Bill and Beverly first retired near Pike's Peak in Colorado but now own a
circa 1803 house near Concord, New Hampshire. Among their successful children is
one with a well-known name --- Joe Trench, President for Lockheed Martin
Information Systems and Global Services Performance,
In addition to its onsite programs in Hays, Kansas, Fort Hays State
University has its own online degree programs at
http://www.fhsu.edu/virtualcollege/
What future leaders need is increased communication
skill and confidence in relating with people. The old joke is that an
extroverted accountant is one who looks at your shoe laces rather than only
his/her own shoe laces.
"A Firm Stance: CU Marine Reservist Targeted In Angry Confrontation; No
Disciplinary Action Taken," by Laura Brunts, Columbia Spectator, January
26, 2006 ---
Click Here
Type 5 programs are highly limited in number, especially programs that do not
require at least one or two years of onsite residency. But there are a few
programs such as the University of Colorado's online doctoral program in
pharmacy. I do not know of any major universities that offer a similar doctorate
in accounting and business.
Type 1, 2, and 3 programs are virtually frauds and are wasting the student's
money and perhaps her/his time.
A phony argument against Type 4 programs is that students enrolled in the
same program cannot learn from each other like students in onsite programs learn
from each other. About the only thing that students in Type 4 programs cannot do
is have beer together and otherwise socialize face-to-face. Communications
technology today makes it possible to get inside the head of a professor or a
student better than face-to-face in many instances.
In fact a student may graduate from a Type 4 program and become a better
teacher and/or researcher as a result of germination in a Type 4 program. But it
is misleading to say that starting opportunities are equivalent to a Type 5
Program doctoral degree. They are not equivalent, and it will be quite some time
before they have a chance of becoming equivalents.
The term "accreditation" is highly misleading. An online university that has
a regionally accredited undergraduate program does not make its doctoral program
accredited. In fact the same is true of onsite universities. For example, the
AACSB is the premiere accrediting body for colleges of business within major
colleges and universities. But the AACSB limits accreditation to undergraduate
and masters of business or accounting programs. The AACSB has never had an
accreditation program for doctoral programs within AACSB accredited colleges.
When it comes to doctoral programs, everything rides on the general
reputation and prestige of the entire university is the most important factor.
The reputation of the college or department offering the doctoral degree is the
second most important factor. What goes into that college's reputation is the
research reputation of the faculty involved in the doctoral program. Admissions
standards are also very, very important. Any doctoral program that is easy to
get into becomes suspect. This was especially the case of some major
universities that during some years admitted most military retirees who applied
as long as the applicant had 20 or more years of service with the military.
These programs generated some fine teachers for regional colleges, but the
market generally recognized that these graduates had little prospects of
establishing research reputations. I think most universities no longer give such
ease of admission to veterans.
Doctoral programs should probably be judged more on the quality of the
dissertations. Fortunately or unfortunately, many dissertations are pretty
well ignored unless papers published from them are accepted by major research
journals. A dissertation may be important for landing that first faculty job in
a prestigious college or university. This depends heavily on level of
competition. In fields like accounting and finance there is such a shortage of
doctoral graduates from major universities that applicants can usually get great
job offers before the quality of the dissertation can really be judged. Job
offers are frequently made in the very early stages of a mere dissertation
proposal subject to huge changes later on before the degree is granted. Sadly,
many great dissertation proposals are never carried to fruition.
Jensen Comment
Here's an example of one such "professional doctorate" program.
Grenoble Ecole
de Management's MBA program in France has AACSB accreditation of its MBA
program. Once again I remind readers that the AACSB has never accredited
doctoral programs in the U.S. or elsewhere.
The DBA program
(administered jointly with Newcastle University in the U.K) is apparently a
management technology doctoral program without tracks in functional fields like
accounting. I do not think there are any accounting DBA tracks such as you will
find in the Harvard Business School’s DBA program. I still do not know of any
respectable online doctoral programs in accounting. Of course some
Grenoble/Newcastle DBA students may have prior degrees and work experience in
accounting. Admission requires an MBA degree plus three years of qualified
business experience.
Purportedly
there are nearly 100 DBA candidates which would make this program larger than
most U.S. business doctoral programs. I would question the size of the program
relative to the size of the research faculty. No PhD students are reported to
date ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/04/full_time_profiles/escgrenoble.htm
This is a joint DBA program in partnership with Newcastle University in the U.K.
---
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/nubs/postgrad/dba/
It is not clear
how many faculty are available to work closely with so many DBA students,
especially at the thesis stage where it is very difficult for a faculty member
to supervise more than two or three doctoral theses at any one time
You
can read the following at
http://www.grenoble-em.com/460-dba-with-university-of-newcastle-upon-tyne-business-school-2.aspx
Begin Quote
***************************
Delivery enables a work and study balance
·
a research portal based on a proven virtual learning
platform,
·
a wide range of e-journals and other on-line information and
data sources,
·
an e-portfolio system for managing reflective learning.
During the first part of the programme four workshops are shared between
Grenoble and Newcastle. This helps to maximise the sharing of ideas between
students and faculty and provides cross cultural and global insights.
Research Benefits
for Organisations
Each candidate conducts a doctoral thesis on a management of technology,
innovation or change issue which can be taken directly from their work
experience. Organisations sponsoring candidates can therefore benefit
directly from the research and study undertaken by their staff. Candidates
are able to draw upon the research expertise of senior academics from both
institutions. As research topics are usually based on organisations current
and anticipated needs, the research outcomes of the thesis can provide real
insight for the sponsoring organisation.
The DBA programme is structured to facilitate part-time study. Research
training is provided in four one week blocks and research supervision is
provided throughout the period. This innovative approach makes it easier for
students to combine demanding careers with their doctoral research. The
programme also provides a range of web-based resources including:
************************
End Quote
Online Doctoral Programs ---
http://www.distance-learning-college-guide.com/doctorate-degrees-online.html
There are several types of doctoral degrees online ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm#CommercialPrograms
There are several types of doctoral degrees online:
- Diploma mills where you can simply buy a PhD and have a diploma
within a matter of days. Warnings about Type 1 programs can be found at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill
- Diploma frauds that give a lot of credit for life experience and
perhaps have some minimal course or paper writing assignments that in
reality are a sham. Warnings about Type 2 programs can be found at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill
- Diligent-effort programs that may require several years to complete
but admit virtually anybody and have dubious academic standards even
though a few teachers may try ever so hard to make it work. Warnings
about Type 3 programs can be found at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill
- Diligent-effort programs have some admission standards and varied
faculty participants that try to make the program respectable. Many of
these faculty participants are moonlighting in online doctoral programs
but are also full-time faculty in respected colleges and universities. A
listing of Type 4 doctoral programs is provided at
http://www.distance-learning-college-guide.com/doctorate-degrees-online.html
- Major universities that have extended their onsite doctoral programs
to online or partly online programs.
Type 5 programs are highly limited in number, especially programs that do
not require at least one or two years of onsite residency. But there are a
few programs such as the University of Colorado's online doctoral program in
pharmacy. I do not know of any major universities that offer a similar
doctorate in accounting and business.
Type 1, 2, and 3 programs are virtually frauds and are wasting the
student's money and perhaps her/his time.
Type 4 programs are problematic. They offer genuine learning
opportunities to students who, due to life's circumstances, are not able to
enroll in onsite programs. But Type 4 programs do not yet have the status of
degrees comparable with doctoral degrees of onsite programs of major
universities.
Continued in article
Nontraditional Doctoral Degree Programs: Some With No Courses
"New Ideas for Ph.D. Education," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
August 18, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/18/grad
For educators and state officials who want to
reform doctoral education, “it’s easy if you just want to make it easier,”
said E. Garrison Walters, interim chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents.
The challenge, he said, is to undertake reforms
that don’t sacrifice quality. “It’s difficult to keep the core values of a
Ph.D. and keep it flexible,” he said. Walters spoke this week at a
conference in Chicago of the State Higher Education Executive Officers — the
officials who approve new Ph.D. programs in their states and periodically
review such programs, sometimes with an eye toward saving money by
eliminating them.
At a session on new approaches to doctoral
education, state officials were briefed on two new approaches — both of
which were warmly received. One involves non-residential Ph.D. programs for
students who are older than most who earn doctorates. The other involves
doctoral programs that are run by more than one university — and that
sometimes cross state lines and public/private distinctions. Officials at
the meeting said they believed there was strong demand for both kinds of
programs, and wanted to find ways for their agencies to encourage such
innovations.
Laurien Alexandre, director of Antioch University’s
Ph.D. program in
leadership and change, said it was easy to see
that there is interest in the kind of non-traditional doctorate her
institution has created. The students are already far along in their careers
and lives — 85 percent are over 40, with many in their 50s and 60s — and
they don’t need the doctorate as a credential. “No one is coming at 55
because they need it for their job,” she said. “So why are people paying
$80,000 for a doctorate?”
Her answer is that Antioch’s doctoral students are
on an “evolved path” in which they are seeking to take their understandings
of organizations to a higher level, and want to conduct the kind of in-depth
research associated with doctoral programs. The program attracts students
from all over the country, who periodically meet in person at Antioch’s
campuses around the country, but conduct much of their work in close
collaboration with faculty members, who are also spread out around the
country and communicate with students via phone and videoconferencing.
The program is “courseless,” Alexandre said, and
students must demonstrate their competencies in knowledge and research
skills after completing “multiyear learning paths” that are supervised by
faculty members. Only then, Alexandre said, can they write their
dissertations. And while Alexandre clearly relishes the way Antioch is
“pushing the envelope” on most aspects of the program, she said that the
dissertation process is traditional: committees, chapters, defense, and so
forth. “The dissertation is the gold standard,” she said.
The concept underlying this approach, she said, is
“rigor without rigidity,” and that approach may be what it takes to
encourage doctoral education from older students. She noted that Antioch
just graduated its first students in the program and that retention rates
are well above the typically low rates for many Ph.D. programs.
If the Antioch model demonstrates flexibility
within a graduate program, two new biomedical engineering programs may
represent the ability of universities to be flexible in how they put
together a graduate program in a hot science field — and one that can be
expensive to support. One program joins forces of the
University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University,
and the other combines offerings at
Virginia Tech with Wake
Forest University. Both programs have one
institution with a medical school (Chapel Hill and Wake Forest) and one
institution with an engineering school (N.C. State and Virginia Tech).
Stephen Knisley, director of the North Carolina
program, said that it grew out of a stand-alone program at Chapel Hill that
officials there felt would be strengthened with more ties to engineering. To
make the program effective, Knisley said, real partnerships are needed. That
means admissions decisions, curricular requirements and the like are all
decided jointly. And to really have students be able to move back and forth
to the two campuses, officials have also had to make sure they can get dual
ID cards, parking spaces, and access to all facilities. There are currently
103 graduate students in the program, and North Carolina hopes to double
that number in the next few years.
In a similar approach, Wake Forest and Virginia
Tech decide matters together — and have managed to do so even though the
former is private and the latter is a public university in another state.
Brian J. Love, a professor at Virginia Tech, noted that the two universities
don’t observe the same holidays or have the same class schedules, so
everything must be negotiated. “This program now has its own calendar,” he
said.
But he said that’s a small price to pay to have
combined resources that neither institution could otherwise create. “This
can really be a win-win situation.”
One difficulty such collaborations sometimes face
is with accreditation. Gail Morrison, interim executive director of the
South Carolina Commission on Higher Education, said that the Medical
University of South Carolina and the University of South Carolina recently
merged their pharmacy schools. While both entities had been accredited, they
needed an entirely new review, even though it seemed to Morrison that the
new school was clearly stronger than the two separate ones of the past.
Her story brought knowing nods from the audience of
state officials, several of whom said later that specialized accreditation
was a barrier to the kinds of collaboration being encouraged at the session.
Of course some collaborations don’t require any
accreditors’ approval. Morrison said that generally breaking down
institutional boundaries was a great way to encourage more efficiency and
that formal units aren’t always needed. For example, the state’s three
doctoral institutions are opening a building in Charleston that will bring
professors together. No outside approval needed.
Jensen Comment
The problem with the some of these is that, when students are allowed to
customize a curriculum, they often take the easiest way out. Success of these
nontraditional doctoral programs rests heavily upon admission standards for
getting into the programs and a successful track record of graduates from the
programs. If low GRE (or GMAT) students are accepted, the schools will have a
difficult time overcoming image flaws. Older adults seeking nontraditional
doctoral programs often do not have strong admission test scores.
Students may take the easiest way out in customizable
curricula
Question
Is Harvard's curriculum tantamount to no curriculum?
What does it take at a minimum to have an undergraduate education?
"As Goes Harvard. . . ," by Donald Kagan, Commentary Magazine ---
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=12202034_1
The
dean of Harvard College, Harry R. Lewis, would seem to have agreed with this
assessment. In a recently published book on the decline of Harvard,
Excellence Without a
Soul:
How a Great
University Forgot Education, he cites the excuse offered
by one member of the faculty committee: “the committee thought the best
thing was to put a row of empty bottles up and see how the faculty wanted to
fill them.” Lewis responds, acidly:
The
empty bottles could be filled with anything so long as the right department
was offering it. . . . But there is absolutely nothing that Harvard can
expect students will know after they take three science or three humanities
courses freely chosen from across the entire course catalog. The proposed
general-education requirement gives up entirely on the idea of shared
knowledge, shared values, even shared aspirations. In the absence of any
pronouncement that anything is more important than anything else for Harvard
students to know, Harvard is declaring that one can be an educated person in
the 21st century without knowing anything about genomes, chromosomes,
or
Shakespeare.
_____________________
Does
it matter that Harvard’s curriculum is a vacant vessel? It is
no secret, after all, that to the Harvard faculty, undergraduate education
is at best of secondary interest. What is laughingly called the Core
Curriculum—precisely what Summers sought to repair—is distinguished by the
absence
of any core of studies generally required. In practice, moreover, a
significant number of the courses in Harvard College are taught by graduate
students, not as assistants to professors but in full control of the
content. Although they are called “tutors,” evoking an image of learned
Oxbridge dons passing on their wisdom one-on-one, what they are is a
collection of inexperienced leaders of discussion or pseudo-discussion
groups. The overwhelming majority of these young men and women, to whom is
entrusted a good chunk of a typical undergraduate’s education, will never be
considered good enough to belong to Harvard’s regular faculty.
But
this does matter, and the reason is that how Harvard deals with its
undergraduates is of great importance to other colleges. Harvard’s
antiquity, the high quality of its faculty and student body, its wealth, and
its prestige have made it a model to be watched and emulated. When Harvard
adopted a program of “General Education” after World War II—the forerunner
of today’s debased Core Curriculum—it changed the character of undergraduate
education throughout the country.
So
it is intriguing and instructive that Harvard’s former dean should be
castigating the curriculum produced by the Harvard faculty—a curriculum
that, he believes, exposes Harvard as “a university without a larger sense
of educational purpose or a connection with its principal constituents.” And
it is equally intriguing that Derek C. Bok, a
former and now again, in the wake of Summers’s
departure, the current president of Harvard, should have released his own
troubled look at the same subject.
Continued in article
The radically different buffet-style Stanford University MBA customizable
curriculum resembles, in spirit, the new buffet undergraduate curriculum at Harvard
University.
Some possible problems this creates include the following:
- Students may seek out popular professors who are not necessarily the
"best" professors for their education needs. This becomes especially a
problem when the student may shy away from a hard-grading and or hard
assignment professor who really teaches an important course for their
particular concentration.
- Students may avoid hard topics such as a finance course on derivative
financial instruments or an accounting course that teaches data structures
and database usage.
- Students who choose the easier tracks may graduate cum laude with higher
gpas than students who chose the harder routes. I hope recruiters are smart
enough to look beyond grade averages for students who emerge from Stanford's
new MBA curriculum.
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
"Stanford Graduate School of Business Adopts New Curriculum Model Highly
Customized Program Planned for 2007," Stanford GSB News, June 2006 ---
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/new_mba_curriculum.shtml
Four key elements characterize the Stanford MBA
Program’s new educational model: 1) a highly customized program; 2) a
deeper, more engaging intellectual experience; 3) a more global curriculum;
and 4) expanded leadership and communication development.
- First, the new curriculum will be customized
to each student. After a common program in the first quarter, students
will face no specific required courses, but rather a set of distribution
requirements that will give them the breadth of knowledge a general
manager requires. The suite of requirements will vary by pace, depth,
and assumed knowledge in order to challenge every student regardless of
past experience. Further, in some cases “flavors” of a given topic will
be offered, so that students can tailor their curriculum to their career
goals.
To take advantage of this flexibility, students will need good
information and advice about the options available. The first quarter of
studies will be devoted in large measure to this. Students will take
courses that raise fundamental questions of managerial relevance and
that point to where answers may be found. These courses will include
Teams and Organizational Behavior, Strategic Leadership, Managerial
Finance, and The Global Context of Management.
Students also will form an advising relationship with a member of the
faculty. Aided by placement exams, the student and his or her advisor
will craft an individual study plan. Students come to the MBA Program
with extremely diverse academic and work experience and varying career
goals. The new program will channel students into courses that will
challenge and prepare them, regardless of their background.
- Second, the new curriculum will foster a much
deeper intellectual exploration of both broad and narrow subjects. This
will begin in a fifth course, tentatively titled Critical Analytical
Thinking, taken in the first quarter. In seminars of fewer than 20
people, students will examine issues that transcend any single function
or discipline of management, such as: What responsibilities does a
corporation have to society? When do markets perform well, and when do
they perform poorly? When does it make sense to exercise discretion;
when should relatively rigid rules govern behavior? Students will be
taught to think and argue about such issues clearly, concisely, and
analytically, setting the tone for the rest of the program.
Then, in satisfying distribution requirements and in general electives,
students will be pressed to think across disciplines and functions. They
will be encouraged to think deeply and on their own. Improved placement
will engage students more effectively. A second-year fall schedule will
feature intensive one-week seminars, in which students will delve into
specific subjects. The School also plans to add to its complement of
Bass Seminars, funded in part by a recent $30 million gift from Robert
M. Bass, MBA ’74. The seminars, as small as 10 people, move students
beyond passive learning and into topics of their own choosing. Guided by
supervising faculty members, students are largely responsible for
creating the content of the seminars.
- Third, the new plan calls for enhancements to
the School’s global management curriculum. This begins with the
first-quarter course on The Global Context of Management and
proceeds in two ways: The School will continue to globalize its cases
and course materials, and a global experience will be required of each
student during his or her two years at the School. This can be fulfilled
by a study trip, an international internship, an overseas
service-learning trip, or a student exchange, such as the School’s new
program with Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management in
China.
- Finally, the new curriculum includes expanded
leadership and communication development. The Strategic Leadership
course will integrate strategy with leadership development and
implementation. Critical Analytical Thinking will have as a major
feature the honing of students’ written and oral communication skills.
In a new capstone seminar near the end of the two years, students will
synthesize what they have learned, examine strengths and weaknesses in
their personal leadership style, and reflect on how they hope to achieve
their goals as they embark on their careers. These seminars are expected
to help students prepare for their jobs and for their careers.
“All this builds on the personal, collaborative
nature of the Stanford MBA experience,” said Joss. “We have much work ahead
of us. Taking this to a new level will require significant funding, a 5 to
10 percent increase in faculty, and ultimately, a new facility with flexible
classrooms to accommodate more and smaller seminars.”
The School has developed a building proposal, which
will be presented to the Stanford Board of Trustees in June. If accepted,
the Business School will pursue a plan for new buildings on the Stanford
University campus.
The schism between academic research and the
business world:
The outside world has little interest in research of the business school
professors
If our research findings were important, there would be more demand for
replication of findings
"Business Education Under the Microscope: Amid growing charges of
irrelevancy, business schools launch a study of their impact on business,"
Business Week, December 26, 2007 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/dec2007/bs20071223_173004.htm
The
business-school world has been besieged by criticism in the
past few months, with prominent professors and writers
taking bold swipes at management education. Authors such as
management expert Gary Hamel and
Harvard Business School Professor
Rakesh Khurana have published books this fall expressing
skepticism about the direction in which business schools are
headed and the purported value of an MBA degree. The
December/January issue of the Academy of Management
Journal includes a
special section in which 10 scholars question the value of
business-school research.
B-school
deans may soon be able to counter that criticism, following
the launch of an ambitious study that seeks to examine the
overall impact of business schools on society. A new Impact
of Business Schools task force convened by the the
Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB)—the
main organization of business schools—will mull over this
question next year, conducting research that will look at
management education through a variety of lenses, from
examining the link between business schools and economic
growth in the U.S. and other countries, to how management
ideas stemming from business-school research have affected
business practices. Most of the research will be new, though
it will build upon the work of past AACSB studies,
organizers said.
The
committee is being chaired by Robert Sullivan of the
University of California at San Diego's
Rady School of Management, and
includes a number of prominent business-school deans
including Robert Dolan of the University of Michigan's
Stephen M. Ross School of Business,
Linda Livingstone of Pepperdine University's
Graziado School of Business & Management, and
AACSB Chair Judy Olian, who is also the dean of UCLA's
Anderson School of Management.
Representatives from Google (GOOG)
and the Educational Testing Service will also participate.
The committee, which was formed this summer, expects to have
the report ready by January, 2009.
BusinessWeek.com reporter
Alison Damast recently spoke with Olian about the committee
and the potential impact of its findings on the
business-school community.
There has been a rising tide of
criticism against business schools recently, some of it from
within the B-school world. For example, Professor Rakesh
Khurana implied in his book
From Higher Aims to Hired Hands
(BusinessWeek.com, 11/5/07) that
management education needs to reinvent itself. Did this have
any effect on the AACSB's decision to create the Impact of
Business Schools committee?
I think that
is probably somewhere in the background, but I certainly
don't view that as in any way the primary driver or
particularly relevant to what we are thinking about here.
What we are looking at is a variety of ways of commenting on
what the impact of business schools is. The fact is, it
hasn't been documented and as a field we haven't really
asked those questions and we need to. I don't think a study
like this has ever been done before.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on the growing
irrelevance of academic accounting research are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
The dearth of research findings replications
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#Replication
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education
controversies are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Putting Great Books Back Into the GenEd
Curriculum
In his new book, Anthony T. Kronman argues that the American college
curriculum is seriously flawed for not giving students a true grounding in the
classics that explore the human condition.
Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the
Meaning of Life (Yale University Press) mixes
Kronman’s assessment of the problems in academe with a set of proposed
solutions. Kronman, the Sterling Professor of Law at Yale University, responded
to questions about the book.
Scott Jaschik, "Elevating the Great Books Anew," Inside Higher Ed,
September 26, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/26/kronman
Harvard University is Making Another Stab at Defining a Core Curriculum
Requirement
"Direction and Choice," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, October 5,
2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/05/harvard
On Wednesday, the university released a new plan
for undergraduate education that would designate certain subjects as ones
that must be studied. As a result, every Harvard undergraduate would have to
take a course on the United States and a course dealing with religion, among
others. Few top colleges and universities have such requirements. But
students would be able to pick within those broad topics, with the idea that
many courses would meet the requirements.
. . .
The report goes on to say that general education
“prepares students to be citizens of a democracy within a global society”
and also teaches students to “understand themselves as product of — and
participants in — traditions of art, ideas and values.” General education
should also encourage students to “adapt to change” and to have a sense of
ethics, the report says.
The general education proposed by the faculty panel
would have students take three one-semester courses in “critical skills” in
written and oral communication, foreign languages, and analytical reasoning.
Then students would have to take seven courses in
the following categories:
- Cultural traditions and cultural change.
- The ethical life.
- The United States and the world (one each in
the U.S. and the world).
- Reason and faith.
- Science and technology (one in a life science
and one in a physical science).
Within these categories, there would be a broad
range of courses that could fulfill the requirements. Each would have to
meet certain general education requirements, such as providing a broad scope
of knowledge and encouraging student-faculty contact. But the subject matter
within categories could vary significantly.
For instance, courses suggested as possibilities
for the cultural traditions requirement include “The Emergence of World
Literature,” “Art and Censorship,” and “Representations of the Other.”
Courses for study of the United States could include “Health Care in the
United States: A Comparative Perspective” and “Pluralist Societies: The
United States in Comparative Context.” The reason and faith requirement,
which would involve all students studying religion in some form, might have
courses such as “Religion and Closed Societies” and “Religion and
Democracy.”
In explaining the rationale for a faith and reason
requirement, the Harvard professors noted that most college undergraduates
care about religion and discuss it, but “often struggle — sometimes for the
first time in their lives — to sort out the relationship between their own
beliefs and practices, the different beliefs and practices of fellow
students, and the profoundly secular and intellectual world of the academy
itself.”
The report also noted the many tensions around
religion in modern society — including fights over school prayer, same-sex
marriage, and stem cell research. “Harvard is no longer an institution with
a religious mission, but religion is a fact that Harvard’s graduates will
confront in their lives both in and after college,” the report said,
explaining why a religion requirement is important. At the same time, it
added: “Let us be clear. Courses in reason and faith are not religious
apologetics. They are courses that examine the interplay between religion
and various aspects of national and/or international culture and society.”
In the ethics requirement, students will consider how to make ethical
choices, but in religion, students “will appreciate the role of religion in
contemporary, historical or future events — personal, cultural, national or
international.”
‘Activity Based Learning’
Beyond the various course requirements, the Harvard
panel called for the university to consider new ways to link students’
in-class and out-of-class experiences.
“The big thing for many Harvard undergrads tends to
be their extracurricular activities. It’s almost a cliché that they spend
more time out of the yard than in the yard,” said Menand. “We don’t want to
bureaucratize that, but we think there is a natural connection between the
classroom and what takes place out of the classroom.”
This part of the report is more vague and less
prescriptive, and in fact the panel calls for another panel to consider how
to carry out the idea of promoting “activity based learning.” Generally, the
report said, the pedagogical idea it wants Harvard to embrace is that “the
ability to apply abstract knowledge to concrete cases — and vice versa.”
Examples given to show the value of this kind of learning include the
statements that “studying the philosophy of the 17th century might inform
the production of a classic play by Molière” and “working on a political
campaign can bring to life material in a course on democracy.”
In a course, this link might be made through
optional papers that students could write on how an outside activity helped
the student understand course material or how course material influenced a
planned activity. If several students participate in the same out-of-class
activity, team work might be involved in and outside of class. And in either
case, the report said, closer faculty-student contact would be encouraged.
What It Means in Cambridge and Beyond
At Harvard, a series of meeting are now being
scheduled for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to review the report and —
eventually — to vote on it. Menand said that while the review would take
months at least, it need not wait for Harvard to have a new permanent
president.
Schneider of the Association of American Colleges
and Universities said she thought the report might have a positive impact.
“I think that what this is doing is restoring the purpose of general
education requirements, which is to connect learning with real world
citizenship.”
She said it made a lot of sense for Harvard to say
that students need to study the United States, and the world, and science,
and religion, etc., rather than using broad distribution requirements.
“Let’s think about what’s going on in American high schools. Students have
one year of American history or maybe two, but they may never study the
United States again,” she said. Harvard’s proposal would mean that they
would study the United States again, and at a deeper level than they could
in high school.
Continued in the article
Do we need huge changes in J-Schools and
B-Schools?
I think this is sad.
Read the graphs of the plunging stock prices and circulation revenues of the
major newspapers
What on earth will replace all those salaried reporters and correspondents
around the world?
Infographic: The Death Of The Newspaper Industry ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/infographic-the-death-of-the-newspaper-industry/
These days
the important factors when students are choosing majors and careers are ---
jobs, jobs, and more jobs. Business schools still provide relatively good
opportunities for jobs, especially the largest accounting firms that have,
gratefully, provided many, many job opportunities and training to entry-level
graduates. The market is bleak at the moment for finance and MBA graduates,
but not nearly as bleak as the job market for journalism (J-School) graduates.
The most
obvious comparison is that the large international CPA firms are thriving/hiring
when compared to the world’s great newspapers. Aside from The Wall Street
Journal, what major newspaper is not in dire financial trouble? The
Boston Globe is now on the chopping block and its owner, the New York
Times, had to sell its Manhattan building to keep paying its bills.
The
Internet has not been kind to journalists. The public has come to expect news
and news commentaries on the cheap --- read that free. This does not bode well
for J-School majors, and probably nobody knows it better than college students
since they’re intensive users of the Internet, Blogs, and Social Networks.
Newspapers
also have an extremely expensive business model with huge networks of reporters
and correspondents around the world. It will be a huge loss when this business
model fails, because television stations, bloggers, and social networks rely
heavily on the news dredged up by newspaper reporters. When the newspapers shut
down the global network of reporters or commence to pay reporters a pittance,
who will dredge up the news? Certainly not bloggers like me sitting on their
butts in the mountains.
Newspapers
have extremely expensive distribution costs in large part because the product is
relatively heavy and is mostly trashed by readers in less than a day.
Newspapers
are facing a seriously declining share of advertising revenues due in large part
to competition from sites like Google and Yahoo, to say nothing about the online
magazines that download Associated Press reports and share the news with the
world for free ---
http://news.google.com/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn
Imploding Job Market: Two-Year MA Degree in Journalism Degree Program
Shrinks to Nine-Months
"J-School Makeovers," by Lauren Ingeno, Inside Higher Ed,
July 16, 2013 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/07/16/usc-announces-changes-its-journalism-masters-degree-program
So who
wants to major in journalism? Practically nobody!
Journalism school majors are now competing with philosophy graduates for
burger-flipping careers.
Am I happy about this? Absolutely and irrevocably --- NO!
The Carnegie
Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation on Monday
announced an $11 million expansion of their joint program to reform journalism
education by supporting new programs at selected institutions. The additional
funds will continue fellowships and curricular efforts at the eight journalism
schools in the program and add three more: those at Arizona State University,
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Nebraska
at Lincoln.
Inside Higher Ed, July 8, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/07/08/qt
"Take It From an Ex-Journalist: Adapt or Die," by Byron P. White,
Chronicle of Higher Education, September 23, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Take-It-From-an-Ex-Journalist-/141779/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Somewhere between our group's discussion of
three-year bachelor's degrees and its deliberation over the value of
general-education courses, the sensation swept over me: I've seen this
before—or at least something close to it. Déjà vu.
The people engaged in the conversation were
different this time. They were members of Cleveland State University's
senior leadership team. We had gathered for President Ronald Berkman's
annual two-day fall retreat, which began with an overview of the forces that
are driving the need for urgent change in higher education.
Noting our industry's notorious reputation for
being stuck in its ways, President Berkman baited his vice presidents and
deans: "Do we really have an appetite for change?" he asked. Thus began a
vigorous dialogue among my colleagues in which we delved into all manner of
institutional innovation.
The scene reminded me of similar sessions at
another time, in another place, concerning urgent change in another "mature"
industry. That industry was the newspaper business. I began my professional
career in 1984 as a newspaper reporter, and after about 10 years, I had
ascended to the management ranks of the Chicago Tribune. I recall countless
conversations around that time with senior staff and peers at national
conferences where we would discuss the powerful forces threatening the
industry and how we desperately needed to respond.
We never really did, at least not sufficiently
enough to stem the onslaught of technological advancements, disruption of
business models, and shifting consumer preferences that have since conspired
to pretty much dismantle newspapers as we knew them. Tribune, parent company
of my beloved Chicago paper, filed for bankruptcy a few years ago. In my
current home, Cleveland, The Plain Dealer recently ceased home delivery on
certain days in order to prolong its survival.
I moved to higher education more than a dozen years
ago, just as newspapers were beginning their rapid descent. However,
listening to my Cleveland State colleagues during the president's retreat, I
could not help but draw comparisons between our current predicament and the
one newspapers faced a few years ago.
Back then, the fundamental challenges were apparent
enough and amazingly similar to those that higher education faces now,
especially public institutions: Newspapers' most reliable source of
revenue—classified advertising, not state subsidy—was steadily disappearing.
A host of online providers had emerged that were willing to deliver
information to consumers faster, more cheaply, and more conveniently. And
our loyal customer base of longtime newspaper subscribers—not unlike the
seemingly endless supply of high-school graduates—was starting to lose
confidence in us.
And yet, our change-the-world brainstorming
sessions more often than not devolved into debates over the merits of making
incremental, operational adjustments. The most radical ideas were usually
deemed either impossible or not really necessary. Just the exercise of
entertaining the notion of a paperless edition or allowing citizens to serve
as journalists (now we call them "bloggers") seemed like progress, even if
we seldom followed through.
To this day, I believe the newspaper industry could
have avoided such a steep decline had we made a serious commitment to adapt
to change. How much better off might we have been if we had been bold enough
to adopt the open-minded approach that the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos
expressed upon his recent purchase of The Washington Post: "I don't want to
imply that I have a worked-out plan," Bezos said. "This will be uncharted
terrain, and it will require experimentation."
Looking back, I can now see why newspaper
executives and journalists had trouble getting there. For the same reasons,
too many university administrators, deans, and faculty members are
struggling to usher in significant change as well. Perhaps this will sound
familiar to you.
First, we really didn't believe we had to change.
Sure, we heard all the doomsday predictions, mostly from those outside the
industry—but, come on! The Chicago Tribune had been around since 1847. Its
abolitionist campaign helped lead to the founding of the Republican Party
and the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. The Tribune Company had just
purchased the Los Angeles Times and Newsday. Sure, we might struggle a
little bit, but go bankrupt? No way.
Second, despite all the evidence that the public's
views of news and media were shifting, we thought the public was wrong. So
what if every reader survey ranked international news coverage near the
bottom of what people wanted to read? Didn't they know our Africa
correspondent had just won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting?
People needed international reporting even if they were too ignorant to
recognize it, and we were determined to give it to them, no matter that the
enormous expense of housing reporters all over the world was killing the
bottom line.
Finally, we just could not envision a reality that
was too far removed from the one we had experienced. Even when we finally
conceded that the Internet was becoming a more popular source of news than
newsprint, we thought the solution was simple: Just paste the newspaper
online in the same format. We could not imagine that people would use the
power of the Web essentially to assemble their own virtual newspapers,
focusing on the topics that interested them and pulling from a variety of
sources that they trusted most.
Continued in article
As college seniors
prepare to graduate, The Daily Beast crunches the numbers to determine
which majors—from journalism to psychology —didn’t pay.
Some
cities are better than others for college
graduates. Some college courses are
definitely hotter than others. Even some
iPhone apps are
better for college students
than others. But when it comes down to it, there’s only one question
that rings out in dormitories, fraternities, and dining halls across the
nation: What’s your major?
Slide
Show
01.Journalism
02. Horticulture
03. Agriculture
04. Advertising
05. Fashion Design
06. Child and Family Studies
07. Music
08. Mechanical Engineering Technology
09. Chemistry
10. Nutrition
11. Human Resources
12. Theatre
13. Art History
14. Photography
15. Literature
16. Art
17.Fine Arts
18. Psychology
19. English
20. Animal Science
Reviving Journalism Schools
For as long as doomsayers have predicted the decline of
civic-minded reportage as we know it, reformers have sought to draft a rewrite
of the institutions that train many undergraduate and graduate students pursuing
a career in journalism. Criticisms of journalism schools have ranged from
questioning whether the institutions are necessary in the first place (since
many journalists, and most senior ones, don’t have journalism degrees) to
debating the merits of teaching practical skills versus theory and whether
curriculums should emphasize broad knowledge or specialization in individual
fields . . . The sessions were part of an effort to evaluate the function of
journalism schools in an age of new media and the public’s declining faith in
the fourth estate: the
Carnegie-Knight
Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education,
which in 2005 enlisted top institutions in the country to bolster their
curriculums with interdisciplinary studies and expose students to different
areas of knowledge, including politics, economics, philosophy and the sciences.
The initiative, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S.
and James L. Knight Foundation, also works with journalism schools to incubate
selected students working on national reporting projects.
Andy Guess, "Reviving the J-School," Inside Higher Ed, January 10, 2008
---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/10/jschools
There are an
increasing number of scholarly videos on this topic at
BigThink: YouTube for Scholars (where
intellectuals may post their lectures on societal issues) ---
http://www.bigthink.com/
Some
of you may benefit by analyzing similarities and differences between the above
tidbit on J-Schools versus the AACSB effort to examine needs for change in
B-Schools.
Key AACSB sites
include the following:
http://www.aacsb.edu/Resource_Centers/AME/AME report.pdf
http://www.aacsb.edu/publications/metf/metfreportfinal-august02.pdf
http://www.aacsb.edu/publications/dfc/default.asp
http://www.aacsb.edu/wxyz/hp-sdc.asp
http://www.aacsb.edu/publications/ValueReport_lores.pdf
From The Wall Street Journal Accounting
Weekly Review on January 11, 2008
Talking B-School: Teaching the
Gospel of Management
by Ron Alsop
The Wall Street Journal
Jan 08, 2008
Page: B4
Click here to view the
full article on WSJ.com
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119974268053072925.html?mod=djem_jiewr_ac
TOPICS: Accounting,
Internal Controls
SUMMARY: Professor Charles Zech,
director of the Center for the study of Church Management
and a professor of economics at Villanova University,
discusses their new MBA program. The article mentions
internal controls needed in church management practices.
CLASSROOM APPLICATION: Familiarity
with specific types of MBA programs, general educational
issues, and the issues of internal control evident in recent
church and clergy scandals can be discussed in an
introductory accounting, accounting information systems, or
auditing class.
QUESTIONS:
1.) You may have seen advertisements for MBA programs
targeted to golf course or ski resort management. In
general, why are different industries targeted in management
education?
2.) Why did Villanova University decide to offer an MBA in
church management? In what ways will Villanova target the
MBA program?
3.) Not all universities may be able to offer this targeted
MBA. Why not?
4.) What is transparency in financial reporting? How do
examples given in the article indicate insufficient
transparency in church management and reporting practices?
5.) What internal control weaknesses are identified in the
article? List each weakness and describe a solution for the
weakness.
6.) How do properly functioning internal controls support
sufficient transparency in financial reporting?
7.) What is the concept of stewardship? How is it discussed
in the objectives of financial reporting in both U.S. and
international conceptual frameworks of accounting?
8.) How do the comments in the article make it clear that
focusing on stewardship better fits church management than
does focusing on other objectives and qualitative
characteristics identified in the conceptual framework of
accounting?
Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of
Rhode Island
|
"Teaching the Gospel of Management Program Aims
to Bring Transparency To Church Business Practices," by RON ALSOP January 8,
2008; Page B4---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119974268053072925.html?mod=djem_jiewr_ac
The reputations of many Roman Catholic Perishes
have been tarnished in recent years, both by the priest sex-abuse scandals
and a growing number of embezzlement cases. That has prompted a burgeoning
movement to improve the management and leadership skills of church officials
through new programs being offered primarily at Catholic universities.
M.B.A. Track columnist Ron Alsop talked recently with Charles Zech, director
of the Center for the Study of Church Management and a professor of
economics at Villanova University's School of Business in Villanova, Pa.,
about the launch of its master's degree in church management in May and the
need for more sophisticated and more transparent business practices in
Perishes and religious organizations.
WSJ: Why did Villanova decide to create a
master's degree in church management?
Dr. Zech: We find that business managers at both
the Perish and diocesan level often have social work, theology or education
backgrounds and lack management skills. While pastors aren't expected to
know all the nitty-gritty of running a small business, they at least need
enough training in administration to supervise their business managers.
Before starting the degree, we ran some seminars in 2006 and 2007 as a trial
balloon to see if folks were interested enough to pay for management
education. The seminars proved to be quite popular, drawing people from all
over the country, including high-level officials from both Catholic dioceses
and religious orders.
How have the sexual-abuse scandals and
embezzlement cases put a spotlight on poor management and governance
practices?
The Catholic Church has some real managerial
problems that were brought to light by the clergy abuse scandals. It became
quite obvious that the church isn't very transparent and accountable in its
finances. Settlements had been made off the books with abuse victims and
priests had been sent off quietly for counseling, to the surprise of many
Perishioners. Then came a string of embezzlement cases. Our center on church
management surveyed chief financial officers of U.S. Catholic dioceses in
2005 and found that 85% had experienced embezzlements in the previous five
years. One of our recommendations was that Perishes be audited once a year
by an independent auditor. There clearly are serious questions about
internal financial controls at the Perish level, and we are now doing
research on Perish advisory councils and asking questions about such things
as who handles the Sunday collection and who has check-writing authority.
Does the same person count the collection, deposit the money and then
reconcile the checkbook? Obviously, you're just asking for problems if it's
the same person; you can imagine the temptations.
Beyond the need for better financial controls,
what other management issues should get more attention from church leaders?
Performance management is definitely an important
but neglected area. That's partly because it's a very touchy issue. Who is
going to appraise the performance of a priest or a church worker who is also
a member of the Perish? There's great reluctance on the part of the clergy
to be appraiser or appraisee. You have to view the Perish as a family
business and understand that it's like evaluating members of your family.
How will Villanova's church management degree be
different from what other universities have started offering?
Some schools combine standard business classes with
courses from theology and other departments. But if you're taking a regular
M.B.A. finance class, you're learning about Wall Street and other things
that aren't really relevant. What we're doing is creating courses
specifically for this degree program, so there are both business and
faith-based elements in every class. For example, the law course will deal
with civil law relative to church law so students understand the possible
conflicts. The accounting course will cover internal financial-control
issues for churches. And the human-resource management class will include
discussion of volunteers, a big part of the labor force for Perishes.
Have you encountered any resistance from church
officials?
Yes, some people say a church is not a business.
But I point out that we still have to be good stewards of our resources --
our financial and human capital -- to carry out God's work on Earth. When
you use management terms with bishops, they often get turned off. But when
you use the word stewardship, it has more impact because it's in the Bible.
Jesus talked about the importance of our being good stewards who take care
of our talents and other gifts.
Is the degree restricted to Catholic clergy and
lay managers?
The courses will have a Catholic focus because as a
Catholic university, our mission is to try to meet the needs of our
community. But the degree is certainly not restricted to Catholics. Every
church has similar managerial problems. In fact, we're eager for other
Christian denominations to become part of the program and provide some
valuable contributions to class discussions. A typical course, however,
would not apply to other religions because of the different way Christian
churches are organized compared with synagogues and other religious
institutions.
Why is the degree being offered primarily
online, with only a one-week residency on campus?
Since we view the market for church-management
education as national and even global, a distance-learning degree will
attract clergy and church workers from any part of the world who can't take
off for two years to come to Villanova. In fact, we already have heard from
a priest in Ireland and a Presbyterian minister in Cameroon interested in
enrolling in the program.
The church management degree costs $23,400. How
can clergy and church workers afford it?
We expect the vast majority of students to be
supported by a diocese or other religious or social service organizations.
We will chop 25% off the price for anyone who can get their organization to
pay a third of the tuition. That cuts a student's out-of-pocket costs by
about half. We're trying to send the message to religious leaders that this
is important and that they should invest in management training.
Question
When does education become more and more like training (or education
specialization at the wrong level)?
Undergraduate accounting programs probably have a worse problem with this
than any other degree programs, including other business programs such as
finance, marketing, and management. Accounting has more required courses in
large measure due to the number of accounting courses required to sit for the
CPA Examination.
"Pre-Med
Education Must Be Compatible with Liberal Arts Ideals," by Timothy R. Austin,
Inside Higher Ed, July 31, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/07/31/austin
As we approach the second decade of the century, it
is fair to ask what young medical doctors should know and where and when
they should learn it. But amid calls for revisions to the undergraduate
premedical curriculum, undergraduate colleges must guard against being
co-opted as “farm clubs” for “big league” schools of medicine.In the
American system of higher education, to paraphrase the opening of a popular
television series, the task of educating and training tomorrow’s doctors is
shared by two separate yet equally important institutions: baccalaureate
colleges of arts and sciences and professional schools of medicine. And, as
the ubiquitous use of the term “pre-med” implies, undergraduate educators
have long accepted their responsibility to equip students who aspire to
become physicians with the knowledge and skills essential for admission to
medical school. It follows from this premise that changes in the scope and
focus of medical school curricula will raise legitimate questions about the
courses most appropriate for premed students.
This argument furnishes the starting point for a
recent contribution by Jules L. Dienstag to the New England Journal of
Medicine (“Relevance
and Rigor in Premedical Education”). In his essay,
Dienstag notes the demands placed on medical school faculties by an ever
expanding range of “new scientific material” and deplores the “widely varied
levels of science preparation” among first-year medical students. As a
remedy, he proposes a radical reshaping of the pre-medical science
curriculum and a corresponding revision of both the Medical College
Admissions Test (or MCAT) and the criteria used by medical school admissions
committees. By “refocusing” and “increasing [the] relevance” of the science
courses pre-med students take, Dienstag argues, undergraduate institutions
could better prepare graduates for professional school while simultaneously
opening up additional space in the curriculum for “an expansive liberal arts
education encompassing literature, languages, the arts, humanities, and
social sciences.”
Dienstag’s prescription deserves serious
consideration by faculty and administrators at baccalaureate and
professional institutions alike. He offers valuable suggestions on a range
of issues. But Dienstag naturally approaches this topic from his own
perspective — that of the dean for medical education at Harvard Medical
School. In advocating for changes that would address the challenges facing
his own colleagues, he ignores (or at least passes too quickly over)
complications and contradictions that those changes would create at
undergraduate colleges.
Each entering class at any undergraduate
institution contains many more students who express their firm intention to
become medical doctors than will ever apply to a medical school, let alone
gain admission. Some will learn in Chemistry 101 that their intellectual
gifts are not those of a scientist. Others will be seduced by the excitement
of laboratory research and pursue Ph.D. rather than M.D. degrees. Still
others will surprise themselves (not to mention their parents) by
discovering a passion for literature or archaeology, economics or music that
overwhelms their earlier conviction about their destined career paths.
Such defections are scarcely surprising, given the
limited knowledge and experience that high school students rely on as the
basis for forming their views about possible life goals. But it is also
important to recognize that many undergraduate institutions – liberal arts
colleges in particular – actively encourage their students to remain
intellectually curious and open to the full range of disciplines that they
sponsor. “Pursue your passion,” we advise incoming first-year students at
the College of the Holy Cross. “Find what excites and fulfills you and see
where it may lead.” Tracking pre-med students into what Dienstag describes
as a science curriculum with “a tighter focus on science that ‘matters’ to
medicine” runs counter to this liberal arts ethos. While it might better
prepare the minority of those students who will one day matriculate at a
school of medicine, it could handicap those whose scientific interests point
them toward industry or teaching and research. It could also restrict the
breadth of the scientific education that non-science majors would take with
them if later decisions led them towards majors in the humanities, arts or
social sciences. And even for the small number of students who would in fact
emerge from such a streamlined curriculum and enter medical school, one has
to question the wisdom of targeting “biologically relevant” material at the
expense of courses in topics as critical to the future of our planet as
ecology and population genetics.
Another way of explaining the unease that some
faculty members at liberal arts colleges may feel over Dienstag’s proposal
is that it implies that the study of biology, chemistry, physics and
statistics is undertaken as a means — and to one very particular end. The
attitude we seek to foster in our students at liberal arts institutions, by
contrast, is that one studies a discipline for what it reveals about the
universe we inhabit and about what the mission statement at the College of
the Holy Cross calls “basic human questions.” The knowledge and skills that
one acquires in the process will be equally useful in one’s career and in
one’s life outside the workplace and certainly do not limit who one may
become, either professionally or personally.
There is no question that the combined eight-year
premedical and medical school curriculum that has served us well for decades
is coming under increasing pressure. With each year that passes, society
expects more of its physicians; as Dienstag notes, we now demand that they
be trained not only in medical science but also in “ethics, … listening
skills, and skills relevant to health policy and economics.” Unless we are
to extend the already long training period by another year, changes in what
we teach and how we teach it are inevitable.
Dienstag urges those of us who teach undergraduates
not to “shy away from the challenge” posed by this shifting environment. I
suggest that the challenge we confront can not be addressed effectively
without all parties being open to possible changes in the way they
contribute to the process. More importantly, our colleagues in the
professional schools must understand that the term “pre-med” designates a
provisional career aspiration far more often than it does a firm commitment.
Undergraduate students are by definition still learning about their world
and seeking out their place in it, so our institutions serve their needs
when we balance the importance of effective pre-professional preparation
with the equally compelling need for curricular flexibility and disciplinary
breadth.
Some Business Schools No Longer Have Core Curriculum Silos
Yale Business School's Core Curriculum No Longer Has Traditional Courses
in Functional Areas of Accounting, Finance, Marketing, Management, Finance, and
Economics
"Breaking Down Silos at Yale: Dean Joel Podolny talks about how the
B-school is putting old paradigms out to pasture with its new curriculum," by
Kerry Miller, Business Week, September 12, 2006 ---
Click Here
Since taking office last
year, Dean Joel Podolny has announced plans for far-reaching changes aimed
at pushing the
Yale School of Management into the top tier of the
nation's business schools (see BusinessWeek.com, 4/28/05,
"A Fresh Face for Yale"). The most significant
change to come to fruition so far is the school's radically redesigned
curriculum, implemented with this fall's entering
class.
What are the core
elements of the new curriculum?
The most important part of the curriculum is that we're replacing the
disciplinary courses that mapped onto the functional silos in organizations
with new courses that are actually organized around the key constituencies
that a manager needs to engage in order to be effective.
We now offer a course on the customer rather than a course in marketing, a
course on the investor rather than a course in finance. All of them are
multidisciplinary in both their design and their delivery. And then we have
a course called the integrated leadership perspective at the end which sort
of brings together all the different perspectives.
Why were these changes are necessary? Do you feel that the standard
MBA is outdated?
When I talked to CEOs, to our alumni, to recruiters, it became clear that
the demands for managers, for leaders, are very different today than they
were in the past century. Effective leaders need to be able to own and frame
problems and take real responsibility for solving those problems, and then
work across organizational boundaries in order to solve those problems. The
curriculum in the past was broken down by these disciplinary silos and
because of that, got in the way of effective management and leadership.
I think, not just at Yale, but at any of the curricula that you would look
at any of the major business schools, they were broken down by functional
silos: a course in marketing, a course in accounting, a course in
organizational behavior. But if you talk to any leader of a major
corporation, they will tell you that the real value to be added is in
working across those silos, and the disciplinary delivery got in the way of
educating students in a way that could maximize their ability to add value
to the organizations of which they are a part.
Who were the major architects of the curriculum?
We started our curriculum reform last year in the fall, and we had over
two-thirds of the senior faculty involved on various committees. We also had
the students involved. It was really kind of faculty-led, but it was led
through engagement with all the constituencies of the school. Our faculty
talked to recruiters. They talked with alumni. They talked with current
students, in addition to the students that were on the committee.
You don't usually use words like courage to sort of talk about faculty
initiatives, but I actually think that that word is quite appropriate for
talking about this curriculum reform on the part of the faculty because it
required them to really give up on their comfort zone in order to embrace a
new model of management education. This is a faculty that's stepping up and
saying, "We're ready to meet the challenge and we're going to do it now.
We're going to make the investment in time and energy."
Over the summer, it has been remarkable to see that investment. In addition
to having multi-disciplinary teams working on the various courses, the
faculty has been meeting once a week in a large group. When the faculty in
one area are presenting syllabi, the faculty from all the areas come and
make comments. That requires trust, and it requires courage, but that's
what's going to make this new curriculum successful.
How does the curriculum fit into your long-term goals for the
school?
What attracted me to this school was the school's mission of educating
leaders for business and society. And my belief after meeting the alumni on
the search committee is that they aren't just words, but that the school
actually lives it.
We create graduates who are looking to make a positive difference in the
world, whether they aspire to be a Fortune 100 CEO or run a major nonprofit
or to have influence on policy and government. We have put in place a
curriculum that helps to further foster that aspiration of our students and
that feature of our culture.
To the degree to which we actually put in place a curriculum that executes
on that mission to the maximum degree, I believe we don't just create a
great school but we raise the bar of management education. I felt coming
here that because of that mission, because of the commitment of the faculty
and the community to that mission, and because of the willingness of people
to put the time and the energy into developing a curriculum that's
consistent with that mission, that this is the place that actually can rise
to that challenge.
So far, how is the new curriculum resonating?
The response has been wildly enthusiastic on all sides. We announced the new
curriculum in March, which was before the Class of 2008 had to make their
decisions. Our yield increased about 21% from the previous year. The
employers and the alumni that we speak to are extremely enthusiastic about
the curriculum as well. We have had those recruiters and alumni say to us
that they feel we really have designed a curriculum that does meet the
challenges of management and leadership today.
What are the other pressing issues for Yale SOM today?
We're going to build a new campus, and for the school that's a major issue
that we're excited about. We're also going to be growing the school
slightly. We're the smallest of the major business schools, and in a lot of
ways that's great. That gives us a tremendous advantage in terms of
reforming the curriculum in a way that works across disciplinary boundaries
because being small, we have faculty who've grown very comfortable working
across disciplinary boundaries.
Over the long run, we'll be increasing our size to about 300 students per
class [from 220]. The campus is part of that growth, but it also means
growing the faculty, and so those are two other issues, but the curriculum
reform is all-encompassing. It touches on everything that we do, and so that
will continue to remain front and center in terms of our efforts for some
time.
Yale isn't the only school to announce a
curriculum overhaul of late (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/6/06,
"Stanford's New Look MBA") How does Yale's new
curriculum fit into that overall landscape?
To the best of my knowledge, we were the first school to announce a major
overhaul of its curriculum. We did so in March. I obviously am not in a
position to comment on the details of other curricula. I haven't seen any in
particular detail. I do know, I was at a conference with 40 deans in Toronto
in March, and it is a topic that's on everybody's mind.
I think everybody is wrestling with this challenge of, O.K., how do you
break out of the disciplinary silos in order to deliver a curriculum that
meets the demands of management as a profession today? My own view is that
the more schools that are embracing this challenge, the better off we all
are. To the degree to which any of us succeed, we all succeed in raising the
standards of management education and meeting the challenges of educating
and professionalizing management. I'm excited to see, though, what everybody
else is doing.
Jensen Comment
The Walton School of Business at the University of Arkansas broke down the
functional silos several years ago. You can read the following tidbit at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book05q1.htm
February 17, 2005
message from Bob Jensen
I call your attention to Page 4 of
the Spring 2005 newsletter called “The Accounting Educator” from the
Teaching and Curriculum Section of the American Accounting Association ---
http://aaahq.org/TeachCurr/newsletters/index.htm
The current Chair (Tomas Calderon)
has a piece about “reflection” which is nice to reflect upon. There are
abstracts of papers in other journals that relate to education, and an
assortment of teaching cases.
Marinus Bouman
has a nice piece entitled “Using Technology To Integrate Accounting Into The
Business Curriculum.” Interestingly, the Sam M. Walton College of Business
at the University of Arkansas no longer has courses in Principles of
Accounting (or Marketing or Finance). You should read Bouman’s article to
find out what took the place of these principles courses in a daring
curriculum experiment.
Are Elite Universities Losing
Their Competitive Edge?
E. HAN KIM University of Michigan - Stephen M. Ross School of Business
ADAIR MORSE University of Michigan
Stephen M. Ross School of Business LUIGI ZINGALES
SSRN April 2006 ---
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=900920
(as reported by Jim Mahar on November 30, 2006) ---
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/
We
study the location-specific component in research productivity of economics
and finance faculty who have ever been affiliated with the top 25
universities in the last three decades. We find that there was a positive
effect of being affiliated with an elite university in the 1970s; this
effect weakened in the 1980s and disappeared in the 1990s. We decompose this
university fixed effect and find that its decline is due to the reduced
importance of physical access to productive research colleagues. We also
find that salaries increased the most where the estimated externality
dropped the most, consistent with the hypothesis that the de-localization of
this externality makes it more difficult for universities to appropriate any
rent. Our results shed some light on the potential effects of the internet
revolution on knowledge-based industries.
Bob Jensen's threads on higher
education controversies are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
"Was Earning That Harvard M.B.A. Worth It?" by Abby Ellin, The New
York Times, June 11, 2006 ---
Click Here
THE popularity of the (MBA)
degrees has surged. In 1970, for example, business schools handed out 26,490
M.B.A.'s, according to the Department of Education. By 2004, after a period
marked by an economic boom and heightened competition for top-flight
business careers, that figure had jumped to 139,347. But opinion and data
appear divided on the tangible benefits of an M.B.A.
. . .
In 2003, Professor Mintzberg tracked the
performance of 19 students who graduated from the Harvard Business School in
1990 and were at the top of their class academically. Ten of the 19 were
"utter failures," he said. "Another four were very questionable, at least,"
he added. "So five out of 19 did well."
Research varies on the value of an M.B.A. A 2006
study by the Lubin School of Business at Pace University, looking at 482
companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange, found that only 162 of them
had chief executives with graduate degrees in business. The companies with
chief executives who went to more prestigious schools did no better than
those who went to less prestigious schools, according to the study. Why this
was so is unclear.
"One possibility is that if you don't have a
graduate degree from a top school then you have to work that much harder to
succeed," said Aron A. Gottesman, an associate professor at Pace and a
co-author of the study.
On the other hand, Professor Gottesman and a
colleague found in a separate study, published earlier this year in the
Journal of Empirical Finance, that mutual fund managers with M.B.A.'s from
BusinessWeek's 30 top-ranked business schools — including Harvard —
generally outperformed other mutual fund managers. Professor Gottesman is
not sure why this was so, either. "One possibility is that at higher-quality
schools they simply teach better technical skills," he speculated. "Or
students at top-tier schools have a higher I.Q."
Continued in article
Question
What's it really like to be the president of a university?
"The Puzzle of Leadership," by William M. Chace, Inside Higher Ed,
September 11, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/09/11/chace
The university president in the United States is
expected to be a friend to the students, a colleague of the faculty, a good
fellow with the alumni, a sound administrator with the trustees, a good
speaker with the public, an astute bargainer with the foundations and the
federal agencies, a politician with the state legislature, a friend of
industry, labor and agriculture, a persuasive diplomat with donors, a
champion of education generally, a supporter of the professions
(particularly law and medicine), a spokesman to the press, a scholar in his
own right, a public servant at the state and national levels, a devotee of
opera and football generally, a decent human being, a good husband and
father, an active member of the church. Above all, he must enjoy traveling
in airplanes, eating his meals in public, and attending public ceremonies.
With the exception of those duties the president of
a public institution alone would have, Kerr’s droll description fit what I
found myself doing.
I knew that people thought my job very difficult,
but perhaps blinded by excessive self-regard or limited in imaginative
intelligence, I thought it a good one, not an impossible one, and I enjoyed
almost all of its aspects. In performing all those duties Kerr described, I
was glad to be active, happy to be involved in many committees, and eager to
learn more about how the place worked, what made different people tick (or
not tick), and what held such a curious thing as a liberal-arts college
together. I slept well, exercised a lot, went to work every day with a
smile, and thought myself a lucky fellow to be at Wesleyan.
When gloomy days descended, as they now and again
did, I consoled myself with little mental games. Thinking about the
profusion of advice I continually received from every quarter of the campus,
I would say to myself: “Being president must be the easiest job in the
world; after all, everybody seems to know how to do it.” Or I would think
about how the “leadership” of a campus is so amusingly different from
leadership elsewhere. I would recall that George Shultz once said that the
biggest difference between his life as a corporate leader and his career as
dean of a business school was that, in business, he had to make sure that
his orders were precise and exact, given that they would likely be followed.
No such danger in academia. In sum, the very peculiarities of the job were
its most appealing feature.
Much of the literature on presidential leadership
concludes that the job is impossible, but it should also note the obvious:
at any given time, about 3,500 men and women do the job. The situation is
much like that of the airplane: there is no obvious reason why so large and
heavy a piece of metal can fly through the sky, yet it does. Despite the
impossibility of their work, thousands of presidents go to the office every
day, successfully complete some tasks, and return home.
Robert Birnbaum, one of those scholars who claims
that the job is unworkable, argues that the problem of presidential
leadership is that the criteria for success and failure are elusive:
…there is no accepted criterion presidents can
employ to judge the benefits of one course of action over another, and
little assurance that they could implement their preferences even if they
could specify them. Presidential authority is limited, complete
understanding of the scope and complexity of the enterprise exceeds human
cognitive capability, and unforeseen changes in demographic, political, and
economic conditions often overwhelm campus plans.
But the “impossibility” of such places can serve as
a healthy reminder of what they are not. A university or college is not a
business, does not make a profit, cannot declare quarterly earnings, “wins”
nothing, hopes to flourish forever, will never be bought out, cannot
relocate, is both in and out of the world, studies everything including
itself, considers itself a meritocracy while continually worshipping the
idea of community, and has as its greatest asset an odd assemblage of
self-directed intellectual entrepreneurs who work on the most complicated
aspects of their respective disciplines. What a university does is
expensive, time-consuming, inefficient, wayward, hard to understand, and yet
prestigious. It also helps young people and, more and more each year, looks
after them in all sorts of ways. It is exclusive in admissions and
appointments, but generous in sharing the fruits of its labor. It stands on
ancient ceremonies yet accelerates the workings of democracy. All in all, I
thought, a good place to be, even if my job was “impossible.”
Debates over the Limits of Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech
The National Association of Scholars
issued a new report Tuesday criticizing social work
education as a “national academic scandal” because its programs’ mission
descriptions and curricular requirements are “chock full of ideological
boilerplate and statements of political commitment.” In addition, the report
questions the Council on Social Work Education, which accredits colleges based
in part on whether the provide “social and economic justice content grounded in
an understanding of distributive justice, human and civil rights, and the global
interconnections of oppression.” The report issued Tuesday is in many ways
similar to
a complaint filed by the association with the
Education Department in 2005. A spokeswoman for the Council on Social Work
Education said that only one person there could respond to questions about the
report’s criticism and that person was not available Tuesday.
Inside Higher Ed, September 12, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/12/qt
“I’ve been a liberal law professor for 28 years,”
Chemerinsky told the Los Angeles Times Wednesday. “I write lots of op-eds and
articles, I argue high-profile cases.”Apparently, though, the details of
Chemerinsky’s background eluded some of those charged with choosing a founding
dean for the University of California at Irvine’s new law school. After being
selected last week for the job — in what was widely described as a remarkable
“coup” for a startup law school — Chemerinsky was informed Tuesday by Irvine’s
chancellor, Michael V. Drake, that the university was revoking the offer because
Drake had not been fully aware of the extent to which there were “conservatives
out to get me,” Chemerinsky told the Times.
Doug Lederman, "Law School Deanship Rescinded; Politics Blamed," Inside
Higher Ed, September 13, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/13/uci
Controversies over the limits of free speech in student-run campus
newspapers
The student-run newspaper at Central Connecticut State
University is under fire for publishing a cartoon this week that critics called
racist and sexist. The three-frame comic, titled “Polydongs,” features two
characters who mention locking a “14-year-old Latino girl” in a closet and
urinating on her. It was published in Wednesday’s issue of The Recorder, a
weekly newspaper distributed free on campus. The university’s president vowed on
Friday to cut off advertising in the paper, and its critics have planned a
protest on Monday on campus to push for reforms, including the ouster of the
paper’s editor, Mark Rowan“We believe the climate here at Central is one that
fosters this kind of behavior,” said Francisco Donis, a psychology professor and
president of the university’s Latin American Association, “so we want more
systematic changes to create a welcoming environment for everyone to feel safe
and secure.” About 5 percent of the 9,600 undergraduates are Hispanic, according
to university figures. The campus is in New Britain, a racially diverse city of
71,000 about 12 miles southwest of Hartford.
"Cartoon in Student-Run Newspaper Elicits Criticism," The New York Times,
September 15, 2007 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/nyregion/15cartoon.html
The University of Michigan Resumes Distribution of Anti-Israel Book
---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/12/mich
Academe vigorously hangs on to its freedom of speech prerogatives..
Question
Do students need more protection from their professor who expound political
views?
For all the fears about David Horowitz’s
Academic
Bill of Rights, the proposal ended up going nowhere
in state legislatures last year. But in Pennsylvania, the House of
Representatives voted to create a special legislative committee to investigate
the state of academic freedom and whether students who hold unpopular views need
more protection. The special committee held hearings — amid charges and
countercharges from Horowitz, his allies, college presidents, faculty groups and
others.
Scott Jaschik, "Who Won the Battle of Pennsylvania?" Inside Higher Ed,
November 16, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/16/tabor
Controversies over the limits of free speech on campus
Sixty British academics have issued a public letter calling for a change in the
law to explicitly protect academic freedom and to give complete freedom of
speech to those who teach at universities,
The Guardian reported.
The professors cite incidents in which colleagues with controversial views have
been attacked or the self-censorship of some who wish to avoid controversy. An
official of the main faculty union in Britain expressed some caution about the
new movement, telling the newspaper: “We should distinguish between the crucial
right of an academic to question and test received wisdom and any suggestions
that this is the same as an unlimited right of a university academic to express,
for example, anti-Semitic, homophobic or misogynist abuse where they were using
a position of authority to bully students or staff, or potentially breach the
duty of care that universities have towards students or staff.”
Inside Higher Ed, December 22, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/12/22/qt
Controversies over the limits of free speech
in student-run campus newspapers
The student-run newspaper at Central Connecticut State
University is under fire for publishing a cartoon this week that critics called
racist and sexist. The three-frame comic, titled “Polydongs,” features two
characters who mention locking a “14-year-old Latino girl” in a closet and
urinating on her. It was published in Wednesday’s issue of The Recorder, a
weekly newspaper distributed free on campus. The university’s president vowed on
Friday to cut off advertising in the paper, and its critics have planned a
protest on Monday on campus to push for reforms, including the ouster of the
paper’s editor, Mark Rowan“We believe the climate here at Central is one that
fosters this kind of behavior,” said Francisco Donis, a psychology professor and
president of the university’s Latin American Association, “so we want more
systematic changes to create a welcoming environment for everyone to feel safe
and secure.” About 5 percent of the 9,600 undergraduates are Hispanic, according
to university figures. The campus is in New Britain, a racially diverse city of
71,000 about 12 miles southwest of Hartford.
"Cartoon in Student-Run Newspaper Elicits Criticism," The New York Times,
September 15, 2007 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/nyregion/15cartoon.html
"Kicked Out," by Cary Nelson, Inside Higher Ed, December 22, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/12/22/nelson
Reverend: “Not here. I decide what gets taught. I
approve what they read. I’m ordering you to leave the building.”
Since it was a private facility I left as ordered.
But the program is to be funded with public money, and the Illinois
Humanities Council was assured free speech was guaranteed in the classes. It
is not. Indeed others have suggested the students were under pressure not to
disagree with church doctrine. This is precisely why the separation of
church and state is established in the United States Constitution, though
there is reason to doubt President Bush is comfortable with the concept.
Continued in article
Cary Nelson is president of the American Association of University
Professors and a professor of English at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign.
"The Two Languages of Academic Freedom," by Stanley Fish, The New York
Times, February 8, 2009 ---
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/the-two-languages-of-academic-freedom/
Last week we came to the section on academic
freedom in my course on the law of higher education and I posed this
hypothetical to the students: Suppose you were a member of a law firm or a
mid-level executive in a corporation and you skipped meetings or came late,
blew off assignments or altered them according to your whims, abused your
colleagues and were habitually rude to clients. What would happen to you?
The chorus of answers cascaded immediately: “I’d be
fired.” Now, I continued, imagine the same scenario and the same set of
behaviors, but this time you’re a tenured professor in a North American
university. What then?
I answered this one myself: “You’d be celebrated as
a brave nonconformist, a tilter against orthodoxies, a pedagogical visionary
and an exemplar of academic freedom.”
My assessment of the way in which some academics
contrive to turn serial irresponsibility into a form of heroism under the
banner of academic freedom has now been at once confirmed and challenged by
events at the University of Ottawa, where the administration announced on
Feb. 6 that it has “recommended to the Board of Governors the dismissal with
cause of Professor Denis Rancourt from his faculty position.” Earlier,
Rancourt, a tenured professor of physics, had been suspended from teaching
and banned from campus. When he defied the ban he was taken away in
handcuffs and charged with trespassing.
What had Rancourt done to merit such treatment?
According to the Globe and Mail, Rancourt’s sin was to have informed his
students on the first day of class that “he had already decided their marks
: Everybody was getting an A+.”
But that, as the saying goes, is only the tip of
the iceberg. Underneath it is the mass of reasons Rancourt gives for his
grading policy and for many of the other actions that have infuriated his
dean, distressed his colleagues (a third of whom signed a petition against
him) and delighted his partisans.
Rancourt is a self-described anarchist and an
advocate of “critical pedagogy,” a style of teaching derived from the
assumption (these are Rancourt’s words) “that our societal structures . . .
represent the most formidable instrument of oppression and exploitation ever
to occupy the planet” (Activist Teacher.blogspot.com, April 13, 2007).
Among those structures is the university in which
Rancourt works and by which he is paid. But the fact of his position and
compensation does not insulate the institution from his strictures and
assaults; for, he insists, “schools and universities supply the obedient
workers and managers and professionals that adopt and apply [the] system’s
doctrine — knowingly or unknowingly.”
It is this belief that higher education as we know
it is simply a delivery system for a regime of oppressors and exploiters
that underlies Rancourt’s refusal to grade his students. Grading, he says,
“is a tool of coercion in order to make obedient people” (rabble.ca., Jan.
12, 2009).
It turns out that another tool of coercion is the
requirement that professors actually teach the course described in the
college catalogue, the course students think they are signing up for.
Rancourt battles against this form of coercion by employing a strategy he
calls “squatting” – “where one openly takes an existing course and does with
it something different.” That is, you take a currently unoccupied structure,
move in and make it the home for whatever activities you wish to engage in.
“Academic squatting is needed,” he says, “because universities are
dictatorships . . . run by self-appointed executives who serve capital
interests.”
Rancourt first practiced squatting when he decided
that he “had to do something more than give a ‘better’ physics course.”
Accordingly, he took the Physics and Environment course that had been
assigned to him and transformed it into a course on political activism, not
a course about political activism, but a course in which political activism
is urged — “an activism course about confronting authority and hierarchical
structures directly or through defiant or non-subordinate assertion in order
to democratize power in the workplace, at school, and in society.”
Clearly squatting itself is just such a “defiant or
non-subordinate assertion.” Rancourt does not merely preach his philosophy.
He practices it.
This sounds vaguely admirable until you remember
what Rancourt is, in effect, saying to those who employ him: I refuse to do
what I have contracted to do, but I will do everything in my power to
subvert the enterprise you administer. Besides, you’re just dictators, and
it is my obligation to undermine you even as I demand that you pay me and
confer on me the honorific title of professor. And, by the way, I am
entitled to do so by the doctrine of academic freedom, which I define as
“the ideal under which professors and students are autonomous and design
their own development and interactions.”
Of course, as Rancourt recognizes, if this is how
academic freedom is defined, its scope is infinite and one can’t stop with
squatting: “The next step is academic hijacking, where students tell a
professor that she can stay or leave but that this is what they are going to
do and these are the speakers they are going to invite.” O, brave new world!
The record shows exchanges of letters between
Rancourt and Dean Andre E. Lalonde and letters from each of them to Marc
Jolicoeur, chairman of the Board of Governors. There is something comical
about some of these exchanges when the dean asks Rancourt to tell him why he
is not guilty of insubordination and Rancourt replies that insubordination
is his job, and that, rather than ceasing his insubordinate activities, he
plans to expand them. Lalonde complains that Rancourt “does not acknowledge
any impropriety regarding his conduct.” Rancourt tells Jolicoeur that
“Socrates did not give grades to students,” and boasts that everything he
has done was done “with the purpose of making the University of Ottawa a
better place,” a place “of greater democracy.” In other words, I am the
bearer of a saving message and those who need it most will not hear it and
respond by persecuting me. It is the cry of every would-be messiah.
Rancourt’s views are the opposite of those
announced by a court in an Arizona case where the issue was also whether a
teaching method could be the basis of dismissal. Noting that the university
had concluded that the plaintiff’s “methodology was not successful,” the
court declared “Academic freedom is not a doctrine to insulate a teacher
from evaluation by the institution that employs him” (Carley v. Arizona,
1987).
The Arizona court thinks of academic freedom as a
doctrine whose scope is defined by the purposes and protocols of the
institution and its limited purposes. Rancourt thinks of academic freedom as
a local instance of a global project whose goal is nothing less than the
freeing of revolutionary energies, not only in the schools but everywhere.
It is the difference between being concerned with
the establishing and implementing of workplace-specific procedures and being
concerned with the wholesale transformation of society. It is the difference
between wanting to teach a better physics course and wanting to save the
world. Given such divergent views, not only is reconciliation between the
parties impossible; conversation itself is impossible. The dispute can only
be resolved by an essentially political decision, and in this case the
narrower concept of academic freedom has won. But only till next time.
Stanley Fish is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor
and a professor of law at Florida International University, in Miami, and
dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University
of Illinois at Chicago. He has also taught at the University of California
at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and Duke University. He is the author of 10
books. His new book on higher education, "Save the World On Your Own Time,"
has just been published.
"An Authoritative Word on Academic Freedom," by Stanley
Fish, The New York Times, November 23, 2008 ---
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/an-authoritative-word-on-academic-freedom/?ei=5070&emc=eta1
More than a few times in these
columns I have tried to deflate the balloon of academic freedom by
arguing that it was not an absolute right or a hallowed principle,
but a practical and limited response to the particular nature of
intellectual work.
Now, in a new book —
“For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom,”
to be published in 2009 — two
distinguished scholars of constitutional law, Matthew W. Finkin and
Robert C. Post, study the history and present shape of the concept
and come to conclusions that support and deepen what I have been
saying in these columns and elsewhere.
The authors’ most important
conclusion is presented early on in their introduction: “We argue
that the concept of Academic freedom . . . differs fundamentally
from the individual First Amendment rights that present themselves
so vividly to the contemporary mind.” The difference is that while
free speech rights are grounded in the constitution, academic
freedom rights are “grounded . . . in a substantive account of the
purposes of higher education and in the special conditions necessary
for faculty to fulfill those purposes.”
In short, academic freedom, rather
than being a philosophical or moral imperative, is a piece of policy
that makes practical sense in the context of the specific task
academics are charged to perform. It follows that the scope of
academic freedom is determined first by specifying what that task is
and then by figuring out what degree of latitude those who are
engaged in it require in order to do their jobs.
If the mission of the enterprise
is, as Finkin and Post say, “to promote new knowledge and model
independent thought,” the “special conditions” necessary to the
realization of that mission must include protection from the forces
and influences that would subvert newness and independence by either
anointing or demonizing avenues of inquiry in advance. Those forces
and influences would include trustees, parents, donors, legislatures
and the general run of “public opinion,” and the device that
provides the necessary protection is called academic freedom. (It
would be better if it had a name less resonant with large
significances, but I can’t think of one.)
It does not, however, protect
faculty members from the censure or discipline that might follow
upon the judgment of their peers that professional standards have
either been ignored or violated. There is, Finkin and Post insist,
“a fundamental distinction between holding faculty accountable to
professional norms and holding them accountable to public opinion.
The former exemplifies academic freedom: the latter undermines it.”
Holding faculty accountable to
public opinion undermines academic freedom because it restricts
teaching and research to what is already known or generally
accepted.
Holding faculty accountable to
professional norms exemplifies academic freedom because it
highlights the narrow scope of that freedom, which does not include
the right of faculty “to research and publish in any manner they
personally see fit.”
Indeed, to emphasize the
“personal” is to mistake the nature of academic freedom, which
belongs, Finkin and Post declare, to the enterprise, not to the
individual. If academic freedom were “reconceptualized as an
individual right,” it would make no sense — why should workers in
this enterprise have enlarged rights denied to others? — and support
for it “would vanish” because that support, insofar as it exists, is
for the project and its promise (the production of new knowledge)
and not for those who labor within it. Academics do not have a
general liberty, only “the liberty to practice the scholarly
profession” and that liberty is hedged about by professional norms
and responsibilities.
I find this all very congenial.
Were Finkin and Post’s analysis internalized by all faculty members,
the academic world would be a better place, if only because there
would be fewer instances of irresponsible or overreaching teachers
invoking academic freedom as a cover for their excesses.
I do, however, have a quarrel with
the authors when they turn to the question of what teachers are free
or not free to do in the classroom.
Finkin and Post are correct when
they reject the neo-conservative criticism of professors who bring
into a class materials from disciplines other than the ones they
were trained in. The standard, they say, should be “whether material
from a seemingly foreign field of study illuminates the subject
matter under scrutiny.”
Just so. If I’m teaching poetry
and feel that economic or mathematical models might provide a
helpful perspective on a poem or body of poems, there is no good
pedagogical reason for limiting me to models that belong properly to
literary criticism. (I could of course be criticized for not
understanding the models I imported, but that would be another
issue; a challenge to my competence, not to my morality.)
But of course what the
neo-conservative critics of the academy are worried about is not
professors who stray from their narrowly defined areas of expertise;
they are worried about professors who do so in order to sneak in
their partisan preferences under the cover of providing students
with supplementary materials. That, I think, is a genuine concern,
and one Finkin and Post do not take seriously enough.
Responding to an expressed concern
that liberal faculty too often go on about the Iraq War in a course
on an entirely unrelated subject, Finkin and Post maintain that
there is nothing wrong, for example, with an instructor in English
history “who seeks to interest students by suggesting parallels
between King George III’s conduct of the Revolutionary War and
Bush’s conduct of the war in Iraq.”
But we only have to imagine the
class discussion generated by this parallel to see what is in fact
wrong with introducing it. Bush, rather than King George, would
immediately become the primary reference point of the parallel, and
the effort to understand the monarch’s conduct of his war would
become subsidiary to the effort to find fault with Bush’s conduct of
his war. Indeed, that would be immediately seen by the students as
the whole point of the exercise. Why else introduce a contemporary
political figure known to be anathema to most academics if you were
not inviting students to pile it on, especially in the context of
the knowledge that this particular king was out of his mind?
Sure, getting students to be
interested in the past is a good thing, but there are plenty of ways
to do that without taking the risk (no doubt being courted) that
intellectual inquiry will give way to partisan venting. Finkin and
Post are right to say that “educational relevance is to be
determined . . . by the heuristic purposes and consequences of a
pedagogical intervention”; but this intervention has almost no
chance of remaining pedagogical; its consequences are predictable,
and its purposes are suspect
Still, this is the only part of
the book’s argument I am unable to buy. The rest of it is right on
target. And you just have to love a book — O.K., I just have to love
a book — that declares that while faculty must “respect students as
persons,” they are under no obligation to respect the “ideas held by
students.” Way to go!
Jensen Comment
The term "political correctness" and related phrases
have a long history ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness#In_the_United_States
However, probably no U.S. scholar is more associated with "political
correctness" since than Stanley Fish when he was at Duke University and
the phrase "political correctness" with feminist language constraints
and liberalism in campus politics ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Fish
Bob Jensen's threads on political correctness are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
"Ideas of Academic Freedom," by Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed,
January 18, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/01/18/review-robert-posts-democracy-expertise-academic-freedom
Robert C. Post’s Democracy, Expertise, Academic
Freedom, published by
Yale University Press, is a succinct and tightly
argued book, and its subtitle, “A First Amendment Jurisprudence for the
Modern State,” clearly signals a calm sobriety that can't be taken for
granted. It covers topics that typically provoke controversy more often than
thought.
Academic freedom and the First Amendment come up
for discussion, most of the time, when some conflict is under way, with the
ideological battle lines already drawn. The editorials on either side write
themselves. And that’s to be expected. Knee-jerk reactions are a pretty
shabby substitute for civic virtue, but it’s not like you can respond to
every dispute in the public sphere by arguing from first principles. The
urgent task is to defend a position.
Post, who is dean of the Yale Law School, is not
writing in that rut. The arguments in Democracy, Expertise, Academic
Freedom were originally presented at the Northwestern University School
of Law when he delivered the Julius Rosenthal Lectures there in April 2008.
Opening the book, my first move was to check its index for the names of
certain culture-war belligerents who were much in the news back then. (You
can probably
guess which
ones.) They are, happily, absent from its pages.
Post is thinking about structural questions -- not commenting on recent
affairs, as such.
Rather than indulge in the columnist’s privilege of
going off on tangents, let me offer a précis of the book, followed by some
very brief remarks.
That the First Amendment exists
“to preserve an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will
ultimately prevail” is a familiar and venerable argument, originally framed
by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. almost a century ago, and invoked in Supreme
Court decisions many times since then. The bit in quotations marks just now,
for example, is a typical instance from 1969. The formulation has been
assessed and contested at great length by legal theorists. Whatever its
merits or deficiencies in general, however, the “marketplace of ideas”
argument is no help at all in understanding the relationship between the
First Amendment and what Post calls “the production of expert knowledge.”
Expert knowledge is produced within disciplines
that regulate what counts as knowledge and what doesn’t. Disciplines involve
methods, practices, and judgments that make preempt a laissez faire
attitude. And that is a good thing. “If a marketplace of ideas model were to
be imposed upon Nature or The American Economic Review or
The Lancet,” writes Post, “we would rapidly lose track of whatever
expertise we possess about the nature of the world.”
There is a complex and constant tension between the
need for untrammeled argument in the public sphere, on the one hand, and the
disciplinary protocols that constitute expert knowledge.
Continued in article
"An Authoritative Word on Academic Freedom," by Stanley Fish, The
New York Times, November 23, 2008 ---
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/an-authoritative-word-on-academic-freedom/?ei=5070&emc=eta1
More than a few times in
these columns I have tried to deflate the balloon of academic freedom by
arguing that it was not an absolute right or a hallowed principle, but a
practical and limited response to the particular nature of intellectual
work.
Now, in a new book —
“For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom,”
to be published in 2009 — two distinguished scholars
of constitutional law, Matthew W. Finkin and Robert C. Post, study the
history and present shape of the concept and come to conclusions that
support and deepen what I have been saying in these columns and elsewhere.
The authors’ most important
conclusion is presented early on in their introduction: “We argue that the
concept of Academic freedom . . . differs fundamentally from the individual
First Amendment rights that present themselves so vividly to the
contemporary mind.” The difference is that while free speech rights are
grounded in the constitution, academic freedom rights are “grounded . . . in
a substantive account of the purposes of higher education and in the special
conditions necessary for faculty to fulfill those purposes.”
In short, academic freedom,
rather than being a philosophical or moral imperative, is a piece of policy
that makes practical sense in the context of the specific task academics are
charged to perform. It follows that the scope of academic freedom is
determined first by specifying what that task is and then by figuring out
what degree of latitude those who are engaged in it require in order to do
their jobs.
If the mission of the
enterprise is, as Finkin and Post say, “to promote new knowledge and model
independent thought,” the “special conditions” necessary to the realization
of that mission must include protection from the forces and influences that
would subvert newness and independence by either anointing or demonizing
avenues of inquiry in advance. Those forces and influences would include
trustees, parents, donors, legislatures and the general run of “public
opinion,” and the device that provides the necessary protection is called
academic freedom. (It would be better if it had a name less resonant with
large significances, but I can’t think of one.)
It does not, however,
protect faculty members from the censure or discipline that might follow
upon the judgment of their peers that professional standards have either
been ignored or violated. There is, Finkin and Post insist, “a fundamental
distinction between holding faculty accountable to professional norms and
holding them accountable to public opinion. The former exemplifies academic
freedom: the latter undermines it.”
Holding faculty accountable
to public opinion undermines academic freedom because it restricts teaching
and research to what is already known or generally accepted.
Holding faculty accountable
to professional norms exemplifies academic freedom because it highlights the
narrow scope of that freedom, which does not include the right of faculty
“to research and publish in any manner they personally see fit.”
Indeed, to emphasize the
“personal” is to mistake the nature of academic freedom, which belongs,
Finkin and Post declare, to the enterprise, not to the individual. If
academic freedom were “reconceptualized as an individual right,” it would
make no sense — why should workers in this enterprise have enlarged rights
denied to others? — and support for it “would vanish” because that support,
insofar as it exists, is for the project and its promise (the production of
new knowledge) and not for those who labor within it. Academics do not have
a general liberty, only “the liberty to practice the scholarly profession”
and that liberty is hedged about by professional norms and responsibilities.
I find this all very
congenial. Were Finkin and Post’s analysis internalized by all faculty
members, the academic world would be a better place, if only because there
would be fewer instances of irresponsible or overreaching teachers invoking
academic freedom as a cover for their excesses.
I do, however, have a
quarrel with the authors when they turn to the question of what teachers are
free or not free to do in the classroom.
Finkin and Post are correct
when they reject the neo-conservative criticism of professors who bring into
a class materials from disciplines other than the ones they were trained in.
The standard, they say, should be “whether material from a seemingly foreign
field of study illuminates the subject matter under scrutiny.”
Just so. If I’m teaching
poetry and feel that economic or mathematical models might provide a helpful
perspective on a poem or body of poems, there is no good pedagogical reason
for limiting me to models that belong properly to literary criticism. (I
could of course be criticized for not understanding the models I imported,
but that would be another issue; a challenge to my competence, not to my
morality.)
But of course what the
neo-conservative critics of the academy are worried about is not professors
who stray from their narrowly defined areas of expertise; they are worried
about professors who do so in order to sneak in their partisan preferences
under the cover of providing students with supplementary materials. That, I
think, is a genuine concern, and one Finkin and Post do not take seriously
enough.
Responding to an expressed
concern that liberal faculty too often go on about the Iraq War in a course
on an entirely unrelated subject, Finkin and Post maintain that there is
nothing wrong, for example, with an instructor in English history “who seeks
to interest students by suggesting parallels between King George III’s
conduct of the Revolutionary War and Bush’s conduct of the war in Iraq.”
But we only have to imagine
the class discussion generated by this parallel to see what is in fact wrong
with introducing it. Bush, rather than King George, would immediately become
the primary reference point of the parallel, and the effort to understand
the monarch’s conduct of his war would become subsidiary to the effort to
find fault with Bush’s conduct of his war. Indeed, that would be immediately
seen by the students as the whole point of the exercise. Why else introduce
a contemporary political figure known to be anathema to most academics if
you were not inviting students to pile it on, especially in the context of
the knowledge that this particular king was out of his mind?
Sure, getting students to be
interested in the past is a good thing, but there are plenty of ways to do
that without taking the risk (no doubt being courted) that intellectual
inquiry will give way to partisan venting. Finkin and Post are right to say
that “educational relevance is to be determined . . . by the heuristic
purposes and consequences of a pedagogical intervention”; but this
intervention has almost no chance of remaining pedagogical; its consequences
are predictable, and its purposes are suspect
Still, this is the only part
of the book’s argument I am unable to buy. The rest of it is right on
target. And you just have to love a book — O.K., I just have to love a book
— that declares that while faculty must “respect students as persons,” they
are under no obligation to respect the “ideas held by students.” Way to go!
The term "political correctness" and related phrases have a long history ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness#In_the_United_States
However, probably no U.S. scholar is more associated with "political
correctness" since than Stanley Fish when he was at Duke University and the
phrase "political correctness" with feminist language constraints and liberalism
in campus politics ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Fish
Bob Jensen's threads on freedom of speech and political correctness in
higher education are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
"Wide-Stance Sociology," by Scott McLemee, Inside
Higher Ed, September 12, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/09/12/mclemee
Rarely
does a political scandal inspire anyone to discuss
sociological research done 40 years earlier. But whatever
else Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) may have contributed to
public life, he certainly deserves credit for renewing
interest in
Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places,
by Laud Humphreys, first published in
1970.
Humphreys, who was for many years a
professor of sociology at Pitzer College, in
Claremont, California, died in 1988. But his
analysis of the protocols of anonymous
encounters in men’s rooms — “tearooms,” in
gay slang — has been cited quite a bit in
recent weeks. In particular, reporters have
been interested in his findings about the
demographics of the cruising scene at the
public restrooms he studied. (This research
took place at a public park in St. Louis,
Missouri during the mid-1960s.) Most patrons
visiting the facilities for sexual activity
tended to be married, middle-class
suburbanites; they often professed strongly
conservative social and political views.
So you can see where the
book might prove topical.
But the rediscovery of
Humphrey’s work is not just
a product of the power of
Google combined with the
force of the news cycle. It
is an echo of the
discussions that his work
once stirred up in the
classroom.
Tearoom Trade was, in
its day, among the more
prominent monographs in the
social sciences – an
interesting and unusual
example of ethnographic
practice that was featured
in many textbooks, at least
for a while. I recall
reading a chapter from
Humphreys in an introductory
social-science anthology in
the early 1980s and thinking
that every single subculture
in the world would
eventually have a
sociologist standing in the
corner, taking notes.
The book was also
widely discussed because of
the ethical questions raised
by Humphreys’s methodology.
It would be an overstatement
to call Tearoom Trade
the main catalyst for the
creation of institutional
review boards, but debates
over the book certainly
played their part.
At issue was not the sexual
activity itself but how the
sociologist (then a graduate
student) investigated it.
Posing as a voyeur, and
never revealing that he was
there for research,
Humphreys was accepted as
“watchqueen” by the social
circle hanging out at the
restroom. He was entrusted
with giving a signal if the
police came around. He took
notes on the activity taking
place – including the
license plates numbers of
men who came around for
fellatio. Through a contact
in the police department, he
was able to get their home
addresses.
After a year, and having
disguised himself to some
degree, he visited them
under the pretense of doing
a survey for an insurance
company to gather more data
about their circumstances
and opinions. Humphreys
states that he was never
recognized during these
interviews. He kept all the
documents generated during
this research in a lockbox
and destroyed them after his
dissertation was accepted by
Washington University in St.
Louis.
He
received his Ph.D. that June
1968 – exactly one year
before the patrons of the
Stonewall, a gay bar in
Greenwich Village, got tired
of being harassed by the
police and decided to fight
back. So when the
dissertation appeared as a
book in 1970 (issued by a
social-science press called
Aldine, now an imprint of
Transaction Publishers,
which keeps it in print)
the
timing was excellent. The
main public-policy
implication of Humphreys’s
work was that police could
just as well ignore the
restroom shenanigans: the
activity that Humphrey
reported was consensual and
low-risk for spreading
sexually-transmitted
disease, and it did not
involve “luring” minors. The
book won that year’s C.
Wright Mills Award for the
outstanding book on a
critical social issue.
But concerns about how the
data had been collected were
expressed by Humphreys’s
colleagues almost as soon as
he received his degree, and
the debate continued into
the 1970s. (When the book
was reprinted in 1975, it
included a postscript
covering some of the
discussion.)
Continued in
article
Even supporters of Gay legislation should object to this violation of free
speech at the University of Missouri
Emily Brooker, who graduated from the university’s
School of Social Work last spring, took issue with a project in which students
were asked to draft and individually sign a letter to Missouri legislators that
supported the right of gay people to be foster parents, according to the
complaint. The assignment was eventually shelved, but the complaint says
officials in the social work school charged Brooker with the highest-level
grievance for not following guidelines on diversity, interpersonal skills and
professional behavior. According to the complaint, during a hearing before an
ethics committee, faculty members asked Brooker: “Do you think gays and lesbians
are sinners? Do you think I am a sinner?” and questioned whether she could
assist gay men and women as a professional social worker.
Elia Powers, "Did Assignment Get Too Political?" Inside Higher Ed,
November 1, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/01/complaint
Issue of
Student Free Speech on Campus: Mike Adams' New Job at Missouri State
University
I’m certain that news of my resignation will disappoint
readers who have enjoyed my columns critiquing UNC-Wilmington’s leftist
orthodoxy over the last several years. But I know their disappointment will be
outweighed by UNCW’s joy upon hearing of my decision to leave the university. In
fact, effective today, I’ll be leaving to begin my new career as a Winston Smith
Professor Emeritus of Social Work at
Missouri State University. I have decided to take
the position at MSU for two reasons: 1) I want to commit the rest of my career
to the intellectual rape of my students by forcing
them to lobby the state for policies that violate their deeply held religious
beliefs, and 2) MSU
encourages professors to intellectually and spiritually rape their students -
even defending them when they are caught in the act.
Mike S. Adams, "My New Job at Missouri State University," Townhall,
November 7, 2006 ---
Click Here
Missouri State University has reached an
out-of-court settlement with a student
who sued over a class assignment
in which she says she was told to write a letter to legislators endorsing
adoption rights for gay people, the
Associated Press
reported. Missouri State officials said that not all of the facts in the case
matched what the student had said, but that some concerns were legitimate.
Inside Higher Ed, November 10, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/10/qt
Columbia Charges Students With Violating Protest Rules
Columbia University said yesterday that it had notified
students involved in disrupting a program of speakers in early October that they
were being charged with violating rules of university conduct governing
demonstrations. The university did not disclose the number of students charged
with violations. Columbia’s president, Lee C. Bollinger, announced the
disciplinary proceedings in a letter to the university community yesterday that
was also released publicly. But he said he would not provide further details
because of federal rules governing student privacy. The charges will be heard
next semester by the deans of the individual schools the students are enrolled
in. Possible sanctions include disciplinary warning, censure, suspension and
dismissal.
Karen W. Arenson, "Columbia Charges Students With Violating Protest Rules,"
The New York Times, December 23, 2006 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/23/nyregion/23columbia.html
Jensen Comment
Since the protestors who disrupted and frightened the speakers are totally
non-repentant, it will be interesting to see how this plays out at Columbia.
"A Firm Stance: CU Marine Reservist Targeted In Angry Confrontation; No
Disciplinary Action Taken," by Laura Brunts, Columbia Spectator, January
26, 2006 ---
Click Here
At last fall's annual activities fair, Marine
reservist Matt Sanchez, GS '07, got into an argument with several members of
the International Socialist Organization and later filed a harassment
complaint against three students.
More than three months later, the administration
responded with a letter apologizing for the incident but took no
disciplinary action. Realizing that he would get no public response from
Columbia, Sanchez took his story to the press last week in an interview with
FOX News.
The incident has provoked concern from members of
Columbia's military community about what some see as a widespread
anti-military attitude, and it raises questions about the University's
anti-discrimination policy.
On Club Day, Zach Zill, CC '06, Monique Dols, GS
'06, and Jonah Birch, CC '05, approached the table for the Columbia Military
Society-a Student Governing Board-recognized group for Columbia students in
Fordham's ROTC program-because they heard it was being used for ROTC
recruitment, which is not allowed on campus.
"We went there to voice our disagreement with the
fact that they were there and pick up some of their fliers," Dols said.
Sanchez stopped by the table soon after and entered
the debate. In the course of the argument, Zill asserted that the military
"uses minorities as cannon fodder," Sanchez said.
"My last name is Sanchez. I'm Puerto Rican. I'm a
minority. Zach Zill is blonde and blue-eyed. I said, 'Look, I'm a minority.
I know I enlisted; I don't feel like I'm being used at all,'" Sanchez said.
"[Zill] said, 'Well, you're too stupid to know that you're being used.'"
Mark Xue, CC '06, a Marine officer candidate and
president of the society, was also at the table and confirmed Sanchez's
accusations.
"They were telling him that he was stupid and
ignorant, that he was being brainwashed and used for being a minority in the
military," Xue said. "Regardless of what you think about military
recruiters, those comments were racially motivated."
Continued in article
From Columbia University
Having wreaked havoc onstage, the students unrolled a banner that read, in both
Arabic and English, "No one is ever illegal."
"At Columbia, Students Attack Minuteman Founder," by Eliana Johnson,
The New
York Sun, October 4, 2006 ---
http://www.nysun.com/article/40983
Students stormed the stage at Columbia University's
Roone auditorium yesterday, knocking over chairs and tables and attacking
Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the Minutemen, a group that patrols the border
between America and Mexico.
Mr. Gilchrist and Marvin Stewart, another member of
his group, were in the process of giving a speech at the invitation of the
Columbia College Republicans. They were escorted off the stage unharmed and
exited the auditorium by a back door.
Having wreaked havoc onstage, the students unrolled
a banner that read, in both Arabic and English, "No one is ever illegal." As
security guards closed the curtains and began escorting people from the
auditorium, the students jumped from the stage, pumping their fists,
chanting victoriously, "Si se pudo, si se pudo," Spanish for "Yes we could!"
The Minuteman Project, an organization of
volunteers founded in 2004 by Mr. Gilchrist, aims to keep illegal immigrants
out of America by alerting law enforcement officials when they attempt to
cross the border. The group uses fiery language and unorthodox tactics to
advance its platform. "Future generations will inherit a tangle of
rancorous, unassimilated, squabbling cultures with no common bond to hold
them together, and a certain guarantee of the death of this nation as a
harmonious ‘melting pot,'" the group's Web site warns.
The pandemonium that ensued as the evening's
keynote speaker took the stage was merely the climax of protest that brewed
all week. A number of campus groups, including the Chicano caucus, the
African-American student organization, and the International Socialist
organization, began planning their protests early this week when they heard
that the Minutemen would be arriving on campus.
The student protesters, who attended the event clad
in white as a sign of dissent, booed and shouted the speakers down
throughout. They interrupted Mr. Stewart, who is African-American, when he
referred to the Declaration of Independence's self-evident truth that "All
men are created equal," calling him a racist, a sellout, and a black white
supremacist.
A student's demand that Mr. Stewart speak in
Spanish elicited thundering applause and brought the protesters to their
feet. The protesters remained standing, turned their backs on Mr. Stewart
for the remainder of his remarks, and drowned him out by chanting, "Wrap it
up, wrap it up!" Mr. Stewart appeared unfazed by their behavior. He simply
smiled and bellowed, "No wonder you don't know what you're talking about."
"These are racist individuals heading a project
that terrorizes immigrants on the U.S.-Mexican border," Ryan Fukumori, a
Columbia junior who took part in the protest, told The New York Sun. "They
have no right to be able to speak here."
The student protesters "rush to vindicate
themselves with monikers like ‘liberal' and ‘open-minded,' but their
actions, their attempt to condemn the Minutemen without even hearing what
they have to say, speak otherwise," the president of the Columbia College
Republicans, Chris Kulawik, said. On campus, the Republicans' flyers
advertising the event were defaced and torn down.
The College Republicans expressed their concern
about the lack of free speech for opposing viewpoints on the Columbia campus
in the wake of the evening's events. "We've often feared that there's not
freedom of speech at Columbia for more right-wing views — and that was
proven tonight," the executive director of the Columbia College Republicans,
Lauren Steinberg, said.
The Minutemen's arrival at Columbia drew protesters
from around the city as well. An hour before Messrs. Stewart and Mr.
Gilchrist took the stage, rowdy protests began outside the auditorium on
Broadway, where activists chanted, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, the Minutemen have got
to go!"
Continued in article
Mr. Bollinger (President of Columbia
University), a legal scholar whose specialty is free
speech and the First Amendment, quickly condemned this week’s disruption.
“Students and faculty have rights to invite speakers to the campus,” he said
yesterday in an interview. “Others have rights to hear them. Those who wish to
protest have rights to do so. No one, however, shall have the right or the power
to use the cover of protest to silence speakers.” He added, “There is a vast
difference between reasonable protest that allows a speaker to continue, and
protest that makes it impossible for speech to continue.”
Karen W. Arenson and Damien Cave, "Silencing of a Speech Causes a Furor," The
New York Times, October 7, 2006 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/07/nyregion/07columbia.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
With Columbia University again under fire over
speech issues, the president is condemning anyone who prevents another’s speech
from taking place. On Wednesday, protesters stormed a stage where Jim Gilchrist,
head of the Minuteman Project, a “vigilance operation” opposing illegal
immigration, was speaking, forcing him to stop his talk. Lee C. Bollinger,
Columbia’s president, pledged that the university would investigate the incident
and procedures for making sure that speakers can give their talks. In
a statement, he said: “This is not a complicated
issue. Students and faculty have rights to invite speakers to the campus. Others
have rights to hear them. Those who wish to protest have rights to do so. No
one, however, shall have the right or the power to use the cover of protest to
silence speakers. This is a sacrosanct and inviolable principle.”
Inside Higher Ed, October 9, 2006
Brigham Young University has placed a physics professor on paid leave,
taking away the two courses he had just started teaching, because of his
statements that explosives, not planes, led to the collapse of the World Trade
Center’s two towers.
"Frays on Academic Freedom," Inside Higher Ed, September 11, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/11/disputes
Scholars who endorse dissenting views about 9/11
have been creating numerous controversies in recent weeks. Both the
University of Wisconsin at Madison and the
University of New Hampshire have resisted calls
that they remove from their classrooms scholars who believe that the United
States set off the events of 9/11. In both of those cases, numerous
politicians said that the instructors involved were not fit to teach, but
the universities said that removing them for their views would violate
principles of academic freedom.
At Brigham Young, however, the university has
placed Steven E. Jones on paid leave, and assigned other professors to teach
the two physics courses he started this semester. A statement from the
university said, in its entirety: “Physics professor Steven Jones has made
numerous statements about the collapse of the World Trade Center. BYU has
repeatedly said that it does not endorse assertions made by individual
faculty. We are, however, concerned about the increasingly speculative and
accusatory nature of these statements by Dr. Jones. Furthermore, BYU remains
concerned that Dr. Jones’ work on this topic has not been published in
appropriate scientific venues. Owing to these issues, as well as others, the
university has placed Dr. Jones on leave while we continue to review these
matters.”
Continued in article
Is Osama bin Laden merely a figment of the U.S. Satan's imagination?
The spiritual leader of Norway's Muslims told readers
of Aftenposten Monday he doubts Muslims were responsible for the 2001 terror
attacks on the United States. Imam Zulqarnain Sakandar Madni answered questions
from the newspaper's readers. "There's some good evidence that (U.S. President
George) Bush and company were behind this," he said. "See the film that's called
'Loose Change.' An American film!" He also said he doubts that al-Qaida and
Osama bin Laden exist.
"Norwegian imam: Muslims not behind 9/11," UPI, September 11, 2006 ---
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/view.php?StoryID=20060912-121220-8649r
I wonder if Imam Zulqarnain Sakandar Madni and his radical friends did "a
lot of research for themselves?"
In response to some of these Korey Rowe, the producer of the "Second Edition",
claimed in an interview, “We know there are errors in the documentary (Loose
Change), and we’ve actually left them in there so that people discredit us and
do the research for themselves.
Loose Change ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loose_Change_(video)
A few dissident professors and Robert Scheer writing for The Nation
believe this fiction is fact or rely upon known falsehoods to further a
political agenda ---
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060925/gaping_holes
And now a few words about academic freedom from New Hampshire's Democratic
Governor
and Former Dean of the Harvard Business School,
John Lynch
"Although academic freedom is important," the governor
said, "if the UNH professor is promoting that view, it reflects a reckless
disregard for the true facts and raises questions as to why such a professor
would be teaching at the university in the first place." Woodward is a member of
Scholars for 9/11 Truth, an organization that maintains the Bush administration
permitted the terrorist attacks to occur, and may even have planned them, so as
to rally the public around its policies.
Scott Brooks, "Lynch calls teacher's theories crazy as UNH stands behind 9/11
prof," Union Leader, August 29, 2006 ---
Click Here
The University of New Hampshire is refusing to fire
a tenured professor whose views on 9/11 have led many politicians in the state
to demand his dismissal.
William Woodward, a professor of psychology, is
among those academics who believe that U.S. leaders have lied about what they
know about 9/11, and were involved in a conspiracy that led to the massive
deaths on that day, setting the stage for the war with Iraq. The Union Leader, a
New Hampshire newspaper, reported on Woodward’s views on Sunday, and quoted him
(accurately, he says) saying that he includes his views in some class sessions.
Scott Jaschik, "Another Scholar Under Fire for 9/11 Views," Inside Higher Ed,
August 29, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/29/woodward
"Stretching the Definition of Academic Freedom," by John Friedl,
Inside Higher Ed, August 31, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/08/31/friedl
Academic freedom is under attack on college
campuses across the country. The “Academic Bill of Rights,” authored by
David Horowitz, seems to be motivated by a concern that some professors are
turning their classrooms into personal forums in which they force-feed their
students a liberal political dogma unrelated to the subject matter of the
course.
Horowitz’s attempt to involve legislatures in
addressing what is clearly an academic issue is not only a dangerous
precedent, but unnecessary as well. It is dangerous because it threatens the
freedom of inquiry and critical thinking that we strive to achieve through
open discussion of controversial issues. And it is unnecessary because we
have in place institutional guidelines and professional standards that, when
properly applied, provide balance without destroying the spontaneity and
intellectual stimulation that is currently found in our classrooms.
The real problem that needs to be addressed is the
growing gap in the understanding of the concept of academic freedom shared —
or more often not shared — by faculty and administrators. Matters of
institutional policy proposed by academic administrators are increasingly —
and frequently without justification — condemned by professors as
infringements on their rights.
A few examples provide an enlightening
illustration. These examples involve what are mistakenly seen as academic
freedom issues, providing a sense of how broadly many faculty interpret the
concept and the rights it creates.
My current university for many years has provided
an e-mail list service open to all faculty and staff for virtually any
purpose: to post notices, advertise items for sale, express opinions on any
topic, and to disseminate official university announcements. As the volume
of garage sale ads grew and the expression of opinions became increasingly
vitriolic, many faculty and staff members elected to filter out messages
from the list service, with the result that they did not receive official
announcements.
As a solution to this problem, university
administrators created a second list service limited to official
announcements, in which all employees would participate without the option
of unsubscribing. The original open list remained available to all who chose
to participate. In response to this action, one faculty member sent a
message to the entire university (on the pre-existing list service)
denouncing the change as a violation of academic freedom and First Amendment
rights, because the “official” announcements would first be screened by the
University Relations Office before being posted.
A second example: At my former university, in
response to concerns over a high rate of attrition between the freshman and
sophomore year, the deans proposed a policy whereby each instructor in a
lower division course would be required to provide students with some type
of graded or appropriately evaluated work product by the end of the sixth
week of a 15-week semester. The stated purpose of the policy was to identify
students at risk early enough to help them bring their grades up to a C or
better. (The original proposal also included the suggestion that faculty
members work with students to develop a plan to improve their performance,
but that was quickly taken off the table when faculty complained of an
increase in their workload without additional compensation.)
When this proposal was discussed among the faculty,
several complained that the scheduling of exams was a faculty prerogative
protected by academic freedom, and that any attempt by university
administrators to mandate early feedback to students was an infringement
upon that right. Those who spoke out did not object to the concept of early
feedback — they just didn’t want to be told they had to do it.
Another example: At the same institution, in
preparation for its decennial review by the regional accrediting body, the
vice president for academic affairs began to assemble the mountains of
documents required for that review, including a syllabus for every course
offered. The accrediting organization guidelines list 11 items recommended
for inclusion in every course syllabus, and the vice president duly notified
the faculty, through the deans and department chairs, of this
recommendation.
The response of a surprising number of the faculty
members was to argue that what goes into their syllabus is a matter of
academic freedom, not subject to the mandate of the vice president or the
accreditor. Again, their complaints did not seem to be directed at the
suggested content, but rather they were opposed to being told what they must
put in their syllabi.
The concept of academic freedom is often viewed as
an extension of the rights granted under the First Amendment, applicable
within the limited context of the educational system. One of the earliest
definitions of academic freedom is found in the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of
Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure. The discussion is framed
in terms of the freedom of the individual faculty member to pursue his or
her research and teaching interests without interference from “outsiders,”
whether they be members of the institution’s governing body or the public at
large.
As an indication of how far the pendulum has swung
in the 90 years since the AAUP Declaration was written, in 1915 the authors
expressed concern that “where the university is dependent for funds upon
legislative favor, ... the menace to academic freedom may consist in the
repression of opinions that in the particular political situation are deemed
ultra-conservative rather than ultra-radical.” But the authors correctly
point out that “whether the departure is in the one direction or the other
is immaterial.”
As appealing as the principle embodied in the AAUP
Declaration may be to many academic administrators and to most, if not all,
professors, that principle has not found favor in American jurisprudence.
Academic freedom is not mentioned directly in the U.S. Constitution or in
any federal statute. It was first recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in
the 1957 case of
Sweezy v. New Hampshire, when Justice Felix
Frankfurter defined the four elements of academic freedom as: “the freedom
of an institution to decide who may attend, who may teach, what may be
taught and how it shall be taught.” Note that this definition places the
bundle of rights that make up academic freedom in the institution, not the
individual faculty member.
It is a huge leap from the AAUP Declaration to the
contention that a policy requiring a graded work product by the sixth week
or mandating 11elements in every syllabus is an abridgment of the faculty’s
constitutional rights, not to mention the claim that university
administrators have no right to screen what goes out to the campus community
as an official university announcement.
The problem, of course, goes much deeper. The real
difficulty is that on many campuses throughout the country, the expanding
concept of academic freedom has created an expectation of total individual
autonomy. Our concept of faculty status seems to have evolved from one of
employee to that of an independent contractor offering private tutorials to
the institution’s students using the institution’s resources, but unfettered
by many of the institution’s policies.
Lest any of us grow accustomed to this new order,
it is instructive to see what one federal court has said about the limits to
academic freedom. In the case of
Urofsky v. Gilmore, a prominent legal scholar
challenged a state policy aimed at restricting the use of state-owned
computers by public employees to visit pornographic Web sites. The faculty
member made the by now familiar claim that access to such information for
teaching or research is constitutionally protected under the First
Amendment, and falls within the scope of the individual faculty right to
academic freedom.
The U.S. Court of Appeals disagreed, saying that
academic freedom is not an individual right, but one that belongs to the
institution, and in this case the institution (Virginia Commonwealth
University) is an extension of the state. In the court’s words, “to the
extent the Constitution recognizes any right of ‘academic freedom’ above and
beyond the First Amendment rights to which every citizen is entitled, the
right inheres in the university, not in individual professors....” The U.S.
Supreme Court declined to review this decision, thereby allowing it to
stand. And while it is binding legal precedent only for federal courts in
the Fourth Circuit (Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and
West Virginia), this decision will serve as a powerful influence on other
courts throughout the country.
The court’s conclusion was a shock to many of us,
administrators and faculty members alike. Even more troubling is the court’s
statement that “the [Supreme] Court has never recognized that professors
possess a First Amendment right of academic freedom to determine for
themselves the content of their courses and scholarship, despite
opportunities to do so.” But as offensive as this statement may seem to
some, it could have an unintended and beneficial consequence of bringing
faculty and administrators closer together in recognizing their common bonds
and in working toward achieving common goals for the good of their colleges
and universities.
When faculty members recognize that there are
limits to academic freedom, and that the rights ultimately reside with the
institution, there is a powerful incentive to work with academic
administrators to reach consensus on policies that will achieve important
goals. And even if administrators feel emboldened by what may at first be
perceived as a weakening of the individual faculty member’s freedom, every
seasoned academic administrator knows that without faculty cooperation and
support, even the most well-intentioned policy cannot succeed.
"Ward Churchill Fired," by Scott Jaschik,
Inside Higher Ed, July 25, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/07/25/churchill
More than
two and a half years after Ward Churchill’s
writings on 9/11 set off a furor,
and more than a year after a faculty panel at the University
of Colorado at Boulder found him guilty of
repeated, intentional academic misconduct,
the University of Colorado Board of
Regents voted 8-1 Tuesday evening to fire him.
The vote
followed a special, all-day meeting of the board, in which
it heard in private from Churchill, a faculty panel and from
Hank Brown, president of the University of Colorado System,
who in May
recommended dismissing Churchill
from his tenured post. The regents emerged from their
private deliberations at around 5:30 p.m. Colorado time and
voted to fire Churchill, but they did not discuss their
views and they quickly adjourned. A small group of Churchill
supporters in the audience shouted “bullshit” as the board
vote was announced.
While the
firing is effective immediately, Churchill is entitled under
Colorado regulations to receive one year’s salary, which for
him is just under $100,000.
Churchill
predicted prior to the meeting that he would be fired and
vowed to file a suit against the university, as early as
today. In a press conference after the vote, Churchill
repeated his argument that the board fired him primarily
because of his political views, which he said are
“inconvenient and uncomfortable” to the powerful. He vowed
to keep “fighting the fight” and said that the impact of the
case goes “way beyond Ward Churchill” and will hinder
freedom of expression generally. Churchill was upbeat during
the news conference, which also featured Native American
drumming and chanting by supporters.
In an
interview Tuesday night after the vote, Brown, the system
president, said that the evidence against Churchill for
scholarly misconduct was overwhelming. “I think it was the
depth of the falsification that ultimately led to the
outcome,” Brown said. “It wasn’t just one or two or three or
four, but numerous incidents of intentional falsification,”
such that Brown believed that in the end board members “felt
like they didn’t have a choice.”
Brown, who
was present for the board’s discussions with Churchill and
the faculty panel that reviewed the case, but not for the
deliberations, said that board members seemed focused not on
the question of Churchill’s guilt, but of the punishment.
Brown said that the lone regent who voted against firing did
so based only on the issue of firing him, not out of any
disagreement with the finding that he had committed
misconduct.
The meaning
of the Churchill case has been heatedly debated over the
past two-plus years. To Churchill and his defenders, he is a
victim of politics and of a right wing attack on freedom of
thought. To Brown and others at the university, Churchill’s
case is not about politics at all about enforcing academic
integrity and punishing those who don’t live up to basic
rules of research honesty. To many others in academe, the
Churchill case has been less clearcut. Many academics have
said that they are troubled by both the findings of research
misconduct against Churchill and by the reality that
his work received intense scrutiny only after his political
views drew attention to him.
Churchill
has been working at Boulder since 1978 and has been a
tenured professor of ethnic studies since 1991. In the years
before 2005, he gained a reputation at Colorado and on the
college lecture circuit nationally as an impassioned speaker
and writer on behalf of Native Americans. Most of his
speeches were attended by supporters of his views, so he did
not attract widespread criticism.
All of that
changed early in 2005, however, when Churchill was scheduled
to speak at Hamilton College. Some professors there, who did
not feel Churchill was an ideal speaker, circulated some of
his writings, including an essay with the the now notorious
remark comparing World Trade Center victims on 9/11 to
“little Eichmanns.” Within days, the controversy spread —
with Hamilton under pressure to uninvite Churchill and
Colorado under pressure to fire him. Hamilton stood by its
invitation, on academic freedom grounds, but in the end
called off the appearance, based on threats of violence.
As the
University of Colorado considered what to do, a series of
accusations against Churchill started to come in that
involved his scholarly practices. While Churchill repeatedly
has portrayed his critics as conservatives, a number of
those who brought complaints against him share his fury at
the U.S. government’s treatment of Native Americans. The
complaints included charges of plagiarism, of false
descriptions of other scholars’ work or historical evidence,
and of fabrications. The university first determined that it
could not fire Churchill based on his statements about 9/11,
but that it could investigate the other allegations
of misconduct, which it then proceeded
to do. Three separate faculty panels then found Churchill
guilty of multiple instances of research misconduct. The
various panels had splits on whether Churchill deserved to
be fired and those splits were complicated.
For example,
the Boulder faculty panel that first found Churchill guilty
of misconduct had five members. One member suggested that
Churchill be fired. Two recommended that he be suspended for
five years without pay. And two recommended that he be
suspended for two years without pay. But the two panel
members who preferred a five-year suspension said that they
— like the panel member who favored dismissal — would find
revocation of tenure and firing to be “not an improper
sanction” for Churchill, given the seriousness of the
findings. Thus Churchill’s defenders were able to say that
the panel didn’t want him fired and his critics were able to
say that the panel’s majority saw firing as appropriate.
Ultimately,
the university’s Board of Regents alone had the authority to
fire. Board members have widely been expected to dismiss
Churchill, but they have been circumspect about the case for
months. With Churchill threatening to sue, regents were
sensitive to any suggestion that they were doing anything
except follow standard procedures for allegations of
misconduct serious enough to merit firing a tenured
professor.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on the Ward Churchill
Saga are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HypocrisyChurchill.htm
Should Academic Left Defend Churchill?
The debate might be summed up in an analogy offered by
one of the faculty panels that reviewed Churchill and found that he committed,
intentionally,
all kinds of research misconduct. Committee members
said that they were uncomfortable with the fact that Colorado ignored serious
allegations against Churchill for years, and took them seriously only when his
politics attracted attention. The panel compared the situation to one in which a
motorist is stopped for speeding because a police officer doesn’t like the
bumper sticker on her car. If she was speeding, she was speeding — regardless of
the officer’s motives, the panel said.
Scott Jaschik, "Should Academic Left Defend Churchill?" Inside Higher Ed,
July 25, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/24/churchill
Bob Jensen's threads on Ward Churchill are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HypocrisyChurchill.htm
Question
Should the academic freedom principles guarantee the right to teach astrology?
"Conspiracy Theories 101," by Stanley Fish, The New York Times, July
23, 2006 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/23/opinion/23fish.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin
KEVIN BARRETT, a lecturer at the University of
Wisconsin at Madison, has now taken his place alongside Ward Churchill of
the University of Colorado as a college teacher whose views on 9/11 have led
politicians and ordinary citizens to demand that he be fired.
Mr. Barrett, who has a one-semester contract to
teach a course titled “Islam: Religion and Culture,” acknowledged on a radio
talk show that he has shared with students his strong conviction that the
destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job perpetrated by the
American government. The predictable uproar ensued, and the equally
predictable battle lines were drawn between those who disagree about what
the doctrine of academic freedom does and does not allow.
Mr. Barrett’s critics argue that academic freedom
has limits and should not be invoked to justify the dissemination of lies
and fantasies. Mr. Barrett’s supporters (most of whom are not partisans of
his conspiracy theory) insist that it is the very point of an academic
institution to entertain all points of view, however unpopular. (This was
the position taken by the university’s provost, Patrick Farrell, when he
ruled on July 10 that Mr. Barrett would be retained: “We cannot allow
political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free
exchange of ideas.”)
Both sides get it wrong. The problem is that each
assumes that academic freedom is about protecting the content of a
professor’s speech; one side thinks that no content should be ruled out in
advance; while the other would draw the line at propositions (like the
denial of the Holocaust or the flatness of the world) considered by almost
everyone to be crazy or dangerous.
But in fact, academic freedom has nothing to do
with content. It is not a subset of the general freedom of Americans to say
anything they like (so long as it is not an incitement to violence or is
treasonous or libelous). Rather, academic freedom is the freedom of
academics to study anything they like; the freedom, that is, to subject any
body of material, however unpromising it might seem, to academic
interrogation and analysis.
Academic freedom means that if I think that there
may be an intellectual payoff to be had by turning an academic lens on
material others consider trivial — golf tees, gourmet coffee, lingerie ads,
convenience stores, street names, whatever — I should get a chance to try.
If I manage to demonstrate to my peers and students that studying this
material yields insights into matters of general intellectual interest,
there is a new topic under the academic sun and a new subject for classroom
discussion.
In short, whether something is an appropriate
object of academic study is a matter not of its content — a crackpot theory
may have had a history of influence that well rewards scholarly scrutiny —
but of its availability to serious analysis. This point was missed by the
author of a comment posted to the blog of a University of Wisconsin law
professor, Ann Althouse: “When is the University of Wisconsin hiring a
professor of astrology?” The question is obviously sarcastic; its intention
is to equate the 9/11-inside-job theory with believing in the predictive
power of astrology, and to imply that since the university wouldn’t think of
hiring someone to teach the one, it should have known better than to hire
someone to teach the other.
But the truth is that it would not be at all
outlandish for a university to hire someone to teach astrology — not to
profess astrology and recommend it as the basis of decision-making (shades
of Nancy Reagan), but to teach the history of its very long career. There
is, after all, a good argument for saying that Shakespeare, Chaucer and
Dante, among others, cannot be fully understood unless one understands
astrology.
The distinction I am making — between studying
astrology and proselytizing for it — is crucial and can be generalized; it
shows us where the line between the responsible and irresponsible practice
of academic freedom should always be drawn. Any idea can be brought into the
classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence
and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of
introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may
be thought to imply.
And this is where we come back to Mr. Barrett, who,
in addition to being a college lecturer, is a member of a group calling
itself Scholars for 9/11 Truth, an organization with the decidedly political
agenda of persuading Americans that the Bush administration “not only
permitted 9/11 to happen but may even have orchestrated these events.”
Is the fact of this group’s growing presence on the
Internet a reason for studying it in a course on 9/11? Sure. Is the
instructor who discusses the group’s arguments thereby endorsing them? Not
at all. It is perfectly possible to teach a viewpoint without embracing it
and urging it. But the moment a professor does embrace and urge it, academic
study has ceased and been replaced by partisan advocacy. And that is a
moment no college administration should allow to occur.
Provost Farrell doesn’t quite see it that way,
because he is too hung up on questions of content and balance. He thinks
that the important thing is to assure a diversity of views in the classroom,
and so he is reassured when Mr. Barrett promises to surround his
“unconventional” ideas and “personal opinions” with readings “representing a
variety of viewpoints.”
But the number of viewpoints Mr. Barrett presents
to his students is not the measure of his responsibility. There is, in fact,
no academic requirement to include more than one view of an academic issue,
although it is usually pedagogically useful to do so. The true requirement
is that no matter how many (or few) views are presented to the students,
they should be offered as objects of analysis rather than as candidates for
allegiance.
There is a world of difference, for example,
between surveying the pro and con arguments about the Iraq war, a perfectly
appropriate academic assignment, and pressing students to come down on your
side. Of course the instructor who presides over such a survey is likely to
be a partisan of one position or the other — after all, who doesn’t have an
opinion on the Iraq war? — but it is part of a teacher’s job to set personal
conviction aside for the hour or two when a class is in session and allow
the techniques and protocols of academic research full sway.
This restraint should not be too difficult to
exercise. After all, we require and expect it of judges, referees and
reporters. And while its exercise may not always be total, it is both
important and possible to make the effort.
Thus the question Provost Farrell should put to Mr.
Barrett is not “Do you hold these views?” (he can hold any views he likes)
or “Do you proclaim them in public?” (he has that right no less that the
rest of us) or even “Do you surround them with the views of others?”
Rather, the question should be: “Do you separate
yourself from your partisan identity when you are in the employ of the
citizens of Wisconsin and teach subject matter — whatever it is — rather
than urge political action?” If the answer is yes, allowing Mr. Barrett to
remain in the classroom is warranted. If the answer is no, (or if a yes
answer is followed by classroom behavior that contradicts it) he should be
shown the door. Not because he would be teaching the “wrong” things, but
because he would have abandoned teaching for indoctrination.
The advantage of this way of thinking about the
issue is that it outflanks the sloganeering and posturing both sides indulge
in: on the one hand, faculty members who shout “academic freedom” and mean
by it an instructor’s right to say or advocate anything at all with
impunity; on the other hand, state legislators who shout “not on our dime”
and mean by it that they can tell academics what ideas they can and cannot
bring into the classroom.
All you have to do is remember that academic
freedom is just that: the freedom to do an academic job without external
interference. It is not the freedom to do other jobs, jobs you are neither
trained for nor paid to perform. While there should be no restrictions on
what can be taught — no list of interdicted ideas or topics — there should
be an absolute restriction on appropriating the scene of teaching for
partisan political ideals. Teachers who use the classroom to indoctrinate
make the enterprise of higher education vulnerable to its critics and
shortchange students in the guise of showing them the true way.
Stanley Fish is a law professor at Florida International University.
Jensen Comment
It has always seemed to me that professors should have extreme freedom to teach
what fits within the constraints of the curriculum plan adopted by the college
as a whole. Every college has what is tantamount to a Curriculum Council that
approves contents of the curriculum. The fact that Barrett is allowed to teach
that the President of the United States deliberately targeted the deaths of over
3,000 Americans on 9/11 implies that the University of Wisconsin has approved
this nonsense in the curriculum plan.
Bob Jensen's threads on the saga of Ward Churchill and academic hypocrisy
are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/hypocrisy.htm
When Professors Can’t Get Along
The American Association of University Professors — a
champion of open debate and free exchange — is having some difficulties with the
nature of debate in its own (virtual) house. The association last week told
those signed up for its listserv that it was shutting down. “In recent weeks,
many subscribers have withdrawn from the list, complaining of the nature and
tone of some of the postings. More recently, anonymous messages containing
allegations against other members have been posted, raising possible legal
concerns. In light of these occurrences, it has been determined that AAUP-General
be closed,”
the
message said.
Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, September 25, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/25/aaup
Not Even One Conservative for
Tokenism: Duke is for Democrats and so is the University of Iowa
The University of Iowa's history department and
Duke's history department have a couple of things in common. Both have made
national news because neither has a Republican faculty member. And both rejected
the application of Mark Moyar, a highly qualified historian and a Republican,
for a faculty appointment. Moyar graduated first in the history department at
Harvard; his revised senior thesis was published as a book and sold more copies
than an average history professor ever sells. After earning a Ph.D. from
Cambridge University in England, he published his dissertation as "Triumph
Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965" with Cambridge University Press, which has
received even more attention and praise. Moyar's views of Vietnam are
controversial and have garnered scorn and abuse from liberal historians,
including the department chair at the University of Iowa, Colin Gordon. Moyar
revealed on his resume that he is a member of the National Association of
Scholars, a group generally to the right of the normal academic organization.
Gordon and his colleagues at Iowa were undoubtedly aware of Moyar's conservative
leaning and historical view. Moyar is undoubtedly qualified. He is
unquestionably diverse; his views are antithetical to many of the Iowa
professors' views. Yet the Iowa department hired someone who had neither
received degrees from institutions similar to Cambridge and Harvard nor
published a book despite having completed graduate school eight years earlier
(history scholars are expected to publish books within approximately six years
of finishing their doctorates). In the Iowa history department there are 27
Democrats and zero Republicans. The Iowa hiring guidelines mandate that search
committees "assess ways the applicants will bring rich experiences, diverse
backgrounds and ideology to the university community." After seeking a freedom
of information disclosure, Moyar learned that the Iowa history department had,
in fact, not complied with the hiring manual. It seemed that Moyar was rejected
for his political and historical stands. Maybe it was an unlikely aberration.
But Moyar told the Duke College Republicans earlier this fall that he is
skeptical because an application of his a few years ago at Duke for a history
professorship progressed in much the same way it proceeded in Iowa.
The Duke Chronicle, November 1, 2007 ---
Click Here
Let's face it! Accounting, professors' job performance, and vegetable
nutrition have a lot systemic problems in common ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
"Why I Hate Annual Evaluations," by Ben Yagoda, Chronicle of Higher
Education, March 28, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Why-I-Hate-Annual-Evaluations/64815/
There are three things I don't like about my job.
Two of them are pretty obvious and completely unoriginal: correcting papers
and attending department meetings. The third thing is somewhat obvious as
well, but I hesitate to name it, for fear that it will make me look whiny.
However, that battle has probably already been
lost, so here goes: I hate my annual evaluation.
To the extent that this evaluation is necessary, it
is because of the collective-bargaining agreement between the University of
Delaware and our campus chapter of the American Association of University
Professors. As long as I've been here—going on 18 years—the agreement has
divided our annual pay raises into two parts. The first part is across the
board. This year our raise was 4 percent, of which 1.5 percent was across
the board, meaning, for example, that a full professor making the minimum
salary of about $85,000 got a raise of about $1,275.
The other part of the raise is based on "merit,"
and it works as follows. The average faculty salary is calculated. Say it is
$100,000. Every unit gets a pot of cash equivalent to 2.5 percent, or
$2,500, multiplied by the number of faculty members in the unit. In my unit,
the English department, that would be roughly 50 bodies. The chairman of the
department evaluates each professor's performance. The professor who is
precisely in the middle gets a $2,500 merit raise. Those rated higher will
get more, those rated lower will get less, but the average merit raise has
to be $2,500.
In other words, no department can be a Lake Wobegon,
where all the children are above average.
On paper, this all seems reasonable, and I freely
admit that part of my outsized resentment of the process stems from my own
quirks. It requires a lot of paperwork and rewards good record keeping. I
despise paperwork and am truly terrible at record keeping. (It is a cruel
twist of fate in my world that evaluation time and tax time arrive
together.) My early experience in the working world taught me that I also
deeply and irrationally resent being judged by a boss, which is probably the
main reason why, before becoming an academic, I was a freelance writer and
thus my own boss. Now here I am being evaluated by the department chair, who
isn't really my boss, but at this point the difference seems negligible.
But I maintain that some of my gripes have
objective merit. American colleges and universities, including the
University of Delaware, still view faculty members as a group of scholars
and teachers devoted to and bound by self-instilled standards of excellence.
Tenure, as long as it continues to exist, must and does require evaluation.
But—crucially—at Delaware and elsewhere, that evaluation and judgment are
performed not by the chair but by one's peers (ultimately ratified or not,
to be sure, by provosts, presidents, and other higher-ups).
For faculty members who will eventually go up for
tenure, it definitely makes sense to get input from as many sources as
possible, so I'll grant that for them an annual evaluation by the chair
makes sense. But for tenured faculty members? No—at least not the way we do
it at my university.
Every year around this time, we submit our
materials—publications, syllabi, evidence of service, and so forth—and fill
out a Web form. The chair, who has meanwhile received copies of students'
evaluations of our teaching, rates all of us on a scale of 1 (the worst) to
9 (the best) in scholarship, service, and teaching. Different percentages
are accorded to each area based on an elaborate formula, but generally
speaking, for tenured and tenure-track professors, scholarship counts for
roughly 50 percent, teaching 40 percent, and service 10 percent.
The whole thing is undignified and unseemly. What,
exactly, is the difference between a 5 and 7 in service? Number of
committees served on? Hours spent? Scholarship is even more thorny, because
as everyone knows, an article does not equal an article. Do two short
articles in PMLA equal a New York Review of Books mega-essay, or do I have
to throw in a draft choice and a player to be named later? Number of words
produced and place of publication are important, to be sure, but quality
trumps them both. And how can our chair be expected to judge the quality of
the work of every faculty member, some of whom work in fields very different
from his? The answer is he can't.
Evaluating teaching has its own well-documented set
of problems. We honor faculty autonomy to the extent that evaluators are not
welcome in another professor's classroom, and we are still a good distance
away from giving students No Child Left Behind tests that would "assess" the
extent to which a certain course has achieved its "goals." That's well and
good, but it doesn't leave much as a basis for judgment. There are syllabi
and the narrative Teaching Statements we provide each year, and sometimes
the evidence of a new course devised and designed, but the main thing used
to assess teaching are student evaluations. Those have some value, but they
are most assuredly not the whole story when it comes to the quality of one's
teaching. If they were, we might as well outsource the whole process to
RateMyProfessors.com.
The unseemliness multiplies when my colleagues (as
they often do) complain loudly and frequently about the marks they have
gotten. I would be embarrassed to tell you how many laments I have listened
to along the lines of, "I published a book, and he only gave me a 7!" I
would bet our students don't kvetch as much about their grades.
And what are the consequences of our evaluations?
In the 50-40-10 scholarship-teaching-service ratio, the difference between a
7 and a 9 rating in scholarship is about $540 a year. After taxes, that
comes out to maybe $400 a year, or $8 a week. Not only is that not much, but
for almost everyone, it gets evened out over time; some years, you can
expect to get maybe a little lower rating than you "really" deserve, some
years a little higher. For this my colleagues gnash their teeth and lose
sleep?
Several years ago, I came up with another way to
evaluate faculty performance, based on the understanding that we all expect
excellent work from ourselves and one another. Take the average merit raise
and give almost everyone in the department a raise slightly lower than that;
in the example I've been working with, that could be $2,300. That way, a
handful of colleagues who publish major books or get major awards or stellar
teaching evaluations can receive a slightly higher raise. And if a couple of
people are blatantly not carrying their weight, they can get a little less.
I proposed my idea at a department meeting, and it
was summarily shot down. My explanation for this is Freud's notion of the
narcissism of small differences—our need to exaggerate the minimal
distinctions between ourselves and people very much like ourselves.
Even as I write, we are negotiating our next
collective-bargaining agreement. Word on the street is that salaries will be
frozen for next year. If that happens, I will be secretly glad, and you know
why: It could very possibly mean no annual evaluation!
Ben Yagoda is a professor of English at the
University of Delaware and author, most recently, of Memoir: A History
(Riverhead Books, 2009). His blog on higher education is at
http://campuscomments.wordpress.com
Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
A Call for Professional Attire on Campus
"A Call for Professional Attire," by Erik M. Jensen,
Inside Higher Ed, February 8, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/02/08/jensen
In his Journals, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
noted a hotel’s faded elegance:
“[T]he lobby is filled with tieless men wearing double-knit trousers.”
Tielessness: a bad sign everywhere.
Professors, it’s been said, are the
worst-dressed middle-class occupational group in America. Instead of being
role models, we’ve convinced everyone to slum. As clothing theorist Nicholas
Antongiavanni explains in The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men’s Style,
“[M]any came to believe the protestation of academics that taste was nothing
but a fraud perpetrated by the great to keep down the people.
It was not always so. In the academic
golden age, outliers who refused to follow high standards were viewed with
disdain. Edward Larson describes a law professor who, after being fired,
represented Scopes in the 1925 monkey trial. John Randolph Neal could walk
into a faculty lounge today and, without having evolved a bit, fit right in:
Neal never spent much time on campus —
often arriving late, if at all, for class, devoting class time to rambling
lectures about current political issues rather than to the course subject
matter, and giving all his law students a grade of 95 without reading their
exams. The dean also complained about Neal’s “slovenly” dress, which later
deteriorated into complete disregard for personal appearance and
cleanliness.
At the trial, “[u]nwashed and unshaven as
usual, [Neal] lectured the court in a manner reminiscent of his chaotic
teaching style.”
During Paul Fussell’s teaching career,
“practically compulsory was the daily get-up of gray flannel trousers and
tweed jacket, often, of course, with leather elbow patches, suggestive at
once of two honorable conditions: poverty and learning,” according to
Uniforms: Why We Are What We Wear. When tweed was no longer boss, however,
scruffiness became the standard. At Tom Wolfe’s Dupont University, “the
current fashion among male professors ... was scrupulously improper
cheap-looking shirts, open at the throat, ... and cotton pants with no
creases — jeans, khakis, corduroys — to distinguish themselves from the mob,
which is to say, the middle class.”
If we’re going to have a dress code
anyway, we should be able to do better than “scrupulously improper.” I
therefore propose a Uniform Uniform Code (a lawyers joke — sorry) for
professors. My effort to change clothes might not be fully successful, but
there’s hope. As Michael Bérubé says, “[D]ressing fashionably in academia is
like clearing the four-foot high jump. The bar is not that high.”
I. The Childlike Professoriate
Why the dress problem? Professors might be
grown-ups chronologically, but, if you’ve attended faculty meetings, you
know we haven’t gotten the behavior patterns right. Joseph Epstein writes:
One of the divisions of the contemporary
world is between those who are prepared to dress (roughly) their age and
those who see clothes as a means to fight off age.... I know of associate
deans who never wear neckties. Others — balding, paunchy, droopy-lidded —
have not had a fabric other than denim touch their hindquarters for decades.
They, poor dears, believe they are staying young.
Roger Kimball adds, “There is something
about the combination of denim and tenure that is inherently preposterous.”
Trying to look like students is partly
self-denial, but scruffily dressed faculty also have highfalutin goals. Some
sartorial underachievement is aimed at furthering a “nurturing” atmosphere.
The classroom setting should be non-confrontational, it’s argued, with
professors and students hangin’ out as buddies.
But it doesn’t work, except perhaps for
sexual poaching. Radical economist Bob Lamb discovered “that if I buy my
suits at Brooks Brothers and look like a banker, it is much easier to get
Harvard students to believe what I am telling them.” Bonding is nice only if
you don’t expect intellectual activity.
Dress once represented a quest for
excellence, not leveling, as Donald Kagan noted in a paean to Joltin’ Joe:
[H]is day was not ours. America was a
democracy, but of a different kind. Its people were more respectful of
excellence, both of matter and manner. . . . People wanted to behave
according to a higher and better code because they believed that in doing so
they would themselves become better, worthier, “classier.” Those who are too
young to remember should look at the movies and photographs of games at
Yankee Stadium in DiMaggio’s day. The men wore white shirts and ties under
coats and hats, the proper attire in public, even at a ball game.
Russell Baker thinks the shift to
shiftlessness occurred in the 1960s:
People [then] had so much money that they
could afford to look poor. Men quit wearing fedoras and three-piece suits to
Yankee Stadium and affected a hobo chic — all whiskers and no creases. Women
quit buying hats and high-heeled shoes and started swearing like Marine
sergeants.
People generally act better when they’re
dressed right. If a professor is sending a signal of seriousness, of
civility, students will pick it up. I defer to no one in admiring the
Marines, but the world is not a better place when everyone is swearing like
a Marine sergeant and dressing in hobo chic.
II. The Code
Here’s a draft Uniform Uniform Code:
Continued in article
U.S. Supreme Court Speaks Out About Religion on Campus
"A More Porous Church-State Wall," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
March 14, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/03/14/religion
The developments in the last week
include the following:
- A federal judge ruled that the
University of Wisconsin at Madison
could not deny funds from student fees to a Roman
Catholic group
just because
that group violates the university’s anti-discrimination
policies.
- The California Supreme Court
ruled that government agencies
could issue bonds
on behalf of
Azusa Pacific University and California Baptist
University even though those institutions are
“pervasively sectarian.”
- The College of William and
Mary announced that it
would restore to permanent display
a cross that had been
removed from a historic chapel, setting off alumni
protests and the announcement that one donor was
rescinding plans to bequeath $12 million.
In the last year, meanwhile, there
have been these developments:
In one case in the last year, a
federal judge ruled that a college — in this case the
University of California’s Hastings College of Law —
could enforce its anti-bias rules
against a Christian group, but that case is being appealed,
and even some legal observers who very much applaud the
decision in that case aren’t sure it will survive.
From Rosenberger to Today
Given that many public colleges
have believed for years that they were on solid ground
applying their anti-bias statutes to religious groups
(effectively keeping them from the benefits accorded
“recognized” student groups) or barring funds from going to
religious groups, how did the law change under them? While
the Rosenberger case cleared the way for financial
support, there was an earlier case that set the stage for
Rosenberger. In a 1981 case involving the University of
Missouri at Kansas City, the Supreme Court ruled that if a
public college makes its space generally available to
student groups,
it can’t automatically exclude religious student groups from
this space.
In that case, though, many colleges
thought that the state role was minimal as there was not an
issue of support with mandatory student fees collected by
the college. The Rosenberger case did deal with such
fees and covered much the same philosophical ground of many
of the cases of the last year, in that religious students
publishing Wide Awake focused on their rights of free
expression while the university focused on separation of
church and state. The university noted throughout the case
that it never tried to stop the students from printing their
paper or distributing it — that the only line it drew was
providing funds for it.
The majority decision in the case
came down squarely on the side that this was a free speech
issue. “Were the prohibition applied with much vigor at all,
it would bar funding of essays by hypothetical student
contributors named Plato, Spinoza, and Descartes. And if the
regulation covers, as the university says it does, those
student journalistic efforts which primarily manifest or
promote a belief that there is no deity and no ultimate
reality, then undergraduates named Karl Marx, Bertrand
Russell, and Jean-Paul Sartre would likewise have some of
their major essays excluded from student publications,” the
ruling said.
While the dissent focused on the
question of religious speech being different from other
speech, the majority opinion largely rejected that view.
Pell of the Center for Individual
Rights said that he thinks the reason so many colleges in
recent years have still focused more on church-state
separation than on free association for religious students
is that Rosenberger was such a radical departure.
“This was a huge shift in philosophy and thinking and there
are many people who disagree with that and who have been
trying to find ways around that shift,” he said. “This is
part of a deeper cultural battle.”
Continued in article
The Religious Battle of Vanderbilt: Booting Christian groups from
campus—all in the name of 'nondiscrimination' ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/VanderbiltReligion.htm
On matters sexual and soulful, colleges can
be divided into two categories, the “spiritual” and the “evangelical” — the
former the domain of hookup culture, the latter of purity culture, according to
Donna Freitas, an assistant professor of religion at Boston University and
author of the new book, Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality,
Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses (Oxford
University Press).
"Sex and the Soul," by Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed, April 16,
2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/15/sexsoul
“I think probably most people would expect the
logical division to be between religiously-affiliated schools and
nonreligiously-affiliated schools,” says Freitas, who, in researching the
book, interviewed and collected online journal entries from 111 students and
surveyed more than 2,500 undergraduates at seven different colleges
described as Catholic, evangelical, nonreligious private and public (the
institutions are not identified in the book, other than by affiliation,
geographic location and size).
“Catholic schools, they may as well be public
institutions, in terms of attitudes about sex and religion. Evangelical
colleges were just completely different.”
Despite
research showing that the overwhelming majority of college students consider
themselves “spiritual,” Freitas finds that
students at the private secular, public and Catholic colleges (the
“spiritual” institutions in her classification system) generally treat sex
as a secular act. “They’re secular only in the sexual aspect,” Freitas
writes. “Given the large percentage of students self-identifying with
religion and/or spirituality, one might reasonably expect students to make
meaning of their sexual lives via these resources. Yet religion and
spirituality have almost no influence on student behavior related to
romance, love, and sex at the spiritual colleges.”
At Catholic colleges, Freitas writes that many
students were apathetic about faith traditions and some “literally laughed
out loud” at the church’s teachings on sex. And at Catholic and nonsectarian
public and private colleges, hookup cultures — hookups are defined as
physically intimate encounters occurring outside long-term relationships —
dominate the social scene.
But Freitas finds that many students who
participate in the hookup scene do so with serious qualms – and “suffer in
silence.”
“It seems like students feel the need to hide their
belief systems,” Freitas says. “You’re pretty much just floating…If you’re
already floating and you’re afraid to stand anywhere because you might get
left out, people might not like you, people may reject you, you float where
everybody floats and if it happens to be toward hookup culture, that’s where
you end up.”
By contrast, she finds that students at evangelical
institutions are extraordinarily well-anchored. “Religion and sex are
inseparable. You can’t even begin to think about sex without grounding that
reflection in God and your Christianity.” But, Freitas points out, for
students who feel they can’t live up to or fit into the pervading purity
culture, the anchor weighs them down – sometimes tragically.
“It’s like you’re failing everyone at once and
you’re failing your faith tradition and you’re failing God. You can almost
go down in an instant with one night of having sex. That is a pretty
precarious way to live,” says Freitas.
Women at evangelical colleges are expected to wait
passively but at the same time are under “extreme” pressures to marry – the
so-called “senior scramble” describes “the mad dash to find a husband by
graduation.” The experiences of gay and lesbian students at evangelical
colleges were mixed. Freitas recalls, for instance, one breezily bisexual
female student, known by the pseudonym “Molly Bainbridge,” who had found her
own community, one she called “Heretics Anonymous.” Yet, another evangelical
college student, “Steven Parsons,” was probably, Freitas says, her most
heart-breaking interview. Attracted to other men though he didn’t want to
accept it, “he was an example of someone who was just shattered by his
sexual identity not fitting into what’s being preached.”
“On the flipside at evangelical campuses, what I
saw that I didn’t see at other places was a level of integrated community.
Talk about educating the whole person. I’ve never seen anything like it,”
Freitas says. “Watching a community build itself around shared values was
pretty extraordinary and I think really fulfilling for most of the students
even if it can be stressful.”
“It’s not like I’m advocating, ‘You all should
become evangelical colleges,’ but I do think the way campus community is
formed is pretty fantastic,” Freitas continues. “One of the things I saw at
other [spiritual] campuses was such a yearning to express the personal, [for
students] to express themselves — and meeting up with such roadblocks.”
"The new astrology: By fetishising mathematical models, economists
turned economics into a highly paid pseudoscience," by Alan Jay Levinovitz,
AEON, May 2016 ---
https://aeon.co/essays/how-economists-rode-maths-to-become-our-era-s-astrologers
Since
the 2008 financial crisis, colleges and universities have faced increased
pressure to identify essential disciplines, and cut the rest. In 2009,
Washington State University announced it would eliminate the department of
theatre and dance, the department of community and rural sociology, and the
German major – the same year that the University of Louisiana at Lafayette
ended its philosophy major. In 2012, Emory University in Atlanta did away
with the visual arts department and its journalism programme. The cutbacks
aren’t restricted to the humanities: in 2011, the state of Texas announced
it would eliminate nearly half of its public undergraduate physics
programmes. Even when there’s no downsizing, faculty salaries have been
frozen and departmental budgets have shrunk.
But
despite the funding crunch, it’s a bull market for academic economists.
According to a 2015 sociological
study in the
Journal of Economic
Perspectives, the median salary of economics teachers in 2012
increased to $103,000 – nearly $30,000 more than sociologists. For the top
10 per cent of economists, that figure jumps to $160,000, higher than the
next most lucrative academic discipline – engineering. These figures, stress
the study’s authors, do not include other sources of income such as
consulting fees for banks and hedge funds, which, as many learned from the
documentary Inside Job
(2010), are often substantial. (Ben Bernanke, a former academic economist
and ex-chairman of the Federal Reserve, earns $200,000-$400,000 for a single
appearance.)
Unlike engineers and chemists,
economists cannot point to concrete objects – cell phones, plastic – to
justify the high valuation of their discipline. Nor, in the case of
financial economics and macroeconomics, can they point to the predictive
power of their theories. Hedge funds employ cutting-edge economists who
command princely fees, but routinely underperform index funds. Eight years
ago, Warren Buffet made a 10-year, $1 million bet that a portfolio of hedge
funds would lose to the S&P 500, and it looks like he’s going to collect. In
1998, a fund that boasted two Nobel Laureates as advisors collapsed, nearly
causing a global financial crisis.
The
failure of the field to predict the 2008 crisis has also been
well-documented. In 2003, for example, only five years before the Great
Recession, the Nobel Laureate Robert E Lucas Jr
told the American Economic Association that
‘macroeconomics […] has succeeded: its central problem of depression
prevention has been solved’. Short-term predictions fair little better – in
April 2014, for instance,
a survey of 67 economists yielded 100 per cent
consensus: interest rates would rise over the next six months. Instead, they
fell. A lot.
Nonetheless,
surveys indicate that economists see their
discipline as ‘the most scientific of the social sciences’. What is the
basis of this collective faith, shared by universities, presidents and
billionaires? Shouldn’t successful and powerful people be the first to spot
the exaggerated worth of a discipline, and the least likely to pay for it?
In the hypothetical worlds of
rational markets, where much of economic theory is set, perhaps. But
real-world history tells a different story, of mathematical models
masquerading as science and a public eager to buy them, mistaking elegant
equations for empirical accuracy.
Real Science versus Pseudo Science ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm#Pseudo-Science
Jensen Comment
Academic accounting (accountics) scientists took economic
astrology a step further when their leading journals stopped encouraging and
publishing commentaries and replications of published articles ---
How Accountics Scientists Should Change:
"Frankly, Scarlett, after I get a hit for my resume in The Accounting Review
I just don't give a damn"
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm
Times are changing in social science research (including
economics) where misleading p-values are no longer the Holy Grail. Change among
accountics scientist will lag behind change in social science research but some
day leading academic accounting research journals may publish articles without
equations and/or articles of interest to some accounting practitioner somewhere
in the world ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong
Booth Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago ---
https://www.chicagobooth.edu/
Eugene Fama ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Fama
Kenneth French ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_French
David Booth Brings Academic Research to Life ---
http://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/3552928/investors-endowments-and-foundations/david-booth-brings-academic-research-to-life.html#/.Vzy3Co-cEcQ
Jensen Comment
Although David Booth is doing well bringing academic research to life, we can
also remember how two Nobel Prize winning economics professors (Merton and
Scholes) and some of their doctoral students brought academic research to death
in the infamous Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) trillion dollar failure
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRottenPart2.htm#LTCM
Controversies in Doctoral and Other Graduate Programs
Question
Given the dire shortages of doctoral students in accountancy, should the
requirement for doctoral degrees be eliminated in higher education?
Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding
out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do
is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.
Douglas Adams
There are two explanations one can give for this
state of affairs here. The first is due to the great English economist Maurice
Dobb according to whom the theory of value was replaced in the United States by
theory of price. May be, the consequence for us today is that we know the price
of everything but perhaps the value of nothing. Economics divorced from politics
and philosophy is vacuous. In accounting, we have inherited the vacuousness by
ignoring those two enduring areas of inquiry.
Professor Jagdish Gangolly, SUNY
Albany
The second is the comment that Joan Robinson made
about American Keynsians: that their theories were so flimsy that they had to
put math into them. In accounting academia, the shortest path to respectability
seems to be to use math (and statistics), whether meaningful or not.
Professor Jagdish Gangolly, SUNY
Albany
There are two sides to nearly every profession (as
opposed to a narrow trade). The first one is the clinical side, and
the second one is the research side. But this is not to say that the
twain do not meet.
I advocate requiring that most (maybe not all)
clinical instructors be grounded solidly in research. Requiring a
PhD is a traditional way to get groundings in research. Probably
more importantly is that doctoral studies are ways to motivate
clinically-minded students to attempt to do research on clinical
issues and make important contributions to the practicing
profession.
I define “research” as a contribution to new
knowledge. Among other things a good doctoral program should make
scholars more appreciative of good research and critical of
bad/superficial research that does not contribute to much of
anything that is relevant, including research that should get
Senator William Proxmire's
Golden Fleece Awards. Like urban cowboys, our academic
accounting researchers are all hat (mathematical/statistical models)
with no cows.
The problem with accountancy doctoral programs is
that they’ve become narrowly bounded by accountics (especially
econometrics and psychometrics) that in the past three decades have
made little progress toward helping the clinical side of our
profession of accountancy. This makes our doctoral programs very
much unlike those in economics, finance, medicine, science, and
engineering where many clinical advances in their disciplines have
emerged from studies in doctoral programs.
The problem with higher education in accountancy is
not that we require doctoral degrees in our major colleges
and universities. The problem is that our doctoral programs shut out
research methodologies that are perhaps better suited for making
research discoveries that really help the clinical side of our
profession. Accountics models just do not deal well with missing
variables and nonstationarities that must be allowed for on the
clinical side of accountancy. Humanities researchers face many of
these same issues and have evolved a much broader arsenal of
research methodologies that are
verboten
in accounting doctoral programs --- (See below).
The related problem is that our leading scholars
running those doctoral programs have taken a supercilious view of
the clinical side of our profession. Or maybe it’s just that these
leaders do not want to take the time and trouble to learn the
clinical side of the profession. Once again I repeat the oft-quoted
referee of an Accounting Horizons rejection of Denny
Beresford’s 2005 submission
I quote from
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#AcademicsVersusProfession
*************
1. The paper provides specific recommendations for things that
accounting academics should be doing to make the accounting
profession better. However (unless the author believes that
academics' time is a free good) this would presumably take
academics' time away from what they are currently doing. While
following the author's advice might make the accounting profession
better, what is being made worse? In other words, suppose I stop
reading current academic research and start reading news about
current developments in accounting standards. Who is made better off
and who is made worse off by this reallocation of my time?
Presumably my students are marginally better off, because I can tell
them some new stuff in class about current accounting standards, and
this might possibly have some limited benefit on their careers. But
haven't I made my colleagues in my department worse off if they
depend on me for research advice, and haven't I made my university
worse off if its academic reputation suffers because I'm no longer
considered a leading scholar? Why does making the accounting
profession better take precedence over everything else an academic
does with their time?
**************
Joel Demski steers us away from the clinical side of
the accountancy profession by saying we should avoid that pesky
“vocational virus.” (See below).
The (Random House)
dictionary defines "academic" as "pertaining to areas of study that
are not primarily vocational or applied , as the humanities or pure
mathematics." Clearly, the short answer to the question is no,
accounting is not an academic discipline.
Joel Demski, "Is Accounting an Academic Discipline?"
Accounting Horizons, June 2007, pp. 153-157
Statistically there are a
few youngsters who came to academia for the joy of learning, who are
yet relatively untainted by the
vocational virus.
I urge you to nurture your taste for learning, to follow your joy.
That is the path of scholarship, and it is the only one with any
possibility of turning us back toward the academy.
Joel Demski, "Is Accounting an Academic Discipline?
American Accounting Association Plenary Session" August 9, 2006 ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen//theory/00overview/theory01.htm
Too many accountancy doctoral programs have immunized
themselves against the “vocational virus.” The problem lies not in
requiring doctoral degrees in our leading colleges and universities.
The problem is that we’ve been neglecting the clinical needs of our
profession. Perhaps the real underlying reason is that our clinical
problems are so immense that academic accountants quake in fear of
having to make contributions to the clinical side of accountancy as
opposed to the clinical side of finance, economics, and psychology.
Our problems with doctoral programs in
accountancy are shared with other disciplines, notably education and nursing
schools.
Bob Jensen's threads on the role of academic
accounting research in the profession of accountancy can be found at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm
The Formation of Scholars: Re-thinking
Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century
(Jossey-Bass, 2008) explores the current state of doctoral
education in the United States and shows how practices and elements of doctoral
programs can be made more powerful by relying on principles of progressive
development, integration and collaboration. Written by George E. Walker, Chris
M. Golde, Laura Jones, Andrea Conklin Bueschel and Pat Hutchings, and derived
from a five-year look at doctoral education by the Carnegie Initiative on the
Doctorate, The Formation of Scholars urges educators to consider how graduate
programs can constructively grapple with questions of purpose. The authors
identify the need to create intellectual community as essential for high-quality
graduate education; and underscore that knowledge-centered, multigenerational
communities foster the development of new ideas and encourage intellectual risk
taking.
George Walker, Chris M. Golde, Laura Jones, Andrea Conklin Bueschel, and Pat
Hutchings, The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the
Twenty-First Century (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching,
2008, $40) ---
http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/publications/pub.asp?key=43&subkey=712
Also see
http://www.josseybass.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470197439.html
Foreword by Lee S.
Shulman.
1. Moving Doctoral
Education into the Future.
2. Setting the
Stage for Change.
3. Talking About
Purpose: Mirrors, Lenses, and Windows.
4. From Experience
to Expertise: Principles of Powerful Formation.
5. Apprenticeship
Reconsidered.
6. Creating and
Sustaining Intellectual Community.
7. A Call to
Action.
Appendix A:
Summary Description of the Carnegie Initiative on
the Doctorate.
Appendix B: List
of Participating Departments.
Appendix C:
Overview of the Surveys.
Appendix D:
Graduate Student Survey.
Appendix E:
Graduate Faculty Survey.
References.
Name Index.
Subject Index.
Related Titles
More By These Authors
Administration & Policy
|
|
Bob Jensen's threads on the sad state of
doctoral education in accountancy are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
Greater clinical focus ahead for law and other graduate schools?
Clinical work, along with a professional ethics course,
are the only two requirements in years two and three at Stanford Law. Kramer
said he would like to make the clinical programs more central to the curriculum.
When the law school switches to its quarter schedule, Kramer said he would like
to make quarter-long clinical training an option. He said clinical rotations
could take students outside of Stanford to other universities.
Elia Powers, Beyond the First Year, Inside Higher Ed, November 8, 2006
---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/08/stanford
The Critical Shortage of Doctoral Graduates in Business and Accountancy in
Particular
Quotations from a Report Published in May 2006
There is a Ph.D. glut reported in some disciplines and
shortages in other disciplines, especially in business
education programs. The AACSB business education accrediting
agency reports that doctoral graduate output is critically
short in all specializations. The shortage is especially
acute in accountancy.
Some of the references cited below are listed at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm
In the 1960s huge catalysts for change in accounting
research occurred when the Ford Foundation
poured millions of dollars into the study of
collegiate business schools and the funding of doctoral
programs and students in business studies. Gordon and Howell
(1959) reported that business faculty in colleges lacked
research skills and academic esteem when compared to their
colleagues in the sciences. The Ford Foundation thereafter
provided funding for doctoral programs and for top quality
graduate students to pursue doctoral degrees in business and
accountancy. The Foundation even funded publication of
selected doctoral dissertations to give doctoral studies in
business more visibility. Great pressures were also brought
to bear on academic associations like the AAA to increase
the scientific standards for publications in journals like
TAR. A perfect storm for change in accounting research arose
in the late 1950s and early1960s. First came the critical
Pierson Carnegie Report (1959) and the Gordon and Howell
Ford Foundation Report (1959). Shortly thereafter, the AACSB
introduced a requirement requiring that a certain percentage
of faculty possess doctoral degrees for business education
programs seeking accreditation (Bricker
and Previtts 1990). Soon afterwards, both a doctorate
and publication in top accounting research journals became
necessary for tenure (Langenderfer 1987).
Supply of doctoral graduates in accountancy rose sharply
between 1960 and 1989 to where over 200 graduates per year
were entering academe from over 100 doctoral programs. The
largest programs were such as those at the Universities of
Illinois and Texas were beginning to cut back by 1989.
Subsequently, numbers of doctoral graduates nationwide began
to taper off in spite of assorted newer doctoral programs.
The numbers of accountancy doctoral graduates in the past
few years are critically short to meet increases in demand
in college accountancy programs in virtually all states of
the United States. Increasing salary levels to the highest
levels in many colleges has not seemed to attract more
entrants into doctoral programs. Rodgers and Williams (1996,
67-68) list 56 newer
U.S.
doctoral programs and some have been added since 1996. But
these increases in the number of doctoral programs failed to
alleviate the dramatic declines in graduation rates in
larger and older programs.
As baby
boomers from the World War II era begin to retire, we may
experience a shortage of new faculty to take their place and
meet the growing demand for business programs at
universities. In August 2002, the AACSB International
Management Education Task Force (METF) issued a landmark
report, “Management Education at Risk.” The following is a
quotation from the Foreword on Page 4 that appeals to a
wide-ranging scholarship of “incredibly complex and dynamic
environments”:
Let’s
be clear about the real doctoral faculty issue. It’s not
about day-to-day recruiting challenges, escalating faculty
salaries, adhering to accreditation standards, or protecting
the professoriate. The real threat is to the very core of
collegiate business schools and institutions of higher
education—scholarship. Doctoral faculty produces the body of
knowledge that sustains intellectual inquiry and the ongoing
development of a discipline. Any diminishment of our shared
objective to advance such knowledge and ground education in
solid conceptual frameworks will be a threat to the eventual
academic legitimacy of our discipline. At a time when
organizations operate in incredibly complex and dynamic
environments, when different norms are colliding, and
leadership credibility is at the lowest, such a retreat will
compromise our ability to serve students and other
constituents.
Data are provided in the above report
about the serious decline in the number of doctoral degrees
granted in recent years. Demand is more than double the
projected supply of new doctoral faculty. For accounting in
particular, Hasselback (2006) reports that the number of
accounting doctoral degrees plunged from 212 in 1989 to 96
in 2004. Even if he missed some in his count, the trend is
clearly critical. Fewer and fewer
accounting undergraduate and master’s degree graduates are
returning to earn doctoral degrees. The reasons for this are
complex, but there is considerable anecdotal evidence that
some potential doctoral candidates are not interested in the
narrow scientific methodology curriculum offered at most
doctoral programs.
In 2004 American Accounting Association President Bill
Felix formed an ad hoc Committee to Assess the Supply and
Demand for Accounting Ph.D.s. The Committee conducted an
exhaustive survey and published a report in May 2006 in the
following reference:
"Assessing the Shortage of Accounting Faculty," by
R. David Plumlee (Chairman), Steven J. Kachelmeier,
Silvia A. Madeo, Jamie H. Pratt, and George Krull,
Issues in Accounting Education, Vol. 21, No. 2, May
2006, pp. 113-126.
Some of the highlights of this report are quoted below.
QUOTATION FROM PAGE 114
The AACSB predicts a major
shortage of all business faculty with Ph.D.s over the next
ten years (AACSB 2003). Within accounting, there is
substantial anecdotal evidence that a shortage of
Ph.D.-qualified accounting faculty already exists and may
grow. Referring to the recent increase in accounting
majors, the Wall Street Journal (2004) noted that
"some universities face a problem: a shortage of professors
to teach these young beancounters." The article continues
by stating that:
the
comeback of the accounting career occurs as the number
of business doctorates produced is at a 17-year low and
universities struggle to recruit new accounting
professors. That leaves many wondering who will be left
to teach all the new rules and regulations to the
growing student pool. While many academic fields are
suffering from professor shortages, the issue is more
acute in accounting because of the pull toward
high-paying public-accounting jobs. (Wall Street
Journal 2004)
QUOTATION FROM PAGES 115-117
Table 1 details the estimated
demand for new accounting faculty for the academic years
2005-08 at the three types of schools by rank. We estimated
that program leaders expected to hire 1,174 new accounting
faculty in 2005-06. However, new doctoral graduates
represent only 30.0 percent of the faculty demand for
2005-06. The demand for experienced Ph.D.s. (Assistant,
Associate, and Full Professors) represents 35.5 percent of
the total, and it remains at about the same level for the
subsequent two years. Demand for faculty whose primary
responsibility is teaching (whether or not they have a
doctoral degree) amounts to 36.6 percent of the total
faculty demand. When viewed at the school-category level,
56.0 percent of the "teaching only" faculty are expected to
be hired by Undergrad Schools.
Table 2 shows sample
responses indicating the number of faculty expected to be
hired for each specialty, by both type of school and year.
The number of teachers that the three types of schools
expect to hire within each teaching specialty differs
substantially. While financial accounting is the specialty
in highest demand across all three types of schools, it is
in highest relative demand for the Ph.D. Schools, with 40.3
percent of their expected hiring in financial accounting.
Master's Schools have a somewhat more balanced approach to
hiring across specialties and have the highest demand for
tax and systems teaching. The category with the most
surprising number of anticipated hires is the
multiple-specialty category. Table 2 indicates that the
Master's and Undergrad Schools expect approximately
one-fourth of their new Ph.D.s hires to teach in multiple
areas. The results of the Ph.D. program directors' survey
found that none of the students are preparing themselves for
multiple teaching specialties. When asked about hiring
strategies, Master's Schools had a strong preference for
hiring to meet specific teaching needs, while schools in the
other two categories showed a slight tendency to recruit the
best candidate regardless of specialization.
TABLE 1
Estimated Accounting Faculty Demand for the Academic
Year 2005-06
and the Subsequent Two Years, 2006-07 and 2007-08
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
2006 and
2007 |
|
|
|
2005 |
|
|
|
|
|
Ph.D. |
Master's |
Undergrad
Only |
2005
Totals |
|
Ph.D. |
Master's |
Undergrad |
2006 and
2007
Totals |
|
|
New |
Ph.D. |
74 |
186 |
92 |
352 |
30.0% |
99 |
342 |
149 |
590 |
42.6% |
|
Experienced |
Assistant
Associate
Full Professor |
36
31
21 |
131
46
25 |
57
46
0 |
224
123
46 |
19.1%
10.5%
3.8% |
28
30
6 |
150
52
49 |
115
11
11 |
293
93
66 |
21.2%
6.7%
4.8% |
|
Teaching only |
Ph.D./ABD
Other |
12
26 |
22
128 |
92
149 |
126
303 |
10.7%
25.9% |
13
28 |
8
98 |
80
115 |
101
241 |
7.3%
17.4% |
|
|
TOTAL |
200 |
538 |
436 |
1174 |
100.0% |
204 |
699 |
481 |
1384 |
100.0% |
TABLE 2
Anticipated Demand for Teaching Specialties among
New Ph.D.s Hires for 2005-06, 2006-07, and 2007-08
Academic Years
|
|
Ph.D.
Schools |
Master's
Schools |
Undergrad
Schools |
|
|
2005 |
2006 |
2007 |
Total |
Percent
of Total |
2005 |
2006 |
2007 |
Total |
Percent
of Total |
2005 |
2006 |
2007 |
Total |
Percent
of Total |
|
Audit |
11 |
8 |
1 |
19 |
12.3% |
19 |
11 |
10 |
40 |
10.7% |
1 |
4 |
0 |
5 |
10.6% |
|
Cost |
14 |
9 |
8 |
23 |
14.9% |
15 |
22 |
16 |
53 |
14.2% |
3 |
4 |
2 |
9 |
19.2% |
|
Financial |
31 |
31 |
20 |
62 |
40.3% |
44 |
38 |
19 |
101 |
27.0% |
9 |
5 |
1 |
15 |
31.9% |
|
Tax |
8 |
4 |
4 |
12 |
7.8% |
21 |
13 |
9 |
43 |
11.5% |
2 |
0 |
1 |
3 |
6.4% |
|
Systems |
4 |
4 |
1 |
8 |
5.2% |
13 |
11 |
12 |
36 |
9.6% |
1 |
0 |
0 |
1 |
2.1% |
|
Multiple |
14 |
10 |
8 |
24 |
15.6% |
31 |
29 |
31 |
91 |
24.3% |
5 |
6 |
2 |
13 |
27.7% |
|
Other |
5 |
1 |
4 |
6 |
3.9% |
5 |
1 |
4 |
10 |
2.7% |
0 |
1 |
0 |
1 |
2.1% |
|
|
|
|
|
154 |
100.0% |
|
|
|
374 |
100.0% |
|
|
6 |
47 |
100.0% |
QUOTATION FROM PAGES 118-120
We estimate a total of 141
students will earn their Ph.D.s in 2005-06, 145 in 2006-07,
and 187 in 2007-08. Since some attrition in student numbers
is likely, the supply may be overestimated for later years.
As shown in Table 3, 234 out of 391 students described in
the responses (59.8 percent) have financial accounting as
their teaching specialty. The two identifiable specialties
with the fewest students are auditing and tax with 7.4
percent and 5.9 percent of the students, respectively.
TABLE 3
Ph.D. Program Director's Estimates of the Number of
Current Ph.D. Students in Various
Teaching Specialties Extrapolated to the Population of
Schools with Ph.D. Programs
|
|
Sample
Responses |
|
|
Estimated Number of Ph.D.s Graduating |
|
|
1st yr |
2nd yr |
3rd yr |
4th yr |
5th yr |
Sample
Totals |
Est.
Pop.a |
2005-06 |
2006-07 |
2007-08 |
|
Audit |
9 |
6 |
4 |
8 |
2 |
29 |
49 |
7 |
12 |
8 |
|
Financial |
37 |
62 |
45 |
52 |
38 |
234 |
396 |
91 |
85 |
108 |
|
Cost |
8 |
13 |
18 |
17 |
11 |
67 |
113 |
27 |
29 |
37 |
|
Systems |
11 |
10 |
8 |
5 |
3 |
37 |
63 |
8 |
10 |
19 |
|
Tax |
4 |
4 |
7 |
5 |
3 |
23 |
39 |
8 |
9 |
14 |
|
Other |
0 |
1 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
1 |
2 |
0 |
0 |
1 |
|
Totals |
69 |
96 |
82 |
87 |
57 |
391 |
662 |
141 |
145 |
187 |
|
a
A linear extrapolation from the
sample of 49 respondents to the population of 83
schools with accounting Ph.D. programs. |
Estimated Shortages
One of the Committee's
most critical tasks was to estimated the shortage of new
Ph.D.-qualified faculty members. Using the data collected
from both the accounting program leaders and the Ph.D.
program directors, we estimated the shortages in each
teaching specialty--as well as overall shortages--by
combining the program directors' estimates of students
graduating and the accounting program leaders' estimates of
the number they need to hire. The shortages were estimated
by taking the percentage demanded by specialty from the
sample and multiplying those percentages by the estimated
total supply of new Ph.D.-qualified faculty for two periods:
(1) 2005-06 and (2) 2006-08. For example, in Table 4, the
demand for 43 new auditing Ph.D.s in 2005-06 is found by
taking the percentage demanded for the audit specialty (12.3
percent as shown in Table 2) reported by the department
heads who do hiring and multiplying that percentage by the
estimated total supply of new Ph.D.s (352) in that year
(shown in Table 4).
Table 4 shows that,
across all specialties for 2005-08, the overall supply of
new accounting faculty is only 49.9 percent of the number
demanded. Focusing just on the shortages estimated for
2005-06, the supply for every specialty falls short of the
demand. The two categories with the greatest shortages are
multiple specialties and the "other" category, estimated to
have none of their demand met.4
Nonetheless, we must acknowledge that many
Ph.D. students will be expected to teach across specialties
when they assume their first faculty position. Financial
accounting will have 79.1 percent of its demand met. Tax
will have only eight students graduating and auditing will
only have seven, which is only 18.6 percent and 16.4
percent, respectively, of the expected demand for 2005-06.
Looking at the subsequent two years, shortages remain across
all specialties; however, these shortages are less severe in
most cases.
Figure 1 shows that
over the three-year period 2005-2008, we expect substantial
variation across specialties in the proportion of demand
met. As before, the "multiple" and the "other" categories
fall well short in percentage terms. For the "other"
category, the characteristics of the faculty members
demanded and the students being supplied are unlikely to
match. In the more defined specialties, graduate candidates
are expected to supply only 27.1 percent of the tax faculty
and 22.8 percent of the audit faculty demand, viewed
cumulatively over the three years. On the other hand,
graduates interested in teaching financial accounting almost
reach the level demanded (91.6 percent). These shortages
need to be considered with respect to the significant demand
for experienced Ph.D.s; this demand can only be met in the
short run by faculty moving from one school to another,
creating more demand to replace those faculty members.
4 Note,
however, that the program directors were not given multiple
specialties as a reporting option and "other" may have been
perceived as too vague an option.
TABLE 4
Estimates of the Excess or Shortage of the Supply of New
Ph.D.-Qualified Accounting Faculty Relative to the
Demand the Three Academic Years 2005-2008
|
|
Estimates
for 2005-06 |
Estimates
for 2006-08 |
Cumulative |
|
|
Demand |
Supply |
Excess
(Shortage) |
Percent of Demand
Met |
Demand |
Supply |
Excess
(Shortage) |
Percent of
Demand
Met |
Cumulative
Excess
(Shortage) |
Percent of
Demand
Met |
|
Audit |
43 |
7 |
(36) |
16.4% |
71 |
19 |
(52) |
26.6% |
(88) |
22.8% |
|
Cost |
44 |
27 |
(17) |
61.4% |
74 |
66 |
(8) |
89.5% |
(25) |
79.0% |
|
Financial |
115 |
91 |
(24) |
79.1% |
194 |
192 |
(2) |
99.2% |
(26) |
91.6% |
|
Tax |
43 |
8 |
(35) |
18.6% |
71 |
23 |
(48) |
32.3% |
(83) |
27.1% |
|
Systems |
25 |
8 |
(17) |
31.9% |
41 |
29 |
(12) |
69.9% |
(29) |
55.7% |
|
Multiple |
69 |
0 |
(69) |
0.0% |
115 |
0 |
(115) |
0.0% |
(184) |
0.0% |
|
Other |
13 |
0 |
(13) |
0.0% |
24 |
1 |
(23)% |
2.3 |
(36) |
1.4% |
|
TOTALS |
352 |
141 |
(211) |
40.0% |
590 |
330 |
(260) |
55.9% |
(471) |
49.9% |
QUOTATION
FROM PAGE 125
Diversifying Training across
Teaching Specialties
The Committee believes
the dire shortages in tax and audit areas warrant particular
focus. One possible solution to these specific shortages is
for Ph.D. programs to create new tracks targeted toward
developing high-quality faculty specifically in these
areas. These tracks should be considered part of a
well-rounded Ph.D. program in which students develop
specialized knowledge in one area of accounting, but gain
substantive exposure to other accounting research areas. In
addition, Master's Schools that do not currently offer a
doctorate could develop accounting doctoral programs that
support tax and audit education as part of an overall
doctoral program.
A possible explanation
for the shortages in these areas is that Ph.D. students
perceive that publishing audit and tax research in top
accounting journals is more difficult, which might have the
unintended consequence of reducing the supply of
Ph.D.-qualified faculty to teach in those specialties.
Given that promotion and tenure requirements at major
universities require publication in to-tier journals,
students are likely drawn to financial accounting in hopes
of getting the necessary publications for career success.
While the Committee has no evidence that bears directly on
this point, it believes that the possibility deserves
further consideration.
CONCLUSIONS
The Committee has
uncovered some valuable information about the nature of the
demand for accounting faculty, the state of Ph.D. programs,
and perceptions of current accounting Ph.D. students. While
there is surely some estimation error in determining the
existence of a shortage of new accounting faculty, it is
clear that particularly in the tax and auditing teaching
specialties a shortage exists. At this point there is
neither an organized strategy to recruit more accounting
Ph.D. students, nor is it evident that current accounting
Ph.D. programs have the capacity to absorb additional
students. Despite the Committee's efforts, many questions
and a great deal of work remain to be done in areas such as
developing sources of information useful in recruiting new
accounting Ph.D. students and developing creative ways to
lower the costs to students of getting a Ph.D. and the costs
to schools of offering doctoral programs. Assuring an
adequate supply of qualified accounting faculty in the
future will require broad and dedicated efforts by
Ph.D.-granting schools, the AAA, and other entities with a
vested interest in the academic accounting profession.
Question
Will the business school faculty shortage be a thing of the past?
"Business PhD Applications on the Rise: A weak job market has many
contemplating PhDs and faculty jobs. Will the business school faculty shortage
be a thing of the past?" by Alison Damast, Business Week, May 11, 2009
---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/may2009/bs20090511_815452.htm?link_position=link1
With expenses such as business lunches being
curtailed and a dwindling list of new clients, Wayne Nelms knew it was only
a matter of time before he would be laid off by accounting firm Grant
Thornton.
"The writing was on the wall. I just didn't know
when," says Nelms, 36, who worked as senior internal auditor at the
company's Baltimore office for two-and-a-half-years. "Then I got the
e-mail."
By January he was out of a job and found himself at
a crossroads. Reluctant to jump back into the job market immediately, he
started exploring his options and stumbled upon the PhD Project, a nonprofit
that encourages minority business professionals to earn PhDs and go on to
become professors. He'd heard of the program back when he was an MBA student
at Howard University but had put it on the back burner after graduation.
"When D-day happened, I decided, well I can do one
of two things with my future: Either get a doctorate or look for a good old
dependable job," said Nelms, who got in contact with the PhD Project. A few
weeks later he applied and was accepted to the accounting PhD program at
Morgan State University in Baltimore, Md., where he'll be starting full-time
this fall. Says Nelms: "With a doctorate, I thought my destiny would be a
little more in my control."
Nelms is part of a growing wave of professionals
who are leaving the battered business world behind for a career in the
hallowed halls of academia. Applications are up substantially this year at
many top business PhD programs, with some business schools reporting jumps
in applications as high as 40%. PhD program directors attribute the jump to
professionals fleeing a weak job market, coupled with a surge of interest
from undergraduates bypassing that job market entirely to head straight for
school.
An Encouraging Sign Meanwhile, organizations like
the PhD Project say more people than ever before are expressing interest in
their programs and annual conference, which attracted the largest number of
participants in the organization's 15-year history this fall. It's an
encouraging sign for the world of management education, where a looming
faculty shortage has had B-school deans worried for years.
The surge of interest in becoming a business
professor comes just as a backlash is being felt among those in the business
community who hold MBAs, says Yuval Bar-Or, an adjunct at Johns Hopkins
University's Carey Business School and author of Is a PhD for Me? A
Cautionary Guide for Aspiring Doctoral Students, slated for release on May
19. Many fleeing the business world for academia may view it as a more
venerable profession, he says.
"MBAs are now persona non grata in many places, and
there is a fair amount of animosity being directed at them for living in the
fast lane, spending everyone's money, and not being responsible enough,"
Bar-Or says. "So business leaders, in society's eyes, have been knocked off
a pedestal, and that may be causing a lot of people with an interest in
business to want to go down a path that is more respected in society."
Those who have been thinking about getting a PhD
are not wasting any time exploring their options. Potential PhD students
were out in full force this fall at the PhD Project's annual conference in
Chicago last November, where attendees mingled with professors and deans
from nearly 100 business schools around the country. The conference usually
attracts around 330 people, but this year 832 people applied, about 534 of
whom were invited to attend.
"This was a substantial increase. It was so big
that we were starting to worry from a budgetary standpoint about how we were
going to pay for everything and if the room and hotel was going to be big
enough," said Bernie Milano, president of the PhD Project. He expects that
interest will continue to grow. He's already received 65 applications for
next year's conference, triple the amount he usually receives by this time
of year, he says.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
There are a number of things working against an explosion of doctoral students
in accountancy.
Firstly, the traditionally large accounting doctoral programs (Illinois,
Texas, Michigan, Indiana, Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio State, etc.) have greatly
shrunk in size since their days of glory before the "accountics" revolution
commenced in the 1960s. Shrinking departmental budgets will further dry up
funding going into doctoral programs and accounting research in general.
Generosity of hard-pressed accounting firms and alumni may also shrink private
donations that are often used heavily to fund endowed chair faculty and other
needs of doctoral programs.
Secondly, many jobless accountants with high GMAT scores often have
children and financial responsibilities and will be turned off by the five-year
average time it takes to get an accounting PhD, especially for jobless
applicants who have weak and or maybe forgotten accountics
prerequisites (calculus, advanced calculus, linear algebra, mathematical
statistics, econometrics, data mining, etc.) for which few have interest in
studying for five more years of their lives. Accounting doctoral programs now
have little to do with accounting and everything to do with making graduates
scientists in econometrics, mathematics, and psychometrics ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
Thirdly, virtually all colleges and universities are now being forced
to downsize in some way due to shrinking budget allocations. Recovery of these
budgets will be slow long after the current recession turns around because of
the many demands placed upon states for other priorities such as Medicare and
expanded welfare that was only temporarily shrunk by the Clinton
Administration.. While expanding entitlements for poor people, President Obama
promises to eventually reduce the Federal deficit which means more and more of
the funding burdens will fall upon state taxation. Californians are now showing
the world that taxpayers are not in the mood for higher state taxes. I do not
anticipate that the shrinking doctoral programs in accountancy will get heavy
revival funding for years to come.
Fourthly, due to shrinking budgets and explosive growth in
undergraduate accountancy programs, virtually all colleges and universities,
with blessings from the AACSB, are creating full-time faculty positions for
former practitioners who do not have accounting doctoral degrees (although many
have law degrees or doctorates in other disciplines). These faculty reduce the
demand for more expensive graduates from accountancy doctoral programs. And this
is an outlet for early retirees who are great instructors with specialized
skills (e.g., ERP, auditing, and tax) that are more in line with undergraduate
teaching curricula in accountancy undergraduate and masters programs.
The new AICPA-sponsored fellowship program for doctoral students who elect
auditing and tax will help but the number of students funded in these
professional specialties is too small to have much of an impact on filling empty
tenure track positions. The KMPG Foundation fellowships for minority students
has helped to get more African Americans into accounting doctoral programs, but
I do not anticipate great increases in this funding source. The numerical impact
of both these dedicated programs will be very small among the thousands of
accountancy education programs in the United States.
There will be substantial increases in the doctoral programs in management,
marketing, MIS, and economics. Finance is a question mark since the number of
undergraduate students majoring in finance will greatly decline due to black
hole in job opportunities for graduates in finance. With declines in
undergraduate finance majors there will be less demand for newly-minted
professors of finance. Economics will probably fare better because the fact that
economics doctoral students on average only take three years beyond a bachelors
degree to complete the doctoral program. Three-year doctorates are drawing
cards to many returning jobless graduate students who do not want to spend more
than three years earning a doctorate. And there will probably be increased
opportunities for economists in Obama's exploding Federal government.
Purportedly increasing numbers of doctoral students in economics are looking
forward to civil service careers ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
May 20, 20096 reply from Zane Swanson
[ZSwanson@UCO.EDU]
One other mitigating factor which could increase
space at PhD schools may happen “if” PhD students opt for leaving campus
“all but dissertation” due to the monetary attraction from schools who need
to fill faculty shortage positions.
Zane Swanson
May 21, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Zane,
I think there are more reasons these days not to leave ABD until the
dissertation draft is completed and given preliminary approval by the
dissertation advisor. Firstly, most PhD programs provide financial
incentives to say on campus (e.g., assistantships for the first three or
four years and fellowships at the dissertation stage).
Secondly, most hiring schools place increased stress on dissertation
completion. Tenure clocks start running upon arrival at a new job whether or
not the dissertation is completed. Since publishing is more difficult for
ABD faculty concentrating on both teaching and thesis completion, this is a
huge incentive to delay startup of a new job.
Thirdly, student evaluation of instructors has become an enormous factor
in performance evaluation. A newly hired ABD tenure track professor cannot
shirk on teaching preparation and time spent with students. This factor has
changed greatly over the past few decades. In 1970 an ABD professor could
afford to spend less time on teaching until the dissertation was accepted.
Not anymore!
Of course there are many other factors that complicate matters. An ABD
candidate may follow a spouse to a new job. An ABD candidate may go beyond
five years when there is little financial support in the sixth year of a
doctoral program. Sometimes there is a new expected baby adding to financial
burdens.
Sadly, most excuses for working full time ABD become reasons for never
finishing the dissertation. This happens time and time again. The spouse of
a new professor at Trinity University in 2000 was herself ABD in
microbiology at the University of Illinois. She was ever so close to
finishing but decided to move with her husband to San Antonio and have two
new babies after moving. Her husband doubts that she will ever finish her
PhD degree since it’s especially difficult in science to take up where she
left off years ago. How many times have we heard similar stories about ABD
full-time teachers and ABD spouses who become full time parents?
Bob Jensen
You can read more about the accountics revolution that shrank the
accountancy doctoral programs at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm
You can read more about trends in accountancy doctoral programs at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
Narrowness in accounting doctoral programs has resulted in a critical
shortage leading to more non-doctoral instructors of accounting in colleges
nationwide.
"Teaching for the Love of It: The joy of being an educator—eight career
changers tell their stories," by Randy Myers, Journal of Accountancy,
June 2006 ---
http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/jun2006/myers2.htm
Once they earn their college degrees
and embark on careers, many CPAs are perfectly happy never to see the inside
of a classroom again. But others can’t wait to return. What happens when
they follow their hearts and minds back to campus? To find out, we
interviewed eight professionals—seven CPAs and one tax attorney—who gave up
successful business careers in favor of academia. Some moved directly into
the classroom and are now teaching as professionally qualified faculty
(see “Emerging
Opportunities for Professionally Qualified Faculty”).
Others are students again, pursuing PhDs in accounting
with an eye toward becoming university professors. Still others have already
earned their PhDs and are working as senior faculty at some of the country’s
leading business schools, where they divide their time between teaching and
academic research. If you are considering a career in academia—or are simply
curious about how the other half lives—this article is for you.
This article reveals what
these eight professionals have come to learn, love and yes, question, about
academia. It shows the road to the academic life has many forks, which can
be pursued at almost any stage of a career in accounting. And it shows that
even more than in the business world, CPAs in academia can tailor their
careers to match their own interests and objectives.
| Supply
and Demand
Over
the next three years, U.S. and Canadian universities will try to
hire 942 new PhDs. Unfortunately, the number of graduates
available to fill those slots is expected to total only 621.
Source: American Accounting
Association. |
Jensen Comment
Keep in mind that this does not mean that shortages are
equally spread across all education programs. Some programs
face far more difficulties than others for a variety of
reasons. For example, some educators just do not want to
relocate from Knee Deep, North Dakota to New York City and
vice versa.
Jensen Opinions
Although the reasons for the decline in
doctoral students in accountancy are very complex, Bob
Jensen's opinion is that the leading factor is that
virtually all accountancy programs in the U.S. stripped most
accounting courses from these programs in the shift toward
mathematics, statistics, econometrics, finance, sociometrics,
and psychometrics. In some programs the doctoral studies
courses are not even taught in the business school. Students
with high aptitudes and professional experience in
accounting are discouraged from entering into doctoral
programs unless they want to become economists or other
social scientists.
It is also Bob Jensen's opinion that
accountancy doctoral programs became social science programs
due to the positivism biases of top accounting research
journals that forced positivism research methods on
virtually all accounting faculty seeking to publish in those
leading journals. See
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR.htm
PG. #390 NONAKA
The chapter
argues that building the theory of knowledge creation
needs to an epistemological and ontological discussion,
instead of just relying on a positivist approach, which
has been the implicit paradigm of social science.
The positivist rationality has
become identified with analytical thinking that focuses
on generating and testing hypotheses through formal
logic. While providing a clear guideline for theory
building and empirical examinations, it poses problems
for the investigation of complex and dynamic social
phenomena, such as knowledge creation. In
positivist-based research, knowledge is still often
treated as an exogenous variable or distraction against
linear economic rationale. The relative lack of
alternative conceptualization has meant that management
science has slowly been detached from the surrounding
societal reality. The understanding of social systems
cannot be based entirely on natural scientific facts.
Ikujiro Nonaka as quoted at Great Minds in
Management: The Process of Theory Development ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen//theory/00overview/GreatMinds.htm
Leading accounting research journal biases for accountics
in the past three decades illustrate the process of
Gemeinschaft
to Gesellschaft where the "process eventually
went too far." The
Heck and Jensen (2006) paper is highly supportive of
President Judy Rayburn's TAR Diversity Initiative. This is
important not only for improved accounting research, it's
important for expanded curricula of doctoral programs that
more closely align academe with the accounting profession
much in the same way that schools of law and medicine are
aligned with their practicing professions.
For the good of the AAA membership and the profession of
accountancy in general, one hopes that the changes in
publication and editorial policies at TAR proposed by
President Rayburn will result in the “opening up” of topics
and research methods produced by "leading scholars." I might
add that Paul Williams at North Carolina State University is
a long-time advocate of such changes, and I thank Paul for
some helpful input to the early stages of the Heck and
Jensen paper.
I might also
add that the Heck-Jensen paper tops off my long standing
threads on the sad state of accounting research at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen//theory/00overview/theory01.htm#AcademicsVersusProfession
Many problems of accounting research extend well beyond the
TAR editorial policies.
An "Appeal" for accounting educators, researchers, and
practitioners to actively support what I call The
Accounting Review (TAR) Diversity Initiative as
initiated by American Accounting Association President Judy
Rayburn ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR.htm
Question
What is higher education's "academic underworld" amidst the
Ph.D. glut?
Answer
In the worldwide suckers'
market, gamblers are the only people who are slower to learn
than young adults with master's degrees. Bright graduate
students possess a pair of nonmarketable skills: the ability
to write term papers and the ability to take academic exams.
They are also economic illiterates and incurably naïve....
Those few Ph.D.'s who receive a full-time position at a
university find that they are paid much less than tenured
members of the department. They are assigned the
lower-division classes, which are large. ... Those untenured
faculty members who perform well in megaclasses are kept on
until the day of reckoning: the decision to grant them
tenure, usually eight years after they go on the payroll.
They are usually not rehired unless they have published
narrowly focused articles in professional journals. But
megaclass professors do not have much time to do the
required research. The assistant professor is now 35 years
old or older. He has not made the cut. He is now relegated
to the academic underworld: the community colleges....
Gary North, "In Academia, Big Brains, Empty Pockets," The
New York Times, February 5, 2006 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/weekinreview/05read.html
Also see "The Ph.D. Glut Revisited" ---
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north427.html
Question
How close are some of the big time prostitutes to when they can get Medicare and
Social Security?
How many degrees do some of them have?
Most importantly is this more lucrative than academe for those with doctoral
degrees?
Even more importantly, is a doctoral degree value added in this oldest of
professions?
April 10, 2008 message from Professor XXXXX
Bob,
In light of the recent string on this general subject, you may want to look
at the story in today's Washington Post: More Former Call Girls Take Stand."
"More Former Call Girls Take Stand In Prostitution Trial, Witness With PhD
Describes Illicit Activities for Upscale Firm," by Paul Dugan, The Washington
Post, April 10, 2008, Page B04 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/09/AR2008040903903.html
In attempting to prove that former escort-service
entrepreneur Deborah Jeane Palfrey was, in reality, an upscale pimp,
prosecutors yesterday summoned seven more admitted ex-prostitutes to the
witness stand in federal court in Washington -- not one of them as unlikely
a call girl as Rhona Reiss, PhD.
"I got to the hotel," Reiss testified, describing
one of "more than 100" sexual encounters she had with clients of Palfrey's
firm. "He introduced himself and he sat down and took his pants off" and
asked her to perform a sex act. "I did."
"How old are you?" Palfrey's attorney inquired.
"Sixty-three."
And how old was she when she took a job with
Palfrey as a $250-an-hour escort, indulging the sexual fantasies of male
clients in homes and hotel rooms in the Washington area?
"Fifty-six," Reiss said.
She studied occupational therapy as an
undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s, received a
master's degree in the field from the University of Florida and a doctorate
in higher education from the University of North Texas. She used to be
director of education for the American Occupational Therapy Association.
"Her numerous career adventures include clinical
and academic positions in Tokyo, Chicago, Sydney, Dallas and Washington,
D.C.," the Rocky Mountain University of Health Professions said in a 2006
news release, announcing Reiss's appointment to the faculty as head of a
graduate program.
Not listed among her career adventures was the
position she accepted in February 2001 after answering a Washington City
Paper ad for Palfrey's now-defunct escort business, Pamela Martin &
Associates. In her application letter, Reiss, who now lives in Gaithersburg,
touched briefly on her academic bona fides and highlighted her more relevant
credentials: "fantastic smile, lovely breasts, very shapely legs."
"She said it was adult entertainment," Reiss told
the jury, recalling her job interview with Palfrey. "She asked if I had done
that sort of work before. I hadn't."
And so went another day of testimony in Palfrey's
racketeering and money-laundering trial in U.S. District Court, another
parade of erstwhile call girls, reluctant characters in a legal drama at
once sad and comically absurd. Most spoke in monotones, some squirmed, a few
dabbed at tears.
They are women conservatively attired for court and
hardly resembling the glamour photos they mailed to Palfrey when they were
looking for work in 1998, or 2003, or 1995.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I'm sure we can think of some new acronyms for PhD, DBA, DCS, EED, and what have
you, but I'm not going to touch those with a ten foot pole.
Question
What is the trend in the number of doctoral degrees awarded
in accountancy in the United States?
Answer
It all depends on who you ask and whether or not the alma
maters are AACSB accredited universities
(note that the AACSB accredits bachelors and masters degree
programs but not doctoral programs per se).
The data suggest that there are a lot of ABD doctoral
students who never complete the final hurdle of writing a
dissertation, although this is only my speculation based
upon the higher number of graduates that I would expect from
the size of the enrollments.
On January 27, 2006, Jean Heck at
Villanova sent me the following message:
|
This data is only for AACSB accredited schools, so the
numbers you had for Accounting in the slide are a little
bigger. I got these numbers straight from the AACSB data
director. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Accounting & Finance Historical Data 2000 - 2004 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Accounting |
Full Time Enrollment |
Part Time Enrollment |
Degrees Conferred |
|
2000 |
552 |
36 |
122 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
2001 |
585 |
80 |
102 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
2002 |
578 |
13 |
97 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
2003 |
694 |
12 |
103 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
2004 |
631 |
16 |
86 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Finance |
|
|
|
|
2000 |
738 |
59 |
159 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
2001 |
771 |
109 |
129 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
2002 |
807 |
49 |
125 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
2003 |
939 |
40 |
136 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
2004 |
859 |
48 |
109 |
********************
Jensen Comment
Hasselback, J.R. (2006), Accounting Faculty Directory
2006-2007 (Prentice-Hall, Just Prior to Page 1) reports the
following doctoral graduates in accounting:
1998–99 122 - 18%
1999–00 095 - 22%
2000–01 108 +14%
2001–02 099 - 08%
2002–03 069 - 30%
In Slide 23 of her Presidential
Address at the American Accounting Association Annual Meetings in
San Francisco on August 10, Judy Rayburn presented the following
data regarding doctoral graduates in accounting ---
http://aaahq.org/AM2005/menu.htm
145 Accounting Ph.D.s were awarded in 2002-2003, an increase
over 2001-2002 estimates.
TABLE 3B
Accounting Ph.D’s Awarded 1998–99 Through 2002–03
Number of Graduates Rate of Growth
1998–99 185 – 3%
1999–00 195 + 5%
2000–01 115 – 41%
2001–02 110 – 4%
2002–03 145 + 32%
Data from the U.S. Department of Education
You can download an Excel spreadsheet of Doctor's degrees conferred
by degree-granting institutions, by discipline division: Selected
years, 1970-71 to 2002-03 ---
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d04/tables/dt04_252.asp
Part of that spreadsheet is shown below:
Table 252. Doctor's degrees
conferred by degree-granting institutions, by discipline
division:
Selected years, 1970-71 to 2002-03 |
|
_ |
_ |
_ |
_ |
_ |
_ |
|
Discipline division |
1998-99 |
1999-00 |
2000-01 |
2001-02 |
2002-03 |
|
|
_ |
_ |
_ |
_ |
_ |
|
Agriculture and natural
resources ................. |
1,231 |
1,168 |
1,127 |
1,148 |
1,229 |
|
Architecture and related
services ....................... |
123 |
129 |
153 |
183 |
152 |
|
Area, ethnic, cultural, and
gender studies ................................... |
187 |
205 |
216 |
212 |
186 |
|
Biological and biomedical
sciences ....................................... |
5,024 |
5,180 |
4,953 |
4,823 |
5,003 |
|
Business
........................................................... |
1,201 |
1,194 |
1,180 |
1,156 |
1,251 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Communication, journalism, and
related programs
.............................................. |
347 |
347 |
368 |
374 |
394 |
|
Communications technologies
.......................... |
5 |
10 |
2 |
9 |
4 |
|
Computer and information
sciences ........................... |
801 |
779 |
768 |
752 |
816 |
|
Education
............................................... |
6,394 |
6,409 |
6,284 |
6,549 |
6,835 |
|
Engineering
........................................... |
5,432 |
5,390 |
5,542 |
5,187 |
5,276 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Engineering technologies
................................ |
29 |
31 |
62 |
58 |
57 |
|
English language and
literature/letters ....................... |
1,407 |
1,470 |
1,330 |
1,291 |
1,246 |
|
Family and consumer
sciences/human sciences ........... |
323 |
327 |
354 |
311 |
372 |
|
Foreign languages, literatures,
and linguistics ......................... |
1,049 |
1,086 |
1,078 |
1,003 |
1,042 |
|
Health professions and related
clinical sciences ............................ |
1,920 |
2,053 |
2,242 |
2,913 |
3,328 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Legal professions and studies
................................... |
58 |
74 |
286 |
79 |
105 |
|
Liberal arts and sciences, |
|
|
|
|
|
|
general studies, and
humanities ................................. |
78 |
83 |
102 |
113 |
78 |
|
Library science
.......................................... |
55 |
68 |
58 |
45 |
62 |
|
Mathematics and statistics
........................................ |
1,090 |
1,075 |
997 |
923 |
1,007 |
|
Multi/interdisciplinary studies
................................ |
754 |
792 |
784 |
765 |
899 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Parks, recreation, leisure and
fitness studies ................... |
137 |
134 |
177 |
151 |
199 |
|
Philosophy and religious
studies .................................. |
584 |
598 |
600 |
610 |
662 |
|
Physical sciences and science
technologies ............................. |
4,142 |
3,963 |
3,911 |
3,760 |
3,858 |
|
Psychology
......................................... |
4,695 |
4,731 |
5,091 |
4,759 |
4,831 |
|
Public administration and
social services ........................ |
532 |
537 |
574 |
571 |
596 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Security and protective
services .................................... |
48 |
52 |
44 |
49 |
72 |
|
Social sciences and history
........................................ |
3,855 |
4,095 |
3,930 |
3,902 |
3,850 |
|
Theology and religious
vocations .................... |
1,440 |
1,630 |
1,461 |
1,350 |
1,321 |
|
Transportation and materials
moving ..................... |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
|
Visual and performing arts
............................... |
1,130 |
1,127 |
1,167 |
1,114 |
1,293 |
|
Not classified by field of
study ................... |
6 |
71 |
63 |
0 |
0 |
Question
Why is supply of doctoral faculty, and possibly all business faculty, not a
sustainable process?
Jensen Answer
See Below
Question
Why do accounting doctoral students have to be more like science students
than medical students and law students?
Jensen Answer
With the explosion of demand for accounting faculty, production of only
about 100 doctoral graduates from AACSB schools is no longer a sustainable
process. Perhaps the time has come to have a Scholarship Track and a Research Track
in accounting doctoral studies. One of the real barriers to entry has been the
narrow quantitative method and science method curriculum now required in
virtually all doctoral programs in accountancy. Many accounting professionals
who contemplate returning to college for doctoral degrees are not interested
and/or not talented in our present narrow Ph.D. curriculum.
In my opinion this will work only if our most prestigious universities take
the lead in lending prestige to Scholarship Track doctoral students in
accounting. Case Western is one university that has already taken a small step
in this direction. Now lets open this alternative to younger students who have
perhaps only had a few years experience in accounting practice,
In the January 30, 2006 edition of New Bookmarks I presented tables of
the numbers of doctoral graduates in all disciplines with particular stress on
those in accounting, finance, and business in general. As baby boomers from the
World War II era commence to retire, the AACSB International predicts a crisis
shortage of new faculty to take their place and to meet the growth in popularity
of business programs in universities. In August
2002, the AACSB International Management Education Task Force (METF) issued a
landmark report, “Management Education at Risk.” The 2002 report on this is
available at
http://www.aacsb.edu/publications/dfc/default.asp
In particular, note the section on "Rethinking Doctoral Education" quoted below.
Rethinking Doctoral Education
Several issues in doctoral education are in need of
rethinking in light of doctoral faculty shortages. They include vertical
orientation, strategies for sourcing doctoral faculty, the relevance of
curricula, rewards and promotion, accreditation standards, and leveraging
technology.
Vertical Orientation
Doctoral education is built on vertical orientation
to disciplines, requiring prospective applicants to choose their field at
the point of entry. Many doctoral programs train students in narrowly
defined research agendas, giving them little, if any, exposure to research
problems and methodologies outside their discipline. In parallel, most
hiring adheres to traditional departmental tracks, with few instances of
cross-departmental appointments because they are inherently challenging to
the structure of most business schools. Among the schools that are
exceptions is IMD, in Switzerland, which eliminated departmental and rank
distinctions.
Meanwhile, advancement in business knowledge and
thinking requires research frameworks that can span functional and industry
boundaries. And businesses continue to call for more cross-functional
education in undergraduate and MBA programs. There is inevitable and
healthy tension between training and theory in vertical disciplines, on the
one hand, and the evolving issues of the marketplace that tend to defy such
neat categorization, on the other.
There is little question that schools need to add
to their doctoral curricula research training that encompasses questions and
methodologies across vertical boundaries. Unless some shifts are
instituted, the training ground for researchers in business will become less
relevant to the knowledge advances the marketplace needs and demands, and to
the teaching and learning needs within business schools.
Strategies for Sourcing Doctoral Faculty
To preserve the inimitable scholarship role of
business academics, faculty resources need to be better leveraged. Business
schools must address pervasive doctoral shortages creatively by reaching
beyond traditional sources for doctoral faculty. Though not without
challenges, the following are among possible alternative sources of doctoral
faculty:
- Ph.D. graduates of research disciplines
outside business schools (for example, psychology, sociology,
anthropology, physics, biotechnology), who bring alternative
perspectives on business education and research.
- Executive or professional doctoral
graduates from programs outside the advanced theoretical research
category, such as the Executive Doctor of Management program at Case
Western Reserve University.
- Ph.D. graduates from other fields who have
accumulated years of business experience and can serve as doctorally
qualified clinical professors.
- New models of qualification to the doctorate,
practiced by some European schools, that award doctoral degrees based
solely on published research.
Along with tapping new sources for doctoral
faculty, such strategies may have the added benefit of increasing the
"practice" flavor of curricula.
A concurrent approach to support continued, vibrant
scholarship of business research faculty is a productivity-enhancement
strategy, rather than a focus on faculty supply. The reason for suggesting
that approaches to enhance productivity are needed is that reduced teaching
loads alone do not ensure increased faculty research contributions.
Possible such approaches include faculty development in best research
practices; greater flexibility in faculty employment relationships, to
facilitate researcher collaboration and mobility across institutions; a
multilevel faculty model that fine-tunes faculty assignments to fit their
competencies; and differentiated performance accountability and rewards
around these assignments.
The quest for sustained research productivity also
hinges on our definition of research. EQUIS, the business school
accreditation program offered by the European Foundation for Management
Development, has proposed an expanded definition of research to include
research, development, and innovation (RDI). RDI includes activities
related to the origination, dissemination, and application of knowledge to
practical management.
I have always been one to distinguish scholarship from research. One can be a
scholar by mastering some important subset of what is already known. A
researcher must attempt to contribute new knowledge to this subset. Every
academic discipline has an obligation to conduct research in an effort to keep
the knowledge base dynamic and alive. However, this does not necessarily mean
that every tenured professor must have been a researcher at some point along the
way as long as the criteria for tenure include highly significant scholarship.
This tends not to be the model we work with in colleges and universities in
modern times. But given the extreme shortages in accounting doctoral students,
perhaps the time has come to attract more scholars into our discipline. It will
require a huge rethinking of curriculum and thesis requirements, and I do think
there should be a thesis requirement that demonstrates advanced scholarship. I
also think that the curriculum should cover a variety of disciplines without
aspirations to produce Super CPAs to teach accounting. Possibly universities
will even generate some doctoral theses other than the present ones that
everybody hopes, including the authors, that nobody will read.
Medical schools have used these two tracks for years. Some medical professors
are highly skilled clinically and teach medicine without necessarily devoting
80% of their time in research labs. Other medical professors spend more than 80%
of their time in research labs. In law, the distinction is less obvious, but I
think when push comes to shove there are many law professors who have mastered
case law without contributing significantly to what the legal profession would
call new knowledge. Other law professors are noted for their contributions to
new theory.
Along these lines follows an obligation to teach “professionalization” in
an effort to attract doctoral students
Donald E. Hall finishes his series with proposals to change the dissertation
process and a call to teach “professionalization.”
"Collegiality and Graduate School Training," by Donald E. Hall, Inside
Higher Ed, January 24, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/workplace/2006/01/24/hall
This emphasis on conversational skills
and commitments allows us then to fine tune also our
definition of what “professionalization” actually means.
Certainly in the venues above — the classroom and in
research mentorship — we work to make our students more
aware of the norms and best practices of academic
professional life. But the graduate programs that are most
concerned with meeting their students’ needs attend also to
that professionalization process by offering seminars,
roundtables, workshops, and other activities to students
intent on or just thinking about pursuing an academic
career. In all of these it is important to note that
aspiring academics are not only entering the conversation
represented by their research fields, but also the
conversation of a dynamic and multi-faceted profession.
This does mean encouraging literal
conversations among graduate students and recent graduates
who have taken a wide variety of positions — from high
profile academic, to teaching centered, to those in the
publishing industry and a wide variety of non-academic
fields. I started this essay by noting that when I was a
graduate student I had never heard from or about individuals
who had taken jobs like the one I eventually took. Certainly
I could have sought out those individuals on my own (though
I didn’t know them personally, since they were not part of
my cohort group), but it is also true that those individuals
were not generally recognized as ones to emulate.
One hopes, given the terrible
prospects that most new Ph.D.’s face today as they enter the
academic job market, that such snobbishness has waned.
However, I still would not go so far as to say that we
should tell students that “any job” is better than “no job”
or that they should simply “take what they can get.” Some
individuals would be terribly mismatched with certain
positions — weak teachers who live for research should not
take positions at teaching universities unless they are
willing to re-prioritize and devote their energies to
improving their pedagogies. Similarly, I have known superb
teachers with poor research habits and skills who have taken
wholly inappropriate positions at prestigious universities
and then lost those jobs for low research productivity
during third year or tenure reviews (unfortunately, they
sometimes got their jobs in the first place because they
were able to — and were counseled to — market themselves
within certain highly sought-after identity political fields
but with no recognition of their own individual needs or
abilities). A discussion of who will be happy and will
succeed where must be part of any broad conversation on the
academic profession, whether that conversation takes place
in seminars, workshops, or with groups of students about to
“go on the market.”
Indeed, it is vital to invite
students into conversation on these matters as often and as
early as possible. At the beginning of every meeting of
every graduate class I teach, I ask if there are any
questions on the minds of the students regarding their
program, general professional issues or processes, or the
often unexplained norms of academic life. Even if students
are sometimes too shy to ask what they really want to know
in class, their recognition of my willingness to address
such issues means they often show up during office hours to
ask what they consider an embarrassing question (“how much
do assistant professors typically make?” or “what do you say
in a cover letter when you send out an article for
consideration?”). We have to let students know that we are
willing to share information with them in an honest and
practical manner. We should be “open texts” for them to read
and learn from in their own processes of professional
interpretation and skill-building.
I believe it would be useful to
build some of the expectations above into the desired
outcomes of our graduate programs. In fact, I haven’t heard
of any programs that articulate specific goals for
professionalization processes, but I think we should be
asking what specifically we wish the end product to be of
those seminars, workshops, and other conversations about
academic life. I would offer that an overarching goal might
be to help our students become more supple and skilled
participants in the wide variety of conversations that
comprise an academic career. By necessity, acquiring this
conversational skill means learning the value of being both
multi-voiced and open to the perspectives of others.
This bears some explanation. By
multi-voiced I am not implying that students should learn to
be Machiavellian or duplicitous. Rather, I mean that all of
us who are thriving in our careers have learned to speak
within a wide variety of contexts and to choose our language
carefully depending upon the venue. I would never speak in
class as I do in some of my more theoretically dense
writings. I would never speak to administrators from other
departments as I do to those in my home department who use
the same terms and points of reference. And finally I would
never speak to the public exactly as I would to a scholarly
audience at a conference. Being multi-voiced in this way
means being aware of your conversation partners’ needs and
placing their need to understand above your own desire to
express yourself in intellectually self-serving ways.
And this is, in fact, an important
component of being open to the perspectives of others. Yet
that openness also means allowing one’s own beliefs, values,
and opinions to be challenged and transformed by contact
with those of conversation partners. This does not mean
being unwilling to defend one’s beliefs (whether on matters
of social justice or minute points of interpretation), but
it does mean being able to position oneself at least
partially outside of oneself in the process of
conversational exchange. It certainly means working to
understand how the general public perceives the academy (and
the debate over tenure, for example). It means trying to see
the world through the eyes of a different generation of
professors who may not use the same methodologies or
theoretical touchstones in their work. It means seeing one’s
own sacredly held positions as ones that exist in a
landscape of positions, many of which are also sacredly
held.
Continued in article
Question
What do students in accounting and religious studies have in common?
Answer
They both encounter the great divide in higher education. You can substitute the
word "religion" with "accounting" in most of the following article.
"The ‘Great Divide’ in Religious Studies," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher
Ed, November 20, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/20/religion
When it comes to introductory courses in religion
and theology, the big division isn’t a question of faith, but of priorities.
Students want lots of discussion in class sessions
and they want to learn facts about religious groups. They also want to
become better people. Professors aren’t opposed to any of those things, but
they are much more interested in teaching critical thinking. While the
numbers vary, the gap between students’ and professors’ goals for these
courses is evident at both religious and non-religious institutions.
These are among the results of a national survey of
introductory courses in religion and theology. The study will be published
in book form next year, but the lead investigator — Barbara E. Walvoord of
the University of Notre Dame — gave a preview of the findings Sunday to a
standing-room-only audience at the annual meeting of the American Academy of
Religion. She spoke of the “great divide” between what professors want to
accomplish and what students want to achieve — and a panel of professors who
teach intro courses offered their take on dealing with the divergence.
Walvoord’s study involved surveys of students and
faculty members in 533 introductory courses at a wide range of colleges.
More than 12,000 students participated. For Sunday’s presentation, Walvoord
presented data from 66 courses whose instructors had been identified by
their institutions as “highly effective.” Walvoord said that the data on
course goals was consistent with the larger group.
Both students and professors were asked whether
certain goals were important. The percentages below are those who said that
those goals were either “essential” or “important” for the introductory
courses. The secular college category includes both public colleges and
private nonsectarian colleges. In most cases at religious colleges, the
courses were required and at secular colleges, the courses were not required
but were one way to fulfill a general education requirement or enter a
major.
Faculty and Student Priorities for Intro
Religious Studies Courses
|
Goal |
Faculty at religious colleges |
Students at religious affiliations |
Faculty at secular colleges |
Students at secular colleges |
|
Develop critical thinking |
84% |
65% |
92% |
59% |
|
Develop students’ moral and ethical values |
52% |
73% |
25% |
54% |
|
Develop students’ own religious beliefs |
42% |
70% |
8% |
51% |
|
Consider or strengthen students’
commitment to a particular set of beliefs |
29% |
63% |
17% |
43% |
Walvoord noted that the statistics are surprising
for many kinds of institutions — noting the low percentages of professors at
religious institutions with moral and religioius agendas for their students,
and the high percentages of students at secular institutions with hopes for
such an experience in class.
Among other findings:
- Students are much more interested than
professors in learning facts about religion and discussing “big
questions” about the meaning of life.
- Discussion is crucial to students. When
students in “highly effective” courses were asked what part of the
classes was most helpful, discussion was the top answer. When those same
students were asked about how the courses could be improved, the top
answer was: more discussion.
- Many students take courses in religious
studies fully expecting their views to be challenged. About 40 percent
of “secure Christians” (those with no doubts about their faith) reported
that they expected their beliefs to be challenged — with some predicting
that their beliefs wouldn’t change as a result and others open to the
possibility that it might.
The findings presented at the meeting Sunday are
part of an unusual effort on pedagogy. Participants are helping to gather
information, but they are also receiving breakdowns on the surveys of their
own students — so professors are trying to apply some of the findings to
their own courses, even before final results are out. The project is
sponsored by Notre Dame, the
Wabash Center
for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion,
and the IDEA
Center at Kansas State University. The work comes
at a time of considerable discussion on
the role of religion in the academy
and
students’ interest in developing spiritually
while they are in college.
In the discussion at the session, some professors
noted that those at public institutions may have lines that they can’t
cross. “I teach at a public community college. I can’t care about the
religious development of my students,” said one professor in the audience.
Walvoord stressed that the purpose of the project
was not to suggest that there was one “correct” model — and she acknowledged
that much depends on institutional mission. But she said it was important to
talk about the assumptions students and professors bring to the courses. In
response to the community college professor’s question, Walvoord also said
that in her interviews with study participants, she has found that many have
“official” course goals for the syllabus and “sub rosa goals” that are
important and not expressed.
Those sub rosa goals are all over the place, she
said. Some professors at secular institutions do see themselves playing a
role in students’ moral development. Some professors at religious
institutions have goals of teaching their students to be more tolerant of
others’ beliefs or to rely on sources other than the Bible to make
arguments.
In the Classroom
Professors from both religious and secular
institutions spoke at the session about how they try to balance the issues
raised by the study. One common issue about which professors spoke was
trying to help students see that that the role of professor isn’t the same
as the role of a clergy member — even when the professor is ordained.
David C. Ratke is an assistant professor of
religion at Lenoir-Rhyne College, a North Carolina college affiliated with
the Evangelical Lutheran Church, in which Ratke is an ordained pastor. One
of the things he does on the first day of his introductory course is talk
about his own religious and intellectual development, and to talk about his
overlapping but not identical interests in his students. As a Lutheran, he
said, he feels “jubilant” when a student embraces the faith or comes to a
deeper understanding of it. But as a professor he is focused on intellectual
development — and strives to help students understand the subject matter
regardless of their faith.
Across the country, James K. Wellman teaches
religion in a very different environment at the University of Washington, a
public university where most of his students do not profess any religion.
While he is frank in class, Wellman said he also sets up a space where he
and his students can be even more open. He holds weekly “coffee hours” where
the ground rules are that nothing he says can be held against him and that
he can’t hold against a student anything he or she says.
In class, Wellman said he’s constantly trying to
challenge students’ assumptions, asking them what religious bias may be
involved in terms like “war on terrorism” or what lessons about the
religious right can be learned from the fall of Ted Haggard, the Colorado
evangelist who was until recently campaigning against gay marriage while
having a relationship with a male prostitute. But in between those
challenges, Wellman said that he’s also very conscious that what students
want is information and values: “They want to learn about differences. Tell
us who the Muslims are. They want to overcome their prejudices,” he said.
Some of this material may be ‘boring” to
professors, he said, but the study has reminded him of its importance.
In many cases, professors said, general education
skills of critical education can be combined effectively with subject matter
instruction. Martha Reineke, a professor of religion at the University of
Northern Iowa, has students write religious autobiographies in which they
are encouraged to start with older relatives, preferably grandparents, and
trace the evolution of their own religious beliefs.
Many of her students are from the area and have
families who have lived in the area for generations, and they may think of
religious belief as unchanging. Reineke said that these multi-generation
reports get students thinking about the evolution of religious belief, as
they learn about era when Protestant-Roman Catholic intermarriage would have
been unthinkable, for instance. In another exercise, she uses an essay about
the significance in Hinduism of where in the home certain religious objects
are located, and then has students shift gears and think about the
significance of the location of religious objects in their homes.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
What professors face today is that knowledge bases of their disciplines are
approaching infinity in modern times relative knowledge archives in prior to the
20th century. Some rightly prefer to not to teach in the same way professors
taught before the 20th century. Others in search of higher teaching evaluations
give in to student demands to teach the facts --- "just the facts mam." In
accounting many of the leading research professors do not even want to sacrifice
their own time learning the exceedingly complex rules (principles, standards)
for complicated contract accounting requirements. These professors prefer study
of research methods, techniques, and critical thinking. Accounting students want
to learn more about the complex rules. Reasons vary --- Complex rules appeal to
our great memorizing students who migrate toward accounting; Complex rules are
on the dreaded CPA examination; Knowledge of complex rules can lead to higher
job performance evaluations.
I think that in professions like medicine, law, accounting, and engineering
that it is unwise to teach at either extreme of facts versus critical thinking.
I would most certainly hate to rely on a brain surgeon who's only learned how to
think critically. I want my attorneys to know a tremendous amount of facts about
statutes. I certainly want my bridge builders to know a lot of facts about
materials and structural forces. But I also want these professionals to be able
to think critically and reason creatively when encountering situations not
covered in existing knowledge bases. But mark of a professional scholar still
lies in knowing a huge amount of the facts in the knowledge base of the
profession. The rhetorical question is how much of that should be learned in
college courses. Students most certainly want to graduate with a significant
understanding of the knowledge bases of their chosen disciplines.
Bob Jensen's threads on the sad state of accounting research
are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen//theory/00overview/theory01.htm#AcademicsVersusProfession
"Are American Scientists an Endangered Species?" by Marc Zimmer,
Issues in Higher Ed, July 2, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/07/02/zimmer
There is little doubt that the United States has
some of the best science and engineering schools in the world. So why should
we be concerned that the American scientist might become an endangered
species?
The main problem is that too few Americans are
enrolling in these programs. Although the number of students enrolled in
science and engineering graduate programs in the United States has increased
by 25 percent from 1994 to 2001, the number of U.S. citizens enrolled in
these programs has declined by 10 percent during that period. Contrast this
with India, Japan, China and South Korea, where the number of bachelor’s
degrees in the sciences has doubled and the number of engineering bachelor’s
degrees has quadrupled since 1975.
In the United States, 17 percent of all bachelor’s
degrees are awarded in the sciences and engineering, while in China, 52
percent of four-year degrees focus on STEM areas. This trend is just as
obvious in graduate programs: U.S. graduate degrees in the sciences make up
only about 13 percent of graduate degrees awarded in this country. In Japan,
South Korea, Sweden and Switzerland over 40 percent of the graduate degrees
are awarded in science.
The numbers indicate that the American scientist
population is not healthy, especially not in comparison to scientists in
other countries. This will impact America’s ability to retain its place in
the global (scientific and technological) food chain. What could be
responsible for this decline? My money is on the changing habitat of the
American scientist , climate change, and the introduction of exotic species.
Changing habitat. The number of males going to
colleges and universities in America is declining. This has a significant
effect on the number of scientists, since white males make up two-thirds of
the scientific workforce but represent only one third of the population.
Possible reasons for this — competition from computer games and the
disappearance of chemistry sets. Fortunately the number of females entering
the sciences is increasing; however it’s not fast enough to keep up with the
disappearing males.
African Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians
comprise 23 percent of the American population and the percentage is
increasing. However, students from under-represented minority groups make up
only 13 percent of science graduates. They are an intellectual talent pool
that is waiting to be tapped.
Climate change. The authority and autonomy of
science is being eroded. The current administration is mainly responsible
for this. How can we expect our youth to aspire to being scientists when
NASA, NOAA and the Smithsonian admit to changing reports, graphs and
scientific conclusions in order to appease the Bush administration’s ideas
about global warming?
There are no modern Einsteins gracing the cover of
Rolling Stone. Most Americans will have difficulty naming a living and
influential scientist. Perhaps this is due to the decrease in popular
science writing. In the same week as the Time/People/Fortune group of
magazines laid off their three science writers they paid $4.1 million for
the pictures of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s baby.
Decreased biodiversity. In 2005, 29 percent of
science and engineering graduate students were not U.S. citizens or
permanent residents. Due to stricter immigration regulations after 9/11
fewer of these graduates were able to join the ranks of the American
scientist — depleting the species of diversity and many talented
individuals.
Introduction of exotic species. Pseudoscience is
putting a dent in the reputation of the American scientist at home and
abroad. A $27 million museum just opened in Kentucky. It claims to use
science to prove that everything in the book of Genesis is true. Three
Republican presidential candidates do not believe in evolution, not
surprising since a recent poll showed that half of Americans agree, and
think the age of the earth is in the thousands of years, not billions. Here
again the authority and autonomy of science are called into question.
According to EndangeredSpecie.com, “One of the most
important ways to help threatened plants and animals survive is to protect
their habitats permanently in national parks, nature reserves or wilderness
areas. There they can live without too much interference from humans.”
Perhaps this could be adapted for the endangered American scientists: One of
the most important ways to help threatened scientists is to protect their
habitats permanently in laboratories, classrooms and museums. There they can
live without too much interference from politics and religion.
Broken Promises and Pork Binges
The Democratic majority came to power in January promising to do a better job on
earmarks. They appeared to preserve our reforms and even take them a bit
further. I commended Democrats publicly for this action. Unfortunately, the
leadership reversed course. Desperate to advance their agenda, they began
trading earmarks for votes, dangling taxpayer-funded goodies in front of
wavering members to win their support for leadership priorities.
John Boehner, "Pork Barrel
Stonewall," The Wall Street Journal, September 27, 2007 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119085546436140827.html
"Earmarks Again Eat Into the Amount Available for Merit-Based Research,
Analysis Finds," by Jeffrey Brainard, Chronicle of Higher Education,
January 9, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/01/1161n.htm
After a one-year moratorium for most earmarks,
Congress resumed directing noncompetitive grants for scientific research to
favored constituents, including universities, this year, a new analysis
says.
Spending for nondefense research fell by about
one-third in the 2008 fiscal year, compared with 2006, but the earmarked
money nevertheless ate into sums available for traditional, merit-reviewed
grants, the
analysis
by the American Association for the Advancement of
Science found.
In all, Congress earmarked $4.5-billion for 2,526
research projects in appropriations bills for 2008, according to the AAAS.
Legislators approved the measures in November and December, and President
Bush signed them.
More important, lawmakers increased spending for
earmarks in federal research-and-development programs by a greater amount
than they added to the programs for all purposes, the AAAS reported. That
will result in a net decrease in money available for nonearmarked research
grants, which federal agencies typically distributed based on merit and
competition.
For example, Congress added $2.1-billion to the
Pentagon's overall request for basic and applied research and for early
technology development, but lawmakers also specified an even-larger amount,
$2.2-billion, for earmarked projects in those same accounts.
For nondefense research projects, Congress showed
restraint in earmarking, providing only $939-million in the 2008 fiscal
year, which began in October. That was down from about $1.5-billion in 2006
and appeared to reflect a pledge by Congressional Democrats to reduce the
total number of earmarks.
For the Pentagon, total spending on research
earmarks of all kinds reached $3.5-billion, much higher than the
$911-million tallied by the AAAS in 2007. (Pentagon earmarks were among the
only kind financed by Congress that year.) However, the apparent increase
was largely the result of an accounting change: For 2008, Congress mandated
increased disclosure of earmarks, a change that especially affected the
tally of Pentagon earmarks, said Kei Koizumi, director of the association's
R&D Budget and Policy Program. Adjusting for that change, the total number
of Defense Department earmarks appears to have fallen in 2008, he said.
As in past years, lawmakers avoided earmarking
budgets for the National Institutes of Health and the National Science
Foundation, the two principal sources of federal funds for academic
research. The Departments of Energy and Agriculture were the most heavily
earmarked domestic research agencies. After being earmark-free for the first
years of its existence, the Department of Homeland Security got $82-million
in research-and-development earmarks for 2008.
The AAAS did not report how much of the earmarked
research money will go to colleges, but academic institutions have
traditionally gotten most of it. Some research earmarks go to corporations
and federal laboratories. In addition, many colleges obtain earmarks for
nonresearch projects, like renovating dormitories and classroom buildings,
but the AAAS does not track that spending.
Academic earmarks more than quadrupled from 1996 to
2003,
The Chronicle found. The practice is
controversial because some critics see it as circumventing peer review and
supporting projects of dubious quality. Supporters call earmarks the only
way to finance some types of worthy projects not otherwise supported by the
federal government.
Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
An Internet Casualty: The Losing Research Edge of Elite
Universities
"Losing Their Edge?" by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, June 1, 2006
---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/06/01/edge
As the Internet changed the nature of higher
education in the last decade or so, considerable research has examined the
question of whether students were changing enrollment patterns. But three
scholars whose findings were just published by the National Bureau of
Economic Research suggest that there has been a significant and largely
overlooked relocation going on since learning went online: among faculty
members.
n “Are Elite Universities Losing Their Competitive
Edge?,” the scholars examine evidence that the Internet — by allowing
professors to work with ease with scholars across the country and not just
across the quad — is leading to a spreading of academic talent at many more
institutions than has been the case in the past.
The research by E. Han Kim, Adair Morse and Luigi
Zingales is based on an analysis of faculty members in economics and finance
departments, but many of the conclusions do not appear to be factors that
would apply only in those disciplines. (
An abstract of the
findings is available online, where the full paper may be ordered for $5).
The basic approach of the research was to examine
the productivity of professors at elite universities (defined as the top 25
in economics and finance) in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. What the scholars
found isn’t good news for those top departments. In the 1970s, a faculty
member moving from a non-top 25 university to Harvard University would
nearly double in productivity (based on various measures of journal
publishing, which is where most economics research appears). By the 1990s,
this impact had almost entirely disappeared.
Beyond Harvard, the study found that moving to 17
of the top economics departments would have had a significant positive
impact on productivity during the 1970s, while moving only to 5 of them had
a significant negative impact on productivity. By the 1990s, only 2 such
departments were having a positive impact on productivity while 9 had a
significant negative impact. Finance departments also saw a decline in
productivity impact.
The findings do not necessarily mean that top
economics departments are full of deadwood. But they do suggest a
“de-localization of the externality produced by more productive
researchers.” In other words, these days professors are no longer likely to
be more productive just because there is a genius down the hall. The
cultural norms of departments still matter, the authors write, and being
surrounded by non-productive colleagues has a negative impact on
productivity.
But you no longer need a critical mass on your own
campus to do good work. Part of this, the authors suggest, is that databases
can now be shared more easily across campuses, and so there is less of a
distinct advantage to being physically located at the top universities,
which also tend to be the places where more databases, library collections,
etc., reside.
And as more people are spread out at more
institutions, the elite professors work with them. At the start of the
1970s, the authors write, only 32 percent of the articles in top economics
journals that were written by a professor at an elite institution had a
co-author from a non-elite institution. That percentage had increased to 61
percent by 2004.
The implications of these shifts, the authors
write, can be seen at both non-elite and elite departments. Faculty members
are now “more mobile,” the authors write, “making it easier for a new place
to attract away the most talented researchers with higher salary.”
But the “universal access to knowledge” is also
having a benefit for faculty members at the top 25 departments. Prior to the
Internet, the authors write, the benefits of working in a top department
were greater, so professors might accept slightly lower pay because of such
benefits. With the disappearance of such benefits, data on salaries indicate
greater increases at the top 25 institutions that experienced the greatest
losses in productivity.
The authors of the piece work at top universities.
Kim is professor of business administration at the University of Michigan.
Morse is a graduate student in business at Michigan. Zingales is a visiting
professor of economics at Harvard.
June 1, 2006 message form Carolyn Kotlas
[kotlas@email.unc.edu]
IS THE INTERNET WEAKENING THE ELITES' EDGE?
In a study of economics and finance faculty
affiliated with the top 25 U.S. universities, E. Han Kim, Adair Morse, and
Luigi Zingales looked at the changes on scholarly research brought about by
the Internet. They sought answers to several questions: "How did these
changes modify the nature of the production of academic research? Did local
interaction become less important? If so, how does this decline affect the
value added of elite universities and hence their competitive edge?" Their
findings are published in the report "Are Elite Universities Losing Their
Competitive Edge?" (National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No.
12245, May 2006). The complete report is available online at
http://papers.nber.org/papers/W12245
Founded in 1920, the National Bureau of Economic
Research (NBER) is a "private, nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization
dedicated to promoting a greater understanding of how the economy works."
For more information, contact: National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.,
1050 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138-5398 USA; tel: 617-868-3900;
fax: 617-868-2742;
email: info@nber.org
Web: http://www.nber.org/
Universities in the Marketplace: The
Commercialization of Higher Education
If we are really concerned about academic
standards, then we should apply those standards uniformly to the
University of Phoenix and the major universities now listed in the Top
25 NCAA Division 1 football, basketball, and baseball rankings.
An Enduring Story for a Pioneering For-Profit Distance Learning
Institution
60,000 undergraduate, graduate and doctoral degrees through its distance
learning program
Administrators say that one of the state’s
top universities — either the University of Michigan or Michigan State —
will soon partner with Central on a distance-based business program,
thanks to its strong and solid history. Likewise, leading giants in the
distance education field, including Phoenix, have turned to the
relatively small Midwestern campus for advice.
"Distance Ed Pioneer Reassesses Itself," by Rob Capriccioso, Inside
Higher Ed, May 3, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/05/03/central
“People are very devoted to our campus,”
says Terry Rawls, interim vice president and executive director of
professional education at Central Michigan University, “but I’m
embarrassed to say that most have never been to a Chippewa football
game.”
That’s because — long before for-profit
colleges like the University of Phoenix, Strayer University and
Capella University made Internet-based education a widespread
phenomenon — the institution has been churning out a variety of long
distance degrees for individuals who live nowhere near Michigan. The
university, located in Mt. Pleasant, smack dab in the middle of the
state, has awarded about 60,000 undergraduate, graduate and doctoral
degrees through its distance learning program since 1971, and about
7,000 students now enroll in distance learning courses during any
given term, according to the university. Central has 60 satellite
campuses total, with a majority of sites in Michigan, Georgia,
Virginia and Ontario.
About 10 percent of regular fulltime
instructors from the Central Michigan campus teach both online and
satellite courses. A total of over 200 faculty and staff members
administer the distance education programs. New instructors must
pass a strict review by faculty members from the main campus in
order to be hired. Of all institutions in the country, Central is
the second largest granter of master’s of business degrees to
African Americans.
Administrators say that one of the
state’s top universities — either the University of Michigan or
Michigan State — will soon partner with Central on a distance-based
business program, thanks to its strong and solid history. Likewise,
leading giants in the distance education field, including Phoenix,
have turned to the relatively small Midwestern campus for advice.
But as more institutions — publics,
privates and for-profits — get into the arena that Central first
started researching in the early 1970s, administrators at the
university are trying to cope with the competition. Like many other
pioneering distance education institutions, including the University
of Maryland University College, the institution is trying to figure
out how to position itself for growth, while remaining focused on
offering high quality education.
Phoenix, in particular, has recently opened
several campuses in Michigan, where Central currently has 14
satellites. There has been concern among administrators at Central
Michigan that enrollment growth would wane, which hasn’t happened
yet.
“It’s difficult for a school like CMU to
say that they’re a leader in this field in the Midwest when you’ve
got all kinds of Phoenixes popping up,” says Charles Baker-Clark, a
director with the American Association for Adult and Continuing
Education, who notes that one Phoenix campus has recently opened in
his hometown of Grand Rapids. “As a business, these kinds of shops
can be much more adaptable than a traditional university.”
For-profits aren’t the only competition.
Rawls says that many smaller public universities have created
programs similar to Central’s in various regions of the country.
“It’s the state schools that are trying to do what we’ve been doing
for 35 years now. Everybody is having problems with state
appropriations,” he says. “So more people are saying, ‘Let’s reach
out to adult learners to make some money.’ ”
Alan Knox, an education policy expert with
the University of Wisconsin at Madison, cautions that institutions
that think of distance learning as a money-making venture would be
wise to explore failures like Columbia University, which spent
millions of dollars on a widely heralded distance education program
that failed to take off. “When you look at the cost-benefit ratio,
some assume that distance learning will be profitable,” says Knox.
“But in actuality, it is not hugely different if you ignore the
costs of building and operating bricks and mortar campuses.”
Rawls also says that Central Michigan is
trying to be proactive on the recruitment and retention front. Not
an easy task, considering the fact that the off-campus division of
the university is limited in its budget abilities to spend money on
marketing. Some for-profits spend up to 25 percent of their revenue
on glossy marketing campaigns that have nationwide appeal. “There’s
no way that we can afford to play that game,” says Rawls, even
though his division is self-supporting and provided about $5 million
in profits back to the Mt. Pleasant campus over the past year.
The off-campus programs, to date, have
largely depended on word-of-mouth advertising, but administrators
are currently upping their e-marketing efforts and working with
Web-based companies on how to optimize keyword searches.
Administrators, too, have reached out to
Eduventures, a consulting firm that focuses on the education
industry, to help the institution communicate its strengths and
learn from its weaknesses. That firm has suggested that Central
focus on efforts that help them stand out from other institutions.
“Why are we successful?” asks Rawls.
“Because we have been doing it longer than most and we are as good
as or better than anyone in the country.”
In Rawls’s book, being “good” means
implementing programs that work for adult learners, who make up the
majority of consumer of Central’s distance learning programs. The
university offers a variety of courses to meet the divergent needs
of individuals, including Web-based programs as well as traditional
distance learning programs where a student can take evening courses
at a Central campus — in, for instance, Hawaii. In Atlanta alone,
Central has 12 learning centers, which makes it easier for commuters
to not have to deal with as much traffic, says Rawls.
“Our goal is to deliver the same academic
experience in terms of educational quality in both on- and off-
campus efforts,” says Cheri DeClercq, associate director of
enrollment management for Central’s off-campus programs.
DeClercq also says that Central is
competitive in terms of pricing. For most distance learning programs
offered by the institution, the cost is $345 per credit hour,
whether the classes are offered online or at satellite campuses.
Many for-profit institutions charge substantially more for online
courses than they do for in-person courses because they tend to be
more attractive to students who need flexible scheduling.
Rawls also hopes to expand the number of
online offerings vastly in the short term. About 15 percent of the
classes currently offered in the off-campus programs are online, and
he wants to be more competitive with other institutions on this
front. “Central and many other institutions around the country are
trying to respond to the for-profit market by embracing technology
in ways that help students,” says Knox.
Deborah Ball, dean of the University of
Michigan’s School of Education and an expert on distance education,
says that Central should be careful what programs can and should be
offered online and what needs to be done in person. Rawls says he
realizes that one of the strongest aspects of the program to date
has been the one-on-one interaction that Central has been able to
offer thousands of students at satellite campuses.
Central Michigan’s Board of Trustees has
kept a watchful eye over the growth and development of the
off-campus programs. In the early part of this decade, they explored
a plan to largely expand the off-campus program to try to create
more funds. They determined that accreditation and other concerns
put the idea out of reach at that time.
“We are such a different and unique beast,”
says Rawls. He sees Central going one of two routes over the next 35
years. “We could have a damned good extended learning program in
Michigan because of our infrastructure here already and really focus
on that,” he says. “Or we could have a worldwide online operation,
leveraging on our face-to-face presences already.”
He seems to favor a combination of the two.
From Syllabus News on January 13, 2004
Wal-Mart Signs Capella (Central Michigan) U. as ‘Preferred’ Online
Ed Provider
Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, has
signed a deal for Capella University (Central Michigan University) to become the online education provider
for its new My Education Connection program. Under the offering, Walmart
customers can receive tuition discounts for online degree programs from
Capella, which has 9,000 students and offers degrees and certificates to
working adults in business, technology, education, human services, and
psychology.
You can read the following at http://www.capella.edu/GATEWAY.ASPX
Capella University Overview In Brief Capella
University is an accredited online university that offers courses,
certificates and degree programs, including MBA, doctorate, graduate and
undergraduate degrees in business, technology, education, human services and
psychology. Founded in 1993, Capella is the world's fastest-growing
e-learning institution.
A pioneer in online learning, Capella University is
a results-oriented educational institution geared specifically to the goals
and lifestyles of adult learners. Capella redefines the higher education
experience for non-traditional learners, thereby offering an accessible and
flexible education program that allows technology to remove the barriers of
time and place.
Accreditation Capella University is accredited by
The Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges
and Schools (NCA), the same body that accredits Big Ten universities. The
NCA has recognized Capella for "its pioneering role in translating an
adult learning model into action." Capella is the first and only online
academic institution to participate in the NCA of Colleges and Schools
Academic Quality Improvement Project.
Enrollment Capella University's student body
currently comprises students from all 50 states and more than 40 countries.
The majority of Capella's learners are working adults who often are
balancing family, work and educational achievement.
More than 600 corporations provide tuition
reimbursement to employees enrolled at Capella University. Check the Capella
Learner Organizations list for your employer's name.
Additionally, some Organizations have signed
Corporate Alliance Partnership Agreements with Capella University. Employees
of our Corporate Partners receive several additional benefits such as
tuition discounts, streamlined enrollment process and cohort learning
opportunities. Our programs are designed to have an immediate impact on the
individual learner and the organization, positioning both for greater
success.
Capella is also a leading provider of courses in all branches of the U.S.
Military --- http://www.capella.edu/reborn/html/solutions/military_index.aspx
Corporate partnerships and alliances are listed at http://www.capella.edu/reborn/html/solutions/corp/index.aspx
Bob Jensen's threads on distance learning training and education
alternatives are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on the dark side of distance learning and
education technology are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm
Battle Over Academic Standards Weighs On For-Profit Colleges
Now Congress appears poised to pass legislation
that favors the for-profits, a group of heavily marketed schools that
are often owned by publicly traded companies. Traditional colleges --
the public and private nonprofit institutions from the Ivy League to
state universities that long have formed the backbone of U.S. higher
education -- are fighting the changes. The traditional colleges question
the rigor of many of these newer rivals, which offer degrees in such
subjects as auto repair and massage therapy but have also branched out
into business and other courses of study. The eight regional
associations that have long set standards for traditional colleges
recognize only a few of the thousands of for-profit colleges. These
gatekeepers evaluate everything from the faculty's level of preparedness
to the quality of libraries. Meanwhile, some for-profit graduates have
been left with heavy debts and unfulfilled goals.
John Hechinger, "Battle Over Academic Standards Weighs On For-Profit
Colleges: Many Traditional Schools Don't Accept Degrees; Congress
Ponders New Law," The Wall Street Journal, September 30, 2005;
Page A1 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112804419660556426,00.html?mod=todays_us_page_one
Jensen Comment
I remind readers that there is a definitional definitional difference
between the commercialization of colleges and the corporate (or
for-profit) colleges. Commercialization of not-for-profit colleges is
in many ways a much more serious (at least much bigger) problem as is
noted by former Harvard President Derek Bok ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book05q3.htm#EducationCommercialization
The debate is really not over distance versus non-distance education
except from the standpoint where both non-profit (even Harvard) and
for-profit (notably the University of Phoenix) might try to cut costs
and use distance education as a cash cow. Bok lists this as one of his
three most serious problems with the commercialization of non-profit
universities. For example, the 100,000 online students at the
University of Wisconsin provide a serious source of revenue.
The so-called corporate model is simply a form of ownership that
allows newer colleges and training schools to raise equity capital for
financing new operations. I personally don't think the model is
necessarily bad per se. Some corporate universities are quite rigorous
and prestigious. These typically are affiliated with prestigious
corporations and consulting firms that help draw quality students into
the programs. The problem is that most for-profit schools are newer
institutions that do not have established reputations required for
drawing top students. A university can never have academic respect
without quality students. In spite of Jay Leno's continued snide
remarks about community college students, some of these students have
great abilities and become outstanding students. Jay now has dug
himself into a hole on this one by ignoring appeals from community
colleges to cease and desist.
My bottom line advice is to be careful about definitions.
Commercialization is an enormous problem for academic standards,
curricula, and program growth/decline in not-for-profit as well as
for-profit colleges. So is the problem of academic standards when
full-time basketball players from UCLA sue the university after four
years because they still can't read.
If we are really concerned about academic standards, then we should
apply those standards uniformly to the University of Phoenix and the
major universities now listed in the Top 25 NCAA Division 1 football,
basketball, and baseball rankings.
My added comments on this are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book05q3.htm#EducationCommercialization
"DeVry’s First Dorm," by Scott Jaschik, Inside
Higher Ed, October 25, 2005 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/10/25/dorm
For-profit higher education,
with its emphasis on serving part-time, older students, has not
traditionally been in the business of building dormitories.
But DeVry University dedicated
its first dormitory last week, at its Fremont
campus, outside of San Francisco. Not only is the
dorm a first for DeVry, which has campuses in 22
states, but it goes against the pattern at national,
for-profit colleges. The University of Phoenix and
Corinthian Colleges, for example, don’t have any
dorms or plans to build them.
The Fremont campus has
demographics that are not typical of for-profit
higher education — most of its students are enrolled
full-time and are traditional college age. And Ben
Elias, dean of finance and administration at the
campus, said that those demographics shaped the
decision to try a dorm, and that the university is
watching the project before determining whether any
others will be built.
The push for the dorm
largely came from students and parents, Elias said,
who complained about the high cost and long commutes
involved in living in the Bay Area.
Taylor Hall
is right on
DeVry’s campus and its fees compare favorably with
those elsewhere. Students at DeVry pay $6,600 for a
shared room or $8,800 for a private room for two
semesters. Rooms come with cable television and
high-speed Internet, fitness rooms in the dorm, and
an all-you-can eat meal plan. (The national average
this year for room and board is $6,636 at public
colleges and $7,791 at private colleges, according
to data released last week by the College Board, and
students at DeVry report that off-campus housing in
the Bay Area far exceeds those averages.)
Continued in article
What is the meaning of “commodification” in education today?
When asked to list the top 10 problems facing
the academy today, I bet most professors would include the
“commodification” of education. By that they mean a sort of creeping
penetration of market-forces into the academy such that earning a B.A.
is becoming increasingly indistinguishable from, say, buying a Camaro.
As an adjunct I am not privy to the way this trend has altered the wider
institutional structure of higher education, beyond noticing that that
very little of the tuition my students pay finds its way back to me.
However, as someone who regularly teaches service courses I have
extensive experience with bread and butter teaching, and I am familiar
with what “commodification” is supposed to mean in this context: the
idea that professors are expected to produce “customer satisfaction” in
their students, and students are supposed to actually “enjoy” the
classes they take.
Alex Golub, "The Professor as Personal Trainer," Inside Higher Ed,
October 24, 2005 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/10/24/golub
Community colleges are upset with Jay Leno
Leno had perturbed leaders of two-year
colleges with his occasional cracks and gibes questioning the
intelligence of those who’ve attended the institutions, and by
ignoring letters they’d written urging him to stop.
So in June, Young, president of Ohio’s Northwest State Community
College, hit upon an idea: inviting (daring?) Leno to hop on one of his
Harley-Davidsons and ride with the motorcycle-driving Young while
talking about community colleges. The comedian (or, more likely, his
publicists) ignored that invitation, too, and so last month, the college
announced that Young and some of her aides would head out to Hollywood,
where Leno tapes “The Tonight Show,” on a seven-day swing in which they
would also tout the crucial role that two-year institutions in preparing
workers and educating lifelong learners.
Doug Lederman, "Letting Leno Have It (Gently)," Inside Higher Ed,
September 29, 2005 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/09/29/leno
Derek.Bock, Universities in the Marketplace: The
Commercialization of Higher Education. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton Univ. Pr., 2003. 233p. alk. paper,
$22.95 (ISBN 0691114129). LC 2002-29267.
