By Maurice Black & Erin O'Connor

Review of John C. Cross and Edie Goldenberg's Off-Track Profs: Nontenured Teachers in Higher Education. (Cambridge: MIT Press): 2009.

According to the AAUP, 48 percent of faculty are part-timers, and 68 percent of all faculty appointments take place off the tenure track. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) cites comparable numbers, reporting that a mere 27 percent of postsecondary instructors hold fulltime, tenure-track positions. Such figures are the familiar touchstones of debates about the nature and future of academic work, undergraduate education, and academic freedom. They anchor official statements and form the basis of movements. Adjunct faculty are unionizing, and the AFT has launched a campaign to increase the proportion of undergraduate courses taught by fulltime and tenure-track professors to 75 percent.

Surrounded by statistics, activism, and commentary, the adjunct faculty member is never far from discussions about higher ed reform. "There is no subject so painful and so ubiquitous as the role of adjuncts in higher ed," writes Louisiana State University English professor Emily Toth, the Chronicle of Higher Education's "Ms Mentor." Nor, perhaps, is there an academic subject so thoroughly stylized. The underpaid, uninsured, and underappreciated "freeway flyer" has become a tragic figure, a poster prof for the moral, economic, and ethical failings of modern-day academia. Hardly a month goes by without another scandal in which someone fires---or fails to renew---an "invisible adjunct" who has expressed controversial views. Such cases---and the anger they evoke---have become the standardized set pieces of an academia that has yet to reckon with the fact that its modes of employment have undergone a seismic shift.

The supporting casts in these set pieces are as stylized as their non-tenure-track stars. There is the bean-counting administrator, an anti-intellectual corporate drone who sees adjunct faculty as a handy way to reduce overhead. And there is the smug tenured professor who sits idly by while a corps of shamelessly exploited workers enables his light teaching load, his leisurely sabbaticals, and his inflated salary. Together, these characters facilitate two structures of blame. The first focuses on putatively deliberate actions, assuming that the rise of adjuncts is an intended consequence of a specific, crass economic plan; the second focuses on passive inaction, assuming that tenured professors have made a Faustian bargain to secure their own comfort at the expense of tenure and academic freedom for future generations.

Continue reading "The Ominous Rise Of The Adjuncts" »

By Daphne Patai

One of the key contributions of second-wave feminism to the academy is what is known as "standpoint theory," which asserts that members of oppressed groups have special "ways of knowing" based on their group's unique experiences. The problem standpoint theory attempted to address is how to respond to the apparent monopoly of knowledge and power held by men (usually called "white men" in these discussions). Since women were for centuries excluded from education and professional activities, how could they gain traction for their views and rapidly enhance their present status?

The easiest way to deal with this problem is to consider the source of an idea an adequate gauge of its validity and significance. This is known as the "genetic fallacy," a form of ad hominem or ad feminam argument. Valorizing the viewpoints of hitherto marginalized groups is an obvious instance of this fallacy. It also discourages challenges to one's point of view, since any challenge can be represented as an attempt to demean that group's experience, out of which it presumably speaks.

In the more academic-sounding form of "standpoint epistemology," by which one's racial or sexual identity provides a person with experiences that define how he or she thinks, deference is routinely paid to the special perspectives of minorities. While not wanting to get embroiled in biological essentialism or in the view that acquired experiences are inherited (or transmitted through some sort of collective unconscious), proponents of standpoint theory have turned it into a staple of feminism over the last few decades, and it has been of great utility as well to other identity groups. Its objective, as feminist scholar Sandra Harding, one of the founders of feminist standpoint theory, puts it, is to unearth the special powers that women's lived experience can offer, the special knowledge that they can thus claim.

Continue reading "Standpoint Theory Arrives At The Court" »

By Harvey Silverglate With Kyle Smeallie

Harvard University may be losing money like a hard-luck high-roller, but the Vegas tagline (what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas) certainly does not apply: what happens at Harvard reaches well beyond the Cambridge confines. For better or for worse, many schools follow in Harvard's footsteps. What better place, then, to effect change in American higher education than a place where other schools---at least until the recent economic meltdown---have been green with Crimson envy?

Such was the premise behind my insurgent campaign for a seat on the Board of Overseers, one of Harvard's two governing boards. Dismayed by the lack of principled oversight (a key reason, I suspect, for Harvard's recent financial woes) and the general illiberal culture of his alma mater, I spent months trying to convince alumni to elect me to the board. In early June, however, Harvard officials informed me that my bid for a six-year term on the 30-member board came up a bit short.

In defeat, I learned the very same lesson that Harvard Law School alum Barack H. Obama (Law School class of 1991) learned when he ran as a petition candidate in the 1991 Overseers election: Input from outsiders---those unwilling to place collegiality over candor---is unwanted.

Continue reading "The Cambridge Empire Strikes Back" »

By Richard D. Kahlenberg

Illinois, the state where Senate seats are sometimes sold, has now scandalized higher education with the revelation that hundreds of applicants to the University of Illinois were placed on a special "clout" list, many receiving favorable treatment. According to a series of investigative reports by The Chicago Tribune, state legislators, university trustees, and former Gov. Rod Blagojevich successfully pressured University of Illinois officials to admit less qualified applicants, including a relative of influence peddler Antoin (Tony) Rezko.

Examining email correspondence obtained through the state Freedom of Information Act, the Tribune found that decisions to deny admissions were reversed through a secret appeals process following intervention by top officials. In some cases, notification of admissions for "clouted" candidates with dubious credentials were delayed until the end of the school year in order to minimize attention from more qualified classmates who were denied admissions. In the wake of the publicity, the university has temporarily suspended the clout list and Governor Pat Quinn established an independent panel to investigate the practice.

Illinois state legislators are not the first to push for special treatment in university admissions for favored candidates. In the 1990s, a Los Angeles Times investigation revealed that then-California governor Pete Wilson, and other state officials and prominent citizens made requests on behalf of applicants to institutions such as UCLA and U.C. Berkeley. These applicants, who were placed on a special "VIP" list, had a significantly higher rate of acceptance than regular applicants. Indeed, between 1980 and 1996, more than 200 VIP students were admitted after initially being rejected.

Continue reading "The Illinois Admissions Scandal" »

By John McWhorter

A few weeks ago a teenaged pot dealer was shot dead in a Harvard dormitory.

That alone was depressing enough. However, Harvard suspects a black senior, Chanequa Campbell, of an association with the pot dealer -- Justin Cosby, also black -- and last week was barred from her dormitory and prevented from graduating. Campbell grew up in the depressed Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, but was a star student, a product of elite prep school Packer Collegiate Institiute, and four years ago was celebrated for her achievement.

The details have yet to be released. But one of the three men who planned the murder, and a suspect in the shooting itself, Jabrai Copney, is a songwriter from New York who was dating another Harvard undergrad named Brittany Smith who also grew up in Brooklyn. Copney and Smith are black.

Continue reading "The Murder At Harvard" »

By Ward Connerly

About five years ago, shortly before my term ended as a Regent of the University of California (UC), I was having a casual conversation with a very high-ranking UC administrator about a proposal that he was developing to increase "diversity" at UC in a manner that would comply with the dictates of California's Constitution and the prohibition against race, gender and ethnic preferences.

As I listened to his proposal, I asked him why he considered it important to tinker with admissions instead of just letting the chips fall where they may. In an unguarded moment, he told me that unless the university took steps to "guide" admissions decisions, UC would be dominated by Asians. When I asked, "What would be wrong with that?" I got an answer that speaks volumes about the underlying philosophy at many universities with regard to Asian enrollment.

The UC administrator told me that Asians are "too dull - they study, study, study." He then said, "If you ever say I said this, I will have to deny it." I won't betray the individual's anonymity because to do so would put him in a world of trouble - and he would, indeed, deny having said it. Yet, it is time to confront the not-so-subtle hand of discrimination against Asians that masquerades as "building diversity" at many elite college campuses.

Continue reading ""Study, Study, Study" - A Bad Career Move" »

By Harry Stein

What acid rain is to our irreplaceable forests, lakes and streams, leftist dogma is to American higher education. In every corner of the land, it has turned once-flourishing departments of English and history into barren wastelands where only the academic equivalent of cockroaches can thrive. Its corrosive poison - infantile anti-Americanism, hatred of capitalism, scorn for ideological pluralism - spreads far beyond the narrow confines of its source, polluting popular culture, public education, the very laws under which we live. Absorbed in sufficiently high doses, it is morally and intellectually fatal.

While the mind-boggling damage done to higher education by multicultural activists, diversity-mongers, and all-around leftist jerks is a subject very much on the minds of conservatives, liberals seem truly not to care. More precisely, they actually regard it as progress. Shakespeare elbowed aside by Maya Angelou? Hey, education's got to change with the times, just like the Constitution. Mandatory sensitivity training for incoming freshmen to instill appreciation of transgendered persons? What kind of monster has a problem with sensitivity? Conservative students getting charged with hate speech for daring to take on affirmative action or women's studies zealots? Exactly - that kind of monster. Even the occasional report in the mainstream press of epidemic ideological conformity on the nation's campuses fails to elicit a reaction. So what if, as the Washington Post reports, 80 percent of faculty in America's English literature, philosophy, and political science departments describe themselves as liberal and a mere 5 percent as conservative - with ratios of eighteen to one at Brown, twenty-six to one at Cornell, and sixteen to one at UCLA - or that a study after the 2004 election showed that the Harvard faculty gave John Kerry thirty-one dollars for every dollar donated to George Bush, with the ratios rising to forty-three to one at MIT and three hundred to one at Princeton? (And you think when someone gets around to a comprehensive analysis of the 2008 campaign donations, that will be any less lopsided?) For liberals, the only important question remains what it's always been: How can I get my kid into one of those places?

