Tuesday, November 24, 2009

The Overselling of the Ph.D.   [Robert VerBruggen]

David Kopel writes:

Louis Menand’s new article The Ph.D. Problem: On the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy’s self-renewal [is a good reason to be glad you went to law school instead]. Cliff Notes version: the academy (the tenured folks who run things) have every incentive to take in huge numbers of Ph.D. candidates, and turn them into ABD drones to teach undergraduates — even though about half of them will never finish the Ph.D. program, and half of those that do finish will never get a tenure-track job. The result is the over-production of Ph.D.‘s who are highly specialized but who are not very good at doing the things that universities should foster (e.g., teaching to non-specialists, intellectually engaging with the world outside the academy). The hyper-specialization puts non-tenured people (including Ph.D. candidates, and young teachers) at the mercy of the rigid political correctness of the tenured folks. Ten years of time invested in getting a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature leaves you with almost no job choices in your field, if you get blackballed for non-p.c. attitudes.

11/24 12:35 PM Share

Will the Climate Conspiracy at CRU Curb Dishonest Scientists?   [Candace de Russy]

Peter Wood and Ashley Thorne of the National Association of Scholars analyze the deliberate distortion of data on climate warming by faculty members and researchers at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU).

The NAS has a unique perspective on this scandal:

Our work on sustainability, however, has brought us into contact with scientists who have complained bitterly about the strong-arm tactics used by global warming theory proponents to impede other lines of research. It has become increasingly apparent that the ideological fervency that NAS has documented in the sustainability movement has extended into the scientific journals and funding agencies. 

Wood and Thorne hold out hope that these scandalous revelations about CRU

will alter the burden of proof. From this point on, proponents of global warming theory will receive no benefit of the doubt. Wanton extrapolations, reliance on models in which data can be endlessly readjusted to fit the thesis, and attempts to stigmatize critics as scientifically illiterate will have to stop. Ad hominem attacks on critics suggesting that they are in the hire of “big oil” or other interests will be seen for the shabby evasions they always were. Let’s hope that the result of this scandal is a restoration of principled inquiry to an important public policy debate.

I'm not so sure. The Left has huge sums of money and other incentives riding on their anthropogenic narrative of global warming and will fight back hard. Maybe these "scientists" will just be more stealthy  in their massaging of data and communications on the subject. 

11/24 11:58 AM Share

Talking Candidly About Title IX   [Allison Kasic]

Over at Saving Sports, Eric McErlain points to an interview with Jeffrey Orleans, the former commissioner of the Ivy League, on Title IX. In a pleasant surprise, Orleans not only talks about the successes of Title IX, but also the unintended consequences that the regulation's strict gender quota requirement ("proportionality") has brought. 

Check out the interview here.

11/24 10:58 AM Share

Monday, November 23, 2009

Fiscal Responsibility vs. Equal Opportunity   [Robert VerBruggen]

The NYT has a symposium on the topic featuring Richard Vedder.

I especially like Alfonso Trujillo's response:

Subsidizing top-tier universities in the hope of getting more underprivileged students to attend is tantamount to subsidizing top-tier department stores in the hope that some underprivileged consumers will be clothed. In the end, both results are predictable: higher prices, higher status for those who purchase the product, and an inefficient method of helping the poor.

If those who protest the University of California fee hikes are sincere in their concern for the education prospects of the poor, then why don’t they instead back a program that truly does help the poor: means-tested vouchers?

Subsidize the consumer! (If you subsidize at all.)

11/23 02:16 PM Share

Teaching Students How to Write   [George Leef]

Many students go through their K-12 years without much solid, diligent instruction on writing. The old-fashioned teachers who went through cartons of red pens every year, making comments on student essays and paper have been replaced by younger teachers who for the most part are not very good at writing themselves and willingly take the path of least resistance: Just tell the kids that they're doing fine. Besides, all those fussy rules about grammar, punctuation, organization — they just oppress kids and stifle their creativity! So say educational "progressives" anyway.

Therefore, when students get into college, few write competently. That has given rise to efforts to improve the writing instruction they get in college. Writing Across the Curriculum is such an effort. Much ink has been devoted to it, but does it accomplish its objectives? My Pope Center colleague David Koon takes a critical look in a piece released today.

11/23 12:49 PM Share

America's Terror-Soft 'Poisoned Lives'   [Candace de Russy]

AlfonZo (yes, that's how it's written) Rachel at PJTV harangues with gusto against academic al-Qaeda apologists who permit terrorists to receive a U.S. education and condone their evil deeds.

11/23 12:18 PM Share

Thought Reform at the University of Minnesota?   [David French]

If you attend a public university or work for a public employer, and you ever hear the term "cultural competence," it's time to get your favorite constitutional lawyers on speed dial. Thought reform is incoming.  

Faced with stubborn educational achievement gaps, it looks like the University of Minnesota's "Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group" believes the answer lies in forcing teachers to adopt a radically Leftist view of society (hat tip: Katherine Kersten): 

The [Task Group's] report advocates making race, class and gender politics the "overarching framework" for all teaching courses at the U. It calls for evaluating future teachers in both coursework and practice teaching based on their willingness to fall into ideological lockstep.

The first step toward "cultural competence," says the task group, is for future teachers to recognize — and confess — their own bigotry. Anyone familiar with the reeducation camps of China's Cultural Revolution will recognize the modus operandi.

And how does one create cultural competence? The first step is to confess your own sins:

The task group recommends, for example, that prospective teachers be required to prepare an "autoethnography" report. They must describe their own prejudices and stereotypes, question their "cultural" motives for wishing to become teachers, and take a "cultural intelligence" assessment designed to ferret out their latent racism, classism and other "isms." They "earn points" for "demonstrating the ability to be self-critical."

The task group opens its report with a model for officially approved confessional statements: "As an Anglo teacher, I struggle to quiet voices from my own farm family, echoing as always from some unstated standard. ... How can we untangle our own deeply entrenched assumptions?"

If this program (as conceived) weren't hideously unconstitutional, it would be breathtakingly silly (I suppose it can be both). For example, the ultimate goal

is to ensure that "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."

I suppose that achievement gaps aren't caused by broken families, violence, and community cultures that sometimes stigmatize academic success as much as they are by teachers trapped in their own "heteronormativity."

No thought control would be complete without a bit of compelled speech:

The task force recommends requiring "our future teachers" to "articulate a sophisticated and nuanced critical analysis" of this view of the American promise. In the process, they must incorporate the "myth of meritocracy in the United States," the "history of demands for assimilation to white, middle-class, Christian meanings and values, [and] history of white racism, with special focus on current colorblind ideology."

And, finally, remediation for noncompliance:

What if some aspiring teachers resist this effort at thought control and object to parroting back an ideological line as a condition of future employment? The task group has Orwellian plans for such rebels: The U, it says, must "develop clear steps and procedures for working with non-performing students, including a remediation plan."

As university officials consider this proposal, I would urge them to respect the fundamental First Amendment rights of their students and consider the admonition of the Supreme Court that if there is any "fixed star" in our "constitutional constellation," it is that "no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion."

Otherwise, you may want to beef up the "attorneys fees" line item in the school budget.

11/23 11:46 AM Share

Have British Scientists Been Fooling with Mother Nature?   [Candace de Russy]

It remains to be verified that leading U.K. scientists indeed have deceptively massaged data, unearthed by a hacker, to "hide" a temperature decline in order to support their anthropogenic theory of global warming.

Such manipulation would amount to fraud and a grand conspiracy, and Brent Tantillo at Democracy Project is mad as blazes about it. He waxes both political and theological on this potentially huge academic scandal:

I would say these fellas have some answering to do, especially considering a former Vice President basically used this graph to obtain a Nobel Prize, Congress is considering taxing the hell out of American business using a “cap and trade” system based on this data, and Americans are supposed to start living like serfs in the Medieval age for fear of what Global Warming is doing to our environment. . . . I am no rape and pillage the earth type of guy, but I am mad as hell that scientists are manipulating data for their “Deep Ecology” agenda which puts nature over man. Good environmentalism is about saving our planet for us, so that we can enjoy the bounty that the Creator provided.

11/23 11:15 AM Share

Friday, November 20, 2009

The Huge Tuition Hike in California   [George Leef]

Students are vigorously protesting the planned 32 percent hike in tuition at the University of California, but as Neal McCluskey observes here, that increase is from a very low (that is, heavily subsidized) rate.

Why do California students think they're entitled to college education that is overwhelmingly paid for by others? Most probably aren't explicitly taught to believe that. Rather, this is another instance of the general phenomenon Frederic Bastiat identified — the belief that government makes it possible for everyone to live at the expense of everyone else.

11/20 04:55 PM Share

Why I'll Never Be A University President   [David French]

George, thanks so much for posting on the latest diversity tempest at NYU. Reading the NYU president's simpering response to his "marginalized" Muslim students makes me wish that, for one day at least, I could be president of NYU. If I were, here's what I would say:

Dear offended students,

In response to your recent expressions of outrage, I have read Professor Tunku Varadarajan's recent column in Forbes regarding the Fort Hood massacre. I have a few thoughts.

First, let me state unequivocally that Professor Varadarajan is entitled to state his opinion on matters of public importance (and even on matters only of importance to him), and I appreciate his participation in the marketplace of ideas. Our nation and our university are better off when scholars feel free — and are free — to speak, write, and otherwise engage the public in times of national testing.

Second, I am utterly indifferent to your expressions of "pain." If you believe that you have any right to participate in a robust and diverse democratic society without being challenged, shocked, or even horribly offended, then our educational process has utterly failed you. Democratic discourse can be offensive. It is better to learn this lesson now, when you are young, than to live your life in a state of misguided anger.

Third, to the extent you feel "marginalized," I am amused. You are students at one of the most prestigious universities in the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world. While there are certainly "marginalized" populations in the world, you are not among them. In fact, you enjoy a level of privilege and access to wealth and power enjoyed by only the tiniest minority of your fellow Americans. Yet you claim to "feel marginalized." I suggest you need to broaden your perspective.

Finally, I would hope that the "pain" that you feel over a column is nothing compared to the pain and sympathy you feel for the human lives lost at Fort Hood and elsewhere during the course of the murderous jihadist campaign of the last 30 years. The attack at Fort Hood was horrifying, but it pales in comparison to the attacks on September 11, and even these deaths are but drops in the ocean of blood spilled by your co-religionists in the name of the very religion you claim to be peaceful. Perhaps the most proper target of your outrage is not those who criticize murderers but the murderers themselves.

But a university president could never write a letter like that. It's much too truthful.

11/20 04:24 PM Share

Look at a College's Financials Too   [George Leef]

Prof. Robert Blumenthal of Georgia State College and University (a public liberal arts school with a lovely campus; I spoke there in September) writes about a matter that is becoming increasingly important to parents and students who are considering private colleges — the financial stability of the school. Unfortunately, few schools make it easy for outsiders to get a feeling for their financial conditions.

Now that we seem to be entering into some lean years for higher education (less money available, and if people start to realize that just having a degree doesn't necessarily get you anywhere in the job market, fewer students enrolling), and that will mean an increasing number of colleges closing. Spending a year or more at a school that folds would be highly inconvenient for the student. Professor Blumenthal says caveat emptor and gives some practical advice on red flags to look for.

11/20 03:53 PM Share

Darwish Silenced at Princeton and Columbia   [Candace de Russy]

Both campuses extended official invitations to speak to Nonie Darwish, founder of Arabs for Israel, and then canceled them. However, as Phyllis Chesler points out, the PC speech police at both universities put out the welcome mat to the Israel-hating president of Iran, Ahmadinejad; Holocaust-denier Norman Finkelstein; and anti-Zionist journalist Amira Hass.

Yet another dark day for free speech on American campuses.

11/20 03:38 PM Share

Diversity and the Naval Academy   [George Leef]

My post about the color guard incident is generating a lot of responses. Here is one. The writer's name is James B. Morris:

Thanks for your observations at NRO about “diversity” at the Naval Academy.
 
My 3rd son is a plebe there. I noticed over the past seven years of looking at colleges (from my oldest down to now) that the most prominent message in each college brochure or marketing piece is the gushing endorsement of “diversity.” My oldest was Harvard and Princeton level of achievement, and by the time we had visited those schools, along with Cornell, Washington in St Louis, et al, the ubiquitous message of diversity was making me cringe.
 
So through my second and now third boy, I am consistently disgusted by this focus. Each one of the aforementioned catalogues and brochures rarely mentions their focus on teaching students to be robust and critical thinkers or dynamic leaders. Aside from famous alumni, they spend much of the copy space gushing over each institution’s diversity.

So when my third applied to the Naval Academy, I thought I would find a different perspective. But sure enough, ALL their marketing materials share the same exuberance for diversity. Each recruiting talk we sat through reiterated their diversity goals, and even on Induction Day (July 1st) the Superintendent of the Academy used the word in his welcoming speech.
 
In higher education and in the educated elites, it appears that E Pluribus Unum is rapidly fading into history.

11/20 03:20 PM Share

Thursday, November 19, 2009

The Diversity Mania at the Naval Academy   [George Leef]

How bad is the diversity mania in our military? Evidence mounts that it's pretty bad, including a little-noticed occurrence regarding the Naval Academy's color guard at the October 29 World Series game. Two members of the color guard were replaced because the school's administration was worried that the guard was not sufficiently "diverse." Diana West writes about it here.

Larry Purdy, whose excellent book Getting Under the Skin of "Diversity" I reviewed here, is a 1968 graduate of the Naval Academy. He has some thoughts to share about his alma mater's decision to bow down to the gods of diversity:

As with so much else that has happened in recent days, Ms. West’s piece suggests that an obsessive interest in “so-called” diversity has now taken over at one of our nation’s premier military academies. I say “so-called” because it appears the Academy is promoting a form of diversity that is at odds with the environment the Navy actually claims to be fostering, i.e., one “that respects the individual’s worth based on his or her performance regardless of race, gender or creed.”

The words quoted, above, are important. In fact, they are lifted verbatim from the current Chief of Naval Operation’s own Diversity Policy. I presume, of course, that Admiral Gary Roughead meant what he wrote. And if he did, it follows that the skin colors, genders and ethnicities of the midshipmen whom the Academy is training (and, thus, the skin colors and genders of the color guard who represented the Academy at the recent World Series game) are (or should have been) entirely irrelevant.

The CNO’s policy goes on to state that the Navy “will support a culture of professional and personal development ensuring our people are trained and educated to accomplish our mission, with opportunities available to all in an equal manner.” And ends with this: “We will sustain our force through the fair, equal, and ethical treatment of every member of the United States Navy.”  

To that I say, “Amen.”

The only colors that should matter to the Naval Academy’s senior leadership are Navy Blue and Gold and Marine Corps Green. And while it should not need saying, I am convinced that when every member of our armed services knows he or she will be treated fairly and equitably without regard to race or ethnicity, they will come in abundance from every American community to defend, in the end, the only colors that truly matter: Red, White & Blue.

11/19 04:17 PM Share

The Greedy Hand Reaches for More   [George Leef]

Several years ago, Amity Schlaes wrote a book on taxation entitled "The Greedy Hand," and a piece on IHE today puts me in mind of it. The story reveals that the mayor of Pittsburgh is proposing to tax tuition collected by the ten nonprofit colleges and universities in the city.

This is ostensibly a tax on the educational institutions, but does anyone doubt that it's going to lead to higher tuitions in the future for the students? You can't really tax a business, even if it's non-profit. The tax must ultimately fall on people, and I suspect that the students will bear most of it.

