Tuesday, November 03, 2009  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.
In particular, Rosett singles out the television networks and major newspapers for failing to speak out against the president's vendetta, declaring "They could be next."
Not surprisingly, there's been nary a peep about this outrage against free speech from the academy. Schools of journalism, above all, should be screaming bloody murder, for they too — given the twists and turns of radicalism — could be next.
The academy should be echoing Rosett's message:
The matter of deciding whether a news outlet has “a perspective” — and many do — is something that in a free country, if the country is to remain free, should be left to the private customer ...
Government personnel getting into this act is altogether different. These are people paid out of the public purse, and speaking under the imprimatur of public institutions — in this case the White House. Here they are, urging White House-favored news outfits to follow the White House lead, and ostracize a specific news outlet the White House doesn’t like. This is Banana Republic stuff, a stock tactic of pressure and intimidation. The effect of such stuff, as a rule, is not to promote accurate news coverage, but to cover up stories the government doesn’t want aired, and shut up critics.
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.
This would be a first. No other university has a totally digitized library.
Read how Kirtas Technologies, a leading company in digitization services, is advancing this extraordinary revolution in access to knowledge.
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
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
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
Outbreak of Civilized Debate at UNC [George Leef] In this week's Clarion Call, my Pope Center colleague Jay Schalin writes about an unexpected event — an outbreak of civilized debate at UNC. Last spring, freedom of speech was on life-support as leftist protesters disrupted talks by speakers they didn't like and didn't think anyone should be allowed to listen to. This fall, however, the school has had a cornucopia of talks and debates featuring speakers all across the political and philosophical spectrum. This is a big step in the right direction for UNC. 10/14 12:52 PM Share
A Case Study in the Academic Deformation of Community Organizers [Candace de Russy] With the recent ignominious implosion of the community-organizing behemoth ACORN, it is of interest, although not surprising, to read Bethany Stotts's review of how Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, in its Human Science program, trains the nation's legions of leftist community activists.
Forget even the common, gross misuse of (emphases henceforth mine) interdisciplinary studies. Saybrook, according to the campus website, quixotically invites students to design their own "unique transdisciplinary plan to focus on individual academic and professional goals."
A small sampling of this Saybrook curriculum, in addition to its race-this and gender-that offerings, includes studies in "altered states of consciousness . . . social change among indigenous peoples . . . [and] the way in which religious and therapeutic values impact health care; and physician and patient spirituality.”
Saybrook also conflates the Native American Medicine Circle with social change, for example, in guiding students to transform society by developing "familiarity with philosophies and practices of nonviolence, Aikido, and the Native American Medicine Circle" and "experience with deep ecology perspectives."
Given Saybrook's indoctrinating and jejeune offerings, the title of Stotts's piece, "Can You Say Brook[en]," is especially fitting. 10/14 12:14 PM Share
Tuesday, October 13, 2009 The Power of Accreditors [David French] Today's Inside Higher Ed carries news of an interesting federal-court ruling from North Georgia. St. Andrews Presbyterian College, an 800-student school in North Carolina, sued the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools in 2007, alleging that the association's finding that the school did not have a "sound financial base" was an unlawful violation of the school's common-law right to due process. Apparently, the association was on the verge of stripping the college's accreditation because it was (and is) heavily in debt. The school argued that the terms "sound financial base" or "financial stability" did not provide precise enough standards to guide either the school or the association.
A federal court disagreed:
United Stated District Court Judge William S. Duffey, Jr., of the Northern District of Georgia, writes in his opinion that accrediting agencies like SACS “are to be afforded great deference” in their rulings and that “these interpretations should be upheld unless ‘clearly erroneous.’ ” He further notes that “the weight of authority” allows SACS to “maintain flexible standards” to evaluate myriad institutions. Dismissing the arguments of St. Andrews, Duffey states that “SACS’ compliance requirements are not impermissibly unspecific” but “provide sufficient notice to member institutions and thus do not violate common law due process standards.”
Elsewhere, the court noted that it did not want to be a "super-accreditation" board and expressed reluctance to weigh into the intricacies of higher-ed accreditation.
At one level, it's tough to argue with the conclusion that high debt loads equal financial instability. On the other hand, creating concrete metrics to measure stability is not that difficult and is done every day in the business world.
By conditioning virtually any meaningful federal or state educational benefit on accreditation and then by explicitly recognizing specific accreditors, the government has imbued them with an astonishing level of power over colleges and universities. Is it too much to expect powerful entities to promulgate precise standards? While it seems easy for a court to wash its hands of a case when a debt-burdened college challenges a financial-stability finding, excessive deference could prove dangerous. After all, how does one measure a commitment to "diversity" or "social justice" or any of the other ideological "metrics" that are creeping into the accreditation process? Can a federal court really wash its hands of accreditation decisions when the accreditor derives its power from the government? 10/13 05:04 PM Share
Another Distraction: The Student-Engagement Movement [George Leef] Over at Minding the Campus, University of Wisconsin professor Donald Downs has a good essay on the student-engagement movement.
Student engagement? Does that mean how busy they are with their course work? Well, no — it's about how busy they are with things other than their coursework, but not including the usual college stuff of sports and parties. The idea is to keep track of "community service," artistic and cultural pursuits, and so forth. This can even take the form of a separate transcript.
High-school students these days are under great pressure to show such "engagement" to make themselves look exceptional to college-admissions people. It leads to a lot of claims that are dubious at best. Now this is creeping into college as well. For serious students, it is apt to be mostly a distraction, and for non-serious students, a temptation to deceive. 10/13 12:53 PM Share
A Crisis in Catholic Education [Sol Stern] This week, Time has a welcome look at the plight of urban Catholic schools. The article, by Gilbert Cruz, rightly emphasizes that this is a problem for all of us. Every time one of these successful faith-based schools shutters its doors for financial reasons, the taxpayers ultimately pay the price in the form of more poor students dumped into already-failing public schools.
What Time doesn’t seem to get is the degree to which the deteriorating condition of Catholic schools has been exacerbated by public-school reform schemes that have been oversold to the public and, ironically, cheered by many conservatives and businesspeople. In New York City, for example, the Catholic schools are competing for teachers with a public school system that now has unheard-of sums of money to spend. In just the past seven years, the city’s education budget has increased from $12.7 billion to $22 billion. Teacher salaries have risen 43 percent across the board in six years, passing the $100,000 top-salary threshold for the first time. Ten years ago, the gap between the city’s top salaries for Catholic-school teachers and public-school teachers was around $28,000. It’s now $50,000. Catholic schools find themselves stuck on a treadmill in which they either have to raise salaries even higher — and pass the costs on to students’ families — or lose more teachers to the public schools.
The public-school monopoly is even winning the philanthropy race. Acting as though a per-pupil expenditure of $21,000 isn’t enough, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools chancellor Joel Klein have run a major fundraising drive that has brought in a whopping $400 million in philanthropic funds since 2002. Some of America’s wealthiest people, including Eli Broad, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, and Mort Zuckerman, have made major contributions. Gates alone has given about $125 million to New York’s public schools — which could have created an endowment big enough to prevent most of the city’s Catholic-school closings over the past few years. For Mayor Bloomberg, soliciting every last philanthropic dollar is a question of appetite. For the Catholic schools, it is a question of hunger. In the gilded city, appetite is winning.
The Catholics are still outperforming their much richer public counterparts in test scores and graduation rates. But Bloomberg’s public school system is indisputably better at public relations and marketing. Lots of taxpayer dollars are spent on a slick press operation, which has convinced most New Yorkers that exciting new options are now available in the public schools and that the schools have shown historic academic gains. By failing to analyze the public schools’ test scores critically, while almost never reporting on the achievements of the Catholic schools, the mainstream media have been complicit in this distortion. The Archdiocese of New York’s school system has a one-person PR office. How many potential customers are the Catholic schools losing because they can’t compete with the public schools’ well-oiled publicity machine?
The Catholic schools’ publicity deficit is also a matter of philosophy. Historically, Catholic school leaders have been reluctant to be seen as competitors with the public schools. They have been content to carry out their mission to educate poor children, assuming that if they built strong schools, the children would come. Clearly, that’s a luxury they can no longer afford. 10/13 12:40 PM Share
Re: Columbus Day and Education [NRO Staff] So what if 24 percent of Americans don't care for Columbus Day? No big deal. Indeed, if there were no kind of celebration, then there wouldn't be those school events where he (and by analogy, all Europeans) are put on trial.
A much more sensible approach (thus, won't happen) would be to have two holidays, preferably in August when we can go to the beach. The first holiday would be "Civil Rights Icons Day," and you can celebrate whomever you wish: MLK, Harvey Milk, Cesar Chavez, or even Thomas Jefferson. The other day would be "Ethnic Pride Day," and would incorporate St. Pat's, Columbus, Cinco de Mayo (we are being creative here), and Kwaanza. I can foresee that the growing population of Wiccans might want to move Christmas there, too; but we can deal with that when it arises.
Most important of all, those two holidays would occur when school is not in session, so there wouldn't be any manipulative "education" about them. Just do what you feel, I say, and the rest of us can go catch some rays.
Robert Allgeyer
Aptos, Calif., and Ormond Beach, Fla. 10/13 12:23 PM Share
Identity Issues [Kathryn Jean Lopez] Notre Dame sends another confusing message about why exactly it exists:
A surprise move from the Student Activities Office allowed five students to attend a national gay rights demonstration in Washington D.C. Sunday, sophomore Jackie Emmanuel, president of the Progressive Student Alliance (PSA), said.
The students were granted permission from the Office to use PSA funding to travel to the nation's capital to participate in the National Equality March over the weekend, Emmanuel said.
"The fact that we were University-approved was surprising but it was a wonderful surprise," she said. "The University hasn't always been entirely receptive in the past."
