By Russell K. Nieli

On average black students do much worse on the SAT and many other standardized tests than whites. While encouraging progress was made in the 1970s and early 1980s in improving black SAT scores and reducing the black/white test score gap, progress in this direction came to a halt by the early 1990s, and today the gap stands pretty much where it was twenty years ago. Whereas whites and Asians today average a little over 500 on the math and reading portions of the SAT, blacks score only a little over 400 -- in statistical metric a gap of a full standard deviation. Only about one in six blacks does as well on the SAT as the average white or Asian.

This state of affairs is well known uncomfortable though it may be to bring up in public. Less well known is what in the scholarly literature is called "the underperformance problem." Once in college blacks with the same entering SAT scores as whites and Asians earn substantially lower grades over their college careers and wind up with substantially lower class rankings. This gap in grade performance, moreover, is not reduced by adding high school grades or socio-economic status to the criteria for matching students. Blacks equally matched with whites or Asians in terms of their entering scholastic credentials and socio-economic backgrounds simply do not perform as well as their Asian and white counterparts in college. And the degree of underperformance is often very substantial.

This is contrary to what many people have been led to believe. Standardized tests are "culturally biased," it is said, and do not fairly indicate the abilities or promise of racial minorities growing up outside the dominant white, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon culture. Often this claim is bolstered by reciting items on long outdated verbal tests asking for the meaning of words like "regatta" or "cotillion" that only upper-class whites are likely to know. The implication is usually that those from minority cultures will do better in college in terms of grades than their test scores would predict. The "cultural bias" argument, however, is not only questionable on its face -- since the clearly non-Anglo Saxon Asians do better than whites on most standardized tests of mathematical abilities including the SAT, while the equally non-Anglo Saxon Ashkenazic Jews outperform everyone else on tests of English verbal ability -- but fails to account for the fact that in terms of grade performance blacks in college consistently do worse, not better, than their standardized test scores would predict. Standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT overpredict, not underpredict, how well blacks will do in college, and in this sense the tests are predictively biased in favor of blacks, not against them.

Continue reading "The Underperformance Problem" »

By J. M. Anderson

Dear Assistant Professor:

Congratulations on your new job! Whether you're a visiting professor or on the tenure-track, consider yourself among of the lucky. As someone who ran the academic treadmill for eight years---I taught at a community college, at two four-year liberal arts colleges, and at a state university until I landed a permanent position at a private university, where I am also Director of General Studies---I can appreciate your accomplishment more than most. Like many in the profession, I went to graduate school bushy-eyed and idealistic (a real-life Mr. Smith goes to Washington) so that I could become a professor and continue thinking about important questions. I wanted to inspire others to think about big ideas and to experience the transformative power of liberal education, as my professors had done for me.

Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that teaching is not that important. It won't get you a job, and it certainly won't get you tenure or promoted, even at most so-called "teaching colleges." Chances are that it will not be as intellectually stimulating as you expect, and that after doing it for a few years you will become frustrated if not disillusioned or burnt out. Most college students believe that education is an entitlement and only care about grades and getting a degree. They are indifferent to courses that don't bear on their majors or won't help them get a job or into graduate or professional school. Having been coddled by parents at home and by teachers in grade school and high school, they are demanding, think they have a right to your total attention, and believe that you must always be there for them.

Most of your colleagues will see undergraduate teaching as a burden to escape from whenever possible, but one that must be endured because it's their bread and butter, their meal ticket to do research, which is what they really care about. Research leads to publications, and publications to tenure and promotion and to advancement and recognition in the profession. No one ever gets rich or famous being a teacher. So they exploit the system and resent their students for not taking their courses seriously and interfering with their work. No college or university today, let alone any department, would proclaim what the University of Chicago proudly proclaimed at the beginning of last century: "We come to teach." Professors who come to teach today do so at their peril.

Unfortunately academics don't seem to care how this attitude affects undergraduate teaching and liberal education as a whole. It was, I think, William James who first warned about its corrosive effect more than a hundred years ago. In his essay, "The PhD Octopus," James describes how a brilliant student of Philosophy in the Harvard Graduate School took a job as a teacher of English Literature at a sister-college. When the governors of the college discovered that he didn't have his PhD, he was told that he must get the degree or the appointment would be revoked. The quality of the man and his ability to teach literature meant nothing to the school; the PhD meant everything. The college wanted to see those three magical letters behind the young professor's name. James understood that the PhD, relatively new in his day, was created to stimulate original research and scholarship proper; but he also understood that the fetish for this "sacred appendage" was a "Mandarin disease" that would lead to "academic snobbery" in the profession. "Will any one pretend that its possessor will be successful as a teacher?" The whole thing, he adds, "is a sham, a bauble, a dodge whereby to decorate the catalogues of schools and colleges."

Continue reading "An Open Letter to New Professors" »

By Jackson Toby

In his recent speech at the University of Texas in Austin, President Obama expressed deep unhappiness that the United States is no longer the country with the highest percentage of college graduates in the 25 to 34 age bracket. By 2020 he wants us to regain the top position we enjoyed ten years ago before South Korea, Canada, and Russia forged ahead of us. According to the latest report of the College Board, the United States is now 12th among the 36 developed nations whose college graduation rates the Board tabulated. Should the President have been unhappy? Only if he believes that our lower rate of college graduation reflects a lower rate of genuine educational achievement. If President Obama simply wants bragging rights, the United States can become first very quickly. All that is needed is to reduce graduation requirements or to increase grading inflation in college courses. (Or to give a college degree to every baby born in the United States along with a birth certificate.) The issue is what students with a college degree should know, not whether they have a piece of paper in exchange for all the time and money spent on a campus. It is troubling that only 40 per cent of Americans 25 to 44 have college degrees. It is even more troubling that of the 70 per cent of our high school graduates who enroll in college, only 57 per cent graduate within six years. One rather remote possibility - given studies that show how little American college graduates know - is that American colleges are maintaining high standards and that these high standards necessarily produce higher dropout rates and lower rates of college completion than President Obama would like. Unfortunately high standards do not appear to be the explanation.

Here is how one reader of the Wall Street Journal reacted to an article reporting the President's call for more American college graduates:

Continue reading "Why Remediation in College Doesn't Work" »

By Charlotte Allen

Only a federal bureaucrat could come up with an oxymoron this laughable: "Feasibility of Including a Volunteer Requirement for Receipt of Federal Education Tax Credits." A "volunteer requirement"? Come again? But that's what the Treasury Department said in a call for comments issued this spring on the idea of making community service--volunteer work for charity--mandatory for college students seeking to qualify for a higher-education tax credit made part of the $800 billion economic stimulus bill that Congress passed in 2009.

Fortunately, it turns out grammatical sticklers aren't the only ones who hate the notion of mandatory community service at the post-secondary level. So do many college administrators, who approve of community service and welcome the tax credits that may make their institutions more affordable but adamantly oppose combining the two. The problem is that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 requires the Treasury and Education departments to study the feasibility of forging exactly such a link.

The tax credit in question works like this: Students enrolled in college or some other form of post-secondary training can receive a credit for up to 100 percent of tuition, fees, and course materials up to $2,000 plus 25 percent of the next $2,000, for a maximum credit of $2,500 for each of four years of education. For those students who are too poor to pay income taxes, 40 percent of the credit is refundable. There is a phaseout of the credit for students whose adjusted gross income exceeds $80,000 ($160,000 for married couples).

Continue reading "The Mess of Mandatory Volunteerism" »

By Stefan Kanfer

In full-page newspaper ads, the Kindle displays the first page of an e-book. Its opening is famous: "I am an invisible man." Or is it famous anymore? How many high school seniors---or for that matter college undergraduates---can identify Ralph Ellison's novel? True, the author was an African-American, but he was a male African-American, hence of lesser importance than, say, Maya Angelou or Alice Walker in the PC world of American education. Say the words "invisible man," to most students, and odds are that they'll speak of H. G. Wells's fantasy, or even more likely, that perennial TV favorite, The Invisible Man, a 1933 movie starring Claude Rains in the title role. Or its cinematic sequels, The Invisible Man Returns (1940), The Invisible Woman, (1940), Invisible Agent (1942), The Invisible Man's Revenge (1944) or Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992).

This ignorance is part of a general myth, aided by programs like "Mad Men" and such twisted accounts as Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. According to these shows and books, the 1950's was a decade of American rapacity, sexism, war-mongering, profiteering and mindlessness. In fact, that decade saw a flowering of literary talents that has not been equaled since. J.D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Philip Roth, John Updike published important books in the 1950's, and in 1952 Ellison put himself on the map with his own Invisible Man, a powerful narrative delivered by a black man who calls himself invisible because he walks unnoticed through the white world.

Continue reading "Is This Book Invisible?" »

By Charles Schwartz

Higher education in America is in financial crisis. In constant dollars, the average cost of tuition and fees at public colleges has risen almost 300 percent since 1980. Our best public research universities, like my own University of California (UC), are wracked with doubt: will they be able to continue their historic role as institutions with a vital public mission, or will they become "privatized," demanding ever higher tuition and therefore inevitably serving a more elite clientele?

Let me note some pointed comments by citizens outside the campus. A letter to the editor in the San Francisco Chronicle last March 9th said: "What the public college students (and their parents) in this state must understand is that the days of the taxpayers subsidizing their higher education are over, sad as that may be. ...The costs at all colleges and universities have risen dramatically over the last few years (much higher than the cost-of-living-index). ... Those of us in California who are taxpayers are having a difficult enough time paying our mortgages and for the education of our own children. It simply is not sustainable to expect that there will be free or substantially below-cost education provided on the backs of the state's increasingly dwindling number of taxpayers. ..."

A similar complaint is voiced in an article published by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, July 5, 2010: "As California faces an unprecedented budget crisis, students at California colleges have been asked to pay a greater share of the total cost of their education, most of which is still borne by taxpayers. ...[T]axpayers pay 60-70% of the cost of ... UC students' education, without even counting financial aid."

Continue reading "Who Pays the Hidden Cost of University Research?" »

By Ward Connerly

More than thirteen years ago the people of California voted to end discrimination and "preferential treatment" on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity and national origin, in the public arenas of contracting, education and employment. The margin of the vote on the ballot initiative (Proposition 209) that enshrined the principle of equal treatment in the California Constitution was not a squeaker; it was a decisive 55%-45% margin.

