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March 10, 2010
On March 5th in the Wall Street Journal, Peter Robinson penned an op-ed on the California higher education budget crisis entitled "The Golden State's Me Generation". Robinson begins not with the finances behind the tuition hikes and protests, but rather with the framing of the reaction. He cites participants in the "Strike and Day of Action to Defend Education" casting their efforts in terms of "Freedom Riders," "farmworkers," and the fight for justice in the 60s and 70s. Berkeley urban studies professor Ananya Roy provided a racial angle as well, announcing "We have all become students of color now."
"Evoking protests against the Vietnam War," Robinson observes, "one banner carried by students at San Francisco State University read, 'Shut It Down like '68.' 'Today we strike!' shouted a Berkeley student, 'Today we march! Today we show solidarity with the workers!'"
This is the vocabulary of the peace movement and civil rights and labor protections of migrant workers. It demonstrates, among other things, the continuing moral authority of those causes, even though they took place 40 and 50 years ago. But there is a giant problem with invoking the movements: if you want to align yourself with the Selma marchers, Cesar Chavez et al, then you better experience some of the same sufferings and indignities that they did. If not, then the citation of such honored and sometimes martyred precursors starts to look a lot more like vanity than politics.
This is, indeed, Robinson's conclusion: "Yet what did the protesters demand? Peace? Human rights? No. Money. And for whom? For the downtrodden and oppressed? No. For themselves."
Continue reading "Ideals and Realities in Student Protests" »
March 9, 2010
Both the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed have reported on a newly-released study regarding faculty salaries from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. Both articles highlight how, in the past year, around a third of professors around the country have seen their salaries reduced. (Only at private, research universities has the average professor enjoyed a salary increase in the past year.) Both articles also suggest that the decline might last for some time, because higher education tends to lag behind the economy in reviving from recessions.
It seems to me that both articles buried the lede. We live in a time of nearly-double digit unemployment. Nearly 20 percent of Americans are underemployed. Yet higher education has been all but immune from faculty layoffs.
That, of course, should come as little surprise: though faculty salaries (especially in the humanities and social sciences) might not be as high as many professors would like, job security is higher for the professoriate than for just about any other profession. It's almost impossible to fire a tenured professor (unless he or she commits the type of massive research conduct associated with the likes of Ward Churchill), and only a college that wants to sacrifice all pretense of academic quality will dismiss untenured assistant or associate professors during economic downturns.
The AAUP, however, views the new figures as cause for grave concern. As the Chronicle reports, "University officials should seek faculty input on pay cuts, and state officials must chose priorities correctly, Mr. [AAUP director of research and public policy John W.] Curtis, said. 'I do think we're at a pretty critical juncture at looking at higher education as a public good and as a resource that contributes something to society. Unfortunately, a lot of governors and legislators are looking at higher education as only an expense.'"
Continue reading "The ''Pay Cut'' Crisis" »
March 2, 2010
People who have followed the effort to put initiatives on state ballots eliminating racial preferences from college admissions might remember this advertisement from 2008, which set Ward Connerly in Klan regalia. Two years before, a group called Think Progress posted a video on its web page under the headline "Leader of Michigan Initiative To End Affirmative Action Welcomes Ku Klux Klan Support."
Those are revolting examples. Not much less so are the occasions when Connerly has been shouted down and booed while speaking against racial preferences and supporting various ballot measures across the nation (see here for Connerly leaving the podium after repeated interruptions in Omaha).
Now, according to this story by Peter Schmidt in the Chronicle of Higher Education , the pro-affirmative action group Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary (BAMN) has filed a lawsuit against California's ban, Proposition 209, and their target is Connerly himself and the organization he started, the American Civil Rights Institute. Challenges to 209 have been attempted before and failed, but BAMN believes that 209 nonetheless "violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution by placing a distinct set of legal hurdles in front of minority groups seeking to increase their representation on the university system's campuses."
It takes some tortured logic to reach that conclusion, and here are some of the statements in the actual complaint (which appears here).
Continue reading "The Tortured Logic of BAMN" »
March 1, 2010
Regulars at FIRE's must-read blog, The Torch, already know the ugly details of events at California-San Diego. A fraternity held an off-campus party that was at best tasteless and at worst racist. Appearing on a student-run TV station (which is funded by the student government through student fees), a student satirical organization defended the party in language, The Torch drily noted, "that many persons on campus found highly offensive."
The university response, however, was nothing short of extraordinary. UCSD president Marye Anne Fox---acting under pressure from various California state legislators---has threatened disciplinary actions against the students involved in planning the party. (That Fox's administration has elected to use a judicial code that was modified because its overly broad nature appears not to have worried the UCSD powers that be.) Even more incredibly, the student government president---working in concert with the university's counsel and other university administrators---has frozen funding to all student media organizations. This assault on the First Amendment drew public rebuke from both FIRE and the ACLU, but appears not to have troubled either Fox or her defenders.
The general outlines of the UCSD case should come as little surprise to close observers of contemporary higher education. Regardless of how offensive the student conduct was (and, in this case, it was pretty offensive), the abusive reaction of those with power at the university is far, far more troubling. In the name of promoting "diversity," Fox and her administration seem intent on massively violating due process for her own institution's students and ignoring the requirements that the First Amendment imposes on any public college or university.
Saturday, the New York Times brought its attention to events at the San Diego campus. The First Amendment issue received one sentence in reporter Randal Archibold's article: "The student association has suspended financing to all campus media while it studies what to do about the program about the party." The article ignored the protests against this draconian action. Likewise the Times saw fit to gloss over the civil liberties angle, blandly observing, "The administration is still investigating the Compton Cookout, and whether students can or should be sanctioned."
Continue reading "The Times Does San Diego" »
February 25, 2010
Early February featured an interesting development from Fresno. Students of Bradley Lopez, a health instructor at Fresno Community College, claimed that Lopez was using class time to spread his personal anti-gay views. Lopez denies the allegation, asserting that all of his comments fell "within the scope of health science."
The students' concerns attracted the attention of the local ACLU branch. In a six-page letter to FCC administrators, ACLU staff attorney Elizabeth Gill criticized Lopez for presenting "as 'fact' and 'science' inaccurate information that reflects his own highly discriminatory and religiously-based views." According to Gill's letter, students in Lopez's class reported him using a slide asserted that counseling or "hormonal therapy" were the "recommended treatment" for homosexuality. Neither academic freedom nor the 1st amendment, the ACLU letter maintained, applied to professors who present "factually inaccurate information."
The Gill letter also suggested that Lopez's inaccurate remarks might create a "hostile environment" for gay and lesbian students on campus.
The ACLU's "hostile environment" claim strikes me as very troubling. There's no evidence that Lopez punished any gay or lesbian students, or that he retaliated against students who failed to accept his anti-gay views. There's no evidence, in fact, that Lopez ever did anything inappropriate to any student. Surely, for instance, the ACLU wouldn't suggest that a professor opposing racial preferences in admissions produced a "hostile environment"?
Continue reading "Double Standards: Fresno and Columbia" »
A graduate of Wesleyan sent word that his alma mater now has a "Campus Climate Log" to chronicle "hate incidents and acts of intolerance" and help move "the entire campus towards a hate-free learning environment." The project, wrapped in conventional diversity rhetoric, is overseen by the Dean of Diversity and Student Engagement as well as the Vice President for Diversity and Strategic Partnerships. The Log can be accessed on on-campus computers, including public ones, but it not available elsewhere. The reports range from the obviously hateful ("kill fags and Jews" scrawled on a bathroom wall) to the banal (suggestive comments from a passing car) and a postmodern graffiti by a student uncomfortable with the belief that a man is a man and a woman is a woman ("f---gender binaries"). To their credit, the Log committeepersons wonder about the point of major publicity for minor stupidities ("Would it cause more incidents by demonstrating how a single act received so much attention?") Judging by the scarcity of complaints, either students don't care much or the campus is already pretty much hate-free: the log for this school year shows only seven reports from last fall, and one since January 1.