Sophomore Joanna Whitfield, a PSA officer and an attendee of the trip, said the support from the University was unexpected.
"They haven't always been supportive of us in the past," she said. "But we're thrilled."
10/13 11:43 AM Share
Monday, October 12, 2009 Should College Leaders Act Like Trustees or Delegates? [George Leef] In today's Pope Center article, my colleague Jenna Robinson writes about higher-ed leadership from a perspective suggested by Edmund Burke: Do we want those in positions of authority to just facilitate student desires (the "delegate" role), or do we want them to exercise their judgment and try to make college education what it ought to be even if it isn't what students (and the faculty) want? Burke famously wrote that he thought members of parliament should exercise judgment regarding the best course for the whole nation and not just try to "bring home the bacon" for the voters back home. Jenna (and I) think that higher ed would be a much better value if its leadership would act more like Burke's "trustees" and less like "delegates." 10/12 11:10 AM Share
Happy No More Che Day, Pt. 2 [John J. Miller] A report on the festivities. 10/12 05:23 AM Share
Friday, October 09, 2009 Happy No More Che Day [John J. Miller] They're celebrating it at the University of Florida:
Participants said students wear Guevara’s image on T-shirts without knowing he was involved in killing people in Cuba and elsewhere.
“It’s supposedly trendy. It’s supposedly cool to wear,” said Jeff Ivey of the UF College Republicans, which took part in the event. “Most people don’t know what he’s all about.”
10/09 02:47 PM Share
An Academic Paves the Way [Carol Iannone]
Ever since the eminently privileged Henry Louis Gates erupted into unjustified accusations of racism when a white police officer appeared at his home to investigate a report of a possible robbery, the race card has seemed to suffer a dimunition of potency as a tactic of debate in our public discourse. The president himself had to backtrack from harshly judging the police officer when made fully cognizant of Gates's unreasoned outburst.
This may be one area where a prominent academic opened the way. Since then, those who've tried to argue that opposition to Obama's policies is motivated by racism have been rebuked by none other than the president himself, who reminded everyone that he was black before he was elected. This was echoed by former President Clinton who, while of course affirming that racism persists, said that Obama would be facing the same opposition even if it didn't, since he, Clinton, faced it too. Most recently, New York State's hapless governor, David Paterson, suggested that his opponents were motivated by racism, and he soon after received a request from Obama not to run in New York State's upcoming gubernatorial election. Reports were that the last straw for the president was Paterson's invocation of racism as an excuse for his bumbling. Using race in this way, to ward off criticism and silence opponents, seems to have become as good as announcing "I'm in over my head," "I don't know what I'm doing," and "I have no answers to my critics."
And isn't it surprising that both the exposure of ACORN and the investigation into Charles Rangel's possible financial misdeeds in the House are proceeding pretty much without reference to race?
10/09 01:20 PM Share
Exhibit A on Incentives [Jane S. Shaw] At first glance, it appears to be just another ho-hum report about efforts to improve instruction on the college level. But the Inside Higher Ed article about the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) is my Exhibit A for understanding the incentives in universities.
NCAT has worked for a decade to help universities cut costs and improve learning. The boilerplate surrounding this work is all too familiar — don’t fall asleep reading this example of course redesign from Indiana University-Purdue University:
Jump Start begins with an intensive four-day workshop that focuses on best practices in online course design and starts faculty working with a support team consisting of an instructional design consultant, an instructional technology consultant, an information resources consultant, and a representative from UITS Media Design and Production who provides multimedia development support for the course.
I have to wonder who would sit through four days of this kind of thing, but Inside Higher Ed says that the NCAT course redesigns initiated ten years ago were effective — they lowered costs and improved learning. Now, however, the cost reductions, at least, are being ignored. Few schools are even monitoring costs any more. “You’re dealing with a culture that does not care about reducing cost,” says Carol Twigg, president of NCAT.
Of course they’re not going to monitor costs. Why should they? The grant that spurred the redesign is long spent. My guess is that the improved student learning has faded, too.
In my view, a program like Jump Start is just another of the top-down programs from smart, well-meaning facilitators that have little to do with what faculty want.
Do courses need redesign? Yes. But outstanding teachers probably redesign their courses every year, maybe every week, using technology where it makes sense. Did it take a federal grant for professors teaching giant lecture classes to learn to distribute “clickers” to students allowing them to vote “yes” or “no” to the instructor’s questions? I don’t know, but I doubt it.
And plenty of other instructors probably won’t teach effectively no matter how many four-day instructional seminars they attend. The issue is incentives. Until now, colleges haven’t needed to cut costs, so they haven’t done so. Until now, good college teaching has been poorly rewarded (compared to research), and bad college teaching has been ignored. When the revolution comes — that is, when competition from outside the academy starts drawing away students — course redesign will be all the rage, grants or no grants. 10/09 11:46 AM Share
An Island of Academic Rigor in the Sea of Mediocrity [George Leef] Writing for the Pope Center today, Prof. Ross Emmett and student Rachel Penn of Michigan State's James Madison College show that there's at least one island of academic rigor in the sea of mediocrity that American higher education has become. Read their article here.
Most of our sharp and energetic students will find their ways to the educational programs that offer true value and insist on results. The challenge we face is not in dragging more of the weak and academically disengaged students into college for easy courses, but to avoid having our able students waste their time in dumbed-down courses with low expectations. 10/09 11:20 AM Share
Thursday, October 08, 2009 Student Stories [David French] While there's no shortage of excellent websites commenting about campus issues, there is a crying need for more places for students to tell their own, first-hand tales of life at the modern leftist university. At the Alliance Defense Fund's new website, we're creating a specific space for these stories.
There, you can read (and watch) students discuss — in their own words — the events that led to their own legal challenges. For example, community-college student Beth Sheeran describes her "up close and personal" encounter with university censorship when she tried to hold a pro-life event on campus:
Our college had recently started a program called “Stop the Hate,” which encourages students to report “bias incidents” on campus to a committee composed of faculty and students who will investigate what happened and assign the appropriate disciplinary action. Every club member present at the meeting was given a handout on what the school defined a “bias incident” to be, which was " any act of conduct, speech or expression to which a bias motive is evident as a contributing factor regardless of whether the act is criminal.” We were also given a paper titled “The Pyramid of Hate,” which listed acts of “prejudice” and “hate,” including using “non-inclusive language,” making “insensitive remarks,” jokes, and stereotyping, which were a few steps away from murder and genocide. We were warned that if we passed out fliers as a club we could possibly be expelled. Many of the students in our club were in the process of applying to four year universities. It was not a good time for any of us to risk expulsion, and I took the threat very seriously.
Throughout my dealings with the school administrators, I openly told them that I was seeking the advice of a lawyer. My hope was that the school would understand that I considered the matter to be very serious and that they would take it seriously also. Unfortunately, in most of my conversations with them, they would state that we would violate state law or college policies by holding our event. The excuses for shutting down the display and threatening us ranged from, “Washington is a pro-choice state and we can’t use school grounds for a pro-life display,” to “your club is funded by state money so you have to include pro-choice information also.” The faculty advisor for our club, who was supposed to be in our corner, was the one who told us that we faced disciplinary action, including expulsion from school, for holding this event if someone was “offended.”
Beth eventually sued and won a resounding victory. Hopefully, her story (and all the stories) can help convince other conservatives not to settle for second-class citizenship on campus. 10/08 12:12 PM Share
Female Enrollment to Grow Faster than Male? [Robert VerBruggen] Charlotte Allen covers a new projection:
College enrollment among women is expected to grow by 16 percent, compared with a growth of only 9 percent among men. The U.S. college student population is already 55 percent female, with the total number of women on campus, nearly 10.5 million, outnumbering male students by nearly 2.5 million.
I'm a little skeptical of her analysis of this trend. For one thing, she repeatedly confuses "number" with "proportion" — writing, for example, that since men tend to choose STEM fields more often than women, this new prediction means that "we can expect to see fewer and fewer college students choosing [these] majors." In fact, what it means that we'll see more and more students choosing these (and all) majors, but that growth in these fields won't happen as fast as the growth in the university system as a whole.
Another issue is that she attributes this trend to (as Christina Hoff Sommers calls it) the "war against boys." It's certainly consistent with Sommers's analysis, but there are all sorts of other reasons we might expect to see female enrollment outpacing male now that the barriers to female enrollment are gone. For one, women could be temperamentally better suited to college. Two, thanks to their greater physical strength, men have options women don't when it comes to non-college-requiring jobs — so in a world where both men and women are expected to work, more women will find college to be the best choice.
I have yet another theory that relates to the distribution of IQ. While the male and female average IQs are roughly the same, men are more likely to be very smart or very dull than women are, whereas women cluster more closely around the average. Back when college was very rare and limited to the best and brightest, men predominated in the population that was smart enough; now that more than 50 percent of high-school grads go to college, that factor is dead — and from this alone we should actually expect more women than men to be in college. (When college enrollment pushes further into the population, it's mainly picking up people with IQs around average, which are mostly women.)
Finally, of course, is the skepticism I and many others have about the overall trend — regardless of the gender balance, why are more kids going to college? 10/08 11:45 AM Share
Rum, Sodomy, and — Now — the Lash [Roger Clegg] There have been a number of postings here about the U.S. Naval Academy’s use of racial preferences in admissions and, in particular, the brave willingness of a professor there, Bruce Fleming, to publicize and criticize them. Well, today there’s an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education that begins, “A professor at the U.S. Naval Academy has filed a federal whistle-blower complaint alleging that the institution improperly denied him a deserved pay increase for publicly accusing it of illegally operating a separate admissions track for minority students,” and goes on to discuss Professor Fleming’s travails. 10/08 11:39 AM Share
The Academic Left Has Its Own Version of 'The Other' [George Leef] Peter Wood has written a wonderful piece on a recent speech by Macalester College president John Rosenberg. Why is a speech by the president of a liberal arts college in St. Paul of interest? Because Macalester has been under attack from a group of its alumni, drawn from across the political spectrum, who maintain that the school is overly politicized, with far too much ideological proselytizing and too little serious discussion of competing ideas. (Peter's piece gives the chronology on this battle, including an article the Pope Center published by one of the founders of the "Mac Mods," Roger Peterson.)