In the years since that vote, most Californians have accepted the verdict of the majority and have adapted to a life of equal treatment without preferences for anyone. That is as it should be in a nation for which the principle of equal treatment is the centerpiece of our civic values system, and for which the "rule of law" is one of our most valued ideals. But, there are some who refuse to take "no" for an answer. Instead, they have used every means at their disposal to bureaucratically circumvent, legally challenge, or flat-out disregard the initiative's simple command of equality.

This week the California Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the law, 6-1, in a response to a lawsuit by white contractors against the city of San Francisco. Along the way, the court noted and dismissed various stratagems employed by the city to avoid the clear meaning of the law.

Continue reading "The Endless War Against 209" »

By Andrew Kelly

This past Monday, the Department of Education proposed "gainful employment" rules that will regulate postsecondary vocational programs, primarily those offered by for-profit colleges, on the basis of their graduates' ability to pay back their federal student loans. Proponents of higher education reform should welcome this move, but not because it targets unscrupulous actors in the for-profit sector. More importantly, the initiative makes a rhetorically significant shift: it places postsecondary institutions and the economic value of the education that they provide at the center of discussions about student loans and college costs. It also adds a new and necessary dimension to the outcome data that the federal government can link directly to individual institutions of higher education.

The problem is not, as some critics would have it, that the gainful employment regulations overreach, but that they do not reach far enough. The current proposal singles out one set of postsecondary institutions for intense scrutiny and leaves the rest to operate as they have, feeding on federal loan dollars without having to show much in return, other than keeping their two or three-year default rate under a certain threshold. For these institutions, students who carry excessive debt and/or default after a three-year window are mainly the government's problem, not theirs. As a result, prospective students looking to choose a college do not have access to even the most basic facts about how their future income or debt burden may vary depending on the institution that they choose. To change that, federal and state governments should embark on a broader effort to link students' post-graduation success to the institutions that they attend, to make that information public and accessible, and to attach institution-level sanctions and rewards to performance on these indicators.

In short, policymakers should take the pro-accountability ideas underlying "gainful employment" and super-size them. Extending the effort to cover all colleges and universities that receive federal student loans would provide consumers with much-needed information about institutional quality and return on investment. The question is whether the latest foray into "gainful employment" regulations will remain a shortsighted attempt to bring greater accountability to one small sector of the postsecondary world. If the past is a guide, it could prove to be the proverbial camel's nose under the tent flap that accountability proponents have been looking for.

Continue reading "Those Accountability Rules for Student Loans" »

By Daphne Patai

About fifty undergraduates from around the country gathered outside of Philadelphia, on the campus of Bryn Mawr College, between July 15 and 17th, to discuss the struggle for free speech on American campuses. The event was the third annual Campus Freedom Network (CFN) conference organized by FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

Teaching as I do at the University of Massachusetts flagship campus in Amherst, affectionately known by some as the People's Republic of Amherst, I considered it a rare treat to encounter in one place so many impassioned and curious young people eager to defend their First Amendment rights against the encroachment of overzealous college administrators and others. Horror stories were recounted (about which more anon), but laughter, outrage, smart comebacks, and strategizing were in ample supply.

Since FIRE's founding in 1999 by Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate, co-authors of the 1998 book The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses, the non-partisan non-profit organization has battled speech codes and other assaults on First Amendment rights on campuses from coast to coast. More interested in suasion than in litigation (which, when necessary, is done by FIRE's many lawyer friends and allies), FIRE is by now a well-established outfit with headquarters in Philadelphia, a satellite office in Manhattan, and a total staff of 17. It has been remarkably successful in bringing sunlight and good sense to blinkered administrators, as can readily be attested by a glance at its website, which archives the organization's activities, including its blog, The Torch, its constantly growing list of schools whose speech codes and policies FIRE has rigorously analyzed and classified, and offers free downloads of its five short "Guides to Student Rights on Campus" -- each book focusing on one crucial area: free speech, religious freedom, due process, student fees, and first-year orientation/thought reform efforts on campus

Continue reading "How to Fight for Free Speech on Our 'Sensitive' Campuses" »

By Herbert I. London

This is the slightly edited introduction to the author's new collection of essays, Decline and Revival in Higher Education ( Transaction Publishers ). Dr. London is president of the Hudson Institute, one of the founders of the National Association of Scholars, and the former John M. Olin Professor of the Humanities at New York University.

When I entered Columbia College in 1956, the college had a deep commitment to liberal opinion. Father and son Van Doren (Mark and Charles), the recently appointed Dan Bell, my adviser named Sam Huntington, the legendary Lionel Trilling, and a brilliant lecturer named Amitai Etzioni graced the campus and, more or less, leaned left at the time, albeit over the years several had their political orientation change. Yet there was one constant: These professors eschewed orthodoxies, notwithstanding the fact that in a poll of faculty members Adlai Stevenson won the 1956 presidential sweepstakes hands down.

Different views were welcome. Controversy was invited. "Political correctness" had not yet entered the academic vocabulary, nor had it insinuated itself into debate and chastened nonconformists. I was intoxicated by the sheer variety of thought. For me this smorgasbord of ideas had delectable morsels at each setting. It was at some moment in my senior year that I became enchanted with the idea of an academic career.

Continue reading "The Sad Transformation of the American University" »

By Charlotte Allen

The letter, dated June 17 and addressed to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, made serious allegations of wrongdoing in the already controversial for-profit education sector: that representatives of career colleges were trolling for students at homeless shelters, loading education debt onto a problem-beset population with poor prospects for academic success in order to funnel federal loan funds into for-profit coffers. Now it turns out that the letter was orchestrated by, and its very language prepared by a Dallas woman, Johnette McConnell Early, who was being paid to investigate for-profit colleges by an investment firm that might be hoping to turn its own profits by short-selling the colleges' securities.

Signed by Neil J. Donovan, president of the National Coalition for the Homeless, and 19 administrators of homeless shelters across the country, many of them church-affiliated, the June 17 letter contained strong language essentially urging Duncan to tighten its regulation of the for-profit sector (the department has been considering severe restrictions on federal loans to career-college students that would peg total debt to the average entry-level earnings in the job for which the students are training). The wording of the letter was ominous: It described recruiting at shelters as "a growing problem." It continued: "For-profit trade schools and career colleges are systematically preying on our clients," the letter continued, accusing the schools of "predatory conduct" in enticing shelter residents to run up un-repayable debt that ruined their credit ratings, turned off potential employers, and rendered the defaulting debtors ineligible for further federal student aid. The 20 signers pledged their "unequivocal support" for heavier government regulation of career colleges. Exactly one week later, on June 24, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee held the first of several planned hearings on the for-profit sector, which receives 23 percent of federal student loan funds although it enrolls only 10 percent of the nation's college students, and has been marked by high levels of loan default and relatively low graduation rates.

The letter to Duncan from the shelter administrators, which circulated widely and was posted on the PBS show Frontline's website, seemed yet more red meat for a Democratic Congress and presidential administration that already seems to regard with suspicion the idea of making a profit from higher education.

Continue reading "The Short-Selling of For-Profit Education" »

By Anthony Paletta

In the epilogue of a new compendium volume, Mark Bousquet notes that, "In July 2007, the American Sociological Association reported that one-third of its members felt their academic freedoms were threatened, a significantly higher figure than the one-fifth ratio recorded during the McCarthy years." Sounds dire, doesn't it? Well not if you've spent the prior 500 pages learning just how fantastical the contributors' conceptions of academic freedom are.

The book is Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex, edited by Anthony J. Nocella, II, Steven Best, and Peter McLaren. It's a bad sign when the appearance of Bill Ayers, Ward Churchill, and Howard Zinn as contributors on a book cover leaves one still unprepared for how unfathomable its premises are. Academic Repression purports to demonstrate how corporatization and right-wing assaults have marginalized academic freedom and genuine liberal thinking at our universities. Really?

It's not at all unusual to see hand-wringing from the left over the state of academic freedom; it is unusual to see an essay collection that "asks whether the concept of academic freedom still exists at all in the American University system"(itals mine).

Continue reading "Seeing Academic Repression Everywhere" »

By Frank J. Macchiarola

Tales of the modern-day college president were reported by the Washington Post in a July 12th article, "College Presidents Taste Life Outside Their Offices," by James Johnson and Daniel de Vise. The president, we were told, is more accessible and easy to talk to, less formal and willing to do things with students unheard of just a few years ago, including joining in a student snowball fight on campus. Many of them have transformed themselves from authority figures to buddies and big siblings as they show their human side. It is something that many parents and students have come to expect as they pony up tuitions that continue to grow even as their resources do not. The presidents want to show their respective publics that they know their students and their needs and will make a great effort to satisfy them.

The trend toward more effective marketing of the campus leader comes at the same time that colleges are offering greater creature comforts to their students - health clubs, new labs and classroom buildings, better appointed living quarters and increasing variety in campus dining. Thus, the accessible college president is like the concierge in a first-class vacation resort. In addition, the college can make contacts for students off campus - internships, study abroad programs, joint degree programs, new majors, distance learning and enhanced placement services for graduates. It strives to be "the college for all seasons."

Although the article did not suggest it, the reality is that colleges are falling in line with other institutions in a transformation of major parts of American culture. They are putting extraordinary emphasis on what the consumer would like to have. In some significant ways, the institutions are becoming what the market expects of them. Their actual mission statement begins to describe what will sell. These institutions surrender the sense of self and the understanding of core values that traditionally represented who they were and what they were doing. In many respects they believe that their survival requires them to cast their lot with the future rather than the old past. In this way the accessible, genial, folksy college president is a beloved figure. In many respects, the new college president represents an improvement over the indifferent and aloof administrator. But if all we have is a change in style then we are not offered much in terms of what really matters. Indeed, the cost of satisfying more of what the public wants rather than what it needs is, in the long run, unsustainable. In the universities, these creature comforts mean higher tuitions and increased student debt to meet the costs of attendance. There is a real limit to this kind of accommodation as tuitions and fees consistently exceed cost of living indicators for other needs as the cost-benefit analysis piles up heaps of benefits, some of them unnecessary. A day of reckoning may soon be at hand.

