduates, the bulk of whom have the ability to meet high standards of academic performance. Second, a large proportion of their students are not content merely to graduate; they intend to pursue graduate work in academic disciplines or in professional schools. When students in an undergraduate course are not motivated to do their reading assignments, whether it is a selective college or not, their professor can do little about it. Theoretically he could flunk half the class. In practice, however, the professor would fail only a few of them. (Failing half of the students in a class would be a public-relations disaster for the professor.) Thus, even in selective colleges, standards depend on what students are willing to learn as well as on what professors believe they ought to learn. The students in a class and the professor set the standards of academic performance by an implicit process of collective negotiation. In the unselective colleges there is an additional complication: some students are so badly underprepared for college-level work that they cannot perform well even if they were motivated to do so. Here the negotiation process is affected by professorial resignation to the limitations of their clientele. Furthermore, some professors have ideological objections to failing students who have performed very poorly. Some believe that positive and negative sanctions (grades) do not work.]]> The Grim Figures Anecdotal accounts as well as some statistical data show that students spend a great deal of time on having fun, which usually includes consuming large amounts of alcohol. For a significant proportion of students, "partying"---a euphemism for long weekends of continuous alcohol consumption and occasional recreational drug use---competes successfully with academic obligations. Some colleges have nation-wide reputations as "party schools." Partying is ubiquitous at colleges, even at selective colleges with deserved reputations for academic seriousness. A 1994 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School wrote the following comment about partying in a letter to the New York Times:
To understand the severity of this problem, all you have to do is walk by a fraternity party at an average college campus. Partying starts on Thursday---and you must understand that partying and getting drunk are synonymous to a college student. The answer to "What did you do last night?" that is most likely to get someone to smile and pat you on the back is, "Oh man, I got so drunk."
Some students, underage or not, while away many hours consuming alcohol or doing drugs with friends or alone. Alcohol and drug abuse has been a continuing problem on most college campuses. For example, in 1997 Michigan State University reported 633 alcohol-related arrests; the University of Minnesota---Twin Cities reported 555; the University of California at Berkeley reported 460; Western Michigan University reported 401, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison reported 342. More recently a freshman died in his room at a fraternity house at all-male Wabash College after solitary binge-drinking. The Harvard School of Public Health conducted rigorous statistical studies of alcohol consumption among a random sample of 14,000 college students in 1993, 1997, and 1999 financed by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; 128 nationally representative four-year colleges in 39 states and the District of Columbia participated in the studies. The studies found that between fifteen and twenty percent of all students in the three sample years abstained from alcohol use completely in the year previous to the study---with a somewhat higher rate of abstention in religious colleges. The studies disregarded the abstainers and focused mainly on binge drinking, defined by the principal author --Wechsler and his colleagues -- to describe a style of consuming five or more drinks in a row for men and four or more for women, at least once in the two weeks preceding the surveys, although the surveys threw light other matters, like the proportion of students who abstained from alcohol consumption entirely, the proportion who drank moderately, and at least one question about illegal drugs. The researchers asked on their questionnaires why the binge drinkers adopted this style of alcohol consumption. In response to a question asking whether getting drunk was their motivation for drinking, those students who responded very important, important, or somewhat important, as opposed to not important, were considered to have a drinking style of "drinking to get drunk." Two notable findings about binge drinking among colleges students were (1) how large a proportion of college students reported themselves binging on alcohol (more than 40 percent of students in the surveys) and (2) how many of the bingers did it to get drunk (about half the male bingers and even more than 40 percent of the female bingers). When the samples were divided into occasional binge drinkers and frequent binge drinkers--those who binge three or more times in two weeks--the frequent binge drinkers reported more problems: missing a class, falling behind in school work, doing something they regretted, arguing with friends, engaging in unplanned sexual activities and not using a condom, damaging property, getting in trouble with the campus or local police, getting personally injured, drunk driving, and requiring medical treatment for an alcohol overdose. Of the frequent bingers, 57 percent drove while drunk, and 54 percent were so drunk that they could not remember where they had been and what they had done while binging. Moderate student drinkers notwithstanding, a majority of the student