Reviews are provided from many sources. One review is
at
http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/crljournal/crl2004/backjan2004/bokbookreview.htm
Athletics is the first area
subject to Bok’s critique. Candidly and mercilessly,
he summarizes the ugly history of intercollegiate
football—its failed promise to "build character,"
its unsupportable claim to have helped minorities
achieve a high-quality education, and its grievous
undermining of academic standards. Students whose
academic achievement and potential would hardly
qualify them for careers in any learned profession
are not only routinely admitted to universities of
every quality but are even turned into national
celebrities. Looking at the revenue-generating
sports, mainly football and basketball, Bok informs
the reader that as of
2001,
some thirty coaches were earning in excess of a
million dollars annually, far more than most college
and university presidents. Bok strongly focuses on
the almost complete disconnect between athletic
prowess and academic achievement. He builds a
powerful indictment:
What can
intercollegiate sports teach us about the
hazards of commercialization? First of all, the
saga of big-time athletics reveals that American
universities, despite their lofty ideals, are
not above sacrificing academic values—even
values as basic as admission standards and the
integrity of their courses—in order to make
money.
Indeed, Bok reaches the
conclusion, described by him as "melancholy," that
through their athletic programs, "universities have
compromised the most fundamental purpose of academic
institutions."
Turning to his second area,
scientific research, Bok maintains that the record
has been no less dismal and the battles between the
worlds of intellect and industry no less ruthless:
Scientists have been prohibited from publishing (or
even discussing at conferences) results unfavorable
to their commercial sponsors’ marketing goals.
Companies have punished universities by threatening
to withhold promised financial support should
scientists dare to publish data unfavorable to
sponsors’ interests. Researchers have been
threatened with lawsuits, even grievously defamed.
Companies have imposed a militarylike secrecy upon
faculty who work with them, severely edited
scholars’ reports, and even had their own staffs
write slanted drafts to which university researchers
were expected to attach their names. By Bok’s
account, some elements of the commercial sector
merely look upon faculty and graduate students as
company agents—virtual employees, hired guns—charged
to produce a stream of research from which will
follow a stream of revenue for their businesses.
Bok’s charges are not vague hints; he cites
prestigious institutions, names researchers whose
careers were jeopardized or damaged by threats and
personal attacks, and provides many poignant
details.
In the third area, higher
education itself, Bok outlines the temptations of
easy money, ostensibly available via universities’
willingness, indeed eagerness, to use the income
from distance education (both domestically and
abroad) to finance programs only indirectly linked
to higher education. Bok further suggests that some
schools willingly exploit the Internet more for the
money than for any possible social benefit.
"Is everything in a
university for sale if the price is right?" asks the
book jacket. Are universities now ready to accept
advertising within physical facilities and
curricula? Will they permit commercial enterprises
to put company names on the stadium, team uniforms,
campus shuttle buses, book jackets sold at the
campus bookstore, plastic cups at food service
points, or even on home pages? Will universities
sell the names of entire schools as well as of
buildings? Worse yet, will some schools be tempted
to accept endowed professorships to which the
sponsors seek to attach unacceptable or harmful
restrictions and conditions? There appears to be no
end to the opportunities.
To respond to these and
similar troubling questions, Bok’s two concluding
chapters lay out practical steps the academic
community might consider to avoid sinking into a
quagmire of commercialism in which the academy is
sure to lose control of both its integrity and its
autonomy. Throughout his work, Bok reminds his
readers of the obvious, but sometimes camouflaged
(or ignored), distinction between the academy and
commerce: The mission of the former is to learn,
that of the latter to earn. Conflict between these
missions is inevitable, and should it disappear, the
university as we know it also may vanish. We may not
like what replaces it.
In line with Bok's "Commercialization of
Higher Education," a newer (2005) book
explores the role of market forces in
changing higher education — and the
danger of market forces having too much
influence
Three longtime
observers of higher education explore
the ways — positive and negative — that
universities are changing in
Remaking the American University
(Rutgers
University Press). The authors are
Robert Zemsky, a professor and chair of
the Learning Alliance at the University
of Pennsylvania; Gregory R. Wegner,
director of program development at the
Great Lakes Colleges Association; and
William F. Massy, a professor emeritus
of higher education at Stanford
University and currently president of
the Jackson Hole Higher Education Group.
The three authors recently responded
(jointly) to questions about their new
book.
Scott Jaschik"Remaking the American
University," Inside Higher Ed,
September 21, 2005 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/09/21/remaking
Q: Of the trends
you examine, which
ones are most
worrisome to you?
A: What
worries us most is
that universities
and colleges have
become so
preoccupied with
succeeding in a
world of markets
that they too often
forget the need to
be places of public
purpose as well. We
are serious in
arguing that
universities and
colleges must be
both market smart
and mission
centered. Not
surprisingly, then,
we are troubled by
how often today
institutions allow
their pursuit of
market success to
undermine core
elements of their
missions: becoming
preoccupied with
collegiate rankings,
surrendering to an
admissions arms
race, chasing
imagined fortunes
through impulsive
investments
e-learning, or
conferring so much
importance on
athletics as to
alter the character
of the academic
community on campus.
By far the most
troublesome
consequence of
markets displacing
mission, though, is
the reduced
commitment of
universities and
colleges to the
fulfillment of
public purposes.
More than ever
before, these
institutions are
content to advance
graduates merely in
their private,
individual
capacities as
workers and
professionals. In
the rush to achieve
market success, what
has fallen to the
wayside for too many
institutions is the
concept of educating
students as citizens
— graduates who
understand their
obligations to
contribute to the
collective
well-being as active
participants in a
free and
deliberative
society. In the race
for private
advantage, market
success too often
becomes a proxy for
mission attainment.
Q: We’ve just come
through rankings
season, with U.S.
News and others
unveiling their
lists. Do you have
any hope for turning
back the ratings
game? Any ideas you
would offer to
college presidents
who are fed up with
it?
A: On this
one there is no
turning back — the
rankings are here to
stay. Two, frankly
contradictory ideas
are worth thinking
about. First,
university and
college presidents
should accept as
fact that the
rankings measure
market position
rather than quality.
An institution’s
ranking is
essentially a
predictor of the net
price the
institution can
charge. The contrary
idea is to make the
rankings more about
quality by having
most institutions
participate in the
National Survey of
Student Engagement
and agree to have
the results made
public. Even then,
we are not sure that
prestige and market
position would not
trump student
engagement.
Continued in
article
In line with Bok's "Commercialization of Higher
Education," a newer (2005) book explores the role of
market forces in changing higher education — and the
danger of market forces having too much influence
Three longtime observers of
higher education explore the ways — positive and
negative — that universities are changing in
Remaking the American University
(Rutgers University Press). The
authors are Robert Zemsky, a professor and chair of the
Learning Alliance at the University of Pennsylvania;
Gregory R. Wegner, director of program development at
the Great Lakes Colleges Association; and William F.
Massy, a professor emeritus of higher education at
Stanford University and currently president of the
Jackson Hole Higher Education Group. The three authors
recently responded (jointly) to questions about their
new book.
Scott Jaschik"Remaking the American University,"
Inside Higher Ed, September 21, 2005 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/09/21/remaking
Q: Of the
trends you examine, which ones are
most worrisome to you?
A:
What worries us most is that
universities and colleges have
become so preoccupied with
succeeding in a world of markets
that they too often forget the need
to be places of public purpose as
well. We are serious in arguing that
universities and colleges must be
both market smart and mission
centered. Not surprisingly, then, we
are troubled by how often today
institutions allow their pursuit of
market success to undermine core
elements of their missions: becoming
preoccupied with collegiate
rankings, surrendering to an
admissions arms race, chasing
imagined fortunes through impulsive
investments e-learning, or
conferring so much importance on
athletics as to alter the character
of the academic community on campus.
By far the
most troublesome consequence of
markets displacing mission, though,
is the reduced commitment of
universities and colleges to the
fulfillment of public purposes. More
than ever before, these institutions
are content to advance graduates
merely in their private, individual
capacities as workers and
professionals. In the rush to
achieve market success, what has
fallen to the wayside for too many
institutions is the concept of
educating students as citizens —
graduates who understand their
obligations to contribute to the
collective well-being as active
participants in a free and
deliberative society. In the race
for private advantage, market
success too often becomes a proxy
for mission attainment.
Q: We’ve
just come through rankings season,
with U.S. News and others
unveiling their lists. Do you have
any hope for turning back the
ratings game? Any ideas you would
offer to college presidents who are
fed up with it?
A:
On this one there is no turning back
— the rankings are here to stay.
Two, frankly contradictory ideas are
worth thinking about. First,
university and college presidents
should accept as fact that the
rankings measure market position
rather than quality. An
institution’s ranking is essentially
a predictor of the net price the
institution can charge. The contrary
idea is to make the rankings more
about quality by having most
institutions participate in the
National Survey of Student
Engagement
and agree to have the results made
public. Even then, we are not sure
that prestige and market position
would not trump student engagement.
Continued in article
September 29, 2005 reply from Kim Robertson
Bob,
Somewhat related to your recent email:
There is a "survey of higher education - The Brains Business" in the
Sept 10, 2005 edition of The Economist magazine.
Kim
The Brains Business
For those of a certain age and educational
background, it is hard to think of higher education without thinking of
ancient institutions. Some universities are of a venerable age—the
University of Bologna was founded in 1088, the University of Oxford in
1096—and many of them have a strong sense of tradition. The truly old
ones make the most of their pedigrees, and those of a more recent
vintage work hard to create an aura of antiquity.…
"The brains business," The Economist, September 10, 2005 ---
http://snipurl.com/BrainsBusiness
Question
What may be some of the direct and indirect implications for you
and your college under various new legislation and pending
legislation in Washington DC?
Hint: Under the bill, colleges can no longer be able to turn
down credits solely based on a school's source of accreditation.
"Higher-Education Bill Aims to Stir Up Academia," by John Hechinger,
The Wall Street Journal, March 30, 2006; Page A8 ---
Click Here
Republicans are "opening up a tremendous
number of provisions for the for-profits," says Ms. Flanagan. "Those
are the ones with a seat at the table. The rest of us have been left
out."
Congress recently handed for-profit schools
a big win when it eliminated a rule requiring all colleges to offer
at least half of their instruction in brick-and-mortar classrooms to
be eligible for federal financial aid. The restriction, intended to
prevent fraud, had hindered online education programs that are
especially popular offerings among education companies.
A provision in the latest bill would weaken
another requirement -- that schools receive no more than 90% of
their revenue from federal financial aid. The rule was intended to
prevent a repeat of widespread fraud in the 1980s and early 1990s,
when some trade schools signed up unqualified low-income students in
order to collect federal aid. For-profit schools are most likely to
bump up against the 90% limit because they lack other funding
sources and often cater to low-income students. Schools would now
have more time to get back in line with the rule if they fall short.
Yet another measure would put for-profits
more on equal academic footing with established schools. Traditional
schools have long tended to reject degrees and course credits from
students at for-profit schools, which often lack the imprimatur of
long-established regional accrediting agencies. Under the bill, they
would no longer be able to turn down credits solely based on a
school's source of accreditation.
Jensen Comment
This legislation can have far-reaching impacts on faculty. It will open
employment opportunities in for-profit colleges. But it will also
increase competition, especially in graduate professional programs in
business, law, pharmacy, nursing, etc. I think it will also greatly
increase the danger of fraud.
March 30, 2005 reply from David Fordham, James Madison University
[fordhadr@JMU.EDU]
In a very rare turn of events, I find
myself in total 100% agreement with Bob's speculation on this one.
In reply to Glen's response, I'm not sure the federal employees had
as much to do with this bill as lobbyists. Congress is generally
more attuned to the needs of lobbyists than it is to federal
employees.
And as Bob points out, this smacks not only
of lobbyists, but good old fashioned planking politics, knee-jerk
politics.
Okay, (yawn), so what else is new?
But what I'm really wondering is: Why we
accounting professors -- of all people -- haven't been able to see
the connection between the "calls for transparency in corporate
reporting", and the "calls for accountability in higher education"?
Why don't we have transparency when it
comes to judging the quality of a transcript? Why do we pay so much
attention to accurate, transparent, and fair financial reporting of
corporations, but so little attention to such qualities when it
comes to transcript reporting?
Isn't education more important than mere
money? (Okay, okay, I know the real answer, but we're *supposed* to
be ACADEMICS, aren't we??)
What's good for the goose should be good
for the gander, right? Take a close look at this concept.
We require companies to go to astoundingly
complex, costly, gyrating, unimaginable effort to publicly report on
the results of their operations. Why? So the public can openly
compare quality between organizations, and thereby make good
decisions. To support this public reporting, we have established an
unbelievably-complex set of rules -- and then mandated adherence to
them -- about how to create those annual reports. And then we
require periodic audits to ensure "uniform" application across
organizations to promote public confidence in the comparisons. We
require certification of those who do the checking, too.
Why not apply the same principle to higher
education? Isn't hiring an employee tantamount to making an
investment? Shouldn't there be some way of comparing the quality of
various individuals' transcripts, just as there is a way to compare
stocks and bonds? Why don't we care about the quality of a
transcript the way we do a stock certificate?
Why don't we propose a set of "generally
accepted academic reporting principles" for the issuing organization
(e.g., universities, colleges, diploma mills, etc.) and mandate
adherence to these uniform reporting standards.
Oh, come on, sure, you can claim that
education is more complex and multi-dimensional than simple cash
flows and net income calculations. But hey, get serious -- have you
looked at derivative or SPE or pension accounting lately? I rest my
case.
And we already have the audit mechanism in
place -- kinda -- (given our dean's worshipful obeisance to the
AACSB). (footnote: can you imagine having the AACSB spend four weeks
at your institution EVERY YEAR after the May commencement? Wow, what
a thought! I wonder which junior is going to get stuck spending his
weekend proofing the assessment figures!)
And talk about malfeasance and negligence!
If the accrediting agencies were held to the same standards as
financial auditors, just think of the job opportunities this would
create for all those poor law-school students who might otherwise
face an oversupply of lawyers in our economy in the coming years.
While I believe Congress is acting
politically and irrationally (both as always), they are at least
responding to a problem about bias in decision making relating to
the quality of transcripts. They are responding to a changing market
environment in transcripts. I'm not confident in the winners of
popularity contests to come up with solutions to difficult problems.
Can we as academics do any better?
My experience has been that just because a
bricks-and-mortar school is accredited says very little about the
quality of its education (inputs maybe, outputs no). And while there
are many fraudulent on-line educational programs, my brother-
in-law's experience teaching at such an institution (named after its
home town in Arizona) would seem to indicate that with proper
management, proper administration, proper mission definition, proper
faculty hiring decisions, and proper execution (!), the concept can
possibly result in as good an education as bricks-and-mortar.
But after all my devils-advocating at the
fundamental level, I repeat, I agree with Bob. I see such a law as
this creating far more problems than it solves.
And of course, my whole post here assumes
the WSJ article got things right in the first place. My experience
with WSJ reporting's quality leaves this assumption in grave
doubt... We need transparency and accuracy of reporting in the media
FAR FAR more than we need it in financial reporting or education or
anything else, for that matter.
David Fordham
Actually David, I think the WSJ article got it right this time
although without the details about the political fight described below
by Doug Lederman.
"Partisanship Reigns," by Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed,
March 30, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/03/30/hea
The rest of the rhetoric as
lawmakers began work on the key piece of higher
education legislation probably left many of those
who watched it longing for a different era, or
perhaps a different political system entirely.
Republican and Democratic lawmakers mostly talked
past each other, with Democrats accusing Republicans
of shortchanging students in the bill and squelching
debate by restricting the number of amendments to
the measure, and Republicans charging Democrats with
distorting the goals of the legislation and
devolving into unnecessary partisanship.
In terms of actual
legislating, very little got done Wednesday, in part
because the House Rules Committee, which sets the
terms of debates and voting for each piece of
legislation,
approved only 14, mostly minor amendments
that could be offered on the
House floor Wednesday.
Although Democrats
complained that Republican leaders were purposely
trying to limit their ability to try to alter the
Higher Ed Act legislation — “shutting down this
process,” Rep. Doris Matsui (D-Calif.) said – the
Rules Committee, in a highly unusual move, met late
into the night Wednesday to
craft a second rule that cleared the way
for 8 of the other 100 or so
proposed amendments to be debated and voted on
today.
Included among them are a
sweeping Democratic “substitute”
that takes different
approaches to many of the issues in the bill — which
faces near-certain defeat; a
proposal to ease reporting requirements on college
costs and strip language
from the legislation that would allow states to
begin accrediting colleges;
another that would bar colleges
from denying a student’s
transferred academic credits based solely on the
accreditation of the “sending” institution; and
one that would require colleges
that receive federal funds to
submit an annual report about whether and how they
take race into account in admissions.
The only amendment of real
substance that was considered Wednesday was offered
by Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), and vigorously opposed
by higher education groups. It sought to require
colleges that receive funds through the Higher
Education Act’s international education programs to
report in a public database any donations they
received from foreign sources.
While Burton and other
supporters of the measure portrayed it as an
anti-terrorism effort – a news release from Burton
quoted David Horowitz as saying the amendment would
prevent “the undue influence of foreign monies” –
Burton also did not hide the fact that he was
primarily
targeting campus Middle East studies programs,
some of which conservatives
have accused of being hotbeds of Muslim radicalism.
“The underlying goal of the
amendment is to draw attention to the anti-American,
anti-Semitic, and anti-democratic rhetoric being
preached at some college’s ‘Middle East Studies’
centers,” said the Burton news release, which
featured a line at the top boasting that the
“American Jewish Congress strongly supports
disclosure.”
College groups lobbied hard
against the Burton measure, and it was defeated
soundly, by a vote of 306 to 120.
Continued in article
Trends in Foreign Graduate Enrollments --- Many Pay Full Tuition (unlike
many domestic doctoral students)
Following 9/11 and the tightening of visa rules, the
number of foreign students coming to the United States
for graduate school plunged. But a new report by
the Council of Graduate Schools finds that foreign graduate student enrollment
has finally started to climb. Most foreign graduate students entering this year
came from China and India, which have burgeoning populations of undergraduates
to feed into graduate programs.
Paul D. Thacker, "Foreign Graduate Enrollments Up," Inside Higher Ed,
November 1, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/01/foreigngrads
Trends in Foreign Graduate Enrollments
| |
New Enrollment,
2004 -5 |
New Enrollment,
2005 -6 |
Total Enrolled,
2004-5 |
Total Enrolled,
2005 -6 |
| International total |
1% |
12% |
-3% |
1% |
| Country of origin |
|
|
|
|
| China |
3% |
20% |
-2% |
-2% |
| India |
3% |
32% |
-4% |
8% |
| South Korea |
5% |
5% |
-4% |
-3% |
| Middle East |
11% |
-1% |
1% |
1% |
| Discipline |
|
|
|
|
| Business |
7% |
10% |
-3% |
1% |
| Engineering |
3% |
22% |
-6% |
3% |
| Humanities and Arts |
-2% |
-6% |
1% |
-7% |
| Life Sciences |
-1% |
2% |
-5% |
-1% |
"More Foreign Students — Everywhere," by
Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed, November 12, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/11/12/opendoors
The total number of international students enrolled
in the United States climbed significantly in the
last academic year for the first time since 2001-2.
As for American students studying abroad, the number
increased by 8.5 percent to 223,534 in 2005-6, with
short-term programs and study in non-traditional
destinations outside Europe particularly hot growth
areas, according to the Institute of International
Education’s annual
Open Doors
report, released today.
While survey
results released by the Council of Graduate Schools
last week found that the
rate of enrollment growth of first-time
international graduate students had slowed while
total enrollment had risen more dramatically, the
IIE survey found the opposite pattern, with
enrollments of new international students up 10
percent and total enrollments up 3.2 percent in
2006-7. (While study abroad figures in Open Doors
are from the 2005-6 academic year, international
enrollment numbers are in reference to 2006-7). The
finding, said Peggy Blumenthal, executive vice
president for IIE, points to the excess capacity and
expanding international enrollments outside of
graduate education.
...
Total Enrollment of International Students at
Colleges in the U.S.
|
Year |
Total Foreign Enrollment |
1-Year % Change |
|
2000-1 |
547,867 |
+6.4% |
|
2001-2 |
582,996 |
+6.4% |
|
2002-3 |
586,323 |
+0.6% |
|
2003-4 |
572,509 |
-2.4% |
|
2004-5 |
565,039 |
-1.3% |
|
2005-6 |
564,766 |
-0.05% |
|
2006-7 |
582,984 |
+3.2% |
Top 10 Places of Origin for Foreign Students in
U.S., 2006-7
|
Rank and Country |
Total |
1-Year % Change |
|
1. India |
83,833 |
+9.6% |
|
2. China |
67,723 |
+8.2% |
|
3. South Korea |
62,392 |
+5.7% |
|
4. Japan |
35,282 |
-8.9% |
|
5. Taiwan |
29,094 |
+4.4% |
|
6. Canada |
28,280 |
+0.3% |
|
7. Mexico |
13,826 |
-0.8% |
|
8. Turkey |
11,506 |
-1% |
|
9. Thailand |
8,886 |
+1.4% |
|
10. Germany |
8,656 |
-2% |
For
the sixth year in a row, the University of Southern
California was the leading host institution, and
business and engineering were the most popular
fields of study, representing 18 and 15 percent of
enrollments respectively. Community colleges had a
3.6 percent growth in overall international student
enrollment, research universities 4.1 percent and
master’s institutions 2.1 percent. Bachelor’s
institutions had a 2.4 percent drop.
Top Destinations for International Students in the
U.S., 2006-7
|
Rank and Institution |
Foreign Enrollment |
|
Research universities |
|
|
1. U. of Southern California |
7,115 |
|
2. Columbia U. |
5,937 |
|
3. New York U. |
5,827 |
|
4. U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
5,685 |
|
5. Purdue U., main campus |
5,581 |
|
Master’s Institutions |
|
|
1. San Francisco State U. |
2,496 |
|
2. California State U. at Northridge |
1,963 |
|
3. San Jose State U. |
1,889 |
|
4. California State U. at Fullerton |
1,668 |
|
5. CUNY Baruch College |
1,587 |
|
Bachelor’s Institutions |
|
|
1. Brigham Young U., Hawaii campus |
1,201 |
|
2. SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology |
1,046 |
|
3. University of Hawaii at Hilo |
411 |
|
4. University of Dallas |
405 |
|
5. Mount Holyoke College |
403 |
|
Community Colleges |
|
|
1. Houston Community College |
3,378 |
|
2. Montgomery College |
3,055 |
|
3. Santa Monica College |
2,851 |
|
4. De Anza College |
2,155 |
|
5. CUNY Borough of Manhattan CC |
1,841 |
Meanwhile, a “snapshot” survey of this fall’s
international enrollment numbers conducted by eight
different associations, including IIE and NAFSA:
Association of International Educators, finds
promising indicators for future growth, with 55
percent of institutions responding that new
enrollments of international students increased this
fall over last. “You’re seeing the gradual trend
where the picture brightens marginally each time,
but the overall reality remains, which is that we’re
still not up to the levels we were four years ago,”
said Victor C. Johnson, associate executive director
for public policy at NAFSA.
Continued in article
Endowment Funds and Accounting
Controversies
Harvard -30, Yale -25: Banks aren't the
only ones that swallowed poison
"The Age of Diminishing Endowments: Yale's president on campus
politics and the future of higher education," by Matthew Kaminski, The Wall
Street Journal, June 6, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124425383780391015.html
Richard Levin, the
longest serving president in the Ivy League, had enjoyed a charmed
run at Yale. In his first 15 years Yale's endowment notched up the
best returns of any university's, and its innovative investment
strategy became a model for many others. Mr. Levin rode the bull
market to restore morale, launch a building spree, and strengthen
the school in sciences and internationally. Yale dollars even
spruced up shabby New Haven.
Then came the Great
Recession. What went up so fast for elite universities -- Yale's
endowment grew to $23 billion last summer from $3.1 billion in 1993,
Mr. Levin's first year -- dropped like a stone. The impact was
immediate: Mr. Levin announced a 5% spending cut in December (later
adjusted to 7.5%), then froze faculty pay and most large capital
projects. By the end of this month he says the endowment will be
marked down by a quarter to around $17 billion. Harvard, the only
university with a larger endowment, got caught out on arcane fare
like interest rate swaps and now projects a 30% decline, to about
$24 billion.
"We had a run that
was historically unprecedented, and at the tail end of that it
looked like we were getting too rich," Mr. Levin says, recalling
that members of Congress were then starting to complain about rich
private universities' "hoarding" money. "Well, that's quickly been
amended," he deadpans.
University
endowments once invested primarily in stocks and bonds. Yale's
longtime chief investment officer, David Swensen, pioneered a new
strategy that found better returns in less traditional vehicles like
hedge funds, private equity partnerships and real estate. The
Swensen approach produced a 16% average annual return the past
decade through last June. But the steep and sudden drop has left
schools heavily invested in assets that can't be quickly sold for
cash.
An academic
economist who sounds as if he knows his school's finances as well as
anyone here, Mr. Levin defends the so-called Yale Model against
emboldened critics. "We made huge excess returns on the way up. When
it's all over and things stabilize I think we'll find the overall
long-run performance [of the endowment] is better than if we
didn't." But he acknowledges the downside. "The challenge for the
Swensen strategy is in the area of liquidity. I think it is fair to
say all of us, including Yale, didn't anticipate that." In response,
universities are borrowing at unprecedented levels. Harvard recently
tapped the bond market for $1.5 billion, Stanford and Princeton
borrowed $1 billion each, and Yale $800 million "just to support our
liquidity," says Mr. Levin.
So what does the
dawn of the era of unplenty mean for the future of his university,
and others? Mr. Levin, a youthful 62, finds some comfort in the
numbers to downplay the impact on Yale.
Long ago, private
universities designed "spending rules" for their endowments to
support them less lavishly in flush years and more in the tough.
That cushions the blow to the budget. "We'll spend 6.5% or 6.7% of
our endowment next year when the endowment declines," he says.
"That's the flip side of the spending of 3.8% we were spending when
the endowment was rising very rapidly." While the endowment will
provide some 43% of next year's budget, tuition -- once the
principal source of income -- accounts for just 11% after financial
aid. Yet if the investments don't rebound over the next few years,
Yale and other schools in its league will have to rethink long-term
priorities and expansion plans.
Universities weren't
the only lavish spenders in the bubble years, and they dodged a
bullet when only two years ago Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) tried
to pass legislation to force them to shell out even more of their
endowments to slow tuition increases. The current crisis vindicates
relatively conservative endowment spending rules. "Managing
university finances is very tricky business," Mr. Levin says. "We're
nonprofits. We're not supposed to accumulate large surpluses."
Tuition is always a
big issue. Earlier this year, smack in the midst of the recession,
Yale raised it 3.2% to $47,500, including room and board. Mr. Levin
is unapologetic. "If we are to maintain a 10-to-one ratio of
students to faculty, if professors get average salary increases,
we're going to go up faster than inflation" -- during his tenure, on
average, a percentage point above inflation.
Four years of
college at $200,000 strikes lots of people as indecent. "You're
talking about sticker prices," Mr. Levin says. "The actual net price
people pay, tuition minus financial aid, is basically not changed at
all. If you look at the average net price for all of our students,
it's actually declined over the last decade." That makes for an
average cost of $18,000 per student per year now, compared to
$19,000 a decade ago. Mr. Levin says the boom provoked "something of
an arms race to give more financial aid," and opened private schools
up to a larger -- and as a result stronger -- pool of students "that
used to think that elite private schools were inaccessible to them."
Yale may be "more affordable than ever," he says. But then Yale's
president admits "this logic only applies to five schools" who offer
"need blind" admissions.
Some schools may go
belly-up because of the crisis. Ohio's Antioch College closed last
year. "As always happens in a recession, we'll see some of the
tuition-dependent institutions run into trouble," Mr. Levin says.
"Sadly, it hits some schools that play an important social role like
the historically black schools. And then state schools get hit.
Though they don't get shut down, their budgets get starved."
As Mr. Levin points
out, tuition at public schools has gone up faster than at private
schools -- on average, 2.5% plus inflation -- to make up for state
budget cuts. "They've not kept pace with the private institutions in
terms of resources. That's very sad, because the great state
universities here are really unique and fabulous institutions."
The financial pinch
is forcing schools to impose hiring freezes and consider shuttering
departments with lower enrollments -- say, French literature. This
trend also calls into question America's long-held commitment to a
liberal over a vocational higher education. Mr. Levin is quick to
say "that's not a worry for flagship universities."
Rick Levin knows
plenty about troubled institutions. In the early 1990s, Yale fit
that bill. Its neglected and aging physical plant required urgent
renovation. The budget was deep in the red. A faculty revolt helped
force the resignation of senior administrators, who included
prominent conservatives disliked on the liberal campus. In addition,
Yale had the worst record of labor strife of virtually any school
and found itself in one of America's most crime-ridden towns. (In
1991, a 19-year-old student named Christian Prince was gunned down
near campus.)
The economic revival
and endowment boom helped turn things around. But Mr. Levin also
brought a vision: America's third-oldest university needed to shape
up or lose its leading position. He focused on boosting science,
sometimes neglected at a place renowned for its humanities, and
taking the university global. He expanded ties with China. A tenth
of Yale's undergraduate student body now comes from outside the U.S.
When Mr. Levin took over, only 3% did.
As with other
schools that might like to switch neighborhoods -- think of Penn,
Columbia, the University of Chicago -- the economic downturn exposes
Yale's New Haven handicap. In recent years, the city's largest
employer and landowner tried to improve long-strained town-gown
relations and gentrify the areas around campus. So when Mayor John
DeStefano came with an emergency request to help cover New Haven's
$29 million deficit, Yale in February increased its voluntary
financial contribution to the city by 50%, to $7.6 million --
despite its own shortfall. (As a nonprofit, Yale pays little in
taxes.) Financially, he says, "the city is in deep trouble."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Other
projected declines include Cornell (-27%), Columbia (-22%),
Princeton (-25%), and Stanford (-25%).
Other relatively double digit endowment losers included the University
of Virginia, Duke, Barnard College, and Swarthmore College.
Contrary to early reports that Dartmouth College lost only 6%, an
estimated
23% loss is more realistic. Brandeis University lost 71% of its
endowment with the majority of the losses being stolen by Bernie Madoff.
Heavily endowed state university losses were more varied, but some like
West Virginia lost a quarter of their endowments. The University of
Texas has an endowment second only to Harvard. Texas lost about 20% in
this economic crisis.
In September
2007, Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) held hearings on hedge fund
transparency that morphed into a criticism of university endowment
spending relative to performance, with Harvard as exhibit A. After all,
according to the 2007 NACUBO Endowment Study, Harvard had a $34.6
billion endowment after growing 19.8 percent from 2006. (As always,
Harvard gathers accolades in every field but football.) It's a fine
university, but it's atypical. The average endowment can't spend
anywhere near what Harvard does, nor can endowment managers make up the
difference with performance.
Ann C. Logue, "Five Percent of Very Little Is Even Less," University
Business, March 2008 (before the crash) ---
http://www2.universitybusiness.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=1024&p=1
The Financial
Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has issued FASB Staff Position (FSP)
FAS 117-1, "Endowments of Not-for-Profit Organizations: Net Asset
Classification of Funds Subject to an Enacted Version of the Uniform
Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act (UPMIFA), and Enhanced
Disclosures for All Endowment Funds." The FSP applies to not-for-profit
organizations with donor-restricted endowment funds. Consequently, the
FSP will result in possibly significant net asset category
reclassifications for independent institutions and the not-for-profit
foundations of public institutions that are in UPMIFA states. In
addition, all independent institutions and foundations affiliated with
public institutions will be subject to new endowment disclosure
requirements - regardless of the status or adoption of UPMIFA in their
state.
NACUBO, August 14, 2008 ---
Click Here
"Moody's Warns of 'Sharp Deterioration' in
College Finances," by Mark Beja, Chronicle of Higher Education, June
8, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/daily/2009/06/19501n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Despite the deep
recession, the latest report from Moody’s Investors Service on
private colleges, released on Friday, shows that they are only now
starting to feel the pinch and warns that a “sharp deterioration” is
expected in the 2009 data. The new report looks at private colleges’
data only through June 2008.
Although there has
been growth over the last four years in colleges’ total financial
resources, the report says, negative investment returns and lower
gift revenue led to a decline of almost 3 percent in 2008.
Roger Goodman, a
vice president of the credit-rating agency, which monitors 285
private colleges and universities, said it only makes sense that the
report for 2009 will be even worse because most of the economic
downturn, including the stock-market collapse and heavy job losses,
has occurred since June 2008. He added that, for the 2009 fiscal
year, which ends on June 30 for many institutions, most colleges
will probably report investment losses of 20 percent to 30 percent.
“I don’t know that
there’s anything in here that’s a new worry for colleges,” Mr.
Goodman said. “Even more so than in the past, we already know there
will be substantial changes for most organizations.”
“We really think
that this is a precursor of the direction that these ratios are
heading in the next year,” he added.
Liquidity Problems
While total
enrollment continued to grow slightly in 2008, the report says,
several colleges are already reporting slower growth for 2009 and
expect an increase in demand for financial aid. In addition,
students are choosing lower-priced public colleges over
more-expensive private ones.
Last month,
Moody’s
outlined factors it will consider when
determining whether to downgrade the credit ratings of colleges and
universities, including a decline in student demand, investment
losses, weakened financial standing, and liquidity problems.
Continued in article
CEO Compensation Leaders for
Non-Profit Private Universities
From the Chronicle of Higher
Education, November 14, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/College-Chief-Executives/125311/
College Chief
Executives Earning Over $1-Million in Total
Compensation, 2008
|
Name |
Institution |
State |
Institution type |
Base pay |
Bonus pay |
Other pay |
Deferred compensation |
Nontaxable benefits |
Total compensation |
|
Bernard
Lander* 1 |
Touro
College |
N.Y. |
Master's |
$350,844 |
$85,000 |
$0 |
$4,269,390 |
$81,596 |
$4,786,830 |
|
John R.
Brazil* |
Trinity U. |
Tex. |
Master's |
$332,824 |
$0 |
$2,207,096 |
$233,057 |
$4,676 |
$2,777,653 |
|
R. Gerald
Turner |
Southern
Methodist U. |
Tex. |
Research |
$534,866 |
$264,739 |
$1,627,581 |
$219,223 |
$127,591 |
$2,774,000 |
|
Nicholas S.
Zeppos |
Vanderbilt
U. |
Tenn. |
Research |
$682,071 |
$729,627 |
$736,626 |
$226,910 |
$32,354 |
$2,407,588 |
|
Steven B.
Sample* |
U. of
Southern California |
Calif. |
Research |
$827,597 |
$500,000 |
$222,728 |
$231,800 |
$131,802 |
$1,913,927 |
|
John L.
Lahey |
Quinnipiac
U. |
Conn. |
Master's |
$746,043 |
$0 |
$1,059,367 |
$23,000 |
$17,017 |
$1,845,427 |
|
Lee C.
Bollinger 2 |
Columbia U. |
N.Y. |
Research |
$878,409 |
$0 |
$12,993 |
$518,650 |
$343,932 |
$1,753,984 |
|
Shirley Ann
Jackson |
Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute |
N.Y. |
Research |
$795,001 |
$160,610 |
$143,012 |
$526,292 |
$30,715 |
$1,655,630 |
|
Constantine
N. Papadakis * 3 |
Drexel U. |
Pa. |
Research |
$696,907 |
$310,000 |
$0 |
$574,214 |
$44,971 |
$1,626,092 |
|
Steadman
Upham |
U. of Tulsa |
Okla. |
Research |
$585,000 |
-- |
$3,051 |
$1,030,165 |
$4,013 |
$1,622,229 |
|
Harold J.
Raveché* |
Stevens
Institute of Technology |
N.J. |
Research |
$601,465 |
$285,000 |
$29,003 |
$606,468 |
$59,530 |
$1,581,466 |
|
Richard C.
Levin |
Yale U. |
Conn. |
Research |
$965,077 |
$50,000 |
$165,955 |
$328,250 |
$20,726 |
$1,530,008 |
The above table is continued at
http://chronicle.com/article/College-Chief-Executives/125311/
Jensen Comment
This year Trinity University has a new President, the former Dean of the
college of business at the University of Colorado. I've no idea what his
compensation package is, although Trinity normally provides a large
house on campus, new car, and many other benefits to its CEO. Because
the fringe benefits vary so much and are so difficult to value, the
numbers in the Total Compensation column should be compared with great
caution.
John Brazil is a good friend so I will
refrain from making any comments about his compensation package. The
reported compensation may have been increased in honor of the last year
of his Presidency.
In recent years students have turned
more toward majoring in professional programs which might explain, in
part, why Trinity appointed a President with a background outside the
disciplines of humanities and science, although Trinity has had
economists lead the university in the past. At Trinity economics is not
part of the Department of Business.
Listings of U.S. University
Endowments (including a table on endowments per student) 2005-2009 ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment
A more current listing of many
university data tables is provided in the "Almanac Issue 2010-2011" from
the Chronicle of Higher Education. August 27, 2010. I got my
booklet in hard copy in late August 2010. None subscribers can get the
booklet at a cover price of $15. Most online links to this Almanac data
are only available to subscribers, although students and faculty on
campus may be able to use their library's subscription ---
http://chronicle.com/section/Almanac-of-Higher-Education/463/
Dr. Brazil's roots are in English with
an undergraduate degree from Stanford and a PhD from Yale. Before coming
to Trinity, he was President of Butler University and a member of the
Board of Directors of Caterpillar Tractor. Trinity is a small liberal
arts school with a relatively large endowment (rank 33 per student the
last time I looked at the national rankings for the year 2006 rankings).
Surprising things happen in tables for endowments per student. Number 1
is Princeton University and Number 2 is Bryn Athyn College (never heard
of it until recently). The table shown in the following link is for
years 2005 and 2006.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment
U.S. News and World Report has
ranked Trinity #1 in the West among colleges offering undergraduate and
master's degrees for nearly two decades. ---
http://web.trinity.edu/x836.xml
View IRS Tax Form 990 Outcomes ---
http://www2.guidestar.org/rxg/products/GuideStar-premium.aspx?gclid=CMThoN2bpaUCFQl_5Qod5zl95w
2008 990 Information ---
http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0%2C%2Cid=176722%2C00.html
990 Ground Zero: The 2008 990
Tax Forms are difficult to compare with prior years
"The New 990 Tax Form: More Data, More Headaches," by Paul Fain,
Chronicle of Higher Education, November 14, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-990-More-Data-More/125376/
Also see
http://www.irs.gov/charities/article/0,,id=212597,00.html
A Statement from the President of the
University of Oregon
"Saving Public Universities, Starting With My Own The solution is an
endowment funded by public and private contributions. Here's how to do
it," by Richard Lariviere, The Wall Street Journal, November
23, 2010 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704312504575618303611410956.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t
Oregonians don't
whine. In the face of adversity, we grit our teeth and carry on.
Land use, bottle- deposit bills, beach protection—Oregon has led the
nation.
But Oregon's 25- to
34-year-olds are less likely than their parents to have college
degrees. We have one of the worst-funded systems of public higher
education in America: Oregon ranked 44th in the latest measurement
of state funding per student.
The easy response to
decades of reduced funding is to simply ask the state for more. But
with Oregon expecting a $3.3 billion budget shortfall for the coming
biennium and a "decade of deficits," as Gov. Ted Kulongoski recently
put it, asking for more money is futile.
Boldness is a
necessity—and we think we have the answer. Our plan is to stabilize
the University of Oregon's financial situation by establishing an
endowment funded by a partnership of private and public monies.
Twenty years ago,
the state legislature appropriated $63.3 million for the University
of Oregon. Our state funding for the current fiscal year has dropped
to a projected $60 million. Adjusted for inflation, that's just
$34.9 million in 1990 dollars.
State funding
currently makes up less than 8% of the university's overall budget,
while tuition and fees now account for about 40%. A generation ago,
state funding per student was twice the amount received in tuition.
Because of a dramatic rise in enrollment and an equally dramatic
decline in state funding, tuition has increased by an average of
7.5% each year for the past 38 years. But the rise in tuition has
been erratic, due largely to fluctuations in state appropriations,
with annual tuition increases ranging from 2% to 25% in a single
year.
This
unpredictability adds to the already tremendous burden on
middle-class families hoping to send their children to the
university. College is being put beyond the reach of too many worthy
students. The goal at our university is to sustain high academic
quality, while providing these young Oregonians with an affordable
education.
To accomplish this
goal, we propose three steps. First, the university needs careful
governance by a publicly appointed board specifically charged with
overseeing the university's operations. Second, the university
should be more accountable to the state-level board that oversees
its educational goals and standards. And finally, we propose a
first-of-its-kind formula for replacing year-by-year state
appropriations to the university with a public-private endowment.
Earnings from the endowment's invested capital will replace the
unpredictable muddle of state funding.
It is this third
element—replacing the state's annual appropriation with a
public-private endowment—that makes our proposal unique. We are
asking lawmakers to lock public appropriations for the university at
$63 million over 30 years—enough to make debt payments, at a 7%
taxable bond rate, on $800 million in general obligation bonds.
Meanwhile, the
university will pledge to match the $800 million in bond proceeds
with private donations, and we will raise the private money before
the public money is used for these bonds. The combined $1.6 billion
public-private endowment will create a solid base for the
university's financial operation, replacing the erratic seesaw of
annual state appropriations.
Using historical
returns from the University of Oregon Foundation as a benchmark, the
new public-private endowment will generate $64 million in operating
revenue for the university in its first year. This is more than the
current annual appropriation.
Projecting returns
of 9% and assuming distributions of 4%, the endowment's annual
payout will increase to $263.4 million in its 30th year. The
endowment's capitalized balance of $6.9 billion at that point will
secure the university's future.
Some have labeled
our projected returns as overly optimistic. But the University of
Oregon Foundation's own endowment has returned an average of 9.8%
annually since 1994 (the earliest year for which reliable
information is available). That takes into account three years of
negative returns—including a 17.8% loss in 2008, during the worst
economic downturn since the Great Depression—as well as a strong
return of 10.1% in 2009.
Over the next 30
years, there will inevitably be good times for the state of Oregon,
and it will undoubtedly invest more in higher education. But we're
willing to exchange the prospect of an eventual increase in state
funding for a predictable level of support—even at today's low
level. Having a steady income stream through the public-private
endowment will enable us to better control the rate of tuition
increases.
As the proposal
heads toward legislative consideration next year, we are now also in
discussions to include a requirement that the new endowment maintain
a portion of its investment portfolio in local companies, so we can
help jump-start the state's economy.
Oregon's experience
with higher education funding is not unique. Economic and
demographic changes are demanding a response from universities
across the nation. We believe that we've come up with a viable
answer to the question of how to provide educational opportunity
without sinking our state deeper into the financial hole—and we hope
other states consider following suit.
Mr. Lariviere is president of the
University of Oregon.
Issues in Computing a College's Cost
of Degrees Awarded and the "Worth" of Professors
The Almanac of Higher Education 2013-14
from the Chronicle of Higher Education ---
https://www.chronicle-store.com/ProductDetails.aspx?ID=80261&WG=350
Digital Edition $6.95
Joint Costs --- Direct material and labor costs going into a production
process before the process splits output into separate products such as the
faculty costs of teaching common core courses like writing and mathematics
before students declare majors. Another example would be where a professor
teaching two chemistry courses is assigned a common core basic course and an
advanced course for chemistry majors. Any attempt to split her salary between
chemistry majors and undeclared majors is arbitrary.
Also see
http://maaw.info/JointProductsMain.htm
Overhead Costs --- fixed and variable costs are indirect in the sense
that they cannot be traced to particular items of output such as top
administrator salaries of the college and costs buildings, heating,
cooling, and grounds maintenance. Any attempt to allocate these costs to
different academic disciplines is arbitrary.
http://maaw.info/OverheadRelatedMain.htm
Activities-Based Costing (ABC) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activity-based_costing
Also see
http://maaw.info/ABCMain.htm
One of the main ideas here is concept of back flushing where costs of
upstream decisions like financial aid decisions regarding prospects
intending to major in philosophy are given different amounts of
scholarship money versus students intending to major in business.
Another example would be a decision as to whether a chemistry professor
versus a history professor gets an endowed chair. This affects cost
allocations for years to come. Another example is where decisions in one
department impact on resources needed in another department. For
example, some business schools teach economics whereas other require
that economics be taught in the economics department. If a business
school elects to require calculus from the mathematics department it can
greatly impact on the resources needed in the mathematics department.
As an accountant I can think of all sorts of reasons why computing
the costs of accounting majors versus chemistry majors is an exercise in
futility because of joint costs, overhead costs, and many other costs
where cost allocations are arbitrary and can be performed selectively to
make costs of one major in a university look higher or lower than
another major. It is possible to do zero-based budgeting where estimates
are made as to how much would be saved if a major or a complete
department is abandoned entirely. But even here there are unknowns about
lost revenues and "lost" costs.
Another complication is that colleges have to have certain
disciplines to be respectable even though there are only a trickle of
students choosing to major or minor in those disciplines. For
example, the the number of economics majors at a university in
Mississippi trickled down to one, and the university seriously
considered dropping the economics department. In many universities the
number of geology majors trickled down to almost zero when not having
earth science majors is a questionable move for a "university." If a
university maintains a department of faculty for one or only a handful
of majors the average cost per graduate appears to be very high relative
to the business department having almost half the student body in that
university.
"Accounting for Success" Brenau U., a women's college in
Georgia, is running million-dollar surpluses. Here's how." by Scott
Carlson, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 3, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Accounting-for-Success/144351/
Step into the president’s office at Brenau
University, and you find yourself surrounded by vivid maps
displaying the geology of the United States in bright yellows and
reds, greens and purples. Ask Ed Schrader about the maps, and he’ll
explain how heat, pressure, sediments, and erosion molded this
diverse landscape through the epochs. He’ll speak with all the
enthusiasm that a former geology professor can bring to the subject.
But before he entered the academic world,
in the late 1980s, Mr. Schrader was part of a more "cutthroat"
environment: the mining industry, where he worked for corporations
like Chevron and Süd-Chemie. There he learned a different kind of
discipline, which he brings to the academic world now.
"We counted nuts and bolts, we dug things
up for pennies and sold them for dimes," he says.
Administrators at Brenau, in a similar
fashion, tally all the revenue and expenses of its colleges,
determining the net revenue of each. They count, down to the penny,
what it costs to graduate a business student, or a humanities
student, or a nursing student. They know precisely which academic
units are cash cows and which aren’t, and by how much, and they use
that information to figure out how to grow strategically.
Brenau’s gross income has doubled in the
past decade, from $23-million to $48-million (with $51-million
projected next year). It has run million-dollar surpluses in recent
years, has expanded its campus to several locations across Georgia,
and is considering moving into Florida.
For Mr. Schrader, this is more than just
business discipline, but a way to preserve the more fragile aspects
of Brenau’s mission. At its core, Brenau is a women’s college with a
liberal-arts emphasis, an endangered species these days. The
university’s weekend, online, and professional programs in business,
occupational therapy, and other fields help sustain the women’s
college. "I have to know how many people I need to educate in
nursing to pay for those graduates in English," Mr. Schrader says.
"If I don’t know that, we’re subject to the whims of fate."
That might seem like plain common sense.
But observers of higher education say Brenau’s close attention to
revenue and costs is fairly unusual, especially among smaller
colleges. "It is very much the exception that an institution
understands its costs at a granular level," says Rick Staisloff, a
consultant who spent more than two decades in higher-education
finance. Drawing on a metaphor he often uses, Mr. Staisloff says
colleges tend to look at their offices, programs, and departments as
a big basket of stuff, not knowing what the individual pieces in the
basket cost.
"No one asked you if you made or lost money
on history, or made or lost money on business," he says. "If it all
added up, that’s all people cared about."
That’s changing, Mr. Staisloff notes, for
reasons that everyone in the industry knows: more pressure and
scrutiny on institutions, along with more attention to the complex
financial model of higher education, where richer students and
richer programs usually cover losses from poorer students and poorer
programs. "If you’re going to live in a world of subsidies," he
says, "you should know which things are making money."
Edie Behr, an analyst in the public-finance
group at Moody’s Investors Service, says colleges have had a
longstanding culture of providing education without scrutinizing the
costs—"an ingrained culture that is going to have to break down,"
she says, "because there is a need for cost containment."
"As the programs that cost more than they
bring in are identified," she says, "then the question becomes, What
do you do with them?"
When Mr. Schrader came to Brenau in 2005,
from Shorter University, where he was president, he inherited the
institution from a leader who had gotten it back on firm financial
ground. Still, he says, there were lapses. The administration set
budgets for departments but did not strictly enforce them.
Administrators believed they were spending 5 percent of their
endowment value, but were actually spending 5 percent of the
year-to-year growth, he says. And the college’s financial office was
a bit behind the times. The CFO did not use any sort of computerized
system to track the college’s spending. If you asked him for a
figure, Mr. Schrader says, "he would run to his office, dig about
three feet down in a stack of papers, and come back saying, ‘Here it
is.’"
Mr. Schrader hired a consultant, James F.
Galbally, to act as a kind of forensic accountant, working closely
with a new chief financial officer, Wayne Dempsey, who also came
from Shorter. Mr. Galbally had spent 20 years at the University of
Pennsylvania, where he was an associate dean overseeing finances for
the dental school, and had taught in the management school and the
higher-education program alongside Robert Zemsky, an expert in
college management. He also spent several years as a consultant
specializing in training new college presidents.
Contined in article
Jensen Comment
If managerial accounting for colleges was as simple as this article
makes it sound, then I think many other colleges would be doing the same
thing on a routine bases. Instead such accounting is usually very
experimental. Probably the best known and expensive attempt to compute
costs of majors was done at Texas A&M university.
"Texas A&M Gathers Accountability Data on New Web Site,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, May 18, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/texas-am-launches-new-web-site-in-response-to-demand-for-accountability/43387?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Amid calls for more accountability, Texas
A&M University has unveiled a website that makes data such as
graduation rates, faculty workloads, demographics and student debt
easily accessible.
The site — accountability.tamu.edu — is
composed of data that already was publicly available, but
administrators say the effort is an unprecedented step toward
ensuring public trust.
“It is unfortunate that higher education
faces new questions about its impact,” said Texas A&M President R.
Bowen Loftin in a news release. “We want to do everything in our
power to ensure the public trust in all we do.”
Accountability was the subject of a public
fight last year between the state’s two public research
universities, A&M and UT-Austin, and the Gov. Rick Perry-backed
conservative think tank, the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
The group’s “seven breakthrough solutions”
were a series of ideas with which the group aimed to address
perceived accountability issues. The universities’ regents, all of
whom are appointed by Perry, embraced some of the ideas and flirted
with others until the schools pushed back following media attention.
One of the most criticized of the ideas was
one that reduced a faculty member’s value to a “bottom line”
financial figure, represented by a number in either red or black, by
subtracting his or her salary and benefits from money brought in
through teaching and research.
The document was taken down amid numerous
complaints of inaccuracies in the data.
“I’m not opposed to accountability,” said
Peter Hugill, a Texas A&M faculty member and state conference
president of the American Association of University Professors. “I
was opposed to that crazy red and black report.”
The new accountability website has no such
measure.
The site provides large amounts of
information in a compact format with real-time changes, said Joe
Pettibon, associate vice president for academic services, in the
news release.
“This is a bold step in transparency that
holds the university to the highest standards regarding how we use
our resources,” Pettibon said. “However, the site will always be a
work in progress as information is added, updated, and improved to
address what is happening in higher education and the university.”
The accountability site is at
https://accountability.tamu.edu/
Texas A&M University is committed to
accountability in its pursuit of excellence. The university expects
to be held to the highest standards in its use of resources and in
the quality of the educational experience. In fact, this commitment
is a part of the fabric of the institution from its founding and is
a key component of its mission statement (as approved by the Board
of Regents and the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board), its
aspirations found in Vision 2020 (approved by the Board of Regents
in 1999), and its current strategic plan, Action 2015: Education
First (approved by the Chancellor in December 2010).
Texas A&M Case on Computing the Cost of Professors and Academic
Programs
Jensen Comment
In an advanced Cost/Managerial Accounting course this assignment could
have two parts. First assign the case below. Then assign student teams
to write a case on how to compute the cost of a given course, graduate
in a given program, or a comparison of a the cost of a distance
education section versus an onsite section of a given course taught by a
tenured faculty member teaching three courses in general as well as
conducting research, performing internal service, and performing
external service in his/her discipline.
Issues in Computing a College's Cost of Degrees Awarded and the
"Worth" of Professors ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#CostAccounting
"Treating Higher Ed's 'Cost Disease'
With Supersize Online Courses," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of
Higher Education, February 26, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Treating-Higher-Eds-Cost/130934/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Oh my God, she's
trying to replace me with a computer.
That's what some
professors think when they hear Candace Thille pitch the online
education experiment she directs, the Open Learning Initiative at
Carnegie Mellon University.
They're wrong. But
what her project does replace is the traditional system of building
and delivering introductory college courses.
Professors should
move away from designing foundational courses in statistics,
biology, or other core subjects on the basis of "intuition," she
argues. Instead, she wants faculty to work with her team to put out
the education equivalent of Super Bowl ads: expensively built online
course materials, cheaply available to the masses.
"We're seeing
failure rates in these large introductory courses that are not
acceptable to anybody," Ms. Thille says. "There has to be a better
way to get more students—irrespective of where they start—to be able
to successfully complete."
Her approach brings
together faculty subject experts, learning researchers, and software
engineers to build open online courses grounded in the science of
how people learn. The resulting systems provide immediate feedback
to students and tailor content to their skills. As students work
through online modules outside class, the software builds profiles
on them, just as Netflix does for customers. Faculty consult that
data to figure out how to spend in-person class time.
When Ms. Thille
began this work, in 2002, the idea was to design free online courses
that would give independent novices a shot at mastering what
students learn in traditional classes. But two things changed. One,
her studies found that the online system benefits on-campus
students, allowing them to learn better and faster than their peers
when the digital environment is combined with some face-to-face
instruction.
And two, colleges
sank into "fiscal famine," as one chancellor put it. Technological
solutions like Ms. Thille's promise one treatment for higher
education's "cost disease"—the notion, articulated by William G.
Bowen and William J. Baumol, that the expense of labor-heavy
endeavors like classroom teaching inevitably rises faster than
inflation.
For years,
educational-technology innovations led to more costs per student,
says Mr. Bowen, president emeritus of Princeton University. But
today we may have reached a point at which interactive online
systems could "change that equation," he argues, by enabling
students to learn just as much with less "capital and labor."
"What you've got
right now is a powerful intersection between technological change
and economics," Mr. Bowen tells The Chronicle.
Ms. Thille is, he
adds, "a real evangelist in the best sense of the word."
Nowadays rival
universities want to hire her. Venture capitalists want to market
her courses. The Obama administration wants her advice. And so many
foundations want to support her work that she must turn away some
would-be backers.
But the big question
is this: Can Ms. Thille get a critical mass of people to buy in to
her idea? Can she expand the Online Learning Initiative from a tiny
darling of ed-tech evangelists to something that truly changes
education? A Background in Business
Ms. Thille brings an
unusual biography to the task. The 53-year-old Californian spent 18
years in the private sector, culminating in a plum job as a partner
in a management-consulting company in San Francisco. She earned a
master's degree but not a doctorate, a gap she's now plugging by
studying toward a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania.
She has never taught
a college course.
Ms. Thille wasn't
even sure she'd make it through her own bachelor's program, so
precarious were her finances at the time. Her family had plunged
from upper middle class to struggling after her father quit his job
at the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company because of his opposition
to the Vietnam War. But with jobs and scholarships, she managed to
earn a degree in sociology from Berkeley.
After college, Ms.
Thille followed her fiancé to Pittsburgh. The engagement didn't
last, but her connection to the city did. She worked as education
coordinator for a rape-crisis center, training police and hospital
employees.
She eventually wound
up back in California at the consultancy, training executives and
helping businesses run meetings effectively. There she took on her
first online-learning project: building a hybrid course to teach
executives how to mentor subordinates.
Ms. Thille doesn't
play up this corporate-heavy résumé as she travels the country
making the case for why professors should change how they teach. On
a recent Tuesday morning, The Chronicle tagged along as that mission
brought Ms. Thille to the University of Illinois at Chicago, where
she was meeting with folks from the university and two nearby
community colleges to prepare for the development of a new
pre-calculus course.
It's one piece of a
quiet but sweeping push to develop, deploy, and test Open Learning
Initiative courses at public institutions around the country, led by
an alphabet soup of education groups.
The failure rate in
such precalculus courses can be so bad that as many as 50 percent of
students need to take the class a second time. Ms. Thille and her
colleagues hope to improve on that record while developing materials
of such quality that they're used by perhaps 100,000 students each
year. Facing Skepticism
But first the
collaborators must learn how to build a course as a team. As Ms.
Thille fires up her PowerPoint, she faces a dozen or so
administrators and professors in Chicago. The faculty members
segregate themselves into clusters—community-college people mostly
in one group, university folks mostly in another. Some professors
are learning about the initiative in detail for the first time.
There is little visible excitement as they plunge into the project,
eating muffins at uncomfortable desks in a classroom on the sixth
floor of the Soviet-looking science-and-engineering building.
By contrast, Ms.
Thille whirls with enthusiasm. She describes Online Learning
Initiative features like software that mimics human tutors: making
comments when students go awry, keeping quiet when they perform
well, and answering questions about what to do next. She discusses
the "dashboard" that tells professors how well students grasp each
learning objective. Throughout, she gives an impression of
hyper-competence, like a pupil who sits in the front row and knows
the answer to every question.
But her remarks can
sometimes veer into a disorienting brew of jargon, giving the
impression that she is talking about lab subjects rather than
college kids. Once she mentions "dosing" students with a learning
activity. And early on in the workshop, she faces a feisty challenge
from Chad Taylor, an assistant professor at Harper College. He
worries about what happens when students must face free-form
questions, which the computer doesn't baby them through.
"I will
self-disclose myself as a skeptic of these programs," he says.
Software is "very good at prompting the students to go step by step,
and 'do this' and 'do that,' and all these bells and whistles with
hints. But the problem is, in my classroom they're not prompted step
by step."
Around the country,
there's more skepticism where that came from, Ms. Thille confides
over a dinner of tuna tacos later that day. One chief obstacle is
the "not-invented-here problem." Professors are wary of adopting
courses they did not create. The Online Learning Initiative's
team-based model represents a cultural shift for a professoriate
that derives status, and pride, from individual contributions.
Then there's
privacy. The beauty of OLI is that developers can improve classes by
studying data from thousands of students. But some academics worry
that colleges could use that same data to evaluate professors—and
fire those whose students fail to measure up.
Ms. Thille tells a
personal story that illustrates who could benefit if she prevails.
Years ago she adopted a teenager, Cece. The daughter of a drug user
who died of AIDS, Cece was 28 days' truant from high school when she
went to live with Ms. Thille. She was so undereducated, even the
simple fractions of measuring cups eluded her. Her math teacher told
Ms. Thille that with 40 kids in class, she needed to focus on the
ones who were going to "make it."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
In a way we already have something like this operating in colleges and
universities that adopt the Brigham Young University variable speed
video disks designed for learning the two basic accounting courses
without meeting in classrooms or having the usual online instruction.
Applications vary of course, and some colleges may have recitation
sections where students meet to get help and take examinations ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#BYUvideo
Although BYU uses this no-class video
pedagogy, it must be recognized that most of the BYU students learning
accounting on their own in this manner are both exceptionally motivated
and exceptionally intelligent. For schools that adopt the pedagogies of
Me. Thile or BYU, the students must be like BYU accounting students or
the pedagogy must be modified for more hand holding and kick-butt
features that could be done in various ways online or onsite.
Perhaps Ms. Thille is being somewhat naive about turf wars in
universities. Certain disciplines are able to afford a core faculty for
research and advanced-course teaching with miniscule classes because
teaching large base courses in the general education core justifies not
having to shrink those departments with almost no majors.
Where Ms. Thille's pedagogy might be
more useful is in specialty courses where its expensive to hire faculty
to teach one or two courses. For example, it's almost always difficult
for accounting departments to hire top faculty for governmental
accounting courses and the super-technical ERP courses in AIS.
Bob Jensen's threads on courses
without instructors ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#NoInstructors
Of course Ms. Thille is not exactly advocating a pedagogy without
instructors. There are instructors in her proposed model.
Bob Jensen's threads on
competency-based learning and assessment ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#ECA
Bringing Low Cost Education and Training to the Masses
"MIT’s New Free Courses May Threaten (and Improve) the Traditional Model,
Program’s Leader Says," by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education,
February 6, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/mits-new-free-courses-may-threaten-the-traditional-model-programs-leader-says/35245?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
The
recent announcement that Massachusetts Institute
of Technology would give certificates around free online course materials
has fueled further debate about whether employers may soon welcome new kinds
of low-cost credentials. Questions remain about how MIT’s new service will
work, and what it means for traditional college programs.
On Monday The Chronicle posed some of
those questions to two leaders of the new project: L. Rafael Reif, MIT’s
provost, and Anant Agarwal, director of MIT’s Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. They stressed that the new project,
called MITx, will be run separately from the institute’s longstanding effort
to put materials from its traditional courses online. That project, called
OpenCourseWare, will continue just as before, while MITx will focus on
creating new courses designed to be delivered entirely online. All MITx
materials will be free, but those who want a certificate after passing a
series of online tests will have to pay a “modest fee.”
Q. I understand you held a forum late last
month for professors at MIT to ask questions about the MITx effort. What
were the hottest questions at that meeting?
Mr. Agarwal: There were a few good
questions. One was, How will you offer courses that involve more of a soft
touch? More of humanities, where it may not be as clear how to grade
answers?
Mr. Reif: One particular faculty
member said, How do I negotiate with my department head to get some time to
be doing this? Another one is, Well, you want MIT to give you a certificate,
how do we know who the learner is? How do we certify that?
Q. That is a question I’ve heard on some
blogs. How do you know that a person is who they say they are online? What
is your answer to that?
Mr. Agarwal: I could give a speech
on this question. … In the very short term students will have to pledge an
honor code that says that they’ll do the work honestly and things like that.
In the medium term our plan is to work with testing companies that offer
testing sites around the world, where they can do an identity check and they
can also proctor tests and exams for us. For the longer term we have quite a
few ideas, and I would say these are in the so-called R&D phase, in terms of
how we can electronically check to see if the student is who they say they
are, and this would use some combination of face recognition and other forms
of technique, and also it could involve various forms of activity
recognition.
Q. You refer to what’s being given by MITx
as a certificate. But there’s also this
trend of educational badges,
such as an effort by Mozilla, the people who make the Firefox Web browser,
to build a framework to issue such badges. Is MIT planning to use that badge
platform to offer these certificates?
Mr. Agarwal: There are a lot of
experiments around the Web as far as various ways of badging and various
ways of giving points. Some sites call them “karma points.” Khan Academy has
a way of giving badges to students who offer various levels of answering
questions and things like that. Clearly this is a movement that is happening
in our whole business. And we clearly want to leverage some of these ideas.
But fundamentally at the end of the day we have to give a certificate with a
grade that says the student took this course and here’s how they did—here’s
their grade and we will give it to them. … But there are many, many ways the
Internet is evolving to include some kind of badging and point systems, so
we will certainly try to leverage these things. And that’s a work in
progress.
Q. So there will be letter grades?
Mr. Agarwal: Correct.
Q. So you’ve said you will release your
learning software for free under an open-source license. Are you already
hearing from institutions that are going to take you up on that?
Mr. Agarwal: Yes, I think there’s
a lot of interest. Our plan is to make the software available online, and
there has been a lot of interest from a lot of sources. Many universities
and other school systems have been thinking about making more of their
content available online, and if they can find an open platform to go with I
think that will be very interesting for a lot of people.
Q. If you can get this low-cost
certificate, could this be an alternative to the $40,000-plus per year
tuition of MIT for enough people that this will really shake up higher
education? That may not threaten MIT, but could it threaten and even force
some colleges to close if they have to compete with a nearly free
certificate from your online institution?
Mr. Reif: First of all this is not
a degree, this is a certificate that MITx is providing. The second important
point is it’s a completely different educational environment. The real
question is, What do employers want? I think that for a while MITx or
activities like MITx—and there is quite a bit of buzz going on around things
like that—will augment the education students get in college today. It’s not
intended to replace it. But of course one can think of, “What if in a few
years, I only take two MITx-like courses for free and that’s enough to get
me a job?” Well, let’s see how well all this is received and how well or how
badly the traditional college model gets threatened.
In my personal view, I think the best education
that can be provided is that in a college environment. There are many things
that you cannot teach very well online. Let me give you, for instance, an
example of something that is important: ethics and integrity and things like
that. You walk on the MIT campus and by taking a course with Anant Agarwal
and meeting him and other professors like him you get the sense of ethics
and integrity. Is it easy to transfer that online in a community? Maybe it
is, but it’s going to take a bit of research to figure out how to do that.
Continued in article
The Game Changer
More on Porsches
versus
Volkswagens versus
Competency Based Learning
Bringing Low Cost Education and Training to the Masses
Both a 1950 VW bug and a 1950 Porsche can be driven from Munich to Berlin. A
Porsche (MIT degree) can make the trip faster, more comfortable (the VW didn't
even have a heater), and safer on the autobahn. But the VW can
achieve the same goal at a lower cost to own and drive.
As fate would have it, the day after I wrote about Hitler's Volkswagen versus
Porsche analogy with meeting higher education needs of the masses at very low
cost, the following article appeared the next day of February 3. Ryan Craig and
I went about make the same point from two different angles.
Part of my February 2, 2012 message read as follows:
. . .
But the MITx design is not yet a Volkswagen since MIT provides high
quality lectures, videos, and course materials without yet setting academic
standards. MIT is instead passing along the academic standard setting to the
stakeholders. For example, when an engineering student at Texas A&M
graduates with a 3.96 grade average, the Texas A&M system has designed and
implemented the academic quality controls. In the MITx certificate program,
the quality controls must be designed by the employers or graduate school
admissions officers not part of the Texas A&M system..
My earlier example is that a student in the MITx program may learn a
great deal about Bessel functions ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessel_functions
But obtaining a MITx certificate for completing a Bessel function module
says absolutely nothing about whether the certificate holder really mastered
Bessel functions. It's up to employers and graduate school admissions
officers to introduce filters to test the certificate holder's mastery of
the subject.
I hope that one day the MITx program will also have
competency-based testing of its MITx
certificate holders --- that would be the second
stage of a free MITx Volkswagen model.
Bob Jensen
"A Policy Wonk Brings Data on College
Costs to the Table," by Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher
Education, February 5, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/A-College-Cost-Policy-Wonk/130662/
The dozen
higher-education leaders summoned to the White House in December to
talk about college affordability included 10 prominent college
presidents and the head of one of the nation's most visible
education foundations.
And the 12th person,
the person seated right across from the president to open and frame
the discussion? A self-made number cruncher named Jane Wellman,
whose outspoken devotion to the power of data has helped raise some
uncomfortable questions about the way states and colleges spend
their higher-education dollars.
That Roosevelt Room
meeting helped shape some of the college-cost-control proposals Mr.
Obama announced last month. It also provided a notable reminder of
the national influence Ms. Wellman and her Delta Cost Project now
wield.
With sophisticated
analyses and an often-sardonic delivery, Ms. Wellman has been a
pull-no-punches critic of fiscal policies that starve the
institutions educating the biggest proportion of students—"public
universities are getting screwed, and the community colleges in
particular are getting screwed," she says.
She is just as
dismissive of the "trophy-building exercises" of public and private
institutions that elevate their research profiles by hiring
professors who never teach or that dole out merit aid to enhance
their admissions pedigrees. And don't even get her started on the
climbing-wall craze or colleges whose swimming pools "have those
fake rivers for people to raft on."
But most of all,
through the Delta Project and other consulting work, she's been an
advocate for using financial information and other data to highlight
spending patterns and bring into greater relief the true costs of
academic and administrative decisions. In higher education, she
says, policy makers and administrators too often present "an
analytically correct road to complete ground fog."
Her antidote,
created in 2006, was the Delta Project on Postsecondary Costs,
Productivity, and Accountability, an independent, grant-backed
organization that produces the annual "Trends in College Spending"
and other reports. Over the past several years, the Delta Project's
reports have
highlighted the spending shift from instruction to administration,
the rising cost of employee benefits, and how community colleges
have been disproportionately hurt by public disinvestment.
Notably, the reports
are formatted to reflect the diversity of institutions—the
comparisons are organized by sector, so community colleges aren't
compared with research universities—and to reflect several
categories of spending, not simply revenues and expenses. Ms.
Wellman says that's deliberate. Too many of the generalizations
about higher-education costs are "based on one part of the
elephant," she says. "I wanted to neutralize that."
She has also been
eager to bust open some of the rationalizations that college leaders
trot out, such as that higher education's rising costs are justified
because of uniquely high personnel expenditures. "Everybody spends
80 percent on payroll, unless you're a lumber mill," she says.
That mix of
bluntness and evidence is what's brought the Delta Project, and her,
credibility and fans.
"It's the only place
in higher ed that's really laser-focused on the question 'How much
do you get for how much you put in?'" says Travis Reindl, program
director for the education division of the National Governors
Association. "She has made the cost issue more approachable than
anybody else I can think of, especially for people who don't eat,
sleep, and breathe this stuff."
A Background in Policy
But after five
years, Ms. Wellman and the Delta Project are undergoing a
transition. Under an arrangement Ms. Wellman masterminded, the
organization last month merged its database of financial information
into the National Center for Education Statistics and moved the
policy-analysis side of its work to the American Institutes for
Research, where it will continue to produce reports as the Delta
Cost Project AIR.
Ms. Wellman, 62,
will remain an adviser to the project, but will also devote more
time to her role as executive director of the National Association
of System Heads, a group for presidents and chancellors of public
university and community-college systems. She says the new role will
give her a different kind of platform to articulate "the moral
imperative" of financing the institutions attended by a majority of
students—including those who are the neediest.
It's a natural step
for her, says Charles B. Reed, chancellor of the California State
University system: "Jane has a vision, and I think it's because of
the work she's created in the Delta Project."
Ms. Wellman's
interest in higher education began largely by accident. She dropped
out of the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1960s to
get a job and establish residency as an in-state student. As she
tells it, she "ended up typing for David Breneman," who was then
finishing his dissertation before going on to become a nationally
known scholar on the economics of higher education. The subject
matter "resonated with my political interest," says Ms. Wellman.
She stayed at
Berkeley for a master's in higher education and then began working
as policy analyst, first for the University of California system and
later as staff director for the Ways and Means Committee in the
California State Assembly. (The man who would become her husband was
working there, too, for a committee on prisons.) She was frustrated
by a lot of what she saw, both in Sacramento and when she moved to
Washington, in the early 1990s, and worked for two and a half years
as a lobbyist for the National Association of Independent Colleges
and Universities. Her higher-education colleagues would say things
like "Complexity is our friend" when preparing to talk budgets to
legislators—and to bury them with numbers.
By the mid-2000s,
after about a decade of consulting for the Cal State system and
working on government and association commissions on college
costs—and seeing all of them "go to naught"—she decided it was time
"to create the data set and the methodology that I knew was
possible" to bring more clarity to the issues of spending.
"We were hugely
helped by the recession," she says. "At any other time, I would have
gotten much more pushback from the institutions."
Data for Everybody
Richard Staisloff, a
consultant on college finance who teaches with Ms. Wellman at an
executive doctoral program in education at the University of
Pennsylvania, says her contribution comes in "myth busting." Often,
he says, she makes it clear that where students are is not where
money is being spent. "It's hard to run from the data," says Mr.
Staisloff.
Mr. Reindl remembers
getting together for coffee with Ms. Wellman here in Washington and
listening as "she sketched out on a Starbucks napkin" her plans for
the Delta Project (she chose the name since it's the mathematical
symbol for "change"). Those ideas have taken root, he says. When
people like Jay Nixon, the governor of Missouri and a Democrat,
talk about state spending and degrees per dollar spent, "that's
really out of Delta, and that's a governor talking," he says. "She
has made it not only OK to talk about outcomes and resources in the
same sentence, she's made it necessary."
At least one critic
of rising college costs, however, questions whether she's too much
of an "establishment figure" to be an effective reformer. Richard
Vedder, a professor of economics at Ohio University (and a blogger
for The Chronicle), says her data are good, but "Jane
doesn't tell us what to do about it." He says he wishes she'd do
more to tie her information to data on what students are learning.
"Where does Academically Adrift fit into the picture?" he
asks.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Having taught managerial and cost accounting for over 40 years, it seems to me
that Jane Wellman is overlooking some systemic problems
of cost accounting, cost allocations, and cost aggregations that can
make her numbers very misleading ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
- Systemic Problem:
Aggregation Issues With Vegetable Nutrition
- Systemic Problem: All
Aggregations Are Arbitrary
- Systemic Problem: All
Aggregations Combine Different Measurements With Varying
Accuracies
- Systemic Problem: All
Aggregations Leave Out Important Components
- Systemic Problem: All
Aggregations Ignore Complex & Synergistic Interactions of Value
and Risk
- Systemic Problem:
Disaggregating of Value or Cost is Generally Arbitrary
- Systemic Problem:
Systems Are Too Fragile
- Systemic Problem:
More Rules Do Not Necessarily Make Accounting for Performance
More Transparent
- Systemic Problem:
Economies of Scale vs. Consulting Red Herrings in Auditing
- Systemic Problem:
Intangibles Are Intractable
Bob Jensen's threads on on other
questionable attempts to derive and compare costs of alternative degree
tracks in colleges and universities and the "worth" of professors ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#CostAccounting
---
A New US News Ranking of
Universities: This one is complicated because you can be a lousy
school and still do better than what's expected of a lousy school
and Vice Versa
For example a kid with an IQ of 70 is
doing great just to pass whereas a genius with an IQ of 160 is doing
rotten if he/she earns an B+
"Which Ranked Universities Are Doing
Better Than Their Academic Reputations?" by Robert Morse, US News,
November 29, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/college-rankings-blog/2012/11/29/which-ranked-universities-are-doing-better-than-their-academic-reputations?s_cid=rss:college-rankings-blog:which-ranked-universities-are-doing-better-than-their-academic-reputations
My usual criticisms of rankings can be
found in Bob Jensen's threads on ranking controversies ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
This is another one of those "vegetables" problems with multivariate
aggregations.
For all the hubbub about massive online classes
offered by elite universities, the real
potential game-changer in higher education is competency-based learning.
Ryan Craig. February 3, 2012
"Adventures in Wonderland, by Ryan Craig, Inside Higher Ed, February
3, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/02/03/essay-massive-online-courses-not-game-changing-innovation
"Will MITx Disrupt Higher Education?" by Robert Talbert, Chronicle
of Higher Education, December 20, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2011/12/20/will-mitx-disrupt-higher-education/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
"MIT Expands 'Open' Courses, Adds Completion Certificates," Inside
Higher Ed, December 19, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2011/12/19/mit-expands-open-courses-adds-completion-certificates
"MIT’s New Free Courses May Threaten (and Improve) the Traditional Model,
Program’s Leader Says," by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher
Education, February 6, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/mits-new-free-courses-may-threaten-the-traditional-model-programs-leader-says/35245?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's threads on open source video and course materials from
prestigious universities ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Bob Jensen's threads on education technology in general ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
THE COLLEGE OF 2020: STUDENTS ---
https://www.chronicle-store.com/ProductDetails.aspx?ID=78956&WG=0
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on online training and education alternatives ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
It's troubling enough to study one
university's financial reports. It's a nightmare to compare
universities.
"So You Want to Examine Your University's Financial Reports?"
by Charles Schwartz, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 7,
2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/So-You-Want-to-Examine-Your/130672/
With financial
difficulties facing many universities, some faculty members feel the
urge to take a
critical look into their own institution's
audited financial reports and see what they can learn.
The impulse is
admirable, but some guidance is needed before you enter such
unfamiliar territory. Having spent some time looking at such things
at my own institution (the University of California, which provides
an enormous amount of financial data online), I must warn about the
dreadful pitfalls awaiting any newcomer.
When you wade into
those financial reports, you should understand that the numbers are
invariably correct. What you need to be skeptical about are the
words and labels attached to the numbers. There is, of course, a
large amount of jargon. For example, if you wanted to find out how
much money is spent on administration and management, you might
start with "institutional support," which covers high-level
administration on the campus; then there is "academic
administration," (a subcategory of "academic support"), which covers
the deans' offices; and then there are lower levels of
administrative services buried in every other category.
It turns out that
the trickiest category is the one you would think faculty members
understand the best: expenditures for "instruction." Let me show you
some data for my own university, looking at its two most famous
campuses. This chart comes from page eight of the latest UC Annual
Financial Report.
Operating
Expenses by Function, 2010-11 ($ in Millions)
|
|
Total |
Instruction |
Research |
Medical Centers |
|
UC
Berkeley |
$2,026 |
$
566 |
$
533 |
0 |
|
UC
Los Angeles |
$4,563 |
$1,240 |
$
702 |
$1,285 |
UCLA has a medical
school and associated hospitals; Berkeley doesn't. That mostly
explains the large difference in total expenditures between the two
institutions. Otherwise, one thinks of the two campuses as quite
comparable in size and academic quality. So why is there such a
disparity in the expenditures for instruction? The answer is not
easy to find by simply reading the audited financial report.
The answer starts to
appear when you search more detailed financial reports (the best
resource at my university is called Campus Financial Schedules) and
find tables relating revenues to expenditures. For UCLA there is a
contribution of $530 million for instruction that comes from "sales
and services of educational activities."
What is that? It
turns out that faculty members in the medical school not only teach
and carry out research but are also doctors who treat patients. That
activity, called "clinical practice," is a lucrative business that
is conducted by the university. In the accounting system, such
revenues are lumped into the category "sales and services of
educational activities." Part of that money is used to cover costs
of the clinical practice (offices, supplies, personnel); and a large
part of it is paid out to the medical faculty members on top of
their regular academic salaries. It just happens that the accounting
system lumps all of those payments to faculty members under the
heading of "expenditures for instruction." Who knew?
Does that have any
troublesome consequences? Yes. There is a famous national repository
for detailed data on the nation's colleges and universities: the
U.S. Department of Education's Integrated Postsecondary Education
Data System (IPEDS). One of the things you can get from that lovely
online source is the per-student expenditure for instruction, for
any college or university, in any year. And if you look up that data
for Berkeley and UCLA, you will find that the latter amount is twice
as big as the former. IPEDS uses data supplied by the individual
campuses, the very same data that I mentioned above. Nobody seems to
be aware of how misleading those numbers can be if the campus you
ask about happens to be in the medical-services business. (By the
way, not all campuses with medical enterprises use the same
accounting procedures I described.) IPEDS is seriously distorted.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Think of college and university financial reports as being fund-based
accounting reports similar to municipal, state, and federal government
financial reports. Reporting standards are so messed up for such
financial reporting that it's usually possible to hide anything from the
public simply by overwhelming them with a truck load of information that
is not indexed or otherwise linked in a comprehensible manner.
The Sad State of Not-for-Profit
accounting ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#GovernmentalAccounting
Issues in Computing a College's Cost
of Degrees Awarded and "Worth" of Professors ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#CostAccounting
The University
of Texas System released data Thursday designed to help the system's
regents gauge the productivity of faculty members, The Texas
Tribune
reported -- one part of
an accountability push that has concerned
many professors and troubled some lawmakers. The massive spreadsheet
-- which system officials insisted was raw and unverified, and
should be treated as a draft -- contained numerous data points about
all individual professors, including their total compensation,
tenure status, total course enrollments, and information about
research awards. A similar effort this spring at Texas A&M
University -- also undertaken in response to pressure from Gov. Rick
Perry --
created a stir there.
"Release of Faculty-Productivity Data
Roils U. of Texas," by Audrey Williams June, Chronicle of Higher
Education, May 6, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Release-of/127439/
Issues in Computing a College's Cost
of Degrees Awarded and "Worth" of Professors (including discussions of
the Texas A&M cost allocation study) --- See below
April 7, 2011 message from Francine
McKenna
Huffington Post:
$817 an hour. Are professors worth what they're getting paid?
http://huff.to/dXxZx6
Original Tweet:
http://twitter.com/HuffingtonPost/statuses/55973110557581312
April 7, 2011 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Francine
I think the title put on this by Huffington Post is
misleading. The "worth" of somebody in a profession must focus as
much or even more on the worth of the benefits of that person
vis-a-vis the cost. My wife had four (soon to be five) very
expensive surgeries from one of the outstanding spine surgeons in
the world. We can aggregate the cost of this Boston surgeon's
billings, but how in the world would we ever measure his benefit or
worth?
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Erika2007.htm
Incidentally he's also one of the most important surgical residency
teachers in the shadows of the Harvard Medical School. Residents
seek him out because he's such a superb teacher. How do we
measure the value of his contributions to the future surgeries
performed by all the surgical residents who've worked closely with
this surgeon?
Similarly we can aggregate the cost of having Dennis Beresford for
14 years at the University of Georgia. But how in the world would we
ever measure his "worth?" How do we measure the value of his
contributions to all the accounting students who've worked closely
with this remarkable professor of accountancy?.
Of course we could also argue that the benefit of 23-year old Ms.
Kinder teaching kindergarten in South Chicago is invaluable. About
the only way we have of comparing a unique Harvard spine surgeon
with a kindergarten teacher is how much it takes to replace them
with professionals having comparable skills. I would argue that Ms.
Kinder can be replaced for a whole lot less money than my wife's
very uniquely qualified spine surgeon.
However, comparing their annual compensation is only a very, very
rough way to measure "worth" to society. Like you, I hesitate to
conclude that the "worth" of Stanley O'Neal was the $160 million it
took to get him out the door. Compensation is confounded by a whole
lot of factors other than societal "worth."
.
"Stanley O'Neal who is leaving Merrill
Lynch after giving it a big fat gift of a $8 billion dollar
write-off thanks to risky investments. The board just can't help but
feed this obesity epidemic. They're giving him $160 million plus in
severance for his troubles as he heads for the door. At some point,
the nation's corporations, or most pointedly, their corporate
boards, will realize throwing money at their CEOs is probably not
the best idea"
"Obesity Epidemic Among CEO Pay," The Huffington Post, November 1,
2007 ---
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eve-tahmincioglu/obesity-epidemic-among-ce_b_70810.html
Related to this is the vexing issue of computing the cost of degrees
awarded such as an undergraduate degree in art history versus a PhD
in accountancy ---
Issues in Computing a College's Cost of Degrees Awarded ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#CostAccounting
Here are my earlier threads on the controversial Texas A&M costing
study that focused more on comparing the cost of degrees awarded
than the "worth" of Aggie professors like Ed Swanson.or Tom Omer.
Also see ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#ManagementAccounting
Texas A&M Case on Computing the Cost of Professors and Academic Programs
Jensen Comment
In an advanced Cost/Managerial Accounting course this assignment could have two
parts. First assign the case below. Then assign student teams to write a case on
how to compute the cost of a given course, graduate in a given program, or a
comparison of a the cost of a distance education section versus an onsite
section of a given course taught by a tenured faculty member teaching three
courses in general as well as conducting research, performing internal service,
and performing external service in his/her discipline.
From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on November 5,
2010
Putting a Price on Professors
by: Stephanie Simon and Stephanie Banchero
Oct 23, 2010
Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com
TOPICS: Contribution Margin, Cost Management, Managerial Accounting
SUMMARY: The article describes a contribution margin review at Texas A&M
University drilled all the way down to the faculty member level. Also
described are review systems in place in California, Indiana, Minnesota,
Michigan, Ohio and other locations.
CLASSROOM APPLICATION: Managerial concepts of efficiency, contribution
margin, cost management, and the managerial dashboard in university settings
are discussed in this article.
QUESTIONS:
1. (Introductory) Summarize the reporting on Texas A&M University's Academic
Financial Data Compilation. Would you describe this as putting a "price" on
professors or would you use some other wording? Explain.
2. (Introductory) What is the difference between operational efficiency and
"academic efficiency"?
3. (Advanced) Review the table entitled "Controversial Numbers: Cash Flow at
Texas A&M." Why do you think that Chemistry, History, and English
Departments are more likely to generate positive cash flows than are
Oceanography, Physics and Astronomy, and Aerospace Engineering?
4. (Introductory) What source of funding for academics is excluded from the
table review in answer to question 3 above? How do you think that funding
source might change the scenario shown in the table?
5. (Advanced) On what managerial accounting technique do you think
Minnesota's state college system has modeled its method of assessing
campuses' performance?
6. (Advanced) Refer to the related article. A large part of cost increases
in university education stem from dormitories, exercise facilities, and
other building amenities on campuses. What is your reaction to this parent's
statement that universities have "acquiesced to the kids' desire to go to
school at luxury resorts"?
Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island
RELATED ARTICLES:
Letters to the Editor: What Is It That We Want Our Universities to Be?
by Hank Wohltjen, David Roll, Jane S. Shaw, Edward Stephens
Oct 30, 2010
Page: A16
"Putting a Price on Professors," by Stephanie Simon and Stephanie Banchero,
The Wall Street Journal, October 23, 2010 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703735804575536322093520994.html?mod=djem_jiewr_AC_domainid
Carol Johnson took the podium of a lecture hall one
recent morning to walk 79 students enrolled in an introductory biology
course through diffusion, osmosis and the phospholipid bilayer of cell
membranes.
A senior lecturer, Ms. Johnson has taught this
class for years. Only recently, though, have administrators sought to
quantify whether she is giving the taxpayers of Texas their money's worth.
A 265-page spreadsheet, released last month by the
chancellor of the Texas A&M University system, amounted to a profit-and-loss
statement for each faculty member, weighing annual salary against students
taught, tuition generated, and research grants obtained.
Ms. Johnson came out very much in the black; in the
period analyzed—fiscal year 2009—she netted the public university $279,617.
Some of her colleagues weren't nearly so profitable. Newly hired assistant
professor Charles Criscione, for instance, spent much of the year setting up
a lab to research parasite genetics and ended up $45,305 in the red.
The balance sheet sparked an immediate uproar from
faculty, who called it misleading, simplistic and crass—not to mention,
riddled with errors. But the move here comes amid a national drive, backed
by some on both the left and the right, to assess more rigorously what,
exactly, public universities are doing with their students—and their tax
dollars.
As budget pressures mount, legislators and
governors are increasingly demanding data proving that money given to
colleges is well spent. States spend about 11% of their general-fund budgets
subsidizing higher education. That totaled more than $78 billion in fiscal
year 2008, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers.
The movement is driven as well by dismal
educational statistics. Just over half of all freshmen entering four-year
public colleges will earn a degree from that institution within six years,
according to the U.S. Department of Education.
And among those with diplomas, just 31% could pass
the most recent national prose literacy test, given in 2003; that's down
from 40% a decade earlier, the department says.
"For years and years, universities got away with,
'Trust us—it'll be worth it,'" said F. King Alexander, president of
California State University at Long Beach.
But no more: "Every conversation we have with these
institutions now revolves around productivity," says Jason Bearce, associate
commissioner for higher education in Indiana. He tells administrators it's
not enough to find efficiencies in their operations; they must seek
"academic efficiency" as well, graduating more students more quickly and
with more demonstrable skills. The National Governors Association echoes
that mantra; it just formed a commission focused on improving productivity
in higher education.
This new emphasis has raised hackles in academia.
Some professors express deep concern that the focus on serving student
"customers" and delivering value to taxpayers will turn public colleges into
factories. They worry that it will upend the essential nature of a
university, where the Milton scholar who teaches a senior seminar to five
English majors is valued as much as the engineering professor who lands a
million-dollar research grant.
And they fear too much tinkering will destroy an
educational system that, despite its acknowledged flaws, remains the envy of
much of the world. "It's a reflection of a much more corporate model of
running a university, and it's getting away from the idea of the university
as public good," says John Curtis, research director for the American
Association of University Professors.
Efforts to remake higher education generally fall
into two categories. In some states, including Ohio and Indiana, public
officials have ordered a new approach to funding, based not on how many
students enroll but on what they accomplish.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
This case is one of the most difficult cases that managerial and cost
accountants will ever face. It deals with ugly problems where joint and indirect
costs are mind-boggling. For example, when producing mathematics graduates in
undergraduate and graduate programs, the mathematics department plays an even
bigger role in providing mathematics courses for other majors and minors on
campus. Furthermore, the mathematics faculty provides resources for internal
service to administration, external service to the mathematics profession and
the community, applied research, basic research, and on and on and on. Faculty
resources thus become joint product resources.
Furthermore costing faculty time is not exactly the same as costing the time
of a worker that adds a bumper to each car in an assembly line. While at home in
bed going to sleep or awakening in bed a mathematics professor might hit upon a
Eureka moment where time spent is more valuable than the whole previous lifetime
of that professor spent in working on campus. How do to factor in hours spent
in bed in CVP analysis and Cost-Benefit analysis? Work sampling and
time-motion studies used in factory systems just will not work well in academic
systems.
In Cost-Profit-Volume analysis the multi-product CPV model is
incomprehensible without making a totally unrealistic assumption that "sales
mix" parameters are constant for changing levels of volume. Without this
assumption for many "products" the solution to the CPV model blows our minds.
Another really complicating factor in CVP and C-B analysis are semi-fixed
costs that are constant over a certain time frame (such as a semester or a year
for adjunct employees) but variable over a longer horizon. Of course over
a very long horizon all fixed costs become variable, but this generally destroys
the benefit of a CVP analysis in the first place. One problem is that faculty
come in non-tenured adjunct, non-tenured tenure-track, and tenured varieties.
I could go on and on about why I would never attempt to do CVP or C-B
research for one of the largest universities of the world. But somebody at
Texas A&M has rushed in where angels fear to tread.
Bob Jensen's threads on managerial and cost accounting are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#ManagementAccounting
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Computing a College's Cost of a College
Degree:
This illustrates problems managerial accountants face when estimating various
types of costs in industry
"What Does a Degree Cost?" by Doug
Lederman, Inside Higher Ed, May 19, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/19/degree
College tuition
prices keep rising. State budgets are stagnant or shrinking. And
policy makers, from President Obama on down, are increasingly
calling for increases in the number of Americans who get some higher
education or training.
Those factors have
led more state legislators, trustees and others to argue that, to
accomplish the latter goal given the former circumstances, colleges
are going to have to lower what they spend to produce the average
credential they award. But any discussion of lowering the "cost per
degree" must start with a more fundamental question: What does a
degree cost to produce now?
That question
may be basic, but it is not simple, as
a new report from the Delta Project on
Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability
makes clear. The paper, prepared by Nate Johnson, associate director
of institutional planning and research at the University of Florida,
lays out a range of possible approaches to calculating the cost of a
college degree and then calculates them using a rich set of data
from the State University System of Florida, where Johnson formerly
worked.
The paper shows that
it is distinctly possible to come up with such a figure, but the
wide variation in the numbers -- based on institution type, program,
degree level, and other factors -- suggests that the answer will
depend in large part on how the question is framed. And that
decision is a surprisingly value-laden one, says Johnson. "You frame
the question one way if you are only interested in students who
graduate, and another way if you want to know the cost for people
who go to college and don't complete," he says. "The point is, this
is not just a data question. It's a question of what it is that we
want from our colleges and universities."
The broad work of
the Delta Project and its founder, Jane Wellman, is to analyze the
"spending side" of the higher education cost and price picture; the
group has released a series of reports that try to document the
interplay of colleges' revenues and expenditures, and how those
trends affect what they charge to students. The new study, which
grew out of Johnson's work in Florida, he says, aims to develop a
"common language," if not a common format, for focusing the
discussion about how one might measure the cost of a degree in a
particular institution, system or state. Toward that end, Johnson
proposes several possible ways of calculating the average cost of a
degree.
The analyses are
based on data showing that the Florida university system incurred an
average of $288 in direct and indirect instructional expenditures
per credit hour, with wide variation by level ($188 for lower
division undergraduate, $537 for master's, etc.), institution ($240
for an upper level undergraduate credit at the massive University of
Central Florida, $677 for the same credit at the 700-student New
College), and field of study ($159 in family/consumer sciences, $509
for natural resources/conservation). The analysis counts only those
expenditures derived from state appropriations and student tuition,
excluding endowment and other funds.
The first estimate,
which Johnson calls the "catalog cost," calculates what a college
would spend to educate a student who fulfills the "catalog
requirements" of the average degree to the letter -- no more, no
less. (The equation: cost per credit hour x instructional
expenditures/credit hours.) The average cost is $26,485, with
institutions within the Florida system ranging from $22,440 to
nearly double that. Johnson also found significant variation by
field because of vastly different requirements and program length,
with mechanical engineering averaging $37,870 vs. $27,159 for
elementary education.
The catalog method
is easily understood, but it "does not reflect actual student
behavior," Johnson notes. More accurate in gauging how students
actually maneuver through institutions, he writes, is the
"transcript method" of cost analysis, in which the total number of
credit hours students take are multiplied by the cost per credit
hour, and then divided by the number of degrees awarded. The average
freshman who entered a Florida system university and graduated in
2003-4 "attempted" 131 credits, including failed or withdrawn
courses and subtracting for any AP or dual enrollment courses that
reduced their course requirements.
The average
"transcript cost," then, was $31,763; converting to 2006 dollars, to
make parallel to the figures from the "catalog cost" analysis,
Johnson writes, the average figure is $33,672. (The 2003-4 figure
for mechanical engineering was $47,257.)
Both the catalog and
transcript cost methods factor into the calculation only those costs
incurred by students who actually graduate. The third major
analysis, "full cost attribution," examines the entire amount that
an institution or system spent on instructional purposes to achieve
an "aggregate level of degree completion." The equation looks like
this: all credits taken at an institution over three years x the
three-year average cost per credit hour/three years of degrees.
Not surprisingly,
because all courses taken by all students would be allocated to the
smaller proportion who actually earned degrees, this produces the
highest cost per degree number; $37,757 in 2002-3 dollars,
equivalent to $40,645 in 2005-6, Johnson writes. This analysis grows
less predictable and valid the more narrowly it is drawn, he adds,
because programs with high attrition, or into which many students
transfer late in the game, can have their figures drastically
altered. The overall high and low for the Florida university system,
for example, were $170,831 for "multidisciplinary studies" and
$21,473 for parks and recreation, and the variation by degree level
was enormous: $33,425 for a law degree, $259,781 for an M.D., and
$121,725 for a doctorate.
So which is the most
accurate assessment of what a university spends to educate a
graduate? The catalog cost of $26,485, the transcript cost of
$33,672, or the "full cost" $40,645? The last is "probably closer to
an answer" to the question that policy makers are increasingly
asking now, about "what would we have to spend to get more
graduates," though that assumes that colleges maintained their
current enrollment and expenditure levels, he notes.
But the other key
point, Johnson says, is that the choice of how you measure cost
depends, to an extent, on how you perceive the role of colleges.
Using the "full cost" measure, he asserts, more or less says that
most of what a university does is designed to educate students, and
that "all of those costs could be attributed to the cost of
producing college graduates," as overhead, he says.
"If you highly value
research or public service," though, "you could almost say that the
graduates are free -- a byproduct" of what you spend on those other
purposes.
Jensen Comment
See Bob Jensen's threads on "Systemic" problems of accountancy ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
Especially note the problems of joint costing that plague college cost
accounting.
A course illustration of ethics and
questionable uses of misleading cost accounting
"Colleges Spend Far Less on Educating
Students Than They Claim, Report Says," by Robin Wilson, Chronicle
of Higher Education, April 7, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Colleges-Spend-Far-Less-on/127040/
While universities
routinely maintain that it costs them more to educate students than
what students pay, a new report says exactly the opposite is true.
The report was
released today by the Center for College Affordability and
Productivity, which is directed by Richard K. Vedder, an economist
who is also an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute
and a Chronicle
blogger. It says student tuition
payments actually subsidize university spending on things that are
unrelated to classroom instruction, like research, and that
universities unfairly inflate the stated cost of providing an
education by counting unrelated spending into the mix of what it
costs them to educate students.
"The authors
find that many colleges and universities are paid more to provide an
education than they spend providing one," says a news release on the
report, "Who Subsidizes Whom?"
The report's authors
used data from the U.S. Education Department's Integrated
Postsecondary Education Data System, or Ipeds, to conclude that more
than half of students attend institutions that take in more per
student in tuition payments than what it actually costs them to
deliver an education.
The chief reason
universities inflate the figures on what they spend to educate
students, says the report, is that institutions include all of their
spending—whether it is directly related to instruction or not—when
calculating what it costs them to provide an education. In reality,
says the report, depending on the type of institution, it can cost
universities much less to educate students than what the
institutions bring in through tuition charges.
"This study finds
that education and related spending is only a portion of many
institutions' budgets," says a news release on the study, "and that
many schools spend large amounts on things unrelated to educating
students."
The report uses
Dartmouth College as a poster child to illustrate the gap between
the actual costs of providing an education and what an institution
says it spends. On its Web site, the report says, the Dartmouth
College Fund maintained that while the institution charged
undergraduates about $50,000 each in academic 2009-10, the college
actually spent about $104,400 per student. While the center's report
notes that Dartmouth indeed spent more over all per student than
what it took in through tuition payments, "this does not mean that
students are being subsidized because not all of that spending is
used toward specifically educational purposes."
For example, says
the report, Dartmouth said it spent $37,000 per student on "academic
support," $24,000 per student for research, $15,000 for
"institutional support," and $12,000 for "student services." But,
says the report, "very little of that $88,000 is properly attributed
to the cost of providing an education."
A spokesman for
Dartmouth said it is legitimate for institutions to count research
expenditures as part of instruction. Dartmouth faculty members are
"renowned as teacher-scholars who involve their students in their
scholarship," said the spokesman. "Discovery of knowledge is a key
part of Dartmouth’s fundamental mission and a liberal-arts
education."
The report
criticizes colleges for stating that they subsidize their students'
education, saying "conventional wisdom is often wrong" in that
regard.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on cost accounting
are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory02.htm#ManagementAccounting
Supplemental fees for excellence
A rose by any other name is , ... , ah er , ... a required supplemental
enhancement charge"A Fee That Is Not a Fee," by Paul D. Thacker,
Inside Higher Ed, November 9, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/09/enhancement
But the University of Florida is quite
careful to not call the $1,000 yearly hit to students “tuition” or a
“fee.” The creative wording is causing some giggles. “The Board of
Governors supports this third category of charges,” said Danaya
Wright, professor of law and chair of the Faculty Senate. She then
laughed. “I was going to say ‘fee,’ but it’s an additional charge.”
Wright said that the need to create this
third category arose because the Legislature is loathe to raise
tuition and fees. Florida funds the
Bright Futures Scholarship Program
which
pays for 100 percent of tuition and fees for high school students
who apply with a grade point average of 3.5 and 75 percent of that
for students with a G.P.A. of 3.0. Around 95 percent of in-state
students at Florida are Bright Futures Scholars, and to control the
cost of the program, Wright said, the Legislature has effectively
frozen tuition and fees, leaving the university in a budget bind. By
creating this new charge that is not “tuition” nor a “fee,” the
university can raise funds without affecting the budget for Bright
Futures — because the students won’t be able to expect the state
program to cover the costs.
Jensen Comment
My daughter went to the University of Texas. I discovered that Texas is
most clever about charging hidden and disguised fees. It turns out that
tuition is the cheapest of all the billings of students at UT or so it
seems.
"Public Universities Chase Excellence, at a Price," by Tamar Lewin,
The New York Times, December 21, 2006 ---
If there is any goal that the University of
Florida has pursued as fervently as a national football championship for
the Gators, it is a place among the nation’s highest-ranked public
universities.
“We need a top-10 university, so our kids can
get the same education they would get at Harvard or Yale,” said J.
Bernard Machen, the university president.
To upgrade the university, Dr. Machen is
seeking a $1,000 tuition surcharge that would be used mostly to hire
more professors and lower the student-faculty ratio, not coincidentally
one of the factors in the much-watched college rankings published
annually by U.S. News & World Report. This year, that list ranked
Florida 13th among public universities in the United States.
Like Florida, more leading public universities
are striving for national status and drawing increasingly impressive and
increasingly affluent students, sometimes using financial aid to lure
them. In the process, critics say, many are losing force as engines of
social mobility, shortchanging low-income and minority students, who are
seriously underrepresented on their campuses.
“Public universities were created to make
excellence available to all qualified students,” said Kati Haycock,
director of the Education Trust, an advocacy group, “but that commitment
appears to have diminished over time, as they choose to use their
resources to try to push up their rankings. It’s all about reputation,
selectivity and ranking, instead of about the mission of finding and
educating future leaders from their state.”
While a handful of public universities have
long stood among the nation’s top institutions — the University of
California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan among them — many
have only recently joined their ranks.
Continued in article
Question
What's so controversial about Duke's Group of 88?
What's left to be done at Duke is taking
action against the Group of 88. This group is made up of Duke professors
representing more than a dozen academic departments at Duke who took out
a large newspaper ad that constituted a rush to judgment about the guilt
of the three accused lacrosse players. The ad: (1) publicly demeaned the
players (their own students about whom they are supposed to care), (2)
castigated the players for their actions (as the Group of 88 presumed
those actions to be) and, (3) called for the lacrosse players to simply
confess to their presumed misdeeds.
Charles F. Falk, "What'll Be Done About Duke's 'Group of 88'? July 7,
2007," The Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2007 ---
Click Here
The 88 Duke University faculty members who took
out a hysterical ad, supporting those local loudmouths who were denouncing
and threatening the Duke students, have apparently had nothing at all to say
now. Not only did many Duke University professors join the lynch mob
atmosphere, so did the Duke University administration, which got rid of the
lacrosse coach and cancelled the team's season, without a speck of evidence
that anybody was guilty of anything.
Thomas Sowell, "The Duke Case's Unfinished Business," RealClearPolitics,
June 19, 2007 ---
Click Here
Duke Reaches Settlement With Players
Duke University has reached an
undisclosed financial settlement with three former lacrosse players
falsely accused of rape, the school said Monday. Duke suspended Reade
Seligmann, Collin Finnerty and Dave Evans after they were charged last
year with raping a stripper at an off-campus party. The university also
canceled the team's season and forced their coach to resign. ''We
welcomed their exoneration and deeply regret the difficult year they and
their families have had to endure,'' the school said in a statement.
''These young men and their families have been the subject of intense
scrutiny that has taken a heavy toll.'' The allegations were debunked in
April by state prosecutors, who said the players were the innocent
victims of a ''tragic rush to accuse'' by Durham County District
Attorney Mike Nifong. He was disbarred Saturday for breaking more than
two dozen rules of professional conduct in his handling of the case.
The New York Times, June 18, 2007 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Duke-Lacrosse.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Question
How can you ruin a student's career and maybe her/his life on a discussion
board?
Answer
Trash talk on AutoAdmit (which bills itself at "The most prestigious
college discussion board in the world.") ---
http://www.autoadmit.com/
"Trash Talk: Some lawyers-to-be should exercise their right to
remain silent," by Elizabeth Wurtzel, The Wall Street Journal,
March 19, 2007 ---
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009805
It's hard out there for a law student. All
the stuff to stumble through on the way to that J.D.: torts,
property, contracts, evidence, civil procedure, AutoAdmit.
That last item is a new development: a Web
site of postings for law schools prestigious and otherwise, where
students blab about whatever. An awful lot of it is about other
students, most of it mean-spirited. This is all extremely weird for
those of us born before the Carter administration, who tend to
assume that scrutiny about breast implants--there was a whole thread
of discussion devoted to whether one Ms. J.D.-to-be was
silicone-enhanced--is reserved for celebrities. The flat, affectless
sexual bravado of the trash-talk on AutoAdmit is also a bit of a
shock, coming from allegedly intelligent legal minds.
The AutoAdmitters were happily going about
their gossip, yakking away like yentas pinning laundry on the
clothesline, until sometime last week. That's when the Washington
Post ran a front-page story about some young women here at Yale Law
School whose careers--if not their lives--had been ruined by some
salacious postings. The descriptions of them--sluts and whores--and
the suggestions about what might be done to them--rape and
sodomy--were showing up on Google searches of their names, and had
prevented at least one of them from securing employment.
Since then, Dean Elena Kagan at Harvard Law
School and Dean Harold Koh here at Yale have sent out open letters,
condemning the nasty communications. We've had speak-outs and
write-ins, organized blue-ribbon panels and worn red outfits for
solidarity. There's talk of legal remedies and media campaigns.
Mostly, the young women would simply like the offending postings
removed from the bulletin board. This is not likely to happen. Not
because it shouldn't--of course it should. But because once again,
for about the 80th time in my memory and for at least the 80,000th
time in the life of this country, here is an issue in which the
right to free speech--as opposed to the need for everyone to just
shut up--is going to overwhelm us all.
Cybertalk is about as governable as Iraq,
and the First Amendment allows for most other expression, making the
U.S. a very loud place. For every interest group that says it's
being silenced, for all the people who think they're not permitted
to talk back to power, there are the real rest of us for whom the
din is deafening. The firstness of the First Amendment trumps
everything that competes with it. This is particularly so if you're
going to take your case as high as the Supreme Court, which has
struck down rape shield laws and permitted pictures that resemble
kiddie porn--in the name of First Amendment freedom. For all
Congress's threats to pass a bill banning the burning of the
American flag, even Justice Antonin Scalia has voted for the right
to set Old Glory ablaze, because the First Amendment guarantees it.
Free expression is an issue that everyone can agree on:
old-fashioned conservative textualists, because it's in the
Constitution, and new-fangled liberal interpreters, because, well,
it's in the Constitution. The Federalist Society and the ACLU all
believe the same thing: the First Amendment means that anyone can
say just about anything.
And really, short of that old
chestnut--screaming "Fire!" on the main floor of
Bloomingdale's--there's not a whole lot you can't say in public.
Including the word "faggot," as we recently found out. Social norms
may force you to go to rehab for your stupidity, but the law can't
touch you at all. Likewise, there's not much that cannot be said
about you. "Exposure of the self to others in varying degrees is a
concomitant of life in a civilized society," opined the Supreme
Court in 1967. This was decades before "Cops," in the century before
YouTube.
In such a world, what to do about AutoAdmit?
To start with, pray for mercy, because based on the content of its
postings, the future of jurisprudence does not look good. Having
done that, plead for civility. Just because we can say anything,
does that mean we must say everything? While I could never advocate
censorship, I would certainly ask for sensitivity. We all have to
live in this world, all seven billion of us, brushing closer and
closer together, and bristling in this claustrophobia. Maybe we
ought to be slightly more careful before we say whatever it is we
feel compelled to freely express. Maybe we ought to stop, have a
hesitation, before pressing the send button.
Continued in article
Question
How can you ruin a student's career and maybe her/his life with a newspaper
add from the professors or a posting on a discussion
board?
Answer
Trash talk on AutoAdmit (which bills itself at "The most prestigious
college discussion board in the world.") ---
http://www.autoadmit.com/
"Trash Talk: Some lawyers-to-be should exercise their right to
remain silent," by Elizabeth Wurtzel, The Wall Street Journal,
March 19, 2007 ---
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009805
It's hard out there for a law student. All
the stuff to stumble through on the way to that J.D.: torts,
property, contracts, evidence, civil procedure, AutoAdmit.
That last item is a new development: a Web
site of postings for law schools prestigious and otherwise, where
students blab about whatever. An awful lot of it is about other
students, most of it mean-spirited. This is all extremely weird for
those of us born before the Carter administration, who tend to
assume that scrutiny about breast implants--there was a whole thread
of discussion devoted to whether one Ms. J.D.-to-be was
silicone-enhanced--is reserved for celebrities. The flat, affectless
sexual bravado of the trash-talk on AutoAdmit is also a bit of a
shock, coming from allegedly intelligent legal minds.
The AutoAdmitters were happily going about
their gossip, yakking away like yentas pinning laundry on the
clothesline, until sometime last week. That's when the Washington
Post ran a front-page story about some young women here at Yale Law
School whose careers--if not their lives--had been ruined by some
salacious postings. The descriptions of them--sluts and whores--and
the suggestions about what might be done to them--rape and
sodomy--were showing up on Google searches of their names, and had
prevented at least one of them from securing employment.
Since then, Dean Elena Kagan at Harvard Law
School and Dean Harold Koh here at Yale have sent out open letters,
condemning the nasty communications. We've had speak-outs and
write-ins, organized blue-ribbon panels and worn red outfits for
solidarity. There's talk of legal remedies and media campaigns.
Mostly, the young women would simply like the offending postings
removed from the bulletin board. This is not likely to happen. Not
because it shouldn't--of course it should. But because once again,
for about the 80th time in my memory and for at least the 80,000th
time in the life of this country, here is an issue in which the
right to free speech--as opposed to the need for everyone to just
shut up--is going to overwhelm us all.
Cybertalk is about as governable as Iraq,
and the First Amendment allows for most other expression, making the
U.S. a very loud place. For every interest group that says it's
being silenced, for all the people who think they're not permitted
to talk back to power, there are the real rest of us for whom the
din is deafening. The firstness of the First Amendment trumps
everything that competes with it. This is particularly so if you're
going to take your case as high as the Supreme Court, which has
struck down rape shield laws and permitted pictures that resemble
kiddie porn--in the name of First Amendment freedom. For all
Congress's threats to pass a bill banning the burning of the
American flag, even Justice Antonin Scalia has voted for the right
to set Old Glory ablaze, because the First Amendment guarantees it.
Free expression is an issue that everyone can agree on:
old-fashioned conservative textualists, because it's in the
Constitution, and new-fangled liberal interpreters, because, well,
it's in the Constitution. The Federalist Society and the ACLU all
believe the same thing: the First Amendment means that anyone can
say just about anything.
And really, short of that old
chestnut--screaming "Fire!" on the main floor of
Bloomingdale's--there's not a whole lot you can't say in public.
Including the word "faggot," as we recently found out. Social norms
may force you to go to rehab for your stupidity, but the law can't
touch you at all. Likewise, there's not much that cannot be said
about you. "Exposure of the self to others in varying degrees is a
concomitant of life in a civilized society," opined the Supreme
Court in 1967. This was decades before "Cops," in the century before
YouTube.
In such a world, what to do about AutoAdmit?
To start with, pray for mercy, because based on the content of its
postings, the future of jurisprudence does not look good. Having
done that, plead for civility. Just because we can say anything,
does that mean we must say everything? While I could never advocate
censorship, I would certainly ask for sensitivity. We all have to
live in this world, all seven billion of us, brushing closer and
closer together, and bristling in this claustrophobia. Maybe we
ought to be slightly more careful before we say whatever it is we
feel compelled to freely express. Maybe we ought to stop, have a
hesitation, before pressing the send button.
Continued in article
Authoring and Faculty Ethics or Lack Thereof
Question
How do prestigious professors plagiarize in textbook "authoring" without
even knowing it?
"Schoolbooks Are Given F’s in Originality," by Diana Jean Schemo,
The New York Times, July 14, 2006 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/13/books/13textbook.html
The language is virtually identical to that
in the 2005 edition of another textbook, “America: Pathways to the
Present,” by different authors. The books use substantially
identical language to cover other subjects as well, including the
disputed presidential election of 2000, the Persian Gulf war, the
war in Afghanistan and the creation of the Department of Homeland
Security.
Just how similar passages showed up in two
books is a tale of how the largely obscure $4 billion a year world
of elementary and high school textbook publishing often works, for
these passages were not written by the named authors but by one or
more uncredited writers. And while it is rare that the same language
is used in different books, it is common for noted scholars to give
their names to elementary and high school texts, lending prestige
and marketing power, while lesser known writers have a hand in the
books and their frequent revisions.
As editions pass, the names on the spine of
a book may have only a distant or dated relation to the words
between the covers, diluted with each successive edition, people in
the industry, and even authors, say.
In the case of the two history texts, the
authors appeared mortified by the similarities and said they had had
nothing to do with the changes.
“They were not my words,” said Allan
Winkler, a historian at Miami University of Ohio, who wrote the
“Pathways” book with Andrew Cayton, Elisabeth I. Perry and Linda
Reed. “It’s embarrassing. It’s inexcusable.”
Wendy Spiegel, a spokeswoman for Pearson
Prentice Hall, which published both books and is one of the nation’s
largest textbook publishers, called the similarities “absolutely an
aberration.”
She said that after Sept. 11, 2001, her
company, like other publishers, hastily pulled textbooks that had
already been revised and were lined up for printing so that the
terror attacks could be accounted for. The material on the attacks,
as well as on the other subjects, was added by in-house editors or
outside writers, she said.
She added that it was “unfortunate” that
the books had identical passages, but said that there were only
“eight or nine” in volumes that each ran about 1,000 pages.
Gilbert T. Sewall, director of the American
Textbook Council, a nonprofit group that monitors history textbooks,
said he was not familiar with this particular incident. But Mr.
Sewall said the publishing industry had a tendency to see authors’
names as marketing tools.
“The publishers have a brand name and that
name sells textbooks,” he said. “That’s why you have
well-established authorities who put their names on the spine, but
really have nothing to do with the actual writing process, which is
all done in-house or by hired writers.”
The industry is replete with examples of
the phenomenon. One of the most frequently used high school history
texts is “Holt the American Nation,” first published in 1950 as
“Rise of the American Nation” and written by Lewis Paul Todd and
Merle Curti. For each edition, the book appeared with new material,
long after one author had died and the other was in a nursing home.
Eventually, the text was reissued as the work of another historian,
Paul S. Boyer.
Professor Boyer, emeritus professor of
history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, acknowledged that
the original authors had supplied the structure of the book that
carries his name. But he said that as he revises the text, he adds
new scholarship, themes and interpretations. He defended the
disappearance of the original authors’ names from the book, saying
it would be more misleading to carry their names when they had no
say in current editions.
“Textbooks are hardly the same as the Iliad
or Beowulf,” he added.
Richard Blake, a spokesman for Harcourt
Education, a division of Holt, said none of the editors involved in
the extended use of the Todd and Curti names were still with the
company. But he said that now “all contributors and reviewers on
each edition are listed in the front of the book,” and that naming
new principal authors depended largely on the extent of their
contributions.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
What also happens in authoring of textbooks for basic courses in
accounting is that a senior professor at a huge-market college is added
largely for purposes of gaining an adoption in his/her university or
community college. The actual contribution of that professor to the book
is somewhat as questionable as when some prestigious authors lend their
names to a basic textbook where a lesser-known "co-author" wrote most of
the book.
Bob Jensen's threads on professors who cheat and how they do it
are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoCheat
Does the Fed Control Academic Economics?
The economic collapse of the last year has left many
wondering why more economists didn't warn of the looming disaster. An article in
The Huffington Post suggests that the problem is
the increasingly close relationship between academic economists and the Federal
Reserve, which is alleged to have made the professors reluctant to question what
the Fed was saying. The article notes the many research contracts the Fed awards
to professors and the dominance of the Fed on certain editorial boards. "One
critical way the Fed exerts control on academic economists is through its
relationships with the field's gatekeepers. For instance, at the Journal of
Monetary Economics, a must-publish venue for rising economists, more than half
of the editorial board members are currently on the Fed payroll -- and the rest
have been in the past," the article says. The editor of the journal is quoted
calling the idea of control "a silly one" and saying that it had published work
critical of the Fed.
Inside Higher Ed, September 10, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/09/10/qt#207906
"Faculty Theft," by Carolyn Foster Segal, Inside Higher Ed,
November 6, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/11/05/segal
Thus,
just as the
final decision regarding Glenn
Poshard,
president of Southern Illinois
University (yes, he plagiarized; no,
he won’t be fired) was setting off
yet another round of blogging, I
found myself starting the day with
The Great Gatsby and ending
with Oedipus Rex, thus neatly
pairing a novel in which “Everybody
lies” (the line is Gregory House’s,
although it might easily be Nick
Carraway’s) and a play in which the
tragic hero — driving the plot
toward his own destruction — argues
that “the truth must be made known.”
About a year or so ago, I put out a call at an
online forum for tales about faculty plagiarists.
What was driving my interest was the sneaking
suspicion that in the case of plagiarism,
colleges often have a double standard: one standard
for students and another for faculty and
administrators.
If it is sometimes amusing (note that I said
sometimes — more often it is disheartening and
aggravating) to listen to the excuses that students
will argue in defense of their cheating ways, it is
nothing less than appalling to hear a tenured
administrator plead that he wasn’t adequately
schooled in the meaning of plagiarism or to listen
to a faculty member justify her appropriation of
another’s work under the headings of forgetfulness,
ignorance, or the impossibility of original thought
in the 21st century. If one has already committed
one egregious act — that of stealing — is it
surprising that he or she would attempt to lie his
or her way out of it? And most appalling of all is
how many instances of faculty plagiarism are simply
left alone by administrators.
My
correspondents in the forum answered my query with
examples of faculty plagiarists great and small:
some offenders had been outed and severely
penalized; still other perpetrators of the crime had
triumphed with no punishment at all. A number of
forum participants advised against becoming involved
in bringing any sorts of charges, and, based on the
sagas of revenge cited by several individuals, this
began to seem like very good advice.
Formal grievances filed against them, bad teaching
schedules, being shrouded by other departmental
members, seeing no recourse but to leave: These are
some of the repercussions not for faculty members
who cheat, but for those who uncover the evidence.
Having once or twice stolen the good work of others,
some plagiarists’ line of defense is to go after the
good names of those who cried “foul.”
Plagiarism, I was beginning to understand, was only
part of the story. This fact was reinforced for me
by one of the final postings (readers having already
begun to move on to other forums and forms of
discontent). Why not, my anonymous source
proposed, broaden the topic to faculty theft?
Why not indeed? As the writer — a veteran of
academe, who gave me permission to quote his
response — pointed out:
“Plagiarism” is a somewhat narrowly-understood term
— i.e. the verbatim incorporation of another’s words
without acknowledgment — and the more general
defining principle, theft, sometimes gets lost in
the parsing. I would argue that other academic
thefts — in particular the hijackings of ideas,
proposals, (co-)credit, publishing opportunities,
support funds, courses, students, lab space — are
equally — if not more pernicious.
The
writer was indeed correct: plagiarism is just one
category of the theft that’s practiced within the
halls of academe. I’ve also observed that
individuals rarely commit one isolated act of
thievery — there’s usually a pattern. And to my
generous correspondent’s catalog, I would add the
losses of time, concentration, reputation, joy, and
friendships with colleagues.
What
explains the lists above? Is it simply, as in the
maxim attributed to Henry Kissinger, that university
politics are so vicious because the stakes are so
small? Do academic departments breed this behavior,
or is there something in the makeup of the offender
that led him or her to choose — and abuse — this
line of professional work? In an outside, follow-up
e-mail, my anonymous correspondent continued: “I
think you will find that the most egregious serial
offenders in academe fall under the DSM-IV category
of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.... The essence
of the disorder is an inability to distinguish
between substance and grandiose facade.”
If
that’s the case, then a proposal regarding the
faculty self-evaluation form at my college would be
of even less use that it originally appeared to be.
Several years ago, a provost and subcommittee of the
curricular/academic policy committee suggested that
we add a question involving a statement of ethics:
Faculty members would be asked to describe and
assess in detail their ethical performance. The
introduction of this question provoked a lively
debate. The conundrum it posed was similar to that
of the sink-or-swim test for witchcraft. If a
faculty member composed a lengthy screed on his/her
ethical behavior, wasn’t he/she protesting too much?
If, on the other hand, a faculty member refused to
answer the question, was that an indication that
he/she was in fact guilty of unethical behavior?
Wasn’t the question an insult to anyone striving to
live a moral, ethical life? And finally, what would
a serial offender do with this opportunity? How
likely was it that a faculty member who had
misbehaved would seek atonement on the front page of
the yearly self-evaluation?
As for what
constituted unethical behavior, our discussion never
reached the heights or depths of plagiarism. The one
example that I can recall went something like this:
If you bring cookies for your students on the day
that they fill out the course evaluations, is that
ethical? It’s certainly food for thought — and we
reflected on that dilemma for a bit, while gazing at
the plates of cookies that are always provided for
faculty meetings. (We were, in fact, ahead of our
time, at least on this issue —
see
“Sweetening the Deal”
and the accompanying
commentary on Inside Higher Ed.)
The
question on ethics was cut from the faculty
evaluation forms — not for any philosophical reason
but because the subcommittee had neglected to follow
the procedure for such revisions that is mandated by
the faculty handbook. When the topic surfaced
several months later, there was general agreement
that just as the students must follow an honor code,
so too do faculty members everywhere have an
implicit code. We all know, however, that there is
no honor among thieves.
Plagiarism: Judge Posner Builds a Reputation Cutting and Pasting Opinions
Written by Others
THE club of people accused of plagiarism gets ever larger. High-profile members
include Stephen Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Kaavya Viswanathan — of chick-lit
notoriety — and now even Ian McEwan, whose best-selling novel “Atonement” has
recently been discovered to harbor passages from a World War II memoir by
Lucilla Andrews. Plagiarism is apparently so rife these days that it would be
extremely satisfying to discover that “The Little Book of Plagiarism,” by
Richard A. Posner, has itself been plagiarized. The watchdogs have been caught
before. The section of the University of Oregon handbook that deals with
plagiarism, for example, was copied from the Stanford handbook. Mr. Posner,
moreover, is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh
Circuit and a law professor at the University of Chicago who turns out books and
articles with annoying frequency and facility. Surely, under deadline pressure,
he is tempted every now and then to resort to a little clipping and pasting,
especially since he cuts members of his own profession a good deal of slack on
the plagiarism issue. In the book he readily acknowledges that judges publish
opinions all the time that are in fact written by their clerks, but he excuses
the practice on the ground that everyone knows about it and therefore no one is
harmed. What he doesn’t consider much is whether a judge who gains a reputation
for particularly well-written opinions or for seldom being reversed — or, for
that matter, who is freed from his legal chores to do freelance writing —
doesn’t benefit in much the same way as a student who persuades one of the smart
kids to do his homework for him.
Charles McGrath, "Plagiarism: Everybody Into the Pool," New York Times Book
Review, January 6 2007 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/education/edlife/07books.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Jensen Comment
My question is why it is so inconvenient for Judge Posner to add citations to
his plagiarisms?
Accreditation: Why We Must Change ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
Question
Since the Virginia Tech massacre are college instructors more at risk?
"A Very Scary Story," by Elizabeth
Reddin, Inside Higher Ed, May 17, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/05/17/writing
In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings and
revelations about the killer’s violent writings,
creative writing faculty everywhere faced a stark
reminder of the
occupational hazards they face in distinguishing
fiction from potentially scary fact, in cultivating
an atmosphere fostering free expression and
creativity while maintaining standards not only of
art, but also of safety. The challenges inherent in
that process have proven to be anything but abstract
at San Jose State University, where a lecturer opted
to stop teaching his creative writing class in April
after receiving a disturbing student assignment.
Mitch Berman, director of San Jose State’s
Center for Literary Arts,
spoke with the provost April 23 about a story turned
in prior to the April 16 Virginia Tech shootings,
Pat Harris, a university spokeswoman, said
Wednesday. The university police department
ultimately determined the student did not pose a
threat, but several of the remaining class meetings
for the undergraduate fiction course were canceled,
with two substitute instructors from the English
department teaching the balance of classes this
semester.
The story — described
by
the student newspaper as
“a 17-page fictional narrative about an English
student who convinces a vampire lover to kill the
student’s ‘unethical, wicked’ professor — features,
of course a fictionalized professor whose quotes are
so similar to Berman’s that, as he said, “the
students and I recognized my portrayal in them.”
“The
student’s story created a great deal of anxiety, and
several other students wrote me during the aftermath
of the shooting at Virginia Tech (the story was
written before the shooting) to question their own
safety in the classroom. I view my primary
responsibility as that of maintaining a safe
environment that is conducive to learning. It was
clear that the student’s story had created an
atmosphere of conflict in the classroom which would
make learning very difficult,” Berman said via
e-mail. To alleviate the “atmosphere of conflict,”
Berman proposed either teaching the course online or
hiring a substitute (the students, he said,
ultimately favored the latter option).
“I’ve been teaching full-time for 10 years. I’ve
received many gory stories and stories that were not
to my taste,” he added in a telephone interview
Wednesday night. But this particular piece, he said,
“crossed every conceivable line including lines I
didn’t know were there.”
“Nobody has ever created a character based on me
that has come to any harm at all,” Berman said —
adding that he thinks the university’s response
serves as a key early test of academe’s ability to
adjust to the realities of a post-Virginia Tech
world.
“Of
course episodes like the one concerning Professor
Berman are quite rare,” Scott Rice, chair of San
Jose State’s English & Comparative Literature
Department, said in an e-mail Wednesday. “On the odd
occasion that a writing instructor receives a
disturbing paper, it usually involves a student who
seems suicidal. Our practice is to refer such a
student to Counseling Services, sometimes even
taking the precaution of walking the student over to
insure that he or she does receive help.”
Continued in article
Suggestions for dealing with mental
health of students ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/05/17/bazelon
Question
Are college students good surrogates for real life studies?
"Too Many Studies Use College Students As Their Guinea Pigs," by Carl Bialik,
The Wall Street Journal, August 10, 2007; Page B1---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118670089203393577.html?mod=todays_us_marketplace
Many of the numbers that make news about how we
feel, think and behave are derived from studying a narrow population:
college students. It's cheap for social scientists to tap into the on-campus
research pool -- everyone from psychology majors who must participate in
studies for course credit to students who respond to posters promising a few
bucks if they sign up.
Consider just three studies that have received
press in the past month. In one, muscular men were twice as likely as their
less well-built brethren to have had more than three sex partners -- at
least according to 99 UCLA undergraduates. Another, an examination of six
separate studies that tape-recorded college students' conversations, found
that women, despite being stereotyped as relatively chatty, spoke just 3%
more words each day than men. And in the third, 40 undergraduates at
Washington University in St. Louis were 6% more likely to complete verbal
jokes and 14% more likely to complete visual jests than 41 older study
participants.
College students are "essentially free," says Brian
Nosek, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia. "We walk out of
our office, and there they are." The epitome of a convenience sample, they
have become the basis for what some critics call the "science of the
sophomore."
But psychologists may be getting what they pay for.
College students aren't representative by age, wealth, income, educational
level or geographic location. "What if you studied 7-year-old kids and made
inferences about geriatrics?" asks Robert Peterson, a marketing professor at
the University of Texas, Austin. "Everyone would say you can't do that. But
you can use these college students."
Prof. Peterson scoured the literature for examples
of studies that examined the same psychological relationships in students
and nonstudents. In almost half of the 63 relationships he examined, there
were major discrepancies between students and nonstudents: The two groups
either produced contradictory results, or one showed an effect at least
twice as great as the other.
In a follow-up study, not yet published, Prof.
Peterson demonstrated that even college students are far from homogeneous.
With help from faculty at 58 schools in 31 states, he surveyed undergraduate
business students across the country and found that they vary widely from
school to school. That means a professor studying the relationship between
students' attitudes toward capitalism and business ethics at one school
could reach a sharply different conclusion than a professor at another
school.
"People have always been aware of this issue,"
Prof. Peterson says, but many have chosen to ignore it. A 1986 paper by
David Sears, a UCLA psychology professor, documented the increased use of
college students for research in the prior quarter century and explored the
potential biases that might introduce. In the meantime, the use of college
students has, if anything, risen, researchers say.
Authors of the recent studies on sex, chattiness
and humor acknowledge the limitations of their research pool. But they argue
that college students do just fine for purposes of studying basic cognitive
processes. Others agree. "If you think all people have the same attitudes as
introductory psychology students, that's really problematic," says Tony
Bogaert, a psychology professor at Brock University in St. Catharines,
Ontario. "But if you're looking at cognitive processes, intro psych students
probably work OK."
After all, every study is hampered by possible
differences between those who volunteer to participate and those who don't,
whether they're college students or a broader group.
In any case, the fault often lies not with the
researchers, who are careful not to overstate the impact of their findings,
but with the news articles suggesting the numbers apply to all humanity.
"Even if you only focus on college students, the results are still
generalizable to millions of Americans," says David Frederick, a UCLA
psychology graduate student and lead author of the study on muscularity and
sex partners.
Prof. Nosek, a critic of the science of the
sophomore, responds that college students are still developing their
personalities and behavior. "There is no other time outside my life as an
undergraduate where I thought it would be a good idea to wear all my clothes
inside out," he says, or to "stay up for as many hours in a row as I could
just to see what happens."
To widen the pool of people answering questions
about, say, all-nighters, Prof. Nosek has submitted a proposal to the
National Institutes of Health to fund the creation of an international,
online research panel. That would build on studies his laboratory has
already administered online at ProjectImplicit.net.
Online research has its own problems, but at least
it taps into the hundreds of millions of people who are online globally,
rather than just the hundreds of people enrolled in Psych 101.
"The scientific reward structure does not benefit
someone who puts in the enormous effort" to create a representative research
sample, Prof. Nosek says. "The way to change researchers' data habits is to
make it easier to collect data in a more generalizable way."
August 20, 2007 reply from Tracey
Sutherland
[tracey@AAAHQ.ORG]
Good question --
also being raised by the neuro-biology folks with implications in
legal decisions as well. Interesting analysis (and references) in
the American Bar Association article, "Adolescence, Brain
Development, and Legal Culpability", which notes:
“The evidence
now is strong that the brain does not cease to mature until the
early 20s in those relevant parts that govern impulsivity,
judgment, planning for the future, foresight of consequences,
and other characteristics that make people morally culpable….
Indeed, age 21 or 22 would be closer to the ‘biological’ age of
maturity.”10
Gur, Ruben
C. Declaration of Ruben C. Gur., PhD, Patterson v. Texas.
Petition for Writ of Certiorari to US Supreme Court, J. Gary
Hart, Counsel. (Online at:
www.abanet.org/crimjust/juvjus/patterson.html )
Tracey Sutherland
Executive Director
American Accounting Association
Human Subject Research Controversies
"Academe Hath No Fury Like a Fellow
Professor Deceived," by Paul Basken, Chronicle of Higher
Education, May 8, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Academe-Hath-No-Fury-Like-a/65466/
University
professors plying their trade have been known at times to lie to
store managers, restaurant owners, and even the worldwide readership
of Wikipedia.
A couple of them
have now risked fibbing to a potentially far more problematic lot:
thousands of their fellow professors.
The researchers,
Katherine L. Milkman of the University of Pennsylvania and Modupe N.
Akinola of Columbia University, wanted to find out if people are
more likely to act admirably when given more time to do so. And so
they sent fake e-mail messages to 6,300 professors nationwide,
pretending to be a graduate student seeking a few minutes of the
professors' time.
Ms. Milkman and Ms.
Akinola may now have their answer, though perhaps not in the way
they intended.
The study
"belongs in the trash heap of ill-advised research projects," Andrew
E. Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science at
Columbia, fired back to Ms. Milkman and Ms. Akinola after they
revealed how and why they had deceived him. He posted his
response on
his
blog,
Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
Philip H. Daileader,
an associate professor of history at the College of William and
Mary, wrote back to the two researchers: "Involving colleagues, or
any human beings, in a study without their knowledge and their prior
consent is unethical."
Compensation and
Apologies
The basic tactic
employed by Ms. Milkman, an assistant professor of operations and
information management, and Ms. Akinola, an assistant professor of
management, is hardly without precedent.
Researchers
routinely devise tests in which they or others adopt the guise of
job applicants, home buyers, store customers, and many other false
personae to test theories about such human behaviors as fraud,
racism, and greed.
And some of
their targets have protested in the past. One of the most
infamous cases, cited by Mr. Gelman in his
response to Ms. Milkman and Ms. Akinola, is that of Francis J.
Flynn, another Columbia researcher, who wrote to about 240 New York
restaurants in 2001 claiming to have contracted food poisoning. Mr.
Flynn, now at Stanford University, said he wanted to study how the
restaurant owners handled complaints, and ended up being
sued by 10 of
them.
Nobody is talking
about suing Ms. Milkman and Ms. Akinola, and Mr. Gelman readily
acknowledges this is a far less serious matter than the one
involving Mr. Flynn. But at least a few of the 6,300 professors are
complaining loudly and looking for some kind of compensation or
response.
Mr. Gelman estimates
he is owed $10 for his lost time. Mr. Daileader wants the
researchers to know the damage they've done to the atmosphere of
trust at universities. Corrine McCarthy, an assistant professor of
English at George Mason University, feels she's owed some kind of
apology for being falsely led to believe that a student was actually
interested in the linguistics studies of a junior researcher like
herself.
The professors
contacted by Ms. Milkman and Ms. Akinola were divided into two
groups, with some told by their fictional graduate student that he
or she wanted a 10-minute meeting that same day, and others asked by
the fake student for a meeting in a week.
Ms. McCarthy, among
those asked by her bogus e-mail sender for an immediate meeting,
wrote back saying she would be available during her regular office
hours from 10 to 11 a.m. that day. The researchers sent out
immediate cancellation messages to those who accepted, explaining
what they did and why, but Ms. McCarthy didn't find that follow-up
e-mail message until after sitting in anticipation the full hour.
Ms. Milkman and Ms.
Akinola said in their cancellation messages that they hoped to test
previous research showing that people "tend to favor doing things
they viscerally want to do over what they believe they should do
when making decisions for now, while they are more likely to do what
they believe they should when making decisions for later." They also
varied the names and genders of their fabricated students, testing
what those differences might cause in response rates.
Human-Subject Approvals
Neither Ms. Milkman
nor Ms. Akinola responded to requests from The Chronicle
for comment. In their follow-up messages to the deceived professors,
they said the experiment was approved by the institutional review
boards at both Penn and Columbia, and that those boards were
prepared to answer any questions about their "rights as a research
subject."
The decision to use
deceit in a research experiment is a "really sensitive" matter, said
Devah I. Pager, an associate professor of sociology at Princeton
University who has used the technique in her exploration of racial
discrimination throughout society.
Ms. Pager said she
couldn't assess the propriety of the Milkman-Akinola experiment, but
she said she placed strong emphasis on ensuring trust between
faculty members and students. "It's not the same as the type of
trust between an employer and its employees or its customers," she
said.
Others, both
critical and supportive of the Milkman-Akinola experiment, also
suggested at least the possibility of allowing differences between
deceiving professors and deceiving most other members of society.
Sandra M. Sanford,
director of the Office of Research Subject Protections at George
Mason, said she disagreed with a suggestion by Ms. McCarthy that Ms.
Milkman and Ms. Akinola should have obtained prior consent from the
institutional review board at every university where they contacted
a professor. "It's not possible" to get permission from hundreds of
universities, for the sake of perhaps only a handful of professors
at each institution, Ms. Sanford said.
Ms. Sanford said her
review panel, however, would have expected Ms. Milkman and Ms.
Akinola to seek its permission if it appeared they were specifically
interested in George Mason professors. In an earlier unrelated case,
she said, the George Mason review panel saw no need for its
researchers to gain the approval of stores when the researchers
proposed sending purported job applicants into the stores testing
whether their success was affected by wearing clothes of particular
cultural or religious affiliations.
One key factor in
the panel's approval in that case, Ms. Sanford said, is that the
study did not pursue a single store or chain of stores. The board
also regarded the store managers collectively as a single entity at
each store, she said, rather than individuals deserving any
human-subject protection. She said she believed the university
professors contacted for the Milkman-Akinola study, by contrast,
should have been regarded as individuals.
Differences and Regrets
T. Mills Kelly, an
associate professor of history at George Mason with his own
controversial teaching practices, said Ms. Sanford's review panel
probably would not have approved the Milkman-Akinola request if it
came from George Mason professors, saying the board "is really
touchy about anything like that."
Mr. Kelly has
gained attention for
experiments such as having his class post
to Wikipedia the fictional tale of a pirate who stalked the
Chesapeake Bay in the 1870s, to help the students gain a skeptical
attitude toward the reliability of historical accounts. Mr. Kelly
never sought review-board permission for that exercise, feeling it
didn't technically involve human subjects. The Milkman-Akinola
method differed in that they sent their lie directly to a few
thousand professors, he said, rather than let an unknown number of
people find it on the Internet.
"There's a
difference," Mr. Kelly said, "between push and pull."
Continued in article
Human Subject
Research Review Boards on Campus
A professor who
prefers to remain anonymous asked what I thought about blogs being
subjected to campus human subject research review boards. Typically on
most college campuses these days, a professor, doctoral student, or
staff member on campus who is proposing an experiment or otherwise
having direct contact with human subjects in a research study must have
the proposal cleared by a board concerning itself with the safety and
well-being of the research participants.
These boards are
concerned with use of human subjects in research experiments where the
subjects are usually, but not always, students. Non-students might
include simulation experiments using parents of autistic children or
autistic children themselves. Experiments entail direct involvement with
human subjects, whereas blog involvements are not so direct and
manipulative.
I've never heard of
a blog being subjected to a human subjects research review board. Blogs
generally report research rather than conduct research. If the blog
leader also conducts research on human subjects then that is quite
another matter. You would only have to be concerned with a review if you
conduct research using human subjects. And you would only have to be
concerned if your college was somehow involved such as when you use
students at the college or when you conduct the research on campus using
other human subjects. If you had a summer grant to conduct some research
at an off-campus research center you do not have to involve your campus
review board even if you are on the faculty of the college --- in my
opinion. There is a gray zone that might arise in this instance.
Human subjects
research review boards are generally not something to be feared by
ethical researchers. The first concern is that that research might harm
the subjects in some way such as when Stanford University psychologist
Phil Zimbardo conducted the infamous prison guard experiments that ran
amuck and allegedly damaged student participants in the experiments.
If the Yale’s
Milgram experiments had not already done so, Phil's experiments
triggered creation of human subject research review boards in colleges
across the world. I spent a year with Phil in a think tank called the
Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Advanced_Study_in_the_Behavioral_Sciences
) high on a hill beside Stanford's campus. That was less than a year
before Phil commenced the prisoner guard experiments. Phil never
anticipated the extreme experimental behavior that emerged ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
I never anticipated
harm to subjects when Phil discussed his proposed experiments in advance
with me. Phil actually is a very clever and ethical researcher. Perhaps
a review board might’ve anticipated danger in the Stanford Prison Guard
Experiments, but frankly I doubt it. The behavior of the guards in
simulated settings shocked everybody!
A blog might
actually harm people or organizations just like some of you on the AECM
think at the moment that I am harming Ernst & Young with my comments
about Repo 105 accounting, but that does not fall under the category of
"human subject research." It would only be human subject research if I
created an experiment, such as an accounting simulation experiment,
using human subjects such as E&Y employees or my campus students.
If members of the
academy had to get permission to be critical of events outside their own
controlled experiments then Big Brother in Orwell's 1984 will have
finally arrived on campus. Big Brother is not here yet. Libel laws are
huge problems in the United Kingdom, but in the United States we're very
tolerant of academic criticism that is not deemed by the court as
becoming too personal and defamatory.
In any case, U.S.
colleges have not yet set up criticism review boards. They only have
human subject review boards and possibly lab safety review boards to
prevent chemists from blowing up buildings. The academy would sink to an
all-time low if we had to get permission just to be critical of research
and writing.
A gray zone that I
won’t get into is religious or ethnic criticism. Some types of critical
research of a religious or ethnic group might endanger the campus itself
such as criticism of a particular drug gang by name or defense of the
author of some now-famous Danish cartoons. I really don’t know how
colleges are dealing with writings that might harm the college itself. I
don’t think this falls under the jurisdiction of the human subject
research review boards. It probably must be dealt with by the Office of
the President on campus.
Questions
How can you protect your work in progress and finished works on your computer?
Why are some of these alternatives problematic for your college and/or
your employer?
Answer
One popular solution is to save the data on an external CD, DVD, or hard/flash
drive. To prevent theft loss, however, backups should be kept in a very secure
place and/or have multiple backups in different places. I generally store
important files on a backup computer and on CDs. I also store files on hard
drives in my university's system. My university, in turn, backs up all files in
the system, so chances of losing files are minimal.
It is generally
not a good idea to store files on a Web server unless you don't mind if Web
crawlers read your files. Most universities provide faculty and students with
space on both Web servers and password-protected servers. And universities
continuously back up both kinds of servers. The problem is that it's a pain in
the tail to constantly back up updated files. But it's important! Fire, theft,
and lost computers and flash drives are risks, but there's an even greater risk
that you will screw up a file, inadvertently delete a file, or have a computer
crash that makes it necessary to seek out your latest backup
"Gone With Two Flashes" by Risa P. Gorelick, Inside Higher Ed, August
20, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/08/20/gorelick
But then it happened — in a flash, so to speak —
and I couldn’t have been more wrong. I returned home from a night at my
boyfriend’s place and noticed a light left on and an interior door left
open. At first, I didn’t think much of it. I turned off the light and shut
the door. Then there were some items knocked over in the bathroom that I
picked up and wondered for a minute how it happened, but didn’t really stop
to think too long about it. Instead, I returned some phone calls, made some
strong coffee, and then decided it was time to get to some writing done. I
walked into my home office to turn on my computer and stopped short.
Where’s my laptop??? While it was a functioning
laptop, I hardly ever unplugged it from the wall and the DSL modem — I used
it mostly as a desktop, as it was much newer and faster than my dissertation
desktop that runs at a dinosaur’s pace. I had sent an e-mail right before
leaving the night before, so I know it was there on my desk when I left. But
it wasn’t there now. And I stood there dumbfounded.
I grabbed the phone but wasn’t sure who to call. I
finally managed to remember 911 and got a dispatcher, to whom I told what
had happened. The dispatcher connected me to the local police, who asked a
number of questions and then wanted to know if I was in the house. “Yes, I’m
in the house,” I said— “Should I not be?” I was told I may wish to wait
outside for the police to arrive. Given that I’d been in there an hour, if
someone was still in the house, I think I would have noticed. Still, I
opened up my front door and waited in front of my house for a few minutes
until they got there. The two officers went through my house and thought it
was odd that someone would come in only to take a laptop that was two years
old. My two back-up flash drives were also missing as was the power supply
to the laptop. But the person(s) who took my computer were kind to leave me
the DSL and printer connections and the other items in my office.
I told the cops that I am an academic and that all
of my research was on the computer and flash drives. They asked if someone
in the office was “out to get me” or if I had a disgruntled co-worker or
student. I had finished teaching two summer classes the week before and all
of the students had passed, so I didn’t think a student would attempt to rob
me. And if a colleague really wanted to get me, s/he would have his/her
chance as I was up for my fourth-year tenure review in a few weeks. As one
of two compositionists in my department, I doubt any of my colleagues would
want to sabotage my research or career. They’re mostly concerned that I
publish in blind peer-reviewed journals.
Upon further examination of my house, the robber(s)
stole my checkbook, cash, traveler’s cheques, some small electronics, a
majority of my jewelry and watches — and a pillow case off of my bed to put
the loot in as they left. What they didn’t take, they returned to the
drawers and closets, so I guess I’m fortunate that I had relatively
thoughtful and neat robbers. The police haven’t been very helpful, but I’ve
learned that there had been more than 20 robberies in my neighborhood in the
previous week or so. The police also told me that fewer than 13 percent of
robbery victims ever get any items recovered. While I was devastated that my
grandmother’s jewelry was gone, I was sickened that my scholarly research
had disappeared without a trace.
In the sleepless weeks following the robbery, I
have met more of my neighbors than I had in the previous three years of
living here. Some are nice; some seem rather odd; all are scared about
becoming the next victim of a burglary. My passport, Social Security card,
and birth certificate are locked in a safety deposit box at a nearby bank,
which means I can’t decide on a moment’s notice to grab a flight to Paris,
but I can live with that. I’ve also had an alarm system installed and no
longer think of opening up a window to let in some fresh air. I haven’t been
able to sleep more than two or three hours a night—even after the alarm
system was installed. I feel violated and angry, and wonder how much therapy
it will take before I am able to sleep through the night at home.
It’s hard to go back to the drawing board, so to
speak, and start working on the book project and revisions again — as much
of what I did is gone and would have to be started anew. Looming deadlines
float over my clouded head.
Perhaps those professors who put their
dissertations in the freezer were on to something, though the police said
that most thieves look in freezers and refrigerators for valuables. As a
writing specialist, I have spent much time dealing with plagiarism. I never
really considered someone physically stealing my computer, files — my work —
as an act of plagiarism, but it is. I’m not sure where it’s safe to put
one’s intellectual property. Laptops and flash drives are easy to steal.
Thieves look in freezers for cash, jewelry and other valuables. Most
non-college educated thieves would probably laugh at seeing an ABD’s
dissertation chapters or an assistant professor’s articles under ice. If one
can leave it on the university server, that is an option, but our server
limits the amount of space available so large texts may not fit there. One
can e-mail files to oneself, as I’ve done in the past, but then one must
keep track of various drafts, e-mail accounts, and files, and deal with the
limited space issue as well.
I’m not sure I have a better answer. I can honestly
say that it never occurred to me that someone would think to break into my
house and rob me. (After all, I was in grad school for nine and a half
years; what could I possibly have that someone would want?) The laptop and
flash drives are long gone, I’m sure. I just hope whomever took them wiped
out the drives, as there’s also a concern now not only of intellectual
property loss but of identity theft. I will never attempt to do my own taxes
online, as I did on my laptop this year. Credit bureaus have been notified
and watches were issued to my accounts; new credit card numbers and bank
accounts were also issued, too. There’s a lot of paperwork victims of
robberies must muddle through. Trying to remember PINS and passwords to
reset bills to internet services and EZ-PASS was a nightmare.
Continued in article
Increasingly universities are faced
with lost or stolen flash memory and storage devices.
Bowling Green University recently fined a tenured professor $10,000 for
losing his personal flash drive containing grades (he contends it was
stolen from his classroom when he was distracted.)
Link forwarded by Glen Gray
"Colleges struggle with mandates to
prohibit portable storage: UConn has had success scanning network
traffic for viruses and malware," by Brian Fonseca, Computer World,
August 17, 2007 ---
Click Here
IT managers at
colleges and universities are grappling with the problem of finding
ways to better secure removable storage media in an environment that
encourages information sharing.
Jason Pufahl,
information security team lead for IT services at the University of
Connecticut, said that the needs of students and faculty prevent
universities from implementing mandates that prohibit the use of
unapproved portable storage media.
Such mandates may be
common in the corporate world, but "we don't have the flexibility to
simply say all inbound traffic is locked down or we're going to
allow outbound traffic on only specific ports," Pufahl said. "We
just can't do that. We have to try to provide security when leaving
things open, which is really difficult."
UConn has had
success scanning network traffic for viruses and malware using
Fortigate-5000 technology from Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Fortinet
Inc., though Pufahl acknowledges that it has proven ineffective
against devices such as USB drives, iPods or iPhones.
In recent months,
some universities have been hit by incidents of lost or stolen flash
memory and storage devices.
In June, for
example, Grand Valley State University was forced to notify 3,000
students of a stolen Zip drive.
The university is
currently examining password- and encryption-protected USB drives
from SanDisk Corp. and Kingston Technology Co., said John Klein,
associate director of academic services at the Allendale, Mich.,
school.
Klein said schools
must educate students about the dangers of using unprotected storage
devices and the associated risks of losing confidential data.
"It's not their home
network anymore, where they are safe and cozy and warm," he said.
"It's a campus network, where virtually any computer via a hacker is
viewable and can be attacked."
In May, a professor
at Bowling Green State University in Ohio lost a flash drive
containing Social Security numbers of 199 former students.
The university is
currently engaged in an encryption project designed to safeguard
computers across campus, said a spokeswoman. "Policies are being
looked at again to see what else we could be doing," she added.
"These portable storage devices are just so convenient."
Long Deferred Campus Maintenance:
Crumbling Buildings and Stadiums
"Halls Of Ivy—And Crumbling Plaster:
Amid a building boom, colleges scramble for funds to keep up aging
facilities," Business Week, July 23, 2007 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_30/b4043056.htm
College students and
their parents have come to expect flashy campus amenities: towering
research labs, sprawling B-school trading floors, and recreation
centers with 50-foot rock-climbing walls. And the nation's
universities have in recent years launched a multibillion-dollar
construction frenzy akin to an arms race.
What you may not
realize is that many existing buildings on the nation's campuses are
falling apart. Blame old age and less-than-diligent maintenance.
"When dollars are flowing into new facilities," says Terry W.
Ruprecht, director of energy conservation at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, "they aren't flowing into old
facilities. It's taking an existing problem and making it worse."
The issue is how
schools will pay for this. According to conservative estimates, the
nationwide repair bill could reach $40 billion. Asking well-heeled
contributors to open their wallets isn't an answer since most
philanthropists want to see their names on a fancy new building, not
a fixer-upper. "Maintenance doesn't have that allure to a private
donor," says James E. Alty, director of facilities services at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As a result, students
and their parents are more and more expected to foot the bill,
especially at state schools where funding is tight.
More than half the
buildings on U.S. campuses were slapped up in the 1960s and '70s, a
period when enrollment nearly doubled. Today those buildings are
pushing 40. It's not a pretty picture. At Kansas State University,
limestone exteriors are crumbling, the electrical system shoots
sparks on humid days (workers call the control room the Frankenstein
room), and the wind whistles through the eight-foot, single-pane
windows at Waters Hall, whose deteriorating frames date back to
1923. The University of Illinois, meanwhile, has just completed a
new $80 million institute for genomic research but has a backlog of
repairs that will consume as much as $600 million. Chapel Hill's
outstanding maintenance bill: $400 million, on top of 25 new
building projects. And so it goes, from coast to coast.
To deal with the
problem, schools are hiring consultants to conduct on-site
assessments and prioritize maintenance projects. Others are seeking
additional state funding, borrowing cash, or diverting existing
budgetary funds to the most pressing projects. Several universities
are adding a surcharge to tuition fees to help cover the outlay. At
the Illinois campus of 41,000, students were hit with a $500 annual
maintenance fee last fall--raised to $520 this year--to bring in
more than $20 million a year for the campus' $573 million worth of
high-priority repairs and replacements.
Sometimes the
buildings are so outmoded that fixing them is just not worth it. The
University of Texas at Houston is simply demolishing five buildings
in need of updates and building anew. But even that is not a
solution. Tearing down the 17-floor, limestone-and-steel Houston
Main building next year will cost $6 million, not to mention the
$250 million to build a new medical research and treatment facility
in its place.
Having learned their
lesson from the '60s building boom, universities these days are
planning new projects with long-term costs in mind and investing in
energy-efficient, low-maintenance designs. But there's only so much
they can do. The shorter lifespan of the electronic gizmos found on
the modern campus--interactive whiteboards, motorized window shades,
and remotely operated lighting--means frequent upgrades. And with
enrollments rising, the cost of accommodating additional students
will rise, too. William A. Daigneau, head of facilities at the
University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, says considerations
such as these must be top of mind. "Once you've got that brand-new
asset," he says, "you've got a liability."
Questions
What is the best method of peer review?
Is it truly a value-adding process?
What are the ethical concerns?
And how can new technology be used to improve traditional models?
Peer Review in Which Reviewer Comments are Shared With the World
I think this policy motivates journal article referees to be more
responsible and accountable!
Questions
Is this the beginning of the end for the traditional refereeing process
of academic journals?
Could this be the death knell of the huge
SSRN commercial
business that blocks sharing of academic working papers unless readers
and libraries pay?
"Nature editors start online peer review," PhysOrg, September
14, 2006 ---
http://physorg.com/news77452540.html
Editors of the prestigious scientific
journal Nature have reportedly embarked on an experiment of their
own: adding an online peer review process.
Articles currently submitted for
publication in the journal are subjected to review by several
experts in a specific field, The Wall Street Journal reported. But
now editors at the 136-year-old Nature have proposed a new system
for authors who agree to participate: posting the paper online and
inviting scientists in the field to submit comments approving or
criticizing it.
Although lay readers can also view the
submitted articles, the site says postings are only for scientists
in the discipline, who must list their names and institutional
e-mail addresses.
The journal -- published by the Nature
Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd., of London
-- said it will discard any comments found to be irrelevant,
intemperate or otherwise inappropriate.
Nature's editors said they will take both
sets of comments -- the traditional peer-review opinions and the
online remarks -- into consideration when deciding whether to
publish a study, The Journal reported.
"Nature's Debate on Peer Review and Test of Open Review,"
Issues in Scholarly Communication from the University of Illinois,
July 27, 2006 ---
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/
From Nature... "Peer review is
commonly accepted as an essential part of scientific publication.
But the ways peer review is put into practice vary across journals
and disciplines. What is the best method of peer review? Is it truly
a value-adding process? What are the ethical concerns? And how can
new technology be used to improve traditional models?"
The Nature debate consists of 22
articles of analyses and perspectives from leading scientists,
publishers and other stakeholders on such subjects as listed above.
Readers are invited to comment on the various articles.
Additionally, for a period of three months,
Nature is holding it's own "peer review trial".
Again, from Nature: "The trial will not
displace Nature's traditional confidential peer review
process, but will complement it. From 5 June 2006, authors may opt
to have their submitted manuscripts posted publicly for comment. Any
scientist may then post comments, provided they identify themselves.
Once the usual confidential peer review process is complete, the
public 'open peer review' process will be closed. Editors will then
read all comments on the manuscript and invite authors to respond.
At the end of the process, as part of the trial, editors will assess
the value of the public comments."
Nature's site on this debate is at
http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/debate/index.html
Peer Review or Wikipedia, That is the Question
Peer review, the mainstream media, and
government agencies have landed us in a ditch. Not only are we impatient
with the authorities but we are in a mood to talk back. Wikipedia offers
endless opportunities for self-expression. It is the love child of
reading groups and chat rooms, a second home for anyone who has written
an Amazon review. This is not the first time that encyclopedia-makers
have snatched control from an élite, or cast a harsh light on certitude.
Jimmy Wales may or may not be the new Henry Ford, yet he has sent us
tooling down the interstate, with but a squint back at the railroad.
We’re on the open road now, without conductors and timetables. We’re
free to chart our own course, also free to get gloriously, recklessly
lost. Your truth or mine?
Stacy Schiff, "KNOW IT ALLL Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?"
The New Yorker, July 31, 2006 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060731fa_fact
September 15, 2006 reply from Alexander Robin A
[alexande.robi@UWLAX.EDU]
Even if reviewers are assigned as they are
now, having their comments and the paper on line might be beneficial
in reducing "poor quality" on inappropriate reviews. As probably
most of you have, I had one run in with a poor review. I had a paper
on a study I did using Monte Carlo simulation. The editor of the
journal sent the paper to someone who didn't accept simulation as a
legitimate research methodology. No surprise that he voted to
reject.
Robin Alexander
Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
Issues in Information Technology and
Education on
Campus
"The Great Debate: Effectiveness of
Technology in Education," by Patricia Deubel, T.H.E. Journal,
November 2007 ---
http://www.thejournal.com/articles/21544
According to Robert
Kuhn (2000), an expert in brain research, few people understand the
complexity of that change. Technology is creating new thinking that
is "at once creative and innovative, volatile and turbulent" and
"nothing less than a shift in worldview." The change in mental
process has been brought about because "(1) information is freely
available, and therefore interdisciplinary ideas and cross-cultural
communication are widely accessible; (2) time is compressed, and
therefore reflection is condensed and decision-making is compacted;
(3) individuals are empowered, and therefore private choice and
reach are strengthened and one person can have the presence of an
institution" (sec: Concluding Remarks).
If we consider
thinking as both individual (internal) and social (external), as
Rupert Wegerif (2000) suggests, then "[t]echnology, in various forms
from language to the internet, carries the external form of
thinking. Technology therefore has a role to play through supporting
improved social thinking (e.g. providing systems to mediate decision
making and collective reasoning) and also through providing tools to
help individuals externalize their thinking and so to shape their
own social worlds" (p. 15).
The new tools for
communication that have become part of the 21st century no doubt
contribute to thinking. Thus, in a debate on effectiveness or on
implementation of a particular tool, we must also consider the
potential for creativity, innovation, volatility, and turbulence
that Kuhn (2000) indicates.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on education
technology are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are
at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
"21st Century Learning: 'We're Not Even
Close'," by Dave Nagel, T.H.E. Journal, November 2007 ---
http://www.thejournal.com/articles/21543
Without
incorporating technology into every aspect of its
activities, no organization can expect to achieve
results in this increasingly digital world. Yet
education is dead last in technology use compared
with all major industrial sectors, and that has to
change in order for schools to meet the challenges
of 21st century learning--this according to a paper
released Monday by the State Education Technology
Directors Association (SETDA), the International
Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), and the
Partnership for 21st Century Skills at the SETDA
Leadership Summit and Education Forum in Washington,
DC.
"How
will we create the schools America needs to remain
competitive?" the paper asks. "For more than a
generation, the nation has engaged in a monumental
effort to improve student achievement. We've made
progress, but we're not even close to where we need
to be."
The
paper, Maximizing the Impact: the Pivotal Role
of Technology in a 21st Century Education System,
calls on education leaders to incorporate technology
comprehensively in school systems in the United
States to boost 21st century skills, support
innovative teaching and learning, and create "robust
education support systems."
The
paper reported that there are two major conceptual
obstacles preventing schools from taking full
advantage of technology as a catalyst for
improvements in teaching and learning: a narrow
approach to the use of technology and an unfounded
assumption that technology is already being used
widely in schools in a comprehensive and effective
manner.
According to the paper:
To overcome these obstacles, our nation's
education system must join the ranks of
competitive U.S. industries that have made
technology an indispensable part of their
operations and reaped the benefits of their
actions. This report is a call to action to
integrate technology as a fundamental building
block into education in three broad areas:
1. Use technology comprehensively to
develop proficiency in 21st century skills.
Knowledge of core content is necessary, but no
longer sufficient, for success in a competitive
world. Even if all students mastered core
academic subjects, they still would be woefully
underprepared to succeed in postsecondary
institutions and workplaces, which increasingly
value people who can use their knowledge to
communicate, collaborate, analyze, create,
innovate, and solve problems. Used
comprehensively, technology helps students
develop 21st century skills.
2. Use technology
comprehensively to support
innovative teaching and
learning. To keep pace
with a changing world, schools
need to offer more rigorous,
relevant and engaging
opportunities for students to
learn--and to apply their
knowledge and skills in
meaningful ways. Used
comprehensively, technology
supports new, research-based
approaches and promising
practices in teaching and
learning.
Continued in
article
Bob Jensen's threads on education
technology are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
The Top Ranked
University Websites
"MIT Tops Rankings
of University Web Sites," by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher
Education, February 11, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3609&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
The
Cybermetrics Lab, a research group based in Spain, has
released the latest edition of its biannual
Webometrics Ranking of World Universities,
which seeks to measure “the
performance and impact of universities through their Web
presence.”
According to the group’s Web site, the rankings—which
Cybermetrics began publishing in 2004—were originally
conceived as a way of promoting open access to academic
materials online. It comes as no surprise, then, that
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose
OpenCourseWare project boasts
the world’s largest collection of free teaching
materials, tops the list.
Stanford
University, Harvard University, the University of
California at Berkeley, and Cornell University round out
the top five. American universities are the strongest
performers: The University of Toronto, at No. 24, is the
highest-ranked institution from outside the United
States, and the University of Cambridge, at No. 28,
registered as the highest-ranked European institution.
The Webometrics rankings score each university on
four criteria, including the
number of links to the institution’s Web site from other
sites. These “inlinks” are ostensibly a good way of
evaluating a site’s general impact on the Web community.
|
Bob Jensen's
threads on free course materials and videos from leading universities
are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
June 29, 2007 message from
Carolyn Kotlas
[kotlas@email.unc.edu]
REPORT ON CURRENT
ISSUES IN HIGHER ED IT
The report of
the 2007 EDUCAUSE Current Issues in higher education information
technology is now available online. The survey, now in its eighth
year, asks "campus information technology leaders to rate the most
critical IT challenges facing them, their campuses, and/or their
systems." As it has been in five previous years, funding was ranked
as the number one IT issue. Included in the top ten issues listed
were faculty development, support, and training (number 6) and
course/learning management systems (number 9). The report and
related readings are available at
http://www.educause.edu/2007IssuesResources .
EDUCAUSE is a
nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education
by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. The
current membership comprises more than 1,900 colleges, universities,
and educational organizations, including 200 corporations, with
15,000 active members. EDUCAUSE has offices in Boulder, CO, and
Washington, DC. Learn more about EDUCAUSE at
http://www.educause.edu/
August 31, 2007 message from Carolyn Kotlas
[kotlas@email.unc.edu]
COMMUNITY COLLEGE STUDENTS' IT
EXPERIENCES
A new EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research
(ECAR) research bulletin, "Impressions of Community College
Students' IT Experiences," "highlights some of the similarities and
differences between students attending four-year institutions and
those attending community colleges, focusing on those areas where
there are challenges and opportunities for using IT to improve
students' academic experiences."
Since 2004, ECAR has studied undergraduate
students and the impact of information technology on their academic
experiences. Now in its third year, the study surveyed 96
institutions, including eight community colleges. Compared to
students at four-year institutions, community college students
reported:
-- "less use per week for most
course-related activities, similar use for some social activities,
and less use of social networking and instant messaging "
-- "fewer basic and fewer advanced skills
with presentation software, spreadsheets, library resources, and
CMSs"
-- "higher levels of ownership of PDAs,
smart phones, gaming devices, digital cameras, and wireless hubs"
-- a high desire for computer labs, student
IT training, and free access to software required for their courses
The research bulletin is available online
at
http://connect.educause.edu/library/abstract/ImpressionsofCommuni/44739
for all faculty, staff, and students from
institutions that have subscribed to ECAR.
ECAR "provides timely research and analysis
to help higher education leaders make better decisions about
information technology. ECAR assembles leading scholars,
practitioners, researchers, and analysts to focus on issues of
critical importance to higher education, many of which carry
increasingly complicated and consequential implications." For more
information go to
http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?SECTION_ID=4
"Favorite Education Blogs of 2008," by Jay Mathews, The Washington
Post, April 7, 2008 ---
Click Here
Early last year, as an experiment, I published
a
list of what
I and commentator Walt Gardner considered our favorite education
blogs. Neither Gardner nor I had much experience with this most
modern form of expression. We are WAY older than the Web surfing
generation. But the list proved popular with readers, and I promised
in that column to make this an annual event.
Bernstein: The name
is obviously a takeoff on the foregoing. The author of this one
occasionally posts elsewhere as well. This site often provides some
incisive and clear explanations of the key aspects of educational
policy.
Mathews: I agree,
but have a bias here, too. This is an Education Week blog, and I am
on the board of trustees of the nonprofit that publishes Ed Week.
My promise was
actually more specific: "Next year, through bribery or trickery, I
hope to persuade Ken Bernstein, teacher and blogger par excellence,
to select his favorite blogs and then let me dump on his choices, or
something like that." As I learned long ago, begging works even
better than bribery or trickery, and Bernstein succumbed. Below are
his choices, with some comments from me, and a few of my favorites.
They are in no
particular order of quality or interest. Choosing blogs is a
personal matter. Tastes differ widely and often are not in sync with
personal views on how schools should be improved. I agree with all
of Bernstein's choices, even though we disagree on many of the big
issues.
Bernstein is a
splendid classroom teacher and a fine writer, with a gift for making
astute connections between ill-considered policies and what actually
happens to kids in school. He is a social studies teacher at Eleanor
Roosevelt High School in Prince George's County and has been
certified by the prestigious National Board for Professional
Teaching Standards. He is also a book reviewer and peer reviewer for
professional publications and ran panels on education at YearlyKos
conventions. He blogs on education, among other topics, at too many
sites to list. He describes his choices here as a few blogs he
thinks "are worthwhile to visit."
· Bridging Differences.
blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/
Bernstein: Deborah
Meier and Diane Ravitch in the past have had their differences on
educational issues. They both serve at the Steinhardt School of
Education at New York University, and this shared blog is as
valuable as anything on the Web for the insights the two offer, and
for the quality of their dialog.
Mathews: I have a
personal bias about this blog. I know Meier and Ravitch well,
consider them the best writers among education pundits today and
frequently bounce ideas off them.
· Eduwonk.
www.eduwonk.com/
Bernstein: I often
disagree with Andrew J. Rotherham, but his has been an influential
voice on education policy for some years, and even now, along with
all else he does, he serves on the Virginia Board of Education.
Mathews: I often
agree with Rotherham, and my editors sometimes complain that I quote
him too much. But the guy is only 37 and is going to be an important
influence on public school policy for the rest of my life and long
after.
· Edwize.
www.edwize.org/
Bernstein: The site
is maintained by the United Federation of Teachers, the New York
affiliate of American Federation of Teachers. They have a number of
authors, many active in New York schools, but they occasionally have
posts from others. Full disclosure: I have been invited to
cross-post things I have written elsewhere.
Mathews: A nice mix
of both comment on policy and inside-the-classroom stuff from
teachers.
· Education
Policy Blog.
educationpolicyblog.blogspot.com/
Bernstein: The site
describes itself as "a multiblog about the ways that educational
foundations can inform educational policy and practice! The blog
will be written by a group of people who are interested in the state
of education today, and who bring to this interest a set of
perspectives and tools developed in the disciplines known as the
'foundations' of education: philosophy, history, curriculum theory,
sociology, economics and psychology." Most of the participants are
university professors. I am a participant from time to time in this
blog.
Eduwonkette.
blogs.edweek.org/edweek/eduwonkette/
Continued in article
Bob
Jensen's threads on blogs are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
"We Rent Movies, So Why Not Textbooks?," by Miguel Helft, The New
York Times, July 4, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/business/05ping.html?hpw
Jensen Test
Rent Textbooks from Chegg ---
http://www.chegg.com/
Rental prices are about half the so-called purchase price of a
new book.
Buying a used book is probably a better idea since it, in turn, can be
sold back into the used market.
Intermediate Accounting ISBN 0470374942 by Kieso et al.
New (Chegg claims the new price is $209
but the price of hardcover is $177 at Barnes & Noble )
The Amazon
Price of a new hardcover is $168 ---
Click Here
Bigwords.com (international edition that differs somewhat in chapter
orderings) lists a price of $53.98
Used prices start at Amazon for about $159 (but watch carefully for the
edition number)
Rent from Chegg ($96.53) ---
http://www.chegg.com/details/intermediate-accounting/0470374942/
Jensen Comment
To get value for my money, I prefer used houses, cars, and books.
Of course, both Amazon and Google are now selling electronic versions of
textbooks. For Amazon you must have a Kindle reader. For Google, all you
have to have is a computer, although to date Amazon has a wider
selection of textbooks available.
March 25, 2009 message from Ramsey, Donald
[dramsey@UDC.EDU]
The cost accounting book I'm using retails
for $190.30. I see on a textbook search website called Bigwords.com
that no less than 9 large dealers are offering it at under $50 for a
new copy, including shipping. How can this be possible?
My concern would be how to get the word to
students early enough so they could (1) not buy books at retail, and
(2) get delivery in time for the first assignment.
Cheers,
Don
March 25, reply from Zane Swanson
[ZSwanson@UCO.EDU]
Convince your university/college/department
to go completely electronic (like Kindle) and the pricing problem
would be gone. This recession may well drive some cost-sensitive
programs to go to electronic books looking for a comparative
advantage or a means of covering a budgetary shortfall. The tipping
point will center around the trade-off costs of the campus book
store versus outsourcing the textbooks electronically.
Zane Swanson
Jensen Added Comment
Universities that are promoting Kindle are running into some resistance
from sight-impaired students. Although Kindle benefits some
sight-impaired students by being able to enlarge fonts, the issue is one
of access to Kindle readers and access to audio versions of the text.
Many publishers have audio versions restricted to sight-impaired
students. To avoid conflicts with sight impaired students, universities
might have to offer audio versions to sight-impaired students at deals
as good as Kindle deals to other students.
The National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the
Blind
filed a lawsuit last month against Arizona State University, saying
that its plan to use the Kindle to distribute books to students is
illegal because blind people cannot use the device as currently
configured ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/07/06/kindle
PS
I noticed that Bigwords.com is also selling solutions manuals ---
Click Here
http://www5.bigwords.com/search/?z=easysearch&searchtype=ISBN&searchstring=Kieso&Go.x=36&Go.y=28
Bob Jensen's threads on technologies for aiding handicapped
learners ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped
Free online textbooks, cases, and videos ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm
Teaching Without Textbooks --- See Below
"Teaching Without Textbooks," by Rob Weir, Inside Higher Ed,
March 6, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/03/06/weir
Here’s a statement with which everyone can
agree: College instructors cannot assume that students come to their
classes in possession of basic knowledge. Now here’s one sure to
generate some controversy: In many cases textbooks deter the pursuit
of knowledge more than they help it. The sciences may be different,
but at least in the case of the humanities, most of us would be
better off not assigning a textbook.
Alas, there are still some dinosaurs
lumbering about who only assign a text and subject their students to
drill-and-kill (the spirit) exercises straight out the McGuffey’s
Reader era. There’s really not much to say about such instructors
except to wish them a speedy retirement. If one assumes the ability
to read as the rock-bottom criterion for college entry, there’s
really no point to rehashing text material with students other than
to clarify what confuses them, a matter that should be approached on
a case-by-case basis. Any institution still devoted to text-and-test
could usefully place said courses online.
Most of us assign textbooks for what we
always assumed were good pedagogical reasons: We wanted students to
be able to fill in gaps we don’t get to, engage in fact-checking,
hear other perspectives, have easy access to data, find a framework
for some of our more esoteric departures, and provide students with
a specialized reference guide rather than having them reach for a
general topics encyclopedia. Great ideas — except that it doesn’t
work that way anymore!
Today’s texts are too expensive, too long,
and too dense to be of practical use. I freely admit that it was the
first of these sins that first led me to eschew a text in my
introductory U.S. history classes. Houghton Mifflin’s People and a
Nation retails for $97; Longman’s America, Past and Present goes for
$95.20 and The Pursuit of Liberty for $99; McGraw Hill’s American
History checks out at a whopping $125.75; with Norton’s Give Me
Liberty! and Wadworth’s American Past relative bargains at $77.75
and $79.95 respectively. All of the aforementioned prices are Barnes
and Noble online quotes; chances are good that a college bookstore
near you will inflate each of these. There are only a handful of
U.S. texts under $40 and only one, Howard Zinn’s ideologically
loaded A People’s History of the United States that’s less than $20.
I decided to stop using a text when the $35
paperback I was using shot up to $75 and I simply couldn’t justify
the price, given how little I teach from a text. (Very little
generates more student complaints than a professor assigning a book
that’s not used.)
Now comes the weird part — if anything,
student achievement was better after I stopped assigning a text.
Part of the reason for this is that textbooks are too long. Many
colleges have a proverbial “‘gentlemen’s agreement”’ that more than
100 pages per week of reading per course is excessive. Even those of
us who teach in highly competitive institutions know that there’s an
upper limit. Even if you can get away with 200 per week, in an
average semester your students will read about 2,500 pages. Do you
really want one-third or more of that devoted to a textbook? My
initial trade was easy; dumping the text meant I could assign an
extra three monographs and probe topics in depth that would
otherwise have been glossed. Students consistently tell me they were
happy to have read a biography on Betty Friedan or a study of the
civil rights movement rather than a textbook. I’m sure that they’ll
retain much more from such studies.
Here’s the dirty secret that you’ll never
see printed in a publisher’s glossy promo material: Every textbook
on the market is a crashing bore to read. All the publishers will
assure you that they’ve added special features designed to attract
today’s young people and that the prose is lively and engaging.
Yeah, right. The colorful maps, pop-out documents, intra-textual
questions to contemplate, vibrant graphics, etc. serve only to drive
up production costs and students won’t use them. Note to profs: Got
an image or a chart you really want students to use? Put it on a
PowerPoint and project it in class.
Texts are not boring because of the people
who write them. I know many of the folks whose names are on texts
and know that they’re dynamic teachers and writers. The problem is
density. Put simply, most texts try to do way too much. I’m a
proponent of multiculturalism and the last thing in the world we
need is a return to “dead white men” history, but the more any text
tries to do, the less coherent it will be. What would make more
sense is for publishers to knock out some specialized texts. I’m a
social and cultural historian and there’s little that I teach
doesn’t reference race, class, and gender; hence, I don’t need a
text that parrots me in print. What I could use is a really short
political/economic history; just as those whose specialty is
political history would probably appreciate a nice cultural survey,
or perhaps one that discusses multiculturalism.
Continued in article
August 31 reply from Eileen Taylor [eileen_taylor@NCSU.EDU]
The following article is related to the
discussion about the future of textbook publishing. It was included
in the Raleigh News and Observer this week and can be found at:
http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/columns/story/685565.html
Basic conclusion is that textbook
publishers reward faculty for content more than universities reward
faculty for content. Thus, faculty sell textbook content to
publishers, who then sell it back to students for a profit. Students
pay for this "service"and publishers stay in business.
A possible solution is for universities to
reward faculty directly for producing content, and pass the savings
on to students. The issue I see with that solution is that
publishers are good at distributing the knowledge, so that there is
no duplication of efforts across universities. If e-publishing and
improved communication (like online education journals and the AECM
itself) can address distribution, then I think publishers are in
trouble.
Excerpt from article: "Generally the
faculty still produce the content and sell it to a publisher. The
publisher shrink wraps it and sells it back to students (at an
inflated price). Thirty years ago this arrangement made sense
because the 'hard copy"'that was the textbook represented true value
added. In the present age, the value added by the publisher is often
virtually nil, yet publishers want to maintain the same revenue
stream."
While this may be the natural goal for the
publisher, it hardly makes sense any longer for the university or
for students.
The reality is that the burden of the
present textbook scam falls primarily on students, and faculty have
up until now been provided better incentives by publishing companies
than by the colleges and universities that employ them. It's time
for some dialogue on this issue.
From the standpoint of cost-effectiveness,
it makes no sense for colleges and universities to be both the
producers and consumers of intellectual content for which students
receive a large bill from a middleman who orchestrates a process
designed to maximize off-campus profits."
(Lavon B. Page is retired as a professor of
mathematics at N.C. State University but still teaches part-time. He
served as special assistant to the provost for implementing the
university's "Learning in a Technology-Rich Environment" plan.)
Eileen Taylor
Eileen Z. Taylor, PhD
Assistant Professor,
Department of Accounting
North Carolina State University Campus
Box 8113, Nelson Hall
Raleigh, NC 27695-8113
919-513-2476
eileen_taylor@ncsu.edu
Bob Jensen's threads on metacognition and teaching without
textbooks are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
Colleges On the Far, Far Left Are Having a
Difficult Time With Finances and Accreditation
"Turmoil at Another Progressive
College," by Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed, August 1, 2007
---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/01/newcollege
New College of California, which, according to its
president, depends on tuition for 95 percent of its
budget, finds itself at this crossroads as the
closure of
Antioch College’s main undergraduate institution
focuses attention on
the particular vulnerability of progressive colleges,
which tend to feature small
enrollments, individualized instruction and a
commitment to producing alumni engaged in socially
responsible, if not fiscally rewarding, careers.
With a historic focus on non-traditional education,
New College’s graduate and undergraduate program
offerings today
include women’s spirituality, teacher education,
activism and social change, and experimental
performance.
The college has repeatedly tangled with its
accreditor in the past, with this month’s action
coming a year, its president said, after it was
removed from warning. A July 5 letter from the
Western Association to the college’s president of
seven years, Martin J. Hamilton, documents an
ongoing financial crisis about as old as the college
itself and a “pervasive failure” in proper
recordkeeping. WASC also notes concerns about
academic integrity at the college, including a
“routine” reliance upon independent study that
operates outside of published criteria or oversight.
The accrediting body indicates that it found
“substantial evidence of violations” of its first
standard, that an institution “function with
integrity.” (The
letter is available on the San Francisco Bay
Guardian’s blog).
Continued in article
"Antioch Survives — at What Price?" by
Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, November 5, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/11/05/antioch
Following an
outpouring of anger over the order to suspend Antioch College’s
operations — and an outpouring of donations to avoid the suspension
— Antioch University’s board on Saturday announced it was lifting
the suspension order.
The announcement
followed weeks of intense discussions between the university’s board
and administration and the alumni association of the college — which
has played a historic role in American higher education, but which
has struggled financially for years. Under the agreement between the
alumni and the university, the alumni must come through with key
financial contributions to keep the college operating. In addition,
the alumni are going on record accepting that the college is in a
state of financial exigency, that faculty and staff reductions will
be necessary, and that some programs will be curtailed.
In a sign of how
fragile the situation remains, the agreements announced by the
college focus on continuing Antioch courses for current students and
there are no plans to recruit a new freshman class to enroll in the
fall. In an interview Sunday, a university spokeswoman said that new
freshmen would not be recruited until the curriculum was revised and
facilities were substantially improved — a process that will take at
least a year and could take longer.
Continued in article
Peer Review in Which Reviewer Comments are Shared With the World
Last year Noah Wardrip-Fruin, an assistant
professor of communication at the University of California at San
Diego,
ran an experiment with his latest academic
book: He let readers of a popular blog to which he contributes peer
review the book in public. This week he shared
his final conclusions about the strengths
and weaknesses of his unusual approach.
The book’s publisher,
MIT Press, administered a traditional peer review of the
book, and Mr. Wardrip-Fruin was able to compare the two approaches.
One major difference: Blog commenters tended to focus on discrete
paragraphs and points, and rarely compared ideas in one chapter to
those later in the work. But the blog readers offered more detailed
input than the anonymous reviewers solicited by the press.
Mr. Wardrip-Fruin argues that blog
reviewing works and that it should be tried again in the future. “Of
course, widely read blogs won’t want to be completely taken over by
manuscript review,” he writes. “But I can imagine them hosting two
or three a year, selected for their level of interest or because
they are written by one of the blog’s authors.”
I think this policy motivates journal article referees to be more
responsible and accountable!Questions
Is this the beginning of the end for the traditional refereeing process of
academic journals?
Could this be the death knell of the huge
SSRN commercial business
that blocks sharing of academic working papers unless readers and libraries
pay?
"Nature editors start online peer review," PhysOrg, September 14,
2006 ---
http://physorg.com/news77452540.html
Editors of the prestigious scientific journal
Nature have reportedly embarked on an experiment of their own: adding an
online peer review process.
Articles currently submitted for publication in
the journal are subjected to review by several experts in a specific
field, The Wall Street Journal reported. But now editors at the
136-year-old Nature have proposed a new system for authors who agree to
participate: posting the paper online and inviting scientists in the
field to submit comments approving or criticizing it.
Although lay readers can also view the
submitted articles, the site says postings are only for scientists in
the discipline, who must list their names and institutional e-mail
addresses.
The journal -- published by the Nature
Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd., of London --
said it will discard any comments found to be irrelevant, intemperate or
otherwise inappropriate.
Nature's editors said they will take both sets
of comments -- the traditional peer-review opinions and the online
remarks -- into consideration when deciding whether to publish a study,
The Journal reported.
Elite Researchers No Longer Need Peer Reviewed Elite Journals
"Peer Review in Peril?" by Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed,
July 26, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/07/26/economics
“What I
worry about,” Ellison said, “is you get to a point where
you can’t make a reputation for yourself by publishing
in the peer-reviewed journals. That locks in today’s
elite.”In
“Is Peer Review in Decline?,”
Ellison argues that the peer-reviewed journals,
traditionally relevant for their quality control and
dissemination functions, have become less important for
well-known economists in the Internet age. When papers
can be posted on personal home pages, conference Web
sites and online databases, an article written by a
professor who has already established a reputation can
immediately “be read by thousands.”
Professors in the top five economics departments, as
ranked by the National Research Council — Harvard
University, the University of Chicago, MIT, Stanford and
Princeton Universities – published 86.4 papers in 13
high-profile journals in economics subfields from
1990-93, compared to 71.2 from 2000-3. That 18 percent
drop happened even as many journals were “substantially”
increasing the number of papers they published, Ellison
writes, with the share of papers contributed by scholars
in top departments dropping from 4 percent in the early
1990s to 2.7 percent in 2000-3. Meanwhile, Ellison said,
scholars in the top departments seem to be writing as
much as they ever were, and citations of Harvard
scholars are increasing even as their number of
peer-reviewed publications has declined.
“The
well-known people are going to cut back on their
publishing in top journals because they don’t need the
peer review anymore. They can get attention to their
work without it,” Ellison said. The “slowdown” in the
revisions process for peer-reviewed journals also seems
to be a contributing factor to the decline in
peer-reviewed publications by top department members
with less to gain from the effort: It typically takes
about three years for a paper to be published after its
submission.
Ellison did not find much
evidence to support the alternative theory that the
trend could be a result of high-profile scholars being
“crowded out of the top journals by other researchers,”
though he acknowledges that may be a factor. A 2006
study by scholars from the Universities of Chicago and
Michigan,
“Are Elite Universities Losing Their Competitive Edge,”
found that
elite universities have lost their edge when it comes to
research productivity — in
part because of changes brought about by the advent of
the Internet.
“There’s
a question of whether it’s a trend on publication or a
trend on the professors. I hate to say that, but if they
don’t publish and others do, maybe it says something,”
said Ehud Kalai, a professor at Northwestern
University’s Kellogg School of Management and editor of
Games and Economic Behavior, one of the 13 field
journals analyzed by Ellison.
“The
other thing that’s a bit puzzling in this whole theory,
it seems to me, is that with this explosion of
information on the Internet, peer review has become even
more needed because there are so many more papers,”
Kalai said, adding that the number of economics journals
has exploded in recent years. “They’re just multiplying
like mad. If there is a trend not to publish, why are so
many starting them?”
Ellison
does find that even as they’ve shifted their energies
away from the 13 specialized journals examined,
academics in the top departments are still publishing as
much as ever in five of the most prestigious general
interest economics journals: the American Economic
Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political
Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics and
the Review of Economic Studies. But, beyond those
publications, Ellison said, “it’s fairly high up that we
see people pulling out.” He added that there are
hundreds of academic economics journals.
Ellison’s working paper is
available on
his Web site or online through
the
National Bureau of Economic Research
with a subscription or $5 payment.
And no, it has not been peer reviewed.
An Analysis of
the Contributions of The Accounting Review Across 80 Years: 1926-2005
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm
Co-authored with Jean Heck, December 2007 edition of
the Accounting Historians Journal.
Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
On the Road to Mendeley: New Ideas for Publishing
and Not Perishing (with peer review)
"How to Get Started with PaperCritic (and Why You’d Want To)," by
Heather M. Whitney, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 23, 2012
---
Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/how-to-get-started-with-papercritic-and-why-youd-want-to/38669?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
There has been quite a bit of press
lately about the peer review process and access to journal articles,
namely, how these are controlled by some of the bigger-name journals (at
great expense to libraries and users). The point of this post is not
to argue the rights and wrongs of review and access of journal articles.
What I’d like to highlight here is a complementary service to
Mendeley
that can help you curate your own
subsection of journal articles, including comments and reviews to and
from fellow academics who weren’t invited to review the articles the
first time around.
PaperCritic is a open
publication review tool that uses the Mendeley API in order to
facilitate commentary and review of journal articles. In short, you can
connect it to your Mendeley account and then comment on articles
publicly, including rating them on readability, quality of argument, and
other fields. Check out the
PaperCritic
tour for more details on the
particulars.
Why would you
want to use PaperCritic? Frankly, who hasn’t looked at a
journal article at some point in their career and wondered, “how in the
heck did this get past reviewers?” Or maybe you know that a particular
paper is extremely critical to have one your radar if you’re in a
particular line of research. Or maybe you know that a paper has a
certain set of flaws that can affect its use in later studies and want
to note that to other potential readers. PaperCritic could become an
effective tool for crowdsourcing insight and reviews into journal
articles that normally doesn’t happen as a part of the formal peer
review process.
For the tool to
be effective, it needs to have an audience of users. I don’t think
PaperCritic has a critical mass of users yet, but I could foresee it
being very helpful in my fields if other people latch on to Mendeley as
a information management tool.
Continued in article
Peer Review in Which Reviewer Comments are Shared With
the World ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PeerReview
"Peer Review in the Balance," by Gregory D. Curfman,
M.D. et al., New England Journal of Medicine, May 22, 2008 ---
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/358/21/2276??eaf
For many years, the editors of the
Journal have relied on peer review to ensure the
scientific quality of the articles that we publish. Of the
thousands of manuscripts submitted to the Journal each
year, we publish about 1 in 20. To aid us in selecting those
manuscripts, we seek advice from thousands of peer reviewers.
Confidential peer review is a key component of our manuscript
selection process.
We were therefore concerned when in
May 2007 lawyers for the pharmaceutical company Pfizer served
us with a subpoena demanding that the Journal produce
peer-review and other editorial documents on all manuscripts
. . .
[Full
Text of this Article]
Jensen Comment
Peer review as we know it, with two or three anonymous
referees and a journal editor, is becoming increasingly dangerous. Whether
it's global warming in science or research methodology in accounting, the
biases of editors and referees are becoming more and more worrisome to me.
Peer review has become so ingrained in academe that it's almost heresy to
raise doubts. But I have doubts about the subjective biases and lack of
accountability in the peer review process.
In science peer review bias is not so dangerous for
published articles, because there's a history in science journals to publish
commentaries and replication outcomes of researchers other than the original
authors of the article. In accounting the leading academic journals will not
publish replications and rarely publish commentaries submitted after an
article is published. This exposes new knowledge to the biases and
limitations of two or three referees who control the admission gates without
doing independent verification research ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#Replication
The problem in general with "confidential peer review" is
that reviewers are not held personally accountable for some very important
decisions regarding knowledge provided to the world. Whenever I've published
a research paper, I've found extreme variation in the quality of the
reviewers' efforts and write-ups. Often there are obvious biases as well. I
saw this even more so when I was assigned by Accounting Review Editor
Steve Zeff to evaluate papers that had extremely different reviewer
decisions. I concluded that in many instances peer review is either a random
process or a politically-loaded process. I think what bothered me the most
is the tendency of some reviewers and editors, often respected experts, to
summarily reject a submission in one or two sentences.
The process of making unrefereed working papers available
on the Internet (e.g., via
SSRN) is a good idea in spite of making it almost impossible for the
authors of submitted papers to journals to remain unknown to assigned
reviewers since most of those reviewers will have seen the working papers.
Working papers on the Internet allow most everybody in the world to comment
on the working papers prior to submission to a journal. This enables
thousands or more "experts" to critique the research prior to having it be
submitted to a journal.
In some cases, writings that are published in an
absurdly-priced journal or book for a first time exposure, without being
previously available on the Internet, have greatly limited the exposure of
the research for commentaries and replication. Since many college librarians
now refuse to buy or subscribe to some of the prestigious "rip-off" journals
and books, it also makes it difficult to conveniently and legally expose
that the papers of those journals to students ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#ScholarlyJournals
All contributions to new knowledge need to
be evaluated by experts. The question is whether the evaluations of those
experts should also be shared. In the case of contributions published on the
Internet, the evaluations of experts can also be made available to the
world. In the case of peer review, those evaluations are almost never made
public. It's the lack of availability of reviewer comments in the peer
review process, coupled with the corresponding lack of accountability of the
reviewer decisions, that bother me in this new knowledge generating process.
Flawed Peer Review Process
Faulty Towers: Most Science
Studies Appear to Be Tainted By Sloppy Analysis and Superficial Peer Reviews
Dr. Ioannidis is an epidemiologist who studies research
methods at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece and Tufts
University in Medford, Mass. In a series of influential analytical reports, he
has documented how, in thousands of peer-reviewed research papers published
every year, there may be so much less than meets the eye. These flawed findings,
for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from more
mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or
self-serving data analysis.
"There is an increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be
the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims," Dr.
Ioannidis said. "A new claim about a research finding is more likely to be false
than true." The hotter the field of research the more likely its published
findings should be viewed skeptically, he determined.
Robert Lee Hotz, The Wall Street Journal, September 24, 2007 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118972683557627104.html
"Peer review highly sensitive to poor
refereeing, claim researchers," Physics World, September 9, 2010 ---
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/43691
Thank you Roger Collins for the heads up.
Daniel Kennefick, a
cosmologist at the University of Arkansas with a special interest in
sociology, believes that the study exposes the vulnerability of peer
review when referees are not accountable for their decisions. "The
system provides an opportunity for referees to try to avoid
embarrassment for themselves, which is not the goal at all," he says.
Kennefick feels
that the current system also encourages scientists to publish findings
that may not offer much of an advance. "Many authors are nowadays
determined to achieve publication for publication's sake, in an effort
to secure an academic position and are not particularly swayed by the
argument that it is in their own interests not to publish an incorrect
article."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Especially take note of the many and varied comments on this article.
Bob Jensen's threads on the peer review
process are as follows:
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PeerReview
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PeerReviewFlaws
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
History and Future of Peer Review
"Peer reviewing: privilege and
responsibility," by Jane Johnston and Nigel Krauth, Griffith University,
April 2008 ---
http://www.textjournal.com.au/april08/johnston_krauth.htm
Abstract
Peer review is a central tenet in research across all disciplines. It is
a key feature in monitoring the advance of knowledge, especially in
academic publishing. This article investigates the development of peer
review from the seventeenth century to the present, and analyses
significant aspects of the process. It also attempts to clarify some
criticisms and make suggestions about the role of peer review in the
current climate.
The Rudd
government has announced a new system for recognition and quantification
of research in Australian universities. The ERA (Excellence in Research
for Australia) system is slated to replace the struggling Research
Quality Framework (RQF) of the previous Howard government. Subject to
the Australian Research Council approval of a consultation document, the
ERA proposal will be circulated to universities and research
stakeholders for comment. In this context, it is timely to consider one
of the central tenets of the research process: peer reviewing.
Historical
development of the peer review process
The peer
review process has its genesis in scientific journals. Henry Oldenburg,
the founding editor of the pioneering British scientific journal The
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society established in 1665,
is recognised as the earliest journal editor to articulate the need for
peer review: 'Oldenburg wrote of grappling with the vexing problems of
ensuring authors' intellectual property and vetting their contributed
papers' (Zuckerman
and Merton 1986). Prior
to this, secrecy characterised seventeenth-century scientific
publishing:
At
that time, many scientists sought to keep their work secret so that
others could not claim it as their own. Prominent figures of the
time, including Isaac Newton, were loathe to convey news of their
discoveries for fear that someone else would claim priority - a fear
that was frequently realized. (Committee
on Science, Engineering and Public Policy 2005)
Oldenburg's method used the judgement of peers in the Royal Society as a
validating mechanism and also as an official record of original
authorship. From its inception peer review was used as an instrument to
distinguish scientific journals from book publishing, ensuring quality
control and standards had been met before publication actually took
place (Tobin
2002).
Exactly how
peer review further developed appears sketchy. American historian JC
Burnham has found:
Practically no historical accounts of the evolution of peer review
exist. Biomedical journals appeared in the 19th century as personal
organs, following the model of more general journalism. Journal
editors viewed themselves primarily as educators. The practice of
editorial peer reviewing did not become general until sometime after
World War II. Contrary to common assumption, editorial peer review
did not grow out of or interact with grant peer review. Editorial
peer review procedures did not spread in an orderly way; they were
not developed from editorial boards and passed on from journal to
journal. Instead, casual referring out of articles on an individual
basis may have occurred at any time, beginning in the early to
mid-19th century. Institutionalization of the process, however, took
place mostly in the 20th century, either to handle new problems in
the numbers of articles submitted or to meet the demands for expert
authority and objectivity in an increasingly specialized world. (Burnham
1990)
The
development of scientific research was based on several key values
within the context of seventeenth-century research. These values made up
a system described by Merton as the 'scientific ethos' (see
Merton 1949) upon which research was
validated. The values - universalism, systematic scepticism, ethical
neutrality, communalism and disinterestedness - underpinned this ethos.
However, in his article titled 'A dissenting view on the scientific
ethos', published in the British Journal of Sociology, Rothman
suggested a questioning of these values' strengths, arguing that they
are flawed (Rothman
1972). His argument may
be summarised thus:
-
Universalism: this value is based on the understanding that
there are universal criteria for scientific knowledge, based on
technical norms; BUT it tends to favour the elite level of
scientist while discriminating against less-resourced,
less-famous researchers.
-
Systematic scepticism: it is by this means that science
protects itself from fraud through careful scrutiny and
validation; BUT this does not provide scope for those who use
non-conventional methods of research. In addition, scepticism
can be dispelled due to the 'Matthew Effect' that refers to
recognition based on eminence rather than merit.
-
Communalism: this value is based on the idea of sharing
knowledge; BUT the competitive environment of universities can
work counter to it. In addition, closed 'invisible colleges' can
emerge and result in inadequate refereeing and scrutiny based on
small, elite groupings which look after themselves.
-
Ethical neutrality: is described as a 'no-hold-barred'
approach which should see research proceed, despite the
sensitive nature of an issue; BUT responses may be made based on
the moral or social position of the work rather than its merit.
-
Disinterestedness: is based on the idea that research is not
undertaken for personal recognition or gain, but rather for the
communal good; BUT with professional and public recognition
being part of the reality of research, particularly in seeking
future funding, this is unrealistic. Taken to the extreme, in
seeking recognition, researchers may seek publication in
non-refereed newspapers first and thus be totally 'interested'
in furthering their own careers.
As part of his
critique of the scientific ethos, Rothman notes an insightful
observation made in a letter to a 1966 edition of the journal Science:
"The work
in laboratories is less gay now; the enthusiasm is being misplaced,
from acts of discovery to the work of quick publication. The
practice of science is becoming less for its own sake than for the
advancement of scientists. A slow terror is descending upon us,
compounded of fear and pride and envy, of hate and waste and
misguided zeal, of lacks of joy and satisfaction; let us stop this
before it becomes complete." (Siefevitz cited Rothman 1972: 106)
This
perception, made 40 years ago, is still relevant in the competitive,
pressurised research environment of the Australian Research Quality
Framework (RQF) and the new ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia)
to follow it. The idea that there has been a shift 'from acts of
discovery to the work of quick publication' resonates in the current
system that requires researchers annually to publish peer-reviewed
pieces as journal articles, book chapters and monographs. Indeed, it has
been argued (of scientists) 'without the production of scientific
papers, a scientist ceases to be a scientist' (Price cited
Lindsey, 1979).
Academics in all fields are now subject to the requirement to publish.
Contemporary
peer review
Emerging
alongside the importance of peer-reviewed publications has been the
growth in the importance of the peer reviewer her/himself - the peer who
must evaluate, critically review and respond to the work of another. By
definition, they too will be a researcher and author, with their own
work in the publication cycle. Judson notes of the role: 'although peer
review and refereeing seem rational, indispensable, and immutable, the
histories demonstrate that they are social constructs of recent date.
They are not laws of nature, nor of epistemology. They have changed and
evolved' (Judson
1994). They are subject
to the pressures of the contexts of the time.
The peer review
has changed and evolved yes, but not, it would seem, in any systematic
way. Analysts (e.g. Burnham 1990, Tobin 2002) agree that guidelines and
processes have emerged ad hoc.
For a
component of pivotal importance to the progress of science, journals
provide scant guidelines to the reviewers. The confidential and
anonymous nature of editorial peer review makes it especially
difficult for the novice to learn the skill. (Tobin 2002)
So new academic
writers face difficulties in having their work reviewed and in reviewing
the work of others particularly because the review process is done in
isolation - i.e., it is carried out away from the journal, as a private
confidential activity, and then submitted. Compounding this is the pace
required within the strictures of the publishing process which
comprises: researching, writing, sending for submission, journal
editors' screening and identifying the best reviewers, seeking review
from reviewer, receiving feedback from reviewer, sending back to the
author and quite possibly beginning the cycle again because feedback
from the reviewer requires change to the piece.
New reviewers -
and new contributors - are faced with an array of challenges, not least
of which is their limited writing experience. Putting one's work forward
for refereeing is like playing chess with one's ego - advancing one's
pawn into the maw of scholarly battle. Busy old-hand reviewers are not
necessarily blessed with a generosity of spirit, and may treat pieces
harshly. On the other hand, newly engaged referees may find their
reports ignored by editors, for reasons of lack of skill. Writing a
review, as with receiving one, involves skills of astuteness and
nuancing. This is due to the complexity of the academic publishing
process and its professed responsibility to the advancement of
knowledge.
A very useful
article, 'How to review a paper' in Advances in Physiology Education,
provides the following etiquette:
The
reviewer should write reviews in a collegial, constructive manner.
This is especially helpful to new investigators. There is nothing
more discouraging to a new investigator (or even to a more seasoned
one) than to receive a sarcastic, destructive review … No one likes
to have a paper rejected, but a carefully worded review with
appropriate suggestions for revision can be very helpful. (Benos
et al 2003)
There are many
anecdotes to prove this advice often goes unheeded. Take for example the
following comment, offered in response to a paper written by a PhD
student in a Queensland university on her second attempt at academic
publishing: 'The paper serves no purpose'. The comment, along with the
rejection in the summary section of the reviewer's form, came complete
with a typo that indicated the haste in which the review had been put
together and sent. (The PhD student has since become a tenured academic
at a leading university and learnt much about how not to peer review
from this response.)
But this case
begs the question: how closely is reviewers' feedback monitored? If
reviewers are tardy in their responses, or worse, nasty and unhelpful,
are they cast from the list of a journal's future reviewers? One view is
that the online system of internet publication has enhanced the rigour
of peer review. Editor of the American Journal of Respiratory and
Critical Care Medicine Martin Tobin notes that the journal has 5,600
reviewers on their database, covering 172 fields of research, with new
reviewers regularly added and 'delinquent or superficial reviewers'
noted. He adds that the timeline between submission and the first review
is 33 days for online peer review and applauds this move to electronic
expediency. 'The internet is revolutionising the speed of processing
manuscripts … but the bedrock of science has not changed since the
1660's: experiments are converted into science only after the results
have been published in a peer-reviewed journal' (Tobin 2002).
In 2005 the
developing RQF system in Australia (to be replaced by ERA from 2008)
cautiously asserted the importance of peer review in validating research
in the academic publishing process:
Universities currently receive block funds from the Australian
Government on the basis of their relative positions in
performance-driven formulae comprising research income (including
competitive grants); research student load/number of student
completions; and number of academic (peer reviewed) publications.
However, there is concern that these mechanisms, particularly the
latter, do not sufficiently encourage a focus on research quality,
including research impact. (Commonwealth
of Australia 2005: 7)
This
questioning of the peer review process in journals led to the following:
Many
metrics used in the assessment of research impact are of course
underpinned implicitly by some element of peer judgement. For
instance, in the case of a metric like numbers of publications,
there would normally be some involvement of peers in assessing a
paper/book for publication, although the degree of rigour in the
assessment process would vary considerably depending on the nature
of the journal/book publisher. An RQF is predicated on the
assumption that there is a need to develop a more consistent and
comprehensive approach to assessing the quality and impact of
research through the development of more sophisticated quality
measures for research than currently exists. The Expert Advisory
Group believes that a peer review component is fundamental to a
robust RQF. (Commonwealth of Australia 2005: 10-11)
We await
guidelines for 'a more consistent and comprehensive approach to
assessing the quality and impact of research' and 'the development of
more sophisticated quality measures for research than currently exists'.
In the meantime, we offer the following discussion and make some
suggestions regarding the next phases in the development of peer
reviewing.
The peer
review process
There are four
elements that make up the total picture of the peer review process in
the contemporary research environment:
1. the
researcher/author seeking peer review (Writer)
2. the role of the reviewer (Reviewer)
3. the philosophy of the journal publishing - or rejecting - the
research (Journal)
4. the expectations of the discipline for which the paper is written
(Discipline).
The writer of
the article must go through all the filters - numbers 2 through 4 above
- in seeking publication. The journal sets the benchmark for the writer
and the reviewer and often reflects the wider community of the
discipline, although all three are closely entwined. We will deal with
each of these points in an order that identifies the journal (number 3)
as a crucial pivot point in the mix.
Journal:
The philosophy of the journal
There are many aspects that constitute a journal's philosophy (including
how it comes to that philosophy, whether by an elected editorial board,
a local managing committee, or the influence of a powerful individual).
Key aspects involve:
1. the
journal's attitude towards its standards of scholarship
2. its perceived role in its discipline and the nature of that
discipline
3. its concern to create debate by inviting various viewpoints in
the field, or only to publish a particular school of thought
4. its aggressiveness in the field with regard to other
publications, e.g. its priorities regarding its own status and
leadership in the discipline
5. its policies regarding its handling of referees/reviewers - their
appointment, the use made of their reviews, etc
6. its policies regarding the work of established researchers
7. its concern to foster new researchers
8. its thoroughness in the revisions processes including the amount
of editorial assistance given.
Regarding
points 1 through 4, it is apparent that most academic journals spring up
because an individual or group see 'a gap in the market' with regards to
publication coverage of an established discipline or field, or a need to
represent a newly-emerging field/discipline. Standards and modus
operandi vary according to the priorities or whims of the editors
and committees/administrators who run journals. Journals can change
their profiles and motivations radically and suddenly, or slowly over
time, in accordance with the desires of the personnel who run them.
However, many journals establish an individual style, ethos and
character - an expectation in the readership - which is difficult to
change.
Regarding
points 5 through 8, there are matters in the operation of a journal that
are significantly the domain of the editors. Editors have noteworthy
power in determining how the day-to-day editorial operations of a
journal are handled. A look at the journal Hermes provides
insights especially regarding points 7 and 8 above.
The
journal of language and communication studies Hermes is based in
the Aarhus School of Business (ASB) in Denmark. Journal editor Helle V
Dam has provided an insightful analysis (Dam
2005) because, she
says, the journal focuses on communications/language and also because
she wished to raise issues regarding the journal's balance between
fostering young researchers while gaining international status and
credibility.
Dam explains
that Hermes, founded in 1988, was created as a vehicle for the
publication of local researchers and young scholars and, while it has
grown into an international journal, it has nevertheless maintained its
'local roots' and continued its philosophy of nurturing scholarly
development. Significantly, editors had initially been drawn from ASB
and reviewers had been local until the journal took a strategic change
of direction. In 2005, a policy change was taken to include 'external'
referees as well as locals. The rationale for this is explained:
It is quite
clear that in the scientific community, blind reviews performed by
scholars with no involvement in the journal are considered a sine
qua non for a high-quality journal. Still, highly qualified and
dedicated internal referees may in principle do their job at least
as well as external, independent referees would. Our policy change
is therefore admittedly just as much a question of achieving more
prestige as it is a question of ensuring higher quality. (Dam 2005)
Nevertheless,
the journal remained committed to publishing the work of up-coming
researchers, fostering the development of less experienced scholars. The
editorial board of Hermes lists three main ambitions:
1. to run
an international journal that publishes high-quality research
papers;
2. to offer publication space also to young scholars;
3. to offer fast publication. (Dam 2005)
With a policy
of 'thorough-reviews-rather-than-immediate-rejection' and three rounds
of revisions sometimes being required for inexperienced scholars, the
second and third ambitions could be seen to counteract each other. Dam
notes that this has been overcome by two strategies:
-
the first is the use of local referees who are willing to
work fast;
-
the second is the printing of the journal locally at ASB.
(Dam 2005)
The philosophy
of prioritising the output of young scholars - irrespective of the extra
work this may place on the journal and the discipline - is central to
the role of some journals, particularly in emerging disciplines where
the journal itself is a major contributor to the development and growth
of the discipline (e.g. also TEXT in Australia).
Writer:
The researcher/author seeking peer review
While some academics are highly skilled at preparing work for peer
review, any analysis of the peer review process should also include a
focus on the flaws of the inexperienced or rushed researcher seeking
review. Dam notes typical weaknesses with manuscripts:
-
the purpose of the paper is not clear/lacks focus
-
the literature does not reflect the state of the art
-
excessive use of quotations
-
problems with the relationship between theory and analysis
-
undocumented claims and over-generalisations
-
the conclusion is not a real conclusion
-
style problems
-
the abstract is not sufficiently informative. (Dam 2005: 7)
These issues
can arise out of hasty submission, laziness, professional pressures to
publish, immaturity of the researcher, prematurity of the research
write-up, or a mixture of these.
Manuscripts are sometimes sent hastily to a journal, perhaps to meet a
deadline, with the writer relying on the astute reviewers to plug the
argument gaps, or the editors to fill in from the style guides.
Anecdotal evidence supports this contention. However, the reverse is
also argued. Gannon says that authors tend to raise the standard of
their work knowing it will be scrutinised by another (Gannon
2001).
Both
contentions are correct, and can be correct for the same researcher at
different times in her/his career. The editors at TEXT have seen
every quality of submission from the most perfectly polished and refined
academic pieces (which evoked only gasps of praise from the referees) to
the high-school level mishmash (so poor, in fact, the work was rejected
before being sent for review). Oddly enough, submissions also arrive
which are clearly not suitable for the journal - not even dealing with
the journal's disciplinary focus - and therefore provide evidence that
some writers don't read the journal they submit to.
Having a strong
knowledge of the range of articles published by the targeted journal is
of prime importance. This not only provides an understanding of the
preferred style of the publication, it also leads to avoiding that
embarrassing reviewer report which says: 'Previous articles in this
journal have already covered this topic'.
Reviewer:
The role of the reviewer
The reviewer is engaged to uphold the standards of the journal and
further the causes of the discipline in the context of fostering new
knowledge and new debate. But, being individuals (and, of course, being
academics) no two reviewers have the same methods or the same viewpoint.
This is usually a benefit for the reviewing process, and not a drawback.
The reviewer's
role is to some extent circumscribed by the philosophy of the journal
(as outlined above). Individual reviewers can be selected because the
journal editors know these reviewers are likely to agree with each other
or with the submission, or on the other hand, because opposing views are
sought. Reviewers known for writing tough or aggressive reports might be
engaged for particular submissions, while referees with a lighter touch
employed on others (e.g. from new researchers). Often in the case of
research entering a new area, the reviewers are not fully expert in the
matter under scrutiny, and here the reviewer must be equipped to be
perceptive and flexible. Some reviewers are ideal for the job of
nurturing new ideas, and for providing useful responses in the
circumstance; some aren't. Editors often canvass a spectrum of views by
sending a submission to two or more very differently-oriented reviewers.
The key
role of the reviewer/referee is to interpret and represent the interests
of the journal's readership. However, reviewers differ in their
responses for individual, political, philosophical, cultural, school of
thought and other academic reasons. Klopffer and Heinrich note how, in
young, multidisciplinary academic fields such as communications or
creative writing - which don't have the decades of experience in
publishing enjoyed by the sciences - reviewers may come to opposite
conclusions because of the lack of an accumulated archive of research in
the field (Klopffer
and Heinrich 1999). In
older fields, of course, the very massiveness of that archive can create
difference in reviewers' interpretations and opinions.
Why do referees
referee? Journal editors may sometimes think it an imposition on busy
academics' time. But there is an element of being 'ahead of the game'
when a referee sees new research at its earliest manifestation. And
there is an element of power involved because the privileged reviewer is
given an opportunity to have an influence on the new work. Referees are
frequently given the opportunity to be at the cutting edge of the
discipline.
The combination
of privilege and responsibility involved in the peer reviewer's work is
not often enough articulated. Reviewers hold in their hands keys to
success for all three levels - for the writer, the journal and the
discipline. It is important work, not to be taken lightly, especially
because a reviewer also lays her/his own reputation on the line in
delivering a review.
Discipline: The expectations of the discipline
The development of knowledge requires quality control. Peer review is
the system disciplines have established in pursuit of objective quality
control. A discipline's advance is reliant on two factors: the quality
of its original research and the quality of its critique of that
research.
Disciplines are
shifting, convoluted arrangements. Expectations within them involve the
multitude and range of the expectations of the individuals involved. A
good discipline for a researcher to work in is one where open, fair
discourse prevails. A discipline should expect that its peer reviewers -
along with its researchers and the journals themselves - will cultivate
open, fair discourse.
Good journal
editors are acutely aware of the positioning of their publication within
its discipline; much time is spent orienting and steering a journal in
accordance with the discipline's compass points and the winds of change.
When editors make decisions they set a course for their journal and for
the discipline. Good peer reviewers also need to be aware of the
currents, the shoals, and the goals within the discipline.
Anonymity in
the process
There are two
aspects which set the peer review process apart from more general
reviewing such as that done in the popular media. These are:
1. the peer
review is an examination of academic researchers by peers who are
academic contemporaries (compared with media reviews of filmmakers
by journalists, for example);
2. the peer review is anonymous (those in popular media are named,
bylined or identifiable).
The second of
these aspects is the more contentious. Anonymity is seen as a critical
element of peer reviewing: Klopffer and Heinrich, editors of the
International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment argue that 'the
anonymous and strictly confidentially-performed review procedure … is
the backbone of this process, and we take care of it with our minds and
souls' (Klopffer and Heinrich 1999: 61).
However, this
is not a universal point of view, especially in light of changes within
the contemporary academic environment which has moved toward openness
and transparency: 'Many view the powerful role that reviewers play in
scientific publishing with suspicion, and feel that the anonymity of the
process is contrary to the current demands for transparency' (Gannon
2001).
Young and
upcoming researchers have their own perspective on the process. Writing
on behalf of the World Academy of Young Scientists (a forum created
under the auspices of UNESCO in 2003), Mainguy, Motamedi and Mietchen
(2005) identify problems with single-blind peer reviewing (SBPR) of
young researchers. Basing their views on work done by Wenneras (1997),
Laband et al
(1994), Katz et al
(2002) and others, they suggest:
Even though
peer review is universally accepted as an essential element of
research, considerable debate persists on how to implement it. The
vast majority of our members, especially from developing countries,
were concerned about the apparent unfairness of the current
procedure, a perception that is prone to generate frustration, fear
of discrimination, and distrust. We reached a consensus that slight
modifications to the current review process would help in getting
more objective reviews based on the quality of the research rather
than the age, affiliation, gender, or pedigree of the authors.
Single-blind peer review (SBPR), in which the reviewer knows the
identity of the author but not vice versa, is the currently accepted
practice. Because SBPR can be vulnerable to sexism and nepotism, its
ethical foundations have come under criticism; the method is
frequently recognized to be biased against new ideas, women, young
scientists, career changers, and scholars from less prestigious
universities and/or from developing countries … (Mainguy
et al 2005)
Mainguy et al
propose two means to eliminate bias from the peer-review process: open
peer review (OPR) and double-blind peer review (DBPR).
In open
peer review, the identities of both authors and reviewers are
revealed, affording the authors the ability to identify the
reviewers' comments to a person. Even though this might be an
equitable strategy to prevent unfair rejections, this process has no
safeguard against unfair acceptance of papers - reviewers, and
especially newcomers, may feel pressured into accepting a mediocre
paper from a more established lab in fear of future reprisals. (Mainguy
et al 2005)
As a concept,
OPR is as bold as it is fascinating. Although an obvious device, it is
not an accepted part of the research publishing ethos for journals or
for monographs (where anonymous - and sometimes paid - readers are
employed to assess). Academics' general acceptance of the anonymity of
the reviewer is surprising in a culture where striving to reveal truths
is the principal motivation. Some research journal editors would surmise
that revealing the identities of reviewers could lead to bloodshed.
Still, there is an unusual contradiction in the veiling of the process
which monitors the drive towards unveiling new knowledge.
On the other
hand, the Young Scientists also canvass the possibilities of DBPR, a
method now prevalent in several disciplines including computer science,
philosophy, economics, communications and media studies:
DBPR, in
which both the reviewers and the authors remain anonymous to each
other, is thought to disentangle the peer-review process from
non-scientific factors, thereby presenting an appealing alternative.
The a priori case for masking and blinding is strong, and several
studies have suggested that articles published in DBPR journals were
cited significantly more often than articles published in non-DBPR
journals. However, other studies have been less convincing; critics
of DBPR argue that it is difficult to hide the identity of the
institution, laboratory, and/or authors of a paper from the
reviewers, especially in smaller specializations. For instance, in a
DBPR policy trial, despite explicit instructions to authors, 34% of
prospectively evaluated manuscripts contained hints to unblind the
authors, and editors correctly identified the authors or
institutions of 25% of the manuscripts. The disconnection between
principle and practice is evident, and so far, few journals, and
even fewer in biomedical sciences, have implemented DBPR policies.
The reasons appear to be partly historical, as journals are used to
SBPR, and partly intellectual, as the benefits of DBPR still remain
controversial. (Mainguy et al 2005)
In its earlier
years, TEXT used SBPR but has moved more recently towards greater
use of DBPR. No significant difference in the two techniques has been
noticed by the editors, except that with DBPR established scholars are
probably given a harder time in terms of their use of punctuation! It
goes without saying that the old game of the writer guessing at the
identity of the referee is now also played by the referee guessing at
the identity of the writer.
The next
phases of peer review
It seems
that the major critics of the peer review process are those who defined
it in first place: the scientists.
Linkov et al (2007),
scrutinising peer reviewing in medical education for online publication,
note that until we have properly defined the objectives of peer review,
it will remain almost impossible to assess or improve its effectiveness:
'The research needed to understand the broader effects of peer review
poses many methodological problems and would require the cooperation of
many parts of the scientific community' (Linkov et al 2007: 250). And
Benos et al concede that: 'Very little definitive research into the
practice and effectiveness of peer review has been done' (Benos et al
2003).
Continued in article
The Dark Side of Peer Review ---
Click Here
"European Science Foundation Report Examines Peer Review Issues,"
University of Illinois Issues in Scholarly Communication blog, April 24,
2007 ---
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/
The
European Science Foundation (ESF), France, has published a
report which reveals some concern on the shortcomings of
peer review and outlines some possible measures to cope with
them. The report, ‘Peer
review: its present and future states’,
draws on ideas from an international conference held in
Prague in October 2006.
Scientists are
questioning whether peer review, the internationally
accepted form of scientific critique, is able to meet the
challenges posed by the rapid changes in the research
landscape. The ESF report showcases a number of options that
could lead to greater openness in innovative research. A
central theme of the report is that the current peer review
system might not adequately assess the most pioneering
research proposals, as they may be viewed as too risky. The
conference called for new approaches, enabling the
assessment of innovative research to be embedded in the peer
review system. Participants agreed that the increasing
importance of competitive research funding has also added on
the pressure on referees and on research funding agencies.
All
contributors to the conference report agreed that peer
review is an essential part of research and that no other
credible mechanism exists to replace it.
|
Rethinking Tenure, Dissertations, and Scholarship in Humanities
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#MLA
A New Model for Peer Review in Which
Reviewer Comments are Shared With the World
Peer Reviewers Comments are Open for All to See in New Biology Journal
From the University of Illinois Issues in Scholarly Communication
Blog, February 15, 2006 ---
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/
BioMed
Central has launched Biology Direct, a new online open access
journal with a novel system of peer review. The journal will operate
completely open peer review, with named peer reviewers' reports
published alongside each article. The author's rebuttals to the
reviewers comments are also published. The journal also takes the
innovative step of requiring that the author approach Biology Direct
Editorial Board members directly to obtain their agreement to review
the manuscript or to nominate alternative reviewers. [Largely taken
from a BioMed Central press report.]
Biology Direct launches with publications
in the fields of Systems Biology, Computational Biology, and
Evolutionary Biology, with an Immunology section to follow soon. The
journal considers original research articles, hypotheses, and
reviews and will eventually cover the full spectrum of biology.
Biology Direct is led by Editors-in-Chief
David J Lipman, Director of the National Center Biotechnology
Information (NCBI), a division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM)
at NIH, USA; Eugene V Koonin, Senior Investigator at NCBI; and Laura
Landweber, Associate Professor at Princeton University, Princeton,
NJ, USA.
For more information about the journal or about how to submit a
manuscript to the journal, visit the Biology Direct website ---
http://www.biology-direct.com/
July 28, 2006 reply from Alexander Robin A
[alexande.robi@UWLAX.EDU]
Two quotes from a couple of Bob Jensen's
recent posts:
"Of course we knew students are
obsessed with grades." (from the RateMyProfessors thread)
"The problem is that universities have
explicit or implicit rankings of "journal quality" that is
largely dictated by research faculty in those universities.
These rankings are crucial to promotion, tenure, and performance
evaluation decisions." (from the TAR thread)
These two issues are related. First,
students are obsessed with grades because universities, employers
and just about everyone else involved are obsessed with grades. One
can also say that faculty are obsessed with publications because so
are those who decide their fates. In these two areas of academia,
the measurement has become more important than the thing it was
supposed to measure.
For the student, ideally the learning is
the most important outcome of a class and the grade is supposed to
reflect how successful the learning was. But the learning does not
directly and tangibly affect the student - the grade does. In my
teaching experience students, administrators and employers saw the
grade as being the key outcome of a class, not the learning.
Research publication is supposed to result
from a desire to communicate the results of research activity that
the researcher is very interested in. But, especially in business
schools, this has been turned on its head and the publication is
most important and the research is secondary - it's just a means to
the publication, which is necessary for tenure, etc.
It's really a pathetic situation in which
the ideals of learning and discovery are largely perverted. Had I
fully understood the magnitude of the problem, I would have never
gone for a PhD or gotten into teaching. As to what to do about it, I
really don't know. The problems are so deeply entrenched in academic
culture. Finally I just gave up and retired early hoping to do
something useful for the rest of my productive life.
Robin Alexander
Elite Researchers No Longer Need Peer
Reviewed Elite Journals
"At Harvard, a Proposal to Publish Free on Web," by Patricia
Cohen, The New York Times, February 12, 2008 ---
Click Here
Publish or perish has long been the burden
of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard
faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish on the Web,
at least free.
Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a
measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship
online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly
journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription
costs.
Although the outcome of Tuesday’s vote
would apply only to Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty, the impact,
given the university’s prestige, could be significant for the
open-access movement, which seeks to make scientific and scholarly
research available to as many people as possible at no cost.
“In place of a closed, privileged and
costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to
everyone who wants to learn,” said Robert Darnton, director of the
university library. “It will be a first step toward freeing
scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making
it freely available on our own university repository.”
Under the proposal Harvard would deposit
finished papers in an open-access repository run by the library that
would instantly make them available on the Internet. Authors would
still retain their copyright and could publish anywhere they pleased
including at a high-priced journal, if the journal would have
them.
What distinguishes this plan from current
practice, said Stuart Shieber, a professor of computer science who
is sponsoring the faculty motion, is that it would create an
“opt-out” system: an article would be included unless the author
specifically requested it not be. Mr. Shieber was the chairman of a
committee set up by Harvard’s provost to investigate scholarly
publishing; this proposal grew out of one of the recommendations, he
said.
Continued in article at:
http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntget=2008/02/12/books/12publ.html&tntemail1=y&oref=slogin
Bob Jensen's Related Threads ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
"Peer Review in Peril?" by Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed,
July 26, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/07/26/economics
“What I
worry about,” Ellison said, “is you get to a point
where you can’t make a reputation for yourself by
publishing in the peer-reviewed journals. That locks
in today’s elite.”
In
“Is Peer Review in Decline?,”
Ellison argues that the
peer-reviewed journals, traditionally relevant for
their quality control and dissemination functions,
have become less important for well-known economists
in the Internet age. When papers can be posted on
personal home pages, conference Web sites and online
databases, an article written by a professor who has
already established a reputation can immediately “be
read by thousands.”
Professors in the top five economics departments, as
ranked by the National Research Council — Harvard
University, the University of Chicago, MIT, Stanford
and Princeton Universities – published 86.4 papers
in 13 high-profile journals in economics subfields
from 1990-93, compared to 71.2 from 2000-3. That 18
percent drop happened even as many journals were
“substantially” increasing the number of papers they
published, Ellison writes, with the share of papers
contributed by scholars in top departments dropping
from 4 percent in the early 1990s to 2.7 percent in
2000-3. Meanwhile, Ellison said, scholars in the top
departments seem to be writing as much as they ever
were, and citations of Harvard scholars are
increasing even as their number of peer-reviewed
publications has declined.
“The
well-known people are going to cut back on their
publishing in top journals because they don’t need
the peer review anymore. They can get attention to
their work without it,” Ellison said. The “slowdown”
in the revisions process for peer-reviewed journals
also seems to be a contributing factor to the
decline in peer-reviewed publications by top
department members with less to gain from the
effort: It typically takes about three years for a
paper to be published after its submission.
Ellison did not find much
evidence to support the alternative theory that the
trend could be a result of high-profile scholars
being “crowded out of the top journals by other
researchers,” though he acknowledges that may be a
factor. A 2006 study by scholars from the
Universities of Chicago and Michigan,
“Are Elite Universities Losing Their Competitive
Edge,” found that
elite universities have lost their edge when it
comes to research productivity —
in part because of changes
brought about by the advent of the Internet.
“There’s a question of whether it’s a trend on
publication or a trend on the professors. I hate to
say that, but if they don’t publish and others do,
maybe it says something,” said Ehud Kalai, a
professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg
School of Management and editor of Games and
Economic Behavior, one of the 13 field journals
analyzed by Ellison.
“The
other thing that’s a bit puzzling in this whole
theory, it seems to me, is that with this explosion
of information on the Internet, peer review has
become even more needed because there are so many
more papers,” Kalai said, adding that the number of
economics journals has exploded in recent years.
“They’re just multiplying like mad. If there is a
trend not to publish, why are so many starting
them?”
Ellison does find that even as they’ve shifted their
energies away from the 13 specialized journals
examined, academics in the top departments are still
publishing as much as ever in five of the most
prestigious general interest economics journals: the
American Economic Review, Econometrica,
Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly
Journal of Economics and the Review of
Economic Studies. But, beyond those
publications, Ellison said, “it’s fairly high up
that we see people pulling out.” He added that there
are hundreds of academic economics journals.
Ellison’s working paper is
available on
his Web site or online
through the
National Bureau of Economic Research
with a subscription or $5
payment. And no, it has not been peer reviewed.
Bob Jensen's threads on higher
education controversies are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
An
Analysis of the Contributions of The Accounting Review Across 80
Years: 1926-2005 ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm
Co-authored with Jean Heck and forthcoming in the December 2007 edition
of the Accounting Historians Journal.
Flawed Peer Review Process
Over 62% of Full-Time Faculty Are Off the Tenure Track
More than 62 percent of all faculty members are off
the tenure track, including nearly 30 percent of those with full-time positions,
according to an analysis released today by the American Association of
University Professors.
The study
— based on federal data — comes with
institution-specific numbers on 2,600 colleges, revealing the exact breakdowns
on full- and part-time professors, on and off the tenure track. AAUP leaders
hope that the data will spur discussions on campuses nationwide about the use of
part-timers and the need to create more full-time, tenure-track positions.
Scott Jaschik, "The Job Security Rankings,"
Inside Higher Ed, December
11, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/12/11/aaup
Question
Should the tenure system as we know grind to a rusty halt?
"Moving Beyond Tenure," by Dean Dad," Inside Higher Ed,
February 21, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/02/21/ccdean
Tenure certainly meets the needs for
security and predictability, but it does so by granting impunity and
saddling a college with immovable costs for the life of the
employee. (It used to expire at 70, which struck me as more than
fair, but now it expires at death.) As any academic manager can tell
you, once people have tenure, they’re almost completely
unaccountable for their actions. Give large numbers of people
absolute immunity for decades on end, sheltered from economic
reality, stuck with the same peers for 30 years, and some very weird
behaviors come to the fore.
. . .
Worse, locking a group in for decades on
end has the unintended side effect of locking new hires out. In my
academic field, for example, my current college’s last hire occurred
during the Nixon administration. He’s still here. I’d venture to say
that the field has moved forward since then, but you wouldn’t know
it here.
When I’ve tried to engage faculty friends
in this conversation, they’ve uniformly reacted with horror. “I’ve
killed myself for years to get tenure! Don’t take it away now!”
Well, exactly. I don’t think tenure is the
solution to abuse. It’s a root cause.
The labor surplus in academe is not new.
Why does it persist? Why do smart people keep crowding into a field
with relatively few jobs, shockingly low pay relative to its
training period, and absolutely no idea where it’s going? Sure,
teaching is fun, but lots of things are fun.
I think the siren call of tenure is the
culprit.
Tenure creates a do-or-die moment 15 years
into a career. What other profession has anything even vaguely like
that? At least in law firms, if you don’t make partner, you have the
option of putting out a shingle and starting your own practice. Most
of us can’t afford to start our own colleges. After years of
extended graduate training, some post-grad-school bouncing around,
and more years of tenure-track teaching and writing, you are either
set for life or summarily fired. No wonder people are edgy!
Continued in article
List of Top Academic Employers
Evolves
Through its surveys and
reports, the
Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE)
has stressed the importance of
a wide variety of policies — and not just those about
pay and benefits — in attracting and keeping young
faculty talent. The project’s new list of “exemplary”
higher education employers offers further evidence of
that theme. List of Top Academic Employers Evolves
Through its surveys and reports, the Collaborative on
Academic Careers in Higher Education has stressed the
importance of a wide variety of policies — and not just
those about pay and benefits — in attracting and keeping
young faculty talent. The project’s new list of
“exemplary” higher education employers offers further
evidence of that theme. Generally, private colleges
dominate the list in categories related to compensation
or other categories where finances would be a major
factor. But on qualities related to the clarity of
procedures (a category many junior faculty members take
very seriously), publics tend to do much better. The
Harvard University-based collaborative — known by its
acronym, COACHE — has become an influential player in
discussions of how to make colleges more “family
friendly” and how institutions should prepare for a
generation of professors who may not accept the
traditional hierarchical model of many academic
departments.
Scott Jaschik, "List of Top Academic Employers
Evolves," Inside Higher Ed, December 5, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/05/coache
Question
Does putting up more rigorous research hurdles for
tenure (such as having more outside reviewers and new
policies for choosing reviewers) make it harder or
easier for outstanding teachers to get tenure?
"Standing Their Ground," Inside Higher Ed,
October 7, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/07/brown
Gaming for Tenure as an Accounting
Professor ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTenure.htm
(with a reply about tenure publication point systems
from Linda Kidwell)
Obsolete and Dysfunctional System of
Tenure ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Tenure
Question
Why do some of our very top college graduates in the nation fail to achieve
greatness in their chosen professions like public accounting and law?
Answer
I think some of the answers below can be extrapolated into other professions. I
especially like the answer of Bob Boyles below. Success in life is a function of
being in an environment for excellence, where interactive externalities like
colleagues and resources and serendipity play enormous roles. I also like Dan
Jenkin's answer. Soaring to the top in college is not exactly like soaring to
the top in real life. Professors like me, however, are somewhat different since
we've had very few adventures in the real world.
"Heisman Is No Key to NFL Glory: Why do so few winners make it in
the pros?" by Allen Berra, The Wall Street Journal, December 6, 2007
---
http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110010951
University of Florida sophomore quarterback Tim
Tebow is the odds-on favorite to win the 2007 Heisman Trophy this Saturday
as the nation's outstanding college football player. Since the colleges
serve as a farm system for the National Football League and Mr. Tebow is the
best player in college, he should be a cinch to make it in the pros, right?
Not according to history. In the modern era of the
NFL, only a handful of Heisman Trophy winners have enjoyed genuine success
in the pro ranks. Consider the following:
• In the past half-century, scarcely one in
five Heisman winners has become a major pro-football star. Of the past
50, only four--O.J. Simpson, Earl Campbell, Marcus Allen and Barry
Sanders--have gone on to be voted the NFL Most Valuable Player by the
Associated Press.
• Only seven of the past 50 Heisman Trophy
winners--Roger Staubach, Mike Garrett, Jim Plunkett, Tony Dorsett,
George Rogers, Marcus Allen and Desmond Howard--have been starters on
Super Bowl-winning teams.
• Three of the past seven Heisman
winners--Chris Weinke (2000), Eric Crouch (2001) and Jason White
(2003)--are no longer even playing with the NFL. Last year's winner,
Troy Smith, who won by the widest margin of any player in Heisman
history, is on the roster of the Baltimore Ravens this season but has
not yet thrown a pass.
• The last Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback
to win a Super Bowl ring was Jim Plunkett in 1981, playing for the
Oakland Raiders.
Some feel the reason Heisman winners seldom make it
in the pros is simple: The voters didn't pick the best player in the first
place. For instance, Jim Brown, by consensus the greatest running back in
NFL history, was a three-time league MVP but didn't win the Heisman in
college. Neither did such all-time greats as Johnny Unitas, Fran Tarkenton,
Walter Payton, Lawrence Taylor, John Elway, Joe Montana and Peyton Manning.
Michael David Smith of Pro Football Prospectus
thinks that the failure of most Heisman winners to make it in the pros can
be attributed to some basic differences between the college and pro games.
"In college football, there's so many different schemes, from the option to
the run and shoot, that an incomplete football player can thrive in the
right college system. The right college offense can hide a player's flaws,
but in the NFL those flaws will be exposed."
Bill Walsh, a college coach for Stanford University
and the San Francisco 49ers in the NFL, felt it was often a question of
maturity. "Joe Montana won four Super Bowls for us," he told me in a 2003
interview, four years before his death, "but I don't know that he was really
the best quarterback in the country coming out of college. I thought he had
the potential to become the best."
But many top college players, including some recent
Heisman winners, don't have the luck to be drafted by teams that can give
them a fair chance to develop. "Football," says Bob Boyles, author of "Fifty
Years of College Football," "is the ultimate team-oriented game where a
quarterback can't become a star passer without receivers streaking into the
open and catching the ball while unsung linemen mount great pass
protection."
An example, says Mr. Boyles, is Matt Leinart, the
University of Southern California's 2004 Heisman winner, who was considered
a can't-miss prospect when he was drafted by Arizona. The difference in the
talent level between the USC Trojans and the Arizona Cardinals must have
come as a shock to Mr. Leinart. In college he was surrounded by All-American
caliber linemen and playing the same backfield with such pro prospects as
running backs LenDale White (now with the Tennessee Titans) and Reggie Bush
(himself a Heisman winner, now with the New Orleans Saints). At Arizona, Mr.
Leinart's supporting cast has been far less imposing; quarterbacking for the
Cardinals, Mr. Boyles notes, Mr. Leinart "is sometimes hit more times in a
single game than he was in an entire season at Southern Cal." (This season
he has been on the injured reserve list since Oct. 10.)
Reggie Bush is experiencing a similar fate with the
New Orleans Saints. In 2005, at USC, Mr. Bush had what is regarded as one of
the most remarkable seasons in college football history, averaging 8.9 yards
per carry. So far in two years with the Saints he has averaged just 3.7.
(After 12 games, the Saints are just 5-7.)
Then there are some Heisman winners who perform
well despite the teams they're drafted onto but don't get the recognition
they deserve. Mr. Walsh noted that Tim Brown, the 1987 Trophy winner,
"played 16 years for a Raiders team which only won a dozen games more than
they lost. Yet he's second on the all-time list for receiving yards. If he'd
have been lucky enough to be drafted by a team with great passers like Joe
Montana and Steve Young, who's to say he couldn't have surpassed Jerry Rice
[the all-time leader]?" For some students of the college game, though, the
question of why Heisman winners don't have much success in the pros is
beside the point. Let's give the final word to legendary college-football
writer Dan Jenkins, who says: "The Heisman shouldn't have anything to do
with the NFL. It should be awarded strictly on a guy's performance as a
collegian. It's not like a player should have to justify his Heisman by
becoming a pro star."
December 9 added comments by Bob Jensen
I have an added thought on this with respect to
some of the top faculty prospects from accountancy
doctoral programs. Over the course of my 40 years as
an accounting professor in four universities, I’ve
encountered a number of “Heisman-type” PhD graduates
who failed in the “Accounting Research NFL.” After
being hired at some of the highest starting salaries
in academe and receiving research incentives such as
reduced teaching loads, summer research stipends,
research expense stipends, and other benefits, some
of these Heismans just frittered their research life
away. Several come explicitly to mind. One was a
former undergraduate student who went on to become
one of Stanford’s top doctoral graduates with
exceptional mathematics abilities. Three others were
some of best Stanford graduates that I got to know
when I returned to the Stanford campus for two years
in a think tank. And there have been others whom
thesis supervisors have privately complained about
to me over the years. There have also been some who
were my colleagues on the faculty.
In some cases, I’m convinced that the tenure
system has been dysfunctional. I know of personal
instances where the graduate wrote an excellent
thesis that by itself was the source of a few
publications in top accounting research journals.
These assistant professors got just enough of a
publication record (mostly on the basis of their one
bit of thesis research) to get tenure and promotion
to assistant professorships. The poop! They became
lifetime associate professors or maybe, later in
life, took on administration jobs to help get them
promoted to full professorships. But their
publication records after getting tenure remained
dismal. Or, in some cases, a benevolent hotshot
researcher gave them a small job in a joint research
effort that got their names on occasional papers for
which their contributions were marginal. In several
instances, the benevolent hotshot researchers were
friends who actually felt sorry for the Heisman
failures and were just trying to help them get
promoted to associate or full professor ranks.
For the most part these promising Heisman winners
who wiggled out of research effort (other than maybe
pretense) have let their employers and their
colleagues down. They’re sometimes performing only
teaching duties that low-paid adjuncts could do as
well or better.
In several instances, these Heisman failures
became rather wealthy because senior authors gave
them opportunities to work on successful textbook
revisions. Revision of textbooks can be hard work
and very time consuming. But it’s generally not the
same pressured effort of trying to conduct research
worthy of publication in top journals. And they’re
exceptional research skills are being wasted.
This begs the question of what these Heisman
“failures” did with their time that perhaps would
have been better spent on research. One instance
that I can think of became a really outstanding
“open door” teacher of intermediate accounting. This
person’s success at educating students is noteworthy
and probably should not be faulted other than that
his exceptional research skills are being wasted.
But his professional time is not being wasted.
Interestingly, two of the Heisman failures became
obsessed both with marathon running and nurturing
their children. They should get Heisman trophies for
their efforts in both of these endeavors and the
fifty hours or more each week devoted to these
successful activities. But in the meantime the
universities that pay them full salaries are getting
short-shrifted.
One of my Heisman failures went on to become a
rather good teacher in a prestigious European MBA
program. He truly enjoys the continental life and is
making a worthy professional contribution. But his
publication record is a zero, and his exceptional
research skills are being wasted.
Another one of these Heisman failures devotes
almost all of his time outside of class to his music
and his hobbies connected with music. He is quite
good at what he now does, but once again his
noteworthy accounting research skills are being
wasted. Another one buys and sells antiques. Another
one became a part-time farmer.
As far as Heisman accounting research failures
go, I blame the tenure system more than anything
else. Unlike real world occupations, the tenure
system affords some Heisman winners the opportunity
to pursue personal interests to excess without fear
of being fired, demoted, or even having salaries
cut. Inflation may take its toll over the course of
thirty or more years, but inflation losses can be
made up with spousal income, inheritances/investment
income, hobby income (including antique dealing and
farming), and textbook royalties.
How many tenured faculty do you know who are now
“beating the system?”
Bob Jensen
Liberal Professors Advertise Support for Ward
Churchill's Tenure
Eleven scholars have published
a full-page ad in The New York Review of Books to try to
rally support for Ward Churchill, who is
facing possible dismissal
from his tenured job at
the University of Colorado at Boulder. The text of the
ad is available at a Web site called
“Defend Critical Thinking,”
and focuses on the way charges of
misconduct were brought against Churchill, not the
charges themselves. The ad warns scholars to “be wary of
opportunistic attacks on scholarship that are disguised
means of sanctioning critics and stifling the free
expression of ideas,” adding: “It may be that aspects of
Churchill’s large body of published writings were
vulnerable to responsible academic criticism, but the
proceedings against him were not undertaken because of
efforts to uphold high scholarly standards, but to
provide a more acceptable basis for giving in to the
right-wing pressures resulting from his 9/11 remarks.”
Among those signing: Derrick Bell of New York
University, Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, Juan Cole of the University of Michigan,
and Howard Zinn of Boston University.
Inside Higher Ed, April 3, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/04/03/qt
Bob Jensen's threads on the Ward Churchill saga are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HypocrisyChurchill.htm
Discussions must move beyond tenure
processes. We must now examine the tenure system itself, future career
pathways for our increasingly diverse and mobile faculty, and standards
of performance in a global academic marketplace. There may be
alternative models to explore. Those discussions must involve a variety
of stakeholders who focus on one key question: How do we create and
maintain a rigorous and competitive tenure system that best meets the
needs of our students and our publics, and best positions America for
long-term success? Tomorrow’s students and the next generation of
Americans deserve nothing less.
Hank Brown (President of the University of Colorado), "Tenure
Reform: The Time Has Come," Inside Higher Ed, March 27, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/03/26/brown
How many sexual molestation arrests does it take to fire a tenured
professor?
"A Ring of Fire," by Rob Capriccioso, Inside Higher Ed, August 31,
2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/31/upenn
Penn officials said Tuesday that Ward would
never teach again at the university. But some are asking what took
them so long, since this was not the first time, but the third, that
Ward had been charged in sex scandals involving minors.
Catherine Bath, executive director of
Security on Campus, a nonprofit organization concerned with campus
safety,
told
The Philadelphia Inquirer
that it
seemed that Penn “was giving him a chance” despite his history. “But
do you really want known child molesters on your campus?” she asked.
“I would say no.”
“It seems like an odd situation,” said
Jason Johnston, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania
Law School. “I’m not surprised people are having negative
reactions.”
In 1995, the marketing professor was
acquitted of “involuntary deviate sexual intercourse” after an
18-year-old male alleged that he had sexual contact with Ward
between 50 and 100 times from the time he was 13 or 14 years old.
Four years later, in 1999, Ward was accused of soliciting sex from a
state trooper who had posed as a 15-year-old boy. In that case, he
pleaded guilty without admitting that he tried to promote
prostitution and corrupt minors. Ultimately, he was given five years
of probation and fined $2,500. Ward is currently being held in a
Virginia jail and could not be reached for comment. His lawyer did
not return calls for comment on Wednesday.
Continued in article
How much stolen money does it take to fire a tenured professor?
Priscilla Slade was fired as president of Texas
Southern University and was indicted last month based on allegations
that she mismanaged university funds and that some were used
inappropriately for her home (charges that she denies).
The Houston Chronicle
reported that Slade
is teaching accounting at Texas Southern this semester. Texas Southern
officials noted that Slade is a tenured professor and that her firing as
president did not revoke her tenure.
Inside Higher Ed, August 31, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/31/qt
Helpers for Women in Academe
"New Web Site Offers Career
‘Resilience’ Advice for Female Academics," by Paige Chapman,
Chronicle of Higher Education, November 5, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/new-web-site-offers-career-resilience-advice-for-women-academics/28044?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Women in
science and technology doctoral-degree programs are
more likely to drop out than are their
male counterparts:
Unfavorable workplace climates and
discrimination are leading reasons. Arizona State University, in
partnership with the National Science Foundation, is the latest
university to attempt to combat this problem with a novel approach,
featured on its new
CareerWISE Web site.
Bianca L. Bernstein,
the project’s principal investigator, says the site offers women
examples of resilience: ways to rebound from the discouragement of
situations in which they feel they are belittled and treated as
outsiders. She says this is a different approach from other
Internet-based materials for women academics. “There have been a lot
of resources out there, but we felt a lot of them are not helpful
because they either provide a lot of statistics and reports or tell
a lot of war stories,” Ms. Bernstein says. “We instead want to teach
women how to counter discouragement and give them the confidence to
deal with any situation that comes up.”
One of the tools Ms.
Bernstein says can offer a big help is the “HerStories” section,
which now has approximately 180 video interviews with women who have
continued academic careers in the face of adversity.
“They can see how
women handled situations that may be similar to what they’re facing
with success and learn from those approaches,” she says.