Continue reading "On The Right In The Land Of The Tenured Left" »

By Robert L. Paquette

A few weeks ago, the Delta Phi fraternity at Hamilton College distributed on campus fliers welcoming students to attend "the 53rd annual Mexican Night" party. The invitation, which was intended to be symbolic of spring-break excursions to Cancun and other vacation spots south of the border, contained the image of a Trojan Horse in the shape of a Mexican pinata towering over an armed guard in front of a stout U. S. border fence. The words "Proper Documentation Required," a spoof of the usual language for proper identification at parties that serve alcohol, ran to the left of the image. In a flash, student activists and their faculty allies had mobilized in ginned-up outrage to protest this latest alleged example of institutionalized racism and to demand action by the administration and trustees on a laundry list of particulars that includes a speech code (masked as a "social honor code"), mandatory diversity courses, and the establishment of a multi-million dollar cultural education center to provide "safe spaces" for aggrieved student groups. Administrators competed with each other to see how artistically they could grovel to protesting students. Acting President Joseph Urgo and the college's "diversity ombudsman" called the fraternity to account and pressured its leaders to cancel the party. In an all-campus email, Urgo claimed to have extracted from the contrite fraternity leadership an expansive confession that the image not only "hurt and offended many members of the Hamilton community," but that it "trivializes a contemporary political crisis and reduces the complex history and culture of Mexico to a simple stereotype."

Urgo and other administrators then joined protesting faculty and protesting students in holding a candlelight vigil. Speeches, poetry, and spiritual songs of the Kumbaya variety expressed feelings of solidarity with the disrespected, vulnerable, and marginalized on campus and around the world. Fraternity leaders rained apologies from all directions to no avail. The dean of students, standing in like a kind of sacrificial lamb, bleated enough mea culpas to elicit God's forgiveness of a rash of mortal sins. Unforgiving students, however, led by a group called the Social Justice Initiative, followed by commandeering another faculty meeting. Looking anything but vulnerable and threatened, they seized the microphone and threateningly wagged the finger of blame at college officials for their "lack of response" and "lack of action" to the fraternity's benightedness. Dozens of sympathetic faculty, including leaders of the Diversity and Social Justice Project, signed on to a proposed resolution that would signal to posterity "Our profound appreciation and affection... for our international students and students of color who may have felt marginalized by recent events on campus." The faculty eventually passed overwhelmingly a resolution that supported the creation of a cultural education center on campus, that urged---Hamilton College's recently imposed open curriculum notwithstanding---mandatory "educational and programmatic initiatives" to intensify diversity training, and that directed administrators to expand the powers of existing harassment and grievance boards to "raise critical awareness of different forms of harassment." Stay tuned, for the full extent of the concessions by the guilt-stricken have yet to be determined.

Continue reading "War Over A Trojan Horse" »

By George Leef

The last time President Obama gave a speech dealing with education (his address to Congress on February 24), he misrepresented government data to make his case that the country needs to put a significantly higher percentage of people through college. (I wrote about his fudging of the figures here)

For that reason, Americans would be wise to look skeptically on his policy pronouncements regarding education. Last week the president gave another speech this time extolling college and especially community college programs as a good path for unemployed people who want to prepare for new and better jobs. He gave a couple of nice anecdotes about people who had greatly improved their lives by taking vocational training courses and he wants to make it easy for unemployed workers to get federal money for education and career training.

In one case, a woman in Maine who had lost her job as a receptionist decided to take courses in nursing, and now makes a good living as a registered nurse. Without question, that's a success story, but it's never a good idea to make government policy on the basis of some individual success stories. That's because policy changes usually have hidden costs. To get a few success stories, we often have a greater number of failure stories.

Before looking at the president's proposed changes, we should examine the broad vision he articulated. Here are his key sentences. "Now is the time to put a new foundation for growth in place - to rebuild our economy, to retrain our workforce, and re-equip the American people. And now is the time to change unemployment from a period of 'wait and see' to a chance for our workers to train and seek the next opportunity..."

That sounds quite uplifting. It sounds obvious and simple. But is it realistic?

Continue reading "Should The Unemployed Go Back To School?" »

By Patrick J. Deneen

In recent years the stakes for entrance to the nation's most prestigious colleges and universities have risen to absurd heights, with students (or, their families) not only now paying significant sums for private school tuitions (or the entry cost into good school districts, namely expensive housing), SAT training, and coaching for application writing, but increasingly specialized services such as student "branding" - in which students (or, their families) hire "branding" professionals to develop a marketing strategy for "selling" a student to the top universities - and even such morally damnable practices as anonymously informing schools about the reprehensible qualities of competitors who apply to the same university. Clearly things have gotten out of control, but there are very few people - whether inside or outside the university system - who are willing or even desire to rock the boat by pointing out the absurdity of the current state of affairs.

The reason for this conspiracy of silence is that the current system benefits those who are best positioned to take advantage of the root causes for these absurdities: namely, families with the background, wherewithal and education to know how to "game" the system, and the elite colleges and universities whose denizens benefit in all sorts of financial and professional ways from their placement at these exceedingly small number of desirable schools. A confluence of interest bonds these financial and cultural elites in their ambition to maintain the current arrangement, namely a desperation on the parts of the families to put their children in a position to succeed, and the desperation on the parts of these elite institutions to be the exclusive grantors of the imprimatur for such success. In our profoundly competitive world order, in which increasingly few people can hope to emerge as the "winners" in a system that ruthlessly winnows out those who will not join the small club of the international elite - financial, political and cultural - all stops must be removed, all measures pursued, all efforts expended.

In compensation for their success, students are privileged to join an elite group of similarly-situated peers who harbor the same ambitions of worldly success and achievement. They are simultaneously thrown together as colleagues and competitors, a condition that will continue to define their relationships throughout their college years and beyond. The elite institutions are populated by star professors and a steady stream of noteworthy dignitaries, intellectuals, artists, public intellectuals, and so on: exposure to this class - as well as to the future incarnation of these winners in the form of their classmates - constitutes a considerable share of the education that takes place on today's campuses, namely a socialization in success, the learned capacity to emulate their predecessors who have successfully navigated the shoals of hyper-competitive globalization and emerged as its leaders and beneficiaries.

Continue reading "When Campuses Became Dysfunctional" »

By Richard Vedder

Like Caesar's Gaul, President Obama's plan for higher education is divided into three parts:

1) Every American should have postsecondary educational training, and within a few years we should again lead the world in the proportion of young graduates with bachelor's degrees;

2) Federal financial assistance to pay for college should become an entitlement like Social Security or Medicare, available to all in need;

3) The private provision of loans to students should end and the Federal Government should become the provider of student loans.

The American higher education establishment has mostly endorsed this sweeping proposal. As is so often the case, they are wrong. On every count, this proposal is an Obamination - a perverse set of policies that will raise costs to taxpayers and, surprisingly, also to many college students and families.

Continue reading "Obama's Loan Plan - Scary Stuff" »

By Harvey A. Silverglate

In theory, e-mail should make it easier to organize for social and political change. But, as recent events in my campaign as a petition candidate for Harvard's Board of Overseers have shown, new means of communication can be used to relegate would-be reformers of the academy to dead-ends, and to keep the outsiders outside. If I might make a rough analogy to the familiar Star Wars trilogy: My initial undertaking of my petition candidacy, along with my fellow petition candidate Robert Freedman, has been followed by the second phase of the trilogy, namely The Empire Strikes Back. Freedman and I are now working to get to the third installment, Return of the Jedi. But I'm getting a bit ahead of the story.

I should not feel like an outsider - much less a barbarian knocking on Harvard's gates, seeking a place at the table - but I can't help feeling that I'm being treated like one. After all, I came to Cambridge in 1964, attended my law school classes with due attention (especially given the fact that I had to work full-time to support myself, my mother and younger brother after the sudden death of my father while I was a senior at Princeton), received my LL.B. in 1967, and remained in Cambridge to marry and live and to practice law in Boston. During that time, I became a legal affiliate-in-law at one of Harvard College's undergraduate houses, where I still give unpaid "pre-law table" discussions once each semester. I've judged moot court arguments at Harvard Law School. I taught a course at the law school during a sabbatical-from-practice that I took in the mid-1980s. I've lectured to many an undergraduate class. And I continue to advise Harvard students, and even an occasional faculty member, when they get into trouble (with Harvard, as well as with the outside "real world"). Now, I'm running as a petition candidate for Harvard's Board of Overseers, the university's second most powerful governing body.

So why do I feel like an outsider?

Continue reading "Be Fair, Harvard" »

By John McWhorter

Debra Dickerson said of the Cornell students who took over Willard Straight Hall at Cornell in 1969, "What they actually wanted was beyond the white man's power to bestow." Even after they were granted a Black Studies department as they demanded, a core of black students remained infuriated at Cornell as still "fundamentally" racist.

As we mark the fortieth anniversary of that day, I am reminded of one twenty springs later in May, 1989, when 60 Stanford students took over the university president's building and were arrested. Because 1989 was such a different America racially from that of 1969, such that Stanford had a healthy body of black students of middle-class provenance and above, what went down in the annals as "Takeover 89" was fundamentally a happy event. It was symbolic of a general detour in race ideology in America, and the memory has never left me.

The idea was that in not acceding to certain demands regarding minority issues, the administration had revealed itself to be racist. Interesting, though, what the "demands" were. This time there was already a Black Studies program, plus a student association, and a theme house. So instead, the main demands were four: a Native American Studies department, an Asian-American Studies department (despite there being an Asian-themed dormitory and university-funded Asian students' association), an assistant dean for Chicano affairs (despite a Chicano student center), and a vague demand for "more" black professors. After all, if black professors are not 13% of the faculty when black people are 13% of the American population, then you know what that's all about.

Continue reading "Stanford '89, A Happier Takeover" »

By Donald Downs

Forty years ago this week, an armed student insurrection erupted on the Cornell campus. I was a sophomore on campus at the time and later wrote a book on the events, Cornell '69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. To some the drama represented a triumph of social justice, paving the way for a new model of the university based on the ideals of identity politics, diversity, and the university as a transformer of society. To others, it fatefully propelled Cornell, and later much of American higher education, away from the traditional principles of academic freedom, reason, and individual excellence. "Cornell," wrote the famous constitutional scholar Walter Berns, who resigned from Cornell during the denouement of the conflict, "was the prototype of the university as we know it today, having jettisoned every vestige of academic integrity."