February 24, 2010
In these days of 6-year degrees and students graduating at 25 if at all, it's encouraging to see stories of far more intrepid matriculation - consider "The 10 Youngest College Graduates in U.S. History" at Online Degree. Number 1, Michael Keany, current holder of the Guinness World Record for "Youngest University Graduate." "At the age of 8, the homeschooled prodigy completed an Associate of Science degree in geology while at Santa Rosa Junior College. He would then go on to graduate with a bachelor's degree in anthropology from University of South Alabama at 10, a master's in biochemistry from Middle Tennessee State University at 14, and another master's - this time in computer science - from Vanderbilt at 17."
If those aren't accomplishments enough, how about Kathleen Holtz, number 8 on the list, who graduated from California State University at 15, immediately entered law school and, at 18 became the "youngest law student to ever pass the bar in California - if not the United States." She quickly tried several successful cases as an attorney. Take a look at the list for several more inspiring examples of early talent.
February 21, 2010
Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University, quit the board of directors of Goldman Sachs, citing the "increasing time requirements associated with her position as President." What she didn't cite were the two or three weeks of steady criticism from financial analysts and students and the student newspaper in response to belated awareness of her lucrative remuneration from Goldman Sachs and her comments on her role on the board.
Simmons, who juggles membership on several boards, received $323,000 a year as a Goldman director and she leaves the board, which she joined a decade ago, with $4.2 million in Goldman stock, plus 10,000 options that could raise her take to $5.7 million.
In an interview with the Brown Daily Herald, Simmons, the only African-American on the Goldman board and one of only two women, stressed that as a director on several boards, her goal was "to make certain fields more accessible to women and minorities," and implied that that she served on boards to learn something about economics.
The interview, which preceded the Simmons resignation, immediately drew strong criticism from Felix Salmon, a blogger at Thomson Reuters Corp. who called for a change in the composition of Goldman Sachs's board because he said some of Simmons's comments indicate that she lacks the business sophistication to challenge management.
Continue reading "Out Of Her Depth?" »
February 19, 2010
Anyone who follows college sports knows the basic outlines of the fiasco that befell Binghamton University's men's basketball team. A few years after making the transition to Division I and building a new arena, Binghamton hired a new coach, Kevin Broadus, who recruited low-character, academically challenged "students" who happened to be talented basketball players. The team won a conference championship, but shortly thereafter everything collapsed: several players were arrested (on crimes ranging from selling drugs to making purchases from a stolen credit card) and revelations of academic improprieties emerged. In the aftermath, the athletic director was fired, the head coach was "reassigned," and the president "retired."
The new SUNY chancellor, Nancy Zimpher, commissioned a study chaired by Judith Kaye, former chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals. The Kaye Report revealed such things as how Binghamton, a university that claims to be academically elite, granted transfer credit for such courses as "Introduction to Bowling." But the most striking element of the report is how defenders of the rogue program---both during Broadus' tenure and subsequently in the investigation---tried to play the "diversity" card to undermine those who wanted to uphold even token academic standards at Binghamton. That, of course, is a very familiar storyline, even if it usually doesn't appear in the kind of context we saw at Binghamton.
In its opening section, the report from Kaye---who, after all, is hardly a card-carrying right-winger, and who provided the required paean to the university's "admirable" commitment to admitting "disadvantaged youths" who needed "second (or more) chances"---nonetheless declared, "we have noted the suggestions of 'racism' that have at times been raised to resist questioning, and expressions of concern, about various aspects of the program." (All of Broadus' problem recruits appear to have been minorities.)
Continue reading "Binghamton's Diversity "Experiment"" »
February 16, 2010
One often hears about stressed and stretched and over-scheduled college students, but every survey I've seen, including those issued by National Survey of Student Engagement (Indiana University) and the Higher Education Research Institute (at UCLA) shows dismayingly low levels of study time and academic engagement among undergraduates.
Another one came out the other day. It's the summary of the Spring 2008 survey of undergraduates in the entire University of California system, produced by the Center for Studies in Higher Education at Berkeley. The report appears here.
The survey received more than 63,000 completed questionnaires (a response rate of 39 percent) that showed how students spend their time in an average week. Its 48 pages document, among other things, yet another body of evidence against the notion of the six-hours-of-homework-per-day-student. Here is the summary of time use breakdowns:
Continue reading "The Part-Time College Job" »
February 12, 2010
Take a look at ISI's latest civic literacy survey "The Shaping of the American Mind: The Diverging Influences of the College Degree & Civic Learning on American Beliefs."
One finding: more than half of students polled did not know the three branches of the federal government.
February 11, 2010
Given that it's been 30 years since I left graduate studies in English Lit, I don't spend much time reading up on the field. Still, when I saw the provocative headline, "The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind,'" on a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education I knew immediately that this was a piece about the employment woes that Ph.D.'s in the humanities face. The author, William Pannapacker (writing under the pen name Thomas H. Benton), is an associate professor of English at Hope College in Holland, Mich. He has taken it upon himself to try dissuading a generation of would-be English and other humanities graduate students from wasting years pursuing doctorates unless they have "no need to earn a living for themselves or anyone else, they are rich or connected (or partnered with someone who is), or they are earning a credential for a job they already hold."
That message, Pannapacker writes, is not something that undergrads are likely to hear from their professors. Asking about job prospects in academe, these students are too often told, "there are always jobs for good people" and "don't worry, massive retirements are coming soon, and then there will be plenty of positions available." Too many of these students find out only too late that professors in the humanities have been telling undergraduates this for years while fewer and fewer who head to graduate programs wind up finding employment that can sustain them. Worse, perhaps, the unemployed Ph.D.s ultimately discover that they aren't valued in the rest of the job market, that "graduate school in the humanities is a trap" which is "designed that way" by universities who refuse to reduce admissions, even as job prospects go from desperate to whatever is worse than desperate.
As compelling as I found Pannapacker's pieces, what astonished me the most about them is how little things have changed in 30 years. Virtually everything he says is shockingly similar to the warnings of Darcy O'Brien, a novelist and English professor whose 1979 article, "A Generation of Lost Scholars" in the New York Times magazine observed that, "a profession that traditionally prided itself on its gentility and immunity from the raw practices of the marketplace now finds itself unable to employ more than one in three humanities Ph.D.s." This was no accident, O'Brien recounted, because even as universities of the day "question their degree programs," they continued them, while "students, some of them either ignorant or misled, pursue courses of study that may enlighten the mind but will likely lead to unemployment." More than thirty years ago, O'Brien portrayed this as "a system out of step with social and economic realities" wasting the energies and time of "many of our brightest, most intellectually energetic students."
Continue reading "You Don't Have To Be A Professor" »
February 8, 2010
The AAUP recently produced a new journal devoted to exploring the state of academic freedom on today's college campuses. As customary with anything from the AAUP in recent years, the publication was as notable for what it didn't contain as what it did, in that it offered no mention of the internal threat to academic freedom coming from the ideological and pedagogical majority on most college campuses.
That said, the essays did provide an occasional surprise. As Erica Goldberg at The Torch pointed out, the article by Delaware professor Jan Blits (who opposed the university's infamous residence hall indoctrination program) provided an example of an area in which all friends of academic freedom should agree---that increasing the power of administrators, especially residential life administrators, over curricular and other academic matters poses a grave threat to academic freedom.
The other essays in the journal, alas, didn't rise to Blits' level. Robert Engvall produced a screed against merit pay---even as he conceded that "some people oppose merit pay because they aren't that good at what they do." Nonetheless, he illogically maintained, "opposing merit pay in the university setting is absolutely vital to protecting the essence and quality of that setting." We should go to the barricades, apparently, for the tenured radical who, upon receiving tenure, stops producing any scholarship.
