http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/ en Copyright 2010 Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:54:12 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss By Jackson Toby This is an excerpt from Professor Toby's new book, The Lowering of Higher Education in America (Praeger). The balance between the pursuit of education and the pursuit of fun varies from college to college. Students in selective colleges and universities are less likely to goof off than in unselective institutions for at least two reasons. First, the selective colleges admit high-achieving high school graduates, the bulk of whom have the ability to meet high standards of academic performance. Second, a large proportion of their students are not content merely to graduate; they intend to pursue graduate work in academic disciplines or in professional schools. When students in an undergraduate course are not motivated to do their reading assignments, whether it is a selective college or not, their professor can do little about it. Theoretically he could flunk half the class. In practice, however, the professor would fail only a few of them. (Failing half of the students in a class would be a public-relations disaster for the professor.) Thus, even in selective colleges, standards depend on what students are willing to learn as well as on what professors believe they ought to learn. The students in a class and the professor set the standards of academic performance by an implicit process of collective negotiation. In the unselective colleges there is an additional complication: some students are so badly underprepared for college-level work that they cannot perform well even if they were motivated to do so. Here the negotiation process is affected by professorial resignation to the limitations of their clientele. Furthermore, some professors have ideological objections to failing students who have performed very poorly. Some believe that positive and negative sanctions (grades) do not work.]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/02/by_jackson_toby_this_is.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/02/by_jackson_toby_this_is.html Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:54:12 -0500 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. ]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/02/there_are_two_observations_to.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/02/there_are_two_observations_to.html Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:50:40 -0500 By Peter D. Salins Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University is a short, provocative book that raises many more questions than it answers. Its greatest contribution is that it clearly delineates the development of the American university from its origins in the late 19th century to the many absurdities that characterize it today. Menand's exposition of the various key events and trends that have shaped the contemporary American university runs like a stream throughout the book's occasionally disjointed sections and chapters (the book is largely a compilation of lectures he gave at the University of Virginia). What we learn is that, for the most part, all of the key features of the American university as we know it today emerged full-blown in a burst of academic gestation over a single generation - approximately 1870 to 1900 - largely through the efforts of one man, Charles Eliot, Harvard University's president from 1869 to 1909. Although Menand reviews the important ways in which the American university has changed since then, describing some of the key twists and turns along the way, he stresses that much has remained the same - often for no particularly good reason. Menand divides the American university's historical evolution into three distinct phases: a formative period running from its launch in 1870 under the influence of Harvard's Eliot through its institutional maturation in the 20th century up to the onset World War II; a "golden age" of rapid expansion in enrollment, funding and prestige that lasted from 1945 to 1970, a product of post-war population and economic growth and the cold war, heavily influenced by another Harvard president, James Bryant Conant; and a post-golden age phase taking us from 1970 to the present, that Frederick Hess (but not Menand) has aptly dubbed the "politically correct" university. ]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/02/review_essay_by_peter_d.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/02/review_essay_by_peter_d.html Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:46:09 -0500 By Ron Radosh Howard Zinn's death yesterday affords us the opportunity to evaluate the remarkable influence he has had on the American public's understanding of our nation's past. His book A People's History of the United States, published in 1980 with a first printing of 5000 copies, went on to sell over two million. To this day some 128,000 new copies are sold each year. That alone made Zinn perhaps the single most influential historian whose works have reached multitudes of Americans. Indeed, Zinn found that his book was regularly adopted as a text in high schools and most surprisingly, in many colleges and universities. One can easily summarize the argument Zinn makes in that book, as well as on his recent television special on The History Channel and soon to be released DVD, called "The People Speak." America, he charges, was guilty of waging war on those who really made the American nation: Native Americans, African-Americans, the working-class, the poor, and women. American history, as Zinn saw it, was that of a history of "genocide: brutally and purposefully waged by our rulers in the name of progress. He claimed that these truths were buried "in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth." Zinn was aided in getting his book attention by two youthful neighbors, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. When both became movie stars, they used their celebrity to popularize Zinn's work and to help bring it to a wide audience. As Damon told the press recently, Zinn's message showed that what our ancestors rebelled "against oftentimes are exactly the same things we're up against now." Zinn himself added a few weeks ago that his hope was that his work will spread new rebellion, and "lead into a larger movement for economic justice." ]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/01/america_the_awfulhoward_zinns.