In the wee hours of Friday, April 19, 1969, twenty-some members of Cornell's Afro-American Society took over the student center, Willard Straight Hall, removing parents (sometimes forcefully) from their accommodations on the eve of Parents Weekend. The takeover was the culmination of a year-long series of confrontations, during which the AAS had deployed hardball tactics to pressure the administration of President James Perkins into making concessions to their demands. The Perkins administration and many faculty members had made claims of race-based identity politics and social justice leading priorities for the university, marginalizing the traditional missions of truth-seeking and academic freedom.

Two concerns precipitated the takeover: AAS agitation for the establishment of a radical black studies program; and demands of amnesty for some AAS students, who had just been found guilty by the university judicial board of violating university rules. These concerns were linked, for, according to the students, the university lacked the moral authority to judge minority students. They declared that Cornell was no longer a university, but rather an institution divided by racial identities.

Continue reading "Cornell '69 And What It Did" »

By James Miller

This is the text of an open letter about the student occupation and police intervention last weekend at the New School in New York City. It was sent to members of the New School community by James Miller, professor of political science and liberal studies at the school. Miller is a former member of Students for a Democratic Society and author of several books, including "Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy" and "Democracy in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago." - John Leo

Continue reading "The Situation at the New School" »

By Jeremy Carl

In a recent article that received a fair bit of buzz, The New York Times spun a story of the supposed new reality in the recession-plagued U.S.---Students from more well-off families being given admissions preference at increasingly cash-strapped universities. But the Times article misses the larger point. Lawrence University, Colby College and Brandeis (some of the institutions mentioned) are all fine schools that provide good educations, but they are not entry points into the elite post-graduation professional networks in the same way that top Ivy League schools (and a few others of similar prestige) are. For those schools, the real story is the same as it has been---in a time of increasing economic stress, "need blind" admissions will continue for those fortunate enough to be on financial aid---but the uncontrolled escalations of costs for everyone else will continue, putting an increasing financial burden on these students and their families.

When my father entered Harvard University in 1958, fresh from public high school in Ohio, it had just raised it's tuition a staggering 25% from the previous year. . . to $1250. While inflation would make that figure equivalent to about $9,000 now, the fact remains that this less than one-fourth of the cost of Harvard's tuition and fees today.

Through a combination of scholarships, parental savings and a summer job each summer at Republic Steel, my father's family was able to easily afford an supposedly elitist Harvard. Had my father been applying to Harvard today under similar financial circumstances, his parents likely could not have afforded to send him.

Continue reading "Why Not Eliminate Tuition?" »

By John Ellis

In his Prologue to the Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer distills the betrayal of trust by corrupt public servants into a memorable expression: "If gold rust, what shall iron do?" This is the metaphor that his honest parson lives by, and it reflects on the venal churchmen among the pilgrims who betray the ideals of the church and set a terrible example when they should be a guiding light. This theme---one of high expectations for integrity cruelly disappointed---is timeless: it is exemplified yet again by the sorry tale of malfeasance in the Chancellor's office at UC Berkeley that follows. Yet Chaucer's miscreants are not cardinals and bishops, but only a lowly monk, friar and pardoner, while Chancellor Robert Birgeneau of UC Berkeley is the leader of the flagship campus of the greatest public system of higher education in the world. And while Chaucer's folk cloak their transgressions in the mantle of devotion, Birgeneau wraps his in the mantle of diversity.

Already in late 2007 California's deteriorating budget led to reductions in UC's state support, and President Robert Dynes announced that his system-wide staff would be reduced. A severance pay incentive was offered to those who retired voluntarily, but when the Regents were asked by recently appointed President Mark Yudof in November 2008 to approve severance pay of $100,202 for Linda Williams, alarm bells went off: Williams had transferred from her job as Associate President in system headquarters to the position of Associate Chancellor at nearby UC Berkeley without missing a day's employment. She sought severance pay though she had never been severed. Astonishingly, President Yudof recommended it and the Regents approved the recommendation.

It said much about the entitlement mindset at UC that top administrators were surprised by the outcry that followed. The public easily grasped that it was offensive for Williams to ask for $100K of public money as a "severance package," but that simple point seemed lost on UC's leadership. President Yudof hid behind the notion that the rules for UC's buyout program were not his responsibility, having been written before he took office. That left an obvious question unanswered: why didn't he tell Williams that what she was asking was unseemly, and that it would be an embarrassment to the university if he sought regent approval of this payment when a deepening financial crisis was forcing an increase in student fees? The culture of administrative self-serving in the President's office that had brought down the presidency of Bob Dynes was apparently still in place---a great disappointment for those who hoped that Yudof would be a new broom.

Continue reading "A Tangled Web At Berkeley" »

By Charlotte Allen

A modified version of this piece appears today in the Washington Examiner

Georgetown University, like many colleges and universities hit by the current economic downturn, is in what look like dismal financial straits. The value of Georgetown's endowment shrank 25.5 percent last year, to $833 million, the annual deficit it has been running is estimated to climb to $37.8 million this fiscal year with little abatement in the near future, and donations are expected to be down--and likely to fall further if President Obama's proposal to reduce tax deductions for charitable gifts takes effect. So Georgetown's president, John DiGioia, like many another college CEO these days, recently announced a plan to cut costs.

The nature of DiGioa's proposed cost-cutting, however---freezes on salaries, delays in filling vacant positions, and a hold on the construction of a planned science center---seem anemic in the face of the university's obvious financial problems. That's probably because Georgetown's desire to trim its budget is running smack into the reality of campus politics, in which every program, silly, overstaffed, or non-essential as it might seem to outsiders, has an aggressive constituency ready to raise the pitchforks in its defense. Harvard, for example, facing a projected 30 percent drop in the value of its massive $38.5 billion endowment, announced in February it would trim the ranks of its contract janitors---not even Harvard employees---by a few dozen, leaving some Harvard buildings a shade less spic and span. The upshot? A series of student protests, denunciations by the Service Employees International Union, and on March 23, a unanimous condemnation of Harvard by the city council of Cambridge, Mass. Georgetown clearly doesn't want to go down that road.

Private businesses might shrug off such negative publicity, but most universities are sensitive to their images as repositories of progressive values. So there is a long list of campus sacred cows that can't be nicked by the budget-cutting knife without an uproar. One is tenured faculty. Tenure means having a job for life, no matter how lackadaisically you perform it or whether the department in which you teach attracts many students. The University of Texas Medical Branch laid off 30 of its 127 faculty members, many of them tenured, after Hurricane Ike devastated its Galveston campus last year and forced the temporary closing of its main teaching hospital. The Texas Faculty Association is now suing the state university system to force the professors' rehiring.

Continue reading "Don't Cut The Sacred Cows" »

By KC Johnson

Several years ago, in a seminal Chronicle of Higher Education essay, Mark Bauerlein lamented a campus in which "the simple trappings of deliberation make academics think that they've reached an opinion through reasoned debate---instead of, in part, through an irrational social dynamic. The opinion takes on the status of a norm. Extreme views appear to be logical extensions of principles that everyone more or less shares, and extremists gain a larger influence than their numbers merit."

The Bauerlein hypothesis projected that this "groupthink" environment would produce a more one-sided academy, with extremist voices becoming more prevalent. Three recent academic conferences, on topics of obvious academic and national import, confirm the point.

The first such gathering, which occurred a few weeks ago at NYU's Ewen Academic Freedom Center, examined academic freedom in contemporary America. In the post-9/11 world, the topic was certainly timely, although differing viewpoints exist on whether a serious threat to academic freedom exists from outside the academy. Moreover, in an era of academic mobbing, in which by almost any standards most humanities and some social science departments are becoming more one-sided ideologically and pedagogically, any serious conference on academic freedom would surely examine whether the majority in the academy is truly committed to fostering dissenting points of view.

The NYU conference, however, wasn't interested in viewpoints that challenged prevailing academic orthodoxy. The conference led off with remarks from Alison Bernstein, a Ford Foundation vice president and co-author of Melting Pots and Rainbow Nations, which one reviewer gushingly described as "nothing less than a new feminist approach to global issues." At Ford, Bernstein has developed a program called "Difficult Dialogues: Promoting Academic Freedom and Pluralism on Campus." The "model" for this initiative? The Ford Foundation's earlier "Campus Diversity Initiative," a program implemented most aggressively by the "diversity"-obsessed AAC&U. Many non-academics, I suspect, would wonder about the relationship between protecting academic freedom and promoting a "diversity" agenda. But for the academic majority that Bernstein personifies, the two causes are very much interlinked: the threat to the academic majority's "diversity" agenda, and therefore by extension "academic freedom," comes almost exclusively from outside critics of the academy.

Continue reading "Three Groupthink Conferences---No Dissenters Please" »

By John McWhorter

The Kellogg Foundation is funding a survey of four college campuses by Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute and the Educational Testing Service to examine how students of color's experiences on college campuses impact the notorious black-white achievement gap.

Namely, it will examine how the students feel "welcome and unwelcome, respected and disrespected, supported and unsupported, and encouraged and discouraged."

However, will the researchers be interested in evidence that the black-white achievement gap is connected to aspects of parenting and peer identification that begin long before college? That is, will there be room in their assessment for, as it is put these days, culture over structure?

In his detailed survey of Shaker Heights, Ohio, Black Students in an Affluent Suburb, the late Berkeley Anthropology Professor John Ogbu found that black parents often aren't aware of how closely they need to attend to their children's homework and are less likely to confer with their children's teachers, and that black teens have a tendency to disidentify from school as "white." Subsequent studies have shown that black students are likely to spend less time on homework than white or Asian students and are less likely to be popular if they achieve in school.

Continue reading "Probing The Black-White Achievement Gap" »

By Mary Grabar

Students applying for college admission now face a new reality---the SAT is increasingly optional at our colleges and universities. The test-optional movement, pioneered by FairTest, a political advocacy group supported by George Soros and the Woods Fund---now list 815 schools that do not require SAT scores. That number may seem impressive, but it includes institutions that arguably should not be dependent on SAT scores at all, such as culinary institutes, seminaries and art schools.

Surprisingly, the National Association for College Admissions Counseling (NACAC) has joined the critics of the SAT. Its September 2008 report, lauded by the New York Times and Inside Higher Education, encouraged "institutions to consider dropping the admission test requirements if it is determined that the predictive utility of the test or the admission policies of the institution (such as open access) support that decision and if the institution believes that standardized test results would not be necessary for other reasons such as course placement, advising, or research" (italics in original).