Continue reading "The AAUP Strikes Out . . . Again" »
February 4, 2010
The headline in the East Bay Express a few weeks back probably didn't surprise people in California, bracing as they have been for funding shortfalls in government services, including education: "Berkeley High May Cut Out Science Labs". The first few words of the story delivered the distressing news that the School Governance Council had decided "to eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them."
The science labs under review take place before and after school, allowing science teachers in regular periods to devote more time to academic instruction. All students in science classes have to take one of the labs, while AP students take two of them. The results have been impressive. According to this Los Angeles Times story, "In the last school year, 82% of Berkeley's AP chemistry students passed the rigorous exam, which gives college credit for high school work. The national passing rate is 55.2%. The school's AP biology and physics students are even more successful."
Another Golden State fiscal casualty? Not this time. If people read on, they learned the actual reason for the decision, for the Council didn't plan to kill science labs because of budget problems. They did so because not enough black and Latino students were enrolled in them. Because of a wide achievement gap, a parent representative on the Council explained, "the science labs were largely classes for white students." As a result, the members of the Council, a body made up of parents, teachers, and students charged with redesigning the very "structure" of the school, voted nearly unanimously to shut down the labs and redirect resources to "struggling students." The labs are, indeed, open to those low-performing students, but according to this article from the San Francisco Chronicle, they "don't always attend the extra labs---and ultimately fail the class." (Curiously, the Chronicle story doesn' mention a word about the racial achievement gap, while the LA Times highlights the racial side of the story.)
Continue reading "Identity Politics Beyond Reason" »
February 2, 2010
Last December, I wrote in these pages about allegations of racial discrimination in tenure denial at Emerson College, which had prompted the school to set up a three-person commission charged with reviewing those allegations. The panel's report has just been released, and the good news is that the panelists "noticed no overtly racist or prejudiced attitudes toward African Americans." But, alas, there is also bad news: "There are to be found at Emerson unexamined and powerful assumptions and biases about the superiority, preferability, and normativeness of European-American culture, intellectual pursuits, academic discourse, leadership, and so on." (Emphasis in original.) Left unexamined, these biases result in the "disproportionate undervaluing of African Americans and the disproportionate overvaluing of European Americans." You can read the entire report here, and I urge you to do so, if you like self-parody.
Barack Obama might be the most academia-friendly President since the development of modern higher education in the early 20th century. But anyone wondering why so few professors (and virtually none outside of law or economics) have been appointed to his administration should consider the case of Chai Feldblum. Nominated for a post at EEOC, Feldblum came under attack for signing an only-in-academia petition endorsing recognition for "households in which there is more than one conjugal partner." Faced with a choice between continuing to favor polygamy or pleading incompetence, the professor used her Senate confirmation hearing to claim that she had made a "mistake" in signing the petition, suggesting that she had done so at the urging of an unnamed academic associate.
Feldblum's nomination cleared committee and is currently pending in the full Senate. But her experience reveals how academic groupthink---quite beyond its effects on higher education---also reduces any impact that professors might hope to have in the public policy arena. As Mark Bauerlein's seminal essay on the topic observed, one element of campus groupthink is the law of group polarization, or "when like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts toward extreme versions of their common beliefs . . . Group Polarization happens so smoothly on campuses that those involved lose all sense of the range of legitimate opinion." Once outside of the academy, however, adherents of such positions are easily, and correctly, labeled as extremists.
The recently concluded testimony in the federal trial challenging California's Proposition 8 provided another example of how the pedagogical and ideological imbalance in most humanities and social sciences departments helps diminish the impact professors can have on public policy. Attorneys Ted Olson and David Boies approached the trial with the model of the Brown v. Board of Education cases in mind---using academics to demonstrate the pernicious effects of discrimination.
Continue reading "Prop 8 and the Academy on Trial" »
January 28, 2010
10. Justice O'Connor now suggests that the social-science evidence on which it was based is shaky.
9. The social-science evidence on which it was based is getting shakier, as more and more disinterested research is done.
8. There should not be a social-science exception to the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause anyhow.
7. In a variety of ways, using racial and ethnic preferences actually aggravates the achievement disparities that prompted Justice O'Connor to allow preferences in the first place.
6. America is becoming increasingly multiethnic and multiracial, and in such a nation it is untenable to have a legal regime that sorts people on the basis of their skin color and what country their ancestors came from.
5. Individual Americans are becoming increasingly multiethnic and multiracial, too, which makes racial and ethnic preferences even more unwieldy and untenable.
4. Justice Alito is more likely to get it right than Justice O'Connor was.
3. Who knows when one of the dissenters in Grutter will be replaced by an Obama appointee?
2. Twenty-five years is too long to leave on the books a bad decision that affects thousands of students every year.
1. The Equal Protection Clause makes it illegal to "deny to any person... the equal protection of the laws."
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In yesterday's Commentary section, we listed a discussion by George Leef of Justice O'Connor's second thoughts on Grutter v. Bollinger--her 2003 opinion that upheld racial and ethnic admission preferences at the University of Michigan law school. O'Connor also said she "expected" that in 25 years preferences would no longer be needed.
At several universities this summer, hope will float and perestroika will pay. At the end of August, Princeton, Harvard, Smith, Stanford, and Yale are taking the currying of favor with wealthier alumni seabound. For the fifth straight year, Princeton and other sponsoring universities are joining forces with a for-profit, West-coast speakers and travel bureau, this time offering a new five-star "post-perestroika" cruise along the Black Sea.
The 15-day voyage from August 30 to September 15th along the shores of Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, and Turkey features three Perestroika superstars -- President Bush's former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Defense Secretary William Perry and Russia's own Mikhail Gorbachev as guest speakers. Only one of the "distinguished world leaders," as the Princeton brochure advertizing the cruise calls them, will keep company with the alumni aboard ship for the entire cruise, mind you. The brochure notes, and a spokesman for Princeton's alumni relations office confirms, that Ms. Rice will be aboard ship for only three days, and Mr. Gorbachev for only one. Indeed, Ms. Rice and Mr. Gorbachev will not even overlap. But when the three foreign policy celebrities are not on board, passengers will be hearing from other expert speakers - among them, James H. Billington, a former history professor at Princeton and the Librarian of Congress since 1987, Marvin Kalb, the former chief diplomatic reporter for NBC and professor emeritus at Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center, and Vinton G. Cerf, vice president and chief Internet promoter for Google, widely regarded as one of the "fathers of the Internet."
The brochure says that this floating faculty at sea, including the Perestroika superstars, will lead fellow passengers in discussions of such topics as "Russia's relations with Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan" and "how the West can best engage Russia and the former Soviet republics in facing global challenges such as nuclear proliferation, increasingly scare energy resources, and economic decline."
Alumni in personal economic decline, however, might hesitate signing up for the voyage. Education aboard the Silver Wind, a small luxury cruise liner owned by an Italian company that the travel company charters, is pricey. The ship's least expensive of its 149 cabins, the "Vista Suite," which features a 240-square foot bedroom and a picture window, goes for $23,990 per person in a two-person cabin, or $39,990 for a single passenger. Its luxury bookend, the Grand Suite, 1,019 square feet of space with a teak veranda and floor-to-ceiling doors, costs $39,990. That is not counting the airfare to Moscow, where the program originates - a round-trip $1,558 per person (economy) ticket, or $3,658 per person for business class seats.
Continue reading "Sail with Condi And Gorby For $40,000 Or So" »
January 26, 2010
The New York Times reports today on a new marketing gimmick for colleges seeking to boost applications during this recession-plagued time when every tuition-paying body in a classroom counts: the fast-track application form that allows some high school seniors seeking admission to bypass the usual fees of $50 or so, the tedious filling out of information, and perhaps most significantly, the dreaded college essay.