For example, the
home page features a video of Jean M. Andino, an associate professor
at Arizona State’s school of engineering. In the three-minute clip,
Ms. Andino says she felt pressured to participate in a university
committee because of her gender and race, but she didn’t have the
time to devote to it. She says by emphasizing both the importance of
her other obligations and her dedication to her employer, she was
able to decline the opportunity and maintain the respect of her
colleagues.
The site also
details several different ways that women often respond to
conflict-ridden situations, Women can identify their own patterns
and then see alternative responses that may lead to productive
outcomes.
Ms. Bernstein says
she is hoping that the interpersonal approach will help women learn
how to handle everyday situations and that using the Internet as a
resource will make them more likely to seek help.
“Sometimes, women in
these situations feel very vulnerable and don’t know what to do,”
she says. “Going online gives them the ability to get advice and
help in the privacy of their own home.”
Teaching Case on What's Holding Women Back in the Workplace
Video ---
http://online.wsj.com/video/pepsi-indra-nooyi-on-balancing-work-and-family/44313778-BE51-4C1A-9323-8757ED876F78.html
From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on April
15, 2011
View from the Top
by: Alan Murray
and Indra Nooyi
Apr 11, 2011
Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com
Click here to view the video on WSJ.com
TOPICS: Accounting
SUMMARY: The WSJ
held a conference for business and government leaders to examine
"...what's holding women back in the workplace-and set out an action
plan for creating new opportunities." Participants highlighted in
the article include Chief Executive of PepsiCo Indra Nooyi; retired
Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor; Marissa Mayer, the first
woman engineer at Google; and actress Geena Davis among other highly
accomplished women. The program involved presentation results of
research by McKiney & Co. , panel discussions, and presentation of
task force recommendations for action to solve issues. The focus of
this article is an interview with Indra Nooyi about what she did to
get to the top. The article begins with a summary of the McKinsey
research essentially saying that "...at each stage of [corporate]
advancement, men have at least twice the odds of advancing as women"
and asks, "How the hell did you do it?"
CLASSROOM
APPLICATION: The related video is essentially repeated in the
printed article, so this video could be used in a classroom viewing
followed by the questions. It is a useful discussion for any
business class, particularly entry level accounting classes often
taken by all business majors or in MBA classes.
QUESTIONS:
1. (Introductory) Ms. Nooyi says that to reach the top,
women must obtain P&L management responsibilities as men do. What
does the term "P&L" mean? What does it mean to have "P&L
responsibility"?
2. (Introductory) What are the functions that Ms. Nooyi
says are critical? How do those functions relate to business school
education?
3. (Introductory) What does Ms. Nooyi say were her biggest
sacrifices to advance has she has?
4. (Advanced) Do you think that the statistics regarding
women's advancement in corporate America will change? Support your
answer.
5. (Advanced) Do you think this interview and other
articles contain important lessons for men as well as women? Explain
your answer.
SMALL GROUP
ASSIGNMENT:
The questions may be discussed in classroom groups following viewing
of the Nooyi interview with reporting out, perhaps also including
proposed solutions. These solutions then might be compared to the
recommendations found in the related WSJ articles covering the
conference.
Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island
RELATED ARTICLES:
Why Women Rarely Leave Middle Management
by Sue Shellenbarger
Apr 11, 2011
Online Exclusive
From Kindergarten to the Boardroom: The Top Priorities
by WSJ Editors of the Women in the Economy Report
Apr 11, 2011
Page: R7
"View from the Top," by: Alan Murray and
Indra Nooyi, The Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704013604576247630655985522.html?mod=djem_jiewr_AC_domainid
Task-force participants at the
conference had no end of recommendations for addressing the
challenges—and opportunities—facing women in the economy. Give women
more bottom-line responsibilities. Hold CEOs accountable. Recruit
outside the regular channels. And so on.
To get insight into those issues,
The Wall Street Journal's Alan Murray turned to one of the
highest-ranking women in corporate America: Indra Nooyi, chairman
and chief executive of PepsiCo. Here are edited excerpts from the
discussion.
MR. MURRAY: McKinsey
research, building on Catalyst research, shows this pipeline in
corporate America. The majority of entrants are very high-qualified
women—but at each stage of advancement, men have at least twice the
odds of advancing as women. How the hell did you do it?
MS. NOOYI: I ask
myself that question every day. Especially recently, I've been
looking back and thinking about all of the trade-offs and sacrifices
I've had to make to get here. My second daughter's going off to
college this September, and I say, "My God, I missed so many things
about her growing up." Hopefully, my two daughters will be in an
environment where it's going to be easier for them.
MR. MURRAY: Are you
suggesting that it could have been easier, and you still could have
achieved the pinnacle you achieved?
INDRA NOOYI 'The harder the business,
the bigger the turnaround, put your hand up and say "I
want to do it." '
MS. NOOYI:
From a family situation, I wanted it all, and it wasn't easy. But I
lucked out in one way. I had a husband who said, "You're going to
have true gender equality." He was working, I was working, but we
juggled our schedules. I also had tremendous support from the
extended family.
On the professional
side, I had mentors who gave me feedback. For example, I'm a pretty
honest and outspoken person. So, you sit in a meeting and somebody
presents a three-year, five-year plan. Typically, a lot of the men
in the room would say, "You know, that's very interesting. But maybe
you could think about this slightly differently."
I just said, "That's
crap. This is never going to happen." I'm sure they were all
thinking that, but they were saying it in a much more gentle way.
I'd come out of the meeting, and one of the guys would pull me aside
and say, "You could have said the thing slightly differently. Maybe
not the way I said it. Maybe not the way you said it. There might
have been a middle ground."
I was very happy
that these mentors stepped up and gave me feedback on how to
interact in a world that is predominantly male. How can I keep my
authenticity, yet adapt to the environment?
MR.
MURRAY: Can you have an example of where you didn't make the
compromise on authenticity?
MS. NOOYI:
If my kids called in the middle of a meeting, I took the call. I
never said, "Mom's not available." I said, "Excuse me, my kids need
to talk to me."
The Leaky
Pipe
MR.
MURRAY: How do you account for the fact that the pipeline is, to use
the adjectives that have been used here, leaky, blocked, broken?
MS. NOOYI:
I think the pyramid starts narrowing for everybody, but
disproportionately for women because the pipeline wasn't as rich as
it needed to be coming up.
I think there might
be three reasons why that's so. One, just law of numbers, there
weren't enough women in the pipeline. Second, as you move up the
organization, there are so many trade-offs and sacrifices to be
made. Many women opted out. Third is the environment in many
companies, because it's more male dominated. It's changing now, but
the senior men belong to the older generation who talk differently
and act differently.
Let's say Alan
Murray made a presentation, and it was awful. The guys would go to
Alan Murray, thump him on the back and say, "Alan, buddy, what
happened? You screwed up, man." And Alan says, "You think so? Tell
me what I did wrong." There's a locker-room conversation that goes
on.
When a woman makes a
presentation that's not so good, the men say, "She screwed up, God,
she did." That's not locker room; that's heckling the woman.
Women need to go to
women and say, "Hey, that presentation wasn't very good. Let me tell
you how you could have done it better." But there's a reverse
problem. When women give women feedback, women don't take it well.
So, there's a funny psychological issue we need to address. Women
can be better mentors to women, and women should be more willing to
accept women mentors.
The Bottom
Line
MR.
MURRAY: Let's take a look at the list of priorities. Number one was
that too many women are in support roles. In order to see women
advance to the top, they needed to be put in positions where they
could develop responsibility for the bottom line.
MS. NOOYI:
Punching the ticket that you've done P&L management makes a huge
difference. But roles like finance or HR or marketing are now
critical to the functioning of a company. You can actually exert
your influence from those roles. So, ask for a P&L role, get it out
as soon as you can—and then figure out how to get into a critical
function. But make sure that as you do this job, you expand your own
definition of that job.
MR.
MURRAY: Another recommendation was to hold CEOs accountable for
hiring women in the top jobs and making sure pay was at an equal
level.
MS. NOOYI:
I agree with all of that, especially the pay parity, which is
something we can fix right away. The thing to be very careful about,
though, is that if you don't fix the issue of getting talented women
in the pipeline, you can't fix the top-management issue overnight.
That's a formula for disaster. You put women in there, and they
don't succeed, and then it's a worse situation for women.
MR.
MURRAY: Another idea was to promote women on potential. A phrase
that's been repeated around here for the last few days is that men
are promoted for potential, and women are promoted on performance.
The implication is that there's a higher hurdle that women have to
meet.
MS. NOOYI:
I think that's changed a lot. The sensitivity, the awareness of
these issues is rising, but I think we ought to keep the pressure
on. As long as there are no women in the C-suite, these kinds of
discussions won't happen.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on the Glass
Ceiling (and in some cases lack thereof in CPA firms) are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/BookBob1.htm#careers
Given the dire shortage of accounting doctoral students, there is an
explosion in part-time accounting faculty.
This is also the trend in most other disciplines.
"Inexorable March to a Part-Time Faculty," by Doug Lederman,
Inside
Higher Ed, March 28, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/03/28/faculty
New data from the U.S.
Education Department confirm what faculty leaders
increasingly bemoan: The full-time, tenure-track
faculty member is becoming an endangered species in
American higher education.
A new report
from the National Center for
Education Statistics shows that of the 1,314,506 faculty members at
colleges that award federal financial aid in fall 2005, 624,753, or
47.5 percent, were in part-time positions. That represents an
increase in number and proportion from 2003,
the last full survey of institutions,
when
543,137 of the 1,173,556 professors (or 46.3 percent) at
degree-granting institutions were part timers. (The statistics may
not be directly comparable because the department reported
part-time/full-time figures only for degree-granting institutions in
2003, and for all Title IV institutions in 2005.)
The new report, “Employees in
Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2005, and Salaries
of Full-Time Instructional Faculty, 2005-06,” also
finds the proportion of all professors who are
tenured or on the tenure track to be shrinking. Of
the 675,624 full-time faculty members at
degree-granting colleges and universities in 2005,
414,574, or 61.4 percent, were either tenured or on
the tenure track. That is down from the 411,031 of
630,419 (or 65.2 percent) of professors at
degree-granting institutions who were tenured or
tenure track in 2003.
Full-time Faculty at
Degree-Granting Institutions, 2005 and 2003
|
|
Fall 2005 |
Fall 2003 |
% Change |
|
All faculty |
675,624* |
630,419 |
7.1% |
|
With tenure |
283,434 |
282,429 |
0.4% |
|
Tenure track |
131,140 |
128,602 |
1.9% |
Not on tenure
track/
no tenure system |
235,171 |
219,388 |
7.2% |
*Figure includes 25,879
staff members with faculty status.
The NCES report contains a
wealth of other information about faculty and staff
members at colleges and universities. Among the
other highlights:
- The proportion of
full-time faculty members at degree-granting
institutions who are women rose slightly, to
40.6 percent in 2005 from 39.4 percent in 2003.
- The proportion of
full-time faculty members who are white dropped
slightly, to 78.1 percent in 2005 from 80.2
percent in 2003. The biggest gain was among
Asian/Pacific Islanders, whose share of the
full-time professoriate rose to 7.2 percent from
6.5 percent. The proportion who are black dipped
by a tenth of percentage point (from 5.3 percent
to 5.2 percent), while the share who are
Hispanic rose to 3.4 percent from 3.2 percent.
- Men were significantly
more likely to be tenured or tenure track than
were women. Of full-time male professors, 47.5
percent were tenured and 18.1 percent were
tenure track, while 33.9 percent of women were
tenured and 21.3 percent were tenure track.
Rethinking Tenure, Dissertations, and Scholarship
College campuses display a striking
uniformity of thought
Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield once
famously advised a conservative colleague to wait until he had tenure
and only then to "hoist the Jolly Roger." But few professors are getting
around to hoisting the Jolly Roger at all. Either they don't have a
viewpoint that is different from their colleagues, or they've decided
that if they are going to remain at one place for several decades,
they'd rather just get along. Is tenure to blame for the unanimity of
thinking in American universities? It's hard to tell. But shouldn't the
burden of proof be on the people who want jobs for life?
Naomi Schafer Riley, "Tenure and Academic Freedom: College
campuses display a striking uniformity of thought," The Wall Street
Journal, June 23, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124571593663539265.html#mod=djemEditorialPage
The Digital Revolution and Higher
Education ---
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/College-presidents.aspx
"It's Time for Tenure to Lose Tenure,"
by James C. Wetherbe, Harvard Business Review Blog, March 13,
2013 ---
Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/03/its_time_for_tenure_to_lose_te.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
Jensen Comment
There are quite a few serious movements under foot to eliminate tenure
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#MLA
I'm not so concerned about kissing
tenure goodbye as a dysfunctional relic of the past. However, there are
some arguments that I accept for tenure to carry on in fine
universities.
In fact I am truly saddened by the way
assistant professors now game for tenure ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTenure.htm
Tenure is not entirely dysfunctional.
Without some incentives to turn over faculty we will have departments,
schools, and even entire universities that become even more atrophied
with a long-term set of faculty that only gets a new blood transfusion
in a blue moon. Those with younger tenured faculty become stagnant for
many, many years.
Some universities with tenure systems
that have been reluctant to deny tenure are faced with such atrophy. For
example, Brown University is considered to be too locked into tenured
faculty relative to its Ivy League cohorts
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#MLA
The one advantage of a tenure system is
that I most admire is that it forces universities after 7-10 years
(depending upon their 6-9 year annual evaluation policies) to seriously
consider whether the tenure candidate is really worthy of carrying on in
a particular university for a very, very long time. The weakest tenured
faculty will be the ones who probably will stay on the longest --- we
call them lifetime associate professors. Without being forced to
make hard decisions after 6-9 years, universities without tenure systems
will be inclined to let young Bob just hang on because he's meeting his
classes and getting good teaching evaluations for his popular, albeit
easy courses where the median grade is an A grade to keep his students
happy.
Controversies in the anonymous blind
review process of research journals
"Kill Peer Review or Reform It?" by Scott Jaschik, Inside
Higher Ed, January 6, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/01/06/humanities-scholars-consider-role-peer-review
Thank you Ron Huefner for the heads up.
"Blind peer review
is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet." That's the way Aaron J.
Barlow, an associate professor of English at the College of
Technology of the City University of New York, summed up his views
here on the future of the traditional way of deciding whose work
gets published in the humanities.
Barlow didn't
dispute that most of the top journals in the humanities continue to
select papers this way. But speaking at a session of the annual
meeting of the Modern Language Association, he argued that
technology has so changed the ability of scholars to share their
findings that it's only a matter of time before people rise up
against the conventions of traditional journal publishing.
While others on the
panel and in the audience argued for a reformed peer review as
preferable to Barlow's vision of smashing the enterprise, and some
questioned the practicality of simply walking away from peer review
immediately, the idea that the system needs radical change was not
challenged. Barlow said that the system might have been justified
once when old-style publishing put a significant limit on the
quantity of scholarship that could be shared. But in a new era, he
said, the justifications were gone. (Reflecting the new technology
era, Barlow and one other panelist spoke via Skype, to an audience
that included two tables and wireless for bloggers and Twitter users
-- and this journalist -- to write about the proceedings as they
were taking place.)
To many knowing nods
in the room, Barlow argued that the traditional system of blind peer
review -- in which submissions are sent off to reviewers, whose
judgments then determine whether papers are accepted, with no direct
communication with authors -- had serious problems with fairness. He
said that the system rewards "conformity" and allows for
considerable bias.
He described a
recent experience in which he was recruited by "a prestigious venue"
to review a paper that related in some ways to research he had done.
Barlow's work wasn't mentioned anywhere in the piece. Barlow said he
realized that the journal editor figured Barlow would be annoyed by
the omission. And although he was, Barlow said he didn't feel
assigning the piece to him was fair to the author. "It was a set-up.
The editor didn't want a positive review, so the burden of rejection
was passed on to someone the author would not know."
He refused to go
along, and said he declined to review the paper when he realized
what was going on. This sort of "corruption" is common, he said.
Barlow has a long
publishing record, so his frustrations with the system can't be
chalked up to being unable to get his ideas out there. But he said
that when one of his papers was recently rejected, he simply
published it on his blog directly, where comments have come in from
fans and foes of his work.
"I love the
editorial process" when comments result in a piece becoming better,
he said, and digital publishing allows this to happen easily. But
traditional peer review simply delays publication and leaves
decision-making "in the dark." Peer review -- in the sense that
people will comment on work and a consensus may emerge that a given
paper is important or not -- doesn't need to take place prior to
publication, he said.
"We don't need the
bottleneck or the corruption," he said. The only reason blind peer
review survives is that "we have made appearance in peer reviewed
journals the standard" for tenure and promotion decisions. That will
change over time, he predicted, and then the traditional system will
collapse.
Peer Review
Plus
While Barlow noted
the ability of digital publishing to bypass peer review, the idea of
an intense, collaborative process for selecting pieces and improving
them came at the session from the editor of Kairos, an
online journal on rhetoric and technology that publishes work
prepared for the web. Kairos has become an influential
journal, but Cheryl Ball, the editor and an associate professor of
English at Illinois State University, discussed how frustrating it
is that people assume that an online journal must not have peer
review. "Ignorance about digital scholarship" means that she must
constantly explain the journal, she said.
Kairos
uses
a
three-stage review process. First, editors
decide if a submission makes sense for a review. Then, the entire
editorial board discusses the submission (online) for two weeks, and
reaches a consensus that is communicated to the author with detailed
letters from the board. (Board members' identities are public, so
there is no secrecy about who reviews pieces.) Then, if appropriate,
someone is assigned to work with the author to coach him or her on
how to improve the piece prior to publication.
As Ball described
the process, thousands of words are written about submissions, and
lengthy discussions take place -- all to figure out the best content
for the journal. But there are no secret reviewers, and the coaching
process allows for a collaborative effort to prepare a final
version, not someone guessing about how to handle a "revise and
resubmit" letter.
The process is quite
detailed, but also allows for individual consideration of editorial
board members' concerns and of authors' approaches, Ball said. "Peer
reviewers don't need rubrics. They need good ways to communicate,"
she said. Along those lines, Kairos is currently updating
its tools for editorial board consideration of pieces, to allow for
synchronous chat, the use of electronic "sticky notes" and other
ways to help authors not only with words, but with digital graphics
and illustrations.
Learning
From Law Reviews
Allen Mendenhall, a
Ph.D. student at Auburn University who is also a blogger and a
lawyer, suggested that humanities journals could take some lessons
from law reviews. Mendenhall is well aware of (and agrees with) many
criticisms of law reviews, and in particular of the reliance for
decisions on law students who may not know much about the areas of
scholarship they are evaluating.
Continued in article
A ‘Radical’ Rethinking of Scholarly
Publishing
"Upgrading to Philosophy 2.0," by Andy
Guess, Inside Higher Ed, December 31, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/31/apa
There was no
theorizing about ghosts in the machine at an annual meeting of
philosophers last Friday. Instead, they embraced technology’s
implications for their field, both within the classroom and beyond.
. . .
Harriet E. Baber of
the University of San Diego thinks scholars should try to make their
work as accessible as possible, forget about the financial rewards
of publishing and find alternative ways to referee each other’s
work. In short, they should ditch the current system of paper-based
academic journals that persists, she said, by “creating scarcity,”
“screening” valuable work and providing scholars with entries in
their CVs.
“Now why would it be
a bad thing if people didn’t pay for the information that we
produce?” she asked, going over the traditional justifications for
the current order — an incentive-based rationale she dubbed a “right
wing, free marketeer, Republican argument.”
Instead, she argued,
scholars (and in particular, philosophers) should accept that much
of their work has little market value ("we’re lucky if we could give
away this stuff for free") and embrace the intrinsic rewards of the
work itself. After all, she said, they’re salaried, and “we don’t
need incentives external [to] what we do.”
That doesn’t include
only journal articles, she said; class notes fit into the paradigm
just as easily. “I want any prospective student to see this and I
want all the world to see” classroom materials, she added.
Responding to
questions from the audience, she noted that journals’ current
function of refereeing content wouldn’t get lost, since the
“middlemen” merely provide a venue for peer review, which would
still happen within her model.
“What’s going to
happen pragmatically is the paper journals will morph into online
journals,” she said.
Part of the purpose
of holding the session, she implied, was to nudge the APA into
playing a greater role in any such transition: “I’m hoping that the
APA will organize things a little better.”
"Hear the One About the Rejected Mathematician? Call it a
scholarly 'Island of Misfit Toys,' Chronicle of Higher Education,
August 12, 2009 ---
Click Here
Rejecta Mathematica is an open-access online journal that
publishes mathematical papers that have been rejected by others.
Rejecta's motto is caveat emptor, which is to say that the journal
has no technical peer-review process.
As The Economist notes in its
article on the journal, there are plenty of examples of scholars who
have suffered rejection, only to go on to become giants in their
field. (OK, two.) Nonetheless, if you have lots of free time on your
hands, by all means, check out the inaugural issue.
And if deciphering mathematical
formulae isn't your thing, stand by: Rejecta says it may open the
floodgates to other disciplines. Prospective franchisees are invited
to contact the journal.
Next up: Rejecta Rejecta, a journal
for articles too flawed for Rejects Mathematica, printed on
single-ply toilet paper.
‘Scholarship Reconsidered’ as Tenure Policy," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, October 2, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/02/wcu
"Time's Up for Tenure," Laurie
Fendrich, Chronicle of Higher Education's The Chronicle Review,
April 18, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/fendrich/times-up-for-tenure?utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
"Survey Identifies Trends at U.S. Colleges That Appear to Undermine
Productivity of Scholars," by Peter Schmidt, Chronicle of Higher
Education, June 14, 2009 ---
Click Here
College campuses display a striking
uniformity of thought
Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield once
famously advised a conservative colleague to wait until he had tenure
and only then to "hoist the Jolly Roger." But few professors are getting
around to hoisting the Jolly Roger at all. Either they don't have a
viewpoint that is different from their colleagues, or they've decided
that if they are going to remain at one place for several decades,
they'd rather just get along. Is tenure to blame for the unanimity of
thinking in American universities? It's hard to tell. But shouldn't the
burden of proof be on the people who want jobs for life?
Naomi Schafer Riley, "Tenure and Academic Freedom: College
campuses display a striking uniformity of thought," The Wall Street
Journal, June 23, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124571593663539265.html#mod=djemEditorialPage
Gaming for Tenure as an Accounting
Professor ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTenure.htm
(with a reply about tenure publication point systems from Linda Kidwell)
Bob Jensen's threads on a rethinking
of tenure and scholarship ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#MLA
Harvard's token, albeit an unwanted token, Harvey Mansfield is known
for such things as assigning two grades to a students (the A they get
because Harvard expects that they will get As and the (private) C they
really earned). Much to the dismay of the faculty and administration at
Harvard, he's an extremely popular teacher and renowned scholar.
Harvey Mansfield is the William R. Kenan,
Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has taught
since 1962 ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Mansfield
Optimism for the Future
"The Crisis of American Self-Government: Harvey Mansfield,
Harvard's 'pet dissenter,' on the 2012 election, the real cost of
entitlements, and why he sees reason for hope,": by by Sohrab Ahmari,
The Wall Street Journal, November 30, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323751104578149292503121124.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t&mg=reno-wsj
'We have now an American political party
and a European one. Not all Americans who vote for the European
party want to become Europeans. But it doesn't matter because that's
what they're voting for. They're voting for dependency, for lack of
ambition, and for insolvency."
Few have thought as hard, or as much, about
how democracies can preserve individual liberty and national virtue
as the eminent political scientist Harvey Mansfield. When it comes
to assessing the state of the American experiment in self-government
today, his diagnosis is grim, and he has never been one to mince
words.
Mr. Mansfield sat for an interview on
Thursday at the Harvard Faculty Club. This year marks his 50th as a
teacher at the university. It isn't easy being the most visible
conservative intellectual at an institution that has drifted ever
further to the left for a half-century. "I live in a one-party state
and very much more so a one-party university," says the 80-year-old
professor with a sigh. "It's disgusting. I get along very well
because everybody thinks the fact that I'm here means the things I
say about Harvard can't be true. I am a kind of pet—a pet
dissenter."
Partly his isolation on campus has to do
with the nature of Mr. Mansfield's scholarship. At a time when his
colleagues are obsessed with trendy quantitative methods and even
trendier "identity studies," Mr. Mansfield holds steadfast to an
older tradition that looks to the Western canon as the best guide to
human affairs. For him, Greek philosophy and the works of thinkers
such as Machiavelli and Tocqueville aren't historical curiosities;
Mr. Mansfield sees writers grappling heroically with political and
moral problems that are timeless and universally relevant.
"All modern social science deals with
perceptions," he says, "but that is a misnomer because it neglects
to distinguish between perceptions and misperceptions."
Consider voting. "You can count voters and
votes," Mr. Mansfield says. "And political science does that a lot,
and that's very useful because votes are in fact countable. One
counts for one. But if we get serious about what it means to vote,
we immediately go to the notion of an informed voter. And if you get
serious about that, you go all the way to voting as a wise choice.
That would be a true voter. The others are all lesser voters, or
even not voting at all. They're just indicating a belief, or a whim,
but not making a wise choice. That's probably because they're not
wise."
By that measure, the electorate that
granted Barack Obama a second term was unwise—the president achieved
"a sneaky victory," Mr. Mansfield says. "The Democrats said nothing
about their plans for the future. All they did was attack the other
side. Obama's campaign consisted entirely of saying 'I'm on your
side' to the American people, to those in the middle. No matter what
comes next, this silence about the future is ominous."
At one level Mr. Obama's silence reveals
the exhaustion of the progressive agenda, of which his presidency is
the spiritual culmination, Mr. Mansfield says. That movement
"depends on the idea that things will get better and better and
progress will be made in the actualization of equality." It is
telling, then, that during the 2012 campaign progressives were
"confined to defending what they've already achieved or making small
improvements—student loans, free condoms. The Democrats are the
party of free condoms. That's typical for them."
But Democrats' refusal to address the
future in positive terms, he adds, also reveals the party's intent
to create "an entitlement or welfare state that takes issues off the
bargaining table and renders them above politics." The end goal, Mr.
Mansfield worries, is to sideline the American constitutional
tradition in favor of "a practical constitution consisting of
progressive measures the left has passed that cannot be revoked. And
that is what would be fixed in our political system—not the
Constitution."
It is a project begun at the turn of the
previous century by "an alliance of experts and victims," Mr.
Mansfield says. "Social scientists and political scientists were
very much involved in the foundation of the progressive movement.
What those experts did was find ways to improve the well-being of
the poor, the incompetent, all those who have the right to vote but
can't quite govern their own lives. And still to this day we see in
the Democratic Party the alliance between Ph.D.s and victims."
The Obama campaign's dissection of the
public into subsets of race, sex and class resentments is a case in
point. "Victims come in different kinds," says Mr. Mansfield, "so
they're treated differently. You push different buttons to get them
to react."
The threat to self-government is clear.
"The American founders wanted people to live under the
Constitution," Mr. Mansfield says. "But the progressives want the
Constitution to live under the American people."
Harvey Mansfield Jr. was born in 1932 in
New Haven, Conn. His parents were staunch New Dealers, and while an
undergraduate at Harvard Mr. Mansfield counted himself a liberal
Democrat.
Next came a Fulbright year in London and a
two-year stint in the Army. "I was never in combat," he says. "In
fact I ended up in France for a year, pulling what in the Army they
call 'good duty' at Orléans, which is in easy reach of Paris. So
even though I was an enlisted man I lived the life of Riley."
A return to the academy and a Harvard
doctorate were perhaps inevitable but Mr. Mansfield also underwent a
decisive political transformation. "I broke with the liberals over
the communist issue," he says. "My initiating forces were
anticommunism and my perception that Democrats were soft on
communism, to use a rather unpleasant phrase from the
time—unpleasant but true." He also began to question the progressive
project at home: "I saw the frailties of big government exposed, one
after another. Everything they tried didn't work and in fact made us
worse off by making us dependent on an engine that was getting
weaker and weaker."
His first teaching post came in 1960 at the
University of California, Berkeley. In California, he came to know
the German-American philosopher Leo Strauss, who at the time was
working at Stanford University. "Strauss was a factor in my becoming
conservative," he says. "That was a whole change of outlook rather
than a mere question of party allegiance."
Strauss had studied ancient Greek texts,
which emphasized among other things that "within democracy there is
good and bad, free and slave," and that "democracy can produce a
slavish mind and a slavish country." The political task before every
generation, Mr. Mansfield understood, is to "defend the good kind of
democracy. And to do that you have to be aware of human differences
and inequalities, especially intellectual inequalities."
American elites today prefer to dismiss the
"unchangeable, undemocratic facts" about human inequality, he says.
Progressives go further: "They think that the main use of liberty is
to create more equality. They don't see that there is such a thing
as too much equality. They don't see limits to democratic
equalizing"—how, say, wealth redistribution can not only bankrupt
the public fisc but corrupt the national soul.
"Americans take inequality for granted,"
Mr. Mansfield says. The American people frequently "protect
inequalities by voting not to destroy or deprive the rich of their
riches. They don't vote for all measures of equalization, for which
they get condemned as suffering from false consciousness. But that's
true consciousness because the American people want to make
democracy work, and so do conservatives. Liberals on the other hand
just want to make democracy more democratic."
Equality untempered by liberty invites
disaster, he says. "There is a difference between making a form of
government more like itself," Mr. Mansfield says, "and making it
viable." Pushed to its extremes, democracy can lead to "mass rule by
an ignorant, or uncaring, government."
Consider the entitlements crisis.
"Entitlements are an attack on the common good," Mr. Mansfield says.
"Entitlements say that 'I get mine no matter what the state of the
country is when I get it.' So it's like a bond or an annuity. What
the entitlement does is give the government version of a private
security, which is better because the government provides a better
guarantee than a private company can."
That is, until the government goes broke,
as has occurred across Europe.
"The Republicans should want to recover the
notion of the common good," Mr. Mansfield says. "One way to do that
is to show that we can't afford the entitlements as they are—that
we've always underestimated the cost. 'Cost' is just an economic
word for the common good. And if Republicans can get entitlements to
be understood no longer as irrevocable but as open to negotiation
and to political dispute and to reform, then I think they can
accomplish something."
The welfare state's size isn't what makes
it so stifling, Mr. Mansfield says. "What makes government dangerous
to the common good is guaranteed entitlements, so that you can never
question what expenses have been or will be incurred." Less
important at this moment are spending and tax rates. "I don't think
you can detect the presence or absence of good government," he says,
"simply by looking at the percentage of GDP that government uses up.
That's not an irrelevant figure but it's not decisive. The decisive
thing is whether it's possible to reform, whether reform is a
political possibility."
Then there is the matter of conservative
political practice. "Conservatives should be the party of judgment,
not just of principles," he says. "Of course there are conservative
principles—free markets, family values, a strong national
defense—but those principles must be defended with the use of good
judgment. Conservatives need to be intelligent, and they shouldn't
use their principles as substitutes for intelligence. Principles
need to be there so judgment can be distinguished from opportunism.
But just because you give ground on principle doesn't mean you're an
opportunist."
Nor should flexibility mean abandoning
major components of the conservative agenda—including cultural
values—in response to a momentary electoral defeat. "Democrats have
their cultural argument, which is the attack on the rich and the
uncaring," Mr. Mansfield says. "So Republicans need their cultural
arguments to oppose the Democrats', to say that goodness or justice
in our country is not merely the transfer of resources to the poor
and vulnerable. We have to take measures to teach the poor and
vulnerable to become a little more independent and to prize
independence, and not just live for a government check. That means
self-government within each self, and where are you going to get
that except with morality, responsibility and religion?"
So is it still possible to pull back from
the brink of America's Europeanization? Mr. Mansfield is optimistic.
"The material for recovery is there," he says. "Ambition, for one
thing. I teach at a university where all the students are ambitious.
They all want to do something with their lives." That is in contrast
to students he has met in Europe, where "it was depressing to see
young people with small ambitions, very cultivated and intelligent
people so stunted." He adds with a smile: "Our other main resource
is the Constitution."
Harvard Undergraduate Grades:
Mode = A
Median = A-
In the 1940s both the mode and the median grade was C (the historic
average performance grade).
Question 1
What is the most likely explanation of why the median and mode are
unequal?
Hint:
Think variance and kurtosis when the A grade is also an upper bound.
Question 2
Nearly 70 undergraduates at Harvard were recently expelled for cheating
in a government course that gives every student an A grade for
completing the course. This begs the question of why so many students
cheated when they were assured of getting a top grade without having to
cheat?
Answer to Question 2
The investigation revealed that most of the cheaters were just too
lazy to do the writing assignment even though everybody who
submitted a paper would get the same top grade. The students who were
expelled all plagiarized the same parts of the paper that, when you
think about it,made the detection of plagiarism inevitable if a grader
actually read each paper.
"Most Frequently Awarded Grade at Harvard: A," Inside Higher
Ed, December 4, 2013 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/12/04/most-frequently-awarded-grade-harvard
The most frequently awarded grade for
undergraduates at Harvard University is an A, and the median grade
is A-. University officials released those facts Tuesday at a
meeting of arts and sciences faculty members, and a Harvard
spokesman confirmed the information Tuesday night. The spokesman
cautioned in an email against too much emphasis on the grade data.
"We believe that learning is the most important thing that happens
in our classrooms and throughout our system of residential
education. The faculty are focused on creating positive and lasting
learning outcomes for our undergraduates," he said. "We watch and
review trends in grading across Harvard College, but we are most
interested in helping our students learn and learn well."
Some Harvard faculty members are concerned,
however, about grade inflation. Harvey Mansfield, who has repeatedly
raised the issue, was the one who brought it up with questions at
Tuesday's meeting. He told The Boston Globe that he thought grading
patterns were "really indefensible."
Also see
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/3/grade-inflation-mode-a/
Jensen Comment
The number I recall the most is that over 80% of Harvard's graduates
graduate cum laude.
Who does this hurt the most?
It probably hurts the top 10% of the Harvard Graduates who are not
designated as performing better than the other 60% of the cum laude
graduates. If 1,000 cum laude graduates apply for medical school
recruiters essentially have to ignore Harvard grade averages in favor of
other criteria like GRE scores.
You've got to love the curmudgeon political science professor at
Harvard who assigns a transcript grade (almost always an A grades) and a
private grade that only each student sees showing what Professor
Mansfield thinks the student actually earned if there were not such an
epidemic of grade inflation ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Mansfield
His somewhat weak excuse is that students who take his sections of a
course should not be penalized relative to their alternatives for
earning A grades in other sections. But does not want most of them
leaving his courses thinking that they were nearly perfect.
Unlike Harvard, Princeton University has been making a more concerted
effort to lower the mode and median grades in most courses.
Bob Jensen's threads on the major cause of grade inflation across
the USA (different colleges and universities compared) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GradeInflation
F**k Up That Professor Mansfield!
Larry Summers President of Harvard University
before he became chief economic advisor to President Obama
"White House economist: 'F--- up' conservative prof 'I was astounded
that the president of Harvard would stoop to such tactics',"
WorldNetDaily, December 6, 2009 ---
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=118187
According to a
university colleague, former president of Harvard and current White
House economist Larry Summers once asked for help to "f--- up" one
of the school's conservative professors.
Summers' colleague,
Cornel West, is a radical race relations instructor who is now a
professor at Princeton after departing Harvard in the wake of a
dispute with Summers. Obama named West, whom he has called a
personal friend, to the Black Advisory Council of his presidential
campaign. West was a key point man between Obama's campaign and the
black community.
In his recently
released memoirs, "Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud," West
claims that Summers invited West into his office and asked him to
help undermine Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield, who
had professed conservative views.
"Help me f--- him
up," Summers reportedly said to West without explaining further.
West writes, "For my
part, I was astounded that the President of Harvard would stoop to
such tactics."
West further related the details of the
alleged encounter in a recent interview with Amy Goodman, host of
the far-left Democracy Now
Internet
television network.
Said West: "And as
soon as I walked into the office, [Summers] starts using profanity
about Harvey Mansfield. I said, 'No, Harvey Mansfield is
conservative, sometimes reactionary, but he's my dear brother.' We
had just had debates at Harvard. Twelve hundred people showed up. He
was against affirmative action; I was for it. That was fine. Harvey
Mansfield and I go off and have a drink after, because we have a
respect, but deep, deep philosophical and ideological disagreement.
He was using profanity, so I had to defend Harvey Mansfield."
"Wait, so you're
saying Lawrence Summers was using profanity?" Goodman asked.
Continued West:
"Larry Summers using profanity about, you know, 'help me 'F' so and
so up.' No, I don't function like that. Maybe he thought that just
as a black man, I like to use profanity. I'm not a puritan. I don't
use it myself. I have partners who do."
In response to
West's claimed meeting with Summers, Mansfield told WND, "Larry
Summers was not out to get me."
"I was not present
at the famous interview between him and Cornel West, but in my
opinion (Summers) merely used my name in a clumsy attempt to cajole
Cornel West into behaving more like a professor, less like a
celebrity," said Mansfield.
"Larry Summers was
doing many good things at Harvard before his enemies there succeeded
in ousting him," Mansfield added.
Neither Summers nor West immediately
returned WND e-mail and
phone requests for comment.
Mansfield is
well-known for his opposition to grade inflation at Harvard,
which he has publicly blamed in part on affirmative action. His
views led to student protests and a well-attended debate with West.
Mansfield also defended President Bush's
use of
executive powers and has
been criticized by some leading feminists for his views on gender
roles. He has made statements that men and women have some different
societal roles and wrote a book, "Manliness," in which he bemoaned
the loss of the virtue of "manliness" in a "gender neutral" society.
Summers, meanwhile,
continues to teach at Harvard but lost his position as president in
part after a public feud in which West accused him of racism.
Summers serves as director of the White House's National Economic
Council.
West served as an
adviser on Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March and is a personal
friend of Farrakhan. He authored two books on race with Henry Louis
Gates Jr., who last summer was at the center of controversy after
Obama remarked on the Harvard professor's arrest.
Continued in article
"Sociology and Other 'Meathead' Majors: Archie Bunker was
right to be skeptical of his son-in-law's opinions," by Harvey
Mansfield, The Wall Street Journal, May 31, 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304520804576345632061434312.html?_nocache=1306940719500#&mg=com-wsj
College campuses display
a striking uniformity of thought
Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield once
famously advised a conservative colleague to wait until he had tenure
and only then to "hoist the Jolly Roger." But few professors are getting
around to hoisting the Jolly Roger at all. Either they don't have a
viewpoint that is different from their colleagues, or they've decided
that if they are going to remain at one place for several decades,
they'd rather just get along. Is tenure to blame for the unanimity of
thinking in American universities? It's hard to tell. But shouldn't the
burden of proof be on the people who want jobs for life?
Naomi Schafer Riley, "Tenure and Academic Freedom: College campuses
display a striking uniformity of thought," The Wall Street Journal,
June 23, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124571593663539265.html#mod=djemEditorialPage
"The Idiocy of Promotion-and-Tenure
Letters," by Don M. Chance, Chronicle of Higher Education,
November 14, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Idiocy-of/135740/
Ah, autumn. The
falling of leaves. A new batch of excited freshmen and graduate
students. Some different faces among colleagues, perhaps. The roar
of a football crowd. And alas, the reading and writing of
promotion-and-tenure letters.
For some fortunate
reason, I have none to write this year, which must be a first, but
unfortunately, I have 11 to read. And after many years of serving on
promotion-and-tenure committees, I have finally come to the
conclusion that these letters are nearly worthless. The ones I read
and the ones I have written.
Think about it. We
hardly need letters to evaluate candidates within our own
discipline. We are capable of evaluating their research. Letters are
strictly for the members of collegewide and universitywide
committees, who, through lack of discipline-specific knowledge but
mostly lack of time, cannot evaluate the research of candidates
outside of their fields. So we call on experts, those renowned
scholars from distinguished and preferably higher-ranked
institutions, who can vouch for the quality of the candidate's
record. They have, for lack of a better term, letterhead value.
And they write so
well and so cogently. Today I have read the expressions "highly
commendable," "groundbreaking," "impeccably rigorous," "carefully
designed," and "recognized nationally"—all phrases I wish I could
think of when I am the writer. Instead, I come up with "doing good
work," "interesting," and "innovative." At least I didn't say
"cool."
This process is
absurd. Consider that the evaluators are selected by the candidate's
department, sometimes with input from the candidate. They are not a
random sampling of experts. Indeed, they are far from random and are
often biased, whether subtly or blatantly. The most egregious cases
of bias involve choosing the candidate's former professors or the
department head's former colleagues and friends, but other, subtler
forms exist as well.
Suppose the
candidate has an article accepted for publication in the most
prestigious journal in her field. Her department head asks the
journal's editor to write a letter on her behalf. The editor, of
course, believes that the paper he accepted is excellent. What else
would he think? Is he going to change his mind and say he made a
mistake in accepting the paper? Ideally the editor would look at the
candidate's entire corpus of work, but that is too much trouble. The
editor, after all, has numerous letter requests, not to mention many
manuscripts, awaiting his attention. So in addition to a few casual
observations about the candidate's other research, he writes a
detailed review of the paper he accepted, heaping dollops of
laudation, knowing that any future success of the paper is a shared
success. Kind of like having your kid get into Harvard when you went
to a third-tier state university. You, too, get credit.
I once read a letter
from a journal editor concerning a candidate up for promotion to
full professor who had published four articles in that journal and
was on its editorial board. The editor noted that the journal was
A-level (in fact it was clearly B-level), and that the candidate had
done an extensive amount of refereeing for the editor. Naturally the
letter was favorable. Naturally I wanted to transfer it into the
"stuff that should never have been written" folder, also known as my
recycle bin.
Not only are
external letters nearly useless, but the whole process is flawed.
At least half of all
academics are exposed to the scientific method of research: stating
a testable hypothesis, collecting data, analyzing those data, and
drawing a conclusion with the admission that we could be wrong. That
process is widely accepted as the correct way to investigate an
issue.
In the
promotion-and-tenure process, we try to do the same thing. Whereas a
scientist might hypothesize that a drug has no positive benefit, we
might hypothesize that someone should not be promoted. Whereas the
scientist goes about collecting data, we do the same thing in
gathering information about the candidate's research record. Whereas
the scientist, upon obtaining statistical evidence that admits only
a small possibility of error, concludes perhaps that a drug is
effective, we often likewise analyze the data and conclude that the
candidate should be promoted. In our case, there is no admission of
a margin of error.
The scientist does
it correctly. We do not. Our margin of error in evaluating tenure
candidates is pretty high, because our sample is not random and far
too small. Nonetheless, on that basis, we make a case to the higher
authorities that this candidate should be promoted.
If we conducted our
research like that, we would be laughed out of the profession.
What we ought to do
is make the process more random. For example, each department could
compile an extensive list of experts, perhaps at least 100. It could
then randomly choose a set. A random sample of experts would at
least attempt to remove the subtle biases.
Naturally, I cannot
tell you what percentage of letters I have read that are favorable,
but my estimate is more than 90 percent. Random letters would very
likely produce favorable percentages a good bit lower. Would that
result in a smaller percentage of candidates being tenured?
Possibly, but after all, tenure is a lifetime contract. The hurdle
should be high.
If promotion to full
professor is not granted, it is not the end of the world for the
candidate. Could a good candidate get three or four negative letters
simply because the luck of the draw chose some hard-nosed experts?
It could. I suspect that four letters is not enough. Frankly, I
would prefer to see six to 10. I cannot imagine a deserving
candidate's being denied promotion with 10 letters.
Perhaps there are
other solutions, and I would like to hear some. I just know that we
are trying to answer an important question, and doing it poorly.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Not only do I agree with this article, I think that tenure has become
dysfunctional to long-term teaching and research performance. It's like
the newlywed thinking about sex: "Now that I'm married I won't
have to do that anymore, at least not as often or as enthusiastically."
When I participated in a study (Jean
Heck and Phil Cooley) of top accounting journals, rates of publication
tumbled dramatically after tenure. There are of course exceptions, but
all too often accounting professors game the tenure system and then back
off the game after tenure.
Gaming for Tenure as
an Accounting Professor ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTenure.htm
(with a reply about tenure publication point systems from Linda Kidwell)
Teaching Excellence Secondary to
Research for Promotion, Tenure, and Pay
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#TeachingVsResearch
Bob Jensen's threads on Rethinking
Tenure ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#MLA
When browsing some of my 8,000+ comments on the AAA Commons, I ran across this
old tidbit that relates to our more current AECM messaging on journal
refereeing.
I even liked the "Dear Sir, Madame, or Other"
beginning.
I assume that "Other" is for the benefit of Senator Boxer from
California.
Letter From Frustrated Authors,
by R.L. Glass, Chronicle of Higher
Education, May 21, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php?topic=60573.0
This heads up was sent to me by Ed Scribner at New Mexico State
Dear Sir, Madame, or Other:
Enclosed is our latest version of Ms.
#1996-02-22-RRRRR, that is the re-re-re-revised revision of our paper. Choke
on it. We have again rewritten the entire manuscript from start to finish.
We even changed the g-d-running head! Hopefully, we have suffered enough now
to satisfy even you and the bloodthirsty reviewers.
I shall skip the usual point-by-point
description of every single change we made in response to the critiques.
After all, it is fairly clear that your anonymous reviewers are less
interested in the details of scientific procedure than in working out their
personality problems and sexual frustrations by seeking some kind of
demented glee in the sadistic and arbitrary exercise of tyrannical power
over hapless authors like ourselves who happen to fall into their clutches.
We do understand that, in view of the misanthropic psychopaths you have on
your editorial board, you need to keep sending them papers, for if they were
not reviewing manuscripts they would probably be out mugging little old
ladies or clubbing baby seals to death. Still, from this batch of reviewers,
C was clearly the most hostile, and we request that you not ask him to
review this revision. Indeed, we have mailed letter bombs to four or five
people we suspected of being reviewer C, so if you send the manuscript back
to them, the review process could be unduly delayed.
Some of the reviewers’ comments we could
not do anything about. For example, if (as C suggested) several of my recent
ancestors were indeed drawn from other species, it is too late to change
that. Other suggestions were implemented, however, and the paper has been
improved and benefited. Plus, you suggested that we shorten the manuscript
by five pages, and we were able to accomplish this very effectively by
altering the margins and printing the paper in a different font with a
smaller typeface. We agree with you that the paper is much better this way.
One perplexing problem was dealing with
suggestions 13–28 by reviewer B. As you may recall (that is, if you even
bother reading the reviews before sending your decision letter), that
reviewer listed 16 works that he/she felt we should cite in this paper.
These were on a variety of different topics, none of which had any relevance
to our work that we could see. Indeed, one was an essay on the
Spanish–American war from a high school literary magazine. The only common
thread was that all 16 were by the same author, presumably someone whom
reviewer B greatly admires and feels should be more widely cited. To handle
this, we have modified the Introduction and added, after the review of the
relevant literature, a subsection entitled “Review of Irrelevant Literature”
that discusses these articles and also duly addresses some of the more
asinine suggestions from other reviewers.
We hope you will be pleased with this
revision and will finally recognize how urgently deserving of publication
this work is. If not, then you are an unscrupulous, depraved monster with no
shred of human decency. You ought to be in a cage. May whatever heritage you
come from be the butt of the next round of ethnic jokes. If you do accept
it, however, we wish to thank you for your patience and wisdom throughout
this process, and to express our appreciation for your scholarly insights.
To repay you, we would be happy to review some manuscripts for you; please
send us the next manuscript that any of these reviewers submits to this
journal.
Assuming you accept this paper, we would
also like to add a footnote acknowledging your help with this manuscript and
to point out that we liked the paper much better the way we originally
submitted it, but you held the editorial shotgun to our heads and forced us
to chop, reshuffle, hedge, expand, shorten, and in general convert a meaty
paper into stir-fried vegetables. We could not – or would not – have done it
without your input.
-- R.L. Glass
Computing Trends,
1416 Sare Road Bloomington, IN 47401 USA
E-mail address:
rglass@acm.org
December 30, 2011 reply from Steve
Kachelmeir
This letter perpetuates the sense that "reviewers"
are malicious outsiders who stand in the way of good scholarship. It fails
to recognize that reviewers are simply peers who have experience and
expertise in the area of the submission. The Accounting Review asks about
600 such experts to review each year -- hardly a small set.
While I have seen plenty of bad reviews in my
editorial experience, I also sense that it is human nature to impose a
self-serving double standard about reviewing. Too many times when we receive
a negative review, the author concludes that this is because the reviewer
does not have the willingness or intelligence to appreciate good scholarship
or even read the paper carefully. But when the same author is asked to
evaluate a different manuscript and writes a negative review, it is because
the manuscript is obviously flawed. Psychologists have long studied
self-attributions, including the persistent sense that when one experiences
a good thing, it is because one is good, and when one experiences a bad
thing, it is because others are being malicious. My general sense is that
manucripts are not as good as we sense they are as authors and are not as
bad as we sense they are as reviewers. I vented on these thoughts in a 2004
JATA Supplement commentary. It was good therapy for me at the time.
The reviewers are us.
Steve
December 31, 2011 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Steve,
Thank you for that sobering reply.
I will repeat a tidbit that I posted some years back --- it might've been in
reply to a message from you.
When I was a
relatively young PhD and still full of myself, the Senior Editor,
Charlie Griffin, of The Accounting Review sent me a rather
large number of accountics science papers to referee (there weren't
many accountics science referees available 1968-1970). I think it
was at a 1970 AAA Annual Meeting that I inadvertently overheard
Charlie tell somebody else that he was not sending any more TAR
submissions to Bob Jensen because "Jensen rejects every submission."
My point in telling you this is that having only one or two referees
can really be unfair if the referees are still full of themselves.
Bob Jensen
December 31, 2011 reply from Jim Peters
The attribution bias to which Steve refers also
creates an upward (I would say vicious) cycle for research standards. Here
is how it works. When an author gets a negative review, because of the
attribution problem, they also infer that the standards for publication have
gone up (because, they must have since their work is solid). Then, when that
same author is asked to review a paper, they tend to apply the new, higher
standards that they miss-attributed to the recent review they received. A
sort of "they did it to me, I am going to do it to them," but not
vindictively, just in an effort to apply current standards. Of course, the
author of the paper they are reviewing makes their own miss-attribution to
higher standards and, when that author is asked to review a paper, the cycle
repeats. The other psychological phenomena at work here is lack of
self-insight. Most humans have very poor self-insight as to why they do
things. They make emotional decisions and then rationalize them. Thus, the
reviewers involved are probably unaware of what they are doing. Although a
few may indeed be vindictive. The blind review process isn't very blind
given that most papers are shopped at seminars and other outlets before they
are submitted for publication and there tend to some self-serving patterns
in citations. Thus, a certain level of vindictiveness is possible.
When I was a PhD student, I asked Harry Evans to
define the attributes of a good paper in an effort to establish some form of
objective standard I could shoot for. His response was similar to the old
response about pornography. In essence, I know a good paper when I see it,
but I cannot define attributes of a good paper in advance. I may have missed
something in my 20+ years, but I have never seen any effort to establish
written, objective standards for publishability of academic research. So, we
all still are stuck with the cycle where authors try to infer what they
standards are from reviews.
Jim
January 1, 2012 reply from Dan Stone
I've given lots of thought to why peer review, as
now exists in many disciplines (including accounting), so frequently fails
to improve research, and generates so extensive a waste of authorial
resources. After almost thirty years of working within this system, as an
editor, author and reviewer, I offer 10 reasons why peer review, as is often
constructed, frequently fails to improve manuscripts, and often diminishes
their contribution:
1. authors devote thousands of hours to
thoroughly understanding an issue,
2. most reviewers devote a few hours to
understanding the authors' manuscript,
3. most reviewers are asked to review outside
of their primary areas of expertise. For example, today, I am reviewing
a paper that integrates two areas of theory. I know one and not the
other. Hence, reviewers, relative to authors, are almost universally
ignorant relative to the manuscript,
4. reviewers are anonymous, meaning
unaccountable for their frequently idiotic, moronic comments. Editors
generally know less about topical areas than do reviewers, hence idiotic
reviewers comments are generally allowed to stand as fact and truth.
5. reviewers are rewarded for publishing (as
AUTHORS) but receive only the most minimal of rewards for reviewing
(sometimes an acknowledgement from the editor),
6. editors are too busy to review papers, hence
they spend even fewer hours than authors on manuscripts,
7. most editors are deeply entrenched in the
status quo, that is one reason they are selected to be editors. Hence,
change to this deeply flaws systems is glacial if at all
8. reviewers are (often erroneously) told that
they are experts by editors,
9. humans naturally overestimate their own
competence, (called the overconfidence bias),
10 hence, reviewers generally overestimate
their own knowledge of the manuscript.
The result is the wasteful system that is now in
place at most (though certainly not all) journals. There are many easy
suggestions for improving this deeply flawed system -- most importantly to
demand reviewer accountability. I've given citations earlier to this list of
articles citing the deeply flaws state of peer review and suggesting
improvements. But see point #7.
In short, when I speak as a reviewer, where I am
comparatively ignorant, my words are granted the status of absolute truth
but when I speak as an author, where I am comparatively knowledgable, I must
often listen to babbling fools, whose words are granted the status of
absolute truth.
That's a very bad system -- which could be easily
reformed -- but for the entrenched interests of those who benefit from the
status quo. (see the research cited in "The Social Construction of Research
Advice: The American Accounting Association Plays Miss Lonelyhearts" for
more about those entrenched interests).
Best,
Dan S.
January 1, 2011 reply from Bob Jensen
Thanks Dan for such a nice summary. Personal
anecdote - my respect for Dan went way up years ago when he was the editor
and overrode my rejection of a paper. While I stand by my critique of the
paper, Dan had the courtesy to make his case to me and I respected his
judgment. What constitutes "publishable" is highly subjective and in some
cases, we need to lower the rigor bar a little to expose new approaches. As
I recall, I did work with the author of the paper after Dan accepted it to
help clean it up a bit.
Dan - you state that the fixes are relatively easy,
but don't provide details. In my little hyper-optimistic world, a fix would
create an air of cooperation between editors, authors, and reviewers to work
together to extract the best from research and expose it to the general
public. This is about 180 degrees from what I perceive is the current
gatekeeper emphasis on "what can I find to hang a rejection on?"
I saw a study years ago, the reference for I would
have a hell of a time finding again, that tracked the publications in major
journals per PhD in different disciplines in business and over time. For all
disciplines, the rate steady fell over time and accounting had by far the
lowest rate. It would be simple math to calculate the number of articles
published in top journals each year over time, which doesn't seem to
increase, and the number of PhDs in accounting, which does. Simple math may
indicate we have a problem of suppressing good work simply because of a lack
of space.
Jim
January 1, 2011 reply from Steve Kachelmeir
Dan has listed 10 reasons why peer review fails to
improve manuscripts. To the contrary, in my experience, at least for those
manuscripts that get published, I can honestly say that, on average, they
are discernably better after the review process than before. So, warts and
all, I am not nearly as critical of the process in general as are some
others. I will attempt to offer constructive, well-intended replies to each
of Dan's 10 criticisms.
Dan's point 1.: Authors devote thousands of hours
to thoroughly understanding an issue,
SK's counterpoint: I guess I don't understand why
this observation is a reason why reviews fail to improve manuscripts. Is the
implication that, because authors spend so much time understanding an issue,
the author's work cannot possibly be improved by mere reviewers?
2. Most reviewers devote a few hours to
understanding the authors' manuscript,
SK's counterpont: This seems a corollary to the
oft-heard "lazy reviewer" complaint. Let us concede that reviewers sometimes
(or even often) do not spend as much time on a manuscript as we would like
to see. Even if this is true, I would submit that the reviewer spends more
time on the paper than does the typical reader, post publication. So if the
reviewer "doesn't get it," chances are that the casual reader won't get it
either.
3. Most reviewers are asked to review outside of
their primary areas of expertise. For example, today, I am reviewing a paper
that integrates two areas of theory. I know one and not the other. Hence,
reviewers, relative to authors, are almost universally ignorant relative to
the manuscript,
SK's counterpoint: As I see it, the editor's
primary responsibility is to avoid this criticism. I can honestly say that
we did our best at The Accounting Review during my editorship to choose
qualified reviewers. It is easier said than done, but I employed a 20-hour
RA (and my understanding is that Harry Evans does the same) simply to
research submissions in a dispassionate manner and suggest names of
well-qualified potential reviewers with no obvious axes to grind. In a
literal sense, it is of course true that the author knows the most about the
author's research. But that, to me, does not justifiy the assertion that
"most reviewrs are asked to review outside of their primary areas of
expertise." That is, Dan's anecdote notwithstanding, I simply disagree with
the assertion. Also, a somewhat inconvenient truth I have uncovered as
editor is that too much reviewer expertise is not necessarily a good thing
for the author. As in most things, moderation is the key.
4. reviewers are anonymous, meaning unaccountable
for their frequently idiotic, moronic comments. Editors generally know less
about topical areas than do reviewers, hence idiotic reviewers comments are
generally allowed to stand as fact and truth.
SK's counterpoint: To say that reviewers are
"idiotic" and "moronic" is to say that professors in general are idiotic and
moronic. After all, who do you think does the reviews? To be sure, authors
often perceive a reviewer's comments as "idiotic and moronic." Similarly,
have you ever reviewed a manuscript that you perceived as "idiotic and
moronic"? This is self-serving bias on self-attributions, plain as simple.
As I've said before, my general sense is that the reviews we receive are not
as bad as we think, and the manuscripts we submit are not as good as we
think. As to the assertion that "editors generally know less about topical
areas than do reviewers," of course that is true (in general), which is why
we have a peer review system!
5. Reviewers are rewarded for publishing (as
AUTHORS) but receive only the most minimal of rewards for reviewing
(sometimes an acknowledgement from the editor),
SK's counterpoint: I'm reluctant to tag the word
"counterpoint" on this one, because I agree that the reward system is
somewhat warped when it comes to reviewing. Bad reviewers get off the hook
(because editors wise-up and stop asking them), so they can then sometimes
free-ride on the system. Conversely, good reviewers get rewarded with many
more review requests, proving that no good deed goes unpunished. At least I
tried to take baby steps to remedy this problem by publishing the names of
the nearly 500 ad hoc reviewers TAR asks each year, and in addition,
starting in November 2011, I started publishing an "honor roll" of our most
prolific and timely reviewers.
6. Editors are too busy to review papers, hence
they spend even fewer hours than authors on manuscripts,
SK's counterpoint: Why is this a criticisim of the
review process? It is precisely because editors have limited time that the
editor delegates much of the evalation process to experts in the area of the
submission. Consider the alternatives. An alternative that is not on the
table is for the editor to pour in many hours/days/weeks on each submission,
as there are only 24 hours in the day. So that leaves the alternative of a
dictatorial editor who accepts whatever fits the editor's taste and rejects
whatever is inconsistent with that taste, reviewers be damned. This is the
"benevolent dictator" model to those who like the editor's tastes, but as I
said in my November 2011 TAR editorial, the editorial dictator who is
benevolent to some will surely be malevolent to others. Surely there is a
critical role for editorial judgment, particularly when the reviewers are
split, but a wholesale substitution of the editor's tastes in lieu of
evaluations by experts would make things worse, in my opinion. More
precisely, some would clearly be better off under such a system, but many
others would be worse off.
7. Most editors are deeply entrenched in the status
quo, that is one reason they are selected to be editors. Hence, change to
this deeply flaws systems is glacial if at all
SK's counterpoint: Is the implication here that
editors are more entrenched in the "status quo" than are professors in
general? If that is true, then a peer review system that forces the editor's
hand by holding the editor accountable to the peer reviewers would serve as
a check and balance on the editor's "entrenchment," right? So I really don't
see why this point is a criticism of the review process. If we dispensed
with peer review and gave editors full power, then "entrenched" editors
could perpetuate their entrenched tastes forever.
8. Reviewers are (often erroneously) told that they
are experts by editors,
SK's counterpoint: Sometimes, as TAR editor, I
really wished I could reveal reviewer names to a disgruntled author, if only
to prove to the person that the two reviewers were chosen for their
expertise and sympathy to both the topic and the method of the submission.
But of course I could not do that. A system without reviewer anonymity could
solve that problem, but would undoutedly introduce deeper problems of
strategic behavior and tit-for-tat rewards and retaliations. So reviews are
anonymous, and authors can persist in their belief that the reviewer must be
incompetent, because otherwise how could the reviewer possibly not like my
submission. But let me back off here and add that many reviews are less
constructive and less helpful than an editor would like to see. Point taken.
That is why, in my opinon, a well-functioning peer review system must
solicit two expert opinions. When the reviewers disagree, that is when the
editor must step in and exercise reasoned judgment, often on the side of the
more positive reviewer. Let's just say that if I rejected every manuscript
with split reviews over the past three years, TAR would have had some very
thin issues.
9. Humans naturally overestimate their own
competence, (called the overconfidence bias),
SK's counterpoint: Yes, and this is why we tend to
be so impressed with our own research and so critical of review reports.
10 Hence, reviewers generally overestimate their
own knowledge of the manuscript.
SK's counterpoint: Let's grant this one. But, if I
may borrow from Winston Churchill, "Democracy is the worst form of
government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time
to time." Is a peer review system noisy? Absolutely! Are peer reviews always
of high quality? No way! Are reviews sometimes petty and overly harsh? You
bet! But is a peer review system better than other forms of journal
governance, such as editorial dictatorship or a "power" system that lets the
most powerful authors bully their way in? I think so. Editors have very
important responsibilities to choose reviewers wisely and to make tough
judgment calls at the margin, especially when two reviewers disagree. But
dispensing with the system would only make things worse, in my opinion. I
again return to the most fundamental truism of this process -- the reviewers
are us. If you are asking that we dispense with these "idiotic, moronic"
reports, than what you are really asking is that professors have less
control over the process to which professors submit. Now that I'm back to
being a regular professor again, I'm unwilling to cede that authority.
Just my two cents. Happy New Year to all,
Steve K.
January 1, 2012 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Dan,
My biggest complaint with the refereeing process as we know it is that
anonymous referees are not accountable for their decisions. I always find it
odd that in modern times we deplore tenure black balling where senior
faculty can vote secretly and anonymously to deny tenure to a candidate
without having to justify their reasons. And yet when it comes to rejecting
a candidate's attempt to publish, we willingly accept a black ball system in
the refereeing processes.
Granted, we hope that referees will communicate reasons for rejection,
but there's no requirement to do so, and many of the reasons given are vague
statements such as "this does not meet the quality standards of the
journal."
More importantly, the referees are anonymous which allows them to be
superficial or just plain wrong without having to be accountable.
On the other side of the coin I can see reasons for anonymity. Otherwise
the best qualified reviewers may reject invitations to become referees
because they don't want to be personally judged for doing the journal a
favor by lending their expertise to the refereeing process. Referees should
not be forced into endless debates about the research of somebody else.
I've long advocated a compromise. I think that referee reports should be
anonymous. I also think referee reports along with author responses should
be made available in electronic form in an effort to make the entire
refereeing process more transparent (without necessarily naming the
referees). For example, each published Accounting Review paper could be
linked to the electronic file of referee, author, and editor comments
leading up to the publication of the article.
Rejected manuscripts are more problematic. Authors should have discretion
about publishing their working papers along with referee and editor
communications. However, I think the practice of electronic publishing of
rejected papers along with referee communications should become a more
common practice. One of the benefits might be to make referees be more
careful when reviewing manuscripts even if their rejection reports do not
mention names of the referees.
The AAA Executive Committee is usually looking for things that can be
done to improve scholarship and research among AAA members. One thing I
propose is that the AAA leadership take on the task of how to improve the
refereeing process of all refereed AAA journals. One of the objectives
concerns ways of making the refereeing process more transparent.
Lastly, I think the AAA leadership should work toward encouraging
commentaries on published working papers that indirectly allow scholars to
question the judgments of the referees and authors. As it stands today, AAA
publications are not challenged like they are in many journals of other
scholarly disciplines ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm#TARversusAMR
Respectfully,
Bob Jensen
Hi Dan, Jim, and Steve and others,
One added consideration in this "debate" about top accountics science
research journal refereeing is the inbreeding that has taken in a very large
stable of referees that virtually excludes practitioners. Ostensibly this is
because practitioners more often than not cannot read the requisite equations in
submitted manuscripts. But I often suspect that this is also because of fear
about questions and objections that practitioner scholars might raise in the
refereeing process.
Sets of accountics science referees are very inbred largely because editors
do not invite practitioner "evaluators" into the gene pool. Think of how things
might've been different if practitioner scholars suggested more ideas to
accountics science authors and, horrors, demanded something that some
submissions be more relevant to the professions.
Think of how Kaplan's criticism of accounting science research publications
might've changed if accountics science referees were not so inbred in having
accountics science "faculty is as evaluators
(referees) of, but not creators or originators of,
business practice. (Pfeffer 2007, 1335)."
"Accounting Scholarship that Advances Professional Knowledge and Practice,"
AAA Presidential Scholar Address by Robert S. Kaplan, The Accounting Review,
March 2011, pp. 372-373 (emphasis added)
I am less pessimistic than Schön about whether
rigorous research can inform professional practice (witness the important
practical significance of the Ohlson accounting-based valuation model and
the Black-Merton-Scholes options pricing model), but I concur with the
general point that academic scholars spend too much time at the top of
Roethlisberger’s knowledge tree and too little time performing systematic
observation, description, and classification, which are at the foundation of
knowledge creation. Henderson 1970, 67–68 echoes the benefits from a more
balanced approach based on the experience of medical professionals:
both theory and practice are necessary
conditions of understanding, and the method of Hippocrates is the only
method that has ever succeeded widely and generally. The first element
of that method is hard, persistent, intelligent, responsible,
unremitting labor in the sick room, not in the library … The second
element of that method is accurate observation of things and events,
selection, guided by judgment born of familiarity and experience, of the
salient and the recurrent phenomena, and their classification and
methodical exploitation. The third element of that method is the
judicious construction of a theory … and the use thereof … [T]he
physician must have, first, intimate, habitual, intuitive familiarity
with things, secondly, systematic knowledge of things, and thirdly an
effective way of thinking about things.
More recently, other observers of business
school research have expressed concerns about the gap that has opened up in
the past four decades between academic scholarship and professional
practice.
Examples include: Historical role of business
schools and their faculty is as
evaluators of, but not creators or originators of, business practice.
(Pfeffer 2007, 1335) Our journals are replete with an examination of
issues that no manager would or should ever care about, while concerns
that are important to practitioners are being ignored. (Miller et al.
2009, 273)
In summary, while much has been accomplished during
the past four decades through the application of rigorous social science
research methods to accounting issues, much has also been overlooked. As I
will illustrate later in these remarks, we have missed big opportunities to
both learn from innovative practice and to apply innovations from other
disciplines to important accounting issues. By focusing on these
opportunities, you will have the biggest potential for a highly successful
and rewarding career.
Integrating Practice and Theory: The Experience
of Other Professional Schools
Other professional schools, particularly medicine, do not disconnect
scholarly activity from practice. Many scholars in medical and public health
schools do perform large-scale statistical studies similar to those done by
accounting scholars. They estimate reduced-form statistical models on
cross-sectional and longitudinal data sets to discover correlations between
behavior, nutrition, and health or sickness. Consider, for example,
statistical research on the effects of smoking or obesity on health, and of
the correlations between automobile accidents and drivers who have consumed
significant quantities of alcoholic beverages. Such large-scale statistical
studies are at the heart of the discipline of epidemiology.
Some scholars in public health schools also
intervene in practice by conducting large-scale field experiments on real
people in their natural habitats to assess the efficacy of new health and
safety practices, such as the use of designated drivers to reduce
alcohol-influenced accidents. Few academic accounting scholars, in contrast,
conduct field experiments on real professionals working in their actual jobs
(Hunton and Gold [2010] is an exception). The large-scale statistical
studies and field experiments about health and sickness are invaluable, but,
unlike in accounting scholarship, they represent only one component in the
research repertoire of faculty employed in professional schools of medicine
and health sciences.
Many faculty in medical schools (and also in
schools of engineering and science) continually innovate. They develop new
treatments, new surgeries, new drugs, new instruments, and new radiological
procedures. Consider, for example, the angiogenesis innovation, now
commercially represented by Genentech’s Avastin drug, done by Professor
Judah Folkman at his laboratories in Boston Children’s Hospital (West et al.
2005). Consider also the dozens of commercial innovations and new companies
that flowed from the laboratories of Robert Langer at MIT (Bowen et al.
2005) and George Whiteside at Harvard University (Bowen and Gino 2006).
These academic scientists were intimately aware of gaps in practice that
they could address and solve by applying contemporary engineering and
science. They produced innovations that delivered better solutions in actual
clinical practices. Beyond contributing through innovation, medical school
faculty often become practice thought-leaders in their field of expertise.
If you suffer from a serious, complex illness or injury, you will likely be
referred to a physician with an appointment at a leading academic medical
school. How often, other than for expert testimony, do leading accounting
professors get asked for advice on difficult measurement and valuation
issues arising in practice?
One study (Zucker and Darby 1996) found that
life-science academics who partner with industry have higher academic
productivity than scientists who work only in their laboratories in medical
schools and universities. Those engaged in practice innovations work on more
important problems and get more rapid feedback on where their ideas work or
do not work.
These examples illustrate that some of the best
academic faculty in schools of medicine, engineering, and science, attempt
to improve practice, enabling their professionals to be more effective and
valuable to society. Implications for Accounting Scholarship To my letter
writer, just embarking on a career as an academic accounting professor, I
hope you can contribute by attempting to become the accounting equivalent of
an innovative, worldclass accounting surgeon, inventor, and thought-leader;
someone capable of advancing professional practice, not just evaluating it.
I do not want you to become a “JAE” Just Another Epidemiologist . My
vision for the potential in your 40 year academic career at a professional
school is to develop the knowledge, skills, and capabilities to be at the
leading edge of practice. You, as an academic, can be more innovative than a
consultant or a skilled practitioner. Unlike them, you can draw upon
fundamental advances in your own and related disciplines and can integrate
theory and generalizable conceptual frameworks with skilled practice. You
can become the accounting practice leader, the “go-to” person, to whom
others make referrals for answering a difficult accounting or measurement
question arising in practice.
But enough preaching! My teaching is most effective
when I illustrate ideas with actual cases, so let us explore several
opportunities for academic scholarship that have the potential to make
important and innovative contributions to professional practice.
Continued in article
Added Jensen Comment
Of course I'm not the first one to suggest that accountics science referees are
inbred. This has been the theme of other AAA presidential scholars (especially
Anthony Hopwood), Paul Williams, Steve Zeff, Joni Young, and many, many others
that accountics scientists have refused to listen to over past decades.
"The Absence of Dissent," by Joni J. Young,
Accounting and the Public Interest 9 (1), 2009 ---
Click Here
ABSTRACT:
The persistent malaise in accounting research continues to resist remedy.
Hopwood (2007) argues that revitalizing academic accounting cannot be
accomplished by simply working more diligently within current paradigms.
Based on an analysis of articles published in Auditing: A Journal of
Practice & Theory, I show that this paradigm block is not confined to
financial accounting research but extends beyond the work appearing in the
so-called premier U.S. journals. Based on this demonstration I argue that
accounting academics must tolerate (and even encourage) dissent for
accounting to enjoy a vital research academy. ©2009 American Accounting
Association
We could try to revitalize accountics scientists by expanding the gene pools
of inbred referees.
Happy New Year!
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Up for tenure, promotion, or
accreditation?
"Nominating Your Evaluators," by Elizabeth H. Simmons, Inside
Higher Ed, January 6, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2012/01/06/essay-simmons-nominating-evaluators-faculty-tenure-process
Jensen Comment
I don't think some (most?) of the R1 universities allow candidates to
nominate evaluators. Or they may allow candidates to nominate evaluators
while insisting that not all evaluators be nominated by the candidate.
I was active in varying degrees in
obtaining accreditation for two universities (University of Maine and
Trinity University) while being on the faculty of those universities. At
UMO I was put in charge of the entire process and, as a result, learned
more about the AACSB than ever before.
One of the things that surprised me
somewhat is that the AACSB allowed us to nominate what deans would make
a visit to our campus as part of the accreditation review process. One
of my long-time friends, a dean and former accounting professor, who was
very active in the AACSB for over two decades. When I proposed to our
local faculty that he be one of our AACSB nominees, another faculty
member objected saying that my friend was a known hard ass in the
accreditation review process. After a bit of research into this, even I
agreed that we sould never nominate my friend as an evaluator.
I must admit that the deans we
eventually nominated were pretty easy on us, although in each instance I
thought we had a good case for accreditation.
And when asked to evaluate a faculty
member for tenure or promotion by another university, I recall how much
I dreaded receiving those requests in big brown envelopes that contained
ten or more papers to read and evaluate. It especially made me
uncomfortable when having to be critical of a friend's published
research. However, I don't think I killed the quest for tenure or
promotion of any candidate even though I tried to be professional in
every one of my evaluations.
Now that I'm retired, I enjoy using
retirement as an excuse turn down evaluation requests since moving to
the mountains.
Switcheroo: The Board of Regents
Takes a More Liberal Position Than the Mostly Liberal Tenured Faculty
"10 Years to Tenure at Michigan," by Dan Berrett, Inside
Higher Ed, April 25, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/04/25/university_of_michigan_adopts_longer_pre_tenure_despite_faculty_objections
Professors at the
University of Michigan could face a possible wait of up to 10
years for tenure thanks to a new policy adopted Thursday by its
Board of Regents -- over the objections of faculty.
The change to
a university
bylaw, as Michigan administrators are
quick to point out, is not mandated. It gives schools and
colleges at Michigan's campuses the option to extend the maximum
allowable pre-tenure probationary period (including the terminal
year) by two years, from the current maximum of 8 years to 10.
In practice, each college and school sets its own policy through
its governing faculty body, and this would not change. For
example, in Ann Arbor, while the law school currently has a
five-year probationary period, 13 other schools and colleges set
a six-year period; five maintain a seven-year period.
The regents’
vote Thursday came as a blow to many faculty members in Ann Arbor,
whose governing body, the Senate Assembly, in January
voted nearly unanimously, 54-1, against
the plan. “I think a lot of us are disappointed,” Edward Rothman,
professor of statistics and chair of the assembly, told Inside
Higher Ed. The faculty had wanted, he said, to take more time to
examine the problem “carefully and numerically” and to explore
options that were “consistent with a win-win atmosphere since we’re
all part of the same university."
Despite the
faculty resistance, Phil Hanlon, who serves as provost and as the
Donald J. Lewis Professor of Mathematics, decided to move forward
with proposing the measure to the regents after “much consultation
and thought,” he wrote in a
letter to faculty last week. “In seeking
advice for this decision, I have consulted with the faculty in ways
that are both broad-based and deep."
Continued in article
From Bob Jensen's Archives ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2011/tidbits020811.htm
The faculty senate at the University of Michigan voted overwhelmingly
(54-1) on Monday to reject an administration proposal that would allow
the university to extend the pre-tenure probationary period to 10 years
---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/25/michigan_faculty_reject_bid_to_lengthen_pre_tenure_probation_to_10_years
Hi David and Paul,
I don't think I could vote one way
or another on the 10-year tenure probationary period unless I also
knew if and how performance expectations changed.
New faculty bring new life to a
university. Under the seven-year probationary policy many colleges
are now over 70% tenured. I think this is too high, and under a
10-year policy it will probably soon happen that the college will be
well over 98% tenured. How unexciting!
Arguments for the 10-year period
focus on such things as long delays of the refereeing process in
some top journals and the way starting a family (babies) often
coincides in situations where couples put off starting families
until the completion of a doctoral program and the landing of the
first full-time academic faculty job. Arguments also include the
need for putting more time into development of courses on the first
job and need to experiment with different pedagogies to find the
best pedagogy that suits a particular teacher. Another argument is
that a new faculty member that comes in with say three years of
tenure credit has a bit more time to adjust to a new faculty
position in a new town.
P&T committees may, however, be less
sympathetic with the above excuses/reasons when the university has
extended the probationary period to 10 years. In fact, there may be
demands for more refereed journal hits, more hits in the very top
research journals, and higher level of performance expectations in
teaching.
In fact there may even be some
demands for demonstration of research and teaching leadership of
newer faculty rather than just expectations while being led by
veterans in the department.
One thing is certain in my mind. If
extending the probationary period to 10 years results in virtually
every candidate getting tenure, the entire tenure granting process
becomes dysfunctional to the living university. Here's why! If every
candidate gets tenure it's not long before all faculty in the
university are tenured. This becomes very dysfunctional to the
dynamics of a university that is only very rarely injected with new
blood.
New faculty bring new life to a
university. Under the seven-year probationary policy many colleges
are now over 70% tenured. I think this is even too high, and under a
10-year policy it will probably soon happen that the college will be
well over 98% tenured. How unexciting!
Bob Jensen
From the Most Tenured University in the Ivy League
"Tenure Changes Coming to Brown U.," by Dan Berrett, Inside
Higher Ed, February 8, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/02/08/brown_faculty_okays_changes_in_tenure
Brown University's
faculty members have approved, in concept, changes in how the
institution will reward tenure, including extending the maximum
probationary period to eight years from seven.
With 85
percent of the faculty voting in favor of the general thrust of
the recommended changes, the
170-30 vote in December represented a
stark turnaround from the faculty's previous stance. In October,
faculty members bristled at efforts
floated by Provost David Kertzer and an ad hoc committee to make
tenure -- a process once lauded as
exemplary at Brown -- more difficult
to earn. The faculty will consider codifying the new rules in a
vote later this month.
The changes
include extending the length of the first probationary contract
from three years to four years, increasing the number of
external letters submitted in support of a tenure bid from five
to eight, and keeping confidential from tenure candidates a list
of external scholars who will evaluate their application (though
a minimum of three of these scholars will be drawn from the
candidate's list of suggestions).
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on tenure are at
various points in
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
"Tenure, RIP: What the Vanishing
Status Means for the Future of Education," by Robin Wilson,
Chronicle of Higher Education, July 4, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Tenure-RIP/66114/
Some time this fall,
the U.S. Education Department will publish a report that documents
the death of tenure.
Innocuously titled
"Employees in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2009," the report
won't say it's about the demise of tenure. But that's what it will
show.
Over just three
decades, the proportion of college instructors who are tenured or on
the tenure track plummeted: from 57 percent in 1975 to 31 percent in
2007. The new report is expected to show that that proportion fell
below 30 percent in 2009. If you add graduate teaching assistants to
the mix, those with some kind of tenure status represent a mere
quarter of all instructors.
The idea that
tenure, a defining feature of U.S. higher education throughout the
20th century, has shrunk so drastically is shocking. But, says
Stanley N. Katz, director of Princeton University's Center for Arts
and Cultural Policy Studies, "we may be approaching a situation in
which there will not be good, tenure-track jobs for the great
majority of good people."
Continued in article
"What I Wish I'd Known About Tenure,"
by Leslie M. Phinney, Inside Higher Ed, March 27, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2009/03/27/phinney
1. Striving for tenure at a
university is like gambling in a casino;
2. Becoming tenured is like joining a fraternity;
3. A tenure case is like a hunk of Swiss cheese;
4. The majority of those embarking on an academic career will end up
with tenure cases in the gray zone;
5. Just as there are risk factors for contracting a disease, risk
factors exist for not obtaining tenure;
6. True tenure is always being able to obtain another position;
7. The best type of tenure is that which matches your ideals and
values;
8. Fight or flight decisions are part of the tenure process;
9. While important, tenure is only one facet in life.
Leslie M. Phinney was an
assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1997 until 2003. She received a
National Science Foundation CAREER Award from 2000-2004 and a 2000
NASA/ASEE Faculty Fellowship at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories. She
is now a principal member of the technical staff at Sandia National
Laboratories, in Albuquerque, N.M.
Jensen Comment
I agree with Dr. Phinney on many points, but I disagree that tenure
seeking is like casino gambling. In a fair-game casino the odds are
known and always in favor of the house. In tenure seeking there are so
many unpredictable factors (departmental colleagues, college colleagues,
university-level P&T members, etc.) that the odds are most certainly not
knowable. There are many factors that are unpredictable such as what
weight decision makers will put upon student evaluations and journal
quality where published work appears. Tenure seeking is more like
running for public office than casino gambling.
One of the big
problems with tenure seeking is that decision makers are usually not
held accountable, although committee chairs are often forced to write
down reasons for rejection decisions.
One of the big
advantages of tenure seeking is that most colleges now require
documentation of progress toward tenure every two years or thereabouts.
Tenure decisions should not come as a huge surprise in the sixth year of
appointment.
Another controversial
problem is arises when the tenure clock is suspended, sometimes unpaid,
for a variety of reasons for which there is some justification ---
health of a family member, pregnancy, leaves of absence from teaching,
etc. The reason that these tenure clock suspensions are controversial is
that in many instances the tenure candidate can do research and writing
during the tenure clock suspension and thereby gain some advantage over
other candidates given no more than six years before a final tenure
decision is reached.
Almost 20
years after the first edition came out, the editors of
The Academic’s Handbook (Duke
University Press) have released a new version — the third — with many
chapters on faculty careers updated and some completely new topics
added. Topics covered include teaching, research, tenure, academic
freedom, mentoring, diversity, harassment and more. The editors of the
collection (who also wrote some of the pieces) are two Duke University
professors who also served as administrators there. They are A. Leigh
Deneef, a professor of English and former associate dean of the Graduate
School, and Craufurd D. Goodwin, a professor of economics who was
previously vice provost and dean of the Graduate School.
Inside
Higher Ed, January 10,
2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/workplace/2007/01/10/handbook
Find out what changes in the last ten years of academe are the
most significant!
"Ph.D. From Diploma Mill Doesn't
Block Prof's Tenure," Inside Higher Ed, May 11, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/05/11/qt#227176
Northeastern
Illinois University last year awarded tenure to a faculty member who
lists a Ph.D. from an unaccredited institution that has been labeled
a diploma mill, the
Chicago Sun-Times reported. The
university says that it awarded tenure under a little used rule that
allows tenure for "exceptional" teachers who lack doctorates. The
faculty member says that he disavowed the doctorate years ago, but
the newspaper noted that it remains on his university résumé and
that the university president called him "Dr." in documents related
to his tenure approval.
Bob Jensen's threads on diploma mills
are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill
"Time's Up for Tenure," Laurie
Fendrich, Chronicle of Higher Education's The Chronicle Review,
April 18, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/fendrich/times-up-for-tenure?utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
The time has come
for tenure in academe to be either radically modified or, as I’d
prefer, abandoned altogether. I’ve held this position from long
before I was tenured and promoted to full professor, and nothing
I’ve experienced since being granted tenure — neither the job
security, nor the greatly increased power in affecting departmental
matters, nor the access to the ears of the administration, nor
inclusion on any number of high-level committees, nor anything else
— has changed my mind. Simply put, tenure does more harm than good.
Defenders of tenure
invariably cite its protection of academic freedom and free speech,
and they’re not entirely wrong. In higher education, tenure does
prevent administrations from firing a faculty member simply for
teaching, researching, or merely saying something with which an
administration disagrees. But tenure, while protecting the academic
freedom and free speech of the tenured, exacerbates the lack of
academic freedom and free speech of the untenured. Actually, tenure
suppresses them.
Tenured faculty on a
tenure-decision committee hold an almost life-and-death power over
the untenured candidate. If power corrupts and absolute power
corrupts absolutely, a tenure committee is a veritable Petri dish
for moral and ethical corruption. Members can — and do — vote
negatively on a candidate because they’re threatened by the
competition of the candidate’s teaching or research, because the
candidate has openly disagreed with them in faculty meetings,
because the candidate lunches with a member of the faculty the
members don’t like, because the candidate has a student following,
because the candidate dresses funny, because, well, because of
practically anything.
To the protest that
most if not all of these reasons are not allowed to be factors, I’d
reply that they’re ridiculously easy to conceal in the committee’s
official business. Unless the candidate is a Nobel Prize contender
with students hanging from the rafters to hear his or her lectures,
the tenure case is de facto decidable on illegitimate grounds.
To the protest that
most tenured faculty are decent, reasonable people who wouldn’t vote
against a candidate for illegitimate reasons, I’d reply that in a
good many colleges it takes only one or two negative votes (against,
say, a half-dozen positive ones) for the committee’s recommendation
to seem weak or invalid in the eyes of the next level of
decision-makers. (“The decision to promote wasn’t unanimous,” the
dean says, “and I don’t want to make this schism in the department
permanent, so. . . .”) In short, the institution of tenure and the
way it’s decided — good ol’ peer review — means that if a candidate
makes one measly tenured departmental enemy for any reason
whatsoever, that candidate is most likely doomed.
Tenure also kills
free speech and academic freedom because it institutionalizes and
encourages the bullying of untenured junior faculty. Those tenured
departmental enemies sure don’t wait until the committee meetings
during the up-or-out year to start getting their ounces of flesh.
Although overt bullying may seem rather rare (it’s like rape in one
of those cultures requiring multiple male witnesses for the crime to
be taken to court), subtle and even silent bullying is pervasive to
the point of universality.
Tenure turns
otherwise upstanding junior faculty into servile yes-men and
yes-women — or, worse, cowards. Junior faculty working toward tenure
must develop the servile art of pleasing those who outrank them.
(Where, by the way, besides the military, is the power gap between
“officers” and “enlisted men and women” so enormous?) That leads
them to suppress their real opinions and ideas. So much for the
academic freedom and free speech that tenure is supposed to
preserve.
And if their
servility and cowardice does manage to get them tenure, these same
faculty — like abused children who grow up to abuse their own
children — quickly hoist the Jolly Roger of their own suppressed
anger and humiliation and start bullying the next group of junior
faculty — with, of course, complete impunity.
Bullied or abused
junior faculty can file grievances, you say — to which I reply: Lots
of luck. Grievance boards are either composed of tenured faculty
(who tend to protect their own) or have but a few token untenured
members who are, of course, conveniently bullyable; faculty senates
don’t want to dirty their hands with individual grievances against
colleagues; ditto for the AAUP, which is interested only in
grievances filed against administrators.
For those who’d
argue that corruption and bullying come from only a few aberrant
tenured faculty members and that the rest are decent people of
principle, I’d reply a) as I said above, it takes only one or two
for corruption and bullying to be effective, and b) look around at
the situation on the ground: I’ll bet there’s one or two egregious —
albeit often subtle — bullies in every department on campus,
including yours.
In addition to
bullying, tenure creates the problem of tenured professors hanging
around long past the point when, if they had any sense of honor,
they’d retire. They cling to their lifetime jobs, medical insurance,
their comfy offices, and their phone/fax/copier privileges; they
fumble with crumbling, yellow notes for courses they teach by rote
recital. They profess blameless inability to handle any necessary
IT, including, half the time, simple e-mail. They won’t budge, and
it’s actionable age discrimination in most places for a department
chairman or a dean even to raise the subject of retirement.
Meanwhile, students suffer their perfunctory teaching, and younger,
more energetic, more passionate, more eager teacher-scholars can’t
advance past this arterial blockage or, worse, can’t even find jobs.
While tenure isn’t the only reason for the “adjunctification of the
university,” it’s a big one.
But one of the worst
consequences of tenure is the heavy price of Outcomes Assessment. If
we’re going to be burdened with sinecured faculty members who have
heretofore been “unaccountable” for life, administrators conclude,
we can at least put them through the OA grinder. That is, under
threat of being held responsible for disaccreditation, these non-fireable
faculty can at least be made to insert prescribed “learning goals”
and “learning objectives” into their syllabi. And they are being
made to. That’s right: Outcomes Assessment has grown into Incomes
Approval, i.e., the shaping of course content by administrative
fiat. Where’s the precious academic freedom supposedly bulwarked by
tenure? Where are the putative guardians (committees composed of or
led by tenured faculty, faculty senates, or the AAUP) on this one?
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
In the United States three things are certain in academe: Death,
Taxes, and Tenure
Letter From Frustrated Authors,
Chronicle of Higher Education, May 21, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php?topic=60573.0
This heads up was sent to me by Ed Scribner at New Mexico State
Dear Sir, Madame, or
Other:
Enclosed is our
latest version of Ms. #1996-02-22-RRRRR, that is the
re-re-re-revised revision of our paper. Choke on it. We have again
rewritten the entire manuscript from start to finish. We even
changed the g-d-running head! Hopefully, we have suffered enough now
to satisfy even you and the bloodthirsty reviewers.
I shall skip the
usual point-by-point description of every single change we made in
response to the critiques. After all, it is fairly clear that your
anonymous reviewers are less interested in the details of scientific
procedure than in working out their personality problems and sexual
frustrations by seeking some kind of demented glee in the sadistic
and arbitrary exercise of tyrannical power over hapless authors like
ourselves who happen to fall into their clutches. We do understand
that, in view of the misanthropic psychopaths you have on your
editorial board, you need to keep sending them papers, for if they
were not reviewing manuscripts they would probably be out mugging
little old ladies or clubbing baby seals to death. Still, from this
batch of reviewers, C was clearly the most hostile, and we request
that you not ask him to review this revision. Indeed, we have mailed
letter bombs to four or five people we suspected of being reviewer
C, so if you send the manuscript back to them, the review process
could be unduly delayed.
Some of the
reviewers’ comments we could not do anything about. For example, if
(as C suggested) several of my recent ancestors were indeed drawn
from other species, it is too late to change that. Other suggestions
were implemented, however, and the paper has been improved and
benefited. Plus, you suggested that we shorten the manuscript by
five pages, and we were able to accomplish this very effectively by
altering the margins and printing the paper in a different font with
a smaller typeface. We agree with you that the paper is much better
this way.
One perplexing
problem was dealing with suggestions 13–28 by reviewer B. As you may
recall (that is, if you even bother reading the reviews before
sending your decision letter), that reviewer listed 16 works that
he/she felt we should cite in this paper. These were on a variety of
different topics, none of which had any relevance to our work that
we could see. Indeed, one was an essay on the Spanish–American war
from a high school literary magazine. The only common thread was
that all 16 were by the same author, presumably someone whom
reviewer B greatly admires and feels should be more widely cited. To
handle this, we have modified the Introduction and added, after the
review of the relevant literature, a subsection entitled “Review of
Irrelevant Literature” that discusses these articles and also duly
addresses some of the more asinine suggestions from other reviewers.
We hope you will be
pleased with this revision and will finally recognize how urgently
deserving of publication this work is. If not, then you are an
unscrupulous, depraved monster with no shred of human decency. You
ought to be in a cage. May whatever heritage you come from be the
butt of the next round of ethnic jokes. If you do accept it,
however, we wish to thank you for your patience and wisdom
throughout this process, and to express our appreciation for your
scholarly insights. To repay you, we would be happy to review some
manuscripts for you; please send us the next manuscript that any of
these reviewers submits to this journal.
Assuming you accept
this paper, we would also like to add a footnote acknowledging your
help with this manuscript and to point out that we liked the paper
much better the way we originally submitted it, but you held the
editorial shotgun to our heads and forced us to chop, reshuffle,
hedge, expand, shorten, and in general convert a meaty paper into
stir-fried vegetables. We could not – or would not – have done it
without your input.
-- R.L. Glass
Computing Trends,
1416 Sare Road Bloomington, IN 47401 USA
E-mail address: rglass@acm.org
Bob Jensen's threads on higher
education controversies are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
"Tenure as a Tarnished Brass Ring,"
by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, March 31, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/03/31/tenure
Claire B. Potter has a level of academic success
many young Ph.D.’s these days can only dream about.
A professor of history and chair of American studies
at Wesleyan University, she has tenure at an elite
college. Tenure provides her not only with job
security, but with part of her identity as the
blogger
Tenured Radical, where she
shares views on a range of topics, writing with the
freedom that tenure is supposed to protect.
So why
would Potter recently have approached her provost to
inquire about the possibility of trading in tenure
for a renewable contract? It turns out that there
are lots of obstacles to doing so, Potter said, in
that Wesleyan doesn’t have a model in which someone
off the tenure track could fully participate in
campus governance, and this isn’t a question the
university is used to being asked. So she’s not sure
it will happen. But why even explore it?
Potter’s question was a natural outgrowth of a blog
posting she made this month that questioned the
value of tenure.
Wrote Potter: “I have
argued against tenure for several reasons: that it
destroys mobility in the job market. That we would
do better financially, and in terms of job security
and freedom of speech, in unions. That it creates
sinecures which are, in some cases, undeserved. That
it is an endless waste of time, for the candidate
and for the evaluators, that could be better spent
writing and editing other people’s work. That it
creates a kind of power that is responsible and
accountable to no one. That it is hypocritical, in
that the secrecy is designed to protect our enemies’
desire to speak freely — but in fact we know who our
enemies are, and in the end, someone tells us what
they said. But here is another reason that tenure is
wrong: It hurts people.”
The
posting and similar online comments from others have
prompted considerable discussion — pro and con — in
the academic blogosphere. And out of the
blogosphere, experts on tenure say that the
frustration Potter and others are expressing with
tenure reflects the changing nature of how academics
see their careers and how they are treated. Even
many tenure experts who say that tenure skeptics
fail to appreciate the full value of tenure say that
the frustrations being expressed are real and may
represent a turning point of sorts. What does it
mean when tenure isn’t just being attacked by bean
counters or critics who want to rid the academy of
tenured radicals, but by some tenured radicals (not
to mention tenured and untenured professors of a
variety of views)?
To
be sure, provosts are not being overrun with
questions from professors who want to get off the
tenure track, and the recent Web discussion has
brought out strong defenders of tenure.
“There are lots of things that
have hurt me in academia, but tenure is NOT one of
them,” wrote the blogger
Lumpenprofessoriat. “I
have been hurt by the lack of health care from my
years as an adjunct. I have been hurt by the
uncertainties of working as migrant, contingent
labor in academia for more than a decade. I have
been hurt by deans, provosts, and by some of my
colleagues who put time and effort into delaying my
start in a tenure track line and in further delaying
my final tenure decision for another decade. I have
been hurt by decades of debts and low wages that I
may never recover from. I have grudges, depression,
anger, rage, and issues aplenty from my sojourn
through the academic labor market. But the one thing
that has NOT hurt me is tenure.”
But in online postings and
elsewhere, the questioning of tenure has drawn
considerable support (even if much of that support
isn’t necessarily calling for its abolition, but
pointing to tensions in the system). See
Easily Distracted on the
impact of proceduralism and mystery,
Uncertain Principles on
the different disciplinary standards and the impact
of a “make or break” moment on careers, or
Confessions of a Community College Dean
(whose blog appears on
Inside Higher Ed) on the conflict between
transparency and the tenure system.
Citizen of Somewhere Else
is calling for a cease-fire in the discussions. All
of these postings have drawn comments from readers —
tenured or not — some of them saying that they see
abuses of the system with regularly, others dreading
going through it, and others vowing not to.
One
anonymous academic commented on Tenured Radical this
way: “I am completely freaked out by the mysteries
of the tenure process and have decided not to pursue
a t-t job, but instead to work toward getting either
a permanent lectureship or a split admn/lectshp
position, many of which are held by people at my
institution. I don’t think I want to deal with the
pressure and anxiety of not knowing how to court all
the right people into my camp. I am currently
benefiting from the fact that someone else did not
get tenure, as I hold a visiting position to replace
someone who elected to take their ‘terminal’ year as
a leave year. I have ‘replaced,’ due to overlapping
scholarly interests, a very brilliant teacher, a
dedicated colleague in all the fields of expertise
with which hir work crossed, and a highly respected
scholar with numerous prestigious publications. Why
this person did not get tenure has never been
explained to me. It was very controversial,
inspiring student protests. (I have no idea if the
department waged any sort of protest. It’s all part
of the secrecy.) I sincerely hope this person is
using this year to find a job where s/he will be
appreciated. I don’t think I could measure up. If
s/he couldn’t get tenure here, what must it take?”
Many
factors are at play in the debate, experts say. The
majority of faculty members who work in public
higher education, many say, are better protected on
free speech issues by the Constitution than by
tenure, and the Constitution doesn’t just kick in
after one gets tenure. Another factor is a growing
sense that earning tenure isn’t entirely a matter of
merit, but in many ways can be a fluke. In an era
when those who earn tenure can think of people they
view as equally talented who never made it off the
adjunct track, or when at many universities, people
who never published a scholarly book are judging the
quality of tenure portfolios that must contain two
books, respect for the process has diminished.
The Mysteries of Tenure
Comparisons to other
(generally criticized) processes in society come up
a lot. In the blog
Slave of Academe, Oso Raro
compared the tenure process to hazing (a common
comparison, with many noting that it’s easier to
imagine getting in to a fraternity or sorority after
hazing than earning tenure). The blog posting was
inspired by
the tenure case of Andrea Smith,
whose future at the University
of Michigan is in danger because of a negative vote
by the women’s studies department.
Continued in article
A Dramatic Proposal for
Change in Humanities Education
A panel of some of the top professors of
foreign languages has concluded that the programs that train
undergraduate majors and new Ph.D.’s are seriously off course, with so
much emphasis on literature that broader understanding of cultures and
nations has been lost . . . The implications of this call for change
are, several panel members said, “revolutionary” and potentially quite
controversial. For example, the measures being called for directly
challenge the tradition in which first and second-year language
instruction is left in many departments to lecturers, who frequently
play little role in setting curricular policy. The panel wants to see
tenure-track professors more involved in all parts of undergraduate
education and — in a challenge to the hierarchy of many departments —
wants departments to include lecturers who are off the tenure track in
planning the changes and carrying them out.
Scott Jaschik, "Dramatic Plan for Language Programs,"
Inside Higher
Ed, January 2, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/01/02/languages
A ‘Radical’ Rethinking of Scholarly
Publishing
"Upgrading to Philosophy 2.0," by Andy
Guess, Inside Higher Ed, December 31, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/31/apa
There was no
theorizing about ghosts in the machine at an annual meeting of
philosophers last Friday. Instead, they embraced technology’s
implications for their field, both within the classroom and beyond.
. . .
Harriet E. Baber of
the University of San Diego thinks scholars should try to make their
work as accessible as possible, forget about the financial rewards
of publishing and find alternative ways to referee each other’s
work. In short, they should ditch the current system of paper-based
academic journals that persists, she said, by “creating scarcity,”
“screening” valuable work and providing scholars with entries in
their CVs.
“Now why would it be
a bad thing if people didn’t pay for the information that we
produce?” she asked, going over the traditional justifications for
the current order — an incentive-based rationale she dubbed a “right
wing, free marketeer, Republican argument.”
Instead, she argued,
scholars (and in particular, philosophers) should accept that much
of their work has little market value ("we’re lucky if we could give
away this stuff for free") and embrace the intrinsic rewards of the
work itself. After all, she said, they’re salaried, and “we don’t
need incentives external [to] what we do.”
That doesn’t include
only journal articles, she said; class notes fit into the paradigm
just as easily. “I want any prospective student to see this and I
want all the world to see” classroom materials, she added.
Responding to
questions from the audience, she noted that journals’ current
function of refereeing content wouldn’t get lost, since the
“middlemen” merely provide a venue for peer review, which would
still happen within her model.
“What’s going to
happen pragmatically is the paper journals will morph into online
journals,” she said.
Part of the purpose
of holding the session, she implied, was to nudge the APA into
playing a greater role in any such transition: “I’m hoping that the
APA will organize things a little better.”
Academic Publishing in the Digital
Age: Scott McLemee claims this is a "must read"
"Sailing from Ithaka," By Scott
McLemee, Inside Higher Ed, August 1, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/08/01/mclemee
It’s not always
clear where the Zeitgeist ends and synchronicity kicks in, but
Intellectual Affairs just got hit going and coming.
In
last week’s column, we
checked in on a professor who was struggling to
clear his office of books. They had been piling up
and possibly breeding at night. In particular, he
said, he found that he seldom needed to read a
monograph more than once. In a pinch, it would often
be possible to relocate a given reference through a
digital search – so why not pass the books along to
graduate students? And so he did.
While getting ready to shoot that article into the
Internet’s
“series of tubes,” my
editor also passed along a copy of “University
Publishing in a Digital Age” – a report sponsored by
Ithaka and JSTOR.
It was released late last week. On Thursday, IHE ran
a
detailed and informative article
about the Ithaka Report, as I
suppose it is bound to be known in due time. The
groups that prepared the document propose the
creation of “a powerful technology, service, and
marketing platform that would serve as a catalyst
for collaboration and shared capital investment in
university-based publishing.”
Clearly
this would be a vaster undertaking than JSTOR, even.
The Ithaka Report may very well turn out to be a
turning point in the recent history, not only of
scholarly publishing, but of scholarship itself. And
yet only a few people have commented on the proposal
so far – a situation that appears, all things
considered, very strange.
So,
at the risk of being kind of pushy about it, let me
put it this way: More or less everyone reading this
column who has not already done so ought (as soon as
humanly possible) to get up to speed on the Ithaka
Report. I say that in spite of the fact that the
authors of the report themselves don’t necessarily
expect you to read it.
It’s natural to think of scholarship and
publishing as separate enterprises. Each follows its
own course – overlapping at some points but
fundamentally distinct with respect to personnel and
protocols. The preparation and intended audience for
the Ithaka Report reflects that familiar division of
things. It is based on surveys and interviews with
(as it says) “press directors, librarians, provosts,
and other university administrators.” But not – nota
bene! — with scholars. Which is no accident, because
“this report,” says the report, “is not directed at
them.”
The point bears stressing. But
it’s not a failing, as such. Press directors and
university librarians tend to have a macroscopic
view of the scholarly public that academic
specialists, for the most part do not. And it’s
clear those preparing the report are informed about
current discussions and developments within
professional associations – e.g., those leading to
the recent
MLA statement on tenure
and promotion.
But
scholars can’t afford to ignore the Ithaka Report
just because they were not consulted directly and
are not directly addressed as part of its primary
audience. On the contrary. It merits the widest
possible attention among people doing academic
research and writing.
The report calls for
development of “shared electronic publishing
infrastructure across universities to save costs,
create scale, leverage expertise, innovate, extend
the brand of US higher education, create an
interlinked environment of information, and provide
a robust alternative to commercial competitors.” (It
sounds, in fact, something like
AggAcad, except on
steroids and with a billion dollars.)
The
existence of such an infrastructure would condition
not only the ability of scholars to publish their
work, but how they do research. And in a way, it has
already started to do so.
The professor interviewed for last week’s column
decided to clear his shelves in part because he
expected to be able to do digital searches to track
down things he remembered reading. Without giving
away too much of this professor’s identity away, I
can state that he is not someone prone to fits of
enthusiasm for every new gizmo that comes along. Nor
does he work in a field of study where most of the
secondary (let alone primary) literature is fully
digitalized.
But
he’s taking it as a given that for some aspects of
his work, the existing digital infrastructure allows
him to offload one of the costs of research. Office
space being a limited resource, after all.
It’s
not that online access creates a substitute for
reading print-based publications. On my desk at the
moment, for example, is a stack of pages printed out
after a session of using Amazon’s Inside the Book
feature. I’ll take them to the library and look some
things up. The bookseller would of course prefer
that we just hit the one-click, impulse-purchase
button they have so thoughtfully provided; but so it
goes. This kind of thing is normal now. It factors
into how you do research, and so do a hundred other
aspects of digital communication, large and small.
The implicit question now is
whether such tools and trends will continue to
develop in an environment overwhelmingly shaped by
the needs and the initiatives of private companies.
The report raises the possibility of an alternative:
the creation of a publishing infrastructure designed
specifically to meet the needs of the
community of scholars.
Continued in article
Also see "New Model for University
Presses," The University of Illinois Issues in Scholarly
Communication Blog, July 31, 2007 ---
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/
As posted in Open Access News...
It’s the nightmare-come-true scenario for many an
academic: You spend years writing a book in your field,
send it off to a university press with an interest in
your topic, the outside reviewers praise the work, the
editors like it too, but the press can’t afford to
publish it. The book is declared too long or too narrow
or too dependent on expensive illustrations or too
something else. But the bottom line is that the relevant
press, with a limited budget, can’t afford to release
it, and turns you down, while saying that the book
deserves to be published.
That’s the situation scholars find themselves in
increasingly these days, and press editors freely admit
that they routinely review submissions that deserve to
be books, but that can’t be, for financial reasons. The
underlying economic bind university presses find
themselves in is attracting increasing attention,
including last week’s much awaited
report from Ithaka, “University Publishing in a Digital
Age,” which called for
universities to consider entirely new models.
One such new model is about to start operations:
The
Rice University Press, which was eliminated in 1996, was
revived last year with the
idea that it would publish online only, using low-cost
print-on-demand....
Rice is
going to start printing books that have been through the
peer review process elsewhere, been found to be in every
way worthy, but impossible financially to publish....
Some of
the books Rice will publish, after they went through
peer review elsewhere, will be grouped together as “The
Long Tail Press.” In addition, Rice University Press and
Stanford University Press are planning an unusual
collaboration in which Rice will be publishing a series
of books reviewed by Stanford and both presses will be
associated with the work….
Alan
Harvey, editor in chief at Stanford, said he saw great
potential not only to try a new model, but to test the
economics of publishing in different formats. Stanford
might pick some books with similar scholarly and
economic potential, and publish some through Rice and
some in the traditional way, and be able to compare
total costs as well as scholarly impact. “We’d like to
make this a public experiment and post the results,” he
said.
Another
part of the experiment, he said, might be to explore
“hybrid models” of publishing. Stanford might publish
most of a book in traditional form, but a particularly
long bibliography might appear online…
University Publishing in a Digital Age
In case you've not
seen the notices, the non-profit
organization Ithaka has just released a
report on the state of university press
publishing today,
University Publishing in a Digital Age.
Based on a detailed
study of university presses, which morphed
into a larger examination of the
relationship among presses, libraries and
their universities, the report's authors
suggest that university presses focus less
on the book form and consider a major
collaborative effort to assume many of the
technological and marketing functions that
most presses cannot afford; they also
suggest that universities be more strategic
about the relationship of presses to broader
institutional goals.
|
.
|
The Digital Revolution and Higher
Education ---
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/College-presidents.aspx
Question
What is "scholarship" as a substitute for "research" as a tenure criterion?
Scholarship = the mastery of existing knowledge,
including writing and sharing via review articles, tutorials, online videos,
Website content, etc.
Research = the production of new knowledge from
conception to rigorous analysis, including insignificant fleecing to new
knowledge that overturns conventional wisdom.
"‘Scholarship Reconsidered’ as Tenure Policy," by
Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, October 2, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/02/wcu
In
1990, Ernest Boyer published Scholarship
Reconsidered, in which he argued for abandoning
the traditional “teaching vs. research” model on
prioritizing faculty time, and urged colleges to
adopt a much broader definition of scholarship to
replace the traditional research model. Ever since,
many experts on tenure, not to mention many junior
faculty members, have praised Boyer’s ideas while at
the same time saying that departments still tend to
base tenure and promotion decisions on traditional
measures of research success: books or articles
published about new knowledge, or grants won.
Scholarship Reconsidered may make sense, but the
fear has been that too many colleges pay only lip
service to its ideas, rather than formally embracing
them — at least that’s the conventional wisdom.
Indeed, a trend in recent years has been for
colleges — even those not identified as research
universities — to take advantage of the tight
academic job market in some fields to ratchet up
tenure expectations, asking for two books instead of
one, more sponsored research and so forth.
Western Carolina University — after several years of
discussions — has just announced a move in the other
direction. The university has adopted Boyer’s
definitions for scholarship to replace traditional
measures of research. The shift was adopted
unanimously by the Faculty Senate, endorsed by the
administration and just cleared its final hurdle
with approval from the University of North Carolina
system. Broader definitions of scholarship will be
used in hiring decisions, merit reviews, and tenure
consideration.
Boyer, who died in 1995, saw the traditional
definition of scholarship — new knowledge through
laboratory breakthroughs, journal articles or new
books — as too narrow. Scholarship, Boyer argued,
also encompassed the application of knowledge, the
engagement of scholars with the broader world, and
the way scholars teach.
All
of those models will now be available to Western
Carolina faculty members to have their contributions
evaluated. However, to do so, the professors and
their departments will need to create an outside
peer review panel to evaluate the work, so that
scholarship does not become simply an extension of
service, and to ensure that rigor is applied to
evaluations.
Lee
S. Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for
the Advancement of Teaching (through which Boyer did
much of his work), said Western Carolina’s shift was
significant. While colleges have rushed to put
Boyer’s ideas into their mission statements, and
many individual departments have used the ideas in
tenure reviews, putting this philosophy in specific
institutional tenure and promotion procedures is
rare, he said. “It’s very encouraging to see this
beginning to really break through,” he said. What’s
been missing is “systematic implementation” of the
sort Western Carolina is now enacting, he said.
What
could really have an impact, Shulman said, is if a
few years from now, Western Carolina can point to a
cohort of newly tenured professors who won their
promotions using the Boyer model.
John
Bardo, chancellor at Western Carolina, said that a
good example of the value of this approach comes
from a recent tenure candidate who needed a special
exemption from the old, more traditional tenure
guidelines. The faculty member was in the College of
Education and focused much of his work on developing
online tools that teachers could use in classrooms.
He focused on developing the tools, and fine-tuning
them, not on writing reports about them that could
be published in journals.
“So
when he came up for tenure, he didn’t have normal
publications to submit,” Bardo said. Under a trial
of the system that has now been codified, the
department assembled a peer review team of experts
in the field, which came back with a report that the
professors’ online tools “were among the best
around,” Bardo said.
The
professor won tenure, and Bardo said it was
important to him and others to codify the kind of
system used so that other professors would be
encouraged to make similar career choices. Bardo
said that codification was also important so that
departments could make initial hiring decisions
based on the broader definition of scholarship.
Asked why he preferred to see his university use
this approach, as opposed to the path being taken by
many similar institutions of upping research
expectations, Bardo quoted a union slogan used when
organizing workers at elite universities: “You can’t
eat prestige.”
The
traditional model for evaluating research at
American universities dates to the 19th century, he
said, and today does not serve society well in an
era with a broad range of colleges and universities.
While there are top research universities devoted to
that traditional role, Bardo said that “many
emerging needs of society call for universities to
be more actively involved in the community.” Those
local communities, he said, need to rely on their
public universities for direct help, not just basic
research.
Along those lines, he would like to see engineering
professors submit projects that relate to helping
local businesses deal with difficult issues. Or
historians who do oral history locally and focus on
collecting the histories rather than writing them up
in books. Or on professors in any number of fields
who could be involved in helping the public schools.
In
all of those cases, Bardo said, the work evaluated
would be based on disciplinary knowledge and would
be subject to peer review. But there might not be
any publication trail.
Faculty members have been strongly supportive of the
shift. Jill Ellern, a librarian at the university
(where librarians have faculty status), said that a
key to the shift is the inclusion of outside
reviews. “We don’t want to lose the idea of
evaluations,” she said. “But publish or perish just
isn’t the way to go.”
Richard Beam, chair of the Faculty Senate and an
associate professor of stage and screen in the
university’s College of Fine and Performing Arts,
said that the general view of professors there is
that “putting great reliance on juried publication
of traditional research didn’t seem to be working
well for a lot of institutions like Western. We’re
not a Research I institution — that’s not our
thrust.”
Bob Jensen's threads on tenure can be found in the
following links:
(Teaching vs. Research) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#TeachingVsResearch
(Micro-level Research) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#MicroLevelResearch
(Co-authoring) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#JointAuthorship
(Scholarship in the Humanities) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#MLA
(Obsolete and Dysfunctional Tenure) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Tenure
Bob Jensen's threads on the flawed peer
review process are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PeerReviewFlaws
"Rethinking Tenure — and Much
More," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, December 9, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/12/08/mla
The panel — the MLA Task Force on Evaluating
Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion — urged departments to:
- Create “transparency”
in hiring and promotion, so that junior faculty members know what is
expected of them and are not surprised by changing expectations as their
tenure reviews approach.
- Define scholarship
broadly, including the “scholarship of teaching,” scholarship produced
by teams, and work that is not presented in a monograph.
- Accept “the legitimacy
of scholarship produced in new media,” ending the assumption that print
is necessarily better. (And to the extent that some professors and
departments don’t know how to evaluate quality in new media, “the onus
is on the department” to learn, not on the scholar using new media,
Stanton said.)
- Focus on scholarship,
teaching and research — and not collegiality — as criteria for tenure.
- Consider their missions
in setting standards for tenure, and to consider whether they are
adopting research-oriented missions that don’t reflect the reality of
the kind of institutions where they work.
- Limit the number of
outside review letters sought in tenure reviews, pay those who provide
them, and limit the kinds of questions asked so that they are
appropriate for the institution and the position.
- Improve the process by
which junior faculty members receive guidance on their careers.
The MLA created the panel in 2004, amid
widespread anger and anxiety among younger scholars and others about a
career path that seemed blocked and a system for sharing scholarship that
seemed dysfunctional. A simplified version of the complaints would go like
this: Young scholars need to publish books to get jobs and tenure.
University presses can’t afford to publish books any more and are raising
the bar for publication. Libraries don’t have money to buy the books the
presses do publish, forcing the presses to make more cuts, making it still
more difficult for young scholars to win tenure.
While the MLA task force found plenty of
problems in the system, one thing it did not find was the feared “lost
generation” of scholars who had been denied tenure. The association
conducted a survey of 1,339 departments on their tenure policies and
processes. A key finding was that the actual rates of tenure denials in
these departments are quite low — around 10 percent. But while junior
professors in English and foreign languages were apparently incorrect in
thinking that many were being rejected for tenure, they weren’t incorrect
that the rules and system had changed.
Relatively small percentages of new Ph.D.’s
were found to be finding tenure-track positions and getting through the
process at the institutions that initially hired them. And many were never
finding tenure-track positions. So it’s not that careers were being derailed
at the point of a tenure vote, but that they were never getting that far.
The panel also found that there is a clear
reason why so many junior faculty members perceive that the bar is higher:
At many institutions, the bar is higher.
Among all departments, 62 percent report that
publication has increased in importance in the last 10 years, and the
percentage ranking scholarship as being of primary importance (over
teaching) doubled, to just over 75 percent. While those figures might not be
surprising for doctoral institutions, the report notes a “ripple” in which
the standards for research universities end up elsewhere. Nearly half of
baccalaureate institutions now consider a monograph “very important” or
“important” for tenure. And almost one-third of all institutions are now
looking for significant progress on a second book. And Stanton noted that
while research universities provide support for writing books (in terms of
expectations about courses taught or providing research support), many of
the institutions now looking for a more detailed publication record provide
little if any such assistance.
The MLA’s report also contains ample evidence
of the mismatch between what panel members call “the tyranny of the
monograph” and the realities of scholarly publishing. Recent years have seen
top university presses shift away from the kind of publishing that tenure
committees want to see — with Stanford University Press cutting in the
humanities, Northwestern University Press cutting back in translations, and
Cambridge University Press discontinuing French studies. For books that get
published, readers may be few. Press runs that used to range from 600-1,000
are now more likely to be 250.
Many of the recommendations pushed in the
report represent attempts to reconnect the tenure and promotion process with
the excitement that the committee members see in much of scholarly life
today. One undercurrent of the entire report is that for all the flaws in
the current system of evaluating faculty members, there is no shortage of
appropriate ways to do so.
Take digital media, for example, which the
report notes is “pervasive in the humanities” and says “must be recognized
as a legitimate scholarly endeavor.” While faculty members are engaged in
digital scholarship, departments appear unable or willing to evaluate it. Of
departments, 40.8 percent at doctoral institutions, 29.3 at master’s
institutions, and 39.5 percent at baccalaureate institutions report having
“no experience” evaluating digital scholarship. More than half of all
departments report having no experience evaluating monographs in digital
form.
The report notes that the impact goes beyond
the unfairness to those whose important digital work may be ignored when
being considered for tenure — to creating disincentives to do such work.
“The cause-and-effect relations work in both directions here: Probationary
faculty members will be reluctant to risk publishing in electronic formats
unless they see clear evidence that such work can count positively in
evaluation for tenure and promotion,” the report says.
Continued in article
"How a Plan Evolved," by Michael Bérubé,
Inside Higher
Ed, December 8, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/12/08/berube
Controversies about tenure in the humanities and books that even libraries
will not order
"The Philadelphia Story," by Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed,
December 20, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/12/20/mclemee
The expression “Internet year” refers to a
period of about two or three months — an index of the pace of life
online, in what the sociologist Manuel Castells has called the “space
without a place” created by new media.
That means a decade has passed since Inside
Higher Ed made its first appearance at the Modern Language
Association, during the 2004 convention held in Philadelphia. So next
week is a kind of homecoming. I’ll be in Philadelphia starting on
Tuesday and will not return home until sometime late on Saturday — and
hope to meet as many readers of Intellectual Affairs as possible along
the marathon route in between.
The whole “space without a place” quality of
online experience can, at times, prove more anomic than utopian. So
here’s a thought: Inside Higher Ed will have a booth (#326) in
the exhibit hall. I’ll be there each afternoon between 2 and 4. Please
consider this an invitation to stop by and say hello.
Tell me what you’re reading lately.... What
sessions have blown your mind, or left you cursing under your breath....
Whether you think the
report on
tenure is going to make any difference or
not.... What magazines or journals or blogs you read that I have
probably never heard of....
And, by the way, if I ask you if you’ve heard
any really interesting papers during the week, please don’t then
go, “OK, what’s hot nowadays?” If I want to know what’s hot, I’ll
go ask Paris Hilton. This peculiar insistence on mimicking the ethos of
Hollywood (talking about “academostars,” “buzz,” hunting for the “hot
new trend,” etc.) sometimes makes it seem as if Adorno was an optimist.
To put it another way: I’d much rather know
what you’ve found interesting at MLA (and why) than hear you try to
guess at what other people now think is exciting. Please come by the
booth. But if you use the word “hot,” I hope it is only in the context
of recommending someplace to get a burrito.
That sort of ersatz fashion-mongering is
less a problem than a symptom. Lindsay Waters, the executive editor for
the humanities at Harvard University Press, has been complaining for
some time about the structural imperative for overproduction in some
parts of the humanities — a situation in which people are obliged to
publish books, whether they have anything to say or not. And when
scholarly substance declines as a definitive criterion for what counts
as important, then hipness, hotness, and happeningness take up the
slack.
“Few libraries will buy many of the books
published now by university presses with booths at the MLA convention,”
wrote Waters in an essay appearing in the May 2000 issue of PMLA.
“Why should tenure be connected to the publication of books that most of
the profession do not feel are essential holdings for their local
libraries?”
He brooded over that question at somewhat more
length in
Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of
Scholarship, a pamphlet issued by Prickly
Paradigm Press a couple of years ago. You hear quite a few echoes of the
booklet in the recommendations of the MLA task force on tenure.
“Scholarship,” as the final report puts it, “should not be equated with
publication, which is, at bottom, a means to make scholarship public,
just as teaching, service, and other activities are directed toward
different audiences. Publication is not the raison d’être of
scholarship; scholarship should be the raison d’etre of publication.”
Well, yes. But you’ve got the whole problem of
the optative, right there — the complex and uncertain relationship
between “ought” and “is.” (Sorry, had a neo-Kantian flashback for a
second there.) The real problem is: How do you get them to line up?
The task force makes numerous recommendations –
some discussed
here. I thought it would be interesting to
find out what Waters thought of the report. “It does talk about a lot of
the problems honestly,” he told me, “including the shift to part-time
labor.” But his reservations seem a lot more emphatic.
“My fear for the MLA report,” he wrote by
e-mail, “ is that it will be shelved like the report of the Iraq Study
Group. And there may be another similarity: The ISG made a mistake with
Bush. They gave him 79 recommendations, not one. This report runs that
risk, too. Like my Enemies book, the report offers up ideas that
it will suit many to ignore.... Churchill said it so well — the
Americans will do the right thing only after they have exhausted all the
other possibilities. The problem is that this relatively frail creature,
the university, has survived so well for so long in the US because for
the most part it was located in a place where, like poetry (to cite the
immortal Auden) executives would never want to tamper. But they are
tampering now. And they are using the same management techniques on the
university that they used on General Motors, and they may have the same
deadly effect.”
Worrying about the long-term future of
the life of the mind is demanding. Still, you’ve still got to pack your
luggage eventually, and make plans for how to spend time at the
conference. MLA is like a city within a city. No accident that the
program always looks a little like a phone directory.
It contains a great deal of information – and
it’s well-organized, in its way. But it can also be kind of bewildering
to browse through. It seems like a salutary development that people
have, over the past couple of years, started posting online lists of the
sessions they want to attend. It’s the next best thing to having a
friend or trusted colleague make recommendations. Here is
an example.
If you’ve already posted something about your
conference-going itinerary, please consider using the comments section
here to link to it. For that matter, if you’ve noticed one or two
sessions that you consider not-to-be-missed, why not say so? Consider
the space below a kind of bulletin board.
One tip I hope you’ll consider (despite
the beastly hour of it) is the panel called “Meet the Bloggers.” It is
scheduled for Saturday, December 30th, at 8:30 in the morning. The list
of speakers includes Michael Bérubé, John Holbo, Scott Kaufman, and the
professor known as Bitch, Ph.D.
For abstracts,
go here. I will also be on the panel,
commenting on the papers afterwards. That is, assuming I can get an
intravenous caffeine drip.
There is a nice bit of synchronicity about the
date that the program committee scheduled “Meet the Bloggers.” For it
will be the anniversary (second or tenth, depending on how you count it)
of
“Bloggers in the Flesh” — an article that
appeared well before anyone in MLA thought of organizing a panel on the
topic.
A lot has happened in the meantime — including
a sort of miniature equivalent (confined entirely to academe) of what
sociologists call a
“moral panic.” For a while there, blogging
became a suspicious activity that threatened to weaken your scholarly
reputation, ruin your job prospects, and cause thick, coarse hair to
grow upon your palms.
It all seems kind of silly in retrospect. No
doubt the level of discussion will be much higher at the panel. I hope
some of you will make it. But even if not, please consider stopping by
to say hello at the IHE booth, any afternoon between 2 and 4.
Political Correctness ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness
Political Correctness: New York Times Conveniently Revises History on the
2020 Antifa/BLM-Led Riots ---
https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/01/new-york-times-conveniently-revises-history-on-the-2020-antifa-blm-led-riots/
Political Correctness: Using Social Media to
Bring Down the Power Grid ---
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/08/using-social-media-to-bring-down-the-power-grid.htm
A recent study across Britain, Canada, and the United States revealed that a
sizable portion of the professoriate discriminates against conservatives ---
https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=16957
Jensen Comment
This may vary somewhat between universities such as George Mason/Chicago versus
Yale/Harvard. The faculty of Stanford University has been trying for years to
get rid of the conservative and respectable
Hoover Institution on campus.
Princeton University: The campus activists can't get Katz fired. So
they are trying to make his life so miserable he leaves ---
https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/02/the-targeting-of-princeton-prof-joshua-katz-continues/
Daniel Jacobson on Freedom of Speech at Universities in the Age of Cancel
Culture ---
https://connections.cu.edu/spotlights/five-questions-daniel-jacobson
Florida Congressional Candidate Sues Law School
Claiming She Was Expelled For Supporting President Trump ---
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2020/07/florida-congressional-candidate-sues-law-school-claiming-she-was-expelled-for-supporting-president-t.html
NYT: Should We Cancel Aristotle? He
defended slavery and opposed the notion of human equality ---
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/opinion/should-we-cancel-aristotle.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
Massachusetts School Allegedly Bans ‘The Odyssey’ by
Homer ---
https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/12/massachusetts-school-allegedly-bans-the-odyssey-by-homer/
Some classics are just not politically correct
The
Politidcally Correct Goose Step May Ruin Universities ---
https://mises.org/wire/are-universities-finished?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=96712ec7ff-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_07_17_06_30_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-96712ec7ff-228708937
Suffolk Community College students
call out professor for apparent rant on President Trump ---
http://longisland.news12.com/suffolk-community-college-students-call-out-professor-for-apparent-rant-on-president-trump-42616283
Thank you Eliot Kamlet for the heads up
Walter E. Williams: Despicable behavior of today's academicians
---
https://www.annistonstar.com/the_daily_home/free/walter-williams-despicable-behavior-of-todays-academicians-column/article_91f53c10-c6f6-11ea-aaf6-3bf6925ca976.htm
Politically Incorrect Paper of the
Day: The Persistence of Pay Inequality ---
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/10/politically-incorrect-paper-of-the-day-the-persistence-of-pay-inequality.html
NY Times Columnist Exposes The Deep Deception
Of The NY Times’ 1619 Project ---
https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/10/ny-times-columnist-exposes-the-deep-deception-of-the-ny-times-1619-project/
Scholars Call on Pulitzer Board to Revoke
Prize Given to 1619 Project Author Nikole Hannah-Jones ---
https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/10/scholars-call-on-pulitzer-board-to-revoke-prize-given-to-1619-project-author-nikole-hannah-jones/
Student gov wants to impeach fellow member for daring to
defend Blue Lives Matter face mask ---
https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=16707
Blue Lives Don't Matter in a politically correct university
Students push for removal of student government member over conservative
beliefs ---
https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=16261
Next endangered species --- conservative faculty
The University of Texas agreed to disband its absurd political correctness
police force and end policies that suppress speech on campus ---
https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/12/ut-austin-dropping-bias-response-teams-to-settle-free-speech-lawsuit/
Bob Jensen's threads on political correctness of USA universities ---
See below
Chronicle of Higher Education
Many People Are Seeing Different Facts: Carnegie Mellon Official’s Emails Cast
Doubt on the Integrity of the 2020 Election
https://www.chronicle.com/article/many-people-are-seeing-different-facts-carnegie-mellon-officials-emails-on-election-spark-outcry?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_1892671_nl_Academe-Today_date_20210112&cid=at&source=ams&sourceId=296279&cid2=gen_login_refresh
Doubts
about the validity of the 2020 presidential election emerged in an
unlikely place late last week — the Institute for Politics and
Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University.
“Many people are seeing different facts
and parts of the story about what happened in each state,” wrote
Kiron K. Skinner, the institute’s director and a professor, on
Thursday to colleagues. “In many cases, there simply isn’t just one
set of facts. A research project for some group of us would be to
investigate on our own the election outcome in a handful of states.
We could be surprised at what we find.”
Skinner, who served on President
Trump’s transition team and worked in his administration in the
State Department, sent this email and others just one day after a
violent mob broke into the U.S. Capitol, spurred on by Trump and
right-wing provocateurs falsely alleging election fraud. Her
messages — sent to, by some estimates, at least 100 colleagues — at
times appeared to express sympathy to those who supported these
ideas.
Carnegie Mellon is far from alone in employing
or hosting current and former lawmakers and appointees, who often
teach at colleges as fellows or visiting professors. President-elect
Joe Biden is a professor
of practice at the
University of Pennsylvania.
But Trump officials have brought sharp
criticism when they come to colleges, in part because of the
president’s propensity for lying and campuses’ stated missions to
seek truth. Marc Short, Trump’s former legislative-affairs director, served
as a senior fellow at
the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. Multiple people left
the university in protest of his
hire. Harvard University hosted several Trump officials, including
the former press secretary Sean Spicer, as fellows.
The stakes of such appointments are perhaps
even higher after Wednesday, when the president
incited his supporters with
lies undercutting the validity of the election. The controversy at
Carnegie Mellon suggests as much. As social-media platforms and
corporations break ties with Trump and his enablers, colleges may
find hiring officials from his administration to be both too
controversial and too compromising.
The controversy began when Skinner’s institute
published a news release about Richard Grenell, a Trump appointee
halfway into his year as a senior fellow at Carnegie Mellon’s
Institute for Politics and Strategy. Grenell, who was hired by
Skinner, has used his Twitter account to spread
dismissed claims
about election fraud. The release publicized two recent recognitions
Grenell received from Trump. It was dated
Wednesday,
the day rioters broke into the Capitol.
Several people at the university expressed
disgust over the timing of the announcement. “Academic freedom is
important, but you’re trumpeting evil,” wrote David Andersen, a
computer-science professor, on Twitter.
One professor emailed his concerns to a
large group that included top administrators, his department’s
faculty members, and some students. The university’s president,
Farnam Jahanian, replied, saying to colleagues that he shared their
concerns and had urged the Institute for Politics and Strategy to
remove the post.
Continued in article
Jensen Question
Would your university punish faculty or students who question the integrity of
the 2020 election?
It's not politically correct to investigate or question the validity of this
election.
Bob Jensen's threads on how to be politically correct in academe ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
Campus Reform ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campus_Reform
Campus Reform
regularly publishes articles rehashing professors’ tweets and comments,
presenting them as evidence of what it considers liberal bias on college
campuses ---
Click Here
Sami Schalk has a
protocol for when Campus Reform gets
in touch. When a reporter from the conservative news site emails her
to ask about a recent tweet, the associate professor of gender and
women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison sets the
plan in motion. It’s happened several times this year.
Campus Reform regularly
publishes articles rehashing professors’ tweets and comments,
presenting them as evidence of what it considers liberal bias on
college campuses. Schalk has an active
Twitter feed and
is a frequent target.
“I am aware of being heavily monitored,” she said.
Schalk knows that after an article about her
is published, she’ll hear from Campus Reform readers. If a
more prominent site, like Breitbart or Fox News, picks
up the story,
she’ll be inundated with emails, messages on Twitter, and calls to
her department and administrators.
The messages are vile. People label her with racist and sexist
slurs. They compare her to animals and try to shame her for how she
looks. Schalk has some filters set up to block certain emails. She
asks a friend to scan the other emails in case they contain a threat
to her safety.
“I don’t want to censor myself, so I’m not going to,” said Schalk.
“I have to accept that this is what comes with it.”
Just a few years ago, professors didn’t have a protocol for dealing
with
Campus Reform. It sent the scholars it targeted into retreat
and administrators scrambling to respond. The site is now about 10
years old, and much of higher education is learning to live with it.
Professors like Schalk have fortified themselves against the hate
mail — and found allies elsewhere in academe.
Campus Reform Home
Page ---
https://www.campusreform.org/
Bob Jensen's threads on political correctness and speech restrictions
are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
A new report
finds a majority of students feel they can't express their opinions on campus,
especially when they are in the ideological minority (think conservative
economics) ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/29/fire-report-students-are-censoring-their-opinions?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=8ce914a468-DNU_2020_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-8ce914a468-197565045&mc_cid=8ce914a468&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Report ---
https://speech.collegepulse.com/
College Pulse, the Foundation for Individual
Rights in Education (FIRE), and RealClearEducation have released the
first-ever College Free Speech Rankings, a comprehensive comparison
of the student experience of free speech on their campuses. These
rankings are based on the voices of 20,000 currently enrolled
students at 55 colleges and are designed to help parents and
prospective students choose the right college.
Jensen Comment
The most protective university for free speech is no surprise.
Political Correctness: Iowa Professor Warns Students Might Get Dismissed If
They Oppose Pro-Choice Or Black Lives Matter Positions ---
https://www.lacortenews.com/n/iowa-professor-warns-students-might-get-dismissed-if-they-oppose-pro-choice-or-black-lives-matter-positions
Political Correctness: The administrative torment of UCF
Prof. Charles Negy ---
https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/08/the-administrative-torment-of-ucf-prof-charles-negy/
After Negy questioned
claims of ‘systemic racism’ and asserted ‘black privilege is real,’
there has been a university-wide pile-on, with Negy alleging UCF is
soliciting complaints against him and conducting an abusive
investigation in an effort to justify firing him.
I had heard of Charles
Negy, Associate Professor of
Psychology at the University of Central Florida (UCF). What I heard
seemed like a particularly egregious example of cancel culture that
is purging academia and imposing uniformity of opinion, particularly
with regard to the Black Lives Matter movement. Having looked into
it more, it’s worse than I realized.
Negy’s alleged crime that sparked the
controversy was two tweets questioning the orthodoxy of systemic
racism and white privilege.
One tweet,
which no longer is available,said:
“If Afr. Americans as a group, had the same behavioral profile as
Asian Americans (on average, performing the best academically,
having the highest income, committing the lowest crime, etc.), would
we still be proclaiming ‘systematic racism’ exists?”
A second
tweet, also no longer
available, said:
“Black privilege is real: Besides affirm. action, special
scholarships and other set asides, being shielded from legitimate
criticism is a privilege. But as a group, they’re missing out on
much needed feedback.”
Rather than debate the merits or
lack of merits in his opinions, a particularly aggressive attempt to
get Negy fired ensued.
There was a Change.org
petition with over 30,000
signatures, a Twitter hashtag was launched (#UCFFireHim)
that trended,
the student Senate passed
a resolution, and there were protestson
campus in which
the President participated:
Continued in article
Justice Department Finds Yale Illegally
Discriminates Against Asians and Whites in Undergraduate Admissions in Violation
of Federal Civil-Rights Laws ---
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-finds-yale-illegally-discriminates-against-asians-and-whites-undergraduate
Walter E. Williams: Back to Academic Brainwashing ---
https://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2020/08/19/back-to-academic-brainwashing-n2574500?utm_s
Penn State Retracts Statement Saying Conservative Voices Are Important:
Leftist Ideology is the Only Politically Correct Ideology ---
https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/09/penn-state-retracts-statement-saying-conservative-voices-are-important/
“Dear conservative students. Your viewpoints are
important,” the announcement read, referencing the isolation and
self-censorship many conservative students experience on left-wing campuses.
According to the schools Director of Strategic Communications, it was part
of a statement aimed at creating a supporting and inclusive environment for
students.
. . .
The University quickly crumpled, and retracted the statement.
Jensen Comment
By withdrawing support for debating ideologies that are not politically correct
Penn State is ignoring the appeals of Norm Chomsky and some other liberal
schalars.
That hints that academe is marching
lockstep toward one ideology. Noam and others are worried!
The inmates guarding the asylum: They want goose-step conformance to
political correctness.
Penn State University training film on how to liberal
faculty can deal with military veterans who refuse to be politically correct --
-
The video was deleted on YouTube, but you can
read an analysis by The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/PennStateVeteran.htm
Penn State later issued a public apology for producing the video
---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/04/13/qt#196252
The Harpers free speech letter and controversy ---
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/07/the-harpers-free-speech-letter-and-controversy.html
Harper's Letter on Justice
and Social Debate ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Letter_on_Justice_and_Open_Debate
Noam Chomsky and Other Scholars Fear the Dangers of Losing
Open Debate and Toleration of Differences in Ideology ---
https://www.ibtimes.com/noam-chomsky-malcolm-gladwell-address-cancel-culture-open-letter-3007684
John McWhorter on
the now-famous Harper's Letter--- Our Oppressive Moment ---
https://quillette.com/2020/07/29/our-oppressive-moment/
As one of
the signatories to the much-discussed
“Open Letter” in Harper’s magazine,
I’ve been bemused by the objection that we are merely
whiners—people with impregnable career success, flustered that
social media is forcing us to experience unprecedented
criticism, particularly in the wake of the Floyd protests. This
represents a stark misunderstanding of why I and many others
signed it. I am certainly not complaining about being
criticized. As someone frequently described as “contrarian” on
the fraught topic of race, I have been roasted for my views for
over 20 years—it’s just that, when I started out, I received
invective scrawled on paper folded into envelopes instead of
typed into tweets. The sheer volume of criticism is greater, of
course, but the last thing I would do is sign a letter
protesting it. For writers of commentary on controversial
subjects, the barrage keeps us on our toes. Haters can be
ignored, but informed excoriation can help sharpen our arguments
and ensure we remain acquainted with the views of the other
side.
The Harper’s letter
is a declaration intended to resist the poisonous atmosphere
suffocating those who don’t enjoy our platforms and profiles. We
are not taking issue with critique, but with the idea that those
who express certain views must not simply be criticized but have
their epaulets torn off—demoted, shunned, and personally
vilified. Earlier this month, hundreds of members of the
Linguistics Society of America (LSA) signed their own open
letter calling
for eminent
psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker to have his career award
as a Linguistics Society of America Fellow revoked. This was not
mere criticism of views the signatories found objectionable. It
was not even just criticism of Pinker for expressing them
(although it was certainly that). It was a demand for punishment
that would also serve as an instructive example to others.
Discussion of this issue has become mired in semantic quibbles
over just what constitutes “cancellation”—the LSA letter
signatories were at pains to stress they did not wish to
“cancel” Pinker. But the demand that he be shamed and sanctioned
sent an unmistakable message to other writers and scholars not
protected by his success and reputation. Nor is this simply a
debate about “free speech,” or about whether or not it is still
permissible to argue the merits of slavery or women’s suffrage.
The more pressing problem is that opinions which, until
recently, were well within the Overton Window of acceptable
discourse are being bracketed under the same umbrella as
unambiguously outlandish and hateful opinions that really do now
lie beyond the limits of civilized discussion. Today, views
deemed insufficiently anti-racist (or also anti-misogynist) are
increasingly described as thinly coded expressions of racism and
misogyny that we are encouraged to treat as such.
A lot of smart, progressive people these days seem to think that
this kind of public defrocking is appropriate, just, and even
necessary. This general tendency veers too close to Salem and
the Cultural Revolution for comfort, and its defenders should be
aware that their position is a radical and eccentric one that
will require a more rigorous defense than most of them have seen
fit to produce. We are not tenured infants; we are alarmed at
what is starting to pass for enlightenment in our society, and
that this narrow, punitive form of moral judgment is acquiring
such power. Supporters of these developments suppose that power
is simply being taken from white heterosexual men and
redistributed to the historically voiceless. Excesses have been
very few, they contend, and highlighting them misses broader and
more laudable developments.
Alas, social history is seldom that tidy. Consider the following
three examples:
·
A New
York Times food columnist was suspended for a passing
criticism of half-Thai Chrissy Teigen and Japanese citizen Marie
Kondo, both of whom she accused of selling out. Does this mean a
white person can never criticize a woman of color or was there
something about this particular criticism about representatives
of these particular ethnicities that crossed a particular line?
This was never made entirely clear and was probably never
intended to be.
·
The
president and the board chairman of the Poetry Foundation
resigned after 1800 members signed a protest letter condemning
them because the statement that they had released in support of
Black Lives Matter was not long or substantial enough.
·
The
president of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was forced
to resign after a meeting during which the museum was criticized
for being insufficiently committed to non-white artists. He
concurred but added that the museum would not stop collecting
white artists because this would constitute “reverse
discrimination.” His use of that term cost him his job, because
it implied that non-whites are capable of racism despite their
lack of institutional power.
Are these three cases examples of comfortable whites receiving
their proper comeuppance at the hands of those speaking truth to
power, or are they symptomatic of broader ideological policing?
That it is not only the powerful who find themselves in the
sights of our current mania for persecution suggests the latter
reading is closer to the mark.
·
A
data analyst at a progressive consulting firm tweeted a link to
a study by a black Ivy League political science professor, Omar
Wasow, which found that violent black protests during the long
hot summers of the late 1960s were more likely than nonviolent
protests to make local voters vote Republican. Wasow’s findings
had been
reported by
the Washington
Post as far back as 2015 without incident, and the
analyst’s intention was clearly progressive—he was not
anti-protest, but wanted to draw attention to the fact that
violence might harm Democrats’ electoral chances come November.
But following the death of George Floyd, criticizing street
violence suddenly became taboo in some progressive circles, and
so the thread below the analyst’s tweet began to fill with
caustic sanctimony. When a random Twitter user tagged his
employer with the instruction “come get your boy,” the
consulting firm shamefully expelled him.
·
Two
years ago, a young white woman attended a costume party thrown
by the Washington
Post. She arrived dressed as Megyn Kelly in
blackface, a reference to Kelly’s recent defense of the trope
that had resulted in the news anchor’s abrupt exit from NBC.
This was hardly a graceful decision regardless of intent, and a
number of attendees (including the party’s co-host) made this
clear to the guest. She left the party in tears and apologized
to the host the next day. But in June of this year, a (white)
management consultant and a (black) artist who had both
confronted her at the party approached the Post with
their story, which two of the paper’s writers somehow managed to
work up into a 3,000-word feature. When she warned her employers
that a story about her mortifying faux
pas would be running in a national newspaper, she was
fired.
·
A newly
hired nursing dean was fired from her position for sending an
email which included the newly taboo phrase “everyone’s life
matters.” But in the context of her email the phrase could
hardly have been more innocuous:
I am writing to
express my concern and condemnation of the recent (and past)
acts of violence against people of color. Recent events recall a
tragic history of racism and bias that continue to thrive in
this country. I despair for our future as a nation if we do not
stand up against violence against anyone. BLACK LIVES MATTER,
but also, EVERYONE’S LIFE MATTERS. No one should have to live in
fear that they will be targeted for how they look or what they
believe.
An obscure data analyst, a private citizen with no public
profile, and the dean of a nursing school hardly have their
hands on the levers of power, and yet people like these are as
likely to be persecuted under the new mood as the heads of art
museums and leading food columnists (if indeed people in public
positions like those can reasonably be considered powerful).
These are the new norms and the modus
operandi that
alarm those of us who signed the Harper’s letter,
not any perceived threat to our own careers.
Noam Chomsky and Other Scholars Fear the Dangers of Losing
Open Debate and Toleration of Differences in Ideology ---
https://www.ibtimes.com/noam-chomsky-malcolm-gladwell-address-cancel-culture-open-letter-3007684
In an open letter, a group of public
figures and writers warn readers about the pros and cons of the
current world climate (mania).
The piece, titled " A
Letter on Justice and Open Debate,"
featuring signatures from 150 public figures including the likes of
J.K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, and Noam Chomsky, was published on
the Harper's Magazine website on Tuesday with plans to make a
reemergence in the October issue of the magazine.
"Our cultural institutions
are facing a moment of trial," the letter begins. "Powerful protests
for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for
police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and
inclusion across our society, not least in higher education,
journalism, philanthropy, and the arts."
"But this needed reckoning
has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political
commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and
toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity."
Specifically speaking to their craft and the dire consequences if
mindsets don't change lanes, they conclude, "As writers we need a
culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and
even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith
disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t
defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect
the public or the state to defend it for us."
It seems not everyone was happy with the letter, though.
After it was published both historian Kerri Greenidge and
trans activist Jennifer Finney Boylan announced the
withdrawal of their support on Twitter.
Who
decides which books to burn?
Who decides which books to burn?
Woodrow Wilson (the 28th President (a Democrat) of the USA) ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wilson
Author
During his
academic career, Wilson authored several works of history and political
science and became a regular contributor to
Political Science Quarterly,
an academic journal.[55]
Wilson's first political work, Congressional Government (1885),
critically described the U.S. system of government and advocated adopting
reforms to move the U.S. closer to a
parliamentary system.[56]
Wilson believed the Constitution had a "radical defect" because it did not
establish a branch of government that could "decide at once and with
conclusive authority what shall be done."[57]
He singled out the
United States House of Representatives
for particular criticism, writing, divided up, as it were, into forty-seven
seignories, in each of which a
standing committee
is the court-baron and its chairman lord-proprietor. These petty barons,
some of them not a little powerful, but none of them within reach [of] the
full powers of rule, may at will exercise an almost despotic sway within
their own shires, and may sometimes threaten to convulse even the realm
itself.[58]
Wilson's second publication was a textbook, entitled The State, that
was used widely in college courses throughout the country until the 1920s.[59]
In The State, Wilson wrote that
governments could legitimately promote the general welfare "by forbidding
child labor, by supervising the sanitary conditions of factories, by
limiting the employment of women in occupations hurtful to their health, by
instituting official tests of the purity or the quality of goods sold, by
limiting the hours of labor in certain trades, [and] by a hundred and one
limitations of the power of unscrupulous or heartless men to out-do the
scrupulous and merciful in trade or industry."[60][page needed]
He also wrote that charity efforts should be removed from the private domain
and "made the imperative legal duty of the whole," a position which,
according to historian Robert M. Saunders, seemed to indicate that
Wilson "was laying the groundwork for the
modern welfare state."[61]
His third book, entitled Division and Reunion, was published in 1893.[62]
It became a standard university textbook for teaching mid- and late-19th
century U.S. history.[51]
In 1897, Houghton Mifflin published Wilson's biography on
George Washington;
Berg describes it as "Wilson's poorest literary effort."[63]
Wilson's fourth major publication, a five-volume work entitled History of
the American People, was the culmination of a series of articles written
for
Harper's,
and was published in 1902.[64]
In 1908, Wilson published his last major scholarly work, Constitutional
Government of the United States.[65]
President of Princeton University
See also:
History of Princeton University § Woodrow
Wilson
In June 1902, Princeton trustees promoted Professor Wilson to president,
replacing Patton, whom the trustees perceived to be an inefficient
administrator.[66]
Wilson aspired, as he told alumni, "to transform thoughtless boys performing
tasks into thinking men." He tried to raise admission standards and to
replace the "gentleman's C" with serious study. To emphasize the development
of expertise, Wilson instituted academic departments and a system of core
requirements. Students were to meet in groups of six under the guidance of
teaching assistants known as preceptors.[67][page needed]
To fund these new programs, Wilson undertook an ambitious and successful
fundraising campaign, convincing alumni such as
Moses Taylor Pyne
and philanthropists such as
Andrew Carnegie
to donate to the school.[68]
Wilson appointed the first Jew and the
first Roman Catholic to the faculty, and helped liberate the board
from domination by conservative Presbyterians.[69]
He also
worked to keep African Americans out of the school, even as other
Ivy League
schools were accepting small numbers of blacks.[70][a]
Wilson's efforts to reform Princeton earned him national notoriety, but they
also took a toll on his health.[72]
In 1906, Wilson awoke to find himself blind in the left eye, the result of a
blood clot and hypertension. Modern medical opinion surmises Wilson had
suffered a stroke—he later was diagnosed, as his father had been, with
hardening of the arteries.
He began to exhibit his father's traits of impatience and intolerance, which
would on occasion lead to errors of judgment.[73]
When Wilson began vacationing in
Bermuda
in 1906, he met a socialite, Mary Hulbert Peck. Their visits together became
a regular occurrence on his return. Wilson in his letters home to Ellen
openly related these gatherings as well his other social events. According
to biographer
August Heckscher,
Wilson's friendship with Peck became the topic of frank discussion between
Wilson and his wife. Wilson historians have not conclusively established
there was an affair; but Wilson did on one occasion write a musing in
shorthand—on the reverse side of a draft for an editorial: "my precious one,
my beloved Mary."[74]
Wilson also sent very personal letters to her which would later be used
against him by his adversaries.[75]
Having
reorganized the school's curriculum and established the preceptorial system,
Wilson next
attempted to curtail the influence of social elites at Princeton by
abolishing the upper-class
eating clubs.[76]
He proposed moving the students into colleges, also known as quadrangles,
but Wilson's Quad Plan was met with fierce opposition from Princeton's
alumni.[77]
In October 1907, due to the intensity of alumni opposition, the Board of
Trustees instructed Wilson to withdraw the Quad Plan.[78]
Late in his tenure, Wilson had a confrontation with
Andrew Fleming West,
dean of the graduate school, and also West's ally ex-President
Grover Cleveland,
who was a trustee. Wilson wanted to integrate a proposed graduate school
building into the campus core, while West preferred a more distant campus
site. In 1909, Princeton's board accepted a gift made to the graduate school
campaign subject to the graduate school being located off campus.[79]
Wilson became
disenchanted with his job due to the resistance to his recommendations, and
he began considering a run for office. Prior to the
1908 Democratic National Convention,
Wilson dropped hints to some influential players in the Democratic Party of
his interest in the ticket. While he had no real expectations of being
placed on the ticket, he left instructions that he should not be offered the
vice presidential nomination. Party regulars considered his ideas
politically as well as geographically detached and fanciful, but the seeds
had been sown.[80]
McGeorge Bundy
in 1956 described Wilson's contribution to Princeton: "Wilson was right in
his conviction that Princeton must be more than a wonderfully pleasant and
decent home for nice young men; it has been more ever since his time".[81]
. . .
Historical reputation
Wilson is
generally
ranked by historians and political scientists
as one of the better presidents.[2]
More than any of his predecessors, Wilson took steps towards the creation of
a strong federal government that would protect ordinary citizens against the
overwhelming power of large corporations.[328]
He is generally regarded as a key figure in the establishment of
modern American liberalism,
and a strong influence on future presidents such as
Franklin D. Roosevelt
and
Lyndon B. Johnson.[2]
Cooper argues that in terms of impact and ambition, only the
New Deal
and the
Great Society
rival the domestic accomplishments of Wilson's presidency.[329]
Many of Wilson's accomplishments, including the Federal Reserve, the Federal
Trade Commission, the graduated income tax, and labor laws, continued to
influence the United States long after Wilson's death.[2]
Wilson's idealistic foreign policy, which came to be known as
Wilsonianism,
also cast a long shadow over
American foreign policy,
and Wilson's League of Nations influenced the development of the
United Nations.[2]
Saladin Ambar writes that Wilson was "the first statesman of world stature
to speak out not only against European
imperialism
but against the newer form of economic domination sometimes described as
'informal imperialism.'"[330]
Notwithstanding his accomplishments in office, Wilson has received criticism
for his record on race relations and civil liberties, for his interventions
in Latin America, and for his failure to win ratification of the Treaty of
Versailles.[3][330]
Sigmund Freud
and
William Christian Bullitt Jr.,
an American diplomat, collaborated in the 1930s on a psychological study
that was published in 1966.
[331]
They argued that Wilson resolved his Oedipus complex by becoming highly
neurotic, casting his father as God and himself as Christ, the savior of
mankind.[332]
Historians rejected the interpretation. Diplomatic historian
A. J. P. Taylor
called it a "disgrace" and asked: "How did anyone ever manage to take Freud
seriously?"[333]
Many
conservatives
have attacked Wilson for his role in expanding the federal government.[334][335][336]
In 2018, conservative columnist
George Will
wrote on
The Washington Post
that Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson were the "progenitors of today's
imperial presidency."[337]
In the wake
of the
Charleston church shooting,
during a debate over the
removal of Confederate monuments,
some individuals demanded the
removal of Wilson's name from institutions affiliated with Princeton due to
his administration's segregation of government offices.[338][339]
On June 26, 2020, Princeton University removed Wilson's name from its public
policy school due to his "racist thinking and policies."[340]
The Princeton University Board of Trustees voted to remove Wilson’s name
from the university’s School of Public and International Affairs, changing
the name to the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. The
Board also accelerated the retirement of the name of a soon-to-be-closed
residential college, changing the name from Wilson College to “First
College.” However, the Board did not change the name of the university's
highest honor for an undergraduate alumnus or alumna, The Woodrow Wilson
Award, because it is the result of a gift. The Board stated that when the
university accepted that gift, it took on a legal obligation to name the
prize for Wilson.[341]
Continued in article
Princeton Strips Wilson Name
From School, College
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2020/06/29/princeton-strips-wilson-name-school-college?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=33ab119ab6-DNU_2019_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-33ab119ab6-197565045&mc_cid=33ab119ab6&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
\
Princeton University on Saturday
removed Woodrow Wilson's name from its School of
Public and International Affairs and a residential college. Wilson was a
Princeton alumnus and president of the university. Christopher L. Eisgruber,
the current president, wrote to the campus, where protests in 2015 (and
before that) called for removal of the name. In April 2016, a campus
committee "recommended a number of reforms to make this university more
inclusive and more honest about its history. The committee and the board,
however, left Wilson’s name on the school and the college," Eisgruber wrote.
Today, he wrote, "the tragic killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor,
Ahmaud Arbery, and Rayshard Brooks drew renewed attention to the long and
damaging history of racism in America."
He added that the board acted because "Wilson’s racism was significant and
consequential even by the standards of his own time. He segregated the
federal civil service after it had been racially integrated for decades,
thereby taking America backward in its pursuit of justice. He not only
acquiesced in but added to the persistent practice of racism in this
country, a practice that continues to do harm today. Wilson’s segregationist
policies make him an especially inappropriate namesake for a public policy
school."
Jensen Comment
I started this thread module with the following:
When the Great Scorer comes to write against
your name, one unforgiveable sin
(racial profiling) outweighs all the good you've done in life.
That's not
entirely true. Hypocritical scholars will forgive you if you had sufficient
political correctness like Flannery O'Connor ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flannery_O%27Connor
The New Yorker: How Racist Was Flannery
O’Connor?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/22/how-racist-was-flannery-oconnor
Jensen Comment
Hypocritically her defenders pardon her
for being a racist of her time while being unwilling to forgive George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson for being slave owners, albeit kindly slave owners,
of their time. But then scholars are often hypocritical in defending their own
for sins that they rant about in others.
Like Woodrow
Wilson, Flannery O'Connor's racism was mixed with both bad racism and good
things for Blacks. Wilson for example, fought against child labor and better
working conditions for workers of all races with "a hundred and one limitations
of the power of unscrupulous or heartless men to out-do the scrupulous and
merciful in trade or industry." Woodrow Wilson must be erased from history.
Sir Ronald Aylmer
Fisher ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Fisher
The great statistician was also a racist who believed in the forced
sterilisation of those he considered inferior ---
https://www.newstatesman.com/international/science-tech/2020/07/ra-fisher-and-science-hatred
Aristotle defended slavery,
Kant and Hume were racists, Wittgenstein was sexist. Is it possible to set aside
those positions? Is it wise?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/opinion/should-we-cancel-aristotle.html
'Cancel
Culture' Is a Dangerous, Totalitarian Trend ---
https://reason.com/2020/08/07/cancel-culture-is-a-dangerous-totalitarian-trend/
But 'Cancel Culture'
is Complicated ---
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/opinion/cancel-culture-.html
Loyola University Maryland
is being criticized for removing the name of Flannery O'Connor from a residence
hall ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2020/08/10/should-flannery-oconnor-be-name-residence-hall?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=cc6f8fdf0a-DNU_2020_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-cc6f8fdf0a-197565045&mc_cid=cc6f8fdf0a&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
The question remains as to whether her writings are banned from the curriculum.
Flannery
O'Connor in her personal life was a racist. But in her many writings liberal
scholars point out that there are some of her memorable words for fighting
against racism ---
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/06/how-flannery-oconnor-fought-racism
Flannery O'Connor must live on.
Liberal scholars will praise
her political fight against racism whereas they will tear down all the good
things Woodrow Wilson did for Blacks and other minorities. Hence the following:
When the Great Scorer comes to write against
your name, one unforgiveable sin (racial profiling) outweighs all the good
you've done in life unless you were sufficient in political correctness.
Bob Jensen
I doubt that any university will remove
any awards or praises to Flannery O'Connor like they are in the process of
removing all awards and praises of Woodrow Wilson.
And guess who gets left in the curriculum --- Wilson or O'Connor?
Who
decides which books to burn?
Franklin Pierce
Biographer Urges Consideration Of 14th President's Progressive Civil
Liberties Record Before Removal Of His Name From UNH Law School ---
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2020/06/franklin-pierce-biographer-urges-consideration-of-14th-presidents-progressive-civil-liberties-record.html
No chance
Bob Jensen's
threads on political correctness ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
Joshua Katz Objects
to the Politically Correct Goose Step at Princeton University
A Princeton professor has drawn anger from
his department and the university’s president after criticizing an open
letter signed by faculty members which made extensive “anti-racist”
policy requests to combat racism on campus, among which was the
curtailment of academic freedom ---
https://dailycaller.com/2020/07/14/princeton-joshua-katz-quillette-anti-racism-faculty-academic-freedom/
Joshua Katz, a professor of classics at
Princeton, published a “declaration of independence” in
in Quillette
days after more than 350 faculty members called on the
university to adopt a series of “anti-racist” actions, some of which
Katz says would “lead to civil war on campus.”
In the July 4
“Faculty
Letter,”
the signatories request Princeton’s administration implement
measures they say will combat racism, including rewarding “the
invisible work done by faculty of color with course relief and
summer salary” and removing questions about felony convictions from
admissions applications.
One request specifically called for
punishment of “racist” academic work,
reported Forbes.
The letter demands a “Constitute a committee composed entirely of
faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of
racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part
of faculty … Guidelines on what counts as racist behavior,
incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty
committee for incorporation into the same set of rules and
procedures.”
While Katz says he agrees with many of the
ideas expressed in the faculty
letter, he argued that many of the specific changes, if implemented,
would stoke chaos and erode public confidence in elite higher
education.
“It boggles my mind that anyone would
advocate giving people—extraordinarily privileged people already,
let me point out: Princeton professors—extra perks for no reason
other than their pigmentation,” Katz writes, referencing the calls
to reward faculty of color for “invisible work” and with a
guaranteed one additional semester of sabbatical.
“Not incidentally, if you believe
anti-blackness to be foundational, it is not a stretch to imagine
that you will teach the 1619 Project as dogma,” he goes on.
Continued in
article
Tenured Law Prof Suspended
For Use Of N-Word In Torts Class Sues Emory And Former Dean For Libel And
Retaliation ---
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2020/08/tenured-professor-suspended-for-use-of-n-word-in-torts-class-sues-emory-law-school-and-former-dean-f.html
. . .
"Professor Zwier's use of the racist term was part of the class
discussion and used as an example of how a tortfeasor's words could
elevate the severity of the tort being committed," according to the
complaint. "Professor Zwier did not direct the word at any
individual student, but instead used it as a teaching moment and
integral part of the lecture and discussion."
That evening,
according to the suit, Zwier learned that Black students in his
class had complained about his use of the word. Zwier apologized to
his class the next day and had a discussion with Black students
about his use of the word, he said. Any student issues appeared to
be resolved at that time, he said.
Still, Emory leaders and his then-boss, former interim law school
dean James B. Hughes Jr., suspended
him and
issued several misleading public statements that made it look like
he "improperly used a racial slur in class without an academic
purpose," Zwier said.
Later, Zwier complained that he was being treated differently
because he was white, saying that Black professors had used the word
without reproach, discipline or dismissal. Hughes then tried
to have Zweir's tenure revoked in
retaliation, the professor said. However, the Faculty Hearing
Committee ultimately found that
Hughes and Emory had failed to demonstrate adequate cause to do so,
according to the suit.
A leading voice on welfare reform is accused of racism after he publishes
an article linking poverty to "culture." Journal faces calls for retraction ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/07/28/leading-voice-welfare-reform-accused-racism?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=708582c960-DNU_2020_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-708582c960-197565045&mc_cid=708582c960&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Jensen Comment
This is another in a long list of recent examples of how racism trumps
all the good and important things a person has done in life. Failing to
march to the politically correct goosestep brings down careers these
days.
It also illustrates how research conclusions must be politically
correct for publication of those research conclusions.
Bob Jensen's threads on political correctness and
how leading scholars like J.K.
Rowling, Margaret Atwood, and Noam Chomsk are trying to bring balance
(equality) to the worrisome political correctness trends in research,
teaching, and scholarship ---
See below
We've reached a very low point in the Academy.
Lawrence Mead ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Mead
Jensen Comment
I'm no expert on the award-winning Professor Mead or his research into welfare
and poverty. I am, however, against banning politically incorrect research conducted by respected researchers who intend to help rather than harm their
research subjects and the world in general. Professor Mead is not Josef Mengele.
He's done years of research into poverty and varying cultures.
He thinks a better understanding of what leads to poverty can help us more
efficiently marshal resources in to alleviate poverty.
Having said this I'm also not in favor of encouraging certain
types of research. And if there's a way
to do so, some types of research should be against the law. The obvious
candidates are bomb making for home workshops and development of WMDs for which
the risks are so great that treaties are in effect and advanced nations have
enough WMDs of one type or another to counterbalance newer threats.
In 1971 I spent a year in a think tank on Stanford University land. Three
doors down from my office was the office of Josh Lederberg ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Lederberg
We did not interact on a regular basis since our research interests were far
different, but I did have some conversations with Josh about his research,
usually in the presence of Harvard University's libertarian philosopher Robert
Nozick who had an office next to my office. Bob Nozick and Josh Lederberg argued quite a bit about one topic while I was merely a bookkeeping professor
who mostly just tuned in ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Nozick
The topic in question was what scientific research should be banned or
otherwise vigorously discouraged. Josh Lederberg's best example nearly fifty
years ago was
cloning ---
which at the time was mostly limited to some South African frogs. Later came
dogs, sheep, cows, polo ponies, etc. ---
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/adolfo-cambiaso-the-clones-of-polo-60-minutes/
Professor Lederberg's fear of cloning was how it could be misused if one day
we could successfully clone human beings. The dangers are relatively obvious
with Hitler's master race coming first to mind. But there are other fears on
various fronts that overwhelm most of the good things we can imagine about cloning.
One problem of banning research, however, is the mechanism for doing so. We
can make it illegal within assorted nations, but there will nearly always some
nations that will not go along with the ban or will even encourage
encourage/fund banned research. Do you really think Israel and Iran or the major
world powers will cease all WMD research because they've made it illegal?
The arguments between Nozick and Lederberg made me glad I was a bookkeeping
professor. But they did start me thinking about issues of freedom to conduct
research and publish the findings. Sure it would be easier for me to promote
burying the findings of Professor Mead in politically correct
sand. I would most certainly be more respected as a politically correct blogger.
The research of
Professor Mead has not been declared illegal. I think the research should be
published if for no other reason than to motivate research that counters
Professor Mead's conclusions. Professor
Mead and Arthur Jensen did not necessarily discover truth. It's better
to conduct further research to find what is not true than to bury it in
the sand leaving the world uncertain about the truth.
In any case burying research that is not politically correct
just won't work on a global scale, even research into human cloning and
newer and more scary pandemic viruses.
Sorry, but I think political correctness has taken the Academy to new lows
that are temporary and will go even lower in the next few decades. Visitors to
our campuses today are required to march a politically correct goose step.
Otherwise they will be shouted down at best and physically harmed at worst.
We should openly solve problems like poverty with better corrective
alternatives --- rather than throw trillions of dollars wastefully into
solutions that won't solve the fundamental problems.
My favorite example is the reason given by Fidel Castro why his egalitarian
dream eventually failed ---
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/12/cuba
Believe it or not tens of millions of
people prefer not to work productively and uncomfortably when they have a
choice. I also think this applies to all racial and ethnic groupings. I'm
inclined to doubt Professor Mead, but not to a point where I want him fired and
his research banned.
Why isn’t Andrew
Sullivan allowed to write about protests in his New York Times column?
https://spectator.us/andrew-sullivan-new-york-column-riots/
Apparently because he might say looting and shoplifting are wrong
TED Talk: Why it Pays to Listen to People You Disagree With ---
https://www.ted.com/talks/zachary_r_wood_why_it_s_worth_listening_to_people_we_disagree_with?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2018-04-21&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_content=talk_of_the_week_button
Harvard President Lawrence Bacow to Activist Students Who Shut Down His Talk:
'The Heckler's Veto Has No Place' Here --
-
https://reason.com/2019/04/12/harvard-president-lawrence-bacow-disrupt/
Levy: Why I Resigned In Protest From Penn Law's Board When A Conservative
Professor Was Punished (for not being politically correct)---
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2019/12/levy-why-i-resigned-in-protest-from-penn-laws-board-when-a-conservative-professor-was-punished.html
Ohio University's Radical Students Could Have Ignored Kaitlin Bennett.
Instead, They Threw Liquids At Her.---
https://reason.com/2020/02/19/ohio-university-kaitlin-bennett-riot-free-speech/
Politically Correct Big Brother Will Not Allow Free Speech in USA Colleges
Williams College plans to revise its policies after a faculty petition to
adopt free speech guidelines enraged student activists ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/04/23/williams-college-rework-free-speech-policies-after-controversies?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=1aea7e93d2-DNU_2019_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-1aea7e93d2-197565045&mc_cid=1aea7e93d2&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Political Correctness at Georgetown University
Kevin K. McAleenan, acting head of the U.S. Department of Homeland
Security, was shouted off the stage by protesters who interrupted his
talk at Georgetown University’s law school ---
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/07/us/politics/homeland-security-chief-protesters.html?cid=db&source=ams&sourc
Conservative Law Prof Heckled by CUNY Protestors ---
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2018/04/conservative-law-prof-heckled-by-cuny-protestors.html
Political Correctness in Universities Never Quits
Black Pro-Life Speaker Disinvited From Cornell ---
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/briannaheldt/2019/03/27/black-prolife-speaker-disinvited-from-cornell-n2543853?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=03/28/2019&bcid=b16c6f948f297f77432f990d4411617f&recip=17935167
Beloit College: The incident (a pro-capitalism speaker)
was the latest in a string of free expression occurrences on college
campuses where students have intentionally drowned out speakers whose
views they find distasteful ---
Click Here
Capitalism is such a dangerous topic that mention of it should be banned
in all colleges and universities
Purdue University has won praise for embracing
all expression. What risk does that posture bring in an era of violence?
---
http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Free-Speech-Stronghold/241203?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=037e1e9941bc49ac93470e0e8430fa75&elq=0a44b6cc9e2a42208f8f52234581978a&elqaid=15632&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=6700
I think political
correctness can lead to some kind of paralysis where you don't address reality.
Juan William before he was fired after a distinguished career on NPR.
http://townhall.com/columnists/GuyBenson/2010/10/21/npr_finally_finds_an_excuse_to_fire_juan_williams
The Washington Post:
Conservatives say campus speech is under threat.
That’s been true for most of history ---
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/conservatives-say-campus-speech-is-under-threat-thats-been-true-for-most-of-history/2017/08/11/6aa959fa-7c4b-11e7-9d08-b79f191668ed_story.html?utm_term=.a02b7a26615d
John Cleese Makes a Stand Against Political Correctness ---
http://www.vulture.com/2017/09/john-cleese-monty-python-in-conversation.html
If colleges take precautions to protect their campuses when a controversial
figure comes to speak, they aren't coddling students but encouraging a safe
exchange of different ideas, argues Eddie S. Glaude Jr., a professor of religion
and African-American studies at Princeton University, in this Twitter thread ---
https://twitter.com/esglaude/status/908659323085164545?elqTrackId=8cb0ce38a2a24ea4a554189a51323204&elq=01c6a39c93c14e27a4f00717d1aa8abe&elqaid=15633&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=6701
Professor: Tom Brady’s popularity is result of
white supremacy
---
https://www.thecollegefix.com/professor-tom-bradys-popularity-is-result-of-white-supremacy/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thecollegefixfeed+%28The+College+Fix%29
Jensen Comment
Is there any doubt why academe has lost a lot of respect?
Speaker at CUNY law school interrupted repeatedly by those who said he
shouldn't have been permitted there ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/04/16/guest-lecture-free-speech-cuny-law-school-heckled?mc_cid=e889308cb3&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Politically Correct Rudeness in Academe: ACLU Speaker
Shouted Down at William and Mary ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/05/aclu-speaker-shouted-down-william-mary?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=948d0f34e9-DNU20171005&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-948d0f34e9-197565045&mc_cid=948d0f34e9&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Jensen Comment
Are civil liberties coming to an end in higher education?
The (London) Times: Universities
warned over free speech by Jo Johnson
Universities must “open minds, not close them” and face tough new
penalties if they do not promote freedom of speech . . .
---
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/universities-warned-over-free-speech-by-jo-johnson-bqp2d5np0
Study: Americans Really, Really
Hate Political Correctness ---
https://therevolutionaryact.com/americans-hate-political-correctness/
Collegiality Concerns ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/01/02/fresno-state-adopt-controversial-set-principles-community?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=b1f5bdde86-DNU_2019_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-b1f5bdde86-197565045&mc_cid=b1f5bdde86&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Should Walt Whitman's works be burned and his name never mentioned
again on politically correct college campuses?
https://daily.jstor.org/should-walt-whitman-be-cancelled/
Academic Freedom And The Catholic University
---
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2019/06/academic-freedom-and-the-catholic-university.html
Prejudice and foreign policy views ---
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/07/prejudice-and-foreign-policy-views.html
Liberal Bias in Academe ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#LiberalBias
Former Yale Law School Dean Does not Like the Damaging Rubric of Diversity or
Political Correctness
‘The Assault on American Excellence’ ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/08/13/author-discusses-highly-critical-book-about-american-colleges?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=5bec369ed3-DNU_2019_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-5bec369ed3-197565045&mc_cid=5bec369ed3&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Disinvited Speakers Get a Platform to Talk About Being Denied One ---
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Disinvited-Speakers-Get-a/246518?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&cid=at
Jensen Comment
Your academic life is doomed forever if sometime in your past (maybe
when you were in middle school) you were pictured in black face or did
not follow the liberal dogma on socialism, feminism, gay rights,
transgender rights, abortion, minority intellectual equality, poverty,
universal medical insurance, destroying Wall Street, animal rights,
confiscation of guns, etc. As the article points you you may be invited
to speak on a neutral topic (like cancer) but will be disinvited in if
you're wearing a controversial red letter from your past mistakes of not
being sufficiently liberal from date of birth.
In fact the universities are now denying admission as a first-year
student if you were not sufficiently liberal in your childhood ---
https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/18/us/harvard-rescind-admission/index.html
Ironically, universities are now taking pride in admitting
ex-convicts but not unless they were incarcerated on the assumption that
incarceration washes away all sin.
Harvard considers applicants to be of "low moral character" if they
favor gun rights such as gun rights activist Kyle Kashuv from Parkland
High School ---
https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/18/us/harvard-rescind-admission/index.htm
Harvard told Kashuv in a May letter that it
"reserves the right to withdraw an offer of admission under various
conditions, including 'if you engage or have engaged in behavior
that brings into question your honesty, maturity, or moral
character.'"
You cannot even imagine being granted tenure
at Harvard if you're a conservative thinker ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
A third disgrace in the hiring bias of faculty in higher education.
It's not at all uncommon for over 90+% of the faculty on campus to
be members of the Democratic Party. Harvard's conservative political
scientist Harvey Mansfield once warned a non-tenured Harvard
professor who whispered to Harvey that he too was conservative.
Harvey advised that non-tenured professor against
"raising the jolly Roger"
until after attaining tenure. Harvey was serious in this instance.
Fifty years ago college campuses had conservative thought in the
curriculum and focused on the writings of such conservative
theorists as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Now such writings
are not politically correct. Bravo to the University of Colorado for
creating a professorship for a conservative thinker so there could
be at least one on campus.
Academic Freedom And The Catholic University
---
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2019/06/academic-freedom-and-the-catholic-university.html
Bob Jensen's threads on political correctness ---
Scroll Down
Students at Rice University are petitioning to prevent Vice President Mike
Pence from speaking at a campus event, citing his "violent intolerance of LGBTQ+
identities."
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdGK2ZypQmJsVhvrN9D4JzdBNUN-xJoHmfRqy34cNBMA-ZlYA/viewform?fbzx=-7748057991678917981&fbclid=IwAR3_HuIcbJ8blHXLvE22M-ZAezpJX1caf_75crDbQ6tWAAxEO6SU9S0UkXY&cid=db
Jensen Comment
Mike Pence is a heart beat away from becoming the President of the USA.
Rice students would rather remain ignorant about his domestic and
foreign policies than to let one issue draw a curtain around their
learning more about this leader.
Don't they realize that they could more rigorously campaign against the
re-election of Mike Pence if they learned a few things more about him
and his policies.
Would Rice University students have
done the same thing years ago if Albert Einstein was intolerant of LGBTQ
identities?
The Little Red Hen ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Red_Hen
The UN seeks to Make Migration Between Nations a Basic Human
Right.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1052923/UN-migration-agreement-Angela-Merkel-EU-criticise-migration-hate-crime
Jensen Comment
The compact takes political correctness to the extreme of making it
illegal to criticize or debate the immigration.
This reminds me of The Little Red Hen tale with a twist where one nation
works diligently to prosper and then is forced by a "democratic vote" in
the UN to allow nations to be overwhelmed by immigrants in such numbers
as to ravage the prosperity in terms of free speech, food, health care,
housing, education, etc.
In the UN voting is becoming "Mob Rule," which is one of the major
criticisms of democracy ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy#Criticism
Controlled immigration is a good thing for advancing economic
prosperity, innovation, and the diversity of gene pools. But
uncontrolled immigration can become a disaster. Exhibit A is where
Sweden, Germany, Norway, and other nations are now paying illegal
immigrants to leave and greatly limiting citizenship. Life on earth has
become greatly complicated by criminal gangs (often drug gangs) that
have overwhelmed civil order in some the poorest nations on earth. This
causes desperation (think Syria, Yemen, and Venezuela) among citizens
desperate to leave in exponentially growing numbers.
There are no easy answers. But shutting down freedom of speech is not
a way to seek out better answers.
Bob Jensen's threads on political correctness are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
Conservatism ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism
Chronicle of Higher Education: What Was Conservatism?
https://www.chronicle.com/article/What-Was-Conservatism-/238345?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=ad12bf5ef1ef492e9ebff19bdb2489b4&elq=a70b3a81f49f4bae94da4734a1f51227&elqaid=20280&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=9495
. . .
And so conservatism has been routed by
Trumpism, a movement driven by all the resentments that the right
has dredged up over the decades with none of the ideas that once
animated it. As Nash put it, there is a "return of the repressed" at
work in the rise of the alt-right, with all the ugliness that
Buckley once purged now on full display at rallies and on the
internet. Perhaps there is an intellectual core buried within the
alt-right; if so, that world awaits its Nash.
It took scholars decades to fully
embrace the insight at the core of Nash’s classic work: that over
the course of the 20th century, the intellectual and ideological
energy that had driven the left to great heights and even greater
depths had shifted, and it was conservatives who came to command the
high country of the mind. Unless conservatism experiences a
renaissance that restores its original spirit of intellectual
vitality, the same will not be true of the 21st century.
Jensen Comment
In higher education around the globe conservatism was routed from
campuses and the media decades before Trump rose to power.
It was uprooted heavily by barriers to entry in doctoral programs and
faculty hiring in the latter part of the 20th Century.
The Closing of the American Mind: What Allan Bloom Got Right ---
Scroll down to the Gitlin article below.
C. Christine Fair ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._Christine_Fair
She tweeted for somebody to kill Republican Senators
Political Correctness: One
current Georgetown student said others who see the professor's tweet
might feel "threatened" if they hold different opinions.
https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=11369
Bob Jensen's threads on political correctness ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
It's especially informative to read the three student evaluations at
RateMyProfessors.com ---
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=2220270
Student 1
There is no discussion, questioning, or debate in her class. You
must simply sit and listen to her opinions which are frequently
incoherent and disjointed. Worse, her lectures are never supported,
just presented as unvarnished dogma. This is not what Georgetown is
about. This is not even what a marginal college education is about.
AVOID.
Student 2
It's a little hard to get past the professor's POV to focus on
material related to class. She takes a "my way or the highway"
approach toward opinions. If you take this class, please pretend to
be a politically correct liberal. Otherwise, you are in big trouble
with this uncritical, unfair hothead.
Student 3
Tends to go off on tangents and rant. As a student from the Middle
East I sometimes felt uncomfortable with some of her views and
discussions. Do NOT challenge her point of view as I did -- I wound
up dropping the class because of it. Would have been a good class if
she stuck to the course material.
No other students came to her
defense
Yeah, I know that this is a self-selecting very small number of her
students. However, none of her other students wrote in to counter the
negativism. The numerical ratings on RMP should not be statistically
analyzed. However, the subjective evaluations can be informative,
especially in her case. I found this especially interesting since she
teaches women's studies. Usually students choose such courses because
they have prior positive feelings about women's studies.
It would seem that Professor Fair is intolerant of varied opinions in
her courses.
tossel: Canada's Professor Jordan Peterson vs. 'Social Justice
Warriors' ---
http://reason.com/reasontv/2018/06/19/stossel-jordan-peterson-vs-social-justic
Watch the Video
. . .
Peterson defends his position to John Stossel: "I don't care what
people want to be called. That's fine, but that doesn't mean I
should be compelled by law to call them that."
It's not just students who slam Peterson. In one
TV interview,
Peterson stayed calm while the host tried to put words in his mouth.
"You are saying that women aren't intelligent enough to run these
top companies....You don't believe in equal pay," Cathy Newman, the
reporter at Britain's Channel 4 News, insisted.
"No, I'm not saying that at all," Peterson responded. He
hadn't said that. What he had said, is that natural
differences explain most of the gender wage gap.
As an example, Peterson cites
studies
that find, in wealthy countries that focus
most on equality, like Sweden, even fewer women major in
science and math. Instead they pick fields that deal with
people, like teaching, and men tend more toward
technical fields.
Peterson says this shows that when men and women have the most
freedom to decide what they do, they pick fields that line up with
their
natural
biological interests.
That idea infuriates leftists. "It should infuriate them," Peterson
tells Stossel. "Because I'm going right at the heart of the radical
leftist doctrine."
That doctrine is
social justice, the idea that all
groups should have equal outcomes; that there should be
just as many female CEOs, scientists, and computer programmers,
because men and women are essentially the same. If outcomes differ,
it must be sexism.
Peterson says that the focus on
group equality is a spinoff of Marxism. That after
Marxism failed spectacularly in the economic realm, Marxists applied
their way of thinking to issues like the difference between men and
women.
"We've got a hundred million corpses stacked up to demonstrate" the
failure of Marxism, says Peterson. And the new Marxism-derived focus
on group equality won't end any better.
Peterson calls for the opposite of Marxism–a focus on the
individual.
He says people should stick with "the principles that govern the
West; capitalist principles. The free market principles." With those
principles "we do better than any place has ever done."
Continued in article
University of Pennsylvania: Self-Serving Political Correctness
WSJ: University Boardrooms Need Reform ---
https://www.wsj.com/articles/university-boardrooms-need-reform-1528652211
I recently resigned as a trustee of the
University of Pennsylvania and an overseer of its law school to
protest the shameful treatment of law professor Amy Wax.
Her career-threatening offense was to state
that in her experience with black students over 17 years at Penn,
few had performed in the top half of their class. Penn Law’s dean,
Ted Ruger, declared her in error but
refused to provide evidence.
For dissenting from politically correct
orthodoxy, Mr. Ruger forbade Ms. Wax to teach her
much-admired first-year course in civil procedure—for which the
university gave her an award in 2015.
Since I
quit, I have received an education in why universities can trample
free expression with impunity. My
letter of resignation
was printed in full in the student newspaper and excerpted on
this page.
I received well over 150 supportive messages from, among others,
trustees, students, law school professors and alumni. One was from
Judge Ray Randolph, a 1969 law graduate who sits on the U.S. Court
of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. “You . . . have
disgraced an institution I had admired throughout my professional
career,” Judge Randolph wrote, addressing Dean Ruger.
Mr.
Ruger, meanwhile, directed his fundraisers to tell alumni that his
treatment of Ms. Wax was “fairly common”—a brazen falsehood. No Penn
professor’s teaching responsibilities had ever been changed or
limited for speaking out on public issues. He also claimed that Penn
Law did not “mandate” ethnic diversity in selecting applicants for
law review, traditionally an anonymous, merit-based process. That
was misleading, since Penn now encourages a subjective statement
from law-review applicants, which is intended to reveal their
identity and tip the ethnic scales rather than reward academic
excellence.
Other
than me, not a single Penn trustee, overseer or professor wrote
publicly about Ms. Wax’s treatment or resigned in protest. Nobody in
the university community has an incentive to speak out, and everyone
seems afraid to do so. Professors fear retaliation; students worry
about social ostracism. I sent my letter of resignation to Angela
Duckworth, the Penn psychologist and author of the celebrated 2016
book “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.” She and I met
last year when I accepted the university’s Distinguished Alumni
Award and had a lively email correspondence. She did not respond to
my resignation email.
Trustees and donors candidly admit in private that they do not want
to jeopardize their children’s chances for admission. Many serve out
of genuine interest and affection for their alma mater, although
they also enjoy the prestige, influence and perks, like access to
the university’s medical system, that go with the positions. There’s
no incentive to rock the boat, and universities make sure they don’t
get much opportunity. At the trustee level, the board is large and
its formal meetings are entirely show and tell, with discussion
severely limited and vote outcomes never in doubt. Penn Law
overseers do not vote on anything. One Penn medical school board
member told me he was dropped because he had asked too many
questions.
The
corporate world offers a parallel to trustees’ abdication of their
fiduciary duties. Reformers of the 1980s argued correctly that the
interests of shareholders were too often subjugated to personal
interest and small-group social dynamics on boards that compel
unanimity. Just as the resulting realignment of interests between
corporate boards and shareholders unleashed spectacular value for
American investors, an activist response by the governing bodies of
America’s universities is now essential.
Continued in article
Paul S. Levy
Bob Jensen's threads on the shame of political correctness in
academe are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
Political Correctness: One current Georgetown student
said others who see the professor's tweet might feel "threatened" if they hold
different opinions.
https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=11369
Georgetown University Distinguished
Associate Professor Christine Fair tweeted that white Republican
senators in the Brett Kavanaugh hearing deserve to die.
“Look at thus [sic] chorus of entitled
white men justifying a serial rapist's arrogated entitlement,” Fair
tweeted on Thursday. Referencing a video of "Lindsey Graham's
tirade," Fair, who is a victim of sexual assault, added, “all of
them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take
their last gasps."
"[A]ny of her students that see this rant
are going to feel threatened if they have opinions that differ from
hers."
Tweet This
"Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed
them to swine? Yes," she concluded the tweet.
“Professor Fair’s extremely offensive and
violent remark goes against everything in line with Georgetown’s
values,” TJ Collins, a recent Georgetown graduate told Campus
Reform. “President DeGioia should immediately issue a statement
condemning the tweet, and Professor Fair should not be permitted in
the classroom ever again," Collins added.
[RELATED: Georgetown called out for urging donations to left-wing
groups]
“As a student applying to this school, I
wouldn’t have dared use that kind of language on a social media
platform, especially surrounding a sensitive and controversial
issue. Georgetown wouldn’t have admitted me if they had seen stuff
like that,” a current Georgetown student who wished to remain
anonymous, told Campus Reform.
“I don’t think people that Georgetown
actually employs should be held to a significantly lower standard.
And clearly, any of her students that see this rant are going to
feel threatened if they have opinions that differ from hers” the
student continued.
Upon being contacted by Campus Reform to
comment for this article, Fair stated, “There
is a war going on against women and you, and your despicable herd of
so-called journalists seeking to protect male privilege and shame
women for our victimization or our rage are complicit in this war.”
Days before,
Fair tweeted, "GOP doesn't care about
women. We knew this. Fuck them.”
[RELATED: Georgetown prof: ‘Kreepy Kavanaugh,’ ‘GOP doesn’t care
about women...F*** them']
In addition to her colorful Twitter
timeline, Fair also runs a blog called
ShitMenSay. “This is where I post
snarcastic missives based upon the shit men (and sometimes
woman-hating women) say to me via email, voicemail and comments
‘deposited’ on my various social media like celestial droppings of
stupidity,” Fair writes in the blog description.
“This blog is not about “doxxing” foes or
people with whom I disagree politically or otherwise. This blog is
about ACCOUNTABILITY,” she continues. She has published home
addresses, phone numbers, and places of employment of people who
contacted her. Fair has also bragged about emailing the spouses and
employers of those who contact her.
“Despite what some clowns have said, NO ONE
finds themselves mocked and outed on #ShitMenSay without harassing
me. No one. Some men have had the audacity to whine that I am outing
my poor, defenseless harassers. I tell these weasels to take their
(almost always) white, male privilege and kindly deposit it in the
only orifice that doesn’t embarrass them when it’s open” she says in
her blog description.
Fair runs a second blog titled
Tenacious Hellpussy,
which she describes as “a nasty woman posting from the frontlines of
fuckery.” Fair published Campus Reform’s request for
comment and her response on her blog in a post titled:
When “Aunt Lydia” of Campus
Reform Tried to Launch Another Harassment Campaign: This is what she
got.
“Dear Aunt Lydia (or perhaps, more
appropriately, Rachel Mitchell? Which do you prefer? I prefer Aunt
Lydia, so I”ll roll with that. Cool?)” she says at the start of her
response.
“You don’t like my violent words—which in
fact are not posing a threat to anyone. I am not calling for
violence. I merely speaking to what my spirituality says these vile
souls deserve.” Professor Fair writes.
“Surely, as a fine upstanding Christian,
you condemn the goddless heathens like me to an afterlife of hell?
You can micturate in your yoga pants at my WORDS, but I am angry at
the VIOLENCE done to women and children in this country and the
preponderant complicity of ONE political party right now” she
continues.
Her full
response can be viewed
here.
Continued in article
Don't Mess With a Hate-Crazed Feminist
Georgetown Professor’s Profane Tweet Elicits Tepid Response From
University ---
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Georgetown-Professor-s/244708?cid=db&elqTrackId=ef3f5b05f4df409eb6894ad9523a1cb7&elq=e542730774304dc281de88a3fb579466&elqaid=20789&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=9831
Jensen Comment
Incidents like this are not helping the blue wave in the 2018 midterm
elections. Trump loves it when professors want to kill and castrate men
in public outcries.
Political correctness is the "Closing of the American Minds"
Political
Correctness ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness
Updates on Politically Correct Language Trends ---
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2017/05/20/in-seattle-police-can-no-longer-report-suspects-they-have-to-say-community-members-n2329542?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=
In Seattle, police can no longer use the
term “suspect” for use of force reports. Instead, they have to write
“community member.” Alas, we have political correctness now
infesting law enforcement. Also, this isn’t new. KIRO 7 reported
that the Washington’s Department of Corrections no longer calls
prisoners inmates; they call them students.
Jensen Comment
Becoming a "student" is now punishment for crime convictions. Bernie
Madoff is a lifetime "student."
One of the problems of the new PC language is that words can no
longer be partitioned into different meanings.
A "student" in the State of Washington can be enrolled at the
University of Washington or incarcerated for life at the Washington
State Penitentiary at "Walla Walla."
A "community member" may be a victim or a suspect (who knows which?)
The word "they" is now singular and must be used for both a "he" or a
"she"
Lake Superior State University's 41st Annual List of Banished Words ---
http://www.lssu.edu/banished/
"The
Coddling of the American Mind: In the name of emotional well-being,
college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they
don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health,"
by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The
Atlantic, September 2015 ---
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/
Something
strange is
happening at America’s colleges and
universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely
by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects
that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie
Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law
students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape
law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that
violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February,
Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay
in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus
politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long
investigation after students who were offended by the article and by
a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a
professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox
describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal
Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A
number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped
performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan’s
article in this month’s issue). Jerry
Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity
of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.
Two terms have risen
quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance.
Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on
their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a
kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus
guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or
Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he
or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts
that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might
cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have
called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The
Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that
students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic
violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might
“trigger” a recurrence of past trauma.
Some recent campus
actions border on the surreal. In April, at Brandeis University, the
Asian American student association sought to raise awareness of
microaggressions against Asians through an installation on the steps
of an academic hall. The installation gave examples of
microaggressions such as “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?”
and “I’m colorblind! I don’t see race.” But a backlash arose among
other Asian American students, who felt that the display itself was
a microaggression. The association removed the installation, and its
president wrote an e-mail to the entire student body apologizing to
anyone who was “triggered or hurt by the content of the
microaggressions.”
This new
climate is slowly being institutionalized, and is affecting what can
be said in the classroom, even as a basis for discussion. During the
2014–15 school year, for instance, the deans and department chairs
at the 10 University of California system schools were presented by
administrators at faculty leader-training sessions with examples of
microaggressions. The list of offensive statements included:
“America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most
qualified person should get the job
The press has
typically described these developments as a resurgence of political
correctness. That’s partly right, although there are important
differences between what’s happening now and what happened in the
1980s and ’90s. That movement sought to restrict speech
(specifically hate speech aimed at marginalized groups), but it also
challenged the literary, philosophical, and historical canon,
seeking to widen it by including more-diverse perspectives. The
current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than
the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate
psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from
psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses
into “safe spaces” where young adults are shielded from words and
ideas that make some uncomfortable. And more than the last, this
movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even
accidentally. You might call this impulse vindictive
protectiveness. It is creating a culture in which everyone must
think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of
insensitivity, aggression, or worse.
Continued in article
"The Academy’s Assault on Intellectual Diversity," by Robert
Boyers, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, March
19, 2017 ---
http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Academy-s-Assault-on/239496?key=JQfw5xpCetCwuacmaap92Bzb0ARlrgGe6ByF4T0gSt3g5KNYYPD5R-hD829-mBenc3pNcUxfZWRXQUdPOHlUcXoyLVhzSDlxanpGdEV1Ym1XWVpZZTlSa1lpTQ
The Closing of the American Mind: What Allan Bloom Got Right
---
By Todd Gitlin
Chronicle of Higher Education
October 8, 2017
http://www.chronicle.com/article/What-Allan-Bloom-Got-Right/241375?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=5f4ce19f63264c9ca99a1bcc8e8dcff7&elq=3cc5401748ab40a085486b07961176fc&elqaid=15963&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=6887
"You can slam
its young people into universities with their classrooms and
laboratories, and when they come out all they can talk about is Babe
Ruth. America is a hopeless country for intellectuals and thinking
people." Babe Ruth is the giveaway. These words were spoken in 1923,
and the speaker was Theodore Dreiser, who had dropped out of Indiana
University after one year.
So it is not a new thought that American
universities are nests of self-betrayal and triviality where
inquiring minds trade the nobility of their tradition for cheap
trinkets and the promise of pieces of silver to come. Indeed, five
years before Dreiser popped off,
Thorstein Veblen was denouncing "the
higher learning in America" for having surrendered to business
domination, ditched the pure pursuit of knowledge, cultivated
"conspicuous conformity to the popular taste," and pandered to
undergraduates by teaching them "ways and means of dissipation."
"The conduct of universities by business men," to borrow from
Veblen’s subtitle, had rendered university life "mechanistic."
Veblen anticipated that the academy would wallow in futility when it
was not prostrating itself at the feet of the captains of finance.
His original subtitle was A Study in Total Depravity.
Veblen having dropped it, Allan Bloom should have picked it up.
Veblen thought the university had been
seized by "pecuniary values." To Bloom, whose bestselling book,
The Closing of the American Mind, is celebrating its 30th
anniversary this year, something much worse had happened: The
university had been seized by the absence of values. "The
university now offers no distinctive visage to the young person. He
finds a democracy of the disciplines. … This democracy is really an
anarchy, because there are no recognized rules for citizenship and
no legitimate titles to rule. In short there is no vision, nor is
there a set of competing visions, of what an educated human being
is."
A horde of bêtes noires had stampeded
through the gates, and the resulting noise had drowned out the
proper study of both nature and humanity. Nihilism had conquered.
Its chief forms were cultural relativism, historicism, and
shopping-mall indifference, the humanities’ lame attempts at a
holding action that "flatters popular democratic tastes." Openness
was the new closure; elitism had become the worst of all isms.
Just how this happened, however, Bloom was
uncertain. He was not a stickler for historical causation. When in
doubt, he pounded the table and ranted about his next talking point,
dotted with references to Great Books. Closing read more
dyspeptic than lamentational. But the lamentational note was there.
Once the university had been a crucible of truth; then it had been
seized by, or sold to, the utilitarians; finally, it had collapsed
in the face of nihilism. (Never mind that universities were training
schools before they were Platonic academies.)
Bloom, who died in 1992, pulled no punches,
even those that pummeled his own argument, and the nonstop crescendo
of his rant made it easy for campus leftists to dismiss the book
rather casually — too casually.
For some five years after publication,
Closing helpedinspire an assault on "political correctness" and
the putative left-wing takeover by "tenured radicals" that roiled
the campuses and flowed into the political arena via William Bennett
and Lynne Cheney, among others. Most of the assault came from the
right, of course, though I, among others, contributed
my own variant from the left. But
coiled inside Bloom’s polemic, drowned out by his own thunder, was
an inconvenient truth all the more worth taking seriously30 years
later.
Continued in article
A Grad Student Defended a Controversial Instructor. Now He Says He’s Being
Silenced ---
https://www.chronicle.com/article/A-Grad-Student-Defended-a/242175?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=dc6ee2cf468a454bb61377eccdf46b70&elq=fb59b2c5573240808d5317dec1e56e5e&elqaid=17325&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=7554
Last
June, a Ph.D. student at the University of California at Los Angeles
wrote a letter supporting a lecturer whose job was in jeopardy. The
lecturer was Keith A. Fink, an outspoken lawyer who had taught
communication courses part time at UCLA for a decade, including a
popular one on campus free speech.
The
graduate student, Justin Gelzhiser, had read in the campus newspaper
about Mr. Fink and his battles with administrators. Mr. Fink argues
that he
lost his faculty
job
because of his conservative views and because he often criticized
the administration in his teaching.
When Mr.
Gelzhiser learned that Mr. Fink was on the verge of losing his job,
he felt compelled to call attention to what he saw as threats to Mr.
Fink’s academic freedom. Mr. Gelzhiser was a teaching assistant in
the communication department and served as a graduate-student
representative on the Academic Senate’s academic-freedom committee.
But the
letter, to the interim dean of social sciences, ended up putting Mr.
Gelzhiser’s own job in jeopardy, he says. He has accused university
administrators of threatening him with a sexual-misconduct complaint
to try to force him to leave the department.
The
scuffle is another twist in Mr. Fink’s case, which captured national
attention last year, especially in conservative circles, and
prompted the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education to
demand answers
from the university. It also has sparked a discussion at UCLA about
how, as Mr. Gelzhiser alleges, a Title IX investigation could be
used as a threat — and how to prevent that from happening.
Last
month Mr. Gelzhiser filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of
Education’s Office for Civil Rights alleging that UCLA officials had
used the gender-equity law Title IX as a bargaining chip to try to
silence him.
Meanwhile, Mr. Fink has undertaken a public campaign to call out
what he sees as the university’s disregard for academic freedom and
due process, and he’s created a nonprofit organization to provide
legal help to UCLA students and faculty members. Both men are also
fighting to get their jobs back.
In Mr.
Gelzhiser’s view, one thing is clear: He was targeted because of his
advocacy on Mr. Fink’s behalf. "Keith’s case was essentially done on
campus until I brought it back into the light," he said. But as a
consequence, he said, his teaching-assistant contract wasn’t
renewed, and "my life has been turned upside down."
Kerri L.
Johnson, chair of the communication department, said she couldn’t
comment on Mr. Gelzhiser’s specific claims. She did say, though,
that she had never seen the letter he wrote in support of Mr. Fink,
and that the department’s staff members immediately report any
sexual-misconduct issues to the Title IX office.
A
university spokesman wrote in an email that "due to individual
privacy rights that protect both students and university employees,
we are unable to comment on this specific matter." He added that
"the Title IX Office does not condone any manipulation of its
investigatory processes."
A Letter
of Support
Last year
Mr. Fink went through an "excellence review," as all UCLA lecturers
do after teaching at the university for 18 quarters.
The
department’s nine tenured professors deadlocked on whether to
promote him; three voted yes, three voted no, and three abstained.
That left the final decision to Laura E. Gomez, who was then interim
dean of social sciences.
Mr.
Gelzhiser sent a letter to Ms. Gomez on June 5 discussing Mr. Fink’s
popularity among students and praising his teaching. Mr. Gelzhiser
also suggested that UCLA is a predominantly liberal campus and
pointed to the instructor’s conservative views as an asset.
Continued in article
James Watson (molecular biologist whose analytics determined that DNA had a
double helix structure) ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watson
Political Correctness in Action in May 2017
Nobel Laureate's "Narrowly Focused Scientific Talk" Called Off Over His Racist
Comments U of Illinois research institute agreed to host James Watson. But it
called off the event after faculty members cited his comments on race,
intelligence and geography.---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/05/17/u-illinois-calls-james-watson-lecture-over-his-racist-comments?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=6d2e37e537-DNU20170517&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-6d2e37e537-197565045&mc_cid=6d2e37e537&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
A research institute
at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign agreed to host
James Watson, a Nobel laureate whose work is credited with
discovering the structure of DNA, to give a lecture there. But the
event was quickly called off amid faculty concerns about whether it
was appropriate to host someone like Watson, whose statements have
been widely condemned as racist.
Watson has
made numerous controversial comments over the years and also has
been condemned for
sexist and homophobic
statements.
But his
comments on race have led many to say he
should be shunned.
In a 2007 interview, he said that he was “inherently gloomy about
the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based
on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours -- whereas
all the testing says not really.” Further, he said that while people
hope that all groups are equal, “people who have to deal with black
employees find this not true.” (He also said that some black people
are smart, and has apologized, although many question the sincerity
of his apology.)
Since then, many groups have stayed away from Watson.
The Carl Woese
Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois, however, announced that
it would host a talk by Watson next month.
Gene Robinson,
director of the institute, told
The News-Gazette
that Watson had reached out to the center and then agreed to deliver
a "narrowly focused scientific talk" about his cancer research, and
that institute researchers reached out to colleagues because they
were aware of Watson's reputation on issues of race.
But the institute
backed away from the plans after a number of faculty members took to
social media to condemn the plans to have Watson speak on campus.
Jensen Comment
This is an example how politically correct
censors have taken over college campuses.
Top leaders in academic disciplines are no longer allowed on campus even
when they narrowly confine their talks to their primary area of
expertise.
This is the banning of all messages on campus from PC-Scarlet Letter
researchers and scholars even when their messages are politically
correct
This is one more example of the "Closing of the Academic Minds" on
USA campuses in the name of politically correctness.
Even a top researcher like James Watson must wear a scarlet letter
wherever he speaks in North America.
"The 10 articles in this collection give an overview of how college leaders,
and their campus communities, reacted to controversial speakers,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, May 15, 2017 ---
http://www.chronicle.com/resource/dealing-with-controversial-spe/6314/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=105654f55f064700b1af275d69595da9&elq=3a8a40dc1440424c96b769e74cfdcc6d&elqaid=13969&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=5829
Jensen Comment
You can read about these other incidents and more references at my
history of political correctness versus academic freedom site ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
Go to the above site for links and quotations
Allan
Bloom's 1987 book The Closing of the American
Mind ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind
Political Correctness and Safe Spaces: Tread Carefully with the Socratic
Method ---
https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1806-tread-carefully-with-the-socratic-method?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=634f1b9cd92a47569df50a721f4c0756&elq=671d2781aa214850b36cdc11d4982696&elqaid=14047&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=5874
Whatever you may
think of Neil Gorsuch as a jurist — or of his appointment to the
U.S. Supreme Court — there is one episode from his confirmation
hearing that should give all faculty members a moment's pause.
As readers who followed the hearing may know,
one of the people who wrote to the Senate to object to his
nomination was one of his former students at the University of
Colorado Law School, where Gorsuch — then serving on the 10th
Circuit Court of Appeals — had taught as an adjunct professor. In
her letter, the student accused Gorsuch of demonstrating bias toward
women, based on comments he allegedly made in class. If you're
unfamiliar with the details, you can find them
here.
Other former
students, including women and self-described liberals, quickly came
to Gorsuch's defense, as did 11 of his former law clerks, all women.
Some commentators pointed out that Gorsuch was merely utilizing the
Socratic method, a common teaching strategy in law (and other)
courses that seeks to draw out a student's underlying assumptions
and foster reasoned debate by asking pointed questions and assuming
a contrary position. Gorsuch himself explained that in the
particular situation raised by the objecting student, he had been
using a case study from a popular law textbook.
Whether or not
you believe Justice Gorsuch is sexist — personally, I don't — this
incident might send a slight chill up your spine. Because many of us
also use some version of the Socratic method in our classrooms, in
an attempt to stimulate critical thinking. What if a student takes
offense to something we said — perhaps while we were playing devil's
advocate — and accuses us of some form of discrimination? On today's
hypersensitized campuses, where in many cases emotional responses
have been privileged over intellectual ones, that has become a very
real possibility.
It has actually
happened to me on two occasions. Most recently, a student accused me
in a private meeting of saying something during a class discussion
that I had never said and taking a position I'd never taken. She was
offended and, although she hadn't wanted to bring it up in class,
she felt she should do so now.
The issue was
mainstreaming of students with disabilities in K-12 classrooms,
which another student had proposed as a possible essay topic. During
the ensuing class discussion, the young woman I was meeting with had
asserted that all such students should be mainstreamed. I then asked
her in class if she really meant “all,” or if she thought there were
some students with disabilities so severe that they couldn't
function in a regular class or perhaps needed special attention.
Later in our private meeting, she told me that, as a middle-school
student, she had been misdiagnosed with a mild learning disability
and segregated, even though she was perfectly capable of doing well
in mainstream classes. Hence her awareness on this subject.
I appreciated
her honesty and discretion but was alarmed that she had so
thoroughly misunderstood what was going on in class. I explained
that I had merely been playing devil's advocate, asking questions to
encourage her and her classmates to think more deeply about their
arguments and understand the potential weaknesses of those positions
so they could better defend them — and, most important, be better
equipped to make a more persuasive case.
The meeting
ended amicably enough, and I think she understood. But I was left
wondering: Would things have turned out differently if she had gone
straight to the dean and accused me of having a bias against
students with disabilities?
In my more than
30 years of teaching, I’ve often used a semi-Socratic method in
leading class discussions. Up until just a few years ago, students
seemed to understand very well what I was doing. To my knowledge, no
one got offended or misconstrued my words or intent. In the past few
years, however, I have encountered more students who don’t seem to
grasp that I am playing devil’s advocate in the classroom.
Continued in article
Heather Mac Donald ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_Mac_Donald
Another Speech Shut Down
Protest outside event at Claremont McKenna prevents Heather
Mac Donald event from having an in-person audience. Question period of
appearance at UCLA is disrupted as well ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/04/10/protest-over-speakers-views-race-and-crime-prevents-event-taking-place-planned?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=40d4220488-DNU20170410&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-40d4220488-197565045&mc_cid=40d4220488&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Slavoj Žižek Calls Political
Correctness a Form of “Modern Totalitarianism” ---
http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/slavoj-zizek-calls-political-correctness-a-form-of-modern-totalitarianism.html
Washington Post: If
colleges keep killing academic freedom, civilization will die, too ---
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/if-colleges-keep-killing-academic-freedom-civilization-will-die-too/2017/01/10/74b6fcc2-d2c3-11e6-9cb0-54ab630851e8_story.html?utm_term=.2c6f1b618276
Huffington Post: The 10 Worst Colleges For Free Speech: 2017 ---
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/58ac64bfe4b0417c4066c2f1?elqTrackId=e6013aed3e714a68b6f615c1f42a77d6&elq=04bd27bfa8ef476da32226ccf2ad9f5a&elqaid=12695&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=5199
Race and Intelligence ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence
Debate at Middlebury Over Co-author of the "Bell Curve" (race and intelligence)
---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/02/28/debate-middlebury-over-co-author-bell-curve?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=979f5ef0d8-DNU20170228&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-979f5ef0d8-197565045&mc_cid=979f5ef0d8&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Wake Forrest's Politically Correct Faculty Want No Part of
"Sneaking Capitalist Ideas" Into the University by Way of Koch Brothers'
Millions
An Anti-Koch Meltdown at Wake Forest ---
https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-anti-koch-meltdown-at-wake-forest-1491521075?mod=djemMER
Denizens of the ivory tower are rarely nuanced in their statements
about Charles and David Koch. But the professorial ruminations
published last month at Wake Forest University break new ground by
showing that disdain for conservatives weighs more heavily on
faculty minds than academic freedom.
About
two years ago, Wake Forest professor James Otteson came to the
administration with an idea: a new center devoted to the study of
happiness. Such programs are all the rage in psychology departments,
but Mr. Otteson, a scholar of classical philosophy who has written
books on Adam Smith, offered a unique interdisciplinary approach.
Planning began for a center that draws scholars from across the
university to study the political, economic, moral and cultural
institutions that encourage human happiness. It was named the
Eudaimonia Institute, after Aristotle’s term for flourishing.
None
of this elicited objections from the faculty until last September,
when the university announced it had accepted $3.7 million from the
Charles Koch Foundation to support the institute over five years.
The faculty senate then formed two committees to investigate
Eudaimonia: one to report on the institute itself and another to
study Wake Forest’s policies related to Koch Foundation funding.
The
first committee, in a report published last month, urged Wake Forest
to “SEVER ALL CONNECTIONS TO THE CHARLES KOCH FOUNDATION.” The
original text, which went on at some length, was also in boldface
and underlined. Where, one wonders, were the exclamation points and
angry emojis?
The other committee
concluded that the foundation’s “parasitical” behavior threatened
Wake Forest’s “academic integrity, financial autonomy, and
institutional governance.” The faculty worrying about the Kochs’
fortune seem to have forgotten that their campus exists in large
part thanks to donations from the family behind
R.J. Reynolds Tobacco
Co.
The
situation was deemed so grave that the latter committee recommended
canceling the Eudaimonia Institute’s April conference, freezing all
hiring, and requiring that its publications and presentations be
reviewed by another group of faculty ahead of time. Earlier this
year the faculty announced they would not give credit to students
taking a business class taught by Mr. Otteson—even though the course
had nothing to do with Eudaimonia or the Koch Foundation. According
to Daniel Hammond, a Wake Forest economics professor, the course
would have earned students credit only if they remained business
majors. If they changed their major, it would not count for
graduation. Under pressure, the business school dropped the class as
a prerequisite for majors.
Citing the New Yorker magazine writer Jane Mayer’s investigations
into the Koch family, both committees concluded that Eudaimonia is
really
a way of sneaking capitalist ideas into the
university.
Never mind the ample evidence that the Koch brothers, who are open
about their own ideas, are interested in exploring other points of
view. The report even includes links to a public forum held by the
Charles Koch Institute with guests from liberal organizations such
as the Brookings Institution.
The
controversies over Koch cash—stoked in many cases by the George
Soros-funded campus organization UnKoch My Campus—are not new.
Faculty at the Catholic University of America complained last year
that a $10 million donation from the Charles Koch Foundation would
undermine the school’s religious teachings. The United Negro College
Fund was roundly criticized after it took $25 million of Koch money
in 2014.
But
the professors at Wake Forest have hit a new low. On March 15 the
faculty senate passed a nonbinding resolution against the Koch
funding by a vote of 17-9. The provost offered only a lukewarm
defense of Eudaimonia. “I have faith,” he wrote to me, “in our
faculty and administrative practices that protect faculty research,
creative work and teaching from any improper influence.”
Eudaimonia already has safeguards in place to ensure intellectual
freedom. Even before the Koch money was pledged, it had published a
“Declaration of Research Independence,” which states that the
institute “maintains sole control over the selection of researchers,
the composition of research teams, or the research design,
methodology, analysis, or findings of EI research projects, as well
as the content of EI-sponsored educational programs.”
Ana
Iltis, a Wake Forest bioethicist and faculty adviser to Eudaimonia,
told me this week that she was surprised by her colleagues’
“unwillingness to look at the work we’re doing and take it
seriously.” She noted that the institute’s board includes people
from a variety of religious, political, racial and academic
backgrounds. Bill Leonard —another board member and a former dean of
the Divinity School—led the fight for gays and lesbians to be
admitted to the Baptist graduate school.
The
controversy is even more ridiculous when considering the differences
between the Eudaimonia Institute and other Wake Forest centers. Take
the Pro Humanitate Institute, whose executive director, Melissa
Harris-Perry, made a name for herself as a progressive activist on
MSNBC. That institute does not pretend to ask life’s big, open-ended
questions. Rather, its mission statement declares that its purpose
is “connected to clear practices with meaningful social justice
outcomes.”
No matter what these institutes focus on, the idea that other
faculty might want to censor their work is worrying. Even more
troubling is the notion that professors from one department could
determine that courses taught in another department are not worthy
of credit toward graduation.
Professors opposed to this madness are finally speaking up. A new
petition has been circulating among the faculty objecting to the
proposed censorship. Citing
the recent statement regarding “truth-seeking” by Robert P. George
and Cornel West, the signers note,
“We stand in support of diversity and inclusion of all opinions and
ideologies at Wake Forest University and celebrate such diversity as
the character of our community.”
Continued in article
Harvard and Princeton Leading Scholars Argue for "Truth Seeking"---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/16/ideological-odd-couple-robert-george-and-cornel-west-issue-joint-statement-against?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=bdb7326f2a-DNU20170316&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-bdb7326f2a-197565045&mc_cid=bdb7326f2a&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Stylistically and politically, Robert P. George
and Cornel West don’t have much in common. George, McCormick Professor of
Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals
and Institutions at Princeton University, is one of the country’s most
prominent conservative intellectuals. West, a professor of the practice of
public philosophy and African and African-American studies at Harvard
University, is a self-described “radical Democrat” who, in addition to many
books, once released a spoken-word album.
So when George and West agree on something and lend their names to it,
people take notice -- as they did this week, when the pair
published a statement in support of “truth
seeking, democracy and freedom of thought and expression.” It’s a politely
worded denunciation of what George and West call “campus illiberalism,” or
the brand of thinking that led to this month’s incident at Middlebury
College, where students prevented an invited speaker from talking and a
professor was physically attacked by some who were protesting the
invitation.
“It is all too common these days for people to
try to immunize from criticism opinions that happen to be dominant in their
particular communities,” reads the statement. “Sometimes this is done by
questioning the motives and thus stigmatizing those who dissent from
prevailing opinions; or by disrupting their presentations; or by demanding
that they be excluded from campus or, if they have already been invited,
disinvited.”
Sometimes, it says, “students and faculty
members turn their backs on speakers whose opinions they don’t like or
simply walk out and refuse to listen to those whose convictions offend their
values. Of course, the right to peacefully protest, including on campuses,
is sacrosanct. But before exercising that right, each of us should ask:
Might it not be better to listen respectfully and try to learn from a
speaker with whom I disagree? Might it better serve the cause of truth
seeking to engage the speaker in frank civil discussion?”
All of us “should be willing -- even eager --
to engage with anyone who is prepared to do business in the currency of
truth-seeking discourse by offering reasons, marshaling evidence and making
arguments,” George and West wrote. “The more important the subject under
discussion, the more willing we should be to listen and engage -- especially
if the person with whom we are in conversation will challenge our deeply
held -- even our most cherished and identity-forming -- beliefs.”
Such “an ethos,” they conclude, “protects us
against dogmatism and groupthink, both of which are toxic to the health of
academic communities and to the functioning of democracies.”
George said in an interview Wednesday that
signatures for the statement were flowing in at rate of several per minute,
and that the names reflect all points of the ideological spectrum. “We’re
gratified,” he said, adding that the statement aims to “encourage -- put the
courage in -- people to stand up for themselves” and for the values of the
academy.
“The goal is a heightened sense among faculty,
administrators and students -- all three categories -- that they must refuse
to tolerate campus illiberalism,” George said. “It’s a shared responsibility
of everybody to not only refuse to participate in it but to refuse to accept
it. In order for colleges and universities to fulfill their missions, there
has to be an ethos, an atmosphere, an environment, in which people feel free
to speak their minds -- where people are challenging each other, and thus
learning.”
The immediate impetus for the statement was indeed
the shouting down of Murray, author of the
controversial book The Bell Curve, at Middlebury; the professor who
was injured at the protest is the next signatory, after George and West. But
the authors say they’ve long been concerned with a turning tide on colleges
campuses that’s led to the shouting down and disinvitation of invited
speakers, and other forms of what is arguably intellectual censorship.
They’ve been trying to model the kind of civil dialogue they’re advocating
for several years, teaching and speaking together publicly about the
benefits of a liberal arts education -- including recently at the American
Enterprise Institute.
Yet college illiberalism continues to grow, in
their view. Just recently, for example, George said, Peter Singer, Ira W.
DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton, who has argued in favor of
abortion and euthanasia for severely disabled infants in some instances, was
interrupted by disability rights protesters throughout an appearance via
Skype at the University of Victoria in Canada.
George blamed the phenomenon on a campus
culture of rightful inclusion that has been somehow “corrupted into the idea
that people have the right to be free from hearing positions they disagree
with.” That’s exacerbated, he said, by an emergent “consumer model” of
education, in which colleges and universities competing for
enrollments don’t want to offend their “customers,” even if the product --
higher education -- is supposed to be “challenging students’ deeply held
convictions and helping them to lead examined lives.”
Singer announced on Twitter that he’d signed
the petition. George pointed out that Mary Ann Glendon, Learned Hand
Professor of Law at Harvard University and former U.S. ambassador to the
Holy See, who is anti-abortion and in many ways Singer’s ideological
opposite, also signed on.
Continued in article
"A Letter From An Ivy League Admissions Dean," by James Freeman,
The Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2017 ---
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-letter-from-an-ivy-league-admissions-dean-1492107041?mod=djemBestOfTheWeb
. . .
Oddly, the note referred to the accepted student
not as “she” but as “they.” Dean Powell’s letter also stated that our
reader’s daughter had no doubt worked hard and made positive contributions
to “their” school and community. Our reader reports that his perplexed
family initially thought that Brown had made a word-processing error. That
was before they listened to a voice mail message from the school
congratulating his daughter and referring to her as “them.”
. . .
The letter from Dean Powell included a total of
four short paragraphs, including this one: “And now, as we invite you to
join the Brown family, we encourage you to allow [daughter’s name] to chart
their own course. Just as you have always been there, now we will provide
support, challenge and opportunities for growth.”
Nearly a complete stranger, Mr. Powell is writing a
short, error-filled letter to parents claiming that his organization is fit
to replace them. No doubt the “Brown family” with all its “thems” and
“theys” can offer a wealth of valuable educational opportunities. But anyone
who buys the line that competent parenting is part of the package has
probably never set foot on campus.
But there were worries expressed in papers and
conversations that p.c.-ness has become a rigid concept, a new orthodoxy that
does not allow for sufficient complexity in scholarship or even much clarity in
thinking. One speaker, Michel Chaouli, a graduate student in comparative
literature at Berkeley, said that "politically correct discourse is a kind of
fundamentalism," one that gives rise to "pre-fab opinions." Among its features,
he said, are "tenacity, sanctimoniousness, huffiness, a stubborn lack of a sense
of humor." ---
Michel Chaouli in "The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct," 1990
http://ieas.unideb.hu/admin/file_6308.pdf
Jensen Comment
They (meaning I) am going to continue to use such politically-incorrect words
like " I, me, he, him, himself, she, her, herself" just because we is too
old to become two old men (no longer a politically-correct word) in one old
body.
It might be an interesting writing workshop exercise next semester to rewrite
all the politically incorrect graduation speeches that will be given this coming
May and June. What celebrity is going to make a fool out of theirself by
speaking in the new politically correct plural doublespeak in a graduation
speech?
Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries
Walter E. Williams:
Sheer Lunacy on Campus ---
https://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2017/05/17/sheer-lunacy-on-campus-n2326969?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=
Political Correctness Law of Higher Education
Writings should be judged on the political correctness of the author and not the
written words of the author --- this is the new standard for political
correctness on USA campuses.
Political Correctness on Campus
To be politically correct at the University of Virginia
students and faculty are encouraged to no longer quote the Constitution of the
State of Virginia or anything else Thomas Jefferson ever wrote.
U. of Virginia Students and Faculty Ask President to Stop Quoting
Jefferson, the founder of the University of Virginia and principle author of
Virginia's State Constitution ---
http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/u-of-virginia-students-and-faculty-ask-president-to-stop-quoting-jefferson/115516?elqTrackId=e50a59346dec4186a11b83264cd1ea2a&elq=a373ec4040f04e3bb1f24fb30dd2426c&elqaid=11482&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=4497
Are students in the Law School of the University of Virginia
banned from reading or citing the State Constitution?
Is this type of political correctness that will end historical scholarship?
Writings should be judged on the political correctness of the
author and not the written words of the author --- this is the new standard for
political correctness on USA campuses.
Oops: The Harvard Business Review just violated
the Political Correctness Law
https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-s-working-class?referral=00202&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-weekly_hotlist-_-hotlist_date&utm_source=newsletter_weekly_hotlist&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=hotlist_date&spMailingID=15892371&spUserID=MTkyODM0MDg0MAS2&spJobID=903305802&spReportId=OTAzMzA1ODAyS0
Debate on the Post-Election Reaction of the University of Michigan Campus and
Its President
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/11/15/debate-michigan-presidents-election-statement?mc_cid=0cdad2e794&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
"What So
Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class," by Joan C. Williams,
Harvard Business Review, November 10, 2016 ---
https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-s-working-class?referral=00202&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-weekly_hotlist-_-hotlist_date&utm_source=newsletter_weekly_hotlist&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=hotlist_date&spMailingID=15892371&spUserID=MTkyODM0MDg0MAS2&spJobID=903305802&spReportId=OTAzMzA1ODAyS0
. . .
Avoid the Temptation to Write
Off Blue-Collar Resentment as Racism
Economic
resentment has fueled racial anxiety that, in some Trump supporters (and
Trump himself), bleeds into open racism. But to write off WWC anger as
nothing more than racism is intellectual comfort food, and it is dangerous.
National
debates about policing are fueling class tensions today in
precisely the same way they did in the 1970s,
when college
kids (and professional athletes) derided policemen as “pigs.”
This is a recipe for class conflict. Being in the police is one of the few
good jobs open to Americans without a college education. Police get solid
wages, great benefits, and a respected place in their communities. For
elites to write them off as racists is a telling example of how, although
race- and sex-based insults are no longer acceptable in polite society,
class-based insults still are.
I do not defend
police who kill citizens for selling cigarettes. But the current
demonization of the police underestimates the difficulty of ending police
violence against communities of color. Police need to make split-second
decisions in life-threatening situations. I don’t. If I had to, I might make
some poor decisions too.
Saying this is so
unpopular that I risk making myself a pariah among my friends on the left
coast. But the biggest risk today for me and other Americans is continued
class cluelessness. If we don’t take steps to bridge the class culture gap,
when Trump proves unable to bring steel back to Youngstown, Ohio, the
consequences could turn dangerous.
In 2010, while on a book tour for
Reshaping the Work-Family Debate,
I gave a talk about
all of this at the Harvard Kennedy School. The woman who ran the speaker
series, a major Democratic operative, liked my talk. “You are saying exactly
what the Democrats need to hear,” she mused, “and they’ll never listen.” I
hope now they will.
Joan C. Williams is Distinguished
Professor of Law and Founding Director of the Center of WorkLife Law at the
University of California, Hastings College of the Law.
Joan C.
Williams ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_C._Williams
U Chicago to Freshmen: Don't Expect (Politically Correct) Safe Spaces
---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/08/25/u-chicago-warns-incoming-students-not-expect-safe-spaces-or-trigger-warnings
Those
tasked with writing letters to incoming freshmen frequently wonder if anyone
reads them.
John Ellison, dean of students at the University of Chicago, need not worry.
His letter to new students has been read and scrutinized not only by Chicago
students but by professors and pundits nationwide. "Our commitment to
academic freedom means that we do not support so-called trigger warnings, we
do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove
controversial and we do not condone the creation of intellectual safe spaces
where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their
own," he wrote.
To those who regularly campaign against what they see as political
correctness, and to plenty of others, the letter was the message they have
been waiting for -- and that they think students need.
But to many others, the letter distorted programs on which many students
rely, ignored the hostility many students feel on campus, and belittled the
sincerity of faculty members who work to make higher education more
inclusive. Many also said that the letter, by criticizing specific academic
practices, could be seen as limiting academic freedom by discouraging the
use of those practices.
In a twist first reported by The Chicago Tribune, Chicago may not be as pure
on safe spaces as the letter suggested. It turns out that the University of
Chicago website features references to efforts to create safe spaces for
students -- and even a Safe Space Ally Network for gay, lesbian, bisexual
and transgender students. One of the safe space allies is none other than
the same John Ellison who wrote to freshmen criticizing the safe space
concept. Ellison did not respond to messages, and his email has an "out of
office" response.
While Ellison hasn't been talking, Chicago officials are promoting his
ideas. Chicago's president, Robert J. Zimmer, published an essay in The Wall
Street Journal Friday reiterating the points Ellison made, and saying that
"free speech is at risk" in academe.
"Universities
cannot be viewed as a sanctuary for comfort but rather as a crucible for
confronting ideas and thereby learning to make informed judgments in complex
environments,"
he wrote. "Having one’s assumptions challenged and experiencing the
discomfort that sometimes accompanies this process are intrinsic parts of an
excellent education. Only then will students develop the skills necessary to
build their own futures and contribute to society."
Continued
in article
"The
Chicago School of Free Speech," The Wall
Street Journal, August 27, 2016 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-chicago-school-of-free-speech-1472168075?mod=djemMER
For a change, we come not to bury a college president but to praise him. His
name is Robert Zimmer, and nearby the University of Chicago president
defends the educational and societal virtues of free speech on college
campuses. Let’s hope he wears body armor to the next faculty meeting.
Mr. Zimmer’s public coming out is all the more notable because it appears to
be part of a university-wide message. The school’s dean of students, Jay
Ellison, has written a letter to incoming freshmen noting that the desire
for “safe spaces” from discomfiting speech or ideas will not override the
academic community’s interest in rigorous debate.
“Members of our community are encouraged to speak, write, listen, challenge
and learn, without fear of censorship,” Mr. Ellison wrote for tender
millennial ears. “You will find that we expect members of our community to
be engaged in rigorous debate, discussion, and even disagreement. At times
this may challenge you and even cause discomfort.”
This is so refreshing we want to keep going. Mr. Ellison’s letter adds that
Chicago’s “commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support
so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because
their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation
of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and
perspectives at odds with their own.”
The letter comes with a monograph by dean John Boyer discussing the
university’s “history of debate, and even scandal, resulting from our
commitment to academic freedom.” Maybe Chicago’s example will inspire spinal
infusions at the likes of Rutgers, the University of Missouri, and even the
timorous souls at Yale.
University of Chicago Politically Correctness Professors Fire Back ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/14/u-chicago-professors-issue-letter-safe-spaces-and-trigger-warnings?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=ee6492e835-DNU20160914&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-ee6492e835-197565045&mc_cid=ee6492e835&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
More than 150 faculty members at the University of
Chicago on Tuesday published an open letter to freshmen in which they take a
strikingly different approach from the official communication sent by a
Chicago dean. Safe spaces and trigger warnings, the letter said, are
legitimate topics for discussion and reflect the real needs of many
students.
The earlier letter -- much debated in recent weeks
-- was from John Ellison, dean of students. He told incoming students not to
expect what many of their peers elsewhere may have. "Our commitment to
academic freedom means that we do not support so-called trigger warnings, we
do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove
controversial and we do not condone the creation of intellectual safe spaces
where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their
own," wrote Ellison. He has since been hailed as a hero for free expression
and denounced as out of touch and insensitive -- with his letter becoming a
Rorschach test for how one views higher education.
The faculty letter was published in the student
newspaper, The Chicago Maroon. The letter doesn't say that trigger warnings
or safe spaces are inherently good or bad. But it says that students have
every right to request these things -- and that discouraging students from
doing so represents a squelching of freedom of expression.
"Those of us who have signed this letter have a
variety of opinions about requests for trigger warnings and safe spaces,"
the letter says. "We may also disagree as to whether free speech is ever
legitimately interrupted by concrete pressures of the political. That is as
it should be. But let there be no mistake: such requests often touch on
substantive, ongoing issues of bias, intolerance and trauma that affect our
intellectual exchanges. To start a conversation by declaring that such
requests are not worth making is an affront to the basic principles of
liberal education and participatory democracy.
-
Illustrations
of Political Correctness
Political Correctness Still Dominates University Filters for
Speakers
University of New Haven Disinvites Sheriff
David Clarke From Speaking ---
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2016/10/06/university-of-new-haven-disinvites-sheriff-david-clarke-from-speaking-n2228900?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=
It's just not politically correct to let a police chief speak on a college
campus in the USA even if he is African American
Cardiff University Provides a Listing of Banned Politically Incorrect
Words ---
https://mishtalk.com/2017/03/03/cardiff-metropolitan-university-bans-all-politically-incorrect-words-amusing-list-of-banned-words/
Jensen Comment
Some don't make a whole lot of sense to such as why is "polio victim" banned and
"polio survivor" allowed. The two phrases are not equivalent since not all polio
victims survive. And "efficient" does not necessarily mean "workmanlike" since
some quality products were not produced efficiently such as painstaking handmade
crafts.
A committee at Georgetown University law school is re-evaluating its
policies on student protests after a demonstration prevented a speaker's speech
---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/01/28/georgetown-law-debates-punishments-disruptive-protesters?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=e7b2076c7e-DNU_2019_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-e7b2076c7e-197565045&mc_cid=e7b2076c7e&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Georgetown University
law students are worried school
administrators will restrict their right to protest guest speakers on campus
after a loud demonstration by students and faculty members
interrupted
a speech by a Trump administration
official last year.
The protesters
ultimately prevented Kevin McAleenan, former acting secretary of the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security, from giving the
keynote address
last October during the school's annual
Immigration Law and Policy Conference. By denying audience members the
opportunity to hear McAleenan's speech, the protesters violated the
university's written policies for speech and expression.
Administrators
responded by reconvening the law center's Speech and Expression Committee to
consider limitations and disciplinary measures against demonstrators at
future speaking events.The committee made up of students, faculty members
and senior staff was created in 2017 to examine how and where speech is
expressed on campus.
William Treanor, dean
of the Georgetown University Law Center, asked the committee to recommend
whether to implement more specific guidelines for speech and expression on
campus by spring 2020, according to a Jan. 16 email to law students. The
email was signed by Mitch Bailin, the dean of students, and Peter Byrne, a
professor and faculty director of two programs at the law school.
The committee was
tasked with considering whether the law center should control who is invited
to speak at the campus and who may invite them, what the law center’s
response should be to “disruptive protests” during speaking events, and if
“possible disciplinary or other administrative action” should be pursued
against student and faculty member “disrupters” in the future, according to
the email sent to law center students.
Students and
faculty opposed to the Trump administration's controversial immigration
policies made no secret of their objection to McAleenan's participation in
the conference. They wrote a
letter
to Treanor on Sept. 30, calling on him to disinvite the acting secretary.
The law school anticipated the protest and had additional staff members and
security present. It also set up a designated area for demonstrators to
gather outside the auditorium so as to not disrupt the speech or other
classes and activities occurring in the building, a law school official
said.
Continued in
article
Jensen Comment
I'm opposed to encouraging shout downs for a number of
reasons. First shout downs are likely to increase adrenelin flows of both sides
that, in turn, can easily be ramped up to physical violence as demonstrated by
the famous Middlebury College shoutdown.
Secondly, I opposed to shoul downs
because what's fair for one side is fair for the other. Liberals in the law
school at Georgetown University encourage the shout downs of any speaker
favoring Trump's immigration policies. Think of their horror, however, if
conservative students shout down AOC if she comes to Georgetown promoting open
border policies and automatic citizenship to any and all of over six billion
people in the world.
When someone is approved to speak on
campus it's imperative that courtesy to speak is enforced by campus security.
This of course raises the question of whether Big Brother on campus should have
unrestrained power of approval.
January 2020: Charles Murray
to Return to Middlebury College ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2020/01/24/charles-murray-return-middlebury-college?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=69f8413347-DNU_2019_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-69f8413347-197565045&mc_cid=69f8413347&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
April 2019: Politically Correct Middlebury Still Cannot Keep
Conservative Speakers Safe ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/04/18/middlebury-calls-lecture-conservative-polish-leader-amid-threats-protests?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=779d04ade1-DNU_2019_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-779d04ade1-197565045&mc_cid=779d04ade1&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Jensen Comment
What conservative would want to join this faculty or join the student body?
Is Middlebury so against diversity?
Charles Murray and the Bell Curve ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Murray_(political_scientist)
Race and Intelligence ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence
Debate at Middlebury Over Co-author of the "Bell Curve" (race and
intelligence) ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/02/28/debate-middlebury-over-co-author-bell-curve?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=979f5ef0d8-DNU20170228&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-979f5ef0d8-197565045&mc_cid=979f5ef0d8&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
The (Political Correctness) Mob of Students at Middlebury
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-mob-at-middlebury-1488586505?mod=djemMER
A mob tries to silence Charles Murray and sends a
prof to the ER.
Once again a
scholar invited to speak at a university has been shouted down by an angry
mob clearly unable to challenge him intellectually. On Thursday at
Middlebury College, allegedly an institution of higher learning, a crowd of
protesters tried to run Charles Murray off campus. Mr. Murray is the author
of many influential books, including “Coming Apart,” which the kids might
read if they want to understand their country and can cope without trigger
warnings.
Amid the
shouts, Mr. Murray was taken to another location where he was able to speak.
But a Middlebury professor escorting Mr. Murray from campus—Allison Stanger—was
later sent to the hospital after being assaulted by protesters who also
attacked the car they were in. As if to underscore the madness, the headline
over the initial Associated Press dispatch smeared Mr. Murray rather than
focusing on the intolerance of those disrupting him: “College students
protest speaker branded white nationalist.”
Middlebury
President Laurie Patton apologized in a statement to those “who came in good
faith to participate in a serious discussion, and particularly to Mr. Murray
and Prof. Stanger for the way they were treated.” While she believes some
protesters were “outside agitators,” Middlebury students were also
involved—and she said she would be “responding.”
Mr. Murray
tweeted: “Report from the front: The Middlebury administration was
exemplary. The students were seriously scary.” Let’s hope President Patton
follows through with discipline to scare these students straight.
Harvard and Princeton Leading Scholars Protest the Middlebury Political
Correctness Incident ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/16/ideological-odd-couple-robert-george-and-cornel-west-issue-joint-statement-against?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=bdb7326f2a-DNU20170316&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-bdb7326f2a-197565045&mc_cid=bdb7326f2a&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Stylistically and politically, Robert P. George
and Cornel West don’t have much in common. George, McCormick Professor of
Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals
and Institutions at Princeton University, is one of the country’s most
prominent conservative intellectuals. West, a professor of the practice of
public philosophy and African and African-American studies at Harvard
University, is a self-described “radical Democrat” who, in addition to many
books, once released a spoken-word album.
So when George and West agree on something and lend their names to it,
people take notice -- as they did this week, when the pair
published a statement in support of “truth
seeking, democracy and freedom of thought and expression.” It’s a politely
worded denunciation of what George and West call “campus illiberalism,” or
the brand of thinking that led to this month’s incident at Middlebury
College, where students prevented an invited speaker from talking and a
professor was physically attacked by some who were protesting the
invitation.
“It is all too common these days for people to
try to immunize from criticism opinions that happen to be dominant in their
particular communities,” reads the statement. “Sometimes this is done by
questioning the motives and thus stigmatizing those who dissent from
prevailing opinions; or by disrupting their presentations; or by demanding
that they be excluded from campus or, if they have already been invited,
disinvited.”
Sometimes, it says, “students and faculty
members turn their backs on speakers whose opinions they don’t like or
simply walk out and refuse to listen to those whose convictions offend their
values. Of course, the right to peacefully protest, including on campuses,
is sacrosanct. But before exercising that right, each of us should ask:
Might it not be better to listen respectfully and try to learn from a
speaker with whom I disagree? Might it better serve the cause of truth
seeking to engage the speaker in frank civil discussion?”
All of us “should be willing -- even eager --
to engage with anyone who is prepared to do business in the currency of
truth-seeking discourse by offering reasons, marshaling evidence and making
arguments,” George and West wrote. “The more important the subject under
discussion, the more willing we should be to listen and engage -- especially
if the person with whom we are in conversation will challenge our deeply
held -- even our most cherished and identity-forming -- beliefs.”
Such “an ethos,” they conclude, “protects us
against dogmatism and groupthink, both of which are toxic to the health of
academic communities and to the functioning of democracies.”
George said in an interview Wednesday that
signatures for the statement were flowing in at rate of several per minute,
and that the names reflect all points of the ideological spectrum. “We’re
gratified,” he said, adding that the statement aims to “encourage -- put the
courage in -- people to stand up for themselves” and for the values of the
academy.
“The goal is a heightened sense among faculty,
administrators and students -- all three categories -- that they must refuse
to tolerate campus illiberalism,” George said. “It’s a shared responsibility
of everybody to not only refuse to participate in it but to refuse to accept
it. In order for colleges and universities to fulfill their missions, there
has to be an ethos, an atmosphere, an environment, in which people feel free
to speak their minds -- where people are challenging each other, and thus
learning.”
The immediate impetus for the statement was indeed
the shouting down of Murray, author of the
controversial book The Bell Curve, at Middlebury; the professor who
was injured at the protest is the next signatory, after George and West. But
the authors say they’ve long been concerned with a turning tide on colleges
campuses that’s led to the shouting down and disinvitation of invited
speakers, and other forms of what is arguably intellectual censorship.
They’ve been trying to model the kind of civil dialogue they’re advocating
for several years, teaching and speaking together publicly about the
benefits of a liberal arts education -- including recently at the American
Enterprise Institute.
Yet college illiberalism continues to grow, in
their view. Just recently, for example, George said, Peter Singer, Ira W.
DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton, who has argued in favor of
abortion and euthanasia for severely disabled infants in some instances, was
interrupted by disability rights protesters throughout an appearance via
Skype at the University of Victoria in Canada.
George blamed the phenomenon on a campus
culture of rightful inclusion that has been somehow “corrupted into the idea
that people have the right to be free from hearing positions they disagree
with.” That’s exacerbated, he said, by an emergent “consumer model” of
education, in which colleges and universities competing for
enrollments don’t want to offend their “customers,” even if the product --
higher education -- is supposed to be “challenging students’ deeply held
convictions and helping them to lead examined lives.”
Singer announced on Twitter that he’d signed
the petition. George pointed out that Mary Ann Glendon, Learned Hand
Professor of Law at Harvard University and former U.S. ambassador to the
Holy See, who is anti-abortion and in many ways Singer’s ideological
opposite, also signed on.
Continued in article
Forwarded by a Good Friend on the AECM
Leave Your Safe Spaces: The 2017 Commencement Address at Hampden-Sydney College
---
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/opinion/leave-your-safe-spaces-the-2017-commencement-address-at-hampden-sydney-college.html?_r=0
. . .
Across the country, hundreds of thousands of your peers are also celebrating
their commencements, receiving their diplomas, starting out in the world.
But not all of their educations have been liberal in the truest sense of the
word.
Instead of being educated to a cultured skepticism, too many have been
educated to a fervent certitude. Instead of embracing, or at least
respecting, heterodox or unsettling ideas, they prefer to retreat into
settled convictions. Instead of wanting to engage controversial discussions,
they’d just as soon shut them down.
And instead of wanting to emerge at last from the cocoons of their “safe
spaces,” they want to extend the domain of those spaces into the next stages
of their lives.
Now, don’t get me wrong: The “they” in those sentences consists, for the
most part, of nice, well-intentioned, intelligent, hard-working and often
high-achieving people.
They just happen to know that truth and virtue are on their side.
They are convinced that any difference of opinion on matters they hold dear
isn’t simply an error of reasoning but an affront to human decency.
They believe they are entitled to denounce the people with whom they
disagree as knavish ignoramuses. And they believe that it is imperative to
keep a very safe distance between themselves and the ideas that so disturb
them.
Today, we live in a world that makes it easy to continue inhabiting these
safe spaces, above all when it comes to politics, public policy and
ideology.
On social media, you follow, share, “like” and retweet the people you agree
with — while you ignore, unfriend, remove or block those you don’t.
If you’re a conservative news junkie, Fox News is your safe space, even if
you’d probably never call it that. You can watch it for days — indeed,
weeks, months and years — on end without ever encountering a persuasively
contrary opinion, at least one that isn’t instantly derided as unworthy of
serious consideration. If you’re a liberal, it’s the same story on MSNBC.
When you open the op-ed pages of a newspaper, you’ll turn first to the
columnist with whom you already know you’re likely to agree, so that you can
see your already-correct opinions repeated and ratified once more. As for
the writers with whom you disagree — whether it’s Krugman or Stephens,
Kristof or Krauthammer — you’ve already concluded that they’re idiots or
liars, so you’ll either skip over them or read them with smirking disdain.
And so it goes. We all believe that the system of checks and balances is a
good idea for a well-functioning and prudent government. But where are the
checks and balances in our own thinking — the check that whispers, “You
could be wrong”; the balance that suggests, “There’s another way of thinking
about it”?
This is what I fear we are at risk of losing in America today. Too many of
our schools are producing students who have never learned properly to
engage, understand or accept an alternative point of view.
Too many of our citizens want to hear only from the people whose views they
already share, and who will never change their minds about a thing. And too
many of our media outlets see no problem in catering exclusively to these
increasingly narrow and illiberal tastes.
We worry a lot these days about political polarization, the unpleasant
choices such polarization leaves us with at the ballot box, its effects on
what used to be our common values, our shared sense of nationhood. What we
fail to recognize is that this polarization is a result of us getting
exactly what we want — only to rue the consequences.
A month ago, I chose to do my small part in trying to swim against this
particular current. After 16 productive and happy years as a conservative
writer with the staunchly conservative editorial page of The Wall Street
Journal, I decided to switch teams to the mostly liberal editorial page of
The New York Times.
In case you’re wondering, my opinions are just as conservative, reactionary
and antediluvian as they’ve always been. My salary is pretty much the same.
And, no, I wasn’t pushed out of my last job.
But I did have a gnawing sense that it was time to stop talking to my own
side, preaching to my own choir. I wanted to write for an audience that
might not be wholly receptive — and might even be openly hostile — to what I
have to say.
In short, I thought it was time to leave my own safe space: to take the
gamble that I might be able to sway readers not always inclined to agree
with me, and to accept the possibility that they, in turn, might sway me.
Has it been fun? Yes. Has it been rough? A bit. Has it been worth it? Ask me
again in a few years. But I’m optimistic.
So here’s my advice to you: Get out of your own safe spaces. Define what
your intellectual comfort zone is — and leave it. Enhance your tolerance for
discordant voices. Narrow your criteria for what’s beyond the pale. Read the
authors or watch the talking heads with whom you disagree. Treat those
disagreements as a whetting stone to sharpen your own arguments. Resist the
temptation to call people names.
By all means master the art of being pugnacious in argument — but as a
pugnacious dialogian, not a petulant didact.
Go beyond that. Befriend your intellectual adversaries. Assume that they’re
smart, that they’re motives are honorable and that they are your fellow
travelers in a quest to better understand a common set of challenges.
Master the civilized art of agreeable disagreement. Try to remember that
words are not weapons, and that politics is not warfare, and debate is not a
death sport. Learn that — in politics no less than in marriage — it’s
a bad idea to go to bed angry with one another. Have an argument, then have
a drink, together.
Members of the class of 2017: Do not close
your ears to opposing points of view. Otherwise you cannot learn. Do not
foreclose the possibility that you might change your mind. Otherwise you
cannot grow. Do not lose sight of the fact that you are not in possession of
the whole and only truth. Otherwise you will fail to notice your mistakes,
and so suffer their consequences.
Above all, do not forget that the world would be a duller and darker place
if everyone thought as you did, and if all our thoughts were safe ones, and
if there were nothing to bestir our minds, and inflame our senses, and rouse
our consciences, and churn the warm but too-placid waters in which we swim
at our own peril.
Safe spaces, physical and intellectual, are for children. You are grown-ups
now. If your diplomas mean anything, it’s that it is time you leave those
spaces behind forever.
A Syracuse University professor withdrew an invitation
to a New York University professor, who is Israeli, to present his film at an
academic conference, saying that his nationality would upset colleagues who
favor a boycott of Israeli academe.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/06/syracuse-condemns-action-professor-rescind-invitation-israeli-scholar?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=c61d554145-DNU20160906&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-c61d554145-197565045&mc_cid=c61d554145&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Jensen Comment
How does the phrase read about "race, creed, or national origin?"
We will not, at any
time, debate the science of climate change’
Three professors jointly teaching a science course at the University of Colorado
in Colorado Springs
http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/28825/
Jensen Comment
The first thing I would challenge is their asserted scientific "fact" that 98%
of the world's scientists by all aspects of climate change hook, line, and
sinker!
These politically correct professors also ordered that any student who wanted to
challenge the science of climate change should stay out of their
online course
Why is closed mindedness taking over our Academy?
I think we can safely assume these scientists are rotten examples of
"scientists"
But the latest predictable outrage is that
DePaul University has banned Shapiro from appearing on campus, under the
ludicrous and specious pretense of "security concerns." If there are
security concerns, neither Shapiro nor his admirers are causing them. As
Shapiro's sponsor, Young America's Foundation said, "Make no mistake,
any security concerns we face on campuses are 100 percent incited by the
censorious, intolerant left."
http://townhall.com/columnists/davidlimbaugh/2016/08/05/censorial-depaul-bans-conservative-ben-shapiro-n2201935?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=
Jensen Comment
The :intolerant left" includes most of Depaul's faculty as well as
students.
