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February 6, 2012
In a column posted Saturday, New
York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane concluded that the paper had gotten
it wrong when it went after Yale quarterback Patrick Witt. Brisbane wrote "that reporting a claim of sexual assault based on
anonymous sourcing, without Mr. Witt's and the woman's side of it, was unfair
to Mr. Witt. The Times thought it was
a necessary part in its exposé of the feel-good sports story. But the impact of
the 'sexual assault' label on Mr. Witt is substantial and out of proportion for
a case that went uninvestigated and unadjudicated."
Continue reading "The Times Doubles Down against Patrick Witt" »
February 3, 2012
Claremont McKenna College, a private liberal arts school nestled in the
foothills on the eastern outskirts of Los Angeles County,
dishonored itself and defrauded the public in a cheap effort to bolster its
national rankings in U.S. News and World Report. But if that weren't bad
enough, Claremont's
deception calls into question the very worth of its students, faculty, and
graduates.
Richard Vos, Claremont's dean of
admissions for 25 years, resigned in disgrace this week after admitting to
systematically manipulating the college's SAT scores since 2005. Vos evidently
altered the mean, median, and range of SAT scores to boost the college's
position on the influential list of college rankings.
Continue reading "The Cheating and Fraud at Claremont McKenna" »
February 2, 2012
In an essay
in the Wall Street Journal plugging his new book "Coming Apart" (which I haven't
read yet), Charles Murray writes about a new American divide: "We have
developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite
schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream
America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized
not by poverty but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions."
Conservatives like Richard
Vedder see this as the inevitable result, not of a system rigged to favor
the elite, but of bad government policies, particularly in education: because
of government-sponsored grants and students loans, too many people are in
college who shouldn't be there; decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court and other
legislative actions have virtually eliminated employment testing, which paved
the way for certification inflation and the need for a college degree; laws
protecting labor unions have virtually allowed them to put a choke-hold on the
K-12 public school system.
These points have merit. But will less (or no) government
support and more "vouchers and other pro-competitive measures" at all levels of
education reverse the decline of real opportunities that Professor Vedder finds
so disheartening? Should the free market determine who has access to higher
education and can advance economically, culturally, even socially?
Continue reading "How To Bridge the Educational Divide" »
February 1, 2012
Cross-posted
from Open Market.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports
that a team of eight law firms have just "sued a dozen more law schools
across the country, accusing them of luring students with inflated
job-placement and salary statistics and leaving graduates 'burdened with debt
and with limited job prospects.' The lawyers . . . said they planned to file 20
to 25 new lawsuits every few months . . . the lawsuits had been filed on behalf
of a total of 51 graduates, and each suit was seeking class-action status. The
targets of the latest round of lawsuits" include "Brooklyn Law School
(N.Y.)," "Chicago-Kent College of Law," DePaul University College of Law,"
"Golden Gate University School of Law," "Hofstra Law School," "University of
San Francisco School of Law," "Widener University School of Law," and several
others.
Continue reading "12 More Law Schools Sued for Defrauding Students" »
January 31, 2012
In an ideal world, Richard Perez-Pena and the New York Times would have been subjected
to widespread condemnation, even shame, for the character-assassination frame
the paper gave to the Patrick Witt story. Kathleen Parker, most prominently, has
spoken with moral clarity on the issue, translating the Times argument as, "We don't know
anything, but we're smearing this guy anyway." But far more common have been
defenses of the Times--or even claims
that the Times should have done more
to portray Witt in a negative light.
Continue reading "Media "Watchdogs" Foul Up the Mess at Yale" »
The Chronicle of Higher Education
had a cover story last week by Peter Schmidt on Angana P. Chatterji and
Richard Shapiro, two anthropology professors at the California
Institute of Integral Studies who have been fired,
according to the school, because "they had breached student confidence,
falsified grades, misapplied funds, and otherwise engaged in
unprofessional conduct, generally to ensure the loyalty and obedience of
those they taught and advised."