As Peter's piece shows, under pressure Rosenberg says the right things about being open to different ideas, but in the next breath he snatches that away with disdainful references to those horrid town-hall meetings. True, there was some shouting at those meetings, but some people who spoke in opposition to the proposed changes in our health-care system made entirely sensible arguments. Rosenberg, however, treats the opposition much as the Democratic officeholders did, brushing it away as just annoying behavior by ignorant folks. Rosenberg's speech illuminates the central problem with the academic Left, namely its absolute certainty that its views are intellectually unassailable.
What's amusing about this is that we keep hearing from the Left that America has a terrible aversion to "The Other," meaning people who are different from the mainstream of our society. That's mostly baloney. Few Americans care about race or personal idiosyncracies these days. But the academic Left appears to have its own aversion: for it, "The Other" consists of people who do not share in the faith that increased governmental power is the solution to all socioeconomic problems. The believers shun us infidels and attack straw-man versions of our arguments. That's bad enough in the world of politics, but shameful in the world of education. 10/08 10:53 AM Share
News Flash: Universities Discriminate on the Basis of Race in Admissions [Roger Clegg] So we learn this week from U.S. News & World Report, which has a story on a study by Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade of top private colleges (not including Princeton, by the way) in 1997 (why so long ago?). The article emphasizes that Asians are discriminated against the most, but we also learn that Hispanics and, especially, African Americans get preferences over both whites and Asians.
I suppose we should be grateful for any MSM publicity about universities’ shameful policies in this area, even if some people are obviously more upset about Asians being discriminated against than about whites and Asians being discriminated against. Still, this is not news — the Center for Equal Opportunity has documented such discrimination at public universities for years — and the article strikes a number of off-notes.
For example, within one paragraph, the article says, “And [Princeton] says it doesn’t discriminate on the basis of race or national origin,” and then quotes a university spokeswoman as saying, “Princeton considers factors such as . . . race and ethnicity.”
Another paragraph says that Espenshade “warned against concluding that his study proved that colleges improperly discriminated” because, after all, Asians are overrepresented based on the general population; then, a few paragraphs later, there in an allusion to anti-Jewish quotas back in the bad old days. But somehow these two dots don’t get connected.
Still, as I said, it’s good that people are being reminded that the discrimination is there, it’s severe, and its victims aren’t all rich white boys. 10/08 09:57 AM Share
Load [John J. Miller] Remember Andres Serrano? (Hint: He's the artist behind this NEA-funded travesty.) Well, he's back, sort of. The NYT (who else?) publishes one of his photographs in today's edition here. It's a picture of a decapitated cow.
This is how reputations are made, gentle reader: casual references in America's newspaper for the cultural elite. You gotta have art. 10/08 05:04 AM Share
Wednesday, October 07, 2009 UNC Shows Why It's a Bad Idea to Give Universities Money [George Leef] In this week's Clarion Call, my colleague Jane Shaw writes about the sorry experience of the Pope Lecture Series at UNC. The idea behind the grant was to bring to campus speakers who had important things to say about reviving the Western tradition. So far, the lecturers have had very little to say that bears on that topic.
Once again, the academic community shows that it doesn't care about donor intent, but will happily use donated money however it likes. 10/07 10:27 AM Share
Tuesday, October 06, 2009 'Good Players with Questionable Backgrounds' [Candace de Russy] Some years ago, Pres. Lois DeFleur at the State University of New York at Binghamton led the way in pressing its athletics program to join the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Division I, which The New York Times says "can have a win-at-all cost attitude."
Last week the Times reported that several of the students recruited by Binghamton "had histories of academic or legal problems and that three players had been arrested, one of whom fled the country while on bail."
Citing further Times and other coverage, Inside Higher Ed digs deeper into this scandal:
A widely read article in The New York Times . . . criticized Kevin Broadus, Binghamton head basketball coach, as being “known for recruiting good players with questionable backgrounds.” (Broadus was an assistant coach at Georgetown University and helped recruit a number of academically underprepared players, including one from an acknowledged high school diploma mill.) The Times article also included the comments of faculty members concerned that the institution had lowered its admissions standards for athletes in recent years.
The Binghamton situation burst back into public view two weeks ago, when . . . one of Broadus’s troubled recruits, was arrested for dealing cocaine and dismissed from the team. Following the high-profile arrest, Sally Dear, an adjunct professor who told The New York Times last winter that Binghamton’s athletics department pressured her to compromise her grading system to help failing basketball players, lost her position at the institution. Dear believes her dismissal was retaliatory in nature and told The Times, “I’m being fired for being ethical.” . . . [Later, Dear stated] that other faculty members had been approached to change grades but were afraid to speak for fear of being fired.
Thereafter, with no explanation given by Binghamton's administration, several more players with problems in their pasts, including some of the team’s top scorers, were cut from the roster.
The SUNY Board of Trustees, which at first left the investigation of this troubling affair in the hands of President DeFleur, seems to have had second thoughts. Nancy L. Zimpher, chancellor of the SUNY system, has now announced that the system would oversee an independent audit of Binghamton’s basketball program, rather than allow DeFleur to complete the inquiry herself. (According to the Times, Binghamton's administration had provided "only the sketchiest account of what the investigation might have entailed"; moreover, Professor Dear told the Times, the administration never interviewed her.)
The SUNY board (on which I served for twelve years) must see that an independent, reliable inquiry into this affair takes place, and it must ensure that athletes recruited to SUNY campuses are of good character, prepared for college studies, and graded on a par with other students. The board must also stand foursquare behind professors with the integrity and courage to come forward in matters such as these. 10/06 03:27 PM Share
Academic Logic on Guns [Robert VerBruggen] Jacob Sullum summarizes a study:
In Philadelphia, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania find, possessing a gun is strongly associated with getting shot. Since "guns did not protect those who possessed them," they conclude, "people should rethink their possession of guns."
He headlines the post, "Why Skydivers Would Be Better Off Without Parachutes."
UPDATE: Eugene Volokh has a lot more (arguably more than this ridiculous argument deserves). 10/06 12:29 PM Share
ACORN and the Left's Class Problem [David French] It is absolutely fascinating to watch ACORN's continued implosion. But as more and more leftist groups toss them under the bus, I can't help but wonder . . . is there a bit of classism at work here? After all, ACORN is hardly the first lefty group to be nailed by a sting operation. And as reprehensible as the ACORN employees were, there were, after all, no real prostitutes involved. It's not like they participated in an ideologically motivated witch hunt to send, just to take a random example, three obviously innocent college students to jail for decades. After all, what's worse, conspiring to conceal fake prostitution or using your power and position to attempt to destroy real lives?
But as ACORN gets thrown under the bus, what has happened to the Duke faculty members who did their absolute best to whip up public scorn for the innocent and drove a prestigious university to take wildly inappropriate punitive actions? As chronicled on K. C. Johnson's outstanding blog covering the case, the answer is either nothing, not much, or "hey, their careers have really taken off!"
So why do professors who destroy innocent lives get off scot free within leftist establishment institutions, while ACORN is getting attacked by liberals in congress, liberals in foundations, and liberals in the press? Could it be a bit of the "ewww" factor, as the tapes reveal (what appear to be) poorly educated, urban workers behaving crassly? While destructive radicals like Wahneema Lubiano seem much more like, well, them? "Wahneema? I know Wahneema! Wasn't she at the Euro-gender conference in Stockholm last year?" There's a similar protective cocoon around Planned Parenthood, with abortion enjoying special status amongst the leftist elites — especially university elites.
But ACORN? It's over there on the "messy side" of the rich/poor Democratic divide. 10/06 11:35 AM Share
Bias in Ticket Prices? [Robert VerBruggen] A new paper claims that NCAA Division I basketball teams irrationally charge too much for men's games relative to women's games. The paper is only available via purchase, so I can't say much about the methodology, but I'm skeptical for one simple reason: Even with the higher ticket prices, more people attend men's games. See here and here — this year, men had only two more teams than women did, but had an attendance of 25.4 million to women's 7.5 million. If A and B are similar, A is more expensive than B, and A still sells better than B, it's probably because customers — not just the people setting prices — think A is that much more valuable than B.
Now, this doesn't disprove the authors' thesis; it's just a reason to doubt it. There's a lot that goes into setting a ticket price to maximize revenue. Higher prices mean more money per ticket, but (usually) also that fewer tickets are sold. (Pretty much the only sure thing is that if you sell out early, your prices are too low, but by that point it's too late.) Maybe women's teams would have been better off with lower attendance and more per-ticket revenue. Heck, maybe basketball tickets are a "Veblen good," and a higher price for women would actually increase attendance. (The authors suggest this in their summary, citing research that "lower-priced events are perceived as lower quality and less worth watching or attending.") It just seems like a bit of a stretch. 10/06 11:15 AM Share
A Catholic Identification Story [Kathryn Jean Lopez] I was out at the University of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota, a few weeks ago. It has its eyes set on Truth. My write-up for the National Catholic Register is here. 10/06 08:55 AM Share
The Public Textbook Option [Jane S. Shaw] As part of his plan to beef up community colleges, President Obama and friends in Congress have proposed a $500 million federal project to create online college courses and make them publicly available. At Inside Higher Ed, Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute lays out the problems, from the destruction of private enterprise to the undermining of academic freedom, posed by this latest example of White House audacity. 10/06 08:36 AM Share
Monday, October 05, 2009 More on the Indian-Mascot Crisis [Roger Clegg] Alas, it has been festering for many moons. Here’s my 2001 NRO column on the matter. For a more scholarly treatment — well, as scholarly as I get, anyway — see my “American Indian Nicknames and Mascots for Team Sports: Law, Policy, and Attitude” in the Virginia Sports and Entertainment Law Journal (Spring 2002). Yes, I’m serious. 10/05 01:25 PM Share
Reader Mail Re: Last Stand [NRO Staff] I do understand that Indian imagery in sports — logos, tomahawk chops, and so on — can be offensive. But I went through and looked up Indian team names and mascots for pro and NCAA teams, and for the most part these names and mascots were chosen for positive reasons.