If that sounds like a less than full-throated endorsement of the anti-testers, the reluctance to speak plainly is understandable. The SAT and ACT, the group now says, had been "interpreted by some as indications of the mental capacity of the individual test-taker as well as of the innate capabilities of ethnic groups." Yet, when referring back to the SAT's early years, they acknowledged its value as a tool for measuring the "academic potential of seniors at public high schools from all over the country who had not been specifically prepared" for admission to the nation's top colleges.

Continue reading "The End Of Merit-Based Admission" »

By John McWhorter

I have been teaching a class at Columbia on Western Civilization since September.

The class is highly diverse. By that, I mean that among the 21 students there is an Orthodox Jew, a child of Russian immigrants, and a couple of Korean-Americans. Plus a Chinese-American. And one of them grew up in France; just why she has no accent I have never been quite sure, but culturally she is more French than American. One student is even seven feet tall. And Catholic.

Yes, I have had four black students, and a few Latino ones. They're "diverse" too.

This has been a lesson for me in the benefits of diversity in education. Back in my days as a Berkeley linguistics prof, I was teaching linguistics, a scientific field in which there was little coherent concept of a "diverse" contribution: subordinate clauses have no ethnicity.

But here is a class on the intellectual heritage of our civilization. This is the kind of class that fans of racial preferences in university admissions tell us will be enriched by diversity.

And I heartily agree that discussion in my class would have been much less interesting and rewarding if all of the students were upper-middle-class white kids from the suburbs. If Columbia has created this vibrant mixture by attending to more than grades and test scores in composing their student body, then I applaud them mightily. I was in love with my students after a week and a half and will miss them immensely.

However, my year's experience has given no demonstration whatsoever of the benefit of diversity as we are supposed to tacitly understand it: i.e. the presence of black and Latino students alone.

Continue reading "A Look At Real Diversity" »

By John K. Wilson

Mark Bauerlein asks, "What can we say of disciplines that license teachers to stray so far from their training?" We can say, "great!" Encouraging professors to go beyond narrow disciplinary boundaries is one of the best things we can do to improve higher education. Horowitz's view, seemingly embraced by Bauerlein, would require an incredibly repressive and narrow-minded apparatus of banning discussions beyond one's discipline. For example, Horowitz complains in one case: "Professor Okonkwo, however, is not a historian, let alone a historian of colonialism. He brings no observable academic expertise to bear on the subject."(226) This is a course on "The Colonial Encounter in African Fiction." Horowitz is arguing that English professors should ignore the history of colonialism in teaching African novels about colonialism. It's difficult to imagine a more mouth-dropping display of anti-intellectual sentiment. Horowitz would rather have students remain totally ignorant about the historical context of a novel than allow an English professor to mention a word about a topic beyond Horowitz's narrow vision of academic specialization. Does Bauerlein agree with this? Is this what Bauerlein fears as something that "lightens the burden of knowledge and loosens the ties of rigor"? And what, exactly, does he propose to do to prohibit the mention of banned subjects in the classroom?

Bauerlein wonders, "But what if those objections are true? What if only one-third of the cases are genuine specimens of violation?" Then you would have a very small problem of very little consequence. The question would become, what should be done about it? The obvious answer is this: Criticize those professors you believe are doing a poor job of teaching, and continue to protect everyone's academic freedom. What is Bauerlein's alternative? What system of centralized repression does Bauerlein advocate as an alternative? We already know Horowitz's answer. In his book, Horowitz repeatedly argues for faculty and administrators and trustees to intervene and stop this teaching. The question for conservatives, which they seem unwilling to answer, is: do you agree with Horowitz?

In any massive system where more than a million faculty members teach millions of courses every year, there will always be bad teachers. But who does Bauerlein trust to enforce ideological correctness upon professors and the ideas they express and the books they assign? Horowitz? Administrators who know nothing about the field of study? Trustees who know nothing about these fields and little about higher education? Who should be the guardian protecting students from these allegedly bad ideas? And who will guard us from the guardian?

Continue reading "Questioning Horowitz" »

By Mark Bauerlein

Whenever David Horowitz issues a broadside against leftwing bias in higher education, academics have a ready reply. He packs his sallies with pointed illustrations but the record is feeble, they say. He cherry-picks evidence and magnifies a few bad cases into an epidemic of malfeasance. He relies on indirect documents (for instance, course descriptions) but never enters classrooms to witness how teachers actually teach. And he casts as ideological claptrap respected thinking in fields that has evolved through professional rites of research and peer review.

His latest book, One Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America's Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy (Crown Forum, $26.95), co-authored with Jacob Laskin, they will maintain, does the same. It profiles radical pockets at 12 universities, examining more than 150 courses in Women's Studies, Sociology, English, Rhetoric, African American Studies, and several other departments. The conclusion: "An alarming number of university courses violate existing academic regulations that have been designed to ensure that students receive professional instruction" (p. 5). While every statement of principle by academic organizations advocates open-minded, evidence-based, John Stuart Mill-like marketplaces of ideas, in these heated hives "Curricula are designed not to educate students in critical thinking but to instill doctrines that are 'politically correct'" (5).

Consider the Women's Studies department at Penn State. Its Web site proclaims, "As a field of study, Women's Studies analyzes the unequal distribution of power and resources by gender" (quoted, 93). Political inequality, then, is not one of many aspects of women's history, literature, art, employment, etc., to study, but instead the basic premise and purpose of the field.

Continue reading "The Left Reacts To Horowitz" »

By John Ellis

On February 25, 2009, an article by Patricia Cohen appeared in the New York Times: "In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth." Its thesis was a familiar one: an economic downturn will lead to a decline in the number of college majors in the humanities because in hard times enrollments shift toward majors with direct vocational utility. The article could have been written 25 or 50 years ago---the phenomenon it talks about is well known. For example, English majors made up 7.59% of those graduating with bachelor's degrees in 1968, but as the stock market bottomed in the early 1980's following the Carter economic debacle, that number had sunk to 3.7%. But Cohen's article is not just a tedious rehash of well-known ideas from the past: it has a more serious flaw. For while this argument could have been and in fact was made at many times in the past, it can not be made today. And that is because the humanities have undergone a profound change that makes Cohen's entire argument meaningless.

Let's look first at the statistics. As the economy improved dramatically during the 1980's, the figure for English majors rose with the economy, reaching 4.7% by the end of the decade. But now the familiar pattern broke down: as the economy continued to get stronger, the figures for English majors began to go in the opposite direction, the first time this had happened. By 1995, English majors had declined to 4.3% of all bachelor's degrees, and by 2005 they had gone down to 3.7%, the same figure that was seen at the economy's bottom in the early 80's---except that the economy had now been booming almost continuously for 20 years.

Continue reading "Why Students Flee The Humanities" »

By E. Gordon Gee

This article is adapted from the American Council on Education's Atwell Lecture, delivered on February 8th by Dr. Gee, president of The Ohio State University

The transformative effect of higher education, to change individual lives and to remedy global problems of all kinds, is without question. And it is shared equally among us. Public or private, two-year, four-year, research, and liberal arts---each of our institutions has a sacred responsibility.

Just as our institutions change lives, so too are we changed. Institutions evolve over time with the shifting needs of our students and the world into which they graduate.

Yet at this defining moment in our nation's history, we have a mandate - more than that, a moral imperative - to hasten our pace exponentially. Evolution is too ponderous. What is called for is a step change. A fundamental departure from business as usual. I am calling for intentional upheaval at our colleges and universities just when fiscal chaos already places us on the edge.

To be sure, we are all reeling from sudden funding pressures, institutions as well as students. Virtually all of our public institutions are seeing reductions in state support, many in the double-digits. And all of us---though especially private colleges and universities---are watching helplessly as endowments diminish.

Continue reading "A Call for "Intentional Upheaval"" »

By John Silber

The recent attempts to drive Robert Kerrey from the presidency of The New School are reminiscent of how Larry Summers was driven from the Harvard presidency in 2006 and, further back, how controversies, real and specious, roiled American campuses in the 1960s and 1970s. If the Trustees of the New School are at all tempted to give in to demands for Kerrey's head, these previous academic power struggles ought to send them one clear message of warning: lose a president to a coup and you will fail in the governance of your campus.

The complaints against Kerrey ought to sound familiar to anyone who has watched university reform in action. Kerrey is accused of being an autocrat and of putting fiscal concerns ahead of academic needs. He is lambasted for his politically-incorrect views on America's wars in Vietnam and Iraq.

In December the New School Faculty voted 271-8 to express no confidence in him and his chief financial officer. At the same time radical students occupied Kerrey's office; they have since demanded that Kerrey resign and that they be given a role in picking the next Provost. The students also threaten to shut the campus down if their demands are not met by April 1.

Continue reading "Lose A President To A Coup And You Will Fail" »

By Frank J. Macchiarola

Dr. Macchiarola, chancellor of St. Francis College in Brooklyn, delivered these remarks on February 5th at a one-day conference in New York on "The Future of the University." The conference was sponsored by the Manhattan Institute's Center for the American University.

If I were making this presentation a year ago, I would not have some of the deep concerns about the future of the university as I do today. Certainly the changes that are occurring within the university today are due, in large part, to some of the real difficulties the university faces in adapting to forces that are internal to it. The presence of the deep economic recession that we face today - and that will be with us for some time to come - significantly adds to the uncertainties that today's university has to confront. It puts solutions to a considerable extent beyond the scope of what some universities can actually manage.

The recession - or perhaps depression- has for private universities hurt their financial condition dramatically. Endowments drop and endowment income which is critical to the university's operations fall as well. In virtually all instances this combination means that universities been tremendously impaired. Endowment income which can provide 5% of market value for operating expenses is less available and this adds to the gap between tuition income and expenses that universities must face. Endowments are affected, especially for the tuition dependant schools which require tuition to fund operations in significant ways. Well endowed universities are the exception, not the rule. Costs also increase, usually by a multiple of the rise in the cost of living. This has been almost the universal rule largely because of factors that have driven universities to give students "more and more." The usual course of action -increasing tuition - is made more difficult by the hard economic times. Fewer students being able to afford college mean a shift to lesser charging private universities and the public ones. The factors that have operated to allow universities to grow are not present in anything like the same way. The decline in the number of high school students exacerbates the problem even further. While students may choose public institutions as an alternative, things are not going well there either. The depression has hit states hard, and while the stimulus plan may be helpful to them in the short term, they will not be able to absorb more students at the subsidized costs that they have traditionally borne. The taxpayer is being hit hard, and the state economies are as well. The public universities will have to charge more and give less. There is tuition relief by the way of increased Pell Grants and tax credits for college tuition, but there is no way that we will be back to conditions ante recession.