While the mayor is at it, how about a tax on music lessons?

11/19 03:28 PM Share

WIcked Hangs the Fruit of Historical Revisionism   [Candace de Russy]

In no-holds-barred truth-telling mode, legal expert John Howard demonstrates that bringing the 9/11 terrorists to the U.S. for a civil trial is an irresponsible, dangerous, cynical, and wicked act. 

He shows how this decision is the "the culmination of the malign leftist Alinksy project" that is deeply rooted in "a vast academic project of historical revisionism."

This is must-read, especially for our legally savvy coterie.

11/19 01:01 PM Share

Dissent   [John J. Miller]

E-mail:

Hello Mr.  Miller:   I strongly disagree with the gentleman who wrote you and you posted @ NRO Corner that quote:  "I would point to another factor: professional historians are already familiar with the narrative that popular histories tell, at least in their given area of expertise"  That is simply not true.  I too am a graduate student working on a dissertion on a historical tpic. I may have a beter perspective that the other gentleman since there has been twenty years since I obtained a master's degree and my current work on the Ph.D. The academy then and now are a world apart.  You are correct that modern academia is not interested in popular works, and that is because they are largely driven by ideology. They do not know the American narrative.  My committee does not even know the literature of their own field beyond the last ten years, and they are not interested in learning, except as far as to critique and deconstruct previous research in a facile way.  In my area of military history, they have no clue as to the popularity of such studies now being written by non academic historians or academic historians at small liberal arts colleges who are there to teach and not become deans.  Meanwhile, academic presses make their money on such popularly written works to a large audience, while the academic's books sell only to libraries.   The reason I am so passionate by this is that I have had to practically sell my intellectual soul to get my dissertation through a narrow-minded, post modern, arrogant group of people as you will ever see.  I can't change the committe because the whole department is in lock step.

11/19 12:15 PM Share

What’s Wrong With Education Schools? You Want a List?   [Fred Schwarz]

In yesterday’s New York Post, Thomas W. Carroll reports on the testimony New York State Education Commissioner David Steiner gave earlier this week before the state Board of Regents. Steiner, the former dean of education at Hunter College (and son of the cultural critic George Steiner), “says education schools should focus far more on clinical practice in the classroom — and professors at these colleges should be focused far less on getting published in what the Oxford-educated Steiner termed ‘obscure journals.’” He also suggests data-based accreditation for ed schools, alternative paths to certification, exams to make sure teachers know their subjects, and merit and incentive pay.

Steiner has been studying and criticizing education schools for years, and has come under fire for it. At last, some people in the education establishment seem to be listening to him. That’s a good start, but many tough battles lie ahead with New York’s famously powerful teachers’ unions and hidebound state bureaucracy. Steiner can console himself with the lyrics from Kander and Ebb’s song, which definitely apply to education reform: “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.”

P.S. Also in yesterday's paper:

The state Board of Regents yesterday approved the development of a "virtual high school initiative" that will allow students to earn credits online.

The move comes as state officials are rethinking the requirement that students attend a course for a certain amount of hours — known as "seat time" — to earn credits, instead of having them gain credits by demonstrating mastery of a subject.

11/19 12:00 PM Share

Another Black Eye for 'Diversity'   [George Leef]

Right on the heels of the pummeling Roger Clegg (and others) dished out for Prof. James Sterba's thoughts about the supposed benefits of continuing "affirmative action" policies to ensure "diversity" in college student bodies, James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal writes about The 'Diversity' Sham. (It's the top piece in yesterday's WSJ "Best of the Web.")

Taranto specifically covers a flap at NYU that was brought on when Tunku Varadarajan, columnist now also teaching at NYU's Stern School of Business, wrote that the killings at Fort Hood were a religiously motivated act of messianic violence. Of course, all hell broke loose over that.

Muslim students complained that Varadarajan's statement was "hate-mongering." The NYU administration fell into line, attacking Varadarajan.

Taranto's summation is right on target: "This is how 'diversity' works in practice: Intellectual contention is drowned out in a sea of emotion, much of it phony. Members of designated victim groups respond to a serious argument with 'pain' and 'shock' and accusations of 'hate,' and university administrators make a show of pretending to care."

But we must remember that "diversity" produces great "educational benefits" for colleges and universities. The Supreme Court fell for that risible assertion in  Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003, leading Taranto to conclude, "Every incident of this sort makes it clearer how the University of Michigan played Justice O'Connor and her colleagues for fools."

Precisely so.

11/19 11:28 AM Share

Research vs. Teaching   [John J. Miller]

On The Corner this morning, I commented on the battle of teaching vs. scholarship. It drew this reply:

The distracting effects of research are almost totally irrelevant to the quality of undergraduate teaching. Ill-paid and overworked adjuncts, with or without the doctorate, and professors who teach four classes a semester and have no time for teaching, are the vast majority of teachers; those professors who have time for research are a dwindling few at unrepresentative elite colleges. Is the emphasis on research excessive? - perhaps, although that's a different argument. But it just doesn't matter a hill of beans.

Also consider that the majority of college students are semi-literates who should not be in college anyway, or even high school, and that teaching would be much easier if we could chop down the number of students by the necessary 50-75%.

11/19 10:49 AM Share

Erin Go Blah   [John J. Miller]

Irish universities go on strike.

11/19 09:00 AM Share

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Re: An Academic Defense   [George Leef]

Well said, Roger.

It's interesting to read the comments that follow Roger's. Sterba's defense of racial preferences takes a beating, and several of the beaters identify themselves as liberals. Evidently there are a number of liberals who see "affirmative action" as just a useless and divisive policy we'd be better off without. That's reason for optimism.

11/18 03:30 PM Share

Time's Ten Best    [Jane S. Shaw]

If you’ve looked at Time’s “Ten Best College Presidents,” you probably rolled your eyes (or gnashed your teeth). I’m not criticizing the presidents themselves at this point, just the journalists at Time for their profound ignorance about the state of our universities and their fawning treatment of its most prominent presidents.

Just for starters, let me quote from Time's  profile of the top president, Gordon Gee of Ohio State, the highest-paid president of any public university. Time calls Gee a “thoroughbred politician” who is “campaigning for a revolution in higher education at a time when the field is more important, and perhaps more troubled, than ever before.” It doesn't say what the revolution is (even Gee hasn't made that clear). Time then pontificates about how nothing else is quite as important as higher ed these days:  

Forget the ivory tower: colleges and universities are catalysts of economic development, stewards of public health, incubators of social policy and laboratories of discovery. . . . Classrooms and labs are today what mines and factories were a century ago: America's regional economic powerhouses, one of the few certain engines of growth in good and bad economic times. As a result of these challenges and opportunities, college presidents are on the line as never before.

Someone should have checked with Rich Vedder, whose studies of states tend to show that high public investment in universities correlates with mediocre economic growth or comparatively low numbers of college graduates.

There is much more silliness. Have a look.

11/18 02:13 PM Share

Truly Remarkable Academic Insights on Sarah Palin   [David French]

It has often been said that today's rank-and-file conservative is "anti-elite." I've always been uncomfortable with that characterization because — in my experience — conservatives are quite respectful of certain kinds of elites, like elite soldiers, elite athletes, and talented musicians and other artists (provided those artists don't believe that their abilities also provide them with unique insight into, say, health-care policy or war strategy). The elite that conservatives tend to disdain is the contemporary intellectual (or academic) elite, not because intellectual excellence isn't obtainable or worth respecting but because we look at what what passes for academic thinking these days and, frankly, it's remarkably unimpressive.

Nowhere is this high-minded mediocrity on better display than in the near-universal disdain for Sarah Palin. And today's Inside Higher Ed provides a tremendous gift, a near-perfect example of condescending nothingness masquerading as insight. Called "Palintology," the column, by Scott McLemee, begins:

Important as it was, the campaign of Barack Obama was not the only history-making element of the 2008 presidential election. With Sarah Palin, we crossed another epochal divide. The boundary between reality television and American politics (already somewhat weakened by the continuous "American Idol" plebiscite) finally collapsed.

Her campaign's basic formula was familiar: members of an ordinary middle-class family turn into instantly recognizable national celebrities while competing for valuable prizes.

This is good stuff. Let's begin with a shot at reality TV and then deliver the ultimate insult: that Sarah Palin is like one of "those people," you know, a member of the "middle class" desperate for fame. How her emphasis on her humble roots is any different from John Edwards's "son of a millworker" schtick, or Joe Biden's emphasis (sometimes false) on his blue-collar ancestry, or even our own prep school- and Ivy League-educated president's emphasis on the challenges of his upbringing is left unexplained. I guess intelligent people should just know that Sarah Palin's emphasis on her "every(woman)" identity was somehow worthy of contempt.

But that's not all, of course.

Keep reading this post . . .

11/18 01:47 PM Share

David Protess on the Medill Subpoenas   [Robert VerBruggen]

From an interview with The Daily Northwestern:

Daily: How does your investigative reporting class fall under the umbrella of a journalism class?

Protess: The standards and practices of the class are the same as those used by news organizations when they gather information in similar situations. It’s an experiential learning class, for learning investigative reporting by practicing it. (For) students investigating real-world murder cases involving possible wrong convictions, the sole goal is finding truth. . . . I have adopted that for my class, and they are treated in the real world as journalists.

When they go to interview a prisoner at the Illinois Department of Corrections they are there to interview — not visit the prisoner. They are there in a professional capacity. They are given the same status by the Department that journalists get.

Daily: Is the main purpose of the course to provide evidence or to produce work that will be published?

Protess: Investigative Journalism is a one-unit elective class. The goal is to learn investigative reporting techniques. There is a separate project called the Medill Innocence Project, and that takes the work and exposes it through publication. Students are not involved in that. We have a paid staff.

Maybe he knows something I don't — I doubt he'd be saying this if it were harmful to his case — but I'm not sure his justification jibes with Illinois's definition of a reporter (remember that the subpoenas at issue deal mostly with students' records and interviews, not with the paid staff):

any person regularly engaged in the business of collecting, writing or editing news for publication through a news medium on a full-time or part-time basis; and includes any person who was a reporter at the time the information sought was procured or obtained.

As I've written before, it seems to me that the students' main purpose is to rectify wrongs, not to publish stories, and Protess himself now says the course's main purpose is to teach, not to publish. If you're collecting information that someone might publish someday, but are conducting the research primarily for other purposes, are you a protected journalist? I don't know, but I'm not crazy about a law that gives the government that call to make.

Anyhow, read the whole thing — Protess weighs in on a number of issues and vows to let the judge hold him in contempt before turning over students' grades, unpublished interviews, and e-mails.

11/18 01:11 PM Share

An Academic Defense of Affirmative Action   [Roger Clegg]

11/18 11:32 AM Share

Are We Sure That Students Improve Their Human Capital?   [George Leef]

A couple of weeks ago, I started reading the new book Crossing the Finish Line, which purports to make the case for getting a lot more young Americans not just into, but through, college.

Almost immediately I got stuck on the authors' assumption that college does much to increase the human capital of students. That assumption is crucial to their case, but I think it is very questionable. Many colleges and universities are chiefly interested in processing through as many bodies as possible and have therefore watered down their standards to the point where students can pass courses with only the mental toolkit they had in high school. In athletics, the saying is "No pain, no gain." To keep weak and indifferent students happy, a lot of schools make it possible to get through without any pain.

Whether college adds to human capital or is just a costly period of marching in place is the subject of my Pope Center Clarion Call piece this week.

11/18 11:22 AM Share

Must Math Education be 'Culturally Responsive'?   [George Leef]

Every so often, I read through the e-mails I receive from TC Record, which modestly calls itself "the voice of scholarship in education." Today, there's a review of a new book entitled Culturally Responsive Mathematics Education.

In the review, we find sentences like this: "If we focus our energies on a pedagogy that is responsive to, and interconnects with, students' cultures will we miss the opportunities for a pedagogy that highlights mathematics itself as a social construction which is reflective of particular cultural values and identities?"

I'm tempted to think that TC Record has fallen for a reprise of Alan Sokal's famous hoax in which he got an article published in Duke University's journal Social Text claiming that gravity was just a social construct. But probably not. The notion that there is objective reality apart from culture, and which people can understand no matter what their background may be, is now just about dead within the field of "education."

I wonder if the famously successful inner-city math teacher Jaime Escalante ever worried about being "culturally responsive" when he taught calculus to his Los Angeles students.

11/18 10:29 AM Share

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Coed Housing and Binge Drinking   [Robert VerBruggen]

That's a pretty strong effect:

The research found that 42 percent of students in coed housing reported binge drinking on a weekly basis, while only 18 percent of those in single-sex housing did so. The researchers discounted the idea that student self-selection may result in those likely to engage in binge drinking opting to live in mixed-sex housing. Their rationale is that most students living in single-sex housing didn't request to do so, but were placed there by campus officials when coed slots are filled.

11/17 04:15 PM Share

Read All About It   [John J. Miller]

One of the discussion threads on The Corner yesterday and today involves conservative historians and the books they write. So if you're interested, go over there and check it out. Meantime, here's a e-mail from Jay Bergman of Central Connecticut State University :

I hope you'll pardon my blowing my own horn, but since you've contributed posts to NRO today on conservatives who write history, I believe I can be included in that category.  My recent "Meeting the Demands of Reason: The Life and Thought of Andrei Sakharov," published three months ago by Cornell University Press, is harshly critical of the Soviet Union — as one would expect a biography of a leading Soviet dissident to be.  For more information, in case you're curious, see: http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=5389; and also: http://www.historybookclub.com/pages/nm/product/productDetail.jsp?skuId=1046513249

11/17 03:57 PM Share

Intriguing Developments at the Supreme Court   [David French]

The Supreme Court may be preparing to decide — once and for all — whether student groups have a right to reserve membership and leadership for those who agree with the mission and purpose of the organization. While it is generally presumed in the rest of the world that, say, Baptist churches should be led by Baptist pastors (and not atheists or Muslims) and that these pastors shouldn't engage in sex outside of marriage, in the university world, such common sense is deemed to be "religious" or "sexual orientation" discrimination.

Literally dozens of major universities have de-recognized Christian student groups, and federal cases have been filed from coast to coast. So far, the student groups have been successful everywhere but the Ninth Circuit. In March, that court ruled against the Christian Legal Society at UC-Hastings. Despite the constitutional importance of the issue, the following represents the entire opinion of the Court in the case:

The parties stipulate that Hastings imposes an open membership rule on all student groups — all groups must accept all comers as voting members even if those individuals disagree with the mission of the group. The conditions on recognition are therefore viewpoint neutral and reasonable. Truth v. Kent Sch. Dist., 542 F.3d 634, 649–50 (9th Cir. 2008).

Citing an obvious conflict with cases in the Seventh Circuit and Second Circuit, CLS filed a cert petition. I'll let the Alliance Defense Fund's Jordan Lorence explain what happened next:

According to the schedule, everyone expected the Supreme Court to decide whether to take the case by late September. But no one imagined that by mid-November we would still be waiting for the Supreme Court to act. Normally, when a case is appealed to the Supreme Court, it is set for conference (a meeting of the nine justices). A few days later, the Supreme Court issues an orders list from that conference, stating whether the high court will agree to hear the cases considered at that conference or not.

However, the Supreme Court has now delayed deciding what to do with the case for six conferences. This is so unusual that it has caught the eye of veteran Supreme Court observer Tony Mauro who wondered Thursday in his law.com blog about what is going on with the case.