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/01/america_the_awfulhoward_zinns.html Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:58:49 -0500 By Daniel B. Klein Two researchers offer a new twist on an old question---why do college professors overwhelmingly lean to the left? Bias against conservatives is not the main reason, nor are the allegedly higher IQs of liberals, say Neil Gross of the University of British Columbia and Ethan Fosse of Harvard. Instead they suggest a theory of "path dependence" --few conservatives are attracted to work in scholarly fields dominated by the left, just as few males want to be nurses in a traditionally female field. People tend to giggle when a man wants to become a nurse, they say, and conservatives tend to feel similar embarrassment in entering leftist academe. This giggle theory underrates what leftist domination does to faculties. In the recent book The Politically Correct University: Problems, Scope and Reforms, Charlotta Stern and I discuss groupthink mechanisms. The majoritarian procedure of each department means that once a majority leans left, the department will tend toward leftist uniformity. The pyramidal structure of each discipline means that publication, awards, grants, recommendations will follow the pyramid's apex, and if the apex goes left it tends to sweep leftists/neuters into job posts throughout the pyramid. If leftists have a lock on many fields, it means that non-left applicants will tend to be screened out. Awareness of that feeds back to the non-left student's thoughts about the future. Self-selection is a function of the screening. ]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/01/by_daniel_b_klein_two.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/01/by_daniel_b_klein_two.html Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:14:02 -0500 By Mary Grabar "Who are you kidding?" I wanted to get up and ask the English professor who was giving a talk at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association convention in November. He was analyzing a graphic novel, the spaces between panels, the line widths of the panels, the lettering inside the "speech bubbles." Maybe he was trying to keep his job in a field that by job postings indicates increasing irrelevance. Students are leaving English departments in droves. "This is a profession that is losing its will to live," proclaimed William Deresiewicz, former English professor himself, in 2008 in the pages of the Nation, no less. It's been a death by slow suicide. The reference to "spaces" coming from the podium was the same kind of self-abusive parsing, I had seen applied by deconstructionists in the 1990s when I was a graduate student. The depressed patient, failing to see any worth in his work, had leveled the greatest works to "texts." Reading between the lines of "text" has evolved into reading the gaps between panels: "Lots of stuff happens in that silent space," said the professor. ]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/01/death_by_suicide_the_end_of_en.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/01/death_by_suicide_the_end_of_en.html Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:21:40 -0500 By Cathy Young The death of feminist philosopher, theologian and former Boston College professor Mary Daly earlier this month at the age of 81 received fairly little notice in the media. What attention Daly did receive, however, was almost entirely of the positive kind. Time magazine ran a short obituary by fellow radical feminist Robin Morgan, who eulogized Daly as "a fierce intellectual, an intrepid scholar, a wicked wit and an uncompromising radical" as well as "a central figure in contemporary feminist thought." A Boston Globe editorial called Daly "a fighter" as well as "a vital figure in feminism and in the recent history of Catholicism in America," while acknowledging that her radicalism was at times excessive. Trained as a Roman Catholic theologian, Daly eventually became a self-proclaimed 'post-Christian' whose vitriolic anti-Catholicism went far beyond liberal demands for reform. She wrote, notably, that 'a woman's asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person's demanding equality in the Ku Klux Klan.' She continued, nonetheless, to teach at Catholic Boston College for more than 30 years, despite openly deriding that school as 'a laboratory for patriarchal tricks.' Daly's most notorious moment came in 1999, when she became embroiled in a controversy about her policy of barring men from her "Introduction to Feminist Ethics" course. A Boston College senior, Duane Naquin, complained. Since Daly's practices were a clear violation of one of the feminists' favorite laws, Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments - which forbids educational institutions that benefit from any federal funds to discriminate on the basis of gender, except for single-sex schools - the college ordered her to admit Naquin into the class. Daly discontinued the class instead. After a prolonged squabble, she either she either resigned (according to the college) or was kicked out (according to her).]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/01/the_death_of_a_radical.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/01/the_death_of_a_radical.html Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:03:37 -0500 By Donald Downs

