Will Shortz, the famous crossword puzzle editor for the New York Times, gave the commencement address last week at his alma mater, the University of Indiana. Using his trademark cleverness and brain-taxing ambiguity, Shortz has brilliantly transformed the modern crossword. Early in the week, his Times puzzles are fairly easy (Monday, Tuesday) but each day's puzzle gets a bit harder, and by Friday and Saturday, the crosswords are maddeningly hard. Here are three of my favorite Shortz clues: "rural strip" (answer: Lil Abner, "digital monitor" (answer: manicurist) and "They include M, L and X L" ( the answer was Roman numerals). After listing some famous Indiana graduates (Jane Pauley, Kevin Kline, Dick Enberg, Tavis Smiley, Robert Gates, Wendell Willkie) Shortz quizzed the new graduates about prominent former students.

Here is his commencement quiz:

1) Hoagy Carmichael -- composer, pianist; best known for writing the melody to "Stardust," graduated from IU in 1926 with a degree in what?

a. Mathematics

b. American Literature

c. Music Education

d. Law

2) Robert James Waller Jr. -- author of the best-selling novel The Bridges of Madison County, graduated in 1968 with a degree in what?

a. Business

b. Engineering

c. Dentistry

d. Art History

Continue reading "Indiana: The Return Of The Puzzler" »

KC Johnson continues to pay indefatigable attention to the Group of 88 at Durham-in-Wonderland. We missed a post two weeks ago, but it's certainly worth a look:

Waheena Lubiano, the famously prolific Duke professor, recently co-authored a piece in Social Text (along with fellow group member Michael Hardt, and another professor) on the trials of the Group of 88. What's the issue? They were victimized by bloggers and outsiders.

According to the Lubiano Trio, "the most extreme marginalization was reserved for the faculty whose professional expertise made them most competent to engage the discourses on race and gender unleashed by the inaugurating incident - scholars of African American and women's studies. Instead, administrators, like the bloggers themselves, operated under the assumption that everyone was an expert on matters of race and gender, while actually existing academic expertise was recast as either bias or a commitment to preconceived notions about the legal case. Some faculty thus found themselves in the unenviable position of being the targets of public discourse (and disparaged for their expertise on race and gender) without being legitimate participants in it.

Horrors. What other indignities did these innocents (speaking truth to power) go through? KC reports:

Blogs, according to the Lubiano Trio, used "powerful tactics of harassment" against members of the Group. "Typically we [Group members] should... work as maids for the players' families [or] return to the slave quarters." Group members "have also been found guilty of numerous crimes, including treason, sedition, and tax evasion(!)."

Although the Lubiano Trio's article does contain footnotes, the Group members elected to supply not even one citation for any of these outlandish claims. It doesn't take a Ph.D. to figure out why.

What does the inclusion of these unsourced ramblings say about the editorial policies of the Duke University Press journal Social Text?

Oh ccome now, we all know the Social Text editorial policies are ironclad!

It's an astonishingly risible piece. Read more.

Confirming what college administrators have known for years, Education Sector has released a report based on U.S. Department of Education figures detailing huge gaps between the college graduation rates of white students and those of blacks. The gap (measured by failure to graduate within six years from a four-year institution) averages about 20 percent, although it can soar in excess of 40 percent in a few cases.

These are dispiriting figures, but they need to be approached in context. First of all, as the report notes, only slightly over half - 57 percent - of students of any race who enroll in four-year colleges manage to make it to graduation within six years. This figure suggest that a traditional-style uninterrupted college education isn't for everyone - and in fact many dropouts (although their numbers aren't tracked in the Education Sector report) finish their degrees part-time or after several years in the work-force, as the burgeoning number of institutions devoted to part-time education indicates). White students do fare better in traditional education, according to a study published last year in the journal Blacks in Higher Education: 63 percent of whites graduate in six years, compared to only 43 percent of blacks (although the percentage of graduating black students has been ticking upwards over the past few years, the study noted).

Blacks who attend elite private universities - Harvard et al., - have extremely high graduation rates that approach those of whites, but that is probably to be expected, because those schools have highly selective admissions standards for all their students and typically graduate more than 90 percent of them. And it is safe to say that the blacks at the top private schools are strongly motivated academically and have few distracting financial worries thanks to scholarships or their upper-middle-class families.

Continue reading "Black Success, Black Failure" »

Substantial opposition to the proposed new version of the University of Delaware indoctrination program turned up at Monday's meeting of the faculty senate. That's the good news. The bad news is that the senate will take up the issue again next week and the indoctrinators may still
win.