The Supreme Court has now set the case for its sixth conference for Friday, November 13, after calling for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to send up the record in the case.  Calling for the record is also an odd and unusual step for the justices to take.

What does all this mean? The only thing we can say for certain is that at least one of the justices is taking a very close look at CLS's cert petition. A case can't be pulled from the orders list without an affirmative act by the Court. Moreover, as Jordan notes, there are some unusual aspects to the case. The law school shifted its interpretation of its own policies in the middle of the litigation, arguing that its policy now requires each student group to be open to any student — a stance that deprives every student group of the most basic free-association rights.

Every option is on the table for the high court. It can deny the cert petition, deny it with a dissent, summarily reverse the Ninth Circuit, or grant cert and schedule the case for oral argument. We don't know what will happen, but we do know that the critical issue of student free association is front and center on the radar screen of at least one justice. Stay tuned.

11/17 03:04 PM Share

The Offending Cartoons Will be Printed After All   [George Leef]

Not in the book Yale is publishing, though. Duke University professor Gary Hull includes them in a book.

Bravo!

11/17 02:34 PM Share

Shooter Hasan Bared All in Academic Lecture   [Candace de Russy]

What an academic distinction.

The Fort Hood killer, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, is the first terrorist in history to lay out in a classroom presentation why he was about to mow down his defenseless comrades. Nonetheless, observes Barry Rubin, this "isn't enough for too many people — including the president of the United States — to understand the murderous assault at Fort Hood was a Jihad attack."

11/17 02:02 PM Share

Medill Innocence Project Responds to Allegations   [Robert VerBruggen]

I've pasted (after the jump) a statement from Medill Innocence Project head David Protess. It went out over a Medill alum listserv.

Keep reading this post . . .

11/17 01:50 PM Share

A Victory in Sacramento, For Now   [David French]

Last week, I reported on the strange case of Steve Macias, the student-body president of Sacramento City College. Student activists — working with allied administrators — removed Steve from office and launched an illegal recall effort after he refused to censor a pro-life display on Constitution Day. David Hacker, an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund's Center for Academic Freedom, sent the college a cease-and-desist letter. On Friday afternoon, the university responded.

The result? Steve is now reinstated and the recall results voided. He's not out of the woods yet, however. University censors are not deterred so easily, and the student newspaper is reporting that a member of the student government has filed an impeachment complaint against Steve. We'll keep watching and monitoring events, but for now Sacramento City College students once again have a president who understands free speech.  

11/17 01:02 PM Share

Monday, November 16, 2009

Fort Hood and Academic Obscurantists   [Candace de Russy]

In the aftermath of the Fort Hood massacre, and the mounting evidence that the shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan, was motivated by Islamist beliefs, the MSM is calling for explanations from Middle East studies professors. What they're getting from these "experts," as Cinnamon Stillwell describes in a disturbing, important, and well-researched survey, "are the moral relativism and obfuscation that too often meet any effort to address Islamism or jihadism in an intellectually honest manner."

Example? Writing for the Washington Post, Georgetown University's John Esposito, conflates Hasan's  deeds with "extremists" of all religions, all the while professing ignorance as to why Islam should have been the object of suspicion since 9/11.

Stillwell concludes:

Americans rightly concerned about the culture of political correctness and willful blindness towards Islamist ideology that has infected the U.S. military, intelligence agencies, and so many other institutions need only look to the denizens of the Ivory Tower for an explanation. Instead of explaining events like the Fort Hood shooting to the American public, all too often Middle East studies academics refuse to state the obvious and choose to obfuscate rather than clarify the events at hand. The rush to judgment against those who express valid concerns about Islamism only adds to the self-censorship that was in large part responsible for allowing Hasan to remain in the military and murder his fellow soldiers in cold blood.

11/16 01:05 PM Share

Can Higher Ed Cooperate with the Military?   [George Leef]

The UNC system and the Army's Special Operations Command are going to give it a try. My Pope Center colleague Jay Schalin writes about the recent Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) here.

This is evidently the first such agreement between a segment of the military and a state university system. UNC has been offering courses to military personnel on bases in the state for years, but the new agreement extends the area of collaboration into new areas, including military medics and emergency doctors at the UNC Hospital's trauma center. The MoA also envisions R&D collaboration.

So far, the ultra-leftists on the UNC faculty have been quiet, but it's easy to imagine them denouncing this agreement as a sell-out to the military that will somehow poison the university.

11/16 12:41 PM Share

Supremely Stand-Up Student Confronts Iran's Supreme Leader   [Candace de Russy]

Extraordinary:

An unassuming college math student has become an unlikely hero to many in Iran for daring to criticize the country's most powerful man to his face. On Oct. 28, Mahmoud Vahidnia, a gold medalist at the country's National Math Olympics two years ago, confronted supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at Tehran's Sharif Technical University. "I don't know why in this country it's not allowed to make any kind of criticism of you," said the student. "In the past three to five years that I have been reading newspapers, I have seen no criticism of you, not even by the Assembly of Experts, whose duty is to criticize and supervise the performance of the leader."

The boldness of Vahidnia's comments underlines how Iran's postelection turmoil has undermined the once rock-solid taboo against challenging the supreme leader. "Vahidnia showed a new atmosphere which is the true characteristic of the Iranian people," Ataollah Mohajerani, a former pro-reform cabinet minister, wrote on his Web site. "If from now on in gatherings in the presence of the supreme leader one finds the courage to get up and speak in defense of justice and right, the climate of tyranny will suffocate."

11/16 12:14 PM Share

The Online Skills Laboratory   [Mark Bauerlein]

At Inside Higher Ed, Rick Hess has an article on an Obama-administration program that aims to make college available to more students, but that marks "launched a worrisome but largely unnoticed assault upon the nation’s publishers and the vibrant market in online learning."

Part of the program is an "online skills laboratory," a resource through which "the federal government will 'invite' colleges, publishers and 'other institutions' to create online courses for Uncle Sam in a variety of unspecified areas. The feds will then make the courses freely available and encourage institutions of higher education to offer credit for them."

As Hess says, such resources already exist. Online courses and materials are spreading rapidly, and online enrollments grew from 1.6 million students in 2002 to 3.9 million in 2007 (more than 20 percent of total enrollment that year). The problem, apparently, is that "colleges and universities offer them at prices that approximate those charged to students enrolled in more costly traditional instruction." What the federal program does is intervene in that market by offering services free of charge.

They would do better, Hess says, by intervening in the anti-market devices already at work: "credentialing and regulatory practices that impede the emergence of low-cost entrants; state-funded institutions that use new e-learning students to cross-subsidize other units; and proprietary operators that have happily responded to this cozy arrangement by competing on convenience rather than price."

His conclusion:

For those who think that the U.S. Department of Education can develop instructional programs and identify promising innovations and opportunities more effectively and efficiently than the messy market place, the “Online Skills Laboratory” must sound like a swell idea. For those who believe that functioning markets generally yield better outcomes than state-directed enterprises, it is a very troubling development.

11/16 11:54 AM Share

Will Columbia Counter-Punch?   [Candace de Russy]

Over at Democracy Project, Laurie Morrow inquires whether the Columbia University will "exhibit as high a level of moral authority as the bar that ejected" an apparently out-of-control prof who punched a female employee in the face during an acrimonious exchange on race relations.

11/16 09:35 AM Share

Friday, November 13, 2009

Trustee Tried to Can the Sugar Babies   [Candace de Russy]

The screening of The Sugar Babies at the University of Miami, reports the Human Rights Foundation, took place despite great pressure from a member of the university’s Board of Trustees, Alfonso Fanjul. The latter is also the chairman and CEO of Flo-Sun, Inc., a sugar company featured in the film for its inhumane labor practices, which include employing children to work sugar-cane fields.

Kudos to the campus administration.

11/13 03:29 PM Share

A Defense of Free Speech . . . From a Public University?   [David French]

So I started reading this story in today's Inside Higher Ed and immediately thought: "I know how this will end." A tenured librarian at Purdue writes an "anti-gay" blog post at Townhall.com that makes an "economic" argument against homosexual behavior, the post is discovered by activists on his campus, and then controversy erupts. Students write the school newspaper, making arguments like this:

That’s right. I’ll call for his job. As a student, as a lesbian, as a human being, I believe with every fiber of my being that Purdue University in no way should affiliate itself with the hateful, bigoted opinions of Professor Chapman.

And this:

Bert Chapman surrendered his position at Purdue the moment he decided to publish such intellectual diarrhea on his blog. There are those who would defend this atrocious man by claiming that political correctness has conspired to snatch away his free speech, but this is not so. Dr. Chapman has the right to believe that homosexuals are immoral, just as it would be within his rights to believe the same about any other group of people.

The issue is not Dr. Chapman’s views of homosexuality, bigoted and wrong-headed though they may be, but that he has abused his authority as a scholar and an expert to disseminate hate-filled propaganda. 

I kept reading, just waiting for the university response — for the university to apologize for the librarian's speech, to pledge to make the campus a "safe place for all students," and vow to, at the very least, "investigate" or refer the matter to a diversity committee. But here's what university officials actually said:

"The university asks its faculty to make it clear that the viewpoints they express do not necessarily reflect those of the university. Mr. Chapman has gone out of his way to do this with a very clear disclaimer. He also took an extra step and posted his blog on a server not owned by the university," said a spokeswoman. "The university has a policy prohibiting harassment if it unreasonably affects a person's educational or work opportunities or affects his or her ability to participate in a university activity. This does not meet that standard. The First Amendment clearly allows him to state his opinion. The best response is to speak up, which is exactly what our students and some faculty are doing.

Well done, Purdue — what a wonderful expression of First Amendment values. The answer to speech you don't like is to add your own voice to the debate, not to shut others down. In fact, I can think of at least one other university that could learn from your response to a professor's speech on the same website.

11/13 11:30 AM Share

Do Too Many Students Go to College?   [George Leef]

The Chronicle Review recently published a lively discussion on that question, featuring nine people with widely divergent views. In today's Pope Center piece, I comment on the discussion and offer my own thoughts on a number of the questions posed.

11/13 10:57 AM Share

Landing a Blow against White Privilege   [Robert VerBruggen]

Nice:

A prominent Columbia architecture professor punched a female university employee in the face at a Harlem bar during a heated argument about race relations, cops said yesterday.

Police busted Lionel McIntyre, 59, for assault yesterday after his bruised victim, Camille Davis, filed charges.

McIntyre and Davis, who works as a production manager in the school's theater department, are both regulars at Toast, a popular university bar on Broadway and 125th Street, sources said.

The professor, who is black, had been engaged in a fiery discussion about "white privilege" with Davis, who is white, and another male regular, who is also white, Friday night at 10:30 when fists started flying, patrons said.

11/13 09:47 AM Share

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Re: A New Manhattan Project   [George Leef]

I also read the piece by Espenshade and Walton. Their eagerness to associate academic success or failure with ancestry (Asian kids do very well while black and Hispanic kids do poorly) was striking. That kind of thinking is not useful. Students from families of Asian ancestry don't do well because of their Asian-ness; they do well because of values imparted in the home. (Similarly, Jewish students didn't do exceptionally well because of ancestry or religion, but because of their values.) Nor does ancestry explain the relatively poor educational fortunes of black and Hispanic students. Back in my teaching days, I had some very good, energetic black and Hispanic students — and many others who could hardly be bothered to read a page or attend class. Of course, I also had some white students who were eager to learn as well as some who were neither prepared for nor interested in college studies.

I don't see how the proposed "Manhattan Project" would tell us much that isn't already obvious: Early family influence is overwhelmingly important to a child's educational path. Nor can I see that there is any solution to the problem of broken homes and bad parenting. No direct solution anyway—the sort of change that would interest politicians. If you read Charles Murray's classic Losing Ground, you see that the welfare state is responsible for the growth of the broken-home problem Roger writes about. To get better (more "equitable") educational results, we don't need a new education policy; we need to dismantle welfare. How many politicians will advocate that?

11/12 03:17 PM Share

'A New Manhattan Project'   [Roger Clegg]

11/12 02:05 PM Share

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Amazing Innovation Proposed for Top Public State Universities   [Candace de Russy]

What's so new about the "hybrid model" for leading public higher-education institutions recently put forth by the chief officers of the University of California at Berkeley?

They want these campuses to "receive basic operating support from the federal government and their respective state governments."

Gimme more, more, more. Some innovation.

11/11 06:08 PM Share

More on the Medill Innocence Project   [Robert VerBruggen]

Salon has a decent article about the case. Apparently, prosecutors are now alleging that witnesses recanted murder-trial testimony because the students paid them sums of up to (start Dr. Evil voice) one hundred dollars.

(If you're not familiar with the case, read my previous posts about it here and here. My overall points are: The subpoena asks for too much information, and the prosecutors are making outlandish accusations; nonetheless, Medill's defense rests on the journalist-shield law, under which Innocence Project members are quite arguably not considered journalists; shield laws in general are a bad idea because they discriminate in favor of journalists and force the government to decide who is and is not one.)

I wish the piece had more info on this, though:

The prosecutors, however, will likely get the documents they seek — unless a judge determines that the students are "journalists" under Illinois law. If the judge treats the students as journalists, then Illinois law would shield their communications from disclosure.

There are other ways to quash an unreasonable subpoena — are any of those available to the students? I can't find much about Illinois's rules on this.

In researching this post, I came upon this AP article from Monday, with a gem of a quote from Medill's dean:

"I don't think the prosecution in a criminal case . . . or the defense ever ought to be able to say we decide who is a journalist," Lavine said. "They should never have that right."

Well, first of all, the judge decides in the end, not either side. But the bottom line is that when the law treats journalists differently than it treats everyone else, someone has to decide who's a journalist. You can't base your legal argument on a law that discriminates in favor of journalists, and then act like prosecutors are out of line for trying to convince the judge you're not a journalist.

11/11 03:20 PM Share

Affirmative Action for Men?   [Robert VerBruggen]

Here's an interesting post on the topic from Ronald Bailey of Reason; there's some evidence that it's happening not just to students but also to faculty. In some cases, rather than using preferences to enhance "diversity," colleges might be bringing in male profs to lure female students:

A few years back, a friend who teaches in a graduate political science department at a prominent university told me that the women who applied to his school's program were so much more qualified than the male applicants that if all applicants were selected solely on the basis of academic merit, no men would be admitted to the program. That would be fine with my friend except for the fact that highly qualified women will not attend a program that is all female. Thus this program actually engaged in what amounts to affirmative action for males in order to attract and keep highly qualified female students.

I do remember girls going ga-ga over one of my poli-sci profs. (Prof: "Man, it's hot in here." Girl a few rows behind me, almost certainly loud enough for him to hear: "That's 'cause you're hot.") But is it true that they won't even show up for a lady?

11/11 02:19 PM Share

Higher-Ed Reform Ideas   [George Leef]

In this week's Pope Center Clarion Call, Jane Shaw discusses ideas for change that she has come across in several recent higher-education conferences. The ideas she likes all have a "bottom-up" character rather than a "top-down" one. I strongly agree that beneficial change is apt to come from the "little platoons" and not from higher ed's generals. For the most part, the generals are too busy with fundraising and their obsession over "diversity" to do any good.

11/11 01:08 PM Share

Should We Worry About 'The Lost Boys'?   [George Leef]

Last Thursday, the Wall Street Journal ran an article by Richard Whitmire entitled "The Lost Boys." Whitmire's point is that because a smaller and smaller percentage of young men are going to college, the country is in danger of losing out on entrepreneurs and inventors.

