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July 29, 2010
The New York Times Room for Debate page hosted a forum last week entitled "What If College Tenure Dies?" As the preamble rightly notes, the question follows from an increasing shift in university personnel away tenure and tenure-track lines and toward adjuncts and lecturers hired on temporary contracts. The numbers are stark:
In 1975, 57 percent of all college professors had tenure or were on a tenure track. In 2007, that number had fallen to 31 percent, and a new federal report, to be released in the fall, is expected to show another decline for 2009 . . .
What will happen when the rate slides into a non-critical mass (less than 20 percent)?, the Times asks.
Continue reading "Tenure Is Fading--Is that Really So Bad?" »
July 28, 2010
If damaging evidence against affirmative action turns up in a pro-affirmative action book, the author often explains it away as misunderstood or exaggerated. This has happened once again, this time to a book that made no splash when it was published last October, but drew attention here at Minding the Campus in criticism that spread to Ross Douthat's column in The New York Times, Pat Buchanan's syndicated column and now Time magazine.
The book is No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, a careful study of admission practices at eight unnamed elite colleges by Princeton sociologist Thomas J. Espenshade and a research associate, Alexandria Walton Radford. Writing here on July 12th in an article headlined, "How Diversity Punishes Asians, Poor Whites and Lots of Others," Russell K. Nieli of Princeton wrote that the book reported an immense admissions disadvantage to Asians (because admissions officers think there are already too many in the best colleges) and poor whites, who are penalized by favoritism, not only for blacks and Hispanics, but also for whites with middle-class and upper-class backgrounds. None of the criticism that greeted Nieli's article has focused on the anti-Asian bias. All of it has dealt with the slim chances of poor whites at the most selective colleges.
Time magazine this week interviewed Espenshade about Douthat's charges that elite education seems inclined to exclude the poor of red-state America. (The book does not mention red-state America at all.) Espenshade said this:
What I think he did was take a relatively minor finding and push an interpretation that goes beyond the bounds of available evidence. We have this finding that if students held leadership positions or won awards in career-oriented extracurricular activities when they were in high school, there was a slightly negative impact on their chances of being admitted to one of these top private schools. Now, what are these career-oriented activities? Douthat mentions as possibilities, and I don't deny it, that it could be participating in a 4-H club or Future Farmers of America, but those aren't the only types of activities that might fall into that broader category. It could include Junior ROTC. It could include co-op work programs. It could include a host of things. And these aren't necessarily rural types of activities. My interpretation is that [having leadership positions or winning awards in career-oriented activities] suggests to admission deans that these folks are somewhat ambivalent about their academic future.
Espenshade is right that his critics missed the book's clear point that membership in 4-H clubs, the Future Farmers of America and high school ROTC was not enough to harm the chances of applicants to the elite colleges---the problem is holding high office in these groups (as Senator Sam Brownback did by the way in FFA) or winning group awards, because admissions officers think that such achievements might indicate a lack of seriousness about higher education. But Espenshade goes too far in saying that "there was a slightly negative impact on their chances." His book says on page 126 that "Excelling in career-oriented activities is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission," which seem more like crippling damage rather than a "slightly negative impact." As Nieli wrote: "The lower-class whites proved to be all-around losers... Having money in the family greatly improved a white applicant's admissions chances, lack of money greatly reduced it." If you read the whole book, the prejudice of the elite schools against poor whites seems clear. As a political issue, this is a sure bet to gain ground.
The Education Department's boom has finally fallen on for-profit colleges, much-criticized for their high rates of default on their students' education loans, loans that U.S. taxpayayers have to repay when graduates of proprietary schools can't find jobs either because the jobs don't exist or because the training for which the students have paid doesn't strike prospective employers as adequate.
If a set of proposed rules issued last week by Education Secretary Arne Duncan goes into binding effect; a majority of programs at for-profit colleges would be subject to restrictions on availability of federal loan funds, and about 5 percent of those schools programs would lose access to federal loan dollars altogether. Since for-profit colleges typically derive close to 90 percent of their income from government- guaranteed loans to their students, the Education Department's rules threaten to curtail their operations and even put some investor-owned schools out of business altogether.
Administrators of for-profit schools and their allies are crying foul. They argue that the government should also crack down on loan funding for programs at non-profit colleges, many of which also depend heavily on student-loan proceeds for income and many of whose graduates--say, art-history or women's-studies majors--find themselves unemployed and perhaps unemployable after graduation. The current proposed rules, for-profit advocates contend, discriminate against low-income students who choose career colleges instead of the liberal-arts schools that middle-class young people tend to select. The advocates may have a point--but isn't there a larger point? Should the government be in the business of providing money to everyone who wants to go to college in the first place? And if so, to what extent? If a $100,000 bachelor's degree in English literature from a liberal-arts college and a $14,000 career-college certificate as a medical assistant--training that many medical assistants obtain for free on the job--don't do much to improve their recipients' employment prospects, why are taxpayers underwriting the cost of supplying either? What public good is served?
Continue reading "Government Meddling and For-Profit Colleges" »
July 23, 2010
Russell K. Nieli's recent article, "How Diversity Punishes Asians, Poor Whites and Lots of Others," drew a lot of attention, including a mention in Ross Douthat's New York Times column. Referring to the book, No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, a 2009 study of elite college admissions, Nieli wrote that the authors, Thomas J. Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, found that a student's chances of gaining admission to an elite college dropped by 60 to 65 percent if they were involved in ROTC, 4H Clubs, Future Farmers of America "and other activities that suggest that students are somewhat undecided about their academic futures." Several readers, irritated by the implication that future farmers are Red State rubes, sent in lists of important people who have been FFA members. The noted members included Jimmy Carter, Sam Brownback, Nicholas Kristof, Willie Nelson, Taylor Swift, Tim McGraw, Lyle Lovett, Don Henley of the Eagles and Jim Davis, creator of Garfield.
July 22, 2010
Jennifer Keeton, age 24, is a student in the graduate counselor education program at Augusta State University, Georgia. Faculty members at ASU have informed Ms. Keeton that she will be dismissed if she does not rid herself of beliefs that the school opposes. She holds traditional Christian views about sexuality and gender, and believes homosexuality is a "lifestyle," not a "state of being," as her school teaches. She agrees with her faculty that counselors should never impose their views on clients, and is not accused of saying or believing that she should. She also says she affirms the inherent dignity of all persons, regardless of their views or sexual behavior.
That wasn't good enough for ASU. The school ordered Keeton to attend a "remediation program" in multicultural re-education and sensitivity training. An assistant professor suggested she attend the Gay Pride parade in Augusta, and she was told to file written reports on how she is moving toward the sexual belief system her school requires. She reluctantly agreed to accept the remediation, then backed out, saying in an email to faculty members, "I understand the need to reflect client's goals and to allow them to work toward their own solutions, and I know I can do that... (but) I can't alter my biblical beliefs, and I will not affirm the morality of those behaviors in a counseling situation." She says she was told by two assistant professors that "it was a life and death matter to not affirm a client's sexual decision, and that failure to do so has led and could lead to suicides by clients who are not affirmed in their sexual preferences."
On Keeton's behalf, the Alliance Defense Fund filed suit yesterday against teachers, deans and regents of ASU, charging violations of freedom of speech and religion.
July 21, 2010
Fiscally beleaguered presidents of public universities around the country like to wisecrack: "public universities used to be publicly funded, then they were publicly assisted, now they are publicly named." While easy to dismiss as a self-serving whine, there is something to their complaint, at least as it applies to the two public university systems in New York, CUNY, the City University of New York, and SUNY, the State University of New York. Looking just at SUNY's budget, for instance, out of a total annual system-wide expenditure of $11 billion, only $3.5 billion - or 32 percent - actually comes from New York State's taxpayers. The other 68 percent comes from students, research foundations, users of SUNY facilities, and generous donors. The CUNY proportions are roughly comparable. In other words, to quote a top SUNY financial official, New York State today "is only a minority shareholder" in its public universities.
The problem is that New York's legislators treat all of this non-taxpayer money as if it were actually theirs to collect and to disburse. They not only insist on setting the level of university tuition and then "appropriating" it so that it can be spent, they even want to control the disposition of externally provided research and philanthropy dollars. To add insult to injury, as external funding has gone up, legislators have reduced the state's tax levy allocation - often by an even greater amount. Understandably, this infuriates the public universities' primary financial backers - students, research grantors and philanthropists - who see their contributions being used not to enhance the state's colleges but to indirectly underwrite other state expenditures.