Continue reading "The Worst College Professors Ever?" »
January 30, 2012
In
his January 29 Forum piece, Peter Sacks says that I engaged in "nitpicking" in
a blog post expressing disdain for President Obama's higher education agenda.
He's free to call my skeptical view about federal initiatives to lower the
costs of college whatever he wants. But in my opinion, it is naive to believe
politicians (not just Obama) when they claim that they are going to make any
good or service less costly. That's just glittering rhetoric.
Mr.
Sacks does raise some important issues in his piece, however and I'd like to
address them.
Continue reading "Our College Graduation Rate Doesn't Matter" »
January 29, 2012
The denouement of the Times'
coverage of Duke lacrosse came when then-sports editor Tom
Jolly apologized for the paper's guilt-presuming, error-ridden articles on
the case. Will the paper ever get around to giving former Yale quarterback
Patrick Witt an apology? With a few days perspective, it's become clear that
the Times' mishandling of the Witt story
was, in two specific ways, even worse than originally believed.
Continue reading "Will The NY Times Apologize to Patrick Witt?" »
The naysayers started their nitpicking the day after
President Obama, in his State of the Union Speech, presented his plan to
kick-start America's sputtering system of higher education. George
Leef of the Pope Center said "Obama's talk about getting tough with
colleges over tuition is pure political blather." Hans Bader and others offer
another off-center objection: we don't need a higher education policy.
Rather, we must reduce bloat! There is too much frivolous spending on
higher education's darling programs, such as campus diversity
offices. There is merit to closely examining the spending side of higher
education institutions. No doubt many programs do not find the real
target. But one can shut all the campus diversity offices at every
American college and university, and doing so would do nothing to raise
college completion rates. In fact, targeting diversity offices for
elimination could well compound the completion problem because many of
the beneficiaries of those programs are the very sort of students who
need to feel more welcome on college campuses, long dominated by
relatively well-off white students, white administrators, and white
professors.
Continue reading "Let's Be Serious About Higher-Ed" »
January 27, 2012
Cross-posted from Open Market.
In his State of the Union Address, President Obama decried
skyrocketing college tuition, attempting to take advantage of public anger
over the steadily-worsening
college
tuition
bubble.
This was ironic, since his own Administration has done much to foster rising
college tuitions.
For example, it imposed
the 90-10 rule, which forced low-cost educational institutions to raise
their tuition to comply with a new federal regulation requiring them to charge
enough over federal financial aid so that at least 10 percent of education
costs don't come from financial aid. For example, Corinthian College had
diploma programs in health care and other fields that can be completed in a
year or less. Until 2011, many of those programs had a total cost of about
$15,000, which meant that federal grants and loans could cover nearly 100
percent of their cost. In response to the Education Department's rule, the
college raised
tuition to comply with the 90/10 rule. The net
result of the Obama Education Department's rule was to "create a perverse,
no-win 'Catch-22' that could prevent low-income students from attending
college," by encouraging such colleges to raise tuition to outstrip rising
financial aid by more than ten percent. Administration allies like Senator
Richard Durbin (D-IL) are now pushing a new rule, the 85-15 rule, that would require
low-cost institutions to further raise tuition so that at least 15 percent of
education costs aren't covered by financial aid. (With this kind of
mentality, it is no wonder that college graduation rates have actually "fallen
somewhat since the 1970s" "among poor and working-class students").
Continue reading "Obama Fosters the Skyrocketing Tuition He Criticized" »
Over the past year, FIRE has led a campaign of civil liberties
organizations against the Obama administration's infamous "Dear Colleague"
letter, which ordered colleges and universities to lower the burden of proof in
their on-campus judicial proceedings. The letter demanded that all universities
receiving federal funds employ a "preponderance of the evidence" standard (in
other words, a 50.1 percent degree of certainty) to determine guilt on
allegations of sexual assault.
Given that campus judicial procedures already are tilted,
often wildly so, in favor of sexual-complaint accusers, the letter has produced
a guilty-unless-proven-innocent standard for accused students. In at least one
case, that of Caleb Warner at
the University of North Dakota, the standard (before FIRE's involvement)
amounted to guilty even when proved innocent by the local police.