Cary Nelson, current president of the American Association of University Professors, has a new book dealing with academic freedom and its relationship to broader structural problems in higher education. No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom is interesting and important, but also frustrating. It provides remedies to the problems confronting academic freedom at the same time that it reflects some of the problems it purports to remedy. Nelson is compelled to criticize the nation's faculty members for their lackadaisical support of academic freedom at the same time that he feels obliged to vehemently defend higher education from critics who attack higher education for this very reason. Balancing these positions makes sense if one carefully distinguishes valid and invalid attacks, and Nelson often succeeds in doing so. But too often his defenses of higher education come across as special pleading for the professoriate as a class, thereby weakening his claims. Once upon a time the AAUP was the nation's leading supporter of academic freedom. In recent decades, however, its prestige has slipped. A couple of years ago the Chronicle of Higher Education featured articles on this reversal of fortune, citing such matters as the AAUP's bureaucratic inertia, the association's perceived complacency about the chilling effects of political correctness, and broader trends in higher education that have made faculty members less knowledgeable and appreciative of the organization's efforts. Leaner and meaner, FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, founded in 2000 in Philadelphia) has replaced the AAUP as the nation's most vibrant fighter for academic freedom. FIRE is conscientiously non-ideological, but its eagerness to take on the policies of political correctness that suppress freedom has made it a favorite of the right in addition to the civil libertarian left. Nelson's ascendancy to the presidency of the AAUP represents the organization's effort to regain its past glory. He is a prolifically published, self-proclaimed "radical" (for academic freedom and other causes), a claim that makes him a left-wing answer to FIRE in terms of commitment. Among Nelson's impressive list of publications we find Manifesto of a Tenured Radical and Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left. Nelson's left-wing legacy is important to his arguments because his approach to academic freedom is steeped in a broader leftist framework. ]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/01/cary_nelsons_no_university_is.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/01/cary_nelsons_no_university_is.html Book Reviews Free Speech Politics Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:06:59 -0500 By Charlotte Allen Why do our for-profit colleges seem so disappointing? Why are they plagued by high levels of student debt, high loan-default percentages, dismal graduation rates, and third-rate reputations that lead some employers to reject their graduates automatically? Sure, back in the old days there were plenty of commercial schools whose sole raison d'etre was apparently to separate students from their money: those correspondence law schools that advertised on matchbooks and the art academies that would accept you if you could doodle a stick figure onto a restaurant napkin. But today the situation seems exponentially worse. Commercial colleges, which enroll 2 million out of America's 17 million college students, now seem to be not so much diploma mills as non-diploma mills, where the vast majority of enrollees pay tuition bills comparable to those at four-year public universities but never manage to graduate. Katherine Gibbs, for example, limped along for decades trying to offer alternate career training after the market for private secretaries dried up during the 1970s, then permanently shut its doors in 2009 amid complaints to state regulatory agencies about unqualified faculty members, shoddy and inadequate course offerings, and four-year schools unwilling to accept Gibbs transfer credits. The chain's redoubtable foundress must be turning over in her grave. What happened? How did a for-profit college model morph into today's basement-reputation for-profit model, exemplified by Saturday Night Live's fictional "University of Westfield," where the students mainly learn how to fudge the fact that their degree are from the University of Westfield? I blame the corrupting influence of federal money, the easily available Pell grants and guaranteed loans that began to flow with the passage of the Higher Education Act of 1965. Easy federal money has contributed to a vast growth in enrollments at both non-profit and commercial institutions, a ballooning of tuition costs, and, in the for-profit sector, a focus not on the academic outcomes that might build a school's reputation as a selling point but upon getting as many bodies as possible into their classrooms. Let's take the enormous---and vastly profitable--University of Phoenix, with its nearly 400,000 students in 39 states as well as online. Phoenix is regarded as one of the more reputable commercial schools, and it has gained respect over the last two years for issuing fairly candid reports about its strengths and shortcomings. Still, Phoenix and its parent company, Apollo Group, have had their troubles during the last decade---and recently entered into a $78.5 million settlement regarding allegations that Phoenix illegally paid cash bonuses and other gifts to recruiters based on the number of young people they signed up for classes. Phoenix derives an ever-increasing amount---more than three quarters during its 2008 fiscal year, according to a March article in Business Week--of its $3 billion-plus annual revenue from federal student aid. Ii's the biggest recipient of Pell grants in the nation. Yet Phoenix's graduation rates seem abysmal. According to the U.S. Education Department, only 4 percent of Phoenix's students who entered four-year-programs as freshmen graduated within six years, compared with 55 percent of students at non-profit four-year schools. And an executive-search company specializing in financial services told Business Week that a Phoenix degree didn't "add any value" to a graduate's resume.]