This travesty might finally end (or at least be curtailed) under a proposal now being debated in Albany that is so controversial that its resolution is holding up approval of the 2011 state budget. Called The Public Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act (PHEEIA, pronounced "fee-ah") - supported by Governor David Paterson and the state senate but strenuously resisted by the assembly - this legislation would allow both CUNY and SUNY to set their tuition levels without the legislature's prior approval and keep all the resulting tuition revenue, accept and retain all funds from research grants and philanthropic gifts, more easily enter into contracts with private vendors and enterprise partners, streamline hospital operations (mainly an issue concerning SUNY's three hospitals), fast-track campus facility construction, and lease portions of their campuses to other parties for purposes consistent with their academic mission. Naturally, all of these new operational freedoms are hemmed in by myriad restrictions: tuition increases would kept under the higher education price index, all expenditures and contracts would still be subject to state financial accounting rules, land leases and contracts would be tightly overseen by newly established state boards, just to mention a few of the bill's many constraints.
Continue reading "Unfettering New York's Public Universities" »
July 20, 2010
Speaking to the NAACP convention in Kansas City on Monday (July 12), Michelle Obama said that because of "stubborn inequalities" that "still persist --- in education and health, in income and wealth --- "the NAACP's founders "would urge us to increase our intensity."
The White House, for some reason, appears to have heard her call, for on Tuesday, reported the Chronicle of Higher Education, "White House Official Says Civil-Rights Office Will Enforce Fair State Spending for Black Colleges."
John S. Wilson Jr., executive director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities, said on Tuesday that the Education Department was looking into which states continue to shortchange public black colleges and how the federal government can make sure appropriations are more equitable among public institutions.
Continue reading "White House to Impose "Fairness" on Education Spending" »
Carolyn Rouse, a Princeton cultural anthropologist and gender specialist, has an unusual classroom procedure. In her course on "Race and Medicine," she invites black students to leave class ten minutes early because blacks have a shorter life expectancy than whites. According to the university news service, "Through this startling offer, typically not acted upon by her students, Rouse initiates a discussion about racial disparities in health care, a topic that is just one conduit to her core intellectual and personal interest: social inequality."
There is much to ponder here. To be consistent about departures based on life expectancy, Rouse would presumably need to usher out morbidly obese students and three-pack-a-day smokers about two minutes into her class, followed by reckless drivers and enthusiastic consumers of exotic chemical compounds. Besides, inviting blacks to cut out early does not appear to be a surefire way to promote equality. Taking courses whose titles begin with the words "Race and..." doesn't look like a positive idea either. They are usually classes in grievance production. Come to think of it, though, leaving a class in grievances ten minutes early may help a bit, though probably not as much as skipping the class entirely.
July 19, 2010
By KC Johnson
As part of its more general---and oft-expressed---commitment to academic freedom, CUNY's Board of Trustees has a student complaint policy that appropriately balances the faculty's academic freedom with a recognition that students, too, have the right not to be punished for disagreeing with their professor's political or ideological agenda.
To ensure that student "activists" don't abuse the policy, the Board recently noted that the process existed only to hear complaints from students actually enrolled in a professor's class---since a professor's in-class behavior can, by its very nature, only affect the academic freedom of students in the class.
It seems that they do things differently in Urbana. At the end of the spring semester, a student's "friend" brought a rather unusual e-mail to the attention of the Religion Department chairman. Adjunct professor Kenneth Howell had sent the e-mail, much of which passed along a natural-law critique of homosexuality, to his spring 2010 class, Introduction to Catholicism. (The e-mail sought to help students prepare for their final exam; the natural law section was clearly relevant to the course content.) If this episode had occurred at CUNY, the Religion chair would have thanked the student for his concerns, but noted that only students in the class, nor their friends or associates, could file complaints.
But the University of Illinois hasn't imitated CUNY's policy, costing the school its first opportunity to refuse the controversy. A second chance was lost through the behavior of Religion Dept. chairman Robert McKim. Having decided to entertain the complaint against Howell, the Religion Department could have handled the issue quickly and quietly, by McKim suggesting that, in the future, Howell not pepper exam-prep e-mails with his unrelated and ill-informed insights about public health (see below). Instead, the chair involved diversity-obsessed bureaucrats, who made clear the 'desire not to retain Howell, given that "the e-mails sent by Dr. Howell violate university standards of inclusivity."
Continue reading "The Curious Case of Dr. Howell" »
July 14, 2010
I started UCLA in 1977, having won admission with only a 3.1 GPA (but with decent SAT scores). When I got there my brother and I moved into Sproul Hall dormitory just above the track stadium. I came to campus thinking, "Yeah! Party time."
There was certainly a fair number of loud ones every Friday and Saturday throughout De Neve Drive and along Fraternity Row, plus a few mid-week open doors with beer flowing inside. But something else, too. About half the guys I met spent three or four hours a night in University Research Library (URL---we called it "Urinal"). They rose around 8 or 9am, grabbed a quick breakfast in the dorm cafeteria, speeded down the hill to classes before and after lunch (it was the quarter system, with classes meeting four hours a week), then spent the late afternoon shooting hoops or throwing a football, then dinner at 6, then a trip to the library by 7. If you arrived after 8, you couldn't find a seat. Each night, sitting in a carrel, I heard the tardy ones sidle by searching for spots and wandering floor to floor.
The other half of the guys I met had other plans. They weren't much interested in college, or they dealt drugs, or they played sports all day, or they were just plain screw-ups. The diligent ones recognized them as such, and even though we enjoyed them there was no cachet of "cool" given to them. (Freshman and sophomore year I drifted perilously toward the latter group now and then.) Those who studied hard didn't consider themselves superior, nor did they fit the nerd mold. They played high school football and drank Henry Weinhard. But they studied hard without groaning or crowing, taking their 20 or so hours a week as customary.
Continue reading ""Back-When-I-Was-in-School" Remembrance." »
July 13, 2010
The University of Michigan's education school has released statistics breaking down the percentages of women and ethnic minorities enrolled in its undergraduate and graduate-level programs, and as Roger Clegg of National Review's Phi Beta Cons points out, there's one group that seems to be conspicuously missing: white males. Actually, males in general seem to be mostly missing from the student bodies at Michigan's ed school and elsewhere. A Washington Post article published in May lamented the near-absence of black male teachers in Washington-area schools---a sad fact because the presence of strong, smart African-American role models among teachers may be the best hope that schools have of reversing the endemically high dropout rates among black male students.
The Michigan statistics are as follows: Among the ed school's 510 students enrolled in graduate-level programs (usually aimed at producing faculty for high schools and middle schools), 68 percent are female and 22 percent minority. The 257 students enrolled in undergraduate programs at Michigan (typically aimed at producing elementary-school teachers) are 73 percent female and 16 percent minority. Michigan doesn't say whether there is overlap between the women and minority-group populations, but it's almost a sure bet that the overwhelming number of minority students in education programs at Michigan are women. According to the Washington Post story, only 2 percent of America's 4.8 million teachers are black men.
The Michigan statistics bear themselves out in figures released by other education programs. The University of Illinois-Chicago doesn't include a gender breakdown of its enrollment but notes that only 40.4 percent of its ed-school students are non-Latino whites. A photo on Boston University's education-school website shows a handful of men sharing a classroom with a sea of women. Men simply aren't going into K-12 teaching, it would seem. A 2008 survey by the National Education Association (NEA) revealed that just 24.4 of the nation's teachers are male.
Continue reading "White Men Don't Go to Ed School" »
July 12, 2010
Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education on July 4 ("Who Gets to Define Ethnic Studies?"), Kenneth P. Monteiro, dean of the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State, criticizes what he calls "a piece of legislative hubris from Arizona that purports to ban ethnic studies in public schools."
Monteiro was referring to Arizona House Bill 2281, passed in May, a month after Arizona's controversial immigration legislation. It prohibits school districts or charter schools in the state from offering any classes that
1. Promote the overthrow of the united states government.
2. Promote resentment toward a race or class of people.
3. Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.
4. Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.
Continue reading "Ethnic Studies: ''White Studies'' in Black and Brown?" »
July 8, 2010
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a story this week by Robin Wilson entitled "Tenure, RIP: What the Vanishing Status Means for the Future of Education". It announces a study by the U.S. Dept of Education due out in the fall covering employment in higher education. Its findings regarding tenure are dire:
Over just three decades, the proportion of college instructors who are tenured or on the tenure track plummeted: from 57 percent in 1975 to 31 percent in 2007. The new report is expected to show that that proportion fell even further in 2009. If you add graduate teaching assistants to the mix, those with some kind of tenure status represent a mere quarter of all instructors.
In fact, at many for-profit institutions and two-year colleges, tenure is "a completely foreign concept." Generally, the decline of tenure hasn't happened through direct edict, but rather through a slow process of personnel change. As tenured faculty members have retired, they haven't been replaced. As schools and departments have grown, they have hired adjuncts and graduate students to handle crowded classrooms, not new tenure-track professors.