Continue reading "The Times Vilifies Another Athlete, Presenting No Evidence" »
January 26, 2012
Mark Emmert, the head of the NCAA, is a man with a mission. A
series of unprecedented scandals has eroded confidence in big-time college
sports. In fact, some critics contend the NCAA is an enabler that is
compromised by the billions of dollars colleges earn through football and
basketball programs. Mr. Emmert is intent on changing that perception.
Some contend that the so-called student-athlete should be paid
and, at the very least, have called for "extra money" for athletes. Others
argue that those who violate recruitment regulations and the maintenance of
minimal academic standards should be prohibited from Bowl games and March
Madness tournament participation. With 338 Division I members, whose budgets
range from $5 million to $155 million consensus is not easily achieved. And
some, Joe Nocera of the New York Times for example, contend that "Many NCAA
infractions consist of actions that most people would consider perfectly appropriate
- and entirely legal - but that the NCAA has chosen to criminalize."
Continue reading "What to Do About Big-Money College Sports?" »
January 25, 2012
What does a young academic need to do to qualify for tenure? For the answer, take a look at this recent survey of provosts. In a set of questions regarding tenure, the key question was, do you agree with this statement?: "Junior faculty today confront rising standards for tenure--standards that many of their senior colleagues could not have met when they were up for tenure."
An overwhelming majority of provosts agreed--71 percent from public doctorate universities, 72 percent from public masters universities, and 65 percent from private doctorate universities. This finding is important, not because it marks a major trend of recent times, but because of the opposite--at least that is the case in my area, the humanities. The rising standards have been in place since the mid-1970s, when the job market started to tighten up after massive hirings in the late-60s and early-70s. When I came out of grad school and hit the job market in the late-80s--a bad time to look for a tenure-track post--I and my peers grumbled about how little sympathy we got from 50-year-old professors who were able to snag a job before they even finished their dissertation, and were able to earn tenure by completing their dissertation and publishing an article or two.
Continue reading "After 5,500 Publications on Melville, What's Left for Number 5,501 to Say?" »
January 24, 2012
That question
was the start of an item I posted yesterday on Facebook, referring to KC
Johnson's excellent essay (above), The Ruinous Reign of Race-and-Gender
Historians. It was a question for a reason: the two super techies in our
family, my wife Jackie, editor of the quite brilliant
financial-business-political site, The
Fiscal Times, and my youngest daughter Alex, a technical whiz at Reuters,
have been telling me (a dedicated non-techie) that to attract comments on Facebook
and other social media sites, it's always best to start with a question. Sure
enough, my item drew a lot of comments. The 15th and best came from Alan Charles Kors, an outstanding
professor of history at Penn, co-founder of FIRE and co-author of "The Shadow
University." He wrote: " Not the most corrupted department on campuses---try
English, Comp Lit, Ethnic Studies, Women's Studies, and on---but the most
tragically corrupted department." I agree--his list is worse. But history
matters and reform of our wayward history departments is urgent.
January 23, 2012
A recent study by Harvard's School of Public Health concludes that a third of
all American campuses are now officially "dry"--no beer or booze allowed for
students. This policy has drawn a lot of support from those who believe it
creates communities less focused on drinking. But opponents claim it forces
binge-drinking underground, restricts student freedom, and probably will prove
no more effective than the original Prohibition of 1919 to 1933.
Continue reading "Dry Campuses--A Solution to Binge-drinking or Not?" »
January 20, 2012
Cross-posted from
Open Market.A school superintendent has labeled a column in a school newspaper that criticized homosexuality as "bullying." (The Shawano High School newspaper decided to run dueling student opinion pieces on whether same-sex couples should be able to adopt children; the student article that was labeled as "bullying" answered the question "no." The school district also publicly apologized for the column, and said that it is "taking steps to prevent items of this nature from happening in the future.")