Continue reading "Your College President Is Your Pal" »

By Russell K. Nieli

When college presidents and academic administrators pay their usual obeisance to "diversity" you know they are talking first and foremost about race. More specifically, they are talking about blacks. A diverse college campus is understood as one that has a student body that -- at a minimum -- is 5 to 7 percent black (i.e., equivalent to roughly half the proportion of blacks in the general population). A college or university that is only one, two, or three percent black would not be considered "diverse" by college administrators regardless of how demographically diverse its student body might be in other ways. The blacks in question need not be African Americans -- indeed at many of the most competitive colleges today, including many Ivy League schools, an estimated 40-50 percent of those categorized as black are Afro-Caribbean or African immigrants, or the children of such immigrants.

As a secondary meaning "diversity" can also encompass Hispanics, who together with blacks are often subsumed by college administrators and admissions officers under the single race category "underrepresented minorities." Most colleges and universities seeking "diversity" seek a similar proportion of Hispanics in their student body as blacks (since blacks and Hispanics are about equal in number in the general population), though meeting the black diversity goal usually has a much higher priority than meeting the Hispanic one.

Asians, unlike blacks and Hispanics, receive no boost in admissions. Indeed, the opposite is often the case, as the quota-like mentality that leads college administrators to conclude they may have "too many" Asians. Despite the much lower number of Asians in the general high-school population, high-achieving Asian students -- those, for instance, with SAT scores in the high 700s -- are much more numerous than comparably high-achieving blacks and Hispanics, often by a factor of ten or more. Thinking as they do in racial balancing and racial quota terms, college admissions officers at the most competitive institutions almost always set the bar for admitting Asians far above that for Hispanics and even farther above that for admitting blacks.

Continue reading "How Diversity Punishes Asians, Poor Whites and Lots of Others" »

By Donald A. Downs

We now have a long and fascinating report by the campus police review board on last fall's disruptive protests at the University of California, Berkeley.

The 128-page document, entitled "November 20, 2009: Review,
Reflection, and Recommendations," released in mid-June, is the product of months of yeoman work garnering volumes of evidence. It chronicles and evaluates responses to the events sparked by resentment over tuition increases and cutbacks in the wake of California's financial debacle.

Berkeley deserves credit for thoroughly investigating the situation. And the report is worth reading for many reasons, one of which is because it casts light on a dilemma that Berkeley and many other schools have been unable to resolve since the famous Berkeley "Free Speech Movement" of 1964 launched decades of illegal student protest: how to balance students' passions for social justice (and sometimes other motives) with the rule of law.

Continue reading "What Happened at Berkeley in November" »

By Charlotte Allen

New York University will open its vaunted campus in Abu Dhabi this fall, and so far it does seem to be the best campus that money can buy---Gulf oil money, that is. The story of the NYU-Abu Dhabi linkup, the brainchild of John Sexton, NYU's strategically ebullient and relentlessly donor-courting and expansion-minded president, is a story of many paradoxes. The greatest paradox of all is that this first step toward creating what Sexton calls a "global network university" of NYU campuses all over the world is being entirely bankrolled by the government of oil-rich Abu Dhabi, which is a good thing for NYU because the university's $2.2 billion endowment (shrunken by nearly one-third in the recent financial crisis) is by far the smallest of any private U.S. university with the world-class ambitions that Sexton claims for NYU.

In fact, because NYU enrolls more than 50,000 at its various schools, its endowment works out to about a mere $50,000 per student, according to figures calculated in a recent Business Week article. (Harvard's $26 billion endowment, by contrast, amounts to $1.3 million per student, while Yale has $1.4 million per student and Princeton $1.7 million). The Abu Dhabi campus is a feat of Sextonian sleight-of-hand in which other people's petrodollars pay for what NYU hopes will be a boost in academic prestige without spending a cent of its own scarce money. NYU was happy to publicize Abu Dhabi's initial contribution of $50 million to the joint venture---a down payment on which NYU insisted as a condition of lending its name to the new university---but now neither the university nor the Gulf city-state will reveal how many more millions Abu Dhabi has sunk into the venture, but it must be plenty. Abu Dhabi has not only committed itself to a glitzy brand-new campus for NYU on Saadiyat Island about 500 yards offshore, but is bankrolling some of NYU's expansion in New York.

Back home at NYU's flagship campus at Washington Square, students complain about stingy financial aid packages that often leave them heavily in loan debt and more heavily reliant on poorly paid part-time faculty than any of the top-tier universities with which NYU hopes to compete. NYU's efforts to grow its campus in New York---by acquiring Greenwich Village real estate and demolishing what's there---have made enemies out of many of its neighbors, especially when NYU pulled down the historic Provincetown Playhouse, which it owned, in order to construct a new law school building (it did save some of the playhouse's facade and replaced the theater). The Abu Dhabi campus has also sparked protests among NYU professors over government policies in Abu Dhabi and other United Arab Emirates states that discriminate against gays (homosexual acts are crimes in the Emirates), Israelis (none of the Emirates has formal diplomatic relations with Israel and all frequently deny entry to citizens of the Jewish state), and the foreign guest-workers who form 80 percent of the Emirates' 4.5 million population but have little practical recourse against employers who confiscate their passports, house them in squalid camps, charge huge fees for their job, and pay them less than promised.

Continue reading "NYU's Perilous Adventure in Abu Dhabi" »

By Cathy Young

Connecticut's Quinnipiac College, best known for its political polling, is now at the center of the newest round in the controversy over Title IX and women's sports. In a trial that opened last week, a federal judge must decide whether competitive cheerleading should count as a sport for gender equity purposes. The case illustrates the complexities -- and some would say, the inanities -- of the debate over gender and college athletics.

In March 2009, Quinnipiac announced that it was eliminating several athletic programs, including women's volleyball, due to recession-related budget cuts. On the other hand, the school added a new team to its women's sports roster: a competitive cheerleading squad. Women's volleyball coach Robin Sparks and four team members sued claiming a violation of Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments, which prohibits sex discrimination at educational institutions receiving any federal funds. The team got a temporary lease on life pending the outcome of the lawsuit. Meanwhile, Judge Stefan Underhill has granted the suit class action status, so that, if violations are found, remedies could be ordered for all current and future female athletes at Quinnipiac.

Last year's budget cuts did not spare the male athletic teams at Quinnipiac. Men's golf and outdoor track were dropped along with women's volleyball, with no reprieve or reversal. (As for men's volleyball, the college never had it in the first place.) Other men's teams were forced to downside their rosters -- in the case of soccer, from 29 to 23 players, much to the coach's disgust. Some would say that, when two men's teams are cut while women lose 11 slots on the volleyball team and gain 30 on the cheer squad, it is not the women who should be complaining.

Of course, the question is whether competitive cheering is a "real sport" or not. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) still does not recognize it as a varsity sport, though there is a push to change that next year. Still, college cheerleading in the 21st Century has come a long way from the stereotype of sexy girls shaking their booty and boosting the boys: it requires high levels of athleticism and technical skill and features national competitions. Most of the young women on Quinnipiac's cheer squad are top-grade gymnasts.

Continue reading "The Ongoing Folly of Title IX" »

By Frank J. Macchiarola

Almost every morning, after taking a shower, I get on the scale to see if I have lost some of the extra weight that I do not want or need. I have tried many ways of shedding the pounds, with diet and exercise at the top of the list. The pounds refuse to disappear. After reading Catherine Rampell's piece, "In Law Schools, Grades Go Up, Just Like That," in the New York Times, I realized that there is a simpler way. A slight adjustment to the scale, so that the measuring starts at minus 15 pounds rather than zero, could bring instant relief. I could truthfully -- if not honestly -- say that according to the scale, I was now less than 175 pounds.

This droll reverie faded to disappointment as I pondered the implications of adjusting law school grades in the fashion recounted in the Times. Grades entered on students' transcripts at law school were adjusted upward several semesters later. The article told of law schools abandoning traditional grading standards to give their students an edge in the tough job market. Thus, each school's scale was adjusted to give the appearance that students did better than they actually did. The schools named were Loyola, Georgetown, NYU, Tulane and Golden State Universty. When I thought further about these modifications, I was reminded of other instances where expected objectivity gave way to subjective judgments. The New York State Board of Regents, for instance, has begun the practice of determining acceptable grades by assigning a passing grade to a raw score. The raw score required for passage is only arrived at after the tests are rated. Such a system allows the Board of Regents to crow about an 80% passage rate, notwithstanding the fact that the classification was entirely contrived. It has the feel of issuing traffic citations on the basis of a quota and claiming there is an epidemic of bad drivers.

The fact that this practice of grade adjustment has developed in law schools is, I believe, a much more serious matter. The rule of law, when properly applied, embodies honesty, fairness and impartial justice. The behavior of adjusting grades to conceal the truth does damage to our expectation of the rule of law. That the law itself is made to yield to the dollar is particularly troublesome. As a professor quoted in the Times article put it, "if somebody's paying $150,000 for a law school degree, you don't want to call them a loser in the end. So you artificially call every student a success." The result is a perverse version of the golden rule: "he who has the gold rules."

Continue reading "Make-Believe Grades for Real Law Students" »

By Michael C. Macchiarola

Federal subsidies long ago achieved the goal of making higher education more attainable for students from middle- and lower-income families. Yet such programs cloud the fact that good politics often tend to represent bad economics. In this case, government efforts have reflexively ushered a generation of students down a one-size-fits-all conveyor belt that has too often left the federal government as little more than the underwriter of disappointment. Much as it propelled the housing boom, government policy aimed at "access" has fueled a dramatic increase in the cost of education. And, schools have been more than willing to turn abundantly available dollars into lighter teaching loads for professors, luxury dorms for students and state-of-the-art sports arenas, with little regard for whether these improvements are really worth it to student-customers. Ultimately, however, students foot the bill for these flights of fancy: they are required to repay their loans. And, their ability to do so depends, in large measure, on the quality of the education that they received from their chosen school. The fact that so many student borrowers are in distress today only serves to indict the value proposition that the education industrial complex continues to advance.

Aided by the government-encouraged extension of credit, education costs have skyrocketed. In fact, it is fair to describe today's higher education price tag as having been reduced to a formula - where tuition seems to equal all the money a student can pay plus all the money a student can conceivably borrow. And, this same access-for-all government policy has made loan-eligible middle- and lower-income students easy prey for aggressive higher education and student-loan marketing. The end result has been an unprecedented, debt-fueled wealth transfer from students of modest means to the increasingly affluent higher education industry and its student-loan lenders. Unfortunately, as this damage continues to reveal its depth, its consequences are likely to become more evident by the day.