Continue reading "How Will The Colleges Cope?" »

By Charlotte Allen

On February 11 art-lovers packed a meeting room at Brandeis University to protest Brandeis's plans to shut down its on-campus art museum and auction off the museum's entire 6,000-piece collection. The list of holdings at Brandeis's Rose Art Museum, most of them donated since the museum's opening in 1961, reads like a Who's Who of prominent twentieth-century American artists - works by Max Ernst, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, among others - and is valued at $350 million. Museum curators, especially those associated with university - owned art collections, greeted Brandeis's decision with shocked intimations that selling the art might violate ethical obligations to donors. Elsewhere in the art world there was fear that the fire-sale prices that the Rauschenbergs and Warhols might command if dumped onto today's anemic, recession - beset market for luxury goods could depress the value of other art collections less stellar than Brandeis's.

One thing is certain, however: Administrators and trustees at Brandeis, a well-regarded but not overly rich liberal arts-focused research university of about 3,900 students in Waltham, Mass., saw a need to act quickly and decisively to cut costs and raise cash at a time when nearly every university in America, private and public, is being hit by the double whammy of shrunken endowments (thanks to the tanking of Wall Street) and sharp downturns in revenues from both private donors and financially strapped state governments. Brandeis, founded in 1948 and named after the Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, had an endowment valued at $712 million as of last June - pocket change compared to its neighbor Harvard's $37 billion endowment - but Brandeis's endowment is now reportedly worth only $530 million because of the market meltdown, Furthermore, many of Brandeis's chief donors had invested heavily with alleged Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff, a guarantee of financial wipeout. Indeed, Brandeis's very largest donor; the family foundation of the clothing manufacturer and philanthropist Carl Shapiro, who had several campus buildings named after him, reportedly lost $545 million, nearly all its assets, to Madoff's alleged pyramid of fraud. Although Brandeis denies investing any of its endowment with Madoff, it has admitted to serious investment losses, and its chief operating officer, Peter French, told the online magazine The Daily Beast that the university faces an operating deficit of $79 million over the next six years together with "a tapped-out reserve fund," as the Beast's Judith Dobrzynski wrote, and seriously strapped donors. According to French, Brandeis faced three alternatives: sell the art, shut down 40 percent of its campus buildings, or choose between firing 30 percent of its administrative staff or 200 of its 360 faculty members. Since original works of art are inspirational but not exactly germane to a college education (Brandeis had no art museum for its first thirteen years of existence), the university axed its art, not its buildings or employees - "We'd rather use Rose" to cut costs, French said.

In fact Brandeis is actually lucky to have valuable hard assets on hand to liquidate for a desperately needed cash infusion, and even luckier to have had generous donors in the past whose gifts constitute those assets. The university does not have to decide - at least not right now - whether to shrink its faculty, trim its administrative staff, reduce undersubscribed academic offerings, or deal with the costly results of an overhead-hiking campus construction spree when times looked flush earlier in the decade. Mark Williams, a senior lecturer at Boston University specializing in risk-management told the Bloomberg news organization that one of Brandeis's problems was that it "overbuilt at the peak of the market." In fact, according to Inside Higher Education, the Brandeis faculty recently formed a committee to review the curriculum and review such revenue-boosting or cost-cutting options as adding business and engineering programs to the university's traditional liberal-arts offerings and replacing its existing majors and minors with (apparently cheaper in terms of faculty deployment) interdisciplinary "meta-majors" whose vague parameters have alarmed some professors, not so much because they might dilute standards or jettison, say, Brandeis's longstanding but low-attendance courses in ancient Greek, but because they might result in eliminating entire departments and professorial jobs.

Continue reading "Financial Pain on the Campuses" »

By James Piereson

In the area of higher education especially, but in most other areas too, the Stimulus bill looks more like an emergency measure designed to maintain current programs than a strategic package aimed to stimulate growth. Among others, college and university presidents are likely to be among those sorely disappointed.

Last November, shortly after the election, a group of college presidents took out a full page advertisement in the New York Times to make the case that the proposed stimulus package to be considered by the new administration should include some $50 billion for the construction of new buildings on college campuses across the country. The academic leaders argued that such expenditures were an investment in the future of the country and would, in addition, create new jobs in the short run. They estimated that this allocation would represent but 5 per cent or thereabouts of the total stimulus package, which by their reckoning would add up to something like $1 trillion. Like governors, mayors, and representatives of other interest groups, they were eager to get in line for a piece of this once-in- a-lifetime jackpot of federal largesse.

Continue reading "A Small Stimulus for Colleges" »

Denis Rancourt, a professor of physics at Ottawa University, an anarchist and a backer of Critical Pedagogy, may be the most dramatic example of a politicized teacher yet seen in North America. He believes that college instruction is an instrument of oppression and that his proper job is to combat this oppression by ignoring what he is supposed to be teaching---physics and the environment---and instead promoting radical political action in his class. Over the weekend, Stanley Fish posted a blog on Rancourt at the New York Times website that attracted a good deal of attention. So we asked several professors to write brief reactions to Rancourt and Fish.

- John Leo

Peter Berkowitz

In Save the World on Your Own Time, his 2008 polemic about higher education, Stanley Fish harshly criticized professors who use the classroom to advance political agendas. Professors, he insisted, have a contractual duty to pursue academic purposes in their teaching, to transmit knowledge and refine students' intellectual abilities. Academic freedom was well-defined and narrow: it protected a professor's right to discharge his academic duties without political interference. For professors to use academic freedom as a cover to inculcate in students moral and political doctrines was, in Fish's eyes, a gross abuse.

Or it was in the summer of 2008, when his book came out. Unfortunately, in his exploration of the case of University of Ottawa physics professor Denis Rancourt, Fish indicates that in the winter 2009 the meaning of academic freedom in his judgment is not a matter of right, duty, and the proper understanding of academic life and the university's mission, but rather reflects a clash between narrower and broader views of academic freedom.

To be sure, Fish's relativizing conclusion is in tension with his unflattering portrayal of Professor Rancourt. On the one hand, he concedes that Professor Rancourt's granting an "A+" to each of his students, his refusal to teach courses he has been assigned by his department and for which students sign up, and in the courses he chooses to teach his urging students to engage in political activism represent instances of how "some academics contrive to turn serial irresponsibility into a form of heroism under the banner of academic freedom." On the other hand, Fish treats Rancourt's conception of academic freedom---"the ideal under which professors and students are autonomous and design their own development and interactions"---which Rancourt invokes to justify enlisting students in the quest to transform society and save the world, as a legitimate, if broader, conception of academic freedom that can only be defeated by "an essentially political decision."

Underlying Rancourt's pedagogy, Fish notes, is the "belief that higher education as we know it is simply a delivery system for a regime of oppressors and exploiters." But this moral judgment does not change the parameters of academic freedom. And it is no more a defense against Rancourt's being fired by the university for failing to do the job for which he was hired than it would be for an executive at Exxon Mobil to hold that because oil is polluting the planet, he is entitled to collect his salary while feeding false information to his superiors and encouraging his subordinates to subvert the company from within.

Nor is Rancourt's appeal to Socrates a convincing support for his freedom, against university requirements, to refuse to give students grades. What Rancourt overlooks and Fish fails to point out is that Socrates was not a university professor, did not take money to teach, and taught the obligation to respect, not to subvert, custom and law.

Although there are alternative conceptions of freedom, there is only one conception of academic freedom that is well-grounded in the principles of liberal education and the historic mission of the university. It is the conception forcefully defended by Stanley Fish in Save the World on Your Own Time. Regrettably, by suggesting that Denis Rancourt's rank politicization of the classroom reflects an alternative conception of academic freedom, as opposed to a perversion of academic freedom, Fish lends dignity to a fraudulent claim.

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His writings are posted at www.PeterBerkowitz.com.

Jonathan Imber

Cases about academic freedom are bellwethers for larger social and cultural unrest. They always have been, all the way back to the First World War with the founding of the AAUP. When Arthur O. Lovejoy was dismissed from his position at Stanford University for simply defending a colleague's right to criticize the university, he joined with others in making the case that universities have a special responsibility to allow as full and open debate about all things as possible. Of course, Lovejoy and his colleagues would never have confused lack of collegiality or failure to teach one's subject as defensible in terms of academic
freedom.

The problem with Stanley Fish's assessment is that it has very little to do with the everyday indignities that beset colleges and universities as the result of colleagues who do not do their jobs and thus make everything more difficult. Instead, Fish is taken in by the exotic cases to make otherwise ordinary points. The ordinary points are quite clear: the oversight of faculty at most colleges and universities takes for granted a great deal of good will on both the part of faculty and administrators (most of whom have been faculty). When that good will is tested, it is usually about decisions made by administrators, not about anarchist physics professors. It is impressive in its own way that so much time was given to a person who clearly understood that being paid for his insubordination was likely to be challenged at some point. I suppose Fish's point is that there will always be some case where somebody tries to defy gravity.

But the real lesson is how much our institutions of higher learning depend on a basic trust given in particular to those of us fortunate enough to have what others see as "job security." We owe the public an explanation of what we do and why we do it. Most of us cede this responsibility to our presidents and deans, but in the end, it is the faculty who have the power and responsibility to determine this. We should not become a conspiracy against the laity, especially in times like these.