Taking a lead from credit-card marketers, the express forms, typically packaged in a brightly colored envelope marked "Exclusive Scholar Applications," "Distinctive Candidate Application" or something similar, come already filled in with the student's name and other information (bought from College Board lists) so that all the applicant need do is affix a signature and head for a mailbox. Most of the application packets are produced and designed by the same firm, Royall & Company of Richmond, whose founder, Bill Royall, led direct-mail campaigns to potential donors to President Clinton. High-school counselors tend to hate the short-cut forms, which they say take advantage of "teenagers who don't know what they want" from a college, as a counselor told New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg, and cynics complain that the mass mailings to tens of thousands of young people when the college actually has only a few hundred freshman slots to fill, is an effort to game the U.S. News and World Report college rankings, which are in part based on "selectivity" (the ratio of admissions to applications) and the relative SAT scores of applicants. And although some well-known universities, such as Marquette and the University of Minnesota, have used the express application forms to claimed success, it's clear that the nation's most elite schools---the Harvards, Stanfords, and so forth---don't need to bother with them in order to generate hundreds of applications per freshman slot, and that fast-track forms are yet another sign of the growing gap between the top tier of universities that have the luxury of being genuinely selective and the great mass of lesser-ranked institutions that don't have that luxury and must scramble for students these days.
Continue reading "Are You an ''Exclusive Scholar''? Just Sign Here" »
Sometimes people who don't work in academia wonder why colleges are often the object of debates over free speech. Sure, some observers know that campuses are liberal enclaves, and they regard professors and administrators as easily intimidated by identity politics. But most people remember their college days as pretty much apolitical, and they continue to put the ideological elements in a small box.
That's why it's important to go back to the sources and hold them up to public scrutiny. Take campus speech codes. They have a bad name in public life, but they stand firm in student handbooks and campus policies in black and white. Here is a list of some of them, all taken from the list assembled by Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (www.thefire.org). (Some of them may have been altered by now, but the fact that they ever existed is sufficient cause for response.)
At Ohio University we have this definition of harassment: "Nonsexual verbal or physical conduct that denigrates or shows hostility toward another because of the person's gender can be the basis for a hostile, offensive, or intimidating environment claim. Gender based conduct can take the form of abusive written or graphic material; epithets; sexist slurs; negative stereotyping; jokes; or threatening, intimidating, or hostile acts."
Continue reading "Why Free Speech Advocates Are Angry" »
January 25, 2010
Roger Clegg writes on a shocking new University of Massachusetts set-aside program over at Phi Beta Cons:
The Boston Globe reports that the University of Massachusetts is setting up a med-school set-aside program: "Under an initiative set to be finalized today, the state's only public medical school [i.e., at UMass] will partner with UMass campuses in Boston, Amherst, Lowell, and Dartmouth to create a joint baccalaureate-MD program that would ensure admission for aspiring doctors from underrepresented ethnic and socioeconomic groups. . . . The medical school will set aside 12 slots in its 125-student, first-year class for qualified students from groups underrepresented among Massachusetts doctors. Those groups include African-Americans, Hispanics, certain Southeast Asians, and Cape Verdeans, Brazilians, and other Portuguese speakers. Students of any ethnic background from low-income families or those among the first in their families to attend college would also qualify."
I won't make the usual and obvious points about why discrimination on the basis of skin color and national orgin is unfair, divisive, and stupid. All that aside, this seems to me to be almost certainly illegal. To be sure, this isn't exactly like the race/ethnicity set-aside program that was struck down in Bakke, since here the slots are also (in theory at least) going to be open to applications from members of disfavored racial and ethnic groups, so long as they are low-income or the first in their families to attend college. But this is still a very mechanical use of race, like the point system struck down in Gratz v. Bollinger. And the justification given for the racially discriminatory program by UMass president Jack Wilson is the need for "role models" --- which has also been rejected by the Supreme Court (in Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education, in 1986).
January 21, 2010
The New York Times' "The Choice" blog is running a helpful question and answer series on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Take a look if you're puzzling through the process of filling the thing out.
January 14, 2010
Candace de Russy's January 7 post here, "Hate-America Sociology," understandably attracted a lot of attention. It cited a 10-question Soc 101 quiz at an unnamed eastern college, complete with accusatory leftish questions and some simple-minded answers by a student who drew a mark of 100 for agreeing with the politics of his professor.
A few readers, and many more at other sites that linked to us, asked if the test and answers are authentic. I am satisfied that they are. The material came with assurances from Dr. de Russy, a former professor and trustee at the State University of New York. I know the college involved and have a copy of the test with answers filled in. I talked with the source for the story, who cannot be identified because of privacy concerns and fear of retaliation.
The blog Progressive Scholar saw nothing wrong with the test ("I don't understand, what is the problem with this exam?") Dr. de Russy replied, stressing what she saw as the "unremitting bias" of the test. Its point of view, she wrote, is "entirely anti-capitalist, anti-white, anti-male. No other perspective is included, even as a hypothetical."
Readers who come across other politically loaded exams should send them to us at editor@campusmind.org or Minding the Campus, the Manhattan Institute, 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017.
Apologies to Time education correspondent Gilbert Cruz, who is not the author of the quote, "I'm, pretty sure you'd have to shoot somebody not to graduate from Harvard." That line came from Kevin Carey, policy director of the think tank Education Sector, in an interview with Cruz.
January 13, 2010
At the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, students can minor in social and economic justice without taking a single economics course.---Reported by E. Frank Stephenson on the Division of Labor blog.
January 12, 2010
A Chicago study on "Assessing the Impact of Eliminating Affirmative Action in Higher Education" comes to this conclusion: black and Hispanic representation at all 4-year colleges is predicted to decline modestly---by 2%---if race-neutral college admissions policies are mandated nationwide. However, race-neutral admissions are predicted to decrease minority representation at the most selective 4-year institutions by 10%.
Now, my question is this: Is it worth it?
That is, the systematic discrimination on the basis of skin color and national origin might have the benefit of increasing the political correctness of universities' racial and ethnic mix by this, let's face, trivial amount. And, we are then told, this trivial amount might (since the social scientists are not in agreement) have some marginal improvement in some areas of what students learn.
On the other hand, here are some of the costs of this discrimination: It is personally unfair, passes over better qualified students, and sets a disturbing legal, political, and moral precedent in allowing racial discrimination; it creates resentment; it stigmatizes the so-called beneficiaries in the eyes of their classmates, teachers, and themselves, as well as future employers, clients, and patients; it fosters a victim mindset, removes the incentive for academic excellence, and encourages separatism; it compromises the academic mission of the university and lowers the overall academic quality of the student body; it creates pressure to discriminate in grading and graduation; it breeds hypocrisy within the school; it encourages a scofflaw attitude among college officials; it mismatches students and institutions, guaranteeing failure for many of the former; it papers over the real social problem of why so many African Americans and Latinos are academically uncompetitive; and it gets states and schools involved in unsavory activities like deciding which racial and ethnic minorities will be favored and which ones not, and how much blood is needed to establish group membership.
Pencils down. The correct answer is, no, it is not worth it.
By and large, Christine Quinn has done a commendable job as New York City Council speaker, working cooperatively with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and constraining the more extreme members of her caucus, which is no easy task in a city like New York. Yet she now has a decision that will help define her legacy---whether to reappoint Charles Barron as chair of the Council's Higher Education Committee. (In New York, the Speaker has authority on appointing committee chairs; there is no seniority system.)
As a professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), I have a higher stake than most in Quinn's decision. In most cities, a "higher education committee" for a City Council would seem to make little sense, given that funding for public universities usually flows from state governments. But in a somewhat arcane scheme, government money for CUNY's budget comes from both the state and New York City. So the City Council has appropriate oversight authority over CUNY.