A generation of students has been reduced to the equivalent of the underwater homeowner: resigned to a fate where the amount owed to finance their schooling might be greater than the value of the education they received (and, therefore, beyond their capacity to repay it). All is not lost, however, as there are already machinations within the world of education suggesting that students, governments and institutions are, at long last, awakening to assign considerations of value to a world that for too long has seemed immune to such assessments.

Continue reading "''Too Big to Fail'' Goes to College" »

By J. M. Anderson

In 1977 the great mathematician and teacher Morris Kline published an indictment of academe in a book aptly called Why the Professor Can't Teach. Kline not only blamed "the overemphasis on research" as the "prime culprit" for the poor quality of undergraduate education, he also blamed professors---especially tenured professors---for ignoring their "moral obligations to students" and offering courses "that reflect their own values at the expense of student needs and interests." Little has changed in three decades.

The open secret in the profession remains that professors are paid to publish, not to teach. Most consider teaching a distraction from their research, which is what they really care about, while administrators keep pressuring faculty to publish, even at liberal arts colleges, and increasingly at community colleges, where teaching is supposed to be the most important thing they do. Never mind that there is no evidence that professors who are doing research are better undergraduate teachers because of it, according to Burton A. Weisbrod, economics professor at Northwestern University (also see Mission and Money, 2008). Never mind that in 2006 the magazine Teen Talk noted most students choose their particular institution based on the availability or strength of their preferred major, the ability to get a good job or accepted into a good graduate school, and whether faculty are good teachers or mentors---not the numbers of books or articles they published. Of course publish or perish is not new ("publish, and the students perish," Kline quipped), but until we stop grumbling, and actually do something about it, liberal education will continue its gradual demise.

But that's only part of the problem. The other part is that most graduate students and new college professors are not prepared to teach. Postsecondary teaching is the only profession I know of for which no formal training is required---not even the expectation that one must be prepared. True, most institutions of higher education---even community colleges---expect their faculty to have PhDs, but that only proves the absurdity of the current situation. The PhD is a research degree whose recipients are highly trained specialists. Most colleges and universities are teaching institutions, despite what faculty and administrators like to maintain. Yet the myth persists that if a person has a PhD, he or she can teach. This is nonsense, of course. And most people know it, including the administrators of colleges and universities who fund the Centers for Teaching Excellence (or something like them). These are typically directed by tenured faculty whose job it is to promote the latest "scholarship of teaching and learning" through seminars, workshops, and discussion groups.

Continue reading "Why the Professor Still Can't Teach" »

By KC Johnson

Inside Higher Ed took a look at the controversy over the "Crying Wolf" project, in which a committee consisting mostly of academics will pay for works of "scholarly integrity" dealing with contemporary public policy issues. Scholarly "integrity," in this case, means reaching the conclusion before assembling the evidence.

Defenses of the Wolfers, alas, confirm critiques of the project. Take, for instance, the case of Michael Les Benedict. Much like Wolfer board members Tom Sugrue and Nelson Lichtenstein, Benedict is hardly a fringe figure in the academy. He has published numerous, well-regarded books on Civil War and Reconstruction Era political and constitutional history, and currently serves as AHA Parliamentarian. This background makes his defense of the Wolfers' project all the more troubling.

"Those who contribute to Crying Wolf," Benedict writes, "already have studied the subjects they will write about." Actually, nothing in the Crying Wolf manifesto lists such a prerequisite. Moreover, the decision to open the scholarship-for-pay project up to graduate students (few of whom, given academic realities, would have any publication records) suggests that having studied the subject in any depth isn't a requirement for payment.

Continue reading "The Wolfers Dig a Deeper Hole" »

In the wake of the National Association of Scholars' report on summer reading for college freshmen---the report found many of the assigned books trivial and politically one-sided---we asked Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, to explain his institution's unusually rigorous approach to summer reading.

By Leon Botstein

For the past two years, Bard College has asked first-year students to read works by Kafka and Darwin over the summer. These texts then become subjects of analysis when the students arrive on campus in August for an intensive three-week program of reading and writing before the fall semester begins. Let me explain the thinking behind this approach.

The idea of assigning summer readings to students entering college has three justifications. First, since American high school students usually take more of a vacation from serious thinking and study during the summer months than is warranted, readings remind them that college promises to be demanding and difficult and that it would therefore behoove them to stay in some sort of intellectual shape. This exercise is especially welcome because once high school seniors learn what college they will attend, they often cease to study seriously so that the final months of high school are wasted.

Continue reading "Message to Freshmen: Let's Start with Kafka and Darwin" »

By Charlotte Allen

It's a well-known fact that there's a severe gender imbalance in undergraduate college populations: about 57 percent of undergrads these days are female and only 43 percent male, the culmination of a trend over the past few decades in which significantly fewer young men than young women either graduate from high school or enroll in college. It's also a well-known fact---at least among college admissions officers---that many private institutions have tried to close the gender gap by quietly relaxing admissions standards for male applicants, essentially practicing affirmative action for young men. What they're doing is perfectly legal, even under Title IX, the 1972 federal law that bans sex discrimination by institutions of higher learning receiving federal funds. Title IX contains an exemption that specifically allows private colleges that aren't professional or technical institutions to prefer one sex over the other in undergraduate admissions. Militant feminists and principled opponents of affirmative action might complain about the discrimination against women that Title IX permits, but for many second- and third-tier liberal arts colleges lacking male educational magnets such as engineering and business programs, the exemption may be a lifesaver, preventing those smaller and less prestigious schools from turning into de facto women's colleges that few young people of either sex might want to attend.

Now, however, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has decided to turn over this rock carefully set in place by admissions committees. The commission launched an investigation last fall into the extent of male preferences in admissions decisions at 19 various institutions of higher learning. These include public universities (where such preferences are illegal under Title IX); elite private institutions such as Georgetown and Johns Hopkins; smaller liberal arts schools (Gettysburg College, with 2,600 undergraduates, is on the list); religious schools (the Jesuit-run University of Richmond and Messiah College in Grantham, Pa.); and historically black Virginia Union University, also in Richmond. On May 14 the commission's general counsel, David P. Blackwood, announced that four of the 19 schools--Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Gettysburg, and Messiah---had raised legal issues concerning compliance with the commission's subpoenas, and that Virginia Union, while responding politely, had not complied in any way. Blackwood said that the commission might have to ask the Justice Department for help in obtaining admissions data from Virginia Union.

Continue reading "The Quiet Preference for Men in Admissions" »

by Roger Clegg

An Inside Higher Ed article yesterday by English professor Satya P. Mohanty of Cornell on "Diversity's Next Challenges" constructs an elaborate house of cards but then inadvertently knocks the whole thing down. The piece features, in particular, an argument suggesting that "stereotype threat"---the claim that fear of being judged by a stereotype can cause minorities to do much less well on a test than they should---requires that universities and all of society must be restructured before minorities can be expected to succeed.

Stereotype-threat research regarding test performance has been widely used and abused. But, whatever its merits, Professor Mohanty has extrapolated its claimed findings to a broader one, that the "culture of our campuses," indeed the entire "culture of learning," needs to be restructured with the aim of fostering racial trust. Merely admitting a diverse student body is not enough: We must "think about what our campuses feel like to those who come to learn." Campuses must be perceived as "trustworthy" by these students. And this means that campus culture must be "more open, democratic, and genuinely attentive to the experience of different social groups." Again, there must be a focus not only on admitting a diverse student body, but on "the campus as a learning environment for different kinds of learners."

Professor Mohanty then plugs the forthcoming book he has co-edited , The Future of Diversity (some of the arguments that follow here are fleshed out by the book's various authors, and the op-ed apparently endorses them). That future is important not only for the success of the university per se, but because "university campuses have a special role to play in building the future of our multicultural and diverse society."

Continue reading "Reshape Universities Because of "Stereotype Threat"?" »

By Daniel Callahan

Freshmen in the University of California Berkeley's College of Letters and Science will be asked to take part in a novel program designed, it is said, to stimulate discussion of personalized medicine. That kind of medicine--hailed by many in health care as potentially revolutionary--focuses on genetic screening to determine an individual's susceptibility to various diseases and other medical conditions. The students will be asked to provide a sample of cells from their inner cheek, and those cells will be analyzed for three genes, each bearing on possibly beneficial changes in what they eat and drink.

Organizers of the projects, scientists working on genetics, think that this project will be more stimulating to students than old-fashioned reading, a commonplace for incoming freshmen in the past. I doubt it, and in fact it has the potential for some ethical mischief.

On the surface it looks innocuous enough: the program is voluntary, the information is kept private, the ethics review committee approved it, and it will be followed by lectures and panels on personalized medicine. But the history of screening for genetic diseases and individual genetic variations has been beset with problems, medical and psychological.

Continue reading "Berkeley's Genetic Mistake" »

By John F. Witte

After decades of trying, the Democrat-controlled Wisconsin legislature, with the encouragement of the union-backed governor, passed a statute allowing unionization of faculty in the University of Wisconsin system. Recently the first campus, Superior, voted to unionize their faculty by a 75-5 vote. I believe that ultimately faculty unions will seriously damage public universities in Wisconsin and elsewhere, particularly at "flagship" campuses that produce and require serious faculty research.

I do not say this out of hostility to unions. I have been an advocate for organized labor and taught and directed organizations connected to the movement. I was the last director of the Industrial Relations Research Institute and also worked with the university School for Workers, which has a long history of training union stewards, organizers, leaders of locals. In my book, Democracy, Authority, and Alienation in Work (University of Chicago Press, 1980), I argued that for industrial democracy to work in practice, a union was required as an ultimate protection for workers.

But those connections were to blue-collar workers, in the trades, in manufacturing, or in service positions. They did not include "professional unions," the largest being kindergarten to twelfth-grade teachers, but also including other professions and of course faculty unions. Blue-collar unions were and are necessary to both counteract very asymmetric power relationships with management and to establish decent and living wages and benefits. The great era of American unions from the 1930s to the 1970s did that and the result was a burgeoning middle class that aided the prosperity of the nation through jobs that fathers and mothers held with pride.

Continue reading "Why Faculty Unions Could Destroy Our Universities" »

By KC Johnson

A few years ago, Cornell University spokesperson Thomas W. Bruce rejoiced that the Ivy League school had brought to Ithaca a man whose "distinguished background in contemporary global cultural studies," and whose "unique perspectives and talents" would "add to the range of reasoned intellectual discourse at Cornell."