Dartmouth's team was very likely called the Indians because it was established by Wheelock for Indians. When the Tennessee Titans were looking for a mascot, they wanted something that reflected “power, strength, leadership and other heroic qualities.” Apparently, most of the “Redmen” teams were called that because the players wore red uniforms; they were the men in red. Afterwards, the Indian imagery was attached.
The name of Washington's football team was likely changed to Redskins because of the team's popular coach at the time, Lone Star Dietz. The Cleveland Indians became that informally after Sockalexis played for them in 1897 through 99. Yes, “redskin” is offensive, and that stupid Cleveland Indian cartoon is, too. But there should be some sort of compromise. Do we really want to erase Dietz and Sockalexis from sports history?
Other teams, like the Chicago Blackhawks, aren’t really named after Indians. The Blackhawks were named after 333rd MGB of the 86th Inf Div during WWI, nicknamed "Blackhawk Division." (Okay, so the Blackhawk Division was named after chief of Sauk nation.) The Atlanta Braves came from a Tammany Hall symbol when J. Gaffney (of Tammany Hall) took over team in 1912. The KC Chiefs were named, in a contest, after Mayor Bartle of KC; his nickname was “Chief.”
Of the teams from the NBA, the NHL, the NFL, and MLB, and some of the major NCAA conferences, the ones named after people — not Native Americans and not mythical — include:
49ers, 76ers, Athletics, Bills, Boilermakers, Brewers, Buccaneers, Canadiens, Canucks, Cavaliers, Celtics, Commodores, Cornhuskers, Cowboys, Demon Deacons, (Trolley) Dodgers, Friars, Hoosiers, Irish, Islanders, Kings, Knick(erbocker)s, Mariners, Met(troplitan)s, Mountaineers, Nationals, Oilers, Orange, Packers, Padres, Patriots, Phillies, Pirates, Quakers, Raiders, Rangers, Rebels, Red Raiders, Royals, Scarlet Knights, Senators, Sooners, Spartans, Steelers, Tar Heels, Texans, Trail Blazers, Trojans, Twins, Vikings, Volunteers, Warriors, Yankees . . .
I am of Irish descent, and while I #$*&-ing HATE that stupid little leprechaun, I do take some pride, despite being a University of Michigan alumna, in the Fighting Irish. I would take more pride if they picked something a little more like “Braveheart.” And I am also from Indiana — go Hoosiers!!
Loretta Sheridan 10/05 12:51 PM Share
Re: Lost University [David French] Thank you, Candace, for posting Kurt Westergaard's thoughts about Yale. Most striking to me was his statement that he "would not send [his] child to any school where there is such uniformity and conformity of thought and attitude." Of course, one hallmark of this "conformity" is the unshakeable conviction by these students and professors that they are brave dissenters from an oppressive culture. Their own conformity chokes out internal dissent, while the (false) sense of their own bravery breeds self-righteousness with viral speed and thoroughness.
It must be nice to live as a "dissenter" while thinking and acting like virtually everyone else you know. You get all the fun of rebellion with none of the consequence. 10/05 12:37 PM Share
Prof. Stephen Zelnick Talks About the Educational Core [George Leef] The Pope Center today has published an interview Jane Shaw did with Temple University professor Stephen Zelnick, one of the founders of the Association for Core Texts and Courses. He would like to see college students reading more works by some of history's great "trouble-makers." Unfortunately, keeping good reading in the curriculum is an uphill battle. 10/05 11:52 AM Share
Saturday, October 03, 2009 Lost U. [Candace de Russy]
Kurt Westergaard is the Danish cartoonist whose image of Mohammad with a bomb for a turban triggered, as Roger Kimball retells it, "one of those periodic paroxysms of rage, mayhem, and murder among followers of the religion of peace."
Westergaard recently spoke at Yale, decrying Yale’s decision to censor Jytte Klausen’s book The Cartoons that Shook the World by disallowing publication of the cartoons and other visual depictions of Mohammad.
Rabbi Jon Hausman attended Westergaard's talk and remarked, in an interview, on the antagonism with which the cartoonist was received. Rabbi Hausman also took the occasion to comment forthrightly on Yale and the university in general:
Honestly, I would not send my child to any school where there is such uniformity and conformity of thought and attitude. I was disappointed at the inability of those in attendance amongst the Yale community to place responsibility for the violence that has transpired on those who manifest such responsibility. . . . It was the Imams from Denmark who took those cartoons . . . [and] whipped up violent frenzies. . . . Every questioner seemed to want to misplace blame.
Further, it is clear that the university suffers from the malaise of relativist truth and the multicultural ethic. There are no universal truths any longer. . . . Today, all truths are equal. I abjure this notion.
In the final analysis, I believe that the university is lost.
Blunt, yes. But all too accurate.
10/03 03:19 PM Share
Yet More on Campus Rape [Robert VerBruggen] The Washington Monthly's Jesse Singal is offended by my previous post. I'm re-treading some ground here, so those who are up-to-date on the "campus-rape incidence rate" debate can probably skip this one.
He seems to doubt the notion that "there’s some giant evil lobby benefiting from false accusations of rape." Well, not false accusations so much as false statistics. For this I'll direct him to Heather Mac Donald's definitive take.
He says he has "no idea what numerical system [I'm] using to determine that 70 is 1.2 percent of 24,000." I was probably a little unclear that by "70 different students . . . each year," I meant I was tallying rape incidents over multiple years, for the purpose of comparing the rate at this school to the supposed rate overall ("one-in-five to one-in-four over four years," they like to say). Over a four-year college career, 70 per year adds to 280. 280/24,000=.0117.
He points to a DOJ report indicating that one in five college females will be raped over the course of her time on campus. The report is a little odd in its methodology — it starts with the notion that 3 percent of women will experience rape over the course of a school year, extrapolates that to cover the whole twelve months of a year (bringing it to 4 percent), and then multiplies by five to account for the five years in the now-typical college career (bringing it to 20 percent). And Singal doesn't mention that by "experiences rape," the DOJ means both completed and attempted rapes (both crimes are awful, of course, but it's important to be clear). Going back to the 2000 study the DOJ cites, the figure for completed rape is 1.8 percent per year.
Even that figure is suspect, as Mac Donald has demonstrated:
The 2000 Department of Justice study of campus rape found that those women whom the researchers characterized as rape victims “generally did not state that their victimization resulted in physical or emotional injuries.” . . . Moreover, 65 percent of those whom the researchers called “completed rape” victims and three-quarters of “attempted rape” victims said that they did not think that their experiences were “serious enough to report” — a judgment inconceivable from a real rape victim.
Keep reading this post . . . 10/03 01:11 PM Share
Friday, October 02, 2009 Last Stand [John J. Miller] The Fighting Sioux of the University of North Dakota gained a reprieve for as many as 60 days. But the war against Indian symbols continues. 10/02 05:57 PM Share
Campus-Rape Overreporting [Robert VerBruggen] The University of California at Davis 'fesses up — in three years, it says, an employee doubled-to-tripled the number of sexual assaults in reports to the federal government.
What's interesting is that even the fake numbers are lower than the "rape crisis" crowd would have you believe. There are more than 24,000 students enrolled at the school, and of 70 different students were raped each year, you'd have a total victimization rate of 1.2 percent. Given, there's the additional issue of unreported rapes, but still.
UPDATE: A clarification of this post and a summary of my thoughts on campus-rape statistics can be found here. 10/02 11:57 AM Share
'Beautification' Through Censorship [David French] This week, the Alliance Defense Fund Center for Academic Freedom filed suit against Oregon State University, alleging a rather unique (and outrageous) form of censorship. One morning the editors of the Oregon State Liberty, an independent student newspaper, awoke to find that all of their on-campus distribution bins were just gone. Vanished. Disappeared from campus. They called the police — and after a brief search found them all piled in a heap near a dumpster. The remaining issues in a print run were inside, ruined. You can see pictures here.
Who was responsible for this act of destruction? The administration, of course. As part of a so-called "beautification" effort, university employees removed every one of the Liberty's bins (while leaving the other student newspaper, the Daily Barometer, untouched) and threw them away. This was particularly surprising to the Liberty's editors because the bins were located on campus under a longstanding agreement with the administration.
So, for those keeping score at home, the administration: (1) confiscated private property; (2) without notice to the owners; (3) in violation of an explicit agreement governing the placement of the bins; (4) while leaving a competing publication untouched. All in all, that's a pretty thorough act of censorship.
And now, it's being reviewed by a federal judge. 10/02 11:49 AM Share
Exposing Esposito [Candace de Russy] To its discredit, Georgetown greatly "respects" Prof. John Esposito, who has proclaimed his affinity with militant Islamists and defended their ideology. Here, from IPT, is an in-depth report on Esposito.
All the more testimony to Georgetown's insidious politicization. 10/02 11:08 AM Share
Thursday, October 01, 2009 Just a Thought [Robert VerBruggen] It's kind of weird.
When college girls get drunk, have sex, and don't consider themselves rape victims afterward, to the Left that's a rape crisis.
