By Russell Nieli

Several years ago a Korean-American student in one of my politics classes at Princeton described the reaction of his Asian classmates in the California private school he attended when the college acceptance and rejection letters arrived in the mail the spring of their senior year. A female Black student, he explained, had applied to more than half a dozen of the most prestigious colleges and universities in the nation and got accepted to all of them, deciding eventually to enroll at Stanford. Many of his Asian friends, he said, along with many Whites, reacted bitterly to the Black student's success, some in open disbelief that this student could be so phenomenally successful in her college search. Why was there such bitterness among his classmates, I wanted to know. "Were there better qualified Asian and White students with higher SAT scores than the Black student?" I asked. "Better qualified?!" he said, "there were loads of Asian and White students who were much better qualified, with much higher SAT scores, much higher grade point averages, and who were much more active in student government and a host of other extra-curricular activities than this Black student." To add further fuel to his classmates' anger, he went on, this particular Black student had a cold, off-putting, self-centered personality which hardly endeared her to her classmates. "She didn't make it on charm" was the gist of his further remarks here.

This Korean student's story was in the back of my mind as I read the newspaper accounts about the racial discrimination complaint lodged not long ago with the Department of Education against Princeton University by Jian Li, the Chinese-American student at Yale who had a perfect 2400 (i.e. three 800s) on the newer version of the SAT. Li was a stellar student in high school, who in addition to his perfect SAT score achieved near-perfect scores on several of the College Board achievement tests (SAT IIs), took nine Advanced Placement courses, and had a near-perfect grade-point-average that placed him in the 99th percentile of his graduating class in a competitive suburban high school. In addition to his top-of-the line academic performance, Li was active in a number of extracurricular activities, and was a delegate to the prestigious Boys State. All of this would be an impressive achievement for anyone, but Li was the son of Chinese immigrants, his first language was Chinese, and English was not spoken in his home. Li's academic achievement was a truly remarkable and inspiring story of talent, persistence, and the immigrant work ethic in pursuit of the American Dream.

Li was happy at Yale and lodged his complaint not because of any animus against Princeton -- Princeton was only one of five elite universities that rejected his application (Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Penn were the others) -- but because of a general sense that Asian applicants to elite colleges were being unjustly disfavored in comparison to the members of other minority groups, especially Blacks and Hispanics, and were not being evaluated fairly under the same set of academic standards as others. For anyone familiar with the admissions policies at the more selective colleges and universities over the past thirty years, Li's complaint not only rang true but has been well-documented again and again wherever the situation has been adequately studied. The simple fact is that a Black or Hispanic student with Li's credentials would almost certainly have gained admission to every elite institution he or she applied to. Indeed, an "underrepresented minority student" would have stood a decent chance of gaining admission to some of the schools Li was rejected at with test scores a hundred to two-hundred points below each of his scores on the three-part SAT exam.

Continue reading "Is There An Asian Ceiling?" »

By Joe Malchow

Given their common characteristics it's often difficult for a person of even superior discernment to tell, from a slight distance, the difference between an accomplished university bureaucrat and a robust brick wall. Both seem witlessly to beg for the wrecking ball. The nation's nine colonial colleges---not to mention the hundreds founded since---are thronged with administrative employees whose job it is to justify the outsized administration of the college or university that employs them. On the whole, these congeries of deans report that things are not going very well, that manifold "issues" of tremendous consequence beg resolution, and that, darn it, they just need more manpower. They recommend more deans.

And they are generously obliged on that score. The fact that, on the margin, American colleges now privilege the task of thickening the ranks of bureaucrats over that of educating their students is one reason that alumni---whose gifts are the lifeblood of the colonial institutions, at least---are in "revolt" mode, to use The Wall Street Journal's word. At the front of the fight, facing across the wind-swept college green the marshaled deanery, are the students and alumni of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Reacting to all manner of absurdities---such as the fact that from 2001 to 2006, Dartmouth added twice as many administrators as faculty members---Dartmouth alumni have voted in, four times in a row since 2004, activist trustees who pledged to hold the College's executives to account. At most publicly traded companies the election by the shareholders of an activist board-member cues, if not a resignation, then at least an episode of doleful reckoning on the part of the chief executive. At Dartmouth, the election of four independent trustees resulted in ever more pitched protests from the cocksure deanery; like any bureaucracy, it had become so thoroughly insulated from external inquiry that the notion of it having erred was imponderable.

After the fourth independent trustee was elected in May of 2007, the rubber-stamp set decided to attenuate the fractious independents by "packing" Dartmouth's board. Traditionally half alumni-elected and half self-appointed, the Board under a September 2007 plan would become two-thirds self-appointed and one-third elected - in consequence castrating the elected minority.

Continue reading "How Dartmouth Thwarted Its Alumni" »

By Mark Bauerlein

Observing the sparring that has taken place between professors and conservative/libertarian critics outside the academy, many laypersons must wonder why professors grow so indignant over the criticism. They understand why professors disagree and want to defend themselves, but why so defensive? Why get mad? Other professions get chided - lawyers, doctors, politicians - and they respond, sometimes at least, with concessions and reforms, not "How dare you say that to us?" All-too-often, though, academics have acted with thin skins and prickly sensitivities, rarely to their advantage.

Several causes are at work here, but one of them is hard to discern if you haven't pursued an academic career, and it's insufficiently appreciated by outsiders.

It stems from a relentless truth of professional life for professors in the humanities and "softer" social sciences. The truth is this: when it comes to your status, you aren't judged by how much money you bring the university or how much your students learn. Instead, you are what others say you are. At each stage in a career, advancement depends on the words and opinions of teachers and colleagues. Entry into graduate school rested on the admissions committee, and every semester afterwards each seminar paper grade indicated whether you had a future or not. Three professors approved your dissertation and granted you a PhD. You went on the job market and a hiring committee liked your dossier, three professors in a hotel room at the annual convention smiled at your interview, and you won a tenure-track job offer. A couple of years later, two expert readers of manuscripts for scholarly presses liked your work and you got a book into print. When the department met to review your record, some senior colleagues in related fields approved of your research, teaching, service, and tenure finally arrived.