Continue reading "The End of Tenure and the Fate of Dissent" »
July 7, 2010
Those of you in the New York City area may be interested in an upcoming Manhattan Institute event featuring Ben Wildavsky, author of The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities are Reshaping the World and Senior Fellow at the Ewing Marion Kaufman Foundation. Introductory remarks will be provided by John Leo, MindingtheCampus editor.
If you are interested in attending please contact Barb Golecki at 646-839-3317
July 6, 2010
A revealing window into the mind of modern liberalism (keep snarky comments about looking into a dark, empty room to yourself) is nicely provided by noting what the press, especially the press covering higher educations, regards as controversial.
A case in point: On July 2 both Inside Higher Ed ("Controversial Choice for Virginia Tech Board") and the Chronicle of Higher Education ("Controversial Lawyer Is Reappointed to Virginia Tech's Governing Board") responded identically to Gov. Bob McDonnell's recent appointment of Roanoke lawyer John Rocovich to another term on the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors.
I do not mean to imply that there was no controversy around aspects of Rocovich's prior service. Both Inside Higher Ed and Chronicle link to the Roanoke Times, which described a couple of the controversies:
Continue reading "The Uses of the Word ''Controversial''" »
July 1, 2010
This is a U.S. News column I wrote a decade ago about the first highly publicized attempt by gays and their allies to use anti-discrimination regulations to "derecognize" (i.e., eliminate) campus religious groups that oppose non-marital sex, including homosexuality. The Christian Fellowship at Tufts said it supported gay rights and welcomed gay members, but drew the line at candidates for leadership who denied the group's theology. The decision to derecognize was a student decision, overturned quickly after a burst of publicity and vague threats to sue. I assumed at the time that if cases like this at public universities (Tufts is private) ever got to the Supreme Court, the result would be a no-brainer 9-0 decision in favor of three rather important First Amendment concerns---freedom of religion, freedom of assembly and freedom of speech. How naive.
Tufts University in Medford, Mass., is punishing a campus evangelical group for refusing to allow practicing homosexuals into its leadership positions.
A student tribunal, the Tufts Community Union Judiciary, voted to "derecognize" the Tufts Christian Fellowship. This means that the evangelicals will have trouble functioning on campus. They will not be able to reserve rooms for meetings, publicize events in campus listings, or even use bulletin boards. They are forbidden to use the Tufts name, and they will lose their share of student-activity money doled out to all student groups, some $5,700 a year. One administrator was quoted as telling the group, "I don't mean to get dramatic or anything, but essentially, on the Tufts campus, you do not exist."
Continue reading "Long Before Hastings There Was Tufts" »
The Supreme Court's Christian Legal Society v. Martinez ruling has received a good deal of high-quality commentary: FIRE and David French criticized the ruling; Eugene Volokh argued that the Court got the decision right.
Anne Neal has correctly noted that trustees should respond to the ruling by going slow, especially since the "all-comers" policy employed by Hastings is rare. That said, it seems more than likely that more and more universities will imitate the Hastings policy, whether from a desire to inoculate themselves from lawsuits or on behalf of what Justice Alito termed a campus agenda of political correctness.
The "all-comers" policy has satisfied the Supreme Court. But from an educational standpoint, does it make any sense? What purpose is served by a college or university creating an official Democratic club whose membership is open to unabashed defenders of George W. Bush? Or creating an official Jewish students organization that must admit Arab students who deny Israel's right to exist? Not only does such a policy undermine freedom of association, but the resulting organizations are essentially useless.
Continue reading "What Now After CLS?" »
June 29, 2010
Inside Higher Ed had a brief notice yesterday, "Worldwide Gender Gap in Academic Salaries in Science," that, though accurate as far as it goes, is revealingly, almost humorously, incomplete and misleading.
Here is the IHE piece in its entirety:
A worldwide analysis by Nature of the salaries of men and women in academic science has found that men's salaries were 18 to 40 percent higher in countries for which there were significant sample sizes --- Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Spain and the United States. The general pattern was for salary gaps to grow over the course of careers, with men's salaries starting to gain relative to women in the three-to-five year period after the start of a career in Europe and after six years in North America.
The American higher education establishment, and apparently those who report on it, suffer from gap mania. Everywhere they look there is some "gap" to be corrected, and some uncorrected, often hidden (read "structural") discrimination causing it. To see that attitude at work here, I encourage you take a look at the Nature article linked above. If you do, you will see that it is not "a worldwide analysis ... of the salaries of men and women in academic science" at all. Entitled "For Love And Money," the Nature article begins by noting, in bold, that "[t]he self-reported contentment of researchers with their chosen profession depends on more than just salaries, according to the results of our international career survey."
The purpose of the survey, in short, was only incidentally to examine men's and women's salaries. Rather, it aimed "to track contentment with one's job by region or by job attributes such as health care, the degree of independence or mentoring potential," and it was not limited to "academic science."
Continue reading "''Gender Gap'' Mania" »
June 28, 2010
Ponder this: According to the most current Supreme Court authority, a group of students can form a local chapter of a violent national organization, refuse to promise that they won't disrupt the campus, and still have a right to be recognized by the university. At the same time, however, if the university has a certain, peculiar kind of policy on its books, it can refuse to recognize a small group of religious students who merely want to conduct Bible studies led by members of their own faith.
In 1972, the Supreme Court decided Healy v. James, a landmark case that granted a Connecticut chapter of Students for a Democratic Society the right to exist on a public campus in spite of the fact that SDS chapters nationwide had seized and vandalized buildings, destroyed scholarly research, started fires, and caused campus disruptions that had shut down all university instruction for extended periods. When university officials pointedly asked if the local SDS chapter would disrupt its own campus, they replied that their "action would have to be dependent upon each issue."
Faced with possible violence, the university refused to recognize the SDS. The students sued, and the Supreme Court issued a ringing opinion upholding student rights on campus. Specifically, the Court found that students had a freedom of association interest in student group recognition:
There can be no doubt that denial of official recognition, without justification, to college organizations burdens or abridges that associational right. The primary impediment to free association flowing from nonrecognition is the denial of use of campus facilities for meetings and other appropriate purposes.
Fast-forward to 2010. This year the court heard yet another university student organization case, this one involving not a potentially violent group, but its opposite: a small group of students who wanted to host Bible studies on campus. The Christian Legal Society was denied recognition at Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. But CLS's sin was very different from SDS's: CLS simply wanted its voting members and leaders to share the group's faith and live accordingly.
Continue reading "CLS v. Martinez: A Curious and Mistaken Decision" »
My last post looked at the latest troubling educational initiative from the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U). The organization is especially pernicious not simply because of its agenda---which is, after all, quite mainstream in the contemporary academy. What distinguishes the AAC&U is its contempt toward students at non-elite schools, its belief that such students can't flourish in an education stepped in the liberal arts. Instead, the AAC&U contends that only a presentist education will do for such students. It terms this approach "interdisciplinary," but "nondisciplinary" is a more appropriate term.
The AAC&U touts its "General Education for a Global Century" project as "innovative" partly because it employs "social networking." (The internet---how innovative!) The group's social networking site provides a sense of the topics that, according to the AAC&U, deserve more attention in general education curricula.
What demonstrates "a need for the deep, interdisciplinary education that global learning offers"? According to project coordinator Chad Anderson, "the deliberate plane crash into the IRS building in Austin, Texas," which "must raise complex questions about politics, the economy, and domestic terrorism." Really? This would be a little bit like a cranky conservative professor demanding that Columbia, in 1970, reorient its gen-ed curriculum around to focus on the explosion of the Weathermen townhouse in Greenwich Village.
Continue reading "Building a Curriculum Around a Plane Crash" »
June 24, 2010
Few higher education groups have as pernicious an agenda as the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). The diversity-obsessed organization combines an unrelenting campaign against quality---especially at schools whose student bodies are more middle- or working-class---with an Orwellian tendency to use words to describe their opposite.
Beyond this pattern, AAC&U initiatives tend to have several common themes:
- a refusal to describe the United States as a "democracy"---"diverse democracy" or "multicultural democracy" are the preferred terms;
- a call for "global" learning, which amounts to demands not for ensuring that students have foreign language capabilities or extensive knowledge of foreign cultures but instead a code word for reorienting college curricula around the apparently global principles of race, class, and gender;
-a relentless emphasis on "skills" over course content
- a hostility to disciplinary learning, and equally robust praise for interdisciplinary studies.
The latter two items might seem banal, but for the AAC&U they're critical: a public emphasis on skills means that course content can be molded to fit any agenda (in the AAC&U's case, one-sided, present-oriented agenda), as long as the course theoretically teaches the desired skills. Abandoning disciplines, meanwhile, removes a potential obstacle to course content that amounts to little more than propaganda, on the grounds that such content can be deemed "interdisciplinary" and critical for a "21st century"education.