Continue reading "The Ever-Expanding Concept of "Bullying" Casts an Ominous Shadow Over Free Speech" »
January 19, 2012
NAS president
Peter Wood has defended the organization's handling
of the Jennifer Keeton case, which I have criticized on both legal and, more recently, policy grounds. Though I strongly sympathize
with the general ideals of NAS, the organization's off-base position on Keeton,
which Wood's essay reaffirms, has ended its heretofore consistent--and
commendable--resistance to on-campus preferences.
Continue reading "The NAS & Keeton: Opposition to Preferences Must Be Consistent" »
January 17, 2012
A news story here has garnered some attention; it's
about how "Black students at Duke University are angry over a university
research paper that found African-American undergraduates at the school are
disproportionally more likely to switch from tough majors to easier ones."
There's not much in it that denies the truth of the paper's conclusion, but
what's interesting is that the story suggests that many think that
researchers should keep such unpleasant facts to themselves:
"The implications and intentions of this research at the hands of our very
own prestigious faculty, seemingly without a genuine concern for proactively
furthering the well-being of the black community is hurtful and alienating,"
wrote the officers of Duke's Black Student Alliance in an email sent to the
state NAACP.
Continue reading "No Research, Please, Unless It Helps Our Cause" »
Elizabeth Warren's campaign for a Massachusetts senate seat
may be most known outside the state for this statement she made a few months
back:
"You built a factory out there? Good for you. But
I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us
paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in
your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid
for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize
everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because
of the work the rest of us did."
Continue reading "Elizabeth Warren--Well-Paid Populist Professor" »
January 16, 2012
On June 28, 2010, the Supreme Court of the United States narrowly
ruled in Christian Legal Society v.
Martinez that a university's "all-comers" nondiscrimination policy trumped
the right of a Christian student organization to select its leaders according
to the group's religious beliefs. According
to the Supreme Court, a Christian student group confronted with such a policy
could not exclude a Muslim or atheist from leadership and had to give them the
same chance to lead as a Christian. It
was "surely reasonable," declared the Court that "the . . . educational
experience is best promoted when all participants in the forum must provide
equal access to all students."
Continue reading "Is the Court Changing Its Stand on Religious Freedom?" »
January 14, 2012
FIRE
(the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) has attracted
important support for its open letter asking the Department of Education
to define harassment
narrowly enough to allow genuinely free speech on campus. Many colleges
and universities ban expression that might be considered "offensive" or
cause "embarrassment" or "ridicule." The January 6 letter, sent to
Russlyn Ali, assistant secretary for civil rights
in the Education Department, has been signed by, among others, the
National Association of Scholars, the Alliance Defense Fund Center for
Academic Freedom, Feminists for Free Expression and ACTA, the American
Council of Trustees and Alumni.
January 13, 2012
Last week on its "Working It Out" page, The Atlantic Monthly posed a far-reaching question: Should each college be required to
prominently post consumer information for prospective students -- a kind of
nutrition label for higher ed?
Continue reading "A Consumer Report for Colleges?" »
January 11, 2012
The law school at the University of Iowa, like so many
departments at so many institutions of higher learning, has a faculty that is
politically pretty much of one mind, with (as of 2007) 46 registered Democrats
and only one registered Republican. When instructor Teresa Wagner applied for a
professor's post in her specialty, legal writing, she was warned more than once
that her incongruous political background - she is an outspoken conservative
and active in the right-to-life movement - would be likely to hurt her chances.
An associate dean, Jonathan Carlson, wrote to Dean Carolyn Jones in 2007:
"Frankly, one thing that worries me is that some people may be opposed to
Teresa serving in any role, in part at least because they so despise her
politics (and especially her activism about it). I hate to think that is the
case, and I don't actually think it is, but I'm worried that I'm missing
something."