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/01/the_failure_of_forprofit_schoo.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/01/the_failure_of_forprofit_schoo.html Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:51:31 -0500 By Frank J. Macchiarola and Michael C. Macchiarola Why do law schools charge higher and higher tuitions that keep outrunning the cost of living? In the two decades ending in 2007, according to the American Bar Association, the cost of attending the average private law school (including tuition and fees) more than tripled--increasing from $8,911 a year to $32,367. Unsurprisingly, the average amount borrowed by law students has risen just as dramatically. Last year's average private law student graduated with more than $87,000 in law school debt. In trying to understand this phenomenon, many have blamed the American Bar Association's Standards for Law Schools. The ABA accredits 200 American law schools that adhere to the Standards and, by doing so, permit their graduates to sit for the bar examination in every state. These standards govern student's course of study, the law school's administration, the faculty's rights and obligations and the adequacy of the physical plant. Among other things, law schools are reviewed in a comprehensive three-day site visit with several visitors every seven years to maintain their accreditation. Others, particularly law school deans, who face competitive pressures from other law schools, have blamed the U.S. News and World Report rankings of law schools. These critics believe the rankings spark a tournament of law schools to compete on the magazine's terms, often at great costs and at the expense of more student-centered activities. In a December 2009 report to the Congress, the General Accounting Office dealt, in part, with concerns that have been raised about how some of the accreditation standards of the ABA may affect the cost of law school. ]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/01/does_us_news_make_law_schools.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/01/does_us_news_make_law_schools.html Costs and Tuition Professional Schools Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:39:45 -0500 By Roger Clegg Should universities weigh race and ethnicity in deciding whom to hire for their science departments? The American Association for the Advancement of Science thinks so, according to a recent National Journal article. "Science and engineering should look like the rest of the population," says AAAS's Daryl Chubin, and if hiring decisions don't yield the right numbers, "somebody needs to pull the plug and say this has not been an open and fair search." Taking steps to ensure that the best possible individuals apply and are hired is fine---indeed, that's precisely what the whole process should be about. Casting your recruiting net far and wide is a good idea, as is reassessing your recruiting policies to make sure that you are not overlooking good sources of candidates. Reevaluating selection criteria from time to time is, likewise, unobjectionable; if some criteria are weighed too heavily or not heavily enough, with the result that the best individuals are not selected, then that needs to be fixed. And, of course, everyone involved in the selection process, from beginning to end, needs to be told that the best individuals, regardless of skin color or national origin, are to be picked. But it's clear that nondiscrimination is exactly what AAAS does not have in mind. The National Journal article says that it wants to "allocate additional slots to U.S. racial and ethnic minorities" and to protect universities from "likely lawsuits by groups seeking color-blind admissions policies." As the quotes above suggest, it is demanding that schools get their numbers right. It wants quotas, it wants race and ethnicity to be weighed when hiring decisions are made. ]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/01/another_bad_idea_diversifying.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/01/another_bad_idea_diversifying.html Diversity Professors and Tenure Quotas and Preferences Thu, 07 Jan 2010 13:54:34 -0500 By Charlotte Allen Shortly after his inauguration in January President Obama announced a proposal to get rid of a 44-year-old program known as the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program. In the FFEL system, the federal government guarantees loans to students from private banks and similar institutions under a variety of programs (the best known is the so-called "Stafford" loan) to help pay for the students' education, whether at the undergraduate or postgraduate level. The idea behind FFEL, part of a massive piece of 1965 legislation designed to make higher education more attainable and affordable to larger numbers of Americans, is to encourage private lenders to extend credit for college to a cohort of society that would otherwise not qualify for loans that these days can total tens of thousands of dollars a year. In return for guaranteeing student loans against their borrowers' default, the U.S. Education Department charges the lenders modest fees and sets maximum allowable interest rates. Under Obama's plan all students needing higher-education loans would instead obtain them through the William D. Ford Federal Direct Student Loan Program (Direct Loan for short), a Clinton administration creation of 1993 in which the U.S. Education Department itself lends money for post-secondary education. The only role that private banks and other institutions such as Sallie Mae (the formerly government-backed but, since 2004, completely private entity that currently originates about a fourth of all FFEL loans) would continue to play in student lending would be to service some of the loans