Ben Shapiro is not politically correct for campuses in the USA.
"Resignation at Yale," by Scott Jaschik,
Inside Higher Ed,
December 6, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/12/07/academic-center-yale-controversy-over-halloween-costumes-wont-teach-there-again?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=2743fe76df-DNU20151207&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-2743fe76df-197565045
Smith College Protesters Bar Journalists From
Covering Sit-In Unless They Support the Cause ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/smith-college-protesters-bar-journalists-from-covering-sit-in-unless-they-support-the-cause/106834?elq=46cf6e8cc18e4732b0d54a222e1e06cd&elqCampaignId=1900&elqaid=6971&elqat=1&elqTrackId=c828256ed86e4e7e9eaee73385a1dce0
Jensen Comment
This reminds me of those letters from friends who request that I write letters
of recommendation for their tenure and/or promotion candidacy but only if I
don't write anything negative. Recently I got a letter from a former colleague
requesting that I write a letter in support of his application for a job at
another university under the condition that I let him read the letter before
it's sent out.
But the latest predictable outrage is that
DePaul University has banned Shapiro from appearing on campus, under the
ludicrous and specious pretense of "security concerns." If there are
security concerns, neither Shapiro nor his admirers are causing them. As
Shapiro's sponsor, Young America's Foundation said, "Make no mistake,
any security concerns we face on campuses are 100 percent incited by the
censorious, intolerant left."
http://townhall.com/columnists/davidlimbaugh/2016/08/05/censorial-depaul-bans-conservative-ben-shapiro-n2201935?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=
Jensen Comment
The :intolerant left" includes most of Depaul's faculty as well as
students.
Ben Shapiro is not politically correct for campuses in the USA. He
favors capitalism in economics.
Extreme and Unforgiving Political Correctness Attack on the Former Chair
of the Diversity Committee
Ann Althouse, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin, allegedly has
the most popular law professor blog in the USA ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Althouse
I don't follow it much after finding it more personal than professional, but
there's little doubt that it's a long-time popular blog. Below Professor
Althouse is flabbergasted by the extreme and unforgiving political
correctness of 23 law professors at the University of Oregon.
About that Oregon law professor who wore
blackface as part of a Halloween costume and provoked demands that she
resign.
It turns out
it was a female lawprof and she was dressed as the
male author of a book she likes, "Black Man
in a White Coat." She says she "intended to provoke a thoughtful discussion
on racism in our society, in our educational institutions and in our
professions," and: "It provoked a discussion of racism, but not as I
intended."
I
intended to create a conversation about inequity, racism and our white
blindness to them. Regrettably, I became an example of it. This has been a
remarkable learning experience for me. I hope that all who are hurt or
angered by my costume will accept my apology. I meant no harm to them or
others.
The professor — who is 68 years old and has taught at
the University of Oregon since 1982 — was put on leave while she is
being investigated. There's
a petition demanding
that she resign. (I guess that would mean
retire.) And there's
a petition on the other side
(premised on academic freedom, not the idea that it's
okay for a professor to wear blackface or okay as long as she had positive
racial values).
I find it hard to believe that people are willing to be so vengeful over a
single instance of bad judgment. Whatever happened to mercy and forgiveness?
And what about our shared interest in living in a culture where people
aren't fearful that their lives could be ruined if they said one thing wrong
— even when they were trying to say something quite bland (like why can't we
all get along)?By the way, the
professor, Nancy Shurtz, was not just a white person dressing up as a black
person, she was also a woman dressing as a man, and a law professor dressing
as a doctor. Why is the one crossover an outrage when the other 2 are not?
How about some actual intellectual exploration of the subject of inhabiting
alternate identities?
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
You may want to read some of the comments, some of which are utterly stupid.
What is happening to humanity on our campuses in the name of political
correctness humanity? It's like Oregon professor committed a felony!
Don't you love it when lawyers fight?
Stanley Fish ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Fish
For many years, Stanley Fish has been
one of my heroes and role models ---
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Solitary-Thinker/127464/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
The world needs more Fish tales.
Professor Fish is sometimes incorrectly
given credit for the phrase "political correctness." Perhaps he should
be given credit, however, for a willingness to stand up against the tide
of politcal correctness that swamped our academy ---
See below
The University of British Columbia Apologizes for Rescinding a Speaker's
Invitation ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/01/05/ubc-apologizes-rescinding-speakers-invitation?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=6285ab8803-DNU20170105&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-6285ab8803-197565045&goal=0_1fcbc04421-6285ab8803-197565045&mc_cid=6285ab8803&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Jensen Comment
As far as the politcal correctness police are concerned any charges make you
guilty irrespective of investigation outcomes.
Bob Jensen's threads on the political correctness police ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
President of Columbia University on Political Correctness
The No-Censorship Approach to Life ---
http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-No-Censorship-Approach-to/237807?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=5b26715e0f9847b9946c344a50d984d6&elq=b6871985db7f4957a0ce96606e5b7d12&elqaid=10748&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=4073
. . .
I do not want to discuss any of those specific
issues; however, I do want to make two overarching points. The first is
about proposals to stop speech from happening on campus, officially or
through private acts of disruption. The rules of the road here are very
clear. Even though private institutions like Columbia are not subject to the
First Amendment since it covers only actions by the state, many of them,
including Columbia, have voluntarily chosen to live by First Amendment
principles.
The First Amendment as we know it today is not all
that old — in a few years the nation will celebrate the 100th anniversary of
the first Supreme Court decisions interpreting freedom of speech. Those came
in 1919 in a series of cases under the Espionage Act of World War I, and in
the process the court affirmed the jailing of the presidential candidate
Eugene V. Debs for the crime of opposing the war and draft and for praising
those who resisted.
Looking back, it was obviously not an auspicious
beginning for the First Amendment jurisprudence we have come to embrace. For
while court interpretations have ebbed and flowed in the scope of protection
for speech since then, in the past half century we have all come to a pretty
clear position that is unique among nations: With few exceptions, speech
that is about or relevant to public issues and the search for truth, broadly
interpreted, is fully protected against censorship, no matter how offensive
or dangerous it might seem to the majority of the citizens of this country.
In this case, what’s true for the country is also
true for Columbia. We don’t ban speech. We don’t censor speech. But make no
mistake: This is no simple, clear-cut,
self-evident principle or policy; in fact, far from it.
You hear a lot of people these days talking as if
this were all perfectly obvious and no reasonable person could believe
otherwise. I have spent a good part of my life trying to understand why this
approach is indeed the right and sound way to structure a society or a
university. I can assure you, it is highly complicated. Nevertheless, it is
our choice on my campus that students cannot expect the institution to
intervene, to stop thoughts or viewpoints many of us may dislike, and deeply
so. And we will not let others do what we cannot.
At the same time, we cannot just leave it there.
Just because we cannot and will not stop or
censor expression does not mean we will or should do nothing;
that we are powerless. The burden we impose on ourselves by forgoing
censorship is the responsibility to engage the debate. We can express
counterviews, give reasons why the contrary view was wrong, offensive, and
dangerous. We can be upset and angry, organize an opposition, ignore or shun
a speaker, or deploy humor to deflect injury. We can also listen, reflect,
reconsider, and forgive. To say that we can’t ban speech is, in a sense,
easy. To say what follows next is very, very hard.
This brings me to that second essential point: How
students today grapple with ideas, with thoughts and viewpoints in the
myriad ways available to them, will determine who they are. Of course, they
will never completely resolve this process; it is too complex for rules or
clear guides. They will make many errors, and feel embarrassed looking back.
Or they will feel proud and hope they can replicate what they did.
Does this open environment, created by the First
Amendment for society — and, by extension, for our campuses — allow students
to be confident in their beliefs, yet open to alternative perspectives?
Courageous when confronting evil, or weak and fearful? Does it encourage
them to change their minds when evidence and reason call for a change,
instead of being stubborn and myopic about things they just don’t like or
can’t refute?
I hope so. That’s the best rationale we have for
our no-censorship approach in life. We throw our graduates into the deep
waters of that life, and we must make the most of every opportunity we have
to prepare them to deal with the world they will confront. This won’t always
be easy — for us or for those students. We humans are not naturally disposed
to be open-minded, to be tolerant, and willing to engage with thoughts that
are foreign to us and contrary to our own beliefs and views.
Our natural instinct is to preserve our own ways of
thinking, whatever they happen to be. Left to our own devices, we avoid
discourse, we prefer to associate with those who reinforce our own ways of
thinking, and we fear the uncertainty of not knowing what or how to believe.
But in the academic world, our basic intellectual
inquiry emphasizes habits of mind that we think increase the odds that we
will discover new ideas and truths. We stress being able to suspend our
beliefs, to embrace self-doubt, to take joy in learning that we were wrong,
to welcome knowing what is not true as another step toward knowing what is
true, to be articulate about ideas, to relish complexity, and to use reason
while knowing its limits.
To some extent, this commitment to constant
self-reflection can make us seem ill-suited for the world outside, which too
often elevates voices that are loudest and most sure of themselves. Yet our
essential mission remains to invite students to join us in these special
qualities of intellect that never stop questioning, whether it’s society’s
conventional wisdom or their own beliefs. After all, it may be their only
chance in life to see what’s possible with such a truly open mind.
Lee C. Bollinger is president of Columbia University. This essay was
adapted from his speech at the university’s fall convocation.
Jensen Comment
I might point out that these issues are often not black versus white as alluded
to in the above article For example, in 2006 Lee Bollinger cancelled an
invitation to the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Columbia Withdraws an Invitation to Ahmadinejad
Overruling a prominent dean, the president of Columbia
University, Lee Bollinger, yesterday withdrew an invitation to the Iranian
president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The dean of Columbia's school of international
and public affairs, Lisa Anderson, had independently invited Mr. Ahmadinejad to
speak at the World Leader's Forum, a year-long program that aims to unite
"renowned intellectuals and cultural icons from many nations to examine global
challenges and explore cultural perspectives." In a statement issued yesterday
afternoon, Mr. Bollinger said he canceled Mr. Ahmadinejad's invitation because
he couldn't be certain it would "reflect the academic values that are the
hallmark of a University event such as our World Leaders Forum." He told Ms.
Anderson that Mr. Ahmadinejad could speak at the school of international and
public affairs, just not as a part of the university-wide leader's forum.
Iliana Johnson, "Columbia Withdraws an Invitation to Ahmadinejad," New
York Sun, September 22, 2006 ---
http://www.nysun.com/article/40142
At another time when Ahmadinejad did speak at Columbia Lee Bolinger was
openly hostile toward the speaker ---
http://snarkybehavior.com/2007/09/24/thoughts-on-ahmadinejad-at-columbia/
I might point out that many vocal alumni of Columbia were openly appalled
that Ahmadinejad was ever invited to the campus of Columbia University ---
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-shmuley-boteach/columbia-disgraces-itself_b_65541.html
Iran is the leading state-sponsor of
terrorism, with government officials directly responsible for numerous terrorist
attacks ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-cant-whitewash-its-record-of-terror-1474234929?mod=djemMER
Hence political correctness is and never was a black
and white issue except at the very extremes such as inviting a bomb maker to
campus to demonstrate how to make pressure cooker bombs or inviting Ben Sahapiro
to speak at Depaul University.
But the latest predictable outrage is that
DePaul University has banned Shapiro from appearing on campus, under the
ludicrous and specious pretense of "security concerns." If there are
security concerns, neither Shapiro nor his admirers are causing them. As
Shapiro's sponsor, Young America's Foundation said, "Make no mistake,
any security concerns we face on campuses are 100 percent incited by the
censorious, intolerant left."
http://townhall.com/columnists/davidlimbaugh/2016/08/05/censorial-depaul-bans-conservative-ben-shapiro-n2201935?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=
Jensen Comment
The :intolerant left" includes most of Depaul's faculty as well as
students.
Ben Shapiro is not politically correct for campuses in the USA. He
favors capitalism in economics. This is like showing students how to make
pressure cooker bombs.
Banned From Setting Foot on Campus: Kiss Her Tenure Prospects Goodbye
With this scarlet letter hanging around her neck it's not likely she will ever
be allowed to teach students in the USA
"Kansas Professor on Leave After Using Racial Slur in Class," Time
Magazine, November 21, 2015 ---
http://time.com/4123543/kansas-professor-on-leave-after-using-racial-slur-in-class/?xid=newsletter-brief
. . .
But Amy Schumacher, a first-year doctoral student
who was in the class of nine white students and one black student, said most
“just shut down” after Quenette’s using the slur. Schumacher said she
believes Quenette “actively violated policies” during the discussion, hurt
students’ feelings — including the one black student, who left “devastated”
— and has a previous history of being unsympathetic to students.
Quenette is relieved of all teaching and service
responsibilities, university spokesman Joe Monaco said. He said
administrative leaves are often used “to address substantial disruptions to
the learning environment or concerns about individuals’ welfare” while
investigations are underway.
Quenette said she hopes to secure an attorney to
represent her.
She also said she believes academic freedom
protects her comments and that they were not discriminatory.
“I didn’t intend to offend anyone,” she said. “I
didn’t intend to hurt anyone. I didn’t direct my words at any individual or
group of people.”
Continued in article
Also see
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/11/22/university-kansas-professor-placed-on-leave-after-using-racial-slur-in-class/
Author (and Lawyer) Wendy Kaminer Defends Her Use Of A Racial Slur During
A Free Speech Panel ---
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/05/wendy-kaminer-racial-slur-free-speech_n_7521858.html
Library of Congress: Banned Books That Shaped America ---
http://www.bannedbooksweek.org/censorship/bannedbooksthatshapedamerica
"Closed Minds on Campus: Today’s student protesters start with
valuable observations, writes John H. McWhorter, but then they drift into a
mistaken idea of what a university—and even a society—should be," by John H.
McWhorter, The Wall Street Journal, November 27, 2015 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/closed-minds-on-campus-1448634626?alg=y
. . .
These protesters appear to miss how
Orwellian their terms often sound; the enraged indoctrination sounds like
something out of “1984,” not enlightenment. Then again, one can almost hear
the protesters responding, “Well, yeah, but we really are right!” They
assume that their perspective is a truth that brooks no morally conceivable
objection.
The question for today’s campuses has
become: What is considered unspeakable? Where do we draw the line? There are
indeed some truths that civilized people would not dispute: that women
should have the right to vote, that genocide is wrong. Critics who pretend
university culture is open to “free speech” about all ideas are being
disingenuous. These students aren’t so much trying to shut down free inquiry
as they are assuming that, on this topic, it has already happened. “Racism
is wrong,” they know—and we all agree. “Therefore, when it comes to that
which I find offensive as a person of color, civility and discussion are
beside the point.”
That second part is where these earnest
students go wrong. The idea that only the naive or the immoral would
question issues connected to something as broad and protean as race and
racism is hasty at best and anti-intellectual at worst. What qualifies as
discrimination? As cultural appropriation? As aggression? What is an
ethnicity? What does racial courtesy consist of, and for what reasons? These
are rich, difficult questions with no hard-and-fast answers.
Any insistence otherwise is religious. The
term is unavoidable here. When intelligent people openly declare that logic
applies only to the extent that it corresponds to doctrine and shoot down
serious questions with buzzwords and disdain, we are dealing with a faith.
As modern as these protests seem, in their way, they return the American
university to its original state as a divinity school—where exegesis of
sacred texts was sincerely thought of as intellection, with skepticism
treated as heresy.
The impression that race-related positions
are elementary tenets long resolved explains the “safe space” concept so
often bandied about at universities today. Commentators harrumph that
students who insist on this brand of safety are merely “whining,” but they
miss the point; these students assume that any views on race and racism
counter to theirs genuinely qualify as benighted and toxic. All of us seek
“safety” from genuinely rancid views—how many of us would stay at a party
where someone dominated the conversation with overtly racist bloviations?
These students have merely overextended the bounds of the conclusively
intolerable.
Another factor bolsters the mistaken
impression that these protests are founded on truth rather than opinion. One
may see the students as driven to a breaking point—with emotion naturally
creating some excesses—by endless abuse, erupting after decades of patience.
That narrative would implicitly justify the rage, profanity and perhaps even
aggression (according to a Nov. 14 article in the conservative Dartmouth
Review, a splinter group of black protesters at the university pushed a
white student against a wall yelling, “filthy white bitch!”, though the
university has said that it’s received no official reports of violence).
Dr. McWhorter teaches linguistics, American studies, philosophy and
music at Columbia University. His latest book is “The Language Hoax.”
Jensen Comment
Another aspect of living with the microaggression police is that African
Americans are exempted --- like the Black Live Matters protesters screaming out
profanities and "whities" in the Dartmouth Library. Microaggressions are not
banned entirely on campus; They're reserved exclusively for African Americans.
Black-clad protesters gathered in front of Dartmouth Hall, forming a crowd
roughly one hundred fifty strong.
“F*** you, you filthy white f***s!” “F*** you and your
comfort!” “F*** you, you racist s***!” These shouted epithets were the first
indication that many students had of the coming storm. The sign-wielding,
obscenity-shouting protesters proceeded through the usually quiet backwaters of
the library. They surged first through first-floor Berry, then up the stairs to
the normally undisturbed floors of the building, before coming back down to the
ground floor of Novack.
The Dartmouth Review, November 47, 2015 ---
http://www.dartreview.com/eyes-wide-open-at-the-protest/
Video:
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/justinholcomb/2015/11/17/could-you-quiet-down-please-im-trying-to-learn-n2081756?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=
Students and their sympathizer who
become theatrical about each and every unintended microaggression should listen
to Al Sharpton
If you play the theatrics too much, you get in the way
of your own cause.
Al Sharpton ---
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alsharpton366445.html
Jensen Comment
You can also go over the top where the theatrics are extremely counter
productive such as when students lock arms to block fire trucks and
ambulances on campus
Jane Fonda suggests this in one of her books admitting that she damaged her life
and her cause badly by pretending to fire an anti-aircraft gun in North Viet
Nam.
Patricia Walters wrote:
What do the students have to lose by making
these demands?
Jensen Comment
First and foremost these are the demands of only some students that have
promoted themselves as spokespersons for all students on campus. What is the
process that lets such a few students make such demands in the name of all
students? The more contentious the demands become the more active students who
do not agree will become and pretty soon we could have students on different
sides rioting against each other with the university officials caught in the
middle. And it could also result in lone wolf stalkings and threats made on
students by other students.
There's a lot at stake to lose if a few self-proclaimed dictators make silly
or contentious demands.
One thing the college loses is intellectual respect for even making some
demands such as stupidly demanding that the university violate the constitution
and state statutes by no longer being an equal opportunity employer due to
prejudicial hiring based upon race, creed, or color. That could result in
continual and expensive lawsuits by rejected candidates. It doesn't cost the
student leaders anything, but it could cost the university as a whole a whole
lot of money and respect.
Consider the following demand by Occidental College students:
Immediate demilitarization of Campus Safety,
which includes, but is not limited to, removal of bulletproof vests from
uniform, exclusion of military and external policy rhetoric from all
documents and daily discourse, and increased transparency and positive
direct connection to the student body
Consider the phrase "exclusion of military and external policy rhetoric from
all documents and daily discourse." Does this mean burning the history documents
and books in the campus library that make any reference to military events? Is
this a start of a long list of politically incorrect topics and vocabulary that
students decide cannot be mentioned on campus --- like maybe Woodrow Wilson,
George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson?
There are all sorts of externalities in terms of loss or reputation of
colleges and universities among taxpayers, alumni, and potential donors. Can't
you just hear state legislators quoting the silly or contentious demands of a
subset of radicalized students threatening to riot on state-supported campuses.
"Resignation at Yale," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
December 6, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/12/07/academic-center-yale-controversy-over-halloween-costumes-wont-teach-there-again?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=2743fe76df-DNU20151207&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-2743fe76df-197565045
. . .
Douglas Stone, a professor of physics at Yale who
organized last week's open letter, said via email that the resignation of
Christakis from teaching was a cause for great concern. "This is a very
disturbing development," he said. "Last year Erika Christakis's classes were
shopped by over 300 students and many who wished to take them were turned
away. She has received truly exceptional teaching evaluations. This year she
planned to teach additional sections to handle the demand. The attacks she
has received, not just on her ideas, but on her character and integrity,
have led to the decision not to teach …. Those who mounted the campaign
against her have significantly reduced educational choice for all Yale
undergrads."
Stone added that there was "real reason" to worry
about academic freedom at Yale. "Several undergraduates have told me in
conversation or by email that they feel scared to express their honest
opinions relating to current events that have raised racial issues because
of the likely negative and aggressive response of peers," he said. "In some
cases these were nonwhite students, who care deeply about racism and sexism,
but nonetheless support the sentiments expressed in our letter of support
for the Christakises. They have also claimed that their view is probably
held by the majority of undergrads; even if that is not true (and I don't
know how one can decide at the moment), it suggests that there are
substantial barriers to free exchange of views on these issues at Yale in
the current climate."
Among those expressing concern about the Christakis
announcement was Corey Robin, a professor of political science at Brooklyn
College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Robin is
a prominent voice of the academic left on Twitter.
He said that he wouldn't have been concerned if
Christakis had quit or been removed from her position in a residential
college, since that is primarily an administrative role.
More issues are raised, Robin wrote on Twitter, by
someone in a teaching position who feels unable to teach because of
political pressure over her ideas. "All the evidence suggests she is an
excellent, popular teacher; the only reason she is stepping down is because
of political views she has expressed in the public sphere," Robin wrote.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Some comments at the end of this article to me are particularly distressing
because they reveal the embedded hate of faculty.
Recall that Alan was on OJ Simpson's winning defense team
"Famous Harvard professor rips into 'tyrannical' student protesters,
saying they want 'superficial diversity'," by Abby Jackson, The Wall Street
Journal, November 17, 2015 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/alan-dershowitz-thinks-student-protesters-dont-want-true-diversity-in-colleges-2015-11
High-profile incidents of racial discrimination at
the University of Missouri have spurred students across the US to protest
racism on their own campuses.
And while many civil libertarians have lauded their
actions, Alan Dershowitz, a prominent Harvard Law School professor, has
ripped into these students for what he argues are hypocritical demands.
"The last thing these students want is diversity,"
Dershowitz told Business Insider.
"They may want superficial diversity, because for
them diversity is a code word for 'more of us.' They don't want more
conservatives, they don't want more white students, they don't want more
heterosexuals."
Dershowitz, a leading proponent of civil liberties
and a defense attorney who advised on the O.J. Simpson murder trial and a
number of other celebrity cases, was commenting on what he calls a dangerous
trend of "tyrannical students" on college campuses.
At a number of schools — including The University
of Missouri and Yale University — students have protested racism on campus
and called for the resignation of administration members who they claim are
creating a dangerous environment. And at Amherst College, students have
threatened to respond in a "radical manner" if their demands are not met.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment I spent two years in the CASBS think tank with Alan. He
most certainly is not conservative in economics or civil liberties.
Conclusion
What these radicalized students are losing is the respect of the public for our
colleges and universities, including intellectuals and scholars in the public
who truly despise and fear antics by the new generation of anti-establishment
activists who falsely claim they are speaking for all students on campus.
What is sad is that faculty who protest alongside the other students are
pressuring one or more colleagues to give up due process for job retention.
Jensen Comment
There is due process for "firing employees"
at universities. By threatening to protest and even close down a university the
students are placing enormous pressures on targeted faculty and administrators
to give up their due process rights in order to prevent protests, riots, and
campus shut downs. Students want all sorts of due process when it comes to
preventing their academic dismissal. But they want to deny
those rights to employees by threats and protests that force resignations in the
face of shutting down the universities with protests.
What is sad is that faculty who protest alongside the other students are
pressuring one or more colleagues to give up due process for job retention
Students at Occidental College demanded the
Immediate removal of President Veitch ---
http://www.oxy.edu/news/oxy-student-protest-updates
"Protests at Still More Campuses," Inside Higher Ed, November 17, 2015
---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/11/17/protests-still-more-campuses?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=9802823de8-DNU20151117&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-9802823de8-197565045
One controversial issue is that your score must be absolutely perfect in the
game of political correctness or "microaggression."
Unlike in baseball, one error gets you kicked out of the game.
All it takes is one innocent slip of the tongue or keyboard to earn your
lifetime scarlet letter
Mary Spellman, dean of students at Claremont McKenna College, resigned
after her comments in an email to a student prompted
protests and hunger strikes ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Facing-Protests-About-Racial/234191
Unhappy with a series of small concessions from the
administration, protesters at Yale University have released a new list of
demands that include firing people they don’t
like and giving their favored programs a budget
increase of at least $8 million a year.
http://dailycaller.com/2015/11/13/yale-protesters-demand-school-give-them-8-million-or-else/#ixzz3relcold8
Students at Occidental College who have occupied an
administration building this week have demanded that campus safety officers stop
wearing bulletproof vests ---
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/11/18/students-demand-no-bulletproof-vests-occidental/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social
Jensen Comment
This made me think back to my early days at Trinity University. An unarmed
campus security officer at nearby Our Lady of the Lake University was shot dead
in the chest late at night in a dormitory parking lot by one of San Antonio's
countless car thieves. If the officer had been wearing a bulletproof vest he
might have lived to be with his family the next day. Now our students want only
the killers to have bulletproof vests.
Hi Elliot,
Your research is too shallow. If you go to the Occidental College site
you find the following at
http://www.oxy.edu/news/oxy-student-protest-updates
Immediate demilitarization of Campus Safety,
which includes, but is not limited to,
removal of bulletproof vests
from uniform, exclusion of military and external policy rhetoric from
all documents and daily discourse, and increased transparency and
positive direct connection to the student body
Smith College Protesters Bar Journalists From
Covering Sit-In Unless They Support the Cause ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/smith-college-protesters-bar-journalists-from-covering-sit-in-unless-they-support-the-cause/106834?elq=46cf6e8cc18e4732b0d54a222e1e06cd&elqCampaignId=1900&elqaid=6971&elqat=1&elqTrackId=c828256ed86e4e7e9eaee73385a1dce0
Jensen Comment
This reminds me of those letters from friends who request that I write letters
of recommendation for their tenure and/or promotion candidacy but only if I
don't write anything negative. Recently I got a letter from a former colleague
requesting that I write a letter in support of his application for a job at
another university under the condition that I let him read the letter before
it's sent out.
Princeton University's president, under pressure
from African American student activists, said Thursday night that the school
would begin a process to consider expunging the legacy of former President
Woodrow Wilson from campus
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/princeton-university-agrees-weigh-erasing-woodrow-wilsons-name-n466796
Those coddled,
bullying undergrads shouting their demands for safer spaces, easier classes, and
additional racial set-asides are exactly what the campus faculty and
administrators deserve.
Bret Stephens, The Wall
Street Journal
http://www.wsj.com/articles/radical-parents-despotic-children-1448325901?mod=djemMER
Exterminating the Campus of Those Dreaded Conservatives
"Academia’s Rejection of Diversity," by Arthur C. Brooks, The New York Times,
October 30, 2015 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/31/opinion/academias-rejection-of-diversity.html?_r=1
Wasn't tenure intended originally to protect free speech dialog on campus ---
especially controversial issues?
How much power should we give to the politically correct police on campus"
Protesters Demand Firing Of Tenured Vanderbilt Law Professor Over Publication
Of Op-Ed ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/11/protesters-demand-firing-of-tenured-vanderbilt-law-professor-over-publication-of-op-ed.html
Jensen Comment
Carol Swain is one tough African American professor. She told the political
correctness faculty and student protesters to "grow up."
Students and their sympathizer who become theatrical about each and every
unintended microaggression should listen to Al Sharpton
If you play the theatrics too much, you get in the way
of your own cause.
Al Sharpton ---
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alsharpton366445.html
Jensen Comment You can also go over the top where the theatrics are extremely
counter productive such as when students lock arms to block fire trucks and
ambulances on campus
Jane Fonda suggests this in one of her books admitting that she damaged her life
and her cause badly by pretending to fire an anti-aircraft gun in North Viet
Nam.
All it takes is one innocent slip of the tongue or keyboard to earn your
lifetime scarlet letter
Mary Spellman, dean of students at Claremont McKenna
College, resigned after her comments in an email to a student prompted protests
and hunger strikes.
http://chronicle.com/article/Facing-Protests-About-Racial/234191
Complimenting a Chinese
student that she speaks English very well is an egregious microaggression.
You just know that nanoaggression is coming down the line. Make sure you smile
(or don’t smile) equally at all students passing by in the hall.
Glen Gray
Jensen Comment
Distracted, misbehaving children (including college students) aren’t learning
---
Eva Moskowitz ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-students-need-to-sit-up-and-pay-attention-1447373122?mod=djemMER
I wonder if
anybody has ever documented microagressions in The Bible and the Koran and other
great works of history?
Bob Jensen
These books should be banned and burned since they contain egregious
microaggressions --- Oops that
includes most of the books in the campus library like all those books in history
that used "he" to refer to a generic person..
Wasn't tenure intended originally to protect free speech dialog
on campus --- especially controversial issues?
How much power should we give to the politically correct police on campus"
Protesters Demand Firing Of Tenured Vanderbilt Law Professor Over Publication
Of Op-Ed ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/11/protesters-demand-firing-of-tenured-vanderbilt-law-professor-over-publication-of-op-ed.html
Jensen Comment
Carol Swain is one tough African American professor. She told the political
correctness faculty and student protesters to "grow up."
Hinkle: Crybaby nation ---
http://www.richmond.com/opinion/our-opinion/bart-hinkle/article_00ee8528-db06-54e6-bdc6-bd27d189cbc9.html
"The right to fright;
An obsession with safe spaces is not just bad for education: it also diminishes
worthwhile campus protests," The Economist, November 14, 2015 ---
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21678223-obsession-safe-spaces-not-just-bad-education-it-also-diminishes-worthwhile-campus?cid1=cust/ednew/n/bl/n/20151112n/owned/n/n/nwl/n/n/NA/n
. . .
Like many bad ideas, the notion of safe spaces at
universities has its roots in a good one. Gay people once used the term to
refer to bars and clubs where they could gather without fear, at a time when
many states still had laws against sodomy.
In the worst cases, though, an idea that began by
denoting a place where people could assemble without being prosecuted has
been reinvented by students to serve as a justification for shutting out
ideas. At Colorado College, safety has been invoked by a student group to
prevent the screening of a film celebrating the Stonewall riots which
downplays the role of minorities in the gay-rights movement. The same
reasoning has led some students to request warnings before colleges expose
them to literature that deals with racism and violence. People as different
as Condoleezza Rice, a former secretary of state, and Bill Maher, a
satirist, have been dissuaded from giving speeches on campuses, sometimes on
grounds of safety.
What makes this so objectionable is that there are
plenty of things on American campuses that really do warrant censure from
the university. Administrators at the University of Oklahoma managed not to
notice that one of its fraternities, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, had cheerily sung
a song about hanging black people from a tree for years, until a video of
them doing so appeared on the internet. At the University of Missouri, whose
president resigned on November 9th, administrators did a poor job of
responding to complaints of unacceptable behaviour on campus—which included
the scattering of balls of cotton about the place, as a put-down to black
students, and the smearing of faeces in the shape of a swastika in a
bathroom.
Distinguishing between this sort of thing and
obnoxious Halloween costumes ought not to be a difficult task. But by
equating smaller ills with bigger ones, students and universities have made
it harder, and diminished worthwhile protests in the process. The University
of Missouri episode shows how damaging this confusion can be: some activists
tried to prevent the college’s own newspaper from covering their
demonstration, claiming that to do so would have endangered their safe
space, thereby rendering a reasonable protest absurd.
Fifty years ago student radicals agitated for
academic freedom and the right to engage in political activities on campus.
Now some of their successors are campaigning for censorship and increased
policing by universities of student activities. The supporters of these
ideas on campus are usually described as radicals. They are, in fact, the
opposite.
Black-clad protesters gathered in front of Dartmouth Hall, forming a crowd
roughly one hundred fifty strong.
“F*** you, you filthy white f***s!” “F*** you and your
comfort!” “F*** you, you racist s***!” These shouted epithets were the first
indication that many students had of the coming storm. The sign-wielding,
obscenity-shouting protesters proceeded through the usually quiet backwaters of
the library. They surged first through first-floor Berry, then up the stairs to
the normally undisturbed floors of the building, before coming back down to the
ground floor of Novack.
The Dartmouth Review, November 47, 2015 ---
http://www.dartreview.com/eyes-wide-open-at-the-protest/
Video:
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/justinholcomb/2015/11/17/could-you-quiet-down-please-im-trying-to-learn-n2081756?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=
Students and their sympathizer who
become theatrical about each and every unintended microaggression should listen
to Al Sharpton
If you play the theatrics too much, you get in the way
of your own cause.
Al Sharpton ---
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alsharpton366445.html
Jensen Comment
You can also go over the top where the theatrics are extremely counter
productive such as when students lock arms to block fire trucks and
ambulances on campus
Jane Fonda suggests this in one of her books admitting that she damaged her life
and her cause badly by pretending to fire an anti-aircraft gun in North Viet
Nam.
"University
of Minnesota Rejects 9/11 Remembrance Because it Might Incite Racism," by
Christine Rousselle, Townhall, November 12, 2015
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/christinerousselle/2015/11/12/university-of-minnesota-rejects-911-remembrance-because-it-might-incite-racism-n2079788?utm_source=thdailypm&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm&newsletterad=
Here's
another instance
of political correctness on a college campus going a
smidge too far, courtesy of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities: A
proposed resolution to
recognize the 9/11
terrorist attacks on campus each year was rejected by the Minnesota Student
Association as it may potentially violate a "safe space" on campus.
Continued in article
"The right to fright;
An obsession with safe spaces is not just bad for education: it also diminishes
worthwhile campus protests," The Economist, November 14, 2015 ---
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21678223-obsession-safe-spaces-not-just-bad-education-it-also-diminishes-worthwhile-campus?cid1=cust/ednew/n/bl/n/20151112n/owned/n/n/nwl/n/n/NA/n
. . .
Like many bad ideas, the notion of safe spaces at
universities has its roots in a good one. Gay people once used the term to
refer to bars and clubs where they could gather without fear, at a time when
many states still had laws against sodomy.
In the worst cases, though, an idea that began by
denoting a place where people could assemble without being prosecuted has
been reinvented by students to serve as a justification for shutting out
ideas. At Colorado College, safety has been invoked by a student group to
prevent the screening of a film celebrating the Stonewall riots which
downplays the role of minorities in the gay-rights movement. The same
reasoning has led some students to request warnings before colleges expose
them to literature that deals with racism and violence. People as different
as Condoleezza Rice, a former secretary of state, and Bill Maher, a
satirist, have been dissuaded from giving speeches on campuses, sometimes on
grounds of safety.
What makes this so objectionable is that there are
plenty of things on American campuses that really do warrant censure from
the university. Administrators at the University of Oklahoma managed not to
notice that one of its fraternities, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, had cheerily sung
a song about hanging black people from a tree for years, until a video of
them doing so appeared on the internet. At the University of Missouri, whose
president resigned on November 9th, administrators did a poor job of
responding to complaints of unacceptable behaviour on campus—which included
the scattering of balls of cotton about the place, as a put-down to black
students, and the smearing of faeces in the shape of a swastika in a
bathroom.
Distinguishing between this sort of thing and
obnoxious Halloween costumes ought not to be a difficult task. But by
equating smaller ills with bigger ones, students and universities have made
it harder, and diminished worthwhile protests in the process. The University
of Missouri episode shows how damaging this confusion can be: some activists
tried to prevent the college’s own newspaper from covering their
demonstration, claiming that to do so would have endangered their safe
space, thereby rendering a reasonable protest absurd.
Fifty years ago student radicals agitated for
academic freedom and the right to engage in political activities on campus.
Now some of their successors are campaigning for censorship and increased
policing by universities of student activities. The supporters of these
ideas on campus are usually described as radicals. They are, in fact, the
opposite.
Jensen Comment
And that is an illustration of how campus leaders are becoming gutless in
protecting free speech that is not politically correct. The worst thing is the
power that a single crazy has in turning the campus upside down. Students gather
for protests when a crazy, possibly not even a student, throws a noose the the
lawn or a redneck pickup drives through campus late at night showing a
Confederate Flag. The football coach, following a secret ballot vote among
players, who can and cannot be the next politically correct President of the
University of Missouri.
"Sociology and Other 'Meathead'
Majors: Archie Bunker was right to be skeptical of his
son-in-law's opinions," by Harvey Mansfield, The Wall
Street Journal, May 31, 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304520804576345632061434312.html?_nocache=1306940719500#&mg=com-wsj
In this happy season of college graduations, students and parents will
probably not be reflecting on the poor choices those students made in
selecting their courses and majors. In colleges today, choice is in and
requirements are out. Only the military academies, certain Great-Books
colleges and MIT (and its like) want to tell students what they must
study. Most colleges offer a cornucopia of choices, and most of the
choices are bad.
The bad choices are more attractive because they are easy. Picking not
quite at random, let's take sociology. That great American democrat
Archie Bunker used to call his son-in-law "Meathead" for his fatuous
opinions, and Meathead was a graduate student in sociology. A graduate
student in sociology is one who didn't get his fill of jargonized
wishful thinking as an undergraduate. Such a person will never fail to
disappoint you. But sociology has close competitors in other social
sciences (including mine, political science) and in the humanities.
Part of the problem is the political correctness responsible for "Gender
Studies," a politicized major that has its little echoes in many other
departments, and that never fails to mislead.
More fundamental, however, is the division within the university today,
in America and everywhere, between science and the humanities. Science
deals with facts but the humanities also have to deal with values. This
is where the problem of bad choices arises. We think that one can have
knowledge of fact but not of values—the famous "fact/value" distinction.
Science has knowledge of fact, and this makes it rigorous and hard. The
humanities have their facts bent or biased by values, and this makes
them lax and soft. This fact—or is it a value?—gives confidence and
reputation to scientists within the university. Everyone respects them,
and though science is modest because there is always more to learn,
scientists sometimes strut and often make claims for extra resources.
Some of the rest of us glumly concede their superiority and try to sell
our dubious wares in the street, like gypsies. We are the humanists.
Others try to imitate the sciences and call themselves "social
scientists." The best imitators of scientists are the economists. Among
social scientists they rank highest in rigor, which means in
mathematics. They also rank highest in boastful pretension, and you can
lose more money listening to them than by trying to read books in
sociology. Just as Gender Studies taints the whole university with its
sexless fantasies, so economists infect their neighbors with the
imitation science they peddle. (Game theorists, I'm talking about you.)
Now the belief that there can be no knowledge of values means that all
values are equally unsupported, which means that in the university all
departments are equal. All courses are also equal; no requirements can
be justified as fundamental or more important. Choice is king, except
that there can be no king.
Continued in article
Mr. Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard, is also a
senior fellow of Stanford's Hoover Institution.
Bob Jensen's threads on political
correctness are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
"Academic Rot," by Walter E.
Williams, Townhall, April 23, 2011 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2011/04/20/academic_rot/page/full/
Jensen Comment
Sometimes Professor Williams is a bit over the top, but I still admire
his academic honesty in a world of political correctness. I respect him
more than I respect David Horowitz.
Bob Jensen's threads on political
correctness are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
"Wisconsin professor under
investigation for promoting recall of GOP Senators," by Ed Morrissey,
Hot Air, May 7, 2011 ---
http://hotair.com/wisconsin-fleebagger-teachers/2011/05/07/wisconsin-professor-under-investigation-for-promoting-recall-of-gop-senators/
Consider the
University of Wisconsin
officially shocked, shocked! to
discover that one of their professors politicized his classroom to
encourage the recall of Republican state Senators that backed Gov.
Scott Walker’s public-employee union reforms. Color the rest of us
less shocked that the professor in question, Stephen Richards,
couldn’t bother to get the details right on the law before
instructing his students how to recall those who backed it. First,
Green Bay’s WFRV reports this morning that the university has
released details of the investigation that strongly suggest that
Richards will face disciplinary action (via Tim R)
. . .
Not everyone on
campus is impressed with the investigation. One student told WFRV
that every instructor had pushed their viewpoints on the controversy
in the classroom, which means that instead of a Death on the
Nile whodunit, UW may be looking more at a Murder on the
Orient Express conclusion. Other students disagreed, saying
Richards went out of his way to bully people on the issue in the
classroom setting. Richards denies having done anything
inappropriate, saying that budget matters relate directly to his
coursework, but “regrets” using classroom time to discuss the
recalls.
UW officials
might want to look into Richards’ competence as well as his
judgment. According to
the audio, Richards materially
misrepresented the bill:
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on political
correctness in the classroom ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
This little disparity tells you all you really need
to know about the intellectual orientation of academic faculties and their
disrespect for conservative students. For the failure of any academic department
at Brandeis to sponsor the talk of a well-known university critic who has
written five books presenting a conservative view response to authors like
Schrecker was not an oversight. My student hosts had approached these or similar
departments and asked them to sponsor my talk and been rebuffed. Nor is this an
unusual occurrence. I have spoken at roughy 400 universities in the last 20
years and at only two have I been invited by members of the faculty, and only
one by a department. This is one – and only one -- of the reasons it grieves me
to see conservatives refer to their antagonists, whose deepest passions are
censorious and totalitarian as “liberals.”
David Horowitz, Townhall, October 22, 2010
http://townhall.com/columnists/DavidHorowitz/2010/10/22/schrecker_and_me_at_brandeis
This little
disparity tells you all you really need to know about the intellectual
orientation of academic faculties and their disrespect for conservative
students. For the failure of any academic department at Brandeis to
sponsor the talk of a well-known university critic who has written five
books presenting a conservative view response to authors like Schrecker
was not an oversight. My student hosts had approached these or similar
departments and asked them to sponsor my talk and been rebuffed. Nor is
this an unusual occurrence. I have spoken at roughy 400 universities in
the last 20 years and at only two have I been invited by members of the
faculty, and only one by a department. This is one – and only one -- of
the reasons it grieves me to see conservatives refer to their
antagonists, whose deepest passions are censorious and totalitarian as
“liberals.”
David Horowitz, Townhall, October 22, 2010
http://townhall.com/columnists/DavidHorowitz/2010/10/22/schrecker_and_me_at_brandeis
What It’s Like to Be Named to a Watch List of ‘Anti-American’
Professors ---
http://www.chronicle.com/article/What-It-s-Like-to-Be-Named/238486?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=410fba0f33354e80aa388d560ba42a66&elq=309c0e331f384e268563f56a0255ec34&elqaid=11596&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=4577
Jensen Comment
I'm opposed to this and similar watch lists, although I suspect they're legal if
they are based upon freely available public information (not just
unsubstantiated tips). One problem is that site does not appear to offer, in the
spirit of academic scholarship, opportunities to for professors on the list to
comment on their inclusions on the watch list.
Being against gun carrying on campus is not necessarily "anti-American." The
definition of "anti-American" is poorly defined for this watch list.
Most (all?) professors on the list are exercising their constitutional
rights, although some may be pushing the bounds of AAUP guidelines if they bring
their politics inappropriately into their classrooms. For example, it might be
more appropriate to bring political controversies into a course on Russian
history than a topology course in mathematics.
One way to fight this list is to spam it with lies to a point where the
organizers are totally swamped. Joe McCarthy got in trouble in his insane
"Communist" sweep of government when he commenced to slander good and powerful
folks who fought back like Senator Margaret Chase Smith from Maine ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy
For all the fears about David Horowitz’s
Academic Bill of Rights, the proposal ended up
going nowhere in state legislatures last year. But in Pennsylvania, the House of
Representatives voted to create a special legislative committee to investigate
the state of academic freedom and whether students who hold unpopular views need
more protection. The special committee held hearings — amid charges and
countercharges from Horowitz, his allies, college presidents, faculty groups and
others.
Scott Jaschik, "Who Won the Battle of Pennsylvania?" Inside Higher Ed,
November 16, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/16/tabor
This is great material for a Harvard Business School Leadership,
Management, and Ethics Case
Harvey Mansfield is the William R. Kenan,
Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has taught
since 1962 ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Mansfield
F**k Up That Professor Mansfield!
And to think it was a questionable comment of women that got this President of
Harvard Fired
It seems like conservative men had a better case, at least one man
"White House economist: 'F--- up' conservative prof 'I was astounded that the
president of Harvard would stoop to such tactics'," WorldNetDaily,
December 6, 2009 ---
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=118187
According to a university colleague, former
president of Harvard and current White House economist Larry Summers once
asked for help to "f--- up" one of the school's conservative professors.
Summers' colleague, Cornel West, is a radical race
relations instructor who is now a professor at Princeton after departing
Harvard in the wake of a dispute with Summers. Obama named West, whom he has
called a personal friend, to the Black Advisory Council of his presidential
campaign. West was a key point man between Obama's campaign and the black
community.
In his recently released memoirs, "Brother West:
Living and Loving Out Loud," West claims that Summers invited West into his
office and asked him to help undermine Harvard government professor Harvey
Mansfield, who had professed conservative views.
"Help me f--- him up," Summers reportedly said to
West without explaining further.
West writes, "For my part, I was astounded that the
President of Harvard would stoop to such tactics."
West further related the details of the alleged
encounter in a recent interview with Amy Goodman, host of the far-left
Democracy Now
Internet
television network.
Said West: "And as soon as I walked into the
office, [Summers] starts using profanity about Harvey Mansfield. I said,
'No, Harvey Mansfield is conservative, sometimes reactionary, but he's my
dear brother.' We had just had debates at Harvard. Twelve hundred people
showed up. He was against affirmative action; I was for it. That was fine.
Harvey Mansfield and I go off and have a drink after, because we have a
respect, but deep, deep philosophical and ideological disagreement. He was
using profanity, so I had to defend Harvey Mansfield."
"Wait, so you're saying Lawrence Summers was using
profanity?" Goodman asked.
Continued West: "Larry Summers using profanity
about, you know, 'help me 'F' so and so up.' No, I don't function like that.
Maybe he thought that just as a black man, I like to use profanity. I'm not
a puritan. I don't use it myself. I have partners who do."
In response to West's claimed meeting with Summers,
Mansfield told WND, "Larry Summers was not out to get me."
"I was not present at the famous interview between
him and Cornel West, but in my opinion (Summers) merely used my name in a
clumsy attempt to cajole Cornel West into behaving more like a professor,
less like a celebrity," said Mansfield.
"Larry Summers was doing many good things at
Harvard before his enemies there succeeded in ousting him," Mansfield added.
Neither Summers nor West immediately returned WND
e-mail and
phone requests for comment.
Mansfield is well-known for his opposition to grade
inflation at Harvard, which he has publicly blamed in part on affirmative
action. His views led to student protests and a well-attended debate with
West.
Mansfield also defended President Bush's use of
executive powers and has been
criticized by some leading feminists for his views on gender roles. He has
made statements that men and women have some different societal roles and
wrote a book, "Manliness," in which he bemoaned the loss of the virtue of
"manliness" in a "gender neutral" society.
Summers, meanwhile, continues to teach at Harvard
but lost his position as president in part after a public feud in which West
accused him of racism. Summers serves as director of the White House's
National Economic Council.
West served as an adviser on Louis Farrakhan's
Million Man March and is a personal friend of Farrakhan. He authored two
books on race with Henry Louis Gates Jr., who last summer was at the center
of controversy after Obama remarked on the Harvard professor's arrest.
Continued in article
College campuses display a striking uniformity of thought
Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield once famously advised a conservative
colleague to wait until he had tenure and only then to "hoist the Jolly Roger."
But few professors are getting around to hoisting the Jolly Roger at all. Either
they don't have a viewpoint that is different from their colleagues, or they've
decided that if they are going to remain at one place for several decades,
they'd rather just get along. Is tenure to blame for the unanimity of thinking
in American universities? It's hard to tell. But shouldn't the burden of proof
be on the people who want jobs for life?
Naomi Schafer Riley, "Tenure and Academic Freedom: College campuses display a
striking uniformity of thought," The Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2009
---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124571593663539265.html#mod=djemEditorialPage
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
"Why I don’t like Larry Summers,"
by Massimo Pigliucci, Rationally Speaking, July 22, 2011 ---
http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-i-dont-like-larry-summers.html
I have to admit to a
profound dislike for former Harvard President and former Obama
(and Clinton) advisor Larry Summers. Besides the fact that, at
least going by a number of reports of people who have known him,
he can only be characterized as a dick, he represents precisely
what is wrong with a particularly popular mode of thinking in
this country and, increasingly, in the rest of the world.
Lawrence was famously forced to resign as president of Harvard
in 2006 because of a no-confidence vote by the faculty (wait,
academics still have any say in how universities are run? Who
knew) because of a variety of reasons, including his conflict
with academic star Cornel West, financial conflict of interests
regarding his dealings with economist Andrei Shleifer, and
particularly his remarks to the effect that perhaps the scarcity
of women in science and engineering is the result of innate
intellectual differences (for a critical analysis of that
particular episode see Cornelia Fine’s
Delusions of Gender and the
corresponding
Rationally Speaking podcast).
Now I
have acquired yet another reason to dislike Summers, while
reading Debra Satz’s
Why Some Things Should not Be for Sale:
The Moral Limits of Markets,
which I highly recommend to my libertarian friends, as much as I
realize of course that it will be entirely wasted on them. The
book is a historical and philosophical analysis of ideas about
markets, and makes a very compelling case for why thinking that
“the markets will take care of it” where “it” is pretty much
anything of interest to human beings is downright idiotic (as
well as profoundly unethical).
But
I’m not concerned here with Satz’s book per se, as much as with
the instance in which she discusses for her purposes, a memo
written by Summers when he was chief economist of the World Bank
(side note to people who still don’t think we are in a
plutocracy: please simply make the effort to track Summers’
career and his influence as an example, or check
this short video by one of my
favorite philosophers, George Carlin). The memo was intended for
internal WB use only, but it caused a public uproar when the,
surely not left-wing, magazine The Economist leaked it to
the public. Here is an extract from the memo (emphasis mine):
“Just between you and me,
shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the
dirty industries to the less developed countries? I can think of
three reasons:
1. The measurement of the
costs of health-impairing pollution depends on the foregone
earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point
of view a given amount of health-impairing pollution should be
done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the
country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic
behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country
is impeccable and we should face up to that.
2. The costs of pollution
are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of
pollution probably have very low cost ... Only the lamentable
facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable
industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit
transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world-welfare
enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.
3. The demand for a clean
environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have
very high income elasticity ... Clearly trade in goods that
embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing.
The problem with the
arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution
in least developed countries (intrinsic rights to certain goods,
social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be
turned around and used more or less effectively against every
Bank proposal for liberalization.”
Now, pause for a minute, go
back to the top of the memo, and read it again. I suggest that
if you find nothing disturbing about it, your empathic circuitry
needs a major overhaul or at the very least a serious tuneup.
But it’s interesting to consider why.
As both The Economist
(who called the memo “crass”) and Satz herself note, the
economic logic of the memo is indeed impeccable. If one’s only
considerations are economic in nature, it does make perfect
sense for less developed countries to accept (for a — probably
low — price) the waste generated by richer countries, for which
in turn it makes perfect sense to pay a price to literally get
rid of their shit.
And
yet, as I mentioned, the leaking of the memo was accompanied by
an outcry similar to the one generated by the equally infamous “Ford
Pinto memo” back in 1968. Why?
Here I actually have a take that is somewhat different from,
though complementary to, that of Satz. For her, there are three
ethical objections that can be raised to the memo: first, she
maintains that there is unequal vulnerability of the parties
involved in the bargain. That is, the poor countries are in a
position of marked disadvantage and are easy for the rich ones
to exploit. Second, the less developed countries likely suffer
from what she calls weak agency, since they tend to be run by
corrupt governments whose actions are not in the interest of the
population at large (whether the latter isn’t also true of
American plutocracy is, of course, a matter worth pondering).
Third, the bargain is likely to result in an unacceptable degree
of harm to a number of individuals (living in the poor
countries) who are not going to simultaneously enjoy any of the
profits generated from the “exchange.”
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on the economic
collapse and jobless recovery ---
http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-i-dont-like-larry-summers.html
"Professors to Koch Brothers: Take
Your Green (Money) Back No one ever questions George Soros money, but
apparently this $1.5 million gift violates academic freedom," by
Donald D. Luskin, The Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2011 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304520804576341343051176086.html#mod=djemEditorialPage_t
Times are tough for
state-funded colleges like Florida State University. After four
years of budget trimming, FSU now faces an additional $19 million in
cuts and a $40 million deficit. So it's an inopportune moment to
raise a stink over private donations of $1.5 million made three
years ago.
But that's just what
two FSU professors—Ray Bellamy of the College of Medicine and Kent
Miller, professor emeritus of psychology—did earlier this month in
an op-ed in the Tallahassee Democrat, arguing that the donations are
"seriously damaging to academic freedom." The piece set off a
firestorm of warring newspaper editorials, blog posts and online
petitions.
What's the beef?
Like many large private gifts, the $1.5 million to FSU was given to
endow programs in a designated subject specified by the donors. The
professors' problem in this case is the subject, the strings
attached, and, most important, who the donors are.
The subject being
endowed, as described by the two protesting professors, is the
"political ideology of free markets and diminished government
regulation." That's an inflammatory way to describe a program which,
according to its founding documents, is to study "the foundations of
prosperity, social progress, and human well-being." Such a program
would seem to fit right into its home at FSU's Stavros Center for
the Advancement of Free Enterprise and Economic Education, which was
founded in 1988.
Then there's the
donors. One of the donors, according to the two professors, is known
for his "efforts to influence public policy, elections, taxes,
environmental issues, unions, regulations, etc."
Whom might they be
referring to? Certainly not George Soros—there's never an objection
to that billionaire's donations, which always tend toward the
political left. No, it's Charles and David Koch, owners of Koch
Industries. With revenue estimated at about $100 billion, the energy
and chemicals conglomerate is America's second-largest privately
held company. The Koch brothers tend to give to right-leaning and
libertarian causes. Koch money was instrumental, for example, in
founding the Cato Institute and the Libertarian Party.
As for the strings
attached, there's really only one of any substance. An advisory
board, selected by the Koch brothers' charitable foundation in
consultation with the FSU economics department, reviews and approves
professors chosen for the program before funding is released.
A story two weeks
ago in the St. Petersburg Times claimed that "Koch rejected nearly
60 percent of the faculty's suggestions" in the first round of
hiring in 2009. But according to FSU President Eric Barron in a
subsequent op-ed for the same newspaper, what really happened was
that the board—two of whose three members are themselves FSU
faculty—approved for further interviews 16 out of 50 faculty
suggestions, which had been culled by faculty from 500 applicants.
Neither of the two professors ultimately hired was from among the
16, and the board was fine with that.
But the left won't
be satisfied as long as the Kochs are involved. An editorial in last
weeks' St. Petersburg Times called FSU "For Sale University."
Progress Florida, a leftist online organizing group opposing the
Koch-funded program, is pushing a petition claiming that FSU has
agreed to "sell off the hiring decisions of the university's
economics department to a radical ideologue." The ultimate aim,
according to Progress Florida? To turn it into an "incubator for
extremist propaganda."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
George Soros has given a lot of money to liberal causes, including those
in universities. However, I don't know that he's ever attached strings
to the extent that the Koch Brothers wrapped up this proposed gift to
the Economics Department of Florida State University. Soros really
doesn't have to since he can be assured that a liberal faculty will
carry out his bidding without being asked to do so with ribbons and
bows.
FSU will do the right thing if it turns
down this Koch gift. But principles have their limits. This gift just is
not big enough for a sell out.
Since this is a relatively small amount of
endowment it seems to me to be a no-brainer --- tell Koch "Thanks but no
thanks."
It seems to me that it would be a tougher decision if this $1.5 million
strings-attached gift was accompanied by a $1 billion cash gift to the
FSU general scholarship fund with no strings attached to the $1 billion.
Think of the amount of good FSU could do with $1 billion added to the
general scholarship fund. Heck, I'd even let Glenn Beck teach a couple
courses for $1 billion dedicated poor and middle income family
scholarships as long as we don't force students to take Beck's courses.
Than again . . . a billion is a Billion is a BILLION! Maybe we could at
least give the student applicants a choice about having to take Beck's
two courses along with getting a totally free undergraduate and/or
graduate degree..
My point is that most of us have our
price, and $1.5 million is not enough for buying academic freedom.
However, for an added $1 billion some compromises might be considered.
As the saying goes:(paraphrased from a George Bernard Shaw quotation)
"Now that we've settled the
principle of the thing, let's negotiate a price."
If you want to debate principle, suppose that the $1 billion has only
one string attached --- it must be spent of Seminole Football. Smart
folks would begin to figure how many thousands of student grounds
keepers could be kept busy in and around the Bobby Bowden Stadium if
they were on full-ride academic assistantships. They could pluck the
Japanese beetles off a million climbing roses daily on the stadium
walls.
As the saying goes: (paraphrased from a George Bernard Shaw quotation)
"Now that we've established what you
are, let's negotiate the price."
Are the Canadian critics being too kind
and gentle on themselves?
"Have Canadian Law Schools Become 'Psychotic Kindergartens'?"
Inside Higher Ed, June 7, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/07/qt#229422
Canadian
bloggers have been buzzing in the last week about a harsh critique
of the country's law schools, which are compared to "psychotic
kindergartens" in a journal article published by Robert Martin, a
retired law professor at the University of Western Ontario. The
article was published last year in the journal Interchange,
but has only recently been the topic of debate. The article portrays
law schools as politically correct and focused on obscure issues.
Martin closes his piece by suggesting that Canada's law schools all
be shut down and turned over to the homeless as a place to live --
thus in Martin's view solving multiple social problems at the same
time. The article is available only to subscribers of the journal,
and while its focus is law schools, it isn't much more kind to the
rest of the country's universities. "Each fall, a horde of
illiterate, ignorant cretins enters Canada's universities. A few
years later, they all move on, just as illiterate, just as ignorant
and rather more cretinous, but now armed with bits of paper, which
most of them are probably not able to read, called degrees," he
writes. The Canadian legal blog
SLAW features a defense of legal education
in the country and criticism of Martin's views.
Our Compassless Colleges: What Are Students Really Not
Learning" ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Berkowitz
Tom Tancredo’s speech
at UNC tonight was disrupted multiple times and from what I understand may have
never even began. Several immature children who are students at the university
ran up to the front of the room when Tancredo entered and held up a banner and
began chanting over and over not allowing him to speak. A police officer
eventually removed them and then several members of the audience began getting
belligerent and shouting profanities at Tancredo. Ironically, they did all of
this under the guise of free speech, claiming it was their First Amendment right
to continue preventing Tancredo from speaking. Evidently free speech to them is
only important when it’s speech they agree with and Tancredo’s First Amendment
rights don’t matter. Don’t be surprised by this, however. Incidents like these
go on all the time at college campuses.
Bane Windlow, "Leftist Activists Disrupt Tancredo Speech at UNC,"
Carolina Politics Online, April 14, 2009 ---
http://www.carolinapoliticsonline.com/2009/04/14/leftist-activists-disrupt-tancredo-speech-at-unc/
"Message from the Chancellor: Free
Speech at Carolina, UNC News, April 15, 2009 ---
http://uncnews.unc.edu/news/campus-and-community/message-from-the-chancellor-free-speech-at-carolina.html
I want to express
how disappointed I am in what happened last night when former
Congressman Tom Tancredo wasn't able to speak when a protest got out
of hand, and our Department of Public Safety had to take action.
Congressman Tancredo felt threatened and left without making his
remarks.
Mr. Tancredo was
scheduled to speak about immigration. We expect protests about
controversial subjects at Carolina. That's part of our culture. But
we also pride ourselves on being a place where all points of view
can be expressed and heard. There's a way to protest that respects
free speech and allows people with opposing views to be heard. Here
that's often meant that groups protesting a speaker have displayed
signs or banners, silently expressing their opinions while the
speaker had his or her say. That didn't happen last night.
On behalf of our
University community, I called Mr. Tancredo today to apologize for
how he was treated. In addition, our Department of Public Safety is
investigating this incident. They will pursue criminal charges if
any are warranted. Our Division of Student Affairs is also
investigating student involvement in the protest. If that
investigation determines sufficient evidence, participating students
could face Honor Court proceedings.
Carolina's tradition
of free speech is a fundamental part of what has made this place
special for more than 200 years. Let's recommit ourselves to that
ideal.
Holden Thorpe
Controversial humanist and bioethicist Leon
Kass delivers Jefferson Lecture,
warning that, like the sciences, the humanities seem to have lost their soul.
"Tough Love for the Humanities," by
Serena Golden, Inside Higher Ed, May 22, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/22/kass
While he described
himself as “stunned” to be chosen as this year’s Jefferson Lecturer,
Leon Kass was hardly apologetic. The University of Chicago professor
is best known for the years he spent as chair of President Bush’s
Council on Bioethics, and he was invited to give the lecture last
fall by the then-chairman of the National Endowment for the
Humanities, Bruce Cole, himself twice appointed by President Bush.
But Kass -- whose selection was not made public until March 23, two
months into the Obama administration -- dismissed the idea that it
might be in any way odd for him to deliver the first Jefferson
Lecture in the age of Obama.
“My view of the
humanities,” he told Inside Higher Ed, “has nothing to do
with whose administration it is.”
The Jefferson Lecture
is sponsored by the NEH, which describes it as "the highest honor
the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual
achievement in the humanities." And in his lecture, “’Searching for
an Honest Man’: Reflections of an Unlicensed Humanist” -- delivered
Thursday night at Washington’s Warner Theatre -- Kass summed up his
philosophy by saying that “[t]he search for our humanity, always
necessary, yet never more urgent, is best illuminated by the
treasured works of the humanities….”
But Kass did not come
to Washington to defend the humanities; far from it. In his speech,
Kass argued that we only benefit from studying the humanities if we
do so “in search of the good, the true, and the beautiful” -- and
that most institutions of higher learning today are teaching nearly
the opposite.
Kass’s reservations about humanistic studies
mirror his well-known
reservations about scientific advances,
and his lecture drew repeated parallels between the two, describing
how his early career and studies led him to his current beliefs
about both.
In 1965, having
completed an M.D. at the University of Chicago and while working on
a Ph.D in biochemistry at Harvard University, Kass -- along with his
wife, Amy -- spent a summer doing civil rights work in Mississippi.
The experience forced him to drastically rethink his world view: “A
man of the left, I had unthinkingly held the Enlightenment view of
the close connection between intellectual and moral virtue:
education and progress in science and technology would overcome
superstition, poverty, and misery, allowing human beings to become…
morally superior creatures.”
But “the uneducated,
poor black farmers” he met that summer “seemed to display more
integrity, decency, and strength of character, and less
self-absorption and self-indulgence, than did many of my high-minded
Harvard friends who shared my progressive opinions.”
This cognitive dissonance, Kass said, was
exacerbated by his readings: Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and
Sciences, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and C.S.
Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. His concerns about education,
and about scientific progress in particular, led him, in 1970, to
trade his scientific career for one in the humanities; he wanted to
study "not the hidden parts of the human being," in the manner of
the sciences, but "the manifest activities of the whole" -- for in
Kass's view,
the great failure of the modern sciences is
their refusal to define a human being as anything beyond the precise
sum of his physical parts.
In his ensuing career
as a humanist -- besides his years on the President’s Council on
Bioethics, Kass has been, since 1976, a professor of humanities at
the University of Chicago, where he is currently the Addie Clark
Harding Professor in the College and the Committee on Social
Thought; he is also Hertog Fellow at the American Enterprise
Institute -- Kass became known for his misgivings about scientific
and technological advances. And while in his speech he referred
frequently to those misgivings, his message was about the
humanities.
For while the sciences
have lost touch with their humanistic origins, Kass said, the
humanities have forgotten their relationship “to the ‘divinities’ --
the inquiry into matters metaphysical and ultimately theological.”
Kass argued that it is
the job of the humanities to address “questions of ultimate concern:
the character and source of the cosmic whole and the place and work
of the human being within it.” Unfortunately, the modern “direction
of humanistic learning” has “culminat[ed] in a cynical tendency to
disparage the great ideas and to deconstruct the great works that we
have inherited from ages past….”
This trend, Kass said,
is not only antithetical to the proper mission of the humanities,
but unfair to college students, most of whom “are in fact looking
for a meaningful life or listening for a summons.”
As he told Inside
Higher Ed, “There are people who would love to study English
literature -- but they go to the English department, where, obsessed
with theory, they’re not teaching the books the way the students
want to read them.
"We live in a world in
which very few people have anything positive to say; there's a kind
of intellectual chaos that surrounds us. The last thing young people
need is cynicism and a belief that the truth about these matters is
whatever you want it to be. They deserve the best help that the best
books can offer them, the best thinkers."
In the conclusion of
his lecture, Kass argued for a return to his own “old-fashioned”
brand of humanism. It is best to read books, he said, “in a
wisdom-seeking spirit”; that is, students and professors both should
“search [for] the true, the good, and the beautiful.”
Asked by Inside
Higher Ed to expound upon this, he complied: “I'm basically
saying look, especially in an age in which science is promising or
threatening major alterations in human nature and in which the world
is changing beyond our comprehension, it seems crucial for humanists
to keep alive the important questions of what is a human being, what
is a good life for a human being -- individually and communally --
and make sure that everyone is as thoughtful and concerned about
those things as possible.”
To Kass, the humanities need not and should
not be locked in the ivory tower away from the everyday world; they
are not –
as Stanley Fish would have it – an end
unto themselves. On the contrary, humanistic learning is our best
hope for finding the wisdom we need to deal with "the profound
ethical dilemmas of our biotechnological age."
At the beginning of his
speech, Kass had offered his own life as an example of "what
anyone can learn with and through the humanities." But, of
course, Leon Kass is not just anyone -- and thus his closing list of
those to whom he owes gratitude included "President Bush for the
privilege of leading wonderful colleagues... in exploring and
defending what is humanly at stake in our emerging brave new world."
At this point, the
audience's respectful quiet (broken with laughter at the appropriate
points) became a rather more awkward silence, punctuated only by
coughs. As he'd promised, the gist of Kass's lecture did not have
much to do with whose administration it is.
"Persistent Myths in Feminist Scholarship," by Christina Hoff
Sommers, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, June 26, 2009
---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i40/40sommers.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
"Harder to kill than a vampire."
That is what the sociologist Joel Best calls a bad statistic. But,
as I have discovered over the years, among false statistics the
hardest of all to slay are those promoted by feminist professors.
Consider what happened recently when I sent an e-mail message to the
Berkeley law professor Nancy K.D. Lemon pointing out that the highly
praised textbook that she edited, Domestic Violence Law
(second edition, Thomson/West, 2005), contained errors.
Her reply began:
"I appreciate and share your
concern for veracity in all of our scholarship. However, I would
expect a colleague who is genuinely concerned about such matters to
contact me directly and give me a chance to respond before launching
a public attack on me and my work, and then contacting me after the
fact."
I confess: I had indeed publicly
criticized Lemon's book, in campus lectures and in a post on
FeministLawProfessors.com. I had always thought that that was the
usual practice of intellectual argument. Disagreement is aired,
error corrected, truth affirmed. Indeed, I was moved to write to her
because of the deep consternation of law students who had attended
my lectures: If authoritative textbooks contain errors, how are
students to know whether they are being educated or indoctrinated?
Lemon's book has been in law-school classrooms for years.
One reason that feminist
scholarship contains hard-to-kill falsehoods is that reasonable,
evidence-backed criticism is regarded as a personal attack.
Lemon's Domestic Violence Law
is organized as a conventional law-school casebook — a collection of
judicial opinions, statutes, and articles selected, edited, and
commented upon by the author. The first selection, written by Cheryl
Ward Smith (no institutional affiliation is given), offers students
a historical perspective on domestic-violence law. According to
Ward:
"The history of women's abuse
began over 2,700 years ago in the year 753 BC. It was during the
reign of Romulus of Rome that wife abuse was accepted and condoned
under the Laws of Chastisement. ... The laws permitted a man to beat
his wife with a rod or switch so long as its circumference was no
greater than the girth of the base of the man's right thumb. The law
became commonly know as 'The Rule of Thumb.' These laws established
a tradition which was perpetuated in English Common Law in most of
Europe."
Where to begin? How about with the
fact that Romulus of Rome never existed. He is a figure in Roman
mythology — the son of Mars, nursed by a wolf. Problem 2: The phrase
"rule of thumb" did not originate with any law about wife beating,
nor has anyone ever been able to locate any such law. It is now
widely regarded as a myth, even among feminist professors.
A few pages later, in a selection
by Joan Zorza, a domestic-violence expert, students read, "The March
of Dimes found that women battered during pregnancy have more than
twice the rate of miscarriages and give birth to more babies with
more defects than women who may suffer from any immunizable illness
or disease." Not true. When I recently read Zorza's assertion to
Richard P. Leavitt, director of science information at the March of
Dimes, he replied, "That is a total error on the part of the author.
There was no such study." The myth started in the early 1990s, he
explained, and resurfaces every few years.
Zorza also informs readers that
"between 20 and 35 percent of women seeking medical care in
emergency rooms in America are there because of domestic violence."
Studies by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an agency of the U.S.
Department of Justice, indicate that the figure is closer to 1
percent.
Few students would guess that the
Lemon book is anything less than reliable. The University of
California at Berkeley's online faculty profile of Lemon hails it as
the "premiere" text of the genre. It is part of a leading casebook
series, published by Thomson/West, whose board of academic advisers,
prominently listed next to the title page, includes many eminent law
professors.
I mentioned these problems in my
message to Lemon. She replied:
"I have looked into your
assertions and requested documentation from Joan Zorza regarding the
March of Dimes study and the statistics on battered women in
emergency rooms. She provided both of these promptly."
If that's the case, Zorza and
Lemon might share their documentation with Leavitt, of the March of
Dimes, who is emphatic that it does not exist. They might also
contact the Centers for Disease Control statistician Janey Hsiao,
who wrote to me that "among ED [Emergency Department] visits made by
females, the percent of having physical abuse by spouse or partner
is 0.02 percent in 2003 and 0.01 percent in 2005."
Here is what Lemon says about
Cheryl Ward Smith's essay on Romulus and the rule of thumb:
"I made a few minor editorial
changes in the Smith piece so that it is more accurate. However,
overall it appeared to be correct."
A few minor editorial changes?
Students deserve better. So do women victimized by violence.
Feminist misinformation is
pervasive. In their eye-opening book, Professing Feminism:
Education and Indoctrination in Women's Studies (Lexington
Books, 2003), the professors Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge
describe the "sea of propaganda" that overwhelms the contemporary
feminist classroom. The formidable Christine Rosen (formerly Stolba),
in her 2002 report on the five leading women's-studies textbooks,
found them rife with falsehoods, half-truths, and "deliberately
misleading sisterly sophistries." Are there serious scholars in
women's studies? Yes, of course. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an
anthropologist at the University of California at Davis; Janet
Zollinger Giele, a sociologist at Brandeis; and Anne Mellor, a
literary scholar at UCLA, to name just three, are models of academic
excellence and integrity. But they are the exception. Lemon's book
typifies the departmental mind-set.
Consider The Penguin Atlas of
Women in the World (2008), by the feminist scholar Joni Seager,
chair of the Hunter College geography department. Now in its fourth
edition, Seager's atlas was named "reference book of the year" by
the American Library Association when it was published. "Nobody
should be without this book," says the feminist icon Gloria Steinem.
"A wealth of fascinating information," enthuses The Washington
Post. Fascinating, maybe. But the information is misleading and,
at least in one instance, flat-out false.
One color-coded map illustrates
how women are kept "in their place" by restrictions on their
mobility, dress, and behavior. Somehow the United States comes out
looking as bad in this respect as Somalia, Uganda, Yemen, Niger, and
Libya. All are coded with the same shade of green to indicate places
where "patriarchal assumptions" operate in "potent combination with
fundamentalist religious interpretations." Seager's logic? She notes
that in parts of Uganda, a man can claim an unmarried woman as his
wife by raping her. The United States gets the same low rating on
Seager's charts because, she notes, "State legislators enacted 301
anti-abortion measures between 1995 and 2001." Never mind that the
Ugandan practice is barbaric, that U.S. abortion law is
exceptionally liberal among the nations of the world, and that the
activism and controversy surrounding the issue of abortion in the
United States is a sign of a vigorous free democracy working out its
disagreements.
On another map, the United States
gets the same rating for domestic violence as Uganda and Haiti.
Seager backs up that verdict with that erroneous and ubiquitous
emergency-room factoid: "22 percent-35 percent of women who visit a
hospital emergency room do so because of domestic violence."
The critical work of 21st-century
feminism will be to help women in the developing world, especially
in Muslim societies, in their struggle for basic rights. False
depictions of the United States as an oppressive "patriarchy" are a
ludicrous distraction. If American women are as oppressed as Ugandan
women, then American feminists would be right to focus on their
domestic travails and let the Ugandan women fend for themselves.
All books have mistakes, so why
pick on the feminists? My complaint with feminist research is not so
much that the authors make mistakes; it is that the mistakes are
impervious to reasoned criticism. They do not get corrected. The
authors are passionately committed to the proposition that American
women are oppressed and under siege. The scholars seize and hold on
for dear life to any piece of data that appears to corroborate their
dire worldview. At the same time, any critic who attempts to correct
the false assumptions is dismissed as a backlasher and an
anti-feminist crank.
Why should it matter if a large
number of professors think and say a lot of foolish and intemperate
things? Here are three reasons to be concerned:
1) False assertions, hyperbole,
and crying wolf undermine the credibility and effectiveness of
feminism. The United States, and the world, would greatly benefit
from an intellectually responsible, reality-based women's movement.
2) Over the years, the feminist
fictions have made their way into public policy. They travel from
the women's-studies textbooks to women's advocacy groups and then
into news stories. Soon after, they are cited by concerned political
leaders. President Obama recently issued an executive order
establishing a White House Council on Women and Girls. As he
explained, "The purpose of this council is to ensure that American
women and girls are treated fairly in all matters of public policy."
He and Congress are also poised to use the celebrated Title IX
gender-equity law to counter discrimination not only in college
athletics but also in college math and science programs, where, it
is alleged, women face a "chilly climate." The president and members
of Congress can cite decades of women's-studies scholarship that
presents women as the have-nots of our society. Never mind that this
is largely no longer true. Nearly every fact that could be marshaled
to justify the formation of the White House Council on Women and
Girls or the new focus of Title IX application was shaped by
scholarly merchants of hype like Professors Lemon and Seager.
3) Finally, as a philosophy
professor of almost 20 years, and as someone who respects
rationality, objective scholarship, and intellectual integrity, I
find it altogether unacceptable for distinguished university
professors and prestigious publishers to disseminate falsehoods. It
is offensive in itself, even without considering the harmful
consequences. Obduracy in the face of reasonable criticism may be
inevitable in some realms, such as partisan politics, but in academe
it is an abuse of the privileges of professorship.
"Thug," "parasite," "dangerous," a
"female impersonator" — those are some of the labels applied to me
when I exposed specious feminist statistics in my 1994 book Who
Stole Feminism? (Come to think of it, none of my critics
contacted me directly with their concerns before launching their
public attacks.) According to Susan Friedman, of the University of
Wisconsin at Madison, "Sommers' diachronic discourse is easily
unveiled as synchronic discourse in drag. ... She practices ...
metonymic historiography." That one hurt! But my views, as well as
my metonymic historiography, are always open to correction. So I'll
continue to follow the work of the academic feminists — to criticize
it when it is wrong, and to learn from it when it is right.
Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at
the American Enterprise Institute. She is the author of
Who Stole Feminism? (Simon & Schuster, 1994) and The War
Against Boys (Simon & Schuster, 2000), and editor of The
Science on Women and Science, forthcoming
from the AEI Press.\
Jensen Comment
Problems I have with feminism and feminist scholarship is that it is
sometimes hypocritical in the sense that conservatism is anti-feminist
even if it is supportive of feminism, including the explosion of career
opportunities for women in accounting that is sometimes viewed as
counter to liberal feminism. Conservative women
just aren't allowed in the club. It almost seems that feminists
are disappointed when women make huge strides in professional career
opportunities for women such as when the accounting profession is now
hiring significantly more than 50% of the accounting graduates with
serious initiatives for retaining and promoting women. Another problem
is that feminist researchers and scholars tend, in my viewpoint, to
often make mountains out of mole hills that distracts from their more
serious scholarship. The unwillingness to correct for errors is a new
one to me. Why am I not surprised?
"The Two Languages of Academic Freedom,"
by Stanley Fish, The New York Times, February 8, 2009 ---
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/the-two-languages-of-academic-freedom/
Last week we came to
the section on academic freedom in my course on the law of higher
education and I posed this hypothetical to the students: Suppose you
were a member of a law firm or a mid-level executive in a
corporation and you skipped meetings or came late, blew off
assignments or altered them according to your whims, abused your
colleagues and were habitually rude to clients. What would happen to
you?
The chorus of
answers cascaded immediately: “I’d be fired.” Now, I continued,
imagine the same scenario and the same set of behaviors, but this
time you’re a tenured professor in a North American university. What
then?
I answered this one
myself: “You’d be celebrated as a brave nonconformist, a tilter
against orthodoxies, a pedagogical visionary and an exemplar of
academic freedom.”
My assessment of the
way in which some academics contrive to turn serial irresponsibility
into a form of heroism under the banner of academic freedom has now
been at once confirmed and challenged by events at the University of
Ottawa, where the administration announced on Feb. 6 that it has
“recommended to the Board of Governors the dismissal with cause of
Professor Denis Rancourt from his faculty position.” Earlier,
Rancourt, a tenured professor of physics, had been suspended from
teaching and banned from campus. When he defied the ban he was taken
away in handcuffs and charged with trespassing.
What had Rancourt
done to merit such treatment? According to the Globe and Mail,
Rancourt’s sin was to have informed his students on the first day of
class that “he had already decided their marks : Everybody was
getting an A+.”
But that, as the
saying goes, is only the tip of the iceberg. Underneath it is the
mass of reasons Rancourt gives for his grading policy and for many
of the other actions that have infuriated his dean, distressed his
colleagues (a third of whom signed a petition against him) and
delighted his partisans.
Rancourt is a
self-described anarchist and an advocate of “critical pedagogy,” a
style of teaching derived from the assumption (these are Rancourt’s
words) “that our societal structures . . . represent the most
formidable instrument of oppression and exploitation ever to occupy
the planet” (Activist Teacher.blogspot.com, April 13, 2007).
Among those
structures is the university in which Rancourt works and by which he
is paid. But the fact of his position and compensation does not
insulate the institution from his strictures and assaults; for, he
insists, “schools and universities supply the obedient workers and
managers and professionals that adopt and apply [the] system’s
doctrine — knowingly or unknowingly.”
It is this belief
that higher education as we know it is simply a delivery system for
a regime of oppressors and exploiters that underlies Rancourt’s
refusal to grade his students. Grading, he says, “is a tool of
coercion in order to make obedient people” (rabble.ca., Jan. 12,
2009).
It turns out that
another tool of coercion is the requirement that professors actually
teach the course described in the college catalogue, the course
students think they are signing up for. Rancourt battles against
this form of coercion by employing a strategy he calls “squatting” –
“where one openly takes an existing course and does with it
something different.” That is, you take a currently unoccupied
structure, move in and make it the home for whatever activities you
wish to engage in. “Academic squatting is needed,” he says, “because
universities are dictatorships . . . run by self-appointed
executives who serve capital interests.”
Rancourt first
practiced squatting when he decided that he “had to do something
more than give a ‘better’ physics course.” Accordingly, he took the
Physics and Environment course that had been assigned to him and
transformed it into a course on political activism, not a course
about political activism, but a course in which political activism
is urged — “an activism course about confronting authority and
hierarchical structures directly or through defiant or
non-subordinate assertion in order to democratize power in the
workplace, at school, and in society.”
Clearly squatting
itself is just such a “defiant or non-subordinate assertion.”
Rancourt does not merely preach his philosophy. He practices it.
This sounds vaguely
admirable until you remember what Rancourt is, in effect, saying to
those who employ him: I refuse to do what I have contracted to do,
but I will do everything in my power to subvert the enterprise you
administer. Besides, you’re just dictators, and it is my obligation
to undermine you even as I demand that you pay me and confer on me
the honorific title of professor. And, by the way, I am entitled to
do so by the doctrine of academic freedom, which I define as “the
ideal under which professors and students are autonomous and design
their own development and interactions.”
Of course, as
Rancourt recognizes, if this is how academic freedom is defined, its
scope is infinite and one can’t stop with squatting: “The next step
is academic hijacking, where students tell a professor that she can
stay or leave but that this is what they are going to do and these
are the speakers they are going to invite.” O, brave new world!
The record shows
exchanges of letters between Rancourt and Dean Andre E. Lalonde and
letters from each of them to Marc Jolicoeur, chairman of the Board
of Governors. There is something comical about some of these
exchanges when the dean asks Rancourt to tell him why he is not
guilty of insubordination and Rancourt replies that insubordination
is his job, and that, rather than ceasing his insubordinate
activities, he plans to expand them. Lalonde complains that Rancourt
“does not acknowledge any impropriety regarding his conduct.”
Rancourt tells Jolicoeur that “Socrates did not give grades to
students,” and boasts that everything he has done was done “with the
purpose of making the University of Ottawa a better place,” a place
“of greater democracy.” In other words, I am the bearer of a saving
message and those who need it most will not hear it and respond by
persecuting me. It is the cry of every would-be messiah.
Rancourt’s views are
the opposite of those announced by a court in an Arizona case where
the issue was also whether a teaching method could be the basis of
dismissal. Noting that the university had concluded that the
plaintiff’s “methodology was not successful,” the court declared
“Academic freedom is not a doctrine to insulate a teacher from
evaluation by the institution that employs him” (Carley v. Arizona,
1987).
The Arizona court
thinks of academic freedom as a doctrine whose scope is defined by
the purposes and protocols of the institution and its limited
purposes. Rancourt thinks of academic freedom as a local instance of
a global project whose goal is nothing less than the freeing of
revolutionary energies, not only in the schools but everywhere.
It is the difference
between being concerned with the establishing and implementing of
workplace-specific procedures and being concerned with the wholesale
transformation of society. It is the difference between wanting to
teach a better physics course and wanting to save the world. Given
such divergent views, not only is reconciliation between the parties
impossible; conversation itself is impossible. The dispute can only
be resolved by an essentially political decision, and in this case
the narrower concept of academic freedom has won. But only till next
time.
Stanley Fish is the Davidson-Kahn
Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida
International University, in Miami, and dean emeritus of the College
of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at
Chicago. He has also taught at the University of California at
Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and Duke University. He is the author of 10
books. His new book on higher education, "Save the World On Your Own
Time," has just been published.
Jensen Comment
I think Professor Fish re-enervated the phrase "political correctness"
when he was at Duke University, although the term has been traced back
to Mao's Little Red Book ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Correctness
The term morphed into "professional correctness." I don't think he
has ever been beloved by feminist activists.
Bob Jensen's threads on academic freedom
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#AcademicFreedom
"An Authoritative Word on Academic Freedom," by Stanley
Fish, The New York Times, November 23, 2008 ---
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/an-authoritative-word-on-academic-freedom/?ei=5070&emc=eta1
More than a few times in these
columns I have tried to deflate the balloon of academic freedom by
arguing that it was not an absolute right or a hallowed principle,
but a practical and limited response to the particular nature of
intellectual work.
Now, in a new book —
“For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom,”
to be published in 2009 — two
distinguished scholars of constitutional law, Matthew W. Finkin and
Robert C. Post, study the history and present shape of the concept
and come to conclusions that support and deepen what I have been
saying in these columns and elsewhere.
The authors’ most important
conclusion is presented early on in their introduction: “We argue
that the concept of Academic freedom . . . differs fundamentally
from the individual First Amendment rights that present themselves
so vividly to the contemporary mind.” The difference is that while
free speech rights are grounded in the constitution, academic
freedom rights are “grounded . . . in a substantive account of the
purposes of higher education and in the special conditions necessary
for faculty to fulfill those purposes.”
In short, academic freedom, rather
than being a philosophical or moral imperative, is a piece of policy
that makes practical sense in the context of the specific task
academics are charged to perform. It follows that the scope of
academic freedom is determined first by specifying what that task is
and then by figuring out what degree of latitude those who are
engaged in it require in order to do their jobs.
If the mission of the enterprise
is, as Finkin and Post say, “to promote new knowledge and model
independent thought,” the “special conditions” necessary to the
realization of that mission must include protection from the forces
and influences that would subvert newness and independence by either
anointing or demonizing avenues of inquiry in advance. Those forces
and influences would include trustees, parents, donors, legislatures
and the general run of “public opinion,” and the device that
provides the necessary protection is called academic freedom. (It
would be better if it had a name less resonant with large
significances, but I can’t think of one.)
It does not, however, protect
faculty members from the censure or discipline that might follow
upon the judgment of their peers that professional standards have
either been ignored or violated. There is, Finkin and Post insist,
“a fundamental distinction between holding faculty accountable to
professional norms and holding them accountable to public opinion.
The former exemplifies academic freedom: the latter undermines it.”
Holding faculty accountable to
public opinion undermines academic freedom because it restricts
teaching and research to what is already known or generally
accepted.
Holding faculty accountable to
professional norms exemplifies academic freedom because it
highlights the narrow scope of that freedom, which does not include
the right of faculty “to research and publish in any manner they
personally see fit.”
Indeed, to emphasize the
“personal” is to mistake the nature of academic freedom, which
belongs, Finkin and Post declare, to the enterprise, not to the
individual. If academic freedom were “reconceptualized as an
individual right,” it would make no sense — why should workers in
this enterprise have enlarged rights denied to others? — and support
for it “would vanish” because that support, insofar as it exists, is
for the project and its promise (the production of new knowledge)
and not for those who labor within it. Academics do not have a
general liberty, only “the liberty to practice the scholarly
profession” and that liberty is hedged about by professional norms
and responsibilities.
I find this all very congenial.
Were Finkin and Post’s analysis internalized by all faculty members,
the academic world would be a better place, if only because there
would be fewer instances of irresponsible or overreaching teachers
invoking academic freedom as a cover for their excesses.
I do, however, have a quarrel with
the authors when they turn to the question of what teachers are free
or not free to do in the classroom.
Finkin and Post are correct when
they reject the neo-conservative criticism of professors who bring
into a class materials from disciplines other than the ones they
were trained in. The standard, they say, should be “whether material
from a seemingly foreign field of study illuminates the subject
matter under scrutiny.”
Just so. If I’m teaching poetry
and feel that economic or mathematical models might provide a
helpful perspective on a poem or body of poems, there is no good
pedagogical reason for limiting me to models that belong properly to
literary criticism. (I could of course be criticized for not
understanding the models I imported, but that would be another
issue; a challenge to my competence, not to my morality.)
But of course what the
neo-conservative critics of the academy are worried about is not
professors who stray from their narrowly defined areas of expertise;
they are worried about professors who do so in order to sneak in
their partisan preferences under the cover of providing students
with supplementary materials. That, I think, is a genuine concern,
and one Finkin and Post do not take seriously enough.
Responding to an expressed concern
that liberal faculty too often go on about the Iraq War in a course
on an entirely unrelated subject, Finkin and Post maintain that
there is nothing wrong, for example, with an instructor in English
history “who seeks to interest students by suggesting parallels
between King George III’s conduct of the Revolutionary War and
Bush’s conduct of the war in Iraq.”
But we only have to imagine the
class discussion generated by this parallel to see what is in fact
wrong with introducing it. Bush, rather than King George, would
immediately become the primary reference point of the parallel, and
the effort to understand the monarch’s conduct of his war would
become subsidiary to the effort to find fault with Bush’s conduct of
his war. Indeed, that would be immediately seen by the students as
the whole point of the exercise. Why else introduce a contemporary
political figure known to be anathema to most academics if you were
not inviting students to pile it on, especially in the context of
the knowledge that this particular king was out of his mind?
Sure, getting students to be
interested in the past is a good thing, but there are plenty of ways
to do that without taking the risk (no doubt being courted) that
intellectual inquiry will give way to partisan venting. Finkin and
Post are right to say that “educational relevance is to be
determined . . . by the heuristic purposes and consequences of a
pedagogical intervention”; but this intervention has almost no
chance of remaining pedagogical; its consequences are predictable,
and its purposes are suspect
Still, this is the only part of
the book’s argument I am unable to buy. The rest of it is right on
target. And you just have to love a book — O.K., I just have to love
a book — that declares that while faculty must “respect students as
persons,” they are under no obligation to respect the “ideas held by
students.” Way to go!
The term "political correctness" and related phrases
have a long history ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness#In_the_United_States
However, probably no U.S. scholar is more associated with "political
correctness" since than Stanley Fish when he was at Duke University and
the phrase "political correctness" with feminist language constraints
and liberalism in campus politics ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Fish
Bob Jensen's threads on freedom of speech and
political correctness in higher education are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
"Feminists Psychoanalyze Themselves Again,"
by Phyllis Schlafly, Townhall, October 27, 2009 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/PhyllisSchlafly/2009/10/27/feminists_psychoanalyze_themselves_again
The feminists are
going through one of their periodic soul-searching psychological
examinations of what the women's liberation movement did or did not
do for them, and why they are not happy with the result. Feminist
dominance in newspapers, magazines, book publishers, television and
academia makes it easy to command a full media rollout for their
agonizing.
The media are glad
to divert public attention from the failure of Barack Obama's
stimulus to create jobs. So, we have ponderous discussions: Maria
Shriver's report (with help from a liberal think tank) called "A
Woman's Nation Changes Everything," a Time Magazine cover story
headlined with the double entendre "The State of the American
Woman," Gail Collins' book "When Everything Changed" and articles
from all the feminist columnists.
We wonder if it's
just a coincidence that this torrent of words immediately precedes
Halloween. The writers are scared of their own research because it
contradicts much of their gender-neutral ideology.
These well-educated
writers long ago identified the major goal of the women's liberation
movement as getting more wives out of the home and into the labor
force. They've been strikingly successful with this goal -- women
are now half the labor force, and 40 percent of women are essential
family breadwinners.
In the current
recession, the majority of workers laid off have been men
(especially from construction and manufacturing). Jobs where women
predominate have not been much affected.
Even so, the
feminists demanded that the Obama administration give half the
stimulus jobs to women rather than to the shovel-ready work that was
the reason for passing the stimulus funds. Whatever the feminists
demand from the Democrats they get, and the stimulus money was
directed to jobs in education, health care and social services.
So what are the
feminists complaining about? They want the taxpayers to provide
high-quality daycare and paid family leave, to pass laws to prohibit
employers from ordering women to work overtime (as men are often
required to do) and probably to force men to assume half the
household and baby-care duties.
The feminists are
still crying about President Richard Nixon vetoing a federal program
to make daycare a middle-class entitlement. But Nixon's action was
popular then and still is because the majority of Americans don't
want their tax dollars to pay for babysitters for other people's
children.
No doubt this will
come as a shock to the feminists, but Time Magazine reports that "a
majority of both men and women still say it is best for children to
have a father working and a mother at home."
Women's percentage
in the labor force keeps rising because of who is going to college.
Thirty years ago, the ratio of males to females on college campuses
was 60 to 40; now it's 40 to 60, and women receive the majority of
college degrees.
Continued in article
Penn State University training film on how to liberal
faculty can deal with military veterans who refuse to be politically correct ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhLq9NPLv0M
Alternate ---
Click Here
An analysis by The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/PennStateVeteran.htm
Penn State issued a public apology for producing the video ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/04/13/qt#196252
From the "Best of the Web Today" newsletter of The Wall
Street Journal on December 19, 2008
A Social-Work Housecleaning
Yesterday we noted the case of William Felkner,
a student at Rhode Island College's School of Social work who is
suing the school claiming that professors discriminated against him
because he disagreed with their left-liberal political views. It
turns out a similar lawsuit two years ago had impressive results.
The
Associated Press reported
on the suit when it was filed, in November 2006:
A Missouri State University
graduate has sued the school, claiming she was retaliated
against because she refused to support gay adoption as part of a
class project.
Emily Brooker's federal lawsuit,
filed on her behalf Monday by the Alliance Defense Fund, a
Christian legal group, claims the retaliation against her
Christian beliefs violated her First Amendment right to free
speech. . . .
She said one of her professor's
[sic], Frank G. Kauffman, accused her of the violation after he
assigned a project that required the entire class to write and
each sign a letter to the Missouri Legislature in support of gay
adoption. Brooker said her Christian beliefs required her to
refuse to sign the letter. . . .
Brooker said she was called
before a college ethics committee on Dec. 16, where she was
questioned for two hours by faculty members. She alleges they
asked her questions such as "Do you think gays and lesbians are
sinners?" and "Do you think I am a sinner?" She said she was
also asked if she could help gay and lesbian people in social
work situations.
Brooker said she was required to
sign a contract with the department pledging to follow the
National Association of Social Work's code of ethics, which does
not refer to homosexuality. She alleges the contract requires
her to change her religious beliefs to conform to social work
standards to continue enrollment in the School of Social Work.
It took less than a
week for Brooker to get satisfaction. In a
press release dated
Nov. 8, 2006, the university announced that it had agreed to strike
the disciplinary action from Brooker's record, pay her $9,000, and
reimburse her for tuition and living expenses for two years'
graduate education.
It gets better. In
addition to the terms of the settlement agreement, the press release
announced that Kauffman had "voluntarily stepped down" as head of
the social work program and "had begun weekly consultations" with a
provost, "which will continue at least through the spring 2007
semester."
Further, the
university's president, Michael Nietzel, pledged to "commission a
comprehensive, professionally directed evaluation of the Missouri
State Social Work Program" and "appoint an ad hoc committee to
recommend ways in which the university can better publicize and more
effectively implement its policies regarding freedom of speech and
expression on campus."
The
report came out in March 2007. The
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
described it:
The report is scathing, citing
ideological coercion on the part of the faculty against
dissenting students and the chilling effect of such actions and
policies on the school's intellectual atmosphere. . . .
MSU's report is
encouraging—generally universities try to cover up and excuse
their mistakes, and MSU has done neither. MSU should be
applauded for expending the effort for some serious
self-reflection and its students will no doubt benefit from the
overdue recognition that MSU had been providing them with an
atmosphere of ideological coercion.
"Academic Freedom in the Wired World," by Scott Jaschik,
Inside Higher Ed, March 6, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/03/06/oneil
Robert M. O’Neil has been a player
on academic freedom issues from many perspectives. He has been a
university president (University of Virginia, University of
Wisconsin System), a legal scholar (law professor at U.Va.), and
First Amendment advocate (director of the Thomas Jefferson Center
for the Protection of Free Expression). He has also been chair of
the American Association of University Professors’ committee on
academic freedom. That background informs his new book,
Academic Freedom in the Wired World: Political Extremism, Corporate
Power, and the University,
just published by Harvard University
Press.
O’Neil recently responded to
e-mail questions about the themes of the book.
Q: How do the severity of
threats to academic freedom today compare to other periods in U.S.
history?
A: While there has surely
been no shortage of grave threats to academic freedom in the early
21st century, current conditions are not comparable to the dark days
of the McCarthy era, which were clearly the worst of times within
memory. Especially with regard to threats from sources that were
rampant in the early to mid 1950s — disclaimer-type loyalty oaths,
legislative investigations, campus speaker bans, security screens
and the like — even the gravest of current governmental pressures
tend to pale in comparison. What suggests to some observers an
ominous shadow of McCarthyism is, however, a new set of threats to
free inquiry on the university campus — from private “vigilante”
groups that target professors and even students on Web sites and
blogs, legislative demands for “balance” and removal of “bias” from
the classroom, mounting restrictions on corporate-sponsored
research, and constraints on electronic communications that would
not be tolerated in print media.
Q: How has the 9/11 aftermath
most changed academic freedom?
A: Despite much early
apprehension, reprisals against outspoken faculty critics in the
months after the terrorist attacks proved to be far milder than
might have been feared. Remarkably few adverse personnel actions
resulted for established scholars and teachers — in sharp contrast
to McCarthyism — and the few that did occur reflected highly unusual
conditions. Yet there have been grave consequences in several other
areas. Notably harsh has been the exclusion or denial of visas to
visiting scholars — not only from the Middle East and Islamic
countries, but from other nations where 9/11 and terrorism have no
visible role. Several of these actions have been successfully
challenged through the courts, though a disturbing number of other
barred visitors (notably Islamicist Tariq Ramadan) remain beyond
U.S. borders without either adequate explanation or avenues of
recourse. The other most notably affected area is that of research;
the vague concept of “sensitive but unclassified” has been far more
widely used to constrain university investigators without formal
classification, and thus chill freedom in the laboratory, despite
the absence of a legally reviewable justification for such
limitations. In other (though probably more predictable) ways, the
use of biohazardous materials has been further restricted in the
aftermath of the terrorist attacks.
Continued in article
Question
Does the University of Michigan Press really want to promote a conjecture that
the creation of the State of Israel was a mistake?
Is eliminating the State of Israel now the politically correct position in
academe?
The University of Michigan Press — which has been
under fire for distributing a book,
through a distribution arrangement
with another publisher, that says the creation of Israel
was a mistake — has announced guidelines for such
distribution arrangements. Michigan officials say that
the guidelines (the bottom paragraph on
this link)
could endanger future ties to Pluto Press, the publisher
of the book that set off the controversy. The guidelines
state that Michigan will consider such relationships
only with a publisher “whose mission is aligned with the
mission of the UM Press and whose academic standards and
processes of peer review are reasonably similar to those
of the UM Press.” Pluto publishes serious scholarly
works, but has an explicit political mission — “Pluto
Press has always had a radical political agenda,”
its Web site says
— unlike the Michigan press. Peggy McCracken, an
associate dean at Michigan who is chair of the executive
board of the press, said she did not think Pluto met the
requirements of the new guidelines, and so Michigan
might not renew the relationship. She said, however,
that the decision was “up in the air” while the press
gathers more information about Pluto’s procedures. Last
year, Michigan announced that
it wouldn’t sever ties with Pluto
at that time, but would draw up
guidelines for such relationships.
Jensen Comment
What is confusing is how the phrase "radical political agenda" has
changed over the years in terms of political correctness. Jews in
history have been considered very liberal and form a major part of the
backbone of the Democratic Party. Before 9/11 many Jews were thought to
have a "radical political agenda." Since 9/11 the phrase seems to have
shifted to Muslims and advocates of eliminating Israel as a state.
In any case, I'm not an
advocate of censorship of ideas. Let scholars have access to
ideas/theories and let them sort things out for themselves. The
University of Michigan should not censor publishing scholarly studies
tied to a radical political agenda.
Free Speech and the Controversial
Academic Bill of Rights
The 88 Duke University faculty members who took
out a hysterical ad, supporting those local loudmouths who were denouncing
and threatening the Duke students, have apparently had nothing at all to say
now. Not only did many Duke University professors join the lynch mob
atmosphere, so did the Duke University administration, which got rid of the
lacrosse coach and cancelled the team's season, without a speck of evidence
that anybody was guilty of anything.
Thomas Sowell, "The Duke Case's Unfinished Business," RealClearPolitics,
June 19, 2007 ---
Click Here
The University of Maine is backtracking on a
classroom teacher's suggestion that students would get extra credit for burning
a flag, or a copy of the U.S. Constitution . . . "Leftists seek sanctuary in the
ivory tower of higher education where they can feel free to impose their liberal
moonbattery on hapless college students. The less control they have over the
country, the tighter their grip over academia becomes. And nothing runs more
rampant on college campuses than anti-Americanism." "Perhaps the most telling
quote from Professor Grosswiler was this one: 'If they don't tolerate thought
that they hate, they don't believe in the First Amendment,'" the editorial said.
"So not tolerating a professor asking students to burn the United States flag is
equal to not believing in free speech? Your tax dollars at work, folks."
"University vetoes extra credit for flag-burning," WorldNetDaily,
November 8, 2007 ---
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=58553
"George W. Bush and Melville’s Ahab: Discuss! Tags: Academic Freedom,
Ahab, George W. Bush, The AAUP," by Stanley Fish, The New York Times,
October 21, 2007 ---
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/george-w-bush-and-melvilles-ahab-discuss/?8ty&emc=ty
But the report gets off to a bad start
when its authors allow the charge by
conservative critics that left-wing
instructors indoctrinate rather than
teach to dictate their strategy. By
taking it as their task to respond to
what they consider a partisan attack,
they set themselves up to perform as
partisans in return, and that is exactly
what they end up doing.
Not right away, however. They begin well
by rejecting the idea that instructors
must refrain from teaching, as fact, a
point of view that others in the field
do not accept. “It is not
indoctrination,” they explain, “when, as
a result of their research and study,
instructors assert to their students
that in their view particular
propositions are true, even if these
propositions are controversial within a
discipline.” That’s a roundabout way of
saying, if you think it’s true and you
can back up your judgment with reasons
and evidence, teach it as true and don’t
worry about any obligation to include
contrary views just because they’re out
there.
The name usually given to that
obligation is “balance,” the idea “that
an instructor should impartially engage
all potentially relevant points of
view.” But as the subcommittee points
out, in every discipline there will be
viewpoints “so intrinsically intertwined
with the current state” of the field
that it would be “unprofessional to
slight or ignore them.” And conversely,
there will be view points so marginal to
the field that it would be
unprofessional to accord them equal
time.
The key word here is “unprofessional,”
for it signals that the subcommittee is
refusing the requirement of balance
(which is a statistical not a normative
standard) in favor of the requirement
that instructors be alert to the
judgments and evaluations of their
peers. The enterprise, the subcommittee
is saying, belongs to those who labor
within it, and choices as to what
approaches should be covered in a course
should be made by informed practitioners
and not by an abstraction. The
obligation is not to present everything,
but to “present all aspects of a subject
matter that professional standards would
require to be presented.”
So far, so good. But the report takes a
wrong turn when the contextual criterion
of “professional standards” is replaced
by the abstract criterion of
“connectedness” (the left’s version of
“balance”). In response to the Students
for Academic Freedom’s insistence that
professors “should not be making
statements … about George Bush if the
class is not on contemporary American
presidents,” the subcommittee offers
this grand, and empty, pronouncement:
“[A]ll knowledge can be connected to all
other knowledge.” But if the test for
bringing a piece of “knowledge” into the
classroom is the possibility of
connecting it to the course’s ostensible
subject, nothing will ever fail it, and
the only limitation on the topics that
can be introduced will be the
instructor’s ingenuity.
My point is made for me by the
subcommittee when it proposes a
hypothetical as a counterexample to the
stricture laid down by the Students for
Academic Freedom: “Might not a teacher
of nineteenth-century American
literature, taking up ‘Moby Dick,’ a
subject having nothing to do with the
presidency, ask the class to consider
whether any parallel between President
George W. Bush and Captain Ahab could be
pursued for insight into Melville’s
novel?”
But with what motive would the teacher
initiate such a discussion? If you look
at commentaries on “Moby Dick,” you will
find Ahab characterized as inflexible,
monomaniacal, demonic, rigid, obsessed
and dictatorial. What you don’t find are
words like generous, kind, caring,
cosmopolitan, tolerant, far-seeing and
wise. Thus the invitation to consider
parallels between Ahab and Bush is
really an invitation to introduce into
the classroom (and by the back door) the
negative views of George Bush held by
many academics.
If the intention were, as claimed, to
produce insight into Melville’s
character, there are plenty of
candidates in literature for possible
parallels – Milton’s Satan, Marlowe’s
Faust, Byron’s Cain, Bram Stoker’s
Dracula, Shakespeare’s Iago, Jack
London’s Wolf Larsen, to name a few. Nor
would it have been any better if an
instructor had invited students to find
parallels between George Bush and
Aeneas, or Henry the Fifth, or Atticus
Finch, for then the effect would have
been to politicize teaching from the
other (pro-Bush) direction.
By offering this example, the report’s
authors validate the very accusation
they are trying to fend off, the
accusation that the academy’s leftward
tilt spills over into the classroom. No
longer writing for the American
Association of University Professors,
the subcommittee is instead writing for
the American Association of University
Professors Who Hate George Bush
(admittedly a large group). Why do its
members not see that? Because once again
they reason from an abstract theoretical
formulation to a conclusion about what
instructors can properly do.
The theoretical formulation is borrowed
from an association report of 1948:
“[E]xperienced teachers realize that it
is neither possible nor desirable to
exclude rigidly all controversial
subjects.” That’s right, but it doesn’t
follow from the impossibility of
excluding controversial subjects
(another too general truth) that those
subjects can appropriately be the
vehicles of indoctrination once they are
brought in.
In fact, whether or not a subject matter
is controversial is beside the point.
Any subject – pornography, pedophilia,
genocide, scatology – can be introduced
into an academic discussion so long as
the perspective from which it is
analyzed is academic and not political.
Like their counterparts on the right who
complain endlessly about the presence of
Karl Marx on many reading lists, the
authors of the report fail to understand
the all-important distinction between
the political content of an issue and
teaching that content politically. The
first is inevitable and blameless; the
second is a dereliction of professional
duty.
Nor will the Bush-Ahab example be saved
by invoking (as the subcommittee does)
an instructor’s freedom “to stimulate
classroom discussion and thought.” To be
sure, stimulation is perfectly fine in a
classroom, but not stimulation of any
old kind. Taking off one’s clothes or
throwing things at students would surely
produce stimulation, but no one would
argue that it was academically
appropriate to do so. And neither is it
appropriate to encourage Bush-bashing in
the guise of elaborating a “parallel.”
As for encouraging “critical thought by
drawing analogies” (another of the
subcommittee’s justifications), the
point is the same: it depends on what
the analogies are and in what direction
– academic or political – drawing them
pushes students.
The report ends on a good note when it
warns against the attempts of outside
constituencies to monitor classroom
performance: “We ought to learn from
history that education cannot possibly
thrive in an atmosphere of
state-encouraged suspicion.”
Unfortunately at least one section of
this report serves only to justify that
suspicion.
The
good news is that this it is only a
draft and comments are welcome at
the association’s website.
The
association now has mine.
"Flunking Free Speech The persistent threat to liberty on college
campuses," by Michael C. Moynihan, Reason Magazine, December
24, 2007 ---
http://www.reason.com/news/show/124072.html
In 1995, the liberal
New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis
advised
his young readers—a constituency he mistakenly
assumed existed—that if they felt wounded, were
abnormally thin-skinned, or desirous of professorial
protection against a delicate sensibility, they
might consider enrolling at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst, an institution possessing
rigorous safeguards against various forms of
"harassment." This was all rather surprising to
Lewis because, as he noted, "Speech codes at
universities had seemed to be on the decline.
Several were held unconstitutional. So it is of more
than parochial interest that an extraordinarily
sweeping code should be proposed in this supposedly
liberal-minded state."
It is distressing
then that, 12 years hence, these Stakhanovite
commissars of sensitivity are still laboring against
nature. The virus of teenage insensitivity has
proven stubbornly resistant to social engineering
schemes. According to a new report from the
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
(FIRE), an
indefatigable organization devoted to protecting
free speech on campus, Lewis's decade-old advice has
sadly gone unheeded.
FIRE's
"Spotlight on Speech Codes 2007"
(PDF) found that a full 75
percent of the 346 colleges surveyed "continue to
explicitly prohibit various forms of expression that
are protected by the First Amendment." To qualify as
a "red light" violator—the worst of three designated
classifications-a school must have "at least one
policy that both clearly and substantially restricts
freedom of speech." These include overly restrictive
anti-harassment policies and broadly worded
prohibitions against "degrading comments" and
"hostile" learning environments. It found further
that only 4 percent—yes, 4 percent—of
schools surveyed had "no policies that seriously
imperil speech."
As reason contributing editor Cathy
Young
observed in
2004, and as both
critical observers and wounded veterans of the
previous decade's campus culture wars clearly
misunderstood, political correctness, despite a
concerted campaign to counter it, has proved
surprisingly resilient. And it is doubtless true
that FIRE's findings will be all too familiar to
those currently enrolled in an American university.
After a period of sustained news coverage in the
early 1990s, P.C. outrages went from shocking to
de rigueur, with only the truly bizarre, the
shocking and outrageous, escaping from the pages of
student newspapers into the national-or even
regional-press. Thanks to the intercession of FIRE,
a recent case at the University of Delaware is a
rare exception.
According to a
dossier
compiled by FIRE, incoming
freshman were required to undergo "treatment" (the
university's word) by residence hall apparatchiks,
and forced "to adopt highly specific
university-approved views on issues ranging from
politics to race, sexuality, sociology, moral
philosophy, and environmentalism." These young
scholar-scamps in Wilmington are told solemnly that
they are, according to the precepts of the
university, carriers of racist original sin: "[A]
racist is one who is both privileged and socialized
on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist)
system. The term applies to all white people (i.e.,
people of European descent) living in the United
States, regardless of class, gender, religion,
culture or sexuality." After pressure from FIRE, the
university dumped the program, reluctantly releasing
the little
Ivan Denisovichs,
still tainted by
white skin privilege, into a vulnerable academic
community.
That
university administrators persist in their attempts
to indoctrinate students is mystifying, says
University of Massachusetts at Amherst professor and
FIRE board member Daphne Patai. "What's amazing is
that the universities aren't smart enough—and don't
care enough about the liberal American tradition and
respect for free speech—to, on their own, wise up
and not put students through" these programs, she
observes.
It
should be noted that FIRE isn't, as some of its
partisan critics contend, a conservative
organization or a legal cudgel for the political
right. Indeed, a look through its recent case load
shows that while the attempted silencing of
conservative viewpoints are overrepresented on
campus, the group has defended protesters and
political activists on both sides of the ideological
divide.
. . .
When
Lewis warned of speech codes and the Zamyatin-like atmosphere
on campuses like UMass, my erstwhile comrades
harrumphed that fiddling with the Constitution was a
necessary evil, one that civil
libertarians need accept in favor of a more tolerant
society. Alas, both predictions were correct.
Lewis's fears proved prescient, as the FIRE report
demonstrates. The radical activists have, in the
short term, been largely successful, presiding
over a deeply unfortunate shift in campus values.
Thankfully there exist organizations such
as FIRE who have assumed the role of protector of
the First Amendment on campus, forcing universities,
however incrementally, to roll back policies that
violate student's rights.
Question
Is the disparity between liberals versus conservatives due, in part, to self
selection by undergraduates to pursue doctoral degrees?
Is the shortage of doctoral graduates in some professions (e.g., accounting and
finance) due in part to tendencies of graduates in these professions to not seek
out academic careers?
"The Conservative Pipeline Problem," by Scott Jaschik, Inside
Higher Ed, November 16, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/11/16/conservative
Colleges have
been
increasingly competing
to offer “family friendly” policies
— in the hopes of attracting the
best academic talent from a pool of
Ph.D.’s that includes both more
women than ever before as well as
many men who take parenting
responsibilities seriously. A
new study
suggests that such policies may be
important for another group that
believes its needs aren’t fully
addressed in academe: conservatives.
...
The
authors of the study do not dispute that
conservatives are a distinct minority in academe and
that the imbalance is problematic. They also hold
open the possibility — much proclaimed by other
authors at the conference of the American Enterprise
Institute where all of the work was presented — that
there may be bias against conservatives (although
they question whether this has been proven). But the
authors of the work on the pipeline say there is
considerable evidence that could show conservative
self-selection out of academic careers.
...
The
husband-and-wife social science team based their
findings on analysis they did from national surveys
of freshmen and seniors conducted by the University
of California at Los Angeles’s Higher Education
Research Institute. They found that in both choices
of majors and in personal values, conservatives seem
to be taking themselves off the track for academic
careers well before graduate school. The authors did
not find evidence of statistically significant
differences in grades or measures of academic
performance, so most of the report is based on the
premise that interests and experiences are at play,
not aptitude.
For
starters, the paper finds that conservatives are
much more likely to pick majors in professional
fields — areas that tend to put students on the fast
track for an M.B.A. (or for a job) more than a Ph.D.
Only 9 percent of students on the far left and 18
percent of liberals major in professional fields,
compared to 33 percent of conservatives and 37
percent of those who identify as being on the far
right.
Further, the study finds that not only (as has been
reported many times previously) do students who
identify as liberal outnumber those who identify as
conservative, but that those who are liberal are
much more likely to consider a Ph.D. The UCLA survey
of seniors found that only 13 percent of all
students were considering a Ph.D. But the numbers
were significantly higher for those on the left (24
percent of the far left and 18 percent of liberals)
than on the right (11 percent of the far right and 9
percent of conservatives).
The
study also finds significant differences among
colleges seniors in values that they care about —
including values that might make someone more or
less likely to enter a Ph.D. program. For instance,
in a values study, the seniors were asked to rank
certain experiences on a four-point scale (with 1 as
not important, 2 as somewhat important, 3 as very
important, and 4 as essential). The results show a
divide.
Student Values and Ideology
|
|
Raising a Family |
Being Well Off Financially |
Writing Original Works |
Developing Meaningful Philosophy of Life |
|
Far left |
2.58 |
2.05 |
2.19 |
3.03 |
|
Liberal |
2.98 |
2.50 |
1.81 |
2.75 |
|
Moderate |
3.22 |
2.73 |
1.60 |
2.51 |
|
Conservative |
3.40 |
2.55 |
1.53 |
2.55 |
|
Far right |
3.39 |
2.79 |
1.63 |
2.53 |
It’s
not that conservatives don’t care about philosophy
or that liberals don’t like kids, the paper
suggests, but different underlying values that may
frame decisions.
“Conservatives appear to be very practically
oriented,” said Woessner.
Kelly-Woessner said that for many who want to raise
a family, academic life may be daunting — what with
both graduate school’s relative poverty and the long
hours and stress of the tenure track. “The path up
to tenure is perceived as very hostile to family,”
she said, adding that colleges would do well — for
all kinds of reasons — to become more family
friendly.
In
keeping with the overall paper, Kelly-Woessner
suggested that a cumulative effect may be visible in
explaining lopsidedly liberal departments. “You are
just starting with the choice of majors,” she said,
and then go on to what students value at the point
of graduation.
In
terms of suggestions, the paper argues both for
family-friendly policies and for less politics in
the classroom, expressing hope that the latter might
attract more conservatives to the social sciences
and humanities.
But
the authors stress that — to the extent liberals and
conservatives finishing colleges have different
values — imbalances among college faculties may be
permanent.
“Ideology represents far more than a collection of
abstract political values,” they write. “Liberalism
is more closely associated with a desire for
excitement, an interest in creative outlets and an
aversion to a structured work environment.
Conservatives express greater interest in financial
success and strong desires to raise families. From
this perspective, the ideological imbalance that
permeates much of academia may be somewhat
intractable.”
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on the shortage of accounting doctoral
students are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
Intellectuals, Free speech, and Capitalism
"Intellectuals, Free speech, and Capitalism-Becker," by Nobel
Laureate
Gary
Becker, The Becker-Posner Blog, October 7, 2007 ---
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/
Although there are numerous exceptions in
economics and political science departments, business and medical
schools, and elsewhere, the majority of faculty is considerably to
the left of the general population. They are at the forefront of the
politically correct movement. This is why Larry Summers ran into the
problems that led to his resignation as president of Harvard.
However, college faculties are not the only promoters of political
correctness. Many print and TV journalists, actors and movie
directors, and others involved in more intellectual and creative
pursuits have the same views. Why is this so?
I wish I had the answer; I don’t, so I will
speculate about possible reasons. In his 1950 book, Capitalism,
Socialism, and Democracy, the great economist, Joseph Schumpeter,
discussed exactly this question when asking why intellectuals were
so opposed to capitalism during his time? His answer mainly was that
businessmen do better under capitalism, whereas intellectuals
believe they would have a more influential position under socialism
and communism. In essence, Schumpeter's explanation is based on
intellectuals' feeling envious of the success of others under
capitalism combined with their desire to be more important.
I do believe that Schumpeter put his finger
on one of the important factors behind the skepticism of
intellectuals toward markets, and their continuing support of what
governments do. Neither the unsuccessful performance of the US
government first in Vietnam and now in Iraq, which they so strongly
condemn, nor even the colossal failures of socialism and communism
during the past half century, succeeded in weakening the faith of
intellectuals in governmental solutions to problems rather than
private market solutions. Since their basic hostility to capitalism
is largely unabated, but they are embarrassed to openly advocate
socialism and very large governments, given the history of the 20th
century, intellectuals have shifted their attacks to criticisms of
the way they believe private enterprise systems treat women and
minorities, the environment, and various other issues. They also
promote political correctness in what one can say about causes of
differences in performance among different groups, health care
systems, and other issues.
I believe considerations in addition to
simple jealousy and envy are behind the opposition of intellectuals
to capitalism. A belief in free markets requires confidence in the
view that both sides to a trade generally gain from it, that a
person's or a company's gain is not usually at the expense of those
they trade with, even when everyone is motivated solely by their own
selfish interests. This is highly counter-intuitive, which is why
great intellectuals like the 16th century French essayist, Marquis
de Montaigne, even had a short essay with the revealing title "That
the Profit of One Man is the Damage of Another ". It is much easier
to believe that governments are more likely than private individuals
and enterprises to further the general interest.
Of course, the evidence that has been
accumulated since Schumpeter's book gives good marks to free market
systems in promoting the interests of the poor and middle classes,
including minorities. And examples abound of corrupt and incompetent
government officials who either mess things up for everyone, or
promote these officials' interests. This evidence has impressed the
man and woman in the street, but intellectuals are more removed from
the real world, and tend to rely on and trust ideas and intellectual
arguments.
This would be my primary explanation for
the questions raised by Posner about why faculty (and I add other
intellectuals too) have become further to the left of their students
and the general population. In effect, intellectuals have changed
their views far less than other groups in response to the evidence.
While intellectual opinions have stood rather still, the general
population has moved their thinking against government solutions and
toward solutions that use markets and other private transactions and
relations.
"Intellectuals, Free speech, and Capitalism-Posner," by
Richard Posner, The Becker-Posner Blog, October 7, 2007 ---
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/
Probably another reason for the left's
influence in higher education is that Americans who came of age
during the late 1960s, a portion of whom were radicalized then, are
today in senior positions in many faculties. (A man or woman who was
18 in 1968 is 57 today.) A third reason may be the dearth of other
outlets, besides faculty politics, for political activism today.
There is no serious left-wing movement in the United States. There
is a strident Republican right influential in the Republican Party,
but the strident Democratic left exerts little influence on the
Democratic Party. You can post an angry comment on MoveOn.org, but
that cannot be a very satisfactory mode of political expression
compared to frightening the University of California's Board of
Regents into embarrassing itself by disinviting a Democrat of Larry
Summer’s stature and distinction, or épater-ing the bourgeoisie by
inviting Ahmadinejad to thunder against Bush and the West from a
perch on Morningside Heights.
An ironic counterpoint to university
leftism is the increasing, and increasingly successful, imitation of
business firms by America's colleges and universities. The leading
universities are becoming giant corporations with
multi-hundred-million dollar (or even billion dollar) budgets. As
they grow, they need and so they hire professional management.
Professional university management, in turn, takes its cues from its
peers in the business sector. So we have universities deeply
involved in hedge funds, greedy for supracompetitive investment
returns, engaged in the commercialization of scientific research,
angling for applications for admission by the children of the rich,
manipulating their statistics in order to move up in U.S. News &
World Report’s college rankings (for example by fuzzing up their
admissions criteria, so that they get more applicants and therefore
turn down more and so appear more selective), exaggerating the job
prospects of their advanced-degree graduates, bidding for academic
stars by offering high salaries and low teaching loads, and, related
to the bidding wars, creating a two-tier employment system with
tenured and tenure-track faculty on top and tenure-less,
benefit-less graduate students and temporaries on the bottom to do
the bulk of the teaching. And so the modern American university
system allows its faculty and administrators to live right, while
thinking left.
Here’s why: My students should not be able
to tell, at least from what I say in class, who I prefer to sit in the
oval office. For one thing, this would be a form of “bait and switch,”
since nothing about the sharing of my political opinions appears in the
catalogue that the students presumably consult before paying their money
and scheduling my course. More to the point, however, is that I am not
qualified to teach students about who should be elected. In fact, I am
no more qualified to tell people who they should vote for than I am to
teach a class in quantum mechanics. I have colleagues over in the
physics department who are qualified to offer a course in the latter
subject; none of us has the same credibility when it comes to the
former. Indeed, in an important way, this blanket incompetence is a part
of the class lesson — particularly, though not exclusively, in a class
on American government. It is an implicit argument for democracy, or at
least democratic equality. It is also, however, an argument about
education.
Paul A. Sracic, "Teach Only What You Know," Inside Higher Ed,
October 11, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/10/11/sracic
"Private School, Public Fuss," by Alan Salkin, The New York Times,
November 18, 2007 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/fashion/18mann.html?ex=1196053200&en=bfe058c6d1632d7a&ei=5070&emc=eta1
Andrew Trees had been informed that his contract at
the Horace Mann School, one of the nation’s most academically respected high
schools, would not be renewed, and this May he was in his final days. A
history teacher who had taught at the private school for six years, Mr.
Trees had written a satirical novel, “Academy X,” about an elite school
where students and parents resort to bribery and blackmail to ensure Ivy
League college admission.
Like Robin Williams’s character in “Dead Poets
Society,” Mr. Trees was admired by some of his students despite the school
administration’s disapproval, and a week before the end of classes they were
showing it.
In the movie, the students at a conservative
boarding school stand on desks, saluting their departing teacher by quoting
the Walt Whitman poetry he’d taught them, providing a sense of hope that
their spirits would not be broken. In real life, a former student of Mr.
Trees who had moved on to another history class, this one studying civil
disobedience, rallied his classmates to march toward Mr. Trees’s classroom.
Along the way, they picked up another class of students, studying the rise
of Bolshevism.
More than 30-strong, they walked into Mr. Trees’s
class, overlooking the school’s central lawn, and, along with his current
students, began offering testimonials.
“Dr. Trees is the best teacher I ever had,” said
one, according to Danielle McGuire, the teacher of the class studying civil
disobedience. It is the practice at Horace Mann for students to address
their teachers with Ph.D.s by the title “Doctor.”
The march was a rare flicker of disobedience at one
of New York City’s most prestigious schools, but the departure of Mr. Trees
has continued to roil the Riverdale campus. In the last year, the
controversy has led to the censorship of the school newspaper, the
resignations of all the members of a teachers’ grievance committee and, this
month, a breach-of-contract and defamation lawsuit against the school filed
by Mr. Trees.
Continued in article
Question
Does a professor have more freedom of speech than any employee?
"Professors' Freedoms Under Assault in the Courts," by Peter Schmidt,
Chronicle of Higher Education, February 27, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i25/25a00103.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Public-college professors received some
indication of how little they could count on academic-freedom
protections with a 2000 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
Fourth Circuit, in Urofsky v. Gilmore.
The case involved a lawsuit by Virginia
public-college professors challenging, as an infringement on
academic freedom, a state law prohibiting public employees from
using state-owned computers to view sexually explicit material over
the Internet. The lead plaintiff, Melvin I. Urofsky, was a
constitutional historian at Virginia Commonwealth University who
argued that the law hindered his ability to teach students about the
Communications Decency Act.
In their opinion upholding Virginia's law,
a majority of Fourth Circuit judges said they had extensively
reviewed the history of academic freedom and concluded that, to the
extent the Supreme Court "has constitutionalized a right of academic
freedom at all," it is only a right possessed by higher-education
institutions, not by individuals. The ruling said professors at
public colleges do not have any speech rights beyond those of other
public employees.
No other federal circuit's appeals court
has issued a similar decision. Nevertheless, William E. Thro, a
former Virginia solicitor general who is now a lawyer at Christopher
Newport University, argues that Urofsky has the potential to
influence courts beyond the Fourth Circuit, partly because it may
represent the lengthiest and most detailed discussion of individual
academic freedom to emerge from a federal appeals court.
Of far greater immediate concern to faculty
and free-speech advocates is the fallout from the Supreme Court's
2006 Garcetti ruling. That case involved a deputy district attorney
in Los Angeles, Richard Ceballos, who challenged disciplinary
actions taken against him for questioning an affidavit issued by his
office. Writing for a five-member court majority, Associate Justice
Anthony M. Kennedy said "when public employees make statements
pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking
out as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution
does not insulate their communications from employer discipline."
In a dissenting opinion, Associate Justice
David H. Souter expressed hope the decision would not jeopardize the
speech rights of public-college faculty members who "necessarily
speak and write 'pursuant to official duties.'" The majority
responded to his concern by sidestepping the issue and putting aside
the question of whether its logic "would apply in the same manner to
a case involving speech related to scholarship or teaching."
The Free Speech Climate on Campus Remains Chilly ---
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/jonathan-marks/the-free-speech-climate-on-campus-remains-chilly/
Since 1999, the Foundation for
Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has fought for freedom of speech at
our colleges and universities. This week, FIRE released the
results of a survey, which it commissioned with the education news and
opinion site, RealClearEducation. The survey is notable for its large
sample, nearly 20,000 students at 55
four-year universities. In comparison, a Gallup/Knight survey released
this spring sampled only 3,319.
Yet
the survey contains some familiar bad news. Here it is in brief.
First, majorities of
students oppose their schools allowing outside speakers to promote certain
ideas. These range from the idea that Black Lives Matter is a hate group—75
percent of students oppose opening campus to a speaker who says that—to the
idea that all white people are racist—74 percent oppose admitting a speaker
who carries that message. This result is reminiscent of a 2017 Cato
Institute survey, in which surprisingly high percentages of students
supported laws against saying offensive things in public about white people
and the police. Then and now, Republicans express more support for free
speech than their Democratic counterparts, but both the would-be suppressors
of speech and the viewpoints targeted for suppression cross ideological
boundaries.
Second, and in
agreement with other findings,
too many students,
more Republicans than Democrats, report censoring themselves or feeling
pressure to censor themselves. I don’t worry that 60 percent of students
report ever—as in, at least once—having felt they could not express
their opinion because of “how students, a professor, or the administration
would respond.” I’d expect the figure to be higher. Who, student or
non-student, has never felt that way? But it’s troubling that more than 20
percent of students and nearly 30 percent of Republican students feel “very
uncomfortable” about disagreeing in public with their professors. It’s
natural to worry about offending an authority figure who gives you a grade
at the end of the semester. But it’s the job of professors, who often teach
controversial material, to draw students out. More encouraging, however,
only 8 percent of students report feeling “very uncomfortable” talking
politics with their classmates.
Not
everything in the FIRE survey supports the conventional notion that our
problem is ideologically monolithic campuses in which left-wing activists
and their administrative enablers silence conservatives. South Carolina’s
Clemson University is one of just three campuses in the mix that has a small
majority of Trump-approving students. But respondents there are a little
more likely than those at Harvard or Chicago, which have relatively few
conservative students, to want to bar speakers who maintain that “some
racial groups are less intelligent than others.” And they are much more
likely to want to bar speakers who maintain that “Christianity has a
negative influence on society
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on freedom of speech on college campuses ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
“He gets very emotional. He gets
very excited … a lot of spittle around the mouth and so on," says
Ian Buruma of Paul Berman, kicking off the latest round of polemical
bloodletting between the two liberal intellectuals.
The history of this spat is a bit
tedious and more than a bit convoluted, but here it is in a
nutshell: In February Buruma, a professor at Bard College,
wrote a
profile of the Swiss-born Egyptian scholar Tariq Ramadan
for The New York Times Magazine. Buruma concluded that
Ramadan's "politics offer an alternative to violence, which, in the
end, is reason enough to engage with him, critically, but without
fear."
Berman found that take dangerously
naive and simplistic. In a
28,000 word response that
ran across almost an entire issue of The New Republic,
Berman delved deep into Ramadan's written work and biography to
paint a far more complex -- and menacing -- picture of the
controversial and wildly popular scholar of Islam.
Buruma held his fire until
late last month when he took after Berman and other "such
tub-thumpers for Bush's war" as Christopher Hitchens and the French
writer Pascal Bruckner in the course of a
review of Norman Podhoretz's new book,
World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism. Buruma's
central point was that he sees no difference between the views of
"neo-left" thinkers like Berman and neoconservative thinkers like
Podhoretz. (Bruckner
and Buruma have tangled before
on the related issue of when
tolerance for cultural differences becomes tolerance for
intolerance.)
Berman has just hit back with a
letter to the editor in
the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, in which
he claims that Buruma is for some reason incapable of seeing the
fine distinctions that Berman feels he has drawn between his own
position and that of President Bush's.
Berman and Buruma's ongoing spat
-- which shows every sign of intensifying in the near future --
speaks to a
much larger divide on the left
over how to aid the cause of reform
in the Muslim world.
Buruma's position is
seconded by the New York University historian Tony Judt, most
notably in
this essay in
the London Review of Books -- titled "Bush's Useful Idiots"
-- and in
this op-ed in The New
York Times.
Elements of this debate have been
playing out in the pages of The Chronicle Review. Earlier
this year Tariq Ramadan
made a case
for what the West can learn from Islam. In 2004 Ian Buruma sketched
out the origins of
Occidentalism, which he defined as "a war
against a particular idea of the West, which is neither new nor
unique to Islamist extremism." And in 2003
Paul Berman implored intellectuals
to ask themselves what they are doing
to support "liberal values against the totalitarianism of the Muslim
world and its defenders in the West."
"Skepticism of Faculty and Tenure," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher
Ed, July 12, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/07/12/poll
A
new poll
by Zogby Interactive
may not cheer
professors. A
majority of the
public believes that
political bias by
professors is a
serious problem and
doubts that tenure
promotes quality.
To critics of the professoriate, the
poll is but more evidence of the gap
between academics and the public,
but some experts on public opinion
about higher education have
questions about the value of the new
findings.
The poll was conducted this month
through an online survey of 9,464
adults, and has a margin of error of
+/- 1 percent. A Zogby spokesman
said that the poll was conducted by
the polling company itself, and was
not sponsored by any group.
More
than 58 percent of those polled believe that
political bias is a somewhat serious or very serious
problem.
There are sharp divisions by party lines (73.3
percent of Republicans view the problem as very
serious, while only 6.7 percent of Democrats do),
gender (46.8 percent of men view the problem as very
serious, compared to 32.1 percent of women) religion
(57.9 percent of those who are born again view the
problem as very serious, while only 17.6 percent of
Jews do), and those who shop at Wal-Mart (56.7
percent of those who shop there weekly believe the
problem is very serious, while only 17.6 percent of
those who never do think that).
On
age and race, white people and older people
Continued in article
Political Bias in Undergraduate Education
In this month's Carnegie Perspectives, Tom
Ehrlich and Anne Colby revisit the highly politicized Academic Bill of
Rights legislation. Tom and Anne lead the Foundation's work on the
importance of civic and political engagement among undergraduate students.
In this piece, they argue for the necessity for college faculty members to
become much more self-conscious of the variety of ways in which they
communicate their political and social views to students. They provide
recommendations and precautions for campus leaders who seek to create
opportunities for teaching and inquiry that will encourage student learning
around difficult issues.
Lee S. Shulman, President The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of
Teaching, March 29, 2006 ---
http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/conversations/sub.asp?key=244&subkey=1565
"Reframing the Debate About What Professors
Say," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, September 11, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/11/aaup
From a legislative perspective, the movement for the
“Academic Bill of
Rights” hasn’t led to the
enactments of bills that many professors feared.
Hearings have been held, and bills introduced — and
some have even advanced. But the movement hasn’t
produced new laws. That’s not to say, though, that
it hasn’t had an impact. Plenty of legislators, talk
radio hosts, bloggers and others have picked up the
arguments put forth by David Horowitz and other
proponents of the measure — namely that many
professors are not only liberal, but are committed
to indoctrinating students and punishing those who
don’t accept their views.
With the public debate having been influenced more
than the law, the American Association of University
Professors is today trying to reframe the debate. It
is releasing today a new statement on
“Freedom in the Classroom,”
taking on arguments about indoctrination, the need
for measurable “balance” in courses, and the idea
that professors need to stay close to an agreed upon
syllabus and avoid political references unless
directly and clearly related to course content.
“We
want to help stiffen the spine of the
professoriate,” said Cary Nelson, president of the
AAUP, a professor of English at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a member of the
committee that drafted the new statement. “This is
really, more than anything else, a statement
directed at the higher education community,” said
Nelson, who added that he worried that too many
professors are censoring themselves because they
don’t want to find themselves answering questions
about why they made some political reference or
assigned a certain book and not another.
Starting this week, the AAUP
will be e-mailing the statement to 350,000 American
academics, and similar e-mail campaigns will take
place in Canada (a
French translation has
been provided for those Quebec) and possibly
elsewhere. “We want to give faculty members
arguments that are really clear and that they can
use with administrations,” Nelson said. (A
podcast interview from
this summer features Nelson discussing his goals for
the statement.)
The
statement says that answering the charges of
widespread abuse of classroom discussions is vital
to preventing the kind of legislation and regulation
academics fear. “Modern critics of the university
seek to impose on university classrooms mandatory
and ill-conceived standards of ‘balance,’
‘diversity,’ and ‘respect.’ We ought to learn from
history that the vitality of institutions of higher
learning has been damaged far more by efforts to
correct abuses of freedom than by those alleged
abuses,” the statement says. “We ought to learn from
history that education cannot possibly thrive in an
atmosphere of state-encouraged suspicion and
surveillance.”
Continued in article
Every time
college professors enter their classrooms — any one of the thousands of
classrooms on the thousands of campuses across the United States — they
know they are presiding over an extraordinary and potentially volatile
space. Not all classrooms are charged with drama, of course; some
contain students sitting in remote corners of the lecture hall, catching
up on some much-needed sleep. But classrooms that depend on student
discussion, commentary, and debate are quite another thing — and
seasoned teachers know what every inexperienced teacher dreads: Class
discussion can go in any direction whatsoever. Students can pick up on a
professor’s analogy — for example, my slightly facetious comparison of
Silas Lapham to the Beverly Hillbillies, or my more serious comparision
between two characters’ discussion of American literary figures and our
own sense of the “canon” of American directors — and run with it
anywhere they like; every day, they bring to the classroom their own
analogies, obsessions, fully-formed arguments, and passing concerns, as
well as the ideas that just popped into their heads a few minutes ago.
And in response, professors can pick up on students’ responses and take
them wherever on the syllabus — or wherever in the world — seems most
pedagogically promising.
Michael Bérubé, "Freedom to Teach," Inside Higher Ed, September
11, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/09/11/berube
WHY THE HATE? 2020's most anti-conservative actions, statements on
campus ---
https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=16551
David Horowitz Accused of Poor Scholarship
From the moment in February that David
Horowitz’s new book appeared, scholars have been poking at it,
identifying errors and what they consider to be distortions (even as
Horowitz was praised by many conservative talk show hosts, who have
helped him boost sales). Today, a coalition of academic and civil
liberties groups is releasing a
more detailed analysis of
the Horowitz book, The Professors: The
101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.
In “Facts Count,” the debunking document being
released today, Horowitz’s book is slammed as “sloppy in the extreme.”
The analysis also says that the details included in the book suggest
that Horowitz is not concerned with the students he says he is trying to
protect, but is actually trying to punish professors whose views he
doesn’t like.
"Fact-Checking David Horowitz," by Scott Jaschik, Inside
Higher Ed, May 9, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/05/09/report
Political Correctness, Free Speech and Academic Freedom:
How Unsafe Are Horowitz's 101 Most Dangerous Professors?
Definitions of Political correctness on the Web ---
Click Here
- A trend that wants to make everything fair, equal and just
to all by supressing thought, speech and practice in order to
acheive that goal.
www.information-entertainment.com/Politics/polterms.html
- avoidance of expressions or actions that can be perceived to
exclude or marginalize or insult people who are socially
disadvantaged or discriminated against
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
- Political correctness is a term generally used to disparage
efforts to raise awareness about and eliminate social and
political biases in language and other forms of representation.
The term also appears in the adjectival form politically correct
(often abbreviated PC). While it frequently refers to a
linguistic phenomenon, it is also extended to cover political
ideology and behavior.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness
The history and a varied discussion of the term "political
correctness" appears at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Correctness
A discussion of "academic freedom" appears at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_freedom
Hey, Hey, Political Correctness
PC's Big Brother Decides What's Left for Us
I was distressed to read that the
administration (at Brandeis University)
is assigning human apparatchiks to monitor Brandeis classrooms to
assure linguistic conformity and political orthodoxy. Surely the
administration knows that the technology of authoritarian
surveillance has advanced far beyond the primitive methods employed
by the likes of J. Edgar Hoover and Erich Honecker. A laptop and a
webcam can do the job far more cheaply and efficiently. Just
position one unit per class in the back of the room, then patch the
feed into a mainframe system... This simple expedient would not only
provide an accurate audio-visual record of conversational
malfeasance by faculty and students, but the real-time
administration would allow the administration to dispatch agents
immediately into the classroom to stop the utterance of verboten
words or ideas
Thomas Doherty as quoted by UD, "UD Gives Thanks to Thomas
Doherty," Inside Higher Ed, November 22, 2007 ---
Jensen Comment
This is McCarthyism in reverse. It makes look like free speech. UD
envisions this technology used in tandem with a new product called
SynchronEyes. While, in the back of the room, the university
monitors speech, in the front of the room, the instructor, outfitted
with SynchonEyes technology, views the laptop screens of all
students who bring computers to class. SynchronEyes lets professors
“access thumbnails of every computer screen in the class and block
websites” they don’t like. You can read about the cause of all this
fuss at
http://www.thehoot.net/?module=displaystory&story_id=2434&format=html
Bob Jensen's threads on political correctness are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
Intellectual Diversity or Political Repackaging?
The South Dakota House of Representatives
on Wednesday passed a bill that would require public colleges and
universities to file annual reports on the steps they take to assure
“intellectual diversity” on their campuses. Supporters of the bill
see it as a new approach to raising some of the same issues promoted
by David Horowitz and supporters of the “Academic Bill of Rights.”
Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni,
called Wednesday’s vote “a tipping point moment” that “offers the
promise of a cultural transformation in American higher education.”
Scott Jaschik, "Intellectual Diversity or Political Repackaging?"
Inside Higher Ed, February 9, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/02/09/dakota
Here's an excerpt from the introduction to David Horowitz’s new
book,
The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America,
which was officially released today.
"The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America,"
by David Horowitz," FrontPageMagazine, February 10, 2006 ---
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21249
Jensen Comment:
If
Horowitz became a professor, somebody should be bumped to make room
in the Top 101 for him.
What follows is a reply that came in two messages from a Trinity
University professor.
The second message was more personal than the first message. I
merged them into one reply and received his permission to paste them
into Tidbits.
February 10, 2006 reply from Aaron Delwiche
[Aaron.Delwiche@Trinity.edu]
Jensen Comment: "If Horowitz
became a professor, somebody should be bumped to make room
in the Top 100 for him."
I fully agree, Bob.
David Horowitz has been an
intellectual bully for the past four decades. First for the
left, and now for the right.
In the
late1960s, as the militant
editor of the magazine
Ramparts, Horowitz
marginalized and expelled writers whose ideological views
failed to conform with his Leninist party line. As an
intellectual and activist, he was one of the most excessive
and least tolerant figures associated with the New Left.
Over the past forty years,
most of his old companions on the left have refined their
ideas and adapted to a changing political landscape. Some
moved gradually to the center or to the right, many stayed
on the left, but most of the New Left activists at least
matured with age.
Horowitz, on the other hand, made a 180-degree ideological
flip in the late 1970s. Once an extremist for the left, he
became an extremist for the right. His
targets have changed, but his
bullying tactics remain the same. Rather than discussing the
issues and searching for common ground, he attempts to
silence his opponents completely.
Unfortunately, he is significantly
more well funded this time around.
I found an even-handed article in
The Nation that humanizes Horowitz at the same time that it
highlights his tendency to attack his opponents. See:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20000703/sherman
In reading the article, it is easy
to understand how Horowitz's personal disillusionment with
the Black Panthers caused him to make a 180-degree flip. It
is also hard to avoid feeling some empathy with an "insecure
human being" who "craves approval" and wants to "be taken
seriously as an intellectual."
In the 1980s, as an undergraduate
at Berkeley, I was involved with the movement for human
rights in Central America. During one peaceful march
composed of more than 2,000 people, I encountered a militant
activist that I recognized from campus. He and his friends
were piling up bricks and stones with the intention of
throwing them through local Bank of America. When I argued
that this would discredit our cause, he pushed me away and
threatened to hit me. Eventually, the moment of opportunity
for breaking windows had passed. He and his friends
scattered. At that moment, I finally understood that many
people get involved with politics for a variety of
psychological reasons. My militant acquaintance simply
wanted to break things, and the atrocities in Central
America gave him a justification for doing so.
A self-righteous bully is a
self-righteous bully, regardless of political orientation.
This was probably the most powerful
political insight of my youth. It made it possible for me to
speak with (and respect) people who hold very different
views, and it added an orthogonal dimension to my
understanding of the political spectrum. Often, the way
people say things is more important than what they say.
Unfortunately, David Horowitz
doesn't seem to have learned that lesson.
Aaron
Who’s Afraid of David Horowitz?
You would never know it from McLemee’s
article, but The Professors is not about any threat from
left-wing ideas as such. It is about the intellectual corruption of
the university, and the intrusion of political agendas into the
academic curriculum. I know this statement will come as a surprise
to those familiar only with the attacks themselves, so here is what
the book actually says: “This book is not intended as a text about
left-wing bias in the university and does not propose that a
leftwing perspective on academic faculties is a problem in itself.
Every individual, whether conservative or liberal, has a perspective
and therefore a bias. Professors have every right to interpret the
subjects they teach according to their individual points of view.
That is the essence of academic freedom. But they also have
professional obligations as teachers, whose purpose is the
instruction and education of students, not to impose their biases on
their students as though they were scientific facts.”
"Who’s Afraid of David Horowitz?" by David Horowitz, Inside
Higher Ed, February 27, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/02/27/horowitz
Caroline Higgins is 66 years old, a Peace
Studies professor, and at 5’2” she’s not a daunting figure.
But she's really dangerous!
Walking on the Earlham College campus
last week, she ran into one of her students, a football player who
very much towers over her. She mentioned that she was about to be
named to a list of the “101 most dangerous academics in America.”
Higgins said that her student just started laughing — and that for
anyone who knows her, “dangerous” just isn’t the word that comes to
mind. She teaches peace studies.But today, with the release of David
Horowitz’s new book,
The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America,
Caroline Higgins finds herself in elite
company. She makes the list along with such big name academic stars
as Derrick Bell, Michael Bérubé, bell hooks, Noam Chomsky and Eric
Foner. Horowitz, a one-time ’60s radical, includes plenty of ’60s
radicals who didn’t have the conversion experience he did, so Angela
Davis and Bernadine Dohrn make the list, of course, along with the
likes of Ward Churchill and a who’s who in Middle Eastern studies.
"How Dangerous Are David Horowitz's 101 Most Dangerous American
Academics?" by Sanford Pinsker, The Irascible Professor, March
15, 2006 ---
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-03-15-06.htm
If you happen to be an academic positioned
somewhere on the Left, David Horowitz can be, well, a pain. He is, among
other things, a relentless scold, and an indefatigable self promoter.
During the early l970s Horowitz was not only a member of the New Left,
but, he insists, one of its founders. In any event, his tell-all memoir,
Radical Son (l997), makes it clear that he once lived in the belly of
the beast, and that his politics have moved l80 degrees from where it
once was.
As president of the Center for the Study of
Popular Culture, Horowitz keeps his eye on Hollywood, the media, and not
least of all, academia. It is this last item that engages him in The
Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. Horowitz does
his best to show how he chose his representative cases and how it is
that they cover the territory between the Ivies and very small, small
colleges, and why he purposefully excludes everybody from the Right, a
group that is not nearly as large or as "dangerous" as those on the
Left. My hunch is that some critics will be happy to supply Horowitz
with the names of professors at small religious colleges who have no
more regard for liberal learning than do their ideological counterparts
on the Hard Left.
Even Horowitz's enemies will admit that he is a
slick marketer of his books, and that The Professors is no exception.
Because academics love lists at least as much as the general population
and because there's something fatally attractive about the phase
"dangerous academics", the promise of gossip mongering and mud-slinging
is just too delicious to resist. For example, what if Horowitz singles
out somebody from your college or university, or somebody in your field
who teaches down the road? You'd want to know that, whether you agree
with Horowitz or not. But let me hasten to add that this knowledge is
just not worth the book's $27.95 price tag.
Nonetheless, Horowitz's book, opportunistic and
partisan though it might be, has a limited value. I feel that professors
who misuse the lectern, who have long ago abandoned the pursuit of truth
wherever it may lead for visions of social change that begin in the
classroom are probably just as "dangerous" as Horowitz argues they are.
Part of me would, had I written this book, sub-titled it the 101
"laziest," "silliest," "most irresponsible," or "just plan dumb"
professors, but that imaginary book wouldn't fly off the book shelves
nearly so fast as books about "dangerous" people do.
Alphabetically arranged, Horowitz's scoundrels
go from Professor Lisa Anderson, a relentless critic of our wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan to Professor George Wolfe who teaches music (he is an
accomplished saxophonist), but who also teaches "Introduction to Peace
Studies", a class that shows how and why a great sax man can also be a
fierce critic of Israel. Each profiled academic gets a quick, 2-3 page
thumbnail sketch (Angela Davis, because her history goes back to the
Black Panthers warrants slightly more space). The result is a
biographical fact here (where and what each professor teaches) and a
provocative sound bite culled from their writing or speeches. The result
is slim pickings.
A healthy handful of the people Horowitz scours
are probably familiar (Ward Churchill, for one; Cornel West for
another), but I could be wrong about that. Academic fame of the sort
that made Churchill and West household names often fades after fifteen
minutes. Moreover, most academics are too busy preparing classes,
grading papers, or working on their scholarship to worry about the few
bad apples who give the entire barrel a rotten taste.
The problem, alas, is that the people Horowitz
discusses are symptomatic of what happens when a generation of sixties
radicals grew up to become professors, and, increasingly, deans. They
are now the folks in charge of hiring faculty members and granting them
tenure -- and they bring to these endeavors the same passion and
ideological fervor that they first put on with their tie-dyed shirts and
bell bottomed pants, granny glasses and Birkenstocks.
To imagine that a portion of every faculty, in
the Ivy League or considerably down the food chain, are aging hippies --
charmingly eccentric but hardly threatening -- is to miss the alarm
bells that Horowitz is trying to sound: “How many radical professors are
there on American faculties of higher education?” he asks, and then goes
on to surmise that if, according to the federal government, there are
some 617,00 college and university professors in the United States: If
we were to take Harvard . . . as a yardstick, and assume a figure of 10
percent per university faculty, and then cut that figure in half to
control for the possibility that Harvard may be a relatively radical
institution (as its president, Lawrence Summers, found out when the
thought police eased him out the door), the total number of such
professors at American universities with views similar to the spectrum
represented in this volume would still be in the neighborhood of
25,000-30,000.
As I tried to make sense of Horowitz's numbers
(25,000 strikes me as awfully high, although that would mean that a much
larger number, 592,000, have passed his muster), the only explanation
that presented itself is that the small number of academic radicals have
been able to so bully and intimidate their colleagues that, as the old
song would have it, "anything goes."
What follows are a few quick tests to see if
Horowitz's five percent loony factor is correct. How many faculty
members, in classrooms or campus events, single out "unprotected groups"
(Jews or Christians, for example) and lambaste them with impunity but
who would be outraged if a colleague did the same to, say, blacks,
women, or homosexuals? How many faculty members wear (sometimes
literally) their politics on their sleeves, making it perfectly clear
that they are environmental zealots, that they oppose the war in Iraq,
or that there was never a 'liberation movement ' they failed to support.
For such people, self-righteousness must be an exhausting business. I am
told, moreover, that there are always younger, ever more pure-of-heart
folks ready to speak at the next faculty meeting. My point is that
faculty members in very large numbers have learned to bite their tongues
and to sit on their hands, lest they provoke the politically correct.
Much better, the silenced whisper to themselves, to let the radicals go
off to teach whatever it is that they want to teach. Their foolishness
won't affect me, that is, until the day comes when somebody proposes a
course in "feminist physics" or in "the queering of American lit." As
Horowitz patiently explains, it is easier to give away the farm in small
chunks than it is to get it back.
Academic life has always had more than its fair
share of the lazy, incompetent, and just plain dumb, but most of the
people who choose life in the academy have the same passion for learning
and teaching that long ago energized Chaucer's clerk. The rub, of
course, is that the rules of scholarly engagement have changed, and that
those who continue to believe in hard evidence and harder logic are
being shouted down by those who wrap themselves in the cloak of academic
freedom as they set about to radicalize higher education itself. Even
Stanley Fish, a man on the left, has had enough of apologizing for
professors who confuse a classroom with a political rally. In an article
published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Fish -- in Horowitz's
summary -- "cautioned academics about getting involved as academics in
moral and political issues such as the war on terror." The article
concludes in a typically Fishian way: "It is immoral (Fish insists) for
academics or academic institutions to proclaim moral views." That a
staunch conservative such as David Horowitz and an equally committed
liberal such Stanley Fish can agree gives me a reason, admittedly small,
to cheer. But it also reinforces the point of The Professors: that there
are at least 101 radical professors ready and willing to replace the
ones Horowitz collected.
Bob Jensen's threads on these issues are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PoliticalCorrectness
The history and a varied discussion of the term "political
correctness" appears at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Correctness
A discussion of "academic freedom" appears at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_freedom
"The Real Bias in the Classroom," by Scott Jaschik, Inside
Higher Ed, March 20, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/03/20/politics
There may be political bias in
the classroom, but headed in the other direction. A
new study — soon to be published in PS: Political
Science & Politics — finds that students are the
ones with bias, attributing characteristics to their
professors based on the students’ perceptions of
their faculty members’ politics and how much they
differ from their own.
The authors of the study say
that it backs the claims of proponents of the
Academic Bill of Rights that students think about —
and are in some cases concerned about — the politics
of their professors. But the authors also say that
the study directly refutes the idea that students
are being somehow indoctrinated by views that they
don’t like. “Students aren’t simply sponges,” says
April Kelly-Woessner, part of the husband-and-wife
team of political scientists who wrote the study.
Further, she adds that the study suggests that not
only do students not change their views because of
professors, but may even “push back” and judge
professors based on politics, not merit.
The study — which will be
presented this week at a legislative hearing in
Pennsylvania — ends with a strong call for
professors to be willing to present ideas that may
upset some students. “College is not Club Med. As
instructors, we ought not to refine our pedagogy
exclusively for the purpose of making students
comfortable or improving course evaluations,” write
Kelly-Woessner, who teaches at Elizabethtown
College, and Matthew Woessner, who teaches at
Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg.
The couple will present the
results of two papers based on a survey of 1,385
students in political science courses at a variety
of public and private institutions. The students
were asked a series of questions about their views
of the politics of their professors, their own
politics, and various other qualities that they
attributed to the professors.
Continued in article
Big Student is Not Only Watching, Big Student is Recording
"Whiff of McCarthy as pupils out teachers," by James Bone, News.com,
March 9, 2006 ---
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,18383423-401,00.html?from=rss
TEACHERS who express radical left-wing views in
the classroom are facing a new tactic in America: conservative parents
are encouraging students to make recordings of their views.
The use of micro-recording devices, often in
mobile phones or digital music players, is the latest twist in
conservatives' struggle against what they see as the leftist slant of
American education. A high-school geography teacher was placed on leave
last week in Colorado after a 16-year-old pupil recorded him comparing
US President George W. Bush to Hitler.
The latest flare-up in the festering
controversy came not at a university but at a suburban high school
outside Denver. Sean Allen, 16, made headlines across the country by
recording his geography teacher lambasting Mr Bush.
"Sounds a lot like the things that Adolf Hitler
used to say," Jay Bennish told his class.
"We're the only ones who are right, everyone
else is backward and our job is to conquer the world."
Mr Bennish called the US "probably the single
most violent nation on earth", saying that it had committed more than
7000 "terrorist sabotage acts" against Cuba. But he told pupils that
they were free to disagree with him. The boy's father leaked the
recording to a local radio station and it was quickly picked up by the
national media.
The teacher was placed on paid leave while the
school board investigated whether he had violated its policy of
providing a balanced point of view. He threatened to retaliate with a
lawsuit asserting his right to free speech.
An alumnus group at the University of
California at Los Angeles has also caused an uproar by offering a $US100
($135) bounty for taped evidence of professors' radical rants.
Continued in article
Here's how the Los Angeles Times spun the story:
"Teacher suspended for Bush remark." Wrong! Several other news stories in
our local papers have been no better. Congratulations to Rocky Mountain News
reporters who got it right: "The teacher, Jay Bennish, is on paid leave
pending the outcome of an investigation into whether he violated a district
policy requiring balanced viewpoints being presented in class." Bingo! If
teachers were disciplined merely for criticizing President Bush, half of
them would probably be out of work. Bennish is under scrutiny for violating
his public trust as a teacher of callow young minds by carting his personal
political soapbox into his 10th- grade geography class in violation of a
perfectly sensible and reasonable Cherry Creek Schools policy that requires
teachers to be "impartial and objective" when dealing with controversial
issues.
Mike Rosen, "Rosen: Intellectual child abuse," Rocky Mountain News,
March 10, 2006 ---
Click Here
Jensen Comment
I think recording public conversations is legal such as recording a speaker
on a platform in a city park. Certainly media services record public
speeches all the time. Recording classroom lectures without permission most
likely is prohibited by colleges themselves, but it may not be against the
law in all states of the United States. Audio recording of private
conversations such as telephone conversations is against the law in 12
states but not all other states. It gets more complicated if the recording
is intended for rebroadcast ---
http://www.rcfp.org/handbook/c03p01.html
Some reporters regard tape recorders and
cameras as intrusive devices that all but ensure that interviewees will
be uncooperative. To others, they are invaluable newsgathering tools
that create important documentary evidence of a conversation.
News organizations frequently adopt policies
regarding surreptitious use of these newsgathering tools. It is critical
that reporters and news organizations know the state and federal laws
that govern the use of cameras and tape recorders. The summary that
follows is intended as an introduction to those laws.
You may record, film, broadcast or amplify any
conversation if all parties to the conversation consent. It is always
legal to tape or film a face-to-face interview when your recorder or
camera is in plain view. In these instances, the consent of all parties
is presumed.
Of the 50 states, 38, as well as the
District of Columbia, allow you to record a conversation to which you
are a party without informing the other parties you are doing so.
Federal wiretap statutes also permit
one-party-consent recording of telephone conversations in most
circumstances.1 Twelve states forbid the recording of private
conversations without the consent of all parties. Those states are
California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts,
Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington.2
The federal wiretap law, passed in 1968,
permits surreptitious recording of conversations when one party
consents, "unless such communication is intercepted for the purpose of
committing any criminal or tortious act in violation of the Constitution
or laws of the United States or of any State." Amendments signed into
law in 1986 and 1994 expand the prohibitions to unauthorized
interception of most forms of electronic communications, including
satellite transmissions, cellular phone conversations, computer data
transmissions and cordless phone conversations.
Most states have copied the federal law. Some
expand on the federal law's language and prohibit all surreptitious
recording or filming without the consent of all parties. Some state
statutes go even further, prohibiting unauthorized filming, observing
and broadcasting in addition to recording and eavesdropping, and
prescribing additional penalties for divulging or using unlawfully
acquired information, and for trespassing to acquire it. In most states,
the laws allow for civil as well as criminal liability.
Many of the state statutes make possession of
wiretapping devices a crime even though one-party consent to taping
conversations may be allowed.
Most of the state statutes permit the recording
of speeches and conversations that take place where the parties may
reasonably expect to be recorded. Most also exempt from their coverage
law enforcement agencies and public utilities that monitor conversations
and phone lines in the course of their businesses.
In general, state statutes apply to
conversations that take place within a single state.
When the conversation is between parties in
states with conflicting eavesdropping and wiretapping laws, federal law
generally applies, although either state also may choose to enforce its
laws against a violator.
If a reporter in a state that allows one-party
consent taping calls a party in a state that requires two-party consent,
and tapes the conversation surreptitiously — which is legal under
federal law — a state with tough laws prohibiting unauthorized recording
may choose to apply its laws regardless of the location of the caller or
the existence of a preemptive federal statute. Unfortunately, it is
still unclear whether courts will hold that the federal protection
preempts the state law.3 It is important to know your state law and the
law in the state into which you call before you record surreptitiously.
The federal law and many state laws make it
illegal to possess and particularly to publish the contents of an
illegal wiretap. Some states that allow recordings make the distribution
or publication of those otherwise legal recordings a crime. The U.S.
Supreme Court ruled in Bartnicki v. Vopper in May 2001 that the media
could not be held liable for damages under the federal statute for
publishing or broadcasting information that the media obtained from a
source who had conducted an illegal wiretap. The recording related to a
local union leader's proposal to conduct violent acts in the area. The
Court ruled that any claim of privacy in the recorded information was
outweighed by the public's interest in a matter of serious public
concern.4 The Court did not indicate whether disclosure by the media
under different circumstances would be considered legal.
The Federal Communications Commission also has
adopted a policy, known as the "Telephone Rule."5 It requires a reporter
who tapes a telephone conversation that will later be broadcast to
inform the other party that the tape is intended for broadcast.
Jensen Comment
Interestingly, it is more acceptable from a legal standpoint to record a
person on video without sound than to record audio without video. Otherwise
stores and banks and casinos could no longer have video cameras recording
customers and employees. There even was a reported instance where a peeping
tom was convicted of video taping a couple inside a motel room. The news
account said it would have been more difficult to get a conviction had the
tape not included audio as well as video. I found this a little hard to
believe, but that was the way it was reported some years ago (this story's
buried on one of my former Tidbits, but I've no idea where).
Bob Jensen's threads "Hypocrisy in Academia and the Media" ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/hypocrisy.htm
The Politically Correctness Fracture of Academe
Since
the late 1960s, universities have considered it their mission to teach
students what rather than how to think. Students soon internalize the
catechism, summed up in the Twitter hashtag #whiteprivilege, meaning:
Western civilization thrived on white, Christian, Euro-centric
aggression against Others; Western literature and art are the
patriarchy’s handmaidens; the university’s mission is to further a just
society and empower the wretched of the Earth; objective “knowledge” is
a tool for one dominant race, gender and sexuality to oppress the
powerless; reason is but one “way of knowing”; any opposition to
identity politics and multiculturalism is racism; there are no
hierarchies in cultural values — in matters of gender, art and family,
all manifestations are equally valid; and most insidiously,
acknowledging and rewarding objective merit is considered an
“institutionalized form of racism and classism.”
Barbara Kay ---
http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/03/11/barbara-kay-universities-are-teaching-students-what-to-think-not-how-to-think/
History and Meaning of "Political Correctness" ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Correctness
Penn State Retracts Statement Saying Conservative Voices Are Important:
Leftist Ideology is the Only Politically Correct Ideology ---
https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/09/penn-state-retracts-statement-saying-conservative-voices-are-important/
“Dear conservative students. Your viewpoints are
important,” the announcement read, referencing the isolation and
self-censorship many conservative students experience on left-wing campuses.
According to the schools Director of Strategic Communications, it was part
of a statement aimed at creating a supporting and inclusive environment for
students.
. . .
The University quickly crumpled, and retracted the statement.
Penn State University training film on how to liberal
faculty can deal with veterans who refuse to be politically correct ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhLq9NPLv0M
Alternate ---
Click Here
An analysis by The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/PennStateVeteran.htm
Jensen Comment
Later, quaking in fear, Penn State announced conservative viewpoints are not
important.
That tells us academe is marching
lockstep toward one ideology. Noam and others are worried!
The inmates are guarding the asylum.
The Harpers free speech letter and controversy ---
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/07/the-harpers-free-speech-letter-and-controversy.html
Noam Chomsky and Other Scholars Feer the Dangers of Losing Open
Debate and Toleration of Differences in Ideology ---
https://www.ibtimes.com/noam-chomsky-malcolm-gladwell-address-cancel-culture-open-letter-3007684
In an open letter, a group of public
figures and writers warn readers about the pros and cons of the current
world climate (mania).
The piece, titled " A
Letter on Justice and Open Debate,"
featuring signatures from 150 public figures including the likes of J.K.
Rowling, Margaret Atwood, and Noam Chomsky, was published on the Harper's
Magazine website on Tuesday with plans to make a reemergence in the October
issue of the magazine.
"Our cultural institutions
are facing a moment of trial," the letter begins. "Powerful protests for
racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform,
along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our
society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the
arts."
"But this needed reckoning has also
intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend
to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of
ideological conformity."
Specifically
speaking to their craft and the dire consequences if mindsets don't change
lanes, they conclude, "As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for
experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the
possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional
consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends,
we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us."
It seems not everyone was happy with the letter, though. After it
was published both historian Kerri Greenidge and trans activist
Jennifer Finney Boylan announced the withdrawal of their support on
Twitter.
Who
decides which books to burn?
Franklin Pierce Biographer
Urges Consideration Of 14th President's Progressive Civil Liberties Record
Before Removal Of His Name From UNH Law School ---
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2020/06/franklin-pierce-biographer-urges-consideration-of-14th-presidents-progressive-civil-liberties-record.html
No chance
'Black
Lives Matter' was painted on the streets of New York City and Washington, D.C.
as a way of city officials showing their support for the movement. Questions
have been asked (addressed to the NYC Mayor) about whether or not other political
groups and organizations should have the ability to paint their messages on
city-owned and maintained streets ---
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bethbaumann/2020/07/11/conservative-womens-group-has-an-interesting-request-for-bill-de-blasio-n2572317?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=07/12/2020&bcid=b16c6f948f297f77432f990d4411617f&recip=17935167
Only politically correct messages, in the socialist Mayor's eyes, are allowed.
The Mayor actually helped the mob paint the streets with BLM graffiti in front
of Trump Tower ---
https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/07/de-blasio-bans-large-gatherings-after-he-helps-paint-black-lives-matter-in-front-of-trump-tower
Fun With Google and Political Correctness Study of College Faculty
"Fun With Google and Diversity," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher
Ed, July 3, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/03/diversity
Google doesn’t exactly lack for people
doing searches, but it has been getting a boost from culture
warriors in the last week.
The National Association of Scholars
announced that a search it had
conducted of college and university Web sites indicated that
academe is not only obsessed with diversity, but more
obsessed with diversity than with arguably more important
values, like freedom. The study — quickly praised by
conservative commentators as a sign of the times, and
particularly sad with July 4 approaching — prompted a bunch
of others to Web surf as well, with very different results.
For starters, here’s how the NAS did
its study: It took the top 100 colleges and universities, as
ranked by U.S. News & World Report, and compared how
many references to diversity were on their Web sites,
compared to references to other words, like freedom,
liberty, equality and democracy. Diversity references beat
out all the other words — a five to one ratio for diversity
vs. liberty, for example. The association also compared
colleges’ Web sites to those of other parts of society and
found higher education far more concerned about diversity.
For the association, which is
critical of affirmative action and supports a traditional
curriculum, the implications of the study are clear. Stephen
H. Balch, president of the association, says that the
“endless reiterations in academe” of supporting diversity
“indicate the great gulf that has opened between our
universities and the rest of the country.”
While not opposing the concept of
diversity, Balch says it has a very specific set of meanings
in academe: “In ‘diversityspeak,’ America is a collection of
ethnicities and lifestyles rather than a common cultural
identity, and group membership trumps individuality,” Balch
says. “Given the caste mentality associated with the term
and its emphasis on grievance and victimhood, it is
especially alarming that university references to diversity
exceed those to freedom and liberty.”
Not so fast with the
college-bashing, says Hiram Hover, a historian who blogs
under that pseudonym and who did
some Googling of his own. First he
checked the Web sites of the National Association of
Scholars and
Phi Beta Cons, the new higher ed
blog sponsored by National Review. On both sites,
Hover writes, diversity is far more popular (as a word) than
freedom or democracy.
Then Hover compares the ratio of
the word diversity to the words freedom and democracy at
that ultimate symbol of liberal academe (the University of
California at Berkeley) and the ultimate symbol of Bush-era
corporate power (Halliburton). The ratios indicate that
Halliburton is significantly more liberal (at least judged
by references to diversity on its Web site) than is
Berkeley.
Balch of the NAS faults Hover’s
analysis on several grounds, noting, for example, that the
many references to diversity on conservative Web sites are
natural, given their skepticism of academic diversity. He
also says that Hover is “cherry picking,” while the NAS
study looked at entire sectors — and noted that business has
adopted some of the same emphasis on diversity as is
prevalent in higher education.
But Hover’s Googling got Balch back
online — and he says the Halliburton comparison is unfair
because there are very few idea/political words on the
company’s site generally, so it’s not surprising that words
like freedom are few and far between. Diversity is used,
Balch says, “on advice of counsel and flacks.” Berkeley’s
Web site is full of idea/political words, Balch says, and
when you factor that in, it’s clear that Halliburton is not
more diversity-obsessed than Berkeley.
Still others are Googling to take
on and/or mock the National Association of Scholars study.
Over at
Free Exchange on Campus,
Craig
Smith of the American Federation of Teachers reports on
Harvard University’s site. Among other things, he finds that
words war and corporate do better than diversity. He also
discovers that many of the diversity references have nothing
to do with race and ethnicity, but are parts of such phrases
as “diversity of plants” and “diversity of neutron stars.”
While Smith has fun doing his
Google searches, he closes by urging people to step back
from their terminals:
“Stop! Just stop! Stop putting out
‘research’ that wouldn’t pass muster in a high school class!
Stop surveying the ‘top’ schools and suggesting that tells
us anything about all 4,000 institutions in this country
staffed by over 1 million faculty and instructors, teaching
over 16 million students! Stop suggesting that higher
education is some monolithic ’sector’ that is marching lock
step to some liberal ideology! Stop screaming that higher
education is leading the fall of our country! Please stop,
and let us get back to the issues that really matter for
higher education.”
The Political Correctness Debate
"Halting the Race to the Bottom," by John Sexton, Inside Higher Ed,
September 18, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/09/18/sexton
Nevertheless, that having been said, there
is a kernel of important truth captured in the popular
political correctness debate
— one that transcends political categories like left and right.
Those who enjoy, in the civil sphere, a certitude of viewpoint that
is not open to change by reasoned argument are incapable of
contributing or even participating in meaningful dialogue. They
cannot contribute because they treat their conclusions as matters of
dogma and, therefore, expound their positions in declaratory form;
they live in an Alice in Wonderland world — first the
conclusion, then the conversation. They can incite responses; they
even can create an intellectual adrenaline rush; but they cannot
produce insight. So also they cannot participate meaningfully in the
dialogue because they will not engage it; for them, the exercise is
a serial monologue in which they state, restate, and refute but
never revisit or rethink their positions. Thus, the kernel of truth
in the political correctness debate: ideological conversation is of
little or no value.
If we are to resist successfully external
forces that would impose theological politics and dogmatism on
campus, we must take care to resist any tendency toward dogmatism
within the walls of our universities. So we must insist on a
pervasive, genuine, rigorous, civil dialogue. Silencing of
viewpoints cannot be tolerated, and disciplinary dogmatism must be
challenged. Even if the political correctness attack is largely
baseless (surely, the claim that political correctness rules our
universities is undermined by the fact that most major donors and
board members at major universities hold views contrary to those
allegedly infecting the organizations they control or influence), it
is undeniably true that dogmatism is not confined to people of
faith. The commentator John Horgan offers one charming example:
Opposing self-righteousness is easier
said than done. How do you denounce dogmatism in others without
succumbing to it yourself? No one embodied this pitfall more than
the philosopher Karl Popper, who railed against certainty in
science, philosophy, religion and politics and yet was notoriously
dogmatic. I once asked Popper, who called his stance critical
rationalism, about charges that he would not brook criticism of his
ideas in his classroom. He replied indignantly that he welcomed
students’ criticism; only if they persisted after he pointed out
their errors would he banish them from class.
Dogmatism on campus must be fought if
universities are to be a model for society. Silencing any view — in
class, on campus, or in civil discourse — must be shamed when it
occurs, and those who seek to silence others should be forced to
defend their views in forums convened, if necessary, especially for
that purpose. Above all, we must not let our universities be
transformed into instruments of an imposed ideology. There is
instead an urgent agenda to pursue: the genuine incubation,
preservation, and creation of knowledge, the nurturing of a respect
for complexity, nuance, and genuine dialogue — not only on
university campuses, but beyond the campus gates.
The Research University as Counterforce
My colleague Richard Foley, a significant scholar in philosophy who
now is NYU’s dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, some years ago
noted a trend deep in the history of epistemology that suggests that
if one is rational enough, one can be assured of not falling into
error. Descartes held such a view, and others have followed him in
it. He notes that in some ways this is a natural view: One might
ask, what is the point of having rational opinions if it does not
assure you of the truth? But the big conceptual point of Dick’s
book, Working Without a Net, is that however natural, this is
a mistake, because there is no way to construct an intellectual
system that provides one with non-question begging assurances of its
own truth. So, we are, as it were, always working without an
intellectual net. As he says:
Since we can never have non-question
begging assurances that our way of viewing things is correct, we can
never have assurances that there is no point to further inquiry. The
absolute knowledge of the Hegelian system, which requires the
knowing mind to be wholly adequate to its objects and to know it is
thus, is not a possibility for us. It cannot be our goal, a human
goal. For us there can be no such final resting place.
The last point seems especially significant
for universities — for universities have to be places where there is
no final intellectual resting place. A “final intellectual resting
place” is one that is regarded as so secure and so comprehensive
that there is no longer any point to acquiring further evidence or
to reevaluating the methods that led to the view. The dogmatic in
effect believe that they already have arrived at their final
intellectual resting place, which is why they are so at odds with
the nature of the university.
Research universities, by their nature,
deal in complexity; it is their stock and trade. Their essence is
the testing of existing knowledge and the emergence of new knowledge
through a constant, often vigorous but respectful clash of a range
of viewpoints, sometimes differentiated from each other only by
degrees. In nurturing this process, research universities require an
embrace of pluralism, true civility in discourse, a honed
cultivation of listening skills, and a genuine willingness to change
one’s mind.
In this way, research universities can
offer a powerful reproach to the culture of simplistic dogmatism and
caricatured thought in a model of nuanced conversation. Our
universities must extend their characteristic internal feature, the
meaningful testing of ideas, so that it becomes an “output” that can
reach into and reshape a wider civic dialogue. And, they must invite
the public into the process of understanding, examining and
advancing the most complex and nuanced of issues with an evident
commitment to take seriously the iterative and evolutionary
encounter of a stated proposition with commentary and criticism
about it.
Of course, in this process, so familiar on
our campuses, views are held strongly and defended vigorously. The
embrace of the contest of ideas and tolerance of criticism does not
mean a surrender of conviction. Informed belief is fundamentally
different from dogmatism, just as the search for truth is very
different from the quest for certitude. Dogmatism is deeply rooted
in its dualistic view of the world as saved/damned, right/wrong, or
red/blue — and it claims certainty in defining the borders of these
dualistic frames. But, within the university, conviction is
tempered: the discovery and development of knowledge require
boldness and humility — boldness in thinking the new thought, and
humility in subjecting it to review by others. Dialogue within the
university is characterized by a commitment to engage and even
invite, through reasoned discourse, the most powerful challenges to
one’s point of view. This requires attentiveness and mutual respect,
accepting what is well founded in the criticisms offered by others,
and defending one’s own position, where appropriate, against them;
it is both the offer of and the demand for argument and evidence.
The very notion of the research university
presupposes the possibility of creating a hierarchy of ideas, and it
goes beyond the simple goal of facilitating an understanding of the
positions of others, to achieve genuine progress in thought, the
validation of some ideas and the rejection of others. It is a given
that, at the heart of the process of ongoing testing which
characterizes the university as a sanctuary of thought, is the
notion that no humanly conceived “truth” is invulnerable to
challenge; still, this axiom need not — and does not — mean that the
pursuit of truth requires that all questions must be kept open at
all times. In the university, we can and do reach certainty on some
propositions, subject of course to the emergence of new evidence.
And even the certitudes of faith are subject to new understanding:
My Church once condemned Galileo, but now applauds him; it once
carried out capital punishment, but now condemns it.
While the dialogue within our universities
is not an expression of agnosticism about truth itself, its very
being embodies the realization that a fuller truth is attained only
when a proposition is examined and reexamined, debated and
reformulated from a range of viewpoints, through a variety of
lenses, in differing lights and against opposing ideas or insights.
Whether through scholarly research or creative work, conventional
knowledge is questioned, reaffirmed, revised, or rejected; new
knowledge is generated and articulated, prevailing notions of
reality are extended and challenged and insight is expanded.
Jonathan Cole described the process in Daedalus:
The American research university pushes
and pulls at the walls of orthodoxy and rejects politically correct
thinking. In this process, students and professors may sometimes
feel intimidated, overwhelmed, and confused. But it is by working
through this process that they learn to think better and more
clearly for themselves. Unsettling by nature, the university culture
is also highly conservative. It demands evidence before accepting
novel challenges to existing theories and methods. The university
ought to be viewed in terms of a fundamental interdependence between
the liberality of its intellectual life and the conservatism of its
methodological demands. Because the university encourages discussion
of even the most radical ideas, it must set its standards at a high
level. We permit almost any idea to be put forward – but only
because we demand arguments and evidence to back up the ideas we
debate and because we set the bar of proof at such a high level.
These two components — tolerance for unsettling ideas and insistence
on rigorous skepticism about all ideas — create an essential tension
at the heart of the American research university. It will not thrive
without both components operating effectively and simultaneously.
In short, to a large degree the university
embodies the ideal in discourse — commitment to scrutiny and the
examination of research in the marketplace of ideas. Now it can and
must offer even more as the counterforce and the counterexample to
the simpleminded certainty of dogmatism and the depleted dialogue of
the coliseum culture. It is, of course, conceivable (even plausible)
that instead our universities will assume a defensive posture and
withdraw into their sheltered walls; such a tendency always exists
in the life of the mind, evoking from the cynical the constant
reminder that one of the dictionary’s entries for the word
“academic” is “beside the point.” In the face of forces around it
hostile to the search for knowledge, the temptation for higher
education to insulate itself is greater than normal, and perhaps
more understandable; but withdrawal, however tempting, would be
irresponsible and ultimately destructive for both society and the
university. In these times, society cannot cure itself; the
university must do its part.
The core reasons the university can provide
an antidote to the malaise that’s afflicting civil discourse arise
from some essential features of higher education on the one hand and
contemporary politics on the other.
First, whereas the political domain is now
characterized by bipolar interests or, worse yet, disaggregated
special interests, which are not even bipolar, in principle the
commitment of a university and its citizens is to the common
enterprise of advancing understanding; inherently those involved in
research and creativity build on the work of others and expand
knowledge for all. The university sometimes falls short of this
ideal; but now more than ever, it is vital for universities to live
it. Internal attention to the university’s defining mission and
vigilant adherence to its best attributes must be paramount if it is
to function as a force for renewing civil discourse within our
society.
The second feature of the university that
differentiates it from the prevailing trend in politics is that the
advancement of knowledge and ideas on campus is a fully transparent,
absolutely testable process in which all can participate. And today
the search for knowledge which is at the core of the university can
be uncabined and sometimes even unlocated physically in a particular
institution of higher education; in the era of the communications
revolution and an internet that spans the globe, participation in
the pursuit of knowledge operates on a worldwide network. The
advancement of knowledge is of the university, but not always or
necessarily on the campus. You cannot bar anyone from the process.
If a mathematician in Bombay can disprove a theory conceived in New
York, no amount of misplaced elitism or nationalism can change that
reality. Or, if a clerk in the patent office in Bern, Switzerland,
develops breakthrough theories in physics, it does not matter that
there is not yet a “Professor” in front of his name. By contrast, in
politics, gerrymandering makes it possible to insulate officeholders
from ever having seriously to confront competing ideas, ideologies,
and candidates.
The third feature that distinguishes the
university is that the ultimate test for scholars is time. The
ultimate reward comes in the long-term durability of one’s work,
being remembered by future generations as the father or the mother
of an idea. Indeed, those in the research university know that their
contributions may be understood only in the very long term. The
advancement of knowledge is the driving purpose; it is inherently
collegial and intergenerational, even for the solo thinker or artist
because each person stands on the foundation of someone else’s work,
and successive scholars provide new or higher platforms for the next
chapter in the unfolding story of knowledge. By contrast, in the
politics of the coliseum culture, politicians view short-term losses
as almost apocalyptic.
Given these distinguishing features, the
research university can and must become a place from which we press
back against the accelerating trend toward dogmatism I see
developing. The university has a dual role in the civic dialogue, as
both a rebuke to simplemindedness and as a model of how things can
be done differently. And, in preventing the collapse of civil
discourse, the university simultaneously will safeguard itself from
the concomitant effects of a society that disregards the reflected
thought, reduces the interchange of ideas to the exchange of sound
bytes or insults, and often shrinks the arena for discussion to a
constricted, two dimensional space.
Only the latter part of the article is quoted above.
Our Politically Correct Law Schools in the USA
"Lindgren: The Most Under-Represented Groups in Law Teaching:
Whites, Christians, Republicans, Males," by Paul Caron, TaxProf
Blog, March 21, 2015 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/03/lindgren-the-most-under-represented-groups-in-law-teaching-.html
This article is the first careful look at
the demographic makeup of law faculties compared to the larger pools
of lawyers and the general public. It examines which racial, gender,
religious, and political groups were the most under- and
overrepresented in 1997 and in 2013 compared to persons of similar
ages in larger pools, including the U.S. full-time working
population and the U.S. lawyer population.
The data show that in 1997 women and
minorities were underrepresented compared to some populations, but
Republicans and Christians were usually more underrepresented. For
example, by the late 1990s, the proportion of the U.S. population
that was neither Republican nor Christian was only 9%, but the
majority of law professors (51%) was drawn from that small minority.
Further, though women were strongly underrepresented compared to the
full-time working population, all of that underrepresentation was
among Republican women, who were—and are—almost missing from law
teaching.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Political correctness is very pronounced in USA education, particularly
in faculty hiring. There are tradeoffs. When it came to hiring a female
conservative at the University of Iowa in 2009 political leanings
outweighed gender. In 2015 the U.S. Supreme Court recently forced the
case to have a new trial.
"U. of Iowa Staff Member Sues Law School for Discrimination,"
by Katherine Mangan, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 22,
2009 ---
Click Here
|
A staff member in the
law-school writing center at the University of Iowa has sued
the school and its dean, saying she was turned down for
teaching positions because of her conservative political
views,
Iowa City Press-Citizen
reported.
Teresa Wagner filed the
lawsuit against the school and its dean, Carolyn Jones, on
Tuesday in U.S. District Court.
In the lawsuit, she states
that in 2006, she applied for an advertised job as a
full-time writing instructor, and that later, she applied
for a part-time adjunct position teaching writing. She was
rejected for both positions, even though she had collegiate
teaching experience and strong academic credentials, the
lawsuit says. She argues that affiliations listed on her
résumé, including stints with groups like the National Right
to Life Committee, did her in with a liberal-leaning
faculty.
To bolster her case, the
lawsuit dissects the political affiliations of the
approximately 50 faculty members who vote on law-school
faculty hires; 46 of them are registered as Democrats and
only one, hired 20 years ago, is a Republican, the lawsuit
states. Ms. Wagner also says that a law-school associate
dean suggested that she conceal her affiliation with a
conservative law school and later told her not to apply for
any more faculty positions.
Steve Parrott, a spokesman
for the University of Iowa, says the discrimination claim is
“without merit.” |
There Goes the Neighborhood
"U. of Colorado Is in Search of a Scholar of Conservative Thought U.
of Colorado Is in Search of a Scholar of Conservative Thought," by
Sydni Dunn, Chronicle of Higher Education., February 26, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/U-of-Colorado-Is-in-Search-of/137567/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
The University of Colorado at Boulder is
adding a conservative-in-residence to its liberal-leaning faculty in
an attempt to broaden intellectual diversity at the state's flagship
campus.
The new position, the "visiting scholar in
conservative thought and policy," is being paid for entirely by
private money. A total of close to $1-million will finance the job,
set to begin in the fall and to be housed in the College of Arts and
Sciences, for at least three years.
Some professors and students are
questioning the need for the new role and have been critical of the
credentials of the finalists. Although two of the three finalists
have Ph.D.'s and the third has a master's, they all are better known
for political activism and policy work than for scholarly pursuits.
The finalists, each of whom visited Boulder
and gave public speeches on the campus this month, are Linda Chavez,
chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity; Ron Haskins, a senior
fellow at the Brookings Institution; and Steven Hayward, a fellow at
the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University.
The search committee is scheduled to
recommend a candidate for the hire the first week of March, said
Keith E. Maskus, associate dean for social sciences and head of the
search committee.
The idea for the conservative appointment
goes back a decade, Mr. Maskus said, and was originally conceived of
as an endowed position. When it didn't get "far off the ground" in
terms of support or fund-raising, he said, the project was shelved.
In 2008, however, the idea was revived and reconfigured, and a group
of donors decided to convert the position to a privately financed,
visiting role that is off the tenure track.
The position was created, in part, to
change the public's perception of the institution, Mr. Maskus said.
Most of the faculty present balanced viewpoints in the classroom, he
said, but the university has a longstanding history of leaning left.
And, he said, having a conservative scholar will help balance the
perspectives to which students are exposed.
"We've appeared in the newspaper a few
times; I'm sure you can think of a few of those headlines," said Mr.
Maskus, hinting at the university's controversial firing, in 2007,
of Ward Churchill, an ethnic-studies professor. The decision, which
the university said was based on findings of research misconduct,
came after Mr. Churchill became the focus of national outrage for a
provocative essay he wrote about the September 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks, in which he compared some American victims of terrorism to
Nazi bureaucrats. Breaking the Mold
Some students have reacted positively to
the creation of the conservative-scholar position.
They include Zach Silverman, who is
president of the College Democrats at the Boulder campus and a
senior majoring in political science. A university should be a
marketplace of ideas, he said, and the new visiting job promotes
that mission.
"For CU, this breaks the mold of being a
liberal college, a biased college," Mr. Silverman said. "It shows we
are interested in all opinions, left or right."
Mr. Silverman, who is 21, said his
professors try to remain neutral in the classroom but that it can be
obvious, particularly in political science, which way they lean
politically. In a 2008 survey that included 825 faculty members at
Boulder, only 23 were registered Republicans, according to Ed Rozek,
a political-science professor who conducted the survey.
Embedding a conservative viewpoint in the
classroom will encourage variety, Mr. Silverman said, but only if
that person is actually a scholar. "This person needs a doctorate,"
he said.
Mr. Maskus, the associate dean, said one of
the qualities the search committee sought was a strong record of
published books or articles. All of the finalists fit that
criterion, he said, though to different degrees. Ms. Chavez is the
only finalist without a Ph.D., for example, but she has published
three books and spent more than 40 years in the political arena.
Faculty members, Mr. Maskus said, have
expressed concerns both about the scholarly credentials of
candidates for the position and about whether the university should
be taking donations to make a faculty appointment.
A group of private donors contributed to
this position, and some of them sit on the 10-person search
committee for the job, Mr. Maskus said. The committee has five
tenured faculty members from the College of Arts and Sciences, and
five "external community" members appointed by the chancellor. Mr.
Maskus would not say how many of those people are donors who are
supporting the new position. He also did not reveal how much money
the donors who are serving on the committee collectively contributed
to the project.
Mr. Maskus said he does not believe that
having donors serve on the search committee and participate in
hiring the scholar creates a conflict of interest. The committee is
following procedures that were put in place "to avoid such
conflicts," he said.
Other criticism, coming mostly from
students, has questioned whether the position is necessary.
In a guest column published in a local
newspaper, The Daily Camera, Matthew Aitken, a graduate student in
physics, wrote that the creation of the position supports the
assumption that all universities lack balance.
"Conservatism—like all other political
ideologies—should be considered on its own merits, and no special
position need be created for its proponents' voices to be heard,"
Mr. Aitken wrote. "That an esteemed institution like the University
of Colorado would give credence to this specious notion of
conservative victimhood is disappointing, at best." Taking a Risk
Ms. Chavez, a finalist who visited the
university last week and gave a presentation titled "A Conservative
Approach to Immigration Reform," said it was obvious that some
students did not like the idea of the position. A number of students
grilled her with questions after her speech.
"What I find fascinating is that students
who disagree with me rarely actually read what I've written," she
said. When students hear her point of view, she said, they realize
they have some things in common. "We might differ, but our ultimate
goals are the same."
Continued in article
The chair was designated a "visiting professorship" so the University
of Colorado would not have to give tenure to a conservative --- or so it
seems.
For years one of the hardest things to do is to be politically
conservative when seeking a job in virtually any discipline in our
Academy. Harvard's Harvey Mansfield advises against revealing
conservatism at least until tenured ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#LiberalBias
Even more pronounced is the virtual impossibility of being legally
admitted to the USA as a white immigrant ---
https://whitelocust.wordpress.com/multiculturalism-and-the-war-against-white-america/
The race, class, gender swindle
Eugene D. Genovese ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Genovese
Eugene Dominic Genovese (born May
19, 1930 – September 26, 2012)
was an
American
historian of the
American South and
American slavery. He has been noted for
bringing a
Marxist perspective to the study of power,
class and relations between
planters and slaves in the South. His work
Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made won the
Bancroft Prize. He later abandoned the
Left and Marxism, and embraced
traditionalist conservatism.
. . .
Starting in the 1990s, Genovese turned his
attention to the history of conservatism in the South, a tradition
which Genovese came to celebrate and adopt. In his study, The
Southern Tradition: the Achievements and Limitations of an American
Conservatism, he examined the Southern Agrarians. In the 1930s,
these critics and poets collectively wrote I'll Take My Stand, their
critique of Enlightenment humanism. Genovese concluded that by
recognizing human sinfulness and limitation, the critics more
accurately described human nature than did other thinkers. The
Southern Agrarians, he noted, also posed a challenge to modern
American conservatives, with their mistaken belief in market
capitalism's compatibility with traditional social values and family
structures. Genovese agreed with the Agrarians in concluding that
capitalism destroyed those institutions.
In his personal views, Genovese also moved
to the right. Where he once denounced liberalism from a radical left
perspective, in this later phase he did so as a traditionalist
conservative. His change in thinking included converting to Roman
Catholicism in December 1996. His wife Elizabeth Fox-Genovese had
also shifted her thinking and had already converted.
Continued in article
The author of the most influential body of
Marxist historiography in the United States from the past half-century
turned into one more curmudgeon denouncing “the race, class, gender
swindle.”
"Left to Right & Wrong Both Ways," by Scott McLemee, Inside
Higher Ed, October 3, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/10/03/essay-death-eugene-genovese
An ancient and corny joke of the
American left tells of a comrade who was surprised to learn
that the German radical theorist Kautsky’s first name was Karl and
not, in fact, “Renegade.” He’d seen Lenin’s polemical booklet
The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky but only
just gotten around to reading it.
Eavesdropping on some young Marxist
academics via Facebook in the week following the historian Eugene
Genovese’s death on September 26, I’ve come to suspect that there is
a pamphlet out there somewhere about the Renegade Genovese. Lots of
people have made the trek from the left to the right over the past
couple of centuries, of course, but no major American intellectual
of as much substance has, in recent memory, apart from Genovese.
People may throw out a couple of names to challenge this statement,
but the operative term here is “substance.” Genovese published
landmark studies like Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves
Made (1974) and – with the late Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, his
wife -- Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois
Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism, not
score-settling memoirs and suchlike.
As for the term “renegade,” well… The
author of the most influential body of Marxist historiography in the
United States from the past half-century turned into one more
curmudgeon denouncing “the race, class, gender swindle.” And at a
meeting of the Conservative Political
Action Committee, no less. The scholar who did path-breaking work on
the political culture of the antebellum South -- developing a
Gramscian analysis of how slaves and masters understood one another,
at a time when Gramsci himself was little more than an intriguing
rumor within the American left – ended up referring to the events of
1861-65 as “the War of Southern Independence.”
Harsher words might apply, but “renegade”
will do.
He is listed as “Genovese,
Gene” in the index to the great British historian’s Eric Hobsbawm’s
autobiography Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life
(2002). Actually, now I have to change that to “the late, great
British historian” Hobsbawm, rather: he died on October 1.
The two of them belonged to an extremely
small and now virtually extinct species: the cohort of left-wing
intellectuals who pledged their allegiance to the Soviet Union and
other so-called “socialist” countries, right up to that system’s
very end. How they managed to exhibit such critical intelligence in
their scholarship and so little in their politics is an enigma
defying rational explanation. But they did: Hobsbawm remained a
dues-paying member of the Communist Party of Great Britain until it
closed up shop in 1991.
The case of Genovese is a little more
complicated. He was expelled from the American CP in 1950, at the
age of 20, but remained close to its politics long after that. In
the mid-1960s, as a professor of history at Rutgers University, he
declared his enthusiasm for a Vietcong victory. It angered Richard
Nixon at the time, and I recall it being mentioned with horror by
conservatives well into the 1980s. What really took the cake was
that he’d become the president of the Organization of American
Historians in 1978-79. Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover had to be
spinning in their graves.
When such a sinner repents, the angels do a
dance. With Eric Hobsbawm, they didn’t have much occasion to
celebrate. Though he wrote off the Russian Revolution and all that
followed in its wake as more or less regrettable when not utterly
disastrous, he didn’t treat the movement he’d supported as a God
that failed. He could accept the mixture of noble spirits and
outright thugs, of democratic impulses and dictatorial consequences,
that made up the history he'd played a small part in; he exhibited
no need to make either excuses or accusations.
Genovese followed a different course, as
shown in in the landmark statement of his change in political
outlook, an article called “The Question” that appeared in the
social-democratic journal Dissent in 1994. The title
referred to the challenge of one disillusioned communist to another:
“What did you know and when did you know it?" Genovese never got
around to answering that question about himself, oddly enough. But
he was anything but reluctant He was much less reluctant about
accusing more or less everybody who’d ever identified as a leftist
or a progressive of systematically avoiding criticism of the
Soviets. He kept saying that “we” had condoned this or that
atrocity, or were complicit with one bloodbath or another, but in
his hands “we” was a very strange pronoun, for some reason meaning
chiefly meaning “you.”
Continued in article
Not Even One Conservative for Tokenism: Duke is for
Democrats and so is the University of Iowa
The University of Iowa's history department
and Duke's history department have a couple of things in common. Both
have made national news because neither has a Republican faculty member.
And both rejected the application of Mark Moyar, a highly qualified
historian and a Republican, for a faculty appointment. Moyar graduated
first in the history department at Harvard; his revised senior thesis
was published as a book and sold more copies than an average history
professor ever sells. After earning a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in
England, he published his dissertation as "Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam
War, 1954-1965" with Cambridge University Press, which has received even
more attention and praise. Moyar's views of Vietnam are controversial
and have garnered scorn and abuse from liberal historians, including the
department chair at the University of Iowa, Colin Gordon. Moyar revealed
on his resume that he is a member of the National Association of
Scholars, a group generally to the right of the normal academic
organization. Gordon and his colleagues at Iowa were undoubtedly aware
of Moyar's conservative leaning and historical view. Moyar is
undoubtedly qualified. He is unquestionably diverse; his views are
antithetical to many of the Iowa professors' views. Yet the Iowa
department hired someone who had neither received degrees from
institutions similar to Cambridge and Harvard nor published a book
despite having completed graduate school eight years earlier (history
scholars are expected to publish books within approximately six years of
finishing their doctorates). In the Iowa history department there are 27
Democrats and zero Republicans. The Iowa hiring guidelines mandate that
search committees "assess ways the applicants will bring rich
experiences, diverse backgrounds and ideology to the university
community." After seeking a freedom of information disclosure, Moyar
learned that the Iowa history department had, in fact, not complied with
the hiring manual. It seemed that Moyar was rejected for his political
and historical stands. Maybe it was an unlikely aberration. But Moyar
told the Duke College Republicans earlier this fall that he is skeptical
because an application of his a few years ago at Duke for a history
professorship progressed in much the same way it proceeded in Iowa.
The Duke Chronicle, November 1, 2007 ---
Click Here
"Colleges' Earmarks Grow, Amid Criticism Money from Congress flows
to directed grants as peer-reviewed research struggles," by Jeffrey
Brainard and JJ. Hermes, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 28,
2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i29/29a00101.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
A record-breaking number of Congressional
pork-barrel projects this year has loaded college and university
plates with more of these controversial grants than ever before. The
number of institutions receiving earmarks has shot up despite
growing worries that the noncompetitive grants undermine the
American scientific enterprise, and in spite of promises by some
lawmakers to cut back.
An exclusive analysis by The Chronicle
shows that legislators channeled more than 2,300 projects to 920
institutions, mostly for research, in the 2008 fiscal year. That is
a 25-percent increase in the number of colleges and universities
over 2003, when The Chronicle last surveyed earmarks. The total
dollar amount for 2008 is at least $2.25-billion. The spending is a
slight increase from five years ago, though it is a bit lower when
adjusted for inflation. But it is a huge jump from 10 years ago,
when pork spending totaled $528-million.
Earmarks are given out by members of
Congress — without review of the projects' merits by knowledgeable
scientists — by sprinkling the money into annual spending bills to
favor constituents. This year, for the first time, it is possible to
see just how widespread the practice is: A new law requires Congress
to identify the sponsor of every earmark.
The numbers and names show "a system that's
out of control," says Michael S. Lubell, director of public affairs
at the American Physical Society.
The danger of increased earmarking, critics
charge, is that it continues even as legislators have fallen behind
in spending for scientific grants awarded the conventional way,
through open competition and peer review. Competition is widely
regarded as having made America's science the world's best, and the
strength of that science has helped make America's economy the
world's biggest. Earmarks have neither beneficial effect, some
studies suggest, and other countries' research and trade are
catching up.
The dirty little secret about earmarks for
science is that while college officials occasionally fret about them
in public, they chase them in private. At meetings of the
Association of American Universities, a group of 62 research
institutions, some presidents regularly complain that earmarks are
squeezing out peer-reviewed awards — "and then they go home and call
up their congressman to ask for an earmark," said one president, who
spoke on condition of anonymity in order to be free to discuss the
meetings.
Politicians are similarly conflicted. On
the presidential-campaign trail, earmarks are getting high-profile
attention. Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, battling
for the Democratic slot, supported a one-year moratorium, though
they both handed out generous earmarks to colleges last year. Sen.
John McCain, the expected Republican nominee, wants to abolish them.
But members of both parties in Congress are likely to maintain their
support for earmarks.
A Zero-Sum Game?
Some of this year's academic pork went for
campus roads, classroom buildings, and other construction projects,
but two-thirds, or $1.6-billion, was directed to scientific research
at almost 500 institutions, The Chronicle's analysis shows. That
represents about 5 percent of all federal money for academic
research.
The war in Iraq and rising gasoline prices
clearly influenced the topics of earmarked research, sparking
interest in studies of brain and spinal-cord injuries, biofuels, and
fuel cells. (See articles.)
Compared with 2003, the average value of
earmarks for higher education has dropped because Congress spread
roughly the same amount around many more projects. For 2008, the
median earmark was $462,000, down from $497,000 in 2003.
That's not the only change in how research
is supported. Until a few years ago, Congress had been raising
spending for peer-reviewed grants much more than it had for
earmarks. The budget of the National Institutes of Health doubled
between 1998 and 2003, to $27-billion.
But since 2003, peer-reviewed federal
research grants have become significantly harder to win, making
earmarks more difficult to ignore. The budgets of the NIH and the
National Science Foundation, the two principal federal sources for
academic research money, have declined, considering inflation. In
2008 each agency expects to approve about one in five grant
applications, down from one in three in 2001.
A stream of university representatives have
visited Capitol Hill in recent months to plead for relief. They warn
that the tight budgets are driving talented young scientists away
from research and damaging the country's capacity for innovation.
Congress took note of the issue last year and passed the America
Competes Act, which promised to double spending on the NSF and other
physical-sciences programs over seven years.
But the legislators have already fallen
short of this goal. Most of the increase proposed for 2008 was cut
from the final version of a spending bill after Democrats and the
president deadlocked over government spending.
That underscores what is arguably a
trade-off between money for earmarks and for peer-reviewed work.
Consider that the $1.6-billion in Congressional earmarks for
academic research this year could have paid for the entire increase
called for by the America Competes Act in 2008, with $1-billion to
spare. If that money were given to the NIH, it would have allowed
the agency's budget to keep pace with inflation.
University officials talk up spending for
merit-based awards when they visit their Congressional
representatives, but they send mixed messages by requesting earmarks
during the same meetings, said a higher-education lobbyist, who
asked not to be named so he could speak freely about the private
sessions. Given that the earmarked money is guaranteed to come to a
lawmaker's district and money for peer-reviewed grants is not,
"which part of the message do you think the member is going to
listen to?" he says.
Lawmakers, of course, are aware that it's
far easier to claim credit for a direct earmark. In news releases
sent to their home districts, they regularly boast about their
successes at delivering the money to colleges.
Institutions that receive lots of research
earmarks are unapologetic about accepting them with open arms. Take
Mississippi State University, which topped The Chronicle's list of
institutions receiving the most earmarks in 2008. The institution
pursues the set-asides because "we're in a poor state," says Kirk H.
Schulz, vice president for research and economic development. He
credits earmarks for helping Mississippi State lay the groundwork —
by starting research programs — that has increased the money it gets
for peer-reviewed federal awards. (But that growth has not been
remarkable, roughly matching the average for all academic
institutions.)
Deepening Scholarship of LGBT Studies
"Fifty Years After Stonewall," by Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed,
June 24, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee247
When the police
conducted a routine raid on the Stonewall Inn, a bar in Greenwich
Village, during the early hours of June 28, 1969, the drag queens
did not go quietly. In grief at the death of Judy Garland one week
earlier, and just plain tired of being harassed, they fought back --
hurling bricks, trashing cop cars, and in general proving that it is
a really bad idea to mess with anybody brave enough to
cross-dress in public.
Before you knew it,
the Black Panther Party was extending solidarity to the Gay
Liberation Front. And now, four decades later, an African-American
president is being criticized -- even by some straight Republicans
-- for his administration’s inadequate commitment to marriage rights
for same-sex couples. Social change often moves in ways that are
stranger than anyone can predict.
Today the
abbreviation LGBT (covering lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and
transgender people) is commonplace. Things only become esoteric when
people start adding Q (questioning) and I (intersex).
And the scholarship keeps deepening. Six years
ago, after publishing a
brief survey of historical research on gay
and lesbian life, I felt reasonably well-informed (at least for a
rather unadventurous heteroetcetera). But having just read a
new book by Sherry Wolfe called
Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics, and Theory of LGBT
Liberation (Haymarket) a few days ago, I am trying to process
the information that there were sex-change operations in Soviet
Russia during the 1920s. (This was abolished, of course, once
Stalinism charted its straight and narrow path to misery.) Who knew?
Who, indeed, could even have imagined?
Well, not me,
anyway. But the approaching anniversary of Stonewall seemed like a
good occasion to consider what the future of LGBT scholarship might
bring. I wrote to some well-informed sources to ask:
Continued in article
Affirmative Action College Initiatives for Gay Students ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GayAdmissionPreferences
"Boycotting a Magazine’s Boycott Issue," by Scott Jaschik, Issues
in Higher Ed, September 16, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/15/boycott
In the annals of academic conferences, few
may have been more ill-fated than the aborted conclave on academic
boycotts planned by the American Association of University
Professors.
When the conference was called off in
March, organizers hoped that they could salvage something good from
the idea by taking papers planned for the conference and publishing
them in a special issue of Academe, the AAUP’s magazine.
The issue is out, but the controversy
continues. Authors who are supportive of Israel refused to let
Academe publish their work, arguing that the entire effort was
just an attempt to “demonize” Israel. Ironically, those who support
Israel generally endorse the AAUP policy on academic boycotts, which
takes the view that boycotts are almost always wrong. So the issue
features considerable commentary from scholars who are sympathetic
to the Palestinian cause and who support efforts to boycott Israeli
universities — a stance opposed by the association.
Continued in article
Related stories
Faculty members identify as liberals and
vote Democratic in far greater proportions than found in the American
public at large. That finding by itself won’t shock many, but the
national study released Saturday at a Harvard University symposium may
be notable both for its methodology and other, more surprising findings.
The 72-page study —
“The Social and Political Views of American Professors”
— was produced with the goal of moving analysis of
the political views of faculty members out of the culture wars and back
to social science. The study offers at times harsh criticism of many of
the analyses of these issues in recent years (both from those hoping to
tag the professoriate as foolishly radical and those seeking to rebut
those charges). The study included community college professors along
with four-year institutions, and featured analysis of non-responders to
the survey (two features missing from many recent reports). The results
of the study find a professoriate that may be less liberal than is
widely assumed, even if conservatives are correctly assumed to be in a
distinct minority. The authors present evidence that there are more
faculty members who identify as moderates than as liberals. The authors
of the study also found evidence of a
significant decline by age group in faculty radicalism,
with younger faculty members less likely than their older counterparts
to identify as radical or activist. And while the study found that
faculty members generally hold what are thought to be liberal positions
on social issues, professors are divided on affirmative action in
college admissions.
"Political Shocker: Faculty Moderates," by Scott Jaschik, Inside
Higher Ed, September 19, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/19/politics
The journal Public Opinion Quarterly
has just published
an analysis of professorial politics that
offers a dramatically different picture. To be sure, this study does
say that there are more liberals than conservatives on college
faculties, although the propoportions (while still significant)
aren’t as large as those found in some other reports. But most
significant, the new study suggests that the most dramatic trend
among the professoriate in recent years has been a shift toward the
middle of the road. And the trend is particularly pronounced in some
of the disciplines that enroll the greatest numbers of students.
“There are disciplines where conservatives
are in the majority, and there is a healthy middle overall,” said
John F. Zipp, chair of sociology at the University of Akron, and the
author of the study, with Rudy Fenwick, associate professor of
sociology at the University of Arizona.
Zipp and Fenwick based their analysis on
two broad studies of the American professoriate by the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The studies — in 1989
and 1997 — found a shift toward the middle, while conservative
professors — a distinct minority — did not lose ground.
Political Ideology of Professors
| Ideology |
1989 |
1997 |
|
Liberal |
24.6% |
23.3% |
| Moderately liberal |
31.0% |
32.6% |
| Middle of the road |
16.5% |
19.6% |
| Moderately conservative |
21.2% |
17.7% |
| Conservative |
6.7% |
6.7% |
Then the authors looked at changes within
disciplines. As they expected, humanities faculty members are
liberal and don’t show signs of changing. From 1989 to 1997, the
percentage of humanities faculty members who classify themselves as
liberal increased to 40.9 percent, from 40.3 percent.
But many other disciplines — including
those that attract some of the largest enrollments these days —
showed decreases in the percentages identifying themselves as
liberal and increases in the percentages identifying themselves as
middle of the road:
- Allied health: The liberal percentage
fell from 22.6 percent to 8.4 percent, while the centrist
percentage increased from 14.3 percent to 26.0 percent.
- Biological sciences: A liberal drop
from 24.3 percent to 17.9 percent and a centrist gain from 17.0
to 20.9 percent.
- Business: A liberal drop from 13.7
percent to 8.7 percent and a centrist gain from 17.8 percent to
19.6. (Business and technical/vocational fields ended up with
larger conservative shares — 48.7 percent and 49.6 percent,
respectively — than any other disciplines.)
- Computer science: A liberal drop from
13.3 percent to 8.7 percent and a centrist gain from 24.4
percent to 44.6 percent.
- Psychology: A liberal drop from 28.2
percent to 25.6 percent and a centrist gain from 15.4 percent to
26.7 percent.
Zipp — who describes himself as liberal —
said he wasn’t trying to deny that more faculty members are liberal
than conservative, and that some disciplines are quite lopsided. But
he said that when one looks at the disciplines, it becomes
impossible to accept the conservative critique of higher education
as one that is dominated by some sort of fringe left.
“If one says, ‘look at all those liberal
humanities professors,’ well that’s inevitable. It’s been that way
for a long time,” he said. “But look at the relative position of the
humanities in the university over the last 20 or 30 years.” The
departments into which resources are flowing, he said, are
ideologically diverse. And anyone taking a range of courses in a
range of departments is going to be exposed to diverse views —
however liberal one department or area may be, he said.
Zipp said that he hoped his analysis would
prompt people to recognize the current attack on alleged liberal
bias as part of a historic pattern. As his paper says, “hunting for
subversives in the academy has been a favorite sport of
conservatives for at least a century.”
Some of the scholars who have noted
ideological imbalance in the academy said that they were not
impressed with the new study.
Daniel Klein, a professor of economics at
George Mason University, has
studied ideological leanings in the social
sciences, and published his research in
Critical Review. His research was not
based on asking people if they are liberal or conservative, but
about party registration and stands on a variety of issues. He was
critical of the Carnegie surveys for relying on general descriptions
that people selected. Terms like “middle of the road” and “liberal”
can “mean very different things to different people,” he said.
In contrast, his questions about party
registration yielded clear evidence about lopsided ratios and the
questions he asked about various policy questions identified
“generally statist views” in many disciplines.
Klein identifies himself as “a small-l
libertarian,” and said that he opposes the Academic Bill of Rights
and other efforts to apply outside force to changing the make-up of
faculties. He’d like to see change from within. The new study, he
said, “leaves unchallenged” the evidence he and others have produced
about imbalance in humanities and social science departments.
Anne Colby, a senior scholar at the
Carnegie foundation (who didn’t work on the analysis published in
Public Opinion Quarterly), is currently working on a book about
political engagement in higher education. She said the new article
had much more perspective — about disciplines as a whole, about the
disciplines where students are taking the most courses, and about
trends over time — than the studies that have alleged liberal bias.
“I think this article is very much on target and the earlier ones
were not,” she said.
“If you look at the number of students who
go to different institutional types, and their majors, the great
majority of students are going to the most conservative kinds of
institutions and the more conservative majors,” she said. Further,
she said that more research is finding that peer influence more than
professorial influence results in shifts in students’ political
views, making the emphasis on professorial politics misplaced.
Colby said she hoped the new analysis would
get people off the issue of ideological bias. “I hope this gets a
lot of attention,” she said. “I think this changes the picture.”
Motivating Students to Be More Politically Engaged
Survey after survey reports that American
students — while concerned about the world around them — are apathetic
about politics. Events like Katrina or Darfur spark activism and
voluntarism. And to be sure, college Democrats and Republicans are good
at organizing competing speakers. But voter registration (and voting),
turnouts at town hall meetings and knowledge of the political process
remain embarrassingly low. Research that will be presented this week at
the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting, which
starts today in Chicago, suggests that political engagement can be
taught. In a project led by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement
of Teaching, researchers identified a series of courses that mixed more
traditional political science education with participatory politics —
not in the sense of organizing rallies for presidential candidates but
with activities that go beyond formal classroom instruction.
Scott Jaschik, "Political Engagement 101," Inside Higher Ed,
August 30, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/30/political
Ethics Centers in Universities Devote
Scant Attention to Ethics Breaches in Their Own Houses
It
should not be surprising that our universities generate interesting
and urgent ethical challenges. After all, higher education is a big
business. Scholarship is a demanding discipline. Teaching is a noble
undertaking fraught with weighty responsibilities. And liberal
education plays a crucial role in the formation of free citizens.
What
may surprise is that, at the programs and centers devoted to the
study of ethics and the professions that have been established over
the last two decades at our leading universities, one profession
whose ethical issues the professors generally ignore is their own.
The
return to campus this fall brings sharp reminders of the confusion
about their purpose that plagues our campuses, and so underscores
the need for serious study of university ethics. In the recently
published and already critically acclaimed book "Until Proven
Innocent," K.C. Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr. show how the Duke
University faculty and administration collaborated with a reckless
press and a lawless prosecutor in the rush to convict in the court
of public opinion -- and, but for the superb work of their
attorneys, in the criminal courts of Durham, N.C. -- three white
lacrosse players falsely accused of raping an African-American
stripper.
On
Sept. 28, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,
"Indoctrinate U," Evan Coyne Maloney's riveting documentary about
the war on free speech and individual rights waged by university
faculty and administrations enjoyed its Washington premiere. Also,
in September, for crystal clear political reasons, following a
faculty petition circulated mostly by women from the University of
California, Davis, the UC Board of Regents withdrew a speaking
invitation to former Secretary of the Treasury and former Harvard
President Lawrence Summers.
But
don't expect the leading ethics centers -- Harvard's Edmond J. Safra
Foundation Center for Ethics, Princeton's Program on Ethics and
Public Affairs, or Yale's Program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics
-- to sponsor lectures, fund graduate student and faculty
fellowships, or publish writings that examine these and numerous
other ethical questions that stem from contemporary university life.
While lavishing attention on legal, political and medical ethics,
and to a lesser extent business ethics and journalism ethics --
worthy areas of inquiry all -- our leading university ethicists have
shown scant interest in exploring university ethics.
Celebrating its 20th anniversary last spring, the Harvard University
Program on Ethics and the Professions is among the nation's oldest
and most distinguished. Yet of the more than 130 public lectures by
eminent visitors sponsored over the last two decades by the Harvard
ethics program, only three deal with the university -- one defending
affirmative action, one defending the propriety of academics
engaging in public debate and one defending academic freedom. The
program's Web site lists more than 875 publications by over 120
ethics fellows and senior scholars. Hundreds of the writings deal
with law and politics and ethics. Hundreds explore medicine and
ethics. Dozens discuss business ethics. But only about 10 of the 875
publications, and five of the 120 authors, address university
ethics.
Take
away a few defenses of affirmative action and multiculturalism, and
a few reflections on teaching ethics at the university, and little
is left. All in all, after 20 years of generously funding research
in practical or applied ethics, Harvard's program has made no
discernible contribution to illuminating the challenges of
university governance, and the variety of duties and conflicts
confronted in their professional roles by professors and
administrators.
Much
the same holds true of the Yale Program in Ethics, Politics, and
Economics and the Princeton University Center for Human Values.
What
explains the neglect by our leading university ethics programs of a
vital topic that so plainly falls under their purview? The major
cause is probably routine thoughtlessness: Surrounded by like-minded
souls and therefore protected from questions that might rock the
boat, and from research projects that might call for scholarly
retooling, it may never occur to many ethics professors that, no
less than law, medicine, business and journalism, their profession
too is worthy of systematic scrutiny.
One
cannot rule out that a few ethics faculty may have convinced
themselves that professors and administrators, because of their
peculiar virtue, already confront and wisely dispose of all the
moral dilemmas and professional conflicts of interest that come
before them. It would not be the first time that intellectuals, so
aggressive in finding false-consciousness and self-interest in
others, concealed or overlooked their own.
Nevertheless, if they are impelled or compelled to overcome
disciplinary inertia and intellectual orthodoxy and turn their
attention to their own profession, professional ethicists will
discover a trove of fascinating and timely questions. Here are a
few:
Is it
proper for university disciplinary boards, often composed of faculty
and administrators with no special knowledge of the law, to
investigate student accusations of sexual assault by fellow
students, which involve crimes for which perpetrators can go to jail
for decades?
Should
universities have one set of rules and punishments for students who
plagiarize or pay others to write their term papers, and another --
and lesser -- set for professors who plagiarize or pay others to
write their articles and books, or should students and faculty be
held to the same tough standards of intellectual integrity?
How
can universities respect both professors' academic freedom and
students' right to be instructed in the diversity of opinions?
What
is the proper balance in hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions
between the need for transparency and accountability and the need
for confidentiality?
What
institutional arrangements give university trustees adequate
independence from the administrators they review?
Is it
consistent with their mission for university presses to publish
books whose facts and footnotes they do not check?
In
accordance with what principles may a university bar ROTC from
campus because of the military's "don't ask, don't tell policy"
concerning homosexuals, while inviting to campus a foreign leader
whose country not only punishes private consensual homosexual sex
but is the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism, and who
himself denies the Holocaust and threatens to obliterate the
sovereign state of Israel?
By
exploring these and myriad other issues, our ethics programs would
do more than fulfill their mandate. They would also vindicate
liberal education by demonstrating the premium academicians place on
ensuring that their own practice conforms to the proper principles.
Mr. Berkowitz is a
senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and a
professor at George Mason University School of Law.
What kind of alumni gifts are just not
politically correct?
Alumni provide funds
for U. of Illinois to promote capitalist thought, with goal of creating
public university equivalent of Stanford think tank — and spreading
model elsewhere. Some professors are alarmed.
Is it an “academy”
or a “fund"? The name of the new
Academy on
Capitalism and Limited Government Fund
could be read either way. And the way people at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are reading the name has something to do
with how they view it. Supporters describe it as a fund created by
alumni to support interests they have at the university, in this case
the study of Western civilization and free market economics. But many
professors see it as much more — as a move by conservative alumni with
influential national support to bypass normal faculty governance, create
new courses and impose ideological tests on who gets certain pots of
money.
Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
September 20, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/20/illinois
Jensen Comment
And to think this is going on behind Barach Obama's back. Shame! Shame!
Such a Center/Fund is just not politically correct in academe where
capitalism is more often or not worse than any four letter word you can
think of that's not in the dictionary.
The Politically Correct Fracture of Harvard University
He may be controversial in the
United States, but Lawrence H. Summers, the ousted president of Harvard
University, is a huge hit whenever he lectures in Asia, reported
The New York Times.
Inside Higher Ed, April 17, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/04/19/qt
"The weaker sex: Boys are being outclassed by girls at both
school and university, and the gap is widening," The Economist,
March 7, 2015 ---
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21645759-boys-are-being-outclassed-girls-both-school-and-university-and-gap
Jensen Comment
This is certainly the case in accountancy higher education programs.
Women are especially encouraged by 21st Century hiring of more women
than men by CPA firms. Women must, however, be willing to accept the
negatives of public accounting employment, including job stresses,
overnight travel, and week ends away from home and families. Accountancy
is somewhat conducive to work at home even when employed by the large
firms, but this is not always an option for career advancement when
working at home year after year after year.
There's some evidence in education, nursing, and accountancy that
men, especially minority males, shy away from careers requiring
licensing examinations. However, there are exceptions in engineering and
technology where more males are still being licensed than females. Some
of the real negatives of certain types of consulting work are the months
away from home and families. Long-term absences from families are common
in consulting engagements. Those occasional weekends at home just aren't
enough for some mothers.
"Science and Engineering Degrees Inch Up, but Progress for Women Is Mixed,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, January 26, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/science-and-engineering-degrees-inch-up-but-progress-for-women-is-mixed/92831?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
"Feminism Fizzles: Where is Betty Friedan when we need her?" by
Rachel Shteir, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, January
28, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-End-of-Feminism-/136797/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
Feminism lives on in the feminist academic journals the movement created.
Among other things these journals keep pressuring for shattering of glass
ceilings and for improved wages and benefits of women at work.
The accomplishments of the movement are monumental, especially in terms of
politics and employment. And in some instances the price has been severe,
especially in terms of restraints on rape not keeping pace with the changing
times ---
http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/plank/109083/why-wont-the-military-take-troop-troop-rape-seriously#
"Women fall behind men at the top because they don’t put in enough
hours," by Marina Krakovsky, Quartz, May 20, 2013 ---
http://qz.com/85404/women-fall-behind-men-at-the-top-because-they-dont-put-in-enough-hours/
Jensen Comment
Please don't shoot the messenger.
This research was conducted by a doctoral student and her faculty
advisor in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.
The findings are consistent with earlier findings about women
physicians.
Hypothesized reasons female doctors earn less than male physicians
---
http://thegrindstone.com/career-management/study-female-doctors-paid-much-less-than-their-male-counterparts-991/
What I would like to see is whether there is a significantly higher
ratio of males to females in the highest paying medical careers. For
example, do women tend to avoid those specialties taking the longest
time to complete slave-driving residencies (such as neurosurgery)? Do
women tend to avoid those specialties requiring more strength and
endurance such as orthopedics? A friend who is a physician tells me this
is the case, but I've not investigated the data.
Having said this, it should be noted that there are significant
variances in these findings. My own female physician is one of the
hardest working physicians I've ever seen. She works what seems to be
12-hour days on average 24/7. She's never been married and to my
knowledge only has a relationship with her work. I also know a number of
female professors who work about at the same pace.
History and Professionalism of Women ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#Women
Hip Hop Research Returns to Harvard University
One of the major grievances of many professors
against Lawrence Summers, the former Harvard president, was his reported
skepticism of multicultural research — and one prominent example was his
denial of tenure to Marcyliena Morgan, a scholar of hip hop. After the
denial, Morgan — along with her husband, Lawrence Bobo, who had tenure —
left Harvard’s African and African-American studies program for
positions at Stanford University. Now both are returning, with tenure,
to Harvard. The
Associated Press reported that Derek Bok, then
interim president, approved the tenured offer, in May, with the backing
of Drew Faust, who is now president.
Inside Higher Ed, September 14, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/14/qt
Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and
Engineering ---
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/wmpd/
Those "rifts" included quarrels with a largely
left-wing faculty that has about as much intellectual diversity as the
Pyongyang parliament. Or, as a group of Harvard protesters so charmingly put
it a year or so ago, "Racist, sexist, anti-gay -- Larry Summers, you must
pay." Only on an American university campus could Mr. Summers, a former
Clinton Treasury Secretary, be portrayed as a radical neocon.
"Veritas at Harvard," The Wall Street Journal, February 22, 2006;
Page A14 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114057510944879735.html?mod=opinion&ojcontent=otep
A Harvard education isn't what it used to be.
That's the principal lesson of yesterday's news that Lawrence Summers is
resigning as the 27th president of the nation's oldest university.
By "used to be," we mean the days before the
faculty ran the academic asylum, the days when administrators, students
and, yes, even the trustees also had a say in setting priorities and
making decisions about how a great university is run. If you remember
such a time, you probably graduated with the Class of 1965 or earlier.
In a letter posted on Harvard's Web site yesterday, Mr. Summers said
that "I have reluctantly concluded that the rifts between me and
segments of the Arts and Sciences faculty make it infeasible for me to
advance the agenda of renewal that I see as crucial to Harvard's
future."
Continued in article
National Girls Collaborative Project (science, engineering, and math) ---
http://www.ngcproject.org/resources/newsletter.cfm
"Coup d'Ecole Harvard professors oust Larry Summers. Now they must face
their students," by Ruth R. Wisse, The Wall Street Journal,
February 23, 2006 ---
http://www.opinionjournal.com/cc/?id=110008004
Harvard students frankly blossomed under the
special attention Summers paid them. No university president in my
experience had ever taken such a warm personal interest in undergraduate
education. Not surprisingly, the students return his affection, polling
three to one in favor of his staying on. The day he announced his
resignation, they were out in force in Harvard Yard, chanting "Five More
Years!" The student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, has been outspoken
in its criticism of the faculty that demanded the president's ouster.
"No Confidence in 'No Confidence' " ran the headline of an editorial
demonstrating the spuriousness of the charges being brought against the
president, and reminding faculty to stay focused on the educational
process that ought to be its main concern.
His exit exposes deep fault lines in Harvard's
faculty. Scientists, economists and some in the professional schools formed
the core of Mr. Summers's support, while he was generally unpopular with
humanities professors. Law professor Alan Dershowitz says he and other
Harvard faculty are furious that the university's board, which is called the
Corporation, apparently caved to pressure from the professors who led the
ouster charge. "This is an academic coup d'etat by one small faction...the
die-hard left of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences," he says.
Daniel golden and Steve Stecklow, "Facing War With His Faculty, Harvard's
Summers Resigns: President's Ideas, Manner Alienated Many Professors;
Fault Lines on Campus A Record of Pushing Change," The Wall Street
Journal, February 22, 2006; Page A1 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114054545222679220.html?mod=todays_us_page_one
People interviewed generally thought it would be
a good thing for trustees to pay more attention to faculty members, but some
doubted that it would happen — at least broadly. John Thelin, a professor at
the University of Kentucky and author of A History of American Higher
Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) said that the tensions
at Harvard would be a warning to boards at places “where faculty values are
strong and central to the institution.” But with fewer tenure-track faculty
members in “an era of strong boards and presidents,” he said he worried that
many trustees wouldn’t necessarily rush to renew the principles of shared
governance. . . . To many observers of higher education, Summers stood out
for his willingness to speak out on tough issues — and to take stands that
might offend many on campus. “I think that Larry Summers was hired with the
expressed interest of taking on some of the p.c. orthodoxies of the day,”
said Anne D. Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.
She said that Summers spoke out for numerous causes that are “central to
quality in higher education” and that it was “deeply disturbing” to see him
forced out.
Scott Jaschik, "Summers Postmortem, Beyond Cambridge," Inside Higher Ed,
February 22, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/02/22/summers
Officials at Harvard University faced a divided
campus yesterday along with fear that a search for a new president could put
in limbo ambitious plans for an expansive new campus in Boston, an overhaul
of undergraduate studies and a fund-raising campaign for $5 billion or more.
"It's very hard to say where Harvard goes from here — it's an unprecedented
situation," said Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology and a supporter of
Dr. Summers. "I think all the major projects are in limbo right now, which
can't be good. At the same time, Derek has given a great deal of thought to
what works and what doesn't in education. That's exactly the kind of
expertise we need for the ongoing curriculum reform, which a lot of us feel
is a massive failure." In a brief interview yesterday, Dr. Bok said the
corporation had asked him "only a few days ago" to become interim president.
Patrick D. Healy and Alan Finder, "At Harvard, Resignation Puts Big Plans,"
The New York Times, February 23, 2006 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/23/education/23harvard.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Many of Summers’s pals from the Clinton
administration are spending their time out of office at the Center for
American Progress, which recently started Campus Progress to focus on
college students. David Halperin, who is leading that effort, suggests that
Harvard might look to a woman outside of academe: Oprah Winfrey. Halperin
notes that Oprah “knows how to bring people together and how to run an
enterprise. She also loves books, fiction and nonfiction, and Harvard has
lots of books.” Can’t argue with that logic.
Scott Jaschik, "Give Harvard Some Ideas," Inside Higher Ed, February
23, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/02/23/harvard
"When you make a mistake, recognize that
you've made a mistake, and try to turn heat into light," Mr. Summers
said, according to an account in The Harvard Crimson, the student
newspaper. Perhaps not a bad insight. But "turn heat into light" just
scratches the surface, really, of what he could have done to save his
turbulent five-year reign. When it comes to case studies in failed
management l'affaire Larry provides excellent pointers for once and
future chief executives.
Patrick D. Healy, "Case Study: A Shake-Up at Harvard," The New York
Times, February 26, 2006 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/weekinreview/26healy.html
"He was more bombastic than
humble, more skeptical than complimentary, and so
confident in his intelligence that he personalized
issues," said Richard Chait, a professor at
Harvard's Graduate School of Education. "He had a
problem with grade inflation, but you don't start to
deal with it by having a pitched battle against a
prominent African-American member of the faculty,
Cornel West. If you have
questions about women in science, you respectfully
gather information from people on campus for whom
this is a lifelong effort. In a lot of ways he
fought a one-man war."
The meek may inherit the earth, but they don't
get in to Harvard.
1989 movie The Dead Poets Society directed by Peter Weir,
screenplay by Tom Schulman.
Jensen Comment: But being meek has become a
prerequisite for becoming President of a fractured Harvard
For me, she
says, "this really showed the beauty of science, that you can have this
personal experience that isn't reflected in big data."
Jennifer Jacquet as quoted in
"Gender Gap: Women cluster in certain fields, according to a study
of millions of journal articles, while men get more credit," by Robin
Wilson, Inside Higher Ed, October 22, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Hard-Numbers-Behind/135236/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
In finance, we call important factors not reflected in big data, or
otherwise that cannot be cannot be scientifically quantified, "black
swans."
'Why Women Earn Less Than Men a Year
Out of School," by Elizabeth Dwoskin, Bloomberg Business Week,
October 25, 2012 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-10-25/why-women-earn-less-than-men-a-year-out-of-school
Consider this
scenario: A man and a woman graduate from the same university in
2009. They both major in computer science. They are 22 years old at
graduation, single, and have no prior work experience. One year
later, both are working full time as computer technicians in cities
not too far from where they went to school.
According to a
new report (PDF) by the American
Association of University Women, the man would be earning a salary
of $51,300. The woman’s pay would be $39,600—about 77 percent of
what her male counterpart earns.
The AAUW
report compared the earnings of men and women just one year out of
college across various sectors of the economy. The report controlled
for different factors that tend to impact pay, including hours, job
type, employment sector, and college major. The report—which uses
the class of 2009 as its sample cohort—found that on average, women
working full time earned 82 percent of what their male peers earned.
The average for all women, at all experience levels, is 77 percent,
a number that has
barely budged in a decade.
A good portion of
the pay differential one year out of school can be explained by
choice of major. Eighty-one percent of education majors are female,
as are 88 percent of health-care majors. In computer science,
information technology, and engineering, more than 80 percent of
majors are male. Teachers and physical therapists, on average, tend
to earn less than engineers. Women also choose to work in sectors of
the economy where there are fewer opportunities to advance into
higher-paying jobs. (A teacher might get tenure or become a school
principal after working for 20 years. An engineer will move up the
pay scale more quickly, and the raises will be bigger over time.)
But as the scenario
above shows, even when women and men are in practically identical
situations, their earnings start to diverge just one year out of
school. That’s true across most sectors of the economy. One year out
of college, female teachers earn 89 percent of what male teachers
earn. In sales jobs, women earn 77 percent of what male peers earn.
Women who major in business earn, on average, just over $38,000 the
first year after graduation, while men earn just over $45,000.
“About one-third of the gap cannot be explained by any of the
factors commonly understood to impact earnings,” write the AAUW
researchers, Catherine Hill and Christianne Corbett.
Hill and Corbett
consider what could be causing that “unexplained” portion of the
gender wage gap. One obvious culprit is discrimination. A less
obvious culprit is salary negotiations. Women tend to be worse at
negotiating throughout their careers, including their starting pay,
Hill says.
Everyone knows
that bias exists, but it’s basically impossible to
measure—particularly when the bias is unconscious. One way to track
it is to look at the number of sex discrimination complaints filed
with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which have
jumped 18 percent over the past decade. There are isolated cases, as
when drugmaker
Novartis (NVS)
was
fined $250 million in 2010 for
discriminating on pay, promotion, and pregnancy against female sales
representatives. The authors cite a recent experiment in which male
science faculty members at a research university were asked to pick
a starting salary for a laboratory manager position. The scientists,
who were provided with the same résumé and qualifications for each
applicant, offered a higher starting salary to the male candidate.
Most women who are
victims of wage discrimination are probably not even aware of it.
Asking about your colleagues’ salaries is frowned upon in the
workplace. Those who suspect discrimination may not want to risk it:
Many corporate human-resources policies prohibit employees from
poking around.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
This article points out interesting things that our first year students
should consider when mapping out a career future for themselves. The
article raises questions, but it does not provide answers to some of the
most systemic problems. For example, why does a kindergarten teacher
earn less than an IT woman, computer programming woman, or chemical
engineering woman? There are many reasons of course, but one reason
might be that the kindergarten teacher gets to stay at home with her
family almost 16 weeks every year. No such luck in most other careers
for men or women, except for college professor women that are under
heavy publish or perish pressures that can ruin those 16 weeks of
personal time out of the classroom..
The article asserts that women one year
out earn less than their male counterparts in the same disciplines like
accounting. This to me is very disturbing. When we look for reasons,
perhaps some of the major causes are still those things sociologists
study more in depth. For example, women often get married or become
significant others in the first year following graduation. It is
extremely common for men and women to get their first jobs or change
jobs in that first year. And those new jobs often entail relocating to
other cities and towns. I didn't look up the studies on this, but I
think it is still more common for the woman give up her job to follow
career opportunities of her significant other, although it may be
becoming less as women are facing more and better opportunities than
they did in the 1950s. Then there is still a fact that we cannot ignore.
Many women either drop out of the labor force or go into the part-time
labor force when they be come a parent more than men in the same
situations. The problem may be exacerbated if the male parent is earning
more than the female parent in the full-time labor force. For example,
suppose the husband is a chemical engineer and his wife teaches
kindergarten.
I know it's is heresy to criticize the
STEM movement. There's a concerted effort at the moment to get women
more into science careers. But first-year women should carefully
consider the career opportunities they will face upon graduation in
various STEM disciplines. What opportunities will graduates four-year
graduates face in such disciplines as chemistry, physics, and geology?
It often becomes necessary to pursue doctoral studies in science,
medicine, law, business, or whatever where the jobs are more plentiful,
and graduate studies can be very expensive in terms of stress, time, and
money. Compare this with opportunities that do not require doctoral
degrees in engineering, business, accounting, and K-12 education.
All this does not excuse subtle forms of
gender or other discrimination that still exist in the U.S. We must look
to nations that seem to be doing a better job like Canada or Sweden.
Those of you know, however, know that I do not buy into dysfunctional
social programs that discourage motivation to work overtime or
discourage risk taking and stress by investing savings and working 70
hours a week in entrepreneurial ventures ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/SunsetHillHouse/SunsetHillHouse.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on the gender
gap in higher education ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Harvard
"Feminism Fizzles: Where is Betty Friedan when we need her?" by
Rachel Shteir, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, January
28, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-End-of-Feminism-/136797/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
Feminism lives on in the feminist academic journals the movement created.
Among other things these journals keep pressuring for shattering of glass
ceilings and for improved wages and benefits of women at work.
The accomplishments of the movement are monumental, especially in terms of
politics and employment. And in some instances the price has been severe,
especially in terms of restraints on rape not keeping pace with the changing
times ---
http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/plank/109083/why-wont-the-military-take-troop-troop-rape-seriously#
"Are Middle Eastern Businessmen Less
Sexist than Europeans?" by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, Harvard
Business Review Blog, October 4, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/10/are_middle_eastern_businessmen_less_sexist.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
Jensen Comment
It's interesting how women in the some Middle Eastern nations can
graduate from college and hold full-time jobs but not drive a car, shop
alone in public, and face spectacle of being stoned to death in public
(rare). Maybe times are changing faster where it's least expected and
publicized for women. It will be interesting to see what happens for
women in Afghanistan when the U.S. hands it back to the Taliban.
Sheryl Sandberg (Chief Operating Officer of
Facebook) ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheryl_Sandberg
In Support of the Feminist Movement
"Sheryl Sandberg's
Graduation Speech for the Ages," by Andrew McAfee, Harvard
Business Review Blog, June 1, 2011 ---
Click Here
http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/mcafee/2011/06/sheryl-sandbergs-graduation-sp.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
The University of Chicago Centennial Catalogues ---
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/spcl/centcat/
These catalogues provide a wealth of information about changes in
higher education across over 100 years. For example, today business
administration is a a big deal in the
Booth School of
Business, but in the late 19th Century business administration
really did not exist apart from economics and economics studies did not
really focus on studies of business management, leadership, organization
behavior, marketing, and accounting.
Household administration, however, did exist as an academic division
of the University of Chicago until the middle of the 20th Century.
What I found interesting about Household Administration at the
University of Chicago is how it became the centerpiece of the struggle
of women for academic opportunity. However, the struggle extended to far
more than just academic opportunity.
Marion Talbot |
Household Administration
---
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/spcl/centcat/fac/facch05_01.html
1858-1948
One of
the most important commitments made by the founders of the
University of Chicago was to equal educational opportunities for men
and women at the new institution. Marion Talbot, head of the
Department of Household Administration and Dean of Women, constantly
reminded the three presidents under whom she served of that pledge.
Marion
Talbot held firm convictions about education and the role of women
in education. One of only a handful of women in American university
administration, she advised female students at the University of
Chicago to take full advantage of their academic opportunities.
Always concerned about the distracting temptations of campus life,
she urged women to limit their involvement in extracurricular
activities and cultivate a strong sense of culture. In assuming a
new role in society, women needed both personal self-confidence and
the best professional education. Marion Talbot expected the
University of Chicago to provide these in an environment in which
they could be enhanced and develope
Although Talbot advocated a continuing role for women in the home,
her views were not traditional. Borrowing from progressive models of
efficiency and scientific management and exploiting the new
technology appearing at the time, modern women had the domestic
tools to escape the drudgery of the past. Marion Talbot taught that
a home could be "administered" in an effective way without
compromising its vital role as a cultural hearth.
Crucial to this view was access to academic opportunity. When the
University appeared to renege on its early promises of equal
education by promoting sexually segregated instruction at the turn
of the century, Talbot challenged the administration to abandon its
plan. Later, she pointed out the inequity of preponderently male
faculty appointments and the overwhelming focus on men in University
events, eloquently and precisely identifying the problem and leaving
no doubt as to a solution. Despite her reputation as an advocate for
women, Talbot argued that equality should mean simply that and
nothing else. She expected no more and no less than anyone else
received. Her courses in household administration were specifically
open to both men and women, and she criticized decisions that she
felt patronized any specific group. Marion Talbot asked only that
everyone be given equal opportunities, a goal she vigorously
pursued.
Bob Jensen's threads on gender issues
are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Harvard
Jensen Comment
The Marion Talbot module is only a small part of the wealth of
historical information provided by the University of Chicago Centennial
Catalogues ---
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/spcl/centcat/
The author of
the most influential body of Marxist historiography in the United States
from the past half-century turned into one more curmudgeon denouncing “the
race, class, gender swindle.”
"Left to Right & Wrong Both Ways,"
by Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed, October 3, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/10/03/essay-death-eugene-genovese
An ancient
and corny joke of the American left tells of a comrade who
was surprised to learn that the German radical theorist Kautsky’s
first name was Karl and not, in fact, “Renegade.” He’d seen Lenin’s
polemical booklet The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade
Kautsky but only just gotten around to reading it.
Eavesdropping on
some young Marxist academics via Facebook in the week following the
historian Eugene Genovese’s death on September 26, I’ve come to
suspect that there is a pamphlet out there somewhere about the
Renegade Genovese. Lots of people have made the trek from the left
to the right over the past couple of centuries, of course, but no
major American intellectual of as much substance has, in recent
memory, apart from Genovese. People may throw out a couple of names
to challenge this statement, but the operative term here is
“substance.” Genovese published landmark studies like Roll,
Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974) and – with the
late Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, his wife -- Fruits of Merchant
Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of
Capitalism, not score-settling memoirs and suchlike.
As for the
term “renegade,” well… The author of the most influential body of
Marxist historiography in the United States from the past
half-century turned into one more curmudgeon denouncing “the race,
class, gender swindle.” And at a
meeting of the Conservative Political
Action Committee, no less. The scholar who did path-breaking work on
the political culture of the antebellum South -- developing a
Gramscian analysis of how slaves and masters understood one another,
at a time when Gramsci himself was little more than an intriguing
rumor within the American left – ended up referring to the events of
1861-65 as “the War of Southern Independence.”
Harsher words might
apply, but “renegade” will do.
He is listed
as “Genovese, Gene” in the index to the great British historian’s
Eric Hobsbawm’s autobiography Interesting Times: A
Twentieth-Century Life (2002). Actually, now I have to change
that to “the late, great British historian” Hobsbawm, rather: he
died on October 1.
The two of them
belonged to an extremely small and now virtually extinct species:
the cohort of left-wing intellectuals who pledged their allegiance
to the Soviet Union and other so-called “socialist” countries, right
up to that system’s very end. How they managed to exhibit such
critical intelligence in their scholarship and so little in their
politics is an enigma defying rational explanation. But they did:
Hobsbawm remained a dues-paying member of the Communist Party of
Great Britain until it closed up shop in 1991.
The case of Genovese
is a little more complicated. He was expelled from the American CP
in 1950, at the age of 20, but remained close to its politics long
after that. In the mid-1960s, as a professor of history at Rutgers
University, he declared his enthusiasm for a Vietcong victory. It
angered Richard Nixon at the time, and I recall it being mentioned
with horror by conservatives well into the 1980s. What really took
the cake was that he’d become the president of the Organization of
American Historians in 1978-79. Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover
had to be spinning in their graves.
When such a sinner
repents, the angels do a dance. With Eric Hobsbawm, they didn’t have
much occasion to celebrate. Though he wrote off the Russian
Revolution and all that followed in its wake as more or less
regrettable when not utterly disastrous, he didn’t treat the
movement he’d supported as a God that failed. He could accept the
mixture of noble spirits and outright thugs, of democratic impulses
and dictatorial consequences, that made up the history he'd played a
small part in; he exhibited no need to make either excuses or
accusations.
Genovese followed a
different course, as shown in in the landmark statement of his
change in political outlook, an article called “The Question” that
appeared in the social-democratic journal Dissent in 1994.
The title referred to the challenge of one disillusioned communist
to another: “What did you know and when did you know it?" Genovese
never got around to answering that question about himself, oddly
enough. But he was anything but reluctant He was much less
reluctant about accusing more or less everybody who’d ever
identified as a leftist or a progressive of systematically avoiding
criticism of the Soviets. He kept saying that “we” had condoned this
or that atrocity, or were complicit with one bloodbath or another,
but in his hands “we” was a very strange pronoun, for some reason
meaning chiefly meaning “you.”
Continued in article
Teaching Case from The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly
Review on May 25, 2012
How Women Can Get Ahead: Advice from Female CEOs
by: John Bussey
May 18, 2012
Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com
Click here to view the video on WSJ.com ![WSJ Video]()
TOPICS: Ethics, Nonfinancial performance measures,
Work
SUMMARY: The article begins by referencing Jack
Welch's clash with a group of female executives at a forum on issues
facing women executives that was held in the beginning of May. The
author has written this article after discussing two issues with the
18 women CEOs of Fortune 500 companies; what factors, personal or in
the workplace, fueled their careers and what myths about the
advancement of women did they encounter along the way? The related
video shows Jack Welch's participation in the WSJ's Women in the
Economy conference.
CLASSROOM APPLICATION: The article is useful to
discuss equality in career aspirations and ethics in any business
course
QUESTIONS:
1. (Advanced) Who is Jack Welch? What points did Mr. Welch
make at a recent WSJ forum about women's advancement to the highest
levels of executive leadership?
2. (Introductory) What factors do the women CEO's mentioned
in the article concur with Jack Welch's assessment?
3. (Introductory) What experiences of gender bias do women
CEOs say they faced during their career advancement? How did they
address these biases and related experiences?
4. (Introductory) What steps are women leaders taking to
help their organizations improve on the factors that lead to gender
bias?
5. (Advanced) Do you think that these organizational
improvements also can help men in their career advancement? Explain.
Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island
RELATED ARTICLES:
Women, Welch Clash at Forum
by John Bussey
May 04, 2012
Page: B1
"How Women Can Get Ahead: Advice from
Female CEOs," by: John Bussey, The Wall Street Journal,
May 16, 2012 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303879604577410520511235252.html?mod=djem_jiewr_AC_domainid
Our recent
recounting of how Jack Welch clashed with a group of female
executives over how best to advance to the top of corporate America
touched a raw nerve in the business world.
Readers fired off a
barrage of comments. "He's right," one wrote about the former CEO of
General Electric GE +0.36% . "RESULTS—that's all that counts,
period."
Not so, wrote
another: "Mr. Welch's notion that his career, or anyone's, is a
result of a single androgynous metric—'performance'—is false." The
workplace is still an "old boys' network."
So I went to the 18
women who are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies—a record number but
still just 3.6% of the total—and asked their opinion. What factors,
personal or in the workplace, fueled their careers and what myths
about the advancement of women did they encounter along the way?
Eleven gave their thoughts.
Alan Murray talks
with Jack and Suzy Welch at the Women in the Economy conference
about what steps need to be taken to eliminate the cultural biases
against women advancing in business.