Continue reading "A War on the Quality of Higher Education" »
June 21, 2010
The U.S. soccer team surprised most viewers by tying its first-round World Cup game with soccer-powerhouse England 1-1---and then tied Slovenia 2-2 in a match that many said the Americans should have won except for a bad referee call. Furthermore, the US.-U.K game, televised on ABC, drew 14.5 million viewers, a record for a first-round World Cup contest (the U.S.-Slovenia game, at 10 a.m. EDT on ESPN, attracted 3.9 million). Yet at the very same time that both the quality of and interest in U.S. men's soccer is surging, U.S. colleges' support for the men's soccer teams and their players---the next generation of World Cup contenders---is in seemingly inexorable decline, thanks to the Education Department's draconian rules for enforcing Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in higher education..
On the eve of the U.S.-U.K match the College Sports Council (CSC) released an analysis of what it called a "tremendous disparity of opportunity between male and female soccer players" in NCAA Divison I schools, the schools that invest the most in student athletics and thus usually attract the best student athletes. The analysis of the NCAA's own published data for the 2008-09 academic year revealed that a combination of gender quotas imposed by the Education Department and NCAA rules favoring women over men in awarding college athletic scholarships have resulted in drastically reduced opportunities for college men to play on soccer teams and even fewer opportunities for them to receive scholarships for doing so.
In 1996 the Education Department issued a set of safe-harbor standards that colleges could follow in order to be deemed in compliance with Title IX and thus avoid expensive lawsuits over disparities in athletic spending. The easiest standard, chosen by the overwhelming majority of institutions, was "proportionality": spending on athletics proportional to the ratio of males to females attending the college in question. Proportionality might have seemed fair in 1996---even though women tend to be less interested in the costly team sports that attract men---because only 52 percent of college students were female back then. Now the female-favoring gender disparity is much bigger: 57 percent to 43 percent.
Continue reading "Why U.S. Men's Soccer Will Now Decline" »
June 17, 2010
To continue the commentary on the Cry Wolf project . . .
In the final sentences of the story on the project at InsideHigherEd.com, Peter Dreier offers this remarkable defense of the plan: "'This is legitimate work,' he said, and the essays will be scrutinized for accuracy." In other words, the results will undergo careful review and, if necessary, correction.
The statement clashes, however, with this sentence from Dreier's letter: "We therefore need to construct a counter narrative that demonstrates the falsity or exaggeration of such claims so that the first reaction of millions of people as well as opinion leaders will be 'there they go again!'"
The project findings claim "accuracy," but the "narrative form" in which they are constructed suggests something else, namely, myth-making to counter (presumably) the myth-making of the right. This is not to say that the findings are false, or that myths are false, but rather that the narrative form will inevitably filter and shape and re-arrange and color the facts. Some distortion is bound to occur.
Continue reading "The Wolfers Forget Their Foucault" »
The review board of the UC Berkeley campus police has issued a 128-page report on the violent student protests of last November, criticizing actions by campus police and the University administration. The introduction and summary are here and the full report is here. Coverage of the report by the AP and The Daily Cal are here and here.
June 16, 2010
The "Cry Wolf" project, launched by a group of academics, plans to pay for research papers useful for liberal causes. That sounds harmless, but as KC Johnson argued in his posts here on the project, it boils down to commissioning scholarly work meant to reach a pre-determined result. Before any evidence is gathered, both the sponsors and the paid researchers know how these efforts are going to come out.
Advocacy lightly disguised as scholarship is a continuing problem on campus and at academic meetings. Robert Holland, a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, has a fascinating letter on the subject in the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. He writes about the American Education Research Association. AERA is supposed to be politically neutral but predictably comes down on the left side of contested political issues, strongly opposing, for example, Arizona's anti-illegal-immigration law. (It says, cryptically, that Arizona's "policy, on the face of it, does not take into consideration sustained sound bodies of science.") In clearer English, it has no plans for objective research on the effects of the measure, but instead promises to "disseminate research on the negative effects of the law."
Holland's letter points out the politicized nature of AERA's annual meeting: it had 136 sessions on "social justice," 96 on "diversity," 52 on "critical race theory," and 28 on "feminist theory." This list pretty much exhausts the political obsessions of the cultural left. But it hasn't much to do with real educational research.
June 14, 2010
President Botstein's portrait of Bard College's summer reading assignments in the context of the college's curriculum and larger educational aims is winsome and compelling. The college leads its students astutely into reading important books. It attends to the order in which such books should be read---Virgil before Dante. It is mindful of the need to challenge students with books that demand their full attention.
The reasons Botstein offers for colleges to offer summer reading programs, however, don't track very closely with what most of the colleges in the NAS survey say they are doing. According to Botstein, these programs are founded on the need to rouse high school grads from their summer torpor; to introduce them to general education; and for the institution to make a good first impression on its sometimes skittish and prone-to-transfer new students.
But the colleges we surveyed say something else. Many of them say some version of the idea that they want to "build community" on campus by giving students a "shared intellectual experience." Kalamazoo College, which we quoted in the report, says its:
Continue reading "Amen to Bard's Reading Program, but..." »
June 11, 2010
Every ideology has its factual holes. The press of ideas and values highlights certain facts and obscures others, and when the ideology grows in force in local settings, those obscured facts disappear entirely, or even turn into outright falsehoods in the eyes of the "ideologues."
George Mason economics professor Daniel Klein and Zogby International researcher Zelija Buturovic have analyzed the findings of a Zogby survey that reveals the dangers of excessive ideological conformity.
Zogby posed to nearly 4,835 American adults eight assertions about basic economics and asked them to agree or disagree. The prompts included "Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services," "Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago," and "Rent control leads to housing shortages."
The survey also broke the respondents down into six ideological groups, "Very conservative," "Libertarian," "Conservative," "Moderate," "Liberal," "Progressive/very liberal." It also asked respondents for their political party affiliation.
Here are the researchers' conclusions as recounted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Klein this week: "Americans in the first three categories do reasonably well. But the left has trouble squaring economic thinking with their political psychology, morals and aesthetics." For instance, "On the question about living standards, the portion of progressive/very liberals answering incorrectly (61%) was more than four times that of conservatives (13%) and almost three times that of libertarians (21%)."
Furthermore, "Those responding Democratic averaged 4.59 incorrect answers. Republicans averaged 1.61 incorrect, and Libertarians 1.26 incorrect."
This is to say that possession of certain economic facts varied by ideology. The right performed better, much better. This is not to say that the left would not perform better in other areas. I think it likely that it would. But the survey does support the notion of factual blind spots, and we may infer that in more or less closed bodies such as academic departments in which one ideology reigns, the blind spots can dilate, progressively turning into accepted wisdom. Add to that the complacency that follows and you have a formula for intellectual weakness.
June 10, 2010
Academic freedom carries with it rights as well as responsibilities. The concept derives from the belief that academics, because of specialized training in their subject matter, have earned the right to teach their areas of expertise and to follow their research questions as the evidence dictates---free from political pressure from the government. Indeed, only through a guarantee of such freedom can academics engage in a search for truth.
A corresponding responsibility, of course, is that academics will actually seek to pursue the truth. If professors' research methods imitate the likes of James Carville or Karl Rove, then what purpose exists to safeguard the academy from the government? Indeed, at public universities, if the professoriate functions as partisan hacks, selectively plucking items to advance a political agenda, what's to stop legislative demands that the faculty mirror the partisan breakdown of the state, to ensure proportionate representation to all political viewpoints?
A newly announced project called "Crying Wolf," organized out of the Center on Policy Initiatives, seems blithely unconcerned with any requirements associated with academic freedom. As John has noted, project coordinators Peter Dreier (a distinguished professor of politics at Occidental College), Nelson Lichtenstein (a historian of 20th century U.S. history at UC Santa Barbara who directs the university's Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy), and Donald Cohen, CPI executive director, are recruiting professors and graduate students (in "history, sociology, economics, political science, planning, public health, and public policy") to perform "paid academic research" that can "serve in the battle with conservative ideas."
Continue reading "The Wolfers and Bastardizing Academic Freedom" »
June 9, 2010
The indispensable Erin O'Connor, writing this morning on her web site, Critical Mass, discusses an astonishing memo from Peter Dreier of Occidental College and two other progressives seeking "paid academic research" that can "serve in the battle with conservative ideas." The project, sponsored by the Center on Policy Initiatives in San Diego, will pay fifty cents a word to professors and graduate students in history, sociology, economics, political science, planning, public health, and public policy. The "Cry Wolf Project," as it is called, lists as its coordinators, Dreier; Nelson Lichtenstein, a historian at UC Santa Barbara and Donald Cohen, executive director of the Center on Policy Initiatives. The title of the project reflects the belief that conservatives control political narratives by predicting disaster if progressive policies are pursued. The briefs are supposed to be scrupulously accurate, but obviously prepared to pursue a pre-determined agenda to be spread through the mainstream media.