Each threshold seemed like life or death, the professors in charge rendering Olympian judgment. Their opinion meant everything, and it happened over and over for 12-15 years from the time you entered graduate school to the golden day of tenure. The scrutiny has a deep and long-term effect. No wonder professors come to think that opinions in public life carry the same weight. They rarely do, but academics have spent so many years in a gauntlet of appraisals that they've become touchy and wary. If a letter from an authority in the field carries so much weight in the cloistered spaces of an academic department, just think what a column on liberal bias by George Will in the Washington Post can do.

This is a mis-estimation of off-campus debate, of course, for public life allows for lots more criticism and raillery than scholarly exchange does. Furthermore, the recourse to "You don't understand what we do" doesn't work. The more academics slide into pique when ACTA issues another report on academic freedom, the more they yield the terrain to the critics. Too much time living in the shadow of judgment freezes them up or ticks them off when outsiders challenge their practice. Years of building a reputation renders them inept in ideological battles outside of professional zones. This is one cause of indignation, and until they overcome it, academics will remain in a rearguard posture in public life. And, in a regrettable corollary, within professional zones they will remain intractable and insular. Peer review was never supposed to work this way.

-------------------------------------------

Mark Baulerlein is a Professor of English at Emory University and former Director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts

By Thomas Lipscomb

As the twelve-year tenure of popular President Timothy Sullivan drew to a close in the Spring of 2005, the search for his successor was well underway. Under the direction of the Rector of the College's governing Board of Visitors, Susan Magill, a political appointee whose day job was chief of staff for Virginia Senator John Warner, there were three finalists for the Presidency. Two of them were deans currently serving at the College, in education and law, and the dean of the law school at the University of North Carolina.

That was a tip off that something was drastically wrong with the search conducted by second- tier search firm Isaacson, Miller. If a management consultant is often derided as someone "who borrows your watch and then charges you to tell you what time it is," a search firm that can come up with only one finalist for a position as President at a college like William and Mary who isn't already on campus can't be doing much of a job. And the idea of a dean in one of the most mediocre fields at any liberal arts college, education, being considered as head of a "public ivy" was bizarre. Magill was urged to cancel the search and hire another firm. She refused.

On of the search firm's complicating factors was that Magill and her Board had insisted that the three finalists be exposed in a public beauty contest to the College students and faculty who would have a voice in the selection. The best candidates quite often prefer to keep their considerations of other professional options private so they can keep their options open. That obviously was no problem for two deans already at the College or the expansive Nichol, who was perfectly comfortable running for Congress and the Senate and treating the faculty and students of the College to a South Texas cornpone charm offensive.

Nichol was selected to serve beginning in July 2005. His position was difficult. Sullivan, his predecessor, had been an alum of William and Mary, married to an alumna, a Vietnam veteran, a Harvard law graduate, a high official under Virginia's Governor Robb, a dean at the William and Mary's Marshall-Wythe Law School, and both popular and effective as a fund raiser and for his ability to get appropriations from the Virginia legislature. Fortunately Sullivan supported Nichol's candidacy. He had been Nichol's boss when Nichol had been head of a Bill of Rights Center at the W&M law school.

Continue reading "Trainwreck At William And Mary" »

By Peter D. Salins

What are we to make of the decision by a growing number of "highly selective" colleges to scrap the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) as a criterion for college admission, something brought to our attention recently when another pair of semi-elite schools (Smith and Wake Forest) joined these ranks? The New York Times story of May 27 reporting on the Smith/Wake Forest developments explains the matter thus: "The number of colleges and universities where such tests are now optional... ...has been growing steadily as more institutions have become concerned about the validity of standardized tests in predicting academic success, and the degree to which test performance correlates with household income, parental education and race." If this is really what is driving the SAT defectors, they are deceiving themselves and misleading the public.

Let's begin with predictive validity. Among the countless studies done on this subject over the years, not a single one has failed to find a high correlation between SAT scores and academic performance in college, as measured by grades or persistence. On a personal note, during my ten years as Provost of SUNY, I had my institutional research staff repeatedly review the relationship between SAT scores and academic success among our 33 baccalaureate campuses and their 200,000 + students, and found - as all the national research has confirmed - a near perfect correlation. SUNY schools and students with higher SAT profiles had higher grade point averages and markedly higher graduation rates.

The other claim of test critics is that high school grade point averages are equal to or better than SATs as predictors of college performance. This, too, is inaccurate. Looking at all U.S. high school graduates in any given year, we find the distribution of grade point averages (GPAs) is remarkably uniform - and invariably bell-shaped - across the nation despite enormous local and regional differences in high school quality or curricula. There is statistically no way that such similar high school GPA profiles could accurately reflect the highly variable academic abilities of the American high school graduating cohort. If there is any truth at all to the claims of SAT defectors in this regard, it is that among their own students - most of whom have graduated from academically superior public or private schools - SATs and high school GPAs are highly correlated. Analysts have pointed out, however, that if high school GPAs were to more generally replace SATs as the primary admissions criterion to get into top colleges, grade inflation would very likely erode the predictive validity of GPAs even at privileged public or private high schools.

Continue reading "Abandoning The SAT - Fraud or Folly?" »

By Jan Niklas Wolfe

The overwhelming majority of American catholic colleges won't be honoring public figures that flout church teaching at this year's commencement exercises, according to the Cardinal Newman Society, the conservative Catholic watchdog group. Of the hundreds of men and women who will be awarded honorary degrees by the nation's 225 Catholic universities this month, the Society labels only 6 as dissenters on key moral issues (abortion, as always, seems to be the biggie), down from 24 in 2006 and 13 in 2007, according to the Boston Globe.