Whitmire writes, "women remain less inclined to roll the dice on risky business start-ups or grind out careers in isolated tech labs." True, and let's hope Mr. Whitmire doesn't get the Larry Summers treatment for saying that. But I can't see that there's anything to worry about just from that perspective, because few if any of the young men who decide against college (or never even get to the point where that decision is possible) would have become entrepreneurs or inventors anyway. We have far more serious threats to entrepreneurship and advanced technical work (such as increasing tax and regulatory burdens) than the fact that fewer academically disinclined young men are going to college.

Whitmire also repeats the standard line that "to ensure high future earnings, men and women have an equal need for college degrees." As I've pointed out many times, having a college degree does not ensure high earnings. Large numbers of young people who have them are nevertheless working at jobs that can be done with just a modicum of on-the-job training and do not pay well whether you have a degree or not.

Still, this trend tells us something. As Christina Hoff Sommers observed in her book The War Against Boys, our K-12 system is becoming increasingly feminized with the notions that competition is bad and that boys need to be socialized to act more like girls. That may well be the reason why fewer boys pay attention and grasp the educational basics. So I don't think we need to worry about the fact that there's an imbalance between men and women in college; the thing to worry about is that K-12 is failing to provide much of an education for more boys than girls.

11/11 12:26 PM Share

Another Vote for Class-Based Affirmative Action   [Roger Clegg]

I noted a few weeks ago that the Harvard Crimson’s editorial board had endorsed a transition from race-based to class-based affirmative action. Now a piece in the Stanford Review makes the same plea.  There are obvious limits on the extent to which class-based affirmative action is a good idea — but it beats the heck out of racial preferences.

11/11 11:37 AM Share

Not Much Sharing of Governance   [Jane S. Shaw]

Outsiders who think that the president is in charge of the university should look at this article from Inside Higher Ed. Faculty are offended by the fact that the president of Toledo University interviews each candidate for tenure before the recommendation goes to the board of governors for final approval. The AAUP's president, Cary Nelson, calls the policy "inappropriate." Even Inside Higher Ed seems to dislike the policy, titling the piece "30-Minute Chat to Tenure."

11/11 10:25 AM Share

Political Correctness Versus Academic Freedom   [George Leef]

Professor Walter Block gets tarred for racism and sexism simply because he doesn't accept the politically correct feminist line that the average earnings differential between men and women is due to discrimination. Then, when he attempts to defend himself, the university (Loyola in New Orleans) clams up. Read about Block's case here.

Liberals in academe used to pride themselves on "speaking truth to power" but when they have power, they turn out to be intolerant authoritarians.

11/11 09:12 AM Share

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

The Inexcusable Act of Upholding the Constitution   [David French]

It's heartwarming to see students, faculty, administrators, and activists come together — working cooperatively and in harmony for a common purpose. Such diverse interests, diverse life experiences, and diverse personalities; yet these differences are set aside when a common threat emerges. And what is that threat?

Pro-life speech. More specifically, a student-government president who refuses to censor pro-life speech.

Late last week, ADF Center for Academic Freedom attorneys issued a cease-and-desist letter in a remarkable case involving Sacramento City College. The story begins, ironically enough, with a request by the Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) to set up a pro-life display on Constitution Day. The request was forwarded by student-government president Steve Macias to the rest of the student representatives, who voted to allow it (several representatives later claimed that they didn't know what GAP was — apparently forgetting all about newfangled websites like Google). When GAP erected its rather graphic display, members of the campus community reacted with fury. The student-government adviser and at least one member of the administration demanded that Macias have the display removed. Macias refused, rightly noting that doing so would violate GAP's First Amendment rights.

Macias's refusal to censor triggered a rather dramatic response. The adviser banned Macias from attending a national leadership conference, and the Queer-Straight Alliance (a campus group) and Equality California immediately launched a recall campaign. Although the recall effort violated virtually every material regulation governing recall elections, the administration not only allowed it to happen; they participated in the process. The recall was scheduled without any notice to Macias, and — even before the recall results were known — the student government unlawfully voted to suspend Macias from his duties.  

My friend (and FIRE president) Greg Lukianoff often talks about how students are in the process of "unlearning liberty." (Greg, you really should write a book about that.) This case is a prime example of that phenomenon — where students have learned quite well the lesson taught by the academic generation that brought us speech codes, speech zones, and "civility" policies. What is that lesson? That we have a right not to be offended, and when we are offended, someone must suffer the consequences.  

Steve Macias is suffering those consequences right now — at least until the college remembers that academic fashions and trends have as of yet left the First Amendment untouched.

11/10 12:03 PM Share

Re: Fort Hood and University PC   [George Leef]

Dorothy Rabinowitz has a sharp piece in today's Wall Street Journal on the response to the Ft. Hood murders.

Especially appalling is the statement by Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey she quotes: "This terrible event would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty."

That sounds like precisely the sort of thing a college president would say. Many college leaders utter such inane things as "diversity is our foremost goal." We expect such vacuities in education — but in the military?

11/10 11:21 AM Share

Fort Hood Shooter's Classmates Raised Red Flags   [Candace de Russy]

Hasan's classmates at the Uniformed Services University, the military college where mass killer Nidal Malik Hasan recently took graduate courses, claimed to have repeatedly complained to their superiors about his persistent anti-American tirades.

According to the New York Post, one said he cautioned those in charge that the ranting Hasan was a "ticking time bomb" after he gave a presentation defending Islamic suicide bombers. Another classmate stated he voiced his complaints to two civilian faculty members and five officers.

Indeed, this student went so far in speaking truth to power (as the saying goes) that he commented in a document sent to Pentagon officials that fear in the military of being perceived as politically incorrect stifled an "intellectually honest discussion of Islamic ideology" in the ranks.

But this fear has had far more horrific consequences than merely suppressing forthright speech. If these professors and officers had honestly and courageously confronted the students' concerns, Hasan could have been stopped in his tracks earlier, and the horrific massacre of our soldiers would not have taken place.

So it is that political correctness can do more than hinder open discourse. It can kill. It is to these students' eternal credit that they attempted to surmount their superiors' resistance to the warning signs about Hasan. And shame on the higher-ups for their cowardly and ultimately deadly denial.  

11/10 10:54 AM Share

Monday, November 09, 2009

Running in Place   [Peter Wood]

Candace links a website picture of a test about the Constitution given in 1954 in which an 8th grader, Kenny Hignite, scored 98.5 percent by listing all the cabinet positions and the people holding them, all the justices of the Supreme Court, the substance of the first 22 amendments, and more. It is a feat few eighth graders could perform today — or for that matter, few adults, and certainly few college students. 

The thinness of substantive knowledge among today’s students is often remarked in a general way. But there actually is a systematic study comparing the general knowledge of high-school grads from Kenny Hignite’s era with today’s college grads. In December 2002, the NAS published a survey, "Today's College Students and Yesteryear's High School Grads: A Comparison of General Cultural Knowledge." We did this by commissioning Zogby International to poll a sample of 2002 college seniors with 15 questions regarding "cultural knowledge" that had originally been administered to similar groups of high-school seniors in 1955. These included knowledge of canonical authors, geographical knowledge, and watershed historical events. The results were not reassuring. Sixty-one percent of high-school seniors polled in 1955 knew that Madrid was the capital of Spain; 63 percent of college seniors in 2002 also knew. At the same time, 67 percent of those responding in 1955 knew that Maine bordered Canada, while only 50 percent of 2002 college seniors answered correctly. Overall, we found that the two groups were approximately equivalent in their general cultural and historical knowledge. 

We could be pleased, I suppose, that absolute decline hasn’t set in. But we should also keep in mind that 1955 was before Sputnik and the first great national effort to raise academic standards to keep up with the Soviets. And it was before the 1965 Higher Education Act began the immense federally funded expansion of higher education. All those billions spent improving our schools and colleges may have done something, but they don’t appear to have improved American’s cultural knowledge. What we have instead is college seniors who perform at the level of 1950s high-school students. 

11/09 05:34 PM Share

An Important (and Unsurprising) Ruling in Texas   [David French]

On Friday, FIRE reported that a federal judge in Texas had issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) permitting two students to hold an "empty holder" protest next week outside Tarrant County College's tiny "free speech zone." In response to a FIRE-coordinated suit, the court restrained the college from taking action against the students for "wearing empty holsters, wearing t-shirts depicting empty holsters, discussing handgun regulations, and distributing pamphlets on handgun regulation in traditional public-forum areas including, but not limited to, public streets, sidewalks, and common or park areas."

This is, quite simply, a commonsense judicial ruling, and it's a shame that four decades after the Supreme Court's landmark Tinker case, which allowed high-school students to wear black armbands in class, that colleges believe they can prevent their adult students from wearing T-shirts or empty holsters on a public sidewalk.

A TRO doesn't end a case, obviously, but it certainly puts the suit off to a promising start. And if present trends continue, yet another unconstitutional university policy will bite the dust. How many more federal cases will it take before universities start repealing these policies on their own?

11/09 05:04 PM Share

Michigan U. Holds Firm   [Candace de Russy]

The word from Snopes is that the University of Michigan is standing by the professor who told Muslim students who had protested the Danish cartoons that they were free to leave the country.

(Hat tip: Warren Haber)

11/09 05:01 PM Share

Who Should Go to College?   [Robert VerBruggen]

The Chronicle of Higher Education asks the question, and various experts (including Charles Murray, Richard Vedder, and Marcus Winters) respond.

I liked Marty Nemko's response:

All high-school students should receive a cost-benefit analysis of the various options suitable to their situations: four-year college, two-year degree program, short-term career-prep program, apprenticeship program, on-the-job training, self-employment, the military. Students with weak academic records should be informed that, of freshmen at "four year" colleges who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their high-school class, two-thirds won't graduate even if given eight and a half years. And that even if such students defy the odds, they will likely graduate with a low GPA and a major in low demand by employers. A college should not admit a student it believes would more wisely attend another institution or pursue a noncollege postsecondary option. Students' lives are at stake, not just enrollment targets.

11/09 04:03 PM Share

Fort Hood: PC Reactions Rooted in Academe's Cultural Relativism   [Candace de Russy]

Roger L. Simon makes the point that the politically correct, excusatory responses of officialdom to Nidal Malik Hasan's murderous rampage derives from "the more intellectually respectable docrine of cultural relativism." Given birth to where? Although Simon does not say so specifically, of course in the academy.

11/09 02:47 PM Share

Priorities on Campus   [George Leef]

In a piece the Pope Center has released today, Claremont student Charles Johnson writes about the contrast at his school between the effusive attention given to the Stonewall Inn incident 40 years ago and the complete lack of interest in the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago.

11/09 02:17 PM Share

Today's Students No Match for a 1954 Eighth Grader   [Candace de Russy]

For a stark illustration of the collapse in quality of public-school education over the last few decades, behold this performance of a young student in the '50s on a Constitution test, as posted by The Black Informant.

The blame for this decline lies largely in the academy's subordination of the pursuit of knowledge to political and social engineering as well as its neglect and even deprecation of our traditional institutions and first principles.

11/09 01:16 PM Share

Some Vital Academic Research!   [George Leef]

Duke University professor Dan Ariely is engaged in research on sex toys, and it has a few people upset.

This reinforces my view that faculty research ought to be put on a free-market footing. That is, the norm should be a full teaching load (let's say 12 hours, although — speaking from experience — it's not hard to do more), but if a professor can get sufficient outside funding for a research project to be able to buy a reduced teaching load, fine.

That would lead to far less waste than the prevailing system, which has a low teaching norm and assumes that professors will devote their time to useful research. What we get from that system is a lot of research that's done just for the sake of producing research. We should put academic research to the test of the market: Will people voluntarily pay for it?

11/09 12:51 PM Share

Prediction   [Fred Schwarz]

I'll bet the next issue of Columbia College Today will contain a letter from NR's Andrew C. McCarthy, class of 1981, about this cover:

11/09 12:14 PM Share

The NEA Trumpets Alinsky   [Candace de Russy]

The writings of radical leftist and "community organizer" Saul Alinsky, whose collectivist, class-based ideology shaped President Obama and other prominent contemporary leaders' political outlook, are now on the National Education Association's list of recommended readings.

This illustrates the extent to which our institutions, as velvethammer notes, have been "invaded by stealth."

11/09 11:43 AM Share

Friday, November 06, 2009

China Has Oversold Higher Ed Too   [George Leef]

That's the conclusion to be drawn from a Cato post by Neal McCluskey.

One of the common justifications for continuing the foolish policy of trying to get everybody through college in the U.S. is that if we don't, other countries, especially China, will "get ahead of us." The fact is that credentializing everyone doesn't make a nation any more productive. If anything, by squandering resources on the bloated and inefficient education sector, it gets in the way of productivity.

I wonder: With the Chinese, was it simply the "error of imitation" (that is, the tendency among people in less developed nations to believe that the path to success is to copy what the U.S. does) or rent-seeking by a politically connected education establishment that led to the overexpansion of higher education?

11/06 02:19 PM Share

Academic Freedom Isn't the Only Freedom that Matters   [George Leef]

I'm posting this week's Pope Center Clarion Call a couple of days late because I was down in South Carolina giving an address I entitled "The Conventional Wisdom on Higher Education: Not Just Wrong, but Harmful" at the Economics Club of Columbia and the Bastiat Society in Charleston. Southern hospitality lives!

The subject of the piece is academic freedom and in it, I take issue with the rather alarmist position of Matthew Finkin and Robert Post, authors of For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom. What they regard as ominous, threatening developments (such as complaints from taxpayers that state universities are wasting their money) I see as normal and democratically healthy friction at the edges of academic freedom. The authors evidently regard academic freedom as a fragile glass figurine that might easily be crushed. I think it's much tougher than that.

11/06 09:01 AM Share

Thursday, November 05, 2009

The Soft Bigotry of Diversity   [Roger Clegg]

In today’s Federal Register, there is a notice by the State Department announcing competition for two grants to be spent on summer institutes for youth from various countries. The “Purpose” section says, “Through these institutes, diverse but intellectually curious students aged 16 to 18 will participate in an intensive, three- to four-week exchange program in the United States.”

Now, what interests me in that sentence is the phrase, “diverse but intellectually curious” and, in particular, the word “but.” We are always told by the diversiphiles that diversity and intellectual curiosity go together like ham and eggs, but here the mask seems to have slipped, with an acknowledgment that the relationship between the two is often more like oil and water.

11/05 02:26 PM Share

Yale's Bow to the Crescent   [Candace de Russy]

Yale's cowardly decision to remove the Mohammad cartoons from a book about the Mohammad cartoons was widely condemned as an offense against free speech.

But Yale's action also bespoke a more profound and, in the end, disturbing level of surrender. As the New Criterion points out, it amounted to caving in "to the insidious pressure of Islamification — the pressure, that is, to define the debate in terms dictated by Islam."

11/05 01:55 PM Share

'How Brown Made Me Conservative'   [Fred Schwarz]

David Klinghoffer, an NRO contributor and occasional Derbyshire antagonist, writes about how attending Brown University turned him from a secular liberal into an Orthodox Jewish conservative. It happened in the mid-1980s, but many of his experiences will sound familiar to Phi Beta Cons readers:

I became the lone and reviled conservative columnist for the Brown Daily Herald. In my inaugural column, I wrote about an experience I’d had at the Third World Center. One afternoon, Tamara and I had wandered in and discovered that President Howard Swearer was in the building, about to have a meeting with students. We ambled down the hall to the entrance of the room where the meeting would take place, only to be stopped by a young woman. She looked us up and down. “Sorry, you can’t come in,” she said, adding that because Tamara and I were not “Third World” students, we were not welcome. We were barred from entering a university facility because we were white. . . .