O'Connor writes: "Grad students can now make fifty cents a word to scramble the difference between disinterested scholarship and agenda-driven advocacy work." She argues that the project "explicitly supports the arguments of those who would say that large swaths of academia are little more than publicly funded mechanisms for disseminating and producing an ideologically-driven world view."
We will investigate this ethically dubious project in coming days.
June 8, 2010
Sparks were few at this season's commencement speeches, and so were remarks inspiring much enthusiasm or objection. Protests arose, as they always do, whether of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie at Monmouth College (for state Education budget cuts), Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at Brandeis (for assorted Israeli actions), or Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs (for sub-prime lending and assorted financial misdeeds), but most remarks have been tame. Yet the speeches are almost besides the point - you don't have to have done anything objectionable to draw a protest this year; sins of omission seem just as powerful inspiration for petitions as real deeds on campus this year.
Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, drew pickets from pro-immigration activists. Their ire was partially directed at the department's continuation of a Bush administration policy which permitted the cross-checking of arrestees' fingerprints with a federal immigration database, but most of the protest appeared to be directed at the Arizona immigration law - which, last anyone checked, Napolitano had nothing to do with. Typical of this was a seech given by Emilio Amaya, executive director of the San Bernardino Community Services Center, who urged that: "Secretary Napolitano must take legal action against oppressive local and state immigration policies, including Arizona's SB1070, immediately. Secretary Napolitano can show the leadership that we need to stop racial profiling, stop the separation of families, and end the criminalization of immigrant workers," said Amaya. The Los Angeles Times reported:
As Napolitano spoke to the graduating class, the demonstrators gathered on the steps of the Andrew Carnegie building, chanting "Si, se puede!" (Yes, we can) and "Obama escucha, estamos en la lucha" (Obama, listen, we're in the struggle). The protesters were also waving signs that read "Alto AZ" (Stop Arizona) and "No mas racista" (No more racism).
Continue reading "Protesting the Blameless---A New Trend at Commencement Speeches" »
June 3, 2010
What books do colleges and universities ask incoming freshmen to read over the summer? "Beach Books," a study by the National Association of Scholars, has an answer: it turned up 180 books at 290 institutions and concluded that the book choices are unchallenging, heavily pitched to themes of alienation and oppression, and overwhelmingly reflect liberal themes and the sensibilities of the academic left.
The selections are mostly books published in the last decade and "generally pitched at an intellectual level well below what should be expected of college freshmen.... It is hard to find anything on the list that poses even a modest intellectual challenge to the average reader." The chosen books tend to be "short, caffeinated and emotional" and seem grounded on the premises of Oprah's Book Club.
Many colleges say the selections are intended to start conversations and engage new students in intellectual reflection. But assignments based on this goal seem to betray some unstated anxieties, among them that "students are so lacking in shared intellectual experience as to have little to talk about with one another---or little beyond television, music and sports." The "present-ism" of the selections, the report concludes, reflects an underestimation of the students' ability to discover connections between the past and the contemporary world. Colleges ought to push students toward making such connections rather than assume that students won't get it."
The report wonders whether the colleges are aware of the political slant and triviality of the books pushed on freshmen. It tentatively concludes: "Our guess is that they do not." Sixty of the 290 colleges selected books in what the report calls the multiculturalism/immigration/racism category. Other totals are environmentalism/animal rights/food (36 colleges), the Islamic world (27), new age/spiritual philosophy (25) and holocaust/genocide/war/disaster (25). On the whole, the books offer a distinctly disaffected view of American society and Western civilization. On the left-right spectrum the reports says that 70% of the books lean liberal, 28% neutral and 2% conservative.
June 2, 2010
In a recent article for Career College Central, I discuss the negative implications of the Department of Education's (ED) proposal to alter the gainful employment rule to restrict the amount of money that a student could borrow by program of study and expected entry level occupational earnings. I identified three major flaws with the proposal. First, it would severely limit the ability of for-profit colleges to offer bachelor's degree programs, and other non career-specific fields of study. Next, it fails to account for total compensation, regional variations in compensation, and the possibility that workers will receive a promotion or pay increase over time. Finally, the rule could result in a reduction of educational options and access for those most in need, and a shortage of qualified employees to meet the demands of the labor force.
I also analyzed the effect that the rule would have on 10 occupations that are expected to produce more than 2.6 million additional jobs by 2018, finding that for most of the occupations, students would have been able to borrow less (after adjusting for inflation) to pursue training in them in 2008 than in 2003. ED's arbitrary gainful employment metric would hamper the ability of colleges to offer occupational training in fields that the market demands by exerting what amounts to government price controls. A better solution to protect the interests of both students and taxpayers would be to ensure that colleges provide prospective students with sufficient information (such as job and income data, and debt and default levels) to make wise education decisions, prior to their enrolling and paying a dime of tuition.
May 28, 2010
The controversy at Harvard Law School over last month's email about racial intelligence seems to have died down. The basic facts of the case are these: a Harvard law student who is an editor of the Harvard Law Review sent an email to two friends as a follow-up to an earlier conversation. In it she wrote: "I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African-Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent." The email circulated among the students after one of the friends turned against her and passed it along to damage her reputation. The message infuriated the Black Law Students Association and compelled Dean Martha Minow to issue a denunciation of the statement. The original author apologized profusely.
John Leo wrote about the affair here, among other things highlighting the background of the author. (She was a sociology major at Princeton, where she studied how the campus atmosphere affects different racial groups.) John also pointed out the disproportionate nature of the consequence: a private email to friends turns into a public humiliation of a graduate student.
There is another aspect of the story worth pondering further. It comes up in a recent summary of the affair by Peter Berkowitz at The Weekly Standard.
Berkowitz focuses on the words of Dean Minow. Yes, we all have seen how swiftly university administrators respond to racial incidents, how frantically they wish to demonstrate that they will, indeed, tolerate no hate speech and honor all peoples. But this action was somewhat different. Minow delivered a judgment of a text written by a student. The student was not brought forward on any charges, and no disciplinary procedure was in play. It was the student's words that mattered, and Minow's words would oppose them.
Here's the problem, in Berkowitz's rendering: "Dean Minow's statement, moreover, failed to honor the scholar's duty to restate accurately a view one is criticizing. According to Minow, the student's email 'suggested that black people are genetically inferior to white people.' That's an incendiary revision."
In truth, the email was much more tentative and hypothetical. She wrote that she couldn't "rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent." This is the posture of the scientist, not the racist, the latter of whom would assert inferiority without hesitation. Indeed, the fact that Minow scrambled the student's words indicates that the words themselves weren't enough to justify Minow's denunciation.
That isn't the dean's only crime. She also neglected the rest of the email, which further belies the charge of racism. Berkowitz again:
in the very next sentence, [the student] entertained the possibility that there is no genetic variation in intelligence between the races: 'I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances.' The student went on to speculate that 'cultural differences' are probably 'the most important sources of disparate test scores.' And the student elaborated at length an argument from Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy that in the student's judgment deftly showed, despite the absence of 'quantifiable data,' that racial disparities for violent crimes were rooted in culture. In sum, the student clearly expressed the desire to set aside conclusions of the heart, and instead examine the scientific data and consider reasoned analysis concerning the genetic basis of intelligence.
This is a reasonable discussion, and while the history of social science into intelligence contains some awful episodes of racism, it is still proper to inquire into racial differences in cultural, geographical, and other terms, including genetic ones.
Not in the dean's office. Not only did Minow violate the student's privacy and encourage the rest of Harvard to "regard the student as a pariah," as Berkowitz notes. Not only did Minow encourage students who feel aggrieved or offended to run to authorities and complain. She also demonstrated little understanding of the norms of scientific inquiry. And worse, perhaps, she disregarded what may be the first principle of academic discussion: to represent the words and ideas of others accurately and fairly.
May 27, 2010
Professor Sandra K. Soto's commencement speech at the University of Arizona caused national commotion---she bitterly attacked the new Arizona immigration law---but not much discussion about whether controversial issues are appropriate in such talks. One common opinion, raised repeatedly in Professor Soto's case, is that invited speakers should not impose their politics on a captive audience. Another is that invited speakers should not be expected to steer around their deeply held beliefs and just stick to the usual dreadful cliches---climb very mountain, today is the first day of the rest of your life, etc. The strongest reason for inviting any speaker is often that he or she stands for something and carries the message that conviction is important.