When a famous director gives a 13-year-old girl alcohol and quaaludes, she still says no to his sexual advances, he proceeds anyway, and then he flees the country to escape punishment, to the Left that's no big deal.
(Not to generalize, of course. Some on the left, including Ezra Klein, have come out against Polanski. And you can read here an apparently liberal writer's take-down of various Polanski defenses.) 10/01 02:34 PM Share
Where's the Outrage? [Robert VerBruggen] "Score choice" — the policy of letting kids take standardized tests as many times as they want, send the highest scores to schools, and not tell the schools how many tries those scores took — is absurd on its face. How could the admissions process benefit from less information?
No other argument is needed, but still, why is no one on the left pointing out the "disparate impact" here? Poor and minority kids are less likely to be able to afford to pay the fees over and over, and more likely to need income from part-time jobs (which they forgo each time they take a day off for testing). 10/01 12:26 PM Share
Stopping Hate (of Free Speech) [David French] Earlier this week, the Alliance Defense Fund announced a settlement in its case against Spokane Falls Community College. ADF filed the case after the college barred a pro-life Christian group from putting up a pro-life display, saying that the material didn't contain any pro-choice viewpoints (what?) and noting that it could violate the school's "Stop the Hate" program. ADF's suit challenged not only the censorship itself but also attacked the college's speech codes, including the pernicious "Stop the Hate" program.
As my colleague (and lead counsel on the case) Heather Hacker explains, under the college's policy students were encouraged to report on one another when they observed an “incident” of “bias" defined as:
An act of conduct, speech or expression to which a bias motive (relating to race, religion, disability status, ethnicity/national origin, gender or sexual orientation) is evident as a contributing factor regardless of whether the act is criminal.
The program encouraged anonymous reporting of "biased" speech, empowered "Stop the Hate" officials to investigate, and sanctions loomed over every student's head.
But no longer. Now the policy is dramatically changed, the college's speech codes have been eliminated, and the plaintiff even received a modest damage award for her trouble. But, as Heather notes, Spokane Falls did not invent the Stop the Hate policy, and FIRE has long been active in the fight against anonymous reporting and investigation of student expression. Already we're receiving reports of similar policies at other schools, and I get the distinct feeling that this will not be the last time we go to court to "stop the hate" against free speech. 10/01 11:51 AM Share
Marginalizing Horowitz [Peter Wood] St. Louis University’s silly decision to dis-invite David Horowitz to speak on campus has produced the very “derision” that SLU said it was trying to avoid. We have a rare celestial alignment of the AAUP, NAS, John K. Wilson, and Erin O’Connor, among others, who agree that the SLU administrators have betrayed basic principles of academic freedom and plain good sense.
The irony of David’s providing the occasion for such consensus is certainly to be savored, and Inside Higher Ed and CHE have been savoring it. But I wanted to go a little farther. On the NAS website, Ashley Thorne and I have posted “Horowitz vs. Islamo-Billikenism,” which digs down deep into the bedrock strata of St. Louis University. SLU’s droll mascot is Billiken, a god dreamed up (literally) 100 years ago by a St. Louis art teacher. There was a brief Billiken fad in the U.S., and Billiken-worship caught on in Japan and some other places. Whatever Billiken meant back then, today he is an apt symbol for the moonstruck multiculturalism of the SLU administrators, who so dearly want a campus, in the words of the Dean of Students, “where folks are free not to feel marginalized,” that they muzzle responsible expression of important ideas. If we want a word for this odd combination of aggression and cowardice, Billikenism will do. 10/01 08:04 AM Share
Wednesday, September 30, 2009 Are Traditional Colleges Like Slide-Rules? [George Leef] In this week's Pope Center Clarion Call, I take a look at a new online higher-education competitor. It seems to offer an alternative to the traditional-classroom model that could lead to a major shakeup in the higher-ed industry. 09/30 12:16 PM Share
Students Lead Way against 'Ahmadi' [Candace de Russy] Up to 1,000 brave students have just protested the killer regime at Tehran University in Iran. Here, via Gateway Pundit, is a video of the protest. Would that Western leaders had similar courage. 09/30 11:27 AM Share
Tuesday, September 29, 2009 For All the Ladies Out There [Allison Kasic] The Independent Women's Forum recently released the details for their 2009-2010 college essay contest. Deadline is Dec. 1, 2009, and first prize is $5,000. 09/29 02:41 PM Share
Re: 20 Reasons Why Campus Learning Is Better Than Online [Peter Wood] Fred Schwarz cites my predictions about a “Great Transition” in which higher education will move from in-person campus-based institutions to mostly online instruction in the coming decades. He dislikes the prospect and disagrees about how likely it is. I don’t especially like the prospect either, but that’s neither here nor there. The important question is whether something like the “Great Transition” could happen. My answer is yes, it could. That’s because, though our current institutional basis of higher education looks robust, it is highly vulnerable to small shifts in public esteem.
My article, "The Shape of (Academic) Things to Come," wore its satirical colors openly. I described people, places, and events 20 years into the future and attributed my detailed foresight to scientifically enhanced precognition. It says something about the level of fear that online education strikes in today’s academics that a fair number wrote to me to protest this leap of imagination, as if, like Prospero, I could conjure it out of thin air. Don’t blame me. If something like the Great Transition were to happen, it won’t be because I set it in motion. Nor do I think that my fellow seer, Jane Shaw, can be blamed.
Schwarz provides 20 reasons why campus learning is (or “can be”) better than online college education. Most of his reasons sound right to me. He starts out, “Not every subject lends itself to online learning.” Entirely true, at least with current technology. (Looking at the last 20 years, I wouldn’t exactly rule out the possibility of dramatic improvements in the years ahead.) But the more important point is that the subjects Fred cites as better learned in person — “those that require laboratory work, clinical practice, studio learning, musical instruction, live performance, agricultural work, etc.” — do not require a university. Historically, each of them was taught in a non-university setting. Music conservatories and independent art schools still thrive. Science grew up outside the university and has a vigorous life in independent institutes to this day. Moreover, the decoupling of undergraduate education from more advanced studies already has models such as the Rockefeller University.
I won’t go through all 20 of Fred’s reasons, but most of them fall into this pattern. He makes a valid point about the attraction of or benefit to be had from residential colleges, but the point has no real bearing on the larger economic and social forces at work. Yes, it is nice to retire to a college town (point 3), but are we going to keep colleges going in order to provide enhanced retirement options? It seems unlikely.
Keep reading this post . . . 09/29 02:41 PM Share
David Horowitz Disinvited . . . For Criticizing Islamo-Fascism? [David French] Today's Inside Higher Ed covers Saint Louis University's decision to block David Horowitz from delivering an address called "Islamo-Fascism Awareness and Civil Rights." Apparently, the university believed the program as planned was "attacking another faith" and could cause "derision" on campus (whatever that means). Let's not forget, of course, that we're actually at war with practitioners of Islamo-fascism even now. And I, for one, feel no reluctance in attacking their beliefs or actions and hope that they are so utterly discredited in the marketplace of ideas that the practitioners (and their sympathizers) are derided at every turn.
The following represents a partial list of the crimes committed by Islamo-fascists during my year in Diyala Province, Iraq:
*Raping women to "shame" them into suicide bombings to redeem their family honor.
*Giving backpacks full of explosives to mentally challenged boys and girls and then blowing them up by remote control.
*Decapitating most of the residents of a village and filming the beheadings up close while deliriously shouting "Allah akhbar!"
*Shooting infant children in front of their families as an "intimidation tactic."
*Exploding suicide bombs at restaurants, then following up with a second set of bombs designed to kill doctors and nurses as they tended to the wounded.
*Sending their own children to family events with bags packed with explosives, then remotely detonating them, to punish those who cooperated with the legitimate government of Iraq.
*Decapitating village elders and putting their heads on stakes outside villages.
But of course we wouldn't want to attack the mindset that spawned these hideous crimes. Especially when it might distract us from the real problems facing our culture. Like the concentration camp at Gitmo! Or Republican hate at town-hall meetings! Or the Bush administration's assault on civil liberties!
It is my understanding that the traditional "Jesuit mission" involves speaking truth and fighting injustice. I can think of few fights more vital than the struggle against the twisted barbarism of Islamo-fascism, and few injustices more severe than the atrocities I outline above.
Let David Horowitz speak. You might learn something. 09/29 02:06 PM Share
Another Shallow NYT College Article [George Leef] In last Sunday's NYT, economics columnist David Leonhardt had a piece entitled "The College Calculation."
It starts off well enough, posing the question of "whether the college makes the student or the student makes the college." To be more precise, does college education add to an individual's human capital and thereby make him more productive? Or do innately more capable and ambitious people tend to go to college, and does the fact that they tend to be more successful have little to do with their education? How much does college education, Leonhardt asks, "really matter"?
Leonhardt glances at some evidence and arguments on both sides, but it's evident that he's in the "yes, it really matters" camp. At the end of his piece, he writes, "at the very moment when education would be of most value, money for it is disappearing." Well, the money is not "disappearing," but more to the point, how do we know that education — presumably he means increasing the number of Americans enrolled and graduating — would be of "most value" during our current recession? Leonhardt merely assumes the point he's trying to prove.
It's an article of faith for many people that having more formal education under your belt means that you'll do better, and that the higher the level of "educational attainment" in a nation, the more prosperous it will be, but both of those propositions are highly questionable. Many people with college degrees end up in jobs that most high-school students could easily learn — unfortunately, Leonhardt does not look into that phenomenon. Nor is it true that a country can pull itself up by the bootstraps economically by increasing its "investment" in higher education, since most of what people need to know in order to succeed in their work is learned on the job, not in classrooms.