The professor about whom Bruce gushed was Grant Farred, whose latest contribution to "intellectual discourse at Cornell" came when he labeled two graduate students "black bitches." One of the most extreme members of the Group of 88 (the Duke faculty members who issued a guilt-presuming public statement two weeks into the lacrosse case), Farred had denounced as "racist" those Duke students who registered to vote in Durham; and had wildly charged that unnamed lacrosse players had committed perjury. Duke's settlement with the three falsely accused players shielded him from civil liability for the latter remarks. Cornell knew this record of contempt for the students he taught when it not only awarded Farred a tenured position, but promoted him to full professor, with a median salary of $154,300.

Farred's experience typifies the Group of 88's rebounding from their rush to judgment in the lacrosse case. Indeed, at least three Group members moved on from Duke to endowed chairs at other institutions. Charles Payne, who violated Duke rules by authorizing departmental funds to pay for the Group of 88's ad, is now Frank Hixon Professor at the University of Chicago. He has moved on from presuming the guilt of his own school's students to receiving fellowships to fund his work on urban schools. Payne's most recent book, Teach Freedom: Education for Liberation in the African-American Tradition, is an edited volume published by Columbia Teachers' College Press; it features contributions from self-described "educator-activists" on how principles of African-American "liberation" education remain relevant today.

Rom Coles, who denounced an early 2007 from Duke economics professors that affirmed that the economics professors would welcome all Duke students, even student-athletes, into their classes, is now McAllister Chair in Community, Culture & Environment at Northern Arizona University. He's involved himself in a host of pedagogically predictable causes, ranging from learning communities to "sustainability" initiatives.

Continue reading "Whatever Happened to the Group of 88?" »

By Kevin Nestor

Ohio governor Ted Strickland believes America's public systems of higher education "strengthen our people" and "provide ideas that our [nation] needs to grow." I agree that they should do this. After serving as a trustee of The Ohio State University at Mansfield for the past nine years though, I have begun to wonder whether, in some very important ways, they are actually undermining and doing significant harm to these essential goals.

Numerous surveys and studies show that the faculty and administrations of America's major public campuses are politically well to the left of the typical American. But it's not just one-sided campus opinion that's the problem. Even more so, it's the highly ideological programs, courses, centers and approaches to teaching and learning that these believers keep imposing on our students.

To understand the problem, look at the two related concepts of diversity and multiculturalism. At Ohio State, as at many public universities today, "celebrating" and "respecting" diversity are considered to be highly important goals that are expected to be broadly incorporated into the university's curriculum and student programming and activities. As such - and because diversity is such a broad and all-encompassing term - it is important to understand what the university means by the term diversity. At Ohio State, the preface to the university's 2001 Diversity Action Plan established the focus of the university's diversity efforts. This preface says:

Continue reading "Mandatory Opinions on Public Campuses" »

By Donald A. Downs

New Jersey's Kean University is planning to institute a controversial new academic structure. The university has presented a draft proposal , its second, to replace the traditional arrangement of academic departments with schools headed by "executive directors" appointed by the president. Initiatives to eliminate such departments as philosophy and social work are already in the hopper, "but this plan would kill even large departments like English and biology, dividing faculty members into new organizational structures they played no role in creating."

Not surprisingly, Kean's proposal is sending shock waves through the faculty at Kean and elsewhere. It constitutes a serious challenge to long-standing notions of academic freedom and university life. Among other things, academic freedom entails a significant degree of shared faculty governance, which includes some meaningful say over the organization of teaching and curriculum matters. Kean's proposal "will allow the upper administration to exert increased control over faculty work lives," said physics professor James Castiglione, who is also the president of the Kean Federation of Teachers. "That's what this whole thing is about. This whole thing is about control."

Defenders maintain that the reform is necessary to save money, but debate rages over the financial consequences of the plan and the costs of reorganization. While cutting 38 department chair positions will save money, the plan also calls for creating eighteen "executive directors" to oversee the new arrangement. Faculty leaders contest the university's broader claims regarding its financial situation, while university officials stress that the university anticipates a $17.7 million deficit next year. "To suggest that Kean University, for whatever motive, is somehow immune from New Jersey's severe budget crisis is irresponsible and not in line with economic reality," a university spokesman told Inside Higher Ed.

Few of us are in a position to determine the truth regarding Kean University's financial straits. That said, the very existence of the case reflects fundamental changes in the political and economic environment of higher education that are well worth considering. Universities are facing perhaps unprecedented financial pressures in the brave new world of mountainous debt, and something must give. But is the reshaping of higher education a promising step or an occasion to mournfully sing "Bye, bye, Miss American Pie?"

Continue reading "When the Administration Takes Over the Departments" »

By Edward B. Fiske

In 1983 U.S. News & World Report came up with what Ben Wildavsky, a former education editor at the magazine, described as "a journalistic parlor game." The magazine had just conducted a successful survey of U.S. leaders to identify the most influential Americans. Why not, the editors asked, use a similar approach to identify the country's top colleges and universities?

So U.S. News sent surveys to college presidents around the country asking them to pick ten colleges that provided the best undergraduate education in their particular academic niche. The magazine published the results in 1983 and again in 1985, and by 1987 the project had morphed into a free-standing guidebook entitled America's Best Colleges. "No one imagined that the rankings would become what some consider the 800-pound gorilla of American higher education," recalled the late Alvin Sanoff, the longtime managing editor of the rankings project.

The gorilla continues to stalk U.S. higher education. Last week Daniel de Vise of the Washington Post reported that "a small but determined" group of college presidents in the Washington-Baltimore area is now boycotting the "peer assessments" questionnaire that U.S. News & World Report sends them every year as part of its process of updating its college rankings. Their protest follows a report last year that another group of college presidents across the country had pledged to do likewise.

It's easy to understand why college presidents don't like U.S. News butting into their affairs in the first place and might be inclined not to cooperate at all (as Reed College has done). John Burness, the former communications chief at Duke University, probably spoke for most of higher education when he observed in 2008 that the precision that U.S. News ascribes to its rankings "is, on the face of it, rather silly."

Continue reading "The Achilles Heel of the U.S. News Rankings" »

By Charlotte Allen

With great fanfare Columbia University recently announced that starting this fall it will offer an undergraduate major in the new interdisciplinary field of "sustainable development." That makes Columbia the first Ivy League school to offer such a major, which sounds as though it ought to be a practical mix of hard science, "green" technology, and tough-minded economics joining forces to combat Third World poverty without polluting or deforesting the Third World in the process. In fact, however, undergraduate sustainability majors on many campuses tend to be light on science but heavy on ideology. The reigning ideologies can range from doomsday scenarios of out-of-control global warming and plummeting agricultural yields to, as is likely to be the case at Columbia, the controversial and expensive foreign aid-based economic theories of Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia's Earth Institute, the sponsor of the university's new sustainable-development major.

College majors in sustainability are all the rage these days---as well they might be, since the federal government (thanks to Congress's passage of the Higher Education Sustainability Act in 2008) now makes grants available to institutions of higher learning "to integrate sustainability curricula in all programs of instruction, particularly in business, architecture, technology, manufacturing, engineering, and science programs." Brand-new majors in sustainability have popped up on more than two dozen college campuses during the last few years. The schools now offering the major include small private liberal arts colleges and the public Arizona State University, which operates a School of Sustainability, and Appalachian State University in North Carolina, which offers four different sustainable-development majors plus a minor. In the fall of 2009 Johns Hopkins University began offering both a major and a minor in "global environmental change and sustainability" whose course offerings are somewhat similar to those proposed for Columbia.

Money is also pouring into sustainable-development programs at the graduate level. The MacArthur Foundation just announced that it has made grants totaling $5.6 million to ten universities worldwide to establish new two-year master's-degree programs in "development practice" at 10 universities in eight different countries. The grants are part of a $16 million investment by MacArthur for "the creation of new Master's programs in sustainable development practice," as MacArthur's press release states. MacArthur hopes to see the recipient universities---now totaling 20---churn out as many as 400 graduates by 2013.

Continue reading "Sustainability---More Cash and a Softer Side" »

By Andrew Kelly

From the beginning, Frontline's new documentary College, Inc seems tailor-made to scare the living daylights out of the series' presumably progressive audience. Viewers are first introduced to Michael Clifford, an "educational entrepreneur" without a college degree who buys up struggling colleges and resurrects them as for-profit companies. Clifford is not only making a fortune off of low-income minority students. He also happens to be a born-again Christian, and he is looking to turn a bankrupt college in Oakland, CA into "Dream Center College," an offshoot of a Christian mega-church and rehabilitation center in Los Angeles by the same name. Indeed, viewers are introduced to Clifford's born-again faith almost as soon as they learn anything about his profession. And the introduction to Clifford comes right before correspondent Martin Smith interviews legendary profit-seeker and hard-edged capitalist Jack Welch, who talks about his investments in higher education and "widgets" in the same sentence.

Given the variety of companies and individuals involved in the for-profit sector, particularly the number of founders, faculty, and senior administrators who have PhD's and experience at world-class universities, Clifford seems like an odd place to start. Perhaps it's a nod to the idea that the regulation of college acquisitions is too lax, a worthwhile point to make. But to the discerning viewer, using Clifford, and then Welch, as narrative anchors signals a definite perspective on for-profit higher education: it is full of greedy profiteers, is woefully under-regulated, and is run by outsiders who believe that education is a business.

Predictably, College, Inc goes heavy on the "profits," and the methods used to reap them, but this leaves little room for the "education." As a result, viewers are introduced to many of the sector's warts and excesses, which are real and must be acknowledged, but never get a sense of how these innovative institutions are changing the way higher education is designed and delivered in the twenty-first century.

Continue reading "What Is For-Profit Education Really Like?" »

By Robert Maranto

With various co-authors, University of British Columbia Sociologist Neil Gross has made a cottage industry of downplaying charges that academia is politically correct. Seemingly, the left's domination of social science and humanities departments is of no more concern than the fact, cited by Thomas Sowell, that in the 1990s, Cambodians ran 90 percent of California's donut shops.