Continue reading "Those Pesky Conservatives Just Aren't Bright Enough" »
January 9, 2012
Minding the
Campus readers who follow college basketball doubtless have heard about former
St. Joe's center Todd O'Brien. For others, to recap his story: a few years ago,
the NCAA instituted a rule to allow student-athletes who graduate in four years
but have one year of athletic eligibility remaining to transfer to another
institution, provided that the new school had a graduate program not offered at
their previous school. Each year, a handful of students, mostly in football and
men's basketball (the sports that most frequently use redshirts, and thus have
players who use all five years of their eligibility) take advantage of the
rule. This season, the highest-profile such figure, quarterback Russell Wilson,
led Wisconsin
to the Rose Bowl.
Continue reading "FERPA: Last Refuge of Academic Scoundrels?" »
January 5, 2012
As I noted
previously, a three-judge panel of 11th Circuit made a troubling decision in
the Jennifer Keeton case. But it did so not because it declined to reinstate
Keeton, a Counseling student who said that she would recommend "conversion
therapy" for prospective teenage clients who were gay and lesbian. As the
decision noted, Keeton demanded "preferential,
not equal, treatment," seeking to ignore the field's ethical guidelines
of counselors putting their clients' interests ahead of their own personal or religious
beliefs. The decision was troubling
because its findings could, and likely will, be used by colleges and
universities in the circuit to stifle legitimate student freedoms on campus.
Continue reading "Keeton Defense Contradicts NAS Principles" »
A central
component of the groupthink academy is the law of group polarization--that
in environments (such as most humanities and social sciences departments) in
which people basically think alike, more extreme versions of the common
assumption will emerge. Within the academy, that condition has had the effect
of producing more extreme new faculty hires and less pedagogical diversity.
Outside the academy, the prevalence of groupthink has had the unintended
consequence of making the views of "mainstream" academics of little use even
for their seeming political allies.
Continue reading "Groupthink & Political Analysis" »
January 4, 2012
As a dean at a rural community college in Illinois, I
recently served as a judge for a history fair for seventh and eighth graders at
a local school--an assignment that involved a real surprise. When the Social
Studies teacher gave me the grading rubric, I saw only three categories: Superior,
Excellent, and Good. I asked the teacher what I was supposed to do if a
presentation was bad or poor. She looked at me and said, with a straight face,
"Good means poor." "How so?" I asked. "What kind of semantic gymnastics is
that? Does that mean that superior is above average, and excellent is average?"
She didn't answer the question, but said that the students worked really hard
on their projects and the school didn't want any of them to feel discouraged.
If they scored in the 70s, then their presentation was considered bad. "But
you're telling them that it is good," I said.
Continue reading "A Test Where 'Good" Means 'Terrible'" »
January 3, 2012
In the next 10 months, we shall see the college campus to be a center of Democratic activity. The reason appears in this short piece at The New Republic
by Ruy Teixeira.
According to Teixeira, the youth vote is crucial to Obama's
reelection, 18-29-year-olds forming one of his strongest support groups.
In 2008, the youth vote went for Obama by a 2-to-1 rate, a huge
disparity that, I believe, has never been seen before in presidential
elections.
If those numbers hold up, and if the youth vote turns out as well
as it did in 08, when 51 percent of them went to the polls (a huge gain
over the 40 percent that turned out in 2000), Obama's prospects improve
significantly. It may
make the difference.
Continue reading "Obama Campus 2012" »
December 30, 2011
In the groupthink academy, perhaps the most opaque, but significant, personnel process comes in the hiring of new faculty. In a flawed tenure case (as I came to discover), some precedent exists for the courts (or, in my case, fair-minded senior administrators) intervening to undo an ethically improper outcome. In the typical hiring process, however, there's almost no chance of any type of outside intervention, since it's almost impossible to prove ideological, or political, or pedagogical discrimination. The result, of course, has been a tyranny of the majority in most humanities and many social science departments around the country.
Continue reading "More Ideological Discrimination at the University of Iowa?" »
December 23, 2011
I've written before of the peculiar case of Brown and
Marcella Dresdale. In 2006, Dresdale accused another Brown freshman, William
McCormick, of sexual assault. But she didn't go the local police, and she never
filed charges. Instead, she went to the Brown administration--over which, it
turned out, her father Richard, a major Brown donor, exercised considerable
influence. After a prosecution-friendly process in which McCormick's only
advocate was an assistant wrestling coach, McCormick accepted what amounted to
a plea bargain, and agreed to leave Brown. The university never formally
investigated Dresdale's charges.