Leonhardt also completely misses the screening argument. He thinks it telling that a study of identical twins where one went to college and the other did not shows higher earnings for the college educated. That, however, does not prove the "human capital" hypothesis. Employers tend to only offer better-paying jobs to people with college credentials not because they're necessarily more capable, but because the degree is an easy (and legal) way of sorting people. As more and more employers have taken to using college degrees as a screening mechanism, fewer and fewer job paths leading to high incomes are open to people without them. 09/29 01:30 PM Share
Counterpoint at Yale [Jane S. Shaw] Candace: I don't think that Yale has grown a backbone. What seems to be happening around the country (hat tip to my colleague Jay Schalin) is that student organizations are providing a balance to the left-wing, old-line radical faculty (or, in this case, a timid publisher). A student group at Yale (I haven't found which one) is bringing the cartoonist to speak. This seems increasingly to be the case — student groups bring in conservative speakers while the official "activities board" brings in the radicals. 09/29 12:43 PM Share
Monday, September 28, 2009 Better Late Than Never [Candace de Russy] Is Yale getting some backbone?
The artist behind the infamous Mohammed cartoon, Kurt Westergaard, and the president of the International Free Press Society, Lars Hedegaard, will speak to Yale University students as a new book about the cartoon crisis is set to be published. Yale University Press, an autonomous publishing house associated with the university, is releasing Danish author Jytte Clausen's book 'The Cartoons That Shook The World' on Monday. The publisher has removed images of the cartoons from the book, reasoning that they might incite violence. Westergaard's cartoons, one of which depicts the prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban, were first published by Jyllands-Posten newspaper in 2005. He and Hedegaard have been invited by a student organisation to speak at the university campus on 1 October, just three days after the book's scheduled release.
09/28 05:32 PM Share
Creative Destruction [Jane S. Shaw] Fred: A great list! And, of course, there's much to be said for face-to-face on-campus education, just as there is much to be said for printed newspapers, books, and traditional libraries.
My message is not that web-based education is wonderful. (You'll find support for your critique in David Koon's experience with online education at UNC-Chapel Hill.) I'm really more focused on the for-profit part of "for-profit online learning" and on entrepreneurs, whether they are for-profit or not. These entrepreneurs are likely to shatter higher education as we know it today by taking away chunks of the market, leaving many traditional schools teetering because of their high costs and low enrollment.
Online tools will be part of the entrepreneurial armament, but only part. Jeff Sandefer's Acton MBA demands intense face-to-face interaction between student and professor — but Sandefer also hires editors and English teachers to work online as freelance writing coaches.
My larger message is that big segments of higher education may get into trouble in the next few years. The chief cause is the growing difference between what a college education costs and the value that it provides — similar to the widening discrepancy, a year or two ago, between the price of housing and the value of that housing, a discrepancy that led the bubble to burst. If there are other options out there (and the number is growing) traditional schools should watch out. 09/28 02:54 PM Share
20 Reasons Why Campus Learning Is Better Than Online [Fred Schwarz] Okay, in the headline above, “is” should really be “can be,” and I’ll admit I did some salami-slicing to get the total to 20. My point, though, is to express a bit of skepticism about some recent predictions — by Peter Wood on this blog and by our colleague Jane S. Shaw in the latest issue of our print magazine, among others — that in the next few decades, for-profit online learning will devour most of the market for higher education, leaving the traditional campus-based model as a niche product at best.
I agree that online learning offers many advantages, that its market share will continue to grow, that a central campus is not necessary for many kinds of teaching, and that the present system leads to some unfortunate consequences. But to suggest, as one online business owner told Shaw, that “a complacent higher-education system will not be able to survive competition from hungry entrepreneurs with better operating models,” or to envision (as Wood does, I’m not sure how seriously) a “Great Transition” that “leaves a remnant of residential colleges [that are] marginal to American society,” is way too sweeping. Consider:
Keep reading this post . . . 09/28 12:56 PM Share
Homage to Darwish [Candace de Russy] E-mail in from David Bethune on my post on Nonie Darwish:
Candace, thanks so much for drawing attention to the problems presently being confronted by Nonie Darwish. I have read her excellent books, wherein she writes eloquently about her experiences growing up in Egypt. As I know from my travels to that land, her father is a well-known Egyptian patriot revered by his countrymen.
Specifically, I was in Egypt for three months on a Fulbright scholarship. Egypt has many, many problems, especially its poverty and, related, a centralized incompetent and oppressive government grounded in the socialist legacy of former President Nasser. Nonie is an extraordinarily brave and brilliant woman. She is most of all extremely courageous and willing to look violence and death right in its ugly face.
It is important to draw attention to Nonie's problems with her Islamist enemies. They are intent on making her life miserable, but she is constituted such that she will never relent in the fact of such intimidation.
09/28 12:49 PM Share
Re: Reader Mail [Robert VerBruggen] I just wanted to flag this sentence from your angry reader:
I'd reckon that the average student IQ at a typical state university is higher than at your so-called elite universities.
That's pretty unlikely. Elite universities are elite because they can demand very high SAT and ACT scores of their enrollees — and SAT and ACT scores correlate highly with IQ.
09/28 12:48 PM Share
Reader Mail Re: Those Lazy Students [David French] My post on the "total lack of student effort" as an explanation for low graduation rates seems to have struck a nerve. I came to work this morning to see that I had the most reader mail since I deactivated Facebook. A sampling:
An excellent article, "Low Graduation Rates and the Total Lack of Student Effort,"
especially in regards to Combat Arms.
Some years ago, Parade Magazine had an article that referenced the difference
between a 22 year college graduate and a 22 year old Marine.
I paraphrase below,
One person working in an office asked a fellow worker...
Why do we trust a 22 year old Marine to carry out our foreign policy half-way
around the world, but we don't trust our 22 college graduate to operate the
copying machine?
And another:
I teach juniors and seniors in a suburban Phoenix high school and I can attest to the truth of your statements regarding laziness. The typical student puts forth very little effort actually learning. The average "good" student completes the "work" and that's it. It is a very frustrating situation, because most of them are not stupid; they are just culturally lazy.
One bright light, ironically enough, is reading (trying to read!) Heart of Darkness with my seniors. Even though they do not "get it" and the majority do not actually read it (Sparknotes!), when we get to the section about "the flabby weak-eyed devil" of laziness, they sit up and take notice. That passage usually generates an interesting discussion about how lazy they actually are.
I will not say that I work miracles, but the vast majority finally admit that they do not work hard at almost anything. And, they are not proud of that fact. Relating their utter lack of effort to the "rapacious folly" of the ivory traders is salutary. And, thankfully, some actually do take the lesson to heart.
Keep reading this post . . . 09/28 12:40 PM Share
Just Send the Money [Jane S. Shaw] Things are deteriorating so badly in California that the chancellor and vice-chancellor of UC-Berkeley are pleading for the creation of a new "national federal-state university system," starting with a few select public research universities (such as Berkeley). Essentially, the federal government would guarantee the universities' operating funds. Writing in the Washington Post, Robert J. Birgeneau and Frank D. Yeary call their proposal "a 21st-century version of the Morrill Act." 09/28 10:33 AM Share
Friday, September 25, 2009 Low Graduation Rates and the Total Lack of Student Effort [David French] A week ago I was on a Southwest flight from Dallas sitting next to a very pleasant middle-aged woman who was busily grading papers. As I finished watching one of America's greatest cinematic masterpieces on my (brand-new) MacBook Pro, I glanced over at some of the work. It looked identical to the work I see from my ten-year-old daughter and her classmates: Mostly simple sentences, a few dreadful spelling mistakes, and virtually no complex analysis. Unlike my daughter's classmates, however, this teacher's students skipped entire sections of their tests — failing to answer half the questions.
I was just about to open my mouth and say, "Fifth grade?" when I caught myself. Instead, I said "What grade?"
"Junior English."
"High school?
"Yes. In suburban Chicago."
I almost choked on my peanuts.
I thought of this exchange as I read Richard Vedder's Minding the Campus essay on low graduation rates. Out of every 100 American students who enter high school, only 20 get an undergraduate degree. This is a remarkable failure rate, especially given two factors that Richard mentions: (1) grade inflation (no one flunks anymore) and (2) soaring amounts of financial aid.
Why so many failures? I think the heart of the problem is — to use Richard's phrase — the "willingness to work." Simply put, American college students are lazy on a scale that boggles the mind. It's a laziness that starts early and develops year by year as "breathe-in, breathe-out" promotions (just stay alive and you'll get through) allow students to not only progress from kindergarden to twelfth grade, but do so with a solid "B" average. It's a laziness reinforced by the extraordinarily low academic demands of even elite universities. I studied half as hard in law school as I worked my first year in the "real world."
The problem is cultural, and no amount of wonkery or financial aid is going to solve it. I frequently think of Michael Barone's Hard America, Soft America, a truly excellent book. Few elements of American society are as "soft" as academia, where standards are lowered every year to make sure that everyone can succeed. Yet failure is only magnified. I would say no part of American society is "harder" than combat arms — yet kids who may not have succeeded in school show judgment, initiative, and courage that would boggle the minds of academics who are convinced that "self-esteem" somehow builds character. It's almost as if real challenges build character while coddling destroys it. Go figure.
Anyway, it's ominous to see "soft America" drifting into the marketplace. Recently, I was approached by an earnest law student who said, "I'd love to work for you, but I only want to work nine to five — family comes first." My response? "Good to know. I hear Wal-Mart is hiring." 09/25 01:52 PM Share
The More the Merrier [Candace de Russy]
The National Association of Scholars has joined, and will no doubt enliven, the circle of higher-education blogs.
09/25 12:55 PM Share
Peace Treaty? [John J. Miller] A few years ago, I wrote a grim report for NR on the plight of military history as an academic field. David J. Koon of the Pope Center has written an update. He finds cause for optimism:
[T]he incuriosity and rejection of military history may at last be ending. The past two to three years have seen a small surge in military history’s acceptance and respect in academia.