Gross's studies appeal because they serve the psychological needs of professors. It is comforting to think that we smart folks just happen to surround ourselves with people who think just like we do. Gross assures us that there is nothing unseemly here. Collegiate single-mindedness is of course totally different from the groupthink that characterized the George W. Bush White House, to take a not quite random example.

In fairness, Gross and his colleagues have made some sound points over the years. For example, most academics do not think of themselves as political extremists but as centrists. Of course this is no surprise. People compare themselves to their peers, so liberal professors are indeed in the center or even the right compared to their colleagues on the far left. Some surveys indicate that a quarter of sociologists are self-proclaimed Marxists, meaning that there are quite literally more socialists in Harvard faculty lounges than in the Kremlin. It is not difficult to seem moderate or even conservative in such company.

Gross and others are correct to say that not all of the pronounced leftist tilt in the academy reflects discrimination. As Matthew Woessner and April Kelly Woessner point out in a chapter in my co-edited The Politically Correct University, conservatives value family life more than liberals; thus academically talented liberals are more willing to delay childbearing for the decade it takes to earn a doctorate, and more apt to leave their families and hometowns to attend PhD programs thousands of miles distant. Liberals may talk more about relationships, but conservatives seem less willing to jettison them for academic self-expression.

Yet to say that not all of the conservative under-representation reflects discrimination is very different from saying that none of it does. The Woessners also find that conservative undergraduates receive less mentoring from faculty. This too may explain why fewer conservatives apply to PhD programs, even though conservative and liberal undergraduates have identical GPAs. Similarly, a recent and much hyped Gross co-authored paper argues that conservatives eschew academic careers because of "typing," the stereotype that professors are liberal. As Steve Balch points out, much of this reasoning is circular. How exactly is the stereotype that professors are supposed to be liberal any different from stereotypes that women are not supposed to study science or that African Americans are not supposed to be chief executives? Wouldn't we find it offensive if a CEO explained an all white management team by saying that "African Americans don't type themselves as executives?"

Academia is a merit system based on publication, but one that works better for some than others. In The Politically Correct University Stan Rothman and Bob Lichter present evidence that professors holding socially conservative views must publish more to get the same jobs, with ideology having about one-third of the statistical power of one's publication record. Among professors who have published a book, 73% of Democrats but only 56% of Republicans hold high prestige academic posts. Both statistics and "lived experience" suggest that I am not the only conservative or libertarian professor denied a job or two. And it is no surprise that as the academic job market grew tight in the 1970s, ever more discriminating faculties became more ideologically homogeneous, hiring clones rather than peers.

Continue reading "The Politically Correct University and How to Fix It" »

By Robert Paquette

On 19 April, the board of trustees of Shimer College in Chicago, by an 18 to 16 vote, ousted Dr. Thomas Lindsay from the presidency after little more than a year of service. For sixty years, tiny Shimer (about ten faculty and 100 students) has touted itself as a Great Books college on the Robert Maynard Hutchins plan. Students converse about the content of texts with one another, guided by a professorial facilitator employing the Socratic method. The experience, it was believed, would "sustain a life-long passion for learning." Accordingly, Shimer constructed and reconstructed its mission statement to reflect---and to extend--- Hutchins's ideals. Since 1996, the ambitious Shimer educational experience purported to prepare students for "active citizenship," not just in the United States, but "in the world." After four years of matriculation, Shimer's graduates would learn to shun "passivity" for "responsible action" by moving "beyond either unquestioning acceptance of authority or its automatic mistrust."

Dr. Lindsay came to Shimer from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) where he served as deputy director and oversaw We the People, a well-regarded program designed "to encourage and enhance the teaching, study, and understanding of American history, culture, and democratic principles." There he attracted national attention with impressive publications and lectures on how to teach the principles of the founding to the American people. Inaugurated as Shimer's thirteenth president In January 2009, he set to work trying to elevate an institution possessed of noble goals but gasping from slipping standards, radical egalitarian governance structures, a bare-cupboard endowment, and a long history of financial distress, including several bankruptcies. Re-accreditation itself was hanging in the balance. Dr. Lindsay expanded to thirty-four the number of sitting members on the board of trustees to include educators and philanthropists who could help Shimer out of its chronic fiscal woes. Raising money in good times requires persistence and long hours to persuade prospective donors. During a recession, the task can seem Sisyphean. Dr. Lindsay says he spent two out of every three days during his first year at Shimer on the road with tin cup in hand.

Many at Shimer made known their dislike of Dr. Lindsay from the outset. Despite his obvious relish for the Great Books, many saw him as an outsider with a suspicious agenda. They complained when they discerned that he might be moving to make the founding documents of the United States more central to a Shimer education. In The Federalist Papers, a work that Dr. Lindsay would have liked Shimer's undergraduates to read cover to cover, Publius devotes the majority of the eighty-five essays to the republican character of the Constitution. Of the two species of popular government, republicanism had refining, insulating features that democracy did not. In fact, in The Federalist Papers, the word democracy appears less than a dozen times and when discussed in its pure form draws a pejorative contrast. In a society composed of a small number of persons, Publius warns, the "citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction," and they "are continually exposed, by their incapacity for regular deliberation and concerted measures, to the ambitious intrigues" of others. One would be hard-pressed to find in the United States an institution of higher learning with a more radically egalitarian and democratic structure than Shimer's. Three faculty members and two students sit as voting members on the board of trustees. Shimer's representative assembly consists of all students, faculty, and staff, with one vote each. Dominated by activist students, the assembly has set itself up as the moral authority of the college, and members reference the Assembly's majority votes as if they were exquisite expressions of Rousseau's general will. When dissidents protested that Dr. Lindsay was not sufficiently steeped in Shimer's traditions read that he refused to kow-tow to the majoritarian voice of the predominant element in Shimer's Assembly.

Continue reading "The Cave-Dwellers of Shimer" »

By Ward Connerly

Although my years of service on the University of California (UC) Board of Regents were the most tumultuous years of my life, my pride in the Board and the university that it serves has, until now, never wavered. But, a recent meeting and action by the Board has caused that feeling of pride to diminish.

At several UC campuses, a variety of incidents occurred several weeks ago that were characterized as creating a "toxic" racial climate for black students. The source of the "toxicity" came in the form of an off-campus party called the "Compton Cookout" and a noose found hanging inside the library at the UCSD campus.

In a little over a three-week period, racial epithets were allegedly directed at black students at UCSD; and, at other UC campuses, a swastika was carved into a Jewish student's door and derogatory graffiti was found at the gay and lesbian students' center.

These alleged incidents resulted in a delegation of students, faculty members and UC staff attending a meeting of the Board of Regents in late March to complain that the Regents weren't doing enough to create a climate that nurtures "inclusiveness," for minorities, such as blacks and gays/lesbians. With no effort to validate the assertions, several regents gushed into a state of apologia, as is customary for university governing board members in such circumstances.

Continue reading "More Subterfuge at UCal" »

By Cathy Young

During a conversation at an academic conference, a professor from an Ivy League school refers to two female graduate students as "black bitches." After the students report the incident, the professor apologizes -- but it takes another two months, and vociferous protests from the campus black community, for the university officials to acknowledge the issue publicly, announce mild sanctions against the professor, and state that an investigation was underway.

This is a true story currently unfolding at Cornell University. It is a story with a twist: the offending professor is himself black and teaches in the Africana Studies department, and the incident occurred at a conference on black intellectuals. And, in yet another twist that some have called karmic, the professor, Grant Farred, has now become a target of a rabid campaign that has all the hallmarks of a politically correct witch-hunt -- four years after he was at the forefront of a similar campaign at Duke University during the now-infamous rape hoax in which three white lacrosse team members were accused of assaulting a black stripper at a party.

Professor Farred's recent gaffe, while hardly commendable, seems to have been little more than a tacky attempt at humor -- humor which, compounding the irony, was probably rooted in the identity politics of black "authenticity" expressed through vulgar slang. Farred had invited the women, both of them his advisees, to a February 5-6 conference at the University of Rochester titled "Theorizing Black Studies: Thinking Black Intellectuals." The women arrived late, walking into the conference room in the middle of a panel. After the session ended, Farred came up to them, thanked them for making the drive to Rochester and then added, lowering his voice, "When you both walked in, I thought, 'Who are these black bitches?'"

Continue reading "A Dose of Poetic Justice at Cornell" »

By Ronald Radosh

Teaching in the universities about the so-called McCarthy era has become an area most susceptible to politically correct and one-sided views of what the period was all about. One historian who strenuously objects to the accepted left-wing interpretation that prevails in the academy is Jennifer Delton, Chairman of the Department of History at Skidmore College.

In the March issue of The Journal of the Historical Society Delton writes:

However fiercely historians disagree about the merits of American Communism, they almost universally agree that the post-World War II Red scare signified a rightward turn in American politics. The consensus is that an exaggerated, irrational fear of communism, bolstered by a few spectacular spy cases, created an atmosphere of persecution and hysteria that was exploited and fanned by conservative opportunists such as Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy. This hysteria suppressed rival ideologies and curtailed the New Deal, leading to a resurgence of conservative ideas and corporate influence in government. We may add detail and nuance to this story, but this, basically, is what we tell our students and ourselves about post-World War II anti-Communism, also known as McCarthyism. It is fundamentally the same story that liberals have told since Whittaker Chambers accused Alger Hiss of being a Communist spy in 1948.

This conventional narrative of the left has been told over and over for so many years that it has all but become the established truth to most Americans. It was exemplified in a best-selling book of the late 1970's, David Caute's The Great Fear, and from the most quoted one from the recent past, Ellen Schrecker's Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. My favorite title is one written by the late Cedric Belfrage, The American Inquisition 1945-1960: A Profile of the "McCarthy Era." In his book, Belfrage told the story of how he, an independent journalist who founded the fellow-traveling weekly The National Guardian, was hounded by the authorities and finally deported home to Britain. American concerns about Soviet espionage, he argued, were simply paranoia.

Continue reading "A Fresh View of Cold-War America" »

By KC Johnson

A few years ago, the University of Iowa's History Department conducted a search for a new hire in U.S. foreign relations. After the department denied a preliminary, or screening, interview to Mark Moyar---a highly qualified (B.A. summa cum laude in history from Harvard, Ph.D. In history from Cambridge), but also clearly conservative, historian---it came to light that the department's faculty had a Democrat-to-Republican ratio of 22:0.