There matters might have ended, but McCormick and his family
decided to file a federal suit against both Dresdales and Brown. Their basic
claim: that Brown had railroaded McCormick to accommodate the demands not of
justice but of a major donor.
The case meandered its way through various courts and judges
until this summer, but recently a district court had upheld McCormick's
discovery demands--related to what sort of communication between the Dresdales
and Brown administrators about the case. It seems that the Dresdales really
didn't want McCormick and his attorneys to get access to this material. On Wednesday,
the Dresdales and the McCormicks announced that they had reached an
out-of-court settlement.
As is customary in such matters, terms weren't released,
though the fact that the development came so close on the heels of the
discovery order gives a good sense of which side prevailed. The settlement
also, ironically, proved the McCormicks' claims that Brown effectively acted
not as an institution of higher learning but as an agent of the Dresdales. The
settlement's terms preclude the McCormicks not only from suing the Dresdales
but also from suing Brown--even though Brown wasn't officially a party to the
settlement negotiations. It appears that Richard Dresdale was willing to offer
more money to shield the school from the sunlight of discovery. Brown's spokesperson,
however, issued an Orwellian statement about how, regardless of the apparent
cover-up and Brown's fierce attempts to prevent the McCormicks from getting
access to data about the school's decisionmaking process, "the university stood ready at all times during this
litigation to prove in court that it had acted appropriately and in accordance
with applicable laws, policies and procedures."
A final point, on coverage of the case. Kudos to Bloomberg
News, whose article on the settlement references the Dresdales by name.
Contrast that approach with the Laura Crimaldi of the Associated Press, whose
article never uses the Dresdales' name and instead explains that a settlement
was reached between McCormick, his family, and "his
accuser and her father." (This shielding policy even prevents the AP
from referencing the name of the case, McCormick
v. Dresdale.) Again: Marcella Dresdale never filed charges. She appears
never to have gone to a hospital for a rape examination. Her father paid out an
undisclosed sum of money to prevent documents regarding Brown's handling of the
case from coming to light. And yet the AP believes that she's still entitled to
the cloak of anonymity?
December 19, 2011
Both of my
parents were public school teachers, and through them I gained an appreciation
of the value of teachers' unions. Though the NEA and AFT can sometimes
frustrate public education reforms, they play a critical role in giving
teachers a seat at the table in setting education policies. Indeed, perhaps the
most objectionable aspect of Wisconsin
governor Scott Walker's union law came in his decision to apply its provisions
to teachers' unions even as he shielded unions that represent similarly
situated police and firefighters.
Continue reading "The NEA: Union "Activists" as Diversicrats" »
Crossposted
from OpenMarket.org The New York Times featured an excellent news story
Sunday by David Segal on the costly white elephant that is legal education
in America. He describes how law school is expensive because of
government-enforced accreditation standards that prevent law schools from
containing costs even if they wanted to (and in truth, most law schools are all
too happy to jack up their costs and pass them on to law students and consumers
of legal services): "the lack of affordable law school options, scholars say,
helps explain why so many Americans don't hire lawyers" when they genuinely
need legal assistance or advice. One reason for that is that lawyers who incur
a fortune in student loans need to bring (or defend) big-ticket lawsuits -- even
socially destructive lawsuits -- to pay off their loans, instead of providing
badly needed legal advice and assistance to people of modest means, who can pay
less, even though handling their unmet legal needs would be much more
meaningful work for conscientious lawyers. (Certain types
of lawsuits are favored by one-way
fee-shifting statutes that encourage trial lawyers to bring those particular
types of lawsuits, even when the entity being sued is probably innocent.)
Continue reading "What Do the Law Schools Think They're Doing?" »
December 16, 2011
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