After the article appeared in the Herald, I returned to my room in Andrews Hall to find obscene graffiti on my door: F**K YOUR RACIST A**. Students poured forth enraged letters to the editor, almost every one condemning me. Because I was a resident counselor for a group of freshmen living in the basement of Andrews, the dean in charge of first-year students called me into her office to chastise me. As I understood it, I stood accused of racism for protesting racism. Subsequently, the dean appointed a student committee to oversee my counseling. The last name of the undergraduate who headed the committee was Kafka, proof that God, or possibly the dean of first-year students, had a wicked sense of humor.

(The article is from Brown’s alumni magazine; it appeared last year, which I didn’t notice until I had finished writing this.)

11/05 12:32 PM Share

Tear Down the Wall   [John J. Miller]

Young America's Foundations comemorates the fall of the Berlin Wall.

11/05 12:09 PM Share

Do Professors Matter?   [Candace de Russy]

11/05 11:30 AM Share

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

I Am Not Making This Up   [John J. Miller]

Eliot Spitzer will deliver a Harvard lecture on ethics. Hat tip: K Lo.

11/04 05:01 PM Share

Will Obama Walk Duncan's Talk?   [Candace de Russy]

11/04 01:01 PM Share

Maine and the Yawning Gulf Between Academics and the Public   [David French]

Is there any better example of the yawning gulf between the academic and mainstream cultures than the same-sex-marriage debate? Out in the "real world," the people have spoken about as clearly as citizens of a democracy can speak. The Associated Press reported Maine's results this way:

Voters in the northeastern state of Maine repealed a state law that would have allowed same-sex couples to wed, dealing the gay rights movement a heartbreaking defeat in the corner of the country most supportive of gay marriage.

Gay marriage has now lost in every single state — 31 in all — in which it has been put to a popular vote. Gay-rights activists had hoped to buck that trend in Maine — known for its moderate, independent-minded electorate — and mounted an energetic, well-financed campaign.

But in academia, support for traditional values is viewed, well, differently. In Los Angeles, a student is shouted down by his own professor and threatened with expulsion for quoting a dictionary definition of marriage. In Michigan, a counseling student is literally thrown out of her program when she is unwilling to morally affirm same-sex relationships. In Missouri, a social-work student was ordered to change her values when she refused to write a state representative in support of homosexual adoption. In Georgia, a public university violated the Establishment Clause by literally teaching its students that those who have moral objections to same-sex sexual behavior are comparable to those who used the Bible to justify slavery.  

In other words, academia — allegedly a haven for civilized debate on the great moral and cultural issues of our time — has decided who's right and who's wrong and is enforcing its decision with greater zeal than most churches and political parties. As academics survey the political landscape, will they grow more tolerant of opposing views, or less? I'm guessing less — as they will view the results in Maine (and everywhere else) as a clarion call to redouble their efforts rather than reconsider their dogma.

11/04 12:48 PM Share

Does Tenure Threaten Academic Freedom?   [Candace de Russy]

Professor Mark Kingwell answers in the affirmative, blaming self-reproducing senior faculty and calling the process "conservative."

11/04 11:47 AM Share

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Prominent Norwegian University to Vote on Israel Boycott    [Candace de Russy]

Among those protesting the proposed boycott are NTNU professor Bjørn Alsberg, who argues that it it not "the role of the university . . . to make political statements on behalf of everybody [at the institution]" and that if the university wields a "boycott as a weapon . . . [it] would also have to be critical towards other countries violating human rights."

University of Haifa's Rector, Prof. Yossi Ben-Artzi, states that "academic boycotts serve only to harm academic freedom, impede intellectual advancement, and offend universal values."

And, in a letter to the president of NTNU's Board of Directors, the Simon Wiesenthal Center's director for international relations, Dr. Shimon Samuels, writes — judiciously: "Never since [Vidkun] Quisling [a Norwegian army officer and politician who collaborated with Nazi forces in Norway] has there been such academic prejudice in Norway, and never since Hitler has any University rector in Europe granted it his personal blessing."

The Board should reject this boycott.

Hat tip: Winfield Myers.

11/03 03:23 PM Share

Re: The Power of Race   [George Leef]

I haven't read the book yet either (another pro-diversity book recently landed on my desk: Diversity's Promise for Higher Education by Daryl Smith; it's hard to keep up), but what I wish the people who keep demanding racial preferences at elite schools would explain is what 's so darned important about going to one of those "elite" schools. The courses aren't taught better just because the faculty is loaded with "academic stars." If anything, it goes the other way. Students at schools where the professors actually handle most of the teaching are likely to get more out of a course than at schools where the profs are mainly preoccupied with their publications.

I don't think the mania for admissions preferences is really about the students. Rather, it's about the academic administrators. It makes them feel good about themselves to believe that their social engineering matters a lot. When mean people like Roger Clegg say that they ought to drop racial preferences, that's like telling them to stop playing make believe and grow up.

11/03 02:11 PM Share

U. of Chicago President Sparks Debate   [Candace de Russy]

Minding the Campus has just posted a forum on the future of academic freedom in which I participate, along with Peter Sacks, Erin O'Connor, Maurice Black, and John K. Wilson. We respond to University of Chicago president Richard Zimmer’s 10/21 speech “What is Academic Freedom For?” here: "Is Academic Freedom In Trouble?"

11/03 01:22 PM Share

Disparate Bureaucratic Impact   [David French]

For many years now, I've become increasingly aware of — and agitated by — what is best termed "disparate bureaucratic impact." Simply put, it's the common university practice of using the bureaucratic process to help leftist students fund their message while placing miles of red tape between conservatives and university funds. 

In response to my recent post on the unconstitutional student-fee system at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I received the following from a Michigan alum:

When I was in grad school at the University of Michigan, I was elected to serve on Rackham Student Government, the graduate school student government. Pretty much all we did was hand out money (from “student activity fees”) to student groups. 

. . .
 
I noticed that when some wacky, off-the-wall, lefty group came to Rackham Student Government to ask for money, it was a pretty much rubber-stamped “yes.” When certain other groups did, namely, conservative groups, Jewish groups, Christian groups, they were made to jump through ALL the hoops. They HAD to show that a certain percentage of the people who would benefit from the event for which money was being sought were Rackham (graduate) Students. They HAD to show where the rest of their funding was coming. They HAD to show their budget. (Whenever Jewish organizations asked for money, the discussion ALWAYS devolved to “Well, the Jewish Community in Ann Arbor already has a lot of money; they can get it from them . . .”)
 
Most members of the RSG were looking for reasons to say “NO” to certain student groups (i.e., the Christi[an], Jewish and conservative groups). For other student groups (the wacky, off-the-wall, lefty groups), most members of RSG didn’t want to hear a reason to say, “NO.” So even though not a single member of a student dance troupe was in the graduate school, and the group had no well-thought-out plan on funding or any sort of budget, the vote was to give them money to them for a trip to Cuba. (“Because when they come back, grad student might benefit from attending a performance.”) But when grad students were fully 15 percent of a Jewish group that was seeking funding to send some students to an AIPAC conference, the answer was “NO” because “it wouldn’t provide a sufficient benefit to graduate students at the University of Michigan.” 

What should conservative students take from tales like this? First, be persistent. When you (eventually) jump through all the bureaucratic hoops, the university will face a decision on the merits. At that point, you can't lose: You'll either get your program funded or you'll have a gift-wrapped First Amendment challenge.  

Second, document everything. And that means paying attention to the scrutiny (or lack thereof) given to other groups. Student governments may enjoy rubber stamping liberal applications now, but those rubber stamps are much less enjoyable later, when they're asked about double standards under oath.  

Finally, don't be discouraged. The establishment's bureaucratic guardians count on you giving up and moving on. You have to outlast and outwork them, and that sometimes means creating institutions (like student newspapers) that will live on long after you're gone.

The law mandates viewpoint neutrality. Students can't let administrations reverse through red tape rights that have been won through litigation.

11/03 12:39 PM Share

'The Power of Race'   [Roger Clegg]

That’s the title of a long article today in Inside Higher Ed, which discusses a new book, No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life, by Thomas J. Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford. Doesn’t sound to me like there’s a lot of new ground covered in the book, though it sounds less knee-jerk-left than is usual, and the new data in the book show what the old data in other books and studies have shown. So here’s the comment I posted (“Racial discrimination is just not worth it”):

There are two forests here that should not be obscured by the trees:  First, there is a lot of racial discrimination in admissions taking place; and, second, the purported beneficiaries of such discrimination perform significantly worse academically than other students.  The justification for such discrimination is the supposed educational benefits of a racially diverse student body.  Those benefits are dubious, but even if they exist, they are simply not worth the costs of racial discrimination, namely:  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 or academic underperformance 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.

11/03 11:12 AM Share

The First Assassin   [John J. Miller]

Please pardon this interruption, which has nothing to do with higher ed. My novel, The First Assassin, is now available. It's a historical thriller. Here's what Vince Flynn says: "An excellent book—it's like The Day of the Jackal set in 1861 Washington." We're still in a "soft launch" phase, so it's not listed on Amazon.com yet. But it's available for order and books are shipping right now. More information is here, on my personal website.

11/03 11:07 AM Share

Could Higher-ed Funding Become a Political Issue?   [George Leef]

A hat tip to Tom Shuford for sending me this video, in which Peter Schiff, a prospective rival for the Senate seat now held by Connecticut Democrat Chris Dodd, discusses the impact of governmental subsidies for college attendance.

Schiff gets it right: The reason college now costs significantly more than it did in the days before the federal government started to "help" students afford it is that college administrators are eager to reel in as much money as they can.

He also has a skeptical view on the G.I. Bill, which is often crediting with "creating the middle class." That's not even remotely true. There was a large and growing American middle class prior to World War II, and the country did not lack for talented professionals. The difference was that nearly all of them learned their fields without going to college. Doing a B.A. prior to starting to learn an occupation doesn't make you any better at it; it merely adds considerably to the cost.

Apparently, Schiff's rivals are saying that he's "anti-education" and hoping to make that smear stick with clueless voters. I think Schiff is sharp enough to turn the tables on them, but he could do that better if he'd read my "Overselling of Higher Education" paper and check out Phi Beta Cons regularly.

11/03 10:36 AM Share

'A Government of Laws, and Not of Men'   [Candace de Russy]

. . . necessary, as John Adams said.

Many moons ago, while a trustee at the State University of New York, I extolled the benefits of  requiring that SUNY's professors post their syllabi for all to see. This did not sit well with  SUNY's "shareholders," including my fellow board members.

Good for Texas to have required such posting, as George notes, but too bad such transparency has to be mandated by law rather than provided voluntarily.

11/03 09:39 AM Share

Harvard's Honor and Shame   [John J. Miller]

Did you know that apart from the service academies, Harvard has produced more Medal of Honor recipients than any other college or university? Neither did I, before reading Bill McGurn's column this morning. What a remarkable tradition. Unfortunately, Harvard hasn't allowed ROTC on campus for more than a generation.

11/03 04:37 AM Share

Monday, November 02, 2009

E-mailbag   [John J. Miller]

A reply to last night's article posting about conservative professors:

I'm an adjunct at a large state university ...  I teach a media law course to communications undergraduates.  I gave them the link to the FIRE website, and now I have students showing up to class on a daily basis wanting to talk about the latest atrocity at XYZ university.  

Last week, a student had a question about the castle doctrine and gun rights, and the discussion that followed was so mature and articulate, I could not have been more proud.  In a scary academic world, there are moments, I promise.  And I'm doing everything I can to at least introduce scholarly concervative thought into the mix.

It's scary to think of the academic environment on the whole.  I'm an attorney for my "day job" and cringe at the thought of trying to make it as a full-time professor.  Practicing law?  No big deal.  Academia?  Now that's cutthroat.

11/02 03:02 PM Share

Bad Ideas Die Hard   [Candace de Russy]

Left Coast Conservative revisits behavior on U.S. campuses in the 1930s and finds more of the same today:

The simple lesson from examining the behavior on American universities in the 1930s is that that the appeasement, the support for totalitarian aggression and terror, the academic bigotry, and the anti-Semitism that today fill so many American universities were all predominant forces on many campuses in the 1930s, especially at America’s elite schools, including on much of the Ivy League. The Chomskies, Coles, Beinins and Massads of today could easily be fit into the campus atmosphere of the 1930s.

11/02 11:59 AM Share

Boutique Colleges Can Thrive   [George Leef]

My Pope Center colleague Jay Schalin writes here about the difficulties that very small colleges face, but also about their successes at finding niches in the huge educational marketplace and thriving.

11/02 10:58 AM Share

Aw, Shucks   [Candace de Russy]

In an interview sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, out-and-out declares it "unsatisfactory" that Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist organization, is "too weak" to have fired a rocket in almost nine months since the end of Israel's attack on Gaza in January.

Herewith yet another example of our elite universities evenhandedly at work.

Hat tip: Winfield Myers.

11/02 09:38 AM Share

Sunday, November 01, 2009

Pariahs, Martyrs -- and Fighters Back   [John J. Miller]

Four years ago, I wrote an article for National Review on the plight of conservative professors, complete with horror stories from DePaul, the University of Colorado, Smith College, Columbia, UNLV, and Elizabethtown College. It's now posted on my personal website. Read it and weep.

11/01 09:00 PM Share

Friday, October 30, 2009

Takeover on Campus   [Robert VerBruggen]

On the homepage, Stephen Spruiell takes on the Obama administration's plan to strong-arm private lenders.

10/30 03:10 PM Share

Academic Truth in Advertising   [George Leef]

In the Pope Center's Friday piece, my colleague David Koon discusses a new law in Texas that requires professors to post their syllabi before students register for classes. The purpose of the law is to prevent students from experiencing the unhappy surprise of ending up in a course whose title sounded good but is actually about things the student doesn't want to waste time on.

Too bad that some profs aren't really forthcoming about the content of their courses and need this push.

10/30 02:50 PM Share

UNC Radicals Intolerant of Free Speech by Others   [George Leef]

One day last April, most of the copies of the UNC conservative publication Carolina Journal were stolen. Who dunnit? No evidence was at hand and the matter was forgotten — until the school's Students for a Democratic Society chapter posted some photos on its Facebook page showing beyond any doubt where the copies of Carolina Journal had gone. They were on the floor of the house of the SDS chapter's president, evidently serving in place of a dropcloth during painting.

Here is a post about the incident, with the pictures (since taken down from the SDS page, I understand).

Maybe the SDS punks don't mind this at all. It might help them land jobs in the Obama regime's dissent-suppression (oops — "fairness") initiative.

10/30 01:18 PM Share

Thursday, October 29, 2009

ACTA on Illinois   [Robert VerBruggen]

The organization sums up the state of public higher ed in the Land of Lincoln here.

10/29 11:44 AM Share

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Before Giving to Your Alma Mater   [Robert VerBruggen]

Read Todd Zywicki's piece from National Review's education issue (no longer on newsstands). It's now online for free, and subscribers can read the whole issue here.

10/28 05:04 PM Share

Shameless Plug, Part Two   [Robert VerBruggen]

Detroit talk-radio host Frank Beckmann was kind enough to feature me as a guest this morning. We spoke about the idea of sending fewer kids to college, and you can listen to or download the conversation here.