under contract with the department. The administration argues that eliminating private financial institutions as middlemen (until the administration embarked on its anti-bank stance Sallie Mae and other private entities accounted for 80 percent of the $92 billion federally subsidized loan market, and it continues to issue about 58 percent of those loans), would save the government $87 billion over the next 10 years in default payouts and interest subsidies to institutions that lend to students who demonstrate financial need. (For subsidized loans, the government pays the interest until the student leaves school; for unsubsidized loans, the interest accumulates, but the student is not obliged to make payments before leaving school, and there is also a variety of repayment and forgiveness plans geared to income levels after graduation.) Under Obama's proposal the government would use part of the anticipated savings to put another $40 million into beefing up funding for Pell grants, yet another federal aid program for college students launched in 1973 and named (in 1980) after the recently deceased Democratic Sen. Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island. Under the Pell program, which costs the government $18 billion annually, about 7 million low-income college students (the ceiling family income is $40,000) receive outright grants from the government (the current annual maximum is $5,350), to help pay for their college educations. ]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/01/shortly_after_his_inauguration.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/01/shortly_after_his_inauguration.html Costs and Tuition Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:14:05 -0500 By Matt Shaffer As the senior class of Yale College prepares for its final semester and reflects on the Bright College Years so swiftly gliding by, I have heard one phrase repeated with surprising frequency: "I wish I had done Directed Studies." It's a statement that doesn't accord with the stereotype of Yale seniors as either careerists shaking hands toward Wall Street or activists uninterested in the intellectual foundations of their slogans. Directed Studies is a full year, freshmen-only Great Books program. The very short, very intense introduction to the Western Canon consists of three courses per semester--one in Literature, Philosophy, and History & Political Thought each. All students together attend lectures by professors like Harold Bloom, Dave Kastan, Donald Kagan, Charles Hill, and others less famous but equally revered by their students. Afterward, students break out into smaller discussion seminars. The program has a reputation for being demanding, and a quick look at the syllabus shows why. The spring semester in Literature alone includes Don Quijote, War and Peace, Swann in Love, Paradise Lost, Faust, and more. The fall semester in History and Political Thought covers Thucydides' and Herodotus' histories, The Republic, Aristotle's Politics, Livy, Tacitus and Augustine! And both are just one out of three for the semester.]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2009/12/as_the_senior_class_of.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2009/12/as_the_senior_class_of.html Core Studies Curriculum Wed, 30 Dec 2009 12:04:03 -0500 By Sally Satel Imagine you are a sophomore in college. The semester has been academically overwhelming, and your girlfriend recently dumped you. One night it reaches crisis level and you go to campus mental health worried you might harm yourself. You volunteer to enter the hospital and are released a few days later feeling more hopeful. Then your college tells you to leave school. Period. No formal evaluation of your mental health condition. No discussion with you. Just out. According to a newly released report from the State of New Jersey called College Students in Crisis: Preventing Campus Suicides and Protecting Civil Rights, policies which allow or require removal based solely on the existence of suicidal thoughts or behavior may be increasing. They are premised on the need to remove the student from the stresses of student life and to motivate them to get the care they need. In the wake of tragedies such as the self-immolation of a sophomore at M.I.T. in 2000 and the shooting spree at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 2007, concerns among administrators took on urgency. But lawyers argue that such blanket involuntary removal policies infringe upon a student's civil rights. ]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2009/12/expel_students_who_might_kill.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2009/12/expel_students_who_might_kill.html Miscellaneous Mon, 21 Dec 2009 12:15:51 -0500 By Roger Clegg Allegations of tenure discrimination have recently been leveled against Emerson College on grounds of race and against DePaul University on grounds of sex. At Emerson, two black scholars were denied tenure, the local chapter of the NAACP became involved, and an investigation has been launched by the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination. The school has agreed to give one of the professors another shot next year, in exchange for dropping his complaint with the Commission. Four women are challenging DePaul's tenure denial. They have a lawyer, have unsuccessfully appealed the denial to the school's president, and have now indicated that they plan to take DePaul to court. In neither case has direct evidence of discriminatory intent been alleged, such as racist or sexist comments. Instead, statistical disparities of one sort or another are cited. So, is there anything to these allegations?]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2009/12/allegations_of_tenure_discrimi.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2009/12/allegations_of_tenure_discrimi.html Diversity Professors and Tenure Quotas and Preferences Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:40:48 -0500