drinkers in the Harvard survey were binge drinkers, either occasional binge drinkers (2,962) or frequent bingers (3,135). It is difficult to comprehend how these frequent binge drinkers could have gotten much intellectual education out of their college attendance. The alcohol-related problems of students sometimes bring them to the attention of campus or local police. Whether students are arrested or are subjected to internal disciplinary procedures depends partly on the degree of outrageousness of alcohol-related behavior and partly on college policies. Princeton students developed two traditions that institutionalize alcoholic revelry. One tradition is [Paul] Newman's Day, in which students aim to consume twenty-four beers in twenty-four hours, which sometimes requires them to come to class drunk and to bring beer to class in coffee mugs. Actor Paul Newman had nothing to do with attaching his name to this Princeton tradition and, as a newspaper article indicates, objected to this use of his name. Another Princeton tradition, the Nude Olympics, began in the streaking days of the 1970s. Every year sophomores and often other students drank large quantities of alcohol, removed all their clothes, and ran naked around a particular campus quadrangle at midnight after the first snow. However, in January 1999 the event included some of the 350 revelers throwing bottles as well as visibly urinating and engaging in public sexual activities; ten students were hospitalized with severe alcohol poisoning. The University president, Harold T. Shapiro, appointed a committee of faculty members and students to "prevent a tragedy before it happens." The result was that the Nude Olympics was subsequently banned---although the ban bitterly disappointed some students. Majoring in Fun When American students participate in junior year abroad programs in foreign colleges and universities, their fun expectations often clash with the expectations of the colleges they attend. Apparently the casual misbehavior of American students is exported to foreign colleges and universities through "study abroad" programs, which for many students are better labeled "partying abroad." About 160,000 American students participate in these study-abroad programs every academic year. Originally intended to provide opportunities for students with a serious interest in the language or the culture of a foreign country, they lost this academic rationale, especially for English-speaking destinations like England and Australia. The unfortunate result was boorish behavior. Some Americans students in Amsterdam threw trash out of their dorm-room windows on passers-by on the street below. Other American students in Spain got into a knife-and-stick fight with local youths. Still others disappeared from classrooms for weeks to look for more interesting party scenes. "I had two students in Asia who decided that they would drop beer bottles on passing cars," said Joseph L. Brockington, associate provost for international programs at Kalamazoo College in Michigan. Colleges have attempted to tighten controls on students taking study-abroad programs. One method, adopted by Middlebury College in Vermont, is to place all the grades students earn overseas on their transcripts. David Macey, director of off-campus study at Middlebury, believes that this measure "...will eliminate the student who goes to Australia and just hangs out on the beach and drinks beer." Partying is an obvious repudiation of studying. Not only is the time spent partying not used for studying, but the party goers are often incapacitated the following day, either sleeping most of the day or recovering from hangovers. The idea that students are sent to college so that they can major in fun for four years---or more---is clearly a use of higher education that adult society did not have in mind. In 2005, Johnny Lechner, then 29, was in his twelfth year as a student pursuer of fun at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater campus. He accumulated $30,000 worth of student loans during his college career. Some students do take a long time to graduate, sometimes for legitimate reasons---for instance, family problems or economic circumstances. This is not true of Mr. Lechner. However, he does not hold the record for length of time spent at college. Margaret Spelling, the former The U. S. Secretary of Education, said she had found a student who had been enrolled in college for 17 years. A Rutgers colleague, Richard Tedesco, and I decided to conduct a systematic study of the time-use of students that might provide a more accurate description of how undergraduates spend their time. We speculated that such a study might demonstrate that those students who goof off would be the ones who get low grades and fail to graduate. We paid a random sample of 80 undergraduate dormitory residents at one undergraduate college $35 each for their time and effort. The effort was considerable. Those who accepted our offer to participate in the study were required to keep logs of their time for an entire week, accounting for every ten-minute interval of time, and to hand in the logs on the following day (except for weekends when we collected the logs for Saturday and Sunday on Monday morning).every day (except during weekends). Since they seem to have been punctilious in reporting even trivial details---many reported when they went to the bathroom---we are reasonably confident that we know how this group of students spent their time. We learned about all kind of activities: conversations with friends, watching television, taking showers, working out at the gym, communicating by telephone, attending classes, doing homework. We had