The department's explanations for this discrepancy were almost comical. First, department chairman Colin Gordon attributed the department's not having hired any Republicans to the fact that "about two thirds of Johnson County are Democrats"---as if 67 percent equals 100 percent, and as if all of the applicants for jobs in Iowa's History Department came from the University's home county. Then he pled ignorance: "We do not know if an applicant belongs to the Republican Party, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Black Panthers or the Loyal Order of Water Buffalo." It was, the chairman implied, just a coincidence that the department hired for the position to which Moyar applied a professor whose first academic publication came in Radical History Review, and who committed to teaching courses in "Race, Gender and U. S. International History" and "Comparing Racial Formations."

As Mark Bauerlein observed at the time, "Think of what would happen if other diversities suffered the same disparate outcome. A department of all men would spark an outcry, and rightly so. But nobody seems to worry about the political skew." Gordon's response, on the other hand, made it perfectly clear that he and his colleagues found nothing undesirable about their one-sided partisan makeup, and wouldn't engage in any critical self-reflection about why their department's hiring process had skewed so overwhelmingly in one direction.

Political registration figures represent perhaps the crudest possible measurement tool to evaluate bias in History hiring processes. (For the record, I'm a registered Democrat who supported and donated to Barack Obama's 2008 primary and general election campaigns.) Whatever members of the Texas State Board of Education might think, there shouldn't a Democratic or Republican version of U.S. history. Yet a situation as extreme as Iowa's---and there's little indication that the partisan breakdown in Iowa's History Department differs all that much from that of most other major universities---does suggest something amiss.

As Gordon claimed, it's hard to imagine members of departmental search committees scouring the voter registration pages in applicants' hometowns to determine party registration, so as to eliminate Republicans or independents (though Cary Nelson has implied the AAUP doesn't deem such behavior inconsistent with defending academic freedom, particularly in an instance like Iowa's, in which the addition of a Republican might be "poisonous" to the department’s Democratic bubble).

The wildly one-sided registration figures are best seen more as a symptom than a cause of the disease that afflicts U.S. history in higher education, in that they provide additional, if indirect, evidence of the pedagogical bias that has infected the field.

Continue reading "The Skewing of American History" »

By John Rosenberg

On Monday the Supreme Court heard arguments in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, a case that pitted the right to free association against the principle of non-discrimination.

Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, part of the University of California system, has a policy stating that recognized student organizations "shall not discriminate unlawfully on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, disability, age, sex or sexual orientation." Based on that policy, it refused to grant official recognition (and hence access to college facilities, student funds, student email lists, etc) to the Christian Legal Society because that organization limited voting membership and the right to be an officer to those who share its Christian views.

According to critics, such as Justice Scalia, Hastings' policy is both "weird" and "crazy."

It is so weird to require the campus Republican Club to admit Democrats -- not just to membership, but to officership," Scalia said. "To require this Christian society to allow atheists not just to join, but to conduct Bible classes, right? That's crazy.

Continue reading "Bake Sale Argument in the Supreme Court" »

By Jonathan B. Imber

It is now nearly forty years since the sociologist Robert A. Nisbet published The Degradation of the Academic Dogma, followed two years later by Philip Rieff's Fellow Teachers. Then in the late 1980s, Allan Bloom's best-selling bombshell, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students took pride of place in the sublime critiques of the university. Taken together, these three books stood against a tide that could not be contained, leaving in its wake an even more emboldened organization determined to survive regardless of what it might discard as no longer relevant to its mission.

Nisbet's principal concern was about the emergence of what Clark Kerr called the "multiversity." He objected to the separation of research from teaching, and of teaching from research and anticipated that research might become so specialized that its teaching would crowd out the kinds of courses (and research) that could reach (and benefit) a larger number of students. He also recognized that for all the noses turned up at the professional schools (e.g., law and medicine), they succeeded for a time to bring teachers and students closely together: "Rare indeed during the two decades following the war was the law school that took to itself the kind of institute or project, the batteries of technicians and assistants, that one found in rising intensity coming out of allegedly liberal arts departments. To the present moment I dare say one is far more likely to come upon individual teaching (complete with reading of student examinations and frequent hours of consultation) and individual research in, say, the Harvard Law School than in the Harvard departments of sociology, English, and biology - much less physics and chemistry."

The transformative seeds were already planted in post-war enthusiasms for an academic culture in which gaining grants would eventually be matched by how many "public intellectuals" a school can boast. New opportunities to escape the timeless responsibilities of teaching abound. A controversy has ensued over what is being called the "outsourcing" of grading, taken out of the hands of the instructor (and/or teaching assistants) and given to companies who employ graders in Singapore, India and Malaysia. Along with accounts of the growth of adjunct faculty hired to teach a lot for very little, students and their families, it is argued, are hardly getting their money's worth. Editorialists at the Harvard Crimson complained that outsourcing evaluation "brings up concerns about the quality of contact that students are receiving in large classes." Outsourcing is the wrong description for giving over this particular responsibility of teaching to anyone other than the teacher. After all, teaching assistants have been overseeing grading in large lecture courses in universities for many decades. But this oversight was in principle part of learning to teach by learning to evaluate. Of course, it is easy to view such a principle cynically and to acknowledge that graduate students seeking to unionize have been given over to another kind of class struggle that marks the end of teaching as it once was embraced and practiced.

Continue reading "Degrading The Academic Vocation" »

By Mary Grabar

The teenage girl standing with her father in line behind me at Kroger was clearly annoyed with her teacher. "I just gave her some b.s.," she said.

They were discussing the school day, and a writing assignment. Her father asked her what the topic had been and between loading my items onto the conveyor belt I gathered that the assignment had involved a journal entry regarding feelings about family and living arrangements.

"Well," her father replied, "you could have answered that with fewer than twenty words: 'My parents went through a ten-year custody battle and now I live with my father.'"

"Yeah," the daughter replied, "she has no business knowing about that stuff."

I cheered her on inside, for her resistance to an intrusive English teacher.

When I started teaching college English as a graduate teaching assistant in the 1990s, I dutifully assigned the journals that were recommended in teaching workshops and instructors manuals. Such prewriting was supposed to free up the student's creativity.

But the journaling ended up producing exactly "b.s." Still, my colleagues lug around heavy piles of spiral notebooks with emotive scribblings of college freshmen. They also assign topics from the required textbooks.

I did too. In response to one topic that asked students to describe a learning experience, I received essays about first jobs, joy rides in parents' cars, and joyful births of out-of-wedlock children.

Continue reading ""Feelings" Education---It Starts in Ed School" »

By John Rosenberg

In his impressive recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the formerly banned Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan's first appearance in the United States, Peter Schmidt includes one tidbit that I found particularly interesting.

After noting that Ramadan faced a surprising number of critical questions from a Cooper Union audience thought to be overwhelmingly friendly, Schmidt added that Ramadan also

received support for his positions where it was not entirely expected. Such was the case, for example, when the discussion turned to the longstanding controversy over Mr. Ramadan's refusal to call for an outright ban on the stoning of Muslim women for adultery, and insistence that there should instead by a moratorium on stoning, in general, while Muslims jurists discuss whether it should continue. A fellow panelist, Joan Wallach Scott, a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study, in New Jersey, who identified herself as a feminist, said, "I actually think that his solution to the problem is not a bad one," because an end to stoning cannot be imposed on the Muslim world by the West.

Professor Scott is considerably more than just "a feminist," as she coyly described herself. In fact, she personifies the preconceptions and biases of academic women's studies and is one of the nation's leading feminist theorists and historians. Just ask her. Her posted biography claims that she

Continue reading "Feminist Scholar Can't Condemn Stoning of Muslim Women
(That Would Be Intolerant)" »

By Allison Kasic

At a time when every major bill coming out of Congress seems to push 2,000-plus pages, it is easy to forget that arguably the most sweeping and controversial piece of higher education policy in history, Title IX, was a mere 36 words in the Higher Education Amendments Act of 1972. Some laws, it turns out, pack quite the punch.

At first glance Title IX hardly seems controversial. It simply prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. In practice it affects everything from sexual harassment policies to staff hiring procedures to athletics programs. It is that last area that has sparked quite the firestorm, providing fodder for countless court cases, policy debates, gender equity seminars, and, most recently, a report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

The Commission's report, like most of the greater Title IX policy debate, centered on compliance - how does a school prove it has prohibited sex discrimination in its athletics programs? The critical guidance on this front came in 1979 from the Office for Civil Rights, now housed within the U.S. Department of Education, in what is commonly called Title IX's "three-prong test." Under this test, a school can prove compliance by one of three methods: a) showing that intercollegiate participation opportunities for male and female students are provided in numbers substantially proportionate to their respective enrollments, b) showing a history and continuing practice of program expansion in response to the interest and abilities of the underrepresented sex, or c) demonstrating that the interests and abilities of members of the "underrepresented" sex have been fully and effectively accommodated by the school's program.

Continue reading "A Move Toward Common Sense on Title IX" »

By Jackson Toby

Jackson Toby, professor emeritus of sociology at Rutgers and author of the new book, The Lowering of Higher Education in America, delivered this speech yesterday (April 7) at a luncheon in New York City. The luncheon, at the University Club, was sponsored by the Manhattan Institute's Center for the American University and Minding the Campus.

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"Is College Graduation Enough for a Good Job or Do College Graduates Have to Know Something?" That's the title of one chapter of my new book. And in an effort to illustrate the problems of evaluating what contemporary college graduates know, I began the chapter with the lyrics of "Brush Up Your Shakespeare" from Cole Porter's 1948 hit musical Kiss Me Kate.

Broadway audiences didn't necessarily have to know that the musical was based on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, but it helped. Porter graduated from Yale nearly a century ago. In that era a Yale graduate---or a graduate of any American university---had to have had some exposure to the plays of Shakespeare, because it was an era during which a college education referred to a corpus of common intellectual experiences. Colleges usually had a core curriculum that all graduates had to take, whatever their major or their interests. "Brush Up Your Shakespeare," contained references to Homer, English poets, the Greek playwrights Aeschylus and Euripides, a mention of the "Bard of Stratford-on-Avon," the town where Shakespeare was born, and puns involving titles to several of Shakespeare's plays: Othello, Anthony and Cleopatra, Much Ado about Nothing, Coriolanus, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Members of the audience who did not know at least the titles couldn't understand fully Porter's witticisms. Consider a few lines from the lyrics:

Continue reading "On Pigeons, Pells and Student Incentives" »

By J.M. Anderson

In his recent essay, "Why the Great Books Aren't the Answer," Patrick Deneen is correct about many things. He is correct to criticize conservative supporters of great books like Allan Bloom and William Bennett who see them as a throwback to the "good old days" of liberal education. He is correct to point out the shortcomings of advocates like Anthony Kroman who view them as a means to combat postmodernism and keep relativism and political correctness at bay. He is also correct to point out that these books "contain a wide and ranging set of debates over the nature of the good and best life, the good and best polity, the good and best economic system, and so on." Even a superficial reading of them will show that they are rent with discord and do not indoctrinate.