But there are rules, or should be. Much of a good commencement talk should be about the graduates, and speakers should remember that they are a minor act on a program about student success. Professor Soto passed this test easily. She talked at length about and to the new graduates. But on another test, she did not do nearly so well: speakers who take controversial stances should frame the issue fairly, and leave room for graduates and parents in the audience to disagree without being considered backward or bigoted. Her remark that the law "is considered the strictest anti-immigration legislation in the country" overlooks the fact that the measure is no stricter than existing federal law, and that the measure is anti-illegal immigration, not anti-immigration. Soto's comment that "racial discord is being provoked not solved" is a bit much for a law not yet put into effect, and supported by three out of four Arizonans who have an opinion (72% in favor, 24% opposed, 6% no opinion--Rasmussen). It may be that the professor was misled by the "faculty-lounge effect"--- as a group, college professors are so sure the law is terrible that when emerging from the academic cocoon, they often fail to notice that a huge majority is on the opposite side.
A good deal of soul-searching followed the commencement debacle in 2003 at Rockford College in Illinois. Anti-war activist and New York Times reporter Chris Hedges essentially ignored the graduates and launched into an unusually grating speech on America's faults and how pleased he was that the U.S. had lost in Vietnam. The enraged crowd screamed in protest and twice someone pulled the plug on the sound system. Perhaps fearing a riot, the president of the college stepped in and stopped the speech. So it's fair to say that the speaker, the audience and the president all behaved badly. The popular blogger James Lileks wrote that there's nothing wrong with an anti-war speech, "but such a speech needs to persuade. It needs to draw the audience close, make eye contact. Crack a joke, wax colloquial, opine a bit, then bring it all back to the grads." Most of all, controversial speeches need basic civility and an awareness that the day is about the students.
May 25, 2010
The long-term decline of graduation rates is one of the most intractable problems facing American Higher Education. Trustees at the University of Arkansas are now mulling what appears to be the most popular solution to the problem - simply lower requirements. Under a current proposal, a requirement for 66 core credits would be reduced nearly by half, to 35. Anne Neal, President of ACTA, furnished additional grim details in an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editorial last week:
Under the proposed curricular overhaul, the foreign language requirement would be altogether eliminated. The math requirements would be halved. And the science requirement---a must in the 21st century if there ever were one---would remain, but in a thinned out version.
The University of Arkansas' chancellor, G. David Gearheart, wrote in response to Neal's column in the Democrat-Gazette that "..the truth of the matter is that we have not had a core curriculum review in over 50 years." He pointed out, depressingly, that "the current core of 66 credits in the university's J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences is much higher than many of our peer institutions..." Arkansas is indeed behind the times - it has been comparatively slow to eviscerate core curricula that most colleges destroyed long ago. The case is understandably distressing to ACTA as the University of Arkansas was one of only eight universities to receive an "A" grade on ACTA's "What Will They Learn" survey of core curriculum requirements (Columbia earned a "B", Georgetown a "D", and Stanford a "C" to give you some measure of comparison."
Some in the University have argued that these changes are necessary in order to comply with a recent act of the Arkansas State Legislature designed to ease the transfer of students from two-year to four-year institutions. Arkansas Community colleges could accurately be described as failing, with a graduation rate of 17%, but ACTA and others have averred that other changes could easily have smoothed the way for transfer students. As Paul Greenberg wrote:
If this law amounts to dumbing down education, and it does, then change the law. Or get around it by establishing new requirements for graduation. Surely it is not beyond the ingenuity of our academicians to see that all our college graduates get something like a liberal education rather than a watered-down simulacrum thereof.
Imagine if the same university administrators and public bureaucrats who are proving so talented at rationalizing the degradation of academic standards applied their gift for working the system to raising those standards, or just maintaining them. Or would that be out of character?
Why should not all students, whether in physics or phys ed, be required to have much the same core curriculum, or liberal education? They're all going to be citizens and voters, aren't they? Lest we forget, the term liberal education derives from the concept of an education suitable for the free-those who enjoy liberty. Rather than being enslaved by their own ignorance.
It remains to be seen if Arkansas will be the latest curriculum to fall victim to Higher Education's increasing consensus that a well-rounded mind is merely a roadblock on the road to a cap and gown.
May 24, 2010
By Frank J. Macchiarola
This is a slightly edited version of a commencement speech, given on May 22nd by Dr. Macchiarola, chancellor of St. Francis College, at the Western New England College School of Law, Springfield, Massachusetts.
"In the end, more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life and they lost it all—security, comfort and freedom... When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free."
These words, written by 18th Century Historian Edward Gibbon are as relevant today as they were in the Fourth Century B.C.. Indeed these words are also eerily accurate for 21st century Greece.
The desire for the easy life and the lack of sacrifice, the determination that society owes a living more than it requires obligation is at the root cause of the problem that modern Greek society faces. And the failure of Greek leaders—many of them lawyers—to lead with courage has made the situation tragic.
The fact that 25 centuries later the nations of the modern world are still facing the problems that were alive in ancient Greece attests to the fact that although the world changes a great deal it still remains much as it has always been. It shows that too many modern day leaders also lack the courage to lead with an appreciation of the consequences of their failures.
Your celebration today has to be tempered by the seriousness of what lies ahead. You have a responsibility as much to understand the past as you do to prepare for that future. You have an obligation to understand our society and its needs; you have an obligation to know what the values of democracy are and what the responsibilities of citizenship and leadership in our society mean. Make no mistake about it; the legal profession is the first profession of modern society. Lawyers form and shape the system of laws that govern us and you have to live by the principles of justice that our society requires. If you fail us, you betray the ideals of the rule of law that are necessary for the survival of a democratic society. You sow the seeds of civic despair.
Continue reading "Athens, Fourth Century B.C. = Greece, 2010" »
May 21, 2010
Here's how easy it is to find out whether Adam Wheeler, the 23-year-old who allegedly faked his way into Harvard, was the preternaturally accomplished young scholar he said he was: Google. That's how I spent a productive half-hour after I found Wheeler's resume posted on the New Republic's website. Wheeler had submitted the resume when he applied for a literary internship at the magazine last fall (he did not get the job). That was either just before or just after he abruptly left Harvard during his senior year to avoid a disciplinary proceeding for allegedly getting himself admitted as a transfer student in 2007 (from MIT, he said) on the basis of forged transcripts, forged SAT scores, and forged letters of recommendation--and also for bilking Harvard out of $45,000 in financial aid, research money, and cash prizes for plagiarized student essays. He is now facing criminal prosecution on 20 counts of fraud, larceny, and identity theft.
So I typed into Google's search box the title of one of the three lectures that Wheeler, who claimed to know classical Armenian, said on his resume that he had delivered to a meeting of the National Association of Armenian Studies and Research in 2009: "From Parthia to Robin Hood: The Armenian Version of the Epic of the Blind Man's Son (Koroghlu)" The lecture was real enough, except that it had actually been delivered by James R. Russell, a professor of Armenian studies at Harvard. Russell had also delivered another of the esoterically titled Armenian-themed lectures that Wheeler attributed to himself: "The Rime of the Book of the Dove: Zoroastrian Cosmology, Armenian Heresiology, and the Russian Novel."
Moving on, I Googled the titles of the four books that Wheeler said he had co-authored with Marc Shell, a professor in Harvard's English department (Wheeler was an English major). Again, the books are real---Shell lists them on his own Harvard website--but they're the sole work of Shell, with no credit given to co-authors. Shell had evidently captured Wheeler's imagination, because Wheeler also stated on his resume that he had delivered three lectures at Shell's Seven Days Work Educational Foundation on Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick in 2009 (a busy lecture year for Wheeler!). I admit that my Google search didn't unearth any sources for those lectures---which deal with famous authors of the English Renaissance including Thomas More, Shakespeare, and Andrew Marvell---but a visit to the Seven Days Work Foundation's website (which took less than five minutes to find) led me to wonder how Renaissance poets and playwrights could have fit into the 2009 conference, which was devoted to the ecology and economy of Grand Manan, where Shell has a residence and an interest in the local culture.
Continue reading "Faking Your Way Through Harvard--Almost" »
Eboo Patel, founder and executive director of Interfaith Youth Core, an organization that "seeks to build interfaith cooperation on campus," has a provocative article on Inside Higher Ed May 20, "The New Campus Culture Wars," arguing that the campus rage for inclusion, multiculturalism, and diversity has been too narrow.
"Muslim students waking up to chalk drawings mocking the Prophet Muhammad on their college quads," he writes, "are probably likely wondering why their identity is not a cherished part of the college ethos of inclusiveness."