Given that government revenues are plunging, CUNY almost certainly will have to tighten its belt over the next few years. Having a responsible chair of the Higher Ed Committee who will work cooperatively with the CUNY administration---rather than someone intent on grandstanding or demagoguery---is therefore doubly important.
Barron has a well-deserved reputation as a racial demagogue in a city that has known more than its share of such figures. A former Black Panther who is quick to denounce those who disagree with him as racists, Barron has launched unsuccessful bids for Congress, New York City mayor, and Brooklyn borough president. He remains stuck on the City Council.
Last month, Barron embarrassed both himself and the City Council by behaving---in the words of CUNY Trustee Jeff Wiesenfeld---like a "thug" at the groundbreaking ceremony for Fiterman Hall, a Borough of Manhattan Community College building badly damaged on 9/11. Barron, incredibly, objected to the seating arrangement at the ceremony, complaining that he hadn't been given a prominent enough seat. Last week, he disgracefully excused the behavior of his supporters as he lost 48-1 for Speaker.
Continue reading "The Embarrassing Barron of New York" »
January 7, 2010
Recently, a colleague forwarded to me a copy of an exam from an introductory sociology class found lying in a room at a public college in the east. It was graded 100%. The exam deserves to be quoted at length, as parts of it are virtually indistinguishable from the old Soviet agitprop of the Fifties:
Question: How does the United States "steal" the resources of other (third world) [sic] countries?
Answer: We steal through exploitation. Our multinationals are aware that indigenous people in developing nations have been coaxed off their plots and forced into slums. Because it is lucrative, our multinationals offer them extremely low wage labor (sic) that cannot be turned down.
Question: Why is the U.S. on shaky moral ground when it comes to preventing illegal immigration?
Answer: Some say that it is wrong of the United States to prevent illegal immigration because the same people we are denying entry to, (sic) we have exploited for the purpose of keeping the American wheel spinning.
Question: Why is it necessary to examine the theory of cumulative advantage when it comes to affirmative action?
Answer: Because it is unfair to discredit the many members of minority groups that have (sic) been offered more life chances through the program.
Question: What is the interactionist approach to gender?
Answer: The majority of multi-gender encounters are male-dominated. for (sic) example, while involved in conversation, the male is much more likely to interrupt. Most likely because the male believes the female's expressed thoughts are inferior to his own.
Question: Please briefly explain the matrix of domination.
Answer: the (sic) belief that domination has more than one dimension. For example, Males (sic) are dominant over females, whites over blacks, and affluent over impoverished.
This exam was part of the curriculum in a for-credit class at an accredited degree-granting institution. Introductory sociology courses like this one are frequently required, even for non-majors. A student who matriculates in this field of study will have nothing in the way of useful skills, but will be convinced that his country is rotten to the core, and that whites and males are evil.
China encourages its brightest students to study mathematics and engineering. India has become known as a hotbed of tech-savvy computer programmers. Meanwhile, the U.S. spends billions to teach postmodern, left-wing misinformation as objective "fact."
It seems rather foolish to remain optimistic about the future of this nation when millions of its most "educated" are systematically being taught to loathe it.
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A former member of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York (SUNY), Dr. de Russy writes on educational and cultural issues. She also serves on the boards of several distinguished organizations dedicated to higher education and other institutional reform.
January 6, 2010
In an unintentional, if powerful, commentary on the grip that groupthink has on some quarters of the economy, LeMoyne professor Dolores Byrnes informed readers of the NEA's Thought & Action that "some professors of education recently told me during a department retreat: 'We are all Marxist, it doesn't even need to be said.'"
No wonder Education schools---from Minnesota to the aggressive practitioners of the "dispositions" criterion---have proven so eager to purge from their ranks those with dissenting opinions. And no wonder LeMoyne's Ed School was sued for dismissing a student because of his (non-Marxist, naturally) political beliefs. Byrnes' anecdote also shows just how out of touch the higher education establishment has become---and how the nation's colleges and universities have suffered as a result.
Essay after essay in the NEA's annual higher-education publication complains about how professors lack respect from the public, without ever pausing to consider how the image of colleges and universities as the bastion of out-of-touch ideologues might have caused the problem.
Continue reading "We Are All Marxists Now" »
January 5, 2010
KC Johnson beat me to the punch in registering doubts and concerns about the letter University of Minnesota General Counsel Mark B. Rotenberg has written to Adam Kissel at FIRE regarding the education department's review of the curriculum. Kissel and FIRE are to be praised for having wrought out of the university a letter assuring that the university will never "mandate any particular beliefs, or screen out people with 'wrong beliefs' from the University." But, as KC observes, other statements in Rotenberg's response cloud that pledge. As with ed school dean Jean Quam's explanation of the review process a few weeks ago in the Star-Tribune, Rotenberg's letter recasts several coercive and biased opinions about race, class, etc. into liberal, open-ended, broad-minded explorations of those matters.
The conversion happens in Rotenberg's description of the process. Whereas the Task Group for Race, Culture, Class, and Gender offered a set of tendentious "Outcomes" such as "Future teachers will recognize & demonstrate understanding of white privilege," and asked students to engage in "self-discovery" assignments in which they were to reveal attitudes they hold that damage other groups and identities, Rotenberg pictures a group of "creative thinking" faculty members "re-exploring the designs of our teacher education programs." For support, he cites Dean Quan chractertizing the process as "faculty brainstorming." In his version, the demands of the task force turn into a marketplace-of-ideas climate in which nothing is prescribed but everything is entertained.
KC cites the sentence that follows Rotenberg's assurance that the university will not mandate beliefs ("To the contrary . . ."). The following sentence is equally misleading, and deserves attention as well. It says that the ed school's "commitment" to liberal education "was recognized by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education in its 2006 evaluation of the College, which praised CEHD for 'exposing candidates to a diversity of ideas and viewpoints,' and for 'respecting the variability of race/ethnicity, nationality, culture, language, religion, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, disability status, and human potential.'"
Note, once again, the mendacious softening of language. Rotenberg defends the process as one aimed merely at "exposing" students to diverse viewpoints, and for teaching them to "respect" human variations. Would anybody reading the task group's recommendations conclude that they allow students who have been exposed to "white privilege" argument to dispute them? Does the group allow students to read about "institutional racism" and decide that it isn't all that important to the algebra classroom?
Continue reading "Further Thoughts on the Rotenberg Letter" »
Matthew Levinton, a student at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote us with some encouraging news about a new book club at that school, which he currently serves as President. Read his account:
Last fall at the University of Texas at Austin, a new great books program began its mission to realize Thomas Jefferson's vision of educating citizens and leaders to understand the meaning of liberty and to exercise it wisely. In the spirit of this charge, the Center's new book club, which began last spring with a reading of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, was formally organized as the "Jefferson Book Club," and opened the fall semester with a reading and discussion of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote.
The book club's events, which have included the discussion of such things as Leo Strauss' essay "What is Liberal Education", will continue with Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography when classes resume in the Spring. Plans for the new semester also include readings and discussions of Rousseau, Shakespeare, St. Augustine, Solzhenitsyn, and a viewing of the classic Spartacus. The film event will compliment the Center's lecture to be held in March on Spartacus by Classical historian Barry Strauss.
Events organized by the Jefferson Book Club serve the Thomas Jefferson Center as an informal gathering place for students and faculty, and provide opportunities for those who realize and appreciate the value of great books to come together and learn from each other. Furthermore, the club has caught the interest of students from outside of the liberal arts as well, and provides individuals from other colleges that may not formally study the great books in class with an opportunity to become involved in discussions that may otherwise be absent from their studies.