assumed that, like adults, these college students would wake up in the morning, conduct a variety of activities during the day, and go to bed at night for seven, eight, or more hours of uninterrupted sleep before arising the next morning. Some did this. But others led extremely unstructured lives---eating, napping, TV viewing, and socializing throughout the day and the night, sometimes sandwiching in classes and studying, sometimes not. One male student usually stayed up until after 2 AM and slept until noon the next day. Some of the activities that he engaged in after midnight were watching sitcoms, playing video games, playing pool, eating at diners, and, more rarely, reading an assignment for a class. A few students slept so extensively and got up so late that it would have impossible for them to take morning classes. Despite the disorganized lives that many of the students led, all but three of the 80 eighty students in our sample eventually graduated. Here we relied on official university records rather than reports from students themselves. Part of the explanation may be that graduation is not a very high hurdle, as might be inferred from grade inflation. Unlike the ascetic monks studying in medieval monasteries, American students expect fun, comfort, and recreation in addition to education at our colleges and universities. When Isaac Newton went to the University of Cambridge several centuries ago, he studied seven days a week, at least ten hours a day, and actively avoided the revelry that some Cambridge undergraduates engaged in even then. No one expects American undergraduates to work as hard as Isaac Newton or medieval monks. However, what seems to be happening on many American college campuses is the development of such a powerful "fun" culture that a quarter of the students or more arrive thinking that having fun is the main reason they are at college and that the pursuit of knowledge should be resorted to only when they have nothing better to do. Professors usually think of higher education as an opportunity for students to learn what they do not know and should know, and some students think so too. However, learning is compelled to compete for student attention with a variety of other student interests and also with part-time work. With the cost of college high and getting higher, students say that they have to work in order to attend college at all. If the majority of the students spending 16 hours or more a week working for pay are serious students who would be studying more if they did not need the money in order to help finance their educations, the loss is not only to them but to the academic atmosphere they might help to create on campus were they more visible. On the other hand, working for pay may contribute to the academic seriousness of the college culture rather than detracting from it if student reports are to be believed. I am referring not only to students in work-study programs whose work consists of helping a professor with his research. Students who take menial jobs in the college dining hall of or the building maintenance operation often say that having the discipline of a job helps them to organize their time more efficiently, including time for studying. If students working for pay would not take their academic responsibilities more seriously if they had no job, their employment is not an impediment to higher education. Paradoxically it may even help by getting them out of places where they would otherwise goof off. I do not know of empirical studies that could throw light on this issue. By dint of numbers, the goof-off students may have more impact on the cultural atmosphere of most college campuses than serious students who are trying to learn as much as possible. Perhaps public policy can change this, at least marginally, by providing more incentives for serious students and fewer incentives for goof-off students. ------------------------------------------------- Jackson Toby is professor emeritus of sociology and former director of the Institute for Criminological Research at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. ]]> Is an Endowment a Nest Egg or a Gambler's Stake? tag:www.mindingthecampus.com,2010:/originals//6.3380 2010-02-04T20:50:40Z 2010-02-04T13:46:02Z By Charlotte Allen College investments dropped 23 percent in 2009, the most disastrous year since the National Association of College and University Business Officers began compiling investment statistics in 1971. Two observations can be made about NACUBO's report, issued last... Anthony Paletta By Charlotte Allen College investments dropped 23 percent in 2009, the most disastrous year since the National Association of College and University Business Officers began compiling investment statistics in 1971. Two observations can be made about NACUBO's report, issued last week: One is: The richer the institution, the harder the fall, generally speaking. Harvard, the nation's wealthiest university ($26 billion at the end of fiscal year 2009), lost the most: nearly 30 percent. Yale, second wealthiest ($16 billion), lost almost as much as Harvard: almost 29 percent. It was a dreadful investing year for nearly every college endowment manager in the country, what with the deep recession and the twin collapses of the stock market and credit markets in the fall of 2008. According to the NACUBO study, co-sponsored by Commonfund, U.S. colleges and universities lost a total of $93 billion in endowment value during fiscal year 2009. The average loss was 18.7 percent; in 1974, the second-worst year, endowments lost only 11.4 percent. Not one of the nation's five wealthiest universities, a group that included, besides Harvard and