Their advice is
practical. And notably, it echoes much—but not all—of what Mr. Welch
had to say, albeit with a bit more nuance and finesse.
A recap: Mr. Welch
was speaking at The Wall Street Journal's Women in the Economy
conference and said that, to get ahead, focus laserlike on
performance. Mentoring programs, he said, are a bad idea; everyone
on staff should be your mentor. Support groups, such as women's
employee groups, can be likened to "victims' units," which the best
women tend to avoid. And there is no such thing as work-life
balance. There are work-life choices that have consequences you need
to accept. To get ahead, he said, raise your hand for line jobs and
tough, risky assignments. And take advantage of rigorous performance
reviews, which are the best time to get coaching and address
"The most important
factor in determining whether you will succeed isn't your gender,
it's you," argues Angela Braly, CEO of WellPoint WLP +1.63% . "Be
open to opportunity and take risks. In fact, take the worst, the
messiest, the most challenging assignment you can find, and then
take control."
"I have stepped up
to many 'ugly' assignments that others didn't want," says KeyCorp's
KEY +0.13% CEO, Beth Mooney.
Ursula Burns, the
CEO of Xerox, XRX -3.48% says it's wise for aspiring leaders to
cultivate risk-taking. "There were lots of reasons for Xerox not to
acquire Affiliated Computer Services," she says, by way of example.
But the company took the gamble. "In the two years after we
purchased ACS, we are transforming our company—more than half of our
revenue comes from our services business and we continue to maintain
a leadership position in the technology that made Xerox great."
Along the career
path, the CEOs say, pursue new skills relentlessly. Change jobs
after you've mastered the current one. Be willing to tack sideways
on the career track, or even backward, to pick up key expertise or
command a business unit.
"I knew from an
early age that I wanted to lead a company," says Denise Morrison of
Campbell Soup CPB +0.43% . "I developed a strategic process for my
career plan that set the final destination, developed the career
track, identified skills to build, took line positions to gain
experience, and sought leadership and management training on the
job, through special assignments, coaching and networking. For
example, as VP of Marketing for Nestlé, NESN.VX +0.55% I actually
worked in a manufacturing plant which gave me a deep appreciation
for how the supply chain works."
"In order to lead an
organization, you have to be incredibly comfortable in your own
skin," says Gracia Martore of Gannett, GCI +2.18% "and the only way
to do that is to be confident in who you are."
Look for
opportunities to stand out from the crowd and ask for what you want,
the CEOs advise. And when you hit a goal, speak up and toot your
horn. Don't wait to get noticed. "For a lot of women, they think the
myth is true, that if they just do a good job and work hard, they'll
get recognized. That's not the case," says Maggie Wilderotter, CEO
of Frontier Communications, FTR -2.00% and the sister of Ms.
Morrison.
Mentors were key in
the careers of several of the CEOs. They endorse the idea of
mentorship. Ms. Wilderotter says she regularly picked the brains of
a range of senior execs. "I had many mentors, and they didn't know
it."
As for the sanctity
of performance, Ellen Kullman, CEO of DuPont, DD -0.14% says it
drove her career: "Accountability, performance and external
benchmarking."
"I had a very strong
work ethic," adds Heather Bresch, CEO of Mylan, MYL +1.87% "and was
willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done. There is simply
no substitute for hard work when it comes to achieving success."
"I don't disagree
with Jack Welch that performance is the ticket to the dance," says
Frontier's Ms. Wilderotter. "Unless you're delivering value, there
is no right to move forward. I do disagree that all is fair in the
workplace."
"Men selectively
listen," Ms. Wilderotter says. She recalls making points in
boardrooms, then watching the group take note of a male later saying
the same thing. "When that happened, I'd stop the conversation and
say, 'Do you realize I said that 10 minutes ago?' Women have to take
responsibility for the dynamic around them; you can't just say 'Woe
is me.' "
"My experiences with
gender bias are probably the norm," says Ms. Bresch of Mylan. "What
I found was that expectations of women were simply lower, and this
resulted in being overlooked for certain opportunities. Now as a
leader, I strive to create an environment different than the one I
faced, an environment where good ideas can come from anyone—young,
old, men, women, assistant, executive—and opportunities are open to
everyone."
Continued in article
"Gender Gaps in Performance: Evidence
from Young Lawyers," by Rosa Ferrer and Ghazala Azmat, SSRN, May 2,
2012 ---
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2050037
Abstract:
This paper documents and studies the gender gap in performance among
associate lawyers in the United States. Unlike most high-skilled
professions, the legal profession has widely-used objective methods
to measure and reward lawyers’ productivity: the number of hours
billed to clients and the amount of new-client revenue generated. We
find clear evidence of a gender gap in annual performance with
respect to both measures. Male lawyers bill ten-percent more hours
and bring in more than double the new-client revenue. We show that
the differential impact across genders in the presence of young
children and the differences in aspirations to become a law-firm
partner account for a large part of the difference in performance.
These performance gaps have important consequences for gender gaps
in earnings. While individual and firm characteristics explain up to
50 percent of earnings gap, the inclusion of performance measures
explains most of the remainder.
"Is American Education Neglecting Gifted Children?" by David
Nagel, T.H.E. Journal, November 16, 2009 ---
http://thejournal.com/articles/2009/11/16/is-american-education-neglecting-gifted-children.aspx
America's 3 million gifted and talented students are getting the
shaft in the vast majority of K-12 schools, according to a new
report from the
National
Association for Gifted Children and the Council of State
Directors of Programs for the Gifted. The report found that gifted
students are being neglected at all levels in the United States,
from weak or non-existent policies at the state level to uneven
funding at the district level to a lack of teacher preparation at
the classroom level.
The report,
"2008-2009
State of the States in Gifted Education,"
pointed to several failures on the part of U.S. education, from a a
severe lack of commitment on a national level to spotty services and
little or no support to get teachers trained to deal with gifted
students.
Some of the findings included:
·
A full fourth of states provided zero funding for programs and
resources for gifted students last year;
·
In states that did provide funding, there was little consistency,
with per-pupil expenditures ranging from $2 to $750 last year;
·
Only five states require professional development for teachers who
work in gifted programs;
·
Only five require any kind preparation for these teachers;
·
Gifted students spend most of their time in general classrooms and
receive little specialized instruction;
·
Key policies are handled at the district level, when there are
policies in place at all, rather than at the state level, creating
"the potential for fractured approaches and limits on funding";
·
There is no coherent national strategy for dealing with gifted
students.
Most of those interviewed for the report cited NCLB as a factor that
has contributed to a decline in support and resources for gifted
students. Participants pointed to a number of reasons for this,
including a shift in focus away from academic excellence toward
"bringing up lower-performing students and maintaining adequate
yearly progress" and a shift in staffing away from gifted programs.
"At a time when other nations are redoubling their commitment to
their highest potential students, the United States continues to
neglect the needs of this student population, a policy failure that
will cost us dearly in the years to come," said NAGC President Ann
Robinson in a prepared statement. Robinson is also director of the
Center for
Gifted Education at the
University of
Arkansas at Little Rock. "The solution to this problem
must be a comprehensive national gifted and talented education
policy in which federal, state, and local districts work together to
ensure all gifted students are identified and served by properly
trained teachers using appropriate curriculum."
The impact of this neglect is being felt now, according to the
report, with "continued underperformance on international
benchmarks, particularly in math, science, and engineering, and in
the shortage of qualified workers able to enter professions that
require advanced skills."
Jensen Comment
Accordingly this impacts on higher education in many areas, including
the shortage of women in mathematics and science. To make matters worse,
universities like the University of Texas are dropping their Merit
Scholar programs that fund gifted students.
"Math on the X-Y Axis Women, science, and the gender gap," by Cathy
Young, Reason Magazine, October 3, 2006 ---
http://www.reason.com/cy/cy100306.shtml
The debate over gender and science, which
helped bring down Harvard President
Lawrence Summers this year, has been
revived by a new report from the National Academies, "Beyond Bias
and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science
and Engineering."
The report endorses the view that the
predominance of men in scientific fields is due not to biological
differences and personal priorities, as Summers suggested, but to
gender bias and unconscious institutional sexism. But is this an
effort to find out the truth, or to stamp out heresy?
The makeup of the panel that produced the
report is revealing. Chaired by University of Miami President Donna
E. Shalala, who is known for her commitment to feminist causes, the
panel included a number of strong proponents of the belief that
women in science are held back primarily by sexism and that
aggressive remedies to these biases are needed.
Noticeably absent were proponents of other
viewpoints—including such female scientists as Vanderbilt University
psychologist
Camilla Persson Benbow or Canadian
neuroscientist
Doreen Kimura, who argue that biological
sex differences influence cognitive skills in some areas.
The report has been hailed as a decisive
refutation of what panel member
Ana Mari Cauce, executive vice provost of
the University of Washington in Seattle, dismissed as "myths" about
women in science. A
Reuters story stated, "A committee of
experts looked at all the possible excuses—biological differences in
ability, hormonal influences, childrearing demands, and even
differences in ambition—and found no good explanation for why women
are being locked out."
But a look at the report, available online
from the National Academies Press, shows a much more complex
picture.
For instance, the report points to the
narrowing gap between boys' and girls' mathematics test scores as
evidence that there are no innate differences to inhibit female
success. But average test scores are not a good indicator of what it
takes to be successful in the scientific field. As the report
briefly acknowledges, male scores have far greater variability, with
more boys clustered at the bottom, among children with severe
learning disabilities, and at the top, among the highly gifted.
The report attempts to neutralize this fact
by pointing to a study that found that many women and men in the
science, engineering, and mathematics workforce have SAT math scores
below the "gifted" level. But there's a caveat: The study looked not
primarily at the highest achievers, but mainly at lower-level
professionals with bachelor's degrees. If fewer average women than
average men go into these fields, maybe because their interests lie
elsewhere, is that really a problem?
The body of the report also supports,
rather than rebuts, the view that childrearing is a major factor in
gender disparities.
It cites a study that "found single women
scientists and engineers [were] 16 percent more likely than single
men to be in tenure track jobs five years after the PhD, while
married women with children were 45 percent less likely than married
men with children to be in tenure track positions."
Yet these facts are treated as a result of
discrimination against people with family responsibilities and of
the outmoded assumption that a scientist has a spouse to take care
of such matters. Proposed remedies include more family-friendly
policies. But what if single-minded devotion to work really is
essential to outstanding success in science?
None of this is to say that women are
incapable of being outstanding scientists—many women are, and their
advances in these fields have been spectacular—or that nothing can
be done further to reduce the gender gap. Cultural stereotypes
undoubtedly play a role in the fact that even mathematically and
scientifically gifted girls are more likely than boys to choose
"human interest" professions rather than science.
We can also do more to reduce lingering
prejudice against mothers who are not primary caregivers for their
children, and against fathers who are. But even with these
changes—which need to take place in the culture as a whole, far more
than in academic and scientific institutions—the ratio of women to
men in science and engineering may always remain below 1-to-1.
Ultimately, the report is a missed
opportunity. It could have addressed the personal and family choices
women could make to maximize their career potential, or looked at
the factors in the high achievement of Asian-American women in
science. (Asian-Americans are virtually ignored in all the talk of
minority women in science.) Instead, it upholds an orthodoxy of
female victimization. Women, and science, deserve better.
Thanks to improved outreach efforts,
engineering and technology universities are seeing a boost in female enrollments
nearly across the board.
As
concern has grown about
declining enrollments of men generally
in higher education, engineering
colleges and technology institutes have the opposite
problem: not enough women. But more than two years after
Larry Summers thrust the controversy over women in the
sciences into the spotlight, a number of technologically
oriented colleges have posted significant gains in
women’s enrollment that admissions officers are
attributing in part to beefed-up outreach efforts.
Andy Guess, Inside Higher Ed, August 7, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/07/enrollment
The Paradox of Majoring in Physics
and Chemistry
Note that there are bipolar sides to the debate when pushing more
and more K-12 students, especially females, toward wanting to major in
the physical sciences in undergraduate or graduate school. On one side
we may be dooming many of them toward majors where the opportunities are
lowest in terms of supply of graduates presently outstripping demand,
thereby making many of the graduates of chemistry and physics thinking
they made a mistake by majoring in the physical sciences.
On the other hand, having more students
majoring in things like physics and chemistry because they've
increasingly experiencing counseling hype for science might, at least in
the short run, save those majors in places like Tennessee State
University. But will physics and chemistry students have to start over
in a new major after graduation? Will getting into physics or chemistry
doctoral programs merely increase their eventual agony? Were there
better majors for those wanting to get into medical school, law school,
healthcare administration, and MBA programs?
One question is whether women tend to
avoid physical science is due more to gender bias in early childhood or
more to common sense evaluation of the futures of males and females in
those disciplines?
"Low-Hanging Fruit?" by Kevin Kiley,
Inside Higher Ed, June 27, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/06/27/tennessee_state_cuts_under_producing_programs_to_cope_with_state_laws
When it comes time
to cut a university's budget, who stands up for the small department
that graduates fewer than 10 majors a year? The answer, it turns
out, depends on the department.
To help reconcile
budget cuts and new policies aimed at producing more graduates
prepared for good jobs, the Tennessee Board of Regents on Friday
approved a plan by Tennessee State University to eliminate "low
producing" programs, notably undergraduate majors in physics and
Africana studies. Both programs, along with a bachelor's program in
foreign languages, several master's programs, and two education
degrees, graduate only a few students each year. The university will
go from offering 67 majors to 61, and will consolidate eight schools
into seven.
. . .
Other low-producing
programs that survived the current round of cuts, including history,
art, chemistry, music, and civil engineering, are currently under
review.
Jensen Comment
It's a mistake to think that dropping a major entails dropping all
required and popular elective courses in a discipline where the major is
dropped. But many upper division specialty courses typically taken only
by majors will probably drop out of the curriculum. The main problem
with the majors being dropped is that nationwide the supply of graduates
with this majors vastly exceeds demand, including PhD graduates in many
of these majors.
Compare the above listing with the
following:
Disappearing Schools of Journalism and Journalism Students ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/04/15/qt#257076
Journalism is now ranked as the most useless degree in college ---
As college
seniors prepare to graduate, The Daily Beast crunches the numbers to
determine which majors—from journalism to psychology —didn’t pay.
Some
cities are better than others for college
graduates. Some college courses are
definitely hotter than others. Even some
iPhone apps are
better for college
students than others. But when it comes down to it, there’s only one
question that rings out in dormitories, fraternities, and dining
halls across the nation: What’s your major?
Slide Show
01.Journalism
02. Horticulture
03. Agriculture
04. Advertising
05. Fashion Design
06. Child and Family Studies
07. Music
08. Mechanical Engineering Technology
09. Chemistry
10. Nutrition
11. Human Resources
12. Theatre
13. Art History
14. Photography
15. Literature
16. Art
17.Fine Arts
18. Psychology
19. English
20. Animal Science
Harvard University is Making Another Stab at Defining a Core
Curriculum Requirement
"Direction and Choice," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
October 5, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/05/harvard
On Wednesday, the university released a new
plan for undergraduate education that would designate certain
subjects as ones that must be studied. As a result, every Harvard
undergraduate would have to take a course on the United States and a
course dealing with religion, among others. Few top colleges and
universities have such requirements. But students would be able to
pick within those broad topics, with the idea that many courses
would meet the requirements.
. . .
The report goes on to say that general
education “prepares students to be citizens of a democracy within a
global society” and also teaches students to “understand themselves
as product of — and participants in — traditions of art, ideas and
values.” General education should also encourage students to “adapt
to change” and to have a sense of ethics, the report says.
The general education proposed by the
faculty panel would have students take three one-semester courses in
“critical skills” in written and oral communication, foreign
languages, and analytical reasoning.
Then students would have to take seven
courses in the following categories:
- Cultural traditions and cultural
change.
- The ethical life.
- The United States and the world (one
each in the U.S. and the world).
- Reason and faith.
- Science and technology (one in a life
science and one in a physical science).
Within these categories, there would be a
broad range of courses that could fulfill the requirements. Each
would have to meet certain general education requirements, such as
providing a broad scope of knowledge and encouraging student-faculty
contact. But the subject matter within categories could vary
significantly.
For instance, courses suggested as
possibilities for the cultural traditions requirement include “The
Emergence of World Literature,” “Art and Censorship,” and
“Representations of the Other.” Courses for study of the United
States could include “Health Care in the United States: A
Comparative Perspective” and “Pluralist Societies: The United States
in Comparative Context.” The reason and faith requirement, which
would involve all students studying religion in some form, might
have courses such as “Religion and Closed Societies” and “Religion
and Democracy.”
In explaining the rationale for a faith and
reason requirement, the Harvard professors noted that most college
undergraduates care about religion and discuss it, but “often
struggle — sometimes for the first time in their lives — to sort out
the relationship between their own beliefs and practices, the
different beliefs and practices of fellow students, and the
profoundly secular and intellectual world of the academy itself.”
The report also noted the many tensions
around religion in modern society — including fights over school
prayer, same-sex marriage, and stem cell research. “Harvard is no
longer an institution with a religious mission, but religion is a
fact that Harvard’s graduates will confront in their lives both in
and after college,” the report said, explaining why a religion
requirement is important. At the same time, it added: “Let us be
clear. Courses in reason and faith are not religious apologetics.
They are courses that examine the interplay between religion and
various aspects of national and/or international culture and
society.” In the ethics requirement, students will consider how to
make ethical choices, but in religion, students “will appreciate the
role of religion in contemporary, historical or future events —
personal, cultural, national or international.”
‘Activity Based Learning’
Beyond the various course requirements, the
Harvard panel called for the university to consider new ways to link
students’ in-class and out-of-class experiences.
“The big thing for many Harvard undergrads
tends to be their extracurricular activities. It’s almost a cliché
that they spend more time out of the yard than in the yard,” said
Menand. “We don’t want to bureaucratize that, but we think there is
a natural connection between the classroom and what takes place out
of the classroom.”
This part of the report is more vague and
less prescriptive, and in fact the panel calls for another panel to
consider how to carry out the idea of promoting “activity based
learning.” Generally, the report said, the pedagogical idea it wants
Harvard to embrace is that “the ability to apply abstract knowledge
to concrete cases — and vice versa.” Examples given to show the
value of this kind of learning include the statements that “studying
the philosophy of the 17th century might inform the production of a
classic play by Molière” and “working on a political campaign can
bring to life material in a course on democracy.”
In a course, this link might be made
through optional papers that students could write on how an outside
activity helped the student understand course material or how course
material influenced a planned activity. If several students
participate in the same out-of-class activity, team work might be
involved in and outside of class. And in either case, the report
said, closer faculty-student contact would be encouraged.
What It Means in Cambridge and Beyond
At Harvard, a series of meeting are now
being scheduled for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to review the
report and — eventually — to vote on it. Menand said that while the
review would take months at least, it need not wait for Harvard to
have a new permanent president.
Schneider of the Association of American
Colleges and Universities said she thought the report might have a
positive impact. “I think that what this is doing is restoring the
purpose of general education requirements, which is to connect
learning with real world citizenship.”
She said it made a lot of sense for Harvard
to say that students need to study the United States, and the world,
and science, and religion, etc., rather than using broad
distribution requirements. “Let’s think about what’s going on in
American high schools. Students have one year of American history or
maybe two, but they may never study the United States again,” she
said. Harvard’s proposal would mean that they would study the United
States again, and at a deeper level than they could in high school.
Continued in the article
"Should Colleges Pay for Housework?" by Scott Jaschik,
Inside Higher Ed, January 19, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/19/housework
When Carol W.
Greider of Johns Hopkins University learned that she won the 2009
Nobel Prize in Medicine,
she was doing laundry.
That fact is cited
in a new analysis of academic scientists and housework -- being
published today by the American Association of University Professors
and calling for colleges to create an option for faculty members and
others to have financial assistance for housework as an employee
benefit. The study finds that even among dual career scientist
couples, the time gap spent on housework is hindering the
advancement of women.
The study found
that female scientists with male partners perform 54 percent of
their family housework (cooking, cleaning and laundry) in their
households, while male scientists with female partners perform 28
percent of their family housework. While there are other tasks on
which the male scientists contribute a majority of time (yard, house
and car care), those tasks take much less time a week than those
that women are more likely to perform. It adds up to a 10-hour drain
on the time of female scientists, the study finds.
The study was
conducted by Londa Schiebinger, the John L. Hinds Professor of
History of Science and director of the Clayman Institute for Gender
Research at Stanford University, and Shannon Gilmartin, a
quantitative analyst and the institute. The data come from a large
research project at the institute,
"Dual Career Academic Couples: What Universities Need to Know."
Schiebinger and Gilmartin used data collected
for that report from 1,222 tenured and tenure-track faculty members
in the natural sciences at leading universities. Those studied were
all partnered with someone of the opposite sex. (Data were also
collected from same-sex couples, but the totals were too small to
draw conclusions on them.)
Among the other
findings:
- Male scientists with stay-at-home
partners do the least household work, relying on their female
partners to do 76 percent of such work.
- While very few women in the survey
(13) have stay-at-home male partners, they do more housework
than their male counterparts.
- The men and women in the study
reported nearly identical hours a week at work -- mean of 56.4
hours for men and 56.3 hours for women.
- Men and women who employ others to do
housework are more productive than those who don't employ
others. (Productivity is measured by number of published
articles.)
Based on these
findings, the authors suggest that colleges recognize that housework
is "an academic issue" and revise benefits packages accordingly.
They suggest that institutions offer flexible packages of benefits,
in which financial assistance for housework would be one possible
benefit. They write that some employees might not want the benefit
and would prefer, based on their personal or family situations,
other benefits. But the option should be included, they write.
"One appealing
aspect of this benefit proposal is its inclusivity -- one need not
be partnered or have children to gain access," they write.
Schiebinger and
Gilmartin acknowledge that, given the economic downturn, this may
not be "the right time" to propose a major expansion of benefits.
But they say that over the long run, this is an issue that should be
addressed.
"Providing
benefits to support housework continues dominant social trends of
the past 40 years," they write. "U.S. institutions have stepped into
the domestic sphere to support aspects of private life, from
health-care benefits to child-care supplements. Institutions now
need to step in to support housework."
Cathy A. Trower,
research director and co-principal Investigator of the Collaborative
On Academic Careers in Higher Education, at Harvard University, said
she wasn't surprised by the findings on housework. But she said she
feared that this may not be the issue that most needs reform.
"I'm all for more
benefits for faculty and household help would be great for everyone
-- singles and marrieds and men and women. Bravo," she said.
But the larger
question is whether such changes would actually help many women (and
men). COACHE's surveys of young faculty members have found
significant frustrations with work/family balance in higher
education, but the surveys have also found many young scholars who
don't just want more help, but want different models, with more time
for family or non-academic pursuits.
Too much attention
to issues like housework may shift attention away from broader
reforms, Trower said. She has written about the need for different
models for faculty careers -- long-term renewable contracts, tenure
expectations that may not require 60 hours a week in the lab and so
forth -- as the best way to create more options. Focusing on
benefits -- such as how many times you can stop the tenure clock or
whether you should be paid for hiring household help -- doesn't
address the question of whether the system is one to bolster or
needs real reform.
"What I am against
is the lack of flexibility and the seeming inability to confront
openly the issues at play," she said.
Jensen Comment
Some years ago there was such a dire shortage of nurses that hospitals
provided nurses with meal vouchers, day care services, and free home
cleaning/shopping services. Many hospitals have cut back on all but day
care due to recent budget cuts and the glut of nurses in some parts of
the country. Perhaps the word "glut" is a bit strong, but up here in
northern New England a nursing school could not find a full-time job
with fringe benefits for a single graduate last spring.
What caused this sudden increase in the supply of nurses? Partly it
was the ease of finding jobs in a world where other types of job
opportunities were shrinking. It was also due to the rise in men
attracted to what had previously been a career dominated by women. And
partly it was due to lower turnover. Nursing tended to have relatively
high turnover in times of prosperity due to women electing to devote
full time to families, including starting new families. Now nurses with
families often have spouses who are unemployed or underemployed such
that resigning a high full-time job is no longer an option in these
difficult economic times.
But there's still a shortage of faculty in some disciplines. New PhDs
in accounting are running about 130 per year to meet a demand of upwards
of 1,500 per year give or take for tougher budgetary times in colleges
and the explosion in the use of adjunct accounting teachers.
But since the rise in the number of undergraduate accounting majors
keeps rising across the country, there's still substantial room for a
newly minted PhD to negotiate when applying for a new job. Starting
salaries in major universities are over $160,000 plus summer research
stipends and private expense budgets and fringe benefits.
Accounting Doctoral Information ---
http://www.jrhasselback.com/AtgDoctInfo.html
Accounting Doctoral Programs ---
http://www.jrhasselback.com/AtgDoct/AtgDoctProg.html
Although I've not heard of any college offering free meal vouchers
and home services for accounting faculty, it may well be cheaper than
having to make $200,000 salary deals for top graduates. And if the
science departments are offering their faculty home services, there's a
precedent being set according to the above article.
Accountancy in general does not have the same gender problem as
science. Currently there are more female than male undergraduate
accounting majors, and the gender gap in among accounting professors has
been closing much faster in accountancy than in science.
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/BookBob1.htm#careers
Bob Jensen's threads on why practicing accountants are not rushing
into accounting doctoral programs ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
Jensen Comment
If there ever was BS about a BS or a PhD this has to be the site ---
http://www.collegemeasures.org/
One thing I always warned my students
about is that education is much more than a ticket to a job.
Education is part and parcel to almost everything in life.
And when looking at career alternatives,
I always warned my students to pretty much ignore starting salaries
when choosing a career or choosing from first-time job alternatives.
Reasons are as follows:
- Some companies will offer higher
starting salaries because they're weak in other attractions such as
training, exposure to quality clients, job security, travel
requirements, benefits, etc. In public accountancy, for example, the
most important things are training and exposure to quality clients
who frequently offer jobs to selected members of audit teams that
conduct onsite audits or consulting for these clients.
- Local, state, and federal
government job offers often look low relative to job offers from the
private sector. But there are often many advantages to starting out
with government such as starting out with the IRS. Government
sometimes offers great training opportunities. Secondly, government
may offer "client" exposures that provide similar opportunities for
career advancement in the private sector following that first-job in
government. Some of our best accounting firm tax experts are former
IRS agents, and some of our best tax professors were former IRS
agents. The name Amy Dunbar at the University of Connecticut rings a
bell here.
- Large firms may offer the highest
starting salaries, but the career opportunities may be greater in
small firms. For example, the probability that an accounting
graduate who starts out in a Big Four accounting firm will
ultimately make partner varies among the hundreds of offices around
the world, but the overall probability is much less than 20%. In
fairness, most graduates want Big Four training and client exposure
opportunities without ever intending to stick around long enough to
become partners. Other accounting graduates would prefer to start
out with smaller accounting firms or companies where they can start
out as larger fish in small ponds with much greater opportunity to
become partners or senior managers or executives.
- Relative to salary at any point in
a career, also think about mobility. It is quite common for
employees to change jobs for a number of reasons, including
termination (e.g., no tenure or promotion), unhappiness in a
particular job, transfer of a spouse, desire to get out of a city,
desire to get into a city, etc. Some careers have greater mobility
upon relocation. And high-mobility careers may not have the highest
starting salaries. For example, my UPS driver up here in the
mountains has a BS in finance. He could've had a higher starting
salary when he graduated in Boston, but when he moved to these
mountains he could not find any job in finance. If he had instead
been a nurse, he could've found a nursing job immediately.
- Think of the lifestyle aspects of a
career that become much more important later in life than salary.
For example, many first-year premed majors change majors after their
science teachers fully explain the lifestyle advantages and
disadvantages of being a lifetime medical doctor. For example, if
every day is the same old thing of reading radiology film, fixing
herniated discs, putting in lens implants, or replacing knees and
hips, life can be pretty boring over the next 40 years. Students
should consider the many aspects of a career other than expected
earnings. And there are many aspects to consider. Physicians
generally get rewards of improving or restoring the lives of their
patients. But many also take on heavy pressures of possibly ruining
the lives of their patients.
- Think of the debt and such things
as malpractice insurance. For example, physicians who start out at
relatively high salaries or billings often spend years of paying off
the tens of thousands or more dollars of debt accumulated in medical
school. Getting free of that debt may take a long time. One of my
granddaughters estimates she will be 50 years old before she makes
the last payment on student loans. Also, consider the costs of a
career. The malpractice insurance of my wife's spine surgeon is over
$500,000 per year plus he has to pay for his own office staff, his
own office nurses, his physician assistants, and even his own
accountants and computer specialists.
Lastly, when reading the charts and
tables in the site below consider the aggregation and other weaknesses
of the data. For example, accounting is mixed in with business studies.
But the advantages and disadvantages of an accounting career are much,
much different than those of marketing, management, finance, and other
types of business careers. For example, I looked up the PhD starting
salary for a "business" major in one major university. It was stated as
$90,000. However, accounting PhD graduates at that particular university
are more apt to be $150,000 or more. Plus there are summer stipends that
add up to 20% more to starting salaries.
And while we're at it, consider the
starting salary of an accounting PhD. The highest salary offer may come
from Harvard or Stanford, but the living costs in Cambridge or Palo Alto
are possibly twice as much or more than the living costs in Ames, Iowa
--- perhaps ten times as much in terms of house purchase and rental
prices. And the odds of getting tenure are low at Harvard or Stanford
such that considerations such as research opportunities should outweigh
starting salary considerations.
And now for the BS about a BS or PhD ---
http://www.collegemeasures.org/
"All About the Money: What if
lawmakers and students used starting salaries to evaluate colleges and
their programs?" by Dan Berrett, Chronicle of Higher Education,
September 18, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/All-About-the-Money/134422/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
What is your college
degree truly worth?
That is the question
that a new report seeks to answer. And it does so by distilling
college into a number, expressed in dollars.
"The Earning Power
of Graduates From Tennessee's Colleges and Universities" is the
latest effort to precisely quantify the value of a degree. It
identifies the payoff that individual programs at specific colleges
yield the first year after graduation. While limited to Tennessee,
it will be followed by similar analyses in other states, and it
marks the arrival of a new way of evaluating higher education that
brings conversations about college productivity and performance to
the program level.
Due out this week,
the report—by College Measures, a partnership of the American
Institutes for Research and Matrix Knowledge, a consulting firm—is
bound to spark debate about what it counts and omits, and to raise
fears over how its findings will be used.
The report has been
praised by some analysts for merging data on education and
employment in valuable ways and for producing revealing insights.
For instance, in Tennessee, attending the flagship, in Knoxville,
might not lead to a higher paycheck for new graduates than
completing a community-college program, depending on the major a
student chooses.
The report also
exposes simmering arguments in higher education: whether college is
chiefly for personal economic gain or for serving the public good,
whether teaching potential students about the costs and benefits of
their college choices will further cement an already widespread
consumerist ethos, and whether data on disparate outcomes by
discipline will fuel more attacks on liberal-arts programs, whose
graduates may not earn large salaries right after college but fare
better later.
Produced in
collaboration with the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, the
report was preceded by a Web site, which became public last month,
with
data
for institutions in Arkansas. College
Measures is also producing analyses for Colorado, Nevada, Texas, and
Virginia.
More states may
follow suit. About half the states have the ability to link
postsecondary academic records with labor data, according to a 2010
report by the State Higher Education Executive Officers. Few states
have done so, says Travis J. Reindl, a program director for the
National Governors Association, but interest is growing in the types
of analyses that College Measures performs.
"Governors care very
much about job creation, and they care very much about meeting
work-force needs. Both of these things rely on good information,"
says Mr. Reindl. "This is an issue that's clearly starting to
percolate because it all goes back to jobs, job, jobs."
Salary Matters
Previous
studies by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the
Workforce, among others, have analyzed
wage differences by major. The Tennessee report breaks new ground,
says Jeff Strohl, director of research at the Georgetown center, by
marshaling data from disparate state agencies to identify the
average first-year wages of the state's college graduates between
2006 and 2010, and linking those data to the majors they pursued and
institutions they attended.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on careers are
at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
Law School Faculty Salary Links from
Paul Carone on the TaxProf Blog on June 11, 2013
Following up on my recent post,
Law Faculty Salaries, 2012-13: Above the Law has blogged
individual law faculty salaries at these Top 20 public schools:
Jensen Comment
This is a better way to compare faculty salaries in top schools. Large
surveys like those of the AAUP, Chronicle of Higher Education,
and the AACSB are too skewed by small and low paying colleges.
Keep in mind that salary comparison in
general can be like comparisons of apples and kangaroos. Things to
consider are the many aspects of "compensation" contracts such as summer
income assurances (research or teaching), expense budgets (that in
prestigious schools may be near $20,000 allowances for travel, etc.),
and most importantly access to additional consulting revenues. For
example, faculty at the Harvard Business School may make more consulting
with and teaching CPE credits in HBS alumni companies than they make
from their Harvard salaries.
Just being on the faculty of a
prestigious university also opens doors to lucrative expert witness
offers, consulting offers, and textbook publishing deals where
prestigious faculty are offered deals to publish with lesser known
writers who write most of the books.
Some schools like Stanford, NYU, and
Columbia offer faculty great housing deals such as relatively low rents
or 100-year lot leases for a dollar a year.
Some comparative nine-month academic year salaries recently released by
the AACSB
Note that major research university salaries considerably higher than
average while salaries in many private universities are much lower as are
salaries in state universities that are not flagship research universities. The
results for accounting and taxation new assistant professors primarily reflects
the downward trend of doctoral graduates in accounting, auditing, and taxation
in the past two decades ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
From the Financial Rounds Blog on February 16, 2009 ---
http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
The Annual
AACSB
salary survey is the definitive source for business school faculty
salaries. Here's the most important table from the report - it shows
the mean salaries for new doctorates for the major business
disciplines
The figures
above
are for 9-month salaries. At research schools, summer research
support can add another 10-20% to that, and there are also
opportunities to pick up additional $$ teaching over the summer.
However, at teaching oriented schools, there typically isn't summer
support,
and summer teaching money is also much lower.
For years, Finance professors got the highest salaries across all
business disciplines. That's changed in the last few years, with
accounting salaries pulling ahead. The increase in accounting
new-hire salaries is likely due to smaller numbers of accounting
PhD's
being graduated and a lot of retirements in their field. But still,
$120K isn't bad.
Click
here for the free executive summary (you
can also get the full report, but it'll cost you).
From the Chronicle of Higher
Education
Look up salary data for your university ---
http://chronicle.com/article/faculty-salaries-data-2012/131431#id=144050
Jensen Comment
The data comparisons that bug me are male versus female comparisons. The
implications are that this is primarily gender discrimination. For
example, do female assistant accounting professors at your university
really earn less than male assistant accounting professors? I seriously
doubt it!
To find gender differences (but not
discipline differences) in the above database, pass your mouse over the
salary averages.
The reality of gender salary differences
is that it is more a function discipline differences where in some
disciplines like elementary education and English, a higher proportion
of women have self-selected those disciplines. If a major university has
a tenure track opening in English or Psychology there will be several
hundred qualified applicants whereas in accounting there may be less
than ten applicants. In most R1 universities supply and demand
differences are recognized when making salary offers.
There are, of course, some universities,
usually unionized universities, that ignore supply and demand
differences by discipline and have virtually eliminated differences in
salaries between disciplines by adopting egalitarian salary policies.
This accordingly has made it very difficult for many of them to attract
new leading PhDs in accounting and finance. In those latter disciplines
sometimes side deals are made to attract hard-to-get PhD such as by
granting generous summer research stipends out of private donations such
as donations from accounting firms. I know of no gender bias in these
side deals.
To my knowledge rigid egalitarian salary
policies, however, has not hit most major R1 research universities. You
can find indirect evidence of this in the above salary database by
comparing R1 university gender salary differences (usually 90-93% for
women) with South Dakota State University (98% for women), Skidmore
College (97% for women),
There are some exceptions in R1
universities such as at MIT where female salaries are about on par with
male salaries across the entire university.
Some like Morehouse College pay women
178% (for full professors) and 103% (for assistant professors) more than
men. This, however, is not at all common.
From a PhD to Welfare
"The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps," by Stacey Patton,
Chronicle of Higher Education, May 6, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/From-Graduate-School-to/131795/?sid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en
"I am not a welfare
queen," says Melissa Bruninga-Matteau.
That's how she feels
compelled to start a conversation about how she, a white woman with
a Ph.D. in medieval history and an adjunct professor, came to rely
on food stamps and Medicaid. Ms. Bruninga-Matteau, a 43-year-old
single mother who teaches two humanities courses at Yavapai College,
in Prescott, Ariz., says the stereotype of the people receiving such
aid does not reflect reality. Recipients include growing numbers of
people like her, the highly educated, whose advanced degrees have
not insulated them from financial hardship.
"I find it
horrifying that someone who stands in front of college classes and
teaches is on welfare," she says.
. . .
"The media gives us
this image that people who are on public assistance are dropouts, on
drugs or alcohol, and are irresponsible," she says. "I'm not
irresponsible. I'm highly educated. I have a whole lot of skills
besides knowing about medieval history, and I've had other jobs.
I've never made a lot of money, but I've been able to make enough to
live on. Until now."
An Overlooked Subgroup
A record number of
people are depending on federally financed food assistance.
Food-stamp use increased from an average monthly caseload of 17
million in 2000 to 44 million people in 2011, according to the U.S.
Department of Agriculture's Web site. Last year, one in six
people—almost 50 million Americans, or 15 percent of the
population—received food stamps.
Ms. Bruninga-Matteau
is part of an often overlooked, and growing, subgroup of Ph.D.
recipients, adjunct professors, and other Americans with advanced
degrees who have had to apply for food stamps or some other form of
government aid since late 2007.
Some are struggling
to pay back student loans and cover basic living expenses as they
submit scores of applications for a limited pool of full-time
academic positions. Others are trying to raise families or pay for
their children's college expenses on the low and fluctuating pay
they receive as professors off the tenure track, a group that now
makes up 70 percent of faculties. Many bounce on and off
unemployment or welfare during semester breaks. And some adjuncts
have found themselves trying to make ends meet by waiting tables or
bagging groceries alongside their students.
Of the 22 million
Americans with master's degrees or higher in 2010, about 360,000
were receiving some kind of public assistance, according to the
latest Current Population Survey released by the U.S. Census Bureau
in March 2011. In 2010, a total of 44 million people nationally
received food stamps or some other form of public aid, according to
the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
People who don't
finish college are more likely to receive food stamps than are those
who go to graduate school. The rolls of people on public assistance
are dominated by people with less education. Nevertheless, the
percentage of graduate-degree holders who receive food stamps or
some other aid more than doubled between 2007 and 2010.
During that
three-year period, the number of people with master's degrees who
received food stamps and other aid climbed from 101,682 to 293,029,
and the number of people with Ph.D.'s who received assistance rose
from 9,776 to 33,655, according to tabulations of microdata done by
Austin Nichols, a senior researcher with the Urban Institute. He
drew on figures from the 2008 and 2011 Current Population Surveys
done by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor.
Leaders of
organizations that represent adjunct faculty members think that the
number of people counted by the government does not represent the
full picture of academics on welfare because many do not report
their reliance on federal aid.
Even as the number
of highly educated aid recipients grows, shame has helped to keep
the problem hidden.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on higher
education controversies ---
http://chronicle.com/article/From-Graduate-School-to/131795/?sid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en
The Chronicle of Higher Education's
database (Salary Explorer) on faculty salaries at over 1,300 colleges
and universities ---
http://chronicle.com/article/2011-Salary-Explorer/126972/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Also see
http://chronicle.com/article/Faculty-Salaries-Vary-by/127073
Question
What nation has the highest monthly faculty pay in universities?
by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, November 5, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/11/05/worldpay
The United States
does not lead the world in faculty pay, and is quite far behind when
comparisons of national wealth are factored in, according to a new
analysis released Tuesday.
“International Comparison of Academic Salaries,”
prepared by three scholars at the Boston
College Center for International Higher Education, represents one of
the more ambitious efforts to compare faculty pay across national
lines. While some existing studies look at members of certain groups
(the Association of Commonwealth Universities, for example, which
tends to have as members the leading universities of a country) or
regions (Europe), there have been few efforts to compare salaries
across different types of institutions and countries.
Average Monthly
Salaries, in World Bank Parity Dollars, for
Entry-Level Faculty Positions, 2005-6
| Rank |
Country |
Average |
| 1. |
Canada |
$5,206 |
| 2. |
United
States |
$4,589 |
| 3. |
Australia |
$3,810 |
| 4. |
Germany |
$3,683 |
| 5. |
Britain |
$3,345 |
| 6. |
France |
$3,259 |
| 7. |
Saudi
Arabia |
$3,162 |
| 8. |
New Zealand |
$3,114 |
| 9. |
Japan |
$2,979 |
| 10. |
South
Africa |
$2,560 |
| 11. |
Malaysia |
$2,049 |
| 12. |
Colombia |
$1,987 |
| 13. |
Argentina |
$1,751 |
| 14. |
India |
$1,151 |
| 15. |
China |
$682 |
The
researchers also compared average salaries for
senior academics in the various countries. Here,
Saudi Arabia jumps in front of Canada and the United
States.
Average Monthly
Salaries, in World Bank Parity Dollars, for Senior
Faculty Positions, 2005-6
| Rank |
Country |
Average |
| 1. |
Saudi
Arabia |
$8,490 |
| 2. |
Canada |
$7,992 |
| 3. |
United
States |
$7,385 |
| 4. |
Australia |
$6,570 |
| 5. |
South
Africa |
$6,105 |
| 6. |
New Zealand |
$6,061 |
| 7. |
Britain |
$5,589 |
| 8. |
Japan |
$5,546 |
| 9. |
Germany |
$5,108 |
| 10. |
France |
$4,551 |
| 11. |
Malaysia |
$4,422 |
| 12. |
Columbia |
$4,079 |
| 13. |
Argentina |
$3,950 |
| 14. |
India |
$2,071 |
| 15. |
China |
$1,845 |
While developing nations don’t fare well in pure
dollar totals, they do quite well when national
wealth is factored in — and in fact the United
States does poorly. The Boston College study looked
at the ration of average faculty pay to the gross
domestic product per capita of various countries, on
a monthly basis.
Ratio of Average
Monthly Faculty Salaries, in World Bank Parity
Dollars, to GDP Per Capita, 2005-6
| Rank |
Country |
Average |
| 1. |
India |
8.73 |
| 2. |
South
Africa |
5.77 |
| 3. |
Colombia |
5.38 |
| 4. |
Saudi
Arabia |
3.74 |
| 5. |
China |
3.47 |
| 6. |
Argentina |
3.31 |
| 7. |
Malaysia |
3.25 |
| 8. |
Canada |
2.24 |
| 9. |
New Zealand |
2.19 |
| 10. |
Australia |
1.75 |
| 11. |
Germany |
1.68 |
| 12. |
United
States |
1.67 |
| 13. |
Britain |
1.65 |
| 14. |
Japan |
1.63 |
| 15. |
France |
1.58 |
Salary Issues
Question
How can you compare living costs between any two college towns?
The Salary Mess (causing faculty
attrition rates) for Universities in Wisconsin
The problem is money. Wisconsin's
stagnating state higher-education budget has forced the university to
keep faculty salaries far below average. When professors get feelers
from elsewhere, they learn that a move can easily mean a whopping
100-percent salary increase — sometimes more. Budget problems have also
depleted money for perks that keep faculty members on board — funds for
research and travel, pay for summer months, reduced teaching loads, and
longer and more frequent sabbaticals.
Robin Wilson, "Wisconsin's Flagship Is Raided for Scholars,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, April 18, 2008, Page A1 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i32/32a00103.htm
Jensen Comment
The problem is that analysts in general tend to compare average
before-tax salaries and living costs. Although Wisconsin is slightly low
in terms of state-supported university salaries, on an after-tax basis
they are very low due to high taxes in Wisconsin.
Wisconsin's State/Local Tax
Burden Among Nation's Highest in 2007 ---
http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/topic/67.html
During the past three decades
Wisconsin's state and local tax burden has consistently ranked among
the nation's highest. Estimated at 12.3% of income, Wisconsin’s
state and local tax burden percentage ranks 7th highest nationally,
well above the national average of 11.0%. Wisconsin taxpayers pay
$4,736 per capita in state and local taxes, and per capita state
income is $38,639.
Wisconsin's State-Local Tax Burden, 1970-Present
On the other hand, some states that also
pay lower than average faculty salaries are winners in terms of letting
faculty keep more of their income. For example, consider Delaware:
Delaware's State/Local Tax
Burden Fourth Lowest in Nation in 2007 ---
http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/topic/18.html
Consistently over the past two
decades, Delaware has had one of the nation’s lowest state and local
tax burdens. Estimated at 8.8% of income, Delaware’s state-local tax
burden percentage ranks 47th highest nationally, well below the
national average of 11.0%. Delaware taxpayers pay $3,804 per-capita
in state and local taxes, and per capita state income is $43,471.
Delaware's State-Local Tax Burden, 1970-present
States like New York, New Jersey, and
California that have relatively high average salaries for their major
research universities can be losers in terms of taxes and real estate
costs. Real estate costs in those states are still high even after the
bursting of the sub-prime bubble. High taxes are also bummers in Maine
and Vermont. States like Florida that used to be good deals for taxes
and real estate costs have seen property taxes and insurance costs soar.
You may feed in the name of any state
you choose and get state and local tax burden comparisons ---
http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/topic/18.html
You probably should go to the above site
before comparing the average salaries (by faculty rank) of U.S. colleges
and universities (public and private) that are listed in several
sections of Chronicle of Higher Education, April 18, 2008"
- Page A19: Leading private
universities, public universities, community colleges, and
liberal-arts colleges.
- Page A 20: Expanded table and
graphs.
- Pages A22-24: More than 1,300
major universities and colleges listed by each of the 50 states in
the U.S. (averages by faculty rank)
If you are attracted to or turned off by
the average salaries (by faculty rank) in a given school, don't forget
to compare taxes and real estate costs. There are also other cost
considerations like the cost of private schools in some urban areas that
have low cost or dangerous public schools K-12.
Compare taxes for all 50 states of
the U.S, at ---
http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/topic/18.html
Compare the living costs of any two
locales in the United States in terms of how far your salary will go in
these to locales (such as where you live now versus where you might want
to move to) ---
Click Here ---
http://snipurl.com/comparelivingcosts
[www_salary_com]
Bob Jensen's tax
comparison helpers ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#010304Taxation
Question
From faculty salary compression to inversion: Does it pay to quit and
start over?
"The Seniority Pay
Cut," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, April 9, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/09/compression
To get a good raise, do you need
to quit?
Looking for a job? See all 202 new
postings Browse all job listings: Faculty: 3,114 Administrative:
2,307 Executive: 197 FEATURED EMPLOYERS
Related stories When and Why
Professors Retire, Nov. 13 New Measures for Gender Inequities, Oct.
26, 2006 Where the Jobs Are, Aug. 3, 2006 Explaining the Gender Gap
in Pay, April 13, 2006 Is Your Husband a Worse Problem Than Larry
Summers?, Dec. 9, 2005 E-mail Print
That may well be the case at many
colleges that are suffering from salary compression and salary
inversion — situations where those hired most recently are paid
disproportionately more or flat out more than those with more
experience. The issue is attracting the attention not only of
faculty leaders, but of college administrators, who fear that these
salary gaps discourage talented faculty members from staying at an
institution.
On Tuesday, at the annual meeting
of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in
Higher Education and the Professions, some college officials and
experts shared their takes on the issue, and strategies for
eliminating these “anomalies” in what people are paid.
The most striking example was
offered by Mark Preble, assistant vice chancellor for human
resources at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He did an
analysis last year of the salaries of all assistant professors. He
found that those hired in 2007 – who hadn’t been there long enough
to have received raises — earned more on average than those hired in
2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 or 2006. The starting salary has gone up by
so much, he said, that those not on the market are effectively
punished for not moving. Indeed those hired that year were earning
about $10,000 more a year than those hired five years before.
“It pays to quit,” he said.
Preble said that when he was
preparing his talk, he expected everyone to be shocked by his
figures, but that when he chatted with others at the conference, he
found that many had noticed the same trend — and that was the
impression of many at the session. He said that there are degrees of
salary compression across the board, but that it is most prevalent
in departments where market demands force higher than normal
salaries for professors — fields in the sciences and business, at
his institution.
The faculty contract at UMass
Boston gives the most leeway on salaries at the point of initial
hire — or when someone has an offer from another institution. While
there are regular and merit raises for continuing faculty members,
they quickly fall behind new hires in departments where the starting
salaries are going up at a sharp rate.
Preble discussed several tests
that colleges may consider using to determine whether they have a
salary compression problem, as well as policies that could prevent
one. For example, a college may look at the average salary for a
department’s assistant professors, and consider whether it wants to
set some sort of maximum for new hires of 105 percent of that
average, or to consider salary minimums based on years of
experience, such as that someone with four years of experience as an
assistant professor shouldn’t be earning less than 95 percent of the
average. In doing such calculations, Preble said a college might
want to remove the portion of salary based on merit raises, so that
only base salary — which theoretically should be more equal — is
compared.
In the last two faculty contracts,
UMass Boston has set up two processes for dealing with salary
compression. The first allowed people who believed their salaries
were unfairly low compared to recent hires to apply to a faculty
committee, which reviewed their requests and made recommendations to
the provost, who eventually awarded 58 faculty members adjustments,
ranging from $685 to $7,500. In the new contract, the committee is a
joint faculty-administrative committee and it has final say over
awards — no appeals are possible. However, unlike the first process,
where there was a finite sum of $150,000 to be used, the new
committee is authorized to award raises as appropriate. In addition,
the new process will involve an across-the-board review of salaries,
so people will not be expected to apply for adjustments.
While it will cost money to
provide these raises, Preble said that it makes sense financially.
“Turnover is very expensive,” he said. “We use to put every bit of
new money into hiring new faculty, but now we are looking at
retaining faculty, even if it means fewer [new] slots.”
Saranna Thornton, a professor of
economics at Hampden-Sydney College and chair of the American
Association of University Professors’ Committee on the Economic
Status of the Profession, said that she believes colleges
underestimate the costs associated with faculty turnover. Many
colleges think of the costs of a search in terms of advertising,
sending a few professors to an academic conference to interview
semifinalists, and bringing a few finalists to campus for
interviews. If colleges factored in the time of those involved
(based on their salaries), the time and costs associated with
setting someone up in a department, and the lost momentum of someone
who was doing well leaving, they would add up to much more.
Margaret Merryfield, senior
director of academic human resources for the California State
University System, said that salary compression was a problem in her
system as well. The current faculty contract has created a process
to review possible inequities and to award base raises to those
found behind disciplinary norms for their faculty rank. She said
that just over half of assistant professors will end up receiving
such an adjustment, with most of these raises going to those hired
prior to the fall of 2005.
The process Cal State now has in
place wasn’t easy to set up, Merryfield said. But she argued that it
was much better than the system before these issues were discussed,
when the way of dealing with salary compression was for deans to
periodically give extra money to the “squeaky wheel” — while not
necessarily having a way to evaluate complaints about possible
inequities.
In her presentation, Thornton of
the AAUP noted that there are many other inequities in faculty
salaries. For instance, the AAUP has found growing gaps between
faculty pay in the humanities and in the sciences and some other
fields. She noted that these gaps are bad for morale and raise
fundamental questions about fairness as they don’t reflect hours
worked or difficulty of work.
But when Merryfield and Preble
were asked, they made clear that their plans were focused on
inequities within departments, not among them.
Jensen Comment
It should be noted that accounting professors in general are among the
highest paid in the university. It may well be that your salary is very
fair in the world of academia and that pay scales for newly-minted
doctoral students in accounting are outliers simply because there are so
few of them (less than a hundred) to meet the growth and replacement
demands of over 1,000 colleges.
Stanford Salaries versus UC Berkeley
Salaries
For instance, in the 2006 fiscal year,
Berkeley’s endowment was nearly $2.5 billion. By comparison, in the same
period, the endowment at Stanford University, the elite private
institution in Berkeley’s backyard, was $14 billion. Berkeley also falls
short on faculty salaries. The most
recent salary data from the American
Association of University Professors found that Berkeley was third in
terms of average salary at public universities for full professors, and
Stanford was third on the list of private universities. But Berkeley’s
average was $131,300 while Stanford’s was $164,300.
Elia Powers, "A Prominent Public Targets Faculty Retention,"
Inside Higher Ed, September 12, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/12/cal
Jensen Comment
Both Stanford and UC Berkeley are also in two of the highest priced
living areas in the nation, particularly in terms of astronomical
housing costs. Of course housing prices surrounding most major
universities are typically higher than housing prices outside a short
commuting radius. The exception might be campuses that are hanging on in
urban blight areas.
For a summary of salary data of faculty,
go to
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/12/cal
Up Up and Away: Faculty and
Administrative Salaries Soar
As of fall 2006, the average salary for a
full-time professor at the University of Illinois (UI) was $95,700, up
$13,400 or 16 percent since 2002. When comparing that average salary to
those at the 21 institutions, the UI ranks third from the bottom, behind
Michigan, Texas and North Carolina but ahead of Washington and
Wisconsin....In recent years, as turnovers have occurred in high-level
positions at the university, salaries for new employees have often risen
well above the predecessor's pay. Four years ago, the UI's vice
president for technology and economic development, David Chicoine,
earned $262,500. UI College of Business
Dean Avijit Ghosh will assume that post in January and earn $339,000....Of
the more than 100 people who earn $200,000 or more at the UI, many are
in the business and law schools. And many hold endowed chairs, meaning
some of the salary is funded by a donor.Such top faculty earners include
finance Professor Jeff Brown, who has the title of William Karnes
Professor of Mergers and Acquisitions, and a salary of $245,000;
Christine Des Garennes, News-Gazette, October 28, 2007 ---
http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2007/10/28/going_rate_is_going_up
Among Academe's Sociology Faculty: Men versus
Women (including correlations of pay and parenthood)
Mothers appeared, on
average, to earn less than others in the cohort.
The income question was asked with categories, not
exact amounts. The median income for sociologists who are fathers, and
for sociologists who don’t have children, was between $70,000 and
$99,000. The median income for sociologists who are mothers was between
$50,000 and $59,000. On many issues, mothers and fathers both reported
high levels of stress related to advancing their careers while also
caring for their families. Child care, the tenure process, and teaching
loads were key issues for parents.
Inside Higher Ed, July 3, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/07/03/women
The study is at
http://www.asanet.org/galleries/default-file/ASAPhdMidCareer_r5.pdf
Bob Jensen's threads on academic salaries are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Salaries
One thing commonly ignored is the important factor of varying living
costs and taxes in different states of the U.S. Ignoring this greatly
weakens conclusions on compensation differences.
Now that
commuting costs are increasingly important, the differences between
urban and other parts of the U.S., it is very hard to compare urban
faculty with small-town faculty, especially in urban settings like Los
Angeles and Dallas where public transportation is not convenient. The
study found no gender differences in terms of the number of refereed
publications.
"The weaker sex: Boys are being outclassed by girls at both
school and university, and the gap is widening," The Economist,
March 7, 2015 ---
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21645759-boys-are-being-outclassed-girls-both-school-and-university-and-gap
Jensen Comment
This is certainly the case in accountancy higher education programs.
Women are especially encouraged by 21st Century hiring of more women
than men by CPA firms. Women must, however, be willing to accept the
negatives of public accounting employment, including job stresses,
overnight travel, and week ends away from home and families. Accountancy
is somewhat conducive to work at home even when employed by the large
firms, but this is not always an option for career advancement when
working at home year after year after year.
There's some evidence in education, nursing, and accountancy that
men, especially minority males, shy away from careers requiring
licensing examinations. However, there are exceptions in engineering and
technology where more males are still being licensed than females. Some
of the real negatives of certain types of consulting work are the months
away from home and families. Long-term absences from families are common
in consulting engagements. Those occasional weekends at home just aren't
enough for some mothers.
"Accounting Doctoral Programs: A Multidimensional
Description," by Amelia A. Baldwin, Carol E. Brown and BradS.
Trinkle.
http://www.academia.edu/532495/Accounting_Doctoral_Programs_A_Multidimensional_Description
Advances in Accounting Education: Teaching and Curriculum Innovations,
Volume 11, 101–128Copyright r 2010 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited
ISSN: 1085-4622/doi:10.1108/S1085-4622(2010)000001100
Accounting doctoral programs have been
ranked in the past based on publishing productivity and graduate
placement. This chapter provides descriptions of accounting doctoral
programs on a wider range of characteristics. These results may be
particularly useful to doctoral applicants as well as to doctoral
program directors, accreditation bodies, and search committees
looking to differentiate or benchmark programs. They also provide
insight into the current shortage of accounting doctoral graduates
and future areas of research. Doctoral programs can be
differentiated on more variables than just research productivity and
initial placement. Doctoral programs vary widely with respect to the
following characteristics: the rate at which doctorate sare
conferred on women and minorities, the placement of graduates
according to Carnegie classification, AACSB accreditation, the
highest degree awarded by employing institution (bachelors, masters,
doctorate),
Continued in article
Table 1. Accounting Doctoral Graduates by
Program, 1987–2006(Size; 3,213 Graduates).
http://www.academia.edu/532495/Accounting_Doctoral_Programs_A_Multidimensional_Description
Note that I corrected the ranking for North Texas State from the
original table
The average of 161 per year has been declining. In 2013 there were
only 136 new accounting doctorates in the USA.
| Rank |
Program |
# |
Rank |
Program |
# |
Rank |
Program |
# |
Rank |
Program |
# |
| 01 |
Texas A&M |
87 |
25 |
Arkansas |
46 |
49 |
Columbia |
31 |
73 |
MASS |
17 |
|
02 |
Texas |
78 |
26 |
Florida State |
45 |
50 |
Drexel |
31 |
74 |
Syracuse |
16 |
|
03 |
Illinois |
72 |
27 |
Indiana
|
45 |
51 |
Northwester |
31 |
74 |
Wash St. Louis |
15 |
|
04 |
Mississippi |
70 |
28 |
Tennessee
|
44 |
52 |
Cornell |
30 |
75 |
Central Florida |
14 |
|
05 |
Va. Tech |
70 |
29 |
Texas Tech |
44 |
53 |
Purdue |
29 |
76 |
Cincinnati |
14 |
|
06 |
Kentucky |
69 |
30 |
Georgia St. |
43 |
54 |
Minnesota |
28 |
77 |
Cleveland St |
14 |
|
07 |
Wisconsin |
69 |
31 |
Colorado |
42 |
55 |
Oklahoma |
28 |
78 |
MIT |
13 |
|
08 |
North Texas |
65 |
32 |
NYU |
42 |
56 |
Penn |
28 |
79 |
Fla Atlantic |
12 |
|
09 |
Arizona |
64 |
33 |
Oklahoma St |
42 |
57 |
Rochester |
28 |
80 |
UCLA |
12 |
|
10 |
Georgia |
64 |
34 |
Rutgers |
42 |
58 |
So. Illinois |
28 |
81 |
Union NY |
10 |
|
11 |
Penn State |
63 |
35 |
Alabama |
41 |
59 |
Oregon |
27 |
82 |
Texas Dallas |
09 |
|
12 |
Nebraska |
61 |
36 |
Va. Common |
40 |
60 |
Texas Arling. |
27 |
83 |
Tulane |
08 |
|
13 |
Arizona St. |
60 |
37 |
Memphis |
38 |
61 |
Utah |
27 |
84 |
Duke |
6 |
|
14 |
Houston |
60 |
38 |
Stanford |
37 |
62 |
Baruch |
25 |
85 |
Jackson St. |
6 |
|
15 |
Michigan St. |
60 |
39 |
Chicago |
36 |
63 |
Connecticut |
24 |
86 |
Fla. Internat. |
4 |
|
16 |
Washington U |
55 |
40 |
Missouri |
36 |
64 |
Carnegie M. |
23 |
87 |
SUNY Bing. |
4 |
|
17 |
So. Carolina |
54 |
41 |
No. Carolina |
36 |
65 |
Geo. Wash |
23 |
88 |
Yale |
4 |
|
18 |
Michigan |
52 |
42 |
So. Calif. |
36 |
66 |
Wash. State |
23 |
89 |
Ga. Tech |
3 |
|
19 |
La. Tech |
51 |
43 |
UC Berkeley |
35 |
67 |
Kansas |
22 |
90 |
Rice |
3 |
|
20 |
Ohio State U |
50 |
44 |
Boston Univ |
35 |
68 |
SUNY Buffalo |
21 |
91 |
Tx. San Anton. |
3 |
|
21 |
Kent State |
49 |
45 |
Maryland |
35 |
69 |
St. Louis |
21 |
93 |
Miami |
2 |
|
22 |
LSU |
49 |
46 |
Pittsburg |
35 |
70 |
CWRU |
19 |
94 |
Cal. Irvine |
1 |
|
23 |
Florida |
47 |
47 |
Iowa |
34 |
71 |
Harvard |
19 |
95 |
Hawaii |
1 |
|
24 |
Mississippi St |
47 |
48 |
Temple |
34 |
72 |
South Fla. |
19 |
96 |
Vanderbilt |
1 |
Jensen Comment
For years prior to 1987 and years subsequent to 2006 you can see the
data by years in a sequence of the Accounting Faculty Directories
by James Hasselback. For example, for years 1995-current go to
http://www.jrhasselback.com/AtgDoct/XDocChrt.pdf
For years prior to 1995 you have to go to earlier editions of Jim's
directories.
There are some minor discrepancies. For example, the above table
shows 3 graduates for Rice after 1987 whereas Jim Hasselback shows no
graduates at Rice after 1995. I did not check for all the discrepancies
between the two data sources. Rice no longer has a doctoral program in
accountancy. There are several newer (small) programs such as the one at
the University of Texas at San Antonio.
The Baldwin, Brown, and Trinkle paper goes on to discuss trends over
time in the leading programs and much much more. I did not quote data
from their paper that was not previously provided by Jim Hasselback at
http://www.jrhasselback.com/AtgDoct/XDocChrt.pdf
A few of the many important revelations in the BBT study that might
be noted for 1987-2006:
- The proportion of female accounting doctorates was 38% of
the 3,213 graduates over 20 years.
- The proportion of minority accounting doctorates was 4.6% of
the 3,213 graduates over 20 years.
- Foreign placement of accounting doctoral graduates whose
location is known is about 14% (including those going back to
Canada)
- Non-academic placement of accounting doctoral graduates
whose employment is know is about 3%. There are very few career
advantages of having an accounting Ph. D. in industry. This is
not the case in most other academic disciplines.
There is much more detailed information available in this study at
http://www.academia.edu/532495/Accounting_Doctoral_Programs_A_Multidimensional_Description
Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
"Gender Ratios at Top PhD Programs in Economics," by Galina
Hale and Tali Regev, April 8, 2013 ---
http://econ.tau.ac.il/papers/foerder/2013-10.pdf
The growing concern for the
under-representation of women in science and engineering has
prompted an interest in the mechanisms driving the share of women in
these fields, and in the effect that the gender diversity of the
faculty has on the share of female students. Interestingly, some
universities are more successful than others in recruiting and
retaining women, and in particular female graduate students. Why is
this the case? This paper explores the uneven distribution of female
faculty and graduate students across ten of the top U.S. PhD
programs in economics. We find that the share of female faculty is
correlated with the share of female graduate students and show that
this correlation is causal. We instrument for the share of female
faculty by using the number of male faculty leaving the department
as well as the simulated number of leavings. We find that a higher
share of female faculty has a positive effect on the share of female
graduate students graduating 6 years later.
Women are under represented in science and
engineering. In 2010, Men outnumbered women in nearly every science
and engineering field in college, and in some fields, women earned
only 20 percent of bachelor’s degrees, with representation declining
further at the graduate level (Hill et al., 2010).
In economics, women constituted 33 percent of
the graduating PhD students, and only 20 percent of faculty at PhD
granting institutions (Fraumeni,
2011).
Women in economics have been shown to have different career paths
than men and to be promoted less (Kahn, 1993; Dynan and Rouse, 1997;
McDowell et al., 1999; Ginther and Kahn, 2004). Focusing on the
progression of women through the academic ladder, most research has
failed to fully account for the effect that successful women in the
field have had on the entrance and success of other women. More
specifically, the gross effect that women faculty have on the share
of female students have not been fully explored. In this study we
address this gap in the literature and focus on the causal
relationship between the share of female faculty in top economics
departments and the share of graduating female PhD students.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Women seem to be making greater strides in Ph.D. achievements in
economics that in many other science fields. It would seem that they
could make greater strides in fields like computer science where males
dominate to a much higher degree.
In economics at the undergraduate
and masters levels in North America there are significantly more male
graduates than female graduates. Having more female teachers tends to
increase the number of undergraduate majors according to the above
study.
In accounting at the
undergraduate and masters levels in North America there are
significantly more women graduates than men,
and the large CPA firms hire more women than men. There is a possible
glass ceiling, however, in terms of newly-hired CPA-firm women who
eventually become partners. That is a very complicated story for another
time other than to note that the overwhelming majority of newly-hired
males and females in large CPA firms willingly leave those firms after
gaining experience and very extensive training.
Many of those departures go to clients of CPA firms where the work
tends to have less travel and less night/weekend duties as well as less
stress. In my opinion most accounting graduates who go to work for CPA
firms did not ever intend to stay with those CPA firms after gaining
experience and training. This accounts for much of the turnover,
especially in large CPA firms. Turnover has an
advantage in that it creates more entry-level jobs for new graduates
seeking experience and extensive training.
Bob Jensen's threads on the history of women in the professions
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#Women
Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
"Let's Be Honest About Gender Discrimination at Business Schools," by
Linda Scott, Bloomberg Businessweek, July 28, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-28/most-business-schools-discriminate-against-female-faculty
Jensen Comment
This article has some nice summaries of AACSB data such as the "Salaries
of Business School Faculty Hired One Year Earlier" compared for Finance,
Marketing , Management in Accounting and Female versus Male. In
Accounting the average is slightly over $140,000 for men and slightly
under $140,000 for women in AACSB-accredited programs. This difference
is surprising to me since most schools that I know about do not
gender-discriminate with starting salaries for new PhD faculty on tenure
track. I provide one possible explanation below in terms of
averaging salary data for both R1 research universities and other
universities having AACSB accreditation.
The article does not sufficiently warn about differences in salaries
between R1 research universities that have AACSB accreditation and other
universities and colleges having AACSB accreditation. The R1
universities typically pay more for new accounting faculty because the
supply of such faculty from prestigious research doctoral programs is in
such short supply. This suggests to me that one
possibility for the differences in salary one year out for accounting
faculty men versus women may backflush out to differences in the
proportions of men versus women graduating from prestigious accounting
research doctoral programs.
In other words the differences in salary between men versus women may
not be due to differences in starting salaries of any given
school between newly hired men and women as it is differences between
schools themselves on the basis of higher-paying R1 universities hiring
more men versus lower paying other universities hiring more women.
Other possible explanations are provided in the above article.
The article does not sufficiently warn about limitations in such
comparisons. For example, nearly all newly hired PhD accounting faculty
are given 1-5 years of summer research stipends, usually funded by
donations from alumni in CPA firms matched by the firms themselves. Such
funding is somewhat less common in Marketing, Management, and Finance.
Since the summer stipends are often 2/9 of base pay, difference in
stipend differences between men and women may be exacerbated somewhat
when taking full yearly compensation into account. Also new accounting
faculty may be doing considerably better in terms of 12-month
compensation than their brethren in Marketing, Management, and Finance.
Concluding Note
I might note that an important explanation for gender gap differences in
professional life (i.e., than men are compensated for more hours of
work) probably does not apply to academe as much as it does to
the working world in general. For example, female physicians are known
on average to make less then male physicians because on average they
work fewer hours. I don't think female tenure-track accounting
professors on average work fewer hours then male accounting professors.
In part this is because academic life has flexible work schedules and is
more conducive to raising a family than many other professions.
Also academe does not afford overtime/overwork compensation
alternatives that are available in many other professions. The
overtime/overwork compensation among newly-hired accounting graduates in
practice (not in academe) is systemic.
Because of consulting opportunities and textbook writing, academe
does afford overwork compensation to senior faculty. However, most
non-tenured faculty do not have time to take advantage of those
"overwork" opportunities.
This was eventually published in The American Sociological Review
Title: Overwork and the Slow Convergence in the Gender Gap in Wages
http://mypage.iu.edu/~cha5/Youngjoo_Cha_files/Cha_weeden.pdf
Authors: Youngjoo Cha, Department of Sociology Indiana University
cha5@indiana.edu
Kim A. Weeden , Department of Sociology, Cornell
University kw74@cornell.e
September 24, 2013
Despite rapid changes in women’s
educational attainment and continuous labor force experience,
convergence in the gender gap in wa ges slowed in the 1990s and
stalled in the 2000s. Using CPS data from 1979 to 2009, we show that
convergence in the gender gap in hourly pay over these three decades
was attenuated by the in creasing prevalence of “overwork” (defined
as working 50 or more hours per week) and the rising hourly wage
returns to overwork. Because a greater proportion of men engage in
overwork, these changes raised men’s wages relative to women’s and
exacerbated the gender wage gap by an estimated 10% of the total
wage gap. This overwork effect was also sufficiently large to offset
the wage-equalizing effects of the narrowing gender gap in
educational attainment and other forms of human capital. The
overwork effect on trends in the gender gap in wages was most
pronounced in professional and managerial occupations, where long
work hours are especially common and norms of overwork are deeply
embedded in organizational practices and occupational cultures.
These results illustrate how new ways of organizing work can
perpetuate old forms of gender inequality.
Bob Jensen's threads on the gender gap in hiring and compensation
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#GenderSalaryDifferences
Bob Jensen Threads on the History of Women in Accounting ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#Women
"Study: Higher education playing bigger role in gender wage gap,"
PhysOrg, August 9, 2009 ---
http://www.physorg.com/news169051532.html
While higher education has helped women
narrow their long-running wage gap with men, there is one
college-related factor that has becoming increasingly important in
perpetuating that gap, according to new research.
And that factor is college major.
Women are still segregated into college
majors that will lead them to careers with less pay than men, said
Donna Bobbitt-Zeher, author of the study and assistant professor of
sociology at Ohio State University at Marion.
"Gender segregation in college is becoming
more influential in how men and women are rewarded later in life,"
Bobbitt-Zeher said.
"If you really want to eliminate earnings
inequality, college major segregation is a piece of the puzzle that
really stands out."
The findings are especially important now
because many people assume that, if anything, college helps women
more than it helps men nowadays.
"A lot of people look at data showing that
women are more likely to go to college than men, and that women get
better grades in college than men, and assume that everything is all
right," she said.
"But this research suggests there are still
problems for women that relate to college."
Bobbitt-Zeher presented her research August
9 in San Francisco at the annual meeting of the American
Sociological Association.
She used data from the National
Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 and the National
Education Longitudinal Study of 1988. With these data sets, she was
able to compare women who graduated from high school in 1972 and
1992. She compared the incomes of college graduates seven years
after their high school graduations, in 1979 and 1999. Both samples
included about 10,000 cases.
Findings showed the income gap between
college-educated men and women declined significantly in 20 years -
in 1979, women's earnings were 78 percent of their male
counterparts, but by 1999 the women were earning 83 percent as much
as men.
Using well-accepted statistical techniques,
Bobbitt-Zeher estimated how much of that income difference between
men and women was explained by various factors in 1979 versus 1999.
Some of the factors she examined included occupations and industries
that men and women work in; background, including socioeconomic
status and race; how much individuals valued earning a lot of money;
factors related to parental and martial status; SAT scores; the
colleges that people attended and whether they earned graduate
degrees; and, of course, the percentage of women in their college
majors.
Findings showed that about 19 percent of
the income gap between college-educated men and women in 1999 could
be explained by their college major - nearly twice as much as in
1979, when 10 percent of the gap was explained by college major.
Although work-related characteristics
combine to explain a bigger share of the gap, no other single known
factor was more important than college major in explaining the
income gap in 1999.
In addition, college major is the only
factor explaining a substantial part of the income gap that
increased in importance between 1979 and 1999.
"What this suggests is that college major
segregation is becoming more important for wage inequality than it
used to be," Bobbitt-Zeher said.
Many college majors did become more
integrated between 1979 and 1999, she noted.
"Most of integration has come from women
making different choices, rather than men moving into traditionally
female fields," Bobbitt-Zeher said.
However, significant differences remain in
the majors women and men choose. And this is contributing to the
gender income gap in a more meaningful way than it did in the past.
The continuing wage gap isn't explained
completely by men choosing majors that require greater skills than
majors chosen by women, she said.
"Gender composition of majors is a stronger
influence on the gender income gap than is the content of the field
of study," according to Bobbitt-Zeher.
The reasons for the gender segregation of
majors are not entirely understood, she said. Personal choice could
play a role, or it could be that girls are still influenced to
pursue "women-appropriate" majors. Programs that encourage girls to
pursue scientific careers may be part of the answer.
But Bobbitt-Zeher said the results should
be a reminder for us not to believe gender inequality in higher
education is a problem of the past.
"There's been a lot of attention paid to
the fact that women seem to be doing so well in college compared to
men. But what people don't know is that education is playing a
bigger role than ever in perpetuating the gender income gap," she
said.
"It's an issue that we need to keep at the
forefront."
Forthcoming in The American Sociological Review
Title: Overwork and the Slow Convergence in the Gender Gap in Wages
http://mypage.iu.edu/~cha5/Youngjoo_Cha_files/Cha_weeden.pdf
Authors: Youngjoo Cha, Department of Sociology Indiana
University
cha5@indiana.edu
Kim A. Weeden , Department of Sociology, Cornell University kw74@cornell.e
September 24, 2013
Despite rapid changes in women’s
educational attainment and continuous labor force experience,
convergence in the gender gap in wa ges slowed in the 1990s and
stalled in the 2000s. Using CPS data from 1979 to 2009, we show that
convergence in the gender gap in hourly pay over these three decades
was attenuated by the in creasing prevalence of “overwork” (defined
as working 50 or more hours per week) and the ri sing hourly wage
returns to overwork. Because a greater proportion of men engage in
overwork, these changes raised men’s wages relative to women’s and
exacerbated the gender wage gap by an estimated 10% of the total
wage gap. This overwork effect was also sufficiently large to offset
the wage-equalizing effects of the narrowing gender gap in
educational attainment and other forms of human capital. The
overwork effect on trends in the gender gap in wages was most
pronounced in professional and managerial occupations, where long
work hour s are especially common and nor ms of overwork are deeply
embedded in organizational practices and occupati onal cultures.
These results illustrate how new ways of organizing work can
perpetuate old forms of gender inequality.
Bob Jensen Threads on the History of Women ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#Women
From the Chronicle of Higher Education
Look up salary data for your university ---
http://chronicle.com/article/faculty-salaries-data-2012/131431#id=144050
Jensen Comment
The data comparisons that bug me are male versus female comparisons. The
implications are that this is primarily gender discrimination. For
example, do female assistant accounting professors at your university
really earn less than male assistant accounting professors? I seriously
doubt it!
To find gender differences (but not discipline differences) in the
above database, pass your mouse over the salary averages.
The reality of gender salary differences is that it is more a
function discipline differences where in some disciplines like
elementary education and English, a higher proportion of women have
self-selected those disciplines. If a major university has a tenure
track opening in English or Psychology there will be several hundred
qualified applicants whereas in accounting there may be less than ten
applicants. In most R1 universities supply and demand differences are
recognized when making salary offers.
There are, of course, some universities, usually unionized
universities, that ignore supply and demand differences by discipline
and have virtually eliminated differences in salaries between
disciplines by adopting egalitarian salary policies. This accordingly
has made it very difficult for many of them to attract new leading PhDs
in accounting and finance. In those latter disciplines sometimes side
deals are made to attract hard-to-get PhD such as by granting generous
summer research stipends out of private donations such as donations from
accounting firms. I know of no gender bias in these side deals.
To my knowledge rigid egalitarian salary policies, however, has not
hit most major R1 research universities. You can find indirect evidence
of this in the above salary database by comparing R1 university gender
salary differences (usually 90-93% for women) with South Dakota State
University (98% for women), Skidmore College (97% for women),
There are some exceptions in R1 universities such as at MIT where
female salaries are about on par with male salaries across the entire
university.
Some like Morehouse College pay women 178% (for full professors) and
103% (for assistant professors) more than men. This, however, is not at
all common.
"MBA Gender Pay Gap: An Industry Breakdown," by: Alison Damast,
Bloomberg Business Week, January 7, 2013 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-01-07/mba-gender-pay-gap-an-industry-breakdown
Ross School (University of Michigan) Nearly Erases MBA Gender Pay Gap
-(for graduates) ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-14/ross-school-nearly-erases-mba-gender-pay-gap
At the University of Texas women MBAs beat out the men ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-12/mccombs-women-beat-mba-gender-salary-gap
Jensen Comment
This does not mean that there were no differences between majors. For example,
women finance graduates earned about $6,500 less than men majoring in finance,
but they may have been paid more than women in management and marketing.
I do not know that this is the case, but as in the case of comparing inequality
between nations, it's important to note that the degree of equality is not
nearly as important as the level of poverty. For example, the Gini Coefficients
of equality are about the same for Canada and North Korea, but the absolute
differences in poverty are immense.
Accounting firms probably do not hire many MBA graduates from Michigan since
Michigan has a separate Masters of Accounting Program ---
http://www.bus.umich.edu/Admissions/Macc/Whyross.htm
It would surprise me if there were any gender differences in salary offers in
this MAC program, although there may be some racial differences where top
minority graduates have higher offers than whites.
The one question about all this that I would raise is job location. At
Trinity University when I was still teaching we sometimes placed a single
graduate from our very small MS in Accounting graduating class at a higher
salary in San Francisco or some other city having very high living costs.
The ANOVA statistician in me questions gender comparisons across geographic
cells having greatly varying living costs. For example the MBA woman landing a
consulting job for $140,000 in San Francisco or Geneva really cannot compare her
salary with the woman who gets $140,000 in Detroit. In Detroit some relatively
nice houses are being given away free to people who will occupy them full time.
The exact same house in San Francisco might sell for $845,000. So much for
declaring that both women are being paid the same.
It's also difficult to compare salary offers that are variable. For example,
it's common to offer base salary plus commissions for majors in marketing and
finance for stock brokers and other sales jobs.
In the 1990s it would've also been difficult to compare some salary offers
for graduates in finance and computer science. For example, I know about a
Stanford Computer Science graduate who was paid minimum wage plus $1 million in
stock options. I think this type of hiring declined when the 1990s technology
bubble burst and FAS 126R went into effect. FAS 123R pretty much killed stock
option compensation.
Bob Jensen's threads on gender salary differences ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GenderSalaryDifferences
At the University of Texas MBA women graduates edged out men in terms of
compensation offers
At the University of Michigan female and male MBA graduates average about the
same compensation offers
Why are women MBA graduates from Stanford not faring as well as their male
counterparts?
"Why Stanford MBA Men Make So Much More Than Women?" by Alison Damast,
Bloomberg Business Week, December 21, 2012 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-21/why-stanford-mba-men-make-so-much-more-than-women
The gender pay gap at Stanford’s
Graduate School of Business has female graduates
earning 79¢ on the male dollar, the widest discrepancy in earnings between
men and women at any of the top 30 business schools, according to
new research from Bloomberg Businessweek.
That disparity may seem large, but it isn’t
startling to many of the women in the Stanford Class of 2012, who say the
figures largely indicate the wide range of career choices they are making.
Take Shan Riku, who worked as a consultant at
McKinsey before business school and is now working as head of new business
development at Cookpad, Japan’s largest recipe-sharing website. Riku admits
she took a pay cut in accepting the position but says she was more
interested in taking on a role that would challenge her. It also didn’t hurt
that Cookpad encourages families to cook and spend time together. “Many
women at Stanford tend to make choices that are a little bit more focused on
‘how do I want to balance my life,’ rather than ‘how can I earn a lot of
money,’” she says.
Pulin Sanghvi, director of the career management
center at Stanford’s business school, says most of the pay gap at his school
can be “attributed to industry choice.” According to Sanghvi, women and men
at Stanford who go into the consulting or Internet technology sectors tend
to have average starting salaries that are close or equivalent in size.
Those 2012 MBA graduates who headed into the consulting field received a
mean base salary of $130,636, while others who went into the technology
sector earned $118,050, according to the business school’s most
recent employment report.
The wage gap comes about partly because fewer women
are heading into some of the more lucrative finance fields. For example, 16
percent of male students took jobs in private equity and leveraged-buyout
firms, compared with just 5 percent of women, Sanghvi says. The top four
industries that Stanford women went into in 2012 were information
technology, management consulting, consumer products, and venture capital.
“I think a part of the story of this generation of
students is that they have a much larger playing field in terms of career
choices,” Sanghvi says. “I don’t think the level of income in a job is
necessarily the primary motivator for why someone makes an empowered choice
to pursue a career.”
That’s not to say that women at the school aren’t
thinking long and hard about their salary offers and how to best negotiate
them.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
This says very little about graduates wanting to become CPAs since Stanford does
not offer a career track for taking the CPA examination. The few graduates who
do seek to become auditors or tax accountants most likely were CPAs before
entering Stanford's MBA program. After graduating they most likely will no
longer seek to work for CPA firms as auditors and tax accountants.
Bob Jensen's threads on the gender pay gap in academe ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GenderSalaryDifferences
Among Academe's Sociology Faculty: Men versus Women
(including correlations of pay and parenthood)
Mothers appeared, on average, to earn less
than others in the cohort. The income
question was asked with categories, not exact amounts. The median income
for sociologists who are fathers, and for sociologists who don’t have
children, was between $70,000 and $99,000. The median income for
sociologists who are mothers was between $50,000 and $59,000. On many
issues, mothers and fathers both reported high levels of stress related
to advancing their careers while also caring for their families. Child
care, the tenure process, and teaching loads were key issues for
parents.
Inside Higher Ed, July 3, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/07/03/women
The study is at
http://www.asanet.org/galleries/default-file/ASAPhdMidCareer_r5.pdf
Bob Jensen's threads on academic salaries are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Salaries
One thing commonly ignored is the important factor of varying living
costs and taxes in different states of the U.S. Ignoring this greatly
weakens conclusions on compensation differences.
Gender Differences Among Faculty in Terms of Compensation ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GenderSalaryDifferences
The most significant factor in male versus female faculty compensation
is the lower proportion of tenured women in some of the highest paying
disciplines such as computer science, business, mathematics, and some
other science disciplines. The proportion of women is increasing in some
disciplines such as accounting but not in other areas like computer
science where less than 10% of the doctoral graduates are women.
Pay differences between disciplines is most affected by supply versus
demand irrespective of gender differences. Many colleges are making
concerted efforts to reduce salary differences among tenure-track
faculty, but it is very difficult in some disciplines such as accounting
where there are
less than 100 new PhD graduate men and women each year to meet
demand of over 1,000 open tenure-track positions each year. Colleges
that make offers way "below market" generally come up empty handed for
PhD accountants. The demand for faculty, in turn, is greatly impacted by
student choices of major where accounting has been steadily increasing
in the past decade.
Controversies of affirmative action and pay raises ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#AffirmativeAction
"New Measures for Gender Inequities," Inside Higher Ed, October
26, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/26/salaries
In an effort to draw attention to the
significant gender gaps in many categories of faculty employment,
the American Association of University Professors is today releasing
a
report with “gender equity indicators” for
higher education as a whole and for individual campuses.
The report finds significant gaps in
salaries and in the percentages of faculty members in the senior
ranks of universities, especially at doctoral universities. Gender
parity appears to be much more likely at community colleges and
other teaching-oriented institutions, and in part-time positions
across sectors. Of course those are areas that tend to pay much
less. The data also suggest that even at doctoral institutions,
departments are more likely to have parity at the junior faculty
levels.
“I think one of the questions that this
raises is whether we are going to end up in a two-tiered
profession,” a well paid tier dominated by men at research
universities and a more modestly compensated and diverse tier
elsewhere, said Ann Higginbotham, a professor of history at Eastern
Connecticut State University and chair of the AAUP’s Committee on
Women in the Academic Profession.
Some of the numbers in the report are quite
striking, both as national averages and by comparing individual
institutions. For example, there are nine doctoral institutions
where the average salary for a female assistant professor is less
than 85 percent of that of the average male assistant professor, and
there are nine doctoral universities where women do not make up even
10 percent of full professors. There are also doctoral institutions
that fare well in both of those measures (see lists at end of
article).
But officials at some institutions that
don’t look particularly good — and some experts on salary patterns —
warn that there are many possible explanations for the disparities.
In particular, they say that disciplinary salary differentials, not
gender, may be a key factor in explaining gaps.
AAUP officials acknowledge that there are
many possible explanations. But they say that, at the very least,
the gaps call out for investigation. “I think the significant thing
is that we are releasing the data for individual schools around the
country, so people at their own schools can compare how their school
is doing compared to others,” said Martha S. West, a professor of
law at the University of California at Davis. “Hopefully we’ll
generate some significant attention all over the country,” said
Davis, who co-wrote the report with John W. Curtis, director of
research and public policy for the AAUP.
Continued in article
The report can be downloaded from
http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/research/geneq2006
Jensen Comment
Once again this is the long-standing debate that should focus on salary
differences between disciplines rather than gender issues. It is well
known that supply of faculty is much more scarce in some disciplines
than other disciplines. Many accounting research programs in academe at
the moment cannot get one terminally qualified (doctoral degree)
applicant. Shortages of females in some disciplines are far greater than
in other disciplines. For example, there less than 10% of the new
doctorates in Computer Science are female, and Computer Science faculty
are much more expensive than faculty in most other disciplines at the
moment. Hence female computer scientists are likely to have much higher
salaries than most other female faculty. The issue is mainly one of
discipline rather than sexism in determining starting salaries at most
colleges that by now have put an end to gender discrimination against
females. If anything, there is reverse discrimination in starting
salaries for equally qualified male versus female applicants. Of course
there can be sexual bias in any given circumstance, but it would
surprise me greatly if the sexual bias was widespread against females.
Shortages of faculty have become so critical in the field of Business
Administration that the AACSB initiated a "Bridge Program" to encourage
and provide financial aid for persons with doctoral degrees in
non-business disciplines to become business faculty ---
http://www.aacsb.edu/bridge/default.asp
Special efforts are being made to recruit women and minority students.
Update on the AACSB's Bridge Program for Wannabe Accounting
Professors
I'm sure glad the American Medical Association does not have
a bridging program where accounting PhDs can become medical doctors
by taking four courses in medicine.
Students who get
doctorates in fields other than accounting can typically get a
doctoral degree in less than 9.5
years of full-time college. For example, an economics PhD can
realistically spend only 7.5 years in college. He or she can then
enter a bridge program to become a business, finance, or even an
accounting professor under the AACSB's new
Bridge Program, but that program may take two or more years part
time. There just does not appear to be a short track into accounting
tenure track positions. But the added years may be worth it since
accounting faculty salaries are extremely high relative to most
other academic disciplines. The high salaries, in part, are do to
the enormous shortage of accounting doctoral graduates relative to
the number of tenure-track openings in major colleges and
universities ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
Only four United States Universities
currently participate in the AACSB's Bridge program and one European
business school whose doctoral programs I have doubts about because
of truly absurd faculty-to-student ratios in the doctoral program.
The AACSB's domestic alternatives are as
follows
http://snipurl.com/aacsbbridge
Also see
http://snipurl.com/aacsbbridge2
When I mentioned the Bridge Program last
year on the AECM, Virginia Tech responded by saying they were
participating but not for accounting bridges.
The University of Toledo does not offer
accounting bridges ---
http://www.utoledo.edu/business/aacsbbridge/curriculum.html
Tulane only lists one full professor of
accounting in my Hasselback Directory such that I doubt that Tulane
is a major player in an accounting Bridge Program (Tulane may be
more viable in management, marketing, and finance).
The University of Florida does apparently
have an accounting bridge ---
http://www.cba.ufl.edu/academics/pdbp/
But this strangely does not appear to be affiliated with the well
known Fisher School of Accountancy at the University of Florida.
From what I can tell, Florida is bridging
with only four courses. Can four courses alone turn an economics or
history professor into an accounting professor?
The Bridge Program says yes! I think the Bridge Program has little
to do with it, although a person's prior background such as years of
professional work as a CPA may make all the difference in the world
along with the type of doctoral degree earned outside accounting.
June 20 message from Saeed Roohani
[sroohani@COX.NET]
AACSB Announces May 2008
Bridge Program Graduates, there are many AACSB certified PQ
accounting faculty for hire, see
visit AACSB's online database
Saeed
Roohani
Bryant University
June 20, 2008 reply from Bob Jensen
There is a surprisingly high proportion of the 78 candidates who
want to teach accounting and auditing given than most of the
bridge programs like Virginia Tech opted out of teaching
accounting but do bridge business and finance studies. However,
20 bridged candidates who want to teach accounting and auditing
will not make a big dent in the market where the number of
accounting faculty openings exceeds the new doctoral graduate
supply (less than 100 graduates) by over 1,000 openings.
The big question now is whether those bridged candidates can get
tenure track positions and make tenure with sufficient research
publications in accounting. The leading schools willingly hire
adjunct, non-tenure-track, accounting instructors, but they’re
pretty snooty when it comes to tenure tracks.
In my opinion the bridge program is absurd. Can four-courses in
a typical bridge program is tantamount to a “90-day Wonder
Program” for college graduates to become military officers ---
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/90-day_wonder
There were great military officers that emerged from the
90-Day Wonder officers' candidate programs. There will also be
great accounting, finance, and business professors that emerge
from the AACSB bridging program. However, the programs do not
deserve much of the credit, since the criteria for success are
the credentials and personal qualities of the persons who
entered the program. In accounting there's almost no chance of
success unless the candidate was a good accountant before
entering the bridge program. There's just too much too
accounting that cannot be covered in less than about three years
of full-time study in accountancy modules alone. In most states
it takes five years of college as an accounting major just to
sit for the CPA examination.
I'm sure glad the American Medical Association does not have
a bridging program where accounting PhDs can become medical
doctors.
Bob Jensen
June 20, 2008 reply from David Albrecht
[albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]
I still do not understand why a
practitioner with no experience in teaching (and no real
training, despite what the AACSB says), is more qualified to be
a teaching faculty member than a long-term professor that is no
longer AQ.
The cases I've seen have been that a
practitioner coming in to teach a college classroom bombs much
of the time (at least they bomb in the eyes of the students).
The rationale is that PQ faculty will
be better teachers than non-AQ doctoral faculty. I simply don't
see how this must be so. Becoming a good teacher takes
experience in academe and training. Most doctorally-trained
non-AQ faculty at least have had years of academic experience
(and admittedly no training), and some are great teachers.
I think that the B-school quest for
credibility is like the emperor with no clothes on.
David Albrecht
June 20, 2008 reply from Amy Dunbar
[Amy.Dunbar@BUSINESS.UCONN.EDU]
There are always exceptions, and at
UConn we have at least two of them. One of our auditing
instructors is a retired PwC partner, and the BAP teaching award
went to him. As for being a great colleague, we couldn’t be
luckier! He makes great comments in our research workshops. One
of our tax instructors is also a retired PwC partner, and he
keeps us on our toes when it comes to new tax legislation and
WSJ articles. His sense of humor is great, and he handles the
tax challenge team for our department, as well as other student
activities. Maybe the difference is that we bring the retired
partners on as full-time instructors, and they are part of the
team. I don’t know our part-time adjuncts so maybe the story is
different there.
Amy Dunbar
UConn
June 20, 2008 reply from Anders, Susan
[SANDERS@SBU.EDU]
We owe it to our students to be
teaching them current knowledge—especially in an applied field
like accounting. With AQ faculty, the assumption is that we will
stay current through our research activities. Staying current
just from reading a textbook is not acceptable. However, for my
school, the AACSB is also expecting some “professional”
activities from AQ faculty, which makes sense to me. The AQ
faculty in my accounting dept. are engaging in professional
activities anyway (for example, Volunteer Income Tax Assistance
and Students in Free Enterprise—which are also service
activities), in addition to publishing.
Our PQ faculty are also expected to
stay current—with a reverse emphasis from the AQs. Professional
activities have more emphasis, but we need some publication
activity as well.
Faculty can be out of date and lousy
teachers whether they are AQ or PQ. PhD programs prepare us to
engage in research, not necessarily to teach. PQ faculty can
learn to teach the same way that we AQs do—trial and error.
I have noticed major shifts in the
“culture” of students every three or four years, so even if I
was a good teacher four years ago, I have to modify my
approaches to fit the students in front of me today, in addition
to staying up with changes in technology, tax law, and
accounting pronouncements.
Hopefully, any new faculty that we hire
at my school are committed to being good teachers, whether they
are AQ or PQ.
My colleagues at St. Bonaventure
invested both their time and confidence in me to help me become
both a good teacher and an active publisher. [Thank you Carol
Fischer!!!] As members of academia, we should be reaching out to
new (and old) colleagues to provide mentoring in both teaching
and research.
Thank you.
Susan B. Anders, Ph.D., CPA
Professor of Accounting
St. Bonaventure University
School of Business
St. Bonaventure, NY 14778
Office: (716) 375-2063
Cell: (716) 378-7765
Fax: (716) 375-2191
e-mail:
sanders@sbu.edu
June 20, 2008 reply from Dennis Beresford
[dberesfo@TERRY.UGA.EDU]
To pile on just a bit, I'd like to
think that my now eleven years at the University of Georgia have
been reasonably successful. It is certainly true that I received
virtually no training to teach and had to figure it out for
myself over the years. In fact, I shudder to think how hard I
worked my first MAcc classes as compared to what I now consider
a challenging but reasonable workload.
Being able to share experiences from
both the auditing world and standard setting helps bring the
issues to life for the students, I believe. In thinking back
many years, one of the best accounting classes I had was taught
by the partner in charge of the tax department of Price
Waterhouse in Los Angeles. Rather than the extremely dry
Internal Revenue Code that passed for a textbook at that time,
he could tell us about actual applications of the things we were
learning. It probably helped that he was also the person who
handed out the Academy Awards and was very personable.
My challenge is to avoid using too much
class time to tell war stories. Getting the right balance
between the theoretical and the practical is important for me,
but I assume it is just as important for all of you PhD trained
instructors. And I also think it's important to not rely on
experiences that are too old as the world changes and some of
those observations about "how the real world works" (based on,
for example, two years in public accounting twenty years ago)
are simply incorrect today. On the other hand, having the
opportunity to serve on three large corporate boards and keeping
involved with a number of professional activities on a national
basis allows me to share with the students many of the insights
that are behind the news in the Wall Street Journal and makes
the accounting standards and other things the students are
learning more relevant.
This past semester one of my students
complained because he thought we had been spending too much time
on fair value accounting and international accounting
convergence. He thought those topics had little to do with what
he had learned in other classes and probably wouldn't be on the
CPA exam. Fortunately, most of the other students understood the
benefit of getting in on the ground floor of some of the most
important developments in accounting in history.
My experiences are very unique and I
give thanks every day that I've had these opportunities. But I
sincerely believe that there are many other retired CPA firm
partners and CFOs who would do a great job in the classroom and
bring other benefits to an accounting program. I've even had
some of my colleagues say that they appreciate it when I attend
a research workshop as my comments are both relevant and
practical (at least a few of them!).
By the way, my academic credentials
ended with a B.S.
Denny Beresford
June 20, 2008 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Denny,
Your reply is wonderfully stated.
I might add that NASBA’s problems with building more and more
IFRS into the CPA examination are not trivial. For nearly a
century, the CPA examination has been based upon a lot of bright
lines in U.S. GAAP. Bright lines are especially preferred
because it’s so much easier to distinguish correct answers from
incorrect answers. Much of the infrastructure of our accounting
education programs in terms of curricula and teachers is rooted
in US GAAP and especially the CPA examination.
Accounting education programs in the U.S. will have a very
difficult time changing infrastructure and most certainly do so
at different rates of change. Probably the best way to speed
things up will be a quick introduction of IFRS on the CPA
examination. But there are tremendous problems in making this
transition. For example, something as fundamental as a
“derivative financial instrument” that’s become part and parcel
to risk management is defined differently in IAS 39 versus FAS
133. If the underlying definitions differ, think of the problems
that will arise in changing curricula, textbooks, teaching
notes, reading materials, and teachers themselves!
Another problem will be to change the content of the
examination in terms of bright lines. Wrong versus right answers
will have to become more conceptualized since IFRS has so few
bright lines. Perhaps this is a good thing that will penalize
the best memorizers. But it will be harder to design exam
questions and most certainly harder to grade them when there are
fewer definitive answers to accounting for transactions. A
principles-based CPA examination will probably be chaotic in the
transitioning period.
What a great feeling to be retired from teaching at this
stage of turmoil. So why am I spending most of my time doing
research in IAS 39 versus FAS 133?
Dahh!
Bob Jensen
June 20, 2008 reply from Jagdish Gangolly
[gangolly@CSC.ALBANY.EDU]
Teaching requires tremendous dedication
and discipline. On the other hand, a good teacher is one who
makes the students think.
My own experience is that doctorally
qualified faculty, because of their reward structure, very often
do not show teaching the same dedication they show for
"research", whatever it means in the accounting academia.
My experience is also that those who
have never experienced the professional world are often lacking,
in spite of their exalted status as PhDs, crucial skills is
public speaking, leadership, problem definition and solving,
organisation skills and also often reduce the rich professional
landscape to a set of rote-learning exercises by regurgitating
what is in the books.
They also, often, do not give students
sufficient time in the class to think, and usually act like
machines that spew information. This of course precludes the
students asking penetrating questions for which the
practice-challenged PhD faculty may not have answers. The losers
are the poor students.
On the other hand, my experience, as a
faculty member and recently as department chair, has been that
the PQ faculty are more often than not good in class, very
organised, very dedicated, bring the richness of the profession
in the classroom, make the students think, make the students
write and take time to read them and help the students,
It is quite possible that our
experience at Albany is accidental, and our ability to get
outstanding PQ faculty serendipitous.
Our PQ faculty are usually partners at
small/medium/regional accounting firms, CFOs and senior managers
at large corporations, partners at law firms. Most of them are
CPAs, many are JDs and LLMs.
I want to end with three famous quotes
from Rabindranath Tagore, a literature Nobel laureate and a
poet, on education. He refers to children, but are as applicable
to adult education:
1. "The highest education is that which
does not merely give us information but makes our life in
harmony with all existence. But we find that this education of
sympathy is not only systematically ignored in schools, but it
is severely repressed. From our very childhood habits are formed
and knowledge is imparted in such a manner that our life is
weaned away from nature and our mind and the world are set in
opposition from the beginning of our days. Thus the greatest of
educations for which we came prepared is neglected, and we are
made to lose our world to find a bagful of information instead.
We rob the child of his earth to teach him geography, of
language to teach him grammar. His hunger is for the Epic, but
he is supplied with chronicles of facts and dates...Child-nature
protests against such calamity with all its power of suffering,
subdued at last into silence by punishment.
2. The child learns so easily because
he has a natural gift, but adults, because they are tyrants,
ignore natural gifts and say that children must learn through
the same process that they learned by. We insist upon forced
mental feeding and our lessons become a form of torture. This is
one of man's most cruel and wasteful mistakes.
3. A mind all logic is like a knife all
blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.
Jagdish
June 20, 2008 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Jagdish,
On the battlefield, probably the most important soldiers are
the sergeants who lead in the actual face-to-face operations.
I have the same feelings about full-time adjuncts and PQ
faculty and view them somewhat as our sergeants in the field. Of
course there are some good officers in the field as well.
But sergeants aren't admitted to the officer's clubs and
cannot rise to the highest-paying ranks. Is this the same for
your adjuncts and PQ faculty?
When performance rewards, endowed chairs, travel budgets, and
leaves of absence are doled out, it's most likely the research
faculty who get the best deals unattainable by those with lesser
commissions. I was on the faculty of several universities, for
example, where sabbatical leaves were based upon research
proposals and a research/publication record. A world class
teacher with sparse publications need not apply as a rule. I
nominated and failed in this regard to get one of my "teaching"
sergeants a sabbatical leave at Trinity University. He'd taught
full time at Trinity for over 30 years and never had one
sabbatical leave. Over the course of 40 years I applied for and
got a sabbatical leave on a regular basis even though I think
some of my "teaching" sergeants were more deserving. They just
did not have their publishing gold bars.
Very few accounting programs have high-paying endowed chairs
that are given to sergeants so to speak. The University of
Georgia was given one such chair where a research and
publication record is not a criterion. The chair by the way was
funded by Herb Miller. This is, however, a rare endowed chair in
accounting "education" programs.
Bob Jensen
"Why Do Women Still Earn Less Than Men? Analyzing the Search for
High-paying Jobs," Knowledge@Wharton, August 1, 2012 ---
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=3058
This is a summary of research by Wharton professors Matthew Bidwell and
Roxana Barbulescu
Why do women continue to earn less money
than men -- approximately 20% less, according to some estimates --
and what can be done about it?
At least half the pay gap reflects the fact
that women tend to work in different kinds of occupations and
industries than men, a phenomenon known as "gender segregation."
Understanding the causes of that gender segregation is a key part of
any attempt to address the pay differential.
Wharton management professor
Matthew Bidwell and Roxana Barbulescu, a
management professor at McGill University in Montreal, set out to
understand the causes of gender segregation by taking a different
approach than studies that typically look at variances in the kinds
of jobs that men and women choose, or at the decisions made by
employers during the job application process.
Bidwell and Barbulescu opted instead to
look at job applicants themselves to determine whether the decisions
they make during their job search process have a significant impact
on which offer they accept. Their results are presented in a paper
titled, "Do
Women Choose Different Jobs from Men? Mechanisms of Application
Segregation in the Market for Managerial Workers,"
forthcoming in the journal Organization Science.
"Much of the debate over earnings has
focused on the idea that there are barriers to women getting certain
kinds of jobs, and that a big part of this is due to subtle and not
so subtle discrimination on the part of employers," says Bidwell.
"But most of the available data looks at the jobs women end up in,
which reflects a series of decisions by both the employee and
employer." The challenge was to separate out data that deal
primarily with how women view the employment landscape even before
starting the job application process. Do those views, for example,
lead women to systematically choose different, and lower-paying,
occupations than their male counterparts?
The two researchers analyzed data on 1,255
men and women entering the job market as they were graduating from a
large, elite, one-year international MBA program. Such a group is
far from representative of the population at large. However,
"studying MBA students is particularly valuable for exploring
segregation into some of the best-paid and most influential jobs in
society, which are the kinds of jobs in which women have
traditionally been under-represented," the authors note in the
paper.
Barbulescu surveyed the students about
their job interests at the beginning of the MBA program, and then
again at the end in order to find out what kinds of jobs they
applied for, where they got offers and what jobs they ultimately
accepted.
The researchers' main finding was that
women were significantly less likely to apply to Wall Street-type
finance jobs, somewhat less likely to apply to consulting jobs, and
more likely to apply to jobs in general management, most notably
internal finance and marketing. Not coincidentally, the finance and
consulting jobs that women avoided were also the ones that were most
highly paid.
No surprises there, but the researchers dug
deeper to see what might explain these results. To start, they broke
down the different influences on job search decisions into three
different factors: applicants' preferences for specific rewards from
their jobs, such as money or flexibility; the ability of applicants
to identify with particular kinds of jobs, which often reflects how
compatible those jobs are with other ways the applicants see
themselves; and the applicants' expectations that an application
could succeed.
The researchers argue that each of those
factors might be influenced by gender role socialization, which
shapes our basic beliefs about the behaviors that are most
appropriate for men versus women, and about the kinds of skills that
accompany those behaviors. For example, if women are expected to
play different roles in the workplace and at home than men, then
they may also look for different rewards from their work, such as
pay, intellectual challenge, flexibility, work/life balance and so
forth.
Four Nights in a Hotel
Specifically, the researchers looked at
expected work/life satisfaction with regard to 19 different job
types, and found that women were significantly less likely than men
to apply for jobs where work/life satisfaction ranked low. "This
explained why women weren't applying for consulting jobs," says
Bidwell. "The hours are not that much worse than investment banking
jobs, but the expectation is that you will be staying in a hotel
four nights a week. And that doesn't change. With investment
banking, you might work very hard, but you usually sleep in your own
bed, and the hours tend to trail off as you get more seniority."
The second decision factor shaping
applications is how people identify with different jobs. Bidwell and
Barbulescu found that women identified the least with
stereotypically masculine jobs, and they tended to apply to
industries that usually employ a higher proportion of women. The
third decision factor is whether individuals believe their
applications for certain jobs will be successful: It may not make
sense for applicants to pour a lot of time and effort into
applications for jobs they do not expect to get.
Bidwell and Barbulescu found that at the
beginning of the MBA program, men and women showed the same level of
confidence that they would get an offer for a specific job in most
of the fields they might apply to -- except investment banking.
There are good reasons that women might have lower expectations of
job offer success in stereotypically masculine jobs, says Bidwell,
and no industry has more of a macho image than investment banking.
"Women just didn't think they would get jobs there, so they didn't
apply," he notes.
Equally interesting, says Bidwell, is that
when women did apply to investment banking jobs, they were just as
likely to get them as the men who applied.
"Our research shows how hard it is to bring
about change," Bidwell adds." If you tell employers to stop
discriminating, it doesn't mean you will end up with greater access
for women to better, higher-paying jobs. Instead, it's about
changing perceptions of culture. You can imagine that if you have a
job that is seen as highly macho and aggressive, and you recruit
those kinds of people -- mainly men -- then these perceptions and
stereotypes become self-fulfilling. It's a much more insidious way
in which jobs become gendered."
The researchers emphasize in their paper
that "even when there are no gender differences in the likelihood of
receiving a job offer, this does not imply that employers do not
influence gender segregation." Indeed, employer decisions may affect
applicant behavior "in ways that we could not detect." For example,
they cite the climate and recent litigation history of some of the
sectors they studied, primarily finance, which may have increased
the pressure on employers to hire more women, but doesn't
necessarily mean they will promote them into the same senior level
positions as men.
The behavior of employers -- and the
control they often exert over the workplace -- can clearly affect
whether women apply for jobs with their companies. For example, the
researchers write, "practices that reduce conflicts between work and
family demands could reduce" segregation, and "interventions in the
way that jobs are structured and role behaviors enacted to emphasize
either masculine or feminine stereotypical attributes could also"
lessen segregation. But that is not an easy sell. For instance, as
the researchers note, "workplaces with fewer women face less
pressure to adapt their working styles to accommodate family
demands" -- an example of how segregation becomes self-perpetuating.
At the same time, "addressing these
deep-seated organization issues, alongside the more common question
of how hiring decisions are made, could be critical for increasing
female participation in some of the best-paid jobs in society," the
researchers add.
Token Gestures
According to Bidwell, this research paper
is one of the first demonstrations that much of the segregation in
the job application and hiring processes "happens because of how
people apply for jobs rather than because of employer behavior
further down the line. And that, in turn, reflects what jobs women
are able to identify with, and where they think they will be hired."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Some of the findings are controversial, such as the question over which
spouse tends to take the most advantage of having the other spouse be
the primary bread winner (thereby taking advantage of having more career
options such as one woman accounting professor I know whose Mr. Mom
husband could then find time to write a best-selling Confederate War
book). Statistically, women may take advantage of these options more
frequently than their husbands, but increasingly my anecdotal experience
is that women accounting professors are the primary bread winners on
joint tax returns. And husbands tend to follow these women who have
opportunities to relocate at higher salaries and their husbands then
search for lower paying jobs after the move.
Hypothesized reasons female doctors earn less than male physicians
---
http://thegrindstone.com/career-management/study-female-doctors-paid-much-less-than-their-male-counterparts-991/
What I would like to see is whether there is a significantly higher
ratio of males to females in the highest paying medical careers. For
example, do women tend to avoid those specialties taking the longest
time to complete slave-driving residencies (such as neurosurgery)? Do
women tend to avoid those specialties requiring more strength and
endurance such as orthopedics? A friend who is a physician tells me this
is the case, but I've not investigated the data.
"Sex Matters: Gender and Prejudice in the Mutual Fund Industry,"
by Stefan Ruenzi and Alexandra Niessen-Ruenzi, SSRN, October 13,
2011 ---
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1943576
Abstract:
We suggest customer based discrimination as one potential
explanation for the low fraction of females in the mutual fund
industry. Consistent with investors being prejudiced and
stereotyping female fund managers as less skilled, we find that
female managed funds experience significantly lower inflows. This
result is obtained using market data as well as experimental data.
While we document some behavioral differences between male and
female fund managers, performance is virtually identical. This shows
that rational statistical discrimination can not explain the lower
inflows into female managed funds. Evidence based on an implicit
association test conducted in a laboratory setting supports the
notion that there is prejudice against females in finance.
"Gender Gaps in Higher Ed Around the World," Inside Higher
Ed, November 7, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2011/11/07/gender-gaps-higher-ed-around-world
Bob Jensen's threads on Controversial Issues in Affirmative Action
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#AffirmativeAction
Also search the AAA Commons for "Gender" ---
http://commons.aaahq.org/pages/home
AAA Members Only
"Why Women Are the Biggest Emerging Market," by Sylvia Ann Hewlett,
Harvard Business Review Blog, March 8, 2010 ---
http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/hewlett/2010/03/leverage_your_female_demograph.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-DAILY_ALERT-_-AWEBER-_-DATE
What's the biggest emerging market of them
all? I'll give you a hint: The answer isn't geographic but
demographic. The answer is...women.
Women leaders are the new power behind the
global economy, proclaims
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu's announcement of
its second annual webcast celebrating
International Women's Day. In developing
nations, women's earned income is growing at 8.1 percent, compared
to 5.8 percent for men. Globally, women control nearly $12 trillion
of the $18 trillion total overall consumer spending, a figure
predicted to rise to $15 trillion by 2014.
More significant,
the majority of tertiary degrees are now being awarded to women.
Highly qualified, well-educated and ambitious,
these women are taking over the talent pool from Delhi to Dubai and
bringing new urgency to the issue of managing diversity.
In a speech at the Hidden Brain Drain
Summit held in New York last November, the Right Honorable
Paul Boateng, the U.K.'s first black
cabinet minister and most recently the British High Commissioner to
South Africa, urged representatives of the 57 member organizations
to overcome the obstacles placed in the path of emerging talents.
"If you're serious about growth, if you're serious about innovation,
if you're serious about getting a global reach, then the evidence
tells you that you've got to overcome those obstacles," he said.
"The imperative is to move from sentiment to strategy, to make the
leap from survival to success."
Here's how two smart companies are making
that leap:
-
Goldman Sachs' ReturnshipSM program is
a novel way of recruiting candidates who, after an extended,
voluntary absence from the workforce, are seeking to re-start
their careers. A returnship serves as a preparatory program,
providing "returnees" with an opportunity to re-learn, sharpen
and demonstrate the skills essential for success in a work
environment that may have changed significantly since their most
recent work experience. The eight-week U.S. 2008 pilot program
comprised 11 women. The 2009 program lasted nine weeks and
included 16 returnees chosen from more than 300 applicants.
Acknowledging the importance of Asian markets, the program was
expanded to Hong Kong in the fall of 2009, with an inaugural
class of 37 returnees.
-
Google's India Women in Engineering Award Program was
launched in 2008 to celebrate young women in college and
graduate school who are pursuing careers in engineering and
computer science. That year, 16 women won the $2,000 award for
academic excellence and demonstrated leadership skills; 9 won in
2009, selected from among more than 250 high-caliber applicants.
Google senior management and engineers serve as judges. 2009
winner Anjali Sardana, a Ph.D. candidate at the
Indian
Institute of Technology, says that the award has inspired
her to keep pursuing her dreams: "Not only did the award
encourage me to stay in my field, it has made me confident and
given me the spark to mentor other younger women engineers."
By investing in women in emerging markets,
companies are betting on a brighter future — for a workforce just
waiting to blossom, for economies whose development depends on this
new crop of talent, and, of course, for themselves.
Bob Jensen's threads on careers, including working women
opportunities ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#careers
Although now women lead in doctoral degree recipients, they
account for only 39% of the new business doctoral recipients
"Women Lead in Doctorates," Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
September 14, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/09/14/doctorates
With female enrollments growing at all
levels of higher education, doctoral degrees have been one area
where men have continued to dominate. No more. New data being
released today show that in 2008-9, for the first time ever, women
earned a majority of the doctoral degrees awarded in the United
States.
The data are part of an analysis of
graduate enrollments and degrees from the Council of Graduate
Schools. The majority for women in doctoral degrees is slight --
50.4 percent. But the shift has been steady and significant. As
recently as 2000, women were earning only 44 percent of doctoral
degrees. In master's degrees, where women have already accounted for
a majority of degrees, their share now stands at 60 percent.
Nathan Bell, director of research and
policy analysis for the Council of Graduate Schools, said that the
female majority for doctoral recipients was "a natural progression
of what we have been seeing" in the rest of higher education. Given
that female enrollments have overtaken male enrollments in
associate, bachelor's and master's programs, he said, "the pipeline
is increasingly female."
In fact, he said that the only reason that
women did not become a majority of doctoral recipients earlier is
that a greater share of doctoral degrees are awarded in fields like
engineering that remain disproportionately male than is the case at
the undergraduate level.
The majority for women in doctoral degrees
is not seen in all disciplines. Only 22 percent of engineering
doctorates in 2008-9 were awarded to women, and only 27 percent in
mathematics and computer science. But the fields in which women now
make up a majority go well beyond arts and humanities, and include
health sciences and the biological sciences. Further, the rate of
increase in doctoral awards for women outpaces that for men in all
disciplines. Over all, women became the majority of new doctorate
recipients in a year in which their numbers increased by 6.1 percent
while male numbers increased by 1.0 percent.
For now, the odds of a new doctorate holder
being male or female depend on the field studied:
The female percentages are likely to go up,
if trends of the last 10 years continue. During that time, the
average annual rate of increase in doctorates earned by women was
5.5 percent, more than twice the male percentage of 2.1 percent.
While the size of that gap varies by discipline, it is present even
in disciplines where the vast majority of doctorates today go to
men.
Continued in article
"Graduate Enrollment and Degrees: 1999 to 2009," Council of
Graduate Schools, 2010 ---
http://www.cgsnet.org/portals/0/pdf/R_ED2009.pdf
A few quotations of possible interest:
The broad fields of education, business,
and health sciences enrolled the largest numbers of first-time
graduate students, with about half of all firsttime students
enrolled in one of these three broad fields. The majority of all
first-time graduate students in fall 2009 (85%) were enrolled in
programs leading to a master’s degree or a graduate certificate.
Sixty-four percent of all first-time graduate students were enrolled
full-time in fall 2009. About 58% of all first-time graduate
students in fall 2009 were women. Among first-time graduate students
whose citizenship was known, 83% were U.S. citizens and permanent
residents and 17% were temporary residents. Nearly one-quarter of
all first-time graduate students were members of U.S. citizen and
permanent resident racial/ethnic minority groups.
Page 10
More than half of all graduate students
in fall 2009 were enrolled in programs in education, business, or
health sciences. About three-quarters of all graduate students were
enrolled in programs leading to a master’s degree or a graduate
certificate.
Page 11
At the doctoral level, about 42% of all
degrees awarded were in education, engineering, and biological and
agricultural sciences. At the master’s degree level, education and
business were the largest broad fields, accounting for 51% of all
master’s degrees awarded in 2008-09. Women earned about two-thirds
of the graduate certificates awarded in 2008-09, 60% of the master’s
degrees, and 50.4% of the doctorates. Academic year 2008-09 marked
the first year ever that women earned the majority of the degrees
awarded at the doctoral level.
Page 12
Business, engineering, and social and
behavioral sciences accounted for the largest numbers of graduate
applications in fall 2009 (Table 2.2. Fortyone percent of all
graduate applications
Page 18
Page 25
Page 34
Page 36
Page 37
Page 40
Page 108
Non-salary Controversies
Question
What are the main hiring advantages of public colleges after salaries
are factored out?
A study
released Monday by the
Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education
(or COACHE) suggests that public colleges may have
some advantages, at least once money is set aside. COACHE, which is
based at Harvard University, has conducted a series of surveys of
thousands of junior faculty members, trying to identify factors that
make them satisfied (or not) with their jobs.
Much of the analysis of the data has
focused on the way female and minority faculty members are less likely
than their white, male counterparts to feel good about their positions.
The findings could be significant because other studies from COACHE have
found that
junior professors place increasing importance on factors like the
clarity of the tenure process in
evaluating their employers. These findings go against the long-standing
tradition in higher education that institutions that pay well and have
impressive reputations need not think much about how professors
(especially those without tenure) are treated.“While private
institutions tend to receive higher scores overall from junior faculty,
in certain critical areas, the publics are surpassing private
institutions,” said Cathy Trower, COACHE’s director. “Private
institutions may learn from what the public institutions are doing right
in terms of tenure clarity,” said Trower. “Demystifying tenure, by
making the standards more clear and the expectations more
reasonable, helps to reduce unwanted turnover among tenure-track
faculty.”
Scott Jaschik, "The Public
(Non-Salary) Advantage," Inside Higher Ed, September 18, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/18/coache
Jensen Comment
Years ago when I was in the doctoral program at Stanford University, it
was rumored, with some authority, that a black ball system was still
used where tenure applicants could be denied by two "black balls"
dropped by unidentified tenured professors without any explanation or
accountability whatsoever. Times have changed since we now read about
some tenure rejection instances where the rejecting faculty are
identified in the media and are pestered by reporters. There are also
lawsuits instigated by tenure rejects, although these are seldom won by
plaintiffs except for those that can prove illegal discrimination. In
those rare instances where the plaintiffs win, the courts impose damage
awards that do not include forcing a college to grant tenure. The courts
rarely, if ever, rule on the quantity and quality of research and
research publications, and this is the most common basis for denying
tenure unless teaching is atrocious.
Rethinking the Roles of Spouses of
College Executives
“Spousework” is
my term for a range of tasks that the spouses of college presidents
perform or may perform. There is the involuntary role (being seen as an
ambassador for the institution the partner leads). Every spouse is stuck
with this. There are voluntary roles that could also be delegated to
many people other than the spouse — helping the leader by performing
tasks that impact the couple (such as planning events at the official
residence, running the leader’s personal errands) or helping with
institutional efforts that do not directly impact the leadership couple
(such as serving on the recycling committee). There are also voluntary
roles that only a select few people could fill — acting as a confidante,
sounding board, extra pair of eyes and ears, source of new ideas and
different point of view. And there are voluntary roles that no one other
than the leader or the spouse can play, such as lobbying for the needs
of the family and of the couple, jointly and individually.
Teresa Oden, The Future of Spousework, Inside Higher Ed,
August 6, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/08/03/oden
Debates on Size: Pomona College, Amherst, and Some Other
Small Colleges Plan to Grow in Size
Pomona College, a Claremont McKenna neighbor,
is planning to increase enrollment — currently 1,500 — by 10 percent.
Amherst College has just unveiled a plan to increase the size of each
entering class, currently 410-425 students, by another 15-25 students.
Bryn Mawr College (total enrollment just over 1,200) is currently
conducting a feasibility study about its enrollment size. Grinnell
College last year decided to grow on-campus enrollments by about 150
students, to 1,500. And these moves — all of which involve creating
faculty slots as well — follow shifts involving even larger numbers of
students at places like Middlebury and Gettysburg Colleges. Other
colleges have resisted the trend. The president of Haverford College set
off an intense discussion on the campus last year with his suggestion
that the institution consider expansion. Plans circulated to add several
hundred students. With many students and professors opposed to the idea,
Haverford is staying put at 1,150.
Scott Jaschik, "Size Matters," Inside Higher Ed, February 24,
2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/02/24/libarts
February 24, 2006 reply from Susan Baker
In case you have not heard, Rice U is
proposing an increase of up to 30% in its undergraduate student
body.
Susan Baker
Wright said he does not fully agree with the
suggestion that Dartmouth is less visible. Still, he acknowledged that
the College's size and location might present challenges that its
larger, urban peers do not face. "We compete very well because we stay
focused on what we do," Wright said. "We understand that our niche is to
provide an exceptional undergraduate education -- the strongest in the
country." Wright said bigger institutions are not necessarily better and
that there was a particular "magic" about Dartmouth. He added that the
College has name recognition "for those people who count a lot" --
potential students and parents and faculty.
Dax Tejera, "Wright looks to future, $1.3 billion in fundraising,"
The Dartmouth, March 3, 2005 ---
http://www.thedartmouth.com/article.php?aid=2005030301020
When you start the college search, there are
a lot of different qualities to look into when trying to find the ever
elusive "perfect school." You debate on the college's size, strong
majors and departments, location, and guy/girl ratio (something I should
have taken more careful notice to). But who looks into the "unofficial
campus day of nakedness?" I know I sure didn't. It was definitely a
surprise to me, coming in as a wide-eyed freshman, when I was approached
by a few smug upperclassmen, asking me if I was going to participate in
May Day. May Day? Who cares about May Day? It's just another weird
holiday marked down in my planner book. I never got off from school for
it; why should it be significant to me? And when they further explained
this phenomenon that seems to happen only in Chestertown (well, at least
in terms of college campuses), I was pretty shocked. How did it start?
Where did the idea come from? And why is getting naked a factor in this
whole crazy day? I decided to go to the most reliable source in order to
find the answer to my questions: a giant mass blitz to all four grades.
Surely somebody had to know something; there had to be some knowledge to
be passed on. Only moments later, I started getting my first responses
back; after a couple of hours, I had a little over a dozen. The answer?
"Talk to Professor Lamond."
Sara Wuillermin, The Collegian, May 2002 ---
http://collegian.washcoll.edu/may02/may.html
Jensen Comment
The above piece by Sara Wuillermin is also interesting from the
standpoint of her poetry class and nudity events on campus.
And just because I love my readers so much
(yes, all five of you are very special to me) I took the next step
and approached the founding father who gave us a day of freedom from
synthetic fabrics and itchy clothes. After my afternoon chat with
the good professor, my eyes were opened to all things May Day.
It began in 1968 in a 10:30am Forms of Lit.
and Comp. class. Spring had found its way to Chestertown, and it was
the perfect time for Professor Lamond's class to study "Carpe Diem"
poems-Herrick's "Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May," "Corrina's Gone A
Maying," Hopkins's "Spring." Who knows if it was the poetry that
inspired one of Lamond's students or if it was the whole idea of
seizing the day, but, at any rate, Peter Hellar seized the
opportunity (horrible pun intended) to ask the question that changed
Washington College forever: "Instead of just reading about these
poems, why don't we do these poems?"
So Lamond made his way to Fox's Five and
Dime to buy crepe paper in order to decorate the first May Pole. The
students helped in the preparations as well. One student brought his
guitar to provide music, while another walked throughout Chestertown
and picked a single flower from every lawn. And when the time came,
the class made their way to the site where the May Pole stood, a
spot that was not directly on campus at the time, where the CAC and
Fine Arts center now are. There were strawberries, there were Chips
Ahoy cookies, there were beverages, but was there nudity? Not unless
you count bare feet.
I know, I know you're waiting for the "good
parts" (aren't I the ultimate jokester with the puns?) when May Day
got crazy and became the foundation for students today who like to
bare all and be free. But that wasn't in the agenda on this first
celebration on campus. It happened the second time around, but not
during Lamond's class time frolic. We can thank for the nakedness a
half dozen guys who decided to show more than their free spirits
after the official festivities were over.
When Lamond's class was done May Daying it
up, they decided to leave their May Pole standing, as a symbol of
their celebration. Plus it looked too damn nice to tear down. Hours
later, a group of males students decided to transport the pole to
the front of Hodson Hall, where they stripped down to their bare
nothingness and showed their own appreciation of the rejuvenation of
spring. (There's still speculation as to whether or not these
gentlemen were Sigs ...) Ever since this point, the spirit of this
liberating tradition seems to ring true through many of the students
of WAC. It wasn't until the mid-70s that the women finally started
participating in the event, and, as always, the ladies made sure to
show up the men's efforts. Jaime Lang remembered hearing, "a girl
rode down what used to be the old caterwalk naked, on a motorcycle,
with her friend, arms outstretched on the back" Lamond confirmed the
story, noting, "They revved their way right up".
Nicole Mancini recalls how she first heard
about the day: "I think I originally heard about May Day's origin
freshmen year. A bunch of us were sitting around in the Dining Hall
(back when we actually liked the food) talking about it ... I
remember hearing stories of the 'Naked Games' and things like that."
And her thoughts about the modern day
attempts? "Now it seems that a lot of the fun has disappeared due to
so many lacking the confidence to 'strut' their stuff. But the
craziest May Day happening? When that naked guy fell down the
flagpole and had to be rushed to the hospital. Talk about ... uhh
... entertainment!"
Stephanie Coomer was skeptical when she
first heard about the event: "My dad went to WAC, too, and he was
the first person to tell me about May Day. I didn't really believe
him 'cause he tends to be a fibber, but when I was a sophomore, I
finally realized the truth about May Day (I was sleeping out for HFS
festival tickets freshman year). The first thing I saw when I walked
out of the dorm was a naked Jay Maschas ... That's when I knew it
was real."
Catherine Dowling praises the grand spring
event: "May Day is great. I lived in Kent, the dorm which I feel
best captures the spirit of May Day every day. Anyone who has lived
there knows what I'm talking about: Kent is like its own country.
And May Day is the national holiday. The Kent people usually didn't
feel weird about doing May Day because it was a part of life there."
But Dowling has some pet peeves about the
day as well: "My least favorite part of May Day is all the people
who come to the flagpole just to watch. I understand that the naked
people have it coming because, let's be honest, who wouldn't be
curious about such a spectacle? But it is still kind of creepy to
have that huge sea of people just standing there staring. C'mon, put
down those cameras, and join in! Don't be afraid, let loose and
enjoy one of the few moments in life when you can run around buck
ass naked and not get arrested. I know some people hate May Day, but
it is not meant to offend. It's all in fun, and it's just about
doing something crazy and a little naughty before you get out in the
real world, where I hear they don't condone public nudity."
Our Kent correspondent also recalls some
May Day legend: "The craziest story I've heard is that one year a
naked guy made the mistake of being naked in the street and got
arrested. Apparently his friends surrounded the police station,
yelling "free naked guy!" until the police let him go. I don't know
how much of this is true, but I like the happy ending."
Well Catherine, it is true. The boy was
known as Miami, and while trying to cross Washington Avenue, a car
swerved to miss his nakedness. Miami was charged for his public
display of nudity and for causing the accident, and was taken in,
still completely in the buff. Upon hearing the news, one of the
Deans went down and gave the boy his sweater, which did everything
but cover up what needed to be. Soon, a fully- clothed group of
students followed the Dean to the station and screamed to the
officers, "Free Miami!" But the story doesn't end there The Kent
County News heard of the protest and ran a story in the paper about
the naked rioting in Chestertown. Suddenly, wires were sent all
over, and not only did this whole community learn of the incident,
but it reached Chestertowners vacationing in Ireland and even the
local Catholic priest who was in Hawaii at the time (If only I could
think of some sort of witty quip to comment on this, but for once,
I'm at a loss, as I'm sure the good Father was).
But, I hope with this new background to
this day, my fellow WAC chums will realize this magical day is not
just about seeing fellow students in a whole new light, but it's
also a celebration of life, love, and seizing the day. So before you
go out and strut you stuff, find a couple minutes, read "Gather Ye
Rosebuds While Ye May" and appreciate its meaning then go rent "8
minute abs."
Question
Do we need revolutionary changes in Economics 101?
What we know is that the course as it’s
traditionally taught doesn’t achieve much impact. Students are given tests six
months after they’ve taken the course to see whether they understand basic
economic concepts, and students who’ve taken the course don’t score any better
on those tests than students who didn’t take the course at all. That seems like
a pretty scandalous level of performance, to my eye. I think in other sectors of
the economy we’d see malpractice lawsuits filed; in the university, maybe we get
a pass on that sort of thing.
Robert Frank, "Economics Education 101," Inside Higher Ed,
June 1, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/06/01/frank
Market demand
curves. Marginal utility. Dead weight loss. Those terms and
others might awaken a dim flicker of recognition for anyone
who’s ever taken Economics 101. But chances are, according
to new research, that even a basic understanding of
fundamental economic concepts is lost on a majority of
people who have ever taken an introductory course.
Robert Frank, the Henrietta Louis
Johnson Professor of Management and professor of economics
at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell
University, and the co-author of a standard introductory
text,
Principles of Economics
(McGraw-Hill), thinks he’s stumbled onto a better way of
introducing students to concepts like supply and demand and
opportunity cost, foundational ideas of economics that apply
to the real world. In his new book
The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for
Everyday Enigmas (Basic
Books), Frank uses simple concepts to explain facts of life
that, on second thought, are a little counterintuitive —
such as why the keypads on drive-through ATMs have Braille
dots. Most of the questions he addresses came from students
in his class. (Listen to the
podcast
for a sampling of enigmas and Frank’s explanations
demystifying them.)
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
My hunch is that Accounting 101 students have better recall of course content
than Economics 101 students on average. This is strictly conjecture, but I think
the recall is better for content that fits into the structural framework like
the bookkeeping framework of Pacioli’s fundamental accounting equations A=L+E
after closing the books or A+E=L+R+E. before closing. Most Accounting 101
courses have quite a lot of drill in spite claims of many faculty that they cut
out much of the drill. If they are still assigning textbook homework following
each chapter, they are still assigning drill.
I’ve listened to some Intermediate Accounting instructors complain about
lowered mastery/recall of the basics when their Accounting 101/102 curriculum
dropped much of the drill (as with the USC experiments years ago under an AECC
grant). Perhaps students don’t recall as well when introductory courses get more
conceptual.
To me the drill in Accounting 101 is almost exactly like the agonizing drill
of learning to block and tackle long before the scrimmage ever takes place in
football practice. The kid that can’t block and tackle had better be a darned
good quarterback or make plans to gather splinters on the bench. And the
aspiring pianist early on had to practice scales and chords over and over in
different keys before taking on the sheet music.
I’m all for
conceptual learning. But there has to be foundation upon which to build the
advanced concepts and theory. Math students are supposed to get this foundation
in before college in K-12 studies. Accounting students, with only a small
percentage of exceptions, generally know zero about accounting and bookkeeping
when they enter Accounting 101
The biggest problem with drill in
Accounting 101 is that students tend to bifurcate. Some students really love
drill and memorization and low uncertainties. Others are bored by the drill. But
then a whole lot of aspiring football players and musicians are bored by the
drills when they first start out. Some aspiring athletes drop football. Some
aspiring musicians give up on practicing. I'm not sure we should worry so much
about taking the drill out of Accounting 101 if that drill provides an important
foundation for things to come.
In modern times I encounter some students and some accounting faculty who
really can’t block and tackle well at all.
Therein lies the real trouble. Learning is labor.
We're selling the fantasy that technology can change that. It can’t. No
technology ever has. Gutenberg’s press only made it easier to print books, not
easier to read and understand them.
Peter Berger, "The Land of iPods and
Honey," The Irascible Professor, February 26, 2007 --- at
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-02-26-07.htm
June 1, 2007 reply from David Albrecht
[albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]
Bob,
I'm pretty much
convinced that the experience of Econ 101 is repeated for Accounting
101, Marketing 101, Management 101, etc. It all is pretty much
knowledge transfer stuff. Knowing how many of my instructions are
remembered by my sons, I'm not surprised by the lack of recall among
college students.
Research by
psychology profs verifies the phenomenon of "easy to memorize, easy
to forget".
David Albrecht
Most colleges are better ranked on
sex education than government education
Do we need radical changes in Government 101?
"Top-flight colleges fail civics, study
says Cal and Stanford seniors test poorly," by Tanya Schevitz, San
Francisco Chronicle, September 27, 2007 ---
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/09/27/MNGC4LDHS91.DTL
Seniors at UC
Berkeley, the nation's premier public university, got an F in their
basic knowledge of American history, government and politics in a
new national survey, and students at Stanford University didn't do
much better, getting a D.
Out of 50 schools
surveyed, Cal ranked 49th and Stanford 31st in how well they are
increasing student knowledge about American history and civics
between the freshman and senior years. And they're not alone among
major universities in being fitted for a civics dunce cap.
Other poor
performers in the study were Yale, Duke, Brown and Cornell
universities. Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore was the
tail-ender behind Cal, ranking 50th. The No. 1 ranking went to
unpretentious Rhodes College in Memphis.
The study was
conducted by the University of Connecticut's department of public
policy and the nonprofit education organization Intercollegiate
Studies Institute. Researchers sampled 14,000 students at 50
schools, large and small.
The aim was to
determine how well the colleges are teaching their students the
basics of government, politics and history -- the bedrocks of good
citizenship.
Beyond the rankings,
the study found that across the board -- from elite universities to
less-selective colleges -- the typical senior did poorly on the
civics literacy exam, scoring below 70 percent. This would be a D or
F on a basic test using a conventional grading scale.
That shows, the
researchers said, that the students don't have -- and the
universities generally aren't teaching -- the basic understanding of
America's history and founding principles that they need to be good
citizens.
It is a crisis, the
report warns.
"It is at a point in
history in this country where it has probably never been more
important," said Eugene Hickok, a former U.S. deputy secretary of
education and a member of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
"The study tells us we have a rising generation of bright,
intelligent citizens that won't have the knowledge they need to be
informed citizens. We are really only a generation or two away from
a republic in pretty big trouble."
The study was
conducted in 2005 by asking freshmen and seniors to answer 60
multiple-choice questions in the subject areas of American history,
government, America and the world, and the market economy.
It then compared the
averages from the two classes at each school to determine how much
more seniors knew than freshmen -- indicating how well the
university was doing in increasing student knowledge.
The survey found
that more than half of students could not correctly identify the
century (the 17th) when the first American colony was established at
Jamestown.
A majority of
students also could not identify the Baath party as the main source
of Saddam Hussein's political support in Iraq.
At UC
Berkeley, the results showed freshmen knew more than
soon-to-graduate seniors. Freshmen scored an average of 60.4, and
seniors scored an average of 54.8. That earned Cal a failing grade,
the researchers said.
Continued in article
Motivating Students to Be More
Politically Engaged
Survey after survey reports that American
students — while concerned about the world around them — are apathetic
about politics. Events like Katrina or Darfur spark activism and
voluntarism. And to be sure, college Democrats and Republicans are good
at organizing competing speakers. But voter registration (and voting),
turnouts at town hall meetings and knowledge of the political process
remain embarrassingly low. Research that will be presented this week at
the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting, which
starts today in Chicago, suggests that political engagement can be
taught. In a project led by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement
of Teaching, researchers identified a series of courses that mixed more
traditional political science education with participatory politics —
not in the sense of organizing rallies for presidential candidates but
with activities that go beyond formal classroom instruction.
Scott Jaschik, "Political Engagement 101," Inside Higher Ed,
August 30, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/30/political
Question
Is there a need for a change in tenure criteria for humanities and some social
science disciplines?
"A Call for Slow Writing," by Lindsay
Waters, Inside Higher Ed, March 10, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/03/10/waters
What
will it take to make essays the standard of
achievement once again in the scholarly world? This
is not where we are: Books are the gold standard for
tenure in most of the humanities and some of the
social sciences, so much so that journal articles
almost don’t even count. As august a figure as Helen
Vendler assured me recently that essays could never
replace books as a basis for tenuring junior
colleagues. So, in departments of English as on Wall
Street, counting is all that counts. “It’s the
bottom line, stupid.” Countability is the thing
whereby you’ll catch the conscience of the dean, as
a friend of Hamlet might advise the young Danish
assistant professor or the young Shakespeare
scholar. Articles don’t make a thumping sound when
you drop them on a table the way a body might in
Six Feet Under.
I
have claimed
elsewhere (subscription
required) that the book-for-tenure system is coming
to an end, that it is unsustainable, that its growth
has been an obscenity, because it was mindless,
because it sought to make something automatic and
machine-like play the role that should only be
played by the soul. Please excuse my antiquated
language: The “soul,” I remind you, is that faculty
of the human body whose juices are made to flow by
the exercise of judging myself whether something is
of merit. In earlier publications I have charged
that professors have been seeking to dodge the one
activity that is most essential to their own
development when they outsource tenure decisions to
bureaucracies and counting replaces reading as the
central job of tenure committees, because in that
situation content goes by the by. Personally, for me
as a publisher, the situation that has arisen is sad
beyond endurance. I believe the contents of the
books I publish matter. I am not selling milk, which
does sustain life, but is homogenized by comparison
to book. In fact, milk’s the very definition of
homogenized. Each of the books I publish is
different.
Books
are the standard now, and for me to ask you to think
that the future will feature the renaissance of
journals and the replacement of the book by the
essay might seem crazy. (You should know that it
does not seem crazy to many of the leading
university press publishers.) My suggestion is not
crazy; it’s utopian. We don’t live in that world I
am asking you to imagine, the world in which essays
are the norm, but if we were to imagine that world
could exist even for a second, how might seeing
things that way cause us to change what we are
doing?
We need to slow down, and
remember that the essay has been the main form for
humanistic discourse. The book is an outlier. Many
of the writings that changed the direction a
scholarly community was marching toward were essays.
Think of Edward Said’s “Abecedarium Culturae” or
Paul de Man’s “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” to stay
in recent history and not begin, as I easily could,
an epic catalog from Montaigne’s “De l’amitie”
onwards. Some of the most important books are
collections of essays, sometimes assembled with no
pretence to forging a unity of them, such as John
Freccero’s
Dante: The Poetics of Conversion.
One could give many examples.
There is no good reason why
the essay should not replace the book, and a lot of
good reasons why it should. I am tempted to say — in
order to be maximally provocative — that anyone who
publishes a book within six years of earning a Ph.D.
should be denied tenure. The chances a person at
that stage can have published something worth
chopping that many trees down is unlikely. I ask
you: How are you preparing for the future that could
be yours and mine? We — I mean the world in general
— don’t need a lot of bad writing. We need some
great writing. “Pump Up the Volume” has been the
watchword in the scholarly world and in America long
before
that movie with Christian Slater
came out. “Don’t Believe the
Hype” somehow got twisted into “Believe the Hype”
along the way, too. Totally.
The
big problem that afflicts the humanities in the
United States is not a problem of quantity. Yes, I
know, some politicians ridicule university
administrators who retain on their staff professors
who produce so little by way of income,
student-credit hours served, and publications. The
newspapers said that U.S. troops could “walk tall
again” after conquering Granada. Will professors be
able to walk tall again if they produce tall heaps
of publications on the scale of manufactured goods
coming out of the factories in Suzhou? (If you don’t
know where Suzhou is, look it up. It’ll do you good.
You are going to want to know in fewer years than
you can imagine.)
No,
the productivity problem of professors in the U.S.
is not one of quantity, but quality. (Same is
actually the case in China, too.) I recently got a
book proposal that I decided to look at closely
rather than reject it summarily as I knew it
deserved. It consisted of a welter of confusing
sentences. It was contemporary, very up-to-date,
located right where the profession is. And the
scholar, though young, was very accomplished in the
way the world judges achievement, a dozen or more
fellowships, a book from a major press, tenure too
at a respectable university. But the views in the
proposal were those manufactured by others and the
linking of them in the proposal had no coherence,
and the problem was manifest in the clumsy writing.
Who had ever read anything by this young scholar
seriously before, I wondered?
Has
social passing come to grad school? A friend teaches
in a clinic to help people from 3 to thrice 20 to
remedy problems of speaking and reading. I have been
curious about the stories she tells me of people in
their 50s confident enough about their personal
success in life to address what used to be a source
of deep embarrassment — the fact that although they
could talk like a college grad they could not read
better than a second-grader. It takes great
self-acceptance to go to the clinic at that age and
confess you cannot read and to be taught the things
little kids learn.
Continued in article
"Rethinking Tenure — and Much More,"
by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, December 9, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/12/08/mla
New, Albeit Shaky, Partnership
Forming Between Professors and the FBI
"Unlikely Bedfellows," by
Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed, June 13, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/06/13/fbi
The
Federal Bureau of Investigation and higher education as a whole have
enjoyed a decidedly un-cozy relationship since the Vietnam War – a
fact that many in academe have found to be just fine with them,
thanks.
But if
the FBI and higher education still aren’t the best
of friends, they appear to be interacting a lot
more. Reports this week about a nationwide FBI
outreach program in which agents set up meetings
with college leaders to discuss strategies for
safeguarding academic research from unfriendly
foreign interests have fueled growing concerns that
the two entities are cozying up in uncomfortable
ways these days in the name of national security.
And yet
the reports have also raised awareness of the
agency’s potential value as a resource as colleges
confront the vulnerability inherent in an open
system producing reams of research on topics
intimately tied to America’s economic and physical
security.
“Much of the nation’s intellectual property is
produced in universities, in which they have a
culture of sharing and openness. Yet, there are
countries and there are intelligence services that
would exploit these types of studies,” said Bill
Carter, a spokesman at FBI headquarters in
Washington. Academic freedom, Carter said, must
“coexist with government concerns.”
“Now
that the world has changed, it’s more open. We have
business delegations coming into the country, we
have thousands and thousands of foreign students
that an intelligence service could penetrate or
utilize … for intelligence-related purposes,” Carter
said. “We have direct evidence that’s taking place.”
The FBI’s
Counterintelligence Domain Program,
which charges field offices
across the nation with identifying vulnerable
entities, including colleges and businesses, and
with briefing their leaders about resources to
strengthen security, is nothing new, Carter said.
Bob Hardy, director of
contracts and intellectual property management for
the Council on Governmental Relations, a group that
helps universities navigate federal rules on
research, added that his organization has known of
the FBI meetings with college leaders for at least a
year. Nevertheless, The Boston Globe’s
report Tuesday
of the Boston field office’s efforts to meet with
local college leaders — a spokeswoman for the local
office said Tuesday that its director has met with
administrators at Boston, Hampshire and Smith
Colleges, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
the Universities of Massachusetts at Amherst and
Rhode Island, and Worchester Polytechnic Institute,
all since February — has attracted some more public
attention.
That’s despite the fact that the meetings themselves
appear to be mainly informational in nature. “It was
really the FBI contacting us and saying, ‘We
understand that you’re doing more and more
international collaboration through research and
other activities of an educational nature and we
want people to be aware of potential problems that
could compromise intellectual property — and we have
a whole cadre of resources that can educate faculty
and others on these issues,’” said Robert Weygand,
vice president of administration at the University
of Rhode Island. Weygand attended a meeting in early
May, he said, with the university’s president and
the local FBI officials.
Suggestions for safeguarding intellectual property
reflect common sense, said Special Agent Gail A.
Marcinkiewicz, the spokeswoman for the Boston FBI
field office: Be skeptical of people who seem oddly
interested in learning details of your research for
no apparent reason; take notice if you’re finding
graduate students in areas they shouldn’t be
accessing.
Continued in article
Elite colleges are for the rich and the poor and selected
minorities, but less and less for middle income families
Lucas Puente has been accepted at Stanford,
Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania. But to attend any one of
the prestigious universities would cost a total of about $48,000 a year,
and he wouldn't qualify for need-based aid. The University of Georgia,
meanwhile, has offered him a Foundation Fellowship, which would cover
not only his out-of-state tuition of $16,000, but also other costs.
Total value of the package over four years: roughly $125,000 . . . More
middle- and upper-income families are in a similar bind -- trying to
assess the value of a degree from a top-tier school. Even as the price
of attending an elite college approaches $50,000 a year,
less-prestigious schools are offering more merit aid, making the cost
differences starker. Nationwide, $7.3 billion in merit scholarships was
awarded in 2003-2004, up from $1.2 billion in 1993-1994, according to
the latest data available from the National Association of Student
Financial Aid Administrators. And college officials say the trend is
growing.
"Saying 'No' to the Ivy League: Families Face Tough Choice As
Back-Up Schools Boost Merit Aid for Top Students," by Robert Tomsho,
The Wall Street Journal, April 20, 2006; Page D1 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114549432060630668.html?mod=todays_us_personal_journal
Princeton University on Monday announced a
major expansion of its program in
African-American studies. The program will
receive a new home and funds to be raised through a special campaign,
and the size of its faculty will be doubled.
Inside Higher Ed, September 19, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/19/qt
Columbia University plans to replace loans
with grants for all undergraduates with family incomes of up to $50,000,
Bloomberg reported. Columbia’s move follows similar announcements from
other top universities.
Inside Higher Ed, September 19, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/19/qt
Faculty Ambivalence: Debates on Unionization of Faculty and
Graduate Assistants
These strategies do not seem to
have paid dividends. The PSC’s plan fizzled amidst
widespread faculty ambivalence about (or even
opposition to) defying
New York State law, which
prohibits strikes by public employee unions; a
settlement on terms well short of the union’s
“non-negotiable” demands appears imminent. At NYU,
President John Sexton recently stated that striking
graduate students would not receive 2006 teaching
assignments; some of those who started off on picket
lines have
returned to their jobs.
In retrospect, PSC and GSOC leaders probably erred in
their hard-line rhetoric and actions. But the two
organizations also illustrate — if in an exaggerated
fashion — some of the pitfalls associated with academic
unionization.
K.C. Johnson, "The Perils of Academic Unions," Inside
Higher Ed, February 24, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/02/24/johnson
"Teacher Training Termed Mediocre," by Jennifer Medina,
The New York Times, October 22, 2009 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/education/23teachers.html?_r=1&hpw
Calling scores of education school programs
“mediocre,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Thursday implored
universities to significantly change the way they prepare teachers
to run classrooms, saying a “revolutionary change” was needed to
train as many as one million new teachers in five years.
During a speech at Columbia University’s
Teachers College, Mr. Duncan said that too often the schools of
education were simply seen as a “cash cow” for universities, because
they are relatively inexpensive to run and have high enrollment.
“By almost any standard, many if not most
of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges and departments of education
are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of
the 21st-century classroom,” he said.
Mr. Duncan said that he had met hundreds of
teachers who complained that they did not get enough practical
training with classroom behaviors, particularly with poor students.
A report by a former president of Teachers
College, Arthur Levine, found that roughly 60 percent of education
school alumni said that their programs did not prepare them to
teach.
The debate over teacher education is
particularly loud in New York City, which has a number of schools.
Mr. Duncan noted that more than half of the
country’s teachers are trained at colleges of education and only a
fraction come through alternative programs such as Teach for
America. But nontraditional programs have continued to grow in New
York City; roughly a third of the teachers hired in 2008 came
through Teach for America and the city’s Teaching Fellows program,
which places rookie teachers in high-needs schools.
David M. Steiner, the new state education
commissioner, was previously dean of the education school at Hunter
College, and has made similar critiques of traditional training
programs. When he was appointed in July, he said the fact that the
state’s licensing exam had a pass rate of more than 90 percent
showed that the bar was too low.
While Mr. Duncan was generally critical, he
was careful to praise programs at some education schools, including
Teachers College, that require intense practical training.
"New Critique of Teacher Ed," by Elia Powers, Inside Higher Ed,
September 29, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/19/teachered
In “Educating School Teachers,” the second
in a
four-part series of policy papers on the
education of future educators, Levine describes teacher education as
a “chaotic” field largely lacking in uniform standards and
accountability. The first report, “Educating School Leaders,” was
released in 2005.
Levine is hardly the first academic to dish
on teacher education, a field that has been criticized for its lack
of serious scholarship and proven results. Earlier this year, AACTE
held a
press conference inside the Capitol to
dispel what Robinson said are the myths about teacher education
programs.
For his latest report, Levine and a team of
researchers visited 28 colleges with teacher education programs and
surveyed deans, faculty, alumni and principals. Levine based his
analysis on those responses, as well as criteria including school
mission, curriculum and faculty composition.
According to Levine’s report, more than
three of five alumni of teacher education programs surveyed said
that their schools didn’t prepare them to cope with the realities of
the profession. The report indicates that secondary school
principals generally gave the education schools low grades in
training students on how to handle diverse classrooms.
Levine found that the nation’s elite
institutions are not putting enough emphasis on teacher education
and need financial incentives from states and the federal government
to create or expand their programs. Too many programs are housed in
regional, non-flagship public universities that have higher
faculty-to-student ratios and faculty with lesser credentials, the
report says.
Levine added that programs that are shown
to be ineffective should be closed, and that those that produce
prepared graduates should be expanded. “Many of the programs that
should be closed will be found among the Masters I granting
universities (the
Carnegie classification group that
includes the smaller public colleges), and expanded programs among
the research universities and doctoral extensive ones,” the report
says.
Calling that part of Levine’s proposal
“elitist,” Robinson, the AACTE president, said it’s unwise to
abandon programs at the colleges that produce the greatest number of
teachers.
“Like other professions, education must
rely more heavily on the less selective institutions to build the
bulk of its work force, incorporating the growing first-generation
college-going populations,” Robinson said in a statement. “If we
intend to overcome the teacher shortage and produce the education
work force that the nation needs, preparation must be accessible and
affordable.”
Levine said many of the education schools
are merely “cash cows” that are forced to enroll too many students
and lower admission standards. Robinson said that she agrees with
Levine that colleges need to stop the practice of taking money
generated from those colleges and dispersing it to other
departments.
Levine’s proposal also calls for education
schools to adopt a five-year model in which students major as an
undergraduate in a discipline other than education and finish with a
yearlong master’s degree in education. He pointed to the University
of Virginia’s Curry School of Education as a college that uses this
model and emphasizes pedagogical research.
Constantine W. Curris, president of the
American Association of State Colleges and Universities, said in a
statement that Levine’s proposal of five-year programs at elite
institutions isn’t financialy feasible for students.
“At a time when the nation is concerned
about the amount of student indebtedness and repeated studies
indicate that tuition costs are impeding access, the Levine
recommendations would entail even greater indebtedness for would-be
teachers,” Curris said.
Rick Hess, a resident scholar and director
of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute,
said that while the report is on target in its assessment of the
need for more rigorous curriculums, it might not make sense to make
an integrated five-year curriculum the norm when many 18 year olds
aren’t ready to commit to becoming teachers.
In the report, Levine calls out the
National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education for having
insufficiently rigorous guidelines. NCATE has
come under fire for various issues
relating to its standards. Levine said his research shows that there
appears to be no difference in classroom performance for teachers
who were trained in NCATE-accredited programs and those who were
not.
Levine also said he would like every state
to develop a data collection system that allows it to track an
education student’s academic progress. (He pointed out that a number
of states already do this.)
Arthur E. Wise, president of NCATE, said in
a statement that he agrees with Levine’s assertion that
performance-based accreditation should be emphasized, and that NCATE
has already moved to develop such standards, which he said are now
more demanding.
Wise said that the report fails to mention
that NCATE is voluntary and that colleges are free to opt out. He
added that many of the top schools – such as Stanford and Levine’s
former institution, Teachers College — are accredited by NCATE.
One of the NCATE-accredited education
schools is Alverno College, in Milwaukee, which was mentioned by
Levine in the report as a model program. The college expects
students to do extensive field work and demands that those who don’t
meet the minimum standards retake courses.
Levine said that education schools should
embrace the fact that they are professional schools and make
clinical experience a priority from the start.
Responding to criticism that his report is
a regurgitation of past education school critiques, Levine said:
“This report is written with tremendous optimism. We’ve heard some
of these issues in the past and we haven’t acted on them.”
Education doctoral programs in need
serious reform according the the Carnegie Commission ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#DoctoralProgramChange
Fraternity and Sorority Controversies
A Peek Into Fraternities and
Sororities: It's Not Pretty
Ever wonder what goes on behind closed doors on
Greek row? A communications professor provides such a look in
Inside Greek U.: Fraternities, Sororities, and the Pursuit of
Pleasure, Power and Prestige, just
published by the University of Kentucky Press.
Alan D. DeSantis,
who teaches at the University of Kentucky, is
both a tough critic and defender of the Greek system. While much in the
book may embarrass fraternity and sorority members, and worry plenty of
administrators, DeSantis is no abolitionist. He is a fraternity alumnus
and dedicates the book “to my brothers. Many of the expected topics are
covered in the book — hazing, drinking and so forth. But there is also
considerable detail on gender roles, not all of which meet stereotypes.
Fraternity members’ concerns about body image (their own) is portrayed
as extreme. The sisterhood of sorority life is portrayed as including
enough cruelty to suggest that when the Mean Girls graduate from high
school, they rush. Anyone labeled an ORT (for “operation remove tool")
must be rejected from the sorority for being “fat, ugly, unattractive.”
However some sorority sisters like having one (and apparently it is
important never to have more than one) DUFF (for “designated ugly fat
friend") to make the other sorority sisters look more attractive.
DeSantis does not identify the university where he observed Greek life
up close, but the characteristics he reveals sound like Kentucky, where
he teaches. He responded to questions about his book, via e-mail:
Scott Jaschi, "Inside Greek U." Inside Higher Ed, October 25,
2007 ---
http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/25/greek
College Dating/Marrying Ain't What It Used
to Be Many Long Years Ago
"Where Is the Love? Students Eschew Campus Romance,"
by Sue Shellenbarger, The Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2008,
Page D1 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120172523751229601.html
Remember the movie "Love Story"
and its star-crossed student lovers? Such torrid campus romances may
be becoming a thing of the past. College life has become so
competitive, and students so focused on careers, that many aren't
looking for spouses anymore.
Replacing college as the top
marital hunting ground is the office. Only 14% of people who are
married or in a relationship say they met their partners in school
or college, says a 2006 Harris Interactive study of 2,985 adults;
18% met at work. That's a reversal from 15 years ago, when 23% of
married couples reported meeting in school or college and only 15%
cited work, according to a 1992 study of 3,432 adults by the
University of Chicago.
. . .
Researchers cite a couple of
factors. Young adults are delaying marriage, for one thing. In the
past 15 years, men's median age at first marriage has risen by 1.2
years to 27.5, and by 1.4 years for women, to 25.5, the highest in
more than a century, Census Bureau data show.
Also at work is "credential
inflation" -- an increase in the qualifications required for many
skilled jobs, says Janet Lever, a sociology professor at California
State University, Los Angeles. Many young adults want the
flexibility to relocate freely and immerse themselves in new work
and educational opportunities before making room for marriage and
family. As a result, students favor "light relationships that aren't
going to compromise where they go to grad school or which job they
take," she says.
Cody Cheetham, 22, a Purdue
senior, is looking for a marketing job after she graduates in May
and plans on getting an MBA. "A lot of us don't even know where
we're going to be living six months after we graduate," she says.
"We don't want to bring another person into the chaos of our lives."
Continued in article
"Stronger Marriages Forged on Campus or the Work
World?" by Sue Shellenbarger, The Wall Street Journal, January
31, 2008 ---
http://blogs.wsj.com/juggle/2008/01/31/stronger-marriages-forged-on-campus-or-the-work-world/
I couldn’t help feeling a bit of
poignancy as I reported and wrote today’s Work & Family column on
the eclipse of campus romance. Fewer college students are finding
their mates on campus, as the office replaces school as the No. 1
place for pairing up.
The historic shift toward marrying
later that underlies this trend is proceeding at a breakneck pace,
in historical terms. After hovering almost unchanged between the
late 1940s and the mid-1970s, the median age at first marriage has
surged by more than four years, to 27.5 years for men and 25.5 for
women — the highest levels recorded by the Census Bureau since 1890.
My own family patterns reflect this: My late parents met in high
school. My two older siblings met their lifelong spouses in
undergraduate school. Intent on establishing a career in the
bra-burning 1970s, I waited until I was working before finding my
future husband, as did my three Gen-X stepchildren. My two Gen-Y
birth children, 17 and 20, seem even more years removed from making
such a choice. At this rate, my grandkids will be on Social Security
before they tie the knot.
Waiting to get married is wise in
many ways; I recommend it to my own kids. Men and women alike can
benefit from investing heavily in education and skill-building
before shifting gears to make room for marriage and family.
Continued in article
Athletics Controversies in Colleges
Athletics creates a more vibrant environment,” said
Terry Mohajir, associate athletics director. “There’s been a great deal of
research on that.
As quoted by Paul D. Thacker, "If They Build It ...," Inside Higher Ed,
November 10, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/10/stadium
Journal of Issues in Collegiate Athletics ---
http://csri-jiia.org/
Nothing Ever Changes in Division 1: 2018 New Colleges
(Kansas and North Carolina) Are Named in FBI's Basketball-Corruption
Inquiry ---
https://www.chronicle.com/article/New-Colleges-Are-Named-in/243091?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=a27c9467e42247b08af2e0f2dbbc1167&elq=d6726c6e75f14f9795b2381d76401686&elqaid=18583&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=8351
Notre Dame Appeals for More Leniency Regarding Academic
Fraud
Notre Dame President Blasts NCAA ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2018/02/14/notre-dame-president-blasts-ncaa?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=b58b2cd924-DNU20180111&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-b58b2cd924-197565045&mc_cid=b58b2cd924&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
The
University of Notre Dame’s president delivered an unusually harsh
rebuke of the National Collegiate Athletic Association after it
denied the institution’s appeal
on an
academic fraud case.
The NCAA Division I Committee on Infractions found that a Notre Dame
athletics trainer had helped football players cheat, and ordered 21
of the program’s victories from the 2012-13 and 2013-14 seasons
vacated.
On Tuesday, the NCAA’s Infractions Appeal Committee rejected the
university’s appeal, prompting a lengthy statement from the
university's president, the Reverend John I. Jenkins.
Jenkins refers to the NCAA’s decision as a “dangerous precedent”
that “turns the seminal concept of academic autonomy on its head.”
“We believe strongly that a university should make decisions core to
its academic mission without having to factor in the possible
consequences of an athletic association,” Jenkins said in his
statement. “The NCAA has not chosen to ignore academic autonomy; it
has instead perverted it by divorcing it from its logical and
necessary connection to the underlying educational purpose.”
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Notre Dame thinks it got it tough, but the NCAA did almost nothing
regarding fake courses and grade changing of athletes for nearly 20
years at the University of North Carolina. Maybe the NCAA is trying to
change its sorry image of wink wink punishments.
Bo Hunk's Choices: Basket Weaving 101-123 versus Hospitality 101-118
versus Fake Course 101-120
Or Bo Hunk can take Astrophysics 101 and illegally change the transcript
grade from an F to an A
Or the instructor of Astrophysics 101 assigns an A in exchange for six season
tickets on the 50-yard line
Inside Auburn’s Secret Effort to Advance an Athlete-Friendly Curriculum
---
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Inside-Auburn-s-Secret/242569?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=d1dff08b5dee4373bcc1f8d6e4e6d6c0&elq=a189013ee18747daae60a18a570425a5&elqaid=17892&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=7923
The University of Louisville’s men’s basketball team must forfeit
123 wins, including its 2013 national title, a punishment stemming from
a scandal in which staffers arranged for recruits and players to be
visited by sex workers ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2018/02/21/louisville-must-vacate-2013-basketball-championship?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=04a989013e-DNU20180111&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-04a989013e-197565045&mc_cid=04a989013e&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
"The Admissions Gap for Big-Time Athletes," by Doug Lederman,
Inside Higher Ed, December 29, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/12/29/admit
"University of North Carolina learning specialist receives death threats
after her research finds one in 10 college athletes have reading age of a THIRD
GRADER," by Sara Malm, Daily Mail, January 10, 2014 ---
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2537041/University-North-Carolina-learning-specialist-receives-death-threats-research-finds-one-10-college-athletes-reading-age-fifth-grader.html
Mary Willingham exposed college athletes' lack of
academic abilities
- She found that 10 per cent read at elementary
school level
- A majority of players' reading level was
between 4th and 8th grade
- Men's basketball makes $16.9m-a-year for
University of North Carolina
Continued in article
"North Carolina Admits to Academic Fraud in Sports Program,"
Inside Higher Ed, September 20, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/09/20/qt#270772
Former U. of Southern Mississippi Coach Directed Cheating Ring, NCAA Says
---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/former-u-of-southern-mississippi-coach-directed-cheating-ring-ncaa-says/110171?elqTrackId=9d30a63574cb44dc94a698eac5a736a6&elq=ecde872b4ec84565b7b560ec97cde1ff&elqaid=8605&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=2882
"Incomplete Passes: College-Athlete Academic Scandals," Bloomberg
Businessweek, February 27, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-27/incomplete-passes-college-athlete-academic-scandals
Academic irregularities related to athlete eligibility have haunted
several U.S. colleges.
Auburn (2006)
Helped by academic advisers, football players padded their grade-point
averages in “directed reading” classes.
Florida (2008)
Cam Newton,
now quarterback of the NFL’s Carolina Panthers, left Florida after facing
potential expulsion for cheating, Fox Sports reported.
Florida State (2009)
Academic advisers participated in taking tests and in writing papers for
basketball and football players.
Fresno State (2003)
The men’s basketball statistician and an academic adviser were caught in a
paper-writing-for-athletes scheme.
Georgia (2003)
The university withdrew from postseason play after basketball players
received inflated grades in a coaching class.
Memphis (2008)
The NCAA stripped the basketball team of its run to the finals after
Derrick Rose’s SAT
scores were ruled invalid.
Michigan (2008)
The Ann Arbor News reported that from 2004 to 2007, 251 athletes
took independent study classes with the same professor and received
suspiciously high grades.
Minnesota (1999)
The basketball team had tournament victories erased after hundreds of
assignments were completed for players.
Stanford (2011)
Academic advisers discontinued a list of classes recommended for years
because they were easy and/or convenient.
Tennessee (2000)
ESPN profiled an English professor whose objections led the university to
acknowledge that, on average, athletes received twice as many grade changes
as other students.
USC (2001)
The NCAA issued sanctions against the football and women’s swimming teams
after tutors were found to have written papers for athletes.
Others --- See Below
UNC Fudging the Grades of Athletes and Fake Courses for Nearly 20 Years at
UNC
The NCAA Punishment Was a Wink Wink
"Scandal Bowl: Why Tar Heel Fraud Might Be Just the Start," by Paul M.
Barrett, Bloomberg Businessweek, January 6, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-06/unc-athletic-scandal-charges-of-fraud-could-be-tip-of-wider-revelations?campaign_id=DN010614
The corruption of academics at
the University of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill campus could turn into the
most revelatory of all of the undergraduate sports scandals in recent
memory. Beginning three years ago with what sounded like garden-variety
reports of under-the-table payments from agents and improper classroom help
for athletes, the affair has spread and deepened to include evidence of
hundreds of sham courses offered since the early 1990s. Untold numbers of
grades have been changed without authorization and faculty signatures
forged—all in the service of an elaborate campaign to keep elite basketball
and football players academically eligible to play.
After belatedly catching up with the UNC debacle in
this recent dispatch,
I’ve decided the still-developing story deserves wider
attention. Or, to put it more precisely, the
excellent reporting already done by the News &
Observer of Raleigh merits amplification outside of North Carolina.
The rot in Chapel Hill undermines
UNC’s reputation as one of the nation’s finest public institutions of higher
learning. Officials created classes that did not meet. That’s not the only
reason more scrutiny is needed. There’s also the particularly pernicious way
that the school’s African and Afro-American Studies Department has been used
to inflate the GPAs of basketball and football players. The corruption of a
scholarly discipline devoted to black history and culture underscores a
racial subtext to the exploitation of college athletes that typically goes
unidentified in polite discussion. (UNC’s former longtime Afro-Am chairman,
Julius Nyang’oro, has been criminally indicted for fraud.)
Another reason Chapel Hill requires
sustained investigation is the manner in which the athletic and academic
hierarchies at UNC, along with the National Collegiate Athletic Association,
have so far whitewashed the scandal. Officials have repeatedly denied that
the fiasco’s roots trace to an illicit agenda that, in the name of coddling
a disproportionately black undergraduate athlete population, has left many
students intellectually crippled.
Dan Kane, the News & Observer‘s lead
investigative reporter, does old-school, just-the-facts-m’am work—and more
power to him. Digging up the basic data has been a lonely and arduous task
for which Kane has been rewarded with craven accusations of home state
disloyalty. As he wrote
last month, the six official “reviews” and
“investigations” of the wayward Afro-Am Department have all failed to
connect the dots in any meaningful way. In coming weeks and months, I hope I
can supplement Kane’s dogged efforts with some long-distance perspective.
Valuable tips from concerned local people, some of them UNC alumni, are
already pouring in, and that’s part of the reason I’m going to pursue the
story. Keep those e-mails coming.
One source of insight is Jay Smith, a
professor of early modern French history at UNC. A serious scholar who
understands the university’s sports-happy culture, Smith has developed a
powerful distaste for the way his employer has obfuscated the scandal.
“What’s going on here is so important,” he told me by telephone, “because
it’s emblematic of what I think goes on at major universities all across the
country,” where the business of sports undermines the mission of education.
That sounds right to me.
Smith has the best sort of
self-interested motivation for making sense of what has happened on his
campus: He’s writing a book about the whole mess, based in part on
statistics and personal experiences proffered by UNC instructors assigned
over the years to assist varsity athletes. To me that sounds like a
page-turner—and even the basis of an HBO movie.
I asked Smith what he thinks is going
to happen next. He pointed to comments that the local district attorney made
when the disgraced former Afro-Am chairman, Nyang’oro, was indicted in
December. Orange County DA Jim Woodall told the News & Observer
that a second person is also under investigation and could be indicted soon.
Woodall did not identify the second target, except to say the person is not
someone who currently works for UNC. ”Other probes have identified
Nyang’oro’s longtime department manager, Deborah Crowder, as being involved
in the bogus classes,” the News & Observer noted. “She retired in
2009.” Both Crowder and Nyang’oro have refused to comment publicly, and
Nyang’oro’s criminal defense lawyer didn’t return my e-mail inquiry.
The indictment of Crowder, a
relatively low-level administrative figure, could crack open the case. It
defies logic that Nyang’oro and his assistant would have operated a rogue
department without the knowledge of more senior faculty members, if not top
university administrators. It further defies reason that this pair would
have created phony classes for athletes without the urging and participation
of people in the UNC athletic bureaucracy. Nyang’oro and Crowder are going
to have ample reason to sing as part of potential plea deals.
Even before that happens,
according to Smith, one or more well-positioned whistle-blowers are likely
to go public and start naming names if they think the powers that be are
planning to isolate Crowder and Nyang’oro as the sole villains. This thing
goes much higher, and there’s much more to come from Chapel Hill.
Shaquille O'Neal's son decommits from Arizona amidst alleged (basketball)
bribery scandal (investigated by the FBI) ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/shaquille-oneals-son-shareef-decommits-arizona-fbi-probe-2018-2
Also see
http://www.businessinsider.com/arizona-sean-miller-fbi-wiretap-2018-2
Jensen Comment
NCAA rules are a farce because so much cheating is still going on in
Division 1 universities, especially academic fraud
NCAA Rules Ex-Official at Cal State-Northridge Committed Academic Misconduct
---
http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/ncaa-rules-ex-official-at-cal-state-northridge-committed-academic-misconduct/116013?elqTrackId=e2197c179cf34a5ba1b324ec101c9261&elq=b789c32b577e4776b3c5e006cd13ce83&elqaid=11758&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=4689
Punishment includes infractions for helping two players
cheat in courses
NCAA Wipes Out 2 Years of Notre Dame Wins in Football ---
http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/ncaa-wipes-out-2-years-of-notre-dame-wins-in-football/115700?cid=db&elqTrackId=1c792753b35c4f648600748ec7d2b57a&elq=6f8a00b797574148a45d000da6336c5f&elqaid=11597&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=4578
When the Coaches Pass the Courses Instead of Football Players
Georgia Southern U. Staff Members Helped Athletes Cheat, NCAA Rules ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/georgia-southern-u-staff-members-helped-athletes-cheat-ncaa-rules/112712?elqTrackId=a1026a29777340c083601d5162be9744&elq=7378f786eb3748d5a44644b992d1716e&elqaid=9769&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=3508
New report finds big-time college football players
at wealthiest programs graduate at rates lower than their nonathlete male peers.
For black players, the gap is even bigger ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/10/19/study-finds-large-gap-between-graduation-rates-black-white-football-players?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=ef383d3357-DNU20161019&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-ef383d3357-197565045&mc_cid=ef383d3357&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Jensen Comment
Blame the Admissions Department, Curriculum Requirements, and the University of
North Carolina.
- The Admission Department admits top athletes on scholarship who have
lower academic credentials than other applicants.
- The curriculum requires something other than basket weaving and physical
education courses where athletes are assured of highest grades.
- The University of North Carolina made fake courses and fake grades out
of style for athletes. After 18 years of fake courses UNC administrators and
faculty got caught.
Former U. of Southern Mississippi Coach Directed Cheating Ring,
NCAA Says ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/former-u-of-southern-mississippi-coach-directed-cheating-ring-ncaa-says/110171?elqTrackId=9d30a63574cb44dc94a698eac5a736a6&elq=ecde872b4ec84565b7b560ec97cde1ff&elqaid=8605&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=2882
"We’re Glad We Say No to College Football," by John A. Frey,
The Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2015 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/were-glad-we-say-no-to-college-football-1451855999?mod=djemMER
The spectacle of the NCAA
national-championship game Jan. 11 in Glendale, Ariz., between
Clemson University and the University of Alabama is sure to inspire
fresh dreams of prosperity and prominence at many universities.
That’s too bad, because for all but a
handful of schools the cost of a prime-time sports program will
always exceed revenues. Yet many universities are spending tens or
even hundreds of millions to build football stadiums and training
facilities, shelling out millions more to attract star coaches.
In the past five years public universities
have allocated more than $10.3 billion in student fees and other
subsidies to prop up sports programs, according to a November
examination by the Huffington Post and the Chronicle of Higher
Education. A study released last year by the American Association of
University Professors found that athletic spending increased by 25%
at public four-year colleges between 2004 and 2011, adjusted for
inflation. Funding for instruction and academic support remained
nearly flat. The study also found that the median pay for NCAA
Division I football head coaches increased 93% between 2006 and
2012. Median pay for professors rose a mere 4%.
In many states the highest-paid state
employee is the head coach of the state university football or
basketball team. University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban
made $7.2 million last year, about 50 times more than the average
pay of a full-time professor. But at least his team returned some
revenue to the university.
That is unusual: A NCAA study last year
found that only 20 of the nearly 130 university athletic programs in
the top-flight Football Bowl Subdivision enjoyed a positive
operating margin. The average loss was $17.6 million. These athletic
programs wouldn’t survive in the private economy and only function
by “taxing” the rest of the university.
The mounting sports losses force
universities to divert funding from the fundamental task of
educating students. Student fees, according to an analysis by USA
Today, fund 65% of Old Dominion University’s athletic department
budget. That Virginia school shared a conference with the
institution of which I am president, Drexel University, but Old
Dominion switched to another in 2013, aspiring for a big-time
football run.
Colorado State University sold $239 million
in bonds earlier this year to build a football stadium. Jessica
Wood, an analyst at Standard & Poor’s said in April that the new
debt would “exert greater pressure on financial resources that we
already view as very weak for the rating.” The university hopes the
stadium will attract more out-of-state applicants and encourage
alumni to attend games.
That isn’t a sure bet. Ask the University
of Akron, which opened a $65 million football stadium in 2009. After
an initial attendance bump, the school’s ticket sales can’t cover
the stadium’s annual debt service of $2.2 million.
Pressure to win can also compromise
academic integrity. Nearly half of all big-time college sports
programs were punished for major NCAA rules violations in the past
decade, according to the news outlet Inside Higher Ed. Some schools
have been cited multiple times.
Continued in article
Southern Methodist University has broken serious
National Collegiate Athletic Association rules -- yet again
"The Incorrigible Institution," by Jake New, Inside Higher Ed, September
30, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/09/30/ncaa-bans-smu-basketball-postseason-suspends-coach-9-games?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=702caaa7b5-DNU20150930&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-702caaa7b5-197565045
Southern Methodist University has broken serious National Collegiate Athletic Association rules -- yet again.The association on Tuesday suspended SMU’s head men's basketball coach for nine games and banned the team from postseason play after concluding that the coach ignored an instance of academic fraud in which an administrative assistant completed course work for a basketball player.
This is the third NCAA infractions case involving the coach, Larry Brown, whose programs at the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Kansas also violated association rules, including offering improper financial aid and committing academic fraud. And it is at least the 10th major NCAA infractions case for SMU, which retains the distinction of being the last Division I institution to be given the NCAA’s “death penalty” for violations in the 1980s.
“The fact that this institution has been before the NCAA so many times was an aggravating factor,” Michael Adams, chancellor of Pepperdine University and chief hearing officer in the case, said. “On one hand the institution had made some efforts to comply, and yet at the same time a fairly large number of individuals were at least making individual decisions that were unethical.”
Those individuals include Brown and a former administrative assistant for the basketball program, as well as the former head men’s golf coach and a former compliance director -- in NCAA parlance, the chief official responsible for ensuring that the sports program follows the rule. Only Brown still remains employed by the university.
In Brown’s case, the NCAA said the head coach was unaware of any misconduct as it was occurring, but he failed to “promote an atmosphere of compliance” when he later learned of the academic fraud and chose not to inform SMU or the NCAA. He later lied to enforcement officials about what he knew, according to the NCAA’s infractions report.
Continued in article
"More lawsuits in UNC academic scandal; whistleblower settles with
university," by Sara Ganim, CNN, February 25, 2015 ---
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/25/us/unc-academic-fraud/
Three more athletes who say they were
scammed out of an education at the University of North Carolina are
now suing over academic fraud, and the whistleblower who exposed the
fake-class system has now settled her lawsuit with the university.
Former basketball player Kenya McBee has
joined former football player Mike McAdoo's federal class-action
lawsuit, claiming the university denied him and thousands of other
athletes education when advisers forced him to take classes that
never met.
Former basketball player Leah Metcalf, and
former football player James Arnold filed a separate but similar
class-action lawsuit in state court in North Carolina.
Ken Wainstein, who was hired by the
university to act as an independent investigator, revealed in
October that academic fraud had taken place at UNC for 18 years, and
that UNC officials were wrong when they denied -- for nearly five
years -- that anyone in athletics was involved.
Instead it was players, like McAdoo, who
were blamed by the university for cheating and punished by the NCAA.
"All of these student-athletes were
promised a legitimate UNC education, were implored to trust UNC
academic advising, and were then guided into academically bereft
courses against their interests," said attorney Jeremi Duru, one of
the attorneys representing these athletes.
Earlier this year high-profile attorney
Michael Hausfeld filed a class-action suit against UNC and the NCAA
over the same scandal. About 3,100 students -- nearly half of them
athletes -- who enrolled in the fake classes could easily join these
lawsuits.
Mary Willingham, the whistleblower who
began revealing details about the sham classes, accused UNC of
retaliating against her before she quit last year, and then sued the
university to get her job back.
Willingham told CNN that she reached a
settlement agreement with the school this week, although it had not
yet been approved by a judge. It would compensate her financially
but not restore her job as a learning specialist and adviser.
Continued in article
Cheated
by Jay M. Smith and Mary Willingham
Potomac, 280 pages, $26.95
Book Review of Cheated
Dark Days in Chapel Hill: If you ran a college and knew there
was substantial money to be had from sports but no requirement to
educate athletes, you might cut corners—that’s exactly what the
University of North Carolina did for nearly two decades.
Mr. Smith is a history professor at the
University of North Carolina, Ms. Willingham was for many years an
academic counselor there who brought attention to the scandal by
granting interviews to the Raleigh News & Observer. The authors
accuse their state’s prestige public campus of “broad dishonesty”
and of stocking its teams in football and men’s basketball—the
“revenue sports”—with athletes to generate profit, then breaking its
promise to educate them. Ms. Willingham resigned last year and later
sued the school—a settlement was reached this week—and both authors
recount being shunned in Chapel Hill for helping bring the scandal
to light, so they may have an ax to grind. At times, their account
flirts with a tone of “if only they’d listened to me.” Nonetheless
“Cheated” sounds an important call for reform.
Details of the scheme confirm the worst
fears about “student athletes,” at least as regards football and
men’s basketball. (Other men’s and all women’s collegiate sports
generally have good academic reputations.) Some Tar Heels men’s
basketball players, Ms. Willingham contends, read at a third-grade
level. (A university official last year dismissed her research as “a
travesty.”) As a student at Chapel Hill, Green Bay Packers star
Julius Peppers failed real courses but got B’s in what were known as
“paper classes,” barely supervised independent-study courses that
required only a single research paper. (Mr. Peppers claims that he
“earned every grade” he got at UNC.) “Cheated” reports that Rashad
McCants, key to the Tar Heels’ 2005 March Madness title, “saw his
GPA rise significantly—he even made the dean’s list—after a semester
in which he had done no academic work.”
Like many large universities, Chapel Hill
has a committee that grants admission waivers to top sports
recruits. “Cheated” says that the committee admitted players who
scored below 400 on the verbal SAT—that’s the 15th percentile,
barely north of illiterate—or who were chronically absent from high
school except on game days. There is no chance that a student so
poorly prepared for college will earn a diploma. All he can do is
generate money for the university.
Most of the phony classes described in the
report were in the African and Afro-American Studies Department,
under Prof. Julius Nyang’oro and a departmental administrator. The
department had multiple subject codes for its courses, including
AFRI, AFAM and SWAH (for Swahili). This allowed transcripts to
appear to satisfy Chapel Hill’s distribution requirement, even if
most of an athlete’s “classes” were within the same department. Mr.
Nyang’oro resigned in 2012 and was eventually indicted for fraud,
accused of accepting pay for “teaching” that was imaginary. Charges
were dropped when he agreed to assist investigators.
“Cheated” details how Mr. Nyang’oro liked
to hang around with athletes: He was even invited to serve as a
“guest coach” for the football team. Tutors and academic-support
staffers also enjoyed friendly access to the jocks. At
football-factory and basketball-power programs, teachers and tutors
who avert their eyes from grade fixing may be rewarded with
courtside seats and sideline passes.
The authors and the report agree that Mr.
Nyang’oro and the administrator perceived that their role was partly
to make academic problems go away so that stars could tape their
ankles. University of North Carolina officials did not want to know
how athletes who had barely bested chance on their SATs were
suddenly pulling A’s at a selective college. “Cheated” recounts two
instances when staffers told superiors that football or men’s
basketball stars handed in plagiarized work. The university took
swift, decisive action, the authors write: It punished those who
made the reports.
Last year, according to Education
Department data, UNC–Chapel Hill cleared $30 million in profit on
football and men’s basketball, a number that does not include
whatever part of the $297 million in gifts and grants received by
the school last year was prompted by athletics, or $130 million in
assets held by the athletic foundation affiliated with the college.
Some of the gain is expended on sports that lose money, but football
and men’s basketball are still profit centers. At a prestige
university, the African-American studies department became a
mechanism to exploit African-Americans. Players may as well have
been picking cotton.
Across the big-college landscape, around $3
billion annually flows from networks to schools in rights fees for
national TV broadcasts of football and men’s basketball. Ticket
sales and local marketing add to the total. Meanwhile, the NCAA
almost never sanctions colleges that don’t educate scholarship
athletes.
Coaches and administrators make out well
themselves even if their players don’t get educations. Tar Heels
men’s basketball coach Roy Williams and football coach Larry Fedora
each earn $1.8 million per year, according to the USA Today NCAA
salary database. Speaking and endorsement fees for coaches rise with
victory totals. Athletic director Lawrence Cunningham draws $565,000
annually, plus bonuses for wins.
Perhaps the reader is thinking: Why this
worry about diplomas? Don’t big-college athletes go on to wealth in
the pros? Surely starry-eyed teens with Greek-god physiques arriving
at the University of North Carolina, or at any powerhouse program,
believe they’re headed for professional glory in prime time.
Yet most scholarship players never receive
a pro paycheck. “Cheated” reports that the Chapel Hill swindle went
into full swing in 2003, when the school was trying to rebuild its
basketball reputation. Since that year, 54 Tar Heels have been
drafted by the NFL or NBA. That’s less than a fifth of University of
North Carolina football and men’s basketball scholarship holders
during the period. And Chapel Hill does better than most: Broadly
across NCAA football and men’s basketball, only about 2% of
athletic-scholarship recipients are drafted. Because a bachelor’s
degree adds about $1 million to lifetime earnings, the diploma is
the potential economic reward for the overwhelming majority of
college athletes.
Of course, athletes have only themselves to
blame for not taking their studies seriously. But many are
encouraged by coaches to believe pipe dreams about the pros, to
focus all their effort on winning so the coach gets his victory
bonus. By the time NCAA athletes realize they’ve been duped, their
scholarships are exhausted. Used up and thrown away, they are easily
replaced by the next batch of starry-eyed teens who believe their
names will be called on draft day.
After the Chapel Hill scandal went public,
the school commissioned a flurry of reports, the two most prominent
of which appeared to tell all but were at heart whitewashes. The
first, overseen by former North Carolina Gov. Jim Martin, in 2012
declared “with confidence” that the Tar Heels athletic department
knew nothing, nothing: “This was not an athletic scandal,” the
report stated. “Sadly, it was clearly an academic scandal; but an
isolated one.” Mr. Smith and Ms. Willingham write that in “an
amazing display of evasiveness and dishonesty,” Chapel Hill
chancellor Holden Thorp pretended that the Martin report concluded
the matter. Later Mr. Thorp resigned and floated away to the
provost’s post at Washington University in St. Louis. The best-case
analysis of Mr. Thorp is that he was hopelessly incompetent;
explanations go downhill from there. Yet he paid little professional
price. If an NCAA athlete commits a petty violation, he can be
thrown out of school. University leaders know that if their schools
are caught systematically cheating, a wrist slap will be their fate.
The second report, conducted by a law firm
and released in 2014, revealed that the first report was a fairy
tale. Though Mr. Thorp denied knowing about the “paper classes,” it
concluded that he knew Mr. Nyang’oro’s department “issued higher
grades than most other departments and was popular among
student-athletes.” Why wasn’t this a red flag? But this document,
too, largely exonerated those who commissioned it. Thousands of
students got A’s in fake classes. Yet “the higher levels of the
university” were guilty only of “a loose, decentralized approach to
management” that prevented “meaningful oversight,” even though the
existence of “easy-grading classes with little rigor” was widely
known.
The second report attached no blame to
basketball coach Williams, the most marketable figure in Chapel Hill
athletics, reporting his insistence that he “constantly preaches
that [the] number one responsibility [of] coaches and counselors is
to make sure their players get a good education.” The men’s
basketball program has seven coaches for a roster that averages
16—the kind of instructor-to-student ratio normally found only in
doctoral programs. Yet we’re asked to believe there’s no way the
coaches could have noticed that many players never seemed to need to
be in class. Mr. Williams should have been fired for presiding over
an institutionally corrupt program. Instead he was given a pass.
Cheating may have gone over the top at
Chapel Hill, but in collegiate sports, institutional corruption is a
norm. The NCAA works assiduously to change the subject from football
and men’s basketball graduation rates, a straightforward measure
that anyone can understand. Instead it offers Academic Progress
Rate, a hocus-pocus metric seemingly designed to be
incomprehensible.
Currently the overall APR of big-college
sports is 976 out of 1000. That sounds as if everyone’s nearly
perfect. But on this scale, perfection is achieved if all players
have at least a 2.0 GPA. Since the average GPA at public
universities is 3.0, what the NCAA touts as “academic progress” may
equate to significantly below-average outcomes in the classroom.
But the APR shifts the spotlight from
actual grades. Last fall, Louisville announced to fanfare that
football coach Bobby Petrino will receive a $500,000 bonus for his
players’ academic performance. Sound enlightened? The bonus is
triggered by the team hitting a 935 APR. Since the average for NCAA
football programs is 951, academic excellence at Louisville is now
defined down to below average.
Cynicism regarding athletics and education
pervades the big-college system. The networks that are “broadcast
partners” (their term) with the NCAA—ABC, CBS, ESPN, Fox, NBC and
Turner—have a financial stake in college sports income and so steer
clear of issues like grades and graduation rates.
Nobody much seems to care so long as money
flows. Steven Spielberg is a member of the board of trustees at USC,
where the graduation rate for African-American men’s basketball
players is 25% and 38% for African-American football players. The
reason these numbers are terrible isn’t that athletes are departing
early for the pros—in the past decade, more than two-thirds of USC
football and men’s basketball players were not drafted. The numbers
are terrible because players are used for revenue without receiving
educations. Mr. Spielberg has made two powerful movies depicting the
historical exploitation of African-Americans, “The Color Purple” and
“Amistad.” Where is his movie about present-day exploitation of
African-Americans in college athletics? He need only look out the
window at USC. Or he could buy the rights to “Cheated.”
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on the UNC scandal and the many, many other
athletics cheating scandals at major universities in the USA --- See
Below
We're led to believe that they nearly all cheated at one time or
another. The UNC scandal was unique in that it entailed fake courses and
grade changes for nearly two decades and covered multiple sports and
even students who were not into athletics. The sad thing is that many of
the principle coaches and faculty who cheated moved on from UNC before
the scandal broke and are still thriving unpunished in their careers.
Most of the students now suing UNC were not innocent victims
and were knowingly cheaters. They are victims in a larger sense that
they were promised an education (such as learning how to read) that was
denied them in their years at UNC.
"Restore Integrity to College Sports by Converting Big Programs to Farm
Teams," by Perry A. Zirkel, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 17,
2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Restore-Integrity-to-College/230935/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Later this month, the National Basketball
Association will hold its annual draft, which will be televised
nationally on ESPN. Seven members of this year’s University of
Kentucky team have declared themselves eligible for the draft, and
Duke, which won the national championship, is expecting three of its
freshmen to be one and done.
It is beyond dispute that college football
and men’s basketball have become big business, with the National
Collegiate Athletic Association, television, sports-apparel
companies, gambling enterprises, and a rotating set of well-paid
coaches and commentators at its center. It is also indisputable
that, at some colleges, the term "student athlete" is a myth.
It is high time to do something about the
hypocrisy and abuses at the moneyed tip of big-time college sports.
Big-time Division I institutions dominate the national stage,
competing for bigger slices of the ever-fattening financial pie. The
big five conferences — the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC —
collected a combined $311 million last year just from bowl games and
NCAA tournament payouts.
Those conferences have muscled their way
into obtaining a separate set of rules that has allowed them to pay
players a so-called full cost of attendance. The problem, however,
is that the colleges cloak these measures under the increasingly
corrupting guise of the student athlete. Yes, colleges trickle down
a subsidy from their huge profits to smaller sports, but there is a
far more preferable way to improve equity and integrity among
institutions of higher education in terms of athletic and academic
opportunity.
I propose a surgical separation that
retains a more limited connection between big-time sports and
students’ higher education that preserves each on a mutually
healthier basis. The starting point for this model comes from
baseball. Feeding major-league baseball are minor leagues at various
levels. Minor-league teams are for-profit businesses with employees
that play and manage and are entirely separate from college
baseball.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
There are many problems with this proposal.
Firstly there's the problem of facilities. Most big-time NCAA
Division 1 stadiums, gymnasiums, tennis courts, swimming pools,
baseball fields, etc. were built with heavy funding from alumni and
other large donors. Turning these facilities into for-profit
facilities in total or in part may entail all sorts of complications
and lawsuits. More importantly many of the benefactors will probably
stop giving to for-profit farm teams.
Secondly there's the problem of student athletes. Every team in
every sport generally has some serious and often very gifted
scholars. In some teams like those of Notre Dame, Stanford, the Ivy
League, etc. the scholars outnumber those that major in basket
weaving.
Thirdly, if universities are going to make investments in
for-profit enterprises there are probably better opportunities to
earn higher returns than the returns of farm teams. For example,
Stanford University makes a fortune on its leases of land to Silicon
Valley tech businesses (e.g., Intel) and a luxury shopping mall. I
doubt that the football, basketball, and baseball teams will earn
anything close to Stanford's land-leasing enterprise.
The best way to clean up the athletics mess in higher education
is to take away athletics scholarships. That can be accomplished by
simply turning Division 1 into Division 2 and let the chips fall
where they may. Students can still participate in varsity sports in
Division 2, but make them earn their scholarships on the basis
of academic merit and need for funding to support their academic
goals.
Sure some universities will lose hundreds of millions of dollars
in ticket sales and loss of television revenues. And some programs
such as swimming and volleyball that are funded from football
"profits" will have less money for travel and payroll for assistants
to the assistant coaches, but perhaps this is a price universities
must pay to restore integrity to the academic missions in
higher education.
I've been on the faculties of three Division 1 universities and
one Division 2 university. I think the Division 2 sports teams were
more supported by a spirited student body. Sure the are fewer fans
from the outside descending on campus for sports spectaculars.
Should that really be a major mission of a university?
Less Than Honorable Academic Standards and Integrity at the University of
Texas
"How Athletics and Academics Collided at One University," by Brad
Wolverton, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 10, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/How-AthleticsAcademics/230795/?cid=at
Pamela G. Powell had a problem. As she
administered a final exam in remedial math at the University of
Texas at Austin, she reportedly spotted a high-profile basketball
player cheating.
The player, Martez Walker, a freshman from
Detroit, was allegedly snapping pictures of test questions with his
phone and looking for answers from someone outside the classroom,
according to two former academic advisers informed of the incident.
Ms. Powell, a mathematics instructor who
had several athletes in her class that semester, the fall of 2013,
contacted Adam Creasy, her liaison with the athletic department. The
instructor asked what she should do, recalled Mr. Creasy, then an
academic counselor for the football team. He spoke with Brian Davis,
then head of academic support for football, who advised the
instructor to talk with Randa Ryan, executive senior associate
athletic director for student services.
What happened next is unclear.
But Mr. Walker passed the class, according
to Mr. Creasy. Soon after, the player was named to the
Big 12 Commissioner’s Honor Roll, for
earning at least a 3.0 grade-point average. That season Mr. Walker
became a key contributor to the team, scoring in double figures
seven times, including a season-high 16 points in an NCAA tournament
win against Arizona State University.
Mr. Walker, who has since transferred to
Oakland University, in Michigan, where he is expected to play
basketball this season, did not respond to multiple requests for
comment. He withdrew from Texas last fall, after he was arrested and
suspended from the team following allegations that he had assaulted
his girlfriend.
Ms. Powell declined to speak about the
situation, citing student-privacy concerns.
The accusations against Mr. Walker, one of
several new claims of academic misconduct involving Texas athletes,
illustrate how the university has appeared to let academically
deficient players push the limits of its policy on academic
integrity as it has sought to improve its teams' academic records.
Continued in article
Although some of the most noted cheating scandals have been in Division 1
NCAA football, there have been scandals in cheating nearly all top universities
in all sports. The following article deals with top basketball schools.
Ivy League universities are excluded due to unavailable data for basketball
players.
"Here’s Who Wins March Madness in the Classroom," by Sean
Gregory and Dave Johnson, Time Magazine, March 17, 2015 ---
http://time.com/3745396/march-madness-classroom/?xid=newsletter-brief
. . .
Continued in article
And in last place --- Indiana University
Bob Jensen's threads on athletics in universities ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#Athletics
Jensen Comment
In Germany only the top 25% of high school graduates are allowed to go
to college. In the USA the bottom 10% are given full athletic
scholarships if they're good in sports. Then we keep them so busy in
training, practice, and travel to games that they have even less of a
chance to learn how to read.
"A Competitive Disadvantage," by Jake New, Inside Higher Ed,
November 19, 2014 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/11/19/are-selective-colleges-big-time-sports-greater-risk-compromising-academics
Speaking to the University of Michigan
faculty senate last week, Mark Schlissel, the university’s
president,
was candid in his assessment of the
admissions process for athletes. "We admit students who aren't as
qualified," he said. “And it's probably the kids that we admit that
can't honestly, even with lots of help, do the amount of work and
the quality of work it takes to make progression from year to year.”
His comments -- made as the University of
North Carolina is still reeling from
a high-profile academic scandal where
athlete preparedness was a central issue -- were perhaps too candid
for some.
Schlissel became president of Michigan in
July after serving as provost for three years at Brown University,
an institution with a very different take on athletics. In his short
time at Michigan, Schlissel has been pressured by angry students,
alumni, fans, and the board of regents to replace the university's
since-resigned athletic director. Schlissel said he wants to take
his time and find a new athletic director who has "academic
integrity," while many fans want him to hire an athletic director
who will quickly fire the current football coach, Brady Hoke. “I’ve
really learned that this whole athletic sphere and the usual way you
approach things just doesn’t work," he said. "It’s just a crazed or
irrational approach that the world and the media takes to athletics
decisions."
The president later publicly apologized for
his remarks and the stir they caused, though not before Hoke swiftly
offered a rebuttal, explaining that Michigan is a university that
boasts both a proud athletic tradition and strong academics. “Being
truly an academic institution that it is, that degree will last
forever,” he said. “So we take it very seriously.”
But academically competitive universities
with big-time sports programs like Michigan and UNC may be precisely
where the risk for this sort of compromise is greatest. And, like Schlissel said, it starts with admissions.
“The original sin of college sports is
willfully admitting deficient or unprepared students into an
institution,” Gerald Gurney, president of the Drake Group and the
former president of the
National Association of Academic Advisors for Athletics,
said. “Admissions, specifically special
admissions, is the single most problematic issue in college sports.
It’s particularly troublesome with highly selective institutions.”
The National Collegiate Athletic
Association sets minimum standards athletes must meet to be eligible
to play sports, but leaves admissions practices up to individual
institutions, allowing athletes who do not meet "standard or normal
entrance requirements” to be admitted to colleges through “special
admissions” programs. An athlete who passes the NCAA's eligibility
bar and receives special admission to an open-admission institution
might be much closer to the average student's credentials there than
an athlete at a highly selective college.
The NCAA allows institutions to use special
admissions programs as long as they also offer the opportunity to
other types of students, such as those in music programs. A
2009 review by the Associated Press found
that athletes were far likelier to benefit from special admissions
than other types of students, identifying about 30 universities
where athletes were at least 10 times more likely to be admitted
through special admissions than non-athletes were.
At the University of California at
Berkeley, one of the most highly selective public universities in
the country, athletes were 43 times more likely to gain special
admissions than non-athletes were.
A Gulf
When
a report released in October revealed just
how extensive academic fraud had been at UNC, Carol Folt, the
university’s chancellor, said that one of the reasons that it went
undetected for nearly two decades was that many at the university
simply assumed that UNC employees were above such conduct.
Richard Southall, director of the College
Sports Research Institute at the University of South Carolina, said
the fraud was simply a “logical extension of the special admissions
that is in place at many universities where players" are admitted
based on how they can contribute to a revenue-generating sports team
rather than how they can contribute to the university's academic
profile.
Continued in article
The independent study course at the University of Georgia that's one
centimeter behind a fake course at the University of North Carolina
NCAA Slaps U. of Georgia With $5,000 Fine for Coach’s Effort to
Keep Athlete Eligible ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/ncaa-slaps-u-of-georgia-with-5000-fine-for-coachs-effort-to-keep-athlete-eligible/91307?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
See below for Bob Jensen's threads on the fake courses at UNC.
Question
How extensive was the University of North Carolina athletics phony
course and grade change cheating scandal?
Answer
Even though I made tidbits about this scandal early on, including that
about 10% of the athletes could not read at a third-grade level. I guess
it never sunk in how many years UNC officials were aware of the cheating
and how many athletes were part of this scandal.
. . . since the 1990s Nang' Oris'
department offered hundreds of fake "paper classes" that never
actually met. Some 500 grades had been changed without
authorization . . .
"UNC officials apologize for a huge sports scandal, while
attacking the woman who brought it to light," Bloomberg
Businessweek, February 3-9, 2014 ---
After trying for years to minimize an
academic corruption scandal on its prestigious Chapel Hill campus,
the University of North Carolina has abruptly switched
strategies---form obfuscation to mea culpa. The apologia comes with
a bitter footnote, though in the form of vilification of a campus
whistle-blower.
. . .
UNC called the police after an
internal university inquiry concluded that that
since the 1990s Nang' Oris' department offered
hundreds of fake "paper classes" that never actually met. Some 500
grades had been changed without authorization,
. . .
Also see
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-27/university-of-north-carolina-apologizes-for-fake-classes-promises-real-change
"UNC's Fake 'Paper Classes' Were Not Just For Athletes — They Were
Also Very Popular With Frat Boys," by Peter Jacobs, Business
Insider, October 23, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/uncs-fake-paper-classes-were-also-popular-with-frat-boys-2014-10
Jensen Comment
It's possible to estimate the number of students who took fake classes
(the media is reporting 3,100 students over 20 years) at the University
of North Carolina. But we will probably never know the number of
students who forged grade change slips for legitimate courses.
UNC's 20-Year Academic Scandals Were Not Confined to Athletics and
African and Afro-American Studies Departments
Where were the internal controls on grade change forms?
"Widespread Nature of Chapel Hill's Academic Fraud Is Laid Bare," by
Jack Stripling, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 23, 2014
---
http://chronicle.com/article/Widespread-Nature-of-Chapel/149603/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
My accounting background makes me think first about internal control.
UNC apparently had no internal control over grade changes. For example,
when I taught at Trinity University a grade change form had four carbon
copies that I submitted to the registrars office. When the student's
grade was changed one of those copies I signed was returned to me.
At UNC the Afro-American Studies Department left grade change forms
where students could get blank copies and forge instructor signatures
for virtually any courses on campus. Apparently a copy of a grade change
form was not sent back to an instructor who would then realize that
somebody had forged his or her signature. UNC gets an F on internal
control, and nobody should change that grade!
Yeah Right! Wink! Wink!
What is unbelievable is that UNC said this went on for 20 years without
coaches, higher administrative officials, and 99.9% of the faculty being
aware that thousands of students were cheating, only about half of them
being athletes.
"UNC investigation: Bogus classes were pushed by academic
counselors," by Dan Kane and Jane Stancill, newsobserver.com,
October 22, 2014,
http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/10/22/4255098_unc-investigation-bogus-classes.html?rh=
"New Report Implicates UNC's Athletics Department In Fake Classes
Scandal," by Peter Jacobs, Business Insider, October 22, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/new-report-implicates-uncs-athletics-department-in-fake-classes-scandal-2014-10
The University of North Carolina Chapel
Hill athletics department knew about and encouraged fake classes and
grade manipulation for the school's athletes, according to a new
report released Wednesday.
A previous report released in 2012
revealed a long history at UNC of classes in the Department of Afro
and African-American Studies that never
met, as well as a culture of changing and improving grades. These
classes were heavily populated by student athletes.
The 2012 report cleared the UNC athletics
department of any involvement in the athletes' grade inflation.
This no longer seems to be the case.
According to The News & Observer, Wednesday's report "found
a new culprit: the Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes
... The report describes a fairly broad group
of academic and athletic officials who knew about athletes getting
better grades in classes that only required papers, yet taking
little or no action."
Additionally,
student newspaper The Daily Tar Heel reports, the
new report "found clear evidence that academic counselors from the
football, men's basketball and women's basketball teams asked for
players to be enrolled in bogus independent study classes in order
for them to be eligible."
The more recent investigation was led by
Kenneth Wainstein, a former U.S. Justice Department official.
Wainstein reportedly had an unprecedented level of access to
material related to the UNC scandal, as well as the cooperation of
former African studies chairman Julius Nyang'oro and department
administrator Deborah Crowder.
"University of North Carolina learning specialist receives death
threats after her research finds one in 10 college athletes have reading
age of a THIRD GRADER," by Sara Malm, Daily Mail, January 10, 2014
---
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2537041/University-North-Carolina-learning-specialist-receives-death-threats-research-finds-one-10-college-athletes-reading-age-fifth-grader.html
Mary Willingham exposed college athletes'
lack of academic abilities
- She found that 10 per cent read at
elementary school level
- A majority of players' reading level
was between 4th and 8th grade
- Men's basketball makes $16.9m-a-year
for University of North Carolina
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
More often than not employers make it uncomfortable for whistleblowers
who don't resign. UNC does not deny that for ten years varsity athletes
took fake courses and were "allowed" to change their grades. They just
contend that these athletes did not suffer academically because they
were in the wonderful learning environment of the University of North
Carolina. Yeah Right!
UNC Fudging the Grades of Athletes
"Scandal Bowl: Why Tar Heel Fraud Might Be Just the Start," by
Paul M. Barrett, Bloomberg Businessweek, January 6, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-06/unc-athletic-scandal-charges-of-fraud-could-be-tip-of-wider-revelations?campaign_id=DN010614
The corruption
of academics at the University of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill
campus could turn into the most revelatory of all of the
undergraduate sports scandals in recent memory. Beginning three
years ago with what sounded like garden-variety reports of
under-the-table payments from agents and improper classroom help for
athletes, the affair has spread and deepened to include evidence of
hundreds of sham courses offered since the early 1990s. Untold
numbers of grades have been changed without authorization and
faculty signatures forged—all in the service of an elaborate
campaign to keep elite basketball and football players academically
eligible to play.
After belatedly catching up with the UNC
debacle in this recent dispatch,
I’ve decided the still-developing story
deserves wider attention. Or, to put it more precisely, the
excellent reporting already done by the
News & Observer of Raleigh merits amplification outside of
North Carolina.
The rot in Chapel
Hill undermines UNC’s reputation as one of the nation’s finest
public institutions of higher learning. Officials created classes
that did not meet. That’s not the only reason more scrutiny is
needed. There’s also the particularly pernicious way that the
school’s African and Afro-American Studies Department has been used
to inflate the GPAs of basketball and football players. The
corruption of a scholarly discipline devoted to black history and
culture underscores a racial subtext to the exploitation of college
athletes that typically goes unidentified in polite discussion. (UNC’s
former longtime Afro-Am chairman, Julius Nyang’oro, has been
criminally indicted for fraud.)
Another reason
Chapel Hill requires sustained investigation is the manner in which
the athletic and academic hierarchies at UNC, along with the
National Collegiate Athletic Association, have so far whitewashed
the scandal. Officials have repeatedly denied that the fiasco’s
roots trace to an illicit agenda that, in the name of coddling a
disproportionately black undergraduate athlete population, has left
many students intellectually crippled.
Dan Kane, the News & Observer‘s
lead investigative reporter, does old-school, just-the-facts-m’am
work—and more power to him. Digging up the basic data has been a
lonely and arduous task for which Kane has been rewarded with craven
accusations of home state disloyalty. As he wrote
last month, the six official “reviews” and
“investigations” of the wayward Afro-Am Department have all failed
to connect the dots in any meaningful way. In coming weeks and
months, I hope I can supplement Kane’s dogged efforts with some
long-distance perspective. Valuable tips from concerned local
people, some of them UNC alumni, are already pouring in, and that’s
part of the reason I’m going to pursue the story. Keep those e-mails
coming.
One source of
insight is Jay Smith, a professor of early modern French history at
UNC. A serious scholar who understands the university’s sports-happy
culture, Smith has developed a powerful distaste for the way his
employer has obfuscated the scandal. “What’s going on here is so
important,” he told me by telephone, “because it’s emblematic of
what I think goes on at major universities all across the country,”
where the business of sports undermines the mission of education.
That sounds right to me.
Smith has the best
sort of self-interested motivation for making sense of what has
happened on his campus: He’s writing a book about the whole mess,
based in part on statistics and personal experiences proffered by
UNC instructors assigned over the years to assist varsity athletes.
To me that sounds like a page-turner—and even the basis of an HBO
movie.
I asked Smith what
he thinks is going to happen next. He pointed to comments that the
local district attorney made when the disgraced former Afro-Am
chairman, Nyang’oro, was indicted in December. Orange County DA Jim
Woodall told the News & Observer that a second person is
also under investigation and could be indicted soon. Woodall did not
identify the second target, except to say the person is not someone
who currently works for UNC. ”Other probes have identified
Nyang’oro’s longtime department manager, Deborah Crowder, as being
involved in the bogus classes,” the News & Observer noted.
“She retired in 2009.” Both Crowder and Nyang’oro have refused to
comment publicly, and Nyang’oro’s criminal defense lawyer didn’t
return my e-mail inquiry.
The indictment of
Crowder, a relatively low-level administrative figure, could crack
open the case. It defies logic that Nyang’oro and his assistant
would have operated a rogue department without the knowledge of more
senior faculty members, if not top university administrators. It
further defies reason that this pair would have created phony
classes for athletes without the urging and participation of people
in the UNC athletic bureaucracy. Nyang’oro and Crowder are going to
have ample reason to sing as part of potential plea deals.
Even before
that happens, according to Smith, one or more well-positioned
whistle-blowers are likely to go public and start naming names if
they think the powers that be are planning to isolate Crowder and
Nyang’oro as the sole villains. This thing goes much higher, and
there’s much more to come from Chapel Hill.
Too Little Remedy Too Late for a UNC Philosophy Professor (after
nearly 20 years of fake classes and lax grading of athletes)
"UNC Is Firing The Sports Ethics Professor Involved In The Fake Class
Scandal," by Peter Jacobs, Business Insider, December 31,
2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/unc-is-firing-the-sports-ethics-professor-involved-in-the-fake-class-scandal-2014-12
Jensen Comment
The University of North Carolina would like to have us believe that the
higher administration and coaches were unaware of the athlete cheating
scandals for nearly 20 years. Yeah Right!
Bob Jensen's threads on professors who allow students to cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#RebeccaHoward
Bob Jensen's threads on athletics scandals in higher education ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#Athletics
"Alleged Academic Fraud at U. of North Carolina Tests NCAA's
Reach: Myths surrounding the group's investigation cloud the
controversy at Chapel Hill," by Brad Wolverton, Chronicle of
Higher Education, September 7, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Alleged-Academic-Fraud-at-U/134270/
"North
Carolina Admits to Academic Fraud in Sports Program,"
Inside Higher Ed, September 20, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/09/20/qt#270772
"Former UNC Basketball Star Says He Got Straight A's Without Going
To A Single Class," by Emmitt Knowlton, Business Insider, June 6,
2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/rashad-mccants-on-unc-academic-scandal-2014-6
Rashad McCants, the second-leading scorer on
the University of North Carolina's 2004-05 basketball team that won
the national championship,
told ESPN's "Outside the Lines" that he
rarely attended class, turned in papers written entirely by tutors,
and took bogus courses in the African-American Studies department
during his three years in Chapel Hill.
"I didn't write any papers," McCants said.
"When it was time to turn in our papers for our paper classes, we
would get a call from our tutor ... carpool over to the tutor's
house and basically get our papers and go about our business."
During the spring term of 2005, McCants
says he made the Dean's List and got straight-A's in four classes
that he never attended.
When asked if UNC men's basketball coach
Roy Williams knew about this, McCants told Outside The Lines, "I
think he knew 100%. ... It was something that was a part of the
program."
Chapel Hill Researcher at Center of Turmoil Over Athletes’
Literacy Resigns ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/chapel-hill-researcher-at-center-of-turmoil-over-athletes-literacy-resigns/76317?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
"University of North Carolina learning specialist receives death
threats after her research finds one in 10 college athletes have reading
age of a THIRD GRADER," by Sara Malm, Daily Mail, January 10, 2014
---
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2537041/University-North-Carolina-learning-specialist-receives-death-threats-research-finds-one-10-college-athletes-reading-age-fifth-grader.html
Mary Willingham exposed college athletes'
lack of academic abilities
- She found that 10 per cent read at
elementary school level
- A majority of players' reading level
was between 4th and 8th grade
- Men's basketball makes $16.9m-a-year
for University of North Carolina
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
More often than not employers make it uncomfortable for whistleblowers
who don't resign. UNC does not deny that for ten years varsity athletes
took fake courses and were "allowed" to change their grades. They just
contend that these athletes did not suffer academically because they
were in the wonderful learning environment of the University of North
Carolina. Yeah Right!
UNC Fudging the Grades of Athletes
"Scandal Bowl: Why Tar Heel Fraud Might Be Just the Start," by
Paul M. Barrett, Bloomberg Businessweek, January 6, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-06/unc-athletic-scandal-charges-of-fraud-could-be-tip-of-wider-revelations?campaign_id=DN010614
The corruption
of academics at the University of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill
campus could turn into the most revelatory of all of the
undergraduate sports scandals in recent memory. Beginning three
years ago with what sounded like garden-variety reports of
under-the-table payments from agents and improper classroom help for
athletes, the affair has spread and deepened to include evidence of
hundreds of sham courses offered since the early 1990s. Untold
numbers of grades have been changed without authorization and
faculty signatures forged—all in the service of an elaborate
campaign to keep elite basketball and football players academically
eligible to play.
After belatedly catching up with the UNC
debacle in this recent dispatch,
I’ve decided the still-developing story
deserves wider attention. Or, to put it more precisely, the
excellent reporting already done by the
News & Observer of Raleigh merits amplification outside of
North Carolina.
The rot in Chapel
Hill undermines UNC’s reputation as one of the nation’s finest
public institutions of higher learning. Officials created classes
that did not meet. That’s not the only reason more scrutiny is
needed. There’s also the particularly pernicious way that the
school’s African and Afro-American Studies Department has been used
to inflate the GPAs of basketball and football players. The
corruption of a scholarly discipline devoted to black history and
culture underscores a racial subtext to the exploitation of college
athletes that typically goes unidentified in polite discussion.
(UNC’s former longtime Afro-Am chairman, Julius Nyang’oro, has been
criminally indicted for fraud.)
Another reason
Chapel Hill requires sustained investigation is the manner in which
the athletic and academic hierarchies at UNC, along with the
National Collegiate Athletic Association, have so far whitewashed
the scandal. Officials have repeatedly denied that the fiasco’s
roots trace to an illicit agenda that, in the name of coddling a
disproportionately black undergraduate athlete population, has left
many students intellectually crippled.
Dan Kane, the News & Observer‘s
lead investigative reporter, does old-school, just-the-facts-m’am
work—and more power to him. Digging up the basic data has been a
lonely and arduous task for which Kane has been rewarded with craven
accusations of home state disloyalty. As he wrote
last month, the six official “reviews” and
“investigations” of the wayward Afro-Am Department have all failed
to connect the dots in any meaningful way. In coming weeks and
months, I hope I can supplement Kane’s dogged efforts with some
long-distance perspective. Valuable tips from concerned local
people, some of them UNC alumni, are already pouring in, and that’s
part of the reason I’m going to pursue the story. Keep those e-mails
coming.
One source of
insight is Jay Smith, a professor of early modern French history at
UNC. A serious scholar who understands the university’s sports-happy
culture, Smith has developed a powerful distaste for the way his
employer has obfuscated the scandal. “What’s going on here is so
important,” he told me by telephone, “because it’s emblematic of
what I think goes on at major universities all across the country,”
where the business of sports undermines the mission of education.
That sounds right to me.
Smith has the best
sort of self-interested motivation for making sense of what has
happened on his campus: He’s writing a book about the whole mess,
based in part on statistics and personal experiences proffered by
UNC instructors assigned over the years to assist varsity athletes.
To me that sounds like a page-turner—and even the basis of an HBO
movie.
I asked Smith what
he thinks is going to happen next. He pointed to comments that the
local district attorney made when the disgraced former Afro-Am
chairman, Nyang’oro, was indicted in December. Orange County DA Jim
Woodall told the News & Observer that a second person is
also under investigation and could be indicted soon. Woodall did not
identify the second target, except to say the person is not someone
who currently works for UNC. ”Other probes have identified
Nyang’oro’s longtime department manager, Deborah Crowder, as being
involved in the bogus classes,” the News & Observer noted.
“She retired in 2009.” Both Crowder and Nyang’oro have refused to
comment publicly, and Nyang’oro’s criminal defense lawyer didn’t
return my e-mail inquiry.
The indictment of
Crowder, a relatively low-level administrative figure, could crack
open the case. It defies logic that Nyang’oro and his assistant
would have operated a rogue department without the knowledge of more
senior faculty members, if not top university administrators. It
further defies reason that this pair would have created phony
classes for athletes without the urging and participation of people
in the UNC athletic bureaucracy. Nyang’oro and Crowder are going to
have ample reason to sing as part of potential plea deals.
Even before
that happens, according to Smith, one or more well-positioned
whistle-blowers are likely to go public and start naming names if
they think the powers that be are planning to isolate Crowder and
Nyang’oro as the sole villains. This thing goes much higher, and
there’s much more to come from Chapel Hill.
"Alleged Academic Fraud at U. of North Carolina Tests NCAA's
Reach: Myths surrounding the group's investigation cloud the
controversy at Chapel Hill," by Brad Wolverton, Chronicle of
Higher Education, September 7, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Alleged-Academic-Fraud-at-U/134270/
"North
Carolina Admits to Academic Fraud in Sports Program,"
Inside Higher Ed, September 20, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/09/20/qt#270772
Chapel Hill Researcher at Center of Turmoil Over Athletes’
Literacy Resigns ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/chapel-hill-researcher-at-center-of-turmoil-over-athletes-literacy-resigns/76317?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
"University of North Carolina learning specialist receives death
threats after her research finds one in 10 college athletes have reading
age of a THIRD GRADER," by Sara Malm, Daily Mail, January 10, 2014
---
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2537041/University-North-Carolina-learning-specialist-receives-death-threats-research-finds-one-10-college-athletes-reading-age-fifth-grader.html
Mary Willingham exposed college athletes'
lack of academic abilities
- She found that 10 per cent read at
elementary school level
- A majority of players' reading level
was between 4th and 8th grade
- Men's basketball makes $16.9m-a-year
for University of North Carolina
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
More often than not employers make it uncomfortable for whistleblowers
who don't resign. UNC does not deny that for ten years varsity athletes
took fake courses and were "allowed" to change their grades. They just
contend that these athletes did not suffer academically because they
were in the wonderful learning environment of the University of North
Carolina. Yeah Right!
UNC Fudging the Grades of Athletes
"Scandal Bowl: Why Tar Heel Fraud Might Be Just the Start," by
Paul M. Barrett, Bloomberg Businessweek, January 6, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-06/unc-athletic-scandal-charges-of-fraud-could-be-tip-of-wider-revelations?campaign_id=DN010614
The corruption
of academics at the University of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill
campus could turn into the most revelatory of all of the
undergraduate sports scandals in recent memory. Beginning three
years ago with what sounded like garden-variety reports of
under-the-table payments from agents and improper classroom help for
athletes, the affair has spread and deepened to include evidence of
hundreds of sham courses offered since the early 1990s. Untold
numbers of grades have been changed without authorization and
faculty signatures forged—all in the service of an elaborate
campaign to keep elite basketball and football players academically
eligible to play.
After belatedly catching up with the UNC
debacle in this recent dispatch,
I’ve decided the still-developing story
deserves wider attention. Or, to put it more precisely, the
excellent reporting already done by the
News & Observer of Raleigh merits amplification outside of
North Carolina.
The rot in Chapel
Hill undermines UNC’s reputation as one of the nation’s finest
public institutions of higher learning. Officials created classes
that did not meet. That’s not the only reason more scrutiny is
needed. There’s also the particularly pernicious way that the
school’s African and Afro-American Studies Department has been used
to inflate the GPAs of basketball and football players. The
corruption of a scholarly discipline devoted to black history and
culture underscores a racial subtext to the exploitation of college
athletes that typically goes unidentified in polite discussion. (UNC’s
former longtime Afro-Am chairman, Julius Nyang’oro, has been
criminally indicted for fraud.)
Another reason
Chapel Hill requires sustained investigation is the manner in which
the athletic and academic hierarchies at UNC, along with the
National Collegiate Athletic Association, have so far whitewashed
the scandal. Officials have repeatedly denied that the fiasco’s
roots trace to an illicit agenda that, in the name of coddling a
disproportionately black undergraduate athlete population, has left
many students intellectually crippled.
Dan Kane, the News & Observer‘s
lead investigative reporter, does old-school, just-the-facts-m’am
work—and more power to him. Digging up the basic data has been a
lonely and arduous task for which Kane has been rewarded with craven
accusations of home state disloyalty. As he wrote
last month, the six official “reviews” and
“investigations” of the wayward Afro-Am Department have all failed
to connect the dots in any meaningful way. In coming weeks and
months, I hope I can supplement Kane’s dogged efforts with some
long-distance perspective. Valuable tips from concerned local
people, some of them UNC alumni, are already pouring in, and that’s
part of the reason I’m going to pursue the story. Keep those e-mails
coming.
One source of
insight is Jay Smith, a professor of early modern French history at
UNC. A serious scholar who understands the university’s sports-happy
culture, Smith has developed a powerful distaste for the way his
employer has obfuscated the scandal. “What’s going on here is so
important,” he told me by telephone, “because it’s emblematic of
what I think goes on at major universities all across the country,”
where the business of sports undermines the mission of education.
That sounds right to me.
Smith has the best
sort of self-interested motivation for making sense of what has
happened on his campus: He’s writing a book about the whole mess,
based in part on statistics and personal experiences proffered by
UNC instructors assigned over the years to assist varsity athletes.
To me that sounds like a page-turner—and even the basis of an HBO
movie.
I asked Smith what
he thinks is going to happen next. He pointed to comments that the
local district attorney made when the disgraced former Afro-Am
chairman, Nyang’oro, was indicted in December. Orange County DA Jim
Woodall told the News & Observer that a second person is
also under investigation and could be indicted soon. Woodall did not
identify the second target, except to say the person is not someone
who currently works for UNC. ”Other probes have identified
Nyang’oro’s longtime department manager, Deborah Crowder, as being
involved in the bogus classes,” the News & Observer noted.
“She retired in 2009.” Both Crowder and Nyang’oro have refused to
comment publicly, and Nyang’oro’s criminal defense lawyer didn’t
return my e-mail inquiry.
The indictment of
Crowder, a relatively low-level administrative figure, could crack
open the case. It defies logic that Nyang’oro and his assistant
would have operated a rogue department without the knowledge of more
senior faculty members, if not top university administrators. It
further defies reason that this pair would have created phony
classes for athletes without the urging and participation of people
in the UNC athletic bureaucracy. Nyang’oro and Crowder are going to
have ample reason to sing as part of potential plea deals.
Even before
that happens, according to Smith, one or more well-positioned
whistle-blowers are likely to go public and start naming names if
they think the powers that be are planning to isolate Crowder and
Nyang’oro as the sole villains. This thing goes much higher, and
there’s much more to come from Chapel Hill.
"Alleged Academic Fraud at U. of North Carolina Tests NCAA's
Reach: Myths surrounding the group's investigation cloud the
controversy at Chapel Hill," by Brad Wolverton, Chronicle of
Higher Education, September 7, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Alleged-Academic-Fraud-at-U/134270/
"North
Carolina Admits to Academic Fraud in Sports Program,"
Inside Higher Ed, September 20, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/09/20/qt#270772
"Charge Is Dropped Against Ex-Official in Chapel Hill Academic Scandal,
by Andy Thomason, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 7, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/charge-is-dropped-against-ex-official-in-chapel-hill-academic-scandal/81137?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Prosecutors have dropped a felony charge
against Julius Nyang’oro, the former department chair at the center
of an academic scandal that has rocked the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, the
News & Observer reports.
The Orange County district attorney, Jim
Woodall, said the charge had been dismissed because of Mr.
Nyang’oro’s cooperation with both a criminal investigation and an
independent inquiry set to be completed in the fall.
Mr. Nyang’oro
had been charged with obtaining property
on false pretenses, for accepting $12,000 for a class he did not
teach. The allegation was part of
large-scale fraud in the department, which
featured fake classes populated by disproportionate numbers of
athletes. The
independent investigation,
led by a former U.S. Justice Department
official, seeks to find the origin and extent of the fraud.
Prompted by the willingness of individuals
“who were previously uncooperative”
to talk to its staff, the NCAA
announced on Monday that it would resume
its 2011 investigation into academic irregularities at the
university.
Continued in article
Question
How extensive was the University of North Carolina athletics phony
course and grade change cheating scandal?
Answer
Even though I made tidbits about this scandal early on, including that
about 10% of the athletes could not read at a third-grade level. I guess
it never sunk in how many years UNC officials were aware of the cheating
and how many athletes were part of this scandal.
. . . since the 1990s Nang' Oris'
department offered hundreds of fake "paper classes" that never
actually met. Some 500 grades had been changed without
authorization . . .
"UNC officials apologize for a huge sports scandal, while
attacking the woman who brought it to light," Bloomberg
Businessweek, February 3-9, 2014 ---
After trying for years to minimize an
academic corruption scandal on its prestigious Chapel Hill campus,
the University of North Carolina has abruptly switched
strategies---form obfuscation to mea culpa. The apologia comes with
a bitter footnote, though in the form of vilification of a campus
whistle-blower.
. . .
UNC called the police after an
internal university inquiry concluded that that
since the 1990s Nang' Oris' department offered
hundreds of fake "paper classes" that never actually met. Some
500 grades had been changed without authorization,
. . .
Also see
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-27/university-of-north-carolina-apologizes-for-fake-classes-promises-real-change
"Incomplete Passes: College-Athlete Academic Scandals," Bloomberg
Businessweek, February 27, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-27/incomplete-passes-college-athlete-academic-scandals
Academic irregularities related to athlete eligibility have
haunted several U.S. colleges.
Auburn (2006)
Helped by academic advisers, football players padded their
grade-point averages in “directed reading” classes.
Florida (2008)
Cam Newton,
now quarterback of the NFL’s Carolina Panthers, left Florida after
facing potential expulsion for cheating, Fox Sports reported.
Florida State (2009)
Academic advisers participated in taking tests and in writing papers
for basketball and football players.
Fresno State (2003)
The men’s basketball statistician and an academic adviser were
caught in a paper-writing-for-athletes scheme.
Georgia (2003)
The university withdrew from postseason play after basketball
players received inflated grades in a coaching class.
Memphis (2008)
The NCAA stripped the basketball team of its run to the finals after
Derrick Rose’s
SAT scores were ruled invalid.
Michigan (2008)
The Ann Arbor News reported that from 2004 to 2007, 251
athletes took independent study classes with the same professor and
received suspiciously high grades.
Minnesota (1999)
The basketball team had tournament victories erased after hundreds
of assignments were completed for players.
Stanford (2011)
Academic advisers discontinued a list of classes recommended for
years because they were easy and/or convenient.
Tennessee (2000)
ESPN profiled an English professor whose objections led the
university to acknowledge that, on average, athletes received twice
as many grade changes as other students.
USC (2001)
The NCAA issued sanctions against the football and women’s swimming
teams after tutors were found to have written papers for athletes.
Others --- See Below
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating in higher education ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
"Should College Athletes be paid?" by Steven Mintz, Ethics
Sage, August 13, 2013 ---
http://www.ethicssage.com/2013/08/should-college-athletes-be-paid.html
Jensen Comment
This raises all sorts of matching questions regarding revenues and
costs. Should revenues from the extremely popular Women's basketball
team at the University of Connecticut go into an athletes' compensation
pool that also rewards the less popular softball and volleyball players?
Should revenues from the extremely popular medical school faculty
performing services at the Stanford University Hospital go into an
faculty compensation pool that also rewards the less popular classics
professors or should it only go into a medical faculty compensation
pool?
"What the Hell Has Happened to College Sports?" Chronicle
of Higher Education, December 11, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/What-the-Hell-Has-Happened-to/130071/
Having, with the help of Penn State, found
himself fully aware inside of a whorehouse, Feeney now proposes that we
do a sort of Las Vegas, a sort of Italy, on big-time college sports.
"Kentucky is the ugly truth the NCAA wants to hide, and Duke is
the hysterical lie they hide it with," Inside Higher Ed,
November 12, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university-diaries/ugly-truth-hysterical-lie
How the NCAA Misleads With Statistics
"Gaps in Grad Rates for Athletes," by Allie Grasgreen, Inside
Higher Ed, September 25, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/09/25/report-finds-football-players-graduate-rates-lower-full-time-student-peers
The National Collegiate Athletic
Association
likes to boast that athletes graduate at
rates higher than non-athletes – in some cases, significantly
higher. But the tool the NCAA uses to make that assertion -- the
Graduation Success Rate, or GSR -- follows a unique formula that
factors out athletes who transfer in good academic standing, instead
counting them as graduates.
That is not the case with the Federal
Graduation Rate, an older measurement required by the government
(which is why the NCAA developed the GSR in the first place). But
the federal rate counts only full-time, first-time students who
graduate from the institution where they began. That means that
students who go part-time or take breaks bring down an institution's
graduation rate, again making it a less-than-ideal benchmark for
comparison, given that all athletes (unlike other students) are
required to maintain full course loads.
Enter the
Adjusted Graduation Gap, a model that
compares athletes’ graduation rates by conference and sport directly
to the rates of their non-athlete peers by factoring out part-time
students. The annual installment looking at the adjusted gaps for
football players was released today by the Collegiate Sport Research
Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“We know that part-time students graduate
at a much lower rate, and one of the reasons that we know affects
that is that they’re working,” said Richard Southall, an associate
professor of sport administration and coordinator of UNC’s Graduate
Sport Administration Program. “Instead of saying, ‘Well, athletes
graduate at a rate that’s better,’ instead of making just short
sound bites, let’s look at the situation and say, ‘Athletes from
different sports are different.’ It’s like students at different
colleges are different.”
And using the AGG model does paint a
different picture. In most athletic conferences, athletes graduate
at rates lower than non-athletes; the gap is widest (for the third
year in a row) in the Pacific 12 Conference, where football players
graduated at rates 27 percentage points lower (in other words, an
AGG of -27) compared to full-time male students at those
institutions in the 2004-10 cohort, the latest data available.
For the most part, the gaps are largest in
the conferences that are most successful athletically. Rounding out
the “bottom five” with the starkest rate differences are the
Atlantic Coast Conference (-22), the Big Ten Conference (-20), the
Western Athletic Conference (-19), and the Southeastern Conference
(-18).
The smallest differences were found in the
Mountain West Conference and Conference USA, both of which had gaps
of -13.
And with this, the third installment of the
AGG football report, Southall included averages since the report’s
inception. “We see that things aren’t changing significantly one way
or another,” he said. While some conference figures have shifted
somewhat, he said, that could be the result of realignment.
Adjusted Graduation Gap
by Athletic Conference
| Football Bowl Series |
2012 Adjusted
Graduation Gap |
Three-year
Average AGG |
| Conference USA |
-13 |
-14 |
| Mountain West Conference |
-13 |
-18 |
| Big 12 Conference |
-14 |
-16 |
| Mid-Atlantic Conference |
-14 |
-13 |
| Sun Belt Conference |
-15 |
-15 |
| Big East Conference |
-15 |
-14 |
| Southeastern Conference |
-18 |
-18 |
| Western Athletic Conference |
-19 |
-19 |
| Big Ten Conference |
-20 |
-21 |
| Atlantic Coast Conference |
-22 |
-21 |
| Pacific-12 Conference |
-27 |
-28 |
| Mean |
-17 |
-19 |
| Football Championship
Series |
|
|
| Southwestern Athletic Conference |
+10 |
+7 |
| Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference |
+1 |
+1 |
| Big South Conference |
-4 |
-3 |
| Southern Conference |
-5 |
-5 |
| Missouri Valley Conference |
-9 |
-11 |
| Patriot League |
-10 |
-11 |
| Northeast Conference |
-10 |
-10 |
| Colonial Athletic Association |
-11 |
-11 |
| Ohio Valley Conference |
-14 |
-17 |
| Southland Conference |
-16 |
-13 |
| Big Sky Conference |
-17 |
-19 |
| Mean |
-8 |
-9 |
The only conferences with positive AGGs
were the Southwestern Athletic Conference (+10) and the Mid-Eastern
Athletic Conference, both of which are made up of historically black
colleges in their respective regions.
For the first time, the report also
compared AGGs of black and white football players at Division I
institutions. The gaps range from +10 and +7 for black and white
players, respectively, in the SWAC, to -34 and -17 in the Pac-12.
“It’s three times more likely that black
football players [in the Football Bowl Series conferences] don’t
graduate at that same rate” as black non-athletes, Southall said.
“We haven’t done enough long-term research to be able to say why
this is occurring. All we know is you can see the gaps are much
larger at high-performing conferences.”
The NCAA said in a statement that "there is
no evidence that any part-time bias exists in graduation rates, and
this approach does not account for the wide variety of campuses and
types of students at those campuses."
"This so-called study is simply a
hypothetical exercise. The only fair comparison is with actual
full-time students," the statement said. "Both the NCAA Graduation
Success Rate and the federal graduation rate count actual students
and already allow for part-time behavior with their six-year
graduation windows. Adjustment for student demographics and incoming
academic characteristics would be more realistic and useful. An even
better approach would be for the federal graduation rate to track
transfer students, like the NCAA GSR, because the GSR includes 35
percent more students in its calculation and is more accurate."
Southall doesn’t believe one graduate rate
measurement tool is superior to any other – they measure different
things, he says. But he argues that this more direct comparison to
the general student population’s graduation rates raises a number of
questions regarding NCAA and institutional policies.
Continued in article
"The Education of Dasmine Cathey," by Brad Wolverton,
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Education-of-Dasmine/132065/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
"Dasmine Cathey Reflects on His Moment in the Spotlight," by
Brad Wolverton, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 12, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/players/dasmine-reaction/30411
Jensen Comment
This is an article that each of us will probably react differently to
after reading it carefully. Some readers will see this as another case,
in a long list of cases, where a NCAA Division 1 university makes a sham
out of college education of a star, albeit learning disabled, athlete.
By sham I mean where the main goal is to make that athlete able to read
after four years --- whereas the goal for non-athletes in the university
is much higher. As a non-athlete he probably would have flunked out of
the university in the first year. The coaches helped pull him through
courses while he was still eligible to play football only to leave him
hanging out to dry in completing the requirements for a diploma.
Other readers will see this as a case where a learning disabled
student was pushed beyond what he might have otherwise been without
special treatment as an athlete in college. The tragedy is that his
non-athlete counterparts receive no such special treatment from
"coaches."
As a retired college professor I question the commitment of any
student who does not care enough to try by attending class every day and
by seeking help from the teachers.
Personally, I think if Dasmine Cathey gets his diploma it makes a
sham out of that diploma. Dasmine deserves better in life, but why does
it have to be at the expense of lowered academic standards in higher
education?
"Alleged Academic Fraud at U. of North Carolina Tests NCAA's
Reach: Myths surrounding the group's investigation cloud the
controversy at Chapel Hill," by Brad Wolverton, Chronicle of
Higher Education, September 7, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Alleged-Academic-Fraud-at-U/134270/
More than a year after allegations of
academic improprieties surfaced in the University of North
Carolina's athletic department, we're still a long way from knowing
the full extent of the problems and whether the NCAA might issue new
sanctions.
But you wouldn't know that from a statement
the university released last week, in which it said that the NCAA
had yet to find any rules violations following an apparently
extensive joint investigation. That assertion led to a chorus of
unfair criticism against the NCAA for failing to act.
Several investigations still have yet to be
completed in Chapel Hill, including one led by a former North
Carolina governor. And the allegations—which include reports of
players' enrolling in aberrant courses, unauthorized grade changes,
and forged faculty signatures—could still lead to NCAA sanctions,
say former enforcement and infractions officials at the NCAA, and
others familiar with its investigation.
What once looked like an open-and-shut case
of high-profile players' taking bogus classes to stay eligible is
anything but straightforward. Let's explore a few myths surrounding
the case, which could help explain the public's heightened
expectations of penalties and give clues to where things might be
headed.
1. Academic fraud constitutes an
NCAA violation.
Academic impropriety would appear to strike
at the heart of college sports and the NCAA's stated mission to be
"an integral part of higher education and to focus on the
development of our student-athletes."
Yet, despite being a cornerstone of NCAA
rules, the term "academic fraud" is mentioned only once in the
entire Division I manual, as a basis for postseason bans, says John
Infante, a former compliance officer at Colorado State University.
As hard as it may be for the public to
understand, the NCAA rarely gets involved in issues of academic
fraud, instead leaving it up to colleges to police the integrity of
their curricula.
In cases involving extra benefits for
athletes, preferential treatment of them, or recruiting violations,
the NCAA is and should be the sole arbiter, college officials say.
But in situations that touch on academic irregularities, NCAA
institutions have made it clear that they don't want the association
to meddle.
Unless a member of an athletic department
knowingly arranges for an athlete to receive fraudulent credit,
knows about such fraud, or helps facilitate improper grade changes
or other academic shenanigans, the NCAA usually stays away.
Likewise, if both nonathletes and athletes
are enrolled in the sham classes, the NCAA often doesn't get
involved. Its thinking: This goes beyond sports.
You can question the logic—some, in fact,
have said any form of academic misconduct deserves the NCAA's
attention—but it's hard to argue that the NCAA is better positioned
to enforce academic standards than the faculty.
2. This is one of the biggest
academic scandals college sports has ever seen.
Pat Forde, the national college columnist
for Yahoo! Sports, was among several writers to weigh in on the
problems in recent weeks, saying that North Carolina seems to have
"made a mockery of its ballyhooed academic mission for a long time
in order to gain competitive advantage in football and men's
basketball." Its alleged violations, he argued, could call for the
most severe of NCAA penalties, as it may have demonstrated a lack of
institutional control.
A
university report
released in May found that Julius Nyang'oro, a former chair of the
department of African and Afro-American studies, and Deborah
Crowder, a former department manager, had been involved in creating
at least 54 classes that had little or no instruction.
Through a public-records request, the
Raleigh
News & Observer
determined that
athletes had accounted
for nearly two-thirds of the enrollments, with football players
taking up more than a third of the seats.
Last month the
newspaper found evidence
that Julius Peppers, a former two-sport star at North Carolina who
is now an all-pro player in the NFL, had gotten D's and F's in many
courses, but had received a B or better in some of the no-show ones.
According to the player's transcript, which
the university accidentally posted on its Web site, he was allowed
to take an independent-studies class the summer after his freshman
year—a course typically offered to more-experienced students who
have demonstrated academic proficiency. Those classes appeared to
help Mr. Peppers maintain his eligibility in football and
basketball. (In a statement released by his agent, Mr. Peppers said
he had committed no academic fraud.)
It's hard to see how those alleged
transgressions, which stretched back to the 1990s, didn't provide
certain athletes with an unfair advantage. But are they among the
worst ever, as some observers have claimed?
On the continuum of academic fraud in the
NCAA, the worst violations usually involve accusations of academic
dishonesty, in which someone else does the work for the athletes or
they either buy or plagiarize papers or get access to exam answers
ahead of time, says Mr. Infante, the former Colorado State
compliance officer, who now works as an NCAA expert for
Athleticscholarships.net, a Web site on recruiting.
On the opposite end, he says, are examples
of athletes who cluster in easier majors or are directed into snap
courses.
Somewhere in the middle are
independent-study courses where there's less assurance that the
players are actually doing the work.
Poorly supervised independent-study courses
were part of the problem at North Carolina, the university's report
says. But the university also found evidence that students had
completed written work.
For those and other reasons, maybe this
won't turn out to be one of the worst academic scandals we've seen,
says Mr. Infante. But the North Carolina case could turn out to be
one of the more important ones in pushing the NCAA and member
institutions to take a closer look at how athletes progress through
the system.
"The NCAA as a whole ... needs to move
beyond [the Academic Progress Rate] and the awarding of degrees into
regulating how athletes are educated," he says. "If it starts with
stricter regulation of online and independent-study classes, that
sounds like a good first step."
3. The NCAA went outside its
typical judicial process to punish Penn State. It should do the same
with North Carolina.
Mr. Forde, the Yahoo! columnist, believes
the situation demands a signal from Mark Emmert, the NCAA's
president. "Will he and the NCAA Executive Committee cowboy up
again?" he wrote last month. "Will they circumvent the rules manual
and due process and go after Carolina on the basis of general
principle, à la Penn State?"
Earlier this year the NCAA penalized North
Carolina after members of its football team committed academic fraud
and multiple athletes accepted $31,000 in impermissible benefits.
But as the academic problems there have widened, NCAA leaders have
made it clear they're in no hurry.
They have also done what they can to
distance the problems at North Carolina from those at Penn State,
where a former assistant football coach serially molested young boys
while top administrators reportedly worked to conceal the crimes.
The alleged cover-up led Mr. Emmert to impose unprecedented
penalties on the university, including a $60-million fine and a
four-year bowl ban.
But as recently as last week, Mr. Emmert
called the Penn State situation extraordinary and said he hoped he
never had to exercise that type of power again.
Continued in article
"North
Carolina Admits to Academic Fraud in Sports Program,"
Inside Higher Ed, September 20, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/09/20/qt#270772
The Privileged Learners on Campus With Scholarships and Tutors
"Big Sports Programs Step Up Hiring to Help Marginal Students,"
by Brad Wolverton, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 4, 2012
---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/players/the-fastest-growing-job-in-sports-helping-marginal-students/30171
"What the Hell Has Happened to College Sports?"
Chronicle of Higher Education, December 11, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/What-the-Hell-Has-Happened-to/130071/
Flaunting the
NCAA Academic Standards for Top Athletes
"Bad Apples or More?" by Doug Lederman, Inside Highe Ed,
February 7, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/02/07/ncaa_punishes_almost_half_of_members_of_football_bowl_subdivision_for_major_rules_violations
"College athletes studies guided toward 'major in eligibility'," by
Jill Steeg et al., USA Today, November 2008, Page 1A ---
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/2008-11-18-majors-cover_N.htm
"The Education of Dasmine Cathey," by Brad Wolverton,
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Education-of-Dasmine/132065/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
"Dasmine Cathey Reflects on His Moment in the Spotlight," by
Brad Wolverton, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 12, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/players/dasmine-reaction/30411
Has academic fraud become the name of the game in NCAA Division 1
athletics?
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics
In the wake of cheating scandals the Chancellor of the University of
North Carolina resigns
"The Achilles Heel," by Kevin Kiley, Inside Higher Ed, September
18, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/09/18/unc-president-steps-down-after-two-years-athletics-scandals
You can’t plan for everything, and
increasingly it seems like the one thing you don’t plan for will
undermine your public university presidency.
Holden Thorp, chancellor at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, announced Monday that he would
step down as chancellor at the end of the school year, only his
fifth on the job, a premature exit for a chancellor whom many
expected to serve at least 10 years.
Prior to being named chancellor in May 2008
at just 43 years old, Thorp had risen meteorically through the ranks
of UNC’s administration, from professor to dean of the university’s
College of Arts and Sciences in five years, and was seen as
something of a wunderkind. A UNC graduate with deep ties to the
state, a noted chemist who spent his career at the university, and a
successful entrepreneur, Thorp was viewed by many as a perfect fit
for helping move the university into the 21st century, bring
entrepreneurship and innovation to the forefront of campus activity,
and confront a litany of challenges related to funding, direction
and academics.
But less than six months into his tenure,
the country and state’s economies collapsed, forcing Thorp to
confront budget cuts, salary freezes and protracted revenue
constraints. The state’s political leadership, once immensely
supportive of UNC-Chapel Hill and the rest of the university system,
saw significant turnover in 2010. And since 2010, the university has
been plagued by a series of scandals -- many originating in the
university’s athletics program – that have dominated local media
headlines.
Many at UNC say Thorp's seemingly perfect
pedigree for the job was undermined by what he inherited: a series
of headline-grabbing and time-consuming problems that they say would
doom any president. “Holden Thorp was largely the victim of
circumstance,” said Jay Smith, a history professor at the university
who worked on a faculty investigation of the university’s athletics
problems. “His experience shows just how treacherous the waters of
higher education are right now. If someone of his talents and energy
and commitment can’t succeed in this position, it makes you wonder
who can.”
But others say that Thorp’s background in
academics and quick rise through the ranks left him unprepared to
tackle the types of Gordian knots that modern university presidents
face, particularly the athletics scandals. “The drip-drip-drip of
scandals suggest that Thorp has a poor understanding of shortcomings
on his campus and insufficient appreciation of their import once
they come to his attention,” wrote
The Charlotte Observer’s
editorial board on Sunday.
A spokesman for UNC-Chapel Hill said Thorp
did not have time Monday to respond to a request for comment.