As the Globe's Michael Paulson points out, pro-choice catholic politicians are the most obvious snubs. Rudy Giuliani, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, and Ted Kennedy, all regulars on the commencement speaker circuit, will not be addressing a catholic college's graduating class this year.

Many catholic schools, particularly the smaller, more conservative institutions, seem to have genuinely taken to heart the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops advice from 2004 that "the Catholic community and the institutions which are a part of our family of faith should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles."

For schools like Notre Dame, Georgetown, and Boston College, which have large, politically diverse student bodies and faculties, as well as the prestige to lure big names if they want to, the move away from politicians as speakers may also be borne at least in part from a desire to avoid partisan rancor that detracts from the communal nature of commencement. Boston College, in particular, has drawn ire from all directions over its choice in partisan honorees in the past. Extending invitations to socially liberal honorees like Warren B. Rudman (1992) and Janet Reno (1997) has been panned by more conservative voices within the church, while attempts to honor Bush administration officials like Condoleezza Rice (2006) and Michael Mukasey (Law School, 2008) have angered pacifist Jesuits on campus and the more left-leaning lay faculty. It's not surprising that this year the school opted for the very non-controversial historian David McCullough.

Continue reading "Who Should Speak At Catholic Colleges?" »

By KC Johnson

This past winter, Andy Ram and Jonathan Erlich, a men's doubles team who captured the 2008 Australian Open championship, announced plans to enter the ATP tournament in Dubai. Normally, tennis players' schedules aren't big news. But Ram and Erlich are citizens of Israel, and the government of the United Arab Emirates prohibits holders of Israeli passports from entering the country. (Indeed, a UAE visa page can't even bring itself to concede that the country's name is legitimate: "Nationals of 'Israel' may not enter the UAE.") At the last minute, despite ATP rules that should have guaranteed both their entrance into the tournament and their safety while in Dubai, the duo withdrew - acting under pressure, it was widely believed, from the ATP tour and the UAE government.

Given the contemporary academy's professed celebration of "tolerance" and "diversity," at first blush it might seem inconceivable that a major research university would establish a co-equal branch of its institution in a country that discriminates on the basis of national identity. Yet NYU is planning to do just that. A university press release described "NYU Abu Dhabi," which will open in 2010, as "a major step in the evolution of NYU as a 'global network university."

The university, which the Abu Dhabi government will fund, "will be a residential research university built with academic quality and practices consistent with the prevailing standards at NYU's Washington Square campus, including adherence to its standards of academic freedom. The development of all the programs at the Abu Dhabi campus will be overseen by the New York-based faculty and senior administrators." And graduates will receive the same NYU degrees given to students who attend the university in Manhattan.

NYU Abu Dhabi is the handiwork of NYU president James Sexton, who sees the new university as a step ahead in globalization. It's also a step ahead for NYU's finances. The Abu Dhabi government has already given a $50 million "down payment" for the institution, with promises of more money to come - including assistance for NYU's endowment, which lags well behind that of Harvard, Yale, or Princeton.

In an interview with New York, Sexton came across as at best a naif and at worst an academic version of George W. Bush peering into Vladimir Putin's soul. The NYU president recalled an instant "electric" connection in which "the crown prince told me that he felt it in my handshake, in my eyes, in my aura at that first meeting... I knew right then and there that we had found our partner."

Continue reading "NYU's Middle East Problem" »

By Peter Wood

The student loan crisis - or near crisis; narrowly-averted crisis ; or postponed crisis - no one is sure - comes co-incidentally at a moment when many colleges and universities are once again repackaging their basic programs. The new buzzword, as John Leo has pointed out is "sustainability." I also recently tried my hand at unpacking this polyvalent idea. "Sustainability" sounds to the uninitiated as though it is about environmentalism, but it is much more. As I wrote in Inside Higher Education, many of the advocates of "sustainability" see it as an encompassing concept. It includes science, economics, and the social structure. And for many in the movement, the focus on social order is the basis for far-reaching attempts to advance "social justice" policies.

I doubt this development has come into focus for many parents or people outside the campus. The campus left learned with its promotion of the concept of "diversity" the advantages of packaging hard-core ideology in bland, feel-good terminology. Sustainability is another venture in this direction. No one can really be against sustainability (definition 1) - prudent use of resources with the needs of future generations in mind. But while most of us hear the word in that sense, campus ideologues are busy rearranging the curriculum and student life around "sustainability" (definition 2) - a condition that arises when capitalism and hierarchy are abolished; individuals are made to see themselves as "citizens of the world;" and a new order materializes on the basis of eco-friendliness, social justice, and new forms of economic distribution.

Sustainability (2) is an amalgam of environmental extremism, shards of Marxism, romantic utopianism, and identity group politics. It doesn't have a significant political following in America outside college campuses, and in that sense it is a fringe movement. But on campus it's everywhere. Hundreds of campuses now have sustainability officers, courses that promote the ideology, and most ominously, "co-curricular" programs run through student life and residence halls that attempt to "educate" students about their mistaken "worldviews" and bring them aboard this new ideological ark.

Continue reading "What Does 'Sustainability' Have to Do With Student Loans?" »

By John K. Wilson

The Faculty Senate at the University of Delaware is meeting later today to discuss approving the controversial Residence Life (ResLife) proposal for educational programming in the residence halls. The faculty should approve the proposal, partly because it's a good idea, but primarily because academic freedom is endangered whenever voluntary educational programs are banned. Conservative critics of the program are demanding censorship of ideas they dislike, and the Faculty Senate at a free university must not participate in such repression.

The only relevant question is whether the ResLife program violates the rights of students by compelling them to participate or censoring their views. There is not even a shred of evidence that this is the case, and the program explicitly says otherwise. There is no compulsion to participate or agree, there is no grading, there is no threat at all to a student's academic progress or to a student's ability to remain in a residence hall. In terms of compulsion, there is no there there, and no amount of hyperbolic fantasizing about what might happen can change this fact. The fact that in the past there were some minor issues about intrusive questions being asked of students by RAs is irrelevant to the consideration of this current program.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) claims, "Saying that the programming will be optional is hard to swallow. After all, how can a freshman, first day on campus, opt out at a time of great social pressure to do the activities everyone else is doing, and without full knowledge of what the program really entails?" Easy: stay in your room, hang out with other people, and ignore what the ResLife staff does.