The book club is establishing a blog to use for communication among club participants regarding suggestions for readings, and ideas for when discussions may take place. I am serving as the book club's president, and the process of working with the Center's directors and faculty to bring the club together, and to help make it something for students to enjoy and learn from has been a very meaningful experience for me. I look forward to our plans for the New Year. When I explain the book club to my professors, or talk with those who are involved with it, they are always very supportive of the club and the opportunity it presents to students to learn from meaningful discussions outside of the classroom. The events held last semester have generated much interest among students and faculty, and I expect the Jefferson Book Club to become a strong part of the great opportunities to learn at the University of Texas at Austin, and I am honored to be a part of it.
Andrew Gillen of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity wrote this note to Charlotte Allen to clarify comments of his in Allen's article today on student loans:
Charlotte, I saw your article on student loans is up at Minding The Campus. I liked it, but at the very end, you have a long quote from me that is problematic.
The quotation says: "I think that having a federally run program makes some sense, as long as the government is limited to determining eligibility and setting interest rates. Get rid of lender subsidies, let interest rates vary, and let the government subsidize students directly if it wants to. The problem with the private loans was that they happened because federal loan limits got mazed out. So drop the cumulative loan limit and let people borrow what you can pay back. Drop the non-dischargeability, but let lenders pursue borrowers to a limit of, say, $200,000 or $300,000."
This is sort of a merging my views on both gov and private loans, but it's not clear from the quote which program I was talking about when. You probably wrote it down correctly, since I tend to be all over the place when talking, but as it is, it could be misinterpreted very easily. Probably the easiest thing to do would be to replace it with this "I think that having a federally run program makes some sense, as long as the government is limited to determining need based eligibility and setting the loan limits. Get rid of lender subsidies, let interest rates vary, and let the government subsidize students interest payments directly if it wants to. For private loans, drop the non-dischargeability and let the market determine the terms of lending."
Thanks,
Andrew
January 4, 2010
The National Education Association has just published its annual higher education journal, Thought & Action, whose 2009 edition contains a special focus: "A New Progressive Era for Higher Education." The essays (which are not yet available on-line) lament the declining government support for public institutions---all while providing (unintentional) examples of why the public might doubt the wisdom of pouring more money into higher education.
Take, for instance, the tale told by Max Page, a professor in the University of Massachusetts-Amherst's department of art, and sociology professor Dan Clawson, whose recent publications include such only-in-academia topics as "Class Struggle in Higher Education" and "Neoliberalism Guarantees the Future of Social Movement Unionism." Page and Clawson relate how a small group of UMass professors---mostly from "Labor Studies and Sociology, with long activist resumes"---formed a group called Save UMass, to protest the education funding priorities of the Massachusetts state government.
The activist professors encouraged colleagues to take time from class to criticize the state legislature for not giving UMass more money. Page and Clawson rejoice that around 40 percent of faculty spent a half-hour of class time doing so. The "activist" duo appears unaware of how their colleagues' behavior violated the AAUP's 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure.
Continue reading "Saving U Mass From Its Faculty" »
December 28, 2009
Just before Christmas, FIRE issued a press release appropriately celebrating a letter from the University of Minnesota general counsel declaring GET. The letter was good news not for its contents but for its existence. It's hard to imagine that a public university's chief attorney would sign off on anything approximating what the U of M's Education School proposed regarding the teaching of "cultural competence"---and the existence of the letter strongly suggests that the Education curricula will now be reviewed by the general counsel's office.
That said, other passages in General Counsel Mark Rotenberg's letter are deeply troubling. "No University policy or practice ever will mandate any particular beliefs, or screen out people with 'wrong beliefs' from the University," he encouragingly wrote. But then, in his next sentence, Rothenberg stated, "To the contrary, as Dean [Jean] Quam repeatedly has emphasized, an essential component of CEHD's curriculum initiative will be to expand -- not restrict - the horizons of future teachers."
Those two sentences are mutually irreconcilable given the facts of the case. FIRE's letter (and, of course, additional coverage of the Minnesota fiasco) made perfectly clear that the Education faculty sought to "expand" (a wonderfully euphemistic verb) the "horizons of future teachers" through mandating "particular beliefs" and screening "out people with 'wrong beliefs' from the University." Does Rothenberg see anything wrong with the behavior of his university's faculty? If so, he 'say.
Indeed, Rothenberg goes out of his way to defend the Education professors' performance. He accuses FIRE of having based its letter on "an unfortunate misunderstanding of the facts." (Unfortunately, he doesn't reveal what those misunderstood "facts" were.) He hails the Education process as indicative of the "creative thinking of many faculty members charged with exploring ideas to improve P-12 education and student achievement." Under his own signature, he repeats Dean Jean Quam's absurd description of a formal task force report as nothing more than "faculty brainstorming"---as if the professors sat around a table over high tea, exchanging ideas off the top of their heads.
Continue reading "More Troubling News From Minnesota" »
Thanks for reading and check back in with us in the new year for more coverage of pressing academic questions.
December 23, 2009
At InsideHigherEd.com, Richard Whitmire has an interesting discussion entitled "Soon-to-Be Open Secret" on the delicacies of the "boy problem" on college campuses. The problem itself is simple. An achievement gap between male and female high school students has opened, and it's pushing college enrollments nationally toward 60-40 proportions (in many schools and systems, women already make up more than 60 percent of the population). Girls get better grades, take more AP courses, do more homework, participate in more extra-curricular activities, and have fewer behavioral problems. Admissions officers can't help but admit them in higher numbers.
Colleges want to keep the ratio as even as possible, however, for a variety of reasons. One is that when one sex significantly outnumbers the other, sexual rivalries and competitions set in. When we head toward a two-thirds majority (remember the Jan and Dean line, "Two girls for every boooooyyyyyyyyyyy"), the sexual gamesmanshiip of social life goes up. Added to that, admissions people worry that strong female students won't want to go to school where the number of men is low.
And so, Whitmire writes, "favoring men is an open secret at private, four-year college, where there's no legal penalty for helping men. Actually, it's even done by some public colleges willing to roll the dice in the hope they won't get sued."
Why, he wonders, haven't more people talked about the problem? Why isn't affirmative action for boys as controversial as affirmative action for African Americans and Hispanics?
Continue reading "The Problem with the "Boy Problem"" »
December 22, 2009
Kara Miller, who teaches rhetoric and history at Babson College, is the latest professor to decry the laziness of American college students. You can read her Boston Globe op-ed here.
Miller is careful to say that some native-born students work hard, but the gap she sees between American and international students is large. She says her foreign students, chiefly from China, India, Thailand and Latin America, work hard, excel on exams and contribute in class, while her American students are generally disengaged and account for almost all of her "C," "D" and "F" students this semester. Among the leading activities of the American students are texting during class, declining to take notes, and staying up late logging hours of video games.
Many critics of the college scene have made the same general observation, , including two who write for this site, Mark Bauerlein (The Dumbest Generation) and Peter Sacks (Generation X Goes to College.) Why the lackadaisical approach to college? Many point to a sense of entitlement, the impact of the self-esteem movement and the generally inept curricula of the public schools, which increasingly stress diversity, equality and feelings rather than actual learning. Then too, many colleges are gearing courses to the declining level of student readiness and energy---not just all the courses that end in the words "studies," but also impossible-to-fail courses about American entertainment that seem like rainy-day activities at summer camp. A common argument in defense of slackers is that they understand that college is a time for fun, drugs and sex, and the time to get going doesn't arrive until graduation. A sophisticated version of this explanation--that softness and indulgence peel away as Americans leave their school years behind, is found in Michael Barone's book, Hard America, Soft America.
Still, it's hard to overcome lifelong habits of indifference and disengagement. In a globalizing economy, Miller writes, "Americans' inability to stay focused and work hard could prove to be a serious problem."
December 16, 2009
The Gates Foundation has just released a report "With Their Whole Lives Ahead of Them" on why students fail to finish college, which might seem a timely topic amidst recent hand-wringing about our persistent failure to actually get students to a diploma. The problem, as with about all studies on this topic, is that it shows little information of any real evaluative use.