When there is a racially demeaning event on a college campus... higher education responds like it's a five-alarm fire. Administrators organize town hall meetings to discuss the threats to inclusiveness, Presidents send out e-mails to the whole campus calling for racial sensitivity. Faculty committees are formed to submit recommendations on how to make minority students feel welcome. The incident is used, appropriately, as a teachable moment, an opportunity to affirm and expand the university as an inclusive learning environment.
If there was any alarm raised by higher education in response to the chalking Muhammad incidents, it's been hard to hear.
The issue, Patel insists, is about far more than Muslim sensitivities. "What the race-class-gender-ethnicity-sexuality movement of the 1990s missed was religion."
Continue reading "Does Identity Politics Need More Identities?" »
May 19, 2010
Many colleges assign incoming freshmen a book to read over the summer. The original idea was to give new students a shared taste of what intellectual life is like. Over the years, the books came to reflect the dominant faculty obsession with race-class-gender group grievance and the idea that America is a grossly unfair nation---Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, for instance, was a popular choice. And as students seemed to grow more averse to serious reading, the assigned books got shorter and simpler, and often included upscale comic books like Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus.
Now The University of California at Berkeley has assigned freshmen a non-reading task instead of a book---they are to return a cotton swab with cells from the inside of their cheeks. The university is doing this, according to Inside Higher Ed, because "a reading assignment didn't make sense for something as cutting-edge and personalized as genetic analysis."
But of course that analysis will be done in labs by non-freshmen. Instead of spending hours on a book, each student will have to commit three seconds or less to the assignment---a major time-saving gain for busy high-school graduates. Alix Schwartz, director of academic planning for the undergraduate division of the university's college of letters and science, sees another advantage for a cheek swab over a book: "If we assigned them a book, it would be out-of-date by the time they read it." Last year freshmen were assigned Michael Pollan's account of food chains, The Omnivore's Dilemma, which was pretty good at the time, but sadly out of date now, along with Plato, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Ehrenreich, comic books and oh so many other once-pertinent works.
Schwartz said the freshman swabs are a one-time thing in the freshman program. "Who knows what creative thing the deans will come up with next?," she said. We have no idea, but we certainly hope it will further reduce the summertime intellectual demands made of new students.
May 18, 2010
The College Board has issued another of its reports on student loan debt, focusing this time on the 17 percent of students who graduate from four-year colleges with "high debt levels"---that is, more than $30,500 worth of education loans. The average debt load for those high -borrowing students, one out every six graduates with bachelor's degrees, was $45,500 in 2007-2008, the academic year covered by the study. That's a staggering amount, considering that the average annual starting salary for a new college graduate is about $49,000 (for liberal arts majors, it's only $36,000). Two-thirds of college students and their parents borrow for higher education, and a fourth of those borrowers are at the highest debt level. About a third of that debt is in non-federally guaranteed loans that typically bear higher interest rates and are more difficult to defer repaying. High levels of student debt typically correlate with high levels of loan default, as college graduates discover that the entry-level jobs for which they qualify right after graduation don't pay enough to enable them to keep up with their loan repayment schedules.
What is most intriguing---and disconcerting---about the new College Board study, titled "Who Borrows Most?" is the role played by race and ethnicity in student borrowing. "[H]igh debt levels are more prevalent among black bachelor's degree recipients than among those from other racial/ethnic groups, and these differences are not entirely explained by differences in family income levels." the study reports. Some 27 percent of black recipients of bachelor's degrees in 2007-2008 borrowed $30,500 or more to pay for college, compared with 16 percent of whites, 14 percent of Hispanics, and 9 percent of Asians. The racial/ethnic discrepancies in taking on debt existed at all income levels, from the poorest (families earning less than $30,000 a year) to the solidly middle-income. Only among families at the highest income levels—those earning $100,00 or more a year---were the borrowing levels among ethnic groups roughly comparable: Nine percent of well-off white students graduated with more than $30,500 in loans, compared with 11 percent of well-off blacks and 10 percent of well-off Hispanics. Even in this prosperous group that could presumably afford high debt levels, Asians stood out for their low levels of borrowing. Only five percent of Asians from families earning $100,000 or more a year graduated from four-year colleges with more than $30,500 in student debt.
What does this all suggest? To the report's authors, Sandy Baum and Patricia Steele, it suggests that a sizable percentage of college undergraduates make rash and uninformed decisions about how much to borrow in order to pay for their educations and need an array of government interventions to protect them from the consequences of their poor planning. "[I] is difficult for students to estimate in advance [It] is vital that policies be designed to protect students from unmanageable debt to the extent possible," they write. The new student-loan provisions tacked onto the healthcare overhaul that President Obama signed into law this year---increases in the size of federal Pell grants for low-income students and easier repayment and forgiveness terms for those who borrow directly from the government---seem to be the kind of "policies" that Baum and Steele have in mind. "Strong income-based repayment is important as a supplement to moderating price increases and increasing the generosity of need-based financial aid," they write.
Continue reading "Race and Ethnicity in Student Borrowing" »
May 17, 2010
On Friday, New York Times education reporter Lisa Foderaro penned a curious article about City University of New York Chancellor Matthew Goldstein. The substance was clear: to quote Terry Hartle of the American Council of Education, Goldstein's "compensation, while a significant amount of money, is relatively modest for the best public university presidents in the country, and I would certainly put Matt in that class." Hartle's evaluation seems self-evident: by virtually any standard, CUNY has dramatically improved under Goldstein's leadership. Moreover, Goldstein's current salary, as CUNY Board of Trustees chairman Benno Schmidt told Foderaro, is "below the median" in comparison to heads of "other systems of similar size."
This, in short, seems like a non-story: CUNY's widely (and justifiably) praised chancellor has a salary that's below the median among his peers.
So what headline did the Times choose? "Growth of CUNY Chancellor's Salary Outpaces Rise in Faculty's Pay." That statement speaks not to anything about Goldstein but to the ineffectiveness of the CUNY faculty union, whose leadership seems more interested in extraneous matters such as demonizing Israeli security policy---and thereby losing political support from key legislators---than in achieving faculty raises.
More problematic, by providing little context about the union head's previous behavior with Goldstein and withholding key information about one of her interviewees, Foderaro conveyed the false impression that a faculty consensus opposes Goldstein's pay level.
Continue reading "The Times Misleads Its Readers about CUNY" »
May 13, 2010
One of the most popular assessment tools in higher education is the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), a questionnaire administered each year to some 300,000 first-year and senior students at diverse institutions across the country. It has items on how many books students read, how many papers they write, how often they meet with professors outside of class, and a host of other out-of-class "engagement" queries. One of them goes like this:
Had serious conversations with students of a different race or ethnicity than your own.
Students answer "Never," "Sometimes," "Often," or "Very often," and school administrators, presumably, use the results as a fair measure of racial/ethnic mixing on campus. (The 2009 results may be found here). To anybody who eschews counting people by skin color, needless to say, the item is somewhat annoying. One senses behind it the social engineer, someone with designs on personal attitudes and behaviors. Obviously, too, it signals a leading intention, namely, to make the number of inter-racial exchanges go up every year.
The fact that if the inter-racial rate for a particular university ever went down it would embarrass school administrators indicates how deeply racial diversity awareness has penetrated campus affairs. Diversity is, of course, the notion of the moment in higher education, the incessant announcements of "diversity-is-our-strength," "we-are-diverse," and so on forming the white noise of campus life. That NSSE makes talking to people of another race a separate measure, and that respondents likely answer the question without blinking, shows just how normal and routine racial counting has become.
Continue reading "A Downside of Racial Awareness?" »
May 11, 2010
The New York Times recently brought news that that the union and faculty activists determined to establish a graduate student union at NYU have renewed their crusade. I use the phrase "union and faculty activists" deliberately, since it's hard to imagine that any of the graduate students actually involved in the original controversy remain at NYU, unless they have experienced writers' block in the production of their dissertations.
The matter appeared to be settled in 2004, when the NLRB understandably ruled that graduate students are primarily just that---students, not workers. The reaction on the NYU campus and among faculty and professional allies was fierce. Graduate student activists then serving as teaching assistants decided to penalize their own undergraduate students for the NLRB decision, going on strike and refusing to submit grades. In perhaps the most bizarre expression of support for the strikers' cause, the AAUP declared that NYU's refusal to recognize the union constituted a violation of both academic freedom and the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights(!).
When NYU president John Sexton reasonably decided to hire for the spring 2006 semester only those graduate students who would commit to actually teaching their classes---rather than going on strike on NYU's dime---a group of around 200 NYU professors calling themselves "Faculty Democracy" protested the "undemocratic" requirement. The signatories even threatened to withhold grades in their courses. In the end, except for a handful of malcontents, the situation returned to normal, and the strike fizzled.