Jonathan Imber is Professor in Ethics and Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College

Daphne Patai

It's hard to see why Stanley Fish is hot and bothered by the Rancourt case at the University of Ottawa. After all, it's merely an extreme example of a routine event - a professor's political grandstanding and exhibitionism of his impeccable leftist credentials. What's unusual is only that Rancourt did suffer the consequences of his professional irresponsibililty. The real story here, however, is that so many professors, especially in the humanities and social sciences, routinely and with far less drama than Rancourt contrive to treat their classrooms as staging grounds for their political commitments. In many cases they announce this without embarrassment - look at the mission statements and job ads for various identity programs, in which activism (of a certain type only, of course) is routinely promoted as an academic goal. This is so much the norm these days that only truly egregious cases, such as Rancourt's, or Ward Churchill's, evoke strong reactions and censure. It's very rare for a professor to be charged with incompetence. There's almost no such thing in higher education these days, least of all over manifesting political biases.

To the contrary, the real threat to education these days is far more likely to come from the shutting down of free speech by means of university policies aimed at inhibiting "harassment" (sexual or racial primarily), which has many professors watching their every word. Look at Brandeis University, which last year found Professor Donald Hindley guilty of "racial harassment" and placed a monitor in his classroom! His offense? To discuss the word "wetback" as a racial slur in his Latin American Politics course! FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, keeps track of the sorry state of free speech on America's campuses, and has had to go to bat for many of the accused (see its website at www.thefire.org). Where political correctness rather than genuine education has become a norm in American universities, why be surprised that professors feel free to indulge their biases? Most of them, of course, are a bit less blatant about their agenda than Rancourt obviously was.

As for the guaranteed grades of A+ -- that too is noteworthy only because it takes to an extreme a pervasive problem in education: grade inflation. The only surprise is that a university administration actually acted in the Rancourt case. Competence seems rarely to be questioned and all kinds of partisan distortions of education are promoted and even celebrated. So we should thank Rancourt for having taken standard professorial actions to an extreme and thus calling attention to a persistent reality that is rarely addressed.

Daphne Patai is Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Amitai Etzioni

Stan Fish does here what he does so well: he takes one odd case and builds a general theory on its peculiar facts. I wish he would be more of a sociologist. Look at the thousands of tenured professors (a declining number by the way). See how often they are under attack for being too liberal, too anti-Israel, even too conservative. Realize that although most people in society do not have their kind of protection---it serves a free society well to have several thousands who are so privileged, just as it is served by having some judges who have tenure.

True, some abuse their tenure (typically not by outlier behavior but by doing little work). Such abuses are largely handled through informal social pressures which Fish confuses with coercion. And when things get really bad, some of the abusers have their tenure revoked. Given that the world around us is collapsing and we are at war, maybe Professor Fish can use his privileged position to worry about even greater threats to our freedoms, well-being, indeed sanity.

Amitai Etzioni is a University Professor at The George Washington University

Mark Bauerlein

Stanley Fish's ruminations on academic freedom are always stimulating, but in this case his example is a no-brainer. A physics professor whose classroom posture aims to undo the institution and invalidate his own grades doesn't pose difficult questions about duty and freedom. No arguments about oppression and exploitation can turn his dereliction into an academic outlook. The very distance between his expertise, physics, and his subversive role-playing makes the case too easy.

What about fields, though, that close the distance, for instance, the composition instructor who believes that student writing will improve only when students question authority, including the authority of teachers and schools to evaluate them? What about education schools that explicitly profess to convert students into "change agents"?

In other words, academic freedom gets fuzzy when adversarial, radical, revolution, and other ideological goals are admitted as legitimate aspects of disciplines themselves. In these cases, we look not to the conduct of wayward instructors hijacking classrooms--a rare enough happening. No, we look to entire fields and subfields and departments that have made political agendas a normal functioning of research, hiring, peer review, graduate training, and undergraduate instruction. And that condition, unfortunately, isn't as rare as it ought to be.

Mark Bauerlein is Professor of English at Emory University

Continue reading "Stanley Fish And The Storm In Ottawa: Seven Professors Say What They Think" »

By William Creeley & Harvey Silverglate

Reaction to Brandeis University's plan to close the Rose Art Museum and sell its esteemed collection was swift---and scathing. Within the Brandeis community, President Jehuda Reinharz's proposed fire sale provoked howls of betrayal from students, faculty, alumni, and donors. In the art world and news media, the move was met with blistering condemnation. Even the Massachusetts attorney general's office launched an investigation.

The press reported that Michael Rush, the Rose's director, expressed "shame and deep regret" at the university's plan. (Adding insult to injury, Rush was notified of Reinharz's plan just an hour before the press release was issued.) In Rush's assessment, by shuttering the Rose, Brandeis would place its "intellectual capital and very credibility as an institution of higher learning on the auction block." That the museum director was not involved in such a momentous decision is perhaps as revealing and important as the decision itself.

A strict adherent to the corporate model of university governance, Reinharz responded to the furor with an empty apology, expertly crafted by a public relations firm to sound palatable while leaving the decision largely intact. But the backlash against Reinharz's announcement stems not only from its wrong-headedness, but also from the arrogance and lack of process with which the decision was made.

Continue reading "Brandeis: Still Abusing A Professor" »

By Donald Downs

In a recent op-ed, New York Times columnist David Brooks raised an interesting and important question. Drawing on a recent book (largely neglected) by Hugh Heclo entitled On Thinking Institutionally, Brooks critiqued a report on education that a Harvard University faculty committee issued a few years ago. According to the report, "the aim of a liberal education is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them find ways to reorient themselves."

Brooks observed that this logic "is deeply consistent with the individualism of modern culture, with its emphasis on personal inquiry, personal self-discovery and personal happiness." The problem is that this way of living neglects the important role that tradition and institutional custom play in providing order and a sense of duty that give meaning and form to life. Brooks quotes Heclo: "In taking delivery, institutionalists see themselves as debtors who owe something, not creditors to whom something is owed."

Brooks points to the erosion of obligation and responsibility in the banking profession as one example of the problem, among many. "Faith in all institutions, including charities, has declined precipitously over the past generation... Lack of institutional awareness has bred cynicism and undermined habits of behavior. Bankers, for example, used to have a code that made them a bit stodgy and which held them up for ridicule in movies like 'Mary Poppins.' But the banker's code has eroded, and the result was not liberation but self-destruction."

Continue reading "Universities, Individualism, and David Brooks" »

By Anonymous

In March 2008 I reluctantly made the decision to leave academia. After six years in graduate school and three years as a professor, it was clear to me that the discrimination I faced was so pervasive that there would be no escaping it in the years ahead. Don't misunderstand what I write in the paragraphs that follow. I am not bitter, vengeful, enraged, or anything of the sort. My experience as a professor was disappointing and saddening, but not for me. I feel sad for the students and taxpayers. My leaving was the latest in a long string of departures that stem from the discrimination I describe below.

I was a good professor, well liked by students (third highest student evaluations in my department of 18), productive scholar (2 books, 6 articles, and 10 book reviews in two years while teaching a 4/4), member of a university committee, and the advisor to a campus organization.

The proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back" occurred a week after I approached the university lawyer to notify him that I would be running for a seat on the county commission. As a political scientist, it seemed appropriate for me to have some experience in the subject I taught and loved. I also discussed my plan to challenge the incumbent US Senator in 2010. It may seem an ambitious endeavor, but ambition is something of which I have an abundance.

Continue reading "Why I Left Academia" »

By Maurice Black & Erin O'Connor

The current upheavals in the financial markets have left everyone confused. But in the midst of all the confusion, one thing has become crystal clear: A free country simply must be an economically and financially literate country. Amid the waves of failing banks, roiling stock exchanges, massive government bailouts, and wildly fluctuating currency and energy markets, we have become newly aware of how much our nation's wellbeing, and, indeed, our freedom, depends on our financial security. Disturbingly, we have also become newly aware of how little most Americans understand about financial markets, or even about their personal finances. American colleges and universities should take note---and should act swiftly to ensure that their students are economically and financially literate.

State of Ignorance: What Young Americans Don't Know about Money

Younger Americans are deplorably uninformed about economic and financial matters. In 1999, researchers at the Securities and Exchange Commission concluded that 66 percent of high school seniors could not pass a basic economic literacy test. Things have not changed for the better since then. In 2008, the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy administered its biennial thirty-question financial literacy test to 6,856 high school seniors in 40 states. The respondents averaged an overall score of just 48 percent, down four percentage points from 2006. Students were most oblivious when it came to investment strategies: Overall, only 17 percent knew that investing in stocks would probably generate the greatest financial return over an eighteen-year period.

When Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke attended a Jump$tart news conference in 2006, he stated that financial literacy is "vital to the future of our economy" and called for improved financial education in our nation's schools. American parents agree---76 percent say that schools should be required to teach students about money management. But schools are not addressing the problem in any consistent or systematic way. The Young Americans Center for Financial Education recently reported that fewer than 30 percent of students receive even one week's worth of financial training during their entire high school careers. In 2004, only seven states made personal finance education a requirement for high school graduation.

Continue reading "Shouldn't All Students Learn Economics?" »

By Robert Weissberg

It is not so much our friends' help that helps us, as the confidence of their help. - Epicurus (Greek Philosopher 341 BC-271 BC)

Though relatively tiny in number PC forces now exercise disproportionate influence across the university, even capturing entire departments. What makes this conquest especially noteworthy is the lack of resistance from academics, liberal and conservative, who know better and should have stood up and shouted, "Enough with this race/class/gender crap, we need people to teach Chinese or Japanese politics, not yet one more course about African Americans." Going one step further, where is the vocal outrage when the PC contingent accuses a fellow professor of "hateful insensitivity" by assigning the Bell Curve or his "heretical" remarks on colonialism? Outside the university this bystander unresponsiveness even has a name---the Kitty Genovese phenomena, named after a repeatedly stabbed woman who lay unattended for hours in an apartment building courtyard while "oblivious" neighbors ignored her screams (she eventually died). But, why would life-time tenured professors go deaf when the ninnies beat up on a colleague who, to be hypothetical, dare hypothesized a biological factor in male/female mathematical distinction? Rallying to his defense is hardly as dangerous as, say, trying to stop a Mafia execution. Callous indifference to the plight of those singled out for PC attack is critical to understanding what bedevils today's academy, and deserves an explanation.