We find that "most students leave college because they are working to support themselves and going to school at the same time." 54% of the students who left school cited "I needed to go to work and make money." They also reported problems with textbook costs and other fees greater than their peers who graduated as well. Simple enough.
Also unsurprisingly, those who did not have financial support from their parents were far more likely not to graduate, at a rate of 58% dropping out as opposed to 38% graduating. Similarly, those without scholarships or loans were far more likely to drop out.
And yet, when we venture into reasons why students selected their schools, 41% of those who indicated that financial aid or a scholarship was a major reason for choosing their school did not graduate. Perhaps these had additional insurmountable financial difficulties, yet it not, there are clearly larger problems at hand.
What's left? Well, in keeping with prior indications, students who did not graduate were far more likely to choose colleges based on proximity to where they lived or worked, and to seek a class schedule that worked with my schedule (the students who graduated seemed to have far fewer prior commitments).
What is there to say, based on this sample of 614 students? Well, not much. Clearly, financial problems are at the root of numerous decisions to leave college before completion. Whether graduated or not, most students were supportive of the idea of cutting the cost of college by a quarter (who wouldn't? and why only a quarter? How about half?). One interesting, and very-much neglected idea was "making part-time attendance more viable by giving those students better access to loans, tuition assistance and health care - benefits and services that are frequently available only to full-time students." Otherwise, given the data in this report, it seems that there's very little that can be done. Financial problems are intractable, and in an age where tuition restraint is an absent quantity and increasing federal support never seems to cut the actual price of education, this report is a series of points that fail to add up to anything resembling an answer.. Now if the Gates Foundation pledged to pay for all these shortcomings, that might make a difference. As it is, all we have is just another thick stack of paper.
December 15, 2009
KC Johnson has spoken well of the Minnesota teacher education initiative, and his analysis of the op-ed by the dean of the College of Education, Jean Quam, identified the thorough disregard of claims of indoctrination made by columnist Katherine Kersten in the Star-Tribune. Quam's defense is so feeble and misleading, in fact, that it deserves more scrutiny.
Just compare her summary statements about the initiative's "diversity awareness" aims with actual statements made in the "Race, Class, Culture, Gender" report posted on the Minnesota blog on September 14th.
Regarding the focus on "issues of race, class, culture, and gender," Quam says, "Our belief is that acknowledging these issues is essential to teacher and student success and that ignoring them will not make them go away." Note the reasonable word "acknowledging," an action that doesn't prescribe how you acknowledge the issues and what judgments you make about them.
But one "OUTCOME" of the "Race, Class, Culture, Gender" report extends far beyond acknowledgement:
"Our future teachers will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression."
In case anyone believes that "drawing on notions of white privilege etc." leaves open the possibility that one might conclude that "white privilege" is a mistaken, tendentious, errant, or irrelevant notion, another "OUTCOME" allows no such answer:
"Future teachers will recognize & demonstrate understanding of white privilege."
Continue reading "The Minnesota Case---An Institutional Diagnosis" »
December 9, 2009
Last Sunday, the New York Times' "Ethicist" column featured a letter from a lawyer loath to hire internship applicants that belonged to the Federalist society. Randy Cohen, the "Ethicist" suggested that disqualification on the grounds of their membership was unfair. The lawyer went ahead and rejected all applicants who were members anyway.
Ilya Somin, at the Volokh Conspiracy notes that, while this case is blatantly unfair, the legal world seems to feature little political discrimination against applicants. Not so in other fields, he continues:
By contrast, both liberal and conservative law professors warned me not to put the Fed Soc on my CV for the academic job market, where ideological discrimination is likely to be greater because the academia is far more ideologically homogenous than the law firm world, (see also here), there is little or no equivalent to the constraint imposed by the profit motive, and academics tend to care about politics far more than practicing lawyers do.
These personal experiences aren't necessarily typical. Only systematic data can really settle the issue. But they are similar to those of other Fed Soc members I know in the law firm and academic worlds (and I know a great many in both). It's not unusual for people to put Fed Soc membership on their law firm resumes, while the conventional wisdom is strongly against doing so on academic CVs.
December 8, 2009
The Center for Public Integrity has launched a major new investigative series on the dangers of unpunished sexual assault on the nation's college and university campuses. The basic thesis of the series: "One national study funded by the Justice Department found that one in five women who attend college will become the victim of a rape or an attempted rape by the time she graduates. But students reporting sexual assault routinely say they face a host of institutional barriers in pursuing the on-campus remedies meant to keep colleges and universities safe, according to a nine-month investigation by the Center for Public Integrity. The result, say experts, is a widespread feeling that justice isn't being served, and may not even be worth pursuing."
This isn't investigative reporting: it's advocacy journalism at its most blatant. The series uncritically accepts the finding of the (unnamed) "national study funded by the Justice Department" (of which the CPI website does not provide a copy) claiming that one in five women are victims of a violent crime (either rape or attempted rape) during their four years on campus.
To provide some perspective on the dubious nature of this figure: as of 2005, 57% of all college students were women. If 20% of them are victims of violent crime by the time they graduate, that means over a four-year period, around 11.5 percent of all students on the typical college campus will be victims of rape or attempted rape. On an annual basis, the figure would be around 2.7% of students.
Continue reading "College Rape Stats---Cutting-Edge Modern Fiction" »
December 7, 2009
December 4, 2009
Our friend Patrick Deneen of Georgetown posted an evocative comment today on an Inside Higher Ed item concerning the President's hopes for higher education as a source of job creation. It's very much worth a read.
The nation's universities have already implicitly justified their existence - and expense - to a generation or more of students that the main reason for attending university is to attain the necessary credential for potential employers. Universities uniformly have one devoted office or center that is dedicated to helping students make the transition into post-graduate life, namely and inevitably a "Career Services Center" (by contrast, there is no "Family Preparation" or "Transition to Being a Citizen and Neighbor" centers). Understanding well this implicit promise, alumni have begun suing their alma maters when their post-graduate job search has proven unsuccessful, and many believe such lawsuits to be anything but unjustified or frivolous.
The President is doing great damage in his constant reiteration of the view that our universities and colleges should be seen solely as places of job preparation. This can only deepen the pervasive careerism that pervades our institutions of higher education.
Our universities and colleges were once devoted to the ideals of the "liberal arts." The liberal arts were oriented to teaching its students the art of being free, the art of attaining liberty. That art is above all the art of self-government, the art of learning the bounds of what is appropriate for human beings. Moreover, necessarily such an undertaking was an education in citizenship, the hallmark of the person educated for liberty (not bondage). By necessity, such an education oriented its charges toward res publica, toward public dedications that transcended narrowly private interest.
The current emphasis on "career preparation" is a profound betrayal of this ideal of the liberal arts. This emphasis elicits in two simultaneous dispositions among students: a utilitarian worldview that views all aspects of education as means for one purpose - a job, or more narrowly, "money-making" - and the transformation of the object of education of one devoted to commonweal to narrowly private interest.
The President has spoken on occasion in tones of moral condemnation over the behavior that precipitated the economic crisis, yet out of the other side of his mouth further promotes the mindset - and an educational emphasis - that would only deepen the preconditions that led to the economic crisis. A people formed with dedicated devotion to utilitarian and narrowly financial calculation, combined with extreme privatism of orientation, is the fertile ground from which just such financial chicanery and irresponsible indebtedness arises. Does he not have a sensible and liberally educated advisor in his circle that help him come to this realization? Given how many of his advisors come from our "elite" institutions - the Princetons, Harvards and Yales of the nation - and how deeply the orientation of these institutions has for a long time been precisely guided by such narrowly and perversely utilitarian and careerist aims, there can be little hope that he can be dissuaded from his mission of further destroying our institutions of higher learning. Perhaps it's time for him to tap someone from a St. John's College in order at least to provide a somewhat different take on matters, for a change.