I have my doubts about whether this is an actual trend, but I do hope that David's thesis is correct. His article is well reported and provides good reason for hope. 09/25 11:00 AM Share
Thursday, September 24, 2009 Lessons for College Activists: The ACORN Takedown [David French] As word comes that the IRS is now severing ties with ACORN, and ACORN has filed suit against James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles (an odd choice, considering that the discovery process will make this scandal the gift that keeps on giving), it's worth considering lessons learned from this, the most successful single act of college activism in a decade (or more). After all, when was the last time that an undergraduate and graduate student triggered such a massive media, popular, and governmental response? Already, histories are being written, but a dry recitation of facts isn't much of a guide for aspiring conservative journalists and activists. What can we learn?
First, be creative. Too many college activists look at one or more standard paths to influence. Want to write? Start a blog, maybe get a column in your student newspaper, write an op-ed or two, intern at a conservative publication, and let talent (and fate) take its course. More politically partisan? Intern with a legislator, become a staffer, work for the right campaign, and let talent (and fate) take its course. There's nothing wrong with these tracks, of course, but they're well-worn, highly competitive, and — quite frankly — not all that transformational. If James and Hannah had merely written a column about ACORN, would they have accomplished anything?
Keep reading this post . . . 09/24 01:15 PM Share
Wednesday, September 23, 2009 Diversity in College Leadership Training [Karin Agness] This past summer, student leaders at the University of Virginia attended a leadership training seminar. How do you think diversity was treated at the seminar?
One student recounts her experience here. 09/23 08:04 PM Share
Re: The World in a Beer Glass [Carol Iannone] Fred, thanks so much for the link to your questions and answers on the Scopes Trial — nice work. But leaving aside the substantive argument as to whether Darwin is or is not compatible with the God of the Bible, I wanted only to establish that it was reasonable for Bryan to claim that they are not, given that many Darwinians today say as much. Even if you think the position is wrong, it is reasonable. The general view of the Scopes Trial has been that all thinking beings know that Darwin and God are perfectly compatible and that Bryan was an ignoramous for saying otherwise. But he has been amply vindicated by subsequent discussion. And according to a statistic cited by David Berlinski in The Devil's Delusion, only 18 percent of people who accept Darwin's theory think that evolution is guided by a supreme being.
Also, to bring in higher ed, here's a tidbit from the University of California Museum of Paleontology website's step-by-step presentation of the theory of evolution, titled Evolution 101:
It is important to remember that:
1. Humans did not evolve from chimpanzees. Humans and chimpanzees are evolutionary cousins and share a recent common ancestor that was neither chimpanzee nor human.
2. Humans are not "higher" or "more evolved" than other living lineages. Since our lineages split, humans and chimpanzees have each evolved traits unique to their own lineages.
No doubt this is why the Hall of Mammals at DC's natural-history museum features a big sign saying, "Come meet your relatives"! 09/23 06:04 PM Share
Obama Acts Just Like a College President [George Leef] My friend Victor Davis Hanson, whom I have gotten to know on a couple of tours in Europe, here compares Obama's approach to ruling America with the management style of the typical college president. His argument is right on target — the traits of the academic world are readily apparent in Obama. One of the most important of those traits is disdain for the free-market system that makes possible the wealth that college presidents and politicians so badly want for their own purposes. 09/23 12:53 PM Share
Angela Davis is Still Around; Just Spoke at N.C. State [George Leef] My Pope Center colleague Jay Schalin, who gets the plum assignments like listening to radical speakers and attending bizarre shows, writes about Angela Davis's recent talk at N.C. State in today's Clarion Call.
A few State students got to hear her babble away on the need to get rid of prisons and spend much more on education. And they all got to help pay for it, a sore spot with some. 09/23 10:25 AM Share
Tuesday, September 22, 2009 Islamist Censorship and Feminist Callousness at Whittier [Candace de Russy] Student and faculty Islamists at Whittier College, reports the Investigative Project on Terrorism, have aggressively been trying to silence Nonie Darwish, a native of Egypt who has had the temerity to speak out against the persecution of women under sharia. According to a student leader, the manner in which campus president Sharon Herzberger and law school dean Penelope Bryan, both well-known feminists, have handled these slanderous attacks on Darwish has been craven.
Darwish faced earlier efforts to disrupt her speech at Wellesley College and the University of California-Berkeley (described here and here). She recalls how she was treated, all too typically, at Wellesley:
a large number of female members of the Muslim Students Association attended. As I described the plight of seven Iranian women awaiting death by stoning for sexual violations, I saw no compassion towards their sisters in Islam. I saw only rigid faces and hardened, unsympathetic hearts. Some even made faces at me as I spoke. These young, educated Muslim women live in America under the protection of the U.S. Constitution, far removed from the harsh realities of Sharia law I experienced.
Too few on campuses come forth to defend heroines like Darwish. IPT rightly observes that at places like Whittier, "the dignity of women and protection of their rights are top priorities — so long as they don't interfere with the political agenda of campus Islamists." 09/22 04:41 PM Share
The World in a Beer Glass [Fred Schwarz] My goodness, Robert takes a week off and look at all the tangents this education blog gets into. And it’s only Tuesday.
It seems to me that the question of whether Darwinism is compatible with the existence of God is largely a matter of lexicography. If you define Darwinism to mean “a system of natural selection in which there is no god,” then they are incompatible by definition. But if you define Darwinism simply as a belief in evolution through random mutation, survival of the fittest, and all that stuff, then there’s no reason God can’t be involved.
It’s like brewing beer. Fermentation is a biological process that proceeds on its own, but the brewer can control it by selecting the ingredients, regulating the temperature, and so forth. Similarly, if you believe in evolution, there’s no reason God could not have used His infinite wisdom to set the initial conditions for that biological process; not even the strictest Darwinists think their theory explains how the universe was created.
It’s also possible that God may have controlled evolution by intervening from time to time, through non-biological events (adjusting the sun’s output, for example, or summoning a meteor strike when necessary) or even by giving a boost to a favored species. The assumption that no such controlling intelligence exists is just that, an assumption; it may be correct, but there’s no logical way to exclude the contrary.
In much the same fashion, an economist may assume (for purposes of various mathematical models) that people always act rationally, without believing that this assumption is actually true 100 percent of the time. The fact that the origin of species can be explained, up to a point, without need for a deity does not mean that no deity exists; it could just mean that He prefers to keep His role hidden.
P.S. Regarding William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial, while I do think Bryan was scientifically misguided, the seemingly unshakable notion that Clarence Darrow humiliated him and stopped creationism dead in its tracks is the opposite of what actually happened at Dayton. See my article here. 09/22 03:49 PM Share
Did the Harvard Law Review Just Get a Black Eye? [David French] Over the past several weeks, defenders of academic freedom have been in an uproar over Harvard Law Review's unsigned student comment defending speech codes and criticizing the Third Circuit's landmark decision in DeJohn v. Temple University. The comment argued that workplace harassment rules could apply to student speech and ignored a mountain of federal precedent to the contrary. Excellent critiques can be found here, here, and here.
Almost immediately after the comment was published, the Los Angeles Community College District put it to the test, citing it as authority (arguing that DeJohn was poorly reasoned and had come under scholarly criticism) in a motion to reconsider a July 10 injunction against the school's speech code. Late last week, the court responded, and the injunction stands.
My colleague, Heather Hacker (writing in the ADF Center for Academic Freedom's new website), notes this nice quote from the court's opinion:
Finally, Defendants criticize DeJohn as a singular case and not well reasoned. (Motion 14). We think that DeJohn is well reasoned. Moreover, Defendants are unable to cite any case where a similar policy survived a constitutional challenge in a college setting so that it might arguably be said to conflict with DeJohn. To the contrary, the Third Circuit has rejected a substantially similar policy even in an elementary and high school setting. Saxe v. State College Area Sch. Dist., 240 F.3d 200, 216–17 (3d Cir. 2001). Thus, Defendants’ scattershot and disjointed arguments do not defeat the reasoning of DeJohn.
With this latest ruling, two things are becoming clear. First, law students — even Harvard law students — can't trump federal precedent merely by stating their opinions. And second, as Heather says in her excellent post: "Public universities may not like it, but DeJohn is here to stay." 09/22 02:18 PM Share
Re: Dissent everywhere [Carol Iannone] Regarding George’s post of a few days ago, I’m having trouble seeing Camille Paglia as a collectivist. She is such a distinctive figure, with very independent views, it seems, and she has been very critical of the Obama administration. She did vote for Obama, but does George think that all who voted for him must share his quasi-socialist vision of America?
I’m thinking a lot of people just saw him as more appealing than the dour McCain.
Regarding Bryan, although he was cruelly mocked by Mencken, many of his objections to Darwinism have been justified in recent years. For example, whether one agrees with this point or not, many Darwinians themselves now admit that their theory eliminates God as generally understood, and some have even admitted that acceptance of the theory destroyed their faith, such as it was. David Berlinski’s The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions exposes the many inadequacies of Darwinian doctrine, some admitted by the scientists themselves. “Darwin?” a Nobel laureate in biology remarked to Berlinski. “That’s just the party line.” The short of it is that Bryan did not deserve Mencken’s wild, brutal, vicious, and irresponsible ridicule just because the Great Commoner opposed Darwinism.
As for Mencken, I’m beginning to see him as an early version of South Park, Family Guy, Borat, and the like. Their political incorrectness can seem encouraging in the culture wars to some conservatives, but IMO the price they exact is too high for what they give. 09/22 01:11 PM Share
The Symptoms Don't Lie [David French] In addition to its unmatched ability to fight and win wars, the United States Army has one great and abiding strength: PowerPoints. I'm beginning to think that officers are losing the ability to communicate without the use of that vile Microsoft product. But in the avalanche of slides, occasionally one can stumble across real wisdom.