Professor Jan Blits of the Delaware affiliate of the National Association of Scholars writes: "Things went much better than I had expected. The discussion will be continued next Monday. Most of the people who spoke (and there was a large number) were on our side. Students were very helpful. They will return next week. Everything seemed to fall into place. The odds are still against us, but not nearly as long as I originally thought."

Both students and faculty spoke with some passion against the Residential Life proposal. Both argued vehemently that the concept of "sustainability" running through the voluminous ResLife prose has little to do with the environment and a great deal to so with imposing political dogmas.

A genuine howler came from Professor Matt Robinson, chairman of the faculty senate student life committee who presented the ResLife plan. "The concept of sustainability, that's only speaking in terms of (the) environmental," he said. Apparently he is not familiar with the
ResLife program's listed goals for 2008-200. In these goals, no environmental concern is mentioned; everything revolves around the social plan behind the "sustainability" codeword -changing the beliefs and attitudes of students.

Adam Kissel of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) wrote a Monday open letter to the university faculty, saying "I strongly believe that ResLife is attempting to use the faculty to restore its highly politicized and unabashedly coercive 'sustainability' curriculum. It is intended to be indoctrination into an ideology. The proposal offers on meager, halting respect for the private conscience of UD students." Kissel, a graduate of the University of Delaware, wrote that the ResLife officials took every opportunity - one-on-one sessions, bulletin boards, parties, etc. - to pressure students.

Kissel reports ResLife, which removed some potentially embarrassing material from its site last fall, has now removed yet another document. In the missing document, a diversity official under the plan is held responsible for "resource development" covering oppression, prejudice reduction, heterosexism, ageism, racism, HIV/AIDS awareness and "multicultural jeopardy," whatever that is.

- Richard Vedder marvels at the obdurate defense of embattled University Presidents - something much like a defacto system of Giving Presidents Tenure

- Jay Greene offers an analysis of gifts to U.S. Universities originating in Middle Eastern states. They're massive, as you might imagine. As Greene comments:

To put the magnitude of those gifts in perspective, the Arabian Gulf states from which the money came have economies that represent less than 2% of global GDP (excluding the US). So, their share of foreign gifts to US universities is eight times as large as their foreign share of global wealth production.

- The APSA is entertaining concerns about the location of their professional conference, namely that "states with Constitutional restrictions on rights afforded recognized same-sex unions and partnerships may create an unwelcoming environment for our members in cities where we might meet." Read more, from Joe Knippenberg.

- Students at Ashland University are protesting, with an unusual aim - the right to take ancient Greek to fulfill language requirements. Imagine that.

Look to the latest New Criterion, focused on liberal education, for some incisive writing on the modern academy and its afflictions:

Our own Jim Piereson, reviewing Education's End, in "Liberalism vs. humanism"

Alan Charles Kors' fascinating and depressing account of his long experiences in the academy in "On the sadness of higher education"

Charles Murray on our extravagant educational expectations in "The age of educational romanticism"

more also from Victor Davis Hanson, Robert Paquette, and Roger Kimball. Take a look.

Columbia University enhanced its Israel-hating reputation by naming John Coatsworth as the new dean of its School of International and Public Affairs. The university has so many full-time detractors of Israel on its payroll that one would think an opportunity to name at least a moderate to the deanship would be overwhelming.

Coatsworth signed a petition in 2002 calling on Harvard and MIT to divest from Israel and from American companies selling arms to Israel. Columbia's disappointing president, Lee Bollinger, called the divestment movement "grotesque," but apparently he does not regard it as grotesque enough to appoint a better dean than Coatsworth. It was Coatsworth who played the major role in inviting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak at Columbia, a move that Bollinger supported and then finessed by delivering a coarse attack on the Iranian before he had a chance to speak. This allowed Bollinger to place himself where he very much likes to be - on both sides of a controversial issue. Coatsworth, on the other hand, bulls straight ahead whenever he can. Defending the invitation to Ahmadinejad, he foolishly went on television to announce that he would have invited Hitler to speak at Columbia too.

Like most America-hating Americans, Coatsworth has been a strong fan of Fidel Castro, insisting that Cuba has been a mostly benign nation under his leadership, although it "prosecutes and harasses some dissenters." That would include journalists, librarians and more than 100,000 others. Columbia gets worse and worse under its weak president.