10/28 04:34 PM Share

Severe Critique of Goldin and Katz Book   [George Leef]

I just came across an article by Arnold Kling and John Merrifield, "Goldin and Katz and Education Policy Failings in Historical Perspective," published last January in Econ Journal Watch. (Hat tip to Dan Klein!)

The book has been widely cited as showing a need for the U.S. to push for increasing college attendance and graduation rates. Kling and Merrifield give it some rough treatment. They point out, inter alia, that Goldin and Katz are much to eager to blame a slowdown in college-graduation rates for increasing income inequality when the deterioration in basic education is a much better explanation.

Also, the authors cast doubt on the implicit assumption G and K make that simply going through college does much to increase a student's human capital. As I have been arguing, the degradation of rigor in many college programs (a.k.a. dumbing down) to keep mediocre to weak students happy and enrolled means that those students can get through their college "studies" without having to improve upon the human capital they had at the end of high school.

Golden and Katz completely miss the harmful changes that governmentalization (as Kling and Merrifield put it) has brought to education — and yet they prescribe more governmentalization.

10/28 04:06 PM Share

Countering the Left   [Jane S. Shaw]

In an important two-part essay at Minding the Campus, Robert Weissberg offers a plan for countering the leftist dominance of universities. His essay is well worth reading, although he somewhat undercuts his points by the nomenclature he chooses, and he is a bit divisive when he criticizes other approaches and complains about lack of support for his. But perhaps I cavil.

In a nutshell, Weissberg recommends what he calls a “covert CIA approach” which “takes its inspiration from the agency's work to undermine post-WW II European communism.” (The difficulty here is his choice of words — the CIA is a government agency, but Weissberg is talking about philanthropy, not government — and, really, many individuals, forces, and entities contributed to the downfall of European Communism. But don’t be too distracted by that.)

The content is this: To be successful, academic scholars must publish, and today’s universities promote, subsidize, and nurture mostly leftist, statist, and nonsensical scholarship. He asks philanthropists to support conservative/free-market research by: supporting individual scholars (the Earhart Foundation is an example, but it is “sunsetting”), subsidizing books and journals, funding academic conferences, and networking through a central website that includes links to many opportunities for the conservative or free-market scholar. “It is a familiar sports farm team model: cultivate young talent, often on the cheap,” says Weissberg.

Great ideas. Philanthropists are already doing some of them, and others are worth exploring. I don't see why this policy has to be covert, though. Perhaps someone will tell me. 

10/28 03:34 PM Share

The Right Role for the Federal Government in Higher Ed   [George Leef]

Writing at Cato's At Liberty blog, Neal McCluskey dives into the question of the proper role for the federal government to play in higher education. He cuts the Gordian Knot: Under the Constitution, no branch of the federal government is empowered to do anything with respect to education. He gives the best refutation to the idea that the "General Welfare" clause was intended to allow the government plenty of latitude to do whatever it deems necessary for our supposed good. As Madison wrote, there would have been no point in putting in all of the restrictions on government power if one clause was meant to say to the politicians, "Do what you think is good."

That argument settles it for me.

10/28 03:02 PM Share

Gaming the System: University Bad Faith and the Problem of Mootness   [David French]

Yesterday, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed an appeal and ordered the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by Brothers Under Christ, a Christian fraternity that had sued officials at the University of Florida after the university refused to recognize the fraternity because it "discriminated" on the basis of religion. This "discrimination" of course was nothing more than the desire of a Christian fraternity to have, well, Christian members.

In this case, the District Court denied the fraternity's request for an injunction, and the fraternity appealed. The Eleventh Circuit granted an injunction pending appeal (which permitted the group to operate on campus) and then set the case for oral arguments. After oral argument (an argument in which the court seemed skeptical of the university's position), the university changed its policy, recognized the fraternity, and asked that the case be dismissed as moot. Yesterday, the court granted the university's motion, stating (essentially) there was no further need for litigation after the university recognized the group.  

It is becoming increasingly common for universities to defend unconstitutional policies (sometimes for years), make changes at the last possible moment, and then seek dismissal of a case. Just last week, ADF Center for Academic Freedom attorneys argued a case against Arizona State University (retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor presided) in which the university changed its policies (for the second time) after ASU Students for Life filed their appellate brief and now seek dismissal for mootness.  

In 2007, Temple University sought to moot Christian DeJohn's speech code challenge by changing policies on the eve of the court-imposed summary judgment deadline. Fortunately, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals recognized the obvious: Policies "voluntarily" changed can be changed back — especially when the university won't concede to the illegality of the old policy.

Federal judges sometimes seem to take at face value the completely non-binding assurances of counsel that policy changes, once made, won't be "un-made." Yet one doesn't have to reach far back into history to find examples of colleges not just reinstating policies but actually breaching settlement agreements to do so. While I have seen universities violate even settlement agreements, I have yet to see them defy federal injunctions.

Further, when a case is mooted, students' constitutional rights depend almost entirely on institutional memory and good faith. What happens six years from now, when an activist asks the University of Florida why they recognize "discriminatory Christian groups"? Will the university — which has never conceded the unconstitutionality of its original policy — test the waters again? History suggests they will, and that they'll be willing to drag their students through years of litigation before "voluntarily" complying with the Constitution.

10/28 02:28 PM Share

Mandating Ideological Conformity   [George Leef]

In this week's Pope Center Clarion Call, Virginia Association of Scholars president Carey Stronach writes about the push by administrators at Virginia Tech to make conformity to their "diversity religion" a key element in the promotion of faculty members. Anyone who doesn't display "diversity accomplishments" is apt to be looked upon with disfavor.

Would any Virginia Tech professor be so bold as to criticize the diversity mania, saying perhaps that it's a foolish distraction from the real business of education? Doing so would be a dangerous move.

Whether professors have any "diversity accomplishments" or not should be as irrelevant as whether they have "religious accomplishments" or "chess accomplishments" or "gardening accomplishments." If the administrators involved cannot see that subordinating real academic work to their "diversity" crusade is inappropriate, they should be summarily replaced.

10/28 01:57 PM Share

Words Fail   [David French]

Prof. Gerald Horne of the University of Houston writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Jonathan Brent expresses surprise — if not shock and disgust — at what he sees as the rehabilitation of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in contemporary Russia ("Postmodern Stalinism," The Chronicle Review, September 25).

Pray tell: Is there an analytical difference between the phenomenon he perceives and the glorification and hagiography that bedeck the slaveholding "founding fathers" of his own United States (not to mention those that founded the settler colonies upon which this slaveholding republic was based)? Or is the difference that in this latter case, after all, we are discussing the brutalization of only Africans, and in the former case, non-Africans — and we all know that the lives of one are worth more than the lives of the other? Or is the difference that Stalin's rule lasted 30-odd years while North American enslavement was a process that stretched over centuries?

Yes, the Founding Fathers are no better (and perhaps worse) than Joseph Stalin. Citizens of Texas, I present . . . your tax dollars at work.

10/28 12:46 PM Share

Free Speech Is Good; Just Don't Say Anything We Dislike   [George Leef]

That sums up the attitude of the hard-Left professoriate and administrators at many American colleges and universities. A good case in point is the treatment of Prof. Walter Block for having offended the dogmatic feminists at Loyola. For having questioned one of the core beliefs of feminism, that the "earnings gap" is due to discrimination, Block is being treated like a war criminal. Prof. Tom DiLorenzo writes about the tumult here.

Larry Summers was hounded out of the presidency of Harvard for the same offense. Universities are supposed to be places where the search for truth is paramount, but the vicious attacks on those who question whether certain beliefs are true belies that idea.

Incidentally, DiLorenzo refers to a very important book written at the dawn of the PC era: Hayek's The Mirage of Social Justice.

10/28 12:01 PM Share

If Soros Wants to Toss Away His Money, Fine   [George Leef]

George Soros plans to spend a bundle to start a new institute devoted to crushing the "failed" ideas of the free-market camp. Read about it here.

The premises behind this are simply laughable. First, it isn't the case that most of the academic world embraces "free market fundamentalism" — a term that is itself ludicrous because every economist I know who thinks that markets do a whole lot better than coercive regulation by government officials holds that belief on the basis of reason, not faith. As Thomas Sowell said long ago, "I don't have faith in markets. I have evidence about markets."

Second, while there are some islands of strong free-market research and teaching to be found among American colleges and universities, more of the economics profession remains rooted in the (I think discredited) interventionist views of the Keynesians.

Finally, you have to be wilfully blind to say that the financial meltdown we've experienced is due to the failure of the free market. Government meddling in housing and credit was massive and distorting. That's your culprit.

10/28 09:25 AM Share

Shameless Plug   [Robert VerBruggen]

I'll be on WJR Radio (Detroit) talking about why fewer kids should go to college later this morning — a little after 11 a.m. Eastern. You can listen online here.

10/28 08:43 AM Share

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Free the ND 88   [John J. Miller]

Website:

It is our fervent hope that the University of Notre Dame will decide to drop the criminal trespass charges that have been pending against the eighty-eight defendants who “dared” to venture onto Notre Dame’s campus last Spring , to bear peaceful, prayerful witness to the sanctity of all human life, from conception to natural death on the day President Obama spoke at the 2009 Notre Dame Commencement and was awarded an honorary degree by the University.

10/27 05:55 PM Share

A Big Day for Free Speech and Legal Equality on Campus   [David French]

As I type this post, my colleagues at the Alliance Defense Fund Center for Academic Freedom are arguing a critical case before the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago. The subject: the use and abuse of mandatory student activity fees at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

For at least the last 22 years, UW-Madison has been requiring each and every student to pay large sums of money to fund student expression. For at least the last 22 years, the university has channeled hundreds of thousands of dollars per year into various leftist organizations — like Ralph Nader-inspired WISPIRG or (Hugh Hefner inspired?) Sex Out Loud — while fighting an ongoing, rear-guard battle against equal funding of conservative and religious organizations.  

In recent years, UW students have started to lose patience with the bias and blatant viewpoint discrimination, filing three federal lawsuits in three years. Today, the Seventh Circuit will consider whether the university may essentially ignore Supreme Court precedent and treat religious speech differently from secular speech. Specifically, the university violated a settlement agreement in a previous case by withholding approximately $35,000 in funds it had agreed to pay the Roman Catholic Foundation. The District Court issued a declaratory judgment against the university, but refused to issue an injunction and refused to order repayment of the fees. The Roman Catholic Foundation appealed the denial of the injunction and denial of fees, while UW appealed the declaratory judgment.

Lest anyone think that UW-Madison is somehow unique in its viewpoint discrimination, the misappropriation of mandatory student fees to fund left-wing activism on a vast scale has long been a problem. For example, Michael Moore's 2004 "Slacker Uprising," designed to energize the college vote for John Kerry, was largely funded by a massive infusion of student fees. On other campuses, student-fee discrimination is so pervasive and longstanding that religious and conservative organizations often don't even bother to apply for funds.  

In the Seventh Circuit at least, all that could change if Roman Catholic Foundation prevails. Students, for the first time, could have real assurance that they have equal access to the funds they are forced to pay. And that would be a true victory for free speech, for legal equality, and for fundamental fairness.

10/27 12:25 PM Share

The Wage Premium   [Jane S. Shaw]

Robert and George rightly challenge Marcus Winters's argument that more students should be going to college (the popular view, it appears). One point that Winters raises is the “wage premium” — the difference between the lifetime earnings for high-school graduates and college graduates.

Many questions swirl around this premium. How much of it is due to the role of the college degree as a screening device rather than to actual education? How much is due to the natural abilities of the college-bound population, who would earn more money even without college? What will be the wage premium for the more marginal students now drawn in by the push to go to college? And how much of the premium reflects the decline in the value of the high-school degree, rather than the benefits of a college degree?

And then there is the amount of the premium itself. The “million dollars over a lifetime” figure has been discredited. The National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges came up with an estimate of $121,539. Mark Schneider parses the figures in a recent AEI Outlook paper.

10/27 11:30 AM Share

Re: Send Fewer Students to College   [George Leef]

Very good work, Robert!

By all means, let's try to get K-12 to perform better. If students who graduate from high school today were as well educated as high-school grads (and maybe even 8th graders) of a century ago, college wouldn't seem nearly so important. For many young Americans, all that college does is to partially overcome the academic deficits of the previous twelve years.

Getting K-12 (sorry, now it's P-12, isn't it?) to work better is very hard because the education establishment likes things just as they are, especially with teacher-licensure requirements and union job protection. If the public schools could hire people who both want to teach and appear to have the necessary knowledge, and then promptly fire those who do a poor job, classrooms would improve very quickly.

For an excellent article on the inanity of the preparation many teachers get in ed school, read Heather Mac Donald's classic "Why Johnny's Teacher Can't Teach."

One surprise in the Winters piece is that he apparently is unfamiliar with the fact that colleges are already graduating large numbers of people who can't find work other than the kinds of jobs that are learned just through some on-the-job training. Those of us in the skeptics camp have repeatedly argued that we're already far past the point of diminishing returns on higher ed with our glut of people with low-grade college credentials doing mundane work once they get into the labor force. I have never seen anyone in the education-establishment camp even acknowledge that point, much less explain why we nevertheless will benefit from processing yet more young people — overwhelmingly ones with mediocre-to-weak academic capabilities — through to their BA degrees.

Nor have I ever seen anyone from the establishment camp acknowledge that standards and expectations at many schools are so low that students often graduate without having to improve on the human capital they took from high school. Winters, as Robert notes, writes as if the typical student's college experience is one of high intellectual engagement that significantly adds to his human capital, giving him "knowledge and skills that employers prize." That's true for some, but for many others, college is mostly an extended vacation. Employers often complain that the graduates they interview and sometimes have to hire are so weak in fundamentals that they have to spend money on such matters as how to write a memo. The trouble is that colleges are more interested in keeping students content than in forcing them through the "boot camp" many badly need. For example, rigorous criticism of student writing is mostly a thing of the past because few professors want to fight the "How dare you say that my writing isn't good!" battle.

If you think about the reality of higher education rather than its lovely facade, you have to drop the belief that we need to send more students to college.

10/27 10:32 AM Share

More on the Winters Article   [Robert VerBruggen]

I respond over on the homepage.

10/27 08:31 AM Share

Monday, October 26, 2009

Academics Loons on Terrorism   [Candace de Russy]

David Solway has a trenchant commentary at Pajamas Media about professors' partisan, appeasing, and dangerous  "babbling" about Islamic terror. Their departure from reality is exemplified by Ian Lustick’s Trapped in the War on Terror.

The argument of Lustick, a political-science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is typical:

The threat has been grossly exaggerated. . . . The fear factor has been exploited by business and government for profitable ends. . . . Terrorism is mainly a European problem, and . . . 9/11 was a one-off attack.

How handy to leave out 

that it was owing to sheer dumb luck that 40,000-50,000 people did not perish in the inferno — and, indeed, only by grace of a miscue that the Madrid attack did not claim thousands of victims. Conveniently, he pays no heed to the many subsequent terrorist attempts, not only in the UK and Germany, but in Canada and the U.S. that have been foiled by alert surveillance.

The sound thinkers here? Our own Mark Bauerlein, who writes:

The very system that academics invoke to fend off critics has become part of the problem. Ideological bias has seeped into the standards of professionalism. . . . Tenured professors enjoy their lifetime paychecks and proceed by professional habits . . . los[ing] touch with common sense and real-world implications.