I agree with most of what Deneen says, but unfortunately he misses the point about the great books. Like most liberal critics of the canon---and even many conservative supporters---he writes about these books on political and philosophical, not pedagogical, grounds. As a result---again like most critics and many supporters of these books---he fails to address their primary value as tools of instruction that must be central to the undergraduate curriculum because they are the best and most efficient means to achieve the aims of liberal education.

True, the great books preserve a tradition and connect us with the past, as Bloom and Bennett have argued. But equally important is how they educate us as we read them; how they reinforce the varieties of knowledge, the skills, and the habits of thought and mind appropriate to free and cultured human beings; above all else, how they teach us to "read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit," which Thoreau reminds us "is a noble exercise" that "will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem" and "requires a training such as the athletes underwent." The great books are the answer because they promote continuity in the curriculum, reinforce the connections between the courses that students take, and foster genuine synergy of learning in the classroom.

The great books connect us with the past because they invite us to listen to and participate in the great conversations of the ages. "Great books of every civilization," says Thoreau, "are the voices of human experience and as such worth reading and pondering." They are a form of travel in time and space, allowing us to experience vicariously what others have thought, felt, and even seen. They enlarge our perspectives and strip us of our provincialism. They can free us from our self-imposed nonage and transform us, as Candide was transformed in Voltaire's story, a modern version of Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

Continue reading "Why the Great Books Are the Answer" »

By Susan Pinker

If only Carole Carrier and her peers felt more aggrieved, the new report released by the American Association of University Women on women in science would make more sense. On the day the AAUW report was released, Carrier, a 34 year-old mechanical engineer who works part-time, was walking down the street in early spring with her 20 month old son, Luke, and her mother, Anita. They were on their way to see the spring flower display in the municipal greenhouse when we all stopped for a neighborly chat. "I've never experienced bias," said Carrier, her pale eyes registering surprise when I described the gist of the report. Standing on the sidewalk, I summarized its main points: that women avoid going into STEM careers (science, technology, engineering and math) because hidden cultural signals have persuaded them that women don't have what it takes to succeed in those fields. The few women who do buck these stereotypes then tend to abandon their career plans due to implicit gender biases and university science programs that make women feel unwelcome. Hence, a ratio of women in physical science and math that won't budge past 20 percent, and the title of the report,"Why So Few?"

But Carrier, like many female engineers and scientists I've spoken to over the past five years, was frankly puzzled about why anyone might see her as a victim. All along she has felt her choices were entirely her own. She always liked math and was encouraged by her parents, especially her father, who also likes numbers, to study Pure and Applied Science. Then she went into a Forestry program, but she switched out of that because "it was too touchy-feely. It was like, is this environment good for squirrels? I needed to go into something where there's a right answer." So she transferred into agricultural engineering, and told me she enjoyed it immensely---the university program, as well as the work that came afterwards. So, what about the AAUW's conclusion that women avoid studying engineering because role models are scarce, and university programs are hostile to women? "Hostile environment? Not at all. We had excellent professors. Many female professors, too." There were also many other young women in the program, she said, because students could specialize in food or water treatment and most of the women planned to work in the developing world. Not Carole. "From university I went to work at a cement company because of my love of heavy machinery. They have their own open pit mine, and it was fantastic! I loved every minute of it. I loved the work, and the people there. We worked extremely well together. I started out as a mechanical engineer working on reliability issues, then worked on production, then on machinery output." The company was good at staff development, offering courses and the opportunity to advance, she added, and she "mixed well" with employees, and was well-liked, especially on the shop floor, where she considered other employees' real life expertise as instructive as her academic training. She even had an octengenarian male mentor. Hers seemed like an unequivocally happy story, so thin on the ground these days.

Continue reading "On Women, STEM and Hidden Bias" »

By John Rosenberg

Sometimes it seems as though the most heavily researched, richly funded area of American science today involves studies of why there aren't more women in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) and efforts to induce, recruit, and retain more of them.

In her article for Minding the Campus, Susan Pinker deftly punctures the omissions and evasions of the most recent such study, the AAUW's "Why So Few?", pointing out how that study's predictable bogeymen of "stereotyping" and "unconscious bias" denigrate the choices many women freely make.

There is nothing new about this attempt (dare one call it patronizing?) to deny and denigrate women's choices. A generation ago, for example, in its spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to hold Sears, Roebuck responsible for the "underrepresentation" of women in such jobs as installing home heating and cooling systems, (EEOC v. Sears, Roebuck and Co. 628 F. Supp. 1264 (1986), 839 F.2d 302 (1988)), the EEOC submitted testimony from an expert witness (Alice Kessler Harris, a prominent women's historian) that discrimination was the only possible explanation for such "underrepresentation" because "where opportunity has existed, women have never failed to take the job offered.... Failure to find women in so-called non-traditional jobs can thus only be interpreted as a consequence of employers' discrimination."

Continue reading "The Misguided Push for STEM Diversity" »

By Patrick Deneen

For several decades, conservative critics of higher education have argued against trends toward the elimination of "core" curricula and with equal ferocity against their replacement by "distribution requirements" or even open curricula. They have, in particular, defended a curriculum in "Great Books," those widely-recognized texts in the Western tradition authored by the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Mill, and Nietzsche, among others. This curriculum - preserved still in some of the nation's leading universities such as the University of Chicago and Columbia University - as well as at the heart of the longstanding Great Books approach of St. John's College - is seen as a bulwark against contemporary tendencies toward relativism, post-modernism, and political correctness.

More recently, even some faculty who would eschew the "conservative" label have sought to restore sustained study of the Great Books to some place of pride in the curriculum. Some twenty years after the height of the "culture wars" over the Western canon - during which the phrase "Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go" was chanted on the Stanford campus - there seems to be a growing sense among some moderate faculty that the curriculum has become too fragmented, and that something valuable was lost in the politically-motivated elimination of a common core. Notably, at Harvard an ad hoc effort by some faculty to establish a Great Books track in the "Gen Ed" requirement was advanced before crashing on the shoals of Harvard's new fiscal reality (as well as the opposition of some faculty).

This reassessment has been most articulately argued by Anthony Kronman - a moderate liberal - in his recent book Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. Kronman, a professor and former Dean at the Yale Law School, laments the abandonment of a serious engagement with the Great Books. Their neglect has led to the decline of an examination of "the meaning of life," an activity that he argues should be at the heart of the university experience. He praises a period in the history of American universities which was dominated by what he calls a worldview of "secular humanism." This period of "secular humanism" followed the widespread disaffiliation of traditionally religious institutions and preceded the rise of the modern research university and the concomitant rise of political correctness in the humanities. He urges modern institutions of higher education to adopt something like the Yale program in "Directed Studies" - in which he teaches - which requires students to engage in a concentrated study of the Great books ranging from Homer to Luther, from Machiavelli to Kant, from Plato to Nietzsche - over a two year span.

Continue reading "Why the Great Books Aren't the Answer" »

By Joe Malchow

I once asked a pilot friend if he didn't tire of the lumbering, leviathan commercial airliner he flew. He surprised me by saying that a 747 can handle like a Lamborghini if ever it needed to.

A bit of that seems to be underway in Hanover, New Hampshire, where the new president of Dartmouth College, my alma mater, is responding with alacrity to the slackening economy. Even given the market's nosedive, Dartmouth possesses a substantial multi-billion dollar endowment and employs nearly 2,800 full-time equivalent staff and 450 faculty. That's a rather large organization---one now operating at a loss of $34 million.

But Dartmouth has one big asset: a group of Carl Icahnesque independent trustees who were elected by worried alumni in 2004, 2005, and 2008. These outsiders were vigorously resisted by Dartmouth---whose power establishment didn't want activist directors---but the outsiders' platforms of staunch fiscal conservatism and a leap out of the thicket of professional educrats won the day. After all, who needs a "Sustainability Director" or a "Dean of Pluralism"?

Alumni responded by their levels of giving, and Dartmouth's former president, historian James Wright, responded by resigning his post early. In that position, now, is Jim Kim, the Harvard doctor who has never been the head of a major organization but who has now been thrown into a parlous billet.

Continue reading "Dartmouth Turns on a Dime" »

By Donald Downs

A student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin-Madison drew an unusual and alarming advertising request for its online edition. The request to the Badger Herald came a few weeks ago from an agent for Bradley R. Smith, a notorious denier of the Holocaust and founder of the loopy fringe group, Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust. Unlike ads in the Herald's paper edition, online ads linger for a month, providing more opportunity for mischief.

Like some other controversies involving the Herald in recent years, this episode began, essentially, as an accident. The process involved in the placing of ads did not fully vet Smith's advertisement, which announced his mission and provided an Internet link to his group and other materials. The ad remained on line unnoticed for five days before persons at Hillel, the Jewish center, noticed it and urged the Herald to withdraw it

Many Jewish students had already felt aggrieved by the Herald because of another incident a few weeks before Smith's ad appeared. Anonymous sources had published threatening anti-Semitic remarks in the "Comments" sections that accompanied the paper's stories of incidents relating to a party at a Jewish fraternity. Alarmed, the Herald expunged these comments, but only after the damage was done.

Made aware of Smith's ad, the Herald's board had to decide what to do. The board of nine students votes independently, but the students consider advice given by faculty members who do not have voting power. Advisors (I am one) provide advice in a manner that is designed to preserve the independence of the board. At a meeting the board voted to do two things: keep the ad up, and produce an editorial, written by editor in chief Jason Smathers, making clear that Holocaust denial is a pernicious fraud that lies outside the bounds of rational debate. I supported these decisions as an advisor. The editorial was a sign that the board knew Smith's ad was different from the usual controversial ads.

Continue reading "Hate and Free Speech at Wisconsin" »