Regardless of the exact reason for Thorp’s
departure, he is the latest in a long list of prominent public
university presidents who were either forced out of their positions
or chose to step down in the past two years. That list includes the
presidents of the University of Arizona, the University of Wisconsin
at Madison, the University of Oregon, Pennsylvania State University,
and, depending on the criteria, the University of Virginia, whose
president was reinstated shortly after she was forced out.
In many cases, these presidents said they
were either driven out by scandals that happened on their watch but
that they were unaware of, or that political forces conspired to
drive them out. You can do everything right, they say, and the job
will still find a way to bring you down.
Higher education observers say the
widespread turnover – and
occasional panic by boards – is indicative
of broader shifts in the higher education landscape that are making
the role of public university president increasingly difficult and
different from any other job.
“These universities are going through
historic, unprecedented change that no one is prepared for. Truly,
it’s an environment where, particularly at large universities,
you’re responsible for bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars
in research funding, hundreds of millions in endowments, engaging in
economic development and entrepreneurial activity,” said Lucy Leske,
vice president, partner, and co-director of the education and
not-for-profit practice at Witt/Kieffer, an executive search firm.
“How can you be trained for this?”
Those shifts are forcing people like Leske
to reconsider how colleges and universities choose new leaders.
A Difficult Job
Flagship Public University President Departures since
2010Resignations:
Firings:
“Near Misses”:
By many measures of university success, UNC-Chapel
Hill thrived under Thorp’s leadership. The institution has been
steadily climbing the ranks in terms of research expenditures,
cracking the top 10 this year. Student applications increased, and
the academic profile of the incoming class was at its highest
levels. Fund-raising increased despite the recession.
Immediately prior to the recession the
university brought in management consultants Bain & Company to
review the institution’s administrative structure and find ways to
reduce costs. The university made
national headlines for that review, the
recommendations from which are estimated to save $50 million a year.
Other notable universities, including the University of California
at Berkeley, Cornell University and the University of Connecticut,
have since hired consultants to perform similar work.
Joe Templeton, a long-serving chemistry
professor at UNC who once chaired the university’s faculty and has
led the implementation of the Bain report as special assistant to
the chancellor, said that in terms of faculty and student success,
the university is right where it should be. “As far as the things
that as faculty we care about and pay attention to, the structure is
in good shape and the future is bright,” he said.
But Templeton and others note that those
victories have been overshadowed by the myriad scandals Thorp has
faced, particularly in the state and in the local media.
First there was the NCAA investigation into
the university’s football program that found that players received
impermissible benefits from agents. The football program received
sanctions from the NCAA that included a one-year ban in post-season
play and scholarship reductions. That scandal led to the firing of
head football coach Butch Davis -- a story that caught national
attention and generated significant controversy among fans and
alumni -- and the resignation of longtime athletic director Dick
Baddour.
The football scandal also uncovered
academic fraud by some members of the football team, including
evidence that a tutor altered players’ papers.
Continued in article
Professors who let students cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#RebeccaHoward
Coaches who let students cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics
The Privileged Learners on Campus With Scholarships and Tutors
"Big Sports Programs Step Up Hiring to Help Marginal Students,"
by Brad Wolverton, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 4, 2012
---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/players/the-fastest-growing-job-in-sports-helping-marginal-students/30171
As
my cover story
in this week’s Chronicle illustrates,
major-college athletics programs are investing more time and money
to help players who have serious reading, writing, and learning
problems.
While some may question the cost—and
whether colleges have lowered their academic standards by moving
such low-functioning students through the system—others defend the
spending, saying that specialized academic advisers have helped
athletes and could help other students, too.
Over the past year, nearly one in five
big-time athletic departments has created a new learning-specialist
position to work with at-risk athletes, according to a recent
national survey of academic advisers. Baylor, Maryland, Missouri,
Purdue, and UCLA are but a few of the 23 Football Bowl Subdivision
programs that have added a learning specialist in that time
(see the full list
here).
There are approximately 150 learning
specialists in the FBS, according to the survey of academic
advisers, which was done last month by Bradley R.H. Bethel, a
reading and writing specialist in the athletic department at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And while there are
still far more academic advisers (roughly 740 at FBS programs), jobs
for learning specialists are growing much faster, he found.
“All these student-athletes are coming to
campus who are really underprepared, which is why the need for
learning specialists has arisen,” says Bethel, who got responses
from 53 of 120 FBS programs.
This week, at the annual meeting of the
National Association of Academic Advisors for Athletics, Bethel will
present recommendations for a
new set of professional standards for
learning specialists, whose job descriptions can vary greatly. Most
are trained to teach basic reading and writing skills and to work
with students who have learning disabilities and other academic
deficiencies. But Bethel’s goal is to help define the profession
more clearly so he and his colleagues across the country understand
what is expected of them.
For good or ill, Bethel says, our society
puts a high value on sports—and because colleges play to win, they
are accepting students who might not otherwise make it into their
institutions. Bethel sees that as an opportunity, both for those
students and for the learning specialists who help them.
Continued in article
"How Insiders Use the College Bowl System to Loot American
Universities," by Pete Kotz, Phoenix New Times, December 15,
2011 ---
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2011-12-15/news/how-insiders-use-the-college-bowl-system-to-loot-american-universities/
Thanks to Richard Campbell for the heads up.
By the time the 2009 football season rolled
around, the University of Minnesota hadn't won a Big Ten title in 42
years. The Gophers largely spent those decades serving as target
practice for the league's higher powers, yet they weren't without
occasional bursts of second-string glory.
One arrived two years ago. Minnesota
finished 6-6, collecting the minimum wins needed to earn a slot in
the Insight Bowl in Tempe.
Their bragging rights would be slender.
Every year, 70 of Division I football's 120 teams get bowl
invitations, making faceless games like the Insight akin to summer
camp participation awards.
Minnesota would face Iowa State, a 6-6 team
from the Big 12. The teams were charged with providing three hours
of TV programming for hardcore fans and shut-ins just before New
Year's. The ratings would be measured in decimal points.
But within the U of M football offices in
Minneapolis, there was cause for celebration, however muted. Though
the game orbited well outside the realm of consequence, it was still
a chance to reward players, boast to recruits, liquor up boosters,
and feed a small army of university suits with a paid vacation in
the Arizona sun.
The accounting office no doubt held a much
different view. It surely knew that, like nearly all bowls, the
Insight was designed to plunder all it could from a college
treasury.
The bloodbath began the moment the contract
was signed. Minnesota was obligated to write a check for 10,000
tickets, which were supposed to be resold to fans. Never mind that
even the best of teams struggle to unload such sums. For middling
squads like the Gophers, it was nothing more than a way for the men
in funny yellow blazers who ran the Insight to grab piles of money
from a public university.
Minnesota managed to sell just 901 seats.
After kicking another 900 to the band, administrators, and cherished
hangers-on, the school was forced to eat $476,000 worth of useless
tickets.
The contract also required the team to show
up a week early, if only to burn as much school money as possible at
the restaurants and retailers of Greater Phoenix.
One would think school administrators would
protest such gall. But one would be wrong. They were quick to see
the advantages of a luxury vacation on the school's dime. So they
happily signed off.
The school's traveling party was larded up
with 722 people, including players, band members, and faculty.
Airfare alone ran $542,000. Toss in hotels and meals, and the school
had blown $1.3 million before the opening kickoff.
The ballsiest part of all: None of it was
necessary.
Minnesota and Iowa State sit less than 200
miles apart. Their teams were providing the game. Their bands
supplied the halftime entertainment. In fact, the Insight offered
nothing — save for warm weather — that the schools couldn't have
done better themselves.
Had the game been played in Minneapolis,
the teams could have sold more tickets and put on a profitable game,
since Big Ten matches typically generate $1 million to $2 million —
not knee-bending losses.
Yet none of this was ever considered.
Thanks to an alliance of unblushing incompetence and corruption,
college football long ago decided to outsource its most valuable
asset — its post-season earnings.
The scheme plays out each year on the
ostensibly pristine fields of amateur athletics. Bowl executives
grant themselves breathtaking salaries. The games, meanwhile,
provide coaches, athletic directors, and the suits who nominally
supervise them with an unending stream of bonuses.
Everyone else picks up the tab.
There's a reason cities hosting Super Bowls
or rounds of March Madness bid with buffets of giveaways just to
land the tourist traffic: If you want a taste, you have to pay.
College football is the only sport that
gives away its postseason revenues. Its business model is akin to
Walmart keeping its profits for the first 10 months of the year,
then letting Value World host its holiday sales.
This is an especially hazardous form of
capitalism for the nation's universities, which have been bloodied
by ever-diving state funding combined with double-digit tuition
hikes. And contrary to popular belief, their athletic departments
just widen the damage.
Depending upon the year, only about 20 of
the 120 athletic departments featuring Division I football actually
pay for themselves. The rest require students and taxpayers to ride
to the rescue.
Minnesota is typical. From 2006 to 2009,
the Gophers went to three Insight Bowls. Their bill for unsold
tickets alone was well over $1 million. At the same time, their
athletic department needed a $25 million infusion over five years
just to break even.
These kinds of losses could be allayed if
college football simply cut out the middlemen — the bowls — and took
its postseason in-house by adopting a playoff system. Instead,
universities have chosen to hand their money away in a deal that's
at best moronic, and at worst an epic swindle.
The racket works like this: Through
required purchases of anywhere from 10,000 to 17,500 tickets,
schools essentially pay for the right to appear in a bowl. The bowls
keep the ticket and sponsorship money. Bowl execs also negotiate
their own TV contracts.
After taking 50 percent to 60 percent off
the top, the bowls then write checks to the teams' conferences. The
conferences, in turn, split that money among their schools. (Profits
from the five Bowl Championship Series games are spread to varying
degrees among all conferences.)
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Wide Gaps Between Graduation Rates of Football Players Versus
Other Males in NCAA Division 1 Universities ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/09/01/qt#269379
Wide gaps persist in the graduation rates
of Division I football players and other male students, and these
gaps are not limited to "football factory" institutions, according
to a report released this morning by the College Sport Research
Institute of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The
study found only two conferences in Division I -- the Southwestern
Athletic Conference and the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference -- in
which football players graduated at rates greater than the full-time
male student body. The Pac-12 (formerly the Pac-10) had the greatest
gap, with football players graduating at a rate 26 points lower than
other male students.
Also see
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/big-graduation-rate-gap-looms-between-football-players-and-full-time-male-students/35848
Flaunting the NCAA Academic Standards for Top Athletes
"Bad Apples or More?" by Doug Lederman, Inside Highe Ed,
February 7, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/02/07/ncaa_punishes_almost_half_of_members_of_football_bowl_subdivision_for_major_rules_violations
The National Collegiate Athletic
Association punished nearly half of all big-time college sports
programs for major violations of its rules in the last decade, an
Inside Higher Ed analysis shows.
The review finds that 53 of the 120
universities in the NCAA’s top competitive level, the Football Bowl
Subdivision, were found by the NCAA's Division I Committee on
Infractions to have committed major rules violations from 2001 to
2010. That number appears to have held largely constant from the
previous two decades, but the 2000s show that the number of colleges
that committed serious violations of the association’s academic
rules nearly doubled, to 15 from 8 in the 1990s.
Exactly what these results say about the
state of NCAA rule-breaking and enforcement is to some extent in the
eye of the beholder. To many critics of big-time college sports, the
fact that so many major programs committed what the association
deems major violations of its rules is likely to undermine the
argument -- historically heard from some sports officials -- that
rule-breaking is relegated to “a few bad apples” (an argument likely
to resonate with those paying attention to the debate in Washington
over for-profit colleges).
To others, though, the large number of
colleges ensnared in the NCAA’s infractions process is evidence that
the association has an impossibly complex (and, some would argue,
arcane) set of rules that virtually no program can follow to a tee.
Some argue that college and university sports officials -- with
bigger compliance staffs and more cooperation with NCAA
investigators -- are doing a much better job ferreting out (and
self-reporting) wrongdoing in their own programs.
Still others point out that, especially
compared to some of the high-profile pay-for-play and other scandals
of the 1980s and 1990s, many of the cases in the last decade involve
relatively minor violations, such as excessive phone calls to
recruits.
Yet even some experts who take a more
upbeat view of the infractions statistics admit to concern about the
increase in academically related violations, which they attribute,
at least in part, to changes in NCAA eligibility rules that lowered
the minimum academic requirements for freshmen and imposed penalties
on teams and colleges whose athletes do not make consistent progress
toward a degree. (See
related Views article here.)
Continued in article
NCAA hits the championship men's basketball team with one of 103 wet
towels
"NCAA Penalizes 103 Teams for Missing Academic-Progress Mark," by
Libby Sander, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 24, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/NCAA-Penalizes-103-Teams-for/127617/
The University of Connecticut men's
basketball team is the reigning NCAA champion, but it is also one of
a handful of marquee basketball and football programs to receive
penalties from the association this week for poor academic
performance.
The Huskies' score of 893 out of 1,000
points on the NCAA's annual academic-progress report, released on
Tuesday, was well below the cutoff point drawing a penalty of
reduced scholarships for the team. Five other basketball and
football programs in major athletic conferences scored below the
NCAA's benchmark of 925 out of a possible 1,000, down from a dozen
big-time teams last year.
In basketball the penalized teams included
Arkansas (892), Georgia Tech (915), and Louisiana State (905). Both
Arkansas and Georgia Tech's men's basketball programs received
penalties two years ago. The elite football teams receiving
penalties this year for their low academic-progress rates were
Louisville (908) and Maryland (922).
NCAA officials on Tuesday credited the
reduced number of teams receiving penalties to a willingness among
most athletic departments to make athletes’ academic performance a
priority. Over all, 350 of the NCAA's roughly 6,400 Division I teams
did not meet the academic mark, but just 103 were penalized. The
scores represent a four-year average of teams' academic-progress
rates from the 2006-7 to 2009-10 academic years.
The NCAA dealt the harshest punishment, a
one-year restriction on postseason competition, to eight teams at
seven institutions this year. (Last year only one program, the men's
basketball team at Portland State University, received that
penalty.) All were men's basketball and football programs. In
basketball the penalty went to California State University at
Northridge (871), Chicago State (823), Grambling State (873), and
the University of Louisiana at Monroe (852).
In football the teams suffering a
championship ban were Idaho State (888) and Jackson State (879).
Southern University at Baton Rouge received such a ban in both
football (899) and men's basketball (852).
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The Division 1 NCAA universities need more academic flexibility. For
example if basket weaving is just too tough in some sports management
programs or arranging the pieces in alphabetical order from an Alpha
Bits Cereal box, I mentioned last week that a greater variety of
academic team projects can be introduced in courses --- things like
arranging M&Ms in alphabetical order and choral singing of "100 Bottles
of Beer on the Wall."
Bob Jensen's threads on athletics controversies in higher
education are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics
"Former University of North Carolina professor faces fraud charge in
academic scandal," Fox News, December 2, 2013 ---
http://www.foxnews.com/sports/2013/12/02/former-university-north-carolina-professor-faces-fraud-charge-in-academic/
A former professor at the center of an
academic scandal involving athletes at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill has been charged with a felony, accused of
receiving $12,000 in payment for a lecture course in which he held
no classes.
A grand jury on Monday indicted Julius
Nyang'Oro with a single felony count of obtaining property by false
pretenses.
Nyang'Oro was chairman of the Department of
African and Afro-American Studies. He resigned from that post in
2011 during a campus investigation that found certain classes in the
department that instructors did not teach, undocumented grade
changes and faked faculty signatures on some grade reports.
The scandal contributed to the departure of
football coach Butch Davis and the resignation of a former
chancellor, Holden Thorp.
Nyang'Oro, who retired in 2012, could face
up to 10 months in prison if convicted. The university said it
recouped the $12,000 from his final paycheck.
Calls to two numbers listed for Nyang'Oro
rang busy. A man answering a call to a third number for Nyang'Oro on
indictment documents hung up without comment and follow-up messages
weren't returned.
Orange County District Attorney James
Woodall said the professor's 2011 summer course was supposed to have
had regular class meetings. But he said Nyang'oro instead ran an
independent study class that required students to write papers but
not show up. The school found that the course, a late addition to
the schedule, had an enrollment of 18 football players and one
former football player.
A campus investigation into academic fraud
released last year blamed the scandal solely on Nyang'oro and a
department administrator who also has since retired. The probe led
by former Gov. Jim Martin concluded that alleged fraud didn't
involve other faculty or members of the athletic department.
Martin, a former college chemistry
professor, was aided by consultants with experience in academic
investigations. After shortcomings of the report's method were
highlighted, Martin and university officials said they lacked the
subpoena powers of State Bureau of Investigation, or SBI, to force
people to answer questions and produce evidence.
"Both the university and Mr. Woodall relied
on the SBI to help determine whether any criminal acts had occurred,
since the SBI had broad investigative powers not available to the
university," said Tom Ross, president of the state university
system.
He added in his statement Monday that the
university's ongoing cooperation with the criminal process will
continue to its conclusion.
Martin said there was no evidence the
university's athletics department pushed students into courses with
known irregularities that would allow athletes to remain eligible
for competition. Unauthorized grade changes in the African studies
department were not limited to student-athletes, Martin said, and
athletes generally didn't flock to problematic African studies
courses.
The NCAA sanctioned the university's
football program in March 2012 with a one-year bowl ban and
scholarship reductions for previously discovered improper benefits
including cash and travel accommodations. The NCAA reviewed
irregularities in the African studies department after an earlier
campus probe found 54 problem classes between 2007 and 2011. The
collegiate sports oversight body told university officials it had
found no new rules violations.
The school's chancellor issued her own
statement Monday on the indictment.
"The action described in today's indictment
is completely inconsistent with the standards and aspirations of
this great institution," Chancellor Carol Folt said in a statement.
"This has been a difficult chapter in the university's history, and
we have learned many lessons."
"North Carolina Admits to Academic Fraud in Sports Program,"
Inside Higher Ed, September 20, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/09/20/qt#270772
The University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill
acknowledged in a report to the National
Collegiate Athletic Association on Monday that two former employees
had given improper academic help to football players, and said it
would impose several penalties on its athletics program as
punishment for that and other violations. The university made public
a redacted version of its response to a notice in which the NCAA
alleged a series of violations by the Tar Heel sports program. It
responds point by point to the charges made by the NCAA, which
include improper payments to football players and other breaches,
and states that North Carolina will cut scholarships and vacate 16
football victories from 2008 and 2009, but stops short of tougher
penalties.
The whole world is invited to learn from BYU's many online courses
(except for high school athletes)
"Black Mark for BYU," by Doug Lederman , Inside Higher Ed, June
9, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/09/byu
Brigham Young University's Independent
Study program appears to be wildly successful. At any given time,
students are taking more than 100,000 high school courses and 22,000
college classes, for a variety of reasons: to get courses out of the
way in the summer, finish high school or college early, or improve
their performance in classes in which they struggled. Based on those
numbers and
the fees the program charges for its
nearly 600 online courses, the program
generates millions of dollars in revenue a year. (BYU officials
won't say.)
A tiny fraction of
its enrollments -- about 500 a year -- are high school athletes
seeking to use the BYU program's courses to
meet the National Collegiate Athletic Association's freshman
eligibility standards. Yet for the second
time in several years, dealings with the high-stakes world of
big-time college athletics appear to pose a potentially serious
threat to the 90-year-old program's status. Last month,
the NCAA decided to "de-certify" the BYU
program (and one other,
the American School) as a legitimate
provider of
"nontraditional" courses. The decision
came in response to a change in NCAA rules this spring requiring
"nontraditional" courses to include regular interaction between
students and professors, and to set specific timeframes in which the
courses must be completed.
Brigham Young
officials expressed dismay about the NCAA's decision, which they
said had caught them by surprise. "We do want to look at what we can
do to be in compliance with what the NCAA has put in place," said
Carri Jenkins, a spokeswoman for the university.
She noted that BYU
Independent Study had made a set of changes in its programs and
policies the last time
it
drew NCAA scrutiny -- when athletes at
several colleges were
found to have earned credit from their institutions for
courses at BYU in which they did little or no work (or cheated to
complete). Among other changes, Jenkins noted, BYU Independent Study
altered its policies surrounding when and how tests are
administered, and stopped letting athletes enrolled in NCAA member
colleges enroll in its classes.
But the courses
remain a commonly-trod path for high school athletes seeking to meet
the NCAA's academic eligibility standards for freshman athletes,
which require students to surpass a minimum grade-point average in
16 core high school courses to compete in their first year in
college. BYU and the American School, which is based in Illinois,
are among the most common programs from which high school athletes
seek eligibility through nontraditional courses, which the
association defines as "[t]hose taught via the Internet, distance
learning, independent study, individualized instruction,
correspondence, and courses taught by similar means, including
software-based credit recovery courses."
Use of the courses
has burgeoned, and in March the association's Division I members
approved a rule aimed at toughening oversight of them, said Chuck
Wynne, an NCAA spokesman. "Members were obviously concerned that
prospective student-athletes were taking these courses and not being
prepared for the rigors of college academics," he said. The changes
require that instructors and students have "ongoing access to one
another and regular interaction with one another for purposes of
teaching, evaluating and providing assistance to the student
throughout the duration of the course"; that the "student's work ...
is available for review and validation"; and that "[a] defined time
for completion of the course is identified by the high school or
secondary school program."
In the wake of the
rules changes, NCAA officials began reviewing providers of
nontraditional courses, and the association has "approved a bunch"
as meeting the new standards, Wynne said. So far, only BYU
Independent Study and the American School were found to fall short.
(American School responded to the NCAA's findings, which it is
appealing,
here.)
Wynne declined to
specify exactly how and why BYU was deemed to fall short of the NCAA
standards. But he said that most of the scrutiny of the
nontraditional programs focused on the lack of regular, sustained
interaction between students and instructors -- ideally interaction
initiated by the instructor, designed to ensure at least some
oversight of the students' work -- and on some programs' failure to
set a minimum timeframe for the completion of course work.
One NCAA review --
"not necessarily at BYU," Wynne said -- found that one high school
athlete had completed "a semester of algebra in six minutes."
"We understand
that these are good quality educational tools when implemented and
done right," Wynne said, noting that the NCAA is not philosophically
opposed to online learning. "It's mostly about the administration of
these programs. You can have the best curriculum in the world, but
if someone does algebra in six minutes, you know there's something
wrong."
Jenkins of BYU
insisted that the six-minute-algebra incident had most definitely
not taken place in one of the university's online offerings. She
said that the university plans to do whatever it needs to to
reassure the NCAA that its courses are of high quality, and that the
independent study program had not heard from past, current or
prospective students who might be concerned about a stigma from the
NCAA's action.
Bob Jensen's threads on online training and education programs ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
"Southern Cal Signs 13-Year-Old Quarterback," Inside Higher Ed,
February 8, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/08/qt#219541
Need more evidence of the disconnect
between big-time college sports and the institutions to which they
are appended? The University of Southern California's football team
has committed one of its football scholarships for the 2015 entering
class to David Sills, a 13-year-old quarterback at a middle school
in Delaware, The News-Journal of Wilmington
reported. Lane Kiffin, the new coach at
Southern Cal,
made a similar signing of a 13-year-old
last year when he was at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville,
and that player is presumably out of luck now that Kiffin has moved
on to USC. Sills
told ESPN that Southern Cal has always
been his "dream school." Reports that USC's admissions office is
offering slots in its 2015 undergraduate class to several very
talented middle school mathematicians are false.
Jensen Comment
Quarterbacks are hard to predict at an early age, but linemen and
basketball players can be signed up before conception if the mother
plays for the WNBA and the father is a veteran lineman in the NFL or
play the post in the NBA.
Colleges might work on attracting accounting majors among
preschoolers showing exceptional signs of introversion.
"On Eve of NCAA Meeting, College Sports Wrestles With Vexing
Questions," by Libby Sander, Chronicle of Higher Education, January
11, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/On-Eve-of-NCAA-Meeting/63502/
What a difference a year makes.
When leaders of the nation's biggest
athletics programs last met as a group, one year ago, the scope of
the economy's malaise was still unknown. This week, as officials
gather again for the NCAA's annual meeting, in Atlanta, they do so
under starkly different circumstances.
Few athletics departments have escaped the
recession's chill: Midyear state budget cuts and a slowdown in key
revenue streams have combined to create a special kind of pain. To
help balance their budgets, some have eliminated teams, including
such formerly untouchable sports as football and baseball. Others
have laid off, furloughed, or frozen the pay of employees.
Yet the past year has done more than shake
the foundations of all but the wealthiest programs. It has also cast
into sharp relief some pressing—and familiar—questions about the
financial sustainability of big-time college sports. Meanwhile,
tensions between faculty and athletics departments that smoldered
even during flush times grew more heated as the budget situation
worsened on many campuses.
For Cary Groth, athletic director at the
University of Nevada at Reno, the recession merely highlighted
disparities between well-off programs and those clamoring to keep up
with them. Revenue-distribution agreements that funnel larger
payouts to the six major athletic conferences, she believes, put
programs like hers at a disadvantage—and heighten temptations at
some programs to mortgage the future to keep up in the present.
"It's an issue of fairness," she told The
Chronicle last year. "What would it be like if you had 119 schools
playing on common ground?"
Troubled Times Last year began with layoffs
in a storied athletics program, at Stanford University, and ended
with the University of Texas's football coach, Mack Brown, passing
the $5-million compensation mark. In between those unlikely bookends
was a steady drumbeat of dire news as athletics departments labored
to balance their books.
There were layoffs (at the Georgia
Institute of Technology, and Southern Methodist and Texas A&M
Universities, to name a few) and dozens of dropped teams (at the
Universities of California at Irvine, Maine, Massachusetts,
Washington, and many more). At some colleges, the difficult year
further inflamed long-simmering budget woes, leading, in one case,
to a likely—and unusual—move to scale back from Division I to
Division III. Donors guarded their checkbooks (the University of
Central Florida saw a 20 percent decline in fund-raising) many
stadiums and arenas had vacant seats, and debt from costly capital
projects bore down heavily as revenue dried up.
Yet as some programs struggled, for the
well-off, it appeared to be business as usual.
The Southeastern Conference saw the first
payouts from a 15-year, $3-billion deal with CBS and ESPN. The
University of Michigan's athletics department posted a surplus of
$9-million, while the University of Florida increased its athletics
budget by $6-million. There were multimillion-dollar deals for
marquee coaches like Mr. Brown and John Calipari, who inked an
eight-year, $32-million contract to coach the University of
Kentucky's men's basketball program. Ribbon-cuttings at luxurious
new facilities (the University of Oregon put the finishing touches
on a sparkling new academic center for athletes) and expansive plans
to build more (the University of Arizona announced it would spend
$378-million over the next 20 years on a dozen major sports
projects) further threatened competitive imbalances among programs.
Not surprisingly, big budgets for sports
did not go over well on some campuses, particularly those reeling
from universitywide retrenchment. Watchdog groups like the Knight
Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, as well as faculty-led
organizations, stepped up their protests.
One of the most vocal objections came from
the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley, where
severe budget cuts, coupled with a 32-percent tuition hike, have
roiled the university system. In October, faculty members at
Berkeley approved a nonbinding resolution to end university
subsidies to athletics, which amounted to about $8-million last
year.
Looking For Answers As athletics officials
head into their annual meeting this week, they are unlikely to find
solutions to their financial woes, or to the broader questions that
surround college sports. NCAA rules can do many things—impose
academic standards on scholarship athletes, for instance—but they
can't control the vast commercial forces that, for better or worse,
shape today's landscape of big-time college sports.
Even the NCAA, of course, takes part in the
commercial side of college sports: The association is reportedly in
early talks with broadcasters over the possibility of expanding the
men's basketball tournament, a move that would potentially increase
its revenue. (The NCAA's current deal with CBS for broadcast rights
to the tournament is worth $6-billion.)
What officials will find this week is
plenty of debate and speculation. Scholars will weigh in on
questions of college sports' economic sustainability. College
presidents will speak about calming a fiscal storm they recently
admitted to feeling "powerless" to control. Workshops and panel
discussions will offer practical tips on weathering the recession
and other challenges.
What athletics officials might long for the
most, though, is a map to tell them how to navigate the twists and
turns ahead. In Atlanta, at least, they'll find plenty of other
weary travelers. But as for that map? Don't count on it.
U. of Alabama's National Title Tab: $4.3 Million
The University of Alabama spent a total of $4.3
million for its football team to participate in the Bowl Championship
Series title game in January, The Birmingham
News
reported based on a review of National
Collegiate Athletic Association expense reports. Not all of that total
came from the costs of travel for its team and 83-member "official
party," though those costs were heavy: $1.2 million in airfares,
$700,000 for food and lodging for the team, and nearly $200,000 to house
and feed the rest of its traveling contingent. The $4.3 million bottom
line also included $1.2 million in bonuses paid to the coaches for
winning the national championship game, the newspaper reported.
Inside Higher Ed, March 16, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/03/16/qt#222593
"Crimson Tide's $4.3 million trip," by Jon Solomon. The Birmingham
News, March 14, 2010 ---
http://blog.al.com/solomon/2010/03/crimson_tides_43_million_footb.html
The SEC provided Alabama with a
travel-expense allowance of $505,400. But there is much more money
Alabama receives from the game not included in the NCAA report.
SEC rules stipulate that Alabama gets
$1.925 million off the top of the game's $18.3 million payout. The
remaining $16.375 million from the payout gets divided into 13
equal shares ($1.26 million to each SEC member and the league
office).
That puts Alabama's revenue from the
national title game at $3,690,400. However, that doesn't include an
unspecified amount each SEC school receives by sharing revenue from
other bowls, including a second Bowl Championship Series game.
Texas reported a net profit of $603,149
from its Big 12 expense allowance of $2,962,200 to Pasadena.
The largest single-line expense for
Alabama was $1,256,631 for bonuses, which included $200,000 to Nick
Saban for winning the national championship. Texas spent $495,391 on
bonuses.
Flying Alabama's team, staff, band,
cheerleaders and official party to Pasadena cost $1,219,455. Texas,
which had a shorter distance to travel, spent $590,126 on
transportation.
The Longhorns' priciest single-line item
was $602,579 on meals and lodging for the team and staff. Texas
counted its official party within that figure, whereas Alabama spent
$701,847 for meals and lodging for the team and staff and $193,987
for 83 members of its official party. The Crimson Tide spent $89,959
more than the Longhorns on entertainment and $91,256 more on
awards.
Alabama absorbed a loss of $329,250 from
1,605 game tickets it didn't sell. Universities keep some as
complimentary tickets given to coaches, administrators, band
members and cheerleaders.
The Crimson Tide purchased 19,035 tickets
priced at $200 each and another 1,820 at $275 apiece. Alabama sold
a total of 19,200 tickets.
Texas absorbed a loss of $429,600 by not
selling 2,148 tickets from its allotment of 19,000, all priced at
$200. Ticket allotment and credentialing were sore points for Texas
Athletics Director DeLoss Dodds in his NCAA survey of the game.
Dodds noted he was "very dissatisfied" that
the 19,000-ticket requirement fell far short of the school's demand.
He wants the BCS to provide a larger allotment to participating
schools in the future.
"We have to turn thousands of potential
donors away and the limited number of tickets creates a
significant public relations and customer service issue for us in
dealing with our loyal constituencies," Dodds wrote.
Dodds also was dissatisfied with the BCS
limit of 60 bench credentials and five "wildcards" on the sideline.
He wrote that severely limited Texas' ability to allow all of its
working equipment and medical, operations and coaching staff on the
sideline, describing the policy as the "single biggest headache"
large schools encounter in BCS games.
By working closely with Alabama, Dodds said
that both schools left many student workers in the locker room or
in the stands instead of providing their usual important functions
on the sideline. Dodds stressed the Rose Bowl was not at fault for
the credential issue and that bowl officials were frustrated with
the policy, too.
"All aspects of participating in a Rose
Bowl event are outstanding and second to none," Dodds wrote.
The only complaint from Alabama Athletics
Director Mal Moore in his survey was the condition of the practice
field. Otherwise, Moore wrote the game was well-organized and
accommodating.
Auburn expenses at Outback Bowl
Meanwhile, Auburn reported spending
$1,363,096 at the Outback Bowl in Tampa after receiving $1,212,200
from the SEC as an expense allowance. Auburn did not lose money
because a second SEC team in the BCS provided additional revenue
not reflected in the NCAA report, said Scott Carr, Auburn senior
associate athletics director.
Auburn's largest single-line expense was
$427,823 on meals and lodging for the team and staff over eight
days. The Tigers absorbed a loss of $260,110 in 3,229 unsold
tickets, which include complimentary tickets.
Auburn purchased 13,000 tickets from the
Outback Bowl at $70 apiece and another 2,000 tickets at $150 each.
The school sold a total of 11,771 tickets -- 10,197 at the $70 level
and 1,574 at the $150 price.
In his bowl survey, Auburn Athletics
Director Jay Jacobs noted that the lack of locker room and shower
space at the practice facility presented logistical issues. Supplies
such as towels, soap and soft drinks were available at a charge, so
Auburn transported its own supplies, he said.
Jacobs noted that VIP transportation was
not provided and would have been utilized if offered. Auburn
received one complimentary hotel suite and would have liked
additional free suites for President Jay Gogue and coach Gene
Chizik rather than paying a "reasonable" rate for them, Jacobs
wrote.
Jacobs said the Outback Bowl did not
provide social events geared specifically toward children and
suggested a trip to the aquarium. He concluded there were no major
issues for the bowl to address, writing that it was "very
accommodating and provided a memorable experience for our travel
party."
Jensen Comment
Accounting for athletics is a lot like accounting for a division or
product within a large corporation. First and foremost there's no
accounting for the intangibles such as future revenues arising from
reputation, goodwill, loyalty, brand recognition, esprit de corps,
morale (student, employee, and alumni), etc. Secondly, there are huge
joint costing problems when a division or product is embedded within
other divisions or products. Thirdly, to be a winner in business and
athletics it often strains ethics and standards. Especially in
athletics, maintaining academic and recruiting standards is particularly
dicey for Division 1 universities. In business it is most difficult to
achieve global success when having to deal in nations that are
themselves highly corrupt.
And think of what it's costing the teams consistently near the bottom
of the SEC conference.
Athletics Versus Academics: Is it possible to be great in both?
Jensen Comment
It's still really exceptional to be great in both, and it's becoming harder to
become great in one and satisfactory in the other. The sad thing is that at K-12
levels, top athletes are often getting the changing message that without decent
grades they probably will not be given an opportunity for making a name for
themselves in collegiate athletics. Chances of making it in professional
athletics without college are nearly zero except in rare, very rare, exceptions.
Hence, K-12 athletes should be made to realize early on that grades are
increasingly crucial for athletes. And so many failures in life can be
attributed to good athletes who wash out of college admissions or college
graduation.
The conference won't say how many athletes
it has denied eligibility, but the increased scrutiny has made a
difference, says Todd Diacon, executive director for academic assessment
for the University of Tennessee system, and the faculty athletics
representative on the Knoxville campus. "People have just backed off
recruiting certain players," he says, "because they know they'd never
get them past a review."
"A Powerful League Piles Up Its Advantages," by Brad Wolverton,
Chronicle of Higher Education, August 31, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Rise-of-the-SEC/48197/
On a quiet block in this sleepy Southern
town sits an ordinary office building that, but for a few football
helmets visible along a row of office windows, gives little hint of
being the center of the college-sports universe.
But thanks to a $3-billion television
agreement that kicks in with the start of the college football
season this week, that is exactly what the Southeastern Conference,
headquartered here, has become.
The 15-year deal with CBS and ESPN, the
richest in the history of college sports, guarantees each of the
league's 12 athletics departments an average of nearly $17-million a
year, the equivalent of a major bowl payout. Add that to the tens of
millions in guaranteed sponsorship revenue that SEC teams already
generate, and ticket sales and private donations that, for many of
the conference's programs, have seen little falloff during the
economic slump, and it's no wonder this league seems to be
separating from the pack among major conferences.
Even before the new TV contract, the
Southeastern Conference was virtually minting money. Home to six of
the country's 15 largest athletics budgets, and many of the
highest-paid coaches, SEC teams increased their spending on sports
by 36 percent over a recent four-year period, according to U.S.
Education Department data.
Over the past decade, the SEC has been the
rabbit in the race to build the nicest facilities, scored more
top-20 finishes than any other conference in sports it plays, and
smashed fund-raising records, giving it a leg up over other leagues
in recruiting the best coaches and most talented players. (And for
anyone who wants to dispute the conference's dominance, feel free to
take up the case on one of dozens of blogs and Web sites where rabid
SEC fans hang out.)
Not that the league is without detractors.
The SEC's swagger—if it was a nation, conference officials like to
say, its former and current athletes' Olympic medals would have
placed it fourth in last summer's Beijing Games—has led critics to
decry it as little more than a breeding ground for professional
athletes. While its academic record is improving, the SEC still
trails its peer conferences in several key measures.
And the league's heightened spending on a
select group of sports—its departments sponsor an average of 20
sports, far fewer than many other universities do—has raised
concerns that, to stay in the race, programs in competing
conferences may have to streamline their own offerings.
"The SEC has been the catalyst for an
escalation of spending in a select number of sports that I think
ultimately is going to break the current model of Division I
athletics," says Amy P. Perko, executive director of the Knight
Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, referring to the
broad-based programs that many departments support.
The only way other conferences will be able
to keep up, she and others fear, is by ramping up their spending on
football and basketball and reducing opportunities in other sports.
But with an average of one SEC athletics event scheduled to be
televised nationally every day of the year for the next decade and a
half, even that might not be enough.
Recent Success Many factors have
contributed to the league's rise to power, including the South's
fast population growth, the lack of professional sports in most of
the states where SEC teams play, and the conference's well-timed
winning streak.
The SEC has a long history of success, but
this may be its golden age. Last year the Southeastern Conference
won national championships in five sports, and finished as
runners-up in six others. Three straight national titles in
football, and two of the past four NCAA championships in men's
basketball, have given the SEC a Forrest Gump-like presence on the
biggest stages.
The victories were piling up just as the
league was renegotiating its media-rights package. Most people
figured the SEC would blaze its own path, following the Big Ten
Conference in creating a television network. But ESPN was hungry to
hold on to SEC football, which it says some 77 million people
watched last season.
When the league's commissioner, Michael L.
Slive, one of the shrewdest negotiators in sports, laid out his list
of demands, he was surprised when the powerful cable network came
back with everything he wanted, and more. Last summer, just before
the economy headed into free fall, ESPN agreed to pay the league
$2.25-billion to broadcast its games. With a few strokes of the pen,
the Southeastern Conference became America's Conference.
"There is no downside to this deal," Mr.
Slive told The Chronicle in July, during the league's preseason
media gathering here. Instead of fronting start-up costs for a
separate network, bickering with cable companies over distribution,
and trying to sell advertising spots on its own, league officials
can kick back in their La-Z-Boys and click between one of several
ESPN networks that will televise an unheard-of number of games.
During the first four days of this season alone, ESPN and its sister
channels will broadcast seven SEC showdowns. ESPN also picked up the
rights to syndicated league games, such as Tennessee-Western
Kentucky, a David and Goliath match-up that, until now, would have
never aired outside the region. But in a world where the SEC rules
the airwaves, games like that will now be broadcast from coast to
coast.
SEC universities hope the exposure will
help them attract students who might otherwise not have considered
their institutions. One thing is for sure: The league's additional
reach is something that highly recruited athletes have already
noticed.
"I felt the SEC was the strongest
conference, and where I could get the most publicity," says Brent
Benedict, a Florida football standout who committed to the
University of Georgia in June. "We're going to be on TV the most,
and that's part of what my decision came down to."
A Damaged Reputation Until recently, such
big television deals might not have been possible. While the league
was well-known for its winning ways, it was also notorious for
skirting the rules. Since the NCAA began keeping records, in 1953,
Southeastern Conference teams have committed 49 major infractions,
more than any league except the Big 12 Conference.
When Mr. Slive took over as commissioner,
in 2002, nine SEC programs were either on NCAA probation or being
investigated for purported violations, league officials say.
"You don't do yourself a lot of good if
you're successful because you're cutting corners," says Gene A.
Marsh, a professor of law at the University of Alabama, who served
on the NCAA's Division I Committee on Infractions from 1999 to 2008.
"People think less of you."
Mr. Slive, a lawyer who in the 1990s
co-founded a private practice to help athletics departments stay off
NCAA probation, pushed hard for the SEC to clean up its act. His
goal was to have every program in the clear within five years, and
he established a committee to put an end to the infighting that had
led many SEC programs to rat out their rivals whenever they thought
they had crossed the line.
"In our league the crucible of competition
is so intense and hot, there is sometimes a tendency for people to
be happy if somebody else gets hurt," Mr. Slive says. "What I try to
sell to people is that we are inexorably tied to one another, and
our success helps all of us, and the failure of one of us—even if
you think it makes you better—makes you worse."
Although some SEC football coaches have yet
to get that message—within months of being hired last year, Lane
Kiffin, Tennessee's coach, had (incorrectly) accused Urban Meyer,
Florida's coach, of violating recruiting rules—the finger-pointing
seems to have calmed down, and the major violations have slowed.
Mr. Slive has helped change the recruiting
culture, too, acting as an impartial judge in reviewing
controversial initial-eligibility cases. With the blessing of the
league's chancellors and presidents, he established a process for
evaluating recruits whose academic backgrounds raise red flags. If
he doesn't like what he sees, he has the power to rule a prospective
player ineligible.
The conference won't say how many athletes
it has denied eligibility, but the increased scrutiny has made a
difference, says Todd Diacon, executive director for academic
assessment for the University of Tennessee system, and the faculty
athletics representative on the Knoxville campus.
"People have just backed off recruiting
certain players," he says, "because they know they'd never get them
past a review."
Continued in article
The National Basketball Association and the
National Collegiate Athletic Association are planning an announcement
today. While there is no official word on what will be said, both
The Raleigh News and Observer and
FOXSports.com are reporting speculation of
a new deal with would require more basketball players to stay in college
for at least two years before leaving for the NBA. Such a rule would end
the phenomenon of the “one and done” stars who comply with current
regulations by going to college only for a single year before leaving to
play professional basketball.
Inside Higher Ed, April 7, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/07/qt
Jensen Comment
This was in large measure prompted by data showing that less than half
the varsity basketball players in Division 1 universities graduate from
college. For very young players with superstar talent, however, it will
still be possible to enter the NBA without any college.
The University
of Rhode Island, which has already announced plans to eliminate its
gymnastics team, on Monday announced it was also
ending its men’s swimming, men’s tennis and field hockey teams.
The university cited state budget cuts.
Inside Higher Ed, April 15, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/15/qt
The NCAA’s Academic Performance Program
(APP) is creating positive behavioral change among Division I
institutions, according to new four-year data released May 6, 2008 ---
Click Here
"Classroom Failure, Postseason Ban," by
David Moltz, Inside Higher Ed, May 7, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/07/ncaa
For the first time
in its history, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has
banned teams from postseason play for their athletes’ poor academic
performance.
Football teams from
the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and Jacksonville State
University and a men’s basketball squad from Centenary College of
Louisiana are the first to be punished because each has a low
Academic Progress Rate -- a nationally comparable score the NCAA
uses to judge teams based on their athletes’ ability to remain in
good academic standing, stay enrolled from semester to semester and
ultimately graduate.
Teams are evaluated
on the four-year average of their APR. The measure was introduced
more than five years ago, but the NCAA first began penalizing teams
for poor academic performance last year. The score of all Division I
institutions and their teams is updated annually, and publicly
released by the NCAA every spring. The latest scores and subsequent
penalties were released Wednesday.
Teams whose APRs are
less than 925 -- a perfect score is 1,000 -- are subject to
“immediate penalties” that can take away up to 10 percent of their
athletic scholarships. This year, 124 teams are facing “immediate
penalties” and most will have their number of full scholarships
reduced for the coming academic year. Some of the more prominent
men’s basketball teams facing scholarship reductions include Auburn
University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Ohio State University,
Purdue University, the University of South Carolina at Columbia and
the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. The only two football
teams from a Bowl Championship Series (or major) conference facing
penalties are the University of Minnesota and the University of
Mississippi.
After “immediate
penalties,” teams that continue to have low APRs over the years --
the benchmark moves to 900 -- become susceptible to “historical
penalties.” During this process, penalized institutions have to
submit plans to the NCAA outlining how they intend to improve their
academic performance. After two consecutive years of unsatisfactory
scores, teams can lose more scholarships and be forced to reduce
their number of practices. This year, 30 teams are facing
second-year penalties. More than a third of these teams are men’s
basketball teams from mid-major conferences, such as those from New
Mexico State and Portland State Universities.
Following a third
consecutive year of poor scores, teams can lose the ability to
participate in postseason play. This is the first year that this
penalty has been available for use. Of the three teams facing this
penalty, only Jacksonville State has lobbied the NCAA for a waiver
from this penalty.
Six teams that faced
second-year penalties last year did not advance to third-year
penalties this year, even though their APRs were still below 900.
Kevin C. Lennon, the NCAA's vice president for membership services,
explained that the NCAA evaluates each team and its plan to improve
its APR separately. He added that some teams are given more leniency
than others and that the NCAA can override a substandard APR to keep
a team at a certain penalty level. Football and men’s soccer teams
at San Jose State University, for example, continue to have APRs
below 900, but did not advance to the third-year penalties and have
not been banned from postseason play.
Once a team has a
fourth consecutive year of substandard APR scores, its sponsoring
institution can potentially lose its Division I status, jeopardizing
all of its other sports teams. Next year, institutions will be
eligible for this punishment for the first time. In recent weeks,
some troubled institutions have responded to the strong potential of
receiving this penalty by cutting underperforming teams instead of
attempting to solve the academic problem they were facing.
“Our objective is to
change behaviors,” said Myles Brand, NCAA president. “Our objective
is not to punish and sanction.”
Brand, who has
championed a number of sweeping academic reforms during his term as
president, said he believed that very few institutions ultimately
would cut academically troubled teams to avoid more serious
punishment.
Still, he and other
NCAA officials acknowledged that smaller athletics programs at
less-wealthy institutions are often at a disadvantage to prevent
these harsh academic penalties. Judging from the relatively small
number of teams from larger programs facing penalties, Brand said he
expected future academic penalties would be disproportionally levied
against teams from poorer institutions.
"The truth of the
matter is that if you're going to participate in high-level
intercollegiate athletics, you have to provide for academic
opportunities for the students," Brand said. "And that's not
inexpensive."
The method the NCAA
uses to calculate the APR changed slightly this year. For example,
as a result of a recent NCAA policy change, athletes must be in good
academic standing at one institution before they can qualify for
scholarship money at another. Those athletes who transfer with less
than a 2.6 grade point average will cost their institutions APR
points. Additionally, this is the first year that athletes’ progress
toward degree status is being considered by the APR.
Continued in article
Question
How do some varsity athletes beat the system and then regret it later in life?
It's interesting that not all the
"beating the system" majors were majoring in Athletic Departments
There are of course other athletes who are also great students that were
not out to "beat the system," including an recent All-American
quarterback for Notre Dame named Brady Quinn ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_Quinn
Brady majored in accounting at Notre Dame, which has one of the best
accounting programs in the United States
"College athletes studies guided toward
'major in eligibility'," by Jill Steeg et al., USA Today,
November 2008, Page 1A ---
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/2008-11-18-majors-cover_N.htm
Steven Cline left
Kansas State University last spring with memories of two years as a
starting defensive lineman for a major-college football team. He
left with a diploma, credits toward a master's degree and a place on
the 2007 Big 12 Conference all-academic team. He also left with
regrets about accomplishing all of this by majoring in social
sciences — a program that drew 34% of the football team's juniors
and seniors last season, compared with about 4% of all juniors and
seniors at Kansas State. Cline says he found not-so-demanding
courses that helped him have success in the classroom and on the
field but did little for his dream of becoming a veterinarian.
"I realize I just
wasted all my efforts in high school and college to get a social
science degree," says Cline, who adds he did poorly in biology as a
freshman, then chose what an athletics academic adviser told him
would be an easier path.
His experience
reflects how the NCAA's toughening of academic requirements for
athletes has helped create an environment in which they are more
likely to graduate than other students — but also more likely to be
clustered in programs without the academic demands most students
face.
Some athletes say
they have pursued — or have been steered to — degree programs that
helped keep them eligible for sports but didn't prepare them for
post-sports careers.
"A major in
eligibility, with a minor in beating the system," says C. Keith
Harrison, an associate professor at the University of Central
Florida, where he is associate director of the Institute of
Diversity and Ethics in Sports.
Special Admission Students in Varsity
Athletics
Many universities
fill the spots on their football squads through the use of “special
admits,” a phrase that means that these students didn’t meet regular
admissions requirements, according to an article and survey in
The Indianapolis Star. While most
colleges have provisions for special admits, which in theory are for
truly special applicants, very few non-athletes benefit. For example,
the Star noted that 76 percent of the freshman football class at Indiana
University at Bloomington is made up of special admits. Among all
freshmen last year, only 2 percent are special admits. Some universities
rely even more on special admits for football, the survey found: the
University of California at Berkeley (95 percent of freshmen football
players, compared to 2 percent for the student body), Texas A&M
University (94 percent vs. 8 percent), the University of Oklahoma (81
percent vs. 2 percent). While some universities didn’t report any
special admits, the Star article quoted athletics officials who are
dubious of these claims. Myles Brand, president of the National
Collegiate Athletic Association, told the newspaper he was surprised by
the extent of special admits, but said the issue was whether
universities provide appropriate help for these students to succeed
academically.
Inside Higher Ed, September 8, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/09/08/qt
Bob Jensen's threads on athletics
controversies in higher education ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics
"The Admissions Gap for Big-Time Athletes," by Doug
Lederman, Inside Higher Ed, December 29, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/12/29/admit
Consider two would-be college
basketball players. One scored 850 on his SATs and had a high school
grade point average of 2.75; the other scored 975 and had a GPA of
3.2. But the former enrolls at a university where his SAT is within
150 points of the average for all students at the institution. The
latter’s test score, though higher, puts him more than 300 points
below those for the average freshman who will be sitting alongside
him in class.
Which one is at more of a
disadvantage academically in college? Are colleges doing a
disservice to athletes if they have markedly different admissions
standards for them than for other students? Or, as many sports
officials argue, should colleges be held accountable more for the
ultimate academic performance of their athletes on the way out
(e.g., do they graduate?) than for their credentials on the way in?
Questions like those have arisen
periodically about big-time college athletics, and they are likely
to to be raised anew by
an investigative report published Sunday
by the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution. The package of articles is based on a
year-long review of information submitted as part of the National
Collegiate Athletic Association’s accreditation-like “certification”
process by more than 50 public universities that play big-time
football or basketball. As part of that process, colleges provide a
wide range of information and data, including, typically, on the
admission of athletes.
The data collected by the Atlanta
paper are difficult to compare from college to college, because they
cover different years; institutions participate in the NCAA
certification process only once a decade, and so admissions
information for the 54 colleges range from the late 1990s through
2006.
Still, they offer an unusual
glimpse at data that rarely see the light of day, and, taken
together with recent investigative reports by USA Today
(examining
the clustering of athletes in certain academic majors), the
Indianapolis Star (exploring the rates at which Division I
colleges use
“special” processes to admit athletes
and other students), and the Associated Press (showing the
significant sums that colleges are pouring into academic support
for athletes), the Atlanta
paper’s report draws attention to the tension inherent in a system
in which major colleges increasingly provide sports as high-profile
entertainment with athletes whom they argue are in many ways like
regular students at their institutions.
The problem is that there are many
ways in which athletes, especially in sports such as football and
basketball, differ radically from average students. They spend
dozens and dozens of hours a week on their sports, travel away from
campus for days at a time and, in some cases, integrate little with
other students on campus. Some of these same things can be said of
students in other time-intensive activities, such as musicians or
student newspaper editors.
But that’s where the question of
academic preparation comes in: If athletes are entering college with
significant lesser academic preparation than their peers (as
measured, it should be said, by measures such as standardized test
scores and high school grades that are admittedly imperfect, though
widely used), does that put them at a major disadvantage, given the
intense demands on them?
Athletes Lag
The Atlanta newspaper’s project
puts those questions front and center for many colleges. It focused
its research on colleges in the six major Bowl Championship Series
conferences — those that play at the highest level of NCAA football
— plus a few other institutions that were highly ranked in football
or basketball polls in 2007-8. It sought access to the institutions’
NCAA certification reports, a process that the NCAA treats as
confidential except for its ultimate result.
The newspaper did not bother to
collect information from the private universities that compete in
those conferences — prestigious and high-profile institutions such
as Duke, Stanford and Northwestern Universities and the University
of Notre Dame — because they are not subject to the state
open-records laws on which the Journal-Constitution based its
requests for information. (The newspaper did include data on one
private institution, Syracuse University, that was contained in its
certification report, which it
made public on the athletics department’s Web
site.) Most of
those independent institutions tend to have academically selective
student bodies but to recruit from the same population of athletes
as other institutions, giving them wide gaps in qualifications
between their athletes and other students.
Despite those laws, even some of
the public universities did not provide the relevant information,
the Journal-Constitution noted. “Penn State and the
University of Pittsburgh refused to provide the information. The
University of Kansas and West Virginia University said their most
recent NCAA certification self-study did not include the
information. Kansas State University deleted all of its
sport-by-sport data,” the newspaper explained.
For those colleges that did report
their information, the gaps in academic preparation between athletes
and other students are wide. The average SAT for all freshmen at the
colleges in question was 1161, while the average for all athletes
was 1037, 124 points lower. The average SAT for football players was
941, and for male basketball players, 934.
The averages mask much wider
variation among colleges. The University of Cincinnati, Clemson
University, the University of California at Berkeley and Georgia
Institute of Technology all had average SAT scores for their men’s
basketball players of roughly 950. But at Cincinnati, the basketball
players were within 124 points of the student body at the urban
public university; at Clemson, the gap was 201 points; at
California, a highly selective flagship, 350 points; and at Georgia
Tech, one of the nation’s leading public institutions for science
and particularly engineering, 396 points.
Similar gaps show up within
conferences. To judge by the SAT scores of its freshmen, the
University of Florida is the most selective institution in the
Southeastern Conference, yet its football players had the lowest
average SAT score, 346 points lower than the average for all
students. Mississippi State’s football recruits had a roughly
similar academic profile, within about 20 SAT points, yet its
football players were much more in line with the qualifications of
the general student body there.
Whether the data suggest a problem
at any particular college — or for the powers-that-be in the NCAA —
is open for debate. Officials at selective institutions with big
gaps say such divergences are the price of competing with
institutions with more open admissions policies, and tend to point
to high graduation rates as evidence that they are helping to ensure
that the athletes they admit succeed, regardless of their incoming
credentials.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on athletics controversies in
higher education are at
www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Question
What universities spend the most money recruiting athletes and what is
the trend on such recruitment spending?
Hint
Don't consider the top-ranked athletics programs at the University of
Southern California, Oklahoma, UCLA, Texas A&M, Kansas, or Stanford.
Nearly half of
the nation's largest athletics programs have doubled or tripled their
recruitment spending over the past decade, as their pursuit of elite
athletes intensifies and becomes more national in scope.
Libby Sander, "Have Money, Will Travel: the Quest for Top Athletes
Budgets soar, and so do coaches, as colleges beef up recruiting
efforts," Chronicle of Higher Education, August 1, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i47/47a00102.htm
TOP SPENDERS IN SPORTS RECRUITING
Athletics departments spent
much more on recruiting athletes in 2007 than they
did a decade earlier, with many NCAA Division I
programs doubling or tripling their recruiting
expenses. Here are the biggest spenders in each
division, along with the programs' rank in the
2007-8 U.S. Sports Academy Directors' Cup, which
measures athletics departments by division according
to their overall sports success.
|
DIVISION I-A
|
|
U. of Tennessee at Knoxville
|
$2,005,700
|
$1,419,400
|
$915,000
|
41%
|
119%
|
16
|
|
U. of Notre Dame
|
1,758,300
|
1,014,600
|
674,000
|
73
|
161
|
21
|
|
U. of Florida
|
1,451,400
|
1,097,300
|
665,000
|
32
|
118
|
6
|
|
Auburn U.
|
1,374,900
|
1,228,900
|
646,000
|
12
|
113
|
20
|
|
Kansas State U.
|
1,316,700
|
626,600
|
359,000
|
110
|
267
|
71
|
|
U. of Georgia
|
1,284,000
|
1,020,000
|
605,000
|
26
|
112
|
10
|
|
U. of Nebraska at Lincoln
|
1,275,000
|
925,300
|
826,000
|
38
|
54
|
31
|
|
U. of Arkansas at Fayetteville
|
1,259,700
|
749,000
|
506,000
|
68
|
149
|
24
|
|
Duke U.
|
1,245,300
|
592,500
|
378,000
|
110
|
229
|
19
|
|
Ohio State U.
|
1,236,800
|
691,200
|
522,000
|
79
|
137
|
11
|
|
U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
|
1,203,500
|
512,400
|
472,000
|
135
|
155
|
34
|
|
U. of Texas at Austin
|
1,156,800
|
1,047,200
|
514,000
|
10
|
125
|
5
|
|
Syracuse U.
|
1,121,200
|
635,300
|
474,000
|
76
|
137
|
87
|
|
U. of Oklahoma at Norman
|
1,120,800
|
763,900
|
908,000
|
47
|
23
|
23
|
|
U. of Virginia
|
1,112,000
|
617,900
|
616,000
|
80
|
81
|
17
|
|
Georgia Tech
|
1,111,900
|
835,000
|
620,000
|
33
|
79
|
55
|
|
Michigan State U.
|
1,098,800
|
890,500
|
733,000
|
23
|
50
|
29
|
|
West Virginia U.
|
1,094,200
|
524,200
|
398,000
|
109
|
175
|
30
|
|
U. of Oregon
|
1,077,300
|
841,500
|
555,000
|
28
|
94
|
26
|
|
U. of Kentucky
|
1,056,100
|
706,700
|
589,000
|
49
|
79
|
36
|
|
Median for all Division I-A
|
632,600
|
499,000
|
371,500
|
36
|
82
|
--
|
|
DIVISION I-AA
|
|
Princeton U.
|
$941,000
|
$624,800
|
$282,000
|
51%
|
234%
|
60
|
|
Harvard U.
|
851,900
|
712,400
|
485,000
|
20
|
76
|
61
|
|
Columbia U.
|
778,000
|
477,000
|
328,000
|
63
|
137
|
135
|
|
Dartmouth College
|
774,700
|
708,000
|
464,000
|
9
|
67
|
132
|
|
Brown U.
|
757,200
|
425,700
|
534,000
|
78
|
42
|
103
|
|
Cornell U.
|
752,800
|
673,500
|
449,000
|
12
|
68
|
75
|
|
Yale U.
|
748,300
|
574,200
|
508,000
|
30
|
47
|
93
|
|
U. of Pennsylvania
|
643,600
|
420,400
|
374,000
|
53
|
72
|
79
|
|
U. of Massachusetts at Amherst
|
543,800
|
501,900
|
500,000
|
8
|
9
|
89
|
|
Colgate U.
|
452,300
|
445,000
|
249,000
|
2
|
82
|
166
|
|
Median for all Division I-AA
|
195,600
|
126,300
|
93,000
|
50
|
101
|
--
|
|
DIVISION I-AAA
|
|
Marquette U.
|
$521,600
|
$130,600
|
$139,000
|
299%
|
275%
|
197
|
|
Xavier U. (Ohio)
|
482,400
|
387,200
|
185,000
|
25
|
161
|
124
|
|
Boston U.
|
447,900
|
367,800
|
266,000
|
22
|
68
|
76
|
|
U. of Denver
|
426,400
|
343,600
|
n/a
|
24
|
n/a
|
47
|
|
St. John's U. (N.Y.)
|
412,600
|
153,900
|
188,000
|
168
|
119
|
114
|
|
Providence College
|
397,000
|
375,200
|
266,000
|
6
|
49
|
146
|
|
Wichita State U.
|
387,100
|
166,100
|
152,000
|
133
|
155
|
131
|
|
Saint Joseph's U. (Pa.)
|
351,300
|
95,800
|
97,000
|
267
|
262
|
237
|
|
U. of North Carolina at Charlotte
|
326,000
|
272,500
|
163,000
|
20
|
100
|
140
|
|
George Washington U.
|
323,800
|
337,000
|
320,000
|
-4
|
1
|
185
|
|
Median for all Division I-AAA
|
143,700
|
107,200
|
74,000
|
34
|
104
|
--
|
|
DIVISION II
|
|
U. of North Dakota
|
$272,900
|
$180,700
|
51%
|
10
|
|
Minnesota State U. at Mankato
|
210,400
|
155,400
|
35
|
3
|
|
St. Cloud State U.
|
164,700
|
210,700
|
-22
|
53
|
|
U. of Central Missouri
|
148,600
|
49,000
|
203
|
18
|
|
U. of Minnesota at Duluth
|
139,700
|
116,900
|
19
|
74
|
|
Northern Michigan U.
|
138,800
|
119,400
|
16
|
158
|
|
Michigan Technological U.
|
136,600
|
116,600
|
17
|
164
|
|
Northwest Missouri State U.
|
128,000
|
104,400
|
23
|
44
|
|
U. of Alaska at Anchorage
|
127,700
|
67,100
|
90
|
52
|
|
Abilene Christian U.
|
125,000
|
71,700
|
74
|
2
|
|
Median for all Division II
|
28,000
|
19,100
|
36
|
--
|
|
DIVISION III
|
|
New York U.
|
$181,400
|
$197,700
|
-8%
|
31
|
|
St. Lawrence U.
|
156,700
|
135,200
|
16
|
44
|
|
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
|
155,600
|
91,300
|
70
|
182
|
|
Hobart and William Smith Colleges
|
135,500
|
66,000
|
105
|
50
|
|
Union College (N.Y.)
|
119,600
|
95,800
|
25
|
84
|
|
Hope College
|
113,500
|
87,200
|
30
|
38
|
|
Christopher Newport U.
|
104,700
|
23,500
|
345
|
43
|
|
Hartwick College
|
102,200
|
53,300
|
92
|
267
|
|
Stevens Institute of Technology
|
97,500
|
71,500
|
36
|
80
|
|
Methodist U.
|
97,100
|
46,800
|
108
|
47
|
|
Median for all Division III
|
19,700
|
11,900
|
40
|
--
|
|
SOURCES: U.S. Department of
Education; Chronicle reporting
|
|
SPENDING INCREASES
Among elite athletics
programs, these five had the largest percentage
increases in recruiting spending in the past 10
years.
|
1. U. of Maryland at College Park
|
277%
|
|
2. Kansas State U.
|
267%
|
|
3. Louisiana State U. at Baton Rouge
|
248%
|
|
4. Duke U.
|
229%
|
|
5. West Virginia U.
|
175%
|
|
SOURCES: U.S. Department of
Education; Chronicle reporting
|
|
BIGGEST JUMPS IN RECRUITMENT SPENDING
The 65 biggest athletics
programs are members of the NCAAs six Bowl Championship
Series conferences. From 1997 to 2007, most of those
institutions significantly increased their recruiting
budgets. Below are the biggest movers among BCS programs
with football teams.
|
|
|
|
|
|
U. of Maryland at College Park
|
$912,100
|
$242,000
|
277%
|
|
Kansas State U.
|
$1,316,700
|
$359,000
|
267%
|
|
Louisiana State U. at Baton Rouge
|
$994,200
|
$286,000
|
248%
|
|
Duke U.
|
1,245,300
|
378,000
|
229%
|
|
West Virginia U.
|
$1,094,200
|
$398,000
|
175%
|
|
Texas Tech U.
|
$883,700
|
$323,000
|
174%
|
|
Indiana U. at Bloomington
|
$905,200
|
$341,000
|
165%
|
|
U. of Notre Dame
|
$1,758,300
|
$674,000
|
161%
|
|
U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
|
$1,203,500
|
$472,000
|
155%
|
|
U. of Arkansas at Fayetteville
|
$1,259,700
|
$506,000
|
149%
|
|
WHICH
POWER CONFERENCE SPENDS THE MOST?
Below are the BCS conferences
ranked according to their 2007 spending.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Southeastern
|
$13,129,700
|
$6,639,000
|
98%
|
|
Big 12
|
11,538,200
|
6,663,000
|
73
|
|
Atlantic Coast*
|
10,748,200
|
4,401,000
|
144
|
|
Big Ten
|
10,134,600
|
5,792,000
|
75
|
|
Pacific-10
|
8,344,700
|
4,625,000
|
80
|
|
Big East*†
|
6,125,700
|
4,334,000
|
41
|
|
* In 2003 three Big East institutions -- Boston
College, Virginia Tech, and the University of
Miami -- joined the Atlantic Coast Conference.
The Big Easts 1997 recruiting expenses here
reflect its 1997 membership; the 2007 ACC totals
reflect the addition of the three institutions.
† Includes only the eight Big East institutions
that play football in the BCS.
|
|
|
A Dumb Policy for Dumb Athletes
If you're a really dumb football/basketball/baseball player, note
that it's easier to be dumb at the top NCAA Division 1 universities!
Read that "Bench Sitting for Dummies" who are not quite good enough
to make the starting team at top schools but could be stars in mid-level
NCAA Division 1 colleges.
"NCAA Imposes Stiffer
Penalties for Academic Performance of Midlevel Division I Teams," by
Libby Sander, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 30, 2008 ---
Click Here
The
NCAA punishes athletics programs at
midlevel Division I colleges more harshly for having low
academic-progress rates than it does teams in marquee conferences
like the Big Ten or the Pacific-10, according to an analysis
published today in
USA Today.
In its latest
round of
penalties for low academic performance,
released last month, the
NCAA sanctioned more than 200 teams at 123
Division I institutions for having low academic-progress rates.
But as
USA Today
explains, the six wealthiest and highest-profile conferences, which
make up nearly 20 percent of the NCAA’s
Division I membership (Atlantic Coast, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12,
Pacific-10, and Southeastern), accounted for less than 10 percent of
the scholarship cuts the NCAA doled out as
part of the penalties.
Two midlevel
programs — San Jose State University and the University of Alabama
at Birmingham — lost more scholarships for poor academic performance
than all 65 institutions in the power conferences, the report said.
USA Today
said one possible explanation for the disparate results is that
richer colleges can provide their athletes with more academic
support, including summer school, and can afford to use airplanes,
not buses, to transport their players to away games, making for less
time missed in the classroom.
The Good News
Athletes with weak brains are unlikely to sustain more brain damage on
the bench than in the game.
"Academic fraud runs rampant at major universities," by Mike
Finger, San Antonio Express-News, September 2, 2003 --- http://news.mysanantonio.com/story.cfm?xla=saen&xlb=200&xlc=1058365&xld=200
The first time a coed casually walked up to him,
introduced herself and offered to do his homework, it would have been natural
for Terrance Simmons to be taken aback.
When he learned that his basketball coach at
Minnesota, Clem Haskins, was being forced out as a result of massive NCAA
rules violations, Simmons understandably could have been shocked.
And when he read this spring about another seemingly
endless string of new academic fraud cases — involving people who somehow
didn't learn from the 1999 scandal that was supposed to be a national wake-up
call — one might have expected Simmons to be a bit dismayed.
But he wasn't.
None of it surprised him.
Because the way Simmons sees it, he knew the kind of
world he was getting into from the very beginning.
He remembers sitting in his family's living room in
Louisiana as a prized high school recruit. He remembers college coaches —
"and we're talking about coaches from major universities," he said
— giving him all kinds of reasons to join their programs.
Most of all, he remembers many of those recruiters
making it quite clear that scholastic integrity wasn't exactly their top
priority.
"They didn't come right out and say I didn't
have to go to class," Simmons said, "but it wasn't very hard to read
between the lines."
Likewise, it doesn't take many code-breaking skills
to figure out that academic fraud has become a scourge of epic proportions in
major college athletics.
In the past four years alone, the NCAA has doled out
punishment nine times for academic infractions, ranging from grade tampering
to improper use of tutors. That number doesn't even include all of the schools
involved in the latest outbreak.
In the span of just a few weeks at the end of last
season, the men's basketball teams at Fresno State, Georgia and St.
Bonaventure all removed themselves from postseason play amid reports of fraud.
Those scandals were followed by accusations of
similar violations at Fairfield and Missouri. The possibility of academic
infractions hasn't been ruled out at Baylor, where the basketball program is
already under intense scrutiny after the alleged murder of a player, the
ensuing cover-up and the resignation of coach Dave Bliss.
Simmons, who graduated from Minnesota with a degree
in communications and economics and wasn't involved in the violations that
occurred while he played for the Golden Gophers, thinks the frequency of
reported similar transgressions will grow before it subsides.
Continued in the article
Another Case of Academic Fraud Involving Athletes
For the fourth time in a little
over a year, the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Division I
Committee on Infractions has punished a big-time sports program for
academic wrongdoing. And in punishing the University of New Mexico for
engaging in academic fraud on Wednesday, the NCAA panel linked the
shenanigans back to a single source, much to the dismay of the
institution singled out.
In its report on the case,
the NCAA infractions panel found that two since-fired assistant football
coaches at New Mexico, operating without the knowledge of officials at
the university, had arranged in 2004 for one then-football player and
three prospective players to take correspondence courses from an
unidentified instructor they knew at another institution. According to
the NCAA, the athlete who was already enrolled at New Mexico actually
completed the work in the correspondence course, but the situation still
violated NCAA rules against “extra benefits” — over and above those
available to the typical student — because the former coaches arranged
for him to take the course.
Inside Higher Ed, August 21, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/08/21/newmexico
Question
Why are Division 1 athletic scholarships becoming much more costly?
"NCAA Agrees to Pay Up to $228-Million to Settle Vast
Antitrust Case Brought by Athletes (four basketball players)" by Brad
Wolverton, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 30, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/01/1426n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
In a move that would provide tens
of thousands of athletes with more money for college expenses, the
National Collegiate Athletic Association agreed on Tuesday to
reallocate up to $228-million to settle a massive antitrust lawsuit
filed by four former players. But the deal could have costly
implications for colleges in the coming years.
Under the settlement, which must
still be approved by a federal court in California, the NCAA agreed
to set aside $218-million over the next five years to help the more
than 150,000 Division I athletes in all sports pay for basic
expenses not covered by their athletics scholarships. The NCAA would
allocate an additional $10-million over the next three years to
cover career-development services and other educational expenses for
some 30,000 current and former Division I football and men's
basketball players.
Much of that money was already
designated to help colleges hire tutors, build academic facilities
for athletes, and assist needy students. The settlement would allow
more of those funds to go directly to athletes for their
out-of-pocket expenses, such as personal travel.
Meanwhile, the settlement could
hit athletics departments with significant new costs. It would allow
Division I programs to begin offering year-round, comprehensive
health insurance to athletes, as well as basic accident insurance
for injuries players sustain while participating in intercollegiate
athletics. Insurance experts say those policies could cost colleges
$100,000 or more a year.
Hardship Complaint
The plaintiffs, four former
Division I football and men's basketball players, accused the NCAA
of creating a hardship for college athletes by capping the amount of
scholarship aid they may receive. Full athletics awards at Division
I colleges include tuition, fees, books, and room and board, but the
players' complaint asserted that athletes must often pay $2,500 or
more annually out of their own pockets for basic expenses not
covered by their athletics scholarships.
Members of the Coalition on
Intercollegiate Athletics, a group of 56 faculty senates from some
of the biggest athletics programs, said the settlement was good news
for players—but could present additional problems for athletics
departments in five years. After 2012, colleges could be forced to
pay for athletes' out-of-pocket expenses themselves, said Nathan
Tublitz, a professor of biology at the University of Oregon who is
the group's co-chair.
"Any settlement that helps
student-athletes financially and enables them to stay in school and
graduate is a good settlement," Mr. Tublitz said in an interview on
Tuesday. "But we're concerned that after five years, someone is
going to have to pick up this cost, and that's a lot of money that
could be transferred onto institutions."
'Landmark' Settlement
The size of the deal shocked some
legal experts, who described it as a "landmark" settlement for
college sports.
"This makes the settlement against
assistant coaches look like a Sunday-school picnic," said Sheldon E.
Steinbach, a Washington lawyer, referring to the NCAA's
$54.5-million settlement in 1999 with a group of former assistant
coaches whose salaries the NCAA had capped.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I hope this convinces as many Division 1 schools to change to Division 3
and divert the scholarship money to academic standouts rather than
athletic standouts. Of course those schools who who run their athletic
departments at a profit will think otherwise.
This reminds me of a lawsuit by four UCLA basketball
players who played for UCLA for four seasons and still found themselves
to be functional illiterates. Universities must decide the real purposes
of such athletic "scholarships." If I'd have been the judge I'd have
ordered that UCLA give them four more years of college with supervised
study (in windowless rooms) of 48 hours per week. I don't think these
athletes would be pleased with the outcome.
January 30m 2008 reply from David
Albrecht
[albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]
Bob,
I've not read any court documents on this issue, but that doesn't
mean that I can't voice my opinion loudly (and in all the wrong
places). Afterall, I have a Ph.D.
I have comments on two issues. Apparently this settlement applies
to students on full-ride scholarships. What about students on
partial scholarship? I know that in a number of "minor" sports, a
scholarship is sometimes split and allocated to two or more
students? With respect to the additional benefits such as career
development and other advisory services, do the non-full ride
students get anything?
It seems to me that if benefits for
the five-year period are to be paid for by the NCAA, which governs
all student participation in D1 intercollegiate sports, then the
benefits should be paid for all students in intercollegiate
athletics (ICA), even those that receive no or only partial
scholarship.
I agree with you about the
over-emphasis on sports.
I am a supporter (in principle) of intercollegiate athletes and club
sports athletes. However, sometimes I wish that schools in general
would support scholarships for students in the arts to the same
extent that they supports scholarships for students in the sports.
As an example (chosen only because I know the details, not because I
think it does bad), I'll talk about my school. My school is
somewhat known for its success in the performance arts (especially
music). It provides nearly 550 full-ride scholarships for
attracting students to campus for athletic performance, and less
than $200,000 per year to attract students to campus for musical
performance. And my school sends more students to the pros in music
than in sports. To my knowledge, there are no full-ride or partial
scholarships for recruiting students to BGSU for the debate team
(which has a storied history).
At my school, there aren't that many tickets sold for D1 sports
events, so the general student body ends up paying a majority of the
budget for intercollegiate sports. A few years ago I did a quick
mental computation and concluded that students were in effect
required to pay more than $50 per ticket for all home events in the
money sports (FB, H, MBB, WBB) whether or not they choose to
attend most don't). We can only get non-students attending sports
events to pay $5-15 per ticket, and many are even comped in. It has
been a while since we approached a sell-out at a sporting event.
(As in interesting aside, WBB now out-draws MBB.) (As another
interesting aside, Club Rugby has been to three final fours, and
students must pay to play.)
My school is a member of the Mid-American Conference for ICA. The
mid-tier MAC is in an athletic facilities race. Many schools have
built (or are planning to build) large indoor practice facilities
for outdoor sports and fancy buildings for weight and other
training. Recently, my school announced plans to build a new
basketball arena (seating capacity only 10% larger than that of the
old building), a football stadium renovation, and a Hockey arena
renovation.
I'd love to be in a position to make a financial offer to an
accounting student that would woo them from other schools in my
state. I don't think I've ever been at a school that has
scholarship money targeted solely to accounting students to attract
them to campus.
There are many things out of whack in American higher education.
The emphasis on sports is only one of them.
David Albrecht
Where have all the top teams gone,
Long time passing?
Notre Dame, one of the most storied programs in college
football history, set a team record for losses in going 3-9. Why is this
happening? After Stanford, a 41-point underdog, defeated the perennial power
Southern California, the question was asked. After the third time a No. 1 team
lost to an unranked opponent, the question was asked again. Scholarship limits
have prevented programs from stockpiling talented players, leaving plenty of
players for previously overlooked teams. Spread offenses have neutralized larger
programs’ speed and size advantages. Increased coverage on television and the
Internet has created more interest among more teams and players. And more
universities have committed millions to enhancing their programs.
Pete Thamel, "Missouri, No. 1?
College Football Surprises Again," The New York Times, November 26, 2007
---
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/sports/ncaafootball/26bcs.html
Jensen Comment
Just proves the obvious --- academic standards are hazardous your competitive
edge.
"NCAA to Support Research on Diversity in
College Sports," The Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog, January
3, 2007 ---
http://chronicle.com/news/article/3698/ncaa-to-support-research-on-diversity-in-college-sports?at
The
National Collegiate Athletic Association will provide financial and
other means of support to a research laboratory at Texas A&M
University at College Station that examines ethnic, racial, and
gender diversity in college sports,
the NCAA announced today.
Under the
new partnership, Texas A&M’s
Laboratory
for Diversity in Sport will receive
financial support from the NCAA for its
research into how athletics departments can increase diversity among
employees, teams, and fans. The agreement also calls for the
eventual expansion of the laboratory’s annual Diversity in Athletics
Award to all three NCAA divisions.
"A Texas Team Loads Up on All-American Talent,
With No Americans," by Robin Williams, Chronicle of Higher Education,
January 11, 2007 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i18/18a03001.htm
But at the
university's Kidd Field — where the brick-red track is surrounded by
an expanse of rocky brown mountains — you won't find any El Paso
natives on the men's cross-country team. In fact, you won't find a
cross-country runner from anywhere in North America.
It's been that way
for the past couple of years, after Paul Ereng, who won a gold medal
for Kenya in the 1988 Olympic Games, arrived at El Paso to coach the
Miners' cross-country team. He is trying to put it back on the map
by recruiting students from his own country, which is well known for
its long-distance runners.
The strategy is
working. El Paso's cross-country team earned a spot in the NCAA
championships in 2005 for the first time in 13 years. And it has won
its conference title in each of the past three seasons.
This year's team
consists entirely of seven Kenyan runners, all of whom are on full
scholarships. They speak a dialect called Nandi, live together in
off-campus apartments, drink hot tea and eat homemade cornbread
together, and attend the Anglican Church of St. Clement. Most of
them never return home during their entire undergraduate career,
becoming like family members to one another.
Continued in article
UNC Fudging the Grades of Athletes
"Scandal Bowl: Why Tar Heel Fraud Might Be Just the Start," by
Paul M. Barrett, Bloomberg Businessweek, January 6, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-06/unc-athletic-scandal-charges-of-fraud-could-be-tip-of-wider-revelations?campaign_id=DN010614
The corruption
of academics at the University of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill
campus could turn into the most revelatory of all of the
undergraduate sports scandals in recent memory. Beginning three
years ago with what sounded like garden-variety reports of
under-the-table payments from agents and improper classroom help for
athletes, the affair has spread and deepened to include evidence of
hundreds of sham courses offered since the early 1990s. Untold
numbers of grades have been changed without authorization and
faculty signatures forged—all in the service of an elaborate
campaign to keep elite basketball and football players academically
eligible to play.
After
belatedly catching up with the UNC debacle in this recent dispatch,
I’ve decided the still-developing story
deserves wider attention. Or, to put it more precisely, the
excellent reporting already done by the
News & Observer of Raleigh merits amplification outside of
North Carolina.
The rot in Chapel
Hill undermines UNC’s reputation as one of the nation’s finest
public institutions of higher learning. Officials created classes
that did not meet. That’s not the only reason more scrutiny is
needed. There’s also the particularly pernicious way that the
school’s African and Afro-American Studies Department has been used
to inflate the GPAs of basketball and football players. The
corruption of a scholarly discipline devoted to black history and
culture underscores a racial subtext to the exploitation of college
athletes that typically goes unidentified in polite discussion. (UNC’s
former longtime Afro-Am chairman, Julius Nyang’oro, has been
criminally indicted for fraud.)
Another reason
Chapel Hill requires sustained investigation is the manner in which
the athletic and academic hierarchies at UNC, along with the
National Collegiate Athletic Association, have so far whitewashed
the scandal. Officials have repeatedly denied that the fiasco’s
roots trace to an illicit agenda that, in the name of coddling a
disproportionately black undergraduate athlete population, has left
many students intellectually crippled.
Dan Kane, the
News & Observer‘s lead investigative reporter, does
old-school, just-the-facts-m’am work—and more power to him. Digging
up the basic data has been a lonely and arduous task for which Kane
has been rewarded with craven accusations of home state disloyalty.
As he wrote
last month, the six official “reviews” and
“investigations” of the wayward Afro-Am Department have all failed
to connect the dots in any meaningful way. In coming weeks and
months, I hope I can supplement Kane’s dogged efforts with some
long-distance perspective. Valuable tips from concerned local
people, some of them UNC alumni, are already pouring in, and that’s
part of the reason I’m going to pursue the story. Keep those e-mails
coming.
One source of
insight is Jay Smith, a professor of early modern French history at
UNC. A serious scholar who understands the university’s sports-happy
culture, Smith has developed a powerful distaste for the way his
employer has obfuscated the scandal. “What’s going on here is so
important,” he told me by telephone, “because it’s emblematic of
what I think goes on at major universities all across the country,”
where the business of sports undermines the mission of education.
That sounds right to me.
Smith has the best
sort of self-interested motivation for making sense of what has
happened on his campus: He’s writing a book about the whole mess,
based in part on statistics and personal experiences proffered by
UNC instructors assigned over the years to assist varsity athletes.
To me that sounds like a page-turner—and even the basis of an HBO
movie.
I asked Smith what
he thinks is going to happen next. He pointed to comments that the
local district attorney made when the disgraced former Afro-Am
chairman, Nyang’oro, was indicted in December. Orange County DA Jim
Woodall told the News & Observer that a second person is
also under investigation and could be indicted soon. Woodall did not
identify the second target, except to say the person is not someone
who currently works for UNC. ”Other probes have identified
Nyang’oro’s longtime department manager, Deborah Crowder, as being
involved in the bogus classes,” the News & Observer noted.
“She retired in 2009.” Both Crowder and Nyang’oro have refused to
comment publicly, and Nyang’oro’s criminal defense lawyer didn’t
return my e-mail inquiry.
The indictment of
Crowder, a relatively low-level administrative figure, could crack
open the case. It defies logic that Nyang’oro and his assistant
would have operated a rogue department without the knowledge of more
senior faculty members, if not top university administrators. It
further defies reason that this pair would have created phony
classes for athletes without the urging and participation of people
in the UNC athletic bureaucracy. Nyang’oro and Crowder are going to
have ample reason to sing as part of potential plea deals.
Even before
that happens, according to Smith, one or more well-positioned
whistle-blowers are likely to go public and start naming names if
they think the powers that be are planning to isolate Crowder and
Nyang’oro as the sole villains. This thing goes much higher, and
there’s much more to come from Chapel Hill.
"University of North Carolina learning specialist receives death
threats after her research finds one in 10 college athletes have reading
age of a THIRD GRADER," by Sara Malm, Daily Mail, January 10, 2014
---
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2537041/University-North-Carolina-learning-specialist-receives-death-threats-research-finds-one-10-college-athletes-reading-age-fifth-grader.html
Mary Willingham exposed college athletes'
lack of academic abilities
- She found that 10 per cent read at
elementary school level
- A majority of players' reading level
was between 4th and 8th grade
- Men's basketball makes $16.9m-a-year
for University of North Carolina
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Put another way, the poor readers can only comprehend children's books.
This is why they need agents to explain their pro contracts. Opps only a
few get pro contracts.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill has revoked a reading specialist and adjunct professor’s permission
to discuss her research or otherwise use her data on student athlete
literacy, just weeks after she was featured in a network news story on
the topic. The university also questioned her methodology and the
validity of her findings.
"Whistle-Blower Blocked," by Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed,
January 20, 2014 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/01/20/u-north-carolina-shuts-down-whistle-blower-athletes
The University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill has revoked a reading specialist and adjunct professor’s
permission to discuss her research or otherwise use her data on
student athlete literacy, just weeks after she was featured in a
network news story on the topic. The university also questioned her
methodology and the validity of her findings.
Mary Willingham, who works in the Center
for Student Success and Academic Counseling and teaches an education
course, cannot use data that could be used to identify human
subjects until she receives permission from the university's
Institutional Review Board, it told her last week. Previously, the
board determined that review and approval of her research was not
necessary because it involved “de-identified” data – meaning that it
did not contain personally identifiable information about human
research subjects, either to the researchers or the public.
In other words, the board believed it did
not have to oversee Willingham’s work because her data couldn’t be
linked back to her student subjects by anyone.
Earlier this month, Willingham
told CNN she’d worked with 183 Chapel Hill
basketball and football players for her research, from 2004-12,
while she was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina
at Greensboro. Some 10 percent read below a third-grade level, she
said. Willingham also shared anecdotes about students she’d worked
with during her career, such as one who was illiterate, and one who
couldn’t read multisyllabic words.
Another student asked if Willingham could
"teach him to read well enough so he could read about himself in the
news, because that was something really important to him," she told
CNN. Her quotes didn't identify any students by name or unique
characteristics.
It’s unclear, however, if those comments
were related to her work as a teacher and adviser or researcher.
Willingham hasn’t published a paper on her
research, but has spoken publicly before about her experiences with
student literacy at Chapel Hill. She is credited with the blowing
the whistle on a
no-show course scam involving athletes
there that made national headlines and prompted several internal
investigations in 2010. (One of those investigations found that scam
was isolated to one department, and was not motivated by athletics,
but dated back to 1997. The university’s chancellor, Holden Thorp,
resigned following the scandal.)
In a statement Friday, the university said
the review board had noted, through Willingham’s recent, public
statements, that she had “collected and retained identified data,”
requiring review board oversight. It did not say which of her
statements revealed that.
“All human subjects research requires
review by the university’s Institutional Review Board,” a university
spokesman said in a separate, emailed statement. “Review and
approval must be obtained before the research can begin. In
addition, any time there is a change to the research protocol, the
researcher must submit an updated application for review and
approval. Researchers are expected to describe in detail the data
being used in their work. That includes the specific data that a
researcher and their collaborators have collected and/or assembled,
any further work on the data that is planned, and how the data will
be analyzed.”
The review board concluded in 2008 and
again 2013 that researchers involved in Willingham’s project could
not identify individual subjects and that any codes that could allow
linkage to identifiers were “securely behind a firewall outside the
possession of the research team,” according to the statement. The
board directed Willingham to submit a full application for its
review, and said that continued use of her data without its approval
would violate university and federal policies protecting human
research subjects.
The university also disputed Willingham’s
claims that it admits athletes who lack academic preparation.
"I take these claims very seriously, but we
have been unable to reconcile these claims with either our own facts
or with those data currently being cited as the source for the
claims,” Chancellor Carol L. Folt said in a
statement posted on the Chapel Hill
website. “Moreover, the data presented in the media do not match up
with those data gathered by the Office of Undergraduate Admissions.
For example, only 2 of the 321 student-athletes admitted in 2012 and
2013 fell below the SAT and ACT levels that were cited in a recent
CNN report as the threshold for reading levels for first-year
students. And those two students are in good academic standing.”
(The news report cited that threshold as 400 on the SAT critical
reading or writing test, or 16 on the ACT.)
In addition to Folt’s statement, the
university published the results of its
analysis of eight years of admissions data
for athletes, which says 97 percent met the cited threshold. In
2013, it says, 100 percent of admitted student athletes achieved
those test scores. The student government released a similar
statement, slamming Willingham’s data.
Folt said the university was investigating
further the discrepancy between its data and those presented in the
CNN report. “We also will do our best to correct assertions we
believe are not based in fact,” she added.
The chancellor and other administrators
also discussed Willingham’s research at a scheduled Faculty Council
meeting Friday. But a faculty member present who did not want to be
named or quoted directly said a lengthy presentation about the
project focused almost entirely on methodological concerns about
Willingham’s assessment tool and how accurately it could be used to
correlate scores with grade-level reading readiness, not the review
board issue.
The university published a
news release late Friday about those
findings, accusing Willingham of making a “range of serious
mistakes” in her research.
“Carolina has a world-renowned reputation
for our research, and the work we have just reviewed does not
reflect the quality and excellence found throughout the Carolina
community,” Folt said in the release.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I wonder what would happen if reading tests were required for the top
ten NCAA football and basketball varsity players?
More to the UNC scandal than empty classrooms
"Professors in Class on Time? Check. At the U. of North Carolina, a culture
of autonomy falls victim to one department's no-show scandal," by indsay
Ellis and Robin Wilson, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 6, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Professors-in-Classroom-on/143813/
. . .
The academic improprieties, in which
professors' signatures were forged to change
students' gradee and undergraduates got
credit for courses that never met, went undetected for nearly 15 years
within the African- and Afro-American-studies department. The university
says the fraud appears to be the work of a longtime administrator in the
department and its chairman, Julius E. Nyang'oro, who led African-American
studies here for nearly two decades. Many of the students who were involved
in the questionable classes were athletes.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The internal control question is how students got access to their grade
sheets in order to change grades! Sounds like an insider made it easy for
them to find those grade sheets in the dead of night.
Didn't UNC learn from FSU?
Academic Fraud and Friction at
Florida State University
On Friday,
the National Collegiate Athletic Association announced
that more than 60 athletes at the university had
cheated in two online courses over a year and a half long period, one of
the most serious cases of academic fraud in the NCAA's recent history.
Yet just about all anyone seemed to be able to talk about -- especially
Florida State fans in commenting on the case and
news publications in reporting on it -- is
how the NCAA's penalties (which include requiring Florida State to
vacate an undetermined number of victories in which the cheating
athletes competed) might undermine the legacy of the university's
football coach, Bobby Bowden. Bowden has one fewer career victory than
Pennsylvania State University's longtime coach, Joe Paterno, and if
Florida State has to wipe out as many as 14 football wins from 2007 and
2008, it could end Bowden's chance of being the all-time winningest
coach in big-time college football.
Inside Higher Ed, March 9, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/09/fsu
More to the UNC scandal than empty classrooms
"Professors in Class on Time? Check. At the U. of North Carolina, a
culture of autonomy falls victim to one department's no-show scandal,"
by indsay Ellis and Robin Wilson, Chronicle of Higher Education, January
6, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Professors-in-Classroom-on/143813/
. . .
The academic improprieties, in which
professors' signatures were forged to
change students' gradee and
undergraduates got credit for courses that never met, went
undetected for nearly 15 years within the African- and
Afro-American-studies department. The university says the fraud
appears to be the work of a longtime administrator in the department
and its chairman, Julius E. Nyang'oro, who led African-American
studies here for nearly two decades. Many of the students who were
involved in the questionable classes were athletes.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The internal control question is how students got access to their
grade sheets in order to change grades! Sounds like an insider made
it easy for them to find those grade sheets in the dead of night.
Compounding FSU's problem is an earlier cheating scandal
20 Florida State University Football Players
Likely to Be Suspended in Cheated Scandal
"Source: Multiple suspensions likely for
Music City Bowl, plus 3 games in 2008," by Mark Schlabach, ESPN.com,
December 18, 2007 ---
http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=3159534
As many as 20
Florida State football players will be suspended from playing
against Kentucky in the Dec. 31 Gaylord Hotels Music City Bowl, as
well as the first three games of the 2008 season, for their roles in
an alleged cheating scandal involving an Internet-based course, a
source with knowledge of the situation said Tuesday morning.
Florida State
officials are expected to announce the results of the investigation
this week. The source said university officials determined Monday
night the exact number of football players who will be suspended.
Federal privacy laws prohibit the school from releasing names.
. . .
The investigation
already has led to the resignations of two academic assistance
employees who worked with FSU student-athletes. The school revealed
in September that as many as 23 student-athletes were given answers
before taking tests over the Internet.
Further
investigations revealed additional student-athletes were involved in
the cheating, according to the source.
"If the players
fight the suspensions, they'll risk losing all of their
eligibility," a source with knowledge of the situation said Tuesday
morning.
The school's
investigation found that a tutor gave students answers while they
were taking tests and filled in answers on quizzes and typed papers
for students.
Florida State
president T.K. Wetherell, a former Seminoles football player,
reported the initial findings in a letter to the NCAA in September.
Wetherell ordered an
investigation by the university's Office of Audit Services in May
after receiving information an athletics department tutor had
directed one athlete to take an online quiz for another athlete and
then provided the answers.
The tutor implicated
in the audit told investigators he had been providing students with
answers for the test since the fall of 2006, according to a
university report.
Wisconsin was the
last football program to suspend as many as 20 players. Days before
the start of the 2000 regular season, 26 Badgers were given three-
or one-game suspensions for getting unadvertised price breaks at a
shoe store.
Florida State
announced in October that athletics director Dave Hart Jr. will
resign Dec. 31. Wetherell appointed State Rep. William "Bill"
Proctor interim athletics director. Proctor also is a former FSU
football player.
The school announced
last week that longtime football coach Bobby Bowden had agreed to a
one-year contract extension through the 2008 season that will pay
him at least $1.98 million. Bowden, who is in his 32nd season at the
school, is major college football's all-time winningest coach with
373 career victories.
Florida State also
designated offensive coordinator Jimbo Fisher as Bowden's eventual
successor. Fisher's new contract calls for him to replace Bowden by
the end of the 2010 season. If Fisher isn't named FSU's new coach by
then, the school's booster organization would owe him $2.5 million.
Under the terms of the new contract, Fisher would owe Seminoles
boosters $2.5 million if he leaves the school before the end of the
2010 season.
The Seminoles
struggled for the fourth consecutive season in 2007, finishing 7-5
overall, 4-4 in ACC play. It is the fourth consecutive season they
failed to win 10 games, after winning at least 10 games in 14
consecutive seasons, from 1987 to 2000.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
It ended up being 25 players who were suspended ---
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/sports/content/sports/epaper/2007/12/18/1218fsu.html
Florida State lost to Kentucky in the Music Bowl (35-28)
Beating the NCAA to the Punch
Florida State U. Cuts Scholarships and Places Itself on Probation
Florida State University has placed itself on probation
for two years and will reduce the number of scholarships it offers in several
sports as a result of an academic-fraud scandal involving some 60 athletes,
The Orlando Sentinel reported today. The scandal swept
up athletes in various sports, most notably the
football
team, which had to play in December’s Music City
Bowl without two dozen players implicated in the violations.The university has
been conducting an
internal
investigation of the misconduct since last year. In
addition to the probation, it will impose penalties that include personnel
changes at several top positions in the athletics department and the firing of
the “learning specialist” and tutor accused of helping dozens of athletes cheat,
the Sentinel reported.
Libby Sander, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 14, 2008 ---
Click Here
The Now Infamous Favored
Professor by University of Michigan Athletes
A single University of Michigan professor
taught 294 independent studies for students, 85 percent of them
athletes, from the fall of 2004 to the fall of 2007, according to
The Ann Arbor News. According to the
report, which kicks off a series on Michigan athletics and was based on
seven months of investigation, many athletes reported being steered to
the professor, and said that they earned three or four credits for
meeting with him as little as 15 minutes every two weeks. In addition,
three former athletics department officials said that athletes were
urged to take courses with the professor, John Hagen, to raise their
averages. Transcripts examined by the newspaper showed that students
earned significantly higher grades with Hagen than in their regular
courses. The News reported that Hagen initially denied teaching a high
percentage of athletes in his independent studies, but did not dispute
the accuracy of documents the newspaper shared with him. He did deny
being part of any effort to raise the averages of his students. The
newspaper also said that Michigan’s president and athletics director had
declined to be interviewed for the series.
Inside Higher Ed, March 17, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/03/17/qt
Question
Has the University of Michigan blocked efforts to investigate its "independent
study" athletics scandals?
In March, The Ann Arbor News
ran a series of articles exploring allegations that many top athletes at
the University of Michigan were
encouraged to enroll in independent study courses with a
professor who allegedly didn’t require much work for great grades. On
Sunday, the newspaper started
a new series — arguing that the university
has blocked efforts by professors to study issues related to athletes
and academics. While university officials have said that they would
provide information sought by faculty members, the series suggests
otherwise.
Inside Higher Education, June 16, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/16/qt
When it comes to the
academic clustering of athletes,
the question typically is “in
what major?” The suggestion: Members of a given
sports team are enrolled in a particular program at
a much higher rate than are other students at the
college. But what about when the question is “with
what professor?”
That’s the case at the University of Michigan, where
officials Monday were responding to an Ann Arbor
News
article
that alleges athletes there have been steered to
independent study courses taught by a psychology
professor who often requires little of the students
and gives them high grades. The investigation found
that the professor, John Hagen, taught 294
independent studies for students, 85 percent of them
athletes, from the fall of 2004 to the fall of 2007.
Michigan doesn’t dispute those numbers, but it
refuted the article’s description of Hagen as a
safety net for athletes who might need a quick
grade-point-average jolt. The university also denies
that athletics department academic counselors are
directing students to Hagen, or that any athlete has
been forced to take an independent study course with
him.
The Michigan allegations come
less than two years after the New York Times
published
findings that a large
number of Auburn University athletes were taking
“directed studies” with the same professor and
earning significantly higher grades on that work
than in regular courses. As a result, Auburn
announced new limits on
the number of students whose independent study work
can be supervised by a single professor.
That
the practice of independent study, commonly reserved
for students with unique intellectual interests, is
at the center of a controversy over special
arrangements and academic rigor comes as little
surprise to some faculty members. Among them is R.
Scott Kretchmar, a professor of exercise and sport
science at Pennsylvania State University’s main
campus and a sports philosopher. He said in a recent
meeting with academic support staff at Penn State,
independent study emerged as one of several
potential red flags.
“It’s clearly an area of risk,” Kretchmar said. “Any
student can go to any faculty member and work out a
deal, and there aren’t many checks on that. It’s one
of those slippery areas in higher education that
probably deserves a little more scrutiny — both for
athletes and generally speaking.”
The
content of independent study courses can be met with
skepticism, Kretchmar said, because it often doesn’t
undergo Faculty Senate review as new courses
typically do. In many cases, a department chair
signs off on the topic.
David Goldfield, a professor of history at the
University of North Carolina at Charlotte and past
president of the Faculty Athletics Representatives
Association, said that despite the fact that the
majority of independent study arrangements would
pass an academic merit test, the possibility of
impropriety is significant.
“The
great advantage of independent study at a public
institution is that it gives students an opportunity
to work one-on-one with a particular faculty member
in a subject area that’s of interest to them,” said
Goldfield, the current faculty athletics
representative at Charlotte who has served on the
academic eligibility and compliance cabinet of the
NCAA. “The most disturbing aspect of [the Michigan
case] is that there appears there was no monitoring,
and it’s mind boggling that nobody picked up on
this.”
For
its part, Michigan says that the psychology
department closely monitors independent study, and
that two internal investigations have showed no
wrongdoing on the part of Hagen or the department.
(More on that later.)
Still, Goldfield said based on
what he’s read, it looks to him like a case of
academic advisers feeling the heat to boost
athletes’ academic standing. When the National
Collegiate Athletic Association lowered initial
eligibility requirements and raised the stakes for
athletes remaining eligible, it
placed an increasing strain on institutions —
and in particular academic
support staff within athletics departments — to keep
athletes eligible, Goldfield said.
The
question, then, is who should set the tone on
independent study? While the NCAA has talked
recently about taking a closer look at which majors
athletes tend to choose, Erik Christianson, an
association spokesman, said that it’s up to campuses
to come up with independent study policies that best
fit their institutions.
Kretchmar said such decisions as how many such
courses an athlete (or non-athlete) can take, or how
many students a professor can take on should be
handled internally.
“I
worry about the NCAA regulating it, because we
aren’t all cut out of the same mold,” he said.
“Clearly, each institution should be vigilant about
keeping statistics on number of students in a major,
number of students taking a course from a professor
and grading differences.
“Our
general philosophy is we don’t want to be draconian
in prohibiting athletes from taking independent
study, but we don’t want to be stupid about ignoring
particular problems.”
Goldfield agreed that the NCAA “can’t micromanage
academic integrity” and that its role is to “set a
standard and hope universities live up to it.”
Faculty athletics representatives have the
responsibility to monitor statistics on who’s
choosing what major, Goldfield said.
The Ann Arbor News
continued its series Monday
with a look at the rise in general studies majors
among Michigan athletes. Critics of clustering say
that athletes are funneled year after year into
programs that are seen as less rigorous. Others
argue that if a major isn’t up to university
standards, it’s not the athletes or academic
advisers who should be faulted — it’s the committee
that approved the program.
Goldfield said he has never asked his department
about the number of independent studies athletes are
taking. “I believe in the integrity of the
athletic-academic support center,” he said.
Fallout at Michigan
In
his experience running independent studies,
Goldstein said there’s “no way to provide any
semblance of academic rigor” by directing as many
students as Hagen did over several years. There’s
simply not enough time and energy to go around, he
said.
Others quoted in the News article make
similar points. They say that athletes have signed
up for several of Hagen’s independent studies
knowing that they’ll have to put in minimal effort —
earning three or four credits for meeting with him
as little as 15 minutes every two weeks, the
investigation found. An analysis of transcripts also
showed that athletes performed better in his classes
than they did in other classes.
Hagen issued a statement defending his academic
record and said in an e-mail Monday that he takes
issue with some of the data cited in the News
article. He said that students in his courses do
demanding work.
A
FAQ response posted on the
university’s Web site says that faculty such as
Hagen make themselves readily available to students.
“The independent study model is very flexible,” it
says. Hagen scores high in accessibility and time
spent with students in student evaluations, Michigan
added.
Percy Bates, Michigan’s faculty athletics
representative and a professor of education, said
“it’s clear to me that the monitoring that we do is
pretty adequate, even around the issue of
independent studies. We make sure that what people
are doing is legitimate work for students, and these
aren’t professors who are willy-nillying.
“Given all that’s out there, that doesn’t mean we
won’t take another look at what we’re doing,” Bates
added.
Two
summers ago, after the Auburn case became public,
Michigan’s provost office asked deans in each
undergraduate college to look into how independent
studies courses are vetted. A professor in the
psychology department has since raised concern with
Hagen’s arrangement.
Two subsequent reviews — one
by his
department’s executive committee
and another by the
College of Literature, Science and the Arts
— found Hagen clear of
wrongdoing, saying that the courses are academically
rigorous and that the professor’s grading patterns
caused no concern. The latter report concluded “not
only that there is nothing about Professor Hagen’s
independent study program that should concern us,
but that in fact he is performing a valuable service
for the students in those studies and to the
university by having them available.”
But
are enough non-athletes getting that experience?
Michigan says that the ratio of athletes to other
students in Hagen’s independent study courses is
often 2:1 in a given semester. University research
shows that other psychology professors have a
proportion of athletes to students that ranges from
0 to 60 percent.
Phil
Hanlon, vice president for academic and budgetary
affairs at Michigan, said Hagen’s focus on
developmental psychology — and in particular student
learning and teaching style — attracts many athletes
who are interested in becoming coaches or teachers.
According to Michigan’s FAQ explanation: “Much of
Professor Hagen’s scholarly work addresses learning
styles and skills among college students who excel
in physical attributes and performance.”
Word
of mouth, Hanlon said, is another reason to explain
the high number of athletes in his independent study
courses.
The
university’s FAQ explanation also says that “in a
recent term, more than 20 students with identified
learning problems or disabilities took Independent
Study with Professor Hagen because his expertise and
interest in working with students in this area is
well known.”
Hanlon said because the university doesn’t
disaggregate students by disability status, he
couldn’t say whether more athletes had learning
disabilities than students over all at the
institution. “I have no reason to think there’s any
kind of connection,” he said.
Bates, the faculty athletic representative, said he
didn’t find the number of athletes in Hagen’s
courses alarming. “What he was doing was focusing on
a number of athletes who might be labeled at-risk
and with learning problems.” Bates said he’s unsure
if they are athletes with documented disabilities or
not, but that many students heard from past students
that Hagen had a record of helping students with
different learning styles.
“I
can’t think of a professor who’s been more concerned
with at-risk students than Hagen has over his time
here,” Bates said.
According to Michigan, in academic year 2006–7,
nearly 4,000 undergraduate students enrolled in one
or more independent study course. This year,
Michigan has 716 athletes, but the university said
it couldn’t immediately provide data on how many
athletes took independent studies courses.
"CNN Finds Athletes Who 'Read Like
5th Graders'," Inside Higher Ed, January 8, 2014 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2014/01/08/cnn-finds-athletes-who-read-5th-graders
Jensen Comment
Given their admission qualifications naive analysts might wonder
unqualified applicants got into college. But it's really simple when you
think about it. I recall the time when five varsity basketball players
sued UCLA because after four years at UCLA they still could not read. To
UCLA's credit none of these illiterate basketball players graduated with
a diploma.
Athletes Seek Out Professors Who Will Pass Almost Any Athlete
Watkins says it is all too common to see athletes
grouped in certain departments or programs under the sheltering wings of faculty
members who appear to care more about their success on the courts, rinks and
fields than in the classroom. Faculty members are often the most vocal critics
of favoritism for athletes (the issues at Auburn were raised by one whistle
blowing sociology professor against another), he says, but it is frequently
professors who are responsible for the favoritism in the first place.
Rob Capriccioso, "Tackling Favoritism for Athletes," Inside Higher Ed, July 20,
2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/20/sports
Bob Jensen's threads on professors who cheat and let students cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#RebeccaHoward
Linebacker's Wife Says She Wrote His Papers
(and took two online courses for him)
The wife of a star University of South Florida
linebacker says she wrote his academic papers and took two online classes for
him. The accusations against Ben Moffitt, who had been promoted by the
university to the news media as a family man, were made in e-mail messages to
The Tampa Tribune, and followed Mr. Moffitt’s filing for divorce. Mr. Moffitt
called the accusations “hearsay,” and a university spokesman said the matter was
a “domestic issue.” If it is found that Mr. Moffitt committed academic fraud,
the newspaper reported, the university could be subject to an NCAA
investigation.
"Linebacker's Wife Says She Wrote His Papers," Chronicle of Higher Education
News Blog, January 5, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/news/article/3707/linebackers-wife-says-she-wrote-his-papers?at
Jensen Comment
If Florida investigates this and discovers it was true, I wonder if Moffitt's
diploma will be revoked. Somehow I doubt it.
First the Irish Were Displaced Among the
"Fighting Irish"
Now Television May Have Withered the "Fighting Irish"
(Just like television has made politics a money game)
"A Crossroads for the Fighting Irish
(and Their Peers)," by Alan Sack, Inside Higher Ed, January 4,
2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/01/04/sack
The decline of the
football program at the University of Notre Dame, where I played in
the 1960s, has been consistent fodder on sports radio and fan Web
sites in recent months. But the situation has implications that
extend far beyond the concerns of the university’s loyal alumni and
other Fighting Irish fanatics – and I propose that Notre Dame deal
with it in a way that could make it a national leader in
intercollegiate athletics reform.
One explanation for
Notre Dame’s football meltdown since the mid-1990s — the one I find
most compelling — is that it reflects major and irreversible changes
in the college football landscape, some of which Notre Dame helped
to initiate. In 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the
National Collegiate Athletic Association’s monopoly control of the
sale of football broadcasts to television networks, thus allowing
individual schools to negotiate their own TV deals.
The Irish, who led
the charge for free enterprise in college sports, undoubtedly
benefited from this decision. But so too did scores of other schools
— including upstarts like Boise State, Hawaii, and South Florida —
whose increased television exposure allows them to recruit
head-to-head with the traditional powers like Notre Dame. NCAA
limits on the number of football scholarships and the increase in
blue chip players coming out of high school have also created
greater parity within the Bowl Championship Subdivision, which
features the bigger football playing universities.
As the stunning
number of upset victories during the 2007 football season made
clear, Notre Dame is not the only traditional powerhouse struggling
to keep up with the flood of new entrants and rising stars that now
compete for college football’s pot of gold. But academically
competitive institutions like Notre Dame have the added disadvantage
that their admissions standards far exceed the freshman eligibility
requirements recently adopted by the NCAA.
In 1986, the NCAA
responded to reports of functional illiteracy among college athletes
by passing a rule known as Proposition 48. Over the years,
Proposition 48 has gone through a number of revisions, each one
further watering down the test score component. Today an athlete
with a combined SAT score of 400 — the lowest score possible — can
compete and receive athletic aid as a freshman if a high grade point
average in high school offsets the low test score.
Notre Dame, like
every other football power, lowers its admissions standards for
athletes. But even though the SAT average for Notre Dame football
players — about 1048 — falls about 300 points below the average for
the student body, it soars above the NCAA minimum. Stellar running
backs with a combined SAT score of 600 and a B average in high
school would be fair game for many other colleges. Academically
competitive universities like Notre Dame, Stanford and Duke would be
unlikely to consider them.
To try to get the
Fighting Irish football program back up to a nationally competitive
level, Notre Dame is at a crossroads. It can either continue to fish
in a smaller recruiting pond than some of its competitors, thus
continuing the slide into football mediocrity. Or it can find a
creative way to go deeper into the college football talent pool,
while at the same time preserving the university’s academic
integrity. Although this latter approach would require courageous
and visionary leadership, the model for getting it done already
exists.
I propose the
following. Using NCAA minimum standards, Notre Dame could offer
scholarships to athletes who are academically at risk, including
highly motivated students from educationally disadvantaged
backgrounds. But these athletes would be barred from practicing,
attending film sessions, and playing in games during their first
semester in college unless they score at least a 900 on the SATs (or
an equivalent ACT score) and graduate from high school with a 3.0
grade point average. They would then need at least a 2.0 to practice
in the spring semester.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I think another factor is that Notre Dame may have maintained higher
academic integrity than some of the competition. Witness the fact that
Florida State University recently suspended 25 players after it leaked
out that they were cheating on examinations. Although some progress has
been made by the NCAA in bringing academic integrity into Division 1
athletics, huge problems remain ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics
Alumni and coaches have far more power in this regard than faculty who
all too often ignore academic integrity problems in their athletic
departments (Paul Williams at North Carolina State being an exception).
Question
In a dispute
between coaches and faculty, guess which side wins, in some cases at
least, when the publicity is out?
Hint:
Surprisingly it's not always the side that gets paid ten times as much per year.
Students get the minimum admissions
bar if they can play football but not necessarily otherwise
The University of
South Carolina is looking for ways to streamline its admissions process
amid a threat from its football coach, Steve Spurrier, to quit if the
university doesn’t admit all recruits who meet basic (read
that really, really minimal) eligibility
requirements set by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, The
State reported. Spurrier is angry because the university rejected two
recruits this year. “As long as I’m the coach here, we’re going to take
guys that qualify,” Spurrier said at a press conference. “If not, then I
have to go somewhere else because I can’t tell a young man, ‘You’re
coming to school here,’ he qualifies, and not do that. And we did that
this year.”
Inside Higher Ed, August 6, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/06/qt
But the
overarching issue Spurrier raises — what coaches and colleges tell
athletes about their prospects for admission, and when in the process
they send those signals — is a real one that affects every university
that plays big-time sports. (Lest anyone wonder,
it even applies in the Ivy League.)
Doug Lederman, "Star
Athlete, You’re Admitted. Er, Never Mind," Inside Higher Ed,
August 8, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/08/recruit
Officials at
both Clemson and South Carolina said that they were aware of peer
colleges — they declined to name names — where meeting the NCAA’s
freshman eligibility standards, even as they have been weakened in
recent years, was good enough to ensure admission for athletes, as
Spurrier said he would prefer it at South Carolina. Clemson and South
Carolina say that that’s not something they’re willing to do, and that
the admissions processes for athletes — even those admitted outside the
regular admissions process — must remain in control of academic
administrators. Said Reeder, the Faculty Senate chair at South Carolina:
“As long as that admissions process — whether we’re talking about
standard or special admits — as long as that remains under purview of
the faculty, that’s probably as good as it gets.”
Doug Lederman, "Star
Athlete, You’re Admitted. Er, Never Mind," Inside Higher Ed,
August 8, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/08/recruit
College Football Players Spend 44.8 Hours a
Week on Their Sport, NCAA Survey Finds
Playing major-college football is a full-time job,
according to new research presented here on Saturday during the National
Collegiate Athletic Association's annual convention. In a 2006 NCAA survey of
21,000 athletes who were then playing in a variety of men's and women's sports,
football players reported spending 44.8 hours a week practicing, playing, or
training for their sport. That's on top of the time players spend in the
classroom. The findings shocked campus leaders and athletics officials at the
gathering here. "That's out of control," said Walter Harrison, president of the
University of Hartford. "I'm hoping the [NCAA] bodies that oversee football will
do something about this, and that the board of directors pays attention to it."
Brad Wolverton, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 14, 2008
---
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/01/1208n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Among other
results, the survey found:
- Almost
two-thirds of Division I athletes said they believed
their grade-point averages would be higher if they had
not participated in sports.
-
Athletes who reported having more balance between their
athletics and academic commitments performed better in
the classroom.
- The
majority of those surveyed viewed themselves more as
athletes than as students. But those who viewed
themselves primarily as students had higher graduation
rates.
A report on
the survey, "Goals: Growth, Opportunities, Aspirations, and
Learning of Students in College," will be released later
this year.
|
Jensen Comment
Football players play approximately 12-16 games each autumn semester. I
think baseball players probably spend even more time on their sport
since they play 50-80 games each spring semester.
Call
for major reforms of intercollegiate athletics
A coalition of faculty senates will today release a
report calling for
major reforms of intercollegiate athletics — with
many of the recommendations calling for an enhanced role for professors
in overseeing sports programs. The Coalition on Intercollegiate
Athletics is calling for the creation of a Campus Athletic Board at each
campus, a majority of whose members would be tenured professors selected
through faculty governance structures. This board would have to be
consulted on all major athletics decisions, including the hiring of key
officials, changes in the number of sports offered, and adding
significant facilities. Other recommendations are designed to assure the
primacy of academic values. For example, one recommendation is that
admissions standards should be the same for all students, regardless of
whether they are athletes, and that athletes “should be admitted based
on their potential for academic success and
not primarily on their athletic contribution.”
Inside Higher Ed, June 18, 2007
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/06/18/qt
Scholarships to Athletic Illiterates?
Comments by a long-time critic of the impact of big-time athletic programs on
college athletics are bringing accusations of racism — while others accuse
Rutgers University officials of throwing around the term much too loosely.
William Dowling is a professor of English at Rutgers whose new book,
Confessions of a Spoilsport: My Life and Hard Times Fighting Sports
Corruption at an Old Eastern University
(Penn
State University Press),
details his unsuccessful campaign
against
an increased emphasis on athletics at Rutgers. In an article in
The New York Times
last week, Dowling was quoted as saying: “If you were giving the scholarship to
an intellectually brilliant kid who happens to play a sport, that’s fine. But
they give it to a functional illiterate who can’t read a cereal box, and then
make him spend 50 hours a week on physical skills. That’s not opportunity. If
you want to give financial help to minorities, go find the ones who are at the
library after school.” Those comments, the
Associated Press
reported, have Bob Mulcahy, the Rutgers athletics director, calling the remarks
“blatantly racist” and President Richard McCormick blasting them as “inaccurate
and inhumane” and having “a racist implication that has no place whatsoever in
our civil discourse.” Dowling noted to the AP that he was answering a specific
question from the Times about the argument that athletics programs helped
minority students. “If someone has a way to answer that question without
mentioning race, I would like to hear it,” said Dowling, who called the
accusation of racism the “cheapest rhetorical ploy I’ve ever heard.”
Scott Jaschik and Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed, October 1, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/01/qt
Just Don't Call It Education: Is there fraud in academic
assessment of top college athletes?
Three newspapers this weekend
explored the academic compromises universities make in the name of
athletic success.
The New York Times reported that an internal audit at Auburn
University revealed that an athlete’s grade had been changed without the
professor’s knowledge, to bring the athlete just over the minimum
average needed for eligibility. Auburn isn’t talking.
The Athens Banner-Herald reported that in
1999 and 2000, the University of Georgia’s president, Michael Adams,
authorized the admission of 119 athletes who did not meet academic
standards, and that 21 of them left because of academic problems. And
The San Diego Union Tribune reported on the
percentages of scholarship athletes at many Western institutions who are
“special admits” (translation: they don’t meet admissions standards).
The newspaper found that special admits are rare in the student body as
a whole at the institutions studied, but quite high (70 percent at the
University of California at Los Angeles, 65 percent at San Diego State
University) for scholarship athletes.
Inside Higher Ed, December 11, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/12/11/qt
NCAA Committee to Explore Concerns Over
Athletes' Clustering in Certain Majors
Athlete clustering is one of the
most controversial topics in college sports, and many athletics
officials have long denied that it takes place (The
Chronicle,
January 17, 2003). But as colleges have demanded more of athletes, and
the NCAA has raised academic standards to keep players on track toward
graduation, some academic advisers have seen an increase in the number
of athletes who choose certain majors.The Committee on Academic
Performance, which created the stricter academic requirements for
athletes, wants to look at the effect the rules have had on players. It
also wants to explore how athletes' majors compare with those of the
overall student population. The NCAA already has data on athletes'
majors. And members of its research staff believe they may have found
comparable data for overall enrollments." We've all heard examples of
athletes' taking majors with more electives, or not studying things like
chemistry" because of how much time students must spend in the
laboratory, Mr. Harrison said. "We just want to know if athletes are
being channeled away from, say, psychology and into sports management."
Brad Wolverton, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 14, 2008
---
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/01/1209n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
"Academic Fraud in Collegiate Athletics,"
by Elia Powers, Inside Higher Ed, October 2, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/02/fraud
Academic fraud cases have long been a staple of the
National Collegiate Athletic Association’s
infractions list. The descriptions are pleasure
reading for critics of big-time college sports who
question the influence that determined athletics
officials, administrators and faculty can have on
keeping athletes eligible at all costs.
Of late, there’s been no shortage of
material:
-
At Florida State University, a
“learning specialist” and a
tutor “perpetrated academic
dishonesty” in a scandal
involving 23 athletes, an
internal investigation found. In
some cases, the employees — both
of whom resigned, according to
the university — gave students
answers to online exams and
typed material for them.
-
A former
Purdue University women’s
basketball assistant coach,
fired last year, was found to
have
partially researched and
composed a sociology paper
for a
player and then lied about it to
university officials who were
looking into the allegations.
The coach left an e-mail trail
behind that proved to be the
smoking gun.
-
The
University of Kansas received
three years’ probation last fall
for a
series of violations,
including
a former graduate assistant
football coach who gave two
prospective athletes answers to
test questions for
correspondence courses they were
taking at the university.
-
Add to the
list
concerns over correspondence
courses
that allow athletes to gain
eligibility and the issue of
“clustering”
—
illustrated in the Auburn
University case involving a
sociology professor who is
accused of offering specialized
classes to athletes that
required little work.
Whether or not
cases of academic fraud have become
more rampant or even more serious in
recent years is up for debate;
statistics on their occurrence
(increased or otherwise) are hard to
come by. But many agree that the
climate has changed in college
athletics in ways that may make such
misbehavior more likely. And it has
happened since the NCAA unveiled
its latest set of academic policies
that
raised the stakes on colleges to
show that their athletes perform
well in the classroom while
simultaneously lowering the
requirements freshman athletes must
meet to become eligible initially.
Largely as a response to sagging
graduation rates for football and
basketball players, the NCAA put
into place several years ago new
academic rules that require colleges
to report each term whether their
athletes are on progress toward a
degree — with penalties awaiting
those whose students aren’t
progressing and aren’t performing.
At the same time, the NCAA reversed
its previous approach of continually
raising initial entrance
requirements and began allowing
students with SAT scores as low as
400 (or a corresponding ACT score)
to enroll so long as their high
school grades were high enough. That
move appeased critics of the
standardized test score requirement
who said it adversely affected
minority students.
In the years since the changes, many
have expressed concern that the
combination of heightened academic
expectations and lowered entrance
regulations would put the campus
employees responsible for providing
academic support to athletes in a
tough spot, asked to help a growing
number of marginal students —
potentially at all costs.
That fear is so real to James F.
Barker, president of Clemson
University, that he meets each
semester with everyone who gives
tutorial help or guidance to
athletes and “reads them the Riot
Act.”
“I tell them, ‘I’m responsible for
20,000 people and a
half-a-million-dollar budget — those
two things could keep me awake at
night, but they don’t. What does is
academic fraud. No student-athlete
is worth crossing that line for,’ ”
says Barker, who also heads the
NCAA’s Division I Board of
Directors, the panel of college
presidents that governs the NCAA’s
highest-profile competitive level.
David Goldfield, a professor of
history at the University of North
Carolina at Charlotte who served on
the academic eligibility and
compliance cabinet of the NCAA,
which helped craft the new policy,
said he supports the new progress
standards but still opposes lowering
entrance requirements — which he
said strains the entire system of
academic support.
“When there’s pressure applied
you’re going to get a reaction, and
the reaction we’re seeing is
academic fraud cases,” Goldfield
said. “From a coach’s perspective,
the major task is to win, but now
with the new requirements, the
second and often equally pressing
task is to maintain the eligibility
of players.”
Goldfield fears that academic fraud
cases are far more widespread than
just the ones reported to the NCAA.
Compliance officers can have a
difficult time tracking down such
cases, he said, because they can
involve wrongdoing by people in all
parts of an institution, and often
rely on self-reporting by athletics
officials.
The NCAA did
not have a comment for this article.
Kevin Lennon, the association’s vice
president for membership services,
said in a
statement
about the Florida State case that
“the NCAA and its member
institutions take seriously any
allegation of academic misconduct”
and that “these types of violations
are among the most serious that can
be committed.”
Lennon added that the NCAA is
committed to its academic reform
measures. The association has
defended its eligibility changes by
arguing that the focus should be
primarily on what students can
achieve in college and not just on
their high school academic
performance.
But some say that stance ignores the
reality that unprepared students
often can’t cut it in college.
“Just because you’re technically
eligible to compete doesn’t mean you
are ready to compete in the
classroom,” said Tim Metcalf,
director of compliance at East
Carolina University.
Terry Holland, a longtime men’s
basketball coach at the University
of Virginia who is now athletics
director at East Carolina, said
coaches and college officials are
under increasing pressure to accept
any student who qualifies under the
NCAA’s rules. In his meetings with
other athletics directors, Holland
said he hasn’t encountered one yet
who says athletes are better
prepared now than they were five
years ago.
“For many programs, the recruiting
pitch is, ‘We have a great academic
support system and everyone
graduates,’ ” Holland said. “Maybe
what the athletes are hearing is,
‘You’re going to do the work for me.
It may not be fraud, but I won’t
have to do as much.’ “
Colleges have largely responded by
devoting more resources to academic
support services. They are hiring
more tutors, building new academic
centers and beefing up compliance
offices.
Continued in article
Academic Fraud as Usual in College Athletics
Coaches at colleges in the Maricopa
Community College District offer courses without textbooks, homework or exams,
but in which almost everyone earns an A, according to an investigation by
The East Valley Tribune. The newspaper
reported that many coaches encourage their athletes to take the courses, which
raise their averages. In at least one of these credit courses, class work
included fielding drills and pre-game stretches. After the newspaper gave its
findings to Rufus Glasper, chancellor of the Arizona system, he ordered a full
study of the classes.
Inside Higher Ed, June 12, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/06/12/qt
June 13, 2007 reply from Henry Collier
[henrycollier@aapt.net.au]
Could it be because
university athletic programs are more about money than education? If
a university can fill their stadiums and field houses, and gain more
alumni donations, why would they bother to worry about ‘education’
or ‘standards’? One of my now retired colleagues always used to say
“standards are what you use to hold up your volleyball net”.
Australian universities have their own set of problems with
‘standards’ and variances, but athletics programs do not contribute
to the mix.
I have a problem
with the data reported about the Georgia ‘special admissions’. If
about 20% of the students admitted under ‘special conditions’ have
academic problems, how does this differ from statistics on ‘regular’
admissions? What % of ‘regular admissions’ have academic problems?
Henry Collier
Hon Research Fellow
University of Wollongong
Just Don't Call It Education: Is there fraud in academic
assessment of top college athletes?
Three newspapers this weekend
explored the academic compromises universities make in the name of
athletic success.
The New York Times reported that an internal audit at Auburn
University revealed that an athlete’s grade had been changed without the
professor’s knowledge, to bring the athlete just over the minimum
average needed for eligibility. Auburn isn’t talking.
The Athens Banner-Herald reported that in
1999 and 2000, the University of Georgia’s president, Michael Adams,
authorized the admission of 119 athletes who did not meet academic
standards, and that 21 of them left because of academic problems. And
The San Diego Union Tribune reported on the
percentages of scholarship athletes at many Western institutions who are
“special admits” (translation: they don’t meet admissions standards).
The newspaper found that special admits are rare in the student body as
a whole at the institutions studied, but quite high (70 percent at the
University of California at Los Angeles, 65 percent at San Diego State
University) for scholarship athletes.
Inside Higher Ed, December 11, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/12/11/qt
"The Best Way To Search Videos On the
Internet," by Katherine Boehret, The Wall Street Journal, August 22,
2007; Page D1 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118773008539604389.html
This week, I tested
four video-search engines, including revamped entrant Truveo.com, a
smartly designed site that combs through Web video from all sorts of
sources ranging from YouTube to broadcasting companies. Truveo, a
subsidiary of AOL, is stepping out on its own again after spending
three years in the background, powering video search for the likes
of Microsoft, Brightcove and AOL itself. It unveiled its new site
last week, though I've been playing with it for a few weeks now.
|
This Web site,
www.truveo.com, operates under the
idea that users don't merely search for video by entering
specific words or phrases, like they would when starting a
regular Web search. Instead, Truveo thinks that people don't
often know what they're looking for in online video
searches, and browsing through content helps to retrieve
unexpected and perhaps unintended (but welcome) results. I
found that, compared with other sites, Truveo provided the
most useful interface, which showed five times as many
results per page as the others and encouraged me to browse
other clips.
In
effect, Truveo combines the browsing experience of a YouTube
with the best Web-wide video-search engine I've seen.
The other video-search sites I tested
included Google's (www.google.com/video)
and Yahoo's (www.video.yahoo.com),
as well as Blinkx.com (www.blinkx.com).
None of these three sites do much to
encourage browsing; by default they display as many as 10
results per search on one page and display the clips in a
vertical list, forcing you to scroll down to see them all.
The majority of clips watched on Truveo, Yahoo and Blinkx
direct you to an external link to play the video on its
original content provider's site -- which takes an extra
step and often involves watching an advertisement.
Searching on Google video almost always displays only
content from Google and its famously acquired site, YouTube.
The giant search company is working on improving its search
results to show a better variety of content providers.
Still, the upside here is that clips play right away in the
search window rather than through a link to the site where
the video originated. YouTube works this way because its
clips are user-generated -- either made by users and posted
to the site or copied from original host sites and posted to
YouTube, saving a trip to the original content provider's
site.
Yahoo's video-searching page looks clean and uncluttered,
with a large box for entering terms or phrases with which to
conduct searches. Two options -- labeled "From Yahoo! Video"
and "From Other Sites" -- help you sort results in one step.
But the clips that I found on Yahoo video seemed less
relevant, overall, and included more repeated clips. One
search for the Discovery Channel's "Man Versus Wild" show
returned seven clips, four of which were identical.
Blinkx,
a three-year-old site, distinguishes itself with its "wall"
feature -- a visually stimulating grid of moving video
thumbnails. It is like Truveo in that it also works behind
the scenes for bigger companies, including Ask.com. Blinkx
says it uses speech recognition and analysis to understand
what the video is about, while the others stick to
text-based searching. And this seemed to hold true: I rarely
got results that were completely off-base using Blinkx.
But
Truveo's focus on browsing and searching worked well. It
repeatedly displayed spot-on results when I was looking for
a video about a specific subject, or provided a variety of
other videos that were similar, requiring less overall
effort on my part. Its most useful feature is the way it
shows results: by sorting clips into neatly organized
buckets, or categories, such as Featured Channels, Featured
Tags and Featured Categories. These buckets spread out on
the page in a gridlike manner, giving your eye more to see
in a quick glance.
. . .
With so many videos added to the Web each day, the search
for online clips can be fruitless and tiresome. Truveo
starts users out with enough relevant clips right away so
that they can more easily find what they're looking for. And
its organizational buckets encourage browsing and,
therefore, entertainment -- one of the reasons for Web
video's popularity.
Truveo takes a refreshing look at video search, and as long
as you have the patience to travel to sites where content
originated, you'll find it useful. It stands apart from
other search engines in looks and functionality.
|
Bob Jensen's search helpers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm
"Coach Caught By an E-Mail Trail,"
by Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed, August 23, 2007 ---
http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/23/purdue
The National Collegiate Athletic Association
punishes anywhere from a handful to a couple dozen
colleges a year for violating its rules, and the
reports about the association’s actions are usually
pretty dull. But every once in a while, the cases
can read like a cautionary tale about one aspect of
American society or another. And so it was Wednesday
when the NCAA’s Division I Committee on Infractions
penalized Purdue University
for a serious case of academic fraud in its women’s
basketball program.
The gist of the situation, as described in
the NCAA panel’s report on the case,
is that a former assistant
coach at Purdue, whom the university fired last
year, broke NCAA rules by “partially researching and
composing” a two-part sociology paper for a player
and then lied (as did the player) to university
officials who were investigating the alleged
breaches. The university began investigating in
February 2006 after another former assistant coach
told Purdue officials that she had overhead the
player say that a coach had helped her with a paper.
But as often happens in cases like this, the coach
in question minimized the significance of her
actions, telling investigators that she had not
“independently” done any research and that she had
made only “non-substantive revision(s)” of the
assignment. The player, too, denied that she had
received substantive help from the coach.
It
is not uncommon in the course of such investigations
for college or NCAA officials to run into he
said/she said disputes. But in this case, Purdue
recovered e-mails and instant messages that the
assistant coach had deleted from her e-mail account
the day after her colleague reported the alleged
wrongdoing (but that were retained on her computer
hard drive) — and they told the tale.
In
an e-mail message one late afternoon in late October
2005, the former coach sent the player a one-page
attachment and wrote in the body of the e-mail:
“Here are some thoughts that should help. Make sure
you read it and add your own info from class notes
or any textbooks you use. All of my info is from the
internet and what I remember, which may not be the
important points from class or what your professor
has stressed in class. Just make sure you double
check everything.”
Later that night, the coach sent another draft of
the same paper (two pages long this time) and a note
that said: “Throw away the other one. This one is
better and more organized. I don’t know when this is
due but if you can bring it to me after you revise
it I’ll look over it. You can change and add things
and send it back to me if you want.”
A
month later, when the second part of the two-part
assignment was due, the coach sent a six-page
document and the following note: “Hey, you still
have to do the title page and the reference page. I
have attached everything you need to do those (two)
things. Make sure you reread the paper and make it
sound like you. I wrote some notes on the bottom of
the paper. I looked at your schedule and see you
have some time in the morning. Make sure you work on
this before you turn it in. Good luck and I hope
this helps!”
An
instant messaging exchange from early November
offered seemingly incontrovertible evidence that the
player in question had been a willing participant in
the scheme. The coach wrote: “Hey Girl! I will be
finished around 9 p.m.…”
The
reply from the athlete: “Stop cakin’ and finish the
paper....dang!”
The
electronic communications between the player and the
coach, the NCAA committee said in its report, “were
tantamount to the proverbial ’smoking gun,’
confirming that [the] former assistant coach
committed academic fraud with the full knowledge and
complicity of [the] former student-athlete.”
The
case, said Josephine R. Potuto, chair of the
Division I Committee on Infractions and a law
professor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln,
offers an “object lesson in why coaches should not
involve themselves in any way in [players’] academic
work,” adding, “That’s what academic advisers and
tutors are there for.”
Continued in article
‘Confessions of a Spoilsport’
William C. Dowling is, first and foremost, a
professor of English, specializing in 17th and 18th century British and
American literature. But like a relatively small number of established
faculty members, he has developed another highly visible, non-academic
specialty, as a critic of big-time college sports. Dowling was among a
band of professors, students and alumni who led an (ultimately failed)
effort to get Rutgers University to drop out of National Collegiate
Athletic Association Division I-A athletics during the mid-1990s, and
like many such campaigns, it exacted a toll on Dowling. He recounts his
experiences in a new book, Confessions of a Spoilsport: My Life and Hard
Times Fighting Sports Corruption at an Old Eastern University,
published this month by Penn State
University Press.
Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed, August 27, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/27/dowling
It's Still a Shell Game in Terms of Division 1-A Male Athletes
While the NCAA’s numbers do show that
athletes in general graduated at a higher rate than other students at
their institutions, Division I male athletes in general fell short of
other male students (56 vs. 58 percent), and football players (55
percent) and men’s basketball players (46 percent) were lower still. And
the numbers were even lower at the Division I-A level, the NCAA’s top
competitive level, where 41 percent of men’s basketball players and 42
percent of baseball players earned their degrees in six years. (Granted,
those numbers are all generally on the rise, as NCAA officials are
rightly quick to note.)
Doug Lederman, "Graduation Rate Grumbling," Inside Higher Ed,
November 10, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/10/gradrates
NCAA Lowers the Dreaded Boom on the University of Kansas (Kansas
reported the infractions to the NCAA)
The National Collegiate Athletic Association
placed the University of Kansas on three years’ probation for a series
of rules violations, including academic fraud and significant payments
to athletes, involving three of its most visible sports teams. The
NCAA’s Division I Committee on Infractions ratcheted up penalties that
the university had imposed on itself last summer, after the NCAA panel
concluded that Kansas officials had lacked institutional control over
the sports program.
Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed, October 13, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/13/ncaa
‘Dirty Little Secrets’ in Women’s Sports
Last month’s resignation of Louisiana State
University’s women’s basketball coach amid allegations of inappropriate
sexual conduct with her players has once again raised an issue that has
long dogged women’s sports: the perceived prevalence of lesbian coaches.
Some advocates for women’s athletics fear that the incident involving
Pokey Chatman will have negative ramifications for female coaches and
encourage the use of “negative recruiting” aimed at some coaches and
programs. Yet, more hopefully, they say the incident is galvanizing
discussion around issues of homophobia in women’s sports that have long
been silently suppressed, and has cast light on the double standard that
surrounds player-coach relationships.
Elizabeth Redden, "‘Dirty Little Secrets’ in Women’s Sports," Inside
Higher Ed, April 30, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/04/30/sports
This season’s crop of college sports scandals is already so rancid that
just about everyone is riveted to the foulness of it
"The Faculty Bench," by Margaret Soltan, Inside Higher Ed, November
8, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/11/08/soltan
This season’s crop of college sports
scandals is already so rancid that just about everyone is riveted to
the foulness of it.
Rent-A-Stripper night at Duke University is a whiff in the wake
of the fumes pouring out of
Auburn University (professors creating
pretend courses for athletes), the University of Georgia (the
canceling of classes for football games, trustee cronyism and
malfeasance, NCAA violations, rampant fan alcoholism), Ohio
University (
17 football players arrested in the last
10 months, and their coach recently convicted of drunk driving), the
University of Miami (
multiple on-field riots by players), and the other big stinkers.
hose who follow this stuff closely, like the
Drake Group, know that almost every major
sports program in this country’s universities is stewing in some mix
of bogus coursework, endemic plagiarism, diploma mill admits,
risible graduation rates, and team thuggery — and that’s just the
players. Add two-million-dollar-a-year drunk coaches crashing their
cars all over town; meddling and corrupt alumni boosters subsidizing
luxury boxes in new stadiums with massively overpriced tickets and
names honoring the local bank; trustees averting their eyes as
students tailgate their way to the emergency room; and presidents
disciplining on-field rioters by ever so lightly spanking their
bottoms, and you get a problem difficult to ignore.
Or so you’d think. But tenured faculty —
the one group doomed to wander the Boschean triptych of
Athlete-Alumni-Administration forever and ever — seems to have
noticed nothing. Duke’s faculty organized itself to protest the
lurid thing its lacrosse team had become, yes, but where are Miami’s
and Georgia’s professors, where things are much, much worse? It’s
like that scene in Naked Gun when, with buildings exploding
into flames behind him, Leslie Nielson tells the gathering crowd,
“Nothing to see here! Nothing to see here!” Or that W.H. Auden poem,
“Musee des Beaux Arts,” where atrocities
rage in the background while in the foreground “the dogs go on with
their doggy life and the torturer’s horse/ Scratches its innocent
behind on a tree.”
The psych professor pontificates to his
class about Freudian denial, ignoring the fact that outside his
window a group of recruits to the women’s soccer team, hazed to
within an inch of their lives, has just vomited in loud and
anguished unison and then passed out. The sociology professor
deplores the country’s weak gun laws while half a block away, in
student housing, pistol play breaks out on the basketball team. The
political science professor decries corporate graft, his voice
drowned out by a quarterback revving the Hummer he got as a token of
a dealership’s esteem. The literature professor recites Keats’s
“To Autumn” to herself as she trods the
leafy paths of the quad, unaware that underfoot she’s crunching not
leaves but beer cans left over from the football game the school has
always called The World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.
It’s not that the faculty bench has
cleared; the faculty bench was always empty. Even as public
revulsion grows at the sight of grosser and grosser campuses, the
professors stay silent. Why?
Some professors, to start with, are
themselves team boosters. They’re excited by the spectacle of game
day, its bracing autumn weather, everyone wrapped in team-color
scarves, the TV cameras trained on their guys, the shrieking
advertising images on the stadium’s
“Godzillatron” screen, generations of
university grads gathered in the stands to scream so loudly the
other side can’t hear its signals. These are the faculty members who
find ways to rack up course credits for athletes who don’t attend
classes. As teen nerds, these professors worshipped jocks and wished
to serve them. Now they’re serving them.
And some professors are dupes. They
actually think the sports program contributes significant money to
the academic side of their university. In almost every case, they
are wrong, and they could discover they’re wrong. Yet they remain in
a sort of bad-faith fog about it. They don’t really quite exactly
precisely know where all that money from tickets and TV and
endorsements goes, but, hell, some of it’s gotta get to the
library, right? A close look at the books (admittedly, sports
program managers make such looks difficult) would probably reveal
that sports at the dupe’s university drains money from the primary
mission of the place. To say nothing of the reputational damage
that’s being done to the institution by scandal after scandal.
Next, there are the truly oblivious. A lot
of professors are eerily good at ignoring everything in the world.
They’ve written 14 books with obnoxious children and harridan wives
bedeviling them every step of the way. To call them “absent-minded”
would be an insult. They are not there. The sports program
has yet to be devised which is corrupt and homocidal enough to catch
their eye.
Number four would be embarrassed.
Professors have shaky egos and are, as a group, preoccupied with
academic status. Already, if you’re at one of the big sports
schools, you’re unlikely to be at an academic powerhouse; but you
still think of yourself as a serious person, and you very much want
to think of your university as a serious one. It’s humiliating to
your sense of yourself and your institution to have to confront the
overriding importance for almost everyone on campus of sports in
general and the bad boy football and basketball teams in particular.
Understandably, you will find ways to avoid this confrontation.
Now to class issues. Professors may be
intellectual and social snobs, the sort of people who look down on
yoyos whose face paint runs with Budweiser. Being excitable about
anything strikes a lot of professors, whose approach to life tends
to be tight-lipped irony, as tacky. And don’t forget ideology. It’s
the rare women’s studies prof ready to squeal along with the pompom
squad. The chair of peace studies will have quite a struggle with
the naked aggression on the gridiron. The contempt all of these
professors express is at least an emotion and not indifference. Yet
the contempt is frozen. It conveys the belief that the situation’s
too big and too crazy to do anything about.
There’s also, finally, the corporate
outdoorishness of the venture. Professors have nothing against
getting quietly tight in their own snug lodgings, but the idea of
braving the cold and getting soppy with a bunch of fellow drunks is
revolting. In general, professors are not team players — groups of
any kind give them the heebie jeebies.
Given what looks like a pretty hardwired
incompatibility between professors and sports programs, can we even
begin to imagine a time when professors might take a bit of interest
in the athletic scandals on their campuses? Myles Brand, president
of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, recently
extended an invitation to professors to
become “fully engaged” in significant aspects of their universities’
programs.
Individual faculty resistance can sometimes
have an impact. Here are
two examples, both from 2004’s
scandal-plagued darling, the University of Colorado at Boulder:
1.) Professor Carl Wieman, a Nobel
Prize-winning physicist, left Colorado in disgust, citing — among
other concerns — the irreparable academic damage its sports program
had done and continued to do.
2.) Professor Joyce Lebra, a distinguished historian, refused a
University Medal, one of the highest awards the university offers,
writing in her rejection letter that she would never take a prize
from a place whose “gross distortion of priorities” has made it an
“embarrassment.” “The focus and priority on football,” she
concluded, “has undermined the atmosphere of this university, which
by definition should be dedicated to academic endeavor at the
highest level.”
Both Wieman and Lebra got national
coverage, and probably caused a modicum of shame among the trustees
and administrators at Colorado. I don’t claim such gestures make a
big difference, but they certainly get people’s attention. Group
protest, of the sort Duke’s faculty expressed, is more effective,
but more difficult to accomplish. Remember, professors don’t like to
do groups.
Direct action has its attractions — showing
up at trustee meetings and holding signs and insisting on being
heard — but keep in mind a story the other day out of Western
Kentucky University, one of many provincial institutions that
convince themselves to become Division I-A football universities,
because it’ll really put them on the map:
From
The Courier-Journal: “Western Kentucky
University’s board ran roughshod over faculty regent Robert Dietel
last week, as it rushed to embrace Division I-A football.... WKU’s
board told Dietel to shut up. Contempt dripped from [one board
member]: ‘People on this board dedicate their time for free. They
have better things to do than let some university professor just
keep talking.’”
That idiot is what professors who get
serious about their universities’ purulent sports programs are up
against. Professors on some level understand this, and shy away.
But whether through principled exits,
repudiation of academic awards, organized petitions and
demonstrations, involvement in groups like Drake, or simply
unrelenting ridicule, more professors should act upon the disgust
that the stench from sports factories inspires in people who have
not forgotten what universities are.
Duke Reaches Settlement With Players
Duke University has reached an undisclosed financial
settlement with three former lacrosse players falsely accused of rape, the
school said Monday. Duke suspended Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty and Dave
Evans after they were charged last year with raping a stripper at an off-campus
party. The university also canceled the team's season and forced their coach to
resign. ''We welcomed their exoneration and deeply regret the difficult year
they and their families have had to endure,'' the school said in a statement.
''These young men and their families have been the subject of intense scrutiny
that has taken a heavy toll.'' The allegations were debunked in April by state
prosecutors, who said the players were the innocent victims of a ''tragic rush
to accuse'' by Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong. He was disbarred
Saturday for breaking more than two dozen rules of professional conduct in his
handling of the case.
The New York Times, June 18, 2007 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Duke-Lacrosse.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Rethinking an Athletic Code of Conduct
That’s been the case at Ohio University, where 17
football players have been arrested in the local county since January 1. Players
were charged — and some convicted — of assault, driving under the influence of
alcohol and the illegal possession of drugs. None had been suspended by the head
football coach, Frank Solich.
"Rethinking an Athletic Code of Conduct," Inside Higher Ed, October 4,
2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/04/ohiou
Update on May 31, 2007
The vote, organized by the
university’s American Association of University
Professors chapter and released on Wednesday, revealed
that a vast majority of those surveyed say the McDavis
administration — which began in 2004 — is taking the
university in the wrong direction. A year ago, the group
organized a similar campaign, which
resulted in a similar vote of
no confidence . . . Earlier this month, nearly 80
percent of the 4,600 students who voted in a
Student Senate election
(roughly 23 percent of the entire student body) said
they, too, lacked confidence in McDavis. And last week,
the outgoing Faculty Senate executive committee
presented to the board’s executive committee results of
its own survey of faculty that showed concern about the
university’s direction.
Elia Powers, "Leaders Under Siege at Ohio U.," Inside
Higher Ed, May 31, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/05/31/ohio
Government Questions Tax Exempt Status of Division I NCAA Athletics
The chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Ways
and Means Committee has sent the National Collegiate Athletic Association a
pointed
eight-page letter asking the sports group to
justify the tax-exempt status of big-time collegiate sports. The letter, from
Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) to Myles Brand, the NCAA’s president, is framed as
part of the committee’s broader examination of the nonprofit sector, which, like
a parallel review in the Senate Finance Committee, has touched on the pay and
oversight of college presidents, among other things. Thomas’s letter asks 25
questions related to the association’s finances and educational mission, on such
topics as coaches’ compensation and the alleged lack of rigor of many athletes’
academic programs, and demands extensive information from NCAA officials. And
its underlying theme is summed up in such pointed statements as this one, posed
as as question: “How does playing major college football or men’s basketball in
a highly commercialized, profit-seeking, entertainment environment further the
educational purpose of your member institutions?” Thomas’s letter seeks a reply
by October 30.
Inside Higher Ed, October 5, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/05/qt
A New Accounting System for Collegiate Sports Reporting to the NCAA
"Urging Presidents to Step Up," by Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed,
October 31, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/31/ncaa
What the NCAA can do, Brand and the task
force argue, is to arm campus leaders with the best possible
financial information to guide their decision making, using
a new accounting system under which sports
programs would be required to report financial information to the
NCAA using a common set of definitions aimed at teasing out more
precisely what colleges spend on sports programs. For the first
time, the reports would include capital expenditures and athletics
departments’ “indirect” share of costs, for such things as energy
and security, that might be borne by the institutions. Campuses
would have to get independent, third-party verification of the
“accuracy and completeness” of the data they submit.
That new system, combined with a set of
other financial reporting requirements, would arm presidents with
clear, concise and comparable data with which to make informed and
thoughtful decisions. But then they must use it, the task force
said, with the goal of ensuring that athletics expenditures fall
into line with other spending on campuses. “Presidents must use
these data to align athletics budgeting with institutional mission
to to strengthen the enterprise,” the task force wrote. “In effect,
this is where presidential leadership and institutional
accountability take hold.”
Presidents alone cannot ensure financial
accountability and the broader integration of athletics into the
campus culture the task force calls for, though, the report
suggests. Trustees and regents must delegate responsibility for
managing sports programs to presidents, and not “compete with
presidents for management of the program,” Brand said in his speech.
Faculty members, who the task force report says are too often
“uninformed” and “biased” and “attack athletics unfairly” (comments
that rubbed quite a few faculty readers of the report the wrong way)
should be more involved in oversight of sports programs — “as fully
engaged in providing advice on planning and financial issues in
athletics [as they are in] other parts of the campus.”
The report is vague about what kinds of
changes campus presidents should be considering to slow the rate of
sports spending, but in an interview, Brand said he could see
individual campus chief executives concluding that an athletics
department’s staff is bigger than it needs to be to accomplish its
goals or that building that new stadium, and accumulating huge debt
service, is unwise.
The task force report also offers a set of
other “best practices” — rather than binding recommendations or
mandates — aimed at better integrating sports programs with other
departments on campus, including adding athletics directors to their
presidents’ cabinets and restructuring so that academic advisers for
athletes report to academic, rather than athletic, administrators.
Many observers of college sports welcomed
Brand’s speech and the task force’s report as some of the more
forceful statements about the need for change in big-time college
sports to emerge from the NCAA itself. Groups of college presidents,
like the
American Council on Education and the
Association of American Universities,
stepped forward to praise the work of their members (which, perhaps
not surprisingly, were trumpeted on the NCAA’s own Web site).
Continued in article
Admission Hypocrisy: Harvard abandons early admission (except for
athletes)!
Most faculty are clueless and voiceless about admissions operations at
their colleges.
"Where Is the Faculty in the Admissions Debates?"
by Andrew Delbanco, Inside Higher Ed, October 12, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/10/12/delbanco
But what role do faculty play in developing
the policies on which the admissions office acts? At most, a minor
one — which is particularly disturbing when it comes to tenured
faculty, whose job security should encourage frank participation in
university governance without fear of demotion or reprisal. Yes, the
scale of the admissions process has become daunting. In some cases,
tens of thousands of applications must be evaluated, so it would be
hardly more than symbolic for faculty to read — as we once did at
Columbia — a few distinctive folders. And yes, some administrators
regard faculty as potential meddlers and prefer using catch-words
such as “diversity” and “excellence” to asking hard questions about
what these terms actually mean.
But, if admissions policy has been reduced
to slogans, blaming the administrators is finally an evasion of
faculty responsibility. Most faculty are simply not interested and
therefore uninformed. Any discussion of, say, the distinction
between need-based aid and merit aid, or about principle versus
practice in “need-blind” admissions, or the correlation between SAT
scores and family income, or about the case for or against
increasing the numbers of international students, is likely to
elicit a perplexed stare even from those who hold confident opinions
about many other matters outside their field of expertise. Faculty
who normally regard all authorities with suspicion, and who are
quick to proclaim the sanctity of such values as academic freedom,
are strangely inert and indifferent with regard to how their own
institutions decide whom to let in and whom to keep out.
Some of this detachment is understandable,
since college admissions have become a large-scale business whose
intricacies require specialized knowledge. But the cost of
disengagement is high. Faculty testimonials of devotion to the
values of equity and democracy in America and the world can smell of
hypocrisy when we ignore the attrition of these values on our own
campuses. (Sometimes one hears muttering about too many “legacy”
admits, but I haven’t heard much complaining about preferential
treatment for faculty children.) Some of the very colleges where
faculties tend to be most vehement on behalf of left-liberal causes
are slipping out of reach for students from families with modest
means.
Over the last decade, for example, the
percentage of students admitted early in the Ivy League has risen to
roughly half the entering class — even in the face of studies
suggesting that early applicants tend to be academically weaker and
economically stronger than students who apply later in the year.
Since most early applicants must promise to attend if admitted, they
have to be willing to forgo the chance to compare financial aid
offers from multiple colleges, and they come disproportionately from
private or affluent suburban schools with savvy college counselors.
Yet how many faculty have paid attention to what James Fallows,
writing five years ago in The Atlantic, called “the early
decision racket”?
It’s not that the issues are simple. Even
the case of early admissions, on which Harvard has now reversed
itself, is not entirely straightforward. Pros and cons vary from
institution to institution. Although the negative effects of early
admissions are increasingly clear, there are positive arguments,
some better than others, in favor of such programs, on which some
colleges have come to depend. Students accepted early tend to arrive
on campus pleased to be attending their first (and only) choice.
Early admissions programs allow admissions officers to lock in much
of the class — notably the athletes needed to field competitive
teams — before Christmas, and then to use the regular applicant pool
and waiting lists to balance and refine the composition of the full
class. And, lamentably enough, early admissions allow institutions
to inflate their yield rate, which figures in the widely-read
rankings published in U.S. News & World Report.
These issues should be debated with both
idealism and realism not just by administrators in closed-door
meetings but by informed faculty in open session. Yet in watching
and commenting on all the maneuvering and grandstanding, students
have been more alert to the nuances than faculty — as in a recent
Harvard Crimson
article pointing out that despite Harvard’s announcement, up to 100
athlete-applicants will still receive “likely admit” letters each
year as early as October 1.
In short, admissions policies have
consequences for students, for society, and for the functionality of
the college or university that enacts them. They certainly have
effects on faculty. Since most institutions depend heavily on
tuition revenue, the “discount rate” — the amount of financial aid
subsidy offered to students — affects the availability of funds for
other purposes, including faculty salary increments and new or
substitutional hiring lines. Abandoning early admissions would
strain the operating budget on many campuses — though not at Harvard
or Princeton, where yield rates will remain high and income from
their huge endowments will meet the increased demand for financial
aid that will likely follow their recent actions. At some
institutions, a cut in the rate of “legacy” admits might even
jeopardize the institution’s long-term financial viability.
Continued in article
Rewarding Stupidity of Top Athletes
"Remove the Worm From the Apple," by Steve Bahls, Inside Higher Ed,
August 8, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/08/08/bahls
The average Division I football and
basketball player today comes to college with academic credentials
that differ from those of their fellow students. Once they
matriculate, athletes often cluster in a few choice majors — like
interdisciplinary studies or recreation — more hospitable to the
less than serious student. At many schools, athletes register before
the average Joe or Jane, so they can skim off the cream courses
recommended by their advisers.
Grade point averages in the big money
sports often trail their non-sports campus peers, and graduation
rates can be embarrassingly low.
These prized students often eat at
exclusive “training tables,” with the phony justification that
eating the same food available to regular students will not provide
them with “the necessary nutrition.” Peruse the creature comforts of
Division I athletics departments compared to those in philosophy,
sociology or history. The former usually features state-of-the art
facilities and technology; the latter is vastly more modest.
When colleges exempt athletes from the
rules applicable to other students, the institutions shouldn’t be
surprised that the athletes feel exempt from expectations of
responsible conduct applicable to us all. Combine that with the
media hype involving Division I athletics and it’s no wonder that
there is a worm in the apple of big time college sports.
If I sound bitter, it is quite the contrary. As president of a
Division III college, I am delighted to see the educational
opportunities college sports offer to young men and women who
otherwise may not get that most precious opportunity. I’ve seen how
athletes grow in mind, body and spirit through their participation
in sports and I greatly admire the lessons learned on the playing
field. Likewise, I relish the concept that college sports teach a
hard work ethic, the value of teamwork and the spirit of
camaraderie.
But I do worry that Division I sports is
ill-serving far too many young people. And I challenge the NCAA to
accelerate the reform movement promised in the recent past. What has
happened to cries of turning down the volume in college sports? The
media won’t turn down the volume, so college presidents must
exercise their leadership.
I strongly believe Division I sports can
learn something from Division III, where the athletes play sans
scholarships and typically without the promise of future sports
riches. Most importantly, Division III athletes live and breathe not
in the rarified air of a sports subculture, but, when they are out
of uniform, just like other students on campus.
I don’t expect Michigan, Ohio State and
UCLA to dismantle proud (and profitable) athletics programs, and I
strongly believe that would be a foolish mistake. But I do believe
the subculture of today’s big-time college athlete is a problem that
demands open debate and sweeping solutions.
Here are five simple questions Division I
sports administrators should ask of themselves: Are our athletes
representative of the student body in terms of admissions and
financial aid considerations? Are our athletes in revenue sports of
football and basketball studying only in a select few majors? Is it
uncommon for athletes to participate in other campus organizations
or to take advantage of opportunities for international study? Are
our athletes’ GPAs and graduation rates in line with the student
body? Upon graduating, are our athletes prepared for graduate study
and/or careers?
Continued in article
NCAA Moves to Penalize Colleges With Consistently Poor Athlete
Academic Progress
The Division I Board of Directors decided that
teams with an Academic Progress Rate score below 900 each year for the
four-year period that concludes at the end of the 2006-7 academic year
will be eligible in 2007-8 for “historical penalties,” which could
include ineligibility for postseason competition.
David Epstein, "Drawing the Line," Inside Higher Ed, August 4,
2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/04/ncaa
"Athletes' Graduation Rates Hold Steady at 77%," by Libby Sandler, Chronicle
of Higher Education, October 2007 ---
http://chronicle.com/subscribe/login?url=/daily/2007/10/2007100405n.htm
Athletes in the nation's biggest
college-sports programs continue to graduate at high levels, with
more than three-quarters of all players who entered college in the
academic years from 1997 to 2000 graduating within six years of
enrolling, according to data released on Wednesday by the National
Collegiate Athletic Association.
The graduation-success rate, as the
NCAA refers to its measure, increased among the high-profile men's
sports of basketball, football and baseball, and among the popular
women's sports of basketball, ice hockey, and soccer. But although
the rate for men's basketball players increased by 8 percentage
points, from about 56 percent for those who enrolled in 1995 to
nearly 64 percent for those who enrolled in 2000, the NCAA's
president, Myles Brand, said the sport remained a concern.
"Men's basketball is still the lowest
of all our sports in terms of graduation rates, and we will continue
to work on that sport," he said on Wednesday during a conference
call announcing the release of the data.
The association's graduation rates for
scholarship athletes, reported each year, differ from federal
graduation statistics calculated by the U.S. Department of Education
because the NCAA measure accounts for students who transfer into and
out of institutions. The NCAA's figures, unlike the federal ones, do
not penalize an institution for having athletes who leave to attend
other schools, as long as they depart in good academic standing.
NCAA researchers calculated their
latest graduation rates by tracking a cohort of athletes who entered
college between 1997 and 2000. Of those athletes, 77 percent had
graduated within six years. That figure has not changed from data
released last year for a previous four-year period. It is up from 76
percent for the cohort that entered between 1995 and 1998, reported
two years ago, when the NCAA first began accounting for transfer
students.
The most recent cohort had only two
years under the NCAA's stricter academic-performance requirements,
which penalize teams for not meeting certain benchmarks.
The early data reflected in
Wednesday's report were encouraging, Mr. Brand said. But the full
effect of the academic requirements will not be evident for four
more years, when the first full cohort under the new academic
standards graduates, he said.
Among men's sports, fencing,
gymnastics and lacrosse posted the highest graduation success rates,
at 88 percent, followed by water polo, at 85 percent; ice hockey, at
84 percent; and swimming and tennis, both at 82 percent. Baseball
graduated 66 percent of its players. Division I- A football teams
graduated 67 percent of their players, while Division I-AA teams
graduated 65 percent.
Among women's sports, skiing teams
led, with 95 percent of their athletes graduating in six years;
field hockey, gymnastics and lacrosse followed, at 94 percent. The
women's teams with the lowest graduation-success rates were bowling,
at 68 percent; rifle, at 77 percent; and basketball, at 81 percent.
Women's soccer teams graduated 89 percent of their players.
Mr. Brand also said his goal was to
have, on average, an overall graduation rate of 80 percent for all
scholarship athletes. "That will be a grand success," he said. But
in the meantime, a rate of 60 percent is satisfactory, he said, and
should be seen as the goal for most institutions.
"The benchmark is 60 percent," he
said. "So if you're below 60 percent, then we have some work to
correct that."
Below the Benchmark
The lone men's basketball team to post
a graduation-success rate of zero was at the University of Maryland
at College Park.
When asked what kind of red flags a
zero graduation rate would raise, Mr. Brand said, "Big ones. ...
What it tells you is that the athletic department should be looking
closely at that case."
Maryland said it has done so. All of
the 10 freshmen and transfers who were measurable by the NCAA's
formula left the university before graduating to pursue professional
careers, said Anton Goff, associate athletic director for academic
support and career development at Maryland. Three of the 10
eventually graduated; two from other institutions and one from
Maryland, but outside of the six- year time period, Mr. Goff said.
"It's a concern for us," Mr. Goff said
in a telephone interview. "But one of the things we look at is, it
was a long time ago. Since then, we've put in some improvements and
some plans for the men's basketball team."
Last spring, he said, Maryland
graduated three of its five scholarship basketball players. "Those
numbers and those results won't show up for us for a couple years
down the road," he said. "There's nothing we can do to change that
zero, but we feel like we're improving."
The NCAA will release additional data
on graduation rates on October 30, including figures on overall
graduation- success rates and federal graduation-rate data by
institution. More information, including a team-by-team breakdown of
graduation-rate data, is available on the association's
Web site.
What do big-time athletics programs spend? A new Database
Public colleges and universities with big-time athletics programs spent
at least $1 billion on them last year, according to an analysis
published Thursday in
The Indianapolis Star. The newspaper based
its analysis on information that the colleges report to the National
Collegiate Athletic Association — information that The Star obtained
through freedom-of-information requests. The Star also created
a database allowing for searches of the
information it obtained.
Inside HigherEd, March 31, 2006
Badjocks
Northwestern University
announced Wednesday that its women’s soccer coach had resigned, in
the wake of a
controversy over hazing that prompted the
team’s suspension last month. Northwestern is one of numerous
institutions that have been caught up in the publication by several Web
sites, including
Badjocks and
The NCAA Is Weak on Hazing,
of photographs of apparently drunk and occasionally nude athletes
hazing, being hazed, or in post-hazing stupors.
Inside Higher Ed, June 22, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/06/22/qt
Jensen Comment
The Badjocks home page is at
http://badjocks.com/
The Badjocks photo site is at
http://badjocks.com/archive/2006/northwestern-womens-soccer-hazing.htm
Question
Do those "independent studies" for varsity athletes have respectable
academic standards?
A panel at Auburn University has found that
independent study courses that gave many athletes major boosts in their
averages were apparently quite easy for non-athletes as well. While the
report found key flaws in the way the courses were run, it didn’t find
special treatment for athletes.
Inside Higher Ed, November 6, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/06/qt
Yes Bohunk: It's Still Possible to Sign Up for Basket Weaving
Athletes Seek Out Professors Who Will Pass Almost Any Athlete
Watkins says it is all too common to see athletes
grouped in certain departments or programs under the sheltering wings of faculty
members who appear to care more about their success on the courts, rinks and
fields than in the classroom. Faculty members are often the most vocal critics
of favoritism for athletes (the issues at Auburn were raised by one whistle
blowing sociology professor against another), he says, but it is frequently
professors who are responsible for the favoritism in the first place.
Rob Capriccioso, "Tackling Favoritism for Athletes," Inside Higher Ed, July 20,
2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/20/sports
While accusations of widespread abuse like
that alleged at Auburn are unusual, “clustering” of athletes — in
which large numbers of athletes at an institution major in a
particular program or department, out of proportion to other
students at the college — is common.
A 2002-3 analysis by USA Today
found that a large percentage of football players at Auburn and Duke
University (a quarter and a third of the teams, respectively)
majored in sociology, while tiny fractions of all undergraduates
majored in that field. At North Carolina State, the University of
Michigan and University of Southern Mississippi, the most popular
major among football players tended to be sports management, also
far out of proportion with their peer students.
Richard M. Southall, an assistant professor
of sport and leisure studies at the University of Memphis, says that
his own sports and leisure area is the second most popular major for
athletes, just behind those who attend the institution’s University
College, an “individualized and interdisciplinary” degree program.
Continued in article
Tackling Favoritism for Athletes
Watkins says it is all too common to see
athletes grouped in certain departments or programs under the sheltering
wings of faculty members who appear to care more about their success on
the courts, rinks and fields than in the classroom. Faculty members are
often the most vocal critics of favoritism for athletes (the issues at
Auburn were raised by one whistle blowing sociology professor against
another), he says, but it is frequently professors who are responsible
for the favoritism in the first place.
Rob Capriccioso, "Tackling Favoritism for Athletes," Inside Higher Ed,
July 20, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/20/sports
"Conference: An Analysis of Academic Clustering Comparing White and
Minority Players," by Jeffrey J. Fountain and Peter S. Finley, Journal of
Issues in Intercollegiate Athletics, 2009, 2, 1-13 ---
Click Here
GSR = Graduation Success Rate of College Athletes
"New N.C.A.A. Data Shift Graduation Rate Upward," The New York
Times, December 20, 2005 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/20/sports/ncaabasketball/20ncaa.html
Lacrosse had the highest G.S.R. for men and
women, 89 percent and 94 percent.
In men's sports, basketball had the lowest
G.S.R., 58 percent, an improvement on the federally reported
graduation rate of 44 percent. The women's basketball G.S.R. was 81
percent.
In women's sports, bowling had the lowest
G.S.R., 72 percent.
Among the 318 universities in Division I,
the G.S.R. for football was 64 percent; the federal rate was 54
percent.
Teams that have lower G.S.R.'s are those
attracting transfer students who do not end up graduating, Brand
said.
Jensen Comment
The last sentence above points to a questionable practice by
universities with nationally-ranked teams. Athletes who could not
meet admission standards as freshman go to colleges with lower academic
standards and get acceptable grades for transfer with little chance of
ever meeting standards for graduation after they transfer and spend
enormous amounts of time contributing to willing teams.
Question
How do athletes at Auburn University find a way to ace sociology without
having to go to class?
"Top Grades and No Class Time for Auburn Players," by Pete Thamal,
The New York Times, July 14, 2006 ---
Click Here
Professor Petee’s directed-reading classes,
which nonathletes took as well, helped athletes in several sports
improve their grade-point averages and preserve their athletic
eligibility. A number of athletes took more than one class with
Professor Petee over their careers: one athlete took seven such
courses, three athletes took six, five took five and eight took
four, according to records compiled by Professor Gundlach. He also
found that more than a quarter of the students in Professor Petee’s
directed-reading courses were athletes. (Professor Gundlach could
not provide specific names because of student privacy laws.)
The Auburn football team’s performance in
the N.C.A.A.’s new rankings of student athletes’ academic progress
surprised many educators on and off campus. The team had the highest
ranking of any Division I-A public university among college
football’s six major conferences. Over all among Division I-A
football programs, Auburn trailed only Stanford, Navy and Boston
College, and finished just ahead of Duke.
Among those caught off guard by Auburn’s
performance was Gordon Gee, the chancellor of Vanderbilt, a fellow
university in the Southeastern Conference and its only private
institution. Vanderbilt had an 88 percent graduation rate in 2004,
compared with Auburn’s 48 percent, yet finished well behind Auburn
in the new N.C.A.A. rankings.
“It was a little surprising because our
graduation rates are so much higher,” Mr. Gee said. “I’m not quite
certain I understood that.”
The N.C.A.A. cannot comment on specific
academic cases. But when asked how much 18 players taking 97 credit
hours could affect a football team’s academic standing, Thomas S.
Paskus, the N.C.A.A.’s principal research scientist, said it would
be likely to lift the number. He added that it would be difficult to
gauge how much the classes helped the academic ranking.
In the spring of 2005, Professor Gundlach
confronted Professor Petee, to whom he reported, about the
proliferation of directed-reading courses. That spring, the
university’s administration told Professor Petee he was carrying too
many of the classes. Far fewer have been offered since.
Continued in article
NCAA began punishing colleges for their athletes’ academic failure
For the first time in its history, the National
Collegiate Athletic Association has begun punishing colleges for their
athletes’ academic failure.
The association announced Wednesday that
99 teams at 65 Division I colleges would
forfeit at least part of an athletic scholarship in the next year
because of academic underperformance by athletes. (The total could rise
slightly because eight universities are still appealing proposed
penalties.) Ninety of the affected teams are squads for men, and 61 of
them are in the sports of football, men’s basketball or baseball.
Several universities, including
Florida A&M and
New Mexico State Universities, and the Universities of
Hawaii at Manoa and
Toledo, had multiple teams punished.
Doug Lederman, "Punished for Poor Progress," Inside Higher Ed,
March 2, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/03/02/ncaa
College Football Players Spend 44.8 Hours a
Week on Their Sport, NCAA Survey Finds
Playing major-college football is a full-time job,
according to new research presented here on Saturday during the National
Collegiate Athletic Association's annual convention. In a 2006 NCAA survey of
21,000 athletes who were then playing in a variety of men's and women's sports,
football players reported spending 44.8 hours a week practicing, playing, or
training for their sport. That's on top of the time players spend in the
classroom. The findings shocked campus leaders and athletics officials at the
gathering here. "That's out of control," said Walter Harrison, president of the
University of Hartford. "I'm hoping the [NCAA] bodies that oversee football will
do something about this, and that the board of directors pays attention to it."
Brad Wolverton, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 14, 2008
---
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/01/1208n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Among other
results, the survey found:
- Almost
two-thirds of Division I athletes said they believed
their grade-point averages would be higher if they had
not participated in sports.
-
Athletes who reported having more balance between their
athletics and academic commitments performed better in
the classroom.
- The
majority of those surveyed viewed themselves more as
athletes than as students. But those who viewed
themselves primarily as students had higher graduation
rates.
A report on
the survey, "Goals: Growth, Opportunities, Aspirations, and
Learning of Students in College," will be released later
this year.
|
Jensen Comment
Football players play approximately 12-16 games each autumn semester. I
think baseball players probably spend even more time on their sport
since they play 50-80 games each spring semester.
College baseball players strike out a lot in courses
Also Thursday, the NCAA’s Division I Board
of Directors initiated a year-long study aimed at identifying ways to
improve the academic performance of baseball players, who fared
comparatively poorly in March when the association, for the first time,
began punishing sports teams based on members’ failure to proceed toward
a degree.
Doug Lederman, "NCAA Homes In on High Schools," Inside Higher Ed,
April 28, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/04/28/mills
How can you play 70 games of baseball, half of which are out of
town, and pretend to go to class?
"The Brutal Truth about College Sports,"
by Skip Rozin, The Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2005; Page
D7 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112673590440041002,00.html?mod=opinion&ojcontent=otep
Big time college sports are a mess. While
headlines hype the new football season and speculate on an eventual
champion, accounts surface daily of athletes' stealing, assaulting
women and getting busted on alcohol and drug charges. And when a
title game is played, shadowing the coverage will be news of woeful
graduation rates.
Meanwhile, the juggernaut that is college
sports keeps getting bigger, with more television networks airing
more games, not just on weekends but during the week, and colleges
expanding their seasons to meet TV's unquenchable thirst -- up to 40
games each basketball season and 70 in baseball.
. . .
College sports' current crisis has
generated unprecedented reform efforts by groups inside and outside
the establishment. The Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics and
the 16-year-old Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletes, for
example, both work in cooperation with the NCAA. The Drake Group has
bypassed the NCAA; its plan for full disclosure of all classes taken
by athletes was read into the Congressional Record in March by
Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky in hopes of getting Congress involved.
Their combined efforts have netted tougher
NCAA academic requirements, but reform energy still gets bogged down
in issues like the political correctness of team names. Substantive
improvement has been minimal. The system is broken, and the impact
is far reaching.
"The transgressions that universities
commit in the name of winning sports undermine the values of the
institution," says Derek Bok, former president of Harvard. "In all
too many cases, they tarnish the reputation of the university by
compromising its admissions standards, its grading practices, and
the academic integrity of its curriculum."
To create winning teams, reformers believe,
universities break rules on training, on the allocation of funds to
athletics, and most frequently on athletes' eligibility. Deception
begins early, when schools recruit sports prodigies who are
ill-equipped -- or uninterested -- in academics. Popular rhetoric
maintains that these students are preparing for pro careers, just as
medical students are training to be doctors. This is naïve thinking.
The best 1% to 3% may become professionals, but far too many of the
rest are left with no degree and a clouded future.
"The biggest problem is recruiting fine
athletes who should not be in college," says Andy Geiger, who
retired this summer as Ohio State's athletic director after 11 years
that included a national football championship and scandals in
football and basketball. "Do we really want a gifted athlete at our
school for any reason other than our own gain? Are we only in it to
use these kids and then spit them out?"
At the core of the college sports problem
is an obsession with winning. Winning is admittedly the goal in all
competitions and is a treasured American characteristic, but
universities are supposed to live by different standards from those
that govern big business, the New York Yankees, or war.
Continued in article
September 15, 2005 reply from Carol Flowers
[cflowers@OCC.CCCD.EDU]
Having gone through this with a son in
sports, I find the whole thing a joke. I applauded the requirement
of 12 units of C to stay eligible. However, I didn't realize they
are not at class most of the semester -- they seem to be at away
games most of the time. Scholarship offers came with tutorial help
(tutoring turns out to be all but non existent (not to mention that
you need to be in the area for the tutor to tutor). Sports and
education don't mix. I only observed one team whose coach I
respected for trying to enforce eligilbility (after the ball game
the athletes went to dinner, then had a mandatory study hall from
8-9 pm at away games). However, I questioned how much the students
absorbed at that hour and after a big game and dinner!!! But, kudos
to the coach for attempting to keep "education" in the college
experience.
Carol
Jensen Comment
I think the problem lies heavily with professional sports team
owners.
College is a free way that they can filter out the best athletes
who are put to the test and dump the majority of others who just
don’t quite cut it. It would be analogous to sending all young
people to war and then making professional soldiers out of the ones
that win medals.
I think sports are important to the physical and social
development of young people as well as giving them confidence and
pride. But I like the way Trinity does it in NCAA Division 3 where
there are no athletic scholarships and athletes are not dreaming of
professional contracts.
Bob Jensen
September 15, 2005 reply from Paul Williams
Carol, et al,
You have pointed out the real problem in
college athletics for the athlete. Of course it is
hypocritical for
the Wall Street Journal to harumph about college sports. College
athletics is big business increasingly funded and promoted by big
business. At NC State we have completed a third phase of a four
phase renovation of the football stadium -- total projected cost
over $100 million dollars. It sits beside the RBC Center (named
after a corporation), where the Wolfpack plays basketball (and the
Carolina Hurricanes play hockey) -- total cost $170 million. When
all is said and done, there will be $300 million dollars invested in
two college sports. Both facilities are plastered with ads for
corporations and the luxury seating (the biggest cost of the
facilities) is rented by corporations for the purpose of
entertaining clients. Major college sports are entertainment, merely
a medium for advertising and corporate promotion. Wealthy alumni and
the business community are the prime movers behind the enormous
investment in athletic facilities and the prime providers of the
money. The university goes along because it has Title IX obligations
it must finance and the big revenue sports are what fund it. Women's
la crosse does not generate time on ESPN. And before we bash Title
IX, the explosion in women's participation in sports at the
collegiate level indicates that all women lacked was opportunity.
Women crave the opportunity to participate in sport. Women and the
men in the minor sports play for the love of playing. No lucrative
pro career awaits a woman or man playing la crosse, but they work as
hard at it as any of the revenue players.
What to do for the athletes since no
university administrator is going to say let's just scrap our $300
million investment in facilities -- the alumni would have their
head. Let's just quit being hypocritical about the "student
athlete." Much of the problem is the NCAA and its rules that have a
rather Victorian smell to them. Trivial behavior is criminalized by
the NCAA in a vain attempt to foster a prissy rectitude that has
never existed in the history of humankind.
When Tiger Woods was still a college player
at Stanford he played at Bay Hill in Florida. Arnold Palmer wanted
to meet with him, took him to lunch in the grill room, picked up the
tab for a burger and fries and voila put Arnie, Tiger and Stanford
in violation of NCAA rules. The tab was less than $20. There is no
longer the amateur athlete -- look who competes for the US during
the Olympics. The problem for the athlete is being a student AND an
athlete at the same time.
Why don't we face the reality of big time
college athletics and take the pressure off of the athlete? During
the season, let the athletes play their sports -- why do they have
to be a students at the same time? Every sport can have a season
that corresponds to one semester or another. Football is played
during the fall semester and the bowl season ends before the start
of the second semester. So football players play football in the
fall and are full time students during spring and summer. Basketball
doesn't need to start in November. It could start after final exams
in the fall and, instead of March madness, we could have April
madness. Basketball players would be students in fall and summer
semesters. There is no sport whose season could not be accommodated
to just one school term or another. If a student wanted to and could
take classes during the season, then all well and good. But they
shouldn't be made to take them.
As Bernie Sliger, president of FSU when I
was there, harped on constantly, "The more successful the athletic
program, the more money people give to academics." It may be a
brutal truth about college athletics, but most of the brutality is
absorbed by the athletes because of archaic notions of the
"scholar/athlete." And we on the academic side benefit as well.
Those athletes bring a lot of resources to us academics, too.
Perhaps a lot of the "crimes" athletic programs commit could be
alleviated if we let young people be a scholar sometime and an
athlete sometime, but quite expecting them to be both.
Paul Williams
September 15, 2005 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Paul,
Well said about the new NCS Stadium. This reminds me of
Rochester/Simon School's new investment in "games" intended to lift
its US News MBA program ranking from 26th into the Top 10 or Top 5.
Has the Wolfpack ever made it into the media's Top 5 in basketball
or football? Perhaps your new $300 million investment will pay off
--- if that's the real anticipated payoff.
Also, I think you just made my point when choosing the word "hypocritical"
when the WSJ reported a position harmful of big business. The WSJ is
really two newspapers wrapped into one, where one of those "papers"
is allowed to roam free and call it like some very good reporters
roaming about.
In my September 14 edition of Tidbits, I wrote the following ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2005/tidbits050914.htm
How can the media and professors achieve greater
credibility?
You probably observed that I quote a lot from both The Wall
Street Journal (WSJ) and The New York Times (NYT).
Both have credibility in spite of their opposing biases on the
editorial pages. The WSJ is unapologetic in its biases for
financial institutions and business enterprises. And yet the
WSJ is the best place to look for damning criticism of
particular accounting firms, financial institutions, and
corporations. CEOs live in fear of WSJ reporters. For example,
when Enron was riding high, before the Watkins memo, WSJ
reporters did some very clever investigations and wrote articles
that commenced the slide of Enron share prices (particularly
dogged reporters named John Emshwiller and Jonathan Weil). The
NYT sometimes has editorials that make me want to vomit. But
the Business Section of the NYT is one of the best places to go
for balanced coverage of business and finance news.
Certainly not all of my accounting professor friends agree with me
about the WSJ. David's Fordham's book length reply is just too long to
paste in here. Some others like Bobbi Lee agree with him.
Good Riddance to a Fraudulent High School
University High School, a
correspondence school in Miami being investigated for
giving fast, high grades to qualify high school athletes
for college scholarships, is going out of business Dec.
31, its founder, Stanley J. Simmons, said yesterday . .
. The National Collegiate Athletic Association yesterday
named 17 people to a panel to study correspondence high
schools and other nontraditional routes to college
athletic eligibility and scholarships. The move is a
response to questions about the legitimacy of the
academic credentials of some high school athletes.
Duff Wilson, "School That Gave Easy Grades to Athletes
Is Closing," The New York Times, December 25,
2005 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/24/sports/ncaafootball/24schools.html
In the past I’ve bemoaned how athletics in Division 1
universities has turned “education” into a fraud in
countless instances. It’s also a fraud at the admissions
level from questionable K-12 schools.
The New York Times Uncovers Schools Where the Only
Meaningful Curriculum id Basketball
An investigation by The New
York Times found more than a dozen of these
institutions, some of which closed soon after opening.
The Times found that at least 200 players had enrolled
at such places in the past 10 years and that dozens had
gone on to play at N.C.A.A. Division I universities like
Mississippi State, George Washington, Georgetown and
Texas-El Paso. "I would say that in my 21 years, the
number of those schools has quadrupled, and I would put
schools in quotation marks," Phil Martelli, the men's
basketball coach at St. Joseph's University in
Philadelphia, said. "They're not all academic
institutions."
Pete Thamel, "Schools Where the Only Real Test Is
Basketball," The New York Times, February 25,
2006 ---
Click Here
The National Collegiate
Athletic Association acknowledges that it has not
acted as such places have proliferated. For years,
its Clearinghouse has approved transcripts from
these institutions without questioning them.
Until revelations last year
about a diploma mill in Florida and concerns about
other schools like it, the N.C.A.A. chose not to
police high schools. Although the N.C.A.A. recently
commissioned a task force charged with curbing
academic abuse, it still faces the tricky task of
separating the legitimate from the nonlegitimate
schools.
The Times found several
schools with curious student populations.
¶Genesis One Christian
Academy in Mendenhall, Miss.: Two years ago, this
kindergarten-to-Grade 8 school added a high school
and a Grade 13, for basketball players who did not
graduate to raise their grade-point averages. At
least 33 of about 40 students at the unaccredited
high school play basketball, and its stars have
signed letters of intent to attend Oklahoma State,
Arkansas and Alabama.
¶Boys to Men Academy in
Chicago: The student body consists of 16 basketball
players, who can earn credit for the equivalent of
eight high school core courses in a year by studying
online through an accredited correspondence school.
¶Rise Academy in
Philadelphia: Opened last fall, it outsources
lessons to others, including Lutheran Christian and
two online high schools.
¶God's Academy in Irving,
Tex.: A summer basketball coach started with three
students in August. Now 40 students in Grades 6 to
12, all basketball players, meet with two full-time
teachers four days a week at a recreation center.
The curriculum is provided and graded by an
education center 25 miles away. Its star player,
Jeremy Mayfield, signed with Oklahoma.
Some of these institutions
recently joined other private schools to form the
National Elite Athletic Association. With more than
two dozen teams from Los Angeles to Toronto, this
conference is seeking a shoe contract and a
television deal. Its teams sometimes travel
thousands of miles to play in tournaments that often
attract more college coaches than fans. Those
coaches will pay $100 for booklets of information
about the players.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
My question is how these students managed to qualify for
admittance into universities. I seriously doubt that
many, if any, graduated after playing four years of
basket ball in "college."
Bob Jensen's threads on diploma mills is at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill
The proof is in the pressure to change grades:
Repeating the same frauds year after year in academe
Louisiana State University has
settled a lawsuit by a former instructor who said that
she was pressured to change the grades of football
players, the
Associated Press reported.
No details of the settlement were released and the
university denied wrongdoing. Last year, LSU settled a
similar suit for $150,000.
Inside Higher Ed, September 19, 2005 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/09/19/qt
Heavy NCAA Penalties for Georgia Tech
"NCAA Puts Georgia Tech and the U. of South Carolina on Probation for
Violations of Academic Rules," by Rebecca Aronauer and Brad Wolverton,
The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 2, 2005, Page A34.
In November the NCAA put Georgia Tech on
probation for two years and stripped the institution of several
scholarships after discovering that academic officials had
inadvertently allowed 17 ineligible athletes to compete over a
six-year period.
Eleven of the athletes were football
players, including some who had received all-conference or
all-American honors. The other students participated in men's and
women's track and field, and women's swimming. Six of the 17
athletes got a D in a class but were still permitted to compete in
athletic events.
The NCAA's Division I Committee on
Infractions said the institution had displayed a lack of
institutional control by failing to properly train academic
officials and by not conducting a thorough investigation into
possible rules violations.
The committee also said that Georgia Tech
had received a substantial competitive advantage by allowing the
ineligible athletes to compete.
Because of the violations, Georgia Tech
must forfeit the wins its football team had in games from the
1998-99 to 2004-5 seasons in which any of the 11 ineligible athletes
competed.
The university must also expunge all
individual track and swimming athletes' results from contests in
which they competed.
Georgia Tech is considering an appeal of
the ruling.
Coach Takes the Test
More evidence that many universities are losing (or never had) quality
control on athlete admissions and grading
The National Collegiate Athletic Association
punished Texas Christian University’s men’s track program on Thursday
for a set of rules violations that included some of the most egregious
and unusual examples of academic fraud in recent history. They included
an instance in which a former assistant coach took a final examination
alongside a track athlete — with the consent of the faculty member in
the course — and then swapped his version of the test with the
athlete’s, allowing him to pass.
Doug Lederman, "NCAA Finds Fraud at TCU," Inside Higher Ed,
September 23, 2005 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/09/23/tcu
Is this an admissions scandal even in NCAA Division III schools
not having athletic scholarships?
Haverford, a small, selective liberal arts
college outside Philadelphia, competes in Division III, which prohibits
athletic scholarships. But at many Division III institutions, including
most of the nation's small-college academic elite, athletes can
measurably enhance their chances of acceptance by being included on a
coach's list for the admissions office.
Bill Pennington, "Choreographing the Recruiting Dance," The New York
Times, October 16, 2005 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/sports/16haverford.html
On the Dark Side of the Higher Education
Academy:
Generation Gaps, Collegial Apathy or Hostility, and Loneliness
On issue after issue — from workload, to how
research should be conducted, to the preferred structure of tenure reviews — Gen
X faculty members have radically different ideas about higher education should
work, Trower said. And these younger faculty members are willing to give up both
money and prestige to find institutions that provide “a good fit,” Trower said,
potentially changing the way colleges recruit and strive to retain faculty
talent.
Scott Jaschik, "The Gen X Professor," Inside Higher Ed, April
5, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/04/05/genx
My story, then, felt unique, until I heard everyone
else’s stories. There are an awful lot of people out there who live their lives
in a constant state of low-level despondence: They have too many papers to
grade, their colleagues are not interested in their work, their colleges are in
constant crisis, they didn’t get promoted, they live in the middle of nowhere,
they can’t find a date in the middle of nowhere, their partners live hundreds of
miles away. These may sound like the complaints that make older faculty members
tell us to pull up our bootstraps and remember that they didn’t even have boots
to pull up when they walked 10 miles barefoot in the snow to MLA, but I wonder
how many of those older faculty members have spent too long repressing the
details of their own unhappiness. And then there are the people, like me, who
don’t complain, but live their lives atop a constant undercurrent of despair.
"The Apparently Bearable Unhappiness of Academe," by Rebecca Steinitz, Inside
Higher Ed, March 28, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/workplace/2006/03/28/steinitz
It's Lonely in the Academy. Yes indeed is is lonely
"The Isolated Academic," by Shari Wilson, Inside Higher Ed, March
24, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/03/24/wilson
And it’s not just the hours. My discipline
creates a division, too. Yes, I feel at home in my department meeting. I
even feel at home in the liberal arts building. When I traverse the
campus to the health professions building to teach my afternoon class, I
feel a bit like an interloper.
Passing a man with an attaché in the hall, I
nod a teacher’s hello and walk confidently to my classroom. As I write
on the board the day’s lesson, I wonder if he teaches something in the
medical field since we have pre-med classes here. Or maybe something
scientific. I realize that unless I throw myself in his path with an
awkward introduction, I will never find out what this man is doing on
campus. At the big meetings, faculty members are very friendly.
Disciplines seem more permeable; small talk abounds. We feel as if we
are meeting extended family for the first time. Deans move about making
introductions. Yet the next week, there is no contact.
Yes, our choice of career makes us special.
While talking to a science instructor at my university cafeteria, I
realize that students at adjoining tables must think we are crazy.
“Pegagogy” and “curriculum” may mean something to education majors; but
to most, it’s a secret teacher language. I realize that I subscribe to
the adult/child split when on campus — that staff, administrators and
faculty are of one kind; students are another.
I’m sure it seems unfair to some. And it also
lends to a feeling of separateness that engulfs some instructors. A
professor friend who teaches upper-level literature claims it’s not that
bad. He then admits that his students are older and more accomplished;
at times they seem more like colleagues than students. But over the
course of years, I’ve noticed that those who teach must keep some
distance from those we teach. Faculty handbooks caution against close
friendships or love relationships between students and instructors. Many
professors find it better to cultivate peers or those outside of
academia for friendships.
And those who relocate for a position have
another hurdle to overcome. Here in the Midwest, many of my colleagues
are married. Others are more established. We who relocate for positions
often find ourselves trying to horn our way into circles of friends who
have lasted for 10, 20 or 30 years. An ex-colleague of mine in Northern
California confessed that she is going to approach an office mate and
his wife and ask point blank if they’d be interested in cultivating
something more than an acquaintanceship.
Another friend of mine who relocated from
California to the Mid-Atlantic for a position said that she and her
husband have never been more lonely. This is their third semester — and
she is already talking about the possibility of going “back home” — if
only to reestablish old friendships that feel as if they are fading over
the phone. It’s heartbreaking to think of the effort that they’ve put
into this move. Her new tenure-track position is the envy of all of our
friends; he finally found a good corporate job. Their children are in
good schools. And he was contemplating bringing out his father from a
neighboring state. I’m hoping that in time their mid-sized city will
open up to this valuable couple. Yet I know from experience that smaller
towns are tough. Even here in the Midwest, friendliness only goes so
far. And then we outsiders sometimes feel locked out as locals discuss
long bloodlines and who went to high school with whom.
And what about what we bring to our situation?
Is it possible that we lonely academics have a hand in our own fate? How
many of us have secretly felt superior to those around us simply because
of our specialized knowledge? Is it easy to cultivate friendships when
we have high expectations that simply cannot be met? And when we do
start to form acquaintanceships, how many of us realize we are too
afraid to take the next step? When I think about it from an objective
point of view, I have to admit that like many academics, I’m socially
awkward.
After decades with my head in books, I
sometimes trip over my tongue and stand around looking foolish when more
socially accomplished adults make contact. A girlfriend of mine on the
East coast confessed that she and her husband often find themselves
talking to each other at faculty gatherings. He is painfully shy; she is
in a specialty field that makes her feel cast out. Making friends —
especially in smaller towns — can be difficult at best and painful at
worst for the most accomplished academic.
The solution? I’ve found that I have to be
willing to let my guard down and squelch “better than” thinking.
Reaching out in more than one area has helped. Other professors who have
relocated seem more approachable — if only because they are suffering
from loneliness, too. Staff are a possibility — which has the added
advantage of diminishing the “us vs. them” gap. Social service
organizations and volunteer work can provide contacts outside of
academia.
Continued in article
September 11, 2006 message from Dennis Beresford
[dberesfo@TERRY.UGA.EDU]
Last Saturday's edition of the New York Times
included an article about Notre Dame quarterback Brady Quinn, who is a
finance/political science major and a fine student in addition to being the
early favorite for the Heisman Trophy. It included some comments from his
professors about his positive contributions in the classroom in addition to
the gridiron. I enjoyed the following two paragraphs.
Edward Hums, an instructor of accountancy, had
Quinn, then a sophomore, in a class and said he enjoyed Quinn’s demeanor.
“Something that he always brought to class was a smile and an upbeat
attitude,” Hums said. “When you’re teaching financial accounting, the
material is often less than exciting. To see a student who somewhat enjoys
himself is a plus.”
I tell my students at the beginning of each
semester that I love accounting and the class will be more enjoyable for
both them and me if they at least pretend to like the subject too.
Denny
Jensen Comment
The above module from Denny is a marked contrast to the following NYT module.
"College Life 101: Dramatically Stark Orientation," by Karen W. Arenson,
The New York Times, September 11, 2006 ---
Click Here
Many colleges around the country feel obliged to
caution entering students about what to expect and what to avoid, but few
offer more hard-hitting warnings than
New York University’s theatrical orientation
created by the New York playwright and director Elizabeth Swados.
The musical “The Reality Show: NYU,” which has
already played to nearly 5,000 incoming students at the university and will
be shown twice more this month, tells of drugs and date rape, drinking and
anorexia, depression and suicide.
It is not a pretty picture, but it is not far from
the reality of a large urban university. And N.Y.U. feels more pressure than
most because of the spate of student suicides during the 2003-4 school year.
“This production came out of that terrible year,”
said Marc Wais, N.Y.U.’s vice president for student affairs. “There was a
sense of urgency.”
In the fall of 2004 the university used an outside
theater group to tell new students about a telephone hot line and counseling
and referral program it created after the suicides. But N.Y.U. officials
decided that a production by students, for students, might be even more
effective, and turned to their Tisch School of the Arts. Arthur Bartow,
chairman of the undergraduate drama program at the time, recommended Ms.
Swados, 55, who first gained fame with her 1978 Broadway musical “Runaways,”
and had just become a full-time teacher at the school.
“I knew Liz had a way of working with students to
get them to tell the truth rather than some adult’s version,” he said in a
recent interview. “They produce something that is much more stark, much more
real, much more shocking than adults would allow themselves to write.”
Suicide and depression are topics Ms. Swados knows
well. Her mother and brother took their own lives, and, as she explained in
“My Depression: A Picture Book,” published last year by Hyperion, she
contemplated doing the same.
But Linda Mills, senior vice provost for
undergraduate education and university life at N.Y.U., who commissioned Ms.
Swados, said her personal history was not an issue. Ms. Swados was being
brought in as “a creative talent and director, not a clinician or
therapist,” Ms. Mills said.
And Ms. Swados, whose teachers and mentors included
Joseph Papp, Peter Brook, Ellen Stewart and Andrei Serban, said she did not
want to put too much of a spotlight on suicide “because it’s so easily
romanticized by young people.” She added, “The N.Y.U. kids have no
relationship to the darkness of my past.”
The students, chosen from Tisch after several
rounds of auditions by Ms. Swados, provided their own darkness.
Vella Lovell, a senior, said that while at times
the students did portray themselves, other times they were portraying
“someone far removed from them.”
“To do this piece we all had to be willing to play
the most outrageous characters because to at least one person in the
audience it’s not so outrageous,” she said. “If we were playing ourselves,
we tried to make it as big as possible — all extremes.”
Continued in article
"The Syllabus Becomes a
Repository of Legalese: As dos and don'ts get added, some professors cry
'enough'," by Paula Wasley, Chronicle of
Higher Education, March 14, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i27/27a00102.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
The syllabus for a course on American literature at
the University of South Alabama seems pretty routine at first glance. It
includes among its required readings, for instance, The Great Gatsby
and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
But near the bottom of Page 3 is something not
related to course work — a detailed clause on classroom behavior: "Students
are expected to arrive on time, not to leave early, not to wear caps inside
the classroom, and to follow traditions of decorum and civility."
Course syllabi have long been as varied as the
instructors who composed them. Indeed, many faculty members are loath to
share them, for fear of intellectual theft.
But increasingly the contemporary syllabus is
becoming more like a legal document, full of all manner of exhortations,
proscriptions, and enunciations of class and institutional policy — often in
minute detail that seems more appropriate for a courtroom than a classroom.
Take, for example, the injunction that appeared
recently on an introductory-religion syllabus at Wartburg College: "Keep
your e-mail 'inbox' tidy so that you may receive timely notices from your
professor."
Such clauses have cropped up on college syllabi
around the country for a variety of reasons. Some have been required by the
college or university. Since the passage of the Americans With Disabilities
Act, a statement about students with disabilities has become de rigueur.
This fall the University of Missouri at Columbia added a statement on
"intellectual pluralism" to its syllabi. Some institutions require the
inclusion of an inclement-weather policy.
Heading off conflict is another goal. Faculty
members concerned about campus violence add codicils to their syllabi
declaring their commitment to a "safe and supportive learning environment";
others include disclaimers about potentially controversial films and
readings.
With its ever-lengthening number of contingency
clauses, disclaimers, and provisos, the college syllabus can bear as much
resemblance to a prenuptial agreement as it does to an expression of
intellectual enterprise. But experts say that when things go wrong in the
classroom, fuzzy expectations are almost always to blame.
"Our own experiences suggest that when trouble
arises in a class, the conflict often began, in some way, with the
syllabus," wrote Joseph Kenneth Matejka and Lance B. Kurke in a 1994 article
on the syllabus for the journal College Teaching.
"You wouldn't think it was that important," says
Mr. Matejka, a professor of leadership and change management at Duquesne
University's Graduate School of Business. Still, he says, research indicates
that the syllabus is "the single biggest determining variable in determining
the success and reaction to the course." The well-designed syllabus, he
notes, lays out right from the start the goals, requirements, and operating
principles of the course.
Continued in article
Greeks on Campus: A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall, a Hundred
Bottles of Beer, if . . .
A new study from the National Bureau of
Economic Research is unlikely to shock many: It found that fraternity membership
correlates with higher levels of drinking — measured by intensity, frequency and
recency. The study may be
purchased online.
Inside Higher Ed, July 19, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/07/19/qt
The Condition of Education 2006
The Education Department on Thursday released
“The Condition of Education 2006,” this year’s
version of an annual compilation of statistics on a range of issues at all
levels of education. The report provides the latest data on enrollment trends,
most of them consistent with previous projections about enrollment increases and
about the growing gender gap in which more women than men enroll.
Inside Higher Ed, June 2, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/06/02/qt
Sigh! In my day, men were not allowed to live in
sorority houses and vice versa for women
"Big Legal Loss for Fraternities," by Doug Lederman,
Inside Higher Ed, September 14, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/14/frat
The College of Staten Island can deny
official recognition to a fraternity because it excludes women, a federal
appeals court ruled Thursday.
The decision by the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Second Circuit overturned a lower court
judge’s August 2006 ordering the City University of New York
campus to recognize a new chapter of the Alpha Epsilon Pi
fraternity and provide the benefits that go along with that
status.
Staten Island
officials had argued before the lower court that the
fraternity’s denial of membership to women violated the
college’s policy barring discrimination on the basis on
gender. The fraternity had argued that the college’s denial
of recognition prevented it from receiving needed funds,
using university facilities and recruiting at student
orientations, and restricted its membership because members
and potential members had difficulty traveling to off-campus
events.
Judge Dora L. Irizarry concluded that the
college’s policy improperly infringed on the
fraternity’s First Amendment right to
freedom of association. Irizarry, citing the
fraternity as an “organization that promotes
congeniality and a supportive social
structure for male students,” found Alpha
Epsilon Pi to be an “intimate association”
that deserved the First Amendment’s full
protection, outweighing Staten Island’s
interests in carrying out its
nondiscrimination policy. The lower court
issued a preliminary injunction — which
Staten Island and CUNY officials promptly
appealed — that called for the college to
recognize the fraternity and to drop a
prohibition against the group’s recruitment
and “rushing” activities.
The lower court was
heralded by advocates for fraternities as an
important new legal tool to protect their
interests. A
2006 article by the Foundation for
Individual Rights,
for instance, argued that fraternities have
typically only qualified for “expressive”
association rights, earned primarily when an
organization has “taken positions on issues
and actively exercised its members’ right to
speak.”
Granting First Amendment protection to
fraternities “based on their being a locus
of intimate association [between members],”
FIRE argued, “would mean that fraternities
could garner protection based primarily on
the private aspects of their group: their
selectivity, size, and seclusion from the
public eye. For fraternities and sororities
across the country, Judge Irizarry’s order
may signal a new means for Greeks to protect
their First Amendment freedoms — even their
right to exist — from zealous
administrators.”
Continued in article
A Clash of Rights," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, September
17, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/17/rights
Public colleges’ anti-bias
policies have been taking a beating in the courts in recent years. Various
federal courts have said that the policies can’t be used to deny recognition
to Christian student groups — even if those groups explicitly discriminate
against those who are gay or who don’t share the faith of the organizations.
Many lawyers who
advise colleges, even some who deplore these rulings, have
urged colleges to recognize that the force of their
anti-bias policies has been severely weakened. Students’
First Amendment rights of freedom of religion and expression
will end up trumping strong anti-bias principles, or so the
emerging conventional wisdom has gone.
But
an unusual decision from a federal
appeals court on Thursday is challenging that conventional
wisdom. The decision upheld the right of a public college —
the College of Staten Island, of the City University of New
York — to deny recognition to a fraternity because it
doesn’t let women become members. In ruling as it did, the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that the
college’s anti-bias rules served an important state function
— and a function that was more important than the limits
faced by a fraternity not being recognized.
In a
statement that some educators view as long overdue from the
courts, the Second Circuit said that a public college “has a
substantial interest in making sure that its resources are
available to all its students.”
Further, and
this is important because many college anti-bias policies go
beyond federal requirements, the court said that it didn’t
matter that federal law has exceptions for fraternities and
sororities from gender bias claims. “The state’s interest in
prohibiting sex discrimination is no less compelling because
federal anti-discrimination statutes exempt fraternities,”
the court said.
Some legal
experts view last week’s ruling as a blip — a result perhaps
of unusual circumstances in the case, or a trio of judges
who happened to see the issue in a different way. An appeal
is almost certain. But rulings by federal appeals courts
become law in their regions and precedents that can be cited
everywhere. And some lawyers, especially those trying to
defend college anti-bias laws, say that the decision could
be significant.
In the new
ruling, “the court is saying there’s no question but that
the government has a substantial interest in eradicating
discrimination and it recognizes that non-discrimination
policies that condition funding interfere [with students’
rights] only to a limited degree, and that’s exactly the
issue in our case,” said Ethan P. Schulman, a lawyer for the
University of California Hastings College of Law.
A
federal judge ruled last year that
Hastings was within its rights to
deny recognition to the campus chapter of the Christian
Legal Society, which barred from the group students who
engage in “unrepentant homosexual conduct.” Based on other
rulings, the Christian group has appealed, but Schulman said
that the Second Circuit’s finding showed that colleges
should not abandon tough anti-bias policies (as many have,
when faced with similar legal challenges).
“Ultimately
it may well be that the U.S. Supreme Court is going to have
to decide these issues,” Schulman said. “But right now I
think it’s a mistake for colleges and universities to assume
that they should abandon strongly held policies of
non-discrimination.”
Continued in article
Question for Professors
How much would you charge to help restore the tarnished image of a CEO you never
knew?"Academics' 'PR' work raises eyebrows: Ethicists questioning
efforts for Greenberg," by Robert Weisman, Boston Globe, April 5, 2007
---
Click Here
"Academics are supposed to be independent
thinkers," said Jim Hoopes , professor of business ethics at Babson College
in Wellesley. "Once academics start getting paid for their opinions in this
way, there is less confidence in the integrity of their ideas."
The academics, working with eSapience, a
little-known Cambridge company calling itself a new media and research firm,
included Richard Schmalensee , dean of MIT's Sloan School of Management;
David S. Evans , adjunct professor at University College London; and Richard
Epstein , a University of Chicago law professor.
Their mission was "to change the public
conversation about Maurice Greenberg ," according to a confidential plan
summary. This was to be accomplished, in part, by organizing invitation-only
events where "influencers" would hear Greenberg weigh in on insurance issues
and by penning papers, editorials, books, and other content aimed at putting
the executive in a favorable light, the summary said.
The document was filed in US District Court in
Boston last month as part of eSapience's lawsuit against Greenberg's current
company, New York investment firm C.V. Starr & Co., for allegedly refusing
to pay $2 million in bills from the image campaign.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on the AIG scandal are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm#PwC
More female computer scientists wanted
"The numbers are terrible for computer science and
they have been trending downward so far this decade," said Horwitz, noting
that UW-Madison women computer science undergraduates have gone from 11
percent in 2000 to 9 percent in 2005. "No one completely understands the
trend," she added. "Some of it may stem from the dot-com bust and a sense
that outsourcing may be threatening future jobs. But we're actually looking
at a huge pending shortage in the computing workforce."
"More female computer scientists wanted," PhysOrg, August 17, 2006
---
http://physorg.com/news75053557.html
Jensen Comment
This is opposite of the trend in higher education in general and in accounting
in particular where numbers of women are significantly outpacing men.
Women now make up more than 60 percent of all
accountants and auditors in the United States, according to the Clarion-Ledger.
That is an estimated 843,000 women in the accounting and auditing work force.
AccountingWeb, "Number of Female Accountants Increasing," June 2, 2006
---
http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=102218
Also see
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
Incredible shrinking men in higher education: The problem is not
just a shortage of black male applicants
"New Take on the Gender Gap," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
April 26, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/04/26/gender
Where are the male students?
Colleges are increasingly worried
about the way their applicant pools and student bodies are
lopsidedly female. Much of the discussion assumes that the
problem (if it’s a problem) is relatively recent.
A new study from the National Bureau
of Economic Research, however, suggests that the enrollment
patterns colleges are seeing today result from much longer
term shifts. In fact, the analysis — by three Harvard
University economists — suggests that but for certain
societal conditions that either favored men or motivated
men, the gap might have been present or larger earlier.
The study starts with a review of the
long-term trends in gender enrollment and notes a fact that
has received relatively little attention of late: Between
1900 and 1930, male and female enrollments were roughly at
parity. And relatively few of the women enrolled (about 5
percent) were at elite women’s colleges. About half were at
public institutions.
Citing a range of studies, the
Harvard economists suggest that women of that generation —
like women today — made calculated decisions about the gains
that would come from higher education. Significant numbers
were seeking careers, even with the knowledge that careers
and marriage were viewed as incompatible both by would-be
employers and would-be spouses. Others were seeking to marry
college-educated men.
A variety of factors led to the
relative growth in male enrollments in the following
periods. Significantly, those changes did not reflect better
academic preparation by men or any falling off in college
preparation by women. Among the factors cited were the
increase in bans on married women working, the importance of
the GI Bill as a source of funds for college for veterans —
the vast majority of them men — returning from World War II,
and the desire of a subsequent generation of men to avoid
the Vietnam War draft by enrolling in college.
Looked at through this historic
perspective, the edge that men had for many years wasn’t
natural or based on academic achievement, write the Harvard
economists. They call their study “The Homecoming of
American College Women,” driving home the point that the
trends of today reflect a return of women, not the emergence
of women’s outstanding academic performance.
The high point of gender imbalance
in favor of men came in 1947, when men outnumbered women on
campuses by a 2.3 to 1 ratio (a far more lopsided imbalance
than we are seeing today, when women make up 57 percent of
enrollments nationally). Women achieved parity again around
1980 and their proportions have since been growing. In terms
of women’s motivations, the arrival of the women’s movement
certainly played a factor, the authors write, as more
careers were open to women and women delayed or opted
against marriage and/or having children.
So why today’s imbalance? The
Harvard economists suggest several factors. One is that
changes in societal values have meant that more women —
across social classes — hold jobs for significant portions
of their adult lives, or their entire adult lives. The wage
differential between college-educated and non-college
educated woman has always been greater than that for men,
the authors write. Women are behaving with economic logic by
focusing more on college, since they will spend more of
their lifetimes working.
The other major factor they cite is
also very simple: Women do better in high school. They are
more likely to study hard, to take the right courses, and to
do well in those courses than are their male counterparts.
Male high school students are more likely to have behavioral
problems.
As a result, the authors suggest,
today’s gender gap really isn’t surprising.
An abstract of the report is
available on the National Bureau of Economic Research’s
Web site, where the full report
may be purchased online for $5.
The authors are Claudia Goldin,
Lawrence F. Katz, and Ilyana Kuziemko.
Declining Rate of Growth
The Growth and Student Makeup of Higher Education by 2015
"Higher Ed 2015," Elia Powers, Inside Higher Ed, September 15, 2006
---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/15/future
Enrollment in degree-granting institutions jumped
by 25 percent — from 13.8 million to 17.3 million —between 1990 and 2004,
and is expected to increase to nearly 20 million, a 15 percent jump, by
2015. According to the predictions, college enrollment will increase 13
percent for students between the ages of 18 and 24, and 7 percent for those
35 and older. Male enrollment will be up 10 percent; female 18 percent.
The report projects that between 2004 and 2015,
college enrollments will increase:
- Eighteen percent for full-time students and 10
percent for part-timers.
- Fourteen percent for undergraduate students
and 19 percent for graduate students.
- Fifteen percent in public institutions and 14
percent in privates.
- Six percent for students who are white and
non-Hispanic; 27 percent for students who are black and non-Hispanic; 42
percent for students who are Hispanic; 28 percent for students who are
Asian or Pacific Islanders; 30 percent for students who are American
Indian or Alaska native; and 34 percent for students who are nonresident
aliens.
Women will continue to dominate the higher
education landscape, the department envisions. It projects that between 2004
and 2015:
- The number of associate degrees awarded will
increase 12 percent over all (5 percent for men and 16 percent for
women).
- Bachelor’s degrees will increase 22 percent
over all (14 percent for men and 28 percent for women).
- Master’s degrees will increase 35 percent over
all (28 percent for men and 41 percent for women).
- Doctor’s degrees will increase 21 percent over
all (12 percent for men and 31 percent for women).
Higher education isn’t the only sector seeing
growth. Enrollment in public elementary and secondary schools rose 18
percent between 1990 and 2003 and is projected to increase by another 6
percent between 2003 and 2015. The number of high school graduates increased
by 21 percent between 1990-91 and 2004-05 and is projected to increase by 6
percent by the 2015-16 academic year.
"The Eroding Faculty Paycheck," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
April 24, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/04/24/salaries
The average faculty salary increased by 3.1
percent in 2005-6 — a year in which the inflation rate was 3.4 percent,
according to data released today by the American Association of
University Professors.
That makes this year the second straight in
which faculty members have lost spending power over the course of a
year. And this two-year stretch of falling behind inflation is the first
such repeat in inflation outpacing raises since 1981.
A report on salaries, by Saranna Thornton, an
economist at Hampden-Sydney College and chair of the AAUP’s Committee on
the Economic Status of the Profession, speculates that many colleges may
not have accurately projected the rate of inflation. Her report urges
colleges to consider this issue more carefully in the future, and warns
that allowing salaries to fall behind will hurt the ability to attract
professorial talent.
The AAUP compared figures for faculty salaries
with those of other professions that attract highly educated people —
and the picture isn’t pretty. While professors know that physicians and
lawyers earn more money, they may not realize how the gaps are growing.
Between 1986 and 2005, the percentage change in real salaries for
faculty members increased by 0.27 percent. The increases were
substantially larger for engineers (4.68 percent), lawyers (17.73
percent), and physicians (34.41 percent). For good measure, the AAUP
also notes that average salaries of college presidents and the average
size of college endowments have also outpaced increases in professors’
pay.
As the data from the AAUP make clear, the
salary picture for professors varies widely depending on where and in
what capacity someone works. The average increase for continuing faculty
was 4.4 percent, outpacing inflation. The gaps between elite and
non-elite colleges are such that there is no one real category of
faculty pay.
The average for full professors is $172,800 at
Rockefeller University, and five institutions (all private) have
six-figure averages for associate professors. But salaries like that are
not typical. The average salary for one professor at Rockefeller or
Harvard or Princeton Universities would pay for the average salaries of
three associate professors at a community college or three assistant
professors at a baccalaureate institution.
Rockefeller has the highest pay for full
professors this year, while the University of California at Los Angeles
leads for public institutions, Wellesley College for liberal arts
institutions, and Westchester Community College for community colleges.
The California Institute of Technology leads in the rankings for average
associate and assistant professor salaries. (Some tables with the
highest and lowest salaries appear at the end of this article.)
The following table shows averages for
different types of institutions and ranks. The community college
averages are based only on those institutions with faculty ranks.
Average Salaries of Professors, by Rank and
Institution Type, 2006-6
Institution Type/Rank Average Salary 1-Year %
Change
Doctoral — public
—Professor $101,620 +3.9%
—Associate professor 70,952 +3.7%
—Assistant professor 60,440 +3.8%
Doctoral — private independent
—Professor $131,292 +4.4%
—Associate professor 84,419 +3.5%
—Assistant professor 71,877 +3.0%
Doctoral — private church-related
—Professor $113,740 +3.8%
—Associate professor 77,409 +3.9%
—Assistant professor 65,286 +3.9%
Master’s — public
—Professor $78,884 +2.7%
—Associate professor 62,700 +2.6%
—Assistant professor 52,873 +3.0%
Master’s — private independent
—Professor $88,800 +3.4%
—Associate professor 67,148 +3.2%
—Assistant professor 54,996 +2.8%
Master’s — private church-related
—Professor $78,379 +3.3%
—Associate professor 62,208 +3.2%
—Assistant professor 51,411 +3.5%
Baccalaureate — public
—Professor $73,406 +2.9%
—Associate professor 59,913 +3.0%
—Assistant professor 49,546 +2.7%
Baccalaureate — private independent
—Professor $87,779 +3.3%
—Associate professor 64,846 +3.6%
—Assistant professor 53,083 +4.0%
Baccalaureate — private church-related
—Professor $66,547 +3.9%
—Associate professor 55,402 +3.5%
—Assistant professor 45,873 +2.8%
Community colleges — public
—Professor $66,011 +3.0%
—Associate professor 53,405 +2.8%
—Assistant professor 47,116 +2.3%
The data from the AAUP draw attention to the
gap that has grown between public and private salaries. Historically in
the United States, the gap hasn’t been large — and ambitious public
institutions were able to attract top talent. At the doctoral level,
this enabled top institutions to have graduate programs and research
centers that could compete in selected areas with the Ivies and other
top private institutions.
Increasingly, that is not the case. In 2004-5,
public salaries of full professors equaled 77 percent of average private
salaries at doctoral institutions, 91 percent at master’s institutions,
and 83 percent at baccalaureate institutions. For assistant professors —
a key comparison because it affects the initial entry point to academic
careers — the percentages are 83 percent at doctoral institutions, 97
percent at master’s institutions, and 94 percent at baccalaureate
institutions. As recently as 1990-91, pay for assistant professors was
better at public institutions than at privates at the master’s and
baccalaureate levels.
The AAUP study notes many ways in
which its data may not reflect the situation of
individuals in various sectors or at various
institutions. The data collected are from full-time
faculty members, even though a growing proportion of
faculty members work part time. Cost of living obviously
varies widely in the United States, and many
institutions at the top of the salary lists are in
expensive urban areas, so plenty of faculty members who
work at institutions further down the list, and in less
expensive areas, enjoy the ability to have nicer homes
and may have more cash in their retirement accounts.
The AAUP data also do not focus on
disciplines. Cary Nelson, the new president of the AAUP,
said in an interview last week that he would like to see
the survey find ways to reflect disciplinary gaps. (The
College and University Professional Association for
Human Resources releases data that
compares salaries by discipline,
but that does not contain information on individual
institutions.) To the extent that disciplinary gaps
exist, they affect not only individuals, but averages
for institutions, since those with many faculty members
in business may have larger averages than those that
have many classics professors.
Institutional Rankings
Among private research
universities, compared to last year, the California
Institute of Technology fell from No. 6 to 8, with Yale
and the University of Pennsylvania each moving up a
notch. Columbia University, which was ninth last year,
did not submit figures this year.
Top 10 Private Research
Universities in Average Salary for Full Professor
|
University |
Average Salary |
|
1. Rockefeller
University |
$172,800 |
|
2. Harvard University |
$168,700 |
|
3. Princeton
University |
$156,800 |
|
4. Stanford University |
$156,200 |
|
5. University of
Chicago |
$155,100 |
|
6. Yale University |
$151,200 |
|
7. University of
Pennsylvania |
$149,900 |
|
8. California
Institute of Technology |
$147,800 |
|
9. Yeshiva University |
$144,200 |
|
10. New York
University |
$144,000 |
Among public universities with
the highest average salaries for full professors, there
was relatively little movement. The State University of
New York’s Health Sciences Center at Brooklyn fell out
of the top 10 while Rutgers University at New Brunswick
made the cut. With that addition, New Jersey has three
universities in the public top 10 (as does California).
Top 10 Public Research
Universities in Average Salary for Full Professor
|
University |
Average Salary |
|
1. University of
California at Los Angeles |
$128,400 |
|
2. New Jersey
Institute of Technology |
$128,000 |
|
3. University of
California at Berkeley |
$126,200 |
|
4. University of
Michigan at Ann Arbor |
$125,600 |
|
5. Georgia Institute
of Technology |
$123,600 |
|
6. University of
Maryland at Baltimore |
$123,300 |
|
7. University of
Virginia |
$123,100 |
|
8. Rutgers University
at Newark |
$118,800 |
|
9. University of
California at San Diego |
$118,100 |
|
10. Rutgers University
at New Brunswick |
$116,800 |
Among liberal arts colleges,
the top salaries are found at institutions in the
Northeast or in Southern California.
Top 10 Liberal Arts Colleges
in Average Salary for Full Professor
|
College |
Average Salary |
|
1. Wellesley College |
$123,100 |
|
2. Pomona College |
$121,700 |
|
3. Barnard College |
$120,300 |
|
4. Amherst College |
$119,300 |
|
5. Swarthmore College |
$118,200 |
|
6. Williams College |
$116,900 |
|
7. (tie) Harvey Mudd
College |
$116,400 |
|
7. (tie) Middlebury
College |
$116,400 |
|
9. Claremont McKenna
College |
$115,700 |
|
10. Wesleyan
University |
$115,400 |
Among community colleges,
comparisons of institutions are more difficult because
only some two-year institutions have faculty ranks.
Among those that do, however, the Big Apple is the place
to be. Six of the top 10 are in the City University of
New York, while one other is in nearby Westchester
County, and two are in New Jersey.
Top 10 Community Colleges in
Average Salary for Full Professor
|
College |
Average Salary |
|
1. Westchester
Community College |
$95,100 |
|
2. Gloucester County
College |
$94,000 |
|
3. Miami U. (Ohio) at
Hamilton |
$90,600 |
|
4. Union County
College |
$89,900 |
|
5. Queensborough
Community College |
$89,200 |
|
6. Hostos Community
College |
$87,200 |
|
7. LaGuardia Community
College |
$86,700 |
|
8. Borough of
Manhattan Community College |
$85,300 |
|
9. (tie) Bronx
Community College |
$84,300 |
|
9. (tie) Kingsborough
Community College |
$84,300 |
While six-figure salaries have
become the norm for full professors at top public and
private universities, six-figure averages are just
starting to show up at the associate professor rank, and
they are not visible at the assistant level.
Six-Figure Average Salaries
for Associate Professors
|
Institution |
Average Salary |
|
1. California
Institute of Technology |
$106,500 |
|
2. Stanford University |
$106,100 |
|
3. Babson College |
$103,000 |
|
4. Thomas M. Cooley
Law School |
$101,300 |
|
5. University of
Pennsylvania |
$100,700 |
Of the top 10 universities in
average salary for assistant professor, all are private
except one, the University of Texas at Dallas.
Top 10 Institutions in
Average Salary for Assistant Professor
|
Institution |
Average Salary |
|
1. California
Institute of Technology |
$96,800 |
|
2. University of
Pennsylvania |
$88,100 |
|
3. Harvard University |
$87,300 |
|
4. Babson College |
$87,200 |
|
5. Stanford University |
$86,900 |
|
6. Cornell University
(endowed colleges) |
$82,900 |
|
7. Massachusetts
Institute of Technology |
$82,700 |
|
8. University of Texas
at Dallas |
$82,400 |
|
9. Northwestern
University |
$81,200 |
|
10. Carnegie Mellon
University |
$80,500 |
The institutions that have the
lowest salaries for full professors tend to be, like
those that pay the highest, private institutions. Many
on the low end of the pay scale are religious.
Bottom 20 Four-Year
Institutions in Average Salary for a Full Professor
|
Institution |
Average Salary |
|
1. Naropa University |
$28,000 |
|
2. Union College (Ky.) |
$35,700 |
|
3. Bethany (Kan.) |
$38,600 |
|
4. Anna Maria College |
$39,100 |
|
5. Tabor College |
$39,300 |
|
6. Walla Walla College |
$39,500 |
|
7. St. Paul’s College
(Va.) |
$39,700 |
|
8. Toccoa Falls
College |
$41,400 |
|
9. Tennessee Wesleyan
College |
$42,100 |
|
10. College of the
Southwest |
$42,400 |
|
11. Crichton College |
$42,500 |
|
12. Ohio Valley
College |
$42,700 |
|
13. Kentucky Christian
University |
$43,100 |
|
14. Oklahoma Wesleyan
University |
$45,100 |
|
15. Antioch College |
$45,300 |
|
16. Kansas Wesleyan
University |
$45,400 |
|
17. Missouri Valley
College |
$45,600 |
|
18. (tie) Bryan
College |
$46,000 |
|
18. (tie) MacMurray
College |
$46,000 |
|
20. Concordia
University (Oregon) |
$46,300 |
Trouble at Home for the Nation's Highest Paid College CEO
"Division at RPI," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, April 28, 2006
---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/04/28/rpi
It would be hard to beat Shirley Ann Jackson’s
résumé: First black woman to receive a doctorate from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, a physicist who led impressive research teams at
Rutgers University and AT&T Bell Laboratories, chair of the U.S. Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, and — since 1999 — president of Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute.
When national commissions or universities want an
expert on science and especially on diversifying the research work force (a
topic on many minds since a certain university president managed to offend
women nationwide with his thoughts on the topic), Jackson is the person to
call. She publishes papers and captivates conferences.
Back in Troy, however, it turns out a lot of people
are less than impressed. The faculty held a no confidence vote this week and
while Jackson in some sense won the vote, the margin was quite narrow: 155
to 149 in her favor.
According to critics, Jackson has favored new
professors over more senior scholars, allowed the engineering programs to
decline, squelched criticism, and enjoyed too many perks in office.
Professors say that her national reputation has hidden the anger at home,
which has been growing for years. “She talks a good story, but she doesn’t
know how to run a university,” says E. Bruce Nauman, a professor of chemical
engineering who recently finished a term leading the Faculty Senate.
As the faculty opposition has come to a head — in
part over discussion of possible cuts in RPI’s contribution to the faculty
pension plan — student anger at the administration has also grown, but over
a completely different issue. Students are up in arms over administration
plans to curb alcohol in fraternities and sororities and hundreds backing
the Save RPI Greeks movement say they would have left the institution, but
for the houses that they say Jackson’s administration is about to destroy.
While the quality of RPI engineering and the
quality of frat parties are obviously very different issues, there may be a
common thread. “Aside from what the policy is, we weren’t talked to about it
— we feel stepped upon,” said one student leader who asked not to be
identified and who said he finds that his professors share that feeling.
While Jackson is not talking, the board at RPI has
given her strong support, with the chair, Samuel Heffner, releasing a
statement praising Jackson, and saying that while “circumstances of dramatic
change create challenges for all engaged,” the board “stands firmly” behind
the president.
In the debate about Jackson, critics and supporters
can’t agree on the relevant numbers or priorities. Critics say that graduate
enrollments are falling rapidly; supporters say that reforms of graduate
education gave Ph.D. totals a false spike a few years ago, so that the real
numbers are better. Critics — citing U.S. News rankings, which are viewed as
educationally dubious by many, although they are used by many applicants —
say that RPI is no longer the engineering powerhouse it once was. Supporters
say Jackson has pushed interdisciplinary work and made progress in newer
areas like biotechnology. Critics respond that she has failed to attract
faculty talent in some of the fields that she is building, while letting
historic strengths erode.
Some of the tensions at RPI are not unique to the
institute. Institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
the California Institute of Technology have greatly broadened their areas of
expertise in the last generation away from the traditional base in the
physical sciences and engineering to include much more of an emphasis on the
biological sciences. The shift reflects where much of the hot science is
taking place these days. But critics at RPI say that places like MIT and
Caltech pulled off the broadening without hurting their base, and in a more
collaborative way.
As at many institutions, money is a factor, but
here too, the question is which numbers count. Jackson’s supporters say that
average faculty salaries increased by about 16 percent in the last four
years. But her critics say that many faculty members who have devoted their
careers to RPI have been getting raises in the 1-2 percent range, falling
behind inflation, with the institute using the funds saved to pay top dollar
to new faculty members. The institution has also been paying top dollar to
Jackson, whose compensation topped $900,000 two years ago (the last year for
which data are available).
Nauman said that because of his outside business
interests, his take-home pay from RPI doesn’t have a big impact on his
standard of living. But he said that when Jackson favors unequal raises “she
divides the faculty into old and new and is persecuting the old.” There are
ways to recruit good talent, he said, that don’t have the impact of
destroying faculty morale. The gaps are large enough, he said, that many
professors are afraid of speaking out (and he points to a survey conducted
by RPI that backs up his claim.)
But other professors — especially those who are
recent arrivals — are quite happy with the institution and with Jackson’s
leadership. Linda B. McGown, chair of the chemistry and chemical biology
department, was recruited to RPI two years ago, after 17 years at Duke
University. McGown said that there aren’t many science departments that
recruit external candidates who are women to become chairs, so she was
surprised and pleased when RPI came after her.
Since being recruited, McGown said she’s been
impressed with the commitment to interdisciplinary work, which she said has
created an environment “in which I could really revitalize my work.” She
considers RPI an exciting place to be a scientist, where people feel “caught
up in a sense of being at a place on an upward trajectory.”
As for salaries, McGown said that RPI is hardly
unique in giving more money to new recruits. She said she had her best
raises at Duke when she had other offers. “That’s the nature of academia,”
she said.
Both McGown and Nauman took pains to say that they
didn’t view the situation at RPI as strictly a case of new vs. old, with
McGown noting the quality of talent there for a long time and Nauman the
talent that is arriving.
But whatever the nature of the divide, Nauman said
it was significant to see how divided the campus is. Throughout Jackson’s
tenure, one constant from her supporters has been to characterize critics as
a disgruntled few, and the fear of speaking out has meant that — in public,
at least — the numbers may have been small, he said.
“But that supposed few is essentially half the
faculty,” Nauman said, and needs to be listened to.
Already this year, Harvard University’s president
quit after losing one no confidence vote and expecting another, and the
president of Case Western Reserve University quit two weeks after losing a
vote.
Although she won hers, Jackson has invited faculty
members to meet her today to talk about campus issues.
Universities may not provide commissions or other success-based rewards to
student admissions officials
"U. of Phoenix Loses in U.S. Court," by Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed,
September 6, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/06/phoenix
The University of Phoenix must defend itself
against charges that it violated federal law by paying its recruiters based
on how many students they enrolled, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth
Circuit ruled Tuesday. The federal appeals panel’s
unanimous decision, which overturned a lower
court’s ruling in Phoenix’s favor, had been eagerly awaited because of the
for-profit university’s high profile as one of the country’s largest and
because of the mammoth size of the malfeasance alleged — billions of dollars
could be at stake.
But the case is also important because it is the
latest in a string of decisions in which federal courts have gradually
expanded the grounds under which colleges can be sued under the federal
False Claims Act, much to the consternation of some college and university
lawyers and legal experts. In siding with the former admissions officials
who sued Phoenix on the government’s behalf, the Ninth Circuit panel leaned
heavily on one of those earlier decisions,
involving Oakland City University.
At issue in the Phoenix case is a provision in the
Higher Education Act that prohibits colleges from offering bonuses or other
incentive pay to admissions officers or recruiters based on specific
enrollment goals, to discourage them from giving officials extra incentive
to bring in any potential student, regardless of academic ability. Two
former enrollment counselors at Phoenix, Mary Hendow and Julie Albertson,
charge that the for-profit university paid cash bonuses and other gifts to
them and to other recruiters based strictly on how many students they
enrolled — charges Phoenix has denied.
In 2003, Hendow and Albertson filed what is known
as a qui tam lawsuit, which is filed under the federal False Claims
Act by an individual who believes he or she has identified fraud committed
against the federal government, and who sues hoping to be joined by the U.S.
Justice Department. (The plaintiff then shares in any financial penalties,
which can include trebled damages.) The women charged that the allegedly
fraudulent behavior had put more than $1.5 billion in federal funds at risk,
which set the value of a potential verdict in the case at several times
that. The federal government declined to join the lawsuit as a third party,
but the Justice Department did file a friend of the court brief in 2005
encouraging the court to rule against Phoenix.
A federal district court dismissed the women’s
lawsuit in May 2004, concluding that they had not put forward a valid theory
for how Phoenix had defrauded the government under the False Claims Act.
But in its decision Tuesday, a three judge panel of
Ninth Circuit appeals court concluded differently. Reinforcing and even
expanding on
last
October’s decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the Seventh Circuit in United States of America ex. rel. Jeffrey E.
Main v. Oakland City University, the Ninth Circuit judges declared that
the two former admissions officers (known in False Claims Act parlance as
the “relators") had indeed offered two legitimate theories (known as “false
certification” and “promissory fraud") for how the university had defrauded
the government.
Without ruling on whether the women had actually
proven their claims — impossible without a trial on the facts of the case —
the court concluded that they had met the four requirements of filing a
legitimate claim under the federal fraud law: (1) alleging that a defendant
had made false statement or engaged in fraudulent conduct; (2) that the
action had been taken deliberately; (3) that the act or statement played a
direct role in money flowing out of government coffers; and (4) that the
government did indeed pay out or forfeit money as a result. At its core, the
Ninth Circuit ruled that the university had — by participating in a
several-step process to accept federal financial aid — committed to abiding
by a wide range of rules and requirements, including the prohibition on
incentive compensation.
On multiple fronts, the court rejected arguments
made by lawyers for Phoenix. To the suggestion — which other college
officials have echoed in
fighting False Claims Act cases — that “the
incentive compensation ban is nothing more than one of hundreds of
boilerplate requirements with which it promises compliance,” as the appeals
panel phrased it, the court wrote: “This may be true, but fraud is fraud, no
matter how ’small.’
“The university is worried that our holding today
opens it up to greater liability for innocent regulatory violations, but
that is not the case — as we held above, innocent or unintentional
violations do not lead to False Claims Act liability,” Judge Cynthia Holcomb
Hall wrote for the court. “But that is no reason to innoculate [sic]
institutions of higher education from liability when they knowingly violate
a regulatory condition, with the intent to deceive, as is alleged here.”
With that statement, the court seemed to clearly
reject the arguments made by college officials that the federal courts’
decisions in this line of cases are making colleges significantly more
vulnerable to False Claims Act challenges — even if they have violated
federal law by simple mistake.
And Phoenix’s assertion that the ban on incentive
compensation is a condition on participating in the federal student aid
programs, but not a condition on receiving payment from the government, “is
a distinction without a difference,” the court said. “In the context of
Title IV and the Higher Education Act, if we held that conditions of
participation were not conditions of payment, there would be no conditions
of payment at all — and thus, an educational institution could flout the law
at will.”
The Ninth Circuit’s decision not to dismiss the
lawsuit against Phoenix would send the case back to the lower federal court
for a trial on the merits. But several other possibilities seem likelier at
this point. The university could ask the entire U.S. Court of Appeals for
the Ninth Circuit to review the decision of the three judge panel.
Or Phoenix’s lawyers could appeal the Ninth
Circuit’s decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, on the hope that the nation’s
highest court decides to hear the case because it concludes that federal
appeals courts have split on the issues in the case. But the Supreme Court
declined in April to consider the Oakland City case, letting the Seventh
Circuit’s decision stand, which would appear to make it unlikely to hear the
Phoenix case.
Timothy J. Hatch, a Los Angeles lawyer who
represented Phoenix in this case, said that he and the university “obviously
disagree” with the court’s conclusions but had not yet decided how to
respond to the ruling. Terri Bishop, chief communications officer for the
Apollo Group, which owns the University of Phoenix, added in a statement
that the decision “greatly expands the scope of False Claims Act liability
beyond what Congress had intended or even what other courts have
recognized.” The company is “carefully reviewing the opinion in order to
determine our next steps,” she said.
The two California lawyers who represented the
relators in the case, Nancy G. Krop and J. Daniel Bartley, were practically
giddy on the telephone late Tuesday afternoon, and said they were eager to
get the case before a jury. “The evidence is all sitting there waiting for a
courtroom, and once we get a courtroom,” Krop said, Phoenix “is in big
trouble.
Controversial Issues in Affirmative Action Hiring and Pay Raises
Affirmative Action Favors Women, Blacks and Latinos Over Whites and Asian
Males in Science Tenure Track Hiring
"Advantage Women,," by Colleen Flaherty," National Academy of Sciences via
Inside Higher Ed, April 14, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/04/14/study-suggests-stem-faculty-hiring-favors-women-over-men
Many studies suggest that women scientists aspiring
to careers in academe face roadblocks, including bias -- implicit or overt
-- in hiring. But a new study is throwing
a curveball into the literature, suggesting that women candidates are
favored 2 to 1 over men for tenure-track positions in the science,
technology, engineering and math fields.
Could it be that STEM gender diversity and bias awareness efforts are
working, or even creating a preference for female candidates -- or is
something more nuanced going on? Experts say it’s probably both.
Wendy M. Williams, professor of human development
at Cornell University, and Stephen Ceci, the Helen L. Carr Professor of
Developmental Psychology at Cornell, are no strangers to complicating
research on gender bias in STEM. In a
2010 paper in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, for example, they argued that women’s life
choices, whether voluntary or constrained, better explain women’s
underrepresentation in STEM than the usual suspects of discrimination in
journal and grant reviewing and hiring. (They argued such biases were things
of the past, and that efforts to address them missed the real source of the
problem.)
Continued in article
38 Percent Of Women Earn More Than Their Husbands," by Mona Chalabi,
NPR via Nate Silver's 5:38 Blog, February 8, 2015 ---
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/38-percent-of-women-earn-more-than-their-husbands/
Former Yale Law School Dean Does not Like the Damaging Rubric of Diversity or
Political Correctness
‘The Assault on American Excellence’ ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/08/13/author-discusses-highly-critical-book-about-american-colleges?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=5bec369ed3-DNU_2019_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-5bec369ed3-197565045&mc_cid=5bec369ed3&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
USA: The Most Under-Represented Groups
In Law Teaching Are Whites, Christians, Republicans, Males
"MEASURING DIVERSITY: LAW FACULTIES IN 1997 AND 2013," by James Lindgren,
Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy
---
http://www.harvard-jlpp.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/39_1_Lindgren_F.pdf
When the white male
Protestants who ran American law schools thought that women and minorities
were better suited for sweeping the classrooms than for teaching in them,
one did not need statistics to know which groups were underrepresented.
Women and minorities were locked out, and Jews were subject to quotas in
many law schools and locked out of others. By the late 1990s, which groups
were the most underrepresented in legal academia?2 After twenty-five years
of increasingly vigorous affirmative action hiring, there had been a few
pockets of success—enough to merit the first careful comparison of the
racial, gender, religious, and political makeup of law faculties with the
populations from which professors are drawn. It is time to take a close look
at how far we have come and how far we have left to go to reach parity with
the general population—or at least with the lawyer population.3
Additionally, it would help to know which subgroups within the broad
traditional diversity categories are the most underrepresented and thus most
in need of redoubled efforts on their behalf.
Continued in article
Does mandatory diversity training work against diversity in the work place?
Mandatory diversity training in corporate settings
appears to produce results that are the opposite of those intended, a major
study by a University of Arizona sociologist has found.
The Washington Post reported on the
research, which found drops in the percentages of female and minority managers
after diversity training. Benchmarking and other efforts are more effective, the
study found. Alexandra Kalev, the sociologist, said in an e-mail to Inside
Higher Ed that her study did not include colleges and universities, although a
new study would focus on academe. Kalev added that she had “strong confidence”
that she would find similar results in higher education.
Inside Higher Ed, January 21, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/21/qt
Minority Hiring Success Varies Greatly by Discipline:
Law, Business, and Sciences Have the Worst Records
The major cause lies in the supply chain of PhD
graduates
One of the reasons for the shortage of minority
undergraduate students in accounting has been the lack of role models teaching
accounting courses in college.
"Whatever Happened to All Those Plans to Hire More Minority Professors?" by
Ben Gose, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 26, 2008
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i05/05b00101.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Duke U.: Success rates vary by discipline
The black faculty Strategic Initiative began in
1993, on the heels of the failed effort to add at least one black professor
to every department.
As of the fall of 2007, Duke had 62 tenured or
tenure-track black professors, accounting for 4.5 percent of the faculty.
But while the raw number is double that of 20 years ago, it masks tremendous
variation within the university. Black
professors remain rare in the law school, which has one black professor, the
business school, with two, and the natural sciences, with three.
Karla FC Holloway, an English professor who served
as dean of humanities and social sciences from 1999 to 2005, says each unit
of the university should be held accountable for its record on diversity.
"There has been growth in arts and social sciences, and medicine, but in
some ways that growth has arguably allowed other schools or divisions not to
work as aggressively with this effort," she says.
Mr. Lange, the provost, concedes that some parts of
the university have fallen short. He says he is working closely on the issue
with the law school's dean, David F. Levi, and other officials. "They have
made offers and have not been successful at times," Mr. Lange says. "They're
putting in a lot of effort to do better."
Duke makes sure that when black job applicants
visit the campus, they meet other black faculty members — and not just
potential colleagues in the department to which they're applying. The
university also is taking small steps to widen the pipeline. Duke has
financed two postdoctoral positions for minority candidates each year, with
the hope that it will eventually hire some of them for tenure-track faculty
positions.
In 2003, Duke started yet another faculty
initiative related to diversity — but this time the scope was expanded to
include women and all underrepresented minority groups. "We needed to
recognize that diversity had come to include a substantially broader set of
concerns," Mr. Lange says.
Ms. Holloway worries that the broader focus may
give deans and department chairs an out: "People can say, 'I've hired enough
women, and that makes up for the lack of minorities.'"
Harvard U.: Uneven progress on racial diversity
Harvard created an office of faculty development
and diversity, to be headed by a senior vice provost, in 2005, shortly after
announcing that it would spend $50-million to help diversify the faculty.
In the more than three years since that commitment,
the university has made modest progress in diversifying its faculty, and
some professors believe that the new office deserves some of the credit. Kay
Kaufman Shelemay, a professor of music and of African and African-American
studies, says the office has done a good job compiling statistics related to
diversity and working with deans and department chairs to ensure that they
cast a wider net in their searches. "There is no doubt that the office
established by former President Summers both invigorated and centralized our
institutional efforts," Ms. Shelemay says.
Women now make up 16 percent of tenured and
tenure-track faculty members in the natural sciences, up from 12 percent in
2004-5. In the humanities, 32 percent of the professors are women, up from
30 percent, and in the social sciences, 31 percent are women, up from 28
percent.
The changes for the professional schools over that
period varied — law, engineering, and government all saw significant gains
for women, while the proportion of female faculty members actually dropped
in the schools of divinity, dentistry, and education.
The university's progress on racial diversity,
meanwhile, has been uneven. More than 6 percent of the tenured and
tenure-track faculty members in the social sciences are black, but black
professors make up 1 percent or less of faculty members in the natural
sciences and the humanities. Hispanic professors make up no more than 2
percent of faculty members in each of those three areas.
In 2006, Harvard committed $7.5-million to improve
child care on the campus — a primary concern of female faculty members. The
university also just completed its third year of a summer program aimed in
part at improving the pipeline for female and minority professors. The
program allows undergraduates to spend 10 weeks in the research laboratories
of science and engineering faculty members. More than half of the 400
participants have been women, and more than 60 percent have been minority
students.
Judith D. Singer, a professor of education who
became senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity in June,
says she was willing to take on the job because the climate "feels
different" under Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard's first female president. But
Ms. Singer acknowledges that progress has been uneven among departments and
divisions.
"Addressing issues of diversity remains a challenge
throughout higher education," she says. "We at Harvard, like our peer
institutions, must do better."
U. of Wisconsin at Madison: Progress in fits and
starts
The university undertook its Madison Plan in 1988,
vowing to double the number of black, Hispanic, and American Indian
professors by adding 70 new faculty members within three years.
Progress has come in fits and starts. A Wisconsin
official told The Chronicle in 1995 that the university hadn't made
the progress it had hoped for. The number of tenured or tenure-track black
professors, for example, increased only 61 percent, to 37, in that
seven-year span. The total then surged to 60 by 2001, only to stall. Over
the six years ending in 2007, the number of black professors dropped to 51.
Mr. Farrell, the provost, argues that part of the
challenge is increased competition. While institutions like Wisconsin were
among the first to spell out ambitious plans to diversify the faculty, now
almost every institution has one. "We compete with everybody else for the
pool that exists," he says.
Damon A. Williams, who became vice provost for
diversity and climate in August, says Wisconsin and other universities must
seek out minority job candidates more aggressively. For example, he wants to
see Madison recruit aggressively at the annual Institute on Teaching and
Mentoring, sponsored by the Southern Regional Educational Board and attended
by hundreds of minority Ph.D. candidates.
"We have to be visible and present at that meeting
and be willing to sell ourselves to them," he says.
Wisconsin's record with Hispanic and American
Indian faculty members has been stronger. The university had 77 Hispanic
professors in 2007, up from 53 in 1998, and 13 American Indian professors,
up from four in 1998.
The growth of American Indian studies — in a state
that is home to several Indian tribes — has helped attract new American
Indian professors to the campus, Mr. Farrell says. "Professors who visit
say, 'OK, here's a place where people from our background can thrive, fit
in, and have success.'"
Still, Wisconsin and other universities must
persuade more minority undergraduates to pursue academic careers, the
provost says. The engineering school has developed a fellowship program,
aimed primarily at minority graduate students, that encourages them to
pursue research immediately. That program is being copied by the College of
Letters and Science.
"When students spend their first year or two just
on class work," Mr. Farrell says, "they find graduate school is not nearly
as interesting as they thought it would be."
Virginia Tech: A bigger faculty role in hiring
The university made an extraordinary effort to
diversify its campus starting in the late 1990s, and it paid off: During the
three years ending in 2002, the number of black tenured and tenure-track
professors in the College of Arts and Sciences rose by more than 50 percent,
to 17; the number of Hispanic professors more than doubled, to seven; and
the proportion of female professors rose from 20.6 percent to 23.6 percent.
Myra Gordon, an associate dean who left Virginia
Tech in 2002, was the architect of the plan. At the time, faculty members
complained that she had essentially taken over their role of hiring new
professors.
Mark G. McNamee, the provost since 2001, says that
while the university remains strongly committed to diversifying the faculty,
some of the tactics that were criticized have been reined in or eliminated.
Now he and the deans offer input at beginning of the process but for the
most part let faculty members have the final say in hiring.
"It was a much more centrally controlled process at
the time," Mr. McNamee says. "The deans are still engaged and have
responsibilities, but they're not perceived as unduly influencing what the
outcome is going to be."
It is difficult to evaluate progress in the College
of Arts and Sciences since then, because it was divided into smaller
colleges several years ago. Over the four years ending in 2007, the
university had a net increase of five black and five Hispanic professors.
Black faculty members make up about 3 percent of the tenured and
tenure-track professoriate, Hispanic faculty members less than 2 percent,
and women 24.3 percent.
In 2006 students protested the university's
decision not to grant tenure to a black professor known for his activism on
affirmative action and other causes. Mr. McNamee promised to establish a
committee to study the role of race at the university. "When someone doesn't
get tenure, that doesn't help us, but that's just the way it is sometimes,"
he says now.