FIRE is infantilizing college students, treating them like dumb puppies who will follow administrators mindlessly if any programming is allowed in residence hall. This is demeaning and insulting to all students, since it presumes that students would be better off with nothing to do rather than running the "risk" of being pressured to attend an event.

It is the liberal content of the program that FIRE and other conservative critics object to. FIRE argues that ResLife's proposal is "soaked in a highly politicized social and political agenda." I agree. It is a politicized agenda. Virtually all intellectual activity has a politicized agenda, because important ideas are political. ResLife promotes social justice and civic engagement, and these are political values (albeit not very radical ones). I think these are good political values, and conservatives disagree, but that doesn't matter. If ResLife was proposing to promote abstinence and other conservative values, I might disagree with them, but I would never seek to ban any of their activities. Instead, I would express my views and organize activities that reflect my values. So why won't these conservative groups try counterspeech instead of suppression?

Continue reading "Unsustainable? A Defense Of ResLife At Delaware" »

By Adam Kissel

[Read John K. Wilson's defense of Delaware ResLife here]

The University of Delaware Office of Residence Life has tricked another outsider, John K. Wilson, into believing that its proposal to run a highly politicized indoctrination program for over 7,000 students in the school's residence halls is actually just a free exploration of diverse views in a spirit of open debate. Anyone who knows the facts on the ground knows that this is not so.

For Wilson, "The only relevant question is whether the ResLife program violates the rights of students by compelling them to participate or censoring their views. There is not even a shred of evidence that this is the case." Not only is this dead wrong (there is plenty of evidence that students were compelled to participate and even had reports filed against them when they did not "correctly" participate), Wilson fundamentally misrepresents the proposal, last year's program, and the critics. The problem for his argument is that the evidence for indoctrination and mandatory participation is everywhere.

The ResLife directors are the same people who did everything they could to make students aware it was mandatory, while claiming to their superiors it was not. RAs were instructed to tell students that the programming was mandatory. RAs wrote, for instance, about floor meetings, "Not to scare anyone or anything, but these are MANDATORY!" Last year's 500 pages of documentation contain many strong assertions that every student "must" be reached with ResLife's agenda. ResLife advertised an "every-student" model as opposed to the traditional model of residence hall programming. Can ResLife now be trusted with highly politicized educational programming in the very place where students live, socialize, do work, and sleep?

Continue reading "Unsustainable? No, Wilson Is Wrong" »

By Richard D. Kahlenberg

Despite a great flurry of activity to expand financial aid at selective colleges over the past several years, a new study by the Chronicle of Higher Education reported this gloomy bottom line: "Top Colleges Admit Fewer Low-Income Students." As someone who has worked for more than a decade to push colleges to enroll more economically disadvantaged kids of all races, the news was disappointing, though not altogether surprising. For years, elite colleges have assembled freshmen classes that include upper-middle class and wealthy students of all races and declared themselves to be diverse. New financial aid policies alone were unlikely to change that pattern.

The Chronicle study found that the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants declined at the wealthiest 75 private and 39 public colleges and universities between the 2004-05 and 2006-07 academic years. In the 75 private institutions with the largest endowments, 13.1% of undergraduates in 2006-07 received Pell Grants, which typically go to students from families earning less than $40,000 a year, down from 14.3% two years earlier. In 39 public institutions with endowments of $500 million or more, 18% were Pell Grant recipients in 2006-07compared with 19.6% two years earlier.

The news is particularly troubling given the high profile efforts announced in recent years by some 40 top colleges and universities to provide more generous financial aid to struggling families. Why did less, rather than more, economic diversity follow? The primary reason is that aid policies are only part of what drives enrollment. In order to receive aid, low-income and working class students must first be admitted. Because such students often attend lousy schools, even highly talented and hard working students - who have tremendous potential - don't look as good on paper as their more privileged colleagues. Research finds that while colleges and universities give substantial preferences to under-represented minorities (blacks, Latinos and Native Americans) and other groups, they give basically no preference to economically disadvantaged students, despite claims to the contrary.

Continue reading "Still Forgotten: Low Income Students At Selective Colleges" »

By Donald Downs

This past weekend Columbia University held a commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the 1968 Student Strike that shook Columbia and all of higher education. For a week, student activists occupied five buildings in protest of several policies, including ROTC's presence on campus, the university's relationship to the Department of Defense and the war in Vietnam, the intrusion of a new gymnasium into the neighboring African-American community, and a host of student power issues. After violent clashes between police and students brought the university to the precipice, the students won virtually all of their demands. Columbia and higher education in general have never been the same since those climactic events.

The actions of 1968 were of profound importance, calling for a thorough, critical examination in the light of the intervening forty years. Unfortunately, the panels and events over the weekend appear to have fallen short of this hope. Critical viewpoints were not showcased, and a feeling of nostalgia often held sway. Interestingly, this result was as American as apple pie.

We Americans are known for our penchant for nostalgia. We make fun of this sentiment all the time, but few of us are immune to its lures. It's a peculiarly American trait because it is the logical product of combining non-tragic (or anti-tragic) liberal sentimentality with the unavoidable interest in the past. We care about the past, but not enough to let it drag us down with the weight of tragedy. Reinhold Niebuhr, the renowned theologian and foreign policy thinker who taught at Columbia University's Union Theological Seminary from 1930 to 1960 (he even has a street named after him on the campus), captured better than anyone the American peoples' difficulty in fathoming tragedy and evil - including the tragedy and evil in their own hearts. In addressing the Cold War and the drive for social justice, Niebuhr called for a mentality that could face good and evil in oneself and in others, and tragedy and hope, without caving into either naive optimism or dismissive cynicism and Machiavellianism. He called the acolytes of the former mentality the "children of light," the latter the "children of darkness." Charting a middle course, Niebuhr advocated a more enlightened sense of balance that amounted to a more responsible form of civic education.