Continue reading "NYU's ''Union'' Activism Re-Emerges" »
May 7, 2010
When people outside of higher education hear the phrase "threat to academic freedom," they probably think of government officials (ab)using their power to punish professors with controversial views. The post-World War II Red Scare most immediately comes to mind, along with early 1960s purges of academic leftists. Of course, in the 21st century academy, the primary threat to academic freedom comes from within, as defenders of the status quo pay lip service to principles of "diversity" even as they seek to minimize pedagogical or ideological diversity among the professoriate.
Indeed, the more conventional threat to academic freedom---from government officials---has become so comparatively rare that when a case appears, it seems like a throwback to a bygone era. How else to explain the recent decision of Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to demand data from the University of Virginia regarding former professor (and climate change expert) Michael Mann?
Mann was one of the scientists whose name appeared prominently in the "Climate-gate" scandal, the hacked e-mails from a server at the University of East Anglia. Yet an investigation by Penn State determined that he had committed no wrongdoing, and the idea of a government official investigating a university professor because of the professor's research positions is unseemly at best and---as the AAUP's Rachel Levinson put it---filled with "echoes of McCarthyism" at worst.
Continue reading "Cuccinnelli Overrides Academic Freedom" »
May 3, 2010
Here is the opening of a speech given by Jim Leach, Chairman of the NEH, at the University of California-Davis on April 8:
In the wake of a series of incidents at high schools, colleges and universities across the land that range from harassment of immigrants to the painting of swastikas on doors of students to vandalism at LGBT offices to Ku Klux Klan hoods being placed on statues, I have been asked to try to put some perspective on the fracturing of civility on American campuses as well as in society at large.
One might wonder why the head of an agency charged with fostering scholarly study of the humanities should take on campus hate and harassment as an issue. It's part of the so-called "Civility Tour," a 50-state project of the agency in which the chairman travels to different venues to lament the rising incivility of public discourse and remind audiences of their duty to maintain norms of respect and consideration. As Leach puts it, "Civilization requires civility. Words matter. Polarizing attitudes can jeopardize social cohesion."
Continue reading "The Chairman Leach Civility Tour" »
April 30, 2010
Stephanie Grace, an editor at the Harvard Law Review, has been outed as the third-year student who emailed to two friends her opinion that "I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African-Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent." That triggered yet another racial flap at Harvard Law, with the school's Black Law Students Association meeting with Dean Martha Minow, as the Boston Globe put it, "to discuss the hurt caused by Grace's email." Now there are efforts to head off her clerkship in California with Ninth Circuit Court Judge Alex Kosinski.
Casual comments about group inferiority are rightly denounced as repugnant, but in context, Grace's words still look crude, but a bit less stark. She holds a sociology degree from Princeton, where, according to a campus website there, she conducted research on how the racial composition of one's freshman year roommates influences behaviors, attitudes and perceptions during one's college years. So she has been studying what happens to members of various racial groups in higher education. Presumably her research, and the dinner conversation with her two friends that preceded the emails, addressed affirmative action and the issue of why many African-Americans do relatively poorly in college. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education had this to say on the subject: "Nationwide, the black student college graduation rate remains at a dismally low 43 percent. But the college completion rate has improved by four percentage points over the past three years. As ever, the black-white gap in college graduation rates remains very large and little or no progress has been achieved in bridging the divide."
Many explanations have been offered---prejudice, lack of faculty role models, stereotype threat, poor high schools, a mostly Western curriculum and so forth. From Grace's email, it seems that at dinner the three women were sifting through these explanations, one of the women suggested a genetic interpretation that Grace rejected and then followed up with a you-might-be-right email saying that genetic differences are possible . Writing to her friends, she is certainly crude and stumbles into brief mentions of women and math, blacks and violence (no genetic connection there, she says) and the likelihood of the Irish to produce redheads. But she adds the comment that "I would just like some scientific data to disprove the genetic position."
Is this racist? Maybe so, but different people will judge it differently. The fact is though that Grace has been publicly tarred as a racist and probably will be for the rest of her life. This is for private off-the-cuff comments to two friends, one of whom fell out with her and sent the email around in an effort to destroy her. The major lesson: Pick better friends and never count on private emails remaining private. Another lesson is that if you attend a famous law school, assume that any aggrieved fellow students will run to the dean complaining of hurt feelings instead of confronting and, if necessary, denouncing you. Law professor and blogger Ann Althouse made this point: "Why does the dean even get involved with something one student said in private email? If the answer is because the Black Law Students Association came to her and demanded a response, then maybe the question should be why did the Black Law Students Association go to the dean for help? ... Why go to the nearest, biggest authority figure? Stephanie hurt me!"
A few weeks ago I discussed The Misguided Push for STEM Diversity, noting that every month or so (or so it seems) a new report appears pointing with alarm to the "underrepresentation" of women or blacks or Hispanics or Aleuts (or usually all of the above) in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, math and outlining STEM-"diversity" steps that must be taken in order to save the nation from destruction by competition in the "new global economy" with those more diverse than we (like the Japanese?).
I've written about these reports here, here, and here. I'm venturing down this well-trod path yet again because --- you guessed it! --- there's yet another call for increasing diversity, this one from the high-powered duo of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association of American Universities. "Navigating A Complex Landscape To Foster Greater Faculty and Student Diversity in Higher Education" claims to be "a first-of-its-kind" handbook offering "in-depth, cross-referenced legal resources to help promote effective diversity programs for science faculty and students," explaining how U.S. universities can "draw more women and underrepresented minorities into science fields to boost economic and security goals---while minimizing any unreasonable legal risks."
Like all the reports I discussed earlier, this one attempts to answer the question, "Why Is Diversity Important To Science?" (a section of the press release announcing the publication of the handbook), by ... repeating the assertion that diversity is important to science.
Continue reading "More "Diversity" STEM-Selling" »
April 29, 2010
The Obama Department of Justice is keen to support those who seek to expand racial preferences. The latest case is Fisher v. University of Texas, in which two young white women, Abigail Fisher and Rachel Michalewicz, argue that the University's diversity policy-one of the more aggressive in the nation-- violates their right to equal protection. In it, the Department of Justice, led by Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Thomas Perez, stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the University of Texas. If they succeed in convincing the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit of the Texas plan's legality, officially-sanctioned race discrimination on campus could expand significantly.
The argument of the University and the Administration as amicus curiae is essentially this: Seven years ago, in the twin affirmative action cases of Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court drew a distinction between the racially-discriminatory admissions policy of the University of Michigan Law School (Grutter) and that of the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science and the Arts (Gratz). The latter was held unconstitutional while the former was not. The Texas plan is like that in Grutter–or so their argument runs.
I believe the Grutter case was wrongly decided and that both policies should have been held unconstitutional. But it doesn't matter. In fact, the Texas policy at issue is like neither Grutter nor Gratz; it is simply a different animal.
Both Michigan cases were about getting a "critical mass" of minority students-in other words a sufficient number of minority students to prevent them from feeling isolated on campus. Indeed, the term "critical mass" appears fifteen times in the majority opinion-and over forty times in the dissents.
Continue reading "Obama and the Texas Suit against Preferences" »
April 27, 2010
According to a short news item in Inside Higher Ed today, "The American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association of American Universities have issued a new handbook with detailed legal resources to help colleges recruit and retain faculty members and students in science fields. The handbook notes legal challenges to some forms of affirmative action, but suggests that many practices that promote diversity are on solid legal ground."
I criticized bean-counting for science faculties in a recent essay for "Minding the Campus", pointing out both the legal objections and the lack of a policy justification for race-conscious hiring. I'm heartened that the handbook, which will be released later this week, apparently takes the legal issues seriously and may even warn schools away from the worst abuses. But what about the policy justification for striving toward "diversity" in the first place? Well, here's what the press release for the handbook says, with my comments in brackets:
Continue reading "Diversity, Science Faculties, and Circular Reasoning" »
April 26, 2010
A frequent allegation against efforts to inculcate "dispositions" in student-teachers is that they are fuzzy and un-quantifiable. Especially in a high-accountability climate, the rise of "disposition" outcomes is particularly hard to sustain.
Here's a study in The New Educator that answers the objection. Authored by educators at Boston College, it appears under the title "Learning to Teach for Social Justice: Measuring Change in the Beliefs of Teacher Candidates." The breakthrough in the article is a questionnaire designed to be administered to students upon entering a teacher-training program, leaving the program, and one year past the program (after the respondents have spent a year in a classroom of their own). The results, say the authors, allow people drafting ed school curricula to determine how effective they are in planting social justice attitudes in their students.
Here are some of the questions, to which respondents answer on a range of "Strongly Disagree" to "Strongly Agree."
Continue reading "Teach Social Justice--Or Else" »
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