The AAUP recently produced a new journal devoted to exploring the state of academic freedom on today's college campuses. As customary with anything from the AAUP in recent years, the publication was as notable for what it didn't contain as what it did, in that it offered no mention of the internal threat to academic freedom coming from the ideological and pedagogical majority on most college campuses.

That said, the essays did provide an occasional surprise. As Erica Goldberg at The Torch pointed out, the article by Delaware professor Jan Blits (who opposed the university's infamous residence hall indoctrination program) provided an example of an area in which all friends of academic freedom should agree---that increasing the power of administrators, especially residential life administrators, over curricular and other academic matters poses a grave threat to academic freedom.

The other essays in the journal, alas, didn't rise to Blits' level. Robert Engvall produced a screed against merit pay---even as he conceded that "some people oppose merit pay because they aren't that good at what they do." Nonetheless, he illogically maintained, "opposing merit pay in the university setting is absolutely vital to protecting the essence and quality of that setting." We should go to the barricades, apparently, for the tenured radical who, upon receiving tenure, stops producing any scholarship.

Continue reading "The AAUP Strikes Out . . . Again" »

The headline in the East Bay Express a few weeks back probably didn't surprise people in California, bracing as they have been for funding shortfalls in government services, including education: "Berkeley High May Cut Out Science Labs". The first few words of the story delivered the distressing news that the School Governance Council had decided "to eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them."

The science labs under review take place before and after school, allowing science teachers in regular periods to devote more time to academic instruction. All students in science classes have to take one of the labs, while AP students take two of them. The results have been impressive. According to this Los Angeles Times story, "In the last school year, 82% of Berkeley's AP chemistry students passed the rigorous exam, which gives college credit for high school work. The national passing rate is 55.2%. The school's AP biology and physics students are even more successful."

Another Golden State fiscal casualty? Not this time. If people read on, they learned the actual reason for the decision, for the Council didn't plan to kill science labs because of budget problems. They did so because not enough black and Latino students were enrolled in them. Because of a wide achievement gap, a parent representative on the Council explained, "the science labs were largely classes for white students." As a result, the members of the Council, a body made up of parents, teachers, and students charged with redesigning the very "structure" of the school, voted nearly unanimously to shut down the labs and redirect resources to "struggling students." The labs are, indeed, open to those low-performing students, but according to this article from the San Francisco Chronicle, they "don't always attend the extra labs---and ultimately fail the class." (Curiously, the Chronicle story doesn' mention a word about the racial achievement gap, while the LA Times highlights the racial side of the story.)

Continue reading "Identity Politics Beyond Reason" »

Last December, I wrote in these pages about allegations of racial discrimination in tenure denial at Emerson College, which had prompted the school to set up a three-person commission charged with reviewing those allegations. The panel's report has just been released, and the good news is that the panelists "noticed no overtly racist or prejudiced attitudes toward African Americans." But, alas, there is also bad news: "There are to be found at Emerson unexamined and powerful assumptions and biases about the superiority, preferability, and normativeness of European-American culture, intellectual pursuits, academic discourse, leadership, and so on." (Emphasis in original.) Left unexamined, these biases result in the "disproportionate undervaluing of African Americans and the disproportionate overvaluing of European Americans." You can read the entire report here, and I urge you to do so, if you like self-parody.

Barack Obama might be the most academia-friendly President since the development of modern higher education in the early 20th century. But anyone wondering why so few professors (and virtually none outside of law or economics) have been appointed to his administration should consider the case of Chai Feldblum. Nominated for a post at EEOC, Feldblum came under attack for signing an only-in-academia petition endorsing recognition for "households in which there is more than one conjugal partner." Faced with a choice between continuing to favor polygamy or pleading incompetence, the professor used her Senate confirmation hearing to claim that she had made a "mistake" in signing the petition, suggesting that she had done so at the urging of an unnamed academic associate.

Feldblum's nomination cleared committee and is currently pending in the full Senate. But her experience reveals how academic groupthink---quite beyond its effects on higher education---also reduces any impact that professors might hope to have in the public policy arena. As Mark Bauerlein's seminal essay on the topic observed, one element of campus groupthink is the law of group polarization, or "when like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts toward extreme versions of their common beliefs . . . Group Polarization happens so smoothly on campuses that those involved lose all sense of the range of legitimate opinion." Once outside of the academy, however, adherents of such positions are easily, and correctly, labeled as extremists.

The recently concluded testimony in the federal trial challenging California's Proposition 8 provided another example of how the pedagogical and ideological imbalance in most humanities and social sciences departments helps diminish the impact professors can have on public policy. Attorneys Ted Olson and David Boies approached the trial with the model of the Brown v. Board of Education cases in mind---using academics to demonstrate the pernicious effects of discrimination.

Continue reading "Prop 8 and the Academy on Trial" »

10. Justice O'Connor now suggests that the social-science evidence on which it was based is shaky.

9. The social-science evidence on which it was based is getting shakier, as more and more disinterested research is done.

8. There should not be a social-science exception to the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause anyhow.