Continue reading "Columbia's 68 Celebration: Only Radicals Need Apply" »

By Chris Kulawik

If you closed your eyes it sounded like any other college reunion.

Men clamored and women shrieked as old faces called to them from the growing crowd. They were old friends and classmates some four decades removed.

"I can't believe," echoed the voices of the baby-boomer crowd, "it was exactly a hundred years ago today. It's been so long"

"I know," replied one, mechanically, as if she had answered that call so many times before, "everyone changes."

They spoke of lost love and life, "summering spots" in Southampton, top twenty law schools for their kids, stock options and investments. More than one bragged about the new family sedan.

But as you opened your eyes the room changed. As the graying crowd ebbed towards the laughably bourgeoisie wine and cheese bar, name tags flashed against their crisply tailored pink shirts and retro-chic blouses:

"Tom Hurwitz, Math, Planning Committee"

"Jeff Bush, Fayerweather"

The list went on. Few included their year, but not all. There was no need to. This strange coterie of aged radicals had developed their own nomenclature.

Math, Philosophy, Fayerweather, Hamilton, Low.

These were not majors or dorms; they were occupied buildings.

Continue reading "Columbia's 68 Celebration: Amidst The Radicals" »

By John Leo

The academic left is fond of buzzwords that sound harmless but function in a highly ideological way. Many schools of education and social work require students to have a good "disposition." In practice this means that conservatives need not apply, as highly publicized attempts to penalize right-wing students at Brooklyn College and Washington State University revealed. "Social justice" is an even more useful codeword. Who can oppose it? But some schools made the mistake of spelling out that it means advocacy for causes of the left, including support for gay marriage and adoption, also opposition to "institutional racism," heterosexism, classism and ableism. Students at Teachers College, Columbia, are required to acknowledge that belief in "merit, social mobility and individual responsibility" often produce and perpetuate social inequalities. Even in its mildest form "social justice" puts schools in a position of judging the acceptability of students' political and social opinions.

Now the left is organizing around its most powerful codeword yet: sustainability. Dozens of universities now have sustainability programs. Arizona State is bulking up its curriculum and seems to be emerging as the strongest sustainability campus. UCLA has a housing floor devoted to sustainability. The American College Personnel Association (ACPA) has a sustainability task force and has joined eight other education associations to form a sustainability consortium. Pushed by the cultural left, UNESCO has declared the United Nation's Decade of Education for Sustainable Development 2005-2014, featuring the now ubiquitous symbol of the sustainability movement - three overlapping circles representing environmental, economic and social reform (i.e., ecology is only a third of what the movement is about).

Only recently have the goals and institutionalization of the movement become clear. The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability is Higher Education (AASHE) says it "defines sustainability is an inclusive way, encompassing human and ecological health, social justice, secure livelihoods and a better world for all generations." When the residential life program at the University of Delaware - possibly the most appalling indoctrination program ever to appear on an American campus - was presented, Res Life director Kathleen Kerr packaged it as a sustainability program. Since suspended, possibly only temporarily, the program discussed mandatory sessions for students as "treatments" and insisted that whites acknowledge their role as racists. It also required students to achieve certain competencies including "students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society." At a conference, Kerr explained "the social justice aspects of sustainability education," referring to "environmental racism," "domestic partnerships" and "gender equity."

Continue reading "The Worst Campus Codeword" »

By Harvey Silverglate

The punditocracy has offered up a wide range of answers to the question of what should be done about former Department of Justice legal counsel and author of the infamous "torture memos," John Yoo. Suggestions have included indictment, professional discipline or even disbarment, and termination from his tenured position at the University of California-Berkeley's Boalt Hall Law School.

Many of these proposed punishments of Yoo have more to do with partisan politics than legal reality, perhaps because it is nearly impossible to address the Yoo issue without betraying one's visceral reaction to the "War on Terror" as a whole and, more particularly, some of the tactics that have been adopted by the administration in that struggle, often with the explicit approval of the lawyers.

I've been following this story closely as both a criminal defense lawyer, with a vested interest in ensuring that a fellow member of the bar is dealt with fairly, and as a frequent critic of higher education's often evident contempt for academic freedom. So, for the understandably perplexed, here's one lawyer's guide to what sanctions, if any, Yoo might - or perhaps should - actually face.

Federal Indictment

Like many other legal observers, I consider some of the legal analyses Yoo (and in some instances his cohorts) provided for President Bush to be laughable. But just because this advice was, to many, ludicrous, doesn't mean it was criminal.

Continue reading "A Citizen's Guide To Disciplining John Yoo" »

By Anthony Paletta

Feminists Say The Darndest Things
Mike Adams, Sentinel, February 2008

Mike Adams, Professor of Criminology at the University of North Carolina - Wilmington, is nothing if not a provocateur; few other impulses can explain a book entitled Feminists Say The Darndest Things. Adams, as the title amply demonstrates, has an eristic disposition massively ill-suited for the modern academy; this is why the average reader is fortunate that Adams perseveres in his profession, and writes about it. Feminists Say The Darndest Things is a selection of Adams' correspondence to colleagues that furnishes an illuminating portrait of pious academic feminism that's not merely thin-skinned but actively censorious and relentlessly proselytizing.

Adams writes a lot of letters, and given what goes on around him, you can understand why. He wrote to question the tolerance of a colleague who commented, about a faculty candidate: "This guy went to West Point. He may be too conservative to teach here." He wrote another colleague who stormed out when he questioned allegations of sexual harassment leveled against his department chair. She declared, in response to his comment "I will not sit here and listen to a police interrogation." He wrote a colleague who believed that a student who lodged a fake rape accusation (to get out of an exam) should suffer no punishment. And those are just the people with whom he works. Missives also go out to the Northern Kentucky University professor who encouraged her students to destroy an anti-abortion display on that campus, and the Duke Professor who resigned from her committee assignments in indignation at the re-admittance of the falsely-accused Duke Lacrosse players.