Yale, Stanford, Princeton, and the University of Texas System, bested that 18.7 percent figure (Princeton emerged at the top of the five, with its $13 billion endowment losing only 23 percent of its value in fiscal 2009, while Stanford lost nearly 27 percent and Texas nearly 25 percent). According to a Jan. 28 article by Inside Higher Education's Jack Stripling, smaller colleges with lower endowments fared better than their super-rich cousins only---or at least mostly--because their endowments' relatively modest sizes barred them from either participating in the riskier investments such as hedge funds and private equity funds and also kept those schools from hiring the kind of sophisticated endowment managers who gambled their way into disaster. They were stuck, so to speak, with portfolios heavy on unadventurous investments in fixed-income securities and cash, which happened to be the only ones performing relatively well last fiscal year. After all, as Stripling's article points out, the wealthy elite institutions that lost the most remained just as wealthy and elite, comparatively speaking, as they had been before the rolling economic crash that began in 2007---in part because their high-risk investments had paid off royally during the boom years. They thus outpaced their smaller poorer cousins over the long run despite the devastating blows to the rich universities' endowments during the last two years. "Colleges with endowments over $1 billion have an average 10-year return of 6.1 percent, compared with 3.9 percent for the least wealthy," Stripling wrote---even though the 52 institutions that fell into that category suffered higher-than average endowment shrinkages of 20.5 percent during FY 2009, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. ]]> an interview with Forbes.com, Martin Dorph, NYU's senior vice president for finance, attributed his school's comparatively successful performance to the generally conservative nature of NYU's investments. NYU had a full 35 percent of its endowment in fixed-income investments at the beginning of 2009 and only 40 percent in hedge funds and private equity (the remaining 25 percent was in stocks and other equities). "Our endowment is seen as more precious because we don't have as much," Dorph said. Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and one of the most outspoken critics of the high-flying investment strategies that led to huge losses for many of the richer institutions, concurred. In a telephone interview Botstein explained that Bard, a liberal arts school in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., that enrolls only about 1,600 undergraduates plus another 600 or so graduate students, is "under-endowed" at $200 million. "Our losses were about average, at 18 or 19 percent," Botstein said. "We got hit, but not excessively. We had only one risky fund, of $11 million, and that was a security put there by a donor. Our philosophy is that [our endowment] is a cash reserve, not a main source of income for us. Returns on our endowment constitute only about 2 percent of our annual income. We prefer to rely for our operating expenses on tuition and on annual philanthropy, like hospitals and nonprofits dedicated to causes or the arts or social services. That means the money is typically spent within five years of the moment it is given." The textbook example of the opposite strategy is Harvard, which lumped together its general operating fund and its endowment for investment purposes---and ended up so strapped for cash after a $1.8 billion loss on its checkbook account for its fiscal year ending last June that it had to turn to the state of Massachusetts's bond-issuing agency for permission to issue some $2.5 billion worth of bonds, some of them tax-exempt, to meet its obligations and buy its way out of disastrous interest-rate swap contracts with investment banking firms that it had entered into in 2004. The $2.5 billion, according to a detailed Bloomberg.com story about Harvard's woes posted on Dec. 18, was around the total amount that the state usually sells annually for all colleges and universities. The swaps involved Harvard's trading a locked-in loan rate for the $2.3 billion that it planned to borrow (via bonds) in order to build a massive science campus in nearby Allston, Mass., for variable-rate obligations to be paid by J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and other Wall Street firms. It was essentially a bet by Harvard that interest rates would rise during the late 2000s (generating a profit for Harvard) instead of plunging to nearly zero as they actually did. Faced with a collateral call of nearly $1 billion from the bankers when the gamble backfired and the market value of the swaps fell, along with a liquidity crisis with respect to Harvard's cash-hemorrhaging operating accounts, the university hastily stopped work on the Allston campus and paid about $900 million in November to unwind the swap agreements. Analysts of the Harvard debacle treat it as a lesson for university financial managers tempted to dabble---as was the case not only at Harvard but at Cornell and Dartmouth, although with less disastrous results--in the novel and complex investment strategies of investment bankers and hedge funds. "I don't think that colleges should be competing with Wall Street," said Botstein, Bard's president. "Their focus should be on educating their students." So perhaps it was not simply good luck that the financial managers of poorer colleges happened to lack the sophisticated wherewithal to enter into high-risk arrangements but their deliberate decision to treat endowments as safety nets and their institutions as pay-as-you-go operations. ]]>