7. In a variety of ways, using racial and ethnic preferences actually aggravates the achievement disparities that prompted Justice O'Connor to allow preferences in the first place.

6. America is becoming increasingly multiethnic and multiracial, and in such a nation it is untenable to have a legal regime that sorts people on the basis of their skin color and what country their ancestors came from.

5. Individual Americans are becoming increasingly multiethnic and multiracial, too, which makes racial and ethnic preferences even more unwieldy and untenable.

4. Justice Alito is more likely to get it right than Justice O'Connor was.

3. Who knows when one of the dissenters in Grutter will be replaced by an Obama appointee?

2. Twenty-five years is too long to leave on the books a bad decision that affects thousands of students every year.

1. The Equal Protection Clause makes it illegal to "deny to any person... the equal protection of the laws."

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In yesterday's Commentary section, we listed a discussion by George Leef of Justice O'Connor's second thoughts on Grutter v. Bollinger--her 2003 opinion that upheld racial and ethnic admission preferences at the University of Michigan law school. O'Connor also said she "expected" that in 25 years preferences would no longer be needed.

At several universities this summer, hope will float and perestroika will pay. At the end of August, Princeton, Harvard, Smith, Stanford, and Yale are taking the currying of favor with wealthier alumni seabound. For the fifth straight year, Princeton and other sponsoring universities are joining forces with a for-profit, West-coast speakers and travel bureau, this time offering a new five-star "post-perestroika" cruise along the Black Sea.

The 15-day voyage from August 30 to September 15th along the shores of Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, and Turkey features three Perestroika superstars -- President Bush's former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Defense Secretary William Perry and Russia's own Mikhail Gorbachev as guest speakers. Only one of the "distinguished world leaders," as the Princeton brochure advertizing the cruise calls them, will keep company with the alumni aboard ship for the entire cruise, mind you. The brochure notes, and a spokesman for Princeton's alumni relations office confirms, that Ms. Rice will be aboard ship for only three days, and Mr. Gorbachev for only one. Indeed, Ms. Rice and Mr. Gorbachev will not even overlap. But when the three foreign policy celebrities are not on board, passengers will be hearing from other expert speakers - among them, James H. Billington, a former history professor at Princeton and the Librarian of Congress since 1987, Marvin Kalb, the former chief diplomatic reporter for NBC and professor emeritus at Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center, and Vinton G. Cerf, vice president and chief Internet promoter for Google, widely regarded as one of the "fathers of the Internet."

The brochure says that this floating faculty at sea, including the Perestroika superstars, will lead fellow passengers in discussions of such topics as "Russia's relations with Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan" and "how the West can best engage Russia and the former Soviet republics in facing global challenges such as nuclear proliferation, increasingly scare energy resources, and economic decline."

Alumni in personal economic decline, however, might hesitate signing up for the voyage. Education aboard the Silver Wind, a small luxury cruise liner owned by an Italian company that the travel company charters, is pricey. The ship's least expensive of its 149 cabins, the "Vista Suite," which features a 240-square foot bedroom and a picture window, goes for $23,990 per person in a two-person cabin, or $39,990 for a single passenger. Its luxury bookend, the Grand Suite, 1,019 square feet of space with a teak veranda and floor-to-ceiling doors, costs $39,990. That is not counting the airfare to Moscow, where the program originates - a round-trip $1,558 per person (economy) ticket, or $3,658 per person for business class seats.

Continue reading "Sail with Condi And Gorby For $40,000 Or So" »

The New York Times reports today on a new marketing gimmick for colleges seeking to boost applications during this recession-plagued time when every tuition-paying body in a classroom counts: the fast-track application form that allows some high school seniors seeking admission to bypass the usual fees of $50 or so, the tedious filling out of information, and perhaps most significantly, the dreaded college essay.

Taking a lead from credit-card marketers, the express forms, typically packaged in a brightly colored envelope marked "Exclusive Scholar Applications," "Distinctive Candidate Application" or something similar, come already filled in with the student's name and other information (bought from College Board lists) so that all the applicant need do is affix a signature and head for a mailbox. Most of the application packets are produced and designed by the same firm, Royall & Company of Richmond, whose founder, Bill Royall, led direct-mail campaigns to potential donors to President Clinton. High-school counselors tend to hate the short-cut forms, which they say take advantage of "teenagers who don't know what they want" from a college, as a counselor told New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg, and cynics complain that the mass mailings to tens of thousands of young people when the college actually has only a few hundred freshman slots to fill, is an effort to game the U.S. News and World Report college rankings, which are in part based on "selectivity" (the ratio of admissions to applications) and the relative SAT scores of applicants. And although some well-known universities, such as Marquette and the University of Minnesota, have used the express application forms to claimed success, it's clear that the nation's most elite schools---the Harvards, Stanfords, and so forth---don't need to bother with them in order to generate hundreds of applications per freshman slot, and that fast-track forms are yet another sign of the growing gap between the top tier of universities that have the luxury of being genuinely selective and the great mass of lesser-ranked institutions that don't have that luxury and must scramble for students these days.

Continue reading "Are You an ''Exclusive Scholar''? Just Sign Here" »