Self-interest in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land? To be sure, as André Glucksmann also concludes, in real real-world terms: 

The threat of Ground Zero, small or great, advances behind a mask. . . . The terrorist without borders makes us think about him always, everywhere. . . . Each of us waits for the next explosion. . . . The general run of our academics and intellectual elites, however, lapped in their dolce far niente, wait instead for the next book deal, the next invitation to hold forth at learned conferences, the next promotion, the next CNN appearance, the next citation or award — and who knows, maybe even a Nobel Peace Prize.

10/26 04:28 PM Share

More on the Winters Article   [George Leef]

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of meeting Charles Murray at the Philadelpha Society's regional meeting in Indianapolis. He gave the big Saturday evening talk, and I was on a panel devoted to the economics of higher education with professors Dwight Lee and Richard Vedder.

I mentioned the Winters article to Murray, who told me he had already replied on the American Enterprise Institute blog. In short, he thinks the notion that the country can profitably put a lot more young people through college romantic.

I finally got around to reading the piece myself and was surprised to see that it's just a repetition of rather musty ideas, such as that the college "premium" shows that employers have a high demand for the greater knowledge and skills that college supposedly confers. As I have argued for years, that "premium" does not reflect greater productivity on the part of college-degreed people (although of course, some who graduated from college do gain a lot in human capital), but rather that increasingly, employers only offer the better-paying jobs to people with college degrees. Lots of students manage to get through college with little or no improvement in any valuable skills, and what little they may remember from their courses is of scant benefit in most jobs. But the degree does show employers a modicum of perseverance and organization. Given the fact that many young Americans are pretty poor in those characteristics, the degree is a useful screening device. So it's not so much the case that employers pay more for college degrees as that the avenues into the better-paying jobs have been increasingly closed off to people without them.

10/26 01:16 PM Share

Academics Mute on Obama's War on Fox   [Candace de Russy]

In "First They Came for Fox News," Claudia Rosett remarks "how dangerous it is when the President of the United States gives his staff and advisers a green light to single out and denigrate by name a specific news organization," namely, Fox, which has had the gall to expose and criticize Obama's radical left-wing agenda.

10/26 12:15 PM Share

Why Not Build Courses Around Debates?   [George Leef]

In a Pope Center piece, my colleage Jay Schalin, greatly influenced by a series of recent programs at UNC where students got to hear sharply divergent points of view from able advocates, suggests that it would be good to organize some courses around great debates in our history.

I like the idea. Students would find the clash of ideas much more interesting than the mush they're often fed now.

10/26 11:13 AM Share

Students Offered Credit to Join Obama's 'Army'   [Candace de Russy]

The president's legion of citizen volunteers is actively recruiting college students across the nation to earn college credit for advocating his health-care, economic, and green agendas, according to WorldNetDaily. Colleges should refuse to let such "foot soldiering" credit count toward academic degrees.

10/26 10:27 AM Share

Teacher E-Mails   [John J. Miller]

Judging from my e-mail inbox, my posts on teacher certification over the weekend have struck a nerve. Here are two more dispatches from the frontlines:

When I decided to teach at the high school level, I had to take certification courses and decided to do so at a nearby well-regarded school of education.  I was quickly disappointed. ... all but one of my professors were professional academics who either had never been classroom teachers or hadn't been one in the past 10+ years.  They existed on nothing but fads, educational research, anecdotes from actual teachers, and experiences from when they parachuted in on classes for a week or two to conduct a study.  These academics proceeded to teach their students information and imbue them with ideals that are impractical and/or non-applicable for actual classroom use.  Since they're not in classrooms, though, they often honestly don't know any better.

And:

In Kansas, secondary certification in history was abolished a few years ago and replaced by general certification in social studies.  My sense is the change was driven by the perceived need to have somebody as a Jack-of-all-trades in tiny rural Kansas schools.

The effect is that high school history teachers get a two-semester survey of US history, a two-semester survey of world history, one semester of Kansas history, one other US history course, and one other non-US history course.  

That makes seven courses total in history, compared to twelve for real history majors.  Secondary history teachers can graduate without taking a single course on European history.

10/26 05:20 AM Share

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Teacher E-mail   [John J. Miller]

I am a native German, with a MA in German literature and a Ph.D. in German Studies from Duke University and 12 years of teaching experience at the college level. I was told that I would need to go back to school and enroll in various pedagogy and methods classes for two years to become qualified as a High School German teacher in a NC public school.

10/25 02:10 PM Share

Teaching Teachers, cont.   [John J. Miller]

More e-mail:

I am 20 year public school History/Government teacher.  Last year I had my fourth and last ever student teacher.  These people may have taken all of these BS classes, but have virtually no content background and are completely clueless.  I have a BA and MA in History and every education course I had to take sucked the life out of me.

10/25 01:00 PM Share

re: Teaching Teachers   [John J. Miller]

E-mailbag:

I learned more in the first 90 minutes of my first substituting job than I learend in any college teaching course. ... I am certifed to teach social studies to middle school students, but even though I had a BA with a double-major in political science and history, an MS in International Affairs, and graduated fromthe Army's command and General Staff College, I am "unqualified" to teach social studies to 9th graders, needing to complete three "secondary school methods courses" in order to check that box.

Another:

I am a recently retired Biology/Physics teacher

Over the years, as a senior teacher, mentor and science department chair, I was responsible for training or retraining teachers who had received mostly useless teacher training at the local universities.

#1- Get rid of all PhD Education profs and replace them with successful teachers nearing the end of their careers

#2- Do it as a paid internship- half day teaching under close supervision, half day teacher training from retired administrators and teachers.

#3- One semester to one year while they "solo" under pop-in supervision, meeting for feedback twice a week

10/25 12:25 PM Share

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Teaching Teachers   [John J. Miller]

I've always thought that the biggest problem with teacher education is that prospective teachers spend too much time listening to professors talk about pedagogical theory and not enough time learning their core subjects. In other words, a lot of students who go on to become 10th-grade history professors actually take fewer history courses than ordinary history majors.

This isn't precisely the problem Secretary of Education Arne Duncan took on this week in a speech at Columbia's Teachers College, but he was strongly critical of the way our country prepares teachers:

Yet, by almost any standard, many if not most of the nation's 1,450 schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom. ... For decades, schools of education have been renowned for being cash cows for universities. The large enrollment in education schools and their relatively low overhead have made them profit-centers. But many universities have diverted those profits to more prestigious but under-enrolled graduate departments like physics—while doing little to invest in rigorous educational research and well-run clinical training.

Wow.

10/24 06:39 AM Share

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Grade Inflation at Stanford   [George Leef]

A student writer on a Stanford blog laments that grade inflation is so prevalent at the school. Also, there's an interesting comment that Cornell has adopted a policy of releasing average course grades so it's possible to  tell, for instance, whether a B indicated very good work in a hard engineering course or an A was pretty much average in an English course.

10/22 01:55 PM Share

Dress Codes, Race, and Expression   [David French]

Over at Inside Higher Ed, Penn professor Marybeth Gasman posts an interesting op-ed about a new dress code at Morehouse, one of the nation's premier historically black colleges.  Banned are "caps, do-rags, and hoods in the classrooms, cafeteria and indoors; sun glasses and grillz; clothing with lewd comments; sagging pants and pajamas in public; and women’s clothing and accessories."

Professor Gasman sees both expressive and racial problems with the policy:

However, as I think about the new Morehouse dress code, I am reminded that much of America (read: white America) does not see African Americans as individuals. If a young white male dresses in pajamas or saggy pants, and a lewd t-shirt on a predominantly white campus, he is seen neither as a representative of his race nor his campus. And let’s be honest, anyone who visits campuses these days, including some of the most prestigious in the country, will see many white male students displaying more of their underwear than most of us want to see, wearing caps inside, and displaying crude T-shirts. But when a young black male wears saggy pants, pajamas, or a do-rag, many Americans see him as a representative of all black America (and in this case, Morehouse College). The stakes are higher for black men because of American racism. The stakes are higher for Morehouse College as well.

I do think she has a bit of a point. I do think do-rags, saggy pants, etc. are seen as marks of black urban culture, but I think she underestimates the extent to which white kids wearing the same clothes aren't taken seriously (and even mocked).  

As a graduate of a predominantly white Christian university with a (then) more strict dress code, I think Professor Gasman also underestimates the extent to which dress codes at private universities were the rule rather than the exception and remain the rule at those colleges that have not abandoned their historical identity in their pell-mell rush to run with the academic herd.

Simply put, at the private university (especially the religious private university), the dress code is an expression of institutional values.  It is, itself, part of the process of educating students at institutions whose purpose is far more ambitious than providing a solid education in a student's chosen course of study.  At Lipscomb University, part of the mission was to educate the students what it meant to live an entire life as a Christian man or woman, and, yes, that includes dress.

In other words, the dress code — like many aspects of private university life — constituted an act of institutional expression created with the hope that it would become part of the students' individual expression following college. I applaud Morehouse. It is doing what few private educational institutions have the courage to do — retain its distinctive and distinguished identity.

10/22 12:59 PM Share

Re: Send More People to College?   [George Leef]

I'll probably have a lot more to say about the Winters article later, but for now, just two quick comments.

First, we shouldn't be talking about "sending" anyone to college. That phrasing smacks of central planning, as if government officials know the right percentage of the citizenry who need to go to college. Instead, higher education must be an individual choice.  Fewer young people are making that choice, for whatever reason. The fact that college costs a lot and doesn't seem to do much for many of the marginal kids who give it a try (and lots of those who do, drop out) is a logical reason to decide not to try college.

Second, large numbers of young Americans go through their K-12 years with great educational deficits that make them hard to train. The college setting is not a good place for them to catch up on things they ought to have learned back in grade school but didn't. I'll bet that Winters has never tried teaching a college course where most of the students are academically weak and disengaged. It's an exercise in futility.

10/22 10:30 AM Share

Send More People to College?   [Robert VerBruggen]

Over on the homepage, Marcus A. Winters says yes.

10/22 09:27 AM Share

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Our Misplaced Faith in Accreditation   [George Leef]

Should a college lose its accreditation just because its finances are shaky? Should accreditation be the touchstone for eligibility for federal student aid? In this week's Pope Center Clarion Call, I take a look at a recent case in North Carolina (St. Andrews Presbyterian College) that is in serious financial trouble and facing loss of accreditation as a consequence.

I answer both of those questions in the negative.

10/21 02:55 PM Share

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Re: Innocence Project   [Robert VerBruggen]

Just a few quick comments to add in response to the letter below.

First, I did not mean to disparage the Medill Innocence Project (or Prof. David Protess, who runs it) by calling it "activist." Theirs is a very good form of activism — while many participants are no doubt motivated by opposition to the death penalty in general, the focus is always on finding the truly wrongfully convicted. So long as the Innocence Project and groups like it stop pursuing cases when they find the convicted party to be guilty, they have my total support.

Second, the definition of "reporter" under Illinois law — not the question of whether students in this class use journalistic techniques, or may, at some point, publish write-ups of what they do — is what's relevant in terms of the shield. The law defines reporter as:

any person regularly engaged in the business of collecting, writing or editing news for publication through a news medium on a full-time or part-time basis; and includes any person who was a reporter at the time the information sought was procured or obtained.

Do participants in the Innocence Project meet this definition? Again, I'm skeptical. The program's main goal isn't to publish stories, but to rectify injustices. As I pointed out in my original post, some other schools' Innocence Projects aren't even run out of journalism programs, but out of law or criminal-justice programs. If a person is investigating mainly for these reasons, but also plans to publish the results in a newspaper, does that count?

It's a gray area, and as I said before, it illustrates the problem with shield laws generally: They give journalists rights that other people don't have, thus forcing the government to decide who is and is not a journalist. If the law says that prosecutors can access information that's relevant to the case, and a judge agrees that a certain piece of information is relevant, journalists should have to choose between handing over the information and going to jail, just like everyone else.

10/20 03:58 PM Share

Re: Harvard Crimson   [George Leef]

It's something of a breakthrough to see a chink in the armor of preferential admissions — a recognition that it doesn't do anything for "blacks" for an elite university to bend its standards in order to admit a few more black students from prosperous families. The case for preferential admissions based on family income is no better, however, than the case based on ancestry. If a student from a poor family is able to get into a mid-range college, it does nothing to advance "social justice" (a term Hayek rightly called meaningless) for the likes of Harvard to bend its standards to admit him. I think its narcissism for the Harvards of the nation to think that they provide far better education and do much more to put students on the path to success in life than do our non-elite colleges and universities.

10/20 03:25 PM Share

The Push for Tobacco-Free Campuses   [George Leef]

Most schools now compel students and personnel who desire to smoke to do so in designated outside areas, but that isn't enough for a group that wants a complete tobacco ban. Inside Higher Ed has the story.

This ought to worry the "diversity" advocates. Smokers are a minority with some distinct cultural traits. If colleges drive smokers away, as the proposed campus-wide bans would tend to do, won't that deprive other students of the opportunity to learn about them and to benefit from the perspective they'd bring to class discussions involving personal freedom and trade-offs?

Or do those concerns only apply to certain groups and not others?

10/20 03:17 PM Share

The Battle for Free Speech at Bucknell Continues   [Allison Kasic]

In June, David and I reported on the fight for free speech at Bucknell University (refresher: the school shut down two peaceful protests — more into here and here). Unfortunately, the situation at Bucknell is still not resolved. But down I-80 at Bucknell's rival school, Lehigh University, administrators are taking a different approach: Instead of censoring students, they are embracing the First Amendment. Fellow Bucknell alum and PBCer Charles Mitchell notes the contrast over in The Morning Call.

10/20 02:45 PM Share

Kudos to Terror-Wary Cambridge Historian   [Candace de Russy]

How many Western professors are devoting their scholarly acumen, ever so politically incorrectly, to analysing the enduring threat of Islamist terror?

Midst these few, according to CTV News, Cambridge University historian Christopher Andrew stands out. Having been given access to 400,000 files by MI5, Britain's domestic spy service, he recently wrote an official account of the 100-year history of the organization, "The Defence of the Realm."

Andrew concludes that the spy agency, which has only clued into the threat of Islamist terrorism in the last 20 years, has for now tapered off, but that devoted hard-core terrorists remain a threat in the foreseeable future.

10/20 02:11 PM Share

More about Less   [Jane S. Shaw]

Today’s New York Times discusses a proposal by Sen. Tom Coburn to remove political science from National Science Foundation funding. Coburn considers a lot of the discipline's research to be a waste of money, especially compared to the "hard" sciences such as chemistry and biology. Patricia Cohen raises the question of whether political science has become too mathematical, narrow, and irrelevant.

She quotes Joseph Nye, an “influential” professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard: “The danger is that political science is moving in the direction of saying more and more about less and less.”

That statement could be made about a lot of academic research, I suspect. Indeed, Mark Bauerlein came to that conclusion for humanities research in his American Enterprise Education report "Professors on the Production Line, Students on Their Own."

10/20 01:37 PM Share

NYU's Grand Design for Library Digitization   [Candace de Russy]

The folks in the United Arab Emirates and NYU do not think picayunishly.

With the financial backing of Abu Dhabi, reports New York University News, the university plans to completely digitize the campus's libraries, which have a combined 5.1 million volumes, and thus connect New York's research materials not only to the new, degree-granting satellite campus in the United Arab Emirates (NYUAD) but also to the global network university.

10/20 01:06 PM Share

Not Another Law School!   [George Leef]

According to this Boston Globe editorial, Massachusetts is considering the creation of new law school, which would be the only "public" (that is to say, taxpayer-funded) law school in the state.