The decline in friendship explains a lot---friends defend friends, even risk death, but without camaraderie, it is all too easy to run and "not notice." Friendship's role in helping others was made crystal clear following World War II when sociologist Morris Janowitz and others interviewed German POWs to assess their extraordinary unit combat cohesiveness. It turns out that small units like tank crews typically came from the same town and were kept together for the entire war. This bonding, plus the realization that cowardice would travel back home encouraged bravery---Hans would risks his life to save his friend, fellow Bad Homburger, Rolf, and this loyalty far outweighed abstract ideology. American units, by contrast, favored shifting personnel and mixed composition (recall WW II "buddy" movies where "Brooklyn" shared a foxhole with "Tex"). But with the war ending, and German units becoming hastily assembled hodge-podges, combat effectiveness collapsed and mass surrenders ensued. Hans would risk death for Rolf but not the newcomer Wolfgang from far distant Rostock.

Today's universities are almost organized conspiracies against such cohesion. Affirmative action consciously rips it apart (recall how in 1984 friendship was sabotaged to atomize society on behalf of Big Brother). The diversity fetish guarantees departments filled with strangers having little in common. Hiring newcomers who "will fit in" has been replaced with "is he or she sufficiently different enough to satisfy the Diversity and Outreach Dean." Departments grow to resemble modern grade- school earth science textbook role model pictures---no two young faces alike, a few disabled to boot, and numerous smiling representatives from "under-represented" groups hardly known for scientific achievement. Indeed, hiring a white male job candidate who will further cement social cohesion may require extra justification beyond "he is the best." Too many white males implies unacceptable "good old boyism."

Continue reading "The Conspiracy Against Faculty Friendship" »

By Diane Auer Jones

Despite all of the rhetoric from our elected officials about their interest in containing college costs, every American should know that the legislation Congress passed last year reauthorizing the Higher Education Act significantly increases the cost of running a college, and therefore the cost of attending one.

By way of example, let's look at the additional bureaucracy and administrative cost associated with just one of the many new institutional reporting requirements included in the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008. The provision requires institutions of higher education that participate in federal financial aid programs and maintain campus housing to develop a notification system to report students who have been missing from residence facilities for 24 hours.

This provision sets a dangerous precedent by radically expanding in loco parentis responsibilities of colleges and universities. Moreover, it constitutes yet another unfunded mandate imposed by Congress on institutions of higher education. But the real question that university administrators will now struggle with is how to differentiate between a student who is missing, which infers a sense of foul play or of being lost, and a student who is exercising the freedoms of adulthood and simply electing to spend 24 hours somewhere other than in her own room. Shocking as it may seem, college students on occasion venture off campus for parties, romance and even an occasional road trip, and oftentimes they don't notify anyone in advance of their plans. Sometimes they don't even have a plan, but simply let the day - and the night - unfold as it will.

Continue reading "Missing The Point About Missing Students" »

By Ward Connerly

Hardly a sector of the American economy is unaffected by the current recession; however, no matter how painful this period is, it provides an opportunity for many institutions to do the kind of restructuring that should have been done before now. And, fewer segments of our society are in greater need of financial restructuring than American higher education. Unfortunately, public colleges and universities have been the beneficiaries of public "bailouts" from the taxpayers for so long that the message of restructuring may fall on deaf ears, but in case any college administrators are interested, I have a few suggestions.

First, let us begin with the cultural mindset that every high school graduate should go to college. This fact alone creates an inflated and artificial demand for higher education and causes many young people to pursue career paths that are not reflective of their talents, aptitudes or interests, but it does serve to create escalating application numbers that help when it is time to lobby legislators and the Congress for financial assistance.

Because of this artificial and inflated demand for a college education, politicians, educators and others often promote the view that going to college is a "right" and not a commodity to be purchased like any other goods and services in our society. As a "right," everyone is therefore entitled to have the government underwrite the attainment of that "right." It is at this point that the cost of higher education begins its inflationary spiral, because as long as the taxpayers are there to bailout public colleges, there is no need to keep costs at a level that the consumer (college students) can afford.

Continue reading "Toward Market-Based Universities" »

By Richard Vedder

The most important documents governing our behavior and influencing our development as a civilization are mostly short - packing a lot of meaning into a few words. The Ten Commandments is 326 words, the Gettysburg Address is but 268. Even the extraordinarily complex and important law determining our form of federal government, the U.S. Constitution, is only 8,212 words - even with all the amendments added over two centuries. Yet brevity or transcendental meaning does not hold for laws regarding higher education. The original Higher Education Act of 1965 was probably roughly 20,000 words long - well over twice the length of the Constitution but far less significant. The newest reincarnation of that Act, the 2008 reenactment (several years late), is estimated by my colleague Jonathan Robe to be 175,859 words long---over 20 times as long as our foundational rules of government - and vastly less important. We are approaching "much ado about nothing," or maybe the less appealing opposite, "little ado costing us a lot." Moreover, the statistics above understate the complexity of federal higher education legislation. In 2008, in addition to reauthorizing the Higher Education Act, Congress also passed the Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loans Act, The College Cost Reduction and Access Act, and the New GI Bill law, to name just three additional laws. The formerly accepted notion that higher education is primarily an individual or a state and local government responsibility seems to be dying.

Before looking at the "trees" that constitute specifics in the current legislation, let us look at the "forest," the broader picture. Has the 1965 Higher Education Act as amended achieved its objectives? Is access to college greater because of its passage? Is the quality of higher education improved? Are taxpayers getting a lot of "bang" for their federal higher education "bucks"? I think a very strong case can be made that the answer to all of these questions is a resounding "no."

True, more persons are in college today than in 1965. But the rise in college attainment on average was greater in the 43 year period 1922 to 1965 than in the comparable length period 1965 to 2008, and some commentators (e.g., Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz in The Race Between Education and Technology) are lamenting the slowdown in the growth in the proportion of adults with degrees and America's falling behind other nations in this regard.

Continue reading "The Campus And The Nanny State" »

By Judith Cone

Dear Students

Two factors have come together to inspire me to write this letter to you. First, it has been my privilege to promote cross-campus entrepreneurship on college and university campuses, and I have met some amazing young people with great entrepreneurial ideas who want their lives to count for something significant. I also have met many students who have no interest in entrepreneurship because they have a negative perception of business. It is mainly to them that I write this letter.

The second factor is that the world is hungry for what we often take for granted. I have been invited to visit countries around the world to speak with leaders on how to promote entrepreneurship as a way to create opportunity and hope for their young people. These leaders clearly understand that entrepreneurs create the net new jobs by bringing innovative products and services to customers.

The most recent example is a meeting I attended, convened by Her Highness Sheikka Mozad of Qatar, that focused on how to create economic opportunity for young people in the Middle East and Northern Africa. Knowing that hopelessness makes the world a more dangerous place, she has committed $100 million to developing economic opportunity. I sat at a table with people from such countries as Syria, Tunisia, and Morocco and heard their leaders make plans to provide entrepreneurship education. A young Syrian entrepreneur who founded an animation company talked about following his dreams and the thrill of being economically independent through his own efforts. And, in Indonesia, I met a young man who has a doughnut business and is bringing in more money than anyone in his family has ever seen. The common thread in all of this is the belief that entrepreneurship is a powerful avenue for prosperity for an individual, a region, or a country.

Continue reading "Where Goodness Lies: An Open Letter To Students" »

By KC Johnson

In October 2006, 60 Minutes offered a searing examination of the Duke lacrosse case. Reported by the late Ed Bradley, the broadcast exposed then-Durham D.A. Mike Nifong for what he was: an unethical prosecutor advancing a non-existent case to secure the votes of African-Americans he needed to win an upcoming Democratic primary. The broadcast also represented a public relations low point for the Duke administration. Speaking to Bradley, Duke president Richard Brodhead declined to condemn Nifong's behavior. Nor did he question the dubious and in some cases unprofessional conduct by his own university's "activist" faculty members.

Brodhead, instead, targeted the victims of the prosecutor's and his faculty's misconduct: his own students. With a pronounced smirk, he defended Duke's actions by accusing the lacrosse players of having engaged in "highly unacceptable behavior."

More than two years after Brodhead's ill-fated introduction to the national media, Duke has made a reported eight-figure settlement with the three falsely accused lacrosse players. The university also settled lawsuits with former lacrosse coach Mike Pressler and the family of a lacrosse player who suffered grade retaliation from an anti-lacrosse Duke professor. Duke still faces a civil rights lawsuit filed by the unindicted lacrosse players, and the university recently learned that its insurance carrier is refusing to cover any defense or settlement costs arising from the lacrosse case.

Continue reading "Was Nan Keohane Worse Than Brodhead?" »

By George Marsden

Evangelical colleges and universities have been thriving. According to the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, the one hundred or so "intentionally Christ-centered institutions" that they count among their affiliates have been growing at a remarkably faster rate than have other major sorts of American colleges and universities. From 1990 to 2004, all public four-year campuses grew by about 13%, all independent four year campuses (including many schools with broad religious or denominational connections) grew by about 28%. But schools associated with the CCCU grew by nearly 71%.

One factor contributing to this growth is that these schools offer the sort of coherent educational experience that has become increasingly difficult to find elsewhere in American higher education. By way of contrast, consider Harry R. Lewis's, Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education (2006). Lewis, former Dean of Harvard College, laments that Harvard is driven by so many competing careerist and ideological interests that there is little attention either in the curriculum or among faculty (who are rewarded only for scholarship) to fostering healthy personal and moral growth among its students. If that is the case at Harvard, one can imagine the incoherence of the educational experience at the huge state universities and the many community colleges where the vast majority of America's collegians get their degrees. Most of what students study involves practical skills in preparation for careers. Liberal arts are incidental to most undergraduate experience. The best hope for "community" is found in fraternities and sororities or more likely just in a dorm containing many sub-groups of those who happen to find common recreational interests.

Continue reading "Why Christian Colleges Are Thriving" »

By George Leef

On December 16, the higher education establishment put out its tin cup, asking Congress to give it a 5 percent cut of any "stimulus" spending package---around $40 to $50 billion for new university construction projects.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I'm opposed to the concept of "economic stimulus" spending. The federal government can't make the country more prosperous by shifting money and resources around at the whims of federal politicians. But the idea of spending billions on higher education strikes me as particularly unjustifiable. The trouble with higher education isn't a shortage of funds, but that so much of what it has is spent to little effect.