Recently, I found myself in an excellent briefing on the perils of groupthink (which is far less of a problem in the Army than one might think in such a hierarchical organization . . . in part because the Army is actually diverse). As a slide listing the "Eight Symptoms of Groupthink" flashed on the screen, I grabbed a pad and immediately wrote them down:
- Illusion of Invulnerability: Members ignore obvious danger, take extreme risk, and are overly optimistic.
- Collective Rationalization: Members discredit and explain away warnings contrary to group thinking.
- Illusion of Morality: Members believe their decisions are morally correct, ignoring the ethical consequences of their decisions.
- Excessive Stereotyping: The group constructs negative sterotypes of rivals outside the group.
- Pressure for Conformity: Members pressure any in the group who express arguments against the group's stereotypes, illusions, or commitments, viewing such opposition as disloyalty.
- Self-Censorship: Members withhold their dissenting views and counter-arguments.
- Illusion of Unanimity: Members perceive falsely that everyone agrees with the group's decision; silence is seen as consent.
- Mindguards: Some members appoint themselves to the role of protecting the group from adverse information that might threaten group complacency.
If that doesn't describe the university environment, I don't know what does. In fact, it presents a near-perfect explanation of how faculties and administrations that are full of otherwise brilliant individuals can engage in grotesque and obvious constitutional violations and react with seemingly genuine shock when challenged. The illusion of morality combined with the illusion of invulnerability seems to be particularly characteristic of the speech-code mentality. If one is convinced of the rightness of one's cause and feels no day-to-day challenge to one's authority (either actual or moral), then abuse of power follows as night follows day.
The other intriguing aspect of the list is the extent to which groupthink depends upon the dissenters who do exist voluntarily holding their tongues. In other words, groupthink can't survive just a few people willing to cowboy up. 09/22 11:29 AM Share
Monday, September 21, 2009 Leftist Campus Zealots Resort to Intimidation at UNC [George Leef] In this Pope Center piece we have just released, my colleague Jay Schalin writes about the nasty attack on a Chapel Hill student group, Youth for Western Civilization. Among other slurs, the Left insists that it's a white-supremacist organization. Once again we see how the Left plays the race card whenever it can't come up with real arguments.
Last week, I wrote about the risible paper "Manufactured Controversy," which claims that free speech and the exchange of ideas on campus are at terrible risk from "the far right." As I said there, mere criticism of trends in higher education is not the same thing as an attack on speech and academic freedom — but the tactics of intimidation on display at Chapel Hill really do constitute an attack on them. I oppose such tactics no matter who employs them. And as far as I'm aware, these days they are employed exclusively by the intolerant authoritarians on the left. 09/21 09:57 AM Share
Sunday, September 20, 2009 King of the Hill [John J. Miller] Writing in The Hill, David Hill (how's that for synergy?) says that more than political correctness may be blocking conservative students from careers as academics. 09/20 06:21 AM Share
Friday, September 18, 2009 Keep an Eye Out [Robert VerBruggen] For the print edition of National Review dated October 5. It's a special issue focusing on higher ed, with contributions from Richard Vedder, George Leef, Jane Shaw, Todd Zywicki, and yours truly.
I love the cover:
The issue should become available in bookstores over the next week or so. Right now, subscribers can read it online here. 09/18 04:23 PM Share
Nasty Business at East Georgia College [George Leef] Our friends at FIRE have a new case involving a college's astoundingly authoritarian treatment of a professor who had the nerve to say that the school's sexual harassment policy was flawed because it had no provision to protect against false accusations. Evidently that caused the woman in charge of the training session where he made the comment to blow a gasket. He was summarily fired back in August and has yet to receive a hearing or even a formal list of the charges against him. I comment on this unbelievable case here.
Imagine if he'd complained about the school's diversity policy! 09/18 02:33 PM Share
One Reason for Student Credit-Card Debt [Robert VerBruggen] People often decry the massive amounts of credit-card debt students incur in college. One can hardly blame the credit-card companies for their aggressive marketing — they are of course happy to have kids (who have poor impulse control) spending money with the backing of Mom and Dad (who have the wealth to keep Junior from defaulting).
One can, however, blame the current credit-scoring system and the way banks use it; thanks to these factors, students practically have to get credit cards in college. Via Slate, this is what happens when you wait until after graduation:
I am a 27-year-old professional with a full-time job, no mortgage, no children, and no student loans. With the exception of one outstanding dental bill, I have absolutely no debt. I pay my bills on time; I never miss rent. . . .
Why, despite my decent financial record, am I a particularly bad candidate for a credit card? I've got no credit history. Typically, the best time to get your first credit card is in college, when banks litter campuses with offers. One study estimated that students receive 25 to 50 applications per semester. I was always wary of getting a credit card as an undergrad. I was living hand-to-mouth, and it was always easy enough to pick up a bar tab with a debit card. What I didn't realize was that I'd very soon need a credit card to live. If I'm doomed to a life without plastic, what am I going to do if I want to buy a house or lease a car? There are certain things you can't put on a debit card.
My quest for credit is a paradoxical one: How can I establish a credit history when banks won't let me create one in the first place?
I experienced the same thing last year. I had a college degree, no debt, a full-time job, a sizable savings account for someone my age, and a perfect record of paying bills on time, yet I had to get a "secured" credit card — in other words, I deposited money into a bank, which loaned it back to me and charged interest! Seriously, how was I such a risk that even a low-limit credit card wasn't an option?
(I ended up with the same card the guy in the Slate article now has, though he's a lot less bitter about it. He calls a secured card a card with "training wheels" — instead of a flat-out rip-off that benefits the bank at zero risk while doing nothing for you but build the "credit" the bank itself demands.) 09/18 11:27 AM Share
ACORN? Running Schools? [Candace de Russy] The community-organizing group is of course all over the news for employing workers avid to assist pimps and prostitutes in sex-trafficking schemes and housing fraud. This, on top of having a reputation for aggressively shaking down corporations and having long been charged in many states with voter-registration fraud.
But it may come as a surprise to some that ACORN, no matter what its transgressions, is still being allowed to co-run high schools, at least in New York City. The editors of the New York Post "wonder what they teach there!" So should we all! 09/18 10:53 AM Share
News from 2029 [Peter Wood] I’ve gazed 20 years into the future in a posting on the National Association of Scholars website. In "The Shape of (Academic) Things to Come," the public ultimately comes down in favor of the efficiencies of the online education. The “Great Transition” leaves a remnant of residential colleges, but they become marginal to American society. Science finds a new footing in independent laboratories and think tanks. A new pattern of maturation takes hold for youth who discover the advantages of combining work with part-time online degree programs. College campuses are creatively “re-purposed,” scholarship transitions to an amateur avocation, and the chaff of ideological nonsense just blows away. It is a bittersweet picture. Old AAUP veterans evoke the lost golden age of tenured rage. All gone. 09/18 10:51 AM Share
Osama Pitches Profs' Book [Candace de Russy] In his latest audiotape, Osama bin Laden exhorts Americans to read The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who decry what they label the "stranglehold" that U.S. pro-Israel groups and their allies have on American politics. Gabriel Schoenfeld comments that these academics' outlook, like that of other authors recommended by the al-Qaeda leader, "fits neatly with bin Laden's own demented ideology."
09/18 10:49 AM Share
The Educational Money Pit [George Leef] One of my favorite NR authors, John Derbyshire, has an excellent piece on the money pit of education.
Public schools and most colleges and universities are awash in money, thanks to the talent of their leaders for persuading people to give them money and persuading politicians to give them money taken from taxpayers. Little of that money is spent to good educational purposes. Mostly it's spent on layers and layers of administration.
Derb's piece nicely supports my contention that only a very wealthy country could afford an educational system that costs as much and delivers as little as ours. 09/18 10:47 AM Share
Confusion about ZIP Codes [Jane S. Shaw] Edward Fiske, the long-time New York Times education reporter, has a puzzling article on Minding the Campus.
He takes the death of Stanley Kaplan, whom he clearly admires, as an occasion to condemn the entire world of college admissions today. By coaching students to improve their scores, Kaplan “set the stage for students, and later colleges and universities, to game the system,” Fiske writes.
Although his article focuses mostly on the way that universities game the U. S. News rankings, Fiske also dismisses SAT scores as protectors of the status quo: “The best predictor of scores continues to be family income and parental education — or, to keep it simple, zip codes.”
I am not an expert on the SAT, and I know there are endless debates about its content. But the fact that well-educated, well-off people have children who score well on standardized tests that combine aptitude and education is hardly a reason to condemn the tests.
The United States is not a stagnant Third World country where a hereditary aristocracy holds all the wealth. It is a competitive marketplace where intelligence, talent, self-confidence, and hard work enable people to move into those affluent ZIP codes. Intelligent people are apt to beget intelligent children (not always, of course) and provide them with the additional information required (such as sophisticated vocabularies) to score well on standardized tests.
Is Fiske saying that we should expect high SAT scores in neighborhoods where people aren’t very successful? Standardized tests do offer a chance for such children to be discovered — that was the motivation behind Stanley Kaplan’s initial efforts. But to expect such children to dominate those ZIP codes defies common sense. 09/18 10:46 AM Share
Thursday, September 17, 2009 Letter to Yale Protesting Removal of Mohammad Images from Book [Candace de Russy] Three cheers for the eleven organizations, including the American Association of University Professors, the Foundation for Inidvidual Rights in Education, and the Middle East Studies Association, which have banded together in opposition to the university press's censoring of the forthcoming book The Cartoons That Shook the World. The groups have sent a well-crafted letter in defense of academic freedom and freedom of speech to Pres. Richard Levin and Yale Corporation members. 09/17 04:49 PM Share
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