That's just a sampling; there are 61 letters in the book (one, to Abigail Adams, presumably went unread). Most aren't as consequential as the examples I noted above, but point out both a reflexive hostility to criticism on the part of their targets, and a relentless presumption that the academy should reflect their own values in even the most trivial cases. It's good to see, gathered in one volume, stories from a professor canceling classes to protest the Iraq War and offering extra credit to her students to protest, to Adams' removal from a faculty senate email list after he complained about political discrimination on the campus (see, Adams was completely wrong!). Stories about the political character of the academy are often dismissed as mere anecdotes; Adams' dossier makes clear that they're common responses from an entrenched academic community intensely jealous of any threats to the primacy of their worldview.

Continue reading "Review: "Feminists Say The Darndest Things"" »

By John Leo

Columbia University is warily approaching the 40th anniversary of its greatest disaster, the 1968 student uprising and occupation of five buildings, which vigorous and sometimes brutal New York City police eventually ended. A three-day conference looking back at the unrest begins on April 24 and describes itself as an "event," not a celebration or even a commemoration. The conference is being staged "at" Columbia, not "by" it. The university administration is not funding, sponsoring, or organizing the conference. But university president Lee Bollinger is scheduled for two appearances, which would seem to undercut the administration's arm's-length posture. Further, the university is allowing the group of former protesters organizing the event to use several campus buildings, and two Columbia centers are officially listed as sponsors of individual conference events.

The conference program on the sponsors' website promises to air a "wide range of viewpoints" on what happened and why, but the list of speakers shows no range at all - everyone seems to be a proud ex-protester or at least a familiar partisan of the Left. While Todd Gitlin (formerly the president of Students for a Democratic Society, now at Columbia's journalism school) is a sober and reflective thinker, most of his fellow speakers are far from that standard. They include Kathleen Cleaver, Eldridge Cleaver's widow and a former Black Panther official; veteran activist Tom Hayden; several former members of the Weather Underground; and Ti-Grace Atkinson, a radical feminist from the 1960s who opposes all sexual intercourse. Not one member of the Columbia faculty from 1968 is participating. Event sponsors say that voices of non - leftists will be included in a "multi-media narrative," the details of which are not clear; what is clear, so far anyway, is that the panels represent only one point of view.
It isn't as though the event's organizers didn't know whom to invite. Columbia sociology professor Allan Silver, who was a member of a faculty group in 1968 that tried to work out a compromise before police cleared the occupied buildings, suggested that the conference include speakers from a broad range of groups, including the Majority Coalition, which opposed the strike; New York City police officials; aides to then-mayor John Lindsay; reporters who covered the events; current or recent Columbia students in ROTC programs; and "others, NOT from the left." The conference timetable that the organizers issued in mid-March lists representatives of none of these groups. Nor does it include any of the organized "moderates" of '68, such as the members of Students for a Restructured University (SRU), which helped create the University Senate after the traumatic events of that spring. "It's going to be an all-Bolshevik conference," said Neal Hurwitz, a 1967 Columbia graduate, former member of Silver's faculty group, and SRU leader.

Continue reading "Columbia's Rebel Reunion" »

By Robert Weissberg

In the spring of 2008 Baylor University denied tenure to a larger than usual number of Assistant Professors up for promotion, including two-thirds of the women, and while tenure denial is normal at Baylor, the carnage uptick - from 10% to 40% in a single year - drew national attention and outcries of unfairness. No doubt, outsiders may find that awarding life-time employment to 60% of those eligible is a fantastic deal in today's economy where corporations routinely shed entire divisions and even CEO's get the ax. Surely no rational firm could guarantee tenure to 90%, even 60s%, of those initially hired. That harsh economic fact understood, why the sudden indignation? Is something seriously rotten at Baylor? As a veteran spending four decades passing among the natives (I speak fluent numbo-jumbo, passable gibberish, I should add), let me try to explain why what is typical in the "real world" outrages so many academics.

The place to begin is to recognize that winning tenure is customary at American colleges save elite, research-oriented institutions. In fact in a few top departments almost no junior faculty wins tenure, so the review process resembles the annual clubbing of baby seals. Given that rejection runs counter to widespread expectations, it is naturally a bitter pill to swallow. It is not a matter of initial screening being so astute that no mid-course corrections are necessary. Rather, the pathways to tenure abound, standards are pliable, and the ever-present threat of litigation shields protected endangered species faculty, so in many instances a negative outcomes is genuinely surprising, if not shocking.

Truth be told, all the transparency and fairness talk is largely irrelevant administrative boilerplate. Subjectivity is everywhere; as in judging pornography, fuzziness is inherent, and this applies equally to Harvard or Okefenokee Tech. "Original research" or "excellent teaching" are rubber yardsticks far distant from cars sold per month. Apprehensive junior faculty speculate endlessly about thresholds - One or two books? Are five articles enough? How many research grants and of what size? Can mediocre teaching be overcome by outstanding outside letters? - but universities justifiably never operate on piece-work, and it is preposterous to insist that bean counting is even possible. On-the-bubble candidates scrutinized past decisions with Talmudic attentiveness, but the outcomes are always murky - Assistant Professor Alphonse is now an Associate despite his weak publication record while Professor Gaston who followed was booted notwithstanding an outstanding resume. Stories of unexpected failures are told and re-told, embellished and deconstructed, but these hardly calm jangled nerves. In the final analysis, tenure judgments resemble the College of Cardinals electing the Pope - there are usually solid reasons but they may be forever obscure and, critically, no senior faculty is obligated to explain his or her vote. It is a mystery wrapped in a sheepskin encased in a 9 x 12 manila envelop. Up or down reasons can be petty, wrong-headed, misinformed and otherwise flawed, but truth is unknowable. The most vicious personal blackball can be "explained" with "his Bush-as-Hitler research just did not meet the standards for the Benedict Arnold Program in American Studies." Nothing more had to be said. This uncertainty, the knowledge that one's life can be decided by whim, is truly frightening.