The Carnegie Corporation's open letter signed by more than 40 higher education leaders contends that the nation faces a serious problem: "For the first time in our history, the cohort of Americans ages 25 to 34 is less well educated than the older cohorts that preceded it." Supposedly, this is an ominous sign that "our future prosperity and security will be weaker than in the past."

Continue reading "No Stimulus Money For Colleges" »

By Charlotte Allen

This past April, Stanley Fish, the postmodernist English professor with a knack for parlaying whatever current well-compensated teaching job he holds into an even better compensated teaching job somewhere else (he's now a "distinguished professor" at Florida International University after stints---necessarily somewhat brief---at the University of California-Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Duke, and the University of Illinois-Chicago) devoted one of his blog-posts at the New York Times to a rave review of a book yet unpublished in America, "French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co.Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States," by the French intellectual historian Francois Cusset.

The review was less about Cusset's book than about Fish himself and Fish's own ideas about the postmodernism: the notion, promulgated by the ur-postmodernist and Fish idol Jacques Derrida, and now the reigning orthodoxy in college literature departments across the country, that essentially there's no such thing as reality, and there's also no such thing as a "you" or "me" with sufficient rational ability to know anything about that reality. All we have are "texts" or "narratives" that may purport to tell us what is real (example: a scientific article) but are actually no more than self-referential expressions of ideology (such as belief in scientific progress). Fish wrote: "All we lose (if we have been persuaded by the deconstructive critique, that is) is a certain rationalist faith that there will someday be a final word, a last description that takes the accurate measure of everything. All that will have happened is that one account of what we know and how we know it --- one epistemology --- has been replaced by another, which means only that in the unlikely event you are asked 'What's your epistemology?' you'll give a different answer than you would have given before."

Fish continued: "When a deconstructive analysis interrogates an apparent unity --- a poem, a manifesto, a sermon, a procedure, an agenda --- and discovers, as it always will, that its surface coherence is achieved by the suppression of questions it must not ask if it is to maintain the fiction of its self-identity, the result is not the discovery of an anomaly, of a deviance from a norm that can be banished or corrected; for no structure built by man (which means no structure) could be otherwise."

Continue reading "Postmodernism's Dead End" »

By Mark Bauerlein

In early December, the Board of Regents of the Kentucky Community and Technical College system agreed to vote in a few months on a proposal that may have far-reaching effects on higher education. The proposal would end the practice of offering tenured or tenure-track posts to new faculty hires. Is this a crack in the tenure dam that will produce a cascade of other schools eradicating tenure from the ranks?

Whether other universities go that far or not, in fact, the tenure system has been deteriorating for years. Administrations haven't directly taken it away. They simply let tenured professors retire and didn't give departments tenured or tenure-track replacement lines. Or, in responding to rising enrollments, they hired more part-time faculty than full-time faculty to fill classrooms. Indeed, according to the U.S. Department of Education, the portions of tenured and tenure-track faculty in the American professorate nose-dived in the last 30 years.

And according to a recent report by the American Federation of Teachers, "contingent faculty members teach 49 percent" all undergraduate courses (Reversing Course: The Troubled State of Academic Staffing and a Path Forward, i). The proportion doesn't include graduate student teachers, either, those doctoral candidates picking up courses as part of their training, which AFT estimates at 16-32 percent of the courses offered.

Continue reading "Is Tenure Doomed?" »

By Martin Morse Wooster

The nearly six-year-old lawsuit between the heirs of donors Charles and Marie Robertson and Princeton University over who controls the assets of the Robertson Foundation has been settled. Princeton has now acquired most of the Robertson Foundation's endowment, enabling it to exercise control over the foundation's assets, which amount to between $600 and $700 million, or six percent of the university's endowment.

But the case may well send a signal to other donors to be extremely wary of the gifts they make to colleges and universities. We'll never know what would have happened at a trial. But the evidence clearly shows that Princeton was increasingly brazen in its efforts to use the Robertson Foundation's wealth for causes other than which it was intended. Princeton's conduct shows that universities want donors to have as little say as possible about how their contributions will be used.

As part of the settlement, Princeton agreed to pay $40 million between 2009-11 to the Banbury Fund, the Robertson family foundation who paid the Robertsons' legal fees. In addition, Princeton has agreed to donate $50 million between 2012-19 to a new nonprofit designed to fulfill Charles Robertson's intentions in helping to train students for government service. In return, the Robertson Foundation will be dissolved, and its funds will be fully integrated into Princeton's endowment.

Continue reading "Robertson V. Princeton -- Who Really Won?" »

By Harvey Silverglate

After years of fat, our colleges and universities are now facing decisions imposed by the coming years of lean. Will the academy pull back from the spending binge of recent decades by cutting away administrative fat, or by chipping away at academic bone? Will it be administrations or faculties that get downsized? The answer will speak volumes as to whether today's universities are more interested in educating their students, or in reforming their thinking and their conduct.

Whether the enormous growth of the administrative infrastructure has been due to the sudden influx of extraordinarily generous contributions buttressed by ahistorically large portfolio investment returns, or instead to the need to hire foot-soldiers to implement the politically correct ideological programs necessary to create the modern in loco parentis university, is anyone's "chicken-before-the-egg" guess. But the bottom line is that since the mid-1980's, burgeoning academic and student life bureaucracies - and the "needed" money to pay for them - changed the face, and much of the mission, of the modern (or should one say post-modern?) university.

This observer, relying more on observation and hunch than outright cynicism, is willing to bet that the teaching side of the academy will suffer more than the in loco parentis administrative side. Assistant vice-deans of student life specializing in sensitivity training will likely outlast the professor of European history or the instructor in Chinese, Arabic, or other critical languages.

Continue reading "Let's Cut The Administrative Fat" »

By Donald Downs

The idea of "bubble" has been on everyone's mind since the escalating housing and economic crisis first erupted in July 2007. Throughout these turbulent times, one institution appeared to be coasting along above the fray: Higher Education. Higher ed has been growing for decades, becoming a staple in the national political economy. The supply and demand situation has been remarkably favorable to it: believing that higher education is a necessary, if not sufficient, ticket to personal success and social progress, the public has tolerated increasingly higher costs and tuition---forces that citizens have rebelled against in other consumer domains.

After all, didn't ambitious citizens have to pay their dues to higher ed in order to have a meaningful chance at success? With seemingly no viable alternative or exit strategy, consumers have stretched their pocketbooks to the breaking point and taken out loans to purchase a chance at the American Dream. (Today over 35% of students rely on student loans, and the number is growing.) Not surprisingly, the last twenty years have seen tuition costs rise at over three times the rate of inflation. The overall costs for many private schools add up to $50,000 per year, while public universities cost up to $20,000 for state residents, and over $30,000 for those who hail from out of state. Meanwhile, wages for most Americans have been left in the dust.

Something had to give. The fate of the housing market comes to mind. Believing that home prices would rise virtually forever, consumers and investors were willing to stretch themselves and their debt to the limit in order to obtain housing stock. We all know what happened when that assumption ran into the brick wall of reality. Is higher education immune to such a shock?

Continue reading "The Next Bubble?" »

By Joe Malchow

In the reporting on our present economic infelicity we learn, astonishingly, that among the most extravagantly foolish investors have been America's oldest and (so we are given to believe) wisest institutions of higher learning, including Harvard, Princeton, and Dartmouth. A twenty-something taking his first dip in the stock market might be expected to display irrational exuberance. Centuries-old colleges? Stewards of billions and receivers of estates? Call them hedge funds with libraries.

The endowments of institutions have generally been thought to enjoy an infinite time horizon. That is, they are built primarily that they may grow; they fear no expiry; they will never be drawn down; their owners never retire or die. This freedom, unknown to most of Wall Street and certainly to individuals, makes risk unnecessary. Given twenty years, economist Burton Malkiel famously showed, investing in the broad market inevitably beats the frenetic schemes of the best Wall Street analysts. There was a time when the portfolio managers who oversaw endowments were bound by a gentleman's code to keep conservative; and statute, too, once reined endowments in. In The Intelligent Investor, Benjamin Graham yearned for "earlier days, when trust investments were restricted by law to high-grade bonds and a few choice preferred stocks."

Today a pinstripe suit and the telltale jangle of a Collateralized Debt Obligation are just about enough to get the ivory tower on board. Or they were, last year.

An exploration of these schools' finances over the past year does nothing at all to suggest that their tremendous estates are deployed conservatively. Far from taking advantage of their infinite time horizons, each of them has seen fit to make considerable speculations in whatever fresh hedge fund was lately concocted by its alumni. And quite astoundingly none seems to have emerged from the pitch of 2000-2001 having learnt anything about the fundamental distinction between investment and speculation.

Continue reading "Ivy-Covered Hedge Funds" »

Roger Kimball, editor of Encounter Books and co-editor of The New Criterion, delivered these remarks at a Manhattan Institute luncheon in New York City on November 19th. The occasion marked publication of the second revised edition of his influential 1990 book Tenured Radicals.

***

Joining so many old friends from the extended Manhattan Institute family inspires a feeling of what the philosopher Yogi Berra called "deja vu all over again." I know I have been here before, talking about something suspiciously similar to what I am going to be talking to you about today. I am counting on you to agree with me that novelty is a much over-rated commodity and to take consolation, as I do, in the observation of the Sage of Ecclesiastes that "there is nothing new under the sun."

When the first the edition of Tenured Radicals appeared lo, these many years ago, around the time movable type was coming into vogue, the American university, when it came to the humanities and social sciences, anyway, was essentially a left-wing monoculture gravely infected by the stultifying imperatives of political correctness, specious multiculturalism, and an addiction to a potpourri of intellectually dubious pseudo-radicalisms.

Well, that was then. In the meantime, some very talented people have weighed in on the problem. They have written articles and books about the university; they've organized conferences, symposia, and think-tank initiatives; they even managed to place scores of good people in various colleges and universities as a counterweight to the various intellectual and moral depredations I chronicle in Tenured Radicals. Today, two editions and nearly two decades later, we can look at the American university and what do we discover? That it is, essentially, a left-wing monoculture gravely infected by the stultifying imperatives of political correctness, specious multiculturalism, and an addiction to a potpourri of intellectually dubious pseudo-radicalisms.

Continue reading "Still Tenured, Still Radical" »