In August the committee released a plan that calls
for a cluster of six new hires in Africana studies and race and social
policy.
Virginia Tech also frequently invites professors
from historically black universities to deliver lectures on the campus, in
part to elevate awareness of the university among those lecturers.
"Once people know Virginia Tech," says Mr. McNamee,
"they really like it a lot better than they think they're going to like it."
Continued in article
To its credit, the Big Four accounting firm KPMG, inspired heavily by
Bernie Milano at KPMG, years ago created a foundation (with multiple
outside contributors) for virtually five years of funding to minorities to
selected for particular accounting doctoral programs ---
http://www.kpmgfoundation.org/foundinit.asp
Minority Accounting Doctoral Scholarships
The KPMG Foundation Minority Accounting Doctoral
Scholarships aim to further increase the completion rate among
African-American, Hispanic-American and Native American doctoral students.
The scholarships provide the funding for them to see their dreams come to
fruition.
For the 2007-2008 academic year, the Foundation
awarded $10,000 scholarships (annually), for a total of five years, to 9
minority accounting and information systems doctoral students. There are 35
doctoral students who have had their scholarships renewed for 2007-2008,
bringing the total number of scholarships awarded to 44. To date, KPMG
Foundation's total commitment to the scholarship program exceeds $12
million.
Financial support often determines whether a
motivated student can meet the escalating costs of higher education. For
most of those students, a return to school means giving up a lucrative job.
For some, acceptance in a doctoral program means an expensive relocation.
Still others need enough time to study without the burden of numerous
part-time jobs.
Jensen Comment
This is more than just a pot of money. KPMG works with doctoral program
administrators and families of minority candidates to work out case-by-case
solving of special problems such as single parenthood. I think added funding
is provided on an as-needed basis. The effort is designed to help students
not only get into an accounting doctoral program but to follow through to
the very end. It should be noted that although KPMG started this effort,
various competing accounting firms have donated money to this exceptionally
worthy cause. One of the reasons for the shortage
of minority undergraduate students in accounting has been the lack of role
models teaching accounting courses in college.
See one of my heroes, Bernie Milano, on Video ---
http://www.diversityinc.com/public/3150.cfm
Bob Jensen's threads on affirmative action in hiring and pay raises are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#AffirmativeAction
Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering
---
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/wmpd/
If you teach in a Florida college (or at the University of North Carolina)
don't expect all your students to functionally be able read and write
"One State’s Shakeup in Remedial Education Brings a Slew of Headaches," by
Katherine Mangan, Chronicle of Higher Education, December
, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/One-State-s-Shakeup-in/150323/?cid=at
Enrollments in remedial courses dropped by half at
many of Florida’s community and state colleges this fall, but not everyone
is cheering. Just as many poorly prepared students are showing up, but
thanks to a new state law, many are jumping straight into college-credit
classes.
The optional-remediation law is forcing professors
in college-level composition classes to spend time on basic sentence
structure, while math teachers who were ready to plunge into algebra are
going over fractions. It’s also raising questions about how the dwindling
number of students who do sign up for remedial classes here will perform
when those catch-up lessons in math, reading, and writing are compressed,
embedded into credit courses, or offered alongside them.
The shakeup in remedial education, also known as
developmental education, is badly needed, most educators in Florida concur.
But that’s about all they agree on as they begin to assess the impact in its
first year.
Alarmed by the high dropout and failure rates for
college students who start out in remedial classes, Florida lawmakers voted
last year to make such courses, and even the related placement tests,
optional for anyone who had entered a Florida public school as a
ninth-grader in 2003 or later and earned a diploma. Students who are
actively serving in the military can also opt out.
The legislation affects the 28 open-access colleges
known as the Florida College System.
"The law is based on the assumption that students
know better about what they need," said Shouping Hu, a professor of higher
education and director of the Center for Postsecondary Success at Florida
State University. Some faculty members and administrators aren’t so sure,
said Mr. Hu, who leads a research team that received a grant from the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation to study the Florida law’s impact.
Continued in article
"University of North Carolina learning specialist receives death threats
after her research finds one in 10 college athletes have reading age of a THIRD
GRADER," by Sara Malm, Daily Mail, January 10, 2014 ---
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2537041/University-North-Carolina-learning-specialist-receives-death-threats-research-finds-one-10-college-athletes-reading-age-fifth-grader.html
Mary Willingham exposed college athletes' lack of
academic abilities
- She found that 10 per cent read at elementary
school level
- A majority of players' reading level was
between 4th and 8th grade
- Men's basketball makes $16.9m-a-year for
University of North Carolina
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
These days you can expect all your graduate students to be able to read write
because of grade inflation at the undergraduate level ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#RateMyProfessor
"Catalyst: Women MBAs Lag Behind Men in Jobs, Pay, Promotions," by
Luis Lavelle, Business Week, March 3, 2010 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/blogs/mba_admissions/archives/2010/03/tktktk_1.html?link_position=link5
There’s a really interesting, albeit not all that
surprising,
report from Catalyst, the group working to expand
opportunities for women in business.
In 2007 and 2008, Catalyst surveyed 9,927 alumni
who graduated from 26 leading business schools in Asia, Canada, Europe, and
the United States. Less than half, 4,143, were men and women who graduated
from full-time MBA programs and were working full-time at the time of the
survey. The goal was to find how women with MBAs fared (relative to men) in
terms of pay and career trajectory after receiving their degrees.
The answer: not well. Even after correcting for
years of experience, industry, and global region, Catalyst found that women
were more likely than men to start their first post-MBA job at a lower
level. That basic finding held even when considering only men and women who
aspired to senior executive level positions, and even among survey
respondents who did not have children. Overall, 60% of women started on the
post-MBA career ladder at the lowest of rungs, entry-level positions. For
men, that number was 46%.
Men also had higher starting salaries than
women—even after taking all the same factors into account. Overall, men had
a pay premium in their first post-MBA jobs of $4,600.
It would be nice to think that once hired women
eventually catch up to men on the career ladder, but you'd be wrong.
Catalyst also found that at the time of the survey men were twice as likely
to have reached the CEO/senior executive level, and had higher salary
growth. Even among men and women who started in entry-level positions and
were otherwise identical in all ways that matter (received their MBAs in the
same year, had the same amount of experience), men still outpaced women in
terms of promotions and pay.
The numbers are depressing, and the authors of the
report, Nancy M. Carter and Christine Silva, were as depressed as anyone by
the findings. They wrote:
Companies pinned hopes on these on these highly
trained graduates from elite MBA programs to help navigate through the
white-water of the global economy. With the same prestigious
credentials, one would expect these women and men to be on equal footing
in the pipeline and their career trajectories gender-blind. What
emerged, however, is evidence that the pipeline is in peril--one that,
for women, is not as promising as expected. While the overall results of
the study are not all that surprising (who hasn't heard the statistic
that women earn only 75 cents for every dollar men earn?), what is
surprising, at least to me, is that this pay gap doesn't disappear when
examining groups of "high potentials" who are virtually identical except
for gender. After all, the typical rationales for the pay gap are things
like career choices, interrupted work histories caused by motherhood,
and other factors specific to women. Correct for them, and at least
theoretically, you should get perfect parity. But you don't. So
something else must be at work--either something nefarious, like
discrimination against women, or something we haven't thought of yet.
I also find this interesting in connection with the
statistics about the number of women pursuing MBAs, which now hovers
somewhere around 30% at top full-time MBA programs. The usual explanation
for this has always been that women are reluctant to enroll in full-time
programs in their late 20s because they're busy starting families. But maybe
something else is at work. If you take the Catalyst research at face value,
then maybe some women already knew what Catalyst is just now discovering and
are making a rational economic choice instead. If pay and career
trajectories for women really are not all they're cracked up to be, then
maybe forking over $300 grand for a top-tier MBA just isn't worth it.
Food for thought. Are there any female MBAs who
feel that they've been passed over for raises or promotions in favor of men,
or who feel the game is somehow rigged in men's favor? Please tell us your
stories.
Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#careers
Among Academe's Sociology Faculty: Men versus Women (including
correlations of pay and parenthood)
Mothers appeared, on average, to earn less than
others in the cohort. The income question was
asked with categories, not exact amounts. The median income for sociologists who
are fathers, and for sociologists who don’t have children, was between $70,000
and $99,000. The median income for sociologists who are mothers was between
$50,000 and $59,000. On many issues, mothers and fathers both reported high
levels of stress related to advancing their careers while also caring for their
families. Child care, the tenure process, and teaching loads were key issues for
parents.
Inside Higher Ed, July 3, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/07/03/women
The study is at
http://www.asanet.org/galleries/default-file/ASAPhdMidCareer_r5.pdf
Bob Jensen's threads on academic salaries are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Salaries
One thing commonly ignored is the important factor of varying living costs and
taxes in different states of the U.S. Ignoring this greatly weakens conclusions
on compensation differences.
"Leveling the Playing Field: A university is forced to
treat white professors equally," The Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2006
---
http://opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110008521
Talk about back wages due: A federal judge in
Phoenix this month said that Northern Arizona University owes $1.4 million
to a group of professors who have been pursuing justice through the courts
since 1995. The 40 teachers, all white men, argued that they were
discriminated against when the public university gave raises to minority and
female faculty members in the early 1990s but not to white males. Not only
that--the plaintiffs said in a Title VII civil-rights suit--the salary bumps
resulted in some favored faculty members earning more than white men in
comparable positions.
The lawsuit and its outcome are yet another
striking illustration of the perils of affirmative action, with its often
contorted logic of redress and blame and its tendency to commit exactly the
sort of discrimination that it was designed to prevent.
The university may persuade U.S. District Court
judge Robert Broomfield to lower the bill for what is effectively back pay
to the professors. But the school is also facing a claim for the plaintiffs'
legal expenses. Their attorney, Jess Lorona, tells us that, with more than a
decade of litigating on both sides totted up, the cost to Arizona taxpayers
could soar to $2.5 million.
What happened here? The professors' victory, it
should be said, is not a sweeping defeat of affirmative action, and the
plaintiffs didn't ask for one. The university maintains that when it raised
pay for certain faculty it was simply following a federal mandate to
eliminate race or gender wage disparities. What got the school in trouble
was not "catch up" payments per se but the way it made them. Even so, "the
reverberations are going to be tremendous," attorney Lorona predicts. He
explains that this decision "sets out case law about what needs to be done
when you're trying to cure pay inequity."
Lesson One: You should probably prove that
discrimination exists rather than just infer it from dodgy statistics. In
1993, the university's then-president, Eugene M. Hughes, assumed there had
been discrimination, based partly on a study he'd commissioned. The study
used salaries at other schools to help determine a theoretical median wage
that should prevail at Northern Arizona. A lot of white males there fell
below the median, but the significant finding for President Hughes was the
one that showed minorities and women under a "predicted" par.
As Judge Broomfield noted in 2004, the initial
study ignored factors such as whether people held doctorates. At any rate,
the study's own figures indicated that white faculty were earning only about
$87 a year more than minorities, and men were making about $751 more than
women. Mr. Hughes's solution: raises of up to $3,000 for minorities and
$2,400 for women. White men got nada.
Continued in article
Professor Henry Louis Gates has been and still
proves, in my opinion, to be a ego centric opportunist who uses his skin color
to advance himself and his wealth. He maintains his own non-profit organization
that skirts on the edge of fraud as a "bogus charity" ---
Click Here
http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2009/07/a-gatesgate-at-henry-gates-bogus-charity.html
This is not the first time Gates used the N-word (video) ---
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=105144
A foundation created and led by Henry Louis
Gates Jr. is amending its federal tax form after questions were raised about
$11,000 paid to foundation officers -- funds that the original tax form called
research grants, but that should have been classified as compensation,
ProPublica reported. When the payments are
accounted for accurately, the foundation's administrative expenses will account
for 40 percent of its spending in 2007, not 1 percent as originally reported to
the Internal Revenue Service. Gates created the Inkwell Foundation with the goal
of supporting work on African and African-American literature, history and
culture, the article said. The report by ProPublica also noted that some of the
actual grants went to people close to Gates. Gates told ProPublica that the
foundation's second-largest grant, for $6,000, went to his fiancée, Angela
DeLeon. DeLeon was formerly on the foundation board and Gates said he recused
himself from a vote on the grant. A grant of $500 went to Evelyn Higginbotham,
chair of the foundation's board and chair of Harvard University's Department of
African and African-American studies. Gates said she didn't vote on the grant.
ProPublica is an organization that conducts investigative journalism. The
article noted that Gates -- the Harvard scholar who is a leading figure in
African-American studies whose arrest at his home has set off a national debate
about the way black men are treated by law enforcement -- also serves on
ProPublica's board..
"Scrutiny for Foundation Run by Henry Louis Gates," Inside Higher Ed,
July 28, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/07/28/qt#204471
Graduation Trends
"Young Women Outpace Young Men in Degree Attainment, Census Shows," by
JJ Hermes, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 11, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/01/1186n.htm
Greater proportions of young women than
young men are earning bachelor's degrees, according to new data released
Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau. But among adults over 25, men are still
more likely than women to have received such degrees.
Nearly one-third, or 33.1 percent, of women ages 25
to 29 reported in 2007 that they had earned a bachelor's degree or higher.
That compares with 26.3 percent of men in the same age range.
The data strongly suggest that college enrollment
among young women over the past decade has significantly outpaced that among
young men. In 1997, just 29.3 percent of women ages 25 to 29 said they had
earned a bachelor's degree or higher, compared to 26.3 percent of men in
that age range.
While college enrollment among women is surging,
women have yet to close the gap from earlier generations. Among all men 25
years or older, 29.5 percent have a bachelor's degree or higher, compared to
28 percent of women.
The census data is part of the agency's annual
survey on educational attainment in the United States and was published
online in
a series of tables. The Census Bureau maintains
a history of such surveys dating back to 1947.
Continued in article
Gender Issues
"The New Math on Campus," by Alex Williams, The New York Times,
February 5, 2010 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/fashion/07campus.html?hpw
After midnight on a rainy night last week in Chapel
Hill, N.C., a large group of sorority women at the University of North
Carolina squeezed into the corner booth of a gritty basement bar. Bathed in
a neon glow, they splashed beer from pitchers, traded jokes and belted out
lyrics to a Taylor Swift heartache anthem thundering overhead. As a night
out, it had everything — except guys.
“This is so typical, like all nights, 10 out of
10,” said Kate Andrew, a senior from Albemarle, N.C. The experience has
grown tiresome: they slip on tight-fitting tops, hair sculpted, makeup just
so, all for the benefit of one another, Ms. Andrew said, “because there are
no guys.”
North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly
60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel
eerily like women’s colleges. Women have represented about 57 percent of
enrollments at American colleges since at least 2000, according to a recent
report by the American Council on Education. Researchers there cite several
reasons: women tend to have higher grades; men tend to drop out in
disproportionate numbers; and female enrollment skews higher among older
students, low-income students, and black and Hispanic students.
In terms of academic advancement, this is hardly
the worst news for women — hoist a mug for female achievement. And
certainly, women are primarily in college not because they are looking for
men, but because they want to earn a degree.
But surrounded by so many other successful women,
they often find it harder than expected to find a date on a Friday night.
“My parents think there is something wrong with me
because I don’t have a boyfriend, and I don’t hang out with a lot of guys,”
said Ms. Andrew, who had a large circle of male friends in high school.
Jayne Dallas, a senior studying advertising who was
seated across the table, grumbled that the population of male undergraduates
was even smaller when you looked at it as a dating pool. “Out of that 40
percent, there are maybe 20 percent that we would consider, and out of those
20, 10 have girlfriends, so all the girls are fighting over that other 10
percent,” she said.
Needless to say, this puts guys in a position to
play the field, and tends to mean that even the ones willing to make a
commitment come with storied romantic histories. Rachel Sasser, a senior
history major at the table, said that before she and her boyfriend started
dating, he had “hooked up with a least five of my friends in my sorority —
that I know of.”
These sorts of romantic complications are hardly
confined to North Carolina, an academically rigorous school where most
students spend more time studying than socializing. The gender imbalance is
also pronounced at some private colleges, such as New York University and
Lewis & Clark in Portland, Ore., and large public universities in states
like California, Florida and Georgia. The College of Charleston, a public
liberal arts college in South Carolina, is 66 percent female. Some women at
the University of Vermont, with an undergraduate body that is 55 percent
female, sardonically refer to their college town, Burlington, as “Girlington.”
The gender gap is not universal. The Ivy League
schools are largely equal in gender, and some still tilt male. But at some
schools, efforts to balance the numbers have been met with complaints that
less-qualified men are being admitted over more-qualified women. In
December, the United States Commission on Civil Rights moved to subpoena
admissions data from 19 public and private colleges to look at whether they
were discriminating against qualified female applicants.
Leaving aside complaints about “affirmative action
for boys,” less attention has been focused on the social ramifications.
Thanks to simple laws of supply and demand, it is
often the women who must assert themselves romantically or be left alone on
Valentine’s Day, staring down a George Clooney movie over a half-empty pizza
box.
“I was talking to a friend at a bar, and this girl
just came up out of nowhere, grabbed him by the wrist, spun him around and
took him out to the dance floor and started grinding,” said Kelly Lynch, a
junior at North Carolina, recalling a recent experience.
Students interviewed here said they believed their
mating rituals reflected those of college students anywhere. But many of
them — men and women alike — said that the lopsided population tends to skew
behavior.
“A lot of my friends will meet someone and go home
for the night and just hope for the best the next morning,” Ms. Lynch said.
“They’ll text them and say: ‘I had a great time. Want to hang out next
week?’ And they don’t respond.”
Even worse, “Girls feel pressured to do more than
they’re comfortable with, to lock it down,” Ms. Lynch said.
Continued in article
"The Revolution in the Economic Empowerment of Women," by Nobel
Laureate Gary Becker, The Becker-Posner Blog, January 4, 2010 ---
http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/beckerposner/2010/01/the-revolution-in-the-economic-empowerment-of-women-becker.html
The current issue of the
Economist recognizes that the dramatic change in labor force participation
of women is one of the most important transformations in the economic and
social worlds during the past generation. I will discuss the main forces
behind this change, and also consider whether the United States needs
additional public policies to accommodate women at work.
Several crucial changes have
contributed to transforming the position of women. Perhaps the most
fundamental during the past half century were technological advances, such
as the computer, and the shift in richer countries away from manufacturing
and toward services. These developments put much greater emphasis on
knowledge and information as opposed to physical strength and heavy work,
which in turn greatly increased the importance of higher education.
Women have shown a greater
capacity than men in completing universities and four-year colleges, largely
because women have greater and less variable non-cognitive skills, such as
study habits. While the fraction of men with four-year college degrees in
the United States has stagnated since 1970, the fraction of women with these
degrees has exploded, so that now women receive almost 60% of the four-year
degrees in the United States compared to only 40% in 1970. Similar shifts in
higher education toward women have taken place in European countries.
Related trends are occurring also in developing countries, even in
fundamentalist Iran.
The increased importance of
skills and knowledge has greatly affected parental fertility and investment
decision. As parents have recognized the importance of a good education and
other training to succeed in the modern world, they have opted for fewer
children since giving extensive education to many children would be too
expensive. Therefore, modern parents have lower birth rates than parents did
in the past, and instead invest much more in each child. This has produced
sharply declining birth rates almost everywhere, and below replacement
fertility rates in about 90 countries that include all European nations,
much of Asia, including China, Japan, and South Korea, and even a few mainly
Moslem nations.
The declines in fertility and
shift toward greater investment in children have been accelerated by the
growing education of women, who tend to be particularly concerned about
providing a good education to their children. This helps explain why
educated women have relatively few children and invest more in the schooling
of each child. In addition, the time spent by educated mothers in child
rearing is more expensive since they can earn more in the labor force. This
too helps explain why women who graduate from college have always tended to
have fewer children than other women did.
These trends toward greater
emphasis on knowledge and information, low fertility, and much greater
education of women, have all contributed to the large growth in the labor
force participation of women during the past several decades. For example,
about 80% of American women with a college education are in the labor force
compared to less than 50% for female high school dropouts. Although women
are more likely to work part time than men, the gap in their labor force
participation rates has greatly narrowed.
The recession affected men much
harder than women since men are more likely to work in construction and
manufacturing, two sectors especially hit hard. As a result, in recent
months women have made up about half the labor force in the United States.
This fraction will fall as the economy recovers, but the trend is still
strongly toward gender equality in labor force participation, and perhaps
even toward a majority of participants being women. This is partly because
low skilled men have been withdrawing from the labor force.
Although women still lag by a lot
in their representation in the top managerial positions, they have greatly
narrowed the gap between their full time earnings and that of men. Wives
earn more than their husbands in perhaps 30% of all American families with
two earners, and that percentage continues to grow. American women are
starting new businesses at a much faster rate than they did in the past, and
the number of female heads of large companies, although small in number, has
been growing.
Although the United States has
instituted various policies to help working women, unlike Sweden and other
Scandinavian countries it does not provide extensive public subsidies to
childcare, does not have a system of legislated paid leaves to women that
allow them to care for newborn children, and does not guarantee that they
can get their jobs back when they return to work. Yet, contrary to many
claims, I believe that the less interventionist American approach may not
have impeded, and may even have encouraged, women’s’ progress in the labor
force.
Despite all the subsidies to
childcare in Scandinavian countries, the US still has higher fertility rates
than Sweden, Norway, or Denmark, and also than other European countries.
Moreover, the labor force participation rates of women in the US are not
much below those in Scandinavian countries, especially after considering
that American birth rates are higher, and that some women in Scandinavian
countries are counted as having jobs even when they are on paid child care
leaves.
Married women in the United
States with at least a high school education can “afford” to pay for
childcare, and forego employment for months or even years after having
children, since they are usually married to husbands who have decent to high
earnings. Many of these women do leave work for a while to care for their
children, even when that means they reduce their opportunities to advance
when they return to work. I do not believe there is much of a case for the
government to pay these married women to take leaves from work when they
have children, or guarantee them their jobs when they return to work.
Government policies should be rather neutral about whether women leave work
to care for children or continue to work.
On the other hand, public
policies to help children of poorer women, including children of many
unmarried women, may be justified since these women tend to under invest in
their children because they have limited incomes and often low education
levels. Childcare assistance and other subsidies to investments in the young
children of these women could well have a high social return. The US does
subsidize childcare programs for low-income families, and could increase the
subsidies to various head start programs.
But such interventions would not
justify the Scandinavian approach of generously subsidizing all women,
including well off women, to take paid leaves when they have children.
Despite all their job guarantees after they return to work from childcare
leaves, private sector opportunities for Scandinavian women, and women in
several other European countries, are limited. For example, about
three-quarters of employed women in Sweden work for the government compared
to one-quarter of employed men, and women comprise a much larger fraction of
senior managers of American companies than of Swedish companies.
Issues of Affirmative Action in College Admissions
... unless the university (U.C. Berkeley) took steps
to "guide" admissions decisions, the University of California campuses would be
dominated by Asians. When Connerly asked, "What would be wrong with that?", the
UC administrator told him that Asians are "too dull -- they study, study,
study." . . . To deal with the Asian "menace," the UC Regents have proposed,
starting in 2010, that no longer will the top 12.5 percent of students based on
statewide performance be automatically admitted. Students won't have to take SAT
subject matter tests. Grades and test scores will no longer weigh so heavily in
admission decisions. This is simply gross racial discrimination against those
"dull" Asian students who "study, study, study" in favor of "interesting" black,
white and Hispanic students who don't "study, study, study."
Ward Connerly as quoted by Walter E. Williams, "Vicious Academic
Liberals," Townhall, June 24, 2009 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2009/06/24/vicious_academic_liberals
Connerly's full article is at
www.mindingthecampus.com
Ward Connerly is a former U.C. Regent.
"Student Diversity at More Than 4,600 Institutions," Chronicle of
Higher Education, September 18, 2016 ---
http://www.chronicle.com/interactives/student-diversity-2016?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=0232a6c335f14a75a6c9c8de066dd14a&elq=600a2190e4de4e46bb287bb898fdf710&elqaid=10747&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=4072
Jensen Comment
Some things got my attention like the prestigious Ivy League universities that
have nearly 50% minority enrollments. “Total minority” is the percentage of all
students who are not categorized as white, race unknown, or nonresident
Keep in mind that some (most?) prestigious universities invite children of
families earning less than USA average income ($54,500) to attend free if they
meet admission standards. A high proportion of those children are minority, and
the admissions bar may be lower for some or all minorities.
"Ten Elite Schools Where Middle-Class Kids Don't Pay Tuition,"
by Akane Otani, Bloomberg News, April 1, 2015 ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-01/ten-elite-schools-where-middle-class-kids-don-t-pay-tuition?cmpid=BBD040215
Students lucky enough to be accepted
to some of the most competitive schools in the country can save hundreds of
thousands of dollars on tuition.
In a trend that's bound to come as a relief to
parents of high school seniors facing sticker prices that approach $63,000 a
year, a growing number of Ivy League and elite colleges are making college
more affordable for middle-class families.
Stanford University announced last week that,
starting this fall, students whose families make less than $125,000 a year
will not pay any tuition. Previously, the school had set the bar at
$100,000. With the move, Stanford has made it possible for more middle-class
students to get a degree for what they'd spend in tuition at an in-state,
public university (students with a family income above $65,000 a year still
have to cover room and board). That makes an admissions offer that's already
among the most coveted in the country even more attractive.
Stanford is not the first elite school to slash
tuition for middle-class and upper-middle-class students. (For reference,
we're going by the Pew Research Center's definition, which calls a family of
three in the U.S. middle class if they made between $40,667 and $122,000 in
2013.) While the wealthiest schools have long covered nearly all costs for
their poorest students, Harvard since 2004 has steadily broadened the group
of students to whom it gives financial aid, putting pressure on its peers to
match its generous discounts. The aid programs have helped absorb some of
the sticker shock from continuously rising tuition. Take a look at the top
schools that students from a range of middle-class families can attend,
tuition-free:
Continued in article
Summary
-
Princeton
-
Brown
-
Cornell
-
Columbia
-
Duke
-
Harvard
-
Yale
-
Stanford
-
MIT
-
Dartmouth
Supreme Court decision,
praised by college leaders, is opposed by nearly two-thirds of adult Americans.
Support is higher for considering athletic ability or alumni child status than
race in admissions ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/07/08/poll-finds-public-opposition-considering-race-and-ethnicity-college-admissions?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=32f34c528f-DNU20160708&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-32f34c528f-197565045
Jensen Comment
The public seems to tolerate financial aid bias on the basis of income but is
not so tolerant when two equally poor applicants (such as an African American
versus an Asian versus a white versus a Latino) get discriminated for financial
aid on the basis of race, creed, national origin, gender, or sexual orientation.
The Texas 10% Admission Rule is wonderful in the sense that it does not
technically have such affirmative-action biases even though public high schools
in Texas are highly divided according to race and national origin. The 10% rule
also does not technically discriminate on the basis of gender, although
the top 10% of a high schools graduates is likely to have
proportionately more females. Maybe this is why males admitted to the
University of Texas and Texas A&M these days are dancing in the streets.
More on the Texas 10% Rule that requires acceptance of the top 10% of every
public high school in the State of Texas ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#AcademicStandards
Texas House Bill 588 ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_House_Bill_588
California's school test scores reveal gaping racial
achievement gap," by Sharon Noguchi, San Jose Mercury News, September
9, 2015 ---
http://www.mercurynews.com/california/ci_28782503/califs-test-scores-reveal-yawning-achievement-gap
The first results of a new test on student
performance in California schools revealed a majority of students failed to
meet state standards in math and English -- with a stark racial achievement
gap despite decades of efforts to close it.
Of more than 3.1 million public school students
tested in English statewide, only 44 percent met or exceeded standards; in
math, only 33 percent met that threshold, according to the state Department
of Education, which released the new scores. Scores at Bay Area schools
generally mirrored the statewide results, as performance correlated with
family and community wealth, language ability and ethnicity.
Continued in
article
"SAT's Racial Impact," by Scott Jaschik,
Inside Higher Ed, October 27, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/10/27/study-finds-race-growing-explanatory-factor-sat-scores-california?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=9100c271bb-DNU201510027&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-9100c271bb-197565045
Large and growing gaps in SAT scores, by race and ethnicity, are nothing new. The College Board and educators alike have acknowledged these gaps and offered a variety of explanations, with a focus on the gaps in family income (on average) and the resources at high schools that many minority students attend. And indeed there is also a consistent pattern year after year on SAT scores in that the higher the family income, on average, the higher the scores.But a new, long-term analysis of SAT scores has found that, among applicants to the University of California's campuses, race and ethnicity have become stronger predictors of SAT scores than family income and parental education levels.
. . .
The solution, for Geiser, is
to go back to what the University of California did when it adopted the SAT,
but which the state's voters have barred it from doing today: considering
race in admissions. He writes that if public universities are going to
consider SAT scores in a serious way, they should also consider race and
ethnicity.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Asians now outscore whites on SAT and ACT examinations. Also there are now more
Hispanics in California than whites among the younger generations. There is also
a very large and growing Asian population all along the Pacific-bounded states.
Times are changing in terms of white dominance on most anything with
Californians leading the way. Affirmative action based on racial quotas
may eventually benefit whites in California, Oregon, and Washington.
Vancouver is now the most expensive city in all
of North America mainly due to wealthy Chinese buying up of real estate. San
Francisco is right behind. More Chinese wealth is pouring into Canada, however,
due to the Canadian policy of selling citizenship.
Bob Jensen's threads on affirmative action
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HIGHerEdControversies2.htm#AcademicStandards
Easy Question
What minority group beats whites on the SAT?
Harder Question
What is the second highest minority (non-white) group in terms of average scores
on the SAT?
"Flat SAT Scores," by Kaitlin Mulhere, Inside Higher Ed,
October 7, 2014 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/10/07/average-sat-scores-show-little-change
Jensen Comment
It must be getting harder and harder to define minority groups as ethnicities
are mixed in the USA over the years. For example, Native Americans must be
getting harder and harder to define. And how are Native Americans really
different from Latin American Indians that comprise a portion of Latino groups
(that are now less and less Native Americans in terms of genetic history after
centuries of mixing with European and USA ethnicities)?
My point is that SAT scores grouped by ethnicity in the USA are subject to
increasing error and fraud with the passing of each decade in time. I use the
word "fraud" since there may be some financial advantages (e.g., scholarships
and affirmative action admissions) to self-report minority ethnicity. I once had
a student assistant with a Latino last name who was, in my viewpoint, not really
Latino in anything other than name handed down by ancestors that were less and
less Latino in anything other than name.
"The Power of Race," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
November 3, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/11/03/elite
The LSAT Is Not the Problem and Affirmative Action Is Not the Answer
---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2013/08/nlj-dont-blame.html
"University System of Georgia Offers a Model for Raising Black Male
Enrollment," by Libby Sander, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 5,
2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Georgia-Offers-a-Model-for/137711/
Jensen Comment
This article reports that different procedures were used by different
universities. This is understandable since the difference between rural town
African American males is probably great in comparison with African American
males from the heart of Atlanta where gang presence is much more significant.
The finding is that indoctrination can be as important or more important than
the education itself, but indoctrination that succeeds may vary with the needs
of each student.
Experiments in NYC have taken another approach. The most successful
experiment seems to be that of capturing students earlier on in life. Selected
K-12 students are pulled out of their traditional schools (and in some cases
even their homes). They are subjected to intense pressures (with many
more hours of schooling each week and each year) and closer relations with
instructors and each other. The key word here is "selected." Those chosen
students show more promise when selected on the basis of potential. A random
selection process may not have nearly the same performance success.
I think that behind these experiments in NYC and Georgia is an effort to
demonstrate that the research pointing to different genetic intelligence is
either entirely wrong or badly overstated. The nurture versus nature
dispute may never be resolved to anybody's satisfaction.
One thing is the rule rather than the exception --- students who do better in
college really, really want to learn and will sacrifice almost anything to
perform near the top of the competition. For those who resist cheating to get to
the top, the applause we give them at graduation is genuine.
I once had small-group lunch with
George Steinbrenner (of baseball fame) when he was invited to speak at
Trinity University. He had just been on the campus of two universities. One was
a black college where he was invited to give the commencement address. The other
was a prestigious state university where his son graduated.
He noticed a difference between the tone of the two commencements. At the
black college the tone was a dignified celebration that would've brought tears
to the eyes of Martin Luther King, Jr. The tone at the other commencement was:
"let's get this over with so we can go out and get blind drunk."
Perhaps George was overly angry with the young white man in the procession
who revealed in a flash that he was stark naked under his robe. That, of course,
was not George's son.
Affirmative Action in the "Extreme"
"U. of Wisconsin Is Accused of Bias Against White Applicants,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, September 13, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/u-of-wisconsin-is-accused-of-bias-against-white-applicants/36170
Jensen Comment
The University of Wisconsin fought tooth and nail to keep the data hidden from
the public and investigators.
Affirmative action has been much easier and legally defensible in Texas under
the controversial 10% rule that basically ignores the comparative academic
qualifications of the top 10% of each in-state high school graduating class such
that a student with a low admission score competes equally with merit scholar if
they are both in the top 10% of their graduating classes. If both choose a
flagship university both are assured of admission. The net result at the
flagship universities in Texas is to exclude admission to many higher scoring
white students who did not make the top 10% of their relatively affluent school
districts.
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#AcademicStandards
This is a boon to private universities in Texas that get some top SAT and ACT
students who would've otherwise have preferred to go to the University of Texas
or Texas A&M but were denied admission because of the 10% rule. The 10% rule in
Texas is not a magic affirmative action bullet for 90% of the students who did
not graduate in the top 10%.
Officials at the flagship schools in Texas complain that the 10% rule takes
admission decisions out of the hands of the flagship universities --- at least
to a degree that the universities feel is has negative implications. For
example, if the 10% rule fills most admission capacity, this greatly limits
admissions of highly qualified out-of-state students and international students.
It can also lead to program imbalances where students who prefer to major in
Classical Studies might be denied admission in favor of minorities who clog the
business schools. It could also harm athletics, although I suspect Texas and
Texas A&M have figured out ways to get around this problem for varsity
athletics. There may not be enough 350 lb football players or basketball players
over seven feet in height in the top 10% of high school graduating classes in
Texas.
Not having a 10% rule in Wisconsin means that admission officers had to make
more deliberate white student denial decisions when minority students with lower
academic qualifications are accepted over white applicants having equal or
higher qualifications. The was temporarily decreed illegal in Michigan, but an
appeals court recently overturned the law such that the Michigan Supreme Court
will now take up the issue of whether this Wisconsin-style affirmative action is
to be permanently banned in Michigan. My guess is that the U.S. Supreme Court
will ultimately make a decisive affirmative action decision in this regard, but
the legal fighting in states may carry on for years before the Supremes take up
a decisive case.
It would seem that the legal and political battle in Wisconsin is about
to commence.
Report Outlines 'Educational Crisis' for Minority Men
The College Board released a report Tuesday,
"The Educational Crisis Facing Young Men of Color," outlining
current research and important research questions that explore key gaps in
educational attainment. The report highlights "undeniable challenges among
minority students, including a lack of role models, search for respect outside
of education, loss of cultural memory, poverty challenges, language barriers,
community pressures and a sense of a failing education system," according to the
announcement of the study. The report is
the second this week to focus on gaps in
enrollments between minority males and other students.
Inside Higher Ed, January 27, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/27/qt#218571
"Anticipating Unanticipated Consequences: Brazil’s Radical Legislation,"
by Daniel Levy, Inside Higher Ed, August 22, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/world-view/anticipating-unanticipated-consequences-brazil%E2%80%99s-radical-legislation
Illustration of Replication Research Efforts
IS AFFIRMATIVE ACTION RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP BETWEEN BLACK
AND WHITE LAW STUDENTS?
Northwestern University School of Law
2007
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/lawreview/v101/n4/1759/LR101n4Barnes.pdf
This was called to my attention by Paul Caron on December 26, 2011 who then
links to some "updates"
The current issue of the Northwestern
University Law Review contains a remarkable "clarification" regarding
Katherine Y. Barnes (Arizona),
Is Affirmative Action Responsible for the Achievement Gap Between Black and
White Law Students, 101 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1759 (2007), which disputed the
"mismatch" theory proposed by Richard H. Sander (UCLA) in A
Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools, 57
Stan. L. Rev. 367 (2004):
Katherine Barnes concludes the following:
The revised results present a different picture of
student outcomes. The data do not support either the antimismatch effect or
the mismatch hypothesis: mismatched students do not explain the racial gap
in student outcomes. The weakest students do not have systematically
different outcomes at HBS, low-range schools, or mid-range schools. Black
students have lower bar passage rates at HBS schools than at other
institutions. Thus, the results suggest that there remain other factors,
which I term race-based barriers, that adversely affect minority law student
performance. Professors Williams, Sander, Luppino, and Bolus write that my
conclusions are “exactly opposite” to the conclusions in my 2007 essay,
suggesting that my revised results support mismatch.36 This is incorrect.
Their first argument is that ending affirmative action would increase the
percentage of black law students who pass the bar by 27%.This is irrelevant
to mismatch. Their second argument is that I have miscoded bar passage in
this Revision.38 I fixed this coding but was not permitted to publish it
here.
Doug Williams, Richard Sander, Marc Luppino and Roger Bolus conclude the
following:
In the conclusion of her original essay, Barnes
stated: “Although I am cautious about drawing conclusions from the results
due to significant data limitations, the results suggest that mismatch does
not occur. Instead, the data suggest that reverse mismatch—lower
credentialed students learn more when challenged by classmates who outmatch
them—may be occurring.” As we have shown,
this conclusion cannot be supported by either our replication or Barnes’s
revision. To the extent that her model
tells us anything about the issues at hand, it is exactly opposite to the
conclusions of her original essay. Low-credential students have better, not
worse, outcomes at schools where their credentials are closer to their
peers; white students are affected by mismatch as much as black students;
and Barnes’s corrected simulation suggests that, in the absence of any
affirmative action, the number of black and Hispanic lawyers would not
change whereas the number of unsuccessful minority students would drop
precipitously.
Bob Jensen's threads on replication research are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on affirmative action in academe are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#AffirmativeAction
Question
What are blacks and latinos avoiding teacher education majors?
More than half of the black and Latino students who
take the state teacher licensing exam in Massachusetts fail, at rates that are
high enough that many minority college students are starting to avoid teacher
training programs,
The Boston Globe reported. The failure rates
are 54 percent (black), 52 percent (Latino) and 23 percent (white).
Inside Higher Ed, August 20, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/20/qt
From Stanford University
In the United States today, two-thirds of African-American college undergrads
are women, and they are going on to excel in business, particularly in
entrepreneurship, says visiting scholar Katherine Phillips.
"African-American Women Are Moving Ahead
Rapidly," by Michelle Chandler, Stanford GSB News, June 2011
---
http://gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/2011-african-american-women.html?cmpid=alumni&source=gsbtoday
Some people believe that African American women are
doubly oppressed in the workplace, challenged by sexism because they’re
female and by racism because they’re black.
However, that bleak assessment does not tell the
complete story, says Katherine Phillips, PhD ’99, visiting scholar in
organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and an
expert in workplace diversity.
In fact, black women are excelling in education and
entrepreneurship, she said. Two-thirds of African-American college
undergrads are female. And, between 2002 and 2008, the number of businesses
owned by black women rose by 19% — twice as fast as all other firms and
generating $29 billion in sales nationwide.
In reality, Phillips said, black women are viewed
as independent, competent, and demanding of respect — all classic leadership
traits. So, they may find their dual makeup actually boosts their
achievement possibilities, she told a Stanford audience in June during a
talk titled, “Black Women and the Backlash Effect — Understanding the
Intersection of Race and Gender.”
“African-American women may not be seen as
prototypical blacks, and they may not be seen as prototypical women,”
Phillips told the audience comprised of people of various genders, ages, and
races. “That invisibility might end up being something that’s helpful in
allowing [them] to take on behaviors that otherwise would not be allowed.
Black women may be in a unique position to, in fact, step into leadership
positions, to be embraced in leadership positions.”
Phillips presented a wide variety of academic
research about how racial differences affect how individuals are perceived.
Black mothers with outside jobs are viewed more positively than those who
stay at home with their children, for example, while the opposite was true
for white women. Another study, which appeared in 2009 in the journal
Psychological Science found that participants assumed that male African
American managers sporting “baby faces” earned higher salaries — an
assumption that often was true and a pattern that did not extend to white
male managers.
She said black women have more ability to be
forceful in the workplace without appearing threatening, which is not the
case for men of either race. In fact, one study showed that “Black women do
seem to have more latitude to display that dominance,” Phillips said.
And, from heading households to holding down
careers, black women can assume broader roles than white women without being
criticized. “The evidence here suggests that white women are supposed to
stay in this little narrow box more so than black women are,” said Phillips.
“The expectations of what black women are supposed to do around these social
roles is different than the expectations of what white women are supposed to
do.”
Forty percent of African American women between the
ages of 25 and 54 have never been married, a development Phillips said was
examined in a 2010 Dateline ABC News special titled, “Why Can’t a Successful
Black Women Find a Man?” Sometimes strong black women are even stereotyped
as angry, she said, referring to a cover story that appeared in Radar
Magazine during the 2008 presidential campaign headlined, “What’s So
Scary About Michelle Obama? An Insider’s Guide to the Next First Lady.”
“I don’t think I would argue that I’m trying to say
that this is two negatives coming together to make a positive,” said
Phillips. “But I would say that the complexity of how race and gender
interact is not as simple as we typically thought. There may be a
malleability that comes with being an African American woman that allows you
to identify both as black and as a woman that you might be able to use as a
mechanism to make it through the world, to think about things.”
Phillips’ talk was sponsored by Stanford’s Center
for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, along with Stanford’s
Feminist Studies program and Department of Sociology.
A professor of organizational Behavior at the
Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Phillips codirects
the Interdisciplinary Center on the Science of Diversity. She conceived the
creation of the Kellogg School’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion and has
led discussions about workplace diversity at organizations including Goldman
Sachs, Citigroup, and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
In her research she collaborated with Margaret A.
Neale, the John G. McCoy-Banc One Corporation Professor of Organizations and
Dispute Resolution at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, on a 2009
study showing that newcomers who bring divergent
points of view may significantly enhance group performance in the workplace.
“Better decisions come from work teams that include a socially distinct
newcomer,” she told MBA-focused website Poets & Quants, which included
Phillips in their ranking of “The World’s 40 Best B-School Profs Under the
Age of 40.”
She has been published in journals including
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Journal of Experimental
Social Psychology, and Organizational
Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
"Obama’s Union-Friendly, Feel-Good Approach
to Education." by Kyle Olson, Townhall, March 30, 2011 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/kyleolson/2011/03/30/obama%E2%80%99s_union-friendly,_feel-good_approach_to_education
The Obama administration, principally the president
and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, are now routinely making public
statements which are leading to one conclusion: instead of fixing American
education, we should dumb down the standards.
According to the
Associated Press, President Obama “is pushing a
rewrite of the nation’s education law that would ease some of its rigid
measurement tools” and wants “a test that ‘everybody agrees makes sense’ and
administer it in less pressure-packed atmospheres, potentially every few
years instead of annually.”
The article goes on to say that Obama wants to move
away from proficiency goals in math, science and reading, in favor of the
ambiguous and amorphous goals of student readiness for college and career.
Obama’s new focus comes on the heels of a
New York Times report that 80% of American public
schools could be labeled as failing under the standards of No Child Left
Behind.
Put another way: the standards under NCLB have
revealed that the American public education system is full of cancer.
Instead of treating the cancer, Obama wants to change the test, as if
ignoring the MRI somehow makes the cancer go away.
So instead of implementing sweeping policies to
correct the illness, Obama is suggesting that we just stop testing to
pretend it doesn’t exist.
If Obama were serious about curing the disease, one
of the best things he could do is to ensure that there is a quality teacher
in every classroom in America. Of course, that would mean getting rid
teacher tenure and scrapping seniority rules that favor burned-out teachers
over ambitious and innovative young teachers.
That means standing up to the teacher unions. For a
while, it looked like Obama would get tough with the unions, but not
anymore. With a shaky economy and three wars, it looks like Obama’s
re-election is in serious jeopardy. He needs all hands on deck – thus the
new union-friendly education message.
Obama’s new direction will certainly make the
unionized adults happy. They’ve hated NCLB from the get-go.
And the unions will love Obama’s talk about using
criteria other than standardized testing in evaluating schools.
He doesn’t get specific, of course, but I bet I can
fill in the gaps. If testing is too harsh, perhaps we can judge students and
schools based on how hard they try or who can come up with the most
heart-wrenching excuse for failure or how big the dog was that ate their
homework.
Continued in article
"Department
of Injustice," by Walter E. Williams, Townhall, March 30. 2011 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2011/03/30/department_of_injustice
One of the requirements to become a Dayton, Ohio
police officer is to successfully pass the city's two-part written
examination. Applicants must correctly answer 57 of 86 questions on the
first part (66 percent) and 73 of 102 (72 percent) on the second part.
Dayton's Civil Service Board reported that 490 candidates passed the
November 2010 written test, 57 of whom were black. About 231 of the roughly
1,100 test takers were black.
The U.S. Department of Justice, led by Attorney
General Eric Holder, rejected the results of Dayton's Civil Service
examination because not enough blacks passed. The DOJ has ordered the city
to lower the passing score. The lowered passing grade requires candidates to
answer 50 of 86 (58 percent) questions correctly on the first part and 64 of
102 (63 percent) of questions on the second. The DOJ-approved scoring policy
requires potential police officers to earn the equivalent of an "F" on the
first part and a "D" on the second. Based on the DOJ-imposed passing scores,
a total of 748 people, 258 more than before, were reported passing the exam.
Unreported was just how many of the 258 are black.
Keith Lander, chairman of the Dayton chapter of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Dayton NAACP president Derrick
Foward condemned the DOJ actions.
Mr. Lander said, "Lowering the test score is
insulting to black people," adding, "The DOJ is creating the perception that
black people are dumb by lowering the score. It's not accomplishing
anything."
Mr. Foward agreed and said, "The NAACP does not
support individuals failing a test and then having the opportunity to be
gainfully employed," adding, "If you lower the score for any group of
people, you're not getting the best qualified people for the job."
I am pleased by the positions taken by Messrs.
Lander and Foward. It is truly insulting to suggest that black people cannot
meet the same standards as white people and somehow justice requires lower
standards. Black performance on Dayton's Civil Service exam is really a
message about fraudulent high school diplomas that many black students
receive.
Continued in article
"New Analysis on Poverty and Education," Inside Higher Ed, June
9, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/09/qt#229616
The Institute for Higher Education Policy is today
releasing a report, "A Portrait of Low-Income Young Adults in Education,"
with data showing the education gaps between those young adults in poverty
and those who are more affluent. Over all in 2008, 44 percent of young
adults in the United States were from a low-income background -- and they
had low levels of educational attainment, with levels even lower for black,
Latino and Native Americans.
Bob Jensen's threads on global online training and education alternatives
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
"California Dumbs Down Tests," by Linda Chavez, Townhall, April
23, 2010 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/LindaChavez/2010/04/23/california_dumbs_down_tests
When it comes to education trends, as California
goes, so goes the nation. Which is all the more reason to be concerned about
the latest effort in California to dumb down standards. The University of
California's Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS) has
launched another salvo in its long-running war against the SAT, the test
used by many colleges and universities to assess academic achievement among
high school seniors. This is only the latest in a series of moves by BOARS
against the SAT, but this one may be a stalking horse to eliminate
standardized tests in general, especially if they conflict with the goal of
promoting racial and ethnic diversity.
BOARS has already eliminated a requirement that
University of California applicants take at least two subject-matter tests
in addition to the SAT Reasoning Test. Now BOARS is taking aim at the SAT
directly. What makes the action more suspicious is that BOARS' own report
notes that the SAT-R was developed specifically in response to testing
principles it promulgated and that the new test "adds significant gains in
predictive power of first year grades at UC." Nonetheless, BOARS is now
recommending that students forgo the SAT in favor of the less-popular ACT.
Both tests have been accepted for more than 30
years and do a good job of predicting first-year grades. So why is BOARS now
signaling preference for one test over another? After reading the report,
it's hard to come away without feeling that the real target is standardized
testing in general.
As numerous studies and the raw data on test scores
have shown, performance on standardized tests varies not just between
individuals but also between different racial and ethnic groups. In general,
black and Latino students perform less well as a group than do white and
Asian students. Since BOARS is committed to boosting the number of black and
Latino students admitted to the UC system, standardized tests that do not
produce politically correct results are a problem. It's not too far-fetched
to wonder whether BOARS' effort to discourage students from taking the SAT
may be the first step in getting rid of standardized tests altogether.
But getting rid of standardized tests is not the
way to solve the problem of underperforming black and Latino students.
Standardized tests, whether they be the SAT or state tests taken to assess
elementary and secondary school performance required by the No Child Left
Behind Act, merely document the skills gap that exists between whites and
Asians on the one hand and blacks and Latinos on the other. The answer isn't
fixing the tests to produce more even results between racial groups but
improving the skills of those students who lag behind.
In 1996, voters in California did away with racial
preferences in college admissions to state schools by enacting Proposition
209. Since then, many administrators in the UC system have tried to figure
out a backdoor way to boost admissions of blacks and Latinos to the
university's flagship schools, UC Berkley and UCLA. What they've failed to
notice is that black and Latino enrollment system-wide is up over the levels
when racial preferences were common. The students now enrolled under more
race-neutral standards are doing just fine, graduating in higher percentages
than they were when racial preferences admitted many students to campuses
where they couldn't compete with their peers because their grades and test
scores were substantially lower.
Eliminating standardized tests or dumbing down
their contents doesn't help anyone. It simply sweeps evidence of academic
disparities under the rug, where they can't be dealt with. If California
really wants to improve education for all its students, it will work to keep
high standards in place and encourage students to test what they have
learned. California students prefer the SAT to other standardized tests,
judging by the numbers who take this test now. BOARS' job should be to
encourage students to make their own choices about which test they prefer,
not to pick one test over another -- but most of all not to discourage the
use of standardized tests altogether in the hopes of promoting greater
diversity.
Bob Jensen's threads on grade inflation scandals ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#RateMyProfessor
Historically, the evangelical colleges that comprise
the Council for
Christian Colleges and Universities have not been
magnets for many black students.
A new
analysis from The Journal of Blacks in Higher
Education suggests that’s changing, with some Protestant colleges recording
staggering increases in black student enrollments over the last decade. At
Montreat College, in North Carolina, undergraduate black student enrollment
increased from 3.7 percent in 1997 to 23 percent in 2007, according to the
analysis. At Belhaven College, in Mississippi, black student enrollment climbed
from 16.9 to 41 percent. At LeTourneau University, in Texas, the figure grew
from 5.7 to 22 percent. Overall, the analysis finds that the number of CCCU
colleges where black enrollments are at 10 percent or higher has more than
tripled to 29 over the last 10 years — even as a core group of 22 Christian
colleges maintain black enrollments of 2 percent or less (a decrease, however,
from 33 such colleges in 1997).
Elizabeth Redden, "Christian
Colleges Grow More Diverse," Inside Higher Ed, August 14, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/08/15/christian
"The Power of Race," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
November 3, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/11/03/elite
Thomas J. Espenshade, a
professor of sociology at Princeton University, used that question to answer
a question about his new book,
No
Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission
and Campus Life (Princeton University Press),
co-written with Alexandria Walton Radford, a research associate at MPR
Associates. In fact, he could probably use the glass image to answer
questions about numerous parts of the book.
While Espenshade and
Radford -- in the book and in interviews -- avoid broad conclusions over
whether affirmative action is working or should continue, their findings
almost certainly will be used both by supporters and critics of affirmative
action to advance their arguments. (In fact, a talk Espenshade gave at a
meeting earlier this year about some of the findings is already being cited
by affirmative action critics, although in ways that he says don't exactly
reflect his thinking.)
Unlike much writing about
affirmative action, this book is based not on philosophy, but actual data --
both on academic credentials and student experiences -- from 9,000 students
who attended one of 10 highly selective colleges and universities. (They are
not named, but include public and private institutions, research
universities and liberal arts colleges.)
Among the findings:
- Significant advantages and disadvantages exist
for members of some racial and ethnic groups with regard to the SAT or
ACT scores they need to have the same odds of admission as members of
other groups. While advantages and disadvantages were also found based
on economic class, these were far less significant than those based on
race and ethnicity.
- Just about every existing idea for reforming
college admissions would not, by itself, preserve current levels of
racial and ethnic diversity -- if current affirmative action policies
were eliminated or scaled back.
- Most undergraduates at the institutions
studied do have significant interactions with members of different races
and ethnicities, and these interactions result in learning about the
experiences of different groups. At the same time, the data suggest
significant gaps in the kinds of meaningful cross-race interactions that
take place with some groups much more likely than others to have such
interactions. (By far, the most common interactions are white-Latino,
while the least common are black-white).
- On measures of academic performance,
graduation rates across racial and ethnic groups show only modest gaps
at the institutions studied. But analysis of class rank suggests major
gaps in academic performance. More than half of black students and
nearly one-third of Latino students who graduated from the colleges
studied, for example, finished in the bottom quintile of their classes.
Based on these findings,
and the reality that some states have barred affirmative action and that the
U.S. Supreme Court's blessing for consideration of race in admissions came
with a 25-year time limit, the authors suggest that it's time for a massive
federally supported effort, equivalent in intensity to the Manhattan
Project, to determine the source of academic achievement gaps and to develop
plans to shrink them.
The Test Score
Advantage
Among the potential
bombshells in the book are data on the advantages or disadvantages of SAT or
ACT scores by race, ethnicity and economic class. Many studies -- including
those released annually by the College Board and the ACT -- show gaps in the
average tests scores by members of different racial or ethnic groups. This
research takes that further, however, by controlling for numerous factors,
including gender, status as an athlete or alumni child, high school grades
and test scores, type of high school attended and so forth.
The "advantage" referred
to, to take an example from the book, is what it would take to have
equivalent odds of admission, after controlling for other factors. So the
table's figure of a 3.8 black ACT "advantage" means that a black student
with an ACT score of 27 would have the same chances of admission at the
institutions in the study as a white student with a score of 30.8.
As the following table
shows, there are large black advantages in the way colleges consider SAT and
ACT scores, and notable disadvantages for Asian applicants. On issues of
wealth, the SAT shows an expected affirmative action tilt, with the most
disadvantaged students gaining and the wealthiest losing. But there is also
a gain for upper middle class students. On the ACT, analysis found the
advantages go to wealthier students.
The table uses ACT scores
for public institutions and SAT scores for privates. The "norm" score was
considered white for the race section, and middle class for the class
section.
Advantages by Race and
Class on the SAT and ACT at Selective Colleges, Fall 1997
| Group |
Public Institutions (on
ACT scale of 36) |
Private Institutions (on
SAT scale of 1,600) |
| Race |
|
|
| --White |
-- |
-- |
| --Black |
+3.8 |
+310 |
| --Hispanic |
+0.3 |
+130 |
| --Asian |
-3.4 |
-140 |
| Class |
|
|
| --Lower |
-0.1 |
+130 |
| --Working |
+0.0 |
+70 |
| --Middle |
-- |
-- |
| --Upper-Middle |
+0.3 |
+50 |
| --Upper |
+0.4 |
-30 |
Much of the debate about
affirmative action historically has focused on the advantages given to those
from some minority groups. But the research in No Longer Separate, Not
Yet Equal may also be of particular interest to advocates for Asian
students. Many such advocates and guidance counselors who serve those
students have charged in recent years that elite colleges have de facto
higher standards for Asian applicants. Is the Asian disadvantage of 3.4
points on the ACT and 140 points on the SAT evidence to bolster that claim?
Espenshade said in an
interview that he does not think his data establish this bias. He noted that
while his formulas are notably more complete than typical test score
comparisons by race and ethnicity, he doesn't have the "softer variables,"
such as teacher and high school counselor recommendations, essays and lists
of extracurricular activities. It is possible, he said, that such factors
explain some of the apparent SAT and ACT disadvantage facing Asian
applicants.
At the same time, he said
he understood that these numbers would certainly not reassure Asian
applicants or those who believe they are suffering discrimination.
"I understand the worry of
Asian students, but do I have a smoking gun? No," he said.
As to the large racial
gaps on SAT scores, he said it was "distressing" in that it showed the
difficulties colleges face in using their traditional criteria for
admissions and still producing diverse student bodies.
The book notes that
dropping the SAT or ACT as requirements would result in gains for black and
Latino students. Espenshade has given papers previously showing that
the biggest gains in such models are for colleges that drop consideration of
testing entirely, as opposed to just making it
optional. (To date, only one institution -- Sarah Lawrence College -- has
taken that step.)
Beyond shifting test
policies, may other ideas have been proposed over the years to achieve a
racially diverse student body without affirmative action as currently
practiced. Here the book is quite discouraging. It reviews simulations based
on class-based affirmative action (extra points for low-income applicants),
reducing the emphasis given to academic credentials and priority admissions
for those in the top 10 percent of their high school classes. And the book
considers various combinations of these policies, looking for a formula that
would yield diversity similar to what colleges have obtained to date.
"In this exhaustive
examination of a wide variety of potential admissions policies, we have
looked for but have not found any feasible policy alternative to the current
practice of race-sensitive admission that has the capacity to generate the
same minority student representation on campus," the book says. "The closest
we have come among private institutions is a 15 percent minority student
share among all students, achieved by lifting affirmative action, adding
more weight for low-income students, and paying no attention whatsoever to
students' academic qualifications. This policy stands no chance of being
implemented at any academically selective institution."
Do Students Mix?
The new book doesn't just
explore how students get into college, but what happens with them once there
-- especially in terms of interactions with people from different
backgrounds. The book notes that this is a question with important legal
ramifications because colleges have justified affirmative action by pointing
to the educational value of educating students in heterogeneous groups.
Here, the book finds
evidence of significant interactions outside students' own racial and ethnic
groups.
- 62.8 percent said that they often or very
often socialize with someone of a different race.
- 51.2 percent of students reported having lived
with at least one student of a different race.
- 50.9 percent of students reported having a
"close friendship" with at least one student of a different race.
- 35.8 percent of students reported having dated
at least one person of a different race.
The figures reflect all
students, so the numbers are boosted in part by minority students on largely
white campuses who may have relatively few fellow minority students with
whom to interact.
Espenshade said that there
is "no gold standard" for how much social interaction one would like to see
among members of different groups, so it's hard to judge whether these
numbers over all reflect positive or negative news. But he was heartened, he
said, that survey questions showing that students who developed friendships
across racial lines reported learning from those perspectives and gaining
from the experience. Generally, he said, students reported the most gains in
understanding coming from informal activities, such as socializing, and not
from formal activities.
So if a college wants to
encourage this sort of relationship, Espenshade said he would favor random
freshman roommate selection, so more students end up living with people
different from themselves, and policies that encourage groups that are based
on race or ethnicity to co-sponsor events with other groups. But Espenshade
said that the data suggest students are not moved by formal requirements. "I
wouldn't advise diversity training," he said. "Students react negatively if
they think they are being forced to take a diversity orientation session."
Across the various types
of cross-racial interactions, not all groups interact evenly. Looking at who
interacts, the data give the following order of likelihood: white-Hispanic,
white-Asian, Hispanic-Asian, black-Hispanic, black-Asian, black-white.
The data in the book also
suggest that ethnic studies courses are reaching a significant minority of
all college students, but that the percentages of students at the colleges
studied who majored or minored in them is extremely small, even with regard
to their own groups. Nearly 40 percent of students at the colleges studied
-- including nearly one third of white students -- took at least on ethnic
studies course. But only 2.2 percent of students are majoring.
Ethnic Studies
Coursework, by Race
| |
Total |
White |
Black |
Hispanic |
Asian |
| African-American studies
|
|
|
|
|
|
| --Major |
0.5% |
0.2% |
4.2% |
0.3% |
0.3% |
| --Minor |
1.4% |
1.0% |
7.7% |
0.7% |
0.4% |
| --Course |
24.3% |
20.9% |
75.6% |
20.9% |
15.1% |
| Chicano/Latino studies
|
|
|
|
|
|
| --Major |
0.8% |
0.6% |
1.1% |
4.5% |
0.4% |
| --Minor |
1.7% |
1.6% |
1.5% |
5.4% |
1.1% |
| --Course |
12.1% |
10.9% |
19.0% |
40.7% |
6.3% |
| Asian-American studies
|
|
|
|
|
|
| --Major |
1.0% |
0.7% |
0.7% |
0.2% |
3.7% |
| --Minor |
1.0% |
0.4% |
1.2% |
0.7% |
4.7% |
| --Course |
17.3% |
12.8% |
14.7% |
13.2% |
52.2% |
| One or more of the above
|
|
|
|
|
|
| --Major |
2.2% |
1.4% |
5.5% |
5.1% |
4.2% |
| --Minor |
3.6% |
2.6% |
9.5% |
6.2% |
5.8% |
| --Course |
39.6% |
32.4% |
79.8% |
51.2% |
58.5% |
Measures of Academic
Success
One of the most sensitive
issues in discussions of affirmative action concerns academic success.
Critics of affirmative action have long argued that the intended
beneficiaries are in fact victims, because they might have more success in
college -- and gain more confidence in themselves -- at less selective
colleges. This
"mismatch theory" was recently repudiated in a
landmark study of public flagships, the book
Crossing the Finish Line. That book found
that minority students have the greatest level of success (measured by
graduating) at the most competitive institution that admits them.
With regard to academic
performance at the colleges studied in No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal,
the data on graduation rates largely back the conclusions of Crossing the
Finish Line. The average six-year graduation rates for these
institutions is 89 percent, with Asian students most likely to graduate (92
percent) and black students the least likely (78 percent). Similarly, those
from the upper classes are more likely (90 percent) to graduate than those
from working class families (79 percent). But here, even the numbers for
black students and working class students far exceed national averages, and
many institutions report much larger gaps by ethnic and racial groups.
It is among graduates that
the new data raise questions about academic performance, because there are
large differences in academic achievement (as judged by class rank) found
both by race and economic class.
Class Rank by Race and
Economic Class
| Group |
Highest Quintile
|
Second Highest Quintile
|
Middle Quintile
|
Second Lowest Quintile
|
Lowest Quintile
|
| Race |
|
|
|
|
|
| --White |
25.5% |
20.8% |
20.6% |
17.3% |
15.8% |
| --Black |
4.8% |
8.2% |
13.6% |
23.0% |
50.5% |
| --Hispanic |
9.3% |
13.1% |
17.1% |
27.7% |
32.8% |
| --Asian |
20.2% |
20.7% |
21.9% |
20.4% |
16.9% |
| Economic class |
|
|
|
|
|
| --Lower and working
|
13.0% |
10.9% |
19.9% |
20.1% |
36.1% |
| --Middle |
20.3% |
18.6% |
19.2% |
20.7% |
21.1% |
| --Upper and upper middle
|
25.7% |
21.6% |
20.8% |
16.9% |
15.0% |
Asked about the class rank
data, Radford said that she doesn't think it's very significant, compared to
the graduation rate data, which show that minority students are finishing
their degrees.
"How much does a G.P.A.
difference affect your life?" she asked. "It's not preventing these students
from attending prestigious graduate schools or going on to have successful
careers."
Espenshade said that he
realized that there are data in the book that will be embraced by people on
all sides of the debates over affirmative action. Describing himself as a
"staunch moderate" on such issues, he said he will be pleased if advocates
with differing views find evidence they like in the study.
"My main objective here is
to be a mouthpiece for the data," he said. "My job is to let the data talk.
What I may or may not feel about affirmative action doesn't matter. What
matters is how the Supreme Court feels about it and how the voters feel
about it."
"'Opting Out'," by Allie Grasgreen, Chronicle of Higher Education,
December 2, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/12/02/new-book-says-elite-black-students-dont-try-high-paying-jobs
The
economic and educational disadvantages of low-income black students who
struggle to complete college are well-documented.
While black students at elite universities don’t necessarily fit into that
category, a new book says they face social and institutional obstacles of
their own – obstacles that ultimately drive them away from the high-status,
high-paying jobs that they’re qualified for in fields such as engineering,
science, finance and information technology. And while the reasons are
complex, universities are partly at fault, the book argues.
Black students who graduate from elite colleges
consistently gravitate toward less prestigious – though by no means less
important – jobs in fields perceived as directly addressing social and
racial inequities, such as education, social work and community and
nonprofit organizing, the author found.
In an interview about her controversial new book,
Opting Out: Losing the Potential of America’s Young Black Elite
(University of Chicago Press), Maya A. Beasley
explained the findings of her research and what she believes they mean for
students and the colleges that educate them.
“Not everybody is going to make a great social
worker…. Some are going to be fantastic brain surgeons, and we’re really
missing the potential of these students because they’re not getting the
information they need,” says Beasley, who is also an assistant professor of
sociology and a member of the advisory board of the Institute for African
Studies at the University of Connecticut. “It’s something that hasn’t been
studied, and I think it’s a very important topic, particularly because I
believe in people making choices that are informed and are going to fit well
for them. But that’s not what’s happening, and I think there’s a systematic
problem for African Americans, if a huge proportion of the population has
certain types of careers that – while incredibly valuable – are also
relatively lower paying, lower status, and have lower positions of power.
And it’s shocking to me that students coming out of Harvard and Stanford are
following that pattern.”
The Research
Beasley was inspired to look into the issue while
in graduate school at Stanford University, after the dot-com boom hit. She
was puzzled that none of her black peers from undergrad at Harvard
University seemed to be taking part in the boom. Through a statistical
analysis for her master's thesis, Beasley realized black students were
largely absent from science, technology, engineering and mathematics, as
well as other corporate fields.
Despite civil rights legislation enacted in the
1960s and ’70s, a lack of federal enforcement of and funding for black
employment initiatives kept the parents of today’s college students from
making significant strides, Beasley writes – and their children have modeled
their career preferences accordingly. There is more occupational diversity
among black employees today, but the differences as compared to whites are
still significant.
For example, according to the 2000 Census, the top
20 white-collar careers among both black and white employees include
elementary and secondary education as well as registered nursing. But break
it down further and you’ll find that white people hold proportionately more
high-status positions: lawyers, physicians, surgeons, chief executives and
financial, general and operations managers. Black employees, in contrast,
trend toward “service-oriented, racialized jobs” including counselors,
education administrators, preschool and kindergarten teachers and community
and social service specialists. Taken together, the differences in
employment result in: chief executives being the fifth most common
white-collar occupation among whites, but 35th among blacks; lawyers being
10th among whites but 27th among blacks; and physicians being 19th among
whites but 31st among blacks.
Thus, Beasley concludes that a persistent lack of
black employees within certain fields is the source of “significant economic
and status disparities” between black and white populations in America.
Aiming to figure out why young black people
apparently aren’t pursuing these jobs, Beasley conducted in-depth interviews
with 60 elite students total -- 30 black, 30 white – between Stanford and
the University of California at Berkeley. What she found made sense in light
of previous research and statistics regarding who works what jobs: the
aspirations of most of these students, Beasley writes, “corresponded to what
is effectively the status quo.”
“Black students aspired to careers in which they
have greater numbers and/or to racialized occupations,” she writes, “whereas
white students showed a more diverse range of occupational interests, free
of racialized substance.”
The University Role
Despite the significant role of history and culture
in this trend, colleges are partly responsible as well, Beasley says. And
she says one big thing they should do to remedy that is revisit the idea of
black-themed student residence halls.
“The issue of housing is relatively controversial
because the decision to build black-themed dorms and Hispanic-themed dorms
all over in the ’80s and ’90s – in general, they were very
well-intentioned,” Beasley says. “But the result of having students be so
highly segregated is that they’re missing a lot.”
Some black students in Beasley’s study reported
self-segregating their social interactions in part to avoid racism or
stigmas they encounter on campus, a habit that has been documented in
previous research on predominantly white campuses. (While black students
make up 10 to 12 percent of Stanford’s undergraduates, they account for only
4 percent at Berkeley. That number has declined significantly since the
system’s Board of Regents eliminated affirmative action in hiring and
admissions in 1995.) Students take ample advantage of various race-based
groups when they are available.
But limiting interaction between students of
different ethnicities is not only harmful in the widely accepted sense that
it hinders development of tolerance and empathy, Beasley argues, it also
puts groups at an informational disadvantage. While she says she’s not
insisting that these dorms should be eliminated, she says administrators
should “acknowledge the consequences of their support for student requests
to segregate themselves.”
Or, to use another word, to see that they may
“ghettoize” the students.
“College offers black students chances to do the
same kinds of networking and to be exposed to the same information that most
white students have had their entire lives,” Beasley writes. Yet, many of
the students she interviewed socialized primarily with other black peers.
“While black students may derive substantial value from these networks,
there is also a considerable downside to their separation from the wider
campus community. Racially integrated networks provide access to information
otherwise unavailable to these students, including the existence of
occupations they had never considered, the awareness of how to obtain
training for them, and connections to professionals (white and nonwhite) who
possess them.”
Other things universities should be doing::
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I think many minority students opt out of some majors that have
certification/licensing examinations because of what professors, older students,
alumni, and even parents are saying about certification examinations in those
professions. In accounting, for example, many white and minority students avoid
accounting majors because of what they hear about the difficulty and low passage
rates on the nationwide uniform CPA examination. Others fear the CFA,
engineering licensing examinations, teaching certification examinations, etc.
Others fear such admission examinations such as the MCAT (for medical school),
the LSAT (for law school) and the GRE for various other professions like
architecture. Graduate school costs are also considerations, especially for
medical school and law school. Even accounting requires five years (150 credits)
with some particular tough course requirements to sit for the CPA examination.
"Whatever Happened to All Those Plans to Hire
More Minority Professors?" by Ben Gose, Chronicle of Higher Education,
September 26, 2008
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i05/05b00101.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Certification Examinations
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#CertificationExams
Question
What are blacks and Latinos avoiding professions with licensing/certification
examinations?
More than half of the black and Latino students who
take the state teacher licensing exam in Massachusetts fail, at rates that are
high enough that many minority college students are starting to avoid teacher
training programs,
The Boston Globe reported. The failure rates
are 54 percent (black), 52 percent (Latino) and 23 percent (white).
Inside Higher Ed, August 20, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/20/qt
For similar reasons, I think many blacks and Latinos are avoiding other
professions with difficult and color blind licensing examinations. Nursing may
be an exception, but many of the blacks and Latinos in nursing schools are top
female students in the university. Also nursing school curricula are very
focused on the licensing examinations.
"Test Preparation May
Help High Scorers Most, Report Says," by Eric
Hoover, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 20, 2009 ---
Click Here
Students with above-average scores on standardized
admissions tests are likely to get the greatest benefit from commercial test
preparation, according to a
new report from the National Association for
College Admission Counseling.
Yet those benefits may not outweigh the costs for
many families, says the report's author, Derek C. Briggs, associate
professor of education at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "If there
are effects to be gained through preparation," Mr. Briggs said, "can you get
the same effect without spending the money? That's a pertinent question in
this economy."
Existing research suggests that coaching tends to
raise students' SAT scores by up to 30 points. Yet students cannot
necessarily attribute gains they might see to coaching alone, Mr. Briggs
says.
After all, students who take the test more than
once tend to see their scores increase anyway. So, Mr. Briggs suggests, some
students may raise their scores just as much by doing what he once did:
taking a series of practice tests in a relatively inexpensive book.
But even if test takers raise their scores by 30
points, would that make a difference in admissions? It may depend on the
scores they start with and the selectiveness of the colleges to which they
apply.
In his report, "Preparation for College Admission
Exams," Mr. Briggs examined to what extent such increases influence
admissions decisions. One third of colleges he surveyed agreed that in some
cases an increase of 20 points on the SAT's math section, or an increase of
10 points on the critical-reading section, would "significantly improve" an
applicant's chances.
The proportion of colleges that agreed with that
statement rose as the base SAT scores (the scores earned before the gains)
increased. That was especially true of more-selective colleges, where
applicants' scores fall in a relatively narrow range.
"If you come from a wealthy family and have high
scores to begin with and can spend $1,000, then test prep might be worth it
for those 30 points," Mr. Briggs said. "What's unfortunate is if
middle-class or poorer families think test prep is going to raise their
scores by 300 points. If you're a kid with scores between 400 to 500, I'm
not sure it's going to make any difference."
Seppy Basili, a vice president at Kaplan Test Prep
and Admissions, was concerned about what that conclusion might say to test
takers, particularly black and Hispanic students who, on average, do not
score as high as their white peers on the SAT. "I wouldn't want the message
to minority students to be that you can't benefit by preparing," said Mr.
Basili, who had not seen the report but was familiar with its findings.
Mr. Basili agreed that practice alone can help
students improve their scores, but he described effective test preparation
as something that also helps students analyze the mistakes they make on
exams and develop strategies for correcting them.
Yet Mr. Basili agreed with at least one of Mr.
Briggs's observations: the quality of test coaching, like anything else,
varies. "I would be the first to tell you that not all test prep is great,"
Mr. Basili said.
Also see
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/20/testprep
"The SAT’s Growing Gaps," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
August 27, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/08/27/sat
The average score on the SAT
remained steady for the class of 2008 — with the
critical reading (502), mathematics (515) and writing (494) scores all
unchanged from last year.
As is typically the case, the College Board said
that the results were encouraging. “Student interest and participation in
the SAT has grown to historic levels, and our outreach into minority,
low-income and other underserved student groups is yielding tremendous
results,” said Gaston Caperton, president of the board.
What College Board officials didn’t note, however,
was that this year’s overall flat scores are the result of averaging out
very different results for different ethnic and racial groups. Asian and
white students saw their scores increase this year, by 5 and 4 points,
respectively, across the three parts of the SAT. Score averages for minority
groups other than Asians were down by 6 to 8 points across the three exams.
When
the ACT — the main competition for the SAT, and an
alternative that appears to be capturing a larger share of the testing
market — reported its scores this month, the results also showed Asian
scores increasing at rates greater than those for other groups. But there
was much less of a gap between the changes in average scores of other
minority students and white students. The gaps among racial groups for both
tests are crucial. One reason many colleges have ended requirements that all
applicants submit test scores is their discomfort relying on a system that
produces such different results based on race and ethnicity and on which
scores continue to correlate with wealth.
On all three parts of the SAT, the scores of every
income bracket are higher than all of the brackets below. And this year,
while College Board officials noted an increase in the proportion of test
takers receiving fee waivers, the percentage of SAT takers from the highest
income bracket rose while the percentage in the lowest bracket fell.
SAT Scores by Race and Ethnicity, 2008
| Group |
Critical Reading |
1-Year Change, Reading |
Math |
1-Year Change, Math |
Writing |
1-Year Change, Writing |
Total 1-Year Change |
| American Indian |
485 |
-2 |
491 |
-3 |
470 |
-3 |
-8 |
| Asian American |
513 |
-1 |
581 |
+3 |
516 |
+3 |
+5 |
| Black |
430 |
-3 |
426 |
-3 |
424 |
-1 |
-7 |
| Mexican American |
454 |
-1 |
463 |
-3 |
447 |
-3 |
-7 |
| Puerto Rican |
456 |
-3 |
453 |
-1 |
445 |
-2 |
-6 |
| Other Hispanic |
455 |
-4 |
461 |
-2 |
448 |
-2 |
-8 |
| White |
528 |
+1 |
537 |
+3 |
518 |
no change |
+4 |
SAT scores continue a longstanding pattern of
following family financial income. Students with family incomes of more than
$200,000 had an average math score of 570, while those in the
$80,000-$100,000 cohort had an average of 525 and those with family income
up to $20,000 had an average of 456.
The College Board waives SAT fees for low-income
students, and board officials have noted steady increases in the number of
such waivers. But the issue of wealth and SAT success has received increased
attention this year because the College Board announced plans to
change its policy on students who take the SAT multiple times.
Until now, students had the right to do so, but all
scores were reported to colleges, so a student who made an impressive score
only after taking the SAT many times and using a test-prep service would be
visible for having done so. Under the new policy, the College Board will
allow students to submit only one set of scores. Critics have said that this
is an advantage to wealthier students in two ways. First, they are the ones
who can afford coaching services to improve scores over multiple
administrations of the test. Second, the fee waiver is only permitted twice,
so poor students effectively have a limit while wealthier students can take
the SAT again and again.
In recent years, the College Board’s annual reports
have featured data showing an increasing share of the SAT test-taking
population in the $100,000+ level of family income. (By contrast,
the most recent federal data on household income
reports a median for the United States of just over $50,000.) In past years,
the $100,000+ category was the highest category, and it grew from 21 to 26
percent from 2005 through 2007. This year, the College Board broke up the
category into five, while merging some of the lower income categories.
But comparing last year’s income levels to this
year’s reveals that the $100,000+ cohorts combined went to 30 percent from
26 percent last year. Meanwhile, the percentage of test takers reporting
family incomes of up to $20,000 fell to 10 percent from 12 percent.
College Board officials said at a briefing that the
number of repeat test takers this year was “stable,” but did not provide
details at the briefing or in response to multiple inquiries. The policy
shift announced this year on multiple administrations of the test is similar
to that of the ACT, which has been gaining in recent years in its share of
the test-taking market — even as both tests have boasted about generally
steady increases in the number of people taking each test.
Special Admission Students in Varsity Athletics
Many universities fill the spots on their football
squads through the use of “special admits,” a phrase that means that these
students didn’t meet regular admissions requirements, according to an article
and survey in
The Indianapolis Star. While most colleges
have provisions for special admits, which in theory are for truly special
applicants, very few non-athletes benefit. For example, the Star noted that 76
percent of the freshman football class at Indiana University at Bloomington is
made up of special admits. Among all freshmen last year, only 2 percent are
special admits. Some universities rely even more on special admits for football,
the survey found: the University of California at Berkeley (95 percent of
freshmen football players, compared to 2 percent for the student body), Texas
A&M University (94 percent vs. 8 percent), the University of Oklahoma (81
percent vs. 2 percent). While some universities didn’t report any special
admits, the Star article quoted athletics officials who are dubious of these
claims. Myles Brand, president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association,
told the newspaper he was surprised by the extent of special admits, but said
the issue was whether universities provide appropriate help for these students
to succeed academically.
Inside Higher Ed, September 8, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/09/08/qt
Bob Jensen's threads on athletics controversies in higher education ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics
"America's Universities Are Living a Diversity Lie," by Peter Schmidt,
The Wall Street Journal, June 28, 2008; Page A11 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121460672212612067.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
Thirty years ago this past week, Supreme Court
Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. condemned our nation's selective colleges and
universities to live a lie. Writing the deciding opinion in the case Regents
of the University of California v. Bakke, he prompted these institutions to
justify their use of racial preferences in admissions with a rationale most
had never considered and still do not believe – a desire to offer a better
education to all students.
To this day, few colleges have even tried to
establish that their race-conscious admissions policies yield broad
educational benefits. The research is so fuzzy and methodologically weak
that some strident proponents of affirmative action admit that social
science is not on their side.
In reality, colleges profess a deep belief in the
educational benefits of their affirmative-action policies mainly to save
their necks. They know that, if the truth came out, courts could find them
guilty of illegal discrimination against white and Asian Americans.
Continued in article
In spite of legislation and voter mandates, universities will always have
race-based affirmative action
As we wrote at the time, "a cynic might conclude
that the decisions mean universities can still discriminate as long as they're
not too obvious about it." That is exactly what Wayne State is doing. Its new
law school admission guidelines, unveiled last week, avoid mention of race and
other preference criteria explicitly banned by Prop 2. Instead, applicants will
be invited to describe their family's socio-economic status and educational
history, past experiences of discrimination, any foreign languages spoken at
home, etc.
"The Racial Runaround The University of Michigan isn't accepting voters'
rejection of affirmative action," The Wall Street Journal, December 15,
2006 ---
http://opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110009387
"U.S. Education Department to Probe Program for Black Men
on 16 CUNY Campuses," Chronicle of Higher Education, February 4, 2008
---
Click Here
The U.S. Department
of Education has opened investigations at 16 campuses of the City University
of New York to determine whether a program to improve the enrollment and
graduation rates of black men violates federal civil-rights law.
In April 2006, the New York Civil Rights
Coalition
filed a federal complaint with the
Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights about CUNY’s proposed
“Black Male Initiative,” which the civil-rights group charged would offer
“remedial and differential treatment” to students based on race and gender.
The group argued that such a segregated pedagogy violated Title VI of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.
The Office for
Civil Rights received that complaint in May 2006, followed by a second
complaint from the same group, in June 2006, charging discrimination in the
hiring of staff members for the program.
"Bans on Affirmative Action Help Asian Americans, Not
Whites, Report Says," by Peter Schmidt, Chronicle of Higher Education,
January 30, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/01/1424n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Although opposition to colleges'
affirmative-action policies runs highest in the white population, a new
study suggests that it is Asian Americans—not whites—whose chances of
gaining admission to a selective university surges after an institution is
precluded from considering applicants' ethnicity or race.
One of the study's authors, David R.
Colburn, a professor of history and former provost at the University of
Florida, said in an interview on Tuesday that the study shows "Asian
Americans were discriminated against under an affirmative-action system."
Asian Americans' share of enrollment has shot upward at selective public
universities that have been forced to abandon affirmative-action
preferences, he said, and the Asian-American population has not increased
nearly enough to explain the trend.
Meanwhile, a report on the study's
findings says, white enrollments, as a share of the student body, actually
declined slightly at the universities examined. That trend, it says, though
partly attributable to the growing diversity of the states served by the
institutions, "can hardly be satisfying" to "those who campaigned for the
elimination of affirmative action in the belief that it would advantage the
admission of white students."
Black students' share of enrollment at
such institutions generally dropped—sometimes substantially—while the
picture for Hispanic students was mixed, the researchers found.
The study, the results of which are to be
published next week in InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and
Information Studies, was based on an analysis of enrollment data from
selective universities in three states: California, where voters passed a
1996 referendum barring such institutions from considering applicants' race
or ethnicity; Florida, where Gov. Jeb Bush persuaded the state university
system to abandon race-conscious admissions in 2000; and Texas, where
race-conscious admissions were prohibited under a 1996 federal court
decision that remained in effect until the Supreme Court upheld the
constitutionality of such policies in 2003.
The specific institutions examined in the
study, which tracked freshman enrollment patterns from 1990 through the fall
of 2005, were the University of Florida, the University of Texas at Austin,
and the University of California's campuses at Berkeley, Los Angeles, and
San Diego.
One of the study's three co-authors,
Charles E. Young Jr., was chancellor of UCLA when California's ban on
affirmative-action preferences was passed and later served as president of
the University of Florida at the time when public universities there were
barred from considering applicants' ethnicity or race. The third co-author
is Victor M. Yellen, a former director of institutional research at Florida.
Continued in article
"Satire as Racial Backlash Against Asian Americans," by
Sharon S. Lee, Inside Higher Ed, February 28, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/02/28/lee
Imagine for a minute if student leaders at
elite college campuses devoted themselves to mocking black people or Jewish
people or gay people. I’m not talking about drunk students posting pictures
of their offensive parties on Facebook, but student newspaper editors –
thought of as being both smart and progressive – giving space over for the
sole purpose of making fun of people because of their background. It’s hard
to imagine. And yet recently this phenomenon of racial caricatures as
“satire” has emerged with Asian Americans as the object of the jokes.
Why
Asian Americans? After all, Asian American college students
tend to make headlines as super students, attending
prestigious private and public colleges at rates way above
their state demographics (hence they are “over-represented")
and as excelling academically above and beyond any other
racial group, whites included. This “model minority” image
is not new and has been around since at least the late
1960s, with Asian Americans often embraced as symbols of the
merits of hard work and individual effort, all undertaken
without complaint or political agitation. So ... shouldn’t
that mean that Asian Americans would be seen as well
integrated — academic and otherwise — with white students?
Indeed, this image and the
stereotype that all Asian American college students are high
achieving have led to a belief that they are well integrated
into higher education. I would go so far as to say this
model minority image has also conveyed that racism and
racial hostility are no longer issues for Asian American
students. It is not uncommon for colleges to exclude Asian
Americans from affirmative action recruitment efforts and
services for “minority” students. Yes, it is true that
unlike African Americans, Latinos, or Native Americans, many
Asian ethnic groups —
though not all —
do not struggle with severe under-representation in college
matriculation or retention rates. However, does this mean
that they are not racial minorities and do not continue to
confront racial issues on campuses? In my years as a student
and administrator on various university campuses, I have
been troubled by what I have observed to be the increasing
exclusion of Asian Americans from “minority” student or
diversity discussions. Asian Americans are not seen as
contributing to diversity though, in and of themselves, they
are extremely diverse. They are frequently not identified as
being minority students; when I see conference papers,
journal articles, or Web discussion on “minority” students,
I look for any mention of Asian Americans, only to find,
more often than not, their omission. The focus now seems to
be on “underrepresented minorities” — or code for “minority,
but not Asian American.” Asian Americans have been what I
call “de-minoritized,” erased from these discussions.
By
no means do I want to detract from the critical issues of
representation that persist for African American, Latino,
and Native American students; under-parity is a serious
signal of inaccessibility and hostility for students of
color grounded in long and problematic history. However, I
do not subscribe to the presumption that the opposite of
under-representation (over-representation) means that a
racial non-white group has achieved integration and full
acceptance. In fact, in the case of Asian Americans, their
over-presence in competitive institutions such as Ivy League
colleges has heightened a sense of backlash that takes
highly racialized overtones and contributes to a negative
campus climate for this “high achieving” group. Enter the
campus paper satire, the latest manifestation.
As
many Asian American studies scholars have pointed out, Asian
Americans are depicted as model minorities but they are also
portrayed as foreigners, disloyal to America, and
suspicious. Despite generations of citizenship in the United
States (after years of denial of naturalization rights for
Asian immigrants), Asian Americans are still seen as foreign
and un-American, often as the “enemy” during economic and
military crises, as during the World War II incarceration of
Japanese Americans, during the 1980s economic recession and
competition with Japan’s automotive industry that lay the
backdrop to the beating and death of Vincent Chin, and
currently with post-September 11 depictions of South Asians
and Muslims as terrorists. Dual images of Asian Americans as
model minorities, people to be praised and emulated and
embraced, and foreign threats, people to be watched,
monitored, and distrusted, have long been a part of U.S.
history.
Recently, Asian American college students have emerged in
the media in this foreigner/ invading guise — as the butt of
“satirical” jokes published by college student papers.
Whether or not these articles are “satires” or offensive
representations is not my point. My focus is on the powerful
and racialized imagery evoked — the jokes that continue to
depict Asian Americans as foreign, un-American, inscrutable,
non-English speakers— basically as anything but a regular
college student on a university campus. And my focus is on
the fact that often times not many people are laughing at
these satires.
For instance, in October
of 2006, Jed Levine published a
“modest proposal for an immodest proposition”
for the UCLA Daily Bruin. Speaking as a white
male, he identified as an “underrepresented minority” and
pointed to Asian Americans as the real problem who took away
admissions slots from Black and Latino students and proposed
a solution to the “Asian invasion” as funneling “young Maos
and Kim Jongs” into a new UC campus “UC Merced Pandas.” In
January 2007, the Daily Princetonian published its
annual “joke issue” that included
a satire of “Lian Ji", a twist on Jian Li, the Chinese
American student at Yale,
who filed a complaint with the U.S. Education Department for
Civil Rights
claiming his rejection from Princeton was due to his
ethnicity. The joke article, from “Lian’s” point of view was
written in broken English, complaining that Princeton did
not accept “I the super smart Asian,” and touting the
stereotypical nerdy Asian American credentials of winning
record science fair awards, memorizing endless digits of pi,
and playing multiple orchestral instruments simultaneously
for the New Jersey youth orchestra. Ultimately, “Lian”
accepts his fate at Yale saying, “I mean, I love Yale. Lots
of bulldogs here for me to eat.”
Most recently, Inside
Higher Ed reported on yet another satire in the
University of Colorado at Boulder paper, The Campus
Press, which resulted in controversy and a statement by
the chancellor.
In the satire, Max
Karson, noticed the tensions that Asian American students
exhibited towards whites. While pointing out the racial
tensions on both sides, Karson deduces that Asians just hate
whites, and it was “time for war.” Such efforts included
steps to find all Asian Americans on campus (easily
identifiable by areas of campus they frequent and by their
ability to do a calculus problem in their heads), forcing
them to eat bad sushi with forks; and a test for them to
display emotions beyond a normal deadpan (read: inscrutable)
face. At the end, Asian homes will be redecorated “American”
style, replacing rice cookers with George Forman Grills and
the like.
Continued in article
The history of Harvard University is briefly summarized at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University
A faculty of about 2,400 professors serve as of school year 2006-2007, with
6,715 undergraduate and 12,424 graduate students.
Rounding off to 20,000 students in total, the endowment per student is $
1,750,000 = $35,000,000,000/20,000
Invested at 6%, that $1,750,000 earns $105,000 per student (actually Harvard
earns a much higher rate of return on its endowment)
Why does Harvard charge any tuition to any student?
We all understand that
being a rich white kid puts one at a disadvantage in the
college-admissions process. But it is worth pausing to savor the
irony of an institution that charges as much as $45,000 a year
asking its applicants to demonstrate their proletarian
credentials. What's a privileged kid to do? Ms. Hernández, a
former admissions officer at Dartmouth, offers a couple of
options. "Be vague" about your parents' occupations: "If your
mom is the chief neurosurgeon for a New York hospital, try
'medical.' " Or you could get yourself a job, "the less exalted
the better," Ms. Hernández advises, citing one boarding-school
student who improved his admissions chances by baling hay every
summer (on his family's farm).
Naomi Schaefer Riley, "A Desperate Need for Acceptance:
How to get into college despite the disadvantage of privilege,"
The Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2007 ---
http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110011074
Jensen Comment
Actually the top private universities now offer free education
to low income students, but many fail to meet admissions
criteria. Admissions of low income students to top universities
has actually been declining in recent years according to the
Chronicle of Higher Education Blog on January 2. 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/news/article/3693/most-top-colleges-enroll-fewer-low-income-students?at
Also see
http://www.jbhe.com/features/57_pellgrants.html
The
Postsecondary Picture for Minority Students (and Men)
The newest report from the National
Center for Education Statistics is, as its title
(”Status
and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Minorities“)
suggests, designed to provide a
comprehensive look at how members of minority groups are
faring in the American educational system, from top to
bottom. But while the data it offers on that subject are
decidedly mixed — showing significant progress over time for
all groups, but wide gaps remaining in access to and success
in college — the report’s most provocative (and potentially
troubling) numbers may be about gender, not race.
Most of the
data in the report from the Education Department’s
statistical arm have been released in earlier or narrower
reports. But by bringing together reams of statistics over
30 years on the full gamut of educational measures, from
pre-primary enrollment of 3- to 5-year-olds to median
incomes for adults over 25, the study aims to provide a
broad-based look at “the educational progress and challenges
that racial and ethnic minorities face in the United
States.”
Progress and
challenges are both evident; virtually every category
contains good news and bad news. In the higher education
realm, for instance, the report shows that where black,
Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander and American Indian/Alaska
Native students made up 17 percent of college undergraduates
in 1976, their share of that total had risen to 32 percent
by 2004. And each of those groups saw their raw numbers at
least double over that time, with some groups showing
significantly greater proportional increases, as seen in the
table below:
| |
1976 |
2004 |
%
Change |
|
Black |
943,355 |
1,918,465 |
103% |
|
Hispanic |
352,893 |
1,666,859 |
372% |
|
Asian/Pacific Islander |
169,291 |
949,882 |
461% |
|
American Indian/Alaska Native |
69,729 |
160,318 |
130% |
Representation in graduate education changed along roughly
the same lines, the study finds, with minority group members
making up 25 percent of the graduate school population in
2004, up from 11 percent in 1976.
In addition,
the proportion of all 18- to 24-year-old Americans who were
enrolled in college rose sharply for all racial groups
between 1980 and 2004, in most cases increasing by at least
50 percent.
But those
positive developments aside, the research shows that members
of underrepresented minority groups badly lag their white
and Asian peers in college going. By 2004, 60.3 percent of
Asian/Pacific Islander 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in
college, as were 41.7 of white Americans in that age group.
The numbers were lower for other groups: 31.8 for black
Americans, 24.7 for Hispanics, and 24.4 percent for American
Indian/Alaska Natives.
Similarly,
the proportion of degrees awarded to most racial minority
groups fell well short of their representation in the
population. Slightly less than 10 percent of all college
degrees awarded by U.S. degree-granting institutions in
2003-4 — and 9.3 percent of bachelor’s degrees, and 6
percent of doctorates — went to African-Americans, who make
up 12 percent of the population. Hispanics fared worse,
earning 7.3 of all degrees, 6.8 percent of baccalaureate
degrees, and 3.4 percent of doctorates, despite making up 14
percent of the U.S. populace.
Concerning
as those numbers might be to advocates for minority
education, the most striking data in the report are probably
those related to the educational outcomes of men, of all
races and ethnicities.
By virtually
every measure used in the report, male students have fallen
far behind their female counterparts. That development isn’t
new, but the federal report lays out the situation starkly.
For instance, the study finds that the gender gap in
undergraduate enrollments expanded generally and for all
races between 1976 and 2004, as seen in the table below:
The
Gender Gap in Undergraduate Enrollments, 1976 to 2004
| |
Proportion of undergraduates
who were male, 1976 |
Proportion of Undergraduates
Who Were Male, 2004 |
%
Difference Between Female
and Male Enrollment, 2004 |
|
| All |
52.0% |
42.9% |
14.2% |
|
|
White |
52.4% |
44.1% |
11.8% |
|
|
Black |
45.7% |
35.7% |
28.6% |
|
|
Hispanic |
54.3% |
41.4% |
17.1% |
|
|
Asian/Pacific Islander |
53.8% |
46.2% |
7.5% |
|
|
American Indian/Alaska Native |
49.9% |
39.1% |
21.8% |
|
Similarly,
the proportion of male 18- to 24-year-olds enrolled in
college in 2004 had fallen to 34.7 percent, compared to 41.2
percent for women. Six to 10 percent gaps existed for all
racial groups, too, with the exception of Asian/Pacific
Islanders; for them, men were more likely to be enrolled in
college by a 63 to 58 percent margin.
Women are
also outperforming men as degree recipients, as seen in the
table below:
Degrees
Conferred by Gender and Race, 2003-4
|
Demographic Group |
All
degrees |
|
White men |
818,690 |
|
White women |
1,121,646 |
| |
|
|
Black men |
87,728 |
|
Black women |
184,183 |
| |
|
|
Hispanic men |
78,775 |
|
Hispanic women |
122,784 |
| |
|
|
Asian/Pacific Islander men |
75,435 |
|
Asian/Pacific Islander women |
93,335 |
| |
|
|
American Indian/Alaska Native men |
8,476 |
|
American Indian/Alaska Native women |
14,255 |
Question
What are blacks and latinos avoiding teacher education majors?
More than half of the black and Latino students who
take the state teacher licensing exam in Massachusetts fail, at rates that are
high enough that many minority college students are starting to avoid teacher
training programs,
The Boston Globe reported. The failure rates
are 54 percent (black), 52 percent (Latino) and 23 percent (white).
Inside Higher Ed, August 20, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/20/qt
"Defining Diversity Down: A proposal to make it easier to get into
California colleges," The Wall Street Journal, January 9, 2008 ---
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110011101
The world gets more competitive every day, so why
would California's education elites want to dumb down their public
university admissions standards? The answer is to serve the modern liberal
piety known as "diversity" while potentially thwarting the will of the
voters.
The University of California Board of Admissions is
proposing to lower to 2.8 from 3.0 the minimum grade point average for
admission to a UC school. That 3.0 GPA standard has been in place for 40
years. Students would also no longer be required to take the SAT exams that
test for knowledge of specific subjects, such as history and science.
UC Board of Admissions Chairman Mark Rashid says
that, under this new system of "comprehensive review," the schools "can make
a better and more fair determination of academic merit by looking at all the
students' achievements." And it is true that test scores and grades do not
take full account of the special talents of certain students. But the
current system already leaves slots for students with specific skills, so if
you think this change is about admitting more linebackers or piccolo
players, you don't understand modern academic politics.
The plan would grant admissions officers more
discretion to evade the ban on race and gender preferences imposed by
California voters. Those limits became law when voters approved Proposition
209 in 1996, and state officials have been looking for ways around them ever
since. "This appears to be a blatant attempt to subvert the law," says Ward
Connerly, a former member of the University of California Board of Regents,
who led the drive for 209. "Subjective admissions standards allow schools to
substitute race and diversity for academic achievement."
One loser here would be the principle of
merit-based college admissions. That principle has served the state well
over the decades, helping to make some of its universities among the world's
finest. Since 209, Asian-American students have done especially well, with
students of Asian ethnicity at UCLA nearly doubling to 42% from 22%.
Immigrants and the children of immigrants now outnumber native-born whites
in most UC schools, so being a member of an ethnic minority is clearly not
an inherent admissions handicap. Ironically, objective testing criteria were
first introduced in many university systems, including California's,
precisely to weed out discrimination favoring children of affluent alumni
ahead of higher performing students. The other big losers would be the
overall level of achievement demanded in California public elementary and
high schools. A recent study by the left-leaning Institute for Democracy,
Education and Access at UCLA, the "California Educational Opportunity Report
2007," finds that "California lags behind most other states in providing
fundamental learning conditions as well as in student outcomes." In 2005
California ranked 48th among states in the percentage of high-school kids
who attend college. Only Mississippi and Arizona rated worse.
The UCLA study documents that the educational
achievement gap between black and Latino children and whites and Asians is
increasing in California at a troubling pace. Graduation rates are falling
fastest for blacks and Latinos, as many of them are stuck in the state's
worst public schools. The way to close that gap is by introducing more
accountability and choice to raise achievement standards--admittedly hard
work, especially because it means taking on the teachers unions.
Instead, the UC Board of Admissions proposal sounds
like a declaration of academic surrender. It's one more depressing signal
that liberal elites have all but given up on poor black and Hispanic kids.
Because they don't think closing the achievement gap is possible, their
alternative is to reduce standards for everyone. Diversity so trumps merit
in the hierarchy of modern liberal values that they're willing to dumb down
the entire university system to guarantee what they consider a proper mix of
skin tones on campus.
A decade ago, California voters spoke clearly that
they prefer admissions standards rooted in the American tradition of
achievement. In the months ahead, the UC Board of Regents will have to
decide which principle to endorse, and their choice will tell us a great
deal about the future path of American society.
"Affirmative Action Backfires," by Gail Heriot, The Wall Street
Journal, August 24, 2007; Page A15 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118792252575507571.html
Three years ago, UCLA law professor Richard Sander
published an explosive, fact-based study of the consequences of affirmative
action in American law schools in the Stanford Law Review. Most of his
findings were grim, and they caused dismay among many of the champions of
affirmative action -- and indeed, among those who were not.
Easily the most startling conclusion of his
research: Mr. Sander calculated that there are fewer black attorneys today
than there would have been if law schools had practiced color-blind
admissions -- about 7.9% fewer by his reckoning. He identified the culprit
as the practice of admitting minority students to schools for which they are
inadequately prepared. In essence, they have been "matched" to the wrong
school.
No one claims the findings in Mr. Sander's study,
"A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools," are the
last word on the subject. Although so far his work has held up to scrutiny
at least as well as that of his critics, all fair-minded scholars agree that
more research is necessary before the "mismatch thesis" can be definitively
accepted or rejected.
Unfortunately, fair-minded scholars are hard to
come by when the issue is affirmative action. Some of the same people who
argue Mr. Sander's data are inconclusive are now actively trying to prevent
him from conducting follow-up research that might yield definitive answers.
If racial preferences really are causing more harm than good, they
apparently don't want you -- or anyone else -- to know.
Take William Kidder, a University of California
staff advisor and co-author of a frequently cited attack of Sander's study.
When Mr. Sander and his co-investigators sought bar passage data from the
State Bar of California that would allow analysis by race, Mr. Kidder
passionately argued that access should be denied, because disclosure "risks
stigmatizing African American attorneys." At the same time, the Society of
American Law Teachers, which leans so heavily to the left it risks falling
over sideways, gleefully warned that the state bar would be sued if it
cooperated with Mr. Sander.
Sadly, the State Bar's Committee of Bar Examiners
caved under the pressure. The committee members didn't formally explain
their decision to deny Mr. Sander's request for this data (in which no names
would be disclosed), but the root cause is clear: Over the last 40 years,
many distinguished citizens -- university presidents, judges,
philanthropists and other leaders -- have built their reputations on their
support for race-based admissions. Ordinary citizens have found secure jobs
as part of the resulting diversity bureaucracy.
If the policy is not working, they, too, don't want
anyone to know.
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights hopes that it
can persuade the State Bar to reconsider. Its soon-to-be released report on
affirmative action in law schools specifically calls for state bar
authorities to cooperate with qualified scholars studying the mismatch
issue. The recommendation is modest. The commission doesn't claim that Mr.
Sander is right or his critics wrong. It simply seeks to encourage and
facilitate important research.
The Commission's deeper purpose is to remind those
who support and administer affirmative action polices that good intentions
are not enough. Consequences also matter. And conscious, deliberately chosen
ignorance is not a good-faith option.
Mr. Sander's original article noted that when elite
law schools lower their academic standards in order to admit a more racially
diverse class, schools one or two tiers down feel they must do the same. As
a result, there is now a serious gap in academic credentials between
minority and non-minority law students across the pecking order, with the
average black student's academic index more than two standard deviations
below that of his average white classmate.
Not surprisingly, such a gap leads to problems.
Students who attend schools where their academic credentials are
substantially below those of their fellow students tend to perform poorly.
The reason is simple: While some students will
outperform their entering academic credentials, just as some students will
underperform theirs, most students will perform in the range that their
academic credentials predict. As a result, in elite law schools, 51.6% of
black students had first-year grade point averages in the bottom 10% of
their class as opposed to only 5.6% of white students. Nearly identical
performance gaps existed at law schools at all levels. This much is
uncontroversial.
Supporters of race-based admissions argue that,
despite the likelihood of poor grades, minority students are still better
off accepting the benefit of a preference and graduating from a more
prestigious school. But Mr. Sander's research suggests that just the
opposite may be true -- that law students, no matter what their race, may
learn less, not more, when they enroll in schools for which they are not
academically prepared. Students who could have performed well at less
competitive schools may end up lost and demoralized. As a result, they may
fail the bar.
Specifically, Mr. Sander found that when black and
white students with similar academic credentials compete against each other
at the same school, they earn about the same grades. Similarly, when black
and white students with similar grades from the same tier law school take
the bar examination, they pass at about the same rate.
Yet, paradoxically, black students as a whole have
dramatically lower bar passage rates than white students with similar
credentials. Something is wrong.
The Sander study argued that the most plausible
explanation is that, as a result of affirmative action, black and white
students with similar credentials are not attending the same schools. The
white students are more likely to be attending a school that takes things a
little more slowly and spends more time on matters that are covered on the
bar exam. They are learning, while their minority peers are struggling at
more elite schools.
Mr. Sander calculated that if law schools were to
use color-blind admissions policies, fewer black law students would be
admitted to law schools (3,182 students instead of 3,706), but since those
who were admitted would be attending schools where they have a substantial
likelihood of doing well, fewer would fail or drop out (403 vs. 670). In the
end, more would pass the bar on their first try (1,859 vs. 1,567) and more
would eventually pass the bar (2,150 vs. 1,981) than under the current
system of race preferences. Obviously, these figures are just
approximations, but they are troubling nonetheless.
Mr. Sander has his critics -- some thoughtful, some
just strident -- but so far none has offered a plausible alternative
explanation for the data. Of course, Mr. Sander doesn't need to be proven
100% correct for his research to be devastating news for affirmative-action
supporters.
Suppose the consequences of race-based admissions
turn out to be a wash -- neither increasing nor decreasing the number of
minority attorneys. In that case, few people would think it worth the costs,
not least among them the human costs that result from the failure of the
supposed beneficiaries to graduate and pass the bar.
Continued in article
Update on Affirmative Action in Schools: 2007
There was a
national sigh of relief on campuses in June when an
altered U.S. Supreme Court left standing the historic 2003
Grutter v. Bollinger
decision supporting affirmation action in admissions. There had been widespread
fear among civil rights advocates that a more conservative Supreme Court would
seriously undermine or even reverse the 5-4 Grutter decision with its author,
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, no longer on the Court. The voluntary school
integration decision in
Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1
and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education
was, indeed, a serious reversal for desegregation in
K-12 schools but while divided on the constitutionality of the school plans at
issue in the cases, all nine justices agreed that the decision had no impact on
the Grutter precedent. The rights of colleges to use race in admissions
decisions for student body diversity had survived scrutiny by the most
conservative Supreme Court in more than 70 years. Since the Supreme Court rarely
takes such cases, the Grutter precedent might last for a while. While a bullet
was dodged, optimism should be restrained. The dike protecting affirmative
action has held but the river that brings diverse groups of students to colleges
may be drying up as a result of the latest decision.
Gary Orfield, Erica Frankenberg and Liliana M. Garces, "Better Than Expected,
Worse Than It Seems," Inside Higher Ed, July 24, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/07/24/orfield
Has the salary advantage of Historically Black Colleges and Universities
declined?
An April working
paper finding that
the
economic gains associated with attending historically black colleges and
universities (HBCUs) in comparison to traditionally
white institutions have shifted dramatically since the 1970s — and not in the
HBCUs’ favor — came under heavy scrutiny Monday during a session at the
National Historically
Black Colleges and Universities Week Conference in
Washington. . . . The study, conducted by Harvard University’s Roland G. Fryer
and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Michael Greenstone, found that
graduates of HBCUs in the 1970s benefited from a 10 to 12 percent wage gain
relative to those who attended traditionally white institutions. However, by the
1990s, and despite gains on measures of pre-college academic preparedness among
students at black colleges, HBCU graduates had a 12 to 14 percent lower wage on
average than graduates of traditionally white colleges — accounting for a swing
of roughly 20 percent.
Elizabeth Redden, "Heated Debate About HBCUs," Inside Higher Ed,
September 11, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/11/hbcus
Question
What parts of a high school curriculum are the best predictors of success as a
science major in college?
New research by professors at Harvard University
and the University of Virginia has found that no single high school science
course has an impact beyond that type of science, when it comes to predicting
success in college science. However, the researchers found that a rigorous
mathematics curriculum in high school has a significant impact on performance in
college science courses. The research, which will be published in Science, runs
counter to the “physics first” movement in which some educators have been
advocating that physics come before biology and chemistry in the high school
curriculum. The study was based on analysis of a broad pool of college students,
their high school course patterns, and their performance in college
science.
Inside Higher Ed, July 27, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/07/27/qt
Jensen Comment
Now we have this when some colleges are trying to promote applications and
admissions by dropping the SAT testing requirements for admission. In Texas, the
Top 10% of any state high school class do not have to even take the SAT for
admission to any state university in Texas. Of course high schools may still
have a rigorous mathematics curriculum, but what high school student aiming for
the 10% rule is going to take any rigorous course that is not required for high
school graduation? The problem is that rigorous elective courses carry a higher
risk of lowering the all-important grade point average.
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Grades are even worse than tests as predictors of success
"The Wrong Traditions in Admissions," by William E. Sedlacek, Inside
Higher Ed, July 27, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/07/27/sedlacek
Grades and test scores have worked well as the
prime criteria to evaluate applicants for admission, haven’t they? No!
You’ve probably heard people say that over and over again, and figured that
if the admissions experts believe it, you shouldn’t question them. But that
long held conventional wisdom just isn’t true. Whatever value tests and
grades have had in the past has been severely diminished. There are many
reasons for this conclusion, including greater diversity among applicants by
race, gender, sexual orientation and other dimensions that interact with
career interests. Predicting success with so much variety among applicants
with grades and test scores asks too much of those previous stalwarts of
selection. They were never intended to carry such a heavy expectation and
they just can’t do the job anymore, even if they once did. Another reason is
purely statistical. We have had about 100 years to figure out how to measure
verbal and quantitative skills better but we just can’t do it.
Grades are
even worse than tests as predictors of success.
The major reason is
grade inflation. Everyone
is getting higher grades these days, including those in high
school, college, graduate, and professional school. Students
are bunching up at the top of the grade distribution and we
can’t distinguish among them in selecting who would make the
best student at the next level.
We need a fresh approach. It is not good enough to feel
constrained by the limitations of our current ways of
conceiving of tests and grades. Instead of asking; “How can
we make the SAT and other such tests better?” or “How can we
adjust grades to make them better predictors of success?” we
need to ask; “What kinds of measures will meet our needs now
and in the future?” We do not need to ignore our current
tests and grades, we need to add some new measures that
expand the potential we can derive from assessment.
We appear to
have forgotten why tests were created in the first place.
While they were always considered to be useful in evaluating
candidates, they were also considered to be more equitable
than using prior grades because of the variation in quality
among high schools.
Test results
should be useful to educators — whether involved in
academics or student services — by providing the basis to
help students learn better and to analyze their needs. As
currently designed, tests do not accomplish these
objectives. How many of you have ever heard a colleague say
“I can better educate my students because I know their SAT
scores”? We need some things from our tests that currently
we are not getting. We need tests that are fair to all and
provide a good assessment of the developmental and learning
needs of students, while being useful in selecting
outstanding applicants. Our current tests don’t do that.
The rallying
cry of “all for one and one for all” is one that is used
often in developing what are thought of as fair and
equitable measures. Commonly, the interpretation of how to
handle diversity is to hone and fine-tune tests so they are
work equally well for everyone (or at least to try to do
that). However, if different groups have different
experiences and varied ways of presenting their attributes
and abilities, it is unlikely that one could develop a
single measure, scale, test item etc. that could yield
equally valid scores for all. If we concentrate on results
rather than intentions, we could conclude that it is
important to do an equally good job of selection for each
group, not that we need to use the same measures for all to
accomplish that goal. Equality of results, not process is
most important.
Therefore,
we should seek to retain the variance due to culture, race,
gender, and other aspects of non-traditionality that may
exist across diverse groups in our measures, rather than
attempt to eliminate it. I define non-traditional persons as
those with cultural experiences different from those of
white middle-class males of European descent; those with
less power to control their lives; and those who experience
discrimination in the United States.
While the term “noncognitive”
appears to be precise and “scientific” sounding, it has been
used to describe a wide variety of attributes. Mostly it has
been defined as something other than grades and test scores,
including activities, school honors, personal statements,
student involvement etc. In many cases those espousing
noncognitive variables have confused a method (e.g. letters
of recommendation) with what variable is being measured. One
can look for many different things in a letter.
Robert Sternberg’s
system of
viewing intelligence provides a model, but is important to
know what sorts of abilities are being assessed and that
those attributes are not just proxies for verbal and
quantitative test scores. Noncognitive variables appear to
be in Sternberg’s experiential and contextual domains, while
standardized tests tend to reflect the componential domain.
Noncognitive variables are useful for all students, they are
particularly critical for non-traditional students, since
standardized tests and prior grades may provide only a
limited view of their potential.
I and my colleagues and students
have developed a system of noncognitive variables that has
worked well in many situations. The eight variables in the
system are self-concept, realistic self-appraisal, handling
the system (racism), long range goals, strong support
person, community, leadership, and nontraditional knowledge.
Measures of these dimensions are available at no cost in a
variety of articles and in a book,
Beyond the Big Test.
This Web site has previously
featured how
Oregon State University
has used a
version of this system very successfully in increasing their
diversity and student success. Aside from increased
retention of students, better referrals for student services
have been experienced at Oregon State. The system has also
been employed in selecting Gates Millennium Scholars. This
program, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,
provides full scholarships to undergraduate and graduate
students of color from low-income families. The SAT scores
of those not selected for scholarships were somewhat higher
than those selected. To date this program has provided
scholarships to more than 10,000 students attending more
than 1,300 different colleges and universities. Their
college GPAs are about 3.25, with five year retention rates
of 87.5 percent and five year graduation rates of 77.5
percent, while attending some of the most selective colleges
in the country. About two thirds are majoring in science and
engineering.
The
Washington State Achievers program
has also employed the noncognitive variable system discussed
above in identifying students from certain high schools that
have received assistance from an intensive school reform
program also funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
More than 40 percent of the students in this program are
white, and overall the students in the program are enrolling
in colleges and universities in the state and are doing
well. The program provides high school and college mentors
for students. The
College Success Foundation
is
introducing a similar program in Washington, D.C., using the
noncognitive variables my colleagues and I have developed.
Recent articles in this publication
have discussed programs at the
Educational Testing Service for
graduate students and
Tufts University for
undergraduates that have incorporated noncognitive
variables. While I applaud the efforts for reasons I have
discussed here, there are questions I would ask of each
program. What variables are you assessing in the program? Do
the variables reflect diversity conceptually? What evidence
do you have that the variables assessed correlate with
student success? Are the evaluators of the applications
trained to understand how individuals from varied
backgrounds may present their attributes differently? Have
the programs used the research available on noncognitive
variables in developing their systems? How well are the
individuals selected doing in school compared to those
rejected or those selected using another system? What are
the costs to the applicants? If there are increased costs to
applicants, why are they not covered by ETS or Tufts?
Until these
and related questions are answered these two programs seem
like interesting ideas worth watching. In the meantime we
can learn from the programs described above that have been
successful in employing noncognitive variables. It is
important for educators to resist half measures and to
confront fully the many flaws of the traditional ways higher
education has evaluated applicants.
Question
Guess which academic discipline advocates abandoning standardized admission
tests (SAT/ACT) for admission in elite universities?
Hint
It's not the Mathematical Association of America
"Provocative Theory on Merit," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
July 17, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/07/18/sat
If you had to name the hot-button issues in
admissions these days, they would almost certainly include affirmative
action, standardized tests and rankings. Research released Tuesday in the
flagship journal of the American Sociological Association combines those
three issues in a way that challenges many assumptions.
The research argues that colleges with competitive
admissions, motivated by the desire to improve their rankings, have put
steadily increasing emphasis on SAT scores in admissions decisions. While
this shift in emphasis was taking place, the colleges were also increasing
their reliance on affirmative action in admissions, especially with regard
to black students who, on average, do not do as well as other groups on the
SAT. Further, the research argues, if elite colleges abandoned the SAT, they
could achieve levels of diversity similar to what they have now — without
using affirmative action in admissions decisions. Not only that, the
research goes on to say, but doing so would not result in a diminution of
student quality.
Continued in article
Do faculty change grades under pressure from administration?
A Washington Post
investigative report Thursday detailed e-mails and
faculty reports sent to the Board of Trustees suggesting that Gallaudet is
admitting students with poor academic skills. The Post article also
described incidents in which the dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Science
and Technologies, Karen Kimmel, sent e-mails to professors asking them to pass
students who had failed a remedial math test. Professors later changed the
grades, the Post reported.
Paul D. Thacker, "Standards Questioned at Gallaudet," Inside Higher Ed,
November 10, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/10/gallaudet
Jane K. Fernandes, who last year was named as the
next president of Gallaudet University but was then
denied the position after students protested her
appointment, has a new job.
The University of North Carolina at Asheville
announced Friday that she will be its next provost. Fernandes served as provost
at Gallaudet for six years. While she is deaf, many students questioned her
commitment to the deaf rights movement and to their ideas. Since she lost the
Gallaudet presidency, Fernandes has been circumspect about what happened, but in
an interview with
The Asheville Citizen-Times, Fernandes said
that she had been a victim of deaf politics. She noted that an increasing number
of deaf children these days grow up with hearing implants that lead their
parents and medical professionals to see no need for them to learn sign
language. Fernandes said she wanted to make Gallaudet more “inclusive” to the
“diversity” of deaf people, but that protesters wanted a focus on deaf,
sign-language oriented culture. Today, Fernandes said she wishes Gallaudet well,
and believes that “everything works out for the best” and that she now has a
“dream job.” (Most of the comments by Fernandes on Gallaudet are not in the
article, but are about midway though the audio of the interview that accompanies
it.)
Inside Higher Ed, December 3, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/03/qt
Michigan Votes Down Affirmative Action
Michigan voters on Tuesday approved a ban on
affirmative action at the state’s public colleges and in government contracting.
The vote came despite opposition to the ban from most academic and business
leaders in the state — and the history in which the University of Michigan
played a key role in preserving the right of colleges to consider race as a
factor in admissions.
Scott Jaschik, "Michigan Votes Down Affirmative Action," Inside Higher Ed,
November 8, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/08/michigan
The day after Michigan voters approved a ban on
affirmative action by public colleges and universities, the president of the
University of Michigan said that her institution was exploring legal challenges
it might make to the referendum.
Scott Jaschik, "Still Fighting for Affirmative Action," Inside Higher Ed,
November 9, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/09/michfolo
Question
For affirmative action college admissions, will any black student do?
A study released this year put numbers on the trend. Among
students at 28 top U.S. universities, the representation of black students of
first- and second-generation immigrant origin (27 percent) was about twice their
representation in the national population of blacks their age (13 percent).
Within the Ivy League, immigrant-origin students made up 41 percent of black
freshmen. Wilcher would like to know why. She asks if her cause has lost its way
on U.S. campuses, with the goal of correcting American racial injustices
replaced by a softer ideal of diversity--as if any black student will do.
Cara Anna, "Among black students, many immigrants," Yahoo News, April 30,
2007 ---
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070430/ap_on_re_us/colleges_black_students_4
A Possible Solution to the University of
Michigan's Latest Affirmative Action Dilemma
Mary Sue Coleman is president of the University of
Michigan, which has already spent millions of taxpayers' dollars defending its
racial preferences in courts. She addressed what Tom Bray of the Detroit News
called "a howling mob of hundreds of student and faculty protestors" last week.
"Diversity matters at Michigan," she declared. "It matters today, and it will
matter tomorrow."
John Fund, "Preferences Forever? The
University of Michigan's president does her best George Wallace impersonation,"
The Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2006 ---
http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110009275
Jensen Comment
Rather than spend millions more in taxpayer money fighting the new law (making
race-based admission and financial aid preferences illegal) or exposing the
University of Michigan to lawsuit risk, President Coleman should engineer the
University of Texas System solution to affirmative action in Michigan's higher
education system --- that highly effective (at least from an affirmative action
standpoint) Ten Percent (10 Percent) Law. Public universities
in Texas must give student admission and financial aid priorities to the top ten
percent of the graduates of any high school in the State of Texas without regard
to race. There are problems, however, in terms of high school student gaming to
avoid all hard courses in high school in order to graduate in the Top Ten
Percent of their class. Read that gaming to avoid all math and science courses.
An applicant of any race with a low SAT and high grades from an
inner-city or poor rural high school may thereby have priority over a high SAT
applicant from a wealthy suburban Texas high school or a high SAT applicant from
out of state.. Many educators in Texas praise the results
in in both encouraging more integration in housing and high schools as well as
the tremendous affirmative action success that cannot really be challenged in
court.
Some educators criticize that many of the best students in the
states are punished due to geographic happenstance. That is unavoidable as long
as all universities in the state are not perceived as having the same prestige
and opportunity. Actually I see nothing wrong with spreading the highest SAT
graduating seniors around to all state universities rather than concentrating
that talent at the two largest flagship state universities in Texas.
I was once a supporter of the Ten Percent Rule even though it
greatly complicates high school grading where the top ten percent of a high
school class must be designated out of perhaps twenty percent of the graduates
having straight A grades under current grade inflation practices by teachers
and/or easy curriculum choices by devious students. (The
Boston Globe reports We're seeing 30, 40 valedictorians per class).
Learning is more than grades but grades have become the focal point for
opportunities in life. The President of the
University of Texas also expressed concerns that the Ten Percent Rule showed
signs of eventually taking all admission discretion away from the leading
universities in the system. Pros and cons of this Texas affirmative action
initiative were highlighted in a CBS Sixty Minutes video.
See "Is The
"Top 10" Plan Unfair?" at
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/10/15/60minutes/main649704.shtml
But now I'm less enthused about the rule because
it drives top students to avoid the hard courses. See below.
"Texas Limits '10%' Admissions," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
June 1, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/01/texas
The 10% Law is now the 7% law
The "10 percent" plan in Texas has been one of the
most successful experiments ever tried to get more minority students into
top public universities with race-neutral criteria. It spawned similar (if
less ambitious) programs in California and Florida and prompted numerous
debates about equity in higher education admissions. At the behest of the
University of Texas at Austin and suburban politicians, and following
several years of debate, the Texas Legislature on Saturday agreed to a plan
that will limit the use of the system so that Austin is required to fill
only 75 percent of its freshman slots for Texans under the program.
Gov. Rick Perry, a
Republican, has pushed for changes in the admissions system and is expected
to sign the legislation.
"10 percent" refers to
a law adopted in Texas in 1997 that requires all
public colleges and universities to admit any Texas applicant who graduated
from the top 10 percent of his or her high school class. The law was adopted
in the wake of a federal appeals court ruling -- since superseded by a
Supreme Court ruling in another case -- that barred public colleges from
considering race and ethnicity in admissions decisions.
Texas has many high schools
that are overwhelmingly Latino or black -- so the thinking of
those who crafted the law was that 10 percent
admissions would ensure that diversity would be maintained at competitive
universities like UT-Austin, which would admit the top graduates of such
high schools. As time has gone on, the system has worked as predicted,
increasing minority enrollments at UT-Austin and also resulting in the
admission of rural white students who attended
high schools that previously didn't send many students to the flagship.
While the University of
Texas at Austin now has the legal right to practice affirmative action in
admissions (and does so), many advocates for minority students have viewed
percent plans as a key tool for promoting diversity because these plans are
race neutral and because they result in admissions decisions being based on
class rank, not on the SAT or ACT, standardized tests on which black and
Latino students score, on average, at lower levels than do white and Asian
students.
The problem with percent
admissions, according UT-Austin, is that it's too popular. "We were going to
lose control over our class," William Powers Jr., president of the
university, said in an interview Sunday. He called the Legislature's action
"a very positive development."
In the admissions process
for the class that will enter in the fall, 86 percent of Texans admitted
were admitted on the basis of being in the top 10 percent of their high
school classes. Even at a university where out-of-state admissions are
minimal (only 7 percent this year), Powers said that's not enough
flexibility for the university.
Even though the university
attracts outstanding students through 10 percent admissions, Powers said,
there are gaps. There are not enough students enrolling that way who want to
major in key areas such as geosciences, computer engineering and education.
Earlier this year, Powers also suggested (in an argument that received
plenty of attention from non-academics in Texas) that 10 percent was making
it
difficult to recruit athletes in key sports, since
many of the best athletes are not in the top 10 percent of their high school
classes.
To those who question why
there is any need to tinker with a system that has resulted in considerable
diversity (45 percent this year are members of minority groups), Powers said
that "there is a capacity problem." Texas has nearly 50,000 students in all.
Without a change in the admissions law, "we'd have to become a 55,000
student university, or 60,000 or 65,000 and there are no resources to do
that." (The original law applied statewide, but UT-Austin, the focus of the
changes in the law, is the only university where admissions under 10 percent
have become a major issue.)
While Powers stressed the
educational and capacity issues, much of the controversy about changing 10
percent arose from the strong push for change from suburban legislators
whose (generally white) constituents were frustrated by the law. Since the
law was enacted, there have been steadily growing complaints from suburbs
with well financed and academically rigorous high schools that their
students below the top 10 percent but in the top 20 percent (or some other
figure) were more qualified than some of those being admitted from other
high schools, without the same academic resources. Parents and counselors
talked about talented students in the top 11 percent who might have been
accepted previously, but were now losing out.
Those arguments set up an
interesting political dynamic in Austin, where the Legislature at the last
minute two years ago failed to change the 10 percent law, but this year did
so only after considerable negotiations between the Senate (which would have
scaled back the law further) and the House, which resisted. The current
version of 10 percent has strong support not only from minority lawmakers,
but also from white rural legislators.
Michael Olivas is among
those concerned about changes in 10 percent, although he noted that "it
could have been worse," given the desire of some legislators to repeal the
law entirely or let it apply only to a small percentage of UT students.
Olivas is director of the Institute for Higher Education Law and Governance
at the University of Houston, and he advised the late Irma Rangel, the state
legislator who led the efforts to enact the law in the first place.
Olivas said he was
troubled by the "racially coded" comments made by those talking about
outstanding suburban students losing slots at the state's flagship. He noted
that the well prepared white students who were not in the top 10 percent of
their classes had many other options, and that not getting into UT was not
as much of a disaster as some implied. "It wasn't as if they were thrown off
into the streets," he said. "Some of the arguments that have been used
against 10 percent have been ridiculous and demeaning."
The challenge for the
University of Texas now, he said, will be to demonstrate that the change it
wanted in the admissions law was not an attempt to step back on diversity.
Olivas said he and others will be looking to see what happens in the years
ahead.
The overlooked reality,
Olivas said, was the success of 10 percent in not only getting students in,
but in identifying a more diverse group of students who also succeeded at
Austin. He said that many high schools in Texas, prior to 10 percent, just
assumed that their students wouldn't get in to UT-Austin and didn't bother
to try. The law, he said, encouraged them to apply, and when they not only
were admitted, but graduated, these local communities started to see the
flagship as a real possibility.
"The ironic thing here is
that 10 percent has been so successful," Olivas said. "Every internal study
that UT Austin has done or that the UT system has conducted and every
external study have shown that the 10 percent students, relative to others,
have done better by any measure -- lower attrition rates, graduate in
shorter time periods -- and the law has widened the base of high schools
from which students come." The university and legislators have spent years
pushing to change a law that "by any measure of public policy is a success."
Bob Jensen's threads on affirmative action in college admissions and
academic standards ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#AcademicStandards
"10% Admissions -- the Full Impact," by Scott Jaschik, Chronicle of
Higher Education, April 6, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/04/06/texas
The 15% Law is now the 7% law
Texas legislators may be on the verge of changing
one of the most notable admissions experiments in recent years:
a state law requiring that all public colleges and
universities automatically admit all of those who graduate in the top 10
percent of their high school classes.
The focus of lawmakers -- particularly those
advocating a change -- has been the difficulty the law places on the
University of Texas at Austin. As the most competitive institution in the
state, it is highly attractive to anyone eligible to earn admission, and UT
leaders say that they are filling such a large share of admissions slots
through the so-called 10 percent program that they have lost flexibility
and, with it, the ability to admit highly talented students who don’t earn
automatic admission. Defenders of the law tend to focus on its impact
increasing minority enrollments
Two new studies suggest both positive and negative
impacts of the law that have received relatively less attention in the
debate. The studies are scheduled to be released next Friday at the annual
meeting of the American Educational Research Association.
One focuses on the high schools that send students
to UT -- and finds that the law has led to much broader representation,
effectively halting what had been a growing pattern in which a small number
of wealthy high schools were increasingly dominating admissions. Not only
has the overall number of high schools sending students to Austin increased
since the 10 percent program, but the law appears to have shifted high
school students’ decisions. At many high schools before the law took effect,
those who would have almost certainly been admitted never bothered to apply
-- and the law appears to have changed that, the research has found.
A second study could be used to argue against the
10 percent law -- or at least the way it has been carried out at UT-Austin.
This study finds that, as the 10 percent law made it more difficult for some
applicants to win admission, an increasing number of these rejected
applicants used a program allowing transfer from other UT campuses. And as
these transfers grew, transfers from community colleges fell. The finding is
significant because so many low-income and minority students start their
higher education at two-year institutions.
The authors of the studies -- noting
the speed with which Texas legislators appear to be moving to change 10
percent -- released them to Inside Higher Ed
in advance of their formal presentation in the hope that their findings
might inform the debate.
The 10 percent law was adopted in 1997, following a
federal appeals court’s ban on the consideration of race or ethnicity in
admissions decisions. The law was immediately popular (with bipartisan
support). Because so many Texas high schools have ethnically homogeneous
student bodies (whether white, black or Latino), the law ensured that
healthy numbers from all groups would be eligible to enroll at Austin. When
in 2003 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the legality of affirmative action in
college admissions, UT started to again consider race and ethnicity in
admissions, and opposition to the law started to grow. Among the more vocal
opponents have been families and legislators in wealthier parts of the
state, which support high quality public schools where (these critics say)
very well qualified students in the 11th percentile (or further down) are
losing a shot at getting to Austin.
From High School to the Flagship
One of the papers focuses on the issue of which
high schools send students to UT. Mark C. Long of the University of
Washington, Victor B. Saenz of the University of Texas at Austin, and Marta
Tienda of Princeton University analyzed 18 years' worth of data on which
high schools sent students to UT, and they found significant shifts beyond
the issues of race and ethnicity that tend to dominate discussion of 10
percent.
They start by documenting evidence from prior
studies about the role of “feeder” high schools -- those that send a
disproportionate share of students to Austin. One part of the research noted
that in 1996, just before the law was adopted, 59 high schools accounted for
half of UT’s freshman class. (There are more than 1,500 high schools in
Texas.) By 2006, there were 104 high schools whose students made up half of
the freshman class -- by no means an even distribution, but much more than
was the case prior to 10 percent.
The total number of high schools sending at least
one student to UT-Austin went up dramatically as this shift was taking
place. In 1996, the study notes that UT admitted students from 674 high
schools. By 2007, that figure was more than 900. The new high schools were
more likely than those previously sending students to have large
concentrations of minority students and low-income students (minority and
white), to be in rural areas, or small towns and cities. Notably, the
researchers found that once high schools experienced success in getting
students admitted, they tended to continue to do so.
A key question in the debate over 10 percent is
whether the more diverse student pool would continue without the law in its
current form. Here, the research team offers evidence to suggest that there
are key factors to the law itself -- especially its straightforward nature
-- that contribute to its success. The researchers note that, prior to the
10 percent law, nearly all applicants in the top 10 percent of high school
classes were admitted, but at high schools whose students have not flocked
to UT until recently, very few of these students bothered to apply, pre-10
percent.
“Presumably, many seniors who ranked highly in
their class failed to apply because of the opaqueness of UT's admissions
policy; as is the case at most institutions, students have no way of knowing
whether they qualify for admission or the likelihood of being admitted. This
opaqueness would be acute for students at high schools with low sending
rates to UT -- a student at such a high school would not have the experience
of seeing their older peers' application results,” the draft report on the
study says.
“Thus, the apparent increases in access may be due,
in part, to the rendering of an opaque de facto policy that admitted nearly
all top 10% students to a transparent de jure policy that clearly stipulated
the criteria for automatic admission. Not only did this change in admission
policy influence the number of admitted and enrolled students to UT, but it
also diversified their geographic and socioeconomic origins.”
From Community Colleges to the Flagship
The paper on community colleges notes that for many
students, especially low income or minority students, there has never been a
great direct path to the flagship university, and transfer has long been
viewed as a good option. The paper -- by Rose M. Martinez, a doctoral
candidate at UT-Austin, explores what may be an "unintended consequence" of
the 10 percent law: reduced transfers from community colleges.
Continued in article
"Affirmative Action Challenged Anew," by Scott
Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, April 8, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/08/affirm
The 10% Law is now the 7% law
The lawsuit was filed in federal court Monday on
behalf of a white high school senior, Abigail Noel Fisher, who was rejected
from UT Austin. Like other challenges to affirmative action, the suit
charges that Fisher would have otherwise been admitted — but for affirmative
action as practiced by the university. Where the argument differs is that it
is based on a portion of the 2003 Supreme Court decision,
Grutter v. Bollinger,
that upheld the right of the University of Michigan’s
law school to consider race in admissions decisions. The decision noted the
obligation of public universities to consider race-neutral alternatives to
the explicit consideration of race and ethnicity. That obligation is typical
of court decisions upholding affirmative action, and most colleges have
argued that race neutral measures alone — such as affirmative action based
on class, for example — would not produce a diverse class of students.
This is where things could get tricky for the
University of Texas, the plaintiffs hope, because they are pointing to
numerous statements from university officials praising the 10 percent plan
for helping to admit classes of students with as much or more diversity than
the university had before a ban on affirmative action. For example,
this statement
from the university — cited in the court filings — says that “the law is
helping us to create a more representative student body and enroll students
who perform well academically.”
The Project on Fair Representation, which is
handling the suit against the university, is not attacking the legality of
affirmative action or of the 10 percent law, said Edward Blum, who is
involved in the case and has worked for several efforts against affirmative
action. “The court in Grutter very distinctly said that you’ve got to
try race-neutral means before you use affirmative action, and the University
of Texas is not,” he said. “One of the results of this lawsuit may be that
other colleges and universities may be put on notice that they must use
race-neutral means.”
One irony of the suit is that the University of
Texas has been pushing hard since 2003 to have the state repeal the 10
percent law. At the time the law was adopted, a federal appeals court
decision banning affirmative action was in place in Texas. But when the
Supreme Court upheld affirmative action’s legality, the university resumed
consideration of race. University officials have said that they now have
enough tools available to assure a diverse class that they don’t need the
top 10 percent law and fear it deprives them of flexibility. Last year, it
looked like the Texas Legislature was poised to repeal the law, but at the
last minute, the
repeal effort failed
— with many advocates for minority students saying
that the
10 percent plan was still needed.
Continued in article
Also see "Lawsuit Accuses U. of Texas of
Illegally Reintroducing Race-Based Admissions," by Katherine Mangan,
Chronicle of Higher Education, April 8, 2008
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/04/2405n.htm
| The University of Texas at
Austin Lobbies to Scrap the Controversial Top 10% Admissions Law
"Don’t Scrap Top 10% Plans,"
by
Michael A. Olivas, Inside Higher Ed, April 26, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/04/26/olivas
The 15% Law is now
the 7% law
All Texas parents keep a watchful
eye on their progeny’s performance in high school, knowing that a “top
10 percent” class rank guarantees admission to the state college of
their choice. There are variants in other states, but this is the best
known. Acclaimed by many for opening doors to higher education for
disadvantaged students at the state’s most prestigious university, the
program is now the target of sharp criticism from the University of
Texas at Austin.
The state’s flagship university
wants to bury the program. I come to praise it — and to argue that it
may be a model deserving more attention as more states face referenda
that may lead to the abolition of affirmative action and could hinder
minority enrollments at top public universities.
UT’s leaders claim that the Austin
campus has become overenrolled if not overrun with “top 10 percent”
students — but data from fall 2006 show a different story. And
nationally, flagship university leaders fear that such programs take
away too much control over whom they admit to their classes. At Austin,
first-time freshmen indeed increased by 509 to 7,421, but the figure
included new entrants as well as freshmen who entered in the summer and
continued into the fall. Among incoming students from Texas high
schools, about 71 percent were admitted under the 10 Percent Plan,
compared with 69 percent in fall 2005.
The quantity at Austin appears
manageable, but what about the quality? All available data indicate that
students admitted under the statewide 10 Percent Plan do better than
their peers in grade point
average and in college retention. That’s to be expected — since students
who do well in high school have a proclivity to do well in college,
especially when UT and other universities make concerted efforts to
recruit them and to provide them with financial aid.
Final proof of the 10 Percent
Plan’s success is found in data on ethnicity. At UT-Austin, first-time
freshman enrollment included 54.3 percent white, 0.5 percent American
Indian, 5.2 percent African American, 17.9 percent Asian American, 18.7
percent Hispanic and 3.4 percent foreign. Amid the turbulence that
attended major court cases (Hopwood from the Fifth Circuit and
Grutter from the U.S. Supreme Court), the UT campus remains
commendably populated by people from all economic classes and all
corners of the state. But the possibility of a Texas anti-affirmative
action referendum looms.
Credit for these outcomes properly
goes to the late Rep. Irma Rangel, who led the House Higher Education
Committee that crafted the 10 Percent Plan. For nearly 18 months, I was
privileged to work in her shadow as we sought race-neutral ways to
assist colleges that genuinely wished to recruit students from every
precinct in the state. After sifting through dozens of options, we opted
for something we called the frog-pond effect. That is, we determined
that students who were “big frogs” in high school were likely to do well
in college — regardless of the size of the frog pond that spawned them.
Indeed, rank-in-class is a proven marker of excellence, and many
scholarships and other honors traditionally flow from this measure of
excellence.
The plan that emerged in committee
improved upon the California model that requires many markers,
especially standardized tests on which some groups on average perform
better than do others, beyond a simple rank-in-class threshold. In part,
it was based on research that showed a handful of largely suburban high
schools generated many of the students admitted to the state’s flagship
universities, and at UT-Austin in particular. All were excellent high
schools, to be sure, but we identified many other good high schools that
had never sent a graduate to a flagship college in Texas. The 10 Percent
Plan effectively got these schools “into the game” of higher education —
much like the
Olympic Games permits every country to enter three athletes in any given
event. The three-athlete limit might chafe Kenya in distance running and
chap the United States in swimming, but there is global agreement that
the system is fair.
Texas legislators can lend a
sympathetic ear to UT-Austin’s complaints, but the problem is that the
10 Percent Plan works only as it is, when its provisions are automatic
and clear-cut. The benchmark could be set at a higher point for this one
campus — say, the top 7 percent — but such an adjustment would only
delay “filling up” the university at some point down the road. UT-Austin
says its far-reaching campus plans call for improving student-teacher
ratios by hiring more faculty and reducing the number of students. But
these goals could be achieved by limiting transfer students or by hiring
more professors, rather than by constraining the size of admitted
classes.
There may be other options that
UT-Austin could pursue, but if the core problem is “too many excellent
students,” only two plausible solutions exist: other Texas public
institutions need to step up and aggressively recruit these students,
and the state needs to create more attractive flagships. The results of
that second option are readily visible in California, where virtually
all UC campuses except the fledgling Merced campus are awash in
applications from highly accomplished students. Just as not every
qualified student in California can go to Berkeley, perhaps not every
qualified student can plan on attending UT-Austin.
Institutions such as the
University of Virginia or the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill struggle to recruit rural high school graduates and first
generation students. Some public universities have followed the lead of
guaranteeing full financial aid and not simply reimbursable loans, so as
to diversify their entering classes. In most states, there are racial
housing patterns that make recruiting from a wider swath of high schools
efficacious. The deeply ingrained mythology of graduating first in one’s
class is an extreme version of percentage plans, but virtually every
college tracks and recruits such high-achieving frogs.
Instead of waiting for Ward
Connerly to stir the pot, and then to be left stunned when he wins a
referendum, states might be well advised to consider a system like this,
which is consistent with long-standing flagship traditions in many
cases. Why don’t Connerly and the Center for Individual Rights and such
others lead a similar charge against legacy programs in public colleges,
a demonstrably and predominantly white policy?
Continued in article
|
|
10 Percent Plan Survives in
Texas
The 10% Law is now
the 7% law
Ten years ago, Texas legislators
created the “10 percent” plan — an innovative and controversial
approach to public college admissions that seemed to assure
racial and ethnic diversity at flagship universities, even if
they were barred from using affirmative action. Ever since the
plan was created, complaints have come in from the University of
Texas at Austin and its would-be students, and for much of the
2007 session of the Texas Legislature, it appeared that this
would be the year for the plan to be scaled back. Both the House
of Representatives and the Senate passed legislation to do so
and a conference committee came up with a compromise version,
which passed the Senate. But Sunday night, the House refused to
go along, and voted down the idea of changing the 10 percent
plan, 75-64.Legislators representing minority and rural
districts, who perceive the 10 percent system as helping their
constituents, united to push back the legislation.
Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, May 29, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/05/29/percent
Jensen Comment
Good News About the Law
There are a lot of things I like about the 10% law. These include spreading
the top SAT scoring talent around all the state universities rather than
concentrating so much of it at the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M
in College Station. The law has marked impact on affirmative action admission to
the highest ranked universities in the state.
But the Bad News is Worse in the Long Run Due to How it Affects the Top
Talent Who Now Avoid Tough Courses
Too much of the criticism of the Top 10% Law centers on the flagship university
loss of discretion on admissions. Not enough criticism focuses on the
gaming that takes place in high school. Instead
of taking math, science, and other tougher curriculum courses that help improve
SAT or ACT testing scores, students are encouraged to take the easiest A courses
that give them a better shot at being in the Top 10% of their class.
Accordingly, students in the Top 10% are likely to be less prepared for math and
science majors. The fact that they tend to do well in college may also be
reflected in the majors they choose in college. What
proportion of those Top 10% opt for the tougher math, science, and engineering
courses at the university level vis-a-vis the high SAT students who were
denied admission to the flagship universities because they were not in the Top
10% of their more competitive suburban high schools?
May 21, 2007 reply from J. S.
Gangolly [gangolly@CSC.ALBANY.EDU]
Bob,
I also used to categorise subjects into easy and
difficult ones. In fact, when my daughter decided to switch her major from
molecular biology to political science, I told her she was choosing a BS
major. However, with age I have realised how foolish I have been.
Let the whizz kids in science or math take courses
in political philosophy or Poetry and find out for themselves if it is as
easy as they thought. We place too much importance on the sciences and
mathematics at the expense of a balanced development of humans. This had
disastrous consequences especially for countries such as India, and the
educators there are now comiung to realise their folly. Unfortunately, for
us in the US, in spite of the importance placed in science/mathematics we
have fared rather poorly.
Howard Gardner developed theory of multiple
intelligences in his classic Frames of Mind", where he classified
intelligences into six categories: Logical-Mathematical, Linguistic,
Spatial, Musical, Bodily-Kinesthetic, Interpersonal, and Intrapersonal.
Various disciplines require different doses of each of these, and it is
meaningless to come up with a single yardstick (such as SAT or GPA) for
admissions.. It would make a lot more sense to develop a composite score for
each major used in admissions, and ask the students to retake the test
whenever they change their majors. This my version of midieval torture, but
just might be worth it.
My daughter obviously was well qualified for
sciences (she took a five course sequence in Calculus meant for Science &
Engineering and did well there before changing her mind), but just found her
calling. She obviously was forced to choose a socially-desirable field at
the beginning.
It might just be worthwhile doing some research on
exactly what intelligences are important for accounting and developing a
scoringng mechanism. Such an exercise might be more meaningful than all the
current regression mongering on hallucinatory (or imagined) problems. ETS
and US Department of Education might even be interesting funding such
research.
Jagdish
May 21, 2007 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Jagdish,
But you miss the point. If Ms. Dickenson's poetry classes and Mr. Twain's
literature classes are really tough for A grades, the gaming students will
avoid those courses like they avoid tough grading Calculus II and linear
algebra. If Mr. Einstein gives every student an A in linear algebra, then
all students will flock to linear algebra.
The point is that gaming students under the 10% rule aim for only the gut
(easy A) courses in any discipline. This is not academically healthy.
I think the second point is that the students who avoid math and science
courses in high school hurt their chances for majoring in many alternatives
in college, including accounting, economics, political science, finance,
business administration, engineering, as well as math and science.
Many professional programs require math skills as a prerequisite. It's
not so much that poetry classes are easier than Calculus II or linear
algebra. It's just that many professional undergraduate and graduate
programs require the math and not the poetry just to get into those
programs.
I would really like to see a study that tracks the top 10% at the
University of Texas before and after the 10% plan was really rolling (say in
the last five years).
It would also be interesting to track the SAT scores since not taking the
hard math and science courses may lower SAT scores among students really
capable of higher SAT scores had they taken a harder curriculum in high
school.
At some point many college graduates will also have to face GMAT and GRE
graduate admissions tests that have math components. If they avoid math all
the way through high school and college, they've also limited themselves for
graduate school
Bob Jensen
May 29, 2007 reply from Morris, Roselyn E
[rmorris@txstate.edu]
(Who is experienced with Texas students being admitted under the 10 Percent
Plan)
Bob,
Gaming students even go further and do not even
attempt to try on the entrance exams. For instance, top 10% Texas students
are admitted based upon rank in class and must only have taken the entrance
exams but have no required scores. Only students, who are trying for
scholarships, private or out-of-state schools, have incentive to try to make
a good score on the entrance exams.=20
I know from our experience here at Texas State that
we have many students in the top 10% of high school but with total SAT
scores of 900 to 1000. Since many of our incoming freshmen scholarships have
been rewritten to award based on class ranking, we do not necessarily see
higher entrance scores from scholarship applicants.
Roselyn E. Morris, PhD, CPA
Chair, Department of Accounting
McCoy College of Business
Texas State University-San Marcos
601 University Drive
San Marcos, Texas 78666-4616 phone: 512.245.2566 fax: 512.245.7973 email:
rmorris@txstate.edu
May 29, 2007 reply from Paul Williams
[Paul_Williams@NCSU.EDU]
Jagdish, et al,
You observations about kinds of intelligence
reminded me of an exercise the director of our scholars program here had
those of us on his faculty advisory committee perform a few years ago. The
task was to decide from among a number of applicants who would receive a
scholarship. The "applications" were narrative describing the students -- no
metrics were included, but narration provided by each students guidance
counselors.
One student was the overwhelming choice: star
athlete, top grades in all his classes, an Eagle Scout, etc. The moral of
the exercise is that all of the narrations provided to us where actual
descriptions of actual students taken from their academic records. The one
we all preferred was actually Bill Bradley -- Rhodes Scholar, U.S. Senator,
Princeton All-American and New York Knick.
But the others, who we didn't think were so hot,
were also accomplished people, e.g., Albert Einstein (described by his
teachers as lazy and not likely to amount to much), Isadora Duncan (and
indifferent student at best). What we are creating in the U.S. is an
admission process to top universities that favors one kind of student,
notably the one who works incessantly hard at what he or she is told to work
hard at in order to SUCCEED!
Even the aspiring poets that get into Harvard now
have to be ones who have high SAT scores, editied their high school year
book, mastered a musical instrument, and built homes for the less fortunate
so they may effuse in their essay how lucky they are to live in America and
to feel such pity for those who aren't so lucky. (Much like academic success
in accounting). What about the others?
The odd balls and misfits whose genius lies in
their not being like the model student every university seems to set up its
admission process to find so they can brag about the average SAT and high
school rank of their freshmen classes. Perhaps if students were assigned at
random to universities on the basis of their demonstrating some minimum
level of capability for doing college work whatever it might happen to be,
then students in high school could "waste" more of their time doing things
that they enjoyed rather than obsessing on the check list of achievements
required by admission officers at prestigious schools.
May 30, 2007 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Paul,
Actually I think reliance on the SAT helps identify some Einsteins who do
not end up in the top ten percent of their class.
You sent us an interesting reply. My first thought after reading it was
that the Einsteins of high school probably do not graduate in the top ten
percent of their classes and, therefore, lose out to some street smart but
dumb kid who played the game and aced all the easy courses.
What is interesting about the SAT tests is that they give some Einsteins
a shot at the best colleges even though their supposed laziness and
distractions led to low grade point averages on their application forms.
Perhaps this is one reason the SAT-type tests became more popular than
high school grades for admission to top colleges. Admission officers are
seeking out the oddball non-conformist geniuses. The University of Texas
said that the main concern is that the 10 Percent Law takes almost all
discretion out of the hands of university admission officials. Einstein no
longer can be invited to UT.
Another reason is that grade inflation has virtually destroyed the
credibility of grade averages for admissions screening. I wonder how high
schools in Texas pick the top ten percent of students among the twenty or
more percent who have all A grades on their transcripts.
(The Boston Globe reported: "We're seeing 30, 40 valedictorians
per class."
Bob Jensen
May 29, 2007 reply from Glen L Gray
[glen.gray@CSUN.EDU]
This is slightly off this tread but if you ever
want to see a really sad, state-of-education video, I saw a video a couple
of years ago of a guess speaker talking to a group of juniors at Compton
high school (a poor, gang-infested high school south of Los Angeles). She
asked how many of you plan to go to college? No one in camera view raised
their hand. Then she asked how many of you plan to be doctors, lawyers, or
other professionals. Many hands went up. She pointed out that you need to go
to college to get into those professions. The students were surprised to
learn that.
Glen L. Gray, PhD, CPA
Accounting & Information Systems, COBAE
California State University,
Northridge Northridge, CA 91330-8372
818.677.3948 818.677.2461 (messages)
http://www.csun.edu/~vcact00f
Bob Jensen's threads on the pros and cons of the 10 Percent plan are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#AffirmativeAction
Bob Jensen's threads on grade inflation are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#GradeInflation
But
recently something has changed. A student makes an appointment and then walks
in, accompanied by his mother. The mother does all the talking. She tells me
that Johnny has a problem with his Japanese teacher who is a strict grader,
emphasizes writing over speaking, and is too meticulous with deadlines for class
work. Johnny sits by silently, listening to his mother making his case. Johnny
is 22 years old.
Diether H. Haenicke, "Helicopter
Parents - Stop Hovering!," The Irascible Professor, July 25, 2007 ---
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-07-25-07.htm
How well do blacks and Latino
students compete in college? Moving Beyond Affirmative Action
Most colleges provide the public with very little
information about racial and ethnic differences in students’ grades and
graduation rates. Nor do they provide much information about the effectiveness
of their diversity programs. So what should prospective minority students and
their parents expect after being accepted? Unfortunately, the answer is that
race and ethnicity are important predictors of college performance. Recent
research confirms that white and Asian students not only enjoy pre-college
advantages in family income and school quality, but on average, they also
benefit throughout their college experience in ways that black and Latino
students do not.
David R. Harris, "Moving Beyond Affirmative Action," Inside Higher Ed,
January 4, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/01/04/harris
Grade Inflation from High School to Graduate School
The Boston Globe reports seeing 30- 40 valedictorians per class
Extra credit for AP courses, parental lobbying and genuine hard work by the
most competitive students have combined to shatter any semblance of a Bell curve
An increasing number of Canada's business schools are literally selling MBAs to
generate revenue
[some] professors who say their colleagues are so afraid of bad student
evaluations that they are placating students with A's and B's.
From Jim Mahar's blog on November 24, 2006 ---
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/
Grade inflation from HS to Grad school
Three related stories that are not strictly
speaking finance but that should be of interest to most in academia.
In the first article, which is from the
Ottawa Citizen, accelerated and executive MBA
programs come under attack for their supposed detrimantal impact on
learning in favor of revenue.
MBAs dumbed down for profit:
"An increasing number of Canada's business
schools are literally selling MBAs to generate revenue for their
ravenous budgets, according to veteran Concordia University finance
professor Alan Hochstein.
That apparent trend to make master of business administration
degrees easier to achieve at a premium cost is leading to
'sub-standard education for enormous fees,' the self-proclaimed
whistleblower said yesterday"
The second article is a widely reported AP article
that that centers on High School grade inflation. This high school issue
not only makes the admissions process more difficult but it also
influences the behavior of the students ("complaining works") and their
their grade expectations ("I have always gotten A's and therefore I
deserve on here").
A few look-ins from
Boston Globe's version:
"Extra credit for AP courses, parental
lobbying and genuine hard work by the most competitive students have
combined to shatter any semblance of a Bell curve, one in which 'A's
are reserved only for the very best. For example, of the 47,317
applications the University of California, Los Angeles, received for
this fall's freshman class, nearly 21,000 had GPAs of 4.0 or above."
or consider this:
""We're seeing 30, 40 valedictorians at a high
school because they don't want to create these distinctions between
students...."
and
"The average high school GPA increased from
2.68 to 2.94 between 1990 and 2000, according to a federal study."
This is not just a High School problem. In part
because of an agency cost problem (professors have incentives to grade
leniently even if it is to the detriment of students), the same issues
are regular discussions topics at all colleges as well. For instance
consider this story from the
Denver Post.
"A proposal to disclose class rank on student
transcripts has ignited a debate among University of Colorado
professors with starkly different views on whether grade inflation
is a problem.
...
[some] professors who say their colleagues are
so afraid of bad student evaluations that they are placating
students with A's and B's.
The few professors who grade honestly end
up with dismal scores on student evaluations, which affect their
salaries, professor Paul Levitt said. There is also the "endless
parade of malcontents" in their offices."
I would love to wrap this up with my own
solution, but obviously it is a tough problem to which there are no easy
solutions. That said, maybe it is time that I personally look back at my
past years' class grades to make sure I am not getting too soft. If we
all did that, we'd at least make a dent in the problem.
"Admissions boards face 'grade inflation'," by Justin Pope, Boston
Globe, November 18, 2006 ---
Click Here
That means he will have to find other ways to stand
out.
"It's extremely difficult," he said. "I spent all
summer writing my essay. We even hired a private tutor to make sure that
essay was the best it can be. But even with that, it's like I'm just kind of
leveling the playing field." Last year, he even considered transferring out
of his highly competitive public school, to some place where his grades
would look better.
Some call the phenomenon that Zalasky's fighting
"grade inflation" -- implying the boost is undeserved. Others say students
are truly earning their better marks. Regardless, it's a trend that's been
building for years and may only be accelerating: Many students are getting
very good grades. So many, in fact, it is getting harder and harder for
colleges to use grades as a measuring stick for applicants.
Extra credit for AP courses, parental lobbying and
genuine hard work by the most competitive students have combined to shatter
any semblance of a Bell curve, one in which 'A's are reserved only for the
very best. For example, of the 47,317 applications the University of
California, Los Angeles, received for this fall's freshman class, nearly
21,000 had GPAs of 4.0 or above.
That's also making it harder for the most selective
colleges -- who often call grades the single most important factor in
admissions -- to join in a growing movement to lessen the influence of
standardized tests.
"We're seeing 30, 40 valedictorians at a high
school because they don't want to create these distinctions between
students," said Jess Lord, dean of admission and financial aid at Haverford
College in Pennsylvania. "If we don't have enough information, there's a
chance we'll become more heavily reliant on test scores, and that's a real
negative to me."
Standardized tests have endured a heap of bad
publicity lately, with the SAT raising anger about its expanded length and
recent scoring problems. A number of schools have stopped requiring tests
scores, to much fanfare.
Continued in article
"Regents evaluate grade inflation: Class Ranking Debated," by
Jennifer Brown, Denver Post, November 2, 2006 ---
http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_4588002
A proposal to disclose class rank on student
transcripts has ignited a debate among University of Colorado professors
with starkly different views on whether grade inflation is a problem.
On one side are faculty who attribute the climbing
grade-point averages at CU to the improved qualifications of entering
students in the past dozen years.
And on the other are professors who say their
colleagues are so afraid of bad student evaluations that they are placating
students with A's and B's.
One Boulder English professor said departments
should eliminate raises for faculty if the GPAs within the department rise
above a designated level.
The few professors who grade honestly end up with
dismal scores on student evaluations, which affect their salaries, professor
Paul Levitt said. There is also the "endless parade of malcontents" in their
offices.
"You have to be a masochist to proceed in that
way," said Levitt, one of 10 professors and business leaders who spoke to CU
regents about grade inflation Wednesday.
CU president Hank Brown suggested in August that
the university take on grade inflation by putting class rank or
grade-point-average percentiles on student transcripts.
Changing the transcripts would give potential
employers and graduate schools a clearer picture of student achievement,
Brown said.
At the Boulder campus, the average GPA rose from
2.87 in 1993 to 2.99 in 2004.
Regents are not likely to vote on the issue for a
couple of months.
Regent Tom Lucero wants to go beyond Brown's
suggestion and model CU's policy after Princeton University, where
administrators instituted a limit on A's two years ago.
"As long as we do something to address this issue,
I'll be happy nonetheless," he said.
But many professors believe academic rigor is a
faculty issue and regents should stay out of it.
"Top-down initiatives ... will likely breed not
higher expectations but a growing sense of cynicism," said a report from the
Boulder Faculty Assembly, which opposes Brown's proposals.
Still, the group wrote that even though grade
inflation has been "modest," the issue of academic rigor "deserves serious
ongoing scrutiny."
"More important than the consideration of grades is
the quality of education our students receive," said Boulder communication
professor Jerry Hauser.
CU graduates are getting jobs at top firms, landing
spots in elite graduate schools and having no trouble passing bar or
licensing exams, he said.
But faculty who believe grade inflation is a
serious problem said they welcome regent input.
Bob Jensen's threads on grade inflation are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#GradeInflation
"The Failure of Critical Thinking," by John V. Lombardi, Inside
Higher Ed, December 12, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/12/12/lombardi
The current controversies over admission practices
of elite public and private institutions illustrate what happens when we
allow ourselves to fight about the wrong things. This lack of critical
thinking begins with a false premise and continues with an attack on
institutions that do not conform to the false premise. Sometimes, rather
than pointing out the false premise, institutions and their leaders react
defensively as if the false premise were correct. Both attacker and
respondent in this circumstance fail the test of critical thinking.
The error is usually at the beginning. Someone
(
most recently the Education Trust, but the list of
commentators who have taken the same tack is long) asserts that elite public
universities should be admitting as many poor people as there are in the
population of high school graduates in their states. Having asserted this
erroneous notion, they compile data (that may also be flawed) using often
unreliable methodologies, and issue a manifesto damning elite public
universities because they don’t meet the original false premise. Rather than
pointing out the error, some elite universities, sensing a politically
correct risk, counter with data showing how much they do to recruit and
subsidize the poor people who want to come to their university.
All this is not very helpful in addressing issues
of access and affordability. We do indeed have to pay attention to the
possibility that some graduates of high school who have the preparation and
interest might be priced out of an opportunity to acquire a quality higher
education, either by virtue of a high net cost of attendance or by the
imposition of admissions standards that less affluent students find
difficult to meet. This, however, is not a problem that belongs to elite
public or private universities alone but is a challenge faced by all the
providers of higher education in America. To focus on elite institutions is
to make some pernicious and inaccurate assumptions about all the other
institutions of higher education.
If we assume that everyone should have an equal
opportunityto attend an elite public or private institution (since both are
heavily subsidized by taxpayers), then we must also assume that attendance
at a non-elite public or private institution represents an unsatisfactory
and therefore unequal outcome for a student. If the community colleges,
state colleges, non-flagship state institutions, and many non-elite private
colleges represent an unsatisfactory and inequitable opportunity, compared
to what we call elite institutions, that would seem to require us to assume
that they do a poor job of educating students; that the results of their
educational efforts are second rate; and that anyone who attends such places
is sure to be deficient upon graduation. This kind of thinking may reflect
the snobbery of some elite groups who can’t imagine a good education coming
from a campus of the California State University system, or a fine education
at a combination of Greenfield Community College and Westfield State College
in Massachusetts. Such an assumption also reflects a profound ignorance
about the actual academic performance of the students who graduate from
these “non-elite” institutions.
The notion of “elite institution” deserves some
attention. We who live and work in institutions labeled elite have every
reason to accept the premise that only an education in our remarkable places
is worth having even if we can present little evidence to demonstrate that
our elite characteristics result in higher performance after graduation.
Research that attempts to demonstrate the higher value of elite compared to
non-elite education seems to indicate that while some people may benefit
from instruction at a small private elite college, most students do just
about as well after graduation, all other things being equal, whether they
go to elite or non-elite institutions.
The elite status of an institution comes from its
ability to spend more money than institutions deemed “non-elite.” These
expenditures do indeed make a different institution. For example, a state
flagship institution may have its faculty teaching only half time, assigning
the other half time to research. The student activities supported by the
elite institution may be more elaborate, the residential spaces more
elegant, the quality of the buildings and other facilities more impressive,
the student recreation center more comprehensive, and the intercollegiate
sports program more nationally visible. These amenities define elite status
for undergraduates, and many assume that the amenities reflect academic
quality. Students and their parents like these amenities, they ask about
them when they visit campus, and they appear willing to pay a premium for
the opportunity to participate in the residential life of an elite
university. Still, the data that would tell us that the students really
learn more and will do much better after graduation as a result of these
amenities is not very persuasive.
If we figure the cost of attendance at one of these
elite institutions and compare it to the cost of attending a community
college and state college, near where the student lives and where the
student can hold down a job, we find that the best educational bargain by
far is the community college-state college combination.
When we worry about whether poor people can get
access to college, some imagine that a zero cost of attendance will solve
the problem. That doesn’t really work. Even when an institution pays for the
tuition and fees, including room and board, for students below some income
marker, these students still come up short an additional $10K to make up for
the opportunity cost of living away from home and losing the income from a
regular 12-month part-time or full-time job. The public cost of subsidizing
elite education for all is very high for rather limited gains. And, of
course, there are not enough spots in what we call elite institutions to
accommodate all the deserving students of all income levels.
Because space is limited, even in elite public
institutions with enrollments over 40,000, the institutions select students
based on various criteria, some related to geography, some related to
ethnicity, some related to academic preparation, and some related to
athletic skill. It would certainly be possible to add other criteria to this
list to try and achieve an equal opportunity for all students. However, the
only truly “fair” admission process would do what we suggested in
an earlier Reality Check: fill the class using
random selection from a pool composed of all high school graduates who meet
the institution’s minimum admission criteria. There is a certain simplistic
charm to this notion.
Continued in article
Controversial Gay Graffiti at Swarthmore
"How Explicit Is Too Explicit?" by Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed,
November 14, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/14/swarthmore
Feeling Superior?
"How to Sabotage Your Career," by Rob Weir, Inside Higher Ed,
November 14, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/workplace/2006/11/07/weir
Possible Discrimination Against Asian Americans in College Admissions
Nine out of every 10 students who apply to
Princeton University are rejected, and many of them are students with the kinds
of records that just about assure they will end up getting a great education
somewhere. Jian Li, who despite his top grades and perfect SAT scores was one of
this year’s rejects, ended up at Yale University. But he has set off a federal
investigation of whether Princeton’s affirmative action policies discriminate
against Asian American applicants.
Scott Jaschik, "New Challenge to Affirmative Action," Inside
Higher Ed, November 14, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/14/princeton
Minority Gains and Gaps
Minority enrollment at colleges and universities rose
by just over 50 percent, to 4.7 million students, between 1993 and 2003,
according to the American Council on Education . . . A pessimist could note the
many gaps between black and Hispanic students and their white and Asian
counterparts. In particular, figures for black and Latino males remain far
behind not only white and Asian men but also behind black and Hispanic women.
Scott Jaschik, "Minority Gains and Gaps," Inside Higher Ed, October 30,
2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/30/minorities
The ACE report extends to the college presidency,
where it finds that most presidential positions continue to be held by white
men. The last five years, however, have seen significant diversification,
particularly among women of all ethic groups. Community colleges are also
significantly more diverse at the presidential level. These data come from
ACE’s database of presidents. (Note: The figures do include women’s and
historically black or minority-serving institutions.)
Presidents by Gender, Race and Ethnicity, 2005
| Group |
Number of Presidents,
4-Year Institutions |
% Change, 2000-5 |
Number of Presidents,
2-Year Institutions |
% Change, 2000-5 |
| White men |
1,441 |
+10.2% |
700 |
+3.6% |
| White women |
322 |
+9.9% |
253 |
+18.2% |
| Black men |
104 |
+15.6% |
40 |
-2.4% |
| Black women |
37 |
+54.2% |
30 |
+50.0% |
| Hispanic men |
33 |
+10% |
33 |
-8.3% |
| Hispanic women |
9 |
+125% |
15 |
+66.7% |
| Asian American men |
29 |
+11.5% |
7 |
+133.3% |
| Asian American women |
5 |
+0% |
4 |
+33.3% |
| American Indian men |
6 |
+20.0% |
10 |
+0% |
| American Indian women |
2 |
+0% |
6 |
+20% |
The full ACE report is not available online, but may be purchased from
the council through its
Web site.
Old Folks Demonstrate Higher Ability to be Remediated
The
study, “Stepping Stones to a Degree: The Impact of
Enrollment Pathways and Milestones on Older Community College Student Outcomes,
is slated to be released in the November 2007 edition of Research in Higher
Education. It shows that older students who enrolled in remedial courses –
particularly in mathematics – were “less negatively” affected in terms of time
to program completion than were younger students who also took the
courses.Specifically, younger students who took remedial courses were 42 percent
less likely to graduate than their peers who weren’t in the stepping-stone
classes. Older students needing remediation decreased their odds of graduation
in a particular term by 23 percent. A key factor in both cases is that remedial
classes rarely count toward a student’s graduation.
Elia Powers, "Age and Remediation," Inside Higher Ed, October 30, 2006
---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/30/remediation
College Leaders in Michigan Push Hard to Defeat Vote to Bar Affirmative
Action in Colleges
A federal judge on Tuesday refused to block a Michigan
referendum this fall to bar affirmative action by public colleges and
universities and other state agencies,
The Detroit Free Press reported. The judge was
harshly critical of the initiative, and said he believed that many people who
signed petitions to place the measure on the ballot had been misled. But the
judge said he lacked the authority to remove the measure from the ballot.
College leaders are
pushing hard to defeat the measure.
Inside Higher Ed, August 30, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/30/qt
Here's What Happened in Washington State
Minority enrollments have lagged in Washington State, relative to the state’s
population for the last eight years — ever since the state’s voters barred the
use of affirmative action in public higher education, the
Associated Press reported.
Inside Higher Ed, August 30, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/30/qt
Race Preferences Vote Splits Michigan
The ballot initiative, Proposition 2, which would amend
Michigan’s Constitution to bar public institutions from considering race or sex
in public education, employment or contracting, has drawn wide opposition from
the state’s civic establishment, including business and labor, the Democratic
governor and her Republican challenger. But polls show voters are split, with
significant numbers undecided or refusing to say where they stand. Passage would
probably reinvigorate challenges to a variety of affirmative action programs in
other states. In California, where a similar proposition passed in 1996, the
number of black students at the elite public universities has dropped. This
fall, 96 of 4,800 freshmen at the University of California, Los Angeles — 2
percent — are black, a 30-year low. For the University of Michigan, the
proposition would require broader changes than the Supreme Court did; it ruled
in Ms. Gratz’s case and a companion case that while the consideration of race as
part of the law school’s admissions policy was constitutional, a formula giving
extra points to minority undergraduate applicants was not.
"Race Preferences Vote Splits Michigan," by Tamar Lewin, The New York Times,
October 31, 2006 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/us/31michigan.html
Life Experience Work Around of California's Ban on Affirmative Action
Admissions
"UCLA Revamps Admissions," by Rob Capriccioso, Inside Higher Ed,
September 8, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/08/ucla
The number of black students at the University of
California at Los Angeles
has
plummeted since the voter-approved Proposition 209
outlawed the use of race in admissions decisions beginning in 1996. The
university
projected in June that fewer than than 100 black
first-year students planned to enroll this fall, which amounts to less than
2 percent of the class. More than 200 black students were part of the fall
1997 class. Administrators say that the numbers of African American students
at the institution are now at the lowest levels since the 1970s.
Alarm bells have been increasingly ringing on
campus regarding a situation that’s had many black alumni and business
leaders calling for a revamp in admissions policies. And UCLA’s Ralph J.
Bunche Center for African American Studies
released a report this month that said
“[r]esegregation began 10 years ago with the implementation of Proposition
209” and called for administrators to find ways to address that concern.
Some administrators felt constrained to do so under
the confines of the law, which does not allow for special consideration of
race in the admissions process. Now, with support from many of the
institution’s top administrators, some believe that a new admissions model
may help turn the numbers around — although campus officials insist that
isn’t the main goal.
The renovation would be modeled on the University
of California at Berkeley’s current admissions process, adopted after
Proposition 209 passed. That institution’s policies call for consideration
of students’ achievements in the context of their life experiences. A UCLA
faculty committee has already approved the framework that could lead to a
change as early as this fall for students seeking to enroll in fall of 2007.
Two more faculty committees are scheduled to vote on the matter by month’s
end. Acting Chancellor Norman Abrams, too, has voiced his support for a
change.
“We’re very excited,” said Janina Montero, vice
chancellor for student affairs at UCLA. “It’s intended to provide a broader
view of each applicant.”
Montero said that all students would benefit from a
“holistic approach” in reviewing applications — in which academic
achievements, personal achievements and life challenges would be used as
interdependent determining factors for admittance. The institution had
already adopted a policy post-Proposition 209 that it described as being
“holistic” as well. However, the past policy had different admissions
officers weighing the separate admissions criteria independently of one
another. Under the new approach, the same admissions officer would look at
all three areas and have more leeway in assessing an application’s overall
merit.
Montero also noted the low number of African
Americans who are now enrolled at the institution. “It’s a big concern,” she
said. “The numbers this year reached a crisis point.”
Ward Connerly, a former regent with the UC system
who helped create Proposition 209 and is generally critical of affirmative
action, said that he believed the university’s response was racially
motivated, rather than meant to help the whole student body. “I don’t think
they should be disingenous about that,” he said.
Still, Connerly said he doesn’t oppose the plan,
since he believes “the campus should have more flexibility ... as long as
they follow the law.” He said that all low-income and rural students could
have an advantage under the new system, regardless of their race.
Montero said that the university “will meet the
law.” “We want to be fair to all students,” she said. She also said that
community members and alumni could do more than the university in increasing
minority enrollment by holding fund raisers, creating scholarships, and
helping students at low-income high schools realize their options.
Adrienne Lavine, the departing chair of UCLA’s
Academic Senate and an engineering professor, said that there is no way “to
predict how this could impact underrepresented minorities.” “I’m not sure it
will increase our minority admittance,” she said. “But I would be thrilled
if it did have a positive effect.”
Montero said that if the faculty committees
ultimately approve a new plan and hammer out its details, new admissions
training and guidance from the Berkeley campus would be needed. The aim, she
said, would be to have the reformatted admissions process up and running for
applicants this fall.
"CUNY Seeing Fewer Blacks at Top Schools," by Karen Arenson, The
New York Times, August 10, 2006 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/10/education/10cuny.html
The enrollment of black students at three of the
most prestigious colleges of the City University of New York has dropped
significantly in the six years since the university imposed tougher
admissions policies.
One of the sharp declines has come at the City
College of New York, CUNY’s flagship campus, in Harlem, which was at the
center of bitter open admissions battles in the late 1960’s. Black students,
who accounted for 40 percent of City College’s undergraduates as recently as
1999, now make up about 30 percent of the student body there, figures
provided by the university show.
At Hunter, a competitive liberal arts campus on the
East Side of Manhattan, the share of black students fell to 15 percent last
year from 20 percent in 1999. And at Baruch, a campus that specializes in
business, the proportion of black students slipped to 14 percent from 24
percent. Over all, the number of black undergraduates at CUNY, including
those in associate’s degree programs, grew to 57,791 last year from 52,937
in 1999, the figures show.
University officials attributed the declines to
several factors, from their admissions policies to greater competition for
top minority students from other colleges to students’ own preferences about
where they want to study. But Robert Bruce Slater, the managing editor of
The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, which noted the trend at CUNY in
its Weekly Bulletin last week, said, “The tougher admissions policy seems to
have had a major impact.”
CUNY is not the only public university experiencing
such changes. In California, which voted to end affirmative action at its
public universities a decade ago, U.C.L.A. and Berkeley have both seen steep
declines in the number of black students, even as the numbers at other
campuses fell less and have recovered more over time.
CUNY put its tougher admissions policies in place
in 2000 and 2001.
Continued in article
Question
Has the University of Michigan been circumventing the Supreme Court decision on
affirmative action?
"New Salvos on Affirmative Action," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
October 17, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/17/mich
With Michigan voters weeks away from a vote on
whether to ban affirmative action, critics of the practice are releasing
admissions statistics that they say show the extent of the gap between black
and white applicants admitted to the University of Michigan.
The data reveal large differences in grades and
standardized test scores, and indicate that black applicants are much more
likely to be admitted, even with lower grades and test scores. These are the
sort of data that have been influential in other states that have considered
— and passed — statewide bans on affirmative action. “The people of Michigan
have a right to know the extent to which discrimination is taking place,”
said Roger Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, which is
releasing the data today and planning a series of events in Michigan to
publicize the figures.
David Waymire, a spokesman for One United Michigan,
which is leading the fight against the referendum, said that the data being
released were “worthless” because they did not include breakdowns by
economic class. He said that he believed the gaps in scores were largely
driven by class, not race and ethnicity, and that this was just “the usual
half-assed job” from the Center for Equal Opportunity.
The data came from the University of Michigan,
which had to release the figures in response to the center’s Freedom of
Information Act requests. Among the findings:
- The SAT median for black students admitted to
Michigan’s main undergraduate college was 1160 in 2005, compared to 1260
for Hispanics, 1350 for whites and 1400 for Asians. High school grade
point averages were 3.4 for black applicants, 3.6 for Hispanics, 3.8 for
Asians, and 3.9 for whites.
- Black and Hispanic applicants in 2005 with a
1240 SAT and a 3.2 GPA had a 9 in 10 chance of getting in — while white
and Asian applicants with the same scores had a 1 in 10 chance of
getting in.
- For undergraduates in the most recent year for
which data are available (2004), 28 percent of black students had been
on academic probation at some point in their Michigan careers, compared
to 23 percent of Hispanic students, 8 percent of Asian students, and 5
percent of white students.
- Similar patterns hold for law and medical
school admissions. In the latter, for example, the data indicate that of
applicants with an MCAT total of 41 and a GPA of 3.6 in college science
courses, admit rates were 74 percent for black applicants, 43 percent
for Hispanic applicants, 12 percent for white applicants and 6 percent
for Asian applicants.
The debate in the weeks ahead is likely to be over
what these numbers mean. To foes of affirmative action, they are the smoking
gun about the use of racial preferences in admissions. To the University of
Michigan, these are numbers without context or much significance at all
(except perhaps politically).
Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity said that
these data suggest that the university is paying more attention now to race
and ethnicity that it was before two landmark decisions by the Supreme Court
in 2003. Those decisions — one about the system used by Michigan
to admit undergraduates and one about
its law school — effectively said that colleges
could continue to use affirmative action, but couldn’t have separate systems
in which extra points were awarded across the board specifically for race
and ethnicity. Clegg’s group was hoping at the time for the court to
completely bar affirmative action, but he said that the data show that
Michigan is violating the ruling that was handed down.
What the Supreme Court upheld was the use of race
in a “limited and nuanced way,” he said, which is inconsistent with the wide
gaps shown in the data his group is releasing.
Julie Peterson, a spokeswoman for the University of
Michigan, released a statement in which she took issue with Clegg’s
analysis, which she called “flawed and shallow,” noting that expert
witnesses in the affirmative action cases had found that such comparisons
are oversimplified to the point of being misleading.
The center’s analysis ignored key factors, she
said, such as “the rigor of the student’s high school or undergraduate
curriculum, extracurricular activities, essays, teacher and counselor
recommendations, and socioeconomic status.” By ignoring these qualities
about applicants, she said, “CEO attempts to reduce human beings to a couple
of simplistic numbers. No top university admits students solely on the basis
of grades and test scores. We consider many factors in order to admit a
group of students who have diverse talents, who are highly motivated and who
have the potential to succeed at Michigan and make a contribution to the
learning environment.”
Peterson noted that after the Supreme Court
rulings, the university revised its undergraduate admissions process to gain
more information about students. “It is just plain wrong to imply that race
somehow carries a greater amount of weight than it has in the past, or than
the Supreme Court allowed.”
If there was one area on which Peterson and Clegg
agreed, it was that the political stakes are high right now for data like
the figures being released.
“It is no coincidence that CEO has released this
report in the weeks leading up to a ballot proposal that would outlaw public
affirmative action in the state of Michigan,” Peterson said. “This is a
politicized attempt by CEO to narrow the focus of the debate to college
admissions at a single institution, rather than acknowledging the broader
potential impact on state employment and contracting, K-12 schools and
public universities and community colleges, potentially affecting financial
aid, outreach, pre-college and other programs that consider race, gender and
national origin.”
For his part, Clegg said that he hopes the data
will persuade Michigan voters to bar affirmative action. If they don’t, he
said that the data could be helpful to others who may want to sue the
university. And if you aren’t in Michigan, Clegg said that his group — which
previously did a series of studies like the Michigan one — is planning
another series.
Saga of affirmative action at the University of Michigan ---
http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/affirm.html
Controversial Issues in Silver Spoon Admissions and Academic Standards
"Silver Spoon Admissions," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
September 5, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/05/admit
Though Ovitz’s son was admitted, under special
status, he didn’t last long at Brown and left. Ovitz’s daughter followed,
apparently with more success. And Brown also gained, as the book describes
Brown President Ruth Simmons gushing over Ovitz for arranging a campus
appearance in which he appeared with Dustin Hoffman, and for hosting a
reception for her at Ovitz’s Brentwood mansion.
Neither Ovitz nor Brown University officials would
respond to calls to ask about their reactions to the description of their
relationship in
The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite
Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates (Random House).
Daniel Golden, the author, won a Pulitzer Prize for
exploring some of these issues
in The Wall Street Journal, but his book contains numerous
investigations that have not appeared previously, and that are bound to be
controversial.
. . .
That American higher education is not a pure
meritocracy is, of course, hardly news. But Golden’s book has a level of
detail about the degree to which he says some colleges favor the privileged
that will embarrass many an admissions officer. Golden names names of
students — and includes details about their academic records before college
and once there that raise questions about the admissions decisions being
made. For good measure, he attacks Title IX (saying that the women’s teams
colleges create favor wealthy, white applicants), preferences for faculty
children (ditto, although substitute middle class for wealthy), and accuses
colleges of making Asian applicants the “new Jews” and holding them to much
higher standards than other students.
Even before its official release, The Price of
Admission is causing considerable fear among the admissions officers of
elite colleges. If you want to see an admissions dean really happy, tell her
that you can’t find her institution in the index. The preferences
highlighted in this book are the admissions preferences that college
officials don’t like to talk about (except perhaps at reunion weekend).
Presidents and deans in many cases welcome the opportunity to talk about why
they want racial or socioeconomic or geographic diversity in their classes,
why it is important that a class include enough string players for the
orchestra and enough running backs for the football team. Who hasn’t heard
an admissions story about recruiting a tuba player from Wyoming — as the
perfect symbol of the art and science of constructing a class.
But preferences for the rich and famous, or
generous alumni donors? That’s not something people like to talk about.
Several deans accused Golden of taking the admissions process out of context
(they said the numbers of rich who benefit are small), or being naive (when
a billionaire is admitted to the ER, is treatment the same as that for an
average Joe?), and of neglecting history (the preferences Golden described
were far worse a few generations back). Some argued that it would be racist
to eliminate preferences for the children of wealthy alumni now, when for
the first time there are starting to be significant numbers of wealthy
alumni who aren’t white.
Others disputed some details about their
institutions, but most acknowledged that the book is likely to increase
scrutiny of their practices — whatever they think of the fairness of the
book and its message.
A chapter about Duke University, for example, says
that a few years back the institution spread the word among private high
schools that it wanted “development admits,” those whose families had the
potential to become big donors, and that strong academic credentials weren’t
a requirement.
Christoph Guttentag, dean of undergraduate
admissions, said that while the book says this started prior to his arrival,
it doesn’t ring true to him. “It’s certainly not my experience and it
doesn’t feel right to me as a description of what was happening,” he said.
He acknowledged that Duke does consider — “for a
small number of students” — the ability of their families to make
contributions (financial and otherwise) to the university, but he stressed
that he regularly “says No” to requests on behalf of such applicants, and
that only those capable of doing well in Duke’s classrooms are admitted.
Asked whether it was fair to do so, even for a small number, he started by
talking about how this was similar to the way he considers requests from
academic departments, supporters of extracurricular groups, coaches, and
others. But he paused when told that all of those potential candidates
contributed — at least in theory — to the educational environment for all
students by virtue of their skills or interests. Isn’t money different?
Said Guttentag: “I don’t think there is a selective
private university that is the kind of university we are that to one degree
or another doesn’t do this, with the understanding that ultimately the
university as a whole and the students benefit from the facilities or
financial aid [donated]. When there is a significant financial interest in
the university, that’s one of the things we take into account.”
Continued in article
Bias in Elite School Admissions: Target Dumb Kids of the Rich and
Famous
Over more than 20 years, Duke transformed itself from a
Southern school to a premier national institution with the help of a winning
strategy: targeting rich students whose families could help build up its
endowment. At the same time, and in a similar way, Brown University, eager to
shed its label as one of the weakest schools in the Ivy League, bolstered its
reputation by recruiting kids with famous parents. While celebrities don't often
contribute financially, they generate invaluable publicity.
Daniel Golden, "How Lowering the Bar Helps Colleges Prosper: Duke and
Brown Universities Rise in Prestige In Part by Wooing Kids of Hollywood,
Business Elite; A Debate Over Michael Ovitz's Son," The Wall Street Journal,
September 9, 2006; Page A1 ---
Click Here
At Harvard, over 50% of million-dollar donors got at least one of their
children into Harvard
"Price of Admission: By the Numbers," The Wall Street Journal,
September 9, 2006 ---
Click Here
Controversial Issues in Affirmative Action Preferences for Gay Students
Question
Should high school seniors declare themselves gay to get affirmative action
college admission preferences?
This is an issue being actively debated by admission's officials.
And then there is the practical question of how
colleges would respond if word got out that being gay could help your chances of
getting into a good college. “What if people just start to say, ‘Hey, I’m gay.’
Are we going to follow them around for a semester?” McCandless said. High school
counselors in the audience had many questions for the college officials. One
said that he wasn’t sure what to do with his gay students who are out, but who
aren’t particularly involved in gay organizations. “How gay do you have to be”
to include it on an application, and hope for help, he asked?
Scott Jaschik, "Affirmative Action for Gay Students," Inside Higher Ed,
October 9, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/09/gay
Jensen Comment
Possible abuse of affirmative action is not limited to gay declarations.
Allegedly Ward Churchill declared himself a Native American to improve his
chances at getting a faculty job (without having the customary doctoral degree)
at the University of Colorado ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HypocrisyChurchill.htm
Controversial Issues of the Study Abroad (International Studies)
Curriculum
More students studying abroad does not automatically equate
to a good thing!
"Quantity or Quality in Study Abroad? By Adam Weinberg,
Inside Higher Ed, May 8, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/05/08/weinberg
As this work
progresses, we would do well to remember that the desirable
outcomes associated with studying abroad are neither
automatic nor guaranteed under current conditions, nor can
we measure success only by the number of students sent
abroad. We need to be intentional and purposeful and might
start by examining the difference between “high road” and
“low road” models for international education.
Under low road
models, universities and programs send college students into
the world, with little preparation, for culturally thin
experiences. Students make minimal effort to learn local
languages or customs, travel in large groups, and are taught
in American-only classrooms. They live and go to bars with
other Americans, often drinking too much and getting into
trouble. They see local sights through the windows of
traveling buses. Far from experiencing another culture
deeply and on its own terms, these students (at best) simply
get the American college experience in a different time
zone. It is worth noting as well that many of the study
abroad destinations known as “fun” don’t even require
language study and offer relatively minimal challenges to
students’ sense of place and culture. These also happen to
be the places with the highest percentage of students.
High road study abroad programs are
developed to ensure deep cultural and language immersion.
Students are oriented to understand and respect local
customs and encouraged to take responsibility for projecting
a positive image of Americans. High-road providers ensure
that students become part of the culture by staying with
local families and giving back to local communities.
Examples include:
the School for
International Training, the
School For Field Studies and the
International Honors Program.
Each
of these organizations is working to create programs where
students attend classes and participate in activities with
local students and are taught by local staff who are paid
fair wages and offer an inside view of the culture. Students
learn that they return to the U.S. with an obligation to
stay active, help others learn from their experiences, and
push for better policies with regards to the developing
world. These students become young intercultural emissaries,
global citizens able to adapt and contribute to a complex
world.
High road
programs tend to be built with four principles in mind:
-
Commitment to scale and access. Currently, less than 8
percent of American college students study abroad,
despite polling data that suggest most have an interest
in doing so. Just as important, of that small
percentage, less than 9 percent are black or Hispanic,
even though these students constitute 25 percent of all
college students. Stated differently, about 50 percent
of the students who study abroad come from just 100
universities and colleges. We need to do better.
-
Emphasis on exposing students to less-traveled,
less-understood destinations. Two-thirds of students who
study abroad go to Europe. Only 15 percent go to Latin
America, 7 percent to Asia, 3 percent to Africa,.5
percent to the Middle East. As geopolitical and economic
power shifts, study abroad needs to keep up by including
emerging regions of importance. Of course students
should still study in Europe, but they should go on
programs where they learn languages, are deeply immersed
in cultures, and challenged by important themes in
contemporary European society.
- Plans
for student “reentry” and opportunities for lifelong
engagement. Students return from abroad filled with
energy and excitement, often transformed by their
experiences, but struggle to find opportunities and
outlets for channeling their newfound energies. We need
to harness and direct this energy towards lifelong
learning, growth, and engagement in communities back
home. There has been a tremendous amount of chatter
within the higher education around civic education and
engaging undergraduates. Harnessed correctly, study
abroad may be as close to a solution as we will find.
-
Commitment to reciprocity. In this context, reciprocity
might be defined as operating our programs in ways that
strengthen the partners (e.g., community groups,
individuals, and communities) we depend upon for the
vitality of our programs. International education can
either be perceived as one more thing the U.S. does at
the expense of the rest of the world, or something that
has economic and social benefits for host countries and
communities. High road providers work in partnership
with host communities. They bring needed revenues,
networks, and other resources to these communities,
while also maintaining a small and respectful footprint.
Some providers do this by paying
attention to how they run their operations. They
purposefully use local companies, keep the footprint small,
and compensate local staff with good wages, benefits and
professional development opportunities. Other providers are
using community-based research and service-learning projects
to connect students to local development efforts.
The International Partnership for Service-Learning and
Leadership is a good example.
But
reciprocity can and should mean much more. For example, at
the School for International Training, where I work, we
recently signed an agreement with the Royal University of
Bhutan (RUB). RUB is hosting students for a month on its
campus. In return, SIT is using our network with 250
colleges and university to serve as a portal for RUB into
American higher education. We arranged a tour for RUB
administrators to visit their counterparts at a range of
public and private universities. We are placing select RUB
graduates into PhD programs. To make this happen (and bring
things full circle) we are offering the universities who
take RUB students financial aid for their students to come
on our programs. Additionally, we are arranging for American
faculty to spend time in Bhutan. In this form, reciprocity
connects all the partners in loops that benefit American
universities, study abroad providers, and community partners
with clear intentionality and purpose.
All of this
raises interesting questions that have yet to be fully
explored:
- Would
it be OK if study abroad programs fall in short term
numbers, but go up in quality? What would happen if the
key indicator of success shifted from the number of
participants to the magnitude of student learning
outcomes?
- How
might universities create market demand for high road
programs? Consistent with changes to accreditation, what
would happen if universities required study abroad
providers to document how programs meet particular
learning outcomes and provided measurement of successes
and failures?
- How can
we ensure greater access? This is an extremely important
issue partly driven by price. We need to find creative
methods to keep programs affordable. Part of it is also
about moving study abroad beyond the liberal arts into
the professions. We need programs for students who are
studying nursing, hospitality, business, engineering and
a range of other professions that reach beyond the
liberal arts campuses.
Higher
education is under growing pressure from politicians,
parents and even our own accrediting agencies to better
demonstrate value added for students, communities and the
nation. Study abroad is a good example of how we can take
something we are already doing and magnify the impact by
being more purposeful and intentional with our desired
outcomes and strategies for achieving them. In doing so, we
can better position higher education to meet challenges
around global competitiveness and public diplomacy, while
also enhancing our humanitarian commitment to the world.
Continued in article
Dealing With Disturbed and Possibly Dangerous Students
"Deciding When Student Writing Crosses the Line," by Joseph Berger,
The New York Times, May 2, 2007 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/education/02education.html
A writing teacher is sometimes like the Michael
Douglas detective in “Basic Instinct,” trying to decide whether Sharon
Stone’s sultry novelist is toying with him in her potboilers or telegraphing
plans for murder. Teachers also know that literature — “Hamlet,” “Oedipus
Rex,” “Anna Karenina” — is pocked with mayhem or self-destruction in which
violence is essential. As C. J. Hribal, a professor of English at Marquette,
said, Oedipus’s rapping his knuckles would not have packed the same tragic
wallop as Oedipus’s tearing out his eyes.
But when do violent passages need watching, even
attending to? And how does a teacher prepare a response that is therapeutic
rather than invasive?
There is a case for delving deeper, teachers say,
when the darkness of the prose matches the student’s mood or behavior. A
Sylvia Plath-like exploration of depression may be more alarming when it is
matched by a Sylvia Plath-like withdrawal and deep unhappiness.
At Virginia Tech, Mr. Cho’s teachers stepped in
when he wrote his play “Richard McBeef,” in which a teenager threatens to
kill his stepfather to prevent his own rape, because Mr. Cho was also
frightening students with erratic behavior, like asking to be called
Question Mark. One teacher tutored Mr. Cho, another banished him, others
alerted deans. Still, the authorities never put all their concerns together
to make a case for his removal.
Mr. Chee, Amherst’s visiting writer, recalled that
when he was teaching graduate students in New York, one wrote a memoir in
which she told of having been a closeted lesbian preparing to become a nun
and trying to kill herself.
“I didn’t go on red alert precisely, even though I
was deeply alarmed,” Mr. Chee said. “I wrote back to her, ‘Where’s the
chapter where the character talks to a therapist about trying to kill
herself?’ ”
He learned that the student had been treated at a
hospital for a suicide attempt but had never discussed it with her
therapist. He urged her to do so.
Another student of Mr. Chee’s, whom he taught at
Wesleyan, wrote a story about a girl who cuts her flesh. In conference, she
confided that writing about cutting was not quieting her own impulses. She
was not in therapy, so Mr. Chee told her how therapy had helped him.
But writing teachers face a quandary: What some
observers consider warning signs could be misleading, and intervening could
squelch a young writer’s voice.
“A creative writing class should be a place where
you can write things that are disturbing without people thinking you’re
disturbed,” said Sam Maurey, a junior in Mr. Chee’s class. Moreover, as Mr.
Chee explained, there is a “typical male student” who “writes things that
try to shock,” and these violence-filled works need to be seen in
perspective.
“They break certain cultural taboos, but in those
cases, the students are usually quite socialized and not the kind of
shut-down loner we saw at Virginia Tech,” Mr. Chee said.
Continued in article
How Not to Respond to Virginia Tech — I
Such responses by colleges send students who seek help
for mental illness the wrong message. When students have done the right thing
and reached out for help, removing them from colleges sends the message that
they have done something wrong and are not wanted on campus. It also
inappropriately isolates these students from their community and the supports
they need during a time of crisis. Moreover, these policies may actually
increase the risk of harm by discouraging students from getting help for
themselves or others.
Karen Bower, Inside Higher Ed, May 1, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/05/01/bower
How Not to Respond to Virginia Tech — II
Brett A. Sokolow, Inside Higher Ed, May 1, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/05/01/sokolow
We should not be rushing to install
text-message-based warning systems. At the low
cost of $1 per student per year, you might ask what
the downside could be? Well, the real cost is the $1
per student that we don’t spend on mental health
support, where we really need to spend it. And, what
do you get for your $1? A system that will send an
emergency text to the cell phone number of every
student who is registered with the service. If we
acknowledge that many campuses still don’t have the
most current mailing address for some of our
students who live off-campus, is it realistic to
expect that students are going to universally supply
us with their cell phone numbers? You could argue
that students are flocking to sign up for this
service on the campuses that currently provide it
(less than 50 nationally), but that is driven by the
panic of current events. Next fall, when the shock
has worn off, apathy will inevitably return, and
voluntary sign-up rates will drop. How about
mandating that students participate? What about the
costs of the bureaucracy we will need to collect and
who will input this data? Who will track which
students have yet to give us their numbers, remind
them, and hound them to submit the information? Who
will update this database as students switch cell
numbers mid-year, which many do? That’s more than a
full-time job, with implementation already costing
more than the $1 per student. Some
students want their privacy. They won’t want
administrators to have their cell number. Some
students don’t have cell phones. Many students do
not have text services enabled on their phones. More
added cost. Many professors instruct students to
turn off their phones in classrooms.
Texting is useless.
It’s useless on the field for athletes, while
students are swimming, sleeping, showering, etc.
And, perhaps most dangerously, texting an alert may
send that alert to a psychopath who is also
signed-up for the system, telling him exactly what
administrators know, what the emergency plan is, and
where to go to effect the most harm. Would a text
system create a legal duty that colleges and
universities do not have, a duty of universal
warning? What happens in a crisis if the system is
overloaded, as were cellphone lines in Blacksburg?
What happens if the data entry folks mistype a
number, and a student who needs warning does not get
one? We will be sued for negligence. We need to
spend this time, money and effort on the real
problem: mental health.
We should consider installing loudspeakers
throughout campus. This technology has
potentially better coverage than text messages, with
much less cost. Virginia Tech used such loudspeakers
to good effect during the shootings.
We should not rush to perform criminal background
checks (CBCs) on all incoming students. A North
Carolina task force studied this issue after two
2004 campus shootings, and decided that the
advantages were not worth the disadvantages. You
might catch a random dangerous applicant, but most
students who enter with criminal backgrounds were
minors when they committed their crimes, and their
records may have been sealed or expunged. If your
student population is largely of non-traditional
age, CBCs may reveal more, but then you have to
weigh the cost and the question of whether you are
able to
perform due diligence on screening the results of
the checks if someone is red-flagged. How will you
determine which students who have criminal histories
are worthy of admission and which are not? And,
there is always the reality that if you perform a
check on all incoming students and the college
across the street does not, the student with the
criminal background will apply there and not to you.
If you decide to check incoming students, what will
you do about current students? Will you do a
state-level check, or a 50-state and federal check?
Will your admitted applicants be willing to wait the
30-days that it takes to get the results? Other
colleges who admitted them are also waiting for an
answer. The comprehensive check can cost $80 per
student. We need to spend this time, money and
effort on the real problem: mental health.
We should not be considering whether to allow
students to install their own locks on their
dormitory room doors. Credit Fox News Live for
this deplorably dumb idea. If we let students change
their locks, residential life and campus law
enforcement will not be able to key into student
rooms when they overdose on alcohol or try to commit
suicide. This idea would prevent us from saving
lives, rather than help to protect members of our
community. The Virginia Tech killer could have shot
through a lock, no matter whether it was the
original or a retrofit. This is our property, and we
need to have access to it. We need to focus our
attention on the real issue: mental health.
Perhaps the most preposterous suggestion of all
is that we need to relax our campus weapons bans so
that armed members of our communities can defend
themselves. We should not allow weapons on college
campuses. Imagine you are seated in Norris Hall,
facing the whiteboard at the front of the room. The
shooter enters from the back and begins shooting.
What good is your gun going to do at this point?
Many pro-gun advocates have talked about the
deterrent and defense values of a well-armed student
body, but none of them have mentioned the potential
collateral criminal consequences of armed students:
increases in armed robbery, muggings, escalation of
interpersonal and relationship violence, etc.
Virginia, like most states, cannot keep guns out of
the hands of those with potentially lethal mental
health crises. When we talk
about arming students, we’d be arming them too. We
need to focus our attention
on the real issue: mental health.
We should establish lockdown protocols that are
specific to the nature of the threat. Lockdowns
are an established mass-protection tactic. They can
isolate perpetrators, insulate targets from threats
and restrict personal movement away from a dangerous
line-of-fire. But, if lockdowns are just a random
response, they have the potential to lock students
in with a still-unidentified perpetrator. If not
used correctly, they have the potential to lock
students into facilities from which they need
immediate egress for safety
reasons. And, if not enforced when imposed,
lockdowns expose us to the potential liability of
not following our own policies. We should also
establish protocols for judicious use of
evacuations. When police at Virginia Tech herded
students out of buildings and across the Drill
Field, it was based on their assessment of a low
risk that someone was going to open fire on students
as they fled out into the open, and a high risk of
leaving the occupants of
certain buildings in situ, making evacuation from a
zone of danger an appropriate escape method.
We should not exclude from admission or expel
students with mental health conditions, unless they
pose a substantial threat of harm to themselves or
others. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act
prohibits colleges and universities from
discrimination in admission against those with
disabilities. It also prohibits colleges and
universities from suspending or expelling disabled
students, including those who are suicidal, unless
the student is deemed to be a direct threat of
substantial harm in an objective process based on
the most current medical assessment available. Many
colleges do provide health surveys to incoming
students, and when those surveys disclose mental
health conditions, we need to consider what
appropriate follow-up should occur as a result. The
Virginia Tech shooter was schizophrenic or mildly
autistic, and identifying those disabilities early
on and providing support, accommodation — and
potentially intervention — is our issue.
We should consider means and mechanisms for early
intervention with students who exhibit behavioral
issues, but we should not profile loners. At the
University of South Carolina, the Behavioral
Intervention Team makes many early catches of
students whose behavior is threatening, disruptive
or potentially self-injurious. By working with
faculty and staff at opening communication and
support, the model is enhancing campus safety in a
way that many other campuses are not. In the
aftermath of what happened at Virginia
Tech, I hope many campuses are considering a model
designed to help raise flags for early screening and
intervention. Many students are loners, isolated,
withdrawn, pierced, tattooed, dyed, Wiccan, skate
rats, fantasy gamers or otherwise outside the
“mainstream". This variety enlivens the richness of
college campuses, and offers layers of culture that
quilt the fabric of diverse communities. Their
preferences and differences cannot and should not be
cause for fearing them or suspecting them. But, when
any member of the community
starts a downward spiral along the continuum of
violence, begins to lose contact with reality, goes
off their medication regimen, threatens, disrupts,
or otherwise gains our attention with unhealthy or
dangerous patterns, we can’t be bystanders any
longer. Our willingness to intervene can make all
the difference.
All of the pundits insist that random violence can’t
be predicted, but many randomly violent people
exhibit a pattern of detectable disintegration of
self, often linked to suicide. People around them
perceive it. We can all be better attuned to those
patterns and our protocols for communicating our
concerns to those who have the ability to address
them. This will focus our attention on the real
issue: mental health.
Continued in article |
Engineering Programs Facing Up to Possible Requirements for Masters
Degrees
Accounting Programs Were Forced to Do This Via Newly-Enacted State Laws for CPA
Licensure
"Mastering Engineering," by David Epstein, Inside Higher Ed, July 28,
2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/28/engineer
“I would like to see people with an engineering
education go into government,” King said. But King argues that the narrow,
rigorous program required for an undergraduate engineering degree limits the
amount of education engineering students get in other disciplines King hopes
to see the master’s degree, rather than the bachelor’s, become the true
entry level degree for professional engineers.
In King’s view, the undergraduate engineering
program — “pre-engineering,” he calls it, like pre-med or pre-law — should
have a lighter engineering load so that students can get a broader liberal
arts education. “The abilities of engineers to move into other areas … [is]
limited by the narrowness and inward-looking nature of their education,”
King says in a paper titled “
Engineers Should Have a College Education,” on the
Berkeley center’s Web site. A version of the essay appeared in the summer
2006 edition of Issues in Science and Technology. “Engineering is
typically the one undergraduate area that is not subject, or is much less
subject, to the general education requirements that are common for other
undergraduates.”
Making the master’s degree the entry level degree
would open up room in the undergraduate curriculum, King said, which is now
chock full of the requisite science and engineering courses for professional
practice. King makes some very similar suggestions to those made by the
National Academy of Engineering in its 2005 report, “Educating the Engineer
of 2020,” which
calls for a more liberal education for engineers,
and greater prevalence and recognition of the worth of professional master’s
degrees. “We’re recognizing that, because of the very fast expansion of
knowledge in science and engineering,” said Richard Taber, a program officer
at the National Academy of Engineering, “there’s too much for a student to
learn in that area in a four year degree.”
But critics cite students’ past resistance to
five-year B.S./M.S. programs, and say that graduate study is often
unnecessary for engineers, and would turn many students away from
engineering altogether.
Continued in article
Many Professors Oppose Free Open Sharing of
Research Publications
Free Online Textbooks, Videos, and Tutorials ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Free Tutorials in Various Disciplines ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Edutainment and Learning Games ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Open Sharing Courses ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
The Master List of Free
Online College Courses ---
http://universitiesandcolleges.org/
"New Carnegie Mellon U. Project Will Build Online Community-College
Courses," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 14,
2009 ---
Click Here
Carnegie Mellon University is expanding its open
online-learning efforts with
a new project focused on community colleges.
The Community College Open Learning Initiative is
the second wave of an educational experiment that
gained attention recently from the Obama administration.
Carnegie Mellon's work has given about 300 classrooms
around the world access to software-enhanced, college-level online-course
material in subjects like biology and statistics. These digital environments
track students’ progress, give them feedback, and tip off professors about
where students are struggling so the instructors can make better use of
class time.
Now Carnegie Mellon plans to work with a consortium
of community colleges to set up four "high gatekeeper" courses, defined as
classes that have poor success rates but are important to getting degrees.
The goal is to raise completion rates by 25 percent in those courses. The
courses will be team-designed by community-college faculty experts,
scientists who study how people learn, human-computer-interaction
specialists, and software engineers.
Carnegie Mellon says its approach is efficient, but
the tracking-intensive model has also
raised questions about student privacy.
Candace Thille, director of the Open Learning
Initiative, said the community-college project had secured $4.5-million.
Multiple foundations are backing the effort, but Ms. Thille declined to
identify all of them. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has supported
Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative since 2002.
When the Open Learning Initiative began, the idea
was to offer students outside Carnegie Mellon online courses that gave them
a shot at learning the same information a traditional course would convey,
but without an instructor. Researchers have also studied a hybrid mode,
meaning online teaching combined with some classroom time, though less than
in a traditional course. Results showed that students in the hybrid course
"successfully learned as much material in half the time," according to an
overview of the Community College Open Learning Initiative proposal that was
provided to The Chronicle.
The community-college project intends to use the
hybrid style.
Because of work and family responsibilities,
community-college students' schedules are often less flexible than those of
students in residential four-year colleges, Ms. Thille said. Blended
learning gives community-college students more flexibility, she said, and it
has the potential to keep them in classes they might otherwise have to drop
"because life got in the way."
The new project involves partnerships with a
variety of associations and state systems in North Carolina, West Virginia,
Kentucky, and Washington. The proposal calls for reaching 40
community-college partners within three years.
Bob Jensen's threads on various universities that freely share course
materials, video lectures, and entire courses are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Past and future of the SSRN
From Jim Mahar's blog on June 16, 2006 ---
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/
SSRN interview with PrawfsBlawg
via Financial Rounds
Since I get so much material from them, giving
SSRN a plug is the least I can do.
Prawfsblog has an interesting interview with
Gregg Gordon of SSRN. Probably interesting mainly to academics, but....
On look-in:
SSRN was founded in 1994 by Michael Jensen
and Wayne Marr to provide an efficient means to distribute scholarly
research. Our motto, Tomorrow’s Research Today,
drives what we do every day. Tomorrow’s Research
Today means rapidly distributing research worldwide enabling
researchers around the world to be on the cutting edge of new ideas.
Read the entire interview
here.
Thanks to
FinancialRounds for pointing it out!
Bob Jensen Comment
The SSRN home page is at http://www.ssrn.com/
Since I am such a huge fan of open sharing, a major disappointment for me is
that SSRN became a huge business operation charging fees per download or for
annual subscriptions. Many professors who previously would not charge to send
copies of their working papers for free now refer students and other interested
researchers to the fee-based SSRN. SSRN does provide a useful service, but it
has been at the expense of free open sharing. In fairness, the SSRN has become a
free site for some announcements and news.
June 17, 2006 reply from Jagdish S. Gangolly
[gangolly@INFOTOC.COM]
Bob,
I agree with your comment about huge business
operation.
I am not a particularly enthusiastic fan of SSRN
(the profit thing bothers me, and the fact that it is not comprehensive of
all SS disciplines also bothers me).
I am a fan of
1.
http://www.arxiv.org/
2.
http://www.archive.org/index.php
3.
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/
Perhaps the model in 1 or 3 could be emulated much
better in Accounting.
It is difficult to marry openness and profit motive
(except in successful marriages in humans).
Regards,
Jagdish
Many scientists oppose open access publishing
At first glance, it seems that the research world
is united against the
Federal Research Public Access Act. Scholarly
associations are lining up to express their anger over the bill, which would
have federal agencies require grant recipients to publish their research papers
— online and free — within six months of their publication elsewhere. Dozens of
scholarly groups have joined in two letters — one organized by the
Association
of American Publishers and one by the
Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.
To look at the signatories (and the tones of the letters),
it would appear that there’s a wide consensus that the legislation is bad for
research. The cancer researchers are against it. The education researchers are
against it. The biologists are against it. The ornithologists are against it.
The anthropologists are against it. All of these groups are joining to warn that
the bill could undermine the quality and economic viability of scholarly
publishing.
Scott Jaschik, "In Whose Interest?" Inside Higher Ed, June 15, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/06/15/open
"Free for All: National Academies Press Puts All 4,000 Books Online at
No Charge," by Josh Fischman, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2, 2011
---
Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/free-for-all-national-academies-press-puts-all-4000-books-online-at-no-charge/31582?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
This includes such things as books on education assessment and incentives,
dietary assessments, health books, and Medicare geography.
Some Disciplines, Especially in Business
Research,
Do Not Encourage Replication
Question
In science it is somewhat common for published papers to subsequently be
withdrawn because the outcomes could not be replicated.
In the history of
accounting research has any published paper ever been "withdrawn" or “retracted”
because the results could not be replicated?
"Columbia researcher retracts more studies," The New York
Times via PhysOrg, June 15, 2006 ---
http://www.physorg.com/news69601046.html
A Columbia University researcher has reportedly
retracted four more scientific papers because the findings could not be
replicated.
Chemistry Professor Dalibor Sames earlier this year
retracted two other papers and part of a third published in a scientific
journal, The New York Times reported Thursday. All of the papers involved
carbon-hydrogen bond activation research.
Although Sames is listed as senior author on all of
the papers, one of his former graduate students -- Bengu Sezen -- performed
most of the experiments, the Times said.
Sames said each experiment has been repeated by at
least two independent scientists who have not been able to replicate the
results.
Sezen, a doctoral student in another field at the
University of Heidelberg in Germany, disputed the retractions, questioning
whether other members of Sames's group had tried to exactly repeat her
experiments, the newspaper said.
The retraction of one paper, published in the
journal Organic Letters in 2003, appeared Thursday, while the three others
published in The Journal of the American Chemical Society in 2002 and 2003
are to be formally retracted later this month, the Times said.
Jensen Comment
What's disappointing and inconsistent is that leading universities pushed
accounting research into positivist scientific methods but did not require that
findings be verified by independent replication. In fact leading academic
accounting research journals discourage replication by their absurd policies of
not publishing replications of published research outcomes. They also do not
publish commentaries that challenge underlying assumptions of purely analytical
research. Hence I like to say that academic accounting
researchers became more interested in their tractors than their harvests.
My threads on the dearth of replication/debate and some of the reasons top
accounting research journals will not publish replications and commentaries are
at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen//theory/00overview/theory01.htm#Relication
Appearance Versus Reality of Trustee/School Kickbacks
One of the most common reality is that trustees who run portfolio investment
firms become trustees to steer a portion of the school's endowment to their
companies. The connections can be direct or extremely circuitous.
All to often members of the boards of trustees of colleges and school boards
of K-12 schools serve for business reasons (typically to steer business their
way) rather than for purposes of ethically guiding the institutions. Sometimes
these kickbacks are highly illegal. Sometimes they are not illegal but they are
unethical and are frowned upon if details are exposed to the public. For
example, institutions commonly, albeit secretly, promote insurance, legal,
personal finance, computer, or travel business of a trustee. These arrangements
sometimes entail questionable and unmentioned kickbacks such as a kickback to
the school for every trip booked with a trustee's travel agency or every
insurance policy written with an employee, student, or alumnus. One of the more
subtle examples is where a school or alumni association promotes a credit card
without revealing that the school gets a kickback every time the user makes a
payment to the credit card company. Often these kickback arrangements are
established without a trustee being involved, but all too often a trustee has
guided the school into such arrangements.
Stanford University paid more than $2 million in
legal fees to a firm headed by a Stanford trustee, The San Francisco Chronicle
reported. While Stanford defended the arrangement and it is not illegal, it is
the type of apparent conflict of interest that for-profit companies increasingly
try to avoid, the newspaper reported.
Inside Higher Ed, July 3, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/03/qt
Are conflicts of interest and kickbacks among college "trustees" the norm
or the exception?
But Adelphi’s trustees had never voted on his
compensation; only a small committee even knew the details. Adelphi even
concealed the largesse from the Internal Revenue Service for five years,
incurring an $11,500 fine. The Regents also found conflicts of interest
involving two trustees, including the former board chairwoman. Her insurance
company was found to have gotten $1.2 million in fees for handling Adelphi’s
accounts.
"University Enjoys a Renaissance After 90’s Strife," by Bruce Lambert, The
New York Times, September 5, 2006 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/04/nyregion/04adelphi.html
Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Appearance Versus the Reality of Research Independence and
Freedom
Nearly 40 percent of the scientists conducting hands-on research at the
National Institutes of Health say they are looking for other jobs or are
considering doing so to escape new ethics rules that have curtailed their
opportunity to earn outside income.
"Ethics Rules Send NIH Scientists Packing," PhysOrg, October 30, 2006
---
http://physorg.com/news81396442.html
Most scientists say the ethics crackdown is too
severe, and nearly three-quarters of them believe it will hinder the
government's ability to attract and keep medical researchers, according to a
survey commissioned by the government's premier medical research agency.
The tightened rules were put in place last year
after NIH found dozens of scientists had run afoul of existing restrictions
on private consulting deals that had enriched them with money from drug and
biotechnology companies.
Outside income from such companies is now banned.
NIH also is placing greater restrictions and disclosure requirements on
employees' financial holdings.
"Of course we are concerned when any employees are
saying they might consider leaving as a result of a change of policy," said
Dr. Raynard Kington, the agency's principal deputy director. But he said in
a telephone interview Friday that the survey results are muddy because they
combine both those actively seeking to leave and those thinking about it.
Continued in article
College Researchers With Conflicts of
Interest
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.)
released a report Wednesday that he said
showed that researchers at several universities who advised the U.S. Education
Department on its Reading First program had “significant financial ties to
education publishers while they held Reading First positions that required them
advise and provide technical assistance to States and school districts about
which reading programs to chose and how to implement them.”
Inside Higher Ed, May 10, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/05/10/qt
Stanford's Medical School Faculty May Not Accept Gifts from Drug
Companies
The Stanford University Medical Center on Tuesday
announced that it would ban all gifts from drug companies to physicians
affiliated with the university. The policy comes amid growing concern about
ethics experts that these gifts inappropriately influence medical care and
research.
Inside Higher Ed, September 13, 2006
For details
Click Here
Jensen Comment
This poses very serious dilemmas. How far should this go from free coffee to
travel expenses to a corporate-funded conference to an endowed chair? I think
the Stanford ban is still pretty low level, but it does raise questions as to
how far these bans should go.
Should there be any KPMG Professors, Ernst & Young Professors, IBM Scholar
Faculty, and yes even BMW Professors (the most highly endowed chairs in the
nation)? Clemson University now has an entire BMW research and education
engineering program! Should computer science programs be denied free software
from Apple Corporation or free hardware from Hewlett-Packard?
Should
humanities professors accept personal royalties from publishing firms?
Should business schools also ban research money and hardware/software from
corporations and accounting firms and the entire finance/banking industry?
Should law schools ban research funding from law firms? Should engineering
schools ban corporate research grants? Should social science researchers be
denied research funding and hardware/software tools from corporate foundations?
Or is this just a unique problem in medical schools? An even in the latter case,
will this impede technological progress in medical research? Will it drive top
medical researchers out of universities and into industry? There could be
serious losses to medical education in the latter case if the top scholars bail
out of faculty positions!
At the moment I think Stanford's medical faculty may not drink coffee at a
student reception hosted by Pfizer, but I suspect the Medical School would
willingly accept a $500 million gift for a new Pfizer Building filled with
Pfizer Teaching and Research Faculty.
Now that free Pfizer cup of coffee --- that's just, well, too dangerous to
research independence!
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm
"Medicine In Conflict: There is more concern than ever that
doctors are blurring the lines between objective science and financial gain,"
by Arlene Weintraub and Amy Barrett, Business Week, October 23, 2006 ---
Click Here
On Oct. 22, some 5,000 physicians will convene in
Washington for five days of discussions about high-tech heart treatments.
Representatives of more than 160 medical- device companies also will be
there to promote their valves, catheters, and stents. This annual confluence
of medicine and commerce is carefully choreographed, but still, things don't
always go as planned.
In September, 2004, with thousands of doctors at
the conference watching live by satellite on giant screens, a cardiologist
in Milan inserted an experimental heart valve into a gravely ill patient.
Suddenly the patient's heart began to fail. For 45 minutes the stunned
audience watched a series of desperate life-saving attempts, until finally
the satellite transmission was cut. The patient died later that day. "It was
harrowing," says Dr. Martin B. Leon, the New York heart specialist who
started the influential conference 18 years ago. "That was a very difficult
thing for us."
Leon's anguish over the incident remains palpable,
but he also had a financial interest in seeing the valve work. He co-founded
the small company that invented the device. That company was sold to Edwards
LifesciencesEdwards Lifesciences llcEW just a few months before the device
was used in the televised procedure. The deal netted Leon $6 million in
cash, plus the chance to earn an additional $1.5 million if the product
achieved certain milestones, one of which related to the number of patients
successfully treated.
Did Leon's financial stake in the experimental
device play a role in its being promoted at an important conference where he
is the most prominent figure? "Absolutely not," Leon says. The question, he
adds, "borders on being offensive." Nevertheless, he now wonders whether the
technology was refined enough to be ready for prime time.
As Leon prepares for this year's conference, he
does so amid renewed anxiety over the mixing of medical and corporate
interests. Spurred by widespread concern that industry money has too much
influence on patient care, the nation's leading medical institutions are
reining in doctors. In May, the Cleveland Clinic tightened its conflict-of-
interest procedures after ties between device companies and prominent
doctors there came to light. Several top academic medical centers have
ordered physicians not to accept even trivial company giveaways. "We don't
think about whose pen we're holding or who bought us that last pizza, but it
creates influence," says Dr. P.J. Brennan, chief medical officer of the
University of Pennsylvania Health System.
Leon's career illustrates the potential conflicts
that have become commonplace and are prompting the new rules. The doctor,
who traces his choice of profession to the day his grandmother died in his
arms after a heart attack, is chairman of the Cardiovascular Research
Foundation in New York. The foundation uses donations and fees from medical
device companies to stage Leon's annual conference, called Transcatheter
Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT). A professor of medicine at Columbia
University, he has helped start a handful of cardiac device companies
through a corporate "incubator" he co-founded. He also has served as a paid
scientific adviser for several other startups. Over the years, companies to
which he has had close ties have been featured prominently at TCT, creating
at minimum a perception that the companies' products are favored for reasons
other than medical merit.
Continued in article
When Professors Accept Research Money from Questionable Sources
Last week, news reports surfaced that Patrick J.
Michaels,
a research professor of environmental sciences
at the University of Virginia, and Virginia’s state climatologist, is
receiving money from coal-burning utility companies pleased with his public
skepticism about global warming.
David Epstein, "Helping a Global Warming Skeptic," Inside Higher Ed,
July 31, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/31/warming
Question
Study finds tea more healthy than water, but was this a truly independent study?
"Tea seen as healthier than water," PhysOrg, August 25, 2006 ---
http://physorg.com/news75646716.html
British researchers say consuming tea is healthier
than drinking water not only for hydration but for other benefits.
User rating 2.8 out of 5 after 8 total votes Would
you recommend this story? Not at all - 1 2 3 4 5 - Highly They recommend
drinking three or more cups of tea a day, the BBC reports.
The findings by health nutritionist Dr. Carrie
Ruxton and colleagues at Kings College London appears in the European
Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
The BBC report said the study helps dispel the
popular notion tea dehydrates. It said tea not only re-hydrates as well as
water, but claimed it also protects against heart disease because of its
health-promoting flavonoids, which helps prevent cell damage.
Ruxton said tea replaces fluids and also contains
antioxidants.
"Studies on caffeine have found very high doses
dehydrate and everyone assumes that caffeine-containing beverages dehydrate.
But even if you had a really, really strong cup of tea or coffee, which is
quite hard to make, you would still have a net gain of fluid," she said.
"Also, a cup of tea contains fluoride, which is good for the teeth."
The BBC report said the Tea Council provided
funding for the work, but Ruxton said the study was independent.
"Simply Disclosing Funds Behind Studies May Not Erase Bias," by
Shirley S. Wang, The Wall Street Journal, August 4, 2006; Page
A11---
http://online.wsj.com/article/science_journal.html
Think you can't be bought for the
price of a pen? Neither do most people. But we can be notoriously poor at
judging ourselves, and our honesty, psychologists say.
For example, biomedical researchers
reprimanded for failing to disclose financial ties to companies whose drugs
or medical devices they study seem baffled over what they did wrong.
In the past few weeks, several top
journals have published corrections noting that authors of papers failed to
reveal they had served as paid consultants or speakers for companies whose
products they studied, often receiving thousands of dollars. Such conflicts
of interest are emerging as a major concern in research.
Studies show that even small gifts
create feelings of obligation, and that those feelings can influence
subsequent decisions, so why do many researchers feel they're immune to
conflicts of interest?
Just as we fool ourselves into
thinking we're more ethical, kind and generous than we are, so scientists
can be blind to the very real possibility that their work is inappropriately
influenced by financial ties. These psychological processes usually operate
so subtly that people aren't aware that such ties can bias their judgment.
Receiving gifts and money creates the
desire, often unconscious, to give something back, says Max Bazerman of
Harvard Business School. Even small gifts can have an influence. Charities
that send out free address labels, for example, get more in donations than
those that don't. Customers who are given a 50-cent key chain at a pharmacy
spend substantially more in the store.
Conflicts can be hard to recognize,
because "cognitive bias" comes into play. "The mind has an enormous ability
to see the world as we want," says Dr. Bazerman.
We are more likely to scrutinize
information when it's inconsistent with how we want to see things, something
psychologists call motivated skepticism. If a study about an anticipated new
drug is sponsored by the manufacturer, "we don't kick into a higher gear of
criticism," says psychologist David Dunning of Cornell University. "We just
accept the findings" if they are positive, without digging too hard for
possible flaws in methodology or statistics.
Studies of psychiatric drugs by
researchers with a financial conflict of interest -- receiving speaking
fees, owning stock, or being employed by the manufacturer -- are nearly five
times as likely to find benefits in taking the drugs as studies by
researchers who don't receive money from the industry, according to a review
of 162 studies published last year in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
Studies that the industry funded, but in which the researchers had no other
financial ties, didn't have significantly different results than nonindustry-funded
studies.
Studies can be designed in ways that
boost the likelihood that results will come out a certain way, says Lisa
Bero of the University of California, San Francisco. A new treatment can be
compared with a placebo, instead of with a treatment already in use, making
finding a significant statistical difference between the two more likely.
Dosage and timing of medications, which make a big difference in their
effectiveness and side effects, can also be manipulated, she says.
While studies in reputable journals
are reviewed by experts in the field prior to publication, data require
interpretation, which opens the door to subjectivity. If the numbers don't
show an overall benefit of a drug, for instance, scientists with financial
ties to the company might dig deeper to find one, perhaps to one small
group, say, white women over 50 years of age.
Because it's rare for studies to show
that one variable clearly causes an outcome, there's always room for doubt.
Conflicted individuals, says Prof. Bazerman, "continue to have doubts long
after objective observers are convinced by the evidence," as when some
tobacco executives refused to admit that smoking is related to risk of
cancer.
But simply disclosing financial ties,
as many journals require of authors, may not help. In fact, it may make
things worse. For one thing, readers don't know how much, if at all, a
conflict has skewed the reported results.
In a 2005 experiment done by
Harvard's Daylian Cain and colleagues, volunteers were given advice about
how much money was in a jar of coins. In some cases, the advisers were
unconflicted, and the volunteers used the advice to make good guesses about
the coins (which they saw only fleetingly and from a distance). In other
cases, the advisers had a monetary incentive to overestimate the value of
the coins. The volunteers knew this, and adjusted the advice downward. But
they didn't adjust enough, and overestimated the value.
Disclosure poses another problem: It
may unconsciously tempt researchers to exaggerate their findings or put an
even more pro-company spin on their data to counteract the expected reader
skepticism. "If disclosure encourages you to cover your ears, it makes me
shout louder," Dr. Cain says.
"Let the Chips Fall Where They May," Mark Shapiro, The Irascible
Professor, June 28, 2006 ---
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-06-28-06.htm
Political interference in academic research
seems to be on the rise lately. We have seen this in the recent attempts
to harass and intimidate researchers in such diverse fields as climate
change and medicine whose results conflict with a particular political
philosophy or ideology. The latest attempt to discredit the results of
scientific research that uncovers uncomfortable facts is not in the
cutting edge areas of global warming or stem cell research, but in the
rather mundane area of forest management.
This time it's an Oregon State University
graduate student in forestry who has been hauled before a congressional
committee to defend research that has proven to be a bit uncomfortable
for some in the logging industry. The graduate student, Daniel Donato,
discovered that salvage logging following a forest fire can hinder the
regrowth of the forest.
For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the
finer points of forest management, salvage logging refers to the process
of cutting down the dead trees that remain after a forest fire for
commercial use. Salvage logging, which accounts for about one-third of
the timber sales from national forests, is based on the assumption that
clearing the burned over land of dead trees then replanting it with
seedlings is the best way to help the forest recover. Donato and his
team examined areas that were burned in the Biscuit Fire that raged
through Rogue River - Siskiyou National Forest in southern Oregon two
years before the research was carried out. Donato's group found that in
burned areas where no salvage logging had taken place there was abundant
natural regrowth, while in areas that had been logged the number of
seedlings per acre was much less. In addition, Donato's team found that
in areas where salvage logging took place there was a substantial amount
of fallen timber from the logging operations that remained on the forest
floor. This material could fuel future fires.
Much of the area that was burned in the Biscuit
Fire is rugged and roadless. Salvage logging there is carried out mostly
by helicopter. Logging crews are brought in by helicopter and the cut
timber is removed by helicopter. This is difficult and costly work, and
there is no incentive to remove slash timber that has little economic
value. It also is more efficient and profitable to cut all the dead
timber in a burned over area and then replant it than it would be to
thin the standing dead wood and let natural regeneration take place.
Ordinarily, the one-page research note that
Donato's group published on their work in an online edition of the
journal Science would have gathered scant notice. After all, it was a
study that was limited both in scope and duration, and the conclusions
were hardly earthshaking. However, their publication sparked a firestorm
of criticism because it came just as logging industry interests were
pressing for the passage of a bill that would ease federal regulations
on salvage logging in national forests. Some of those interests were
well connected both politically and to the leadership of the College of
Forestry at Oregon State University. The Dean of the college, Hal
Salwasser, is a former U.S. Forest Service official who publicly
supported the salvage logging bill, which was sponsored by Greg Walden
(R, OR) and Brian Baird (D, WA). The college, itself receives
substantial support from the logging industry, and recently had received
a $1 million donation from the wife of the founder of Columbia
Helicopters - a company that is heavily involved in salvage logging and
had a strong interest in the passage of the bill. Columbia Helicopters
and its executives, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times, also
had donated $22,000 to Representative Walden.
Dean Salwasser and senior faculty members in
the OSU College of Forestry attempted to discredit the Donato group's
research, going so far as to attempt to prevent publication of the work
in the print edition of Science. The Bureau of Land Management briefly
pulled funding from Donato's project, and Representatives Walden and
Baird hauled Donato before a congressional field hearing in Oregon to
explain his results. Oregon State Senator Charlie Ringo made public
several email messages from Salwasser to logging industry
representatives that showed he was firmly in their camp.
To his great credit Donald Kennedy,
Editor-in-Chief of Science and former president of Stanford University,
refused to be intimidated. According to the Los Angeles Times, Kennedy
stated that "It certainly was an attempt at censorship..." He decided to
run the paper by Donato's group because it presented "sound,
peer-reviewed research on a subject of considerable interest."
Donato's critics have responded that they were
not attempting to censor the work, but were just responding to what they
viewed as shoddy and incomplete research. In particular, they have
raised questions about the statistical analysis in the Donato paper.
Donato's group countered that six independent statisticians have
examined their methods and have supported their conclusions. (Science is
planning to publish the critique of Donato's work along with a response
from Donato's group.)
The important point that seems to have been
lost on the politicians and the industry representatives is that
disputes over the validity of scientific results need to be addressed in
the setting of a peer-reviewed journal such as Science rather than in
congressional hearings.
Academic researchers like Donato and his group
who provide objective information on politically charged issues often
find themselves under attack from all sides. In this case they ended up
in the middle of a dispute between environmentalists who would like to
ban all salvage logging, and industry interests whose livelihood depends
on logging. Objective research results can help to inform policy
debates, and in this case could lead to sound forest management
practices. However, academic researchers who provide objective
information need to be able to gather and present this information
without interference from vested interests on either side. Deans and
other university officials have an obligation to support that kind of
independence. Unfortunately, it's not so easy to maintain that
independence when the powerful interests that are pressing the
politicians to pass legislation favorable to them also are funding
academic institutions.
"Charities Tied to Doctors Get Drug Industry Gifts," by Reed
Abelson, The New York Times, June 28, 2006 ---
Click Here
Although outside researchers raised questions
about the study's conclusions, the doctor betrayed little doubt. "We
believe these results challenge current medical practice and
recommendations," said Dr. Costanzo, who predicted many patients might
benefit.
Dr. Costanzo did disclose to the audience that
she was a paid consultant with stock in the device's maker, a Minnesota
company called CHF Solutions. But she omitted another potentially
important detail: CHF Solutions was also one of the largest donors to
the nonprofit research foundation that had overseen the study. The
company contributed about $180,000 in 2004, according to the
foundation's federal filings.
Nor did she note that the nonprofit entity, the
Midwest Heart Foundation, was in turn an arm of the thriving for-profit
medical group outside of Chicago where Dr. Costanzo and more than 50 of
her fellow doctors treat heart patients — in many cases using products
and drugs made by CHF Solutions and other big donors to their charity.
Although the CHF Solutions device has generally been slow to catch on,
physicians at Dr. Costanzo's medical group have treated many patients
with the company's filtration system.
The Midwest Heart Foundation, and the way it
has become quietly interwoven into its doctors' professional lives, is
far from unique. Around the country, doctors in private practice have
set up tax-exempt charities into which drug companies and medical device
makers are, with little fanfare, pouring donations — money that adds up
to millions of dollars a year. And some medical experts see that as a
big problem.
The charities are typically set up to engage in
medical research or education, and the doctors involved defend those
efforts as legitimate charitable activities that benefit the public. But
because they operate mainly under the radar, the tax-exempt
organizations represent what some other doctors, as well as regulators
and industry consultants, say is a growing conduit for industry money.
The payments, they say, can bias the treatment decisions of physicians,
may lead to suspect research findings and at times may even risk running
afoul of anti-kickback laws.
Federal officials are starting to take notice
of such tax-exempt charities, which critics say are becoming
increasingly popular as other forms of industry support to physicians —
like lucrative consulting agreements that involve little actual work —
have come under scrutiny from regulators and others worried about the
potential conflicts.
The potential for abuse by these charities is
clear, critics say. "It obviously sets a fertile ground for conflict of
interest and misuse of funds," said Dr. Robert M. Califf, vice
chancellor for clinical research at Duke University Medical Center.
The charities at issue are not philanthropies
like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that dispense grants for
medical research but remain independent of any one group of doctors or
medical practice. Instead, the charities drawing scrutiny are set up by
doctors in private practice and are closely linked to those doctors'
for-profit medical groups.
The Midwest Heart Foundation, which has
received millions of dollars from medical industry donors, including the
drug makers Amgen and AstraZeneca, and the Cordis and Scios units of
Johnson & Johnson, says it stands behind its charitable work, which
currently involves about 30 studies and dozens of doctor-education
lectures each year.
Dr. Mark Goodwin, a managing partner for the
Midwest Heart for-profit practice, said the foundation was created to
help prevent potential conflicts by keeping the industry money separate
from the doctors' private practice. Companies contribute to the
foundation, he said, because they can rely on its research and the
doctors involved can enroll large numbers of patients in studies. "We
are able to deliver excellent research to our community in a timely
fashion," Dr. Goodwin said, "and we are proud of it."
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Question
Do industry ties always have to be disclosed to peer-reviewed journals?
"Think Before You Research," by David Epstein,
Inside Higher Ed, July 17, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/17/faseb
Do industry ties always have to be disclosed to
peer-reviewed journals? What stipulations should researchers put up with in
return for money from the private sector?
These are just a few of the questions that the
Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology wants institutions
and researchers to consider.
The federation released a report,
“Shared Responsibility, Individual Integrity: Scientists Addressing
Conflicts of Interest in Biomedical Research,”
which offers some ethical guidelines that FASEB hopes will spur widespread
discussion and that might eventually lead to consensus on some ethical
issues.
“This will be an unending issue for us,” said Leo
Furcht, president of FASEB, who has been both a researcher, a physician, and
an entrepreneur, and is head of the department of laboratory medicine and
pathology at the University of Minnesota Medical School. “The vast majority
of researchers want to do the right thing, if they know what the right thing
is but … some of the conflicts are not obvious.”
Though FASEB officials acknowledged the
impossibility of rooting out all improprieties in biological research, they
said that more clearly stated principles could go a long way in
strengthening public trust in medical research, even as researchers embrace
and often seek funding or consulting work with companies.
Among the 19 “guiding principles” in the FASEB
report are: “Investigators shall not use federal funds to the benefit of a
company, unless this is the explicit purpose of the mechanism used to fund
the research,” and “Mentors and institutions should make trainees aware of
their rights and responsibilities in industry relationships.”
Guiding principle number nine — “Investigators
shall be aware of and adhere to individual journal policies on disclosure of
industry relationships” — is particularly timely.
Last week, the Journal of the American Medical
Association printed a note telling readers that many of the 13 authors
of a study published in February, which showed that pregnant women who go
off antidepressants can slip back into depression, have ties to drug
companies, including antidepressant manufacturers, which they did not
disclose. It’s the second time in two months that JAMA has had such
an experience with unreported conflicts.
In a letter to JAMA, the researchers
defended their work, saying that industry interests did not influence the
work, and that because it was funded by the government, they did not think
they had overlooked relevant disclosures.
A study by Harvard Medical School researchers,
which was published in JAMA in May, found that about half of medical
studies are now funded entirely by for-profit entities, and that such
clinical trials are more likely to find a positive benefit from whatever
drug or treatment is being tested.
Furcht said that many conflict of interest
questions remain in a gray area, like how much equity, if any, a researcher
should take in a company that funds research at their institution. “We think
there needs to be a greater consensus,” Furcht said. He added that the
attitude often taken is that “laissez faire is fine as long as it
works out,” but that it is not fine right now. “We have fallen short of
where we need to be.”
Robert Palazzo, president-elect of FASEB and
director of the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, said that the medical research community
is “relatively naïve about this terrain.”
Last August, some researchers showed their apparent
naïveté in a
Seattle Times investigation. Some researchers told
the paper that they didn’t see a problem with sharing their impressions of a
clinical trial — for which they had signed a confidentiality agreement —
with select clients from investment firms prior to the completion and public
dissemination of the study. The Securities and Exchange Commission and at
least one of the institutions home to one of the researchers named began
investigations immediately after the article appeared.
Furcht, who said he holds 30-40 patents, said that
researchers also need to learn the ins and outs of the patent process so
they don’t hurriedly make public results that could be patented and used to
bring money to a university. Furcht recalled an assistant professor who
published, without a patent, the discovery of a new signaling pathway in
detecting whether prostate tumor cells are metastatic.
Palazzo echoed one of the guiding principles in the
report when he emphasized the need for student protection. Confidentiality
and pre-publication review stipulations made by corporate funders can delay
or restrict a graduate student’s ability to publish, and hence to complete
their degree. “There has to be clarity that the student needs to be
protected,” Palazzo said. “It’s not something that pops into a junior
professor’s mind when there’s a chance for funding.”
Some institutions have been proactive in outlining
principles for years. Harvard’s Medical School has a comprehensive set of
guidelines
originally drafted in the 1980s, and reviewed every
8-10 years. A Harvard spokesman said that all researchers have to fill out a
formal conflict of interest form every 12-18 months, and that if the forms
show a conflict, Harvard insists that the researcher divest.
Question
What donations to Harvard have been halted or put on hold to date since the
"forced" resignation of Lawrence Summers as President?"Summers's
Supporters Withhold $390 Million From Harvard," by Zachary Seward, The Wall
Street Journal, July 13, 2006; Page B1 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115275908764105412.html?mod=todays_us_marketplace
The fallout from Lawrence H. Summers's resignation
as president of Harvard University has now hit the school's pocketbook,
impairing the largest fund-raising operation in higher education.
At least four major donations to Harvard, totaling
$390 million, have been scrapped or put on hold since Mr. Summers announced
his resignation in February, according to people familiar with the matter.
The donors, who were supportive of
Mr. Summers and elements of his vision for Harvard, have separately
indicated that they won't contribute while the university is without a
permanent leader. Under attack from arts and sciences faculty, Mr. Summers
left office on June 30, and was succeeded on an interim basis by a former
Harvard president, Derek C. Bok.
A Harvard official wouldn't comment
on specific donations. "It is quite normal in situations of leadership
transition in any not-for-profit organization for donors who are considering
very major gifts to wait for a new leader to be in place before finalizing
and announcing a major commitment," said Donella Rapier, Harvard director of
development.
Ms. Rapier said Harvard's fund
raising in fiscal 2006, which ended June 30, "continued to be quite strong
into the fourth quarter," but said she didn't have year-end numbers yet.
Three of the withheld gifts would
have been the largest in Harvard's history. They included $100 million from
media mogul Mortimer Zuckerman to fund a neuroscience institute that has
generated intense interest among Harvard researchers, and $100 million from
Richard A. Smith, a former member of Harvard's governing board, to fund a
500,000-square-foot science complex planned for a new campus in Boston's
Allston neighborhood.
At least one of the contributions was
to be announced this spring: $75 million from David Rockefeller, the banker
and philanthropist, to fund study-abroad trips for every Harvard
undergraduate in need of financial assistance, a key element in Mr.
Summers's plan to expand Harvard's global scope. Instead, Mr. Rockefeller
downgraded his gift to $10 million, announced in May, for Harvard's existing
Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.
![[Donor Dissent]](http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/images/MK-AG660A_HARVA_20060712191619.gif)
Also, as previously reported, Oracle
Chief Executive Larry Ellison recently reneged on a $115 million gift,
citing Mr. Summers's departure.
The lost contributions amount to
two-thirds of what Harvard raised in fiscal 2005, when the school was the
third-largest fund-raiser in higher education. It's unclear exactly how
close some of the gifts were to materializing, but all had been in
negotiations for several years, said people familiar with them.
Even for Harvard, which led all U.S.
universities with a $25.9 billion endowment as of June 30, 2005, the loss of
such huge gifts could be seen as a significant setback. Adding to the blow,
the gifts were to fund initiatives -- from study abroad to scientific
research -- at the very top of the university's priorities.
The donor reaction may make other
universities with smaller endowments think twice before casting off
controversial presidents with strong alumni followings, and may elevate the
impact of graduates in future power struggles at U.S. colleges between
administrators and faculty.
Mr. Rockefeller declined to comment
on his negotiations with Harvard. His spokesman, Fraser Seitel, said, "Mr.
Rockefeller regrets that Larry Summers won't be leading Harvard in the
future, but he continues to have great confidence in the university, and he
does look forward to working with the new president when he or she is
named."
Continued in article
Question
Why is forcing the resignation of Larry Summers costing Harvard $115 million
(what would have been Harvard's largest philanthropic donation in history)?
Lawrence J. Ellison, chief executive of the
Oracle Corporation and one of the world's wealthiest people, has decided not
to donate $115 million to Harvard as he announced he would last year, the
company confirmed yesterday. Harvard had planned to use the donation, which
would have been the largest single philanthropic donation the university had
ever received, to establish the Ellison Institute for World Health, a
research organization devoted to examining the efficiency of global health
projects. Mr. Ellison decided to cancel his plans for the donation after the
resignation in February of Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard,
amid a storm of controversy.
Laurie J. Flynn, "Oracle Chief Withdraws a Donation to Harvard," The New
York Times, June 18, 2006 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/28/business/28donate.html
Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Appearance Versus Reality in Church Dogma and Education Integrity
Question
Why are Baptist colleges increasingly cutting ties with the church?
“The future of Baptist higher education has rarely been
more fragile,’’ R. Kirby Godsey, the former president of Mercer University in
Macon, Ga., said in a speech in Atlanta in June. The Georgia Baptist Convention
voted last November to sever ties with Mercer. The issues vary from state to
state. But many Southern Baptist colleges and their state conventions have been
battling over money, control of boards of trustees, whether the Bible must be
interpreted literally, how evolution is taught, the propriety of some books for
college courses and of some plays for campus performances and whether cultural
and religious diversity should be encouraged. At the root of the conflicts is
the question of how much the colleges should reflect the views of their
denomination. They are part of the continuing battle among Southern Baptists for
control of their church’s institutions.
Alan Finder, "Feeling Strains, Baptist Colleges Cut Church Ties," The New
York Times, July 22, 2006 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/education/22baptist.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
America’s Best Churches Ranked by U.S. News: A Spoof, by
Charlie Clark, Inside Higher Ed, November 30, 2007 ---
http://insidehighered.com/views/2007/11/30/clark
Bloomberg's 2015 Ranking of the Top MBA Programs ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-best-business-schools/?cmpid=BBD102015_BIZ
Jensen Comment
This is nicely presented in a table that lets you compare how rankings differ
under the component criteria. For example, the Booth Business School at the
University of Chicago comes in at an overall Rank 2. It 's Number 1 in terms of
employer ranking and in job placement. However, it came in at Rank 29 in terms
of the alumni survey. Stanford is at Rank 1 in terms of alumni but is Rank 21 in
terms of job placement.
The US News rankings of Top MBA programs can be found at
http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-business-schools/mba-rankings
I think US News relies more on rankings submitted by business school deans.
Accordingly we would expect US News to be more influenced by the reputations of
faculty, especially research reputations.
The Bloomberg rankings illustrate what I call a systemic vegetable
nourishment problem of rankings on the basis of multiple criteria ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
Tesla Slides Stock Price Slides as Consumer Reports Ends Model S
Recommendation (due to lack of reliability) ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-20/tesla-plunges-after-consumer-reports-ends-model-s-recommendation?cmpid=BBD102015_BIZ
...
Tesla Motors Inc. fell the most in more than two
months after Consumer Reports said the Model S luxury electric car fell from
its recommended list because of below-average reliability.
Continued in article
"Let's Talk about Academic Integrity, Part I: BI (Before the Internet),"
by Tracy Mitrano, Inside Higher Ed, August 16, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/law-policy-and-it/lets-talk-about-academic-integrity-part-i-bi-internet
Possibly the Worst Academic Scandal in Past 100 Years: Deception
at Duke
The Loose Ethics of Co-authorship of Research in Academe
In general we don't allow faculty to have publications ghost written for
tenure and performance evaluations. However, the rules are very loose regarding
co-author division of duties. A faculty member can do all of the research but
pass along all the writing to a co-author except when co-authoring is not
allowed such as in the writing of dissertations.
In my opinion the rules are too loose regarding co-authorship. Probably the
most common abuse in the current "publish or perish" environment in academe is
the partnering of two or more researchers to share co-authorships when their
actual participation rate in the research and writing of most the manuscripts is
very small, maybe less than 10%. The typical partnering arrangement is for an
author to take the lead on one research project while playing only a small role
in the other research projects
Gaming for Tenure as an
Accounting Professor ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTenure.htm
(with a reply about tenure publication point systems from Linda Kidwell)
Another common abuse, in my opinion, is where a senior faculty member with a
stellar reputation lends his/her name to an article written and researched
almost entirely by a lesser-known colleague or graduate student. The main author
may agree to this "co-authorship" when the senior co-author's name on the paper
improves the chances for publication in a prestigious book or journal.