The Globe takes a skeptical view of the claim that the school wouldn't cost state taxpayers because it would cover its costs. That's a sensible position. Political assurances that X "will not cost taxpayers anything" are like Lucy telling Charlie Brown that this time she will let him kick the football.

But there is a line that bothers me: "It's not a point of pride for MA to be one of just six states without a public law school." Baloney. There is no reason why legal education should be done by state-sponsored schools. I'd say the fact that Massachussetts doesn't blow taxpayer money on something that the free market provides perfectly well should itself be a point of pride.

10/20 11:59 AM Share

The Harvard Crimson today . . .   [Roger Clegg]

. . . editorializes in favor of less emphasis on race, and more emphasis on socioeconomic status, in admissions. Here’s the conclusion:

President Obama’s daughters Sasha and Malia, for example, are far less in need of affirmative action than many white children living in poverty in the hills of Appalachia. The president himself has stated as much, declaring during the presidential campaign that affirmative action ought to operate “in such a way where some of our children who are advantaged aren’t getting more favorable treatment than a poor white kid who has struggled more.”

Due to its role as a leader among universities, Harvard ought to take the initiative in refashioning affirmative action along the lines of Obama’s postracial vision. Race-based affirmative action has played an important role over the course of its four-decade existence. But socioeconomic-based affirmative action is now the more effective way to fight for social justice.

10/20 11:30 AM Share

Reader Mail re: Innocence Project   [NRO Staff]

I too am an alum of Medill, and I spent six months on a case within the Innocence Project, in which we found evidence that led us to conclude that the suspect was guilty. The case was suspended soon after our discoveries. To call this program activist is actually an insult to me.

I hold the National Review in very high esteem. I am one of the very few conservative-thinking writers to leave Medill each year, and more important, I adamantly support the death penalty. ‘

However, we have witnessed miscarriage of justice after miscarriage of justice coming from the Chicago police force and legal system. There is rampant evidence of repeated, forced confessions, intimidation, and perjury. I would hardly call David Protess an activist. He is a journalist, as was I in his class, and we sought to find out whether or not an individual had been wrongfully accused of felony murder. I worked on a separate case in 2004 while several friends worked on the McKinney case, and what I will say to you is that there is overwhelming evidence and documentation that this man is innocent. That is really all that should matter.

The Cook County prosecutor’s office is trying to undermine this case by trying to undermine the program. We were not graded by or pressured into finding evidence (although my team found actual physical evidence in a case 22 years later at the scene of the crime). This was a class that educated students on how to handle difficult interviews, how to examine court documents, how to ask questions and how to follow leads. This class was probably more investigative in nature than any journalism job that any graduate could obtain well into their 30s. This is journalism, through and through. And at the end of the day, when enough evidence had been compiled and a case had been made, we could have reported the news in the Tribune as had been done in numerous other cases since the Ford Heights Four.

David wanted us to focus on one mission: To find the truth. And in my case, we found evidence leaning toward guilt. He soon suspended the case, although we would later question certain police-reporting practices. In a time when the journalism profession has become a laughingstock, I would be troubled if you do not see this as actual journalism that should be protected at all costs. We have a national press core that is afraid to ask questions. Meanwhile, we have 15 students a quarter walking into the roughest neighborhoods in Chicago, fearlessly asking questions about murders from 20 years ago. I’d hire an alum of this class over any other “professional reporter” any day of the week.

I ask that you take my words into consideration the next time you write an opinion piece about this program. It was the best decision I have ever made, the reason I attended Medill, and although I left journalism and went into political communications, it taught me more about the trials of life than any other personal experience. Never did I feel that my grade was based on discovery. It was based on perseverance. And at the end of the day,  I was far more concerned with discovering the truth than I was about a letter on my student record. I am certain that every other student who took this course feels the same way.

Thank you.
Garrett Baldwin

Medill ’04

10/20 10:42 AM Share

Monday, October 19, 2009

Don't Do That, Morton   [Robert VerBruggen]

I'm pretty skeptical of "stereotype threat" explanations of the racial gap in test scores, but this probably isn't smart:

Last year Morton Sherman, the new superintendent, ordered principals throughout [Alexandria, Va.] to post huge charts in their hallways so everyone — including 10-year-old kids — could see differences in test scores between white, black and Hispanic students. One mother told me that a black fifth-grader at Cora Kelly Magnet School said that “whoever sees that sign will think I am stupid.” A fourth-grade African American girl there looked at the sign and said to a friend: “That’s not me.” When black and white parents protested that impressionable young children don’t need such information, administrators accused them of not facing up to the problem. Only when the local NAACP complained did Sherman have the charts removed.

Hat tip to Discriminations.

10/19 03:12 PM Share

The Innocence Project Tries to Duck Subpoena   [Robert VerBruggen]

The Medill School of Journalism (disclosure: I'm an alum) is fighting Cook County prosecutors over a case the school's Innocence Project handled:

The Cook County state's attorney subpoenaed the students' grades, notes and recordings of witness interviews, the class syllabus and even e-mails they sent to each other and to professor David Protess of the university's Medill School of Journalism.

Northwestern has turned over documents related to on-the-record interviews with witnesses that students conducted, as well as copies of audio and videotapes, Protess said.

But the school is fighting the effort to get grades and grading criteria, evaluations of student performance, expenses incurred during the inquiry, the syllabus, e-mails, unpublished student memos, and interviews not conducted on the record, or where witnesses weren't willing to be recorded.

I'm not sure the syllabus, grading criteria, and final grades are relevant. I'm skeptical the excuse that "students might have been pressured to find evidence that McKinney was innocent or else they would get poor grades in the class" — why not evaluate the evidence itself, much of which was recorded live, rather than the process by which it was collected?

But prosecutors probably are entitled to the notes on the interviews, and to e-mails that discuss the case. Illinois has a "shield" law for journalists, but the Innocence Project, while run in this case from a journalism school, is pretty clearly activist, not journalistic, in nature (at some universities, it's run out of the law or criminal-justice school). The point of the Medill Innocence Project is, in its own words, "to expose and remedy wrongdoing by the criminal justice system."

Medill's dean can point out that the students "took reporting to the nth degree," but under Illinois law, you have to report for publication to be a reporter. These folks report, overwhelmingly at least, for the purpose of exonerating the wrongfully convicted. In this particular case, they "took their findings to the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern law school's Bluhm Legal Clinic," according to the story linked above. Further, even if the students are journalists, under Illinois law the shield does not apply if the information is essential to the public interest and isn't available elsewhere.

If anything, the debate about whether these students count as journalists helps to demonstrate the problems with shield laws. The government has no business deciding who is and who is not a journalist, and then giving special privileges based on the distinction.

Now, I'd respect the folks in the Innocence Project if they, out of respect for the promises they made to their sources, refused to turn over the documents and went to jail. I'm just unimpressed by their request for the law to treat them differently than it treats everyone else.

10/19 01:43 PM Share

What Has Gone Wrong at NC State?   [George Leef]

North Carolina State has been rocked with scandal of late, most significantly the hiring of and oversized compensation for the wife of former governor Mike Easley (who is himself in very hot water over various abuses of power). That embarrassment led to a discussion in the NC State alumni magazine over the troubles at the school, and in a Pope Center piece released today, Jane Shaw takes a look at the substance of the discussion.

Government-funded institutions with weak oversight of large budgets: a perfect recipe for connivers to help themselves to a lot of money.

10/19 10:33 AM Share

Why (Some) College Students Steal Music   [Robert VerBruggen]

Some professors look at the question empirically.

Hat tip to the Volokh Conspiracy.

10/19 08:46 AM Share

Friday, October 16, 2009

The Never-Ending Yale Cartoon Controversy   [David French]

I would encourage PBC readers to jump over to FIRE's blog and read Azhar Majeed's response to Yale professor Anthony Kronman's defense of the university press's now-infamous decision remove "offensive" Mohammed cartoons from a book about . . . those very cartoons.

While I can't improve on Azhar's critique, I do want to highlight what should be an obvious point. Responding to threats of violence with self-censorship only rewards threats. Azhar is correct that the "age of the internet" has made such threats virtually "ubiquitous." How many news stories begin with some variation of, "When Jane Smith published her blog, she had no idea that she would one day be on the receiving end of threatening email." Censorship based on "threats" could be all-consuming.

But what if there is good reason to believe that publication will lead to more than mere threats? What if people have already died because of similar (or identical) speech? Then, there is an even greater need for the speech. If we cannot reward threats with self-censorship, how much more critical is it to deter actual violence?

Let's meet violence with speech, but not with speech alone. Use lawful authority to protect the speakers, protect the public, and protect the rule of law. Sometimes, blood must be shed to defend liberty.

10/16 11:58 AM Share

The Prestige Game   [Jane S. Shaw]

Stephen Trachtenberg, former president of George Washington University, has a curious column in the Washington Post.

He discusses a court case (carefully pointing out that he does not have the full details) in which a student is suing the University of Pennsylvania for misrepresenting its “Executive Masters in Technology Management.” This program is co-sponsored by the engineering department of Penn and the Wharton School of Business. The student received a diploma from Penn, but a mere “certificate of completion” from Wharton. The student expected a Wharton degree, which is considered more prestigious than a degree from Penn’s engineering department.

According to Trachtenberg, the student was “apparently quite satisfied with what he learned,” but he wanted the prestige of the Wharton name.

Trachtenberg uses this case to illustrate a broader issue, that "the brand has overcome the education" — people value a school’s prestige more than they value its education. But he doesn’t take a stand on where the fault lies — in this case, or more generally. Was the student seeking a Wharton degree on the cheap? Or had Penn misrepresented the nature of the master’s degree? My guess is both.

The message for me: People in higher-education transactions are just as self-interested as those in other transactions. The student wanted prestige; the school wanted revenues. Wharton sold its name, but held back giving a diploma because such a diploma would tarnish its prestige. As for the student being “satisfied” with his education, frankly, this is a glib remark. Education was not what he was primarily looking for.

10/16 11:30 AM Share

No Hidden Bias at This College   [George Leef]

I'm referring to the National Labor College, an accredited, degree-granting institution run by the AFL-CIO. In today's Pope Center piece, I write about the school.

10/16 09:41 AM Share

A&M This Morning   [John J. Miller]

NYT on Texas A&M, which President Obama will visit today:

[T]his is no Berkeley. ... A walk across campus remains a quiet, almost solemn idyll, where cadets march in formation, the most provocative T-shirts feature slogans in favor of Jesus and the destination signs on shuttles flash “Bush School.”

10/16 05:32 AM Share

Thursday, October 15, 2009

P.C.U.   [John J. Miller]

If others have mentioned this already, forgive me — but I'd like to call attention to a book just published by the American Enterprise Institute: The Politically Correct University. It's a collection of essays on what has gone wrong with our colleges and universities. More than a set of typical complaints, it's packed with actual data on the political views of the academic class as well as practical suggestions for reform. Contributors include occasional PBCers Anne Neal and Peter Wood. Best of all, the AEI website lets you print it out as a pdf file—so you can download the whole thing for free and print the parts you want to read.

10/15 01:56 PM Share

The 'Tent of Consent'?   [Robert VerBruggen]

Ew.

10/15 12:39 PM Share

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

The Military's Participation in the College-for-All Racket   [Robert VerBruggen]

Legislation has been introduced that would stop interest from accruing on government college loans for active-duty soldiers and National Guard members.

The Washington Monthly calls this a "no-brainer," and it is pretty hard to oppose — but I have to ask: Why are so many of the benefits of military membership restricted to those who attend college? Why, for example, did the college-bound benefit from the immense expenditures of the G.I. Bill, while non–college bound returning vets didn't?

If you want to increase compensation for members of the military, and especially those on active duty, great. But why not just increase their salaries, and let them decide whether to spend it on college and/or paying off education loans? They're bright people; they can figure it out.

The only counterargument I can think of is that by compensating college/college-bound students more, you can attract a higher number of smart kids. The same effect could be achieved, however, by giving bonuses to recruits with high AFQT scores.

10/14 03:40 PM Share

Evolution v. Creationism in Christian Colleges   [David French]

Scott Jaschik has a long and interesting story in today's Inside Higher Ed about efforts to spur greater dialogue within Christian colleges and universities between those Christian biologists who (broadly defined) believe that God created the heavens and earth through evolutionary processes, those who believe in a six-24-hour-day creation and a "young earth," and those who fall somewhere in between. Scott does a better job than most at reporting these kinds of issues, avoiding the "rational and respectable Christians versus fundamentalists" slant that so many reporters take. I have a few thoughts:

First, when biologists find themselves "under fire" for allegedly defying the "literal" creation story, the actual events are often much, much more complex than the simple "I took on the creationists and they sacked me" tale told after the fact. As one commenter notes, there was in fact more to the story of the professor who resigned from Olivet Nazarene College, and there is evidence from within the college that it hardly bans teaching different scientific perspectives.

Second, while civil, intramural debates can be quite healthy, it is important to note the institutional academic freedom interests in play. Different Christian universities have different mission statements and statements of faith. This is, of course, their right, and it is their right — as independent religious organizations — to adhere to those mission statements and ask their faculty to do so as well. No one is required to attend any religious school, no one is required to teach at any religious school, and you are not treating faculty unfairly if you ask them to uphold the school's mission. In many ways, the community of Christian schools represents a "marketplace of ideas" far more open than the parallel community of secular schools — where ideological orthodoxy is rigidly enforced not just within but among the institutions.

Third, I would be surprised if the principles of evolutionary biology were not taught even at schools dominated by a "young Earth" viewpoint. Professors know evolutionary biology and students learn it. They may learn it from a critical standpoint, but they still learn it. It's hardly the case that students at Christian universities leave with yawning gaps in their knowledge. After all, many of them go on to receive doctorates from secular universities. Thus, while the theological/scientific debate is important, the actual impact on classroom instruction — as a rule — is far less material than what outside observers believe.

Finally — and this is a pet peeve of mine — I hate the use of the term "literal" or "literalist" when describing those who believe the Bible is God's word. I have never in my entire life met any single person who believed there was no metaphor in the Bible. So, the actual debate within orthodox Christianity is not between "literalists" and others; it's between those who disagree over the meaning and intent of words, when both sides believe those are the words God intended to use.

10/14 02:34 PM Share

Re: The Power of Accreditors   [George Leef]

David makes a very good point about the desirability of having well-defined standards for financial stability. Nearly two years ago, the Pope Center released this piece written by math professor Robert Blumenthal (then at Oglethorpe and now at Georgia College and State University) making that same point. Given the extraordinary importance that accreditation now has — without accreditation from a federally recognized accrediting body, a school is ineligible for government financial-aid money — schools ought to know exactly what will be treated as an unacceptable financial situation.

The question is not whether St. Andrews is acceptable academically. There is no doubt that it's at least as good a school as most other liberal-arts colleges. It's probably better than many others. So why should the shaky financial situation trigger what amounts to the death penalty from the recognized regional accrediting association, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools? If SACS is concerned that the school's financial difficulties might cause trouble for students, what is the logic in revoking accreditation when that action unquestionably will cause trouble for them by shutting down the school and forcing them to finish their educations elssewhere?

I don't see a good reason to make eligibility for federal financial aid dependent on accreditation at all. We don't want to see students blowing federal money on degree mills, but accreditation is not a good indicator that a school is educationally serious and lack of accreditation is not proof that a school is not educationally serious. The DoE should come up with a more reliable method of finding out degree mills and barring them. Better still would be to cut the Gordian Knot and get the feds out of the business of educational financing, of course.

10/14 01:53 PM Share