http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/ en Copyright 2010 Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:47:19 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 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.]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/03/recapturing_the_university_the.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/03/recapturing_the_university_the.html Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:47:19 -0500 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 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.]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/03/how_the_megacampuses_helped_ru.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/03/how_the_megacampuses_helped_ru.html Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:14:20 -0500 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.]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/03/is_the_campus_45_times_as_dang.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/03/is_the_campus_45_times_as_dang.html Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:52:36 -0500 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.]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/03/why_the_student_protestors_are.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/03/why_the_student_protestors_are.html Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:48:30 -0500 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."]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/03/antiapartheid_week_2.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/03/antiapartheid_week_2.html Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:27:10 -0500 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 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. ]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/03/by_alan_m_dershowitz_every.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/03/by_alan_m_dershowitz_every.html Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:43:03 -0500 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. ]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/03/those_disastrous_student_loans.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/03/those_disastrous_student_loans.html Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:36:17 -0500 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 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. ]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/02/why_do_anthropologists_have_th.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/02/why_do_anthropologists_have_th.html Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:42:48 -0500 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 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. ]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/02/how_corrupted_language_moved_f.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/02/how_corrupted_language_moved_f.html Tue, 23 Feb 2010 13:20:37 -0500 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.]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/02/why_tuition_goes_up_every_year.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/02/why_tuition_goes_up_every_year.html Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:53:29 -0500 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. ]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/02/should_pell_grants_be_entitlem.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/02/should_pell_grants_be_entitlem.html Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:39:21 -0500 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 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. ]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/02/yiddish_rises_again.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/02/yiddish_rises_again.html Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:32:21 -0500 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.]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/02/is_education_just_training.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/02/is_education_just_training.html Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:32:59 -0500 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