Continue reading "Tenure And The Litigation Culture" »

By Robert L. Freedman A.B. '62

I am running as a petition candidate for Harvard's Board of Overseers to help Harvard College improve itself.

I have been interested in higher education - and in particular in what is taught and how it is taught - since graduating from the College in 1962. I have the time, the interest and the energy to try to make a difference.

There is ferment in the world of higher education. When a former Harvard College Dean publishes a book about Harvard subtitled How a Great University Forgot Education, and when a former Harvard President publishes a book about colleges subtitled A Candid Look At How Much Students Learn And Why They Should Be Learning More, you know it's time to get involved.

College is when people are most open to learning. Afterwards their intellectual horizons narrow. It is a major loss if part of those key four years is wasted in a class with a poor teacher or in a subject of only ephemeral importance.

Harvard has two governing boards. The Harvard Corporation (officially the President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a Massachusetts non-profit corporation with seven members. Vacancies are filled by the remaining members. So it is a self-perpetuating board - as are most non-profit boards.

The second governing board is the Overseers (officially the Board of Overseers of Harvard College). Despite their official name, their writ covers the entire University. They have been elected by all the alums since 1921. In April of each year Harvard mails ballots to all one-third of a million Harvard degree holders (except faculty members). Five alums are elected every year for 6 year terms, for a total of 30 Overseers.

The alumni association annually solicits names of possible candidates from the alums, and then nominates eight candidates for the five positions. The eight candidates generally are diverse in terms of occupation, geographical location, gender, ethnicity and race.

These elections are usually non-events. Typically ninety percent of the alums do not bother to vote, perhaps because they believe who is elected makes no difference.

But every once in a while something different happens, because any alum can become a petition candidate upon obtaining the signatures of about 250 alums on official Harvard ballots (that is what I did). Nineteen years ago, when divestiture of South African securities from the endowment was a hot issue, Barack Obama ran as a petition candidate. He lost. The handful of petition candidates over the years believed, like Obama, that certain important issues were not being properly addressed by the powers-that-be. In my case those issues are educational: teaching methods, the curriculum, the quality of student life and the high costs of college.

Harvard is aware of these issues and has made some important progress. But the Overseers have not been in the forefront of pushing for changes. I am running as a petition candidate because, as former Harvard President Derek Bok - in a most careful and thoughtful critique of colleges - recently wrote, reform is too difficult to accomplish solely from within. A push from outside is needed. And a push from a friend is much better than waiting until a crisis develops and an unfriendly heavy hand intrudes.

A more active Board of Overseers should make it its business to understand students' views. As our college experience recedes into the past, most of us lose touch with exactly how we felt and what we thought then. A good sign is that recently, apparently for the first time in living memory, a group of Overseers actually met with a group of students. That modest and long overdue first step could be the beginning of a process to acquaint the Overseers with the college's "customers".

There is lots to be done. Change is in the air. As a recent President said, If not now, when? If not us, who? Together we can make a difference. Let's do so.

---------------------------------------
Robert L. Freedman is a senior partner of the international law firm, Dechert LLP. He is a 1962 graduate of Harvard College. His campaign site can be found here.

By Charlotte Allen

You've just started your freshman year in college, so one of your first stops is the campus bookstore to pick up your textbooks. You signed up for Econ 101, where your professor has assigned one of the top-selling basic textbooks in the field: Harvard professor N. Gregory Mankiw's 936-page Principles of Economics (South-Western/Thomson), now in its fourth edition. The price: $175.95, or if you want to throw in a study guide to help you ace the course, $209.90.

Wow, that's steep for just one book - but you've only just started. Next class: the first semester of your college's world history survey course, spanning the period from 1 million B.C. to 1500 A.D. In that class the prof is having you read the first volume of Traditions & Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past (McGraw-Hill), the ever-so-politically correct overview by Jerry H. Bentley and Herbert F. Ziegler that devotes only 28 of its 600 pages to ancient Greece. The sticker price for Traditions and Encounters, now in its second edition: $89.69. Next, chemistry class, where the assigned textbook is Karen C. Timberlake's Chemistry: An Introduction to General, Organic, and Biological Chemistry (Prentice-Hall), now in its ninth edition. The price here is $148.80 for 736 pages plus a CD-ROM, and another $64.90 if you want a study guide. The bargain on your textbook list, if you can call it that, is Lynn Bloom's The Essay Connection (Houghton-Mifflin), the required anthology for your freshman English class, and "only" $61.16 for 656 pages. The Essay Connection is in its eighth edition, an improvement over the seventh edition, its blurb promises, because the book now includes essays by David Sedaris (can't you read him at home in your parents' New Yorker?), a photo collection on the horrors of war (guess what non-English-related political point that's trying to make), and cartoons and other illustrations for students who learn better by looking at pictures.

Your textbook-bill total for the semester is now $475.60 for just four books, more than a fourth of the average $2,315 in tuition and fees for a semester at a U.S. state college, according to figures for 2004 from the U.S. Education Department) - and that doesn't include optional study guides, the lab manual you might need for chem class, or the photocopied handout packet your English teacher says she'll be passing out at your expense. Why the sky-high prices for basic textbooks? After all, the brand-new, critically acclaimed translation of Tolstoy's War and Peace by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Knopf) lists at only $37 for 1,273 pages in handsomely designed hardback. If Knopf, a trade publisher, can bring in a lengthy volume with a scholarly apparatus of notes and bibliography for less than $40, why can't textbook publishers, serving a market of generally cash-strapped young people, do something similar?

Continue reading "Why Do Textbooks Cost So Much?" »

By Stefan Kanfer

"I expect you'll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That's what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behavior."

- Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall, 1928

Those were the days. A novelist could teach for a year or two and emerge with enough satire to fill a library. Alas, the Academy has grown more ludicrous and exaggerated with each succeeding generation and is now almost beyond parody. Today, all a smart writer has to do, in Emily Dickinson's memorable phrase, is tell the truth but tell it slant.

This melancholy observation was brought to mind by Roger Rosenblatt's comic tale Beet, the story of a professor who fatuously assumes that college is a place for colloquy and intellectual adventure. Instead, he finds an arena rife with faculty politics and political correctness, with courses like Little People of Color and Postcolonial Women's Sports. The administration is even worse than the staff: eyeing the Internet, the chairman of the board of trustees demands, "Why couldn't we run the whole college online? From one building? From a Quonset hut! From a lean-to, for Chrissake! An outhouse!"

Funny stuff. But the fact is that colleges are falling all over themselves to hustle dollars from the Net. Google has more than six million references to courses you can take without bothering to enter a classroom. As for PC, the very real Occidental College offers The Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie?; Oberlin has a seminar called She Works Hard for the Money: Women, Work and the Persistence of Inequality; and UCLA makes much of Queer Musicology, exploring the ways in which "sexual differences and complex gender identities in music and among musicians have incited productive consternation" during the 1990s. I could cite hundreds more.

Continue reading "School Daze: The Best Novels About The Campus" »

[Indoctrinate U, a documentary by Evan Coyne Maloney on the state of intellectual freedom at American universities, premiered at the Kennedy Center in September 2007 and has screened in multiple locations since. Peter Berkowitz, writing in The Wall Street Journal, called Indoctrinate U a "riveting documentary about the war on free speech and individual rights waged by university faculty and administrators..." John K. Wilson, founder of The Institute for College Freedom, doesn't think the film's quite fair. He provided us a critique of Indoctrinate U and invited us to solicit Maloney's response. You can read Wilson's original review, and Maloney's response here. Below is their second round of comments. Indoctrinate U is screening at select campuses and theaters in the near future; check the film's website for more information (and read our original review here.)]

No.
By John K. Wilson

Maloney objects to my claim that liberty on campus is far better protected today than it's ever been. To disprove this, he writes that FIRE "receives hundreds upon hundreds of reports each year in which those rights have been trampled." But that doesn't prove anything. For example, the ACLU didn't exist until after World War I. The fact that the ACLU publicized violations of civil liberties after 1918 does not show that civil liberties were better protected during World War I, it only shows that we lacked organizations to publicize these violations. For example, virtually all of the speech codes FIRE objects to (and usually with good reason) today were typically far worse in the past, when administrators usually had arbitrary power to punish students without due process, without rules, and without appeal.

As for Ward Churchill, Maloney says that he defended his free speech. He did, but none of that is mentioned in the movie, nor is the fact that Churchill was banned from speaking at some campuses (which is separate from the controversy over his firing). That's a key point considering how Maloney tries to show in the movie that only conservative views are silenced in academia.

Citing the fact that Ignatiev hasn't been censored is a rather odd analysis by Maloney, considering that he ignores the counterexample of Churchill. Maloney, after all, doesn't put on film all of the conservatives who haven't been censored, nor any of the liberals who have. At some point, if you only discuss liberals who haven't been censored and conservatives who have been censored, and ignore the counterevidence, you're twisting the data.

On the Clemens case, Maloney claims that "professors were required to inject into their courses political topics." Clemens called it an "ideological loyalty oath." The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that faculty on campus said it wasn't a requirement to inject political topics in class; it was a requirement that faculty proposing a new class had to answer a dumb question on the form about the role of race, class, and gender in the proposed class. After Clemens objected, he was allowed to leave the question blank and had his course approved. He never had his job threatened in any way, so I dismissed this as rather unimportant compared to the far worse penalties suffered by liberals and conservatives in many colleges. (Contrast that with a case this year where a pacifist Quaker professor was fired under a real loyalty oath.)

Continue reading "Indoctrinate U. Was It Fair? Round II" »

By Donald Downs

An interesting news item caught my eye last week. The BB&T Charitable Foundation has made a million-dollar donation to Marshall University's Lewis College of Business. The donation comes with a string attached: Marshall must teach Ayn Rand's classic tribute to capitalism, Atlas Shrugged, as part of the curriculum. The BB&T Foundation has made numerous grants to other institutions dealing with capitalism and economics. John Allison, the foundation's chairman and CEO, expressed the logic behind these grants when he announced a $2 million grant to the Mercatus Center at George Mason University last summer. "We believe there needs to be a deeper understanding of the morality of capitalism and its causal relationship to economic well-being," he declared. "This contribution will encourage a thorough discussion of the moral foundations of capitalism with an organization that meets the highest academic standards and encourages students to hear all points of view."

BB&T's actions regarding Marshall and George Mason are part and parcel of a broader movement taking place across American higher education: redesigned efforts by major moderate and right-leaning foundations and sponsors to fund programs, journals, and chairs on campus that provide viewpoints that challenge the left-liberal orthodoxies that prevail in so many institutions. Among other examples, the University of Illinois recently established a major chair in free market economics, funded by a conservative donor. And the University of Colorado is looking for donors for a new chair in conservative studies. Meanwhile, several groups, including the Olin Foundation and other conservative entities, have decided to target limited term grants at specific individuals or groups whom they trust to carry out programs consistent with the foundations' missions.

One motive for such grants could be to influence academic thinking in the direction the foundations favor. Another motive is simply pedagogical: to counter the lack of intellectual diversity on campus, which several studies have shown tilts decidedly to the left at many institutions, especially in the social science and humanities. The pedagogical problem is not that conservative ideas are not being accepted or followed; the problem is the virtual absence of such ideas, which deprives students of a true liberal education that would expose them to all serious arguments and perspectives about social and political life. The right kind of education prepares students to seek the answer to the most fundamental of questions: How should I live?

Continue reading "When Donors Pick The Courses" »