December 3, 2009
An unusually bitter academic argument of 2000 came up again at the American Anthropological Association annual convention in Philadelphia. At issue was the long and famous (critics would say, notorious) work of Napoleon Chagnon among the Yanomamo Indians of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil and Venezuela. The Yanomomi are not among the most endearing of what used to be called primitive cultures. They acquire women by raiding nearby villages. In the process, the victors kill all the men, bash the brains of babies out on rocks, then gang-rape the women over and over and cart them home as spoils of war. A 1988 article in Science by Chagnon provoked praise and controversy, but the anger reached its peak in 2000 with the publication of Darkness in El Dorado, a vehemently anti-Chagnon book by journalist Patrick Tierney.
The book argued that Chagnon had exaggerated the violence of the Yanomami, staged some fights, and collaborated with his late colleague, geneticist James Neel, in starting a measles epidemic by vaccinating some members of the tribe.(The name Josef Mengele surfaced among critics of Chagnon and Neel.) In a syndicated column at the time, I suggested that the uproar over Chagnon was a shadow war over other issues---the noble savage myth versus the reality of the Yanomami, the sociobiological approach versus the blank-slate theory, and respect for traditional field work versus the post-Sixties politicized view that anthropology is little more than a destructive form of colonialism. The AAA censured Chagnon, an astounding act by a professional academic group. To the amazement to many, myself included, the association later revoked the censure and did it with unusually blunt language: "The task force compromised its objectivity by merging its investigation with a political agenda, in that its mission in conducting the investigation was intended to challenge 'Western elites,' and 'interrupt regimes of knowledge and power."
Jean Quam, a professor of social work who is dean of the University of Minnesota's College of Education and Human Development, has wholeheartedly defended her school's proposed "cultural competence" curricular redesign---in an op-ed for the Star-Tribune that provides a glaringly misleading description of the critics' argument.
Most of Quam's op-ed consists of little more than administrative boilerplate---the sort of jargon that appears on any university website anywhere in the country. Her department's curriculum "will be a national model for preparing teachers for the real challenges of a 21st-century classroom." "Now is a critical time to address barriers to student achievement and to give teachers and administrators the tools they need to be effective." "We value diversity and encourage exploration of all viewpoints and ideologies."
The key point of Quam's op-ed came when she dismissed the argument made by columnist Katherine Kersten, who first exposed the U of M's plan to enforce personnel and curricular bias in its Education program. "Kersten's primary concern," claimed Quam, "is that the initiative addresses the reality of how issues of race, class, culture and gender play out in classrooms and affect student achievement. Her position is that discussion of these issues equates to indoctrination."
I have read Kersten's column; I encourage you to do so as well. Nowhere does it articulate a position that discussion of issues of race, class, and gender "equates to indoctrination." Nowhere does it even come close to such a position.
Continue reading "A Dean Who Can't Read?" »
December 2, 2009
At the Volokh Conspiracy, Todd Zywicki outlines the latest in the Dartmouth alumni suit against Dartmouth College.
The current case, like the previous case, arises from the 1891 Agreement between the Dartmouth Trustees and the alumni of the College, acting through the Association of Alumni, that gave the alumni the right to elect half of the non-ex officio members of the Board of Trustees. At the time, the Board was comprised of 12 members, of which 2 served ex officio (the Governor of New Hampshire and the Dartmouth president). Upon striking the agreement, over the next two years, 5 of the appointed trustees resigned and were replaced with elected trustees. Over time, the size of the board expanded, and by the time I was elected a trustee in 2005 there were 8 elected Alumni Trustees, 8 appointed Charter Trustees, and the Governor and College president as ex officio members. As I have discussed in detail elsewhere, the 1891 Agreement was the culmination of decades of negotiations between the trustees and college administration on one hand and the alumni on the other.
In 2007 after a string of petition trustees were elected to the Board, a majority of trustees voted to impose a board-packing plan, which added 8 new appointed seats to the board, making 16 appointed and 8 elected trustees. I won't rehash that here, except to point interested readers to my earlier discussions as well as the Court's excellent opinion which held that the plaintiffs in that case stated valid claims both on contract and promissory estoppel theories. Importantly, the Court also held that the Association of Alumni had standing to sue and capacity to contract in that case, as well as to provide valid consideration, such as administering the Alumni Trustee elections. For purposes of analysis on the current summary judgment motion, I am going to take it as given that the underlying contract claim is valid.
In Spring 2008, however, the alumni leaders who brought the suit had to stand for reelection and were voted out of office. The winning slate of alumni loyal to the trustees and administration dismissed the suit. Their campaign position had been that the alumni should have "negotiated" more with the trustees before bringing suit. As the current plaintiffs note in their most recent brief, it thus came as quite a surprise when the suit was dismissed with prejudice, with the deliberate intent to try to foreclose a future lawsuit if negotiations broke down (it doesn't actually work, as will be discussed below). After all I've seen over the past few years, I thought that I was beyond being shocked by the sort of behavior described in the plaintiffs' brief, but I confess that this surprised even me. The College has not contested any of the claims in the briefs of the current plaintiffs with respect to the collusive behavior of the AoA leadership in settling the prior case. Read the first 10 pages of so of the plaintiffs' brief if you want to get a flavor of what happened.
Read on for a fascinating outline of the legal questions involved.
A recent report by American Council of Trustees and Alumni entitled "What Will They Learn?" makes clear that the steady deterioriation of general education at the best colleges continues apace. The report studied general education requirements at 100 top schools and found that "Topics like U.S. government or history, literature, mathematics, and economics have become mere options on far too many campuses." Indeed, my own university dropped its U.S. history requirement a year ago, replacing it with a watery "History, Society, Culture" that allows just about everything to count.
The upshot is that one can no longer rely on the ordinary curriculum to ensure a solid liberal education for all students. This is one reason why we need special undergraduate programs, centers, and institutes that emphasize broad learning in civics and history, and provide students a forum for the discussion of ideas and ideologies. I highlighted one of them awhile back, the Alexander Hamilton Institute in Clinton, NY, run by Bob Paquette and providing students a home for the reasoned and critical study of Western civilization.
Another one is the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville. It was established back in 1991 by Senator Mitch McConnell, who graduated from Louisville 27 years earlier. The goal of the center is to educate students to become engaged and informed citizens, and so it hosts luncheons, seminars, panel discussions, and lectures with undergraduates as full participants. Gary Gregg, the Director, holds the Mitch McConnell Chair in Leadership at the university, and his writings The Presidential Republic, Patriot Sage: George Washington and the American Political Tradition and Securing Democracy---Why We Have an Electoral College.
The curriculum of the Center emphasizes civics education, and it developed expressly as a response to "the national problem of declining classroom emphasis on American history and civics education, abysmal student knowledge of the American Constitution and political processes, and a growing detachment of young people from the political process." The programs and events the Center organizes remedy the knowledge deficit by offering scholarships to young people interested in a broad education in political science and the liberal arts, along with internships that give them direct exposure to U.S. politics in action.
Continue reading "Another Success Story" »
December 1, 2009
My article yesterday on this site, "Decoding Teacher Training," discussed the efforts of the University of Minnesota's Education Department to purge prospective public school teachers deemed politically incorrect on "diversity" matters.
A report stresses the seemingly banal concept of "cultural competence," which people from outside the Ivory Tower might suspect is simply making students and prospective teachers aware of the diverse country and world in which we now live.
That, of course, is not how the concept is defined in the groupthink world of Education Departments, where "cultural competence" are codewords that the general public is not supposed to understand.
In its report, the Minnesota department recommended that all Education students be required to perform the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI), "which measures five of the six major stages of the "Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity"; and the "360-degree" analysis of Cultural Intelligence (CQ), "a theoretical extension of existing facet models anchored on the theory of multiple intelligences."
Continue reading "More Minnesota Madness" »
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