This is what happened in a sense in what is becoming the most notorious
academic fraud in the history of the world. At Duke University a famous
cancer researcher co-authored research that was published in the most
prestigious science and medicine journals in the world. The senior faculty
member of high repute is now apologizing to the world for being a part of a
fraud where his colleague fabricated a significant portion of the data to make
it "come out right" instead of the way it actually turned out.
What is interesting is to learn about how super-knowledgeable researchers at
the Anderson Cancer Center in Houston detected this fraud and notified the Duke
University science researchers of their questions about the data. Duke appears
to have resisted coming out with the truth way to long by science ethics
standards and even continued to promise miraculous cures to 100 Stage Four
cancer patients who underwent the miraculous "Duke University" cancer cures that
turned out to not be miraculous at all. Now Duke University is exposed to quack
medicine lawsuit filed by families of the deceased cancer patients who were
promised phone 80% cure rates.
The above Duke University scandal was the headline module in the February 12,
2012 edition of CBS Sixty Minutes. What an eye-opening show about science
research standards and frauds ---
Deception at Duke (Sixty Minutes
Video) ---
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57376073/deception-at-duke/
Next comes the question of whether college administrators operate under
different publishing and speaking ethics vis-à-vis their faculty
"Faking It for the Dean," by Carl Elliott, Chronicle of Higher Education,
February 7, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/says-who/43843?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
Added Jensen Comment
I've no objection to "ghost writing" of interview remarks as long as the ghost
writer is given full credit for doing the writing itself.
I also think there is a difference between speeches versus publications with
respect to citations. How awkward it would be if every commencement speaker had
to read the reference citation for each remark in the speech. On the other hand,
I think the speaker should announce at the beginning and end that some of the
points made in the speech originated from other sources and that references will
be provided in writing upon request.
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism and cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism and cheating by professors ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
College Ranking Issues in the Media
Universities Fabricating Data to Improve Media Rankings ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2018/01/rankings-scandal-unfolds-at-temple-business-school.html
Collegiate Fibbing to US News Can Be Expensive ---
Federal Judge Approves $5.5 Million Settlement In Temple U.S. News Rankings
Scandal ---
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2019/01/federal-judge-approves-55-million-settlement-in-temple-us-news-rankings-scandal-.html
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Challenge to B-School Rankings: 21 scholars publish call to reject
popular measures and ordinal rankings -- and to replace them with more
meaningful tools for comparisons ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/05/12/business-scholars-and-adminsitrators-pubilsh-call-move-away-current-rankings-systems?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=7c7662c4c7-DNU20170512&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-7c7662c4c7-197565045&mc_cid=7c7662c4c7&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Abstract of the Study ---
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/deci.12274/full
I've not read the full article.
Jensen Comment
One possible erroneous conclusion is that the proposed alternate set of rankings
will make the rankings less subjective. Since others' opinions (such as opinions
of B-School deans, alumni, recruiters, etc.) nearly always play a major role in
popular B-School rankings (such as US News, the WSJ, and Bloomberg rankings) the
traditional rankings are aggregations of highly subjective opinions.
It appears that the proposed alternative rankings will focus on a larger
number of specific criteria than the popular traditional rankings that tend to
be heavily influenced by broad criteria such as "research reputation" and
"admission standards."
The biggest problem when it comes to subjective rankings is that the rater
(say a business school dean at a state university) may be very familiar with a
peer set of 20 state universities but have very little knowledge of other sets
of B-school programs like those of MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Oxford,
Cambridge, Dartmouth, Wharton, Rice, etc. that are assumed to be near the top of
the rankings because of the halo-effects of the prestige reputations of the
entire university where each assumed prestigious B-School resides. Dean X at
California State University may know almost nothing about business studies at
Oxford University, but since it's at Oxford the Oxford business program has to
be great.
I'm dubious about having raters (like business school deans) ranking over
200+ B-School programs on 20 or more criteria about which they know almost
nothing for most of the schools they are ranking. For example, it's one thing to
rate the the a Dean at California State rank Harvard Business School higher than
the Tuck Business School on the broad criterion of "research" but it's quite
another matter to compare Harvard with Tuck in more detailed dimensions if the
rater knows very little about relative performance of those programs on those
criteria.
Reducing rankings to numerical scores on criteria can be even more
nonsensical. For example, comparing the rejection rate as a percentage of total
number applications to a program is complete nonsense. Most potential applicants
to a highly prestigious MBA program don't take the time and trouble to even
bother to apply to such a program feeling that there is almost zero chance of
being accepted. If the University of Texas MBA Program has a higher
rejection rate than the Tuck Business School rejection rate it would not
surprise me because hundreds of applicants to UT's MBA program did not even
apply to the Tuck Business School.
Teaching Case from The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on May 12, 2017
Business Schools Take a Stand Against Academic Rankings
by:
Kelsey Gee
May 09, 2017
Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com
TOPICS: Accounting
SUMMARY: A
research paper to be published in the May 2017 edition of the Decision
Sciences Journal has sparked a renewed effort on the part of business
schools to thwart the annual ranking process conducted by Bloomberg
Businessweek, the Financial Times, the Economist and others. The article
currently is available for early view and download on the Decision Sciences
web page at
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/deci.12274/full The
paper's 21 authors "weigh in on the issues," by discussing costs imposed on
schools by the ranking procedure, shifts evident in institutional data used
for rankings, and arguments for re-consideration of the entire process.
Shortcomings in the ranking process, they say, stem "...from the
conceptualization and the architecture of comparisons, and are evident in
survey designs, data collection methods, and data aggregation
procedures...." The authors propose minimum requirements for "...a socially
responsible, transparent, flexible, and highly representative rating (vs.
ranking) approach...." (Bachrach et al. 2017) Citation Bachrach, D. G.,
Bendoly, E., Beu Ammeter, D., Blackburn, R., Brown, K. G., Burke, G.,
Callahan, T., Chen, K. Y., Day, V. H., Ellstrand, A. E., Erekson, O. H.,
Gomez, J. A., Greenlee, T., Handfield, R., Loudder, M. L., Malhotra, M.,
Petroni, K. R., Sevilla, A., Shafer, S., Shih, M. and Voss, D. (2017), On
Academic Rankings, Unacceptable Methods, and the Social Obligations of
Business Schools. Decision Sciences, forthcoming. doi:10.1111/deci.12274
CLASSROOM
APPLICATION: The
article may be used in any class to discuss graduate school options.
QUESTIONS:
1. (Introductory) What entities rank business schools?
2. (Advanced) What factors are considered in ranking business
schools? Cite your source for this information.
3. (Introductory) What are the arguments in favor of ranking business
schools, effectively distilling a lot information in to one number (the
school's rank)?
4. (Introductory) What are the arguments against the ranking
procedure?
5. (Advanced) Are you considering a graduate program? Would rankings
influence the schools that you consider applying to?
Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island
"Business Schools Take a Stand Against Academic Rankings," by Kelsey Gee,
The Wall Street Journal,
May 9, 2017 ---
https://www.wsj.com/articles/business-school-rankings-stir-new-rancor-1494331202?mod=djem_jiewr_AC_domainid
Deans and faculty at more than 20
universities urge others not to participate in the process
Business-school deans and research
faculty at more than 20 universities are taking a stand against the academic
rankings published by media outlets such as Bloomberg Businessweek, Nikkei
Inc.’s Financial Times and the Economist Group.
Rather than “acquiesce to methods of
comparison we know to be fundamentally misleading,” the administrators are
urging their peers at other schools to stop participating in a process they
say rates programs on an overly narrow set of criteria.
The plea, issued by deans and faculty
from institutions including University of Southern California’s Marshall
School of Business, University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business and the
University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, comes in the
form of a research paper to be published in the May edition of the Decision
Sciences Journal.
The researchers examine the approaches
used by media outlets to aggregate different factors like admitted students’
test scores and tenured faculty on a school’s payroll into a single number,
arguing that the process oversimplifies the array of reasons students pursue
business degrees.
The debate over rankings is hardly
new, but the recent rancor comes as schools battle declining enrollment in
two-year M.B.A. programs, compounding pressure on the institutions to tout
the benefits of one of America’s priciest degrees.
Business-school deans
and research faculty at more than 20 universities are taking a stand against
the academic rankings published by media outlets such as Bloomberg
Businessweek, Nikkei Inc.’s Financial Times and the Economist Group.
Rather than “acquiesce
to methods of comparison we know to be fundamentally misleading,” the
administrators are urging their peers at other schools to stop participating
in a process they say rates programs on an overly narrow set of criteria.
The plea, issued by
deans and faculty from institutions including University of Southern
California’s Marshall School of Business, University of Iowa’s Tippie
College of Business and the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler
Business School, comes in the form of a research paper to be published in
the May edition of the Decision Sciences Journal.
The researchers examine
the approaches used by media outlets to aggregate different factors like
admitted students’ test scores and tenured faculty on a school’s payroll
into a single number, arguing that the process oversimplifies the array of
reasons students pursue business degrees.
The debate over rankings
is hardly new, but the recent rancor comes as schools battle declining
enrollment in two-year M.B.A. programs, compounding pressure on the
institutions to tout the benefits of one of America’s priciest degrees.
With sticker prices as
high as $200,000 in tuition, an M.B.A. is “likely among the most expensive
purchases these students will make in their lives,” says Francesca Levy, an
editor at Bloomberg who oversees business-school coverage. “There’s big
value in holding schools to the same standard and measuring them against the
same, transparent criteria so students can make a better informed decision.”
Co-author of the
research paper Elliot Bendoly, an associate dean at Ohio State University’s
Fisher College of Business, disagrees. “If the goal is to help inform
[students] about how to make the best decision about business schools, let’s
give them the raw information, and not take numbers—which may or may not be
relevant to the student—and bungle them together into a ranked list,” Mr.
Bendoly says.
Continued
in article
Bob Jensen's threads on ranking controversies ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
Forbes: Best Value Colleges 2017 By Region: Northeast, West, Midwest
And South ---
https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinconklin/2017/04/26/best-value-colleges-2017-by-region-the-best-in-the-northeast-west-midwest-and-south/#12f694494737
Consumers Are Getting Plucked: Why
America Pays 50% More for Chicken ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-28/is-there-a-vast-conspiracy-to-overcharge-you-for-chicken?cmpid=BBD092816_BIZ
Frequently Asked Questions about US
News Rankings ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/rankings-faq
. . .
19. How does U.S. News handle for-profits
in the rankings?
All regionally accredited for-profit institutions are included in U.S.
News' data collection efforts. Among them are many schools that have large
online
bachelor's degree programs.
Any for-profit college or university that grants
bachelor's degrees, is regionally accredited and meets the specific U.S.
News ranking criteria to be included in the Best Colleges rankings can be
ranked. However, as a result of the U.S. News eligibility standards, almost
all of the for-profit institutions have been grouped with the unranked
schools.
Why? Their bachelor's degree candidates are largely nontraditional
students in degree completion programs, for example, or they don't use SAT
or ACT test scores in admissions decisions – both of which are factors U.S.
News uses to decide if a school is eligible to be ranked.
20. How does U.S. News handle schools that refuse to respond to
the U.S. News annual statistical survey, given that many of them are still
included in the rankings?
Nonresponders are still included in the rankings if they are eligible to
be ranked. For schools that were eligible to be ranked but refused to fill
out the U.S. News statistical survey in the spring and summer of 2015, we
have made extensive use of the statistical data those institutions were
required to report to the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for
Education Statistics. That includes such factors as SAT and ACT scores,
acceptance rates, number of faculty, and graduation and retention rates. We
also use data from other sources, such as the Council for Aid to Education
(for alumni giving rates) and the National Collegiate Athletic Association
(for graduation rates).
How to Use the Rankings
1. What is the best way for students and their parents to use the
rankings?
Students can use the rankings to create an initial list of schools to
consider, to narrow down that list and to compare overall academic quality.
Students can also use the data underlying the rankings to identify schools
with specific characteristics that they value.
However, the editors of U.S. News believe rankings are only one of many
criteria students should consider in choosing a college. Simply because a
school is top in its category does not mean it is the top choice for
everyone. The rankings should not be used as the sole basis to choose one
school over another.
A prospective student's academic and professional ambitions, personal
preferences, financial resources and scholastic record, as well as a
school's size, cost, programs, atmosphere and location, should play major
roles in determining a college choice.
Moreover, it is crucial to remember that schools separated by only a few
places in the rankings are extremely close in academic quality.
[Get more information on
how to use the rankings.]
2. How can I find the rank
of a particular school?
U.S. News publishes the rankings in two places: in a college guidebook,
"Best Colleges 2016,'' and on this website, which also offers the
U.S. News College Compass – home to the most
complete rankings and data. The guidebook is available for purchase at
newsstands, by calling 1-800-836-6397 or by visiting the
U.S. News store. For discounts on bulk orders of
50 or more copies, please contact
booksales@usnews.com.
Continued at
http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/rankings-faq
US News: 2015 Best Online Bachelor's
Programs ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings?int=a2bb09&int=a56509
- Penn State University World Campus
- Daytona State College
- University of Illinois Chicago
- Western Kentucky University
- Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University—Worldwide
- Oregon State University
- Colorado State University Global Campus
- Arizona State University
- Ohio State University --- Columbus
- Pace University
- Others ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings?int=a2bb09&int=a56509
US News: 2015 Best Online Graduate
Education Programs ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
1. University of Houston
2 .Florida State University
3. Northern Illinois University
4. Penn State University World Campus
5. Central Michigan University
Graceland University
University of Nebraska --- Lincoln
8. Auburn University
Ball State University
George Washington University
11. Creighton Unversity
Emporia State University
Michigan State University
Others ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
US News: 2015 Best Online MBA
Programs
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba
1. Indiana University (Kelly)
Temple (Fox)
University of North Carolina ---
Chapel Hill
4. Arizona State University (Carey)
University of Florida (Hough)
6 . University of Texas --- Dallas
7. Carnegie-Mellon University (Tepper)
Penn State University World
Campus
9. North Carolina State University (Jenkins)
10. Auburn University
US News: 2015 Online Higher Education
Search Engine ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education
Bob Jensen's threads on Rankings Controversies ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HIGHerEdControversies2.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
Best Business Schools 2014 according to US News ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/rankings#5?campaign_id=DN040414
Click on the Blue Tabs for "Graduate (182 schools),"
"International (non-USA)," and "Undergraduate
(186 schools)"
Top Accounting Undergraduate Programs Ranked by US News (most now have
masters in accounting programs as well)---
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/business-accounting
AACSB-accredited programs that also have specialized accounting
accreditations as well ---
http://www.aacsb.edu/en/accreditation/accounting/
Top Accounting MBA in Accounting Specialty Programs Ranked by US News
http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-business-schools/accounting-rankings
If we were to just rank the
accounting doctoral programs in terms of research performance the
rankings might be quite different from the rankings shown above for MBA
specialty and Master of Accounting Programs ---
http://www.byuaccounting.net/rankings/univrank/rankings.php
US News Best Undergraduate Business Programs ---
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/business-accounting
Many of these top programs are much more affordable than those chosen by The
Accounting Degree Review.
Guide to Online Community Colleges ---
http://www.affordablecollegesonline.org/online-colleges/community-colleges/
Jensen Comment
Online community college courses are good for things like training certificates
and associate degrees. However, for students wanting four-year and graduate
online courses, there are usually better alternatives such as the ones listed
below.
The Best 50 Colleges for African Americans ---
http://time.com/money/4282512/best-colleges-essence-money-african-americans/?xid=newsletter-brief
Jensen Comment
Virtually all the very top non-profit universities now offer totally free
education applicants below the poverty line. Most also offer free tuition for
children of families earning less than $60,000 or thereabouts. These are the
best deals since top grades are easy to earn in those
universities like Harvard and Princeton (think grade inflation where the
median grades in most courses is an A or A-) and degrees from those top
universities are keys to the kingdom ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#RateMyProfessor
Most flagship state-supported universities now make terrific deals to African
Americans with high SAT or ACT scores. Since virtually all scholarships are need
based children from low income families are given priorities for scholarships.
African American athletes get tremendous financial deals, special tutors, and
other attractions such as a path toward professional sports in colleges that
excel in athletics. However, athletics and scholastic performance do not mix
well in general. This is mostly because athletics takes so much time and
attention away from courses, although sometimes athletes have attitude problems
regarding study and scholarship.
Since the latest affirmative action Supreme Court decision, colleges are not
supposed to have affirmative action in admissions and retention. Most colleges
and universities get around this ruling in one way or another to both attract
and keep African American applicants. But the numbers are still too small,
especially for African American male high school dropouts who think they can
earn higher incomes on the mean streets. That is such a shame.
One reason is that it's such a shame is that African American graduates in
science and professional programs have a tremendous edge in affirmative action
hiring and financial support for graduate studies. The AICPA, for example,
offers $12,000 per year for minority accounting doctoral students. Accounting
doctoral programs generally are tuition free for all students in such programs
such that the $12,000 can be used for living expenses.
Application period now open (until May 16) for $12,000 AICPA Fellowship for
Minority Doctoral Students Other Than Asians ---
https://www.thiswaytocpa.com/education/scholarship-search/fellowship-minority-doctoral-students/?utm_source=mnl:cpald&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14Apr2016
Applicants should also contact the KPMG Foundation for additional opportunities
to study for an accounting Ph.D. ---
http://www.kpmgfoundation.org/
Some universities cooperating with the KPMG Foundation have tailor-made
accountancy Ph.D. programs for minority students other than Asians.
Bloomberg: Best Undergraduate Business Schools of 2016 ---
http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-best-undergrad-business-schools/?cmpid=BBD041916_BIZ&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=
. . .
We
based our ranking on four main metrics
(see full methodology):
Employer Survey (40 percent of total score):
Feedback from recruiters who hire recent business graduates on how well
schools prepared students for jobs at their companies.
Student Survey (35 percent):
Students' own ratings of the campus, career services department, and
faculty and administrators.
Starting Salary (15 percent):
The base compensation of students who had jobs lined up, adjusted
for salary variation across industries and regions.
Internship (10 percent):
The percentage of a school’s graduates who had at least one internship at
any time during college.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The Bloomberg rankings differ from surveys like the reputed US News
survey that depend more heavily upon deans and thus more heavily on research
reputations of faculty in the business school rankings. Also I think US News
relies more heavily on SAT or ACT scholastic test scores ---
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/business-overall
Some of Bloomberg's top 10 undergraduate programs do not make the top 10 in the
US News rankings.
For example, Bloomberg gives top 10 undergraduate business school honors to
Villanova, Boston College, and Bentley that are not in the US News top
10.
Accounting programs are probably best viewed at the graduate level where most
employment takes place. I don't think Bloomberg ranks accounting schools, but
the latest outcomes from US News are at
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/business-accounting
Here we see some key differences in the top 10 accounting schools versus
undergraduate business schools such as with USC, Illinois, and Florida.
Interestingly, MIT comes off the top ranking in accounting vis-a-vis business
rankings. Personally, I don't think MIT's claim to fame is its undergraduate
accounting program relative to other Boston accounting programs such as those at
Boston College and Bentley. MIT comes off ranked at Number 2 in the US News
Undergraduate business school rankings ---
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/business-overall
USA Today: Ten Top Accounting Programs ---
http://college.usatoday.com/2016/02/26/top-colleges-for-accounting/
. . .
1. Bentley University
The accountancy department is the oldest department
at Bentley University, and has a long tradition of providing a high-quality
accounting education. Classes in cost accounting, auditing, financial
accounting and information technology help to provide a core understanding
of the business world and the role accounting plays in it. Accounting is one
of the most popular majors in the school, and it is no wonder as graduates
are often highly successful in their careers, earning an average starting
salary of $51,000 and mid-career salary of $99,000.
2. University of Notre Dame
The Mendoza College of Business at the University
of Notre Dame is a top-tier business school, combining a liberal arts
education with advanced knowledge and research in accounting to provide
students with a strong understanding of the field.
Students take specialized classes in strategic cost
management, audit and assurance services and federal taxation among others
to help develop critical thinking and leadership skills. Graduates of the
accountancy program have a solid grasp of the field and find careers within
the accounting industry earning an average mid-career salary of $119,000.
3.
Bryant University
Founded in
1863, Bryant University has a strong
history of producing professionals who
are leaders in the field. Its accounting
program is no exception.
Classes in
leadership, financial reporting,
taxation, auditing and management
introduce students to the business
world, while improving communication and
analytical skills. Graduates of this
program have a dynamic understanding of
accounting and are prepared for a career
in a challenging field. They typically
earn an average
starting salary of $52,000
and mid-career salaries of $80,000.
4. New York
University
The
Leonard N. Stern School of Business
at New York
University offers two different
undergraduate degrees in accounting, one
with an emphasis in C.P.A., and the
other less technical in nature. The
second option allows students to blend
liberal arts classes with core business
and accounting classes to give them a
broad education in the field.
A B.S in
accounting from Stern leads to a high
average starting salary of $65,000.
Graduates of this
program often progress to positions of
leadership, earning an average
mid-career salary of $114,000.
5.
University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign
Accounting is a
global field that plays a core role in
all business functions. A degree from
the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign will prepare you for a
successful career at any organization.
The
undergraduate program
is centered on
preparing graduates for a career in a
variety of accounting fields, ranging
from corporate to governmental.
Students are
exposed to the fundamental principles of
accounting, while learning how to apply
current best business practices. The
curriculum integrates liberal arts
classes with core business classes in
management, finance and analytics to
create an environment that enhances
critical thinking skills. Graduates of
this program have been highly successful
in the business world, earning an
average mid-career salary of $100,000.
6.
University of Southern California
The Marshall
School of Business at the University of
Southern California houses the
distinguished Leventhal School of
Accounting. This undergraduate
accounting program is one of the best in
the country due to the exclusivity of
the program. Students study the art of
accounting, while understanding the role
it plays in business. They have the
ability to customize their major, so
they are taking classes that prepare
them for quick advancement in the
business world.
Classes in
finance, economics and management help
promote discussions about accounting
practices, while supplementing classes
on accounting principles.
USC graduates of the accounting program
earn an average starting salary of
$55,000, but typically advance quickly,
to an average mid-career salary of
$110,000.
7. The
University of Texas-Austin
In addition to
offering a Bachelor of Business
Administration (BBA) in accounting, the
McCombs School of Business at the
University of Texas also has an
integrated Master
in Professional Accounting (iMPA)
program
that allows strong students to earn both
an BBA and MPA in five years.
Students can
choose a corporate track or a financial
institutions track, depending on their
desired career plans. Upon graduation,
accounting majors typically accept jobs
in industry or government with an
average starting
salary of $51,000.
8. CUNY
Bernard M. Baruch College
The Zicklin
School of Business at CUNY Bernard M
Baruch College is a highly-ranked
business school with a reputation of
providing a quality accounting
education. The school attracts top
faculty that have developed a curriculum
that exposes the relationship between
accounting and other crucial business
practices.
Students take
core classes in cost accounting,
financial accounting, auditing and
taxation along with electives in areas
such as corporate finance and business
law. A degree from Baruch leads to
well-paying jobs, with graduates earning
an average mid-career salary of $89,000.
9. Boston
College
Boston College
is a top school known for its strong
curriculum and the success of its
graduates. The accounting department
holds the same reputation due to its
world-class faculty and collaborative
classes.
Accounting
majors take their core business classes
in finance, taxation, economics,
analysis and auditing at the Carroll
School of Management. They are given the
option to specialize in Accounting,
Accounting Information Systems or
Corporate Reporting. Each of these
concentrations is challenging and
prepares graduates for rewarding careers
in a variety of accounting services,
earning an average mid-career salary of
$109,000.
10.
Villanova University
The Villanova
University School of Business offers an
accountancy program that prepares
students for careers at business firms,
corporations and governmental
organizations. The school has a dynamic
curriculum that incorporates theory and
principles with exposure to current
business practices. This gives students
the opportunity to gain a well-rounded
business education and secure jobs after
graduation.
Classes in
accounting, auditing and taxation are
supplemented by electives in areas such
as fraud, international accounting and
accounting for real estate.
Villanova graduates
are well-equipped
for an accounting career, earning an
average starting salary of $55,000 and
mid-career salaries averaging $107,000.
US News Ranking of Top Accounting Undergraduat Programs ---
http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-business-schools/accounting-rankings
|
#1
Overall Score:
|
University of Texas—Austin (McCombs)
Austin, TX |
$32,298 per year (in-state,
full-time); $48,832 per year
(out-of-state, full-time) |
|
#2
Overall Score:
|
University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
Philadelphia, PA |
$62,424 per year (full-time)
|
|
#3
Overall Score:
|
University of Illinois—Urbana-Champaign
Champaign, IL |
$21,974 per year (in-state,
full-time); $32,974 per year
(out-of-state, full-time) |
|
|
|
#4
Overall Score:
|
University of Chicago (Booth)
Chicago, IL |
$61,520 per year (full-time)
|
|
#5
Overall Score:
|
Stanford University
Stanford, CA |
$61,875 per year (full-time)
|
|
#6
Overall Score:
|
Brigham Young University (Marriott)
Provo, UT |
$11,620 per year (LDS member,
full-time); $23,240 per year
(Non-LDS member, full-time)
|
|
#7
Overall Score:
|
University of Michigan—Ann Arbor (Ross)
Ann Arbor, MI |
$54,450 per year (in-state,
full-time); $59,450 per year
(out-of-state, full-time) |
|
#8
Overall Score:
|
New York University (Stern)
New York, NY |
$60,744 per year (full-time)
|
|
#9
Overall Score:
|
University of Southern California (Marshall)
Los Angeles, CA |
$51,786 per year (full-time)
|
|
#10Tie
Overall Score:
|
Indiana University—Bloomington (Kelley)
Bloomington, IN |
$25,500 per year (in-state,
full-time); $44,460 per year
(out-of-state, full-time) |
|
#10Tie
Overall Score:
|
University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill (Kenan-Flagler)
Chapel Hill, NC |
$34,015 per year (in-state,
full-time); $52,470 per year
(out-of-state, full-time)
|
Jensen Comment
The USA rankings lean toward universities in big cities where starting salaries
are somewhat higher but living costs are much higher than than say living costs
in Utah and surrounding mountain states. Exceptions include Bryant, Illinois and
Notre Dame, but these universities feed nearby urban centers.
I favor the US News report that is influenced more heavily by opinions of
administrators that, in turn, are more influenced by reputations of accounting
faculty. The US News anointed universities have more stars.
Following Starbucks' lead, JetBlue employees will now get free college
education in the online Arizona State University program
"JetBlue Will Pay Employees’ College Tuition Upfront," by Corinne Ruff,
Chronicle of Higher Education, April 18, 2016 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/JetBlue-Will-Pay-Employees-/236144?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=2c1186cfd9b341cb9c63ee9ed19e27b4&elq=ff4810688471400f82f0d34fb98b721c&elqaid=8697&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=2932
The program is the latest
company-and-college partnership
that takes cues from the Starbucks College Achievement Plan —
a program,
created in 2014, that allows employees of the coffee-shop chain to take
online classes at Arizona State University while continuing to work at the
company.
But
there’s a key difference between the JetBlue program and many other
partnerships in the Starbucks-Arizona State model.
Most of the programs either reimburse tuition costs or offer discounts,
requiring employees to foot at least some of the bill for their courses. But
JetBlue employees won’t pay anything upfront: The company will cover the
full cost of an associate degree.
To
earn a bachelor’s degree, however, students would have to cover the $3,500
capstone course at Thomas Edison State, either out of pocket or through a
scholarship.
In
August the company started a pilot version of the program with 200 employees
with at least two years’ seniority and with at least 16 credits from an
accredited college or university already in hand.
Bonny W. Simi, president of the subsidiary JetBlue Technology Ventures, says
that employees had long asked for tuition reimbursement, but that the
company wanted to go a step further and foot the whole bill.
‘Success Coaches’ Are Assigned
As interest grows
in the
unbundling of higher education
— the use of just
the learning material from the college experience — Ms. Simi says the
JetBlue program was made possible by the flexibility and affordability of
competency-based education.
"We’ve mapped out degrees so that it’s basically higher ed but stripped away
are the cafeterias, the football team, the big campuses, the dorm, and
everything," says Ms. Simi, who oversees the program. "It’s just the class."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
There are other free or highly subsidized college programs paid for by employers
such as the huge Wal-Mart program with American Public University, but the
Starbucks and JetBlue programs have the most prestigious diplomas in my opinion.
"News Analysis: Is 'Wal-Mart U.' a Good Bargain for Students?" by Marc
Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 13, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Is-Wal-Mart-U-a-Good/65933/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Following Starbucks employee education benefits with Arizona State
University,
Anthem Blue Cross offers education benefits with the University of Southern New
Hampshire
"Fiat Chrysler Offers Degrees to Employee Families
(including families of dealer employees) ," Inside Higher Ed,
November 23, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/11/23/fiat-chrysler-offers-degrees-employee-families?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=b3c3eb755f-DNU20151123&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-b3c3eb755f-197565045
"An Increasingly Popular Job Perk: Online Education,"
by Mary Ellen McIntire, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/an-increasingly-popular-job-perk-online-education/56771?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's threads on fee-based distance
education ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm
Of course there are thousands of free online education
and training courses available from prestigious universities such as Stanford,
MIT, and top Ivy League universities. But transcript credits are not free for
students who want credits for MOOCs on their transcripts. Of course prices are
much lower than onsite attendance credits ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Added Jensen Comment
What I think is the most interesting trend in what might be termed
competency-based courses and degrees is the lowering of the bar on admissions
standards. Virtually anybody can take these newer online cheaper and/or
subsidized courses with grades awarded on the basis of competency examinations
while taking the courses. In comparison, students admitted on site to
universities like Harvard and Stanford and Arizona State University face higher
admission standards. But with grade inflation in virtually all on-site campuses
(now having median grades of A-) the standards for competency are much lower, in
my viewpoint, than the competency-based online courses
via MOOCs that dare not become shams with grade inflation.
The bottom line is that the competency standard for Harvard University and
Stanford University is being admitted to study on campus. The competency
standard for getting transcript credit for their MOOC courses is . . . er . . .
er . . . demonstrated competency in the subject matter.
If you want to make a Harvard University onsite
student or an ASU onsite student wet his pants make him accept the online
competency-based tests for the course he just received an A or B grade in from
his professor on campus.
Arizona State University is now under enormous
pressure not to make the corporate-subsidized online degrees truly
competency-based and not grade-inflated shams.
Make Your Own College Rankings ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Make-Your-Own-College-Rankings/151473/?cid=inline-promo
Jensen Comment
The above custom rankings software and most major college ranking outcomes in
the media exclude for-profit universities. This is
because all for-profit universities refuse to provide performance data for
ranking systems.
"The Ever-Growing World of College Rankings," by Goldie Blumenstyk,
Chronicle of Higher Education, February 26, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Ever-Growing-World-of/190437/?cid=at
Another day, another college ranking. Or so it
seems.
Last year at least three new rankings emerged from
national publications or major companies, joining a long line of magazines
that have entered the rankings game since U.S. News & World Report
started publishing its list annually, in 1985.
With the August 2014 debut of Money
magazine’s Best Colleges, the ranks of rankers now include Kiplinger’s
Personal Finance, Forbes, and The Washington Monthly, along
with employment-focused companies like LinkedIn, which introduced its
University Rankings in October, and PayScale,
which will release its sixth annual return-on-investment ranking in March,
just before U.S. News publishes the latest edition of its Best
Graduate Schools.
And all the activity doesn’t even count the
ratings proposed by the Obama administration.
To Corbin Martin Campbell, an assistant professor of higher education at
Teachers College of Columbia University, who studies rankings, the
proliferation reflects "a bizarre paradox": There are more rankings than
ever, but "they really don’t speak to the education core of an institution."
At the same time, she notes, colleges possess "this
incredibly rich data" about learning—thanks to accreditation, curriculum
reviews, syllabus analyses, and creative ways of
assessing college teaching—that never make their
way into any kind of consumer ranking. "The public is really left wanting,"
she says.
For other rankings skeptics—and they are legion—the
proliferation is easier to understand. "It’s click bait, basically,"
contends Richard A. Hesel, principal at the Art & Science Group, a
consulting company that works in higher education.
Make Your Own College Rankings ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Make-Your-Own-College-Rankings/151473/?cid=inline-promo
How to Mislead With Statistics
So what's wrong with performance ranking systems in general?
Bob Jensen's answers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm
Sometimes I'm (slightly) Wrong
For example, I used to argue that it was virtually impossible for a teacher
scoring poorly on "course easiness" to be chosen as a top teacher on
RateMyProfessor. In general that is still true, but there are some exceptions in
the top-ranked teachers in the 2013/2014 academic year ---
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/blog/toplist/top-professors-of-2013-2014/
For example see the easiness score of Monessa Cummins ---
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=209108
In general, however, the average grade in the class is A+ for a top rated
professor who also is rated as teaching an easy course. For example, note
Kenneth Andersen at
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/blog/toplist/top-professors-of-2013-2014/
This is so typical in this era of disgraceful grade inflation ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#RateMyProfessor
From US News in 2014
Best Online Degree Programs (ranked) ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education
Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
Central Michigan is the big winner
Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs
---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
Indiana University is the big winner
Best Online Graduate Education Programs ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
Northern Illinois is the big winner
Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs
---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
Columbia University is the big winner
Best Online Graduate Information Technology
Programs ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
The University of Southern California is the big winner
Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
St. Xavier University is the big winner
US News Degree Finder ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders
US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they
don't seem to want to provide the data.
Question
What accredited law schools offer online tax LL.M. degrees?
Answer (these degrees typically take three years to complete for full-time
students unless students already have law degrees)
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/09/nine-law-schools.html
Selected Online Masters of Accounting and Masters of Taxation Programs ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm#MastersOfAccounting
Time between enrollment and graduation depends a great deal on meeting
prerequisite requirements in accountancy, and business core (including economics
and ethics). I'm biased in recommending such degrees from only AACSB-accredited
business programs, although not necessarily AACSB-accredited accounting
programs. Some of the most prestigious AACSB-accredited universities do not have
the added accountancy specialized accreditation.
A Model for Teaching About Corrections and Criticisms in Lies With Statistics
"Ranking The States From Most To Least Corrupt," by Harry Enten, Nate
Silver's 5:38 Blog, January 23, 2015 ---
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/ranking-the-states-from-most-to-least-corrupt/
Jensen Comment
The article itself is great for pointing out how corruption rankings are
misleading in this ranking that paints Louisiana and Mississippi as the most
corrupt and Oregon and Washington states as the least corrupt.
Bob Jensen's threads on ranking controversies ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
Jensen Comment
College Factual has a ranking of good accounting schools, but this is not the
list I would create for the top schools.
USA Today publicizes an accounting program ranking from College
Factual (never heard of that outfit)
http://college.usatoday.com/2014/09/01/top-10-u-s-colleges-for-an-accounting-degree/
Top Accounting Undergraduate Programs Ranked by US News ---
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/business-accounting
-
University of Texas--Austin
-
University of Illinois--Urbana-Champaign
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Jensen Comment
My own listing of the Top 10 would be much closer to the US News rankings. But I
would replace one of the above with Cornell University largely because Cornell
is in the Ivy League. Being in the Ivy League does not make its undergraduate
program better, but being in the Ivy League means that students accepted into
the university in general are in a league of their own.
Note that to sit for the Uniform CPA Examination, accounting graduates must
have 150 credits. This means they must take a fifth year, and most accounting
graduates do so by getting a masters degree in accountancy or taxation rather
than an MBA degree. Most states have require accounting courses to sit for the
CPA examination that are not available in MBA programs. MBA programs that have
accounting concentrations require that students have a set of undergraduate
accounting courses.
I should also note that when I scan the listings of employees who have been
promoted to partnerships in the largest accounting firms (often much less than
10% of the initial hires by the firms) the alma maters of those new
partners are more often than not graduated from much lower-ranked among
accounting education programs. The reason is that exceptional accounting
graduates can be found in any accounting program, and often the top partner
prospects are highly motivated and talented students from lesser-known
universities who can compete with graduates in the top universities.
"The 25 Best Universities In The World For Computer Science," by Melia
Robinson, Business Insider, October 30, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-universities-for-computer-science-2014-10
Ranking Criteria ---
http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings-articles/world-university-rankings/qs-world-university-rankings-methodology
Jensen Comment
The ranking is heavily influenced by the overall prestige ranking of the
university apart from computer science.
I would be inclined to put more emphasis on the quality of the students. For
example, it may well be that a Russian university that graduates the hackers
that upset world businesses and national intelligence agencies is really a
better computer science university in terms of having some of the most gifted
students in the world\. However, Russian Universities in general do not have
stellar academic standards and tolerate a lot of cheating on the part of
students and faculty.
The problem is that in the case of computer science and some other
disciplines like art and music, "student quality" is very difficult to measure.
Recall that Albert Einstein was not a great mathematician in school. The elusive
component is creativity.
At a conference years ago an associate dean from MIT mentioned that MIT
graduates on average will do wonderfully if the university does not get in their
way.
What are the top-ranked accounting graduate programs?
It all depends on what programs and what criteria are used for the rankings
Top Accounting MBA in Accounting Specialty Programs Ranked by US News
http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-business-schools/accounting-rankings
University of Texas—Austin (McCombs)
Austin, TX
University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
Philadelphia, PA
University of Illinois—Urbana-Champaign
Champaign, IL
University of Chicago (Booth)
Chicago, IL
University of Michigan—Ann Arbor (Ross)
Ann Arbor, MI
Stanford University
Stanford, CA
Brigham Young University (Marriott)
Provo, UT
University of Southern California (Marshall)
Los Angeles, CA
New York University (Stern)
New York, NY
University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill (Kenan-Flagler)
Chapel Hill, NC
Jensen Comment
In some ways the above rankings of MBA programs with accounting specialties are
misleading. There are some top-ranked MBA programs above that should probably be
avoided for graduates seeking careers as CPAs in auditing and taxation. All the
programs above have accounting Ph.D. programs, but the above top rankings for
MBA in accounting specialties are not necessarily the top accounting doctoral
programs.
Students seeking to pass the CPA examination and aiming for careers in
auditing and taxation should probably seek out masters of accounting or masters
of taxation programs rather than MBA programs. Brigham Young University
(Marriott) has a top-ranked masters of accounting program but no accounting
doctoral program. The University of Texas, the University of Michigan, the
University of Southern California, the University of North Carolina, and the
University of Illinois have top masters of accounting programs, MBA programs,
and Ph.D. programs.
Stanford University and the University of Chicago have prestigious MBA
programs but do not have masters of accounting programs. Students seeking to
pass the CPA examination and searching for careers in auditing and taxation
would not normally choose Stanford or Chicago.
Top Masters of Accounting Programs ---
Best Master’s in Accounting Schools According to
Professors
Here are the top ranked master’s in accounting programs in 2013 according
to the Public Accounting Report:
1. University of Texas
2. Brigham Young University
3. University of Illinois
4. University of Notre Dame
5. University of Mississippi
6. University of Southern California
7. University of Michigan
8. Texas A&M University
9. Indiana University
10. University of North Carolina
The
Public Accounting Report ranks accounting programs annually based on a
survey of accounting professors at over 200 colleges and universities.
Accounting Schools with the Highest 2013 First-Time CPA
Pass Rate
1. Brigham Young University
2. University Georgia
3. University of Wisconsin Madison
4. University of Michigan Ann Arbor
5. University of Notre Dame
6. Texas A&M University
7. University of Virginia
8. University of Texas Austin
9. Lehigh University
10. University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
These rankings are for large schools with at least 60 candidates for the
CPA exam. For all candidates in the United States, the first-time pass rate
was 54.6% in 2013 according to Nasba.org. You can find more information and
specific statistics on the
2013 NASBA Uniform CPA Examination Candidate Performance report.
If we were to just rank the
accounting doctoral programs in terms of research performance the
rankings might be quite different from the rankings shown above for MBA
specialty and Master of Accounting Programs ---
http://www.byuaccounting.net/rankings/univrank/rankings.php
While some law schools deans are facing possible jail time for fabricating
rankings data, some business school deans may also be on the docket
"Yet Another Rankings Fabrication," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
January 2, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/01/02/tulane-sent-incorrect-information-us-news-rankings
Tulane University has admitted that it sent
U.S. News & World Report incorrect information about the test
scores and total number of applicants for its M.B.A. program.
The admission -- as 2012 closed -- made the
university the fourth college or university in that year to admit false
reporting of some admissions data used for rankings. In 2011, two law
schools and one undergraduate institution were found to have engaged in
false reporting of some admissions data.
A statement issued
by Tulane said that it discovered the problem when
preparing a new set business school data for U.S. News and found
that numbers, "including GMAT scores and the number of applications, skewed
significantly lower than the previous two years. Since the school’s
standards and admissions criteria have not changed, this raised a concern
that our data from previous years had been misreported."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Years ago when I was invited to speak at Tulane, the Associate Dean of the
Business School showed me a very colorful booklet of the Top Ten MBA Programs in
the USA. It showed Tulane's MBA Program as being in the Top 10, whereas US
News did not even include Tulane in the Top 50. I asked this dean about who
did the rankings for the Tulane booklet. Without even batting an eye he admitted
that Tulane did the ranking.
Yawn
2013 US News College Rankings ---
Click Here
http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/college-rankings-blog/2013/02/28/which-universities-are-ranked-highest-by-college-officials?s_cid=rss:college-rankings-blog:which-universities-are-ranked-highest-by-college-officials
US News: Colleges Falsifying Reported Data to Obtain Higher
Media Rankings: Who, How, and Why
"FAQs on Recent Data Misreporting by Colleges," by Robert Morse, US
News, January 10, 2013
http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/college-rankings-blog/2013/01/10/faqs-on-recent-data-misreporting-by-colleges
Is this charity scalping donors?
"$6 Million Worth Of Hair Donations To Locks Of Love Have Gone Missing,"
by Megan Willett, Business Insider, May 14, 2013 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/locks-of-love-could-be-missing-hair-2013-5
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
"America's REAL Most Expensive Colleges," by Peter Jacobs, Business Insider,
July 10, 2013 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/most-expensive-colleges-in-america-2013-7
Followed by a listing of the 25 most underrated colleges that may prove to be
better buys ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/most-underrated-colleges-in-america-2013-6
Followed by The 50 Best Colleges in America ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-50-best-colleges-in-america-2012-11
University of Mary Hardin-Baylor reported an acceptance rate of 27.4
percent. It was really 89.1 percent ---
"Another College Fesses Up," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, May 15,
2013 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/05/15/another-college-admits-it-gave-us-news-incorrect-data
"Law Deans May Go to Jail for Submitting False Data to U.S. News," by
Paul Caron, TaxProf Blog, January 21, 2014 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/01/law-deans.html
A most unlikely collection of suspects - law
schools, their deans, U.S. News & World Report and its employees - may have
committed felonies by publishing false information as part of U.S. News'
ranking of law schools. The possible federal felonies include mail and wire
fraud, conspiracy, racketeering, and making false statements. Employees of
law schools and U.S. News who committed these crimes can be punished as
individuals, and under federal law the schools and U.S. News would likely be
criminally liable for their agents' crimes.
Some law schools and their deans submitted false
information about the schools' expenditures and their students'
undergraduate grades and LSAT scores. Others submitted information that may
have been literally true but was misleading. Examples include misleading
statistics about recent graduates' employment rates and students'
undergraduate grades and LSAT scores.
U.S. News itself may have committed mail and wire
fraud. It has republished, and sold for profit, data submitted by law
schools without verifying the data's accuracy, despite being aware that at
least some schools were submitting false and misleading data. U.S. News
refused to correct incorrect data and rankings errors and continued to sell
that information even after individual schools confessed that they had
submitted false information. In addition, U.S. News marketed its surveys and
rankings as valid although they were riddled with fundamental methodological
errors.
Jensen Comment
Some business schools also got caught submitting false data. One example is
Tulane where a new dean corrected the data.
While some law schools deans are facing possible jail time for fabricating
rankings data, some business school deans may also be on the docket
"Yet Another Rankings Fabrication," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
January 2, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/01/02/tulane-sent-incorrect-information-us-news-rankings
Tulane University has admitted that it sent
U.S. News & World Report incorrect information about the test
scores and total number of applicants for its M.B.A. program.
The admission -- as 2012 closed -- made the
university the fourth college or university in that year to admit false
reporting of some admissions data used for rankings. In 2011, two law
schools and one undergraduate institution were found to have engaged in
false reporting of some admissions data.
A statement issued
by Tulane said that it discovered the problem when
preparing a new set business school data for U.S. News and found
that numbers, "including GMAT scores and the number of applications, skewed
significantly lower than the previous two years. Since the school’s
standards and admissions criteria have not changed, this raised a concern
that our data from previous years had been misreported."
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on rankings controversies ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
The top 51 undergraduate business schools according to Bloomberg
Business Week (Slide Show) ---
http://images.businessweek.com/slideshows/2013-03-20/best-undergraduate-business-schools-2013#slide1
Notre Dame may be Number 2 in football, but it is Number 1 in undergraduate
business studies according to Business Week.
Note the links on the left side for such things as explanations of how the
schools were ranked and the history of such rankings.
"The 25 Colleges With The Highest SAT Scores," by Max Rosenberg,
Business Insider, April 1, 2013 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/colleges-with-the-highest-sat-scores-2013-4
How to Mislead With Statistics: Create a Denominator Effect
"W&L, Other Colleges Goose Rankings by Counting Incomplete Applications to
Shrink Acceptance Rate," by Paul Caron, TaxProf Blog, September 23,
2013 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2013/09/wapo-washington-.html
Jensen Comment
I know a Professor X who used to do something similar. Nearly 80% of his
students had an A grade going into the final. On the last day of class he handed
out teaching evaluations --- well in advance of the final examination scheduled
late in final exam week. Then in the the final exam he clobbered them with an
exam that made them happy to pass the course with any grade.
Of course, there's a difference between Professor X versus the colleges that
report incomplete applications as full applications in computing admission
acceptance rates. In the case of Professor X it did not take many semesters for
it to become widely known across campus how he was shrinking the number of top
grades in his courses. In the case of W&L and other colleges shrinking
acceptance rates it might never have become known by the media how these
colleges were fudging their acceptance rates.
"Law Deans in Jail," by Morgan Cloud and George B. Shepherd. SSRN,
February 24, 2012 ---
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1990746
Abstract:
A most unlikely collection of suspects - law schools, their deans, U.S. News
& World Report and its employees - may have committed felonies by publishing
false information as part of U.S. News' ranking of law schools. The possible
federal felonies include mail and wire fraud, conspiracy, racketeering, and
making false statements. Employees of law schools and U.S. News who
committed these crimes can be punished as individuals, and under federal law
the schools and U.S. News would likely be criminally liable for their
agents' crimes.
Some law schools and their deans submitted false
information about the schools' expenditures and their students'
undergraduate grades and LSAT scores. Others submitted information that may
have been literally true but was misleading. Examples include misleading
statistics about recent graduates' employment rates and students'
undergraduate grades and LSAT scores.
U.S. News itself may have committed mail and wire
fraud. It has republished, and sold for profit, data submitted by law
schools without verifying the data's accuracy, despite being aware that at
least some schools were submitting false and misleading data. U.S. News
refused to correct incorrect data and rankings errors and continued to sell
that information even after individual schools confessed that they had
submitted false information. In addition, U.S. News marketed its surveys and
rankings as valid although they were riddled with fundamental methodological
errors.
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating in higher education are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Business School Rankings
Hi Wes,
Thank you for this since it was a ranking I had not seen ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-best-business-schools-2012-6#
I do track rankings of other media outlets like US News, Bloomberg
Business Week, the WSJ, Forbes, and The Economist ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
This has to be the best one since Stanford comes out on top.
Just kidding of course.
It;s a helpful site in the sense that for each of the 50 ranked programs it
shows the ranks that were also given by US News, Bloomberg Business Week,
Forbes, and The Economist.
Feel free to send me some new pictures. I maintain a file on your
professional photographs.
Thanks,
Bob
"The Best Undergraduate Accounting Programs According to Tax Hiring
Authorities," Jobs in Tax, January 25, 2013 ---
http://www.taxtalent.com/mstsurvey/2013_JobsInTax_Undergraduate_Accounting_Survey.pdf
I don't like Joe's question.
It's too simplistic and demands a complicated answer.
"What Is the Best Book You Ever Read?" by Joe Hoyle, Teaching Blog,
June 23, 2012 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2012/06/what-is-best-book-you-ever-read.html
Jensen Comment
Firstly I don't like this question because many readers who answer this
question, especially in public, will be trying to say something about themselves
instead of the book. To your Mom and your kids, the best book you ever read had
better be The Bible or The Quran.
To your blog audience the best book you ever read from cover to cover had
better be Toynbee's ten-volume set ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_J._Toynbee
Secondly, such a question should be asked in one of a hundred or more
contexts. What is the best book you ever read in accounting history, financial
accounting, cost accounting, tax accounting, accounting information systems,
history of computing, learning and cognition, etc.
What is the best mystery novel you've ever read, the best romantic novel you
ever read, the best biography you ever read, and on and on and on.
Beware of those oral interviews when applying for a job or college admission
or membership in an exclusive club. Be prepared for those trick questions such
as the examples given below:
- What is your all-time favorite book?
- What are the best three books you ever read? (don't overlook the
autobiography of the founder of the company or university)
- If you could've had an intimate dinner with three people, living or dead
who would you choose and why? (this demands creative thought)
- Who was your favorite K-12 teacher and why?
- Who was your favorite athletic coach and why?
- Who was your was your favorite college professor and why?
- Who was your least favorite college professor and why?
- Who is your favorite active in an academic blog and why?
- Who is your favorite active in a non-academic blog and why?
- Who is your favorite blogger in the NYT, the WSJ, the New Yorker,
the Economist, MSNBC, CNBC, the Nation, and on and on and on?
- If you have online debates, who is your favorite antagonist and why?
- If you have online debates, who is your favorite protagonist and why?
- Who is your favorite intellectual progressive?
- Who is your favorite intellectual conservative?
In the end the choices at the top and bottom of your lists on most any topic
are just too close together to rank. And your choices are not locked in time or
place.
Conclusion
Of course my favorite set of books is Toynbee's ten-volume set.
Oops! Sorry Mom, I overlooked The Bible.
2012-2013 PayScale College (Alumni) Salary Report ---
http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report-2013
Jensen Comment
I've repeated my knee-jerk reactions to salary rankings so often that I would
elaborate on the full monte. Firstly, when making such comparisons it's best to
also have data on kurtosis and standard deviations. Secondly, there are gaps in
any university's degree offerings. For example, Princeton has no undergraduate
business school. Cornell has an undergraduate and graduate business school.
Harvard and Stanford have only graduate business programs.
As the old saying goes, size matters --- but not always in a good way. For
example, Harvey Mudd College can hardly be compared with the University of Texas
in any meaningful way because of the enormous difference in the size of each
graduating class.
Lastly, and most importantly these surveys are based on averages that have
little bearing on individual cases. It's analogous to statistics showing that
having a college degree is worth an added $20,000 per year. There are too many
individual cases where this is just not the case. I have one son and his wife
who still owe over $50,000 in student loans on top of financial demands of
raising four children. His degree in Business Administration and her degree in
Criminology have thus far not done them much good when the only jobs they can
find in California do not even require a college diploma.
"Law Deans in Jail," by Morgan Cloud and George B. Shepherd, SSRN,
February 24, 2012 ---
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1990746&download=yes
Abstract:
A most unlikely collection of suspects - law schools, their deans, U.S. News
& World Report and its employees - may have committed felonies by publishing
false information as part of U.S. News' ranking of law schools. The possible
federal felonies include mail and wire fraud, conspiracy, racketeering, and
making false statements. Employees of law schools and U.S. News who
committed these crimes can be punished as individuals, and under federal law
the schools and U.S. News would likely be criminally liable for their
agents' crimes.
Some law schools and their deans submitted false
information about the schools' expenditures and their students'
undergraduate grades and LSAT scores. Others submitted information that may
have been literally true but was misleading. Examples include misleading
statistics about recent graduates' employment rates and students'
undergraduate grades and LSAT scores.
U.S. News itself may have committed mail and wire
fraud. It has republished, and sold for profit, data submitted by law
schools without verifying the data's accuracy, despite being aware that at
least some schools were submitting false and misleading data. U.S. News
refused to correct incorrect data and rankings errors and continued to sell
that information even after individual schools confessed that they had
submitted false information. In addition, U.S. News marketed its surveys and
rankings as valid although they were riddled with fundamental methodological
errors.
Bob Jensen's threads on ranking controversies ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
There are so many business school rankings by Bloomberg Business Week that it
boggles my mind, to say nothing of the other media rankings of business schools
by U.S. News, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Economist, etc.
The above link is one of the more interesting rankings because it vividly
illustrates what I call the "Vegetable Problem of Aggregation" in the context of
accounting number aggregations at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
Take a look at how your favorite greens
stack up in the chart below:
|
Green (Raw -
per 100 g serving) |
Vitamin
A |
Vitamin
C |
Fiber |
Folate |
Calories |
|
Arugula |
2,373 IU |
15 mg |
1 g |
97 mcg |
25 |
|
Chicory |
4,000 IU |
24 mg |
4 g |
109.5 mg |
23 |
|
Collards |
3,824 IU |
35.3 mg |
3 g |
166 mcg |
30 |
|
Endive |
2,050 IU |
6.5 mg |
3 g |
142 mcg |
17 |
|
Kale |
8,900 IU |
120 mg |
2 g |
29.3 mcg |
50 |
|
Butterhead
(includes Boston and Bibb) |
970 IU |
8 mg |
1 g |
73.3 mcg |
13 |
|
Romaine |
2,600 IU |
24 mg |
1 g |
135.7 mcg |
14 |
|
Iceberg |
330 IU |
3.9 mg |
1 g |
56 mcg |
12 |
|
Loose leaf
(red, green) |
1,900 IU |
18 mg |
1 g |
49.8 mcg |
18 |
|
Radicchio |
27 IU |
8 mg |
0 g |
60 mcg |
23 |
|
Spinach |
6,715 IU |
28.1 mg |
2 g |
194.4 mcg |
22 |
|
Source: U.S.
Department of Agriculture, 1999 |
Also see
Examination of Front-of-Package Nutrition Rating Systems and Symbols ---
http://iom.edu/Activities/Nutrition/NutritionSymbols.aspx
Systemic Problem: All
Aggregations Are Arbitrary
Systemic Problem: All Aggregations Combine Different Measurements With Varying
Accuracies
Systemic Problem: All Aggregations Leave Out Important Components
Systemic Problem: All Aggregations Ignore Complex & Synergistic Interactions of
Value and Risk
Systemic Problem: Disaggregating of Value or Cost is Generally Arbitrary
While looking at the following diet
guides, it dawned on me that perhaps accounting reports should be more like food
labeling and comparison tables/charts rather than the traditional bottom line
reporting. The problem with accounting is bottom-line reporting of selective
and ill-conceived aggregates such as earnings-per-share or debt/equity. Suppose
spinach has an e.p.s. of 4.67 in comparison to 5.62 for Kale. The aggregations
all depend upon how components are measured, how they are weighted (e.g.,
Vitamin A versus Folate weighting coefficients), and what components are
included/excluded (e.g., Vitamin A is included below, but Vitamin B components
are ignored). The same is true of e.p.s. in financial reporting. The "bottom
line" depends in a complex way upon how components are measured and weighted as
well as upon what components are included/excluded.
In a similar manner, accounting
aggregations all depend upon how components are measured, weighted, and
included/excluded. Cash is measured with great accuracy whereas goodwill
impairment is highly inaccurate, thereby causing greater error range when cash
and goodwill are added together in balance sheets. Similarly, in the "New
Economy" where intangible intellectual capital is soaring in value relative to
traditional tangible assets, the intangibles left off the balance sheet may be
far more important that the combined value of everything included in the balance
sheet.
An even larger problem is that the
value and risk of diet components depend heavily upon complex and synergistic
relationships. For example, research shows that after the body hits its maximum
threshold of Vitamin C, it simply throws off the excess. Kale far surpasses
endive in Vitamin C content, but this is irrelevant in a diet overflowing in
Vitamin C from other sources such as citrus fruits. Some persons may be
allergic to components that are of greater value to other persons.
In a similar manner accounting valuations are greatly complicated by
synergistic complexities. A patent in the hands of one company may be all but
useless in the hands of another company. Indeed some companies buy up patents
just to squelch newer technology that threatens existing products. Similarly,
financial risk is not a fixed thing. It is a very dynamic threat that is based
upon all sorts of contingencies such as world events and media coverage that can
interact heavily with the level of risk at any point in time.
For similar reasons disaggregating of
values/costs is generally arbitrary. Firstly there is the famous problem of
joint production cost allocation arbitrariness noted in the early writings of
John Stuart Mill (The Principles of Political Economy) and Alfred
Marshall (The Principles of Economics). Then there is the problem of
synergistic complexities noted above. For example, suppose spinach sells for $5
per bunch. Any attempt to disaggregate that $5 into additive values of
nutrients will be arbitrary, because nutrients in combination may be worth more
or less than the sum of disaggregated values of each nutrient. This gives rise
to the systemic problem of consolidation goodwill when two or more companies are
combined into one whole.
Hi Amy,
I do not know the answer to your specific question about how to submit a
US News survey instrument.
The link you provided is a scam promotional for for-profit universities ---
http://www.businessdegreeonline.com/programs/macc-degrees/.
A better link is the U.S. News information page about online programs ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education
US News has been trying to rank online programs for some time but
encountered resistance from virtually all for-profit universities that refused
to cooperate (probably in fear of a low ranking in terms of cost and quality).
New From US News
Best Online Degree Programs (ranked) ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education
Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
Central Michigan is the big winner
Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs
---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
Indiana University is the big winner
Best Online Graduate Education Programs ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
Northern Illinois is the big winner
Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs
---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
Columbia University is the big winner
Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
The University of Southern California is the big winner
Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
St. Xavier University is the big winner
US News Degree Finder ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders
US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they
don't seem to want to provide the data.
Bob Jensen's threads on online training and education programs ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm
For Business Undergraduate Programs the rankings are at
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/faculty-credentials-training-rankings
Note the single line with a drop down box of criteria selections.
Interestingly, US News
avoids some of the systemic aggregation problems that I've discussed in other
contexts (aggregations of net earnings components and aggregations of roll
forward PPE disclosures under IFRS). The result is an "Honor Roll" that ranks
the underlying components but does not aggregate across all components ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/honor-roll-rankings
I was not familiar with Brandman University, but a search of its Website
revealed that it is a non-profit private university in the Chapman University
system.
Bob Jensen's threads on systemic
problems of aggregation ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
Systemic Problem: All
Aggregations Are Arbitrary
Systemic Problem: All Aggregations Combine Different Measurements With
Varying Accuracies
Systemic Problem: All Aggregations Leave Out Important Components
Systemic Problem: All Aggregations Ignore Complex & Synergistic
Interactions of Value and Risk
Systemic Problem: Disaggregating of Value or Cost is Generally Arbitrary
The US News online graduate
school page is at
http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools
This has a link to business graduate studies.
Note the following links:
More About Business Schools
Survey: MBA Admission Officials Uncertain About Revised GMAT
Striking the Perfect Tone in MBA Essays
Which MBA Schools Are Worth the Investment?
Fewer 2012 MBA Applications May Mean More Competition in 2013
5 Benefits of a Dual JD/MBA
Convince MBA Admissions Officials You’ve Done Your Research
5 Reasons Not to Get a Dual JD/MBA
5 Things to Weigh Before Applying to B-School
2013 Best Colleges Preview: Top 10 Business Programs
Strategize and Manage the MBA Recommendation Process
The bottom line is that For-Profit universities are excluded from the U.S.
News tables mostly because those For-Profits refuse to supply the requested data
needed to be rated among the Non-Profit universities. The huge problem for
For-Profit universities is that refusal to be evaluated further hurts graduates
of those universities in the job market.
Note that the respected magazine called The Economist from the U.K
recently revealed its own rankings of the Top 100 Onsite Programs. The
Financial Times recently came out with onsite versus EMBA global rankings.
Top Global Oniste MBA Programs from The Economist
"2012 Full time MBA ranking," The Economist, 2012 ---
http://www.economist.com/whichmba/full-time-mba-ranking
Alternate link ---
http://www.economist.com/whichmba
Top Global EMBAEducation EMBA Programs from The Financial Times
---
"EMBA ranking 2012," Financial Times, October 2012
http://rankings.ft.com/businessschoolrankings/emba-ranking-2012
There's no clear distinction between fully-online EMBA programs versus
hybrid (partly online) EMBA programs.
INote that there are other leading media rankings of the onsite MBA
programs (US News, Business Week, WSJ, Financial Times, etc) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
Really?
Business Schools With the Best Teachers Are Not Necessarily the Highest Ranked
Domestic or International Business Schools
What hurts the top-ranked business schools in terms of teaching reputations?
Hint: Think class size
But don't even mention the unthinkable: Research stress does not always
allow top-ranked business school teachers to perform at their best in
classrooms.
And don't even think the other unthinkable: Having teachers who hate
capitalism and business does not really help, especially outside the U.S.
"B-Schools With Five-Star Teachers," by Louis Lavelle, Bloomberg
Business Week, November 12, 2012 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-12/b-schools-with-five-star-teachers#r=hpt-ls
What qualities make for a great teacher? Like
beauty, that’s very much in the eye of the beholder. But in business school,
students almost universally praise certain attributes: a compelling
classroom presence, an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject, easy
availability after class, and a research record second to none.
As part of Bloomberg Businessweek’s 2012
Best B-Schools ranking, scheduled for publication on Nov. 15, we asked
recent MBA graduates to judge the quality of their business school’s
faculty. When the ranking is published, we’ll award letter grades, from A+
to C, to each of the ranked schools based on how well each program fared in
this area. The letter grades are based on an actual numerical ranking, which
we used to create the ranking below.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about this
list is that it doesn’t include any of the schools typically considered the
best of the best—including Chicago’s
Booth School of Business,
Harvard Business School, and
Wharton, which took the top three spots in our
2010 ranking. In fact, the highest-ranked school
on the “best” list is Virginia’s
Darden School of Business, which ranked 11th in
2010 and came in at No. 3 for teaching. It’s possible that Booth, Harvard,
and Wharton were the victims of high expectations. Their reputations for
excellence may be impossible to live up to. Very large classes probably
don’t help, either. All three have somewhat
crowded classrooms, with Harvard tipping the
scales at an average of 90 students in core courses.
The “worst” list is dominated by international
schools, including two
top 10 programs, No. 4
ESADE in Barcelona and No. 9 York’s Schulich
School of Business in Toronto. There does not appear to be a universal
explanation for this.
See the article itself for a ranking of business schools with the best
teachers.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-12/b-schools-with-five-star-teachers#r=hpt-ls
Jensen Question
If Indiana and Maryland universities have the best business school teachers, why
do highest GMAT applicants still prefer Chicago’s
Booth School of Business,
Harvard Business School, and
Wharton if they can swing the prices of these top ranked business schools?
- The historic halo reputations and media rankings of the universities
themselves are more important to applicants than teaching quality.
- Applicants assume that top-ranked schools have the best teachers without
really investigating such things as class size and faculty research
distractions before it's too late. And there are assorted outstanding
teachers in the top-ranked business schools.
- Classroom learning is only one component of what applicants want from a
university. Possibly even more important are the business and alumni
connections that are outstanding in the top-ranked business schools,
especially when seeking a first job or changing jobs.
- The top ranked business schools are sometimes noted for being hard work
accompanied by relatively easy grading. For example, we hear horror stories
about all the writing required each week by the Harvard Business School. But
we don't hear many complaints about the final course grades.
- Hand holding and close student-teacher relationships probably are more
important to students 18-years of age still seeking what to do with their
lives than top business school applicants averaging 27-years of age who
already have 4-5 years of college education plus experience on the mean
streets before they apply to Chicago’s
Booth School of Business,
Harvard Business School, and
Wharton.
Bob Jensen's threads on the media rankings of business schools and
accounting programs ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
Slide Show From Bloomberg Business Week, November 2012
Top B-Schools With the Highest-Paid MBAs ---
http://images.businessweek.com/slideshows/2012-11-01/top-b-schools-with-the-highest-paid-mbas
Jensen Comment
This is one of those reports where it pays to look at the variance and kurtosis
as well as a measure of central tendency (mean or median).
Also it's not clear how variable compensation (sales commissions and bonuses)
are factored in with fixed portions of salaries. For example, many of the best
entry-level jobs on Wall Street are variable, performance-based compensation
jobs.
And how are benefits factored into the study?
For example, some employees who travel most of the time don't make big
sacrifices for personal housing. I know one, for example, who uses her parent's
address for "home" since she's almost never home. In reality, she lives most of
the year in luxury hotels at the expense of her employer and dines in the finest
restaurants. Is this added "compensation?"
And note that if your NYC employer sends you to London or Los Angeles for a
long-term consulting engagement, your luxury hotel bill may be paid for seven
days a week even if you only work five days a week. This is because paying taxi
and travel expenses to bring you back to NYC every week end is more expensive
than paying your luxury hotel bill for those days when your not on the job.
Best and Worst 2012 MBA Job Placement - Job Offers Abundant, for Most -
Business Week
http://images.businessweek.com/slideshows/2012-11-01/best-and-worst-2012-mba-job-placemen
Jensen Comment
Placement data can be somewhat misleading, especially for very small programs.
For example, before Trinity University dropped its MBA program a significant
proportion of the graduates were full-time military employees. At the time San
Antonio's major employers were five military bases, two of which like Lackland
and Kelly were enormous, although many of our MBA students were medical military
from the Brooke Army Hospital. But placement of other graduates was really
problematic. Also the MBA program did not coincide with Trinity's goal of having
only full-time students in both undergraduate and graduate programs. Enrollments
and placements of full-time MBA students were weak, and the MBA program was
dropped. Later a MS program in accountancy was added after Texas passed the
150-credit rule.
The above Bloomberg Business Week link has a somewhat dubious
advertisement from Thunderbird. In that advertisement, Thunderbird rightly
claims to be the Number 1 School for Global Business in various
international-specialty rankings ---
http://www.thunderbird.edu/about-thunderbird/rankings
But Thunderbird does not even make the Top 30 in terms of the above MBA
placement rankings where Thunderbird advertises itself as being Number 1.
Question
Why do even prestigious colleges universities fudge upward when reporting
where new students ranked in their high school or undergraduate classes?
Hint
It has to do with media rankings of universities and Lake Woebegone
"Another Rankings Fabrication," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
November 9, 2012, ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/11/09/george-washington-u-admits-submitting-false-data-class-rank
George Washington University on Thursday became the
third private university this year
to admit that it has been reporting incorrect information about its new
students -- both on the university's website and
in information provided to U.S. News & World Report for rankings.
In the case of GW, the university -- for at least a
decade -- has been submitting incorrect data on the class rank of new
students. For the most recent class of new students, George Washington
reported that 78 percent of new students were in the top 10 percent of their
high school classes. The actual proportion of such students is 58 percent.
According to the university, the problem was
identified over the summer when a new provost reorganized admissions
functions, and reviewed admissions statistics. The university found that for
applicants whose high schools don't calculate ranks (a growing trend among
high schools), the university estimated the class rank, based on grades and
other factors. That policy is not permitted by U.S. News. After
finding out what had been going on with class rank, the university had an
outside audit done of all admissions data that is reported (including SAT
scores) and found no other problems.
George Washington's announcement follows the news
this year that
Claremont McKenna College and
Emory University also reported incorrect data for
years.
The guide that U.S. News sends to colleges
specifically states that the institutions -- in calculating the percentage
of students in the top 10 percent of their classes -- should include only
students for whom the information is supplied by high schools.
In an interview, Forrest Maltzman, the senior vice
provost who has been overseeing admissions since July, said that the
university believes that the submission of incorrect class rank scores
started more than a decade ago. but that the impact of this approach was
minimal at first. Over the last 10 years, more high schools have stopped
producing class ranks. Further, as GW has become more competitive in
admissions, so more admitted students would have had high class ranks (or
the grades that would have led GW to estimate that they were in the top 10
percent of their classes).
Continued in article
Accounting Program Rankings in Academe
The top ranked accounting programs do not set a
four-hit minimum number of A-Level publications for tenure. In fact the rankings
below indicate that some things are more important to program quality,
especially in the eyes of firms that hire graduates, than research and
publication records of the faculty.
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryRankings.htm
"The Best Undergraduate Accounting Programs According to Tax Hiring
Authorities," Jobs in Tax, January 25, 2013 ---
http://www.taxtalent.com/mstsurvey/2013_JobsInTax_Undergraduate_Accounting_Survey.pdf
Bob Jensen's threads on ranking controversies ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
Lake Wobegone (Illusory
superiority) Rankings of European Universities --- All of Them are Above
Average
It's like a kids' fair where everybody earns a blue ribbon
"A New European Ranking: Prizes for All!" by Ben Wildavsky, Chronicle of
Higher Education, June 13, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/worldwise/a-new-european-ranking-prizes-for-all/28377
"Law Deans in Jail," by Morgan Cloud and George B. Shepherd. SSRN,
February 24, 2012 ---
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1990746
Abstract:
A most unlikely collection of suspects - law schools, their deans, U.S. News
& World Report and its employees - may have committed felonies by publishing
false information as part of U.S. News' ranking of law schools. The possible
federal felonies include mail and wire fraud, conspiracy, racketeering, and
making false statements. Employees of law schools and U.S. News who
committed these crimes can be punished as individuals, and under federal law
the schools and U.S. News would likely be criminally liable for their
agents' crimes.
Some law schools and their deans submitted false
information about the schools' expenditures and their students'
undergraduate grades and LSAT scores. Others submitted information that may
have been literally true but was misleading. Examples include misleading
statistics about recent graduates' employment rates and students'
undergraduate grades and LSAT scores.
U.S. News itself may have committed mail and wire
fraud. It has republished, and sold for profit, data submitted by law
schools without verifying the data's accuracy, despite being aware that at
least some schools were submitting false and misleading data. U.S. News
refused to correct incorrect data and rankings errors and continued to sell
that information even after individual schools confessed that they had
submitted false information. In addition, U.S. News marketed its surveys and
rankings as valid although they were riddled with fundamental methodological
errors.
Bob Jensen's threads on media rankings of colleges and universities ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
"The Business Side of World University Rankings," by Kris Olds,
Inside Higher Ed, April 12, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/globalhighered/business-side-world-university-rankings
"The Law School System Is Broken," National Jurist, February
2012 ---
Click Here
http://www.nxtbook.com/splash/nationaljurist/nationaljurist.php?nxturl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nxtbook.com%2Fnxtbooks%2Fcypress%2Fnationaljurist0212%2Findex.php#/18/OnePage
Thank you Paul Caron for the heads up
It's a troubling trend. The total amount of debt
that has been used to pay for legal education has risen to $3.6 billion, up
from less than $2 billion just ten years prior. And if the current trends
continue, that figure could reach $7 billion by 2020.
It's not a problem that has gone unnoticed. Legal
education observers are worried, recent graduates are frantic and law
schools are looking at their options. ...
[T]here is no easy or simple answer to the problem.
... The reason for the debt is easier to understand: law school tuition
continues to outpace inflation. It increased by 74% from 1998 to 2008.
Why does tuition continue to grow? Most agree it is
related to the number of law professors walking around law school campuses
nowadays. Faculty salaries make up a majority of a law school's budget. And
law schools increased their faculty size by 40% from 1998 to 2008, according
to a National Jurist report. That meant almost 5,000 law professors were
added in 10 years, with the average student-to-faculty ratio dropping from
18.5-to-1 in 1998 to 14.9-to-1.
And why did law schools expand their faculties so
rapidly? Law has become more complex and specialized. Law schools today
offer far more course than ever before, and specializations. But critics
point out that the race to do better in the U.S. News & World Report annual
rankings has also fueled the growth.
Turkey Times for Overstuffed Law Schools ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#OverstuffedLawSchools
"Best Colleges for Return on Investment (by state)." Bloomberg
Business Week, April 2012 ---
http://images.businessweek.com/slideshows/2012-04-09/best-colleges-for-return-on-investment#slide1
Jensen Comment on these Rankings by Garbage Aggregations
Two things to note at the beginning: Firstly, this is a slide show of states in
alphabetical order. Secondly this ranking is not based on business school
education ROI. Some private universities high in the rankings like Bates and
Princeton do not even have business education programs.
In some states the rankings are based on schools having noted engineering
programs. For example, the Colorado School of Mines is rated by BBW as having
the best ROI in Colorado. Nearly all CSM graduates are engineers such that
comparing them with other colleges having no engineering programs is like
comparing automobiles to airplanes. The same can be said for claiming that the
Florida Institute of Technology has the best ROI among all the colleges and
universities in Florida. And the same can be said for the winning Georgia Tech
in Georgia.
It's meaningless to aggregate "returns" for universities that have a great
number of disciplines within those universities such as the University of
Colorado, the University of Florida, and the University of Georgia. Premed
graduates from those huge universities get a lot of return for investment
whereas for elementary education graduates the returns from those same
universities aren't so great. If those huge universities are compared with
specialized universities like the Colorado School of Mines and the Florida
Institute of Technology, the aggregated "return" calculations for huge
universities are nonsense. This is yet another example of the vegetable
nutrition systemic aggregation problem that I illustrate at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
In some states, not all, the rankings are based on prestige irrespective of
cost. For example, I doubt that Princeton would be the best ROI school in New
Jersey if Princeton's graduates were cut off by only degrees given to them by
Princeton. Instead a majority of Princeton's graduates go on to other graduate
schools (including medicine, business, and law) such that the numerator
"return" in the ROI calculation is confounded by non-Princeton variables
relative to the denominator (primarily Princeton's undergraduate tuition rate).
There are some surprising outcomes that I just do not understand. For
example, Drake University according to BBW has the highest ROI in Iowa. In
contrast, Grinnell has much larger endowment and more prestige in terms of media
rankings of private universities. Having grown up in Iowa I considered Drake to
be way below Iowa University, Iowa State University (the engineering school),
Grinnell, and many other Iowa colleges and universities. Having lived in Maine
for ten years I would never choose Bates College as leading in anything in
academics relative to the University of Maine and Bowdoin College There are
other anomalies. I have a hard time rating Washington and Lee above the
University of Virginia on most any scale..
As far as I'm concerned this is just another set of misleading rankings by
the money grubbing media.
New From US News
Best Online Degree Programs (ranked) ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education
Best Online Undergraduate Bachelors Degrees ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/bachelors/rankings
Central Michigan is the big winner
Best Online Graduate Business MBA Programs
---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/mba/rankings
Indiana University is the big winner
Best Online Graduate Education Programs ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/education/rankings
Northern Illinois is the big winner
Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs
---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/engineering/rankings
Columbia University is the big winner
Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/computer-information-technology/rankings
The University of Southern California is the big winner
Best Online Graduate Nursing Programs ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/nursing/rankings
St. Xavier University is the big winner
US News Degree Finder ---
http://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/features/multistep-oe?s_cid=54089
This beats those self-serving for-profit university biased Degree Finders
US News has tried for years to rank for-profit universities, but they
don't seem to want to provide the data.
Bob Jensen's threads on online training and education programs ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/CrossBorder.htm
"Notre Dame Tops List of Best (Undergraduate) College Business Programs,"
by Geoff Gloeckler, Bloomberg Business Week, March 20, 2012 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-03-20/notre-dame-tops-list-of-best-college-business-programs
The 2012 Rankings ---
http://www.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/ugtable_3-20.html
Bloomberg Business Week loves to rank business education programs ---
http://www.businessweek.com/business-schools/special-reports/best-parttime-business-schools-2011.html
-
With MBA students no longer assured of getting a better job at
graduation, part-time and executive programs are thriving
-
For the first time in 20 years, there's a new winner atop Bloomberg
Businessweek's rankings of the world's top EMBA programs
-
A look inside the five top part-time MBA programs in six geographical
regions
-
Tuition, enrollment, class size, and more at the 40 best executive
MBA programs
-
The top 30 U.S. programs from 2010, when Chicago, Harvard, and
Wharton dominated the list
-
Find out how top part-time MBA programs fare on post-degree salary
increases and more
-
Drill down into our data on top executive MBA programs to find out
which B-schools meet your needs
-
How do part-time MBA students rate teaching quality, classmates,
curriculum, and more? Use this tool to find out
-
Students rate top programs on how well (or poorly) they met
expectations, helped their careers, and more
-
Use this interactive table to sort 76 ranked programs on cost,
academic quality, post-MBA salary increase, and more
-
The complete ranking of 66 executive MBA programs, with details on
each program’s class profile and student evaluations of teaching
quality, curriculum, and support services
-
Track the ups and downs in the executive MBA rankings since Bloomberg
Businessweek began ranking the programs in 1991
-
IESE, Columbia, and ESADE all surged ahead on our list of the 20 top
non-degree executive education programs
-
Duke Corporate Education held on to the No. 1 spot , but there was a
reshuffling of the top 20 custom programs, with MIT falling to last
place
-
Our methodologies for ranking part-time MBA, executive MBA, and
executive education programs differ in detail but share a focus on the
end user
-
More than 1,000 in-depth statistical profiles on full-time,
part-time, executive, and distance MBA programs, non-degree executive
education programs, and undergraduate business programs
-
See how programs stack up against each other on dozens of data points
and search for those that meet your needs
-
In a recent online chat, <em>Bloomberg Businessweek</em> editors
Louis Lavelle and Geoff Gloeckler fielded questions from readers on
trends, methodology, and more
Jensen Comment
Media rankings of colleges, universities, and degree programs (like accounting)
are heavily influenced by both attributes selected as important for the
rankings, the weightings of those attributes, and the people themselves who do
the rankings. The above Bloomberg Business Week rankings are based
heavily upon opinions of alumni.
The US News rankings are based upon responses presidents, deans, or
other administrators on selected criteria. The US New Rankings probably
the rankings influenced based heavily upon research reputations of universities
and programs within universities. The non-media rankings of university programs
and faculty based upon academic studies of journal hits such as the BYU (David
Wood) studies are even more heavily based upon research publications.
The Wall Street Journal Rankings of business and accounting programs
are based upon opinions of recruiters.
The Economist rankings are based upon opinions of student applicants
based upon why they chose to apply to particular programs.
Various ranking outcomes and controversies are summarized at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
Updated BYU Study (especially David
Wood): Universities Ranked According
to Accounting Research ---
Issues in Accounting
Education, November 2010, Volume 25,
Issue 4, pp. 613-xv
http://www.byuaccounting.net/rankings/univrank/rankings.php
The
rankings presented via the links . .
. are based on the research
paper Accounting Program Research
Rankings By Topic and Methodology,
forthcoming in Issues In Accounting
Education . These rankings are based
on classifications of peer reviewed
articles in 11 accounting journals
since 1990. To see the set of
rankings that are of interest to
you, click on the appropriate title.
Each
cell contains the ranking and the
(number of graduates) participating
in that ranking. The colors
correspond to a heat map (see legend
at bottom of table) showing the
research areas in which a program
excels. Move your mouse over the
cell to see the names of the
graduates that participated in that
ranking
Jensen
Comment
I'm impressed by the level of detail in
the above BYU study,
I repeat
my cautions about rankings that I
mentioned previously about the earlier
study. Researchers sometimes change
affiliations two, three, or even more
times over the course of their careers.
Joel Demski is now at Florida. Should
Florida get credit for research
published by Joel when he was a tenured
professor at Stanford and at Yale before
moving to Florida?
There is
also a lot of subjectivity in the choice
of research journals and methods. Even
though the last cell in the table is
entitled "Other Topic, Other Material,"
there seems to me to be a bias against
historical research and philosophical
research and a bias for accountics
research. This of course always stirs me
up ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong
In
future updates I would like to see more
on accounting history and applied
accounting research. For example, I
would like to see more coverage of the
Journal of Accountancy. An example
article that gets overlooked research on
why the lattice model for valuing
employee stock options has key
advantages over the Black-Scholes Model:
"How to
“Excel” at Options Valuation,"
by Charles P. Baril, Luis Betancourt,
and John W. Briggs, Journal of
Accountancy, December 2005 ---
http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/dec2005/baril.htm
The
Journal of Accountancy and many
other applied research/professional
journals are not included in this BYU
study. Hence professors who publish
research studies in those excluded
journals are not given credit for their
research, and their home universities
are not given credit for their research.
Having
said all this, the BYU study is the best
effort to date in terms of accounting
research rankings of international
universities, accounting researchers,
and doctoral student research.
574 Shields Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave
An Appeal for Replication and Other Commentaries/Dialogs in an Electronic
Journal Supplemental Commentaries and Replication Abstracts
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
Various ranking outcomes and controversies are summarized
at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
Top 100 MBA Programs (beauty is in the eye of the beholder)
This is some good news for Chicago and New Hampshire
"2012 Full time MBA ranking," The Economist, 2012 ---
http://www.economist.com/whichmba/full-time-mba-ranking
Alternate link ---
http://www.economist.com/whichmba
|
1 |
Chicago, University of - Booth School of Business |
United States |
|
2 |
Dartmouth College - Tuck School of Business |
United States |
|
3 |
Virginia, University of - Darden Graduate School of Business
Administration |
United States |
|
4 |
Harvard Business School |
United States |
|
5 |
Columbia Business School |
United States |
|
6 |
California at Berkeley, University of - Haas School of Business
|
United States |
|
7 |
Massachusetts Institute of Technology – MIT Sloan School of Management
|
United States |
|
8 |
Stanford Graduate School of Business |
United States |
|
9 |
IESE Business School - University of Navarra |
Spain |
|
10 |
IMD - International Institute for Management Development
|
Switzerland |
|
11 |
New York University – Leonard N Stern School of Business
|
United States |
|
12 |
London Business School |
United Kingdom |
|
13 |
Pennsylvania, University of – Wharton School |
United States |
|
14 |
HEC School of Management, Paris |
France |
|
15 |
Cornell University – Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management
|
United States |
|
16 |
York University – Schulich School of Business |
Canada |
|
17 |
Carnegie Mellon University – The Tepper School of Business
|
United States |
|
18 |
ESADE Business School |
Spain |
|
19 |
INSEAD
|
France |
|
20 |
Northwestern University – Kellogg School of Management
|
United States |
|
21 |
Emory University – Goizueta Business School |
United States |
|
22 |
IE
Business School |
Spain |
|
23 |
UCLA Anderson School of Management |
United States |
|
24 |
Michigan, University of – Stephen M. Ross School of Business
|
United States |
|
25 |
Bath, University of – School of Management |
United Kingdom |
|
26 |
Yale School of Management |
United States |
|
27 |
Queensland, University of – Business School |
Australia |
|
28 |
Texas at Austin, University of – McCombs School of Business
|
United States |
|
29 |
Duke University – Fuqua School of Business |
United States |
|
30 |
City University – Cass Business School |
United Kingdom |
|
31 |
Hult International Business School |
United States |
|
32 |
Vanderbilt University – Owen Graduate School of Management
|
United States |
|
33 |
Ohio State University – Fisher College of Business |
United States |
|
34 |
Washington, University of – Foster School of Business |
United States |
|
35 |
Georgetown University – Robert Emmett McDonough School of Business
|
United States |
|
36 |
Mannheim Business School |
Germany |
|
37 |
Cranfield School of Management |
United Kingdom |
|
38 |
Melbourne Business School – University of Melbourne |
Australia |
|
39 |
Rice University – Jesse H Jones Graduate School of Business
|
United States |
|
40 |
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of – Kenan-Flagler Business
School |
United States |
|
41 |
Hong Kong, University of – Faculty of Business and Economics
|
Hong Kong |
|
42 |
Henley Business School |
United Kingdom |
|
43 |
Southern California, University of – Marshall School of Business
|
United States |
|
44 |
Indiana University – Kelley School of Business |
United States |
|
45 |
Cambridge, University of – Judge Business School |
United Kingdom |
|
46 |
Curtin Graduate School of Business |
Australia |
|
47 |
Washington University in St Louis – Olin Business School
|
United States |
|
48 |
Oxford, University of – Saïd Business School |
United Kingdom |
|
49 |
Notre Dame, University of – Mendoza College of Business
|
United States |
|
50 |
Wake Forest University Schools of Business |
United States |
|
51 |
Wisconsin School of Business |
United States |
|
52 |
EDHEC Business School |
France |
|
53 |
Maryland, University of – Robert H Smith School of Business
|
United States |
|
54 |
Strathclyde, University of – Business School |
United Kingdom |
|
55 |
Boston University School of Management |
United States |
|
56 |
Indian Institute of Management – Ahmedabad |
India |
|
57 |
EMLYON
|
France |
|
58 |
Minnesota, University of – Carlson School of Management
|
United States |
|
59 |
Arizona State University – W. P. Carey School of Business
|
United States |
|
60 |
Warwick Business School |
United Kingdom |
|
61 |
Macquarie Graduate School of Management |
Australia |
|
62 |
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology – School of Business and
Management |
Hong Kong |
|
63 |
University College Dublin – Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business
|
Ireland |
|
64 |
Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University |
Netherlands |
|
65 |
Iowa, University of – Henry B Tippie School of Management
|
United States |
|
66 |
Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School |
Belgium |
|
67 |
California at Davis, University of-Graduate School of Management
|
United States |
|
68 |
Pennsylvania State University – Smeal College of Business
|
United States |
|
69 |
Grenoble Graduate School of Business |
France |
|
70 |
SDA Bocconi School of Management |
Italy |
|
71 |
Texas Christian University – Neeley School of Business
|
United States |
|
72 |
Nanyang Business School – Nanyang Technological University
|
Singapore |
|
73 |
George Washington University – School of Business |
United States |
|
74 |
Durham Business School |
United Kingdom |
|
75 |
McGill University – Desautels Faculty of Management |
Canada |
|
76 |
Audencia Nantes School of Management |
France |
|
77 |
Temple University – Fox School of Business |
United States |
|
78 |
Concordia University – John Molson School of Business |
Canada |
|
79 |
International University of Japan – Graduate School of International
Management |
|
|
80 |
Lancaster University Management School |
United Kingdom |
|
81 |
University of St. Gallen |
Switzerland |
|
82 |
Southern Methodist University – Cox School of Business
|
United States |
|
83 |
Yonsei University School of Business |
Republic of Korea
|
|
84 |
Birmingham, University of – Birmingham Business School
|
United Kingdom |
|
85 |
China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) |
China |
|
86 |
Nottingham University Business School |
United Kingdom |
|
87 |
WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management |
Germany |
|
88 |
Aston Business School |
United Kingdom |
|
89 |
Rochester, University of – William E Simon Graduate School of Business
|
United States |
|
90 |
Purdue University – Krannert Graduate School of Management
|
United States |
|
91 |
British Columbia, University of – Sauder School of Business
|
Canada |
|
92 |
National University of Singapore – The NUS Business School
|
Singapore |
|
93 |
HEC
Montréal |
Canada |
|
94 |
Chinese University of Hong Kong |
Hong Kong
|
|
95 |
Calgary, University of – Haskayne School of Business |
Canada |
|
96 |
Copenhagen Business School |
Denmark |
|
97 |
International University of Monaco |
|
|
98 |
University of Georgia – Terry College of Business |
United States |
|
99 |
Pittsburgh, University of – Katz Graduate School of Business
|
United States |
|
100 |
Case Western Reserve University – Weatherhead School of Management
|
United States |
You can read the comments to this article at
http://www.economist.com/whichmba/which-mba-top-25#comments
One comment reads that The Economist's rankings are more accurate
because The Economist magazine is more "trustworthy" that other media
sources that rank MBA programs. This comment seems to overlook the fact that
different media sources use different types of people to do the rankings. There
are different strokes for different folks even if the ranking outcomes were
trustworthy from other sources. Even if the ranking sources are trustworthy,
there are huge sources of possible (honest) error.
And the rankings can be quite misleading for prospects who do not do their
own in-depth homework relative to their needs and wants. For example, most MBA
programs are no longer good sources for preparing students for careers in CPA
firms. There are some exceptions, and students wanting accounting careers might
be badly mislead by any of the MBA ranking sources below.
Who are the people who do the rankings?
- Students (The Economist)
- Deans (U.S. News)
- Recruiters of Graduates (the WSJ)
- Alumni (Business Week) ---
The U.S. News rankings are influenced very heavy by research
reputations of business graduate schools. The WSJ rankings are influenced
heavily by "best buys" in the sense that the top ranked MBA program may be more
of a diamond in the rough where you don't have to pay quite as much to get an
outstanding graduate. The Business Week rankings are influenced heavily by the
varying quality and effort of alumni initiatives and organizations. It would
seem that current students might be the most variable group of evaluators and
the most difficult to predict year-to-year. The criterion that probably is very
important with students is placement in their most desired career tracks.
Top Global Distance Education MBA Programs
"EMBA ranking 2012," Financial Times, October 2012
http://rankings.ft.com/businessschoolrankings/emba-ranking-2012
| |
Rank 2012
|
3 year average
|
School name
|
Programme name
|
Salary ($)
|
Salary growth
|
| |
1 |
1 |
Kellogg / Hong Kong UST Business School |
Kellogg-HKUST
EMBA |
465,774 |
42 |
| |
2 |
2 |
Columbia / London Business School |
EMBA-Global
Americas and Europe |
265,596 |
89 |
| |
3 |
3 |
Trium: HEC Paris / LSE / New York University: Stern |
Trium Global EMBA |
307,992 |
52 |
| |
4 |
- |
Tsinghua University / Insead |
Tsinghua-INSEAD
EMBA |
287,630 |
57 |
| |
5 |
- |
UCLA: Anderson / National University of Singapore |
UCLA-NUS EMBA |
250,940 |
77 |
| |
6 |
5 |
Insead |
Insead Global
EMBA |
212,586 |
57 |
| |
7 |
12 |
Ceibs |
Global EMBA |
274,546 |
74 |
| |
8 |
8 |
University of Pennsylvania: Wharton |
Wharton MBA for
Executives |
229,086 |
60 |
| |
9 |
14 |
Washington University: Olin |
Olin-Fudan EMBA |
255,945 |
60 |
| |
10 |
7 |
University of Chicago: Booth |
EMBA |
230,855 |
60 |
| |
11 |
- |
Sun Yat-sen Business School |
SYSBS EMBA |
280,374 |
69 |
| |
12 |
- |
Korea University Business School |
EMBA |
268,324 |
95 |
| |
12 |
9 |
IE Business School |
EMBA |
186,324 |
138 |
| |
14 |
18 |
Iese Business School |
GEMBA |
215,027 |
58 |
| |
15 |
10 |
London Business School |
EMBA |
180,070 |
68 |
| |
16 |
10 |
Duke University: Fuqua |
Duke MBA - Global
Executive |
250,913 |
43 |
| |
17 |
14 |
CUHK Business School |
EMBA |
309,340 |
45 |
| |
18 |
16 |
Kellogg / WHU Beisheim |
Kellogg-WHU EMBA |
173,684 |
69 |
| |
19 |
- |
Georgetown University / Esade Business School |
GEMBA |
247,110 |
42 |
| |
20 |
16 |
IMD |
IMD EMBA |
221,809 |
60 |
| |
21 |
22 |
ESCP Europe |
European EMBA |
153,168 |
77 |
| |
21 |
23 |
Arizona State University: Carey |
Carey / SNAI EMBA |
237,672 |
74 |
| |
23 |
20 |
Northwestern University: Kellogg |
Kellogg EMBA |
239,134 |
52 |
| |
24 |
24 |
OneMBA: CUHK/RSM/UNC/FGV São Paulo/EGADE |
OneMBA |
184,612 |
54 |
| |
24 |
31 |
Warwick Business School |
Warwick EMBA |
149,331 |
98 |
| |
26 |
24 |
National University of Singapore Business School |
Asia-Pacific EMBA |
236,511 |
62 |
| |
27 |
- |
University of Southern California: Marshall |
USC-SJTU GEMBA |
256,758 |
49 |
| |
27 |
20 |
Kellogg / York University: Schulich |
Kellogg-Schulich
EMBA |
170,828 |
53 |
| |
29 |
29 |
University of Toronto: Rotman |
Rotman One-Year
EMBA |
150,066 |
54 |
| |
30 |
23 |
New York University: Stern |
NYU Stern EMBA |
192,874 |
48 |
| |
31 |
29 |
Imperial College Business School |
EMBA |
140,590 |
75 |
| |
32 |
24 |
City University: Cass |
EMBA |
153,329 |
71 |
| |
32 |
24 |
Columbia Business School |
EMBA |
201,004 |
49 |
| |
34 |
32 |
University of Michigan: Ross |
EMBA |
216,099 |
47 |
| |
35 |
- |
Fudan University School of Management |
Fudan EMBA |
197,476 |
92 |
| |
35 |
28 |
Cornell University: Johnson |
Cornell EMBA |
224,129 |
53 |
| |
35 |
39 |
Georgetown University: McDonough |
EMBA |
190,462 |
67 |
| |
38 |
33 |
University of Oxford: Saïd |
EMBA |
182,709 |
56 |
| |
39 |
38 |
UCLA: Anderson |
EMBA |
195,783 |
46 |
| |
40 |
- |
ESMT - European School of Management and Technology |
EMBA |
144,015 |
58 |
| |
41 |
35 |
Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University |
EMBA |
138,674 |
62 |
| |
41 |
35 |
Essec / Mannheim |
Essec & Mannheim
EMBA |
141,500 |
56 |
| |
43 |
36 |
University of Western Ontario: Ivey |
Ivey EMBA |
190,702 |
51 |
| |
44 |
- |
University of California at Irvine: Merage |
EMBA |
154,612 |
62 |
| |
45 |
48 |
Cornell University: Johnson/Queen's School of Business |
Cornell-Queen's
EMBA |
163,559 |
58 |
| |
46 |
- |
Kozminski University |
EMBA |
152,930 |
62 |
| |
46 |
42 |
Rice University: Jones |
Rice MBA for
Executives |
173,565 |
53 |
| |
48 |
64 |
Euromed Management |
Euromed MBA Part
Time |
149,393 |
82 |
| |
49 |
44 |
Emory University: Goizueta |
Weekend EMBA |
163,979 |
61 |
| |
50 |
- |
Antwerp Management School |
EMBA |
175,930 |
53 |
| |
51 |
- |
WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business)/University of
Minnesota: Carlson |
EMBA (Global) |
157,396 |
50 |
| |
51 |
45 |
University of Maryland: Smith |
Smith EMBA |
176,914 |
43 |
| |
53 |
- |
Henley Business School |
Henley EMBA |
148,557 |
65 |
| |
54 |
- |
University of Hong Kong / Fudan University School of Management |
HKU-Fudan IMBA |
113,508 |
96 |
| |
54 |
50 |
University of Texas at Austin: McCombs |
Texas EMBA |
142,770 |
44 |
| |
56 |
64 |
University of St Gallen |
EMBA HSG |
136,325 |
51 |
| |
56 |
70 |
Ohio State University: Fisher |
Fisher EMBA |
177,478 |
40 |
| |
58 |
58 |
Texas A & M University: Mays |
Texas A&M EMBA |
182,448 |
51 |
| |
59 |
60 |
Vanderbilt University: Owen |
Vanderbilt EMBA |
154,223 |
58 |
| |
60 |
- |
EMLyon Business School |
EMBA |
110,467 |
49 |
| |
60 |
- |
University of Pretoria, Gibs |
Modular and
Part-time MBA |
190,596 |
58 |
| |
62 |
49 |
University of Pittsburgh: Katz |
EMBA Worldwide |
168,087 |
33 |
| |
63 |
- |
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
EMBA at Illinois |
139,507 |
46 |
| |
63 |
53 |
Temple University: Fox |
Fox EMBA |
143,806 |
47 |
| |
63 |
68 |
Georgia State University: Robinson |
EMBA |
166,922 |
59 |
| |
66 |
- |
Boston University School of Management |
Boston University
EMBA |
176,707 |
37 |
| |
66 |
- |
SDA Bocconi |
EMBA |
142,636 |
52 |
| |
66 |
49 |
National Taiwan University College of Management |
NTU EMBA |
204,860 |
39 |
| |
66 |
69 |
University of Texas at Dallas: Jindal |
EMBA |
141,130 |
41 |
| |
70 |
66 |
Yonsei University School of Business |
Corporate MBA |
149,664 |
62 |
| |
70 |
71 |
Rutgers Business School |
Rutgers EMBA |
166,381 |
42 |
| |
70 |
79 |
University of Washington: Foster |
Foster EMBA |
157,327 |
35 |
| |
73 |
- |
Fordham University Graduate School of Business |
EMBA |
161,547 |
52 |
| |
73 |
66 |
Villanova School of Business |
Villanova EMBA |
169,401 |
46 |
| |
75 |
55 |
Cranfield School of Management |
EMBA |
132,934 |
53 |
| |
76 |
84 |
University of Miami School of Business Administration |
University of
Miami EMBA |
153,073 |
39 |
| |
77 |
- |
Centrum Católica |
Global MBA |
185,161 |
50 |
| |
78 |
69 |
Koç University Graduate School of Business |
EMBA |
131,450 |
54 |
| |
79 |
76 |
SMU: Cox |
SMU Cox EMBA |
166,155 |
43 |
| |
80 |
- |
University of Minnesota: Carlson |
Carlson EMBA |
142,556 |
36 |
| |
80 |
- |
University of Rochester: Simon |
EMBA |
132,067 |
47 |
| |
80 |
76 |
Tulane University: Freeman |
EMBA |
161,009 |
46 |
| |
83 |
66 |
Aalto University |
Aalto University
EMBA |
133,563 |
49 |
| |
83 |
77 |
Thunderbird School of Global Management |
EMBA |
158,773 |
34 |
| |
85 |
69 |
FIA - Fundação Instituto de Administração |
International
EMBA |
194,408 |
23 |
| |
86 |
- |
Tilburg University, TiasNimbas |
EMBA |
98,560 |
51 |
| |
86 |
60 |
Tongji University/ENPC |
Shanghai
International MBA (SIMBA) |
131,897 |
74 |
| |
88 |
- |
Georgia Institute of Technology: Scheller |
EMBA |
143,494 |
37 |
| |
88 |
66 |
University College Dublin: Smurfit |
EMBA |
115,445 |
53 |
| |
90 |
77 |
Vlerick Business School |
EMBA |
115,204 |
54 |
| |
91 |
68 |
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York |
EMBA |
140,545 |
51 |
| |
92 |
72 |
Copenhagen Business School |
EMBA |
119,169 |
38 |
| |
92 |
82 |
Queen's School of Business |
Queen's EMBA |
127,542 |
39 |
| |
94 |
73 |
Ashridge |
EMBA |
145,731 |
58 |
| |
95 |
77 |
University of Georgia: Terry |
Terry EMBA |
146,122 |
42 |
| |
96 |
- |
HEC Lausanne |
EMBA in
Management & Corporate Finance |
104,096 |
34 |
| |
96 |
92 |
Baylor University: Hankamer |
Baylor University
EMBA |
126,410 |
57 |
| |
96 |
97 |
University of Denver: Daniels |
Daniels EMBA |
163,450 |
44 |
| |
99 |
73 |
University of Alberta/University of Calgary: Haskayne |
Alberta /
Haskayne EMBA |
130,094 |
41 |
| |
100 |
- |
University of Zurich |
Zurich EMBA |
121,552 |
18 |
| |
Bob Jensen's thread on Onsite MBA Programs ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
Rankings different somewhat as to criteria and who performs the rankings. The
best-known ranking comes from US News where the rankings are based upon
multiple criteria (especially research and faculty reputations) where the
rankings are done by deans and other administrators. The Wall Street Journal
rankings of MBA programs rely heavily upon recruiters of graduates. The
Business Week rankings of undergraduate and graduate business programs rely
heavily upon alumni. An the newer rankings of MBA programs in The Economist
are based upon what students enrolled in programs want from those programs.
"The Top Thirty (Global MBA) Programs," The Economist, October
15, 2011, Page 73 ---
http://www.economist.com/node/21532270
DARTMOUTH COLLEGE’S Tuck School of Business takes
first place in The Economist’s ninth annual ranking of full-time MBA
programmes. The New Hampshire school has moved up from second position last
year. Virtually all of its students—who went into a wide range of
industries—found work within three months of graduating. Its MBAs could
expect a basic salary of $107,000, a 65% increase on their pre-degree
earnings. Tuck students also graded the quality of their alumni the best in
the world—an important consideration given the often-repeated claim that who
you meet on an MBA programme is just as important as what you learn.
Chicago drops to second, having come top last year,
while the world’s most famous school, Harvard, also drops a place to fifth.
Europe’s top programme is IMD, a Swiss school, which ranks third. Though
INSEAD has campuses in both France and Singapore, no purely Asian school
makes our top 30. Hong Kong University, at 36th, is the highest-placed. The
China Europe International Business School is the only school from the
mainland to make our top 100. The Indian Institute of Management in
Ahmedabad, India’s sole representative, and the toughest business school in
the world to get into (see article), is 78th.
Continued in article
MBA Programs at the (Expensive and Cheap) Extremes are Doing Well Whereas
Those in the Middle are Struggling for Students and Placements of Graduates
"Trouble in the Middle: Is time running out for business schools that aren't
quite elite," The Economist, October 15, 2011, pp. 71-72 ---
http://www.economist.com/node/21532269
IN 2009, when the American economy was beset by
recession, interest in MBA programmes hit a record high. No one was much
surprised: applications to business schools often rise during the first
years of a recession as people seek shelter from the storm. So perhaps no
one should be surprised that in both succeeding years applications have
fallen. That’s what prolonged doldrums do.
Yet, privately at least, some business schools are
worried that a two-year decline, along with a level of applications from
American students lower than it has been this century, is more than just a
response to the economy. They fear that the established model of business
education may be in trouble, if not for all schools, then definitely for
mid-ranking American institutions offering a traditional two-year MBA.
Two-thirds of schools which offer long, residential programmes saw
applications drop in 2011.
Data taken from The Economist’s latest
ranking of full-time MBA programmes (see article) show that an MBA from a
mid-ranking school is no longer the investment it once was. In 2010 the
average tuition fee charged by American institutions ranked within our top
100, but outside of the top 15, was $81,911 for the full two years. The
average basic salary of those schools’ freshly-minted MBAs was $81,178 a
year. Five years ago tuition at the same cohort of schools was nearly
$22,000 cheaper—$60,247—while the average salary, $78,442, was barely less
than today’s. This price rise comes at a time when enrolment is falling; for
American mid-level schools it is down 20% over the decade.
In comparison, the schools at the ends of the
spectrum look more appealing. Lower-level programmes, which harbour no
ambitions to be international players and are not covered in our ranking,
are seeing applications rise. They are much cheaper to attend and often
offer a discount for local students. For those taking the increasingly
popular part-time or online programmes, there is no reason even to leave
their jobs. (Disclosure: The Economist has an online business-education
business, but not one that offers an MBA.)
Elite business schools still look like a fair deal.
MBA students attending a top-15 institution may be charged an average of
$92,262 for their tuition, but they can expect a basic salary of $110,879
once they graduate. Payscale, a company that collects pay data, claims that
graduates from Harvard’s MBA programme will earn $3.6m over a 20-year career
(although it is not able to compare this with the rewards that go to equally
smart cookies who haven’t bothered with an MBA).
. . .
High Costs of New and Pampered Faculty
Schools with names that send a less sexy signal,
though, may be in trouble. For one thing,
wages have become a huge drain on their resources. An AACSB survey of 503
American business schools found that a newly-hired academic can expect a
salary of $169,000. At a mid-ranking
school, salaries of $250,000 and above are common. That’s just for nine
months: plenty of time for books, consulting and visiting professorships
during the long summer vacation.
Another strain is that
pampered faculty and
high-paying students expect to be housed in posh buildings with nice
gardens. Few schools enjoy the resources of Stanford, which recently opened
a $345m campus. But many feel the need to splurge millions on new facilities
in the hope of poaching applicants from their peers.
Continued in article
Global Executive MBA Program Rankings
"EMBA Rankings 2011," as ranked by the Financial Times, 2011 ---
http://rankings.ft.com/businessschoolrankings/emba-rankings-2011
"Great Colleges to Work For 2011," Chronicle of Higher Education,
July 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Great-Colleges-to-Work-For/128312/
Jensen Comment
I cannot find the rankings of the 111 colleges and universities. Only the top
winners seem to be identified in various categories.
I cannot quite understand the "Four-Year" category of universities since such
schools as USC and Harvard show up in this category. It would seem that
universities like Yale and Stanford that do not show up are not excluded because
they have graduate programs.
These various rankings are based on employee interests rather than student
and student recruiter interests, although there are obviously external impacts
on students and recruiters. There are also unmentioned conflicts. For example,
Many unionized colleges and universities have egalitarian pay grades such that
compensation is deemed relatively equitable irrespective of employee supply and
demand by discipline. Hence, a new tenure track employee chosen among 300
qualified applicants will get roughly the same salary and benefits as a tenure
track employee chosen among three applicants in another discipline. This is
deemed equitable by most faculty unions, but there's some question whether
students are harmed when a university is unable to hire among the top prospects
in disciplines in short supply such as accounting, finance, architecture,
engineering, nursing, etc.
For example, an extremely high proportion of the top accounting graduates
choose universities that offer them higher salaries, research support, and lower
teaching loads. Those universities are typically R1 research universities that
tend not to be unionized and do not have egalitarian salary categories across
academic disciplines. This is probably why top research universities like Ohio
State, the University of Texas, Texas A&M, Wisconsin (Madison), Stanford, Yale,
etc. are not even mentioned under the "Compensation" category at
http://chronicle.com/article/Great-Colleges-to-Work-For/128312/
There are exceptions such as Harvard Michigan, Notre Dame, and USC.
What would be interesting is to find out is the extent to which humanities
faculty at universities like Stanford and Yale are disgruntled because they are
paid less than faculty in the professional disciplines even though they may in
fact receive higher pay and benefits than their counterparts in unionized
egalitarian colleges and universities.
Of course other factors enter into disgruntlement over compensation. For
example, Faculty at the University of Chicago, Princeton, NYU, and Stanford
receive very high compensation, but there may be disgruntlement, apart from lack
of egalitarianism, over the high living costs that eat up this higher pay.
The bottom line is that I question the results of
any study that concludes that Eastern Kentucky University employees are more
satisfied with their compensation than employees of the University of Kentucky,
Stanford, Yale, Texas, and Texas A&M. Yeah Right!
I also question whether the Eastern Kentucky
University offers more in the way of career development than the University of
Kentucky, Stanford, Yale, Texas, and Texas A&M. Yeah Right!
I only pick on EKU because it comes out so very high
in compensation and career development categories. I've really nothing against
EKU and congratulate this university for being so outstanding in this
Chronicle of Higher Education 2011 study. I question the biases and
competence of the investigators in this study.
SSRN Top 700 Law Schools ---
http://hq.ssrn.com/rankings/Ranking_Display.cfm?TMY_gID=2&TRN_gID=1
Jensen Comment
From a reputational standpoint it pays to open share scholarship and research.
Not too surprising that students who did well on the
SAT would also perform well on the vaguely similar GMAT, especially since as a
rule colleges don't teach the material on the GMAT.
Parnassus (See Below)
"Which College Scores Best on the GMAT?" by Geoff Gloeckler,
Bloomberg Business Week, July 12, 2011 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/blogs/mba_admissions/archives/2011/07/which_college_scores_best_on_the_gmat.html
A few weeks ago we were discussing
the correlation between undergraduate institution and GMAT scores.
We knew which B-schools boast the highest scoring MBA students
(Stanford,
Yale). What we didn’t know is which undergraduate institutions
produce grads who fare the best on the test. It was a statistic none
of us had seen before.
Thanks to the mountain of
data we collect in our various ranking projects—specifically the
graduate surveys from the
MBA Class of 2010—we had
the information necessary to find the answer. So here it is: By and
large, the elite, private institutions fare the best, with Harvard
(738.0 GMAT average), Yale (732.0), and MIT (731.7) leading the way.
In fact, of
the 30 universities whose grads average a 700 or higher on the test,
only three—UC Berkeley (711.1), University of Washington (707.5),
and UCLA (707.2)—are public schools.
We started
with about 200 schools then removed those with fewer than 12 grads
in the sample. This left a total of 107 universities, with scores
ranging from 738 at Harvard to 633 at Louisiana State. The average
score, overall, was 686. The average number of respondents for each
school was 39.
Obviously,
for MBA applicants who have already earned their undergraduate
degree, this information isn't of much value, but for high school
juniors and seniors who see an MBA in their futures, this list might
be something to take into consideration.
(Note:
Scores are not limited to students who graduated with an
undergraduate degree in business.)
Here's the
top 30:
1. Harvard 738.0
2. Yale 732.0
3. MIT 731.7
4. Rice University 731.3
5. Brandeis University 729.4
6. Princeton 727.7
7. Stanford University 724.0
8. Brown University 722.2
9. Williams College 721.6
10. Carnegie Mellon 720.9
11. Duke University 720.2
12. Dartmouth 716.7
13. Wesleyan University 716.2
14. Amherst College 714.4
15. Carleton College 714.2
16. University of Chicago 712.9
17. Columbia University 712.2
18. University of Pennsylvania 712.2
19. Northwestern 712.0
20. UC Berkeley 711.1
21. Claremont McKenna 708.6
22. Middlebury College 707.6
23. University of Washington 707.5
24. UCLA 707.2
25. University of Notre Dame 702.5
26. Cornell University 702.0
27. Davidson College 701.5
28. Southern California 701.0
29. Johns Hopkins 700.8
30. Bowdoin College 700.5
Jensen Comment
Interestingly, the GMAT testing service was one of the very first services to
use computers to grade essay questions ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#ComputerBasedAssessment
Rankings of Universities in Latin and South America
You end up with a system where hundreds of
thousands of people have degrees that are totally worthless.
"The struggle to make the grade: If only more of the region’s
higher-education institutions were like the University of São Paulo," The
Economist, October 8-14, 2011 ---
http://www.economist.com/node/21531468
LATIN AMERICA boasts some giant universities and a
few venerable ones: the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and the National
Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) enroll several hundred thousand
students apiece, while Lima’s San Marcos was founded in 1551. Even so, the
region is hardly synonymous with excellence in higher education. Research
output is unimpressive, teaching techniques are old-fashioned and students
drop out in droves. These failings matter. Faster economic growth is driving
a big rise in demand for higher education in the region and a large crop of
new universities. Now, at last, comes an effort to assess the quality of
Latin American higher education.
On October 4th Quacquarelli Symonds, an education
consultancy, published the first regional ranking of Latin American
universities, combining measures of reputation, research output, academics’
qualifications and staff-student ratios. Of the 200 top universities, 65 are
in Brazil, 35 in Mexico, 25 apiece in Argentina and Chile and 20 in Colombia
(see table for the top ten). The University of São Paulo (USP), the richest
and biggest university in Brazil’s richest state, came top.
This week USP won another plaudit, becoming the
only Latin American university to make it into the world’s top 200
universities in another much-watched list, published by Times Higher
Education, a British specialist weekly. USP ranked 178th this year (up from
232nd last year). Founded and supported by the government of São Paulo
state, USP’s climb up the rankings has been helped by a big increase in
private funding and in international collaborations and recognition. It also
led the Latin American contingent in another list, this time compiled by
Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University and released in August, ranking in the
cluster between 101st and 150th. This list focuses on scientific research;
USP is becoming a world leader in tropical medicine, parasitology and
biofuels.
Nowhere else in Latin America can match USP. The
other leaders in the region are a mix of old-established public universities
(the University of Chile, for example), Catholic institutions or secular
non-profit places such as Bogotá’s University of the Andes and Monterrey’s
Tecnológico.
University rankings miss hard-to-measure factors
such as the quality of teaching and the campus atmosphere. They are biased
towards bigger universities, which tend to be better known and to produce
more research. (This may have helped Argentina’s UBA, whose glory days are
in the past.) But what they do capture matters. In their different ways they
try to identify beacons of excellence and innovation. When they agree, as
with USP’s regional pre-eminence, it is worth taking note.
These regional rankings might also break down the
insularity that has long been a mark of Latin American academia. “Across the
region, good students are recruited to faculty at their own universities,
rather than encouraged to leave and broaden their horizons,” says Jamil
Salmi, a higher-education specialist at the World Bank. “And there’s a
hostility to the very notion you might hire faculty from abroad.”
At many Latin American public universities students
pay nothing, staff are unsackable, and the curriculum is old-fashioned and
politicised. Good teaching and research are not rewarded with extra funding
or promotions; institutions do not lose money if their students drop out.
Except in Brazil many faculty members are part-timers without PhDs.
In the past three decades, governments have
accepted a huge expansion of private provision, much of it by for-profit
outfits. That has allowed them to expand higher education quickly without
spending more, but before they decided what made a good university, says
Francisco Marmolejo, a Mexican consultant on university administration. The
result is that mechanisms to ensure quality are weak or nonexistent. Poor
youngsters who attend the mainly awful state schools usually end up in these
places, paying through the nose.
No country in the region has worked out
satisfactorily how to share the cost of degrees between students and
taxpayers. Chile’s government is currently suffering the consequences.
Months of student protests against the exorbitant cost of for-profit
universities have seen the popularity of the president, Sebastián Piñera,
plunge. The country’s education system, from primary school to university,
is probably the region’s best. But Chile also has one of world’s lowest
levels of public funding for higher education, some of the longest degrees
and no comprehensive system of student grants or subsidised loans. When a
flat jobs market was added to this mix, it became combustible.
In Venezuela Hugo Chávez’s government has expanded
higher education by forcing existing universities to accept a massive
increase in student numbers, and by setting-up a giant new open-access state
institution, the “Bolivarian University”. This is supposed eventually to
have around 200 campuses. The result, says Mr Marmolejo, is a “time-bomb”.
“Unprepared institutions; non-existent infrastructure; 300 students in
classrooms that used to hold 15. You end up
with a system where hundreds of thousands of people have degrees that are
totally worthless.”
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on rankings controversies ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
Normally, I'm opposed to rankings of colleges since the persons submitting
rankings have limited and often biased views of all the colleges they are asked
to rank in the data collection process. However, I think some serious ranking
efforts are needed to offset the highly biased rankings that for-profit
universities generate that ignore the online programs in the non-profit and
generally more prestigious universities.
For example, see "The Best Online College Rankings" at
http://onlineuniversityrankings.org/
It's as if non-profit universities like the University of Wisconsin and Maryland
were not even worth mentioning.
Some of the top-ranked for-profit universities have been operating in the gray
zone of fraud, especially with respect to low admissions standards and
exploitation of government load programs ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud
Watch for US News to publish these rankings in the near future
"Ranking the Online Colleges,"
Inside Higher Ed, June 30, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/06/30/u_s_news_and_world_report_announces_plan_for_best_online_colleges_rankings
U.S. News & World Report, which in the last three
decades has become one of the most successful and controversial kingmakers
in higher education, is taking preliminary steps to apply its rankings to
the increasingly important realm of online colleges.
. . .
he rankings arrive at a time when typing “best
online colleges” into an Internet search engine is more likely to bring a
potential student to a lead-generation website — a site that collects their
contact information and educational interests and sells it to recruiters —
than any kind of rigorous, data-driven assessor of various online options.
U.S. News hopes to provide a tool for
evaluating online programs based on "old-fashioned" data collection and
analysis, said Robert Morse, the director of the rankings.
In interviews on Wednesday, Morse did not want to
talk about specific rankings methodologies because they have not yet come up
with criteria for assessing the different types of online programs — and
also because they do not want respondents to withhold certain information
because they think it might result in a bad ranking. The plan is to solicit
a wide range of data, and then decide on criteria based on a combination of
what makes sense, according to scholarly research into online course
effectiveness and interviews with online education authorities, and what
comes back, said Morse.
However, the rankings director did give some
indications of what data U.S. News is seeking. For example, there are
questions about the degree to which faculty members are trained to teach
online; whether the same faculty members who teach the online version of a
course teach the traditional classroom version; what proportion of faculty
are adjuncts; the extent to which a program polices cheating on online
tests; how much debt the average student takes on and job placement and
salary upon graduation (it will not be asking about program-level loan
default rates); and a number of traditional metrics, such as graduation and
retention rates.
Both Kelly and Morse acknowledged that one of the
biggest challenges of compiling the rankings will be getting cooperation
from for-profit colleges, which make up a significant part of the online
sector but generally shy away from giving up data they are not required by
law to disclose.
But many traditional institutions were no different
when U.S. News first began soliciting them for rankings data in 1983,
said Kelly. Eventually, many “realized it was in their interest, and it
became a national standard,” he said. He said he hopes proprietary online
institutions will arrive at the same conclusion. “Our feeling is the good
institutions will want to share these data,” Kelly said. “And that we’re
going to work with them to make sure we get accurate info in people’s
hands.”
Morse emphasized that the initial survey and
methodologies will not be perfect. “Any ranking or evaluative list that we
do is going to be our first attempt,” he said, “and we know as data get
better they’ll evolve over time to become more robust and sophisticated.”
The upside is especially high with online
institutions, said Kelly, since they have more data on student outcomes than
do traditional colleges and universities. With the amount of data programs
are collecting through their online learning environments, U.S. News
believes it can not only match the reliability of its current rankings with
the online version, but exceed it. Online programs “are about data and
measurement,” said Kelly. “And when you have great data and measurement
ability you can create great rankings.”
Generation Gap
At the same time that U.S. News was
promoting its expansion into online college ranking, a spin-off site it
opened two years ago unwittingly wrote a plug for a new program at an online
institution, Almeda University, that is not recognized as a legitimate
degree-granting university by the U.S. Department of Education or any
mainstream accrediting agency, and which has been
flagged as a “degree mill” by the Oregon state
government.
“Working adults who want to pursue a psychology
master’s degree can benefit from the flexibility of online programs, such as
the one offered by Almeda University’s School of Psychology,” said a news
brief posted Monday on U.S. News University Directory.
Continued in article
A Lesson in the History of Statistics That Has a Lot to Do With Aggregations
and Rankings in Accounting Such as P/E Ratio Rankings
"The Flaw of Overall Rankings,"
by Robert J. Sternberg, Inside Higher Ed, January 24, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/01/24/sternberg
Many college administrators are uncomfortable with
rankings of colleges and universities, such as those found in U.S. News &
World Report. Perhaps they don’t like the idea of measuring the quality of
an institution of higher learning, or they don’t like the way the
measurements are done. But from a psychological point of view — psychology
is my field — there is a more fundamental problem. Overall rankings obscure
what is most interesting about an institution. Consider an analogy to the
assessment of human intellectual qualities.
In 1904, Charles Spearman, a British psychologist,
proposed that quality of mind, at least as characterized by human
intelligence, could be summarized as a single attribute, which he referred
to as "general ability," or g. His assertion was based on his observation
that various tests of quality of mind — for example, verbal, mathematical,
spatial — correlated positively with each other, suggesting to him that they
were different measures of the same thing, except for the relatively
uninteresting aspects of thinking that were wholly particular to each kind
of test.
Spearman’s view was eventually challenged. By 1938,
an American psychologist, Louis Thurstone, suggested that Spearman’s view
was an oversimplification — that the more variegated qualities actually were
important in their own right. Thurstone labeled qualities such as verbal
ability, mathematical ability, and spatial ability as "primary mental
abilities." For example, you might care more about verbal ability for an
English major or future journalist or novelist, more about mathematical
ability for a finance major or future accountant or actuary, and more about
spatial ability for an engineering major or future civil engineer or
air-traffic controller. It might be nice to have an air-traffic controller
with a good command of the English language, but in the end, what passengers
and airport officials likely most care about is whether the controller can
visualize the trajectories of airplanes in a way that prevents their
infringing on each other’s airspace, so long as the controller can
communicate this information to pilots.
Spearman and Thurstone got into a bitter argument
over which of their theories was correct. But as often happens in science,
the two theorists represented a Hegelian thesis and antithesis in a
dialectical argument. What was needed was a synthesis.
The argument was largely resolved in 1993 when
American psychologist John B. Carroll built on previous work and showed that
general and more specific qualities of mind could be understood
hierarchically, with general ability at the top, so-called "primary mental
abilities" beneath them, and still more specific abilities beneath those.
Carroll’s hierarchical theory is widely accepted today, although certainly
not by everyone. There is still some dispute about just how general
"general" ability is. For example, psychological theorists such as Howard
Gardner and I have suggested that "general ability" may not, in fact, be as
general as some have claimed. For example, so-called "general ability" might
be more useful in predicting performance of a pupil in primary school than
in predicting performance of a pianist, plumber, politician, or poet. In
college admissions, "general ability" would correspond loosely to a
composite ACT or summed SAT score.
If we now return to institutional assessments, we
see that roughly the same logic can be applied to assessments of the quality
of colleges and universities. At some general level, colleges and
universities near the top of the U.S. News ratings, such as Harvard and Yale
Universities, probably excel in some meaningful way over those institutions
near the bottom of such rankings, just as people with higher composite ACTs
have certain academic skills that are more developed than those in people
with lower composite ACTs. But such global assessments miss the qualities
that make institutional differences, like individual differences,
interesting. They actually can fool people into missing what is most
important in distinguishing entities, whether individuals or institutions.
For example, the University of California at Los Angeles and the University
of Virginia, tied for the second rank among public universities in recent
U.S. News ratings, would provide very different experiences to
undergraduates (as anyone who has visited UCLA and UVA likely would notice).
They differ in the roles of undergraduate versus graduate students, social
traditions, and, of course, campus ambiance, among other things.
There is no definitive list of the analogues to the
primary mental abilities for institutions of higher learning. But
administrators pretty much know what some of the major ones are: quality of
research, quality of teaching, quality of extracurricular programs, quality
of leadership development, amount of attention individual students receive,
effectiveness with which the institution is led, and so on. These
differential primary qualities matter greatly in institutions, just as they
do in individuals. At the individual level, employers conduct interviews in
large part because they realize that job applicants can score high on tests
of cognitive ability and yet have poor or, in some cases, sorely deficient
social and emotional skills. Similarly, the financial crisis of 2008 was in
part the result of the work of people with impressive quantitative skills
who nevertheless lacked common sense and an ethical compass. Those selecting
an institution of higher learning at which to study or work need to do the
same kinds of "job interviews."
When students (or faculty or staff, for that
matter) select an institution of higher learning, overall rankings may
obscure the information individuals most need to make an informed choice.
Some of the best research institutions in the country show relatively little
concern with teaching and some of the best teaching institutions put only
modest emphasis on research. Of course, there are institutions that care
about both and even those that care about neither (so long as they meet
their projected bottom line). If one were to select an institution solely on
overall quality, one would miss these important differences and many others,
such as size, view of undergraduate versus graduate versus professional
students, kind of campus life, role of religion on campus, salience of
athletics on campus, availability of particular degree programs, pride in
traditions, and so forth. In the case of my own institution, Oklahoma State
University, the rankings would not take into account its fidelity to its
land-grant mission of serving the state of Oklahoma, the nation, and the
world.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
This has a great deal to do with the vegetable problem of aggregation at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
What Went Wrong With Accountics Research ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong
Bob Jensen's threads on rankings controversies ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
"The Order of Things: What college rankings really tell us,".
by Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, February 14, 2011 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_gladwell
ABSTRACT:
DEPT. OF EDUCATION about college rankings. Last summer, the editors of Car
and Driver conducted a comparison test of three sports cars, the Lotus Evora,
the Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport, and the Porsche Cayman S. This was the
final tally: 1. Porsche Cayman 193; 2. Chevrolet Corvette 186; 3. Lotus
Evora 182. Yet when you inspect the magazine’s tabulations it is hard to
figure out why Car and Driver was so sure that the Cayman is better than the
Corvette and the Evora. A ranking can be heterogeneous as long as it doesn’t
try to be too comprehensive. But it’s an act of real audacity when a ranking
system tries to be comprehensive and heterogeneous. The U.S. News & World
Report’s annual “Best Colleges” guide is run by Robert Morse, whose
six-person team operates out of a small office building in the Georgetown
neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Over the years, Morse’s methodology has
steadily evolved, and the ranking system looks a great deal like the Car and
Driver methodology. It is heterogeneous. It aims to compare Penn State—a
very large, public, land-grant university with a low tuition and an
economically diverse student body—with Yeshiva University, a small,
expensive, private Jewish university. The system is also comprehensive.
Discusses suicide statistics. There’s no direct way to measure the quality
of an institution, so the U.S. News algorithm relies instead on proxies for
quality—and the proxies for educational quality turn out to be flimsy at
best. Describes the reputation score and reputational biases. Mentions
Michael Bastedo. Jeffrey Stake, a professor at the Indiana University law
school, runs a Web site called the Ranking Game, which demonstrates just how
subjective rankings are. There are schools that provide a good legal
education at a decent price, and, by choosing not to include tuition as a
variable, U.S. News has effectively penalized those schools for trying to
provide value for the tuition dollar. The U.S. News ranking turns out to be
full of these kinds of implicit ideological choices. It gives twice as much
weight to selectivity as it does to efficacy. It favors the Yale model over
the Penn State model, which means that the Yales of the world will always
succeed at the U.S. News rankings because the U.S. News system is designed
to reward Yale-ness. At a time when American higher education is facing a
crisis of accessibility and affordability, we have adopted a de-facto
standard of college quality that is uninterested in both of those factors.
Mentions Graham Spanier and Ellsworth Huntington.
Only subscribers are allowed to read the article itself, but most faculty
and students can access, like I did, the article through their campus
library's database subscription sevice.
Gladwell's points have been made before ---
See below!
Questions
Do College Rankings Matter?
Should College Rankings Matter?
Existing tools and measurements could allow colleges to develop meaningful
rankings to replace widely discredited rankings developed by magazines,
according to
a report being
released today by Education Sector, a think tank. The report repeats criticisms
that have been made of the U.S. News & World Report rankings, saying that they
are largely based on fame, wealth and exclusivity. A
new system
might use data from the National Survey of Student Engagement and the Collegiate
Learning Assessment as well as considering new approaches to graduation rates
and retention, the report says. Current rankings reward colleges that enroll
highly prepared, wealthy students who are most likely to graduate on time. But a
system that compared predicted and actual retention and graduation rates — based
on socioeconomic and other data — would give high marks to colleges with great
track records on educating disadvantaged students, even if those rates were
lower than those of some colleges that focus only on top students.
Inside Higher Ed, September 22, 2006
Bob Jensen's threads on misleading rankings of accounting education
programs ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryRankings.htm
When person is unfamiliar with details of a school that they are to evaluate,
the elitist reputation of the university as a whole, in my viewpoint, dominates
the evaluation of the business school. For example, Princeton University does
not have a business school. If Princeton started up a business school, before
evaluators knew a single thing about that business school they would probably
rate it in the Top 20 simply because it is la la Princeton. The same thing would
never happen if one of the various St. Cecelia institutions started up a
business school. They aren't sufficiently la la la in terms of international
prestige of their universities as a whole.
I do know these rankings are important to some schools for some purposes.
Seattle University undergraduate business school comes in at Business Week's
Rank 46 in the West region, It's probably a big deal for Seattle University to
be ranked so far ahead of the University of Utah coming in at Rank 109. And
Seattle University is not all that far down from cross town "rival" --- that
immense research University of Washington that came in at Rank 33. Can these two
business schools even be compared meaningfully? Yeah I know they can be compared
on some basis, but I don't think there's any use for comparing Rank 33 with Rank
46 among the hundreds of schools being ranked by Business Week.
And its probably an embarrassment for the University of Utah that will
probably not mention its Rank 109 on its Website. The business school at Utah
might've mentioned it if it had made the Top 20. Sigh!
It's probably an embarrassment for Southern Methodist to fall from grace
according to Business Week graduate business rankings? But its fall from
grace in football is probably more of an embarrassment to alumni of SMU.
"
Rising Up Against Rankings," by Indira Samarasekera,
Inside
Higher Ed, April 2, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/04/02/samarasekera Business Week's Business 2010 School Rankings of Undergraduate Business
School Programs ---
Click Here
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/rankings/index.html?chan=bschools_special+report+--+best+b-schools+2010_special+report+--+best+b-schools+2010
There are also rankings by region
Top Global Business Schools ---Click
Here
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/nov2010/bs2010119_517831.htm?chan=bschools_special+report+--+best+b-schools+2010_special+report+--+best+b-schools+2010
Top Graduate Business Programs ---
Click Here
http://www.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/rankings_history_us_10.html?chan=bschools_special+report+--+best+b-schools+2010_special+report+--+best+b-schools+2010
The methodology behind Bloomberg Business Week's rankings of the world's
best business schools ---
Click Here
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/nov2010/bs2010111_640958.htm?chan=bschools_special+report+--+best+b-schools+2010_special+report+--+best+b-schools+2010
To begin the ranking process, we sent a 50-question
survey to 17,941 MBA graduates from the Class of 2010 at 101 schools in
North America, Europe, and Asia. We received 9,827 responses for a response
rate of 55 percent. In 2008,
Harvard
Business School (Harvard
Full-Time MBA Profile) and the University of
Pennsylvania's
Wharton School (Wharton
Full-Time MBA Profile) declined to provide student
contact information for our survey; this year all 101 schools helped us
contact grads, either by supplying e-mail addresses or distributing the
survey invitations to students on our behalf.
The Web-based survey asks graduates to rate their
programs according to teaching quality, the effectiveness of career
services, and other aspects of their b-school experience, using a scale of 1
to 10. The Class of 2010 survey results count for 50 percent of each
school's total student satisfaction score. Our 2008 survey, which polled
16,704 graduates, and our 2006 survey, which polled 16,565, each count for
an additional 25 percent. Using six years' worth of survey data encompassing
26,389 individual responses effectively ensures that short-term issues,
problems, and improvements won't skew results.
Next we asked David M. Rindskopf and Alan L. Gross,
professors of educational psychology at City University of New York Graduate
Center, to analyze the data. The idea was to ensure that the results were
not marred by any attempts to influence student responses or otherwise
affect the outcome. The professors tested the responses to verify the data's
credibility and to guarantee the poll's integrity.
The second stage of the ranking process involves a
survey of corporate MBA recruiters. This year we surveyed 514 recruiters and
received 215 responses, for a response rate of 42 percent.
Recruiters were asked to rate the top 20 schools
according to the perceived quality of grads and their company's experience
with MBAs past and present. Companies could rate only schools at which they
have actively recruited in recent years, on- or off-campus. With the survey
completed, we first calculated each school's point total, awarding 20 points
for every No. 1 ranking, 19 points for every No. 2 ranking, and so on. Using
each school's point total—along with information on the schools where each
recruiter hires and the number of MBAs it hires—we calculate a recruiter
score. The 2010 score was then combined with scores from the 2008 and 2006
recruiter surveys, totaling 680 responses. (The 2010 survey contributes 50
percent, while the 2008 and 2006 polls each contribute 25 percent.)
At this stage, 26 schools with poor response rates
on one or both 2010 surveys were eliminated from ranking consideration,
leaving 75 schools eligible to be ranked.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The top business school media ranking outfits are US News, The Wall
Street Journal (WSJ) and Business Week. Business Week used to
use alumni. It tends to be a bit more of a combination approach using
alumni and recruiters.
US News rankings are based upon surveys of business school deans who tend to
favor research reputations in such schools as Stanford, Chicago, UC Berkeley,
Wharton, MIT, Harvard, etc. The WSJ surveys recruiters who hire MBA graduates.
Recruiters are often looking for "best buys" in terms of quality at less price
which, at least before the demise of Wall Street investment banks, tended to
favor Dartmouth's Tuck School over outrageously high priced Harvard and Wharton
graduates.
The most glaring weakness in all of these media rankings is that the people
providing inputs to these rankings have such variable knowledge of all the
schools being ranked. They are most familiar with the schools they attended, the
schools where they visit on recruiting trips, and in the case of deans the
schools where they are employed.
When person is unfamiliar with details of a school that they are to evaluate,
the elitist reputation of the university as a whole, in my viewpoint, dominates
the evaluation of the business school. For example, Princeton University does
not have a business school. If Princeton started up a business school, before
evaluators knew a single thing about that business school they would probably
rate it in the Top 20 simply because it is la la Princeton. The same thing would
never happen if one of the various St. Cecelia's institutions started up
a business school. They aren't sufficiently la la la in terms of traditional
prestige.
There is also a certain amount of tradition that keeps some schools ahead of
the pack. For example, Babson (Rank 17 undergraduate) has always ranked ahead of
Bentley and will probably continue to do so even though I personally think
Bentley should move ahead of its cross town rival Babson.
There was a time when one professor could make or break the reputation of a
program such as back in the 1950s when having accounting research professor Carl
Nelson on the faculty of the University of Minnesota made the Gofer's accounting
PhD program Golden. Minnesota never attained such prominence among the top
accounting doctoral programs since the days of Carl Nelson (who by the way like
Ohio State's Tom Burns was more of a research leader than a research publisher)
---
http://www.jrhasselback.com/AtgDoct/XDocChrt.pdf
And thus I return to sleep not caring two hoots about how business schools
get ranked basically on the basis of either how they ranked the last time or the
prestige image of their host universities as a whole.
Bob Jensen's threads on misleading rankings of accounting education
programs ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryRankings.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on ranking controversies in general ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
US News ranking formulas of universities are "rejiggered" (Yawn)
Yield fails to make it back into the formula
"The Rankings, Rejiggered," by Eric Hoover , Chronicle of Higher Education,
August 17, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/The-Rankings-Rejiggered/26253/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's threads on the controversial media rankings of colleges and
universities ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
The Top Party School is the University of
______________________?
The Most Sober School is ________________ University?
Answers ---
Click Here
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-08-02/top-party-school-is-university-of-georgia-mit-best-for-studies.html?link_position=link1
Some of your advisees might be somewhat interested in this
What Business Week thinks are the top 2011 business schools in Europe ---
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/europe/special_reports/20110318european_bschools_2011.htm?link_position=link1
"'Times Higher Education' Releases New Rankings, but Will They Appease
Skeptics?" by Aisha Labi, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 16, 2010
---
http://chronicle.com/article/Times-Higher-Education/124455/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
On Thursday the London-based Times Higher Education
releases its new, and heavily hyped, World University Rankings. Nearly a
year in the making, the rankings have been highly anticipated, if only to
determine whether the magazine has truly delivered on its promise: to create
an evaluation system based primarily on reliable, and quantifiable, measures
of quality rather than on subjective values, such as reputational surveys.
Times Higher Education produced rankings for the
first time this year without the collaboration of Quacquarelli Symonds
Limited. Along with the Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings, the World
University Rankings that Times Higher Education and QS published together
from 2004 until last year have become the most closely watched and
influential university rankings in the world.
Quacquarelli Symonds has continued to produce those
rankings, now called the QS World University Rankings, and is partnering
with U.S. News and World Report for their publication in the United States.
The relationship between the former collaborators
has deteriorated into barely veiled animosity. QS has accused Times Higher
Education of unfairly disparaging the tables they once published together.
This week the company threatened legal action against the magazine over what
Simona Bizzozero, a QS spokeswoman, described as "factually inaccurate" and
misleading statements by representatives of Times Higher Education. She said
THE's role in the collaboration was limited to publishing the rankings based
on a methodology that QS had developed. "What they're producing now is a
brand-new exercise. A totally brand-new exercise, with absolutely no links
whatsoever to what QS produced and is producing," she said. "So when they
refer to their old methodology, that is not correct."
Phil Baty, editor of the rankings for Times Higher
Education, declined to respond to QS's complaints: "We are now looking
forward, not looking backward."
The release last week of the new QS rankings
generated headlines, especially in Britain, with the displacement of Harvard
as the world's top university by the University of Cambridge. QS's full list
of the top 400 universities will be published next week by U.S. News.
Times Higher Education, by contrast, places Harvard
in first place, followed by the California Institute of Technology, the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, and then Princeton.
Cambridge and Oxford tie for sixth place in the highest spot occupied by a
university outside the United States.
"There is no question that this is a real wake-up
call for the U.K.," said Mr. Baty. "This confirms, more than ever, that the
U.S. has absolutely the world-class education system." He did note, however,
that the data on which the rankings are based predate recent cuts in public
financing for higher education in the United States.
Times Higher Education is now collaborating with
the media conglomerate Thomson Reuters, which is providing the data on which
its rankings are tabulated. Because the tables were produced using a new
methodology, they represent "Year 1 of a new system," and "you can't make
direct comparisons" with the previous rankings, said Mr. Baty.
Nonetheless, Times Higher Education is emphasizing
what it describes as the increased rigor of its new methodology, which
according to its news release "places less importance on reputation and
heritage than in previous years and gives more weight to hard measures of
excellence in all three core elements of a university's mission—research,
teaching, and knowledge transfer."
Foremost among the criticisms of the previous
compilation was that it relied too heavily on a reputational survey of
academics, based on fewer than 4,000 responses in 2009. THE's new
methodology is based on 13 indicators in five broad performance
categories—teaching (weighted 30 percent); research influence as measured in
citations (32.5 percent); research, based on volume, income, and reputation
(30 percent); internationalization, based on student and staff ratios (5
percent); and knowledge transfer and innovation based on industry income
(2.5 percent).
Times Higher Education said that the new system was
the only global ranking to devote a section to teaching. The new methodology
is much more evidence-based and relies far less on subjective criteria than
the old tables, said Mr. Baty. But whereas teaching was previously measured
based solely on student-staff ratio, the new rankings incorporate a
reputational survey.
Skeptics Not Swayed But will the Times's new system
impress critics? If the reaction of two of the most outspoken and
influential rankings experts is any gauge, perhaps not.
"Really, nothing has changed," said Ellen Hazelkorn,
executive director of the Higher Education Policy Research Unit at the
Dublin Institute of Technology, whose book "Rankings and the Battle for
Worldclass Excellence: The Reshaping of Higher Education" is due to be
published in March.
Despite Times Higher Education's assurances that
the new tables represent a much more rigorous and reliable guide than the
previous rankings, the indicators on which the new rankings are based are as
problematic in their own way, she believes. The heavily weighted measure of
teaching, which she described as subjective and based on reputation,
introduces a new element of unreliability.
Gauging research impact through a subjective,
reputation-based measure is troublesome enough, and "the reputational aspect
is even more problematic once you extend it to teaching," she said.
Ms. Hazelkorn is also troubled by the role Thomson
Reuters is playing through its Global Institutional Profiles Project, to
which institutions provide the data used in the tables. She dislikes the
fact that institutions are going to great effort and expense to compile data
that the company could then sell in various ways.
"This is the monetarization of university data,
like Bloomberg made money out of financial data," she said.
Geoffrey S. Boulton, a leading University of
Edinburgh academic who wrote a recent report, "University Rankings:
Diversity, Excellence and the European Initiative," for the League of
European Research Universities, agrees that the new rankings do not
represent a significant improvement. "One of the problems is that you have a
system that is not well designed for purpose, and collecting more
information will add nothing at all," he said.
Merely adding more detail, as he said the new
rankings had done, obscures the underlying problem, which is that rankings
depend on inherently unreliable proxy measures to assess the things they
purport to be measuring, he said.
Coming up with an effective way of measuring
teaching excellence, for example, is just one hurdle.
"I can think of lots of proxies, but the most
fundamental proxy of all is the ethos and commitment of the people in the
place, and how can you measure that?" asked Mr. Boulton. "The only way, in a
sense, is by going to a place and sensing it, and this is not practicable
and is profoundly subjective."
Unfortunately, he noted, the effect of rankings
placing so much emphasis on proxies for teaching excellence, such as the
number of academic staff who have Ph.D.'s, is that teaching may in fact be
suffering.
The combined impact of the influence of global
rankings and the weight they give to research, together with Britain's
national program for allocating university financing based largely on
research, mean that in British universities, "the dominant driver of
activity is research, and often not research of a very high quality," said
Mr. Boulton. "The consequence is that many of the best teachers have felt
rather alienated."
Despite their skepticism of the rankings' inherent
worth, both Ms. Hazelkorn and Mr. Boulton acknowledge that rankings are an
unavoidable feature of today's higher-education landscape.
"Given that they are here to stay, they will no
doubt become more elaborate, and one of the key issues is who is this going
to influence and is the influence it has on them appropriate, proper, and
sensible," said Mr. Boulton.
While the World Implodes, Let’s Bicker About
Accounting Program Rankings," by Caleb Newquist, Going Concern, May
6, 2010 ---
http://goingconcern.com/2010/05/while-the-world-implodes-lets-bicker-about-accounting-program-rankings/
Despite
your 401k taking a
deuce and the entire continent of Europe about to
sink into the Atlantic, the Bloomberg Businessweek
Business School undergraduate speciality rankings
are out and the
accounting rankings are, shall we say,
interesting. Maybe no one is that worried about it but if sports play any
part in your like/dislike of a particular school, then there should be a few
words:
1 University of Notre Dame (Mendoza)
2 Brigham Young University (Marriott)
3 Emory University (Goizueta)
4 University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill (Kenan-Flagler)
5 Wake Forest University
6 Lehigh University
7 Boston College (Carroll)
8 University of California – Berkeley (Haas)
9 University of San Diego
10 Southern Methodist University (Cox)
11 Babson College
12 University of Washington (Foster)
13 University of Richmond (Robins)
14 Villanova University
15 Case Western Reserve University (Weatherhead)
16 University of Texas – Austin (McCombs)
17 University of Virginia (McIntire)
18 Cornell University
19 College of William & Mary (Mason)
20 New York University (Stern)
21 University of Southern California (Marshall)
22 Tulane University (Freeman)
23 Fordham University
24 Georgia Institute of Technology
25 Loyola University – Chicago
26 University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign
27 Ohio University
27 University of Denver (Daniels)
29 University of Texas – Dallas
30 University of South Carolina (Moore)
31 University of Connecticut
32 Boston University
33 Santa Clara University
34 University of Maryland (Smith)
35 Indiana University (Kelley)
36 Syracuse University (Whitman)
37 Washington University – St. Louis (Olin)
38 Binghamton University
39 University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
40 Texas Christian University (Neeley)
41 University of Miami
42 University of Missouri – Columbia (Trulaske)
43 University of Michigan (Ross)
44 North Carolina State University
45 University of Wisconsin – Madison
46 Texas A&M University (Mays)
47 The College of New Jersey
48 University of Minnesota (Carlson)
49 Miami University (Farmer)
50 University of Georgia (Terry)
51 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan)
52 University of Delaware (Lerner)
53 Ohio Northern University (Dicke)
54 Seattle University (Albers)
55 Northern Illinois University
56 Michigan State University (Broad)
57 Georgetown University (McDonough)
58 California Polytechnic State University (Orfalea)
59 Loyola College in Maryland (Sellinger)
60 University at Buffalo
61 Bentley University
62 DePaul University
63 University of Iowa (Tippie)
64 Drexel University (LeBow)
65 Northeastern University
66 Marquette University
67 St. Joseph’s University (Haub)
68 University of Pittsburgh
69 University of Utah (Eccles)
70 University of Oregon (Lundquist)
71 Seton Hall University (Stillman)
72 Bowling Green State University
73 Kansas State University
74 Colorado State University
75 Louisiana State University (Ourso)
76 Baylor University (Hankamer)
77 University of Oklahoma (Price)
78 University of Colorado – Boulder (Leeds)
79 University of Massachusetts – Amherst (Isenberg)
80 James Madison University
81 George Washington University
82 University of Tennessee – Chattanooga
83 University of Houston (Bauer)
84 Xavier University (Williams)
85 Florida State University
86 John Carroll University (Boler)
87 University of Hawaii (Shidler)
88 Arizona State University (Carey)
89 Florida International University
90 University of Louisville
91 Bryant University
92 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Lally)
93 Purdue University (Krannert)
94 Illinois State University
95 University of Arizona (Eller)
96 Texas Tech University (Rawls)
97 Hofstra University (Zarb)
98 Ohio State University (Fisher)
99 Clemson University
100 University of Florida (Warrington)
101 University of Akron
102 University of Arkansas – Fayetteville (Walton)
103 Butler University
104 University of Nebraska – Lincoln
105 University of Illinois – Chicago
106 University of Central Florida
107 Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State
University (Pamplin)
108 Carnegie Mellon University (Tepper)
109 Temple University (Fox)
110 Pennsylvania State University (Smeal)
111 Clarkson University
Jensen Comment
Although virtually all of the above universities have AACSB-accredited business
programs, many do not have the specialty AACSB-accredited accounting programs
---
https://www.aacsb.net/eweb/DynamicPage.aspx?Site=AACSB&WebKey=4BA8CA9A-7CE1-4E7A-9863-2F3D02F27D23
I've always had doubts whether AACSB accounting program accreditation benefits
exceed the costs.
"'U.S. News' May Shift Rankings Methodology," Inside Higher Ed,
June 7, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/07/qt#229379
U.S. News & World Report is considering several
changes in the methodology for its college rankings. Robert Morse, who
directs the rankings, discussed the possible changes and invited comment on
them
a blog post. . He said that the magazine may
combine a ranking by high school counselors with the peer ranking currently
done by college presidents -- one of the most controversial parts of the
rankings. He also wrote that the magazine may add yield -- the percentage of
accepted applicants who enroll -- to its formula, and may give more weight
to "predicted graduation rate," which gives credit to colleges that exceed
their expected rates.
Jensen Comment
Find a College
College Atlas ---
http://www.collegeatlas.org/
Among other things the above site provides acceptance rate percentages
Online Distance Education Training and Education ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
For-Profit Universities Operating in the Gray
Zone of Fraud (College, Inc.) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud
Questions
What is driving tuition increases in law schools?
Are these same cost drivers impacting on some business schools and accountancy
programs for the same reasons?
Why are minority enrollments increasing with the exception of African American
law students?
Jensen Comment
Before reading the argument below, it should be noted that court decisions have
been adverse to affirmative action admissions and financial aid, most notably
the famous case that shook the foundations of the University of Michigan ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#AcademicStandards
"Law-School Cost Is Pushed Up by Quest for Prestige, Not Accreditation,
GAO Survey Finds," by Eric Kelderman, Chronicle of Higher Education,
October 26, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Competition-Not/48940/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Critics have
sometimes blamed the accreditation standards of the American Bar Association
for driving up the cost of law school and making it more difficult for
students of color to be admitted to those programs.
But a report
released on Monday by the Government Accountability Office says that most
law schools surveyed instead blamed competition for better rankings and a
more hands-on approach to educating students for the increased price of a
law degree. In addition, the federal watchdog agency reported that, over
all, minorities are making up a larger share of law-school enrollments than
in the past, although the percentage of African-American students in those
programs is shrinking. The GAO attributed that decrease to lower
undergraduate grade-point averages and scores on law-school admissions
tests.
Law-school
accreditation is technically voluntary but practically important: 19 states
now require candidates to have a degree from an institution approved by the
bar association to be eligible to take the bar examination. And a degree
from an ABA-accredited institution makes a student eligible to take the bar
exam in any state.
The costs of
getting a law degree, however, have increased at a faster rate than the
costs of comparable professional programs, says the report, "Higher
Education: Issues Related to Law School Cost and Access." In-state tuition
and fees at public law schools averaged $14,461 in the 2007-8 academic year,
7.2 percent higher than the cost 12 years earlier. In comparison, the cost
of a medical degree from a public institution increased 5.3 percent over the
same period, to $22,048 annually.
Law-school costs
for nonresidents and at private institutions also increased at a slower rate
over that period, but now total about twice as much or more in dollars
compared with residents' costs at public institutions.
The reasons for the
fast-rising costs are that law schools are providing courses and
student-support programs that require more staff and faculty, the federal
survey found. In addition, law schools spent more on faculty salaries and
library resources, among other things, to boost their standing in the U.S.
News & World Report annual rankings, law-school officials told the GAO.
Those findings
stand in contrast to some criticisms that the accreditation standards for
faculty and facilities are a major factor in the cost of law schools.
"Officials from more than half of the ABA-accredited schools we spoke with
stated they would meet or exceed some ABA accreditation standards even if
they were not required," the report says.
Law-school
officials also cited recent declines in state appropriations as a reason for
rising tuition, federal researchers reported.
Accreditation
standards also were not widely blamed for the declining share of
African-American law students, most of those surveyed said. Between the
1994-95 and 2006-7 academic years, the percentage of black students has
shrunk from 7.5 percent of law school students to 6.5 percent, even as the
number of blacks earning bachelor's degrees has grown by two percentage
points.
"Most law-school
officials, students, and minority-student-group representatives we
interviewed focused on issues such as differences in LSAT scores, academic
preparation, and professional contacts, rather than accreditation standards,
to explain minority access issues," the report says.
But the report also
noted that some officials blamed not only accreditation, but also rankings
by U.S. News & World Report for lower or static enrollment rates of
minorities: "Schools are reluctant to admit applicants with lower LSAT
scores because the median LSAT score is a key factor in the U.S. News &
World Report rankings."
The study was a
requirement of the Higher Education Opportunity Act, passed in 2008, and was
meant to compare the costs and level of minority enrollment at law schools
to similar professional-degree programs, including medical, dental, and
veterinary colleges. Federal researchers surveyed officials at 22
institutions, including three that are not accredited by the ABA, and
students in two law programs, one of which did not have the ABA's stamp of
approval.
Bob Jensen's threads on accreditation are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#AccreditationIssues
"Methodology Change for Ph.D. Rankings," by Scott
Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, May 10, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/05/10/nrc
The National Research
Council -- responding to criticism it received in the internal peer review
of its
forthcoming doctoral program rankings -- is
changing the methodology in a few key places for the
long-awaited project.
The changes -- which are
not yet final -- are likely to divide the main ranking of each program into
two separate rankings -- one based on explicit faculty determinations of
which criteria matter in given disciplines, and one based on implicit
criteria. Further, the council is likely to release ranges of ratings for a
90 percent "confidence level," not the confidence level target of 50 percent
that was in the methodology released last year.
The use of confidence
levels means that instead of saying that a given program is the second or
eighth or 20th best, the council will instead say that a given program is in
a certain range. By raising the confidence level to 90 percent, instead of
saying that there is a 50 percent chance that a program is between 20th and
26th, the council will say (to use that hypothetical) that there is a 90
percent chance that a program is between the 15th and 35th best in the
nation -- resulting in much broader ranges for the rankings.
The additional changes in
methodology -- which was
theoretically released in final form in July --
suggest that further delays are likely for the rankings. NRC officials have
for about a year now stopped answering questions about the timing of the
release, although the ratings are still expected in 2010.
Many graduate program
directors and deans are increasingly frustrated by the timing of the
project. Data collection for the project (whatever methodology changes are
used) started in 2006, with
an original schedule for releasing the rankings in 2007.
Many programs note that the departure or arrival of a
few faculty members who are skilled at landing grants means that some
programs may have changed significantly in the years that passed. Further,
with many universities looking at trimming graduate programs, some of those
who run stellar but threatened programs have been hoping that the NRC
rankings would bolster their defenses.
The NRC has not formally
announced that it is changing the methodology. But Jeremiah P. Ostriker,
chair of the committee overseeing the project and a professor of astronomy
at Princeton University, described for Inside Higher Ed the changes
that he said are "likely" but not yet certain.
On the question of the
ranges to be reported, Ostriker said that the committee has long wanted to
avoid the "spurious precision problem" of previous rankings in implying
certainty that a given program is a precise number in relation to all
others. Given the way programs change constantly, imperfections in
information and averages, and a range of other factors, Ostriker said the
rankings will be "more accurate" for being presented as a range, and not as
a single figure. He noted that "commercial" ranking efforts tend to give a
single number, "but that's no excuse for us making the error."
While the idea of giving
ranges was part of the methodology released last year, he said that the peer
review comments for the rankings (and outside comments) have led him and
other committee members to question the idea of giving a range that provides
only a 50 percent confidence level, meaning there is also a 50 percent
chance that the program is somewhere outside of that range. Peer reviewers
found it "confusing" to offer that low a confidence level, so the idea is to
increase it to 90 percent, which will have the effect of expanding the range
of possibilities.
Ostriker acknowledged that
this change will make it more difficult for people to pinpoint exactly where
a program stands. But he said that's because it is impossible to do so in
any accurate way. "We wanted more honesty and more data and we wanted to be
honest about the true uncertainties in rankings," he said. "We hope it
doesn't make people unhappy, but if that does make people unhappy, they will
need to get used to it."
Bob Jensen's threads on ranking controversies are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
Bob Jensen's threads on vegetable ranking controversies
are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
US News Rankings of Universities and Colleges ---
http://www.usnews.com/rankings
Best Business Schools According to Business Week Magazine ---http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/toc/08_47/B4109best_business_schools.htm
This includes a history link on the rankings over the years.
"Best Business Programs by Specialty: College business students
rated their schools on a dozen disciplines, from ethics to sustainability. The
top programs include some surprises," Business Week, May 6, 2010 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/may2010/bs2010055_765866.htm?link_position=link1
Irish eyes are smiling on Notre Dame's
Mendoza College of Business (Mendoza
Undergraduate Business Profile). Not only is
Mendoza home to the top-ranked undergraduate business program in the nation
and the most satisfied students; it's also the most decorated school in
Bloomberg Businessweek's annual ranking of the Best
Undergraduate Business Programs by Specialty.
As part of Bloomberg Businessweek's
annual ranking of the
top undergraduate business programs, senior
business students from the 139 participating schools were asked to assign
letter grades—from A to F—to their business programs in 12 specialty areas:
quantitative methods, operations management, ethics, sustainability,
calculus, microeconomics, macroeconomics, accounting, financial management,
marketing management, business law, and corporate strategy. Based on those
grades, scores were calculated for each of the ranked schools in each area.
Not surprisingly, the top-ranked schools in the
overall ranking, published in March, have the most top-10 specialty
rankings, as well. Notre Dame leads the way, appearing on eight top-10
lists, followed by
Cornell University (Cornell
Undergraduate Business Profile) and
Babson College (Babson
Undergraduate Business Profile)—Nos.5 and 15 in
the overall ranking, respectively—with six top-10 specialty ranks
apiece.Emory University's
Goizueta School of Business
(Goizueta
Undergraduate Business Profile), the
University of Pennsylvania's
Wharton School (Wharton
Undergraduate Business Profile), and the
Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of
North Carolina-Chapel Hill (Kenan-Flagler
Undergraduate Business Profile) each ranked near
the top of five specialty lists.
Racking Up Top Awards
Among them, the top three programs in the overall
ranking took eight of the No. 1 specialty ranks. No. 1 Notre Dame is tops in
accounting and ethics, No. 2 University of Virginia
McIntire School of Commerce (McIntire
Undergraduate Business Profile) takes the top spot
in both macroeconomics and business law, and No.3 Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
Sloan School of Management (Sloan
Undergraduate Business Profile) is best in
quantitative methods, operations management, calculus, and marketing. "Sloan
requires a great deal of its students," says an MIT senior business student
responding to the Bloomberg Businessweek survey. "It's
exceedingly challenging, but that's a good thing."
Continued in article
A Very Critical Article About College
Rankings by the Media
"It’s the Student Work, Stupid," by Sherman
Dorn, Inside Higher Ed, April 7, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/04/07/dorn
Last week, my dean
touted our college’s rise in the U.S. News &
World Report
ranking of graduate colleges of education.
As the anonymous author of Confessions of a Community
College Dean
explains, even
administrators who dislike rankings have to play the game, and in many ways
it’s an administrator’s job to play cheerleader whenever possible. But as
two associations of colleges and universities gear up support for a
Voluntary System of Accountability,
it’s time to look more seriously at what goes into
ratings systems.
We all know the limits of the U.S. News
rankings. My colleagues work hard and deserve praise, but I suspect faculty
in Gainesville do, too, where the University of Florida
explained its
college of education’s drop in the rankings. U.S. News editors rely
heavily on grant funding and reputational surveys to list the top 10 or 50
programs in areas they have no substantive knowledge of. That selection is
why the University of Florida ranking dropped; the dean recently decided it
was a matter of honesty to exclude some grants that came to the college’s
lab school instead of the main part of the college. (My university does not
have a lab school.) But the U.S. News rankings do not honor such
decisions. The editors’ job is to sell magazines, and if that requires
one-dimensional reporting, so be it.
In addition to the standard criticisms of U.S.
News, I rarely hear my own impression voiced: the editors are lazy in a
fundamental way. They rely on existing data provided by the institutions,
circulate a few hundred surveys to gauge reputation, and voila! Rankings and
sales.
The most important information on doctoral programs
is available to academics and reporters alike, if only we would look:
dissertations. My institution now requires all doctoral students to submit
dissertations electronically, and within a year, they are available to the
world. Even before electronic thesis dissemination, dissertations were
microfilmed, and the titles, advisors, and other information about each were
available from Dissertations Abstracts International. Every few months, my
friend Penny Richards compiles a
list of dissertations
in our field (history of education) and distributes it
to an e-mail list for historians of education.
Anyone can take a further step and read the
dissertations that doctoral programs produce. With Google Scholar available
now, anyone see if the recent graduates from a program published the
research after graduating. With the Web, anyone can see where the graduates
go afterwards. All it takes is a little time and gumshoe work ... what we
used to call reporting.
But reading dissertations is hard work, and
probably far more boring than looking at the statistics that go into the
U.S. News rankings. But even while some disciplines debate the value and
format of dissertations, it is still the best evidence of what doctoral
programs claim to produce: graduates who can conduct rigorous scholarship.
(I’m not suggesting people interested in evaluating a program spend weeks
reading dissertations cover to cover, but the reality is that it doesn’t
take too long with a batch of recent dissertations to get a sense of whether
a program is producing original thinkers.)
Suppose the evaluation of doctoral programs
required reading a sample of dissertations from the program over the past
few years, together with follow-up data on where graduates end up and what
happens to the research they conducted. That evaluation would be far more
valuable than the U.S. News rankings, both to prospective students
and also to the public whose taxes are invested in graduate research
programs.
I do not expect U.S. News editors to approve
any such project, because their job is to sell magazines and not produce any
rigorous external evaluation of higher education. But the annual gap between
the U.S. News graduate rankings and the reality on the ground should
remind us of what such facile rankings ignore.
That omission glares at me from the Voluntary
System of Accountability, created by two of the largest higher-ed
associations, the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant
Colleges and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. In
many ways, the VSA project and its compilation of data in a College Portrait
comprise a reasonable response to demands for higher-education
accountability, until we get to the VSA’s pretense at measuring learning
outcomes through one of three standardized measures.
What worries me about the VSA is not just the fact
that the VSA oversight board includes no professors who currently teach, nor
the fact that NASULGC and AASCU chose three measures that have little
research support, nor the fact that their choices funnel millions of dollars
into the coffers of three test companies in a year when funding for public
colleges and universities is dropping.
My greatest concern is the fact that a standardized
test fails to meet the legitimate needs of prospective students and their
families to know what a college actually does. When making a choice between
two performing-arts programs, a young friend of mine would have found the
scores of these tests useless. Instead, she made the decision from observing
rehearsals at each college, peeking inside the black box of a college
classroom.
Nor do employers want fill-in-the-bubble or essay
test scores. The Association of American Colleges and Universities sponsored
a survey of employers
that documented that employers want to see the real work of students in
situations that require the evaluation of messy situations and
problem-solving. And I doubt that legislators and other policymakers see
test statistics as a legitimate measure of learning in programs as disparate
as classics, anthropology, physics, and economics. Except for Charles Miller
and a few others — and it is notable that despite the calls for
accountability, the Spellings Commission entirely ignored the curriculum — I
suspect legislators will be more concerned about graduation rates and
addressing student and parent concerns about college debt.
Continued in article
Losing Chicago's Olympic bid is just the tip of the iceberg
Is UC Berkeley really as low as Rank 39 (at that was below this year's budget
crunch in California)?
"U.S. Decline or a Flawed Measure?" by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
October 8, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/10/08/rankings#
Most higher education
leaders say that institutional rankings are highly questionable, given the
many intangibles in what make a college or university “best” for a given
person or course of study. But what about national trends? Can international
rankings of universities provide a picture of the relative rise and fall of
nation’s universities?
The Times Higher
Education/QS
rankings, out today, suggest that there are
national patterns that can be discerned – and the picture is one of decline
for American institutions. Since narratives about American decline always
attract attention, these rankings are likely to cause a stir.
Some of the patterns are
striking, and there is abundant evidence that the rise of universities in
other countries will
inevitably broaden the global leadership. But some
experts on rankings say that this study shouldn’t be taken too seriously
because of its reliance (even more than the rankings of U.S. News & World
Report) on reputational surveys. And even a top editor at the Times
Higher acknowledged in an interview that some of the measures used favor
institutions in Europe and Asia over those of the United States.
Here’s what this year's
Times Higher rankings found:
- The United States and Britain continue to
dominate the very top ranks with one university in Cambridge, Mass.,
leading the rankings and one in the original Cambridge in second place.
- The number of North American universities in
the top 100 fell to 36 from 42 in just a year.
- The list saw increases in universities from
Europe (39, up from 36) and Asia (16, up from 14 last year).
In ranking universities,
Times Higher uses this formula:
- 20 percent is based on a per capita analysis
of citations of research conducted by faculty members at each
university. This provides an indication of “the density of research
excellence on a campus,” Times Higher says.
- 20 percent is based on faculty-student ratio,
to provide “a sense as to whether an institution has enough teaching
staff to give students the attention they require.”
- 5 percent is based on the percentage of
international faculty members.
- 5 percent is based on the percentage of
international students.
- 40 percent is based on a worldwide survey of
academics, who are asked to name the 30 institutions they consider the
best in the world.
- 10 percent is based on another international
survey – this one of employers of graduates.
The 50 percent of the
formula based on reputation exceeds even the much-criticized percentage used
by U.S. News (25 percent).
And that’s part of why
rankings experts question the methodology. The Institute for Higher
Education Policy has conducted extensive research both on rankings and on
the evolution of a global higher ed infrastructure in which the U.S. is not
as dominant as it once was. Alisa F. Cunningham, vice president of research
for the institute, said that the Times Higher’s rankings are of
“limited value” and that all the much discussed flaws of reputation surveys
(voting based on old information, voting to favor your own institution,
voting on criteria that aren’t those being used, etc.) are only accentuated
in international surveys.
“You’ve got entirely
different contexts in different parts of the world, and you don’t know what
those contexts are,” she said.
Reputational surveys are
“the least reliable way to do these comparisons,” she added.
Another reason to be wary
of these rankings, Cunningham said, is their volatility (which is of course
what gets them more attention). Cunningham said that the great universities
of the world – whether in the United States or elsewhere – change gradually,
not radically, from year to year. So any methodology that suggests that
universities that are centuries old are notably better or worse from year to
year is questionable, she said. “They don’t change that way,” she said.
Phil Baty, Deputy Editor
of the Times Higher, said in an e-mail interview that some of the
measures do favor certain regions. For example, he noted that the citations
index favors institutions where most faculty members are in medicine or hard
sciences, while putting at a disadvantage institutions where much of the
faculty scholarship is in the humanities or social sciences (a
characteristic that applies to most American universities). Likewise, he
noted that European and Asian universities are more likely than others to
have large percentages of foreign faculty members.
But as to the criticism
about relying on surveys, Baty said that was a strength of the Times
Higher rankings.
“When the rankings were
conceived six years ago, a guiding principal was that academics know best
when it comes to identifying the world’s best universities. So we were happy
to include a heavy element of opinion in the rankings formula," Baty said.
"In some ways, giving a strong weighting to the academic opinion survey
helps meet some of the biggest criticisms of the university rankings in
general – that you can’t reduce all the wonderful and less tangible things
that a university does into a simple scientific formula. Universities are
always about more than the sum of their parts."
Robert M. Berdahl,
president of the Association of American Universities, said that at his
association (which includes research universities in the United States and
Canada), "we don’t generally place a great deal of stock in the public
rankings of universities, but we don’t ignore them either. They are
important to the extent that shape public perceptions of the qualitative
hierarchy of institutions, but they all have flaws and biases."
Berdahl said that a "heavy
reliance on reputational surveys, for example, is not terribly reliable, in
part because it depends so heavily on who is surveyed."
The best way to do
international comparisons, he said, is "program by program, using the most
objective criteria possible."
The issue raised by the
Times Higher about an erosion of U.S. dominance is an important one,
Berdahl said, even if he doesn't agree with the findings about specific
universities or the methodology.
"The United States has to
be concerned about this. We know that other nations are investing
substantial amounts in building research universities, while the U.S. has
been disinvesting," he said. "If we cease to be the nation of choice for the
best and brightest international students, or even the best American
students, we will quickly cease to have the universities that are the choice
for the best faculty and we will be caught in a downward spiral."
But Berdahl, a former
chancellor at the University of California at Berkeley, said he just can't
buy the numbers in the Times Higher's survey. "While I think that
there has been some relative slippage as a result of a decline in funding in
the U.S. and the investment elsewhere, the rankings indicated by the
Times seem to me to be wildly off the mark," he said. "No one I know
would rank Berkeley anywhere near as low as 39th in the world. I admit I’m
biased; but this is too far from the mark to be taken terribly seriously."
"Let's (Credit) Grade Wall Street Like Colleges: The more rating
agencies the better," The Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203917304574413072842297920.html#mod=djemEditorialPage
Is Harvard really the best?
It turns out that depends on who you ask—and what
you ask. As students across America return to campus for the new school
year, new editions of three prominent college guides variously rank Harvard
at No. 1, No. 5, and No. 11. Therein lies a timely lesson for our system of
credit ratings.
Some students know from their earliest days they
want to go to Harvard, while others may want to follow mom or dad to East
Carolina or Purdue. Many more rely on the annual college guides to help them
make one of the most important financial decisions in their lives—in much
the same way an investor might look to Moody's to tell them about the
reliability of a corporate bond. The question with both is just how reliable
those ratings are.
When the housing bubble popped, our financial
institutions learned—the hard way—that the mortgage-backed securities on
their balance sheets did not merit the AAA-grades the credit ratings
agencies had assigned them. Similar complaints have long been advanced about
the trustworthiness of college guides. As the dominant player, U.S. News &
World Report's annual America's Best Colleges guide has borne the brunt of
this criticism.
In public, college presidents, deans, and spokesmen
pooh-pooh the U.S. News rankings. In private, however, many do what they can
to boost their schools up the rankings ladder. One area open to manipulation
has to do with the "peer assessment" category that accounts for a quarter of
the U.S. News ranking.
Earlier this year, Inside Higher Ed reported on a
charmingly frank presentation by a Clemson University official who admitted
her school's officials use the peer assessment to rate "all programs other
than Clemson below average." The university denied the charge. But further
reporting revealed that Clemson President James Barker had given his only
"strong" rating to his own school, while giving lower grades to every other
college in the land.
The revelations have been an embarrassment for
Clemson. Still, the woman who set off the firestorm was surely right when
she said, "I'm confident my president is not the only one who does that."
Other schools, after all, have found themselves in the news for manipulating
the way they report to U.S. News everything from their average SAT scores
and alumni giving to per pupil spending and class profiles.
So if the U.S. News report is so flawed, where's
the lesson for Wall Street? The answer lies in the new competition the U.S.
News guide has spawned. In the last few years, the Washington Monthly and
Forbes have each offered guides of their own. They are joined by the
American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which measures colleges by whether
they require seven core subjects the authors deem essential for a solid
liberal arts education. There's even the conservative Intercollegiate
Studies Institute's "Choosing the Right College," which offers advice about
the best professors and courses to seek out on campuses.
Different measures, of course, lead to different
results. The latest U.S. News guide has Harvard and Princeton tied for No.
1, followed by Yale. Over at the Washington Monthly, by contrast—where
editors measure colleges by how well they do at promoting social mobility,
national service and research—Harvard falls to No. 11. And the top three
slots are taken by public universities in the University of California
system: UC Berkeley, UC San Diego and UCLA.
Then there's Forbes, which just ranked West Point
as "America's Best College." The Forbes ratings include student satisfaction
with courses, post-graduate employment success (including salary data and
entries in Who's Who), the likelihood of graduation within four years, and
the average level of debt graduates are stuck with.
Which guide is best at picking the best? The answer
is that no single measurement or guide can tell everyone everything. The
more measures students and parents have, the fuller the picture before them,
and the better equipped they are to make a smart decision. Because the
federal government is not in the business of certifying particular college
guides, moreover, they compete by persuading students and parents to buy
them on the quality and relevance of their findings.
At a time when the Securities and Exchange
Commission is looking for ways to improve the flawed credit ratings that
contributed so much to our financial crisis, it might do well to stop
anointing particular credit rating agencies. Forcing these firms to compete
for customers the way the college guides do would give us better ratings—and
fewer investors lulled into the complacency that comes from thinking Uncle
Sam has done the due diligence. At least when it comes to ratings, the
Groves of Academe have a thing or two to teach our captains of finance about
competition.
Bob Jensen's threads on systemic problems of accountancy (including the
aggregation ratings of nutrients in vegetables) are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews
- Systemic Problem:
All Aggregations Are Arbitrary
- Systemic Problem:
All Aggregations Combine Different Measurements With Varying
Accuracies
- Systemic Problem:
All Aggregations Leave Out Important Components
- Systemic Problem:
All Aggregations Ignore Complex & Synergistic Interactions
of Value and Risk
- Systemic Problem: Disaggregating of Value or Cost is
Generally Arbitrary
- Systemic Problem:
Systems Are Too Fragile
- Systemic Problem:
More Rules Do Not Necessarily Make Accounting for
Performance More Transparent
- Systemic Problem:
Economies of Scale vs. Consulting Red Herrings in Auditing
- Systemic Problem:
Intangibles Are Intractable
|
Bob Jensen's threads on credit rating agencies ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Sleaze
These Clemson University policies remind me of the X Generation
where high grades are more important than learning itself
"Researcher Offers Unusually Candid Description of University's Effort to
Rise in Rankings," by Martin Van Der Werf, Chronicle of Higher Education,
June 3, 2009 ---
Click Here
Clemson University is run in an almost
single-minded direction, with nearly all policies driven by how they will
help the land-grant institution rise in U.S. News & World Report’s rankings,
according to a university official whose candid comments stirred debate
among conference-goers here on Tuesday.
Clemson has doubled its tuition this decade,
manipulated class sizes, and even sought to downgrade the academic
reputations of other institutions when answering surveys, all in an attempt
to meet the goal of pushing the university into the ranks of the top-20
public research institutions, said Catherine E. Watt, the former director of
institutional research at Clemson.
In terms of the rankings, the strategy has worked.
Clemson was 38th among public research universities in the magazine’s 2001
rankings, she said. In 2008, it had risen to 22nd.
Ms. Watt, who is now director of the Alliance for
Research on Higher Education, part of the university’s Strom Thurmond
Institute of Government and Public Affairs, spoke at a session at the annual
conference of the Association for Institutional Research, which concludes
here today.
University representatives could not be reached for
comment late Tuesday, after Ms. Watt's afternoon session.
The U.S. News rankings are built on seven basic
categories meant to measure the quality of colleges and universities,
including academic reputation, financial resources, and graduation rates.
Academic reputation, which is determined by surveying officials at
institutions about how they rate other universities, carries the greatest
weight in the rankings formula, accounting for 25 percent of the total.
While many institutions pay close attention to the
rankings, Ms. Watt’s description of the methods used by Clemson was
startling in its bluntness and for how pervasively she said the rankings
figure in every decision made by administrators.
Robert Morse, who directs the rankings for U.S.
News and is attending the meeting, said after the session that her comments
probably gave public voice to conversations held privately at many
universities about how to rise in the rankings.
A Vision and a Goal
In her presentation, Ms. Watt said that Clemson’s
president since 1999, James F. Barker, had established in 2001 the goal of
reaching the top 20. Soon thereafter, the university adopted a policy to
“affect every possible indicator to the greatest extent possible,” she said.
“Clemson has a specific, year-directed vision,”
said Ms. Watt. “I can promise you, everyone on the Clemson campus can tell
you what the campus vision is. Every president’s speech starts with the
ranking; every policy starts there. Like it or not, you always know where
you stand.”
For example, the university has doubled its tuition
since 2001, she said, reasoning that the extra proceeds could be dumped into
the academic budget and used to reduce student-faculty ratios, one of the
criteria used by U.S. News. When course sections had 21 to 23 students in
them, administrators ordered that more sections be opened to reduce the
class size to 19 students or less, she said. The percentage of courses with
fewer than 20 students is another of the criteria used in the magazine's
rankings.
Conversely, if a course was looking as if it would
have more than 50 students, Clemson administrators would simply let it
continue to grow. “Any class over 50 may as well grow larger,” she said.
“There wasn’t much containment there.”
The percentage of courses with more than 50
students is also a factor in the rankings. But Clemson decided to direct its
resources toward reducing the percentage of classes under 20 students, she
said, and didn’t worry about the number of classes with more than 50.
In the magazine's academic-reputation surveys, Ms.
Watt said, administrators rated all institutions other than Clemson as below
average.
Following the session, Ms. Watt clarified that
administrators had not been directed to deride the reputations of other
institutions as far as she knew, but she said, “I saw copies of a couple of
surveys myself that had that effect.”
Faculty salaries are another factor in the
rankings. Ms. Watt said Clemson attempted to inflate its faculty salaries by
including the value of benefits.
Mr. Morse later clarified, however, that Clemson
was supposed to be including the value of benefits all along, and had
previously been misreporting salary information.
Nervous Response
People attending the session seemed stunned by some
of Ms. Watt's comments. The presentation was met with gasps, guffaws,
nervous laughter, and incredulity. “You’re pandering,” said one audience
member. “What are you trying to accomplish? How does this help the
students?” said another. “How can you justify doing it?” asked another.
“Well, to do anything else is not an option,” said
Ms. Watt. “It’s just that frank.”
And the strategy has had positive effects for
students, she said. They have smaller classes and have more professors in
classrooms, rather than teaching assistants. The six-year graduation rate,
another factor measured by U.S. News, has increased from 72 percent to 78
percent this decade, possibly in part because of the increased attention to
academic resources, Ms. Watt said.
“Clemson has always had a happy, loyal student
body,” she said. “It still is, and, by some measures, it’s even happier
today.”
However, the university is probably guilty of
neglecting its mission, she said. “We have favored merit over access in a
poor state,” she said. “We are more elite, more white, more privileged.”
But in measuring the tradeoffs, the university has
not wavered from the policy, she said.
“We have been criticized for not fulfilling the
mission of a public land-grant institution,” she said. “On the other hand,
we have gotten really good press. We have walked the fine line between
illegal, unethical, and really interesting.”
Continued in article
The Top Ranked University Websites
"MIT Tops Rankings of University Web Sites," by
Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 11, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3609&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
The
Cybermetrics Lab, a research group based in Spain, has released
the latest edition of its biannual
Webometrics
Ranking of World Universities, which
seeks to measure “the performance and impact of universities
through their Web presence.”
According
to the group’s Web site, the rankings—which Cybermetrics began
publishing in 2004—were originally conceived as a way of
promoting open access to academic materials online. It comes as
no surprise, then, that the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, whose
OpenCourseWare project boasts the
world’s largest collection of free teaching materials, tops the
list.
Stanford
University, Harvard University, the University of California at
Berkeley, and Cornell University round out the top five.
American universities are the strongest performers: The
University of Toronto, at No. 24, is the highest-ranked
institution from outside the United States, and the University
of Cambridge, at No. 28, registered as the highest-ranked
European institution.
The
Webometrics rankings score each university on
four
criteria, including the number of
links to the institution’s Web site from other sites. These
“inlinks” are ostensibly a good way of evaluating a site’s
general impact on the Web community.
|
Bob Jensen's threads on free course materials and videos
from leading universities are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Percentages Versus Absolutes
"Challenging the Measures of Success," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
June 6, 2007 ---
http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/06/06/rates
F. King
Alexander, president of California State University at Long
Beach, wants to change the way people evaluate what a
college contributes. “I like to ask people: Do you want
Princeton or Cal State Long Beach in your economy?”
To those who live by U.S. News rankings, or SAT
scores, or prestige, or Nobel Prizes, or graduation rates, the answer is a
no brainer: Princeton. But to Alexander, there’s a simple way to change the
equation. Instead of thinking about graduation rates, which are an easy
proxy for SAT scores, competitiveness, and all kinds of other factors that
relate to the wealth or prestige of an institution, he wants people to think
about how many students graduated. In other words, focus on the raw numbers,
not what percentage met the federal definition for graduating.
“We will have more graduates this year than
Princeton has students,” Alexander said. (Long Beach graduates more than
8,000 students a year, while Princeton’s total enrollment is about 6,700.)
“And we’re going to have 500 engineers who graduate this year, and 300
nurses, and 1,100 school teachers and they are all getting good strong
degrees and are getting very good jobs.”
In contrast, when you look at graduation rates,
Princeton comes out on top, with a rate of 97 percent, compared to 48
percent at Long Beach, using the federal definition, which looks at
first-time, full time enrollees who earn degrees within six years (or three
years for a community college).
While such rates mean something to many people,
Alexander said that they actually reflect a specific set of incentives,
which even if appropriate for Princeton aren’t appropriate for most places.
“If you focus on a rate, you drive public universities away from their
public missions. Everyone knows that to get your graduation rate up, the
best way to do that is turn away all the academically challenged students
and there is evidence of this all over the United States.”
As a result of his views, Alexander is working with
officials of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities to
try to change federal policy and national perceptions about graduation rates
and whether they are a good measure. While the project is still in the idea
stage, it comes at a time that other groups are also considering proposals
to change the way graduation rates are calculated. And while the federal
definition has long frustrated some educators, there appears to be more
discussion now about seeking change than has been the case previously.
Continued in article
A Innovative Approach to Ranking Colleges
Wither though goest Wharton, Harvard, and Stanford?
An economist at Vanderbilt University’s business
school has unveiled a new approach to business school rankings — an approach
that responds to one criticism of M.B.A. education, which is that graduate
schools of business are great at identifying talent, but don’t necessarily do
much with it once students are enrolled. Mike Schor, the economist, took the top
50 programs, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, and took data on inputs
(college grades and scores on the GMAT) and outputs (average salaries). It is no
surprise of course that some of the top ranked programs see their graduates do
particularly well, but Schor noted that these schools attract some of the best
students — so he compared salaries to what might have been the “predictive”
salary based on GMAT scores and college grades. And he ranked the 50 in order of
the gains in salary that the school appears to provide. Using this system,
Cornell University comes out on top, followed by Indiana University at
Bloomington and the University of Virginia. Details are at
Schor’s blog.
Inside Higher Ed, June 20, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/20/qt
Jensen Comment
This does not necessarily mean that a student admitted to Wharton, Harvard, or
Stanford should choose a "higher-ranked" Indiana University. There's too much
snob appeal among recruiters for companies and doctoral programs to count out
the prestige school halo impact on a resume. For example, Wharton opens doors on
Wall Street even if Wall Street's starting salaries are a bit lower and/or based
on securities sales commissions. Having said this, I once stated to a top
administrator at MIT that if MIT did not mess a student up over the course of
four years, the student would probably achieve great success whether or not the
student graduated from MIT because admission standards are so high just to get
into MIT. He nodded his head in agreement.
Bob Jensen's threads on college ranking systems are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
"Rankings Are Useful — But Go Beyond ‘U.S. News’," by Richard Vedder,
Inside Higher Ed, August 29, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/08/28/vedder
The emphasis on rankings has three root causes.
First, parents love their children, and want the very best for them given
their financial constraints. Hence parents and students eagerly devour
college rankings. Second, Americans are by nature competitive “can do”
people who admire and reward merit and excellence. Where else in the world
do 100,000 people pay $60 a ticket to sit in uncomfortable seats to watch
college kids compete by throwing a ball around (college athletic departments
have no problem with performance metrics or rankings!).
Third, the failure of colleges themselves to
provide virtually any information on the value that they add to their
student’s knowledge, critical thinking skills, moral character, leadership
qualities or any positive attribute forces the public to look to outsiders
for evaluations. Accreditation agencies could do this, but being controlled
by the colleges themselves, they provide little meaningful information to
the public, since accreditation reveals little about institutional quality.
Therefore, rankings are useful, trying to
distinguish the great from the mediocre, the good values from the rip-offs.
U.S. News & World Report’s rankings are thus popular and the public pays
good money to get them. U.S. News meets a strongly felt need. Next to the
purchase of a home, the decision about college is the largest non-financial
investment decision most families make, and they need help in assessing what
they are buying, just as Consumer Reports and J.D. Power and Associates help
us overcome the information costs associated with buying a car or
television.
At the same time, given the lack of any
standardized measures of “value added,” ranking colleges involves using
methodologies whose appropriateness can be criticized. And different
approaches yield meaningful, varying results. Let me compare the two most
recent rankings, by Forbes and U.S. News & World Report. Full disclosure: I
was the lead investigator in compiling the Forbes rankings. (For a critical
look at the Forbes ranking, see related essay today.)
Looking at just the 133 schools that U.S. News
ranks on its national research universities “tier one” list, or the similar
list for 124 top ranked liberal arts colleges, I compared its rankings to
those by Forbes. The correlation coefficient in both cases between the
rankings was about +.67, suggesting a lot of commonality between the
rankings — but important differences. too.
For example, among the national research
universities, six of the top 15 schools in the U.S. News rankings did not
make the Forbes top 15 — University of Pennsylvania, Duke University,
Dartmouth College, Washington University in St. Louis, Cornell, and Johns
Hopkins. Forbes’s top 15, however, includes Brown, Rice, Brandeis, Boston
College, Tufts and the University of Virginia. Northwestern and Washington
University in St. Louis are tied for 12th in U.S. News, but Forbes ranks
Northwestern much higher (6th vs. 33rd) than Wash U among national research
universities.
U.S. News ranks the University of Southern
California 27th among national research universities but says it is “up and
coming.” While Forbes ranks USC 66th on the comparable list of national
research universities, it comes in at a so-so 300 rank among all schools,
including liberal arts colleges. Indeed, USC ranks well behind at least six
schools in Los Angeles county alone — the five Claremont Colleges (Pomona,
Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, Scripps and Pitzer) and UCLA. Why? USC
students don’t particularly like their instructors (as indicated on
ratemyprofessors.com), often graduate with a fairly high debt, or worse,
don’t graduate at all. USC seems better at raising and spending money than
at satisfying undergraduate students.
Among the top 16 liberal arts colleges, U.S. News
lists Carleton, Davidson, Claremont McKenna, Vassar, Grinnell and Harvey
Mudd colleges, but Forbes does not. However, Forbes has Smith, Hamilton,
Barnard, Centre, Wabash, and Whitman Colleges. The contrast with U.S. News
with respect to Wabash (6th vs. 54th) and Centre (7th vs. 45th) is
particularly startling. The moral of the story for prospective students:
look at more than one ranking.
Even more important are two major differences in
approaches. First, in compiling the Forbes rankings, both the editors and I
felt strongly that all colleges belong together in a single list. When
choosing a college, high school seniors often compile a short list with both
liberal arts colleges and large research universities. College is college,
and a good ranking system compares the undergraduate experience at all types
of institutions offering the bachelor’s degree. In doing this, Forbes found
on average higher rankings for the smaller schools; only one of Forbes’s top
50 schools (the University of Virginia) had more than 10,000 undergraduate
students. I would hypothesize that where undergraduate education is the sole
or dominant emphasis, students get more attention and thus have a better
overall experience.
Continued in article
The
publication this year of U.S. News & World Report's first ranking of high
schools has parents in a twitter, worrying that their property taxes are too
high (or too low), or that public education has failed them entirely. But
leaving aside the merits and methodology of these particular rankings, we
might wonder whether rankings matter at all and, more importantly, if they
should.
In fact, there
are some numbers that really matter. Getting them is the rub.
To understand
this problem, consider another set of rankings, released about the same time
as the high-school rankings, that didn't garner as much attention: bar-exam
passage rates. The school at which I teach -- New York Law School -- jumped
to fifth on the list of New York area law schools (with an all-time high
passage rate of 90%), while Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School at Yeshiva
University leapfrogged to third, behind only NYU and Columbia.
Cardozo,
however, is ranked 52nd by U.S. News among all law schools (fourth in New
York), while New York Law School is ranked in the "third tier" of law
schools (along with Albany, Hofstra, Pace and Syracuse). So which ranking
matters?
On the one
hand, the U.S. News ranking would seem to be more comprehensive, because bar
passage rate is only one of many factors it considers. On the other hand,
what good is a law degree if a graduate can't practice because he doesn't
pass the licensing exam?
Moreover, if
the bar exam measures a student's fitness to practice law (as the bar
examiners claim), a school's bar passage rate should be a pretty good
indication of how the school is doing in turning out graduates who know how
to practice law.
Nevertheless,
according to a paper commissioned by the Association of American Law
Schools, bar passage rate accounts for only 2% of a school's overall rank in
the U.S. News survey. This doesn't seem right.
Of course
there are other things that matter to law-school graduates -- like getting a
job. Although the U.S. News rankings purport to measure a school's success
at placing its graduates into gainful employment, the rankings do not
distinguish between success at placing students at high-paying corporate law
jobs versus low-paying paralegal-type jobs. Nor do they distinguish between
jobs that graduates want and the jobs that graduates get.
Students who assume that going to a more highly ranked school is more likely
to get them a good job are essentially being misled by lazy reporting.
The U.S. News
rankings are also heavily weighted toward reputation, which would seem to
have some real world significance. But again, "reputation" is misleading,
and often irrelevant. Beyond the top 20 or so law schools, law firms care
less about the ranking of a school when making hiring decision and more
about the ranking of the students at the schools.
Put a
different way, there are really two kinds of law schools: those at which
students decide where they want to interview, and those where firms decide.
The large majority of law schools belong to the latter group. Hiring
partners admit that they use GPA or other bright-line criteria (like law
review membership) to interview at Tier 2, 3, and 4 schools, while taking
resumes from nearly everyone at Tier 1 schools.
In short: The
difference between the 55th-ranked law school and the 105th law school is of
little significance in determining which students are more likely to get a
good job. At both schools, unless a student is in the top 15% or 20% of his
class, he has little chance of getting a high-paying job directly upon
graduation. Students might be better served by going to a lower-ranked law
school and doing better, rather than going to middling law school and not
doing as well.
Students and
parents are led astray by U.S. News because in putting a simple number on
something that is incredibly complex, they are missing the nuances that are
likely to be more important. But schools themselves -- high schools and law
schools -- are partly to blame, because they resist fully disclosing
important information.
Just as law
schools would better serve their constituencies by releasing accurate
information about numbers that matter -- bar results, jobs, and average
salaries -- high schools should make more of an effort to fully disclose
test scores, college admissions, class sizes and other important data. More
information may put some schools under a harsh light. But it will help
students and parents decide whether those high taxes and tuition rates are
worth it. The alternative is letting U.S. News decide for us.
Mr. Stracher is publisher of the New York Law School Law
Review and author of "Dinner with Dad: How I Found My Way Back to the Family
Table" (Random House, 2007).
US News Rankings of Universities and Colleges ---
http://www.usnews.com/rankings
Best Business Schools According to Business Week Magazine ---http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/toc/08_47/B4109best_business_schools.htm
This includes a history link on the rankings over the years.
Bob Jensen's threads on Ranking Controversies ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
"The Rise of the European B-School: Shorter,
cheaper programs and demand for international experience are two reasons
business schools across Europe are flourishing," by Jennifer Fishbein,
Business Week, March 27, 2008 ---
Click Here
European MBA programs may have traditionally lacked
the brand recognition of their U.S. counterparts, but that's changing fast.
The continent's increasingly dynamic business environment, improvements to
curricula, and growing corporate demand for employees with international
experience are attracting top-notch candidates from all over the world. In
addition, most Europe management programs are cheaper, shorter, smaller, and
more diverse than their U.S. rivals, which is drawing a growing number of
American students to studies in the Old World.
Applications from the U.S. to INSEAD, an elite
French business school with campuses in Fontainebleau and Singapore, grew
20% in the past year and the school's 2008 enrollment of Americans grew
nearly 24% since 2007, to 73 students. Barcelona-based IESE Business School
received 32% more applications from the U.S. this year than last, and
expects to enroll 35 Americans in the next class—an increase of 60%. Another
Barcelona-based institution, ESADE, has fielded so many inquiries from
Americans about its full-time MBA programs that it has begun encouraging
them to wait until next year to apply.
INSEAD's dean, Frank Brown, says ever more young
people are recognizing the value of an MBA but don't want to spend two years
earning one—the length of most U.S. programs. Others credit the U.S.
recession.
"Probably, the economic fear is making people think
that it's a good year for education," says Olaya Garcia, ESADE's director of
full-time MBA programs.
Bargains Despite a Weak Dollar Despite the euro's
steep rise against the dollar, which raises the cost of European programs
for U.S. students, prospective applicants are still heading across the
Atlantic for a good deal. Nicole Baum, a 27-year-old Chicagoan studying at
SDA Bocconi in Milan, one of Europe's top 10 business schools, said she
turned down NYU's Stern School of Business in part because tuition cost 30%
more there.
The average tuition at the top 10 European schools
is less than $73,000, vs. $86,600 at Harvard Business School, and about
$95,000 at Wharton. Only one elite European program costs more than the
Wharton degree: IESE's 18-month full-time MBA—long, by European standards—at
€64,900 ($102,000). Tuition at the least expensive school surveyed by
BusinessWeek, Vlerick Leuven Gent in Belgium, runs just €17,000 ($26,000).
Furthermore, MBA students are increasingly looking
to pursue social justice through business, and many European schools have
responded with a wealth of new courses on corporate social responsibility,
social entrepreneurship, and doing business in developing countries. In
2004, Instituto de Empresa Business School in Madrid, another elite
institution, founded the Center for Eco-Intelligent Management to teach
sustainable business practices. That same year Oxford opened the Skoll
Center for Social Entrepreneurship, which provides five MBA scholarships a
year.
Economic and Geographic Diversity The international
mix of students at European schools also attracts applicants. Just 14% of
188 full-time MBA students at HEC-Paris, one of France's elite grandes
écoles, are French, and just 5% of 215 full-time MBA students at Oxford hail
from Great Britain—figures typical of top European programs. By contrast,
63% of the 900-strong MBA class at Harvard Business School and 55% of
Wharton's 800 MBA students are American.
Most of the 25 European programs in this
BusinessWeek report enroll fewer than 100 students a year, making class
diversity even more pronounced. The 50 full-time students at Vlerick Leuven
Gent represent 30 nationalities. The Grenoble Graduate School of Business'
26 full-time MBA students at its French campus hail from 13 countries,
including Azerbaijan and Moldova.
To build on their growing reputations, many
European institutions are now opening satellite campuses in other parts of
the world, particularly the Middle East and Asia. Many have launched
executive training programs in Dubai and Abu Dhabi and some have merged with
foreign schools or built business programs abroad.
Continued in article
Low correlation between top business schools versus accountancy schools?
What sources of data does Business Week use to rank undergraduate business
programs?
Answer at
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/feb2008/bs20080226_182953.htm
There are five sources for the undergraduate
ranking: a student survey, a recruiter survey, median starting salaries for
graduates, the number of graduates admitted to 35 top MBA programs, and an
academic quality measure that consists of SAT/ACT test scores for business
majors, full-time faculty-student ratios in the business program, average
class size in core business classes, the percentage of business majors with
internships, and the number of hours students spend preparing for class each
week. The test scores, faculty-student ratio, and class size information
come from a survey to be completed by participating schools; the internship
and hours of preparation data come from the student survey.
The 2009 Business Week rankings (including a slide show) are at
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/toc/09_10/B4122undergrad_business.htm?campaign_id=bschools_related
Jensen Comment
The relatively low rankings of top accountancy schools like USC, Illinois, Iowa,
Indiana, and Wisconsin lead me to suspect that this ranking outcome does not
correlate at all well with rankings of undergraduate accountancy programs.
| 1 |
2 |
Virginia (McIntire)
Charlottesville |
Public |
2 |
9,490 |
655 |
1 |
52 |
58,000 |
5 |
5 |
100.00 |
10.40 |
1355 |
30 |
A+ |
A+ |
A+ |
| 2 |
3 |
Notre Dame (Mendoza)
South Bend, Ind. |
Private |
3 |
36,847 |
1,669 |
2 |
12 |
55,000 |
11 |
16 |
97.29 |
18.57 |
1405 |
32 |
A+ |
A+ |
A+ |
| 3 |
1 |
Pennsylvania (Wharton)
Philadelphia |
Private |
4 |
37,526 |
2,528 |
13 |
13 |
61,001 |
10 |
1 |
95.78 |
10.89 |
1440 |
32 |
A+ |
A |
A+ |
| 4 |
6 |
Michigan (Ross)
Ann Arbor |
Public |
3 |
10,848 |
1,050 |
18 |
8 |
60,000 |
7 |
8 |
94.47 |
15.22 |
1346 |
30 |
B |
A |
A+ |
| 5 |
7 |
Brigham Young
(Marriott)
Provo, Utah |
Private |
2 |
4,110 |
1,783 |
6 |
1 |
50,000 |
17 |
40 |
93.12 |
19.00 |
1231 |
27 |
A |
A+ |
A+ |
| 6 |
11 |
UC-Berkeley (Haas)
Berkeley, Calif. |
Public |
2 |
8,932 |
668 |
24 |
2 |
55,000 |
3 |
16 |
92.85 |
25.70 |
1388 |
31 |
B |
A+ |
A |
| 7 |
9 |
MIT (Sloan)
Cambridge, Mass. |
Private |
3 |
36,390 |
225 |
5 |
43 |
60,000 |
4 |
12 |
92.41 |
2.70 |
1381 |
33 |
A+ |
A+ |
A+ |
| 8 |
4 |
Cornell
Ithaca, N.Y. |
Private |
4 |
20,364 |
712 |
3 |
46 |
55,000 |
2 |
21 |
92.18 |
19.24 |
1390 |
31 |
A+ |
A+ |
A+ |
| 9 |
5 |
Emory (Goizueta)
Atlanta |
Private |
2 |
36,336 |
622 |
4 |
24 |
55,000 |
8 |
12 |
91.26 |
9.90 |
1361 |
31 |
A+ |
A+ |
A |
| 10 |
10 |
Texas (McCombs)
Austin |
Public |
4 |
9,354 |
3,942 |
12 |
3 |
55,000 |
18 |
40 |
84.51 |
34.00 |
1301 |
29 |
A |
A+ |
A+ |
| 11 |
13 |
Villanova
Villanova, Pa. |
Private |
4 |
37,530 |
1,731 |
8 |
26 |
52,000 |
39 |
5 |
83.00 |
16.03 |
1302 |
30 |
A+ |
A |
A+ |
| 12 |
20 |
Richmond (Robins)
Richmond, Va. |
Private |
4 |
38,850 |
643 |
14 |
64 |
52,500 |
9 |
1 |
82.92 |
12.04 |
1280 |
29 |
A+ |
A+ |
B |
| 13 |
12 |
North Carolina (Kenan-Flagler)
Chapel Hill |
Public |
2 |
5,397 |
632 |
11 |
38 |
53,500 |
16 |
8 |
82.67 |
11.00 |
1343 |
30 |
A |
A+ |
A+ |
| 14 |
21 |
Wake Forest (Calloway)
Winston-Salem, N.C. |
Private |
2 |
36,975 |
399 |
34 |
19 |
51,000 |
15 |
1 |
82.55 |
14.25 |
1353 |
30 |
A+ |
A+ |
A |
| 15 |
8 |
NYU (Stern)
New York |
Private |
4 |
38,686 |
2,305 |
29 |
23 |
59,500 |
21 |
8 |
81.04 |
11.35 |
1435 |
32 |
A |
B |
A |
| 16 |
15 |
Washington U. (Olin)
St. Louis |
Private |
4 |
37,248 |
730 |
32 |
36 |
56,500 |
1 |
21 |
80.23 |
10.50 |
1432 |
32 |
A+ |
A+ |
C |
| 17 |
14 |
Boston College
(Carroll)
Boston |
Private |
4 |
37,410 |
1,936 |
20 |
15 |
55,000 |
14 |
27 |
80.00 |
21.00 |
1331 |
30 |
A+ |
A |
A+ |
| 18 |
24 |
Miami U. (Farmer)
Oxford, Ohio |
Public |
2 |
11,443 |
2,056 |
26 |
4 |
48,000 |
28 |
16 |
79.26 |
14.90 |
1225 |
27 |
A |
B |
A |
| 19 |
22 |
Carnegie Mellon (Tepper)
Pittsburgh |
Private |
4 |
39,754 |
428 |
45 |
47 |
60,000 |
13 |
8 |
78.64 |
9.50 |
1393 |
31 |
A |
A |
A |
| 20 |
16 |
Indiana (Kelley)
Bloomington |
Public |
4 |
9,311 |
4,576 |
15 |
14 |
52,000 |
29 |
27 |
77.56 |
22.74 |
1266 |
29 |
B |
A |
A+ |
| 21 |
17 |
USC (Marshall)
Los Angeles |
Private |
4 |
37,694 |
3,509 |
42 |
5 |
53,000 |
24 |
27 |
76.31 |
26.79 |
1391 |
31 |
A |
A |
A+ |
| 22 |
18 |
Illinois
Urbana-Champaign |
Public |
4 |
13,394 |
2,850 |
28 |
7 |
54,000 |
23 |
40 |
76.14 |
21.10 |
1340 |
30 |
C |
A |
A+ |
| 23 |
28 |
Babson
Babson Park, Mass. |
Private |
4 |
36,096 |
1,851 |
21 |
37 |
50,000 |
30 |
12 |
74.79 |
22.00 |
1254 |
28 |
A+ |
A+ |
B |
| 24 |
19 |
Georgetown (McDonough)
Washington, D.C. |
Private |
4 |
38,122 |
1,345 |
72 |
51 |
60,000 |
6 |
12 |
72.69 |
25.00 |
1365 |
31 |
A |
C |
C |
| 25 |
33 |
U. of Washington
(Foster)
Seattle |
Public |
2 |
6,802 |
1,645 |
38 |
10 |
48,500 |
38 |
27 |
72.11 |
19.89 |
1268 |
28 |
B |
A+ |
B |
| 26 |
25 |
Lehigh
Bethlehem, Pa. |
Private |
4 |
37,550 |
1,472 |
44 |
31 |
55,000 |
33 |
16 |
71.48 |
21.50 |
1293 |
29 |
A+ |
A |
A |
| 27 |
34 |
Northeastern
Boston |
Private |
4 |
33,969 |
2,914 |
22 |
60 |
55,000 |
65 |
16 |
70.41 |
20.50 |
1294 |
29 |
A |
A |
A+ |
| 28 |
NA |
American (Kogod)
Washington, D.C. |
Private |
4 |
33,283 |
841 |
10 |
56 |
50,705 |
41 |
27 |
70.20 |
13.00 |
1218 |
27 |
A+ |
B |
A |
| 29 |
47 |
San Diego
San Diego, Calif. |
Private |
4 |
34,264 |
850 |
40 |
11 |
50,000 |
50 |
40 |
70.02 |
15.88 |
1190 |
26 |
A+ |
B |
B |
| 30 |
29 |
William & Mary (Mason)
Williamsburg, Va. |
Public |
2 |
10,246 |
454 |
35 |
62 |
52,500 |
12 |
21 |
69.92 |
11.35 |
1317 |
29 |
A+ |
A+ |
B |
| 31 |
23 |
SMU (Cox)
Dallas |
Private |
4 |
33,170 |
932 |
7 |
70 |
50,400 |
26 |
40 |
69.57 |
20.00 |
1413 |
32 |
A |
A |
A |
| 32 |
35 |
Santa Clara (Leavey)
Santa Clara, Calif. |
Private |
4 |
34,950 |
1,785 |
37 |
35 |
50,500 |
35 |
21 |
68.85 |
17.30 |
1218 |
27 |
A+ |
A |
A+ |
| 33 |
30 |
Bentley
Waltham, Mass. |
Private |
4 |
34,488 |
3,887 |
17 |
40 |
52,500 |
71 |
40 |
68.79 |
26.26 |
1230 |
26 |
A |
A+ |
A |
| 34 |
32 |
Texas Christian (Neeley)
Fort Worth |
Private |
4 |
28,250 |
1,640 |
9 |
88 |
50,000 |
43 |
27 |
67.15 |
17.50 |
1171 |
26 |
A+ |
A+ |
A |
| 35 |
43 |
Maryland (Smith)
College Park |
Public |
4 |
8,005 |
2,784 |
52 |
32 |
53,000 |
34 |
27 |
65.09 |
19.11 |
1360 |
31 |
B |
A |
B |
| 36 |
26 |
Rensselaer Polytech (Lally)
Troy, N.Y. |
Private |
4 |
37,900 |
407 |
30 |
59 |
50,000 |
47 |
21 |
64.93 |
16.00 |
1267 |
28 |
A |
A+ |
B |
| 37 |
31 |
Texas A&M (Mays)
College Station |
Public |
4 |
7,844 |
4,302 |
19 |
20 |
47,700 |
44 |
61 |
64.10 |
25.47 |
1172 |
26 |
B |
A |
A |
| 38 |
38 |
Penn State (Smeal)
University Park |
Public |
4 |
15,250 |
5,943 |
36 |
9 |
52,000 |
48 |
74 |
63.88 |
43.00 |
1221 |
27 |
B |
A |
A |
| 39 |
41 |
Case Western (Weatherhead)
Cleveland |
Private |
4 |
34,450 |
400 |
78 |
67 |
52,500 |
25 |
5 |
63.33 |
13.00 |
1270 |
27 |
A+ |
B |
C |
| 40 |
37 |
Wisconsin
Madison |
Public |
2 |
8,568 |
1,407 |
27 |
57 |
50,000 |
19 |
50 |
62.27 |
28.05 |
1293 |
28 |
B |
B |
A+ |
| 41 |
27 |
Fordham
New York |
Private |
4 |
35,257 |
2,004 |
64 |
39 |
55,000 |
59 |
27 |
61.96 |
20.70 |
1193 |
26 |
A |
B |
B |
| 42 |
59 |
Ohio State (Fisher)
Columbus |
Public |
4 |
9,810 |
3,536 |
23 |
17 |
47,000 |
80 |
66 |
61.19 |
35.00 |
1203 |
27 |
B |
A |
A+ |
| 43 |
42 |
Boston U.
Boston |
Private |
4 |
37,050 |
2,009 |
55 |
74 |
50,000 |
20 |
21 |
60.78 |
18.80 |
1294 |
29 |
B |
B |
C |
| 44 |
54 |
James Madison
Harrisonburg, Va. |
Public |
4 |
6,964 |
3,121 |
16 |
68 |
50,000 |
53 |
54 |
60.60 |
25.00 |
1102 |
24 |
A |
B |
A+ |
| 45 |
36 |
Baylor (Hankamer)
Waco, Tex. |
Private |
4 |
26,084 |
2,713 |
33 |
66 |
45,000 |
60 |
27 |
60.20 |
23.45 |
1193 |
25 |
A |
A |
B |
| 46 |
NA |
Chapman (Argyros)
Orange, Calif. |
Private |
4 |
34,700 |
877 |
68 |
21 |
48,000 |
55 |
40 |
59.51 |
21.00 |
1200 |
26 |
A+ |
A |
C |
| 47 |
NA |
Ohio
Athens |
Public |
4 |
8,907 |
1,843 |
25 |
79 |
49,030 |
72 |
48 |
59.08 |
29.80 |
1120 |
25 |
B |
B |
A |
| 48 |
40 |
Binghamton
Binghamton, N.Y. |
Public |
4 |
6,692 |
1,420 |
49 |
42 |
57,000 |
31 |
61 |
58.98 |
27.50 |
1304 |
28 |
A |
B |
A+ |
| 49 |
52 |
Syracuse (Whitman)
Syracuse, N.Y. |
Private |
4 |
35,398 |
1,815 |
70 |
58 |
53,000 |
58 |
27 |
57.09 |
24.20 |
1200 |
26 |
B |
B |
B |
| 50 |
49 |
U. of Miami
Coral Gables, Fla. |
Private |
4 |
36,836 |
2,161 |
47 |
93 |
50,000 |
49 |
27 |
57.08 |
14.50 |
1262 |
28 |
A |
A+ |
B |
| 51 |
55 |
Georgia Tech
Atlanta |
Public |
4 |
5,518 |
1,291 |
31 |
45 |
50,500 |
51 |
66 |
56.76 |
27.00 |
1270 |
28 |
B |
A |
A |
Using Foucault to Deconstruct Rankings of Colleges and Universities
The Foucault work Discipline & Punish: The Birth of
the Prison provides the sociological framework for the analysis. The book
explores the power of scrutiny and surveillance to pressure people who might not
otherwise conform to do so and to seek ways to make the system work to their
advantage. Law schools are an ideal subset of higher education to use for
applying these theories to college rankings, the authors write, because the
leaders of legal education spoke out against rankings when they started and the
law school world is relatively small, making it possible for U.S. News or others
to rank all players. The paper mixes the theory of Foucault with information
gathered by the authors in interviews with law school deans and other
administrators at 75 law schools, discussions with dozens of prospective law
students, and analysis of 15 years of law school admissions data.
Scott Chaschik, Inside Higher Ed, February 3, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/02/03/rankings
Jensen Comment
I think my former doctoral student, Ed Arrington, is probably the leading
scholar of Foucault in the accounting academy. He spent several years in Europe
studying the philosophy of Foucault ---
http://web.uncg.edu/bae/directory/profile.php?username=cearring
Ed's interest in Foucault came long after he completed his doctorate. I even
have to look up how to spell Michel (not Michael) Foucault whenever I need to
write the name down ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault
In Defense of College Rankings
Rankings like those U.S. News & World Report released
this month have traditionally been the province of the four-year sector,
particularly the residential colleges that compete for traditional-age students,
funding, and prestige. The two-year colleges that educate 45 percent of American
undergraduates are nowhere to be found. It’s easy to see why: the U.S. News list
is based on wealth, exclusivity, and prestige, and community colleges have none
of those things. Community college students, who tend to enroll in institutions
close to home, are also less likely to pay $9.95 for a list of hundreds of
colleges nationwide.Given the manifest shortcomings of the U.S. News
methodology, this may be a good thing. But the lack of two-year rankings has a
downside: There are few mechanisms by which community colleges can be held
accountable and compete, no way for students and policymakers to know which
colleges are doing the best job educating students and which are not. Students
like Misty can’t know ahead of time if their local community college is truly
prepared to help them. And if it’s not, it doesn’t have strong incentives to
improve.Until recently, such rankings were technically unfeasible because there
was no data on which to base them. That’s changed with the advent of measures
like the Community
College Survey of Student Engagement. More than
half of all community colleges nationwide — over 500 — have participated in
CCSSE over the last five years. The survey gauges the extent to which colleges
use research-proven educational practices to help students learn and succeed.
The results are clear: some two-year colleges are doing a much better job than
others.
Kevin Carry, "Rankings Help Community Colleges and Their Students," Inside
Higher Ed, August 27, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/08/27/carey
"GRE and SAT validity," by Stephen Hsu, Information Processing,
June 8, 2011 ---
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/06/gre-and-sat-validity.html
GPA-SAT correlations
"Psychometric thresholds for physics and mathematics," by Stephen Hsu and
James Schombert, MIT's Technology Review, May 24, 2010 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/posts.aspx?bid=354
This is a follow up to our
earlier paper on GPA-SAT correlations. Click below
for the pdf.
Non-linear Psychometric Thresholds for Physics and Mathematics
ABSTRACT
We analyze 5 years of student records at the University of Oregon to
estimate the probability of success (as defined by superior
undergraduate record; sufficient for admission to graduate school)
in Physics and Mathematics as a function of SAT-M score. We find
evidence of a non-linear threshold: below SAT-M score of roughly
600, the probability of success is very low. Interestingly, no
similar threshold exists in other majors, such as Sociology,
History, English or Biology, whether on SAT combined, SAT-R or
SAT-M. Our findings have significant implications for the demographic
makeup of graduate populations in mathematically intensive subjects,
given the current distribution of SAT-M scores.
There is clearly something different about the physics
and math GPA vs SAT distributions compared to all of the other majors we
looked at (see figure 1 in the paper). In the other majors (history,
sociology, etc.) it appears that hard work can compensate for low SAT score.
But that is not the case in math and physics.
One interesting question is whether the apparent cognitive threshold is a
linear or non-linear effect. Our data suggests that the probability of doing
well in any particular quarter of introductory physics may be linear with
SAT-M, but the probability of having a high cumulative GPA in physics
or math is very non-linear in SAT-M. See figure below: the red line is the
upper bound at 95% confidence level on the probability of getting an A in a
particular quarter of introductory physics, and the blue line is the
probability of earning a cumulative GPA of at least 3.5 or so.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Near perfection in grade averages is increasing due to grade inflation in both
high school and college ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#RateMyProfessor
Hence I would think SAT, ACT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT, and MCAT standardized tests
would be used to further partition graduates with stellar grade averages.
Tests measure cognitive ability, but grades measure motivation as long as
grade inflation does not ruin everything in education.
About ETS Research ---
http://www.ets.org/research
More credit should be give to efforts made my ETS to reduce cultural and
disability factors in testing.
Paying Students to Raise Text Scores ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GMAT
"Physics Explains Why University Rankings Won't Change: Constructal
theory of flows governs social phenomena like rankings," by Kendall Morgan,
Duke University News and Communications, February 12, 2008 ---
http://news.duke.edu/2008/02/rankbejan.html
A Duke University researcher says that his
physics theory, which has been applied to everything from global climate to
traffic patterns, can also explain another trend: why university rankings
tend not to change very much from year to year.
Like branching river channels across the
earth's surface, universities are part of a relatively rigid network that is
predictable based on "constructal theory," which describes the shapes of
flows in nature, argues Adrian Bejan, J. A. Jones Professor of Mechanical
Engineering at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering.
According to the theory, the hierarchy of
university rankings -- in which few schools consistently land at the top and
many more contend for lesser spots -- persists because that structure
supports the easiest flow of ideas, Bejan reported in the recently published
issue of the International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics,
referenced as Vol. 2, No. 4, (2007) 319-327.
"This hierarchy is here to stay," Bejan said
in an interview. "The schools at the top serve everybody well because they
serve the flow of ideas. We're all connected."
That structure also allows talent to flow and
arise naturally in the "right places," he said.
First conceived by Bejan and published in
1996, the constructal law arises from the natural tendency of flow systems
to evolve over time into configurations that make their movements faster and
easier.
More recently, Bejan and Gilbert Merkx, also
of Duke, co-edited a book entitled "Constructal Theory of Social Dynamics,"
including a collection of essays applying the tree-like patterns of
constructal theory to business, crowd dynamics, legal systems and written
languages, among other human endeavors <http://www.mems.duke.edu/news/?id=995>.
In extending the theory to university
rankings, the first step was to define the flow system of the university,
Bejan said, "what territory it covers, and what currents flow through it."
He suspected that a school's rank might
reflect the flow of the ideas its faculty members generate. In support of
that notion, he found that the most highly ranked engineering schools are
also those with the most people on the Institute of Scientific Information's
most-cited listing, meaning that their work is more often referenced by
other researchers.
He also found that university rankings follow
a hierarchical pattern that mirrors the distribution of city sizes. The more
highly ranked a university or larger a city, the fewer competitors it has.
The opposite is also true: the lower the rank, the more numerous are the
candidates that compete for that position.
"The similarity is further evidence that the
distribution of sources of knowledge is intimately tied to geography," he
said, and to the flow of information across the globe.
So, is there a way to change rankings? In
Bejan's view there is, but he says it takes "cataclysmic" events that
encourage the free flow of ideas to alter such deeply ingrained channels.
Such shifts have occurred in the past, he noted. For instance, a "brain
drain" from post-war Europe after World War II led to significant changes in
the academic landscape, catapulting American universities onto the world
stage. Similar shifts were also seen after the launching of Sputnik, with
the enormous jump in funding for basic science, he added.
"The university is the professors, their
disciples, and the disciples' disciples," Bejan wrote. "It is the ideas that
flow through these human links and into the books of our evolving science
and culture. In time, this global vasculature evolves like a river basin
during the rainy season: all the streams swell, but their hierarchy remains
the same."
For more on constructal theory, see
http://constructal.org
Jensen Comment
The study seems to imply that top-ranked universities are more or less locked
into place with only slight variations. This is true with respect to one set of
rankings such as the popular U.S. News rankings. However, rankings do vary
across different media sources (e.g., U.S. News versus The Wall Street
Journal) such that Bejan's theory is more longitudinal than cross sectional.
Some college presidents aren't so honest when rating colleges (including
their own) for the U.S. News Rankings of Colleges
Editors at U.S. News acknowledge anecdotal evidence
that some colleges try to affect the rankings, but they insist it is not
widespread. The editors say they have added myriad safeguards over the years
from specific definitions of what counts as an application to adding questions
that can sniff out fudging. Some colleges used to drop athletes’ SAT scores from
their computation of incoming students’ scores in order to increase their
averages and make their institutions look more selective, Mr. Kelly said. In
response, U.S. News helped to create common definitions with organizations like
the College Board so that data reporting would be standardized and harder to
fudge. Still, critics say that the magazine, which does not verify information
submitted by the colleges, bears some responsibility for the litany of tactics
that colleges employ.
Alan Finder, "College Ratings Race Roars On Despite Concerns," The New York
Times, August 17, 2007 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/education/17rankings.html
Jensen Comment
Dropping out is the way some college presidents hope to eliminate the heat to
raise their rankings. Biased reporting is another way. The heat comes from alumni and faculty wanting a higher
quality pool of student applicants. Lower rankings becomes very stressful to
colleges that think they are in the Top 10 in their classification (particularly
national liberal arts colleges) who find themselves ranked much lower.
The Washington Monthly rankings of the top national universities
differs drastically from the US News rankings (which are based upon opinions of
college presidents rather than self-selected statistical criteria used by The
Washington Monthly.
From Inside Higher Ed, by Scott Jaschik, August 20, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/20/ccranking
Washington Monthly is known as a
liberal-leaning magazine, so the No. 1 national university, Texas A&M
University, may surprise some. But the magazine has a long history pushing
for national service by college students. The magazine’s use of ROTC in its
formula was a big part of Texas A&M’s top rating (and also helped Virginia
Military Institute gain the No. 5 slot among liberal arts colleges).
In the national universities category, the U.S.
News rankings yield a largely private group at the top and Washington
Monthly tilts public. Among privates, the Washington Monthly priorities also
tend to upset standard hierarchies. Here for example is the Monthly’s take
on the Ivies: “Harvard, Yale, and Princeton may make up the top three
finishers on this year’s U.S. News list, but by our measures they don’t
perform nearly as well. The alma maters of John F. Kennedy, George W. Bush,
and Brooke Shields come in at, respectively, 27th, 38th, and (yikes!) 78th
place. Our top Ivy? Humble Cornell, which places seventh, thanks to the
large number of its graduates who earn Ph.D.’s or join the Peace Corps.”
Here is the Washington Monthly’s
top 10 national universities, with their U.S. News
scores as well.
|
Monthly Rank |
University |
U.S. News Rank |
| 1 |
Texas A&M |
62 |
| 2 |
UCLA |
25 |
| 3 |
Berkeley |
21 |
| 4 |
UC
San Diego |
38 |
| 5 |
Penn State |
48 |
| 6 |
U
of Michigan |
25 |
| 7 |
Cornell |
12 |
| 8 |
UC
Davis |
42 |
| 9 |
Stanford |
4 |
| 10 |
South Carolina State |
n/a |
The Washington Times rankings of the top 30 community colleges are
causing even more of a stir in academe
The annual rankings frenzy each fall features rankings of
top colleges, party schools and everything in between. But the sector of higher
education where more than 40 percent of freshmen start — community colleges —
has been notably absent. The magazine ranked colleges using data in different
categories of the
Community College Survey of Student Engagement
(worth a total of 85 percent) and graduation rates (15 percent). While community
college leaders frequently complain that reporters ignore their sector, many are
not at all pleased with the new attention from Washington Monthly — even though
the magazine is full of praise for two-year institutions and features a cover
line that says “Community colleges that beat your alma mater.”
Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, August 20, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/20/ccranking
Trojan(R) Ranks U.S. Colleges and
Universities in Second Annual Sexual Health Report Card ---
Click Here
The makers of Trojan brand condoms today released
their 2007 Sexual Health Report Card, the second annual ranking of sexual
health resources at American colleges and universities. The study, conducted
by Sperling's BestPlaces on behalf of Trojan, finds a lack of access to
information and resources may prevent some students from being sexually
healthy.
This year's report card arrives in the wake of
Trojan's "Evolve" campaign
( http://www.trojanevolve.com ), a
multimedia effort aimed at redefining the national dialogue on sexual health
with an emphasis on responsible behavior and partners' respect for one
another.
In total, 139 colleges and universities
representing each state and major NCAA Division I athletic conference were
reviewed. Placing first and second, the University of Minnesota and
University of Wyoming demonstrated "well- evolved" sexual health programs
and were the most sexually healthy schools according to the study. While
Ohio State and the University of Florida may have recently triumphed in
sports, the Trojan Report Card indicates their sexual health programs have
room to improve, as OSU and UF ranked 26th and 43rd, respectively.
Yale University, which topped the rankings in 2006,
came in at number 16 this year. Access to sexual health information and
resources, including the schools annual Sex Week at Yale (SWAY), continue to
be highly rated; however, the school's lower ranking is a result of the
expanded categories and schools considered. The 2007 Sexual Health Report
Card examined 139 schools, nearly 50 percent more than last year, and judged
several categories not taken into consideration last year, resulting in
different rankings.
Highest- and Lowest-Ranked Schools
1. University of Minnesota (GPA 3.91)
2. University of Wyoming (GPA 3.91)
3. University of Washington (GPA 3.73)
4. Rutgers University (GPA 3.68)
5. Purdue University (GPA 3.64)
135. Villanova University (GPA 1.45)
136. University of Arkansas (GPA 1.36)
137. Arkansas State University (GPA 1.14)
138. University of Louisiana (GPA 0.91)
139. Louisiana Tech University (GPA 0.82)
For the first time, researchers allowed students to
weigh in with an online survey that generated more than 3,300 responses.
This opinion poll did not factor into the rankings, but does point to the
opportunity for health centers on campus to evolve how they meet the needs
of their students.
Continued in article
List of Top Academic Employers Evolves
Through its surveys and reports, the
Collaborative
on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE)
has stressed the importance of a wide variety of policies — and not just those
about pay and benefits — in attracting and keeping young faculty talent. The
project’s new list of “exemplary” higher education employers offers further
evidence of that theme. List of Top Academic Employers Evolves Through its
surveys and reports, the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education
has stressed the importance of a wide variety of policies — and not just those
about pay and benefits — in attracting and keeping young faculty talent. The
project’s new list of “exemplary” higher education employers offers further
evidence of that theme. Generally, private colleges dominate the list in
categories related to compensation or other categories where finances would be a
major factor. But on qualities related to the clarity of procedures (a category
many junior faculty members take very seriously), publics tend to do much
better. The Harvard University-based collaborative — known by its acronym,
COACHE — has become an influential player in discussions of how to make colleges
more “family friendly” and how institutions should prepare for a generation of
professors who may not accept the traditional hierarchical model of many
academic departments.
Scott Jaschik, "List of Top Academic Employers Evolves," Inside Higher
Ed, December 5, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/05/coache
Top Global Business Schools According to Business Week ---
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_43/b4006014.htm
Slide Show ---
Click Here
The 15 business schools included here are strong contenders among the world's
top MBA programs, but lower marks keep them just shy of the top tier
Top European Business Schools According the Business Week ---
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/europe/special_reports/03/31/2008europeanb-s.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on ranking controversies ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
Cheating in Business School Rankings in India
From the Mostly Economics Blog by Amol Agrawal on July 7, 2008 ---
http://mostlyeconomics.wordpress.com/
Premchand Palety has been writing some fantastic
columns every Monday in Mint. He has been discussing each activity of
B-schools in his column and it makes you wonder what are we getting into.
In his
recent column he talks about the B-School ranking
season with a number of magazines coming out with their views on which
school is the best. He says:
I have spoken to different directors and main
promoters of B-schools about the issue of corruption in rankings. Some of
them have confirmed that corrupt practices are followed by some agencies and
publications. I was always surprised by the Top 10 ranking of an otherwise
average B-school that used to participate in only one survey, by a business
magazine.An insider from that school told to me the real reason. There was a
major financial deal, amounting to several lakhs of rupees, struck between
the CEO of the B-school and the agency head.
And then there is a lot
more on corruption in these rankings.
Frankly it does not matter as the list hardly
changes and I do not care why so much newsprint is wasted. I have always
maintained that Business Schools in India, especially the elite ones, are
anything like their abroad counterparts.
In abroad the main thing is the quality of
research. Here, the main (perhaps only) criteria is placements. There is
hardly any research by anyone in India. I haven’t come across one paper from
these elite schools being referred in any research paper, be it any topic
even India-specific. But you do get to hear a lot on their placement
achievements. And if the government imposes a service tax on the basis of
their placement services, there is a big hue and cry.
I would maintain the trend is set by these elite
schools and otehrs have simply copied their ways. There are so many
advertisements these days even of elite schools and all you get to read is
this “100% placements”. It is getting crazy and no one is interested in
teaching. There are so many who pass out paying crazy sums not knowing
anything at all. Throughout Day one and Day final all the students talk
about is internships and placements. So like it was said “All roads lead to
Rome” , B-Schools say ” all roads lead to Placement”.
Continued in article
2007
Sixty-One and Counting: Colleges and Universities Refusing to
Participate in the U.S. News Rankings Studies
Sixty-one college and university presidents have
now signed a letter pledging not to participate in the “reputational” part of
the U.S. News & World Report rankings, and not to use rankings in promotional
materials. The letter, being circulated by the Education Conservancy,
started off in May with 12 presidents.
Inside Higher Ed, July 23, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/07/23/qt
Jensen Comment
Most of the refuseniks do not do well in the rankings. Whether or not this
movement has a major impact depends greatly on whether some of the top-ranking
colleges and universities opt out, especially the top research universities and
the top national liberal arts colleges. One risk is that college applicants will
commence to ask questions about why particular colleges refuse to enter into the
"competition?" Another risk is that rankings will continue based upon data in
the public domain. This would end each college's ability to provide some helpful
input into its own ranking.
Should U.S. News Rankings Make College Presidents Rich?
"Should U.S. News Make Presidents Rich?" by Scott
Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, March 19, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/03/19/usnews
In a move that concerns some experts
on college admissions and executive compensation, the Arizona Board of
Regents has approved contract changes for Michael Crow, president of Arizona
State University, that link $60,000 in bonus pay to an improved rating from
U.S. News & World Report.
Crow — whose total compensation
already tops half a million dollars — was awarded an additional bonus plan
tied to achieving specific performance goals. Incentive-based bonuses are
increasingly common as part of the compensation packages of college
presidents — the idea, common in the corporate sector, is that such a system
promotes accountability and rewards performance.
In Crow’s case, he would be paid an
extra $10,000 for each of 10 goals he achieves and would get
an extra $50,000 if he achieves all of them. Nine of the
goals relate to actions on which the university is the key
actor (goals such as increasing the diversity of freshmen,
improving freshman retention, adding to research
expenditures, improving faculty salaries, etc.). There is
one goal over which the university has no direct control —
an improved U.S. News ranking. If Crow achieves the
other nine only, he would miss a shot at $50,000 in addition
to the reward for the higher ranking.
While Arizona
State has won acclaim for many academic improvements and
innovations in recent years, it has never done well in U.S.
News, and is currently listed as “third tier” among national
universities. The East Valley Tribune on Sunday drew
attention to the rankings incentive, noting that Arizona
State’s provost had been quoted in Inside Higher Ed just
last week questioning whether there was any intellectual
basis to the U.S. News approach to rankings.
Crow could not be reached for
comment Sunday, but he told the Tribune that while he
agreed that parts of U.S. News rankings were
“subjective,” other parts — such as graduation rates — were
valid and pointed to areas on which Arizona State needs to
improve.
Continued in article
Should you refuse to be ranked if you're at or near the top?
The decision was announced Tuesday at the end of an
annual meeting of the Annapolis Group, a loose association of liberal arts
colleges. After two days of private meetings here, the organization released a
statement that said a majority of the 80 presidents attending had “expressed
their intent not to participate in the annual U.S. News survey.” . . . U.S. News
says it provides a valuable service to parents and students in its yearly
evaluations, which are based on factors that include graduation and retention
rates, assessments by competitors, selectivity and faculty resources. Critics
say the ranking system lacks rigor and has had a harmful effect on educational
priorities, encouraging colleges to do things like soliciting more applicants
and then rejecting them, to move up the list . . . Other college presidents who
attended the meeting were more cautious. Anthony Marx, the president of Amherst,
which is ranked second among liberal arts colleges, said he was not ready to
stop cooperating with U.S. News and wanted to continue to discuss the issue.
Alan Finder, "Some Colleges to Drop Out of U.S. News Rankings," The New York
Times, June 20, 2007 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/20/education/20colleges.html
Some college presidents aren't so honest when rating colleges (including
their own) for the U.S. News Rankings of Colleges
Editors at U.S. News acknowledge anecdotal evidence
that some colleges try to affect the rankings, but they insist it is not
widespread. The editors say they have added myriad safeguards over the years
from specific definitions of what counts as an application to adding questions
that can sniff out fudging. Some colleges used to drop athletes’ SAT scores from
their computation of incoming students’ scores in order to increase their
averages and make their institutions look more selective, Mr. Kelly said. In
response, U.S. News helped to create common definitions with organizations like
the College Board so that data reporting would be standardized and harder to
fudge. Still, critics say that the magazine, which does not verify information
submitted by the colleges, bears some responsibility for the litany of tactics
that colleges employ.
Alan Finder, "College Ratings Race Roars On Despite Concerns," The New York
Times, August 17, 2007 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/education/17rankings.html
Jensen Comment
Dropping out is the way some college presidents hope to eliminate the heat to
raise their rankings. Biased reporting is another way. The heat comes from alumni and faculty wanting a higher
quality pool of student applicants. Lower rankings becomes very stressful to
colleges that think they are in the Top 10 in their classification (particularly
national liberal arts colleges) who find themselves ranked much lower.
Rankings of Universities in Terms of Doctoral Student
Placements
The journal PS: Political Science & Politics has just published
an analysis that suggests that there is not
a direct relationship between the general reputation of a department and its
success at placing new Ph.D.’s; some programs far exceed their reputation when
it comes to placing new Ph.D.’s while others lag. The analysis may provide new
evidence for the “halo effect” in which many experts worry that general (and
sometimes outdated) institutional reputations cloud the judgment of those asked
to fill out surveys on departmental quality. And while the analysis was prepared
about political science, its authors believe the same approach could be used in
other fields in the humanities and social sciences, with the method more
problematic in other areas because fewer Ph.D. students aspire to academic
careers.
Scott Jaschik, "A Ranking That Would Matter," Inside Higher Ed, August
21, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/21/ranking
Jensen Comment
The big problem here is defining what constitutes "a top job" or a "a good job."
There are so many elements in job satisfaction, many of which are intangible and
cannot be quantified, that I'm suspect of any study that purports to identify
top jobs. Obviously prestigious universities have a bias for hiring prestigious
university graduates. But this is often due to the reputations of the graduate
student's teachers and thesis advisors. And the quality of the dissertation may
have a great deal of impact on hiring even if the degree is from No-name
University. Also prestigious universities tend to have the highest GMAT
applicants, but this is not always the case. Often the highest GMAT applicants
are really tremendous graduates.
In disciplines having great
shortages of doctoral graduates, especially doctoral graduates in accounting and
finance, findings from political science do not necessarily extrapolate.
Be that as it may, the findings of the above study come as
no surprise to me. Particularly in accounting, some prestigious universities
have taken a nose dive in terms of reputations of faculty supervising
dissertations. And students may not have access to the most reputable faculty,
especially faculty who are too busy with consulting and world travel. For
example, a few years ago I encountered a doctoral student in accounting at the
University of Chicago who claimed that it was very difficult to even find a
faculty member who would supervise a dissertation. But if he ever graduates from
Chicago, he will have the Chicago halo around his head. In fairness, I've not
had recent information regarding what is happening with doctoral students in
accounting at the University of Chicago. Certainly it is still a very reputable
university in terms of its business studies and research programs.
Also there is a problem in accountancy that
mathematics-educated accountancy doctoral graduates from prestigious
universities may know very little about accountancy and additionally have
troubles with the English language. On occasion prestige-university graduates do
not get the "top jobs" where accountancy is spoken.
"Beyond Research Rankings," by Luis M. Proenza,
Inside Higher Ed, May 17, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/05/17/proenza
Research competitiveness and
productivity are complex subjects that should inform the development and
oversight of R&D programs at the national, state and institutional levels.
From a national policy perspective, studies of our national innovation
ecosystem – of the factors that promote discovery and innovation – are
important to America’s economic vitality.
Ironically, rather than advance our knowledge and
discussion of these important topics, many university presidents seem more
inclined to debate the shortcomings of available measures such as the
rankings of U.S. News & World Report, sometimes even
threatening to boycott the surveys. What is
more, these same presidents defend the absence of adequate measurements of
institutional performance by saying that the strength of American higher
education lies in the diversity of its institutions. So why not develop a
framework that characterizes institutional variety and demonstrates
productivity understandably, effectively and broadly throughout the spectrum
of our institutions?
Of course, it
is not easy to characterize the wide range of America’s more
than 3,500 colleges and universities. Even among the more
limited number of research universities, institutional
diversity is so broad that every approach to rank or even
classify institutions has been rightly criticized. Most
research rankings use only input measures, such as amount of
federal funding or total expenditures for research, when
funding agencies would be served better by information about
outcomes — the research performance of universities.
The 2005
report of the Center and a recent column on this site by
Lombardi note the upward or downward skewing of expenditure
rankings by the mere presence or absence of either a medical
or an engineering school, thereby acknowledging the problems
of comparability among institutions. Lombardi hints at a
much-needed analysis of research competitiveness/strengths
and productivity, stating, “Real accountability comes when
we develop specific measures to assess the performance of
comparable institutions on the same measures.”
Indeed, a
particularly thorny question always has been how to create
meaningful comparisons between large and smaller research
universities, or even between specific research programs
within universities. This struggle seems to arise in part
from the fundamental question that underlies the National
Science Foundation rankings — namely, should winning or
expending more research dollars be the only criterion for a
higher ranking? I think not. Quite simply, in the absence of
output measures, the more-is-better logic is flawed. If
research productivity is equal, why should a university that
spends more money for research be ranked higher than one
that spends less? The sizes of research budgets alone do not
create equally productive outcomes. Other contributing
factors need to be considered. For example, some
universities have much larger licensing revenues than those
with comparable research budgets, and all surveys that
measure licensing revenues compared to research income show
no correlation, especially when scaled.
Because
there are no established frameworks to get at the various
factors that are likely involved, I think a good beginning
would be to characterize research competitiveness and
productivity separately.
Research
competitiveness:
Because
available R&D dollars vary widely by agency and field of
research, and because universities do not have uniform
research strengths, I suggest that portfolio analyses of
research funding need to be performed. A given university’s
research portfolio can be described, quantified and weighed
against the percentage of funding available from each
federal agency and, when possible, by the sub-areas of
research supported by each agency. For example, the upward
skewing of rankings is partially explained by the fact that
70 percent of all federal funding is directed at biomedical
research. Likewise, the U.S. Department of Agriculture funds
only 3 percent of federal research, but provides virtually
all of such funds to land grant universities.
Analyses
should focus on federal obligations for R&D, rather than
total expenditures, because federal obligations are
by-and-large competitively awarded and thus come closest to
demonstrating competitiveness. Available data, however,
present various challenges. For example, some federal
funding that supports activities other than research will
need to be excluded from analyses (e.g., large contracts
that give universities management of support programs).
Also, data are available only at the macro level of
disciplines, such as engineering versus life sciences, which
means that detailed distinctions between research areas will
be difficult to achieve.
Continued in article
Should Higher Ed Should Generate Its Own Rankings to Discredit Abusive
Media Rankings?
Existing tools and measurements could allow colleges
to develop meaningful rankings to replace widely discredited rankings developed
by magazines, according to
a report being released today by Education Sector,
a think tank. The report repeats criticisms that have been made of the U.S. News
& World Report rankings, saying that they are largely based on fame, wealth and
exclusivity. A
new system might use data from the National Survey
of Student Engagement and the Collegiate Learning Assessment as well as
considering new approaches to graduation rates and retention, the report says.
Current rankings reward colleges that enroll highly prepared, wealthy students
who are most likely to graduate on time. But a system that compared predicted
and actual retention and graduation rates — based on socioeconomic and other
data — would give high marks to colleges with great track records on educating
disadvantaged students, even if those rates were lower than those of some
colleges that focus only on top students.
Inside Higher Ed, September 22, 2006
Jensen Comment
I don't think this alternative ranking system will ever get off the ground.
Colleges will debate endlessly about ranking criteria. Having higher education
do its own rankings will badly upset colleges who come out in the lower end of
the spectrum, because having higher education do its own
rankings lends more legitimacy to the rankings. Lower ranking colleges in
a particular set of media/publisher rankings can always claim "lack of
legitimacy" under today's ranking systems put in place by the media.
There is an added problem of colleges racing toward the bottom in terms of
academic standards. Since "learning" is difficult to measure for ranking
purposes and "graduation rates" are easy to measure for ranking purposes,
graduation rates will probably be high in terms of higher education's ranking
system. One way to improve graduation rates is to virtually eliminate academic
standards.
"Rising Up Against Rankings," by Indira Samarasekera, Inside Higher
Ed, April 2, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/04/02/samarasekera
Canadian universities are listening with great
interest as the call to boycott U.S. News & World Report rankings continues
to increase in volume among our colleagues to the south. Many of our
American colleagues say that they would like to resist the rankings, but
fear it can’t be done, especially if only a few institutions act. I write to
let you know that institutions can take on the rankings. About a year ago, a
growing number of Canadian institutions began to raise the same alarm,
ultimately resulting in 25 of our 90+ institutions — including many of our
leading universities — banding together to take just such a stand against
the fall rankings issue of Maclean’s, our Canadian equivalent.
Why we did it:
It’s time to question these
third-party rankings that are actually marketing driven,
designed to sell particular issues of a publication with
repurposing of their content into even higher sales volume
special editions with year-long shelf life.
While postsecondary education
always like grades and ranks — they’re the trophies in our
competitive arena – presidents and other top administrators
at our institutions also have an obligation to do what’s
right for our institutions in terms of championing our
values and investing our resources.
Currently, many American colleges
and universities have new presidents — as there were here in
Canada a year ago. It is the role and obligation of a new
president to question the status quo, especially
long-standing practices that may have started a decade or
two ago and have since evolved into a much larger
administrative burden with less advantage or validity than
they appeared to have at their inception.
Setting the stage:
For years Maclean’s
collected various sets of data for its fall undergraduate
institution rankings issue – some objective, some
subjective, some pertinent, some irrelevant – and turned
them into aggregated averages to arrive at one overall score
for each institution. These aggregated scores are listed in
“league tables,” supplemented with some editorial coverage
on our universities (and advertising by many of our
institutions) to create the rankings issue. Sound familiar?
This annually annoying methodology
is initiated with a request to each institution to assist
them by collecting and reporting data to them in the format
Maclean’s desires, typically not the format that we
use in institutional research, thus requiring a special
effort and investment of time and resources.
Assistance is also requested in
administering a student survey for the fall undergraduate
rankings issue and a graduate survey to our alumni for the
spring graduate school rankings, a product line extension
added in 2004 to double the burden. As an alternative they
ask us to provide e-mail addresses to the magazine if we
don’t conduct the survey for them.
The showdown:
The new presidents’ examination of
this process was triggered by the request for data and
survey assistance for the spring 2006 graduate school
rankings. Our uprising started when my colleagues at the
University of Calgary, the University of Lethbridge and I —
presidents of the three largest universities in Alberta —
wrote a letter to Maclean’s and met with the rankings
editor and the publisher in January 2006 to express our
concerns about the methodology of their undergraduate and
graduate surveys and rankings.
Along with raising technical issues
regarding methodology, we pointed out that a vastly
different educational and grading system in Alberta – one of
the highest performing K-12 systems in the world – make
comparisons of the grades of our incoming undergraduate
students with the grades of incoming students in other
provinces inappropriate. Our high schools employ a different
grading system – believed to be more rigorous – and a
student’s final achievement level is defined by a graduation
exam not used in other provinces. In the case of the
graduate survey, we argued that surveying alumni reflects an
institution’s past, not its present, particularly in a
province such as Alberta, where the government has poured
billions of dollars into postsecondary education in the last
few years.
In our letter and meeting we
offered to deploy the expertise at our institutions, from
statistics to education evaluation, to improve the
methodology. We also advised the editor that we would not
participate further if the methodology remained unchanged.
We got no reply.
In the meantime, we enlisted the
support of David Naylor, who had recently assumed the role
of president at University of Toronto, a major research
university that has historically landed at the top of the
overall rankings. He weighed in, supporting our Alberta
perspective from a national vantage point, affirming:
Institutions have different strengths and aggregated
rankings diminish those differences. Having this support was
crucial. Rankings czars love to pretend the only reason to
criticize their work is if you didn’t come out on top, so
our movement gained credibility with Toronto’s backing.
As President Naylor wrote in a
newspaper op-ed last spring: “As academics, we devote our
careers to ensuring people make important decisions on the
basis of good data, analyzed with discipline. But Canadian
universities have been complicit, en masse, in supporting a
ranking system that has little scientific merit because it
reduces everything to a meaningless, average score.”
Equally important to our concerns
about methodology were our growing concerns, as public
universities, about using our resources to respond to the
increasing number of data requests for rankings as more and
more magazines, newspapers and associations are jumping into
the entrepreneurial game of rankings. Using taxpayer money
to feed sales-generating exercises by for-profit
organizations does not align with our values or our
responsibility to be accountable to the public — now matter
much it is alleged the public loves the rankings.
As the deadline for the spring
graduate student issue approached with no response on
addressing the methodology, the presidents of the
Universities of Alberta, Toronto and Calgary were joined by
McMaster University, and together we officially declined to
participate in the graduate survey. When faced with a demand
to supply data for rankings with dubious methodology, we
could no longer assist in misleading the public and our
prospective students.
Into the fray:
We did not go public with our
decision; Maclean’s itself started a buzz about our
boycott – a preemptive strike – knowing that controversy
sells issues. At this point, we all still anticipated
participating in the fall undergraduate rankings and
continued trying to obtain a response from Maclean’s
staff on fixing the methodology for the fall issue. Months
wore on as we attempted to work with the magazine, resulting
in many unanswered phone calls that culminated with the
staff basically dismissing our concerns, asserting that the
magazine staff certainly knew more about statistical
analysis than some academics.
Faced with this unwillingness to
consider the requests of the universities, punctuated by the
annual request for a sizeable amount of data for the fall
issue, we four once again opted out of that rankings issue.
But another buzz was growing among the universities. We were
quickly joined by seven other presidents who asserted to
Maclean’s that they, too, would withdraw if the
methodology didn’t change. Solidarity mounted and, in the
end, 25 colleges and universities refused to participate in
the fall issue.
Truth is, most of us already had
much of the data sought on our Web sites, but not always in
an easy-to-locate places or formats since they are posted as
institutional research. The “boycott schools” countered by
organizing themselves to post their data – albeit not
reworked into identical form or the way Maclean’s
requested it – and heighten ease of access on our sites.
(The University of Alberta’s information
can be found here and
also here; for comparison, the University of Toronto
data
are here.)
Just before their fall deadline,
Maclean’s filed a freedom of information request, but it
was too late to for us to respond. Most of us had already
posted the data online, and we directed Maclean’s
staff to our Web sites. In instances where the magazine
staff couldn’t find data on our Web site, they chose to use
the previous year’s data.
Did it work?
We think that it did and continue
to hope that collaboration with Maclean’s to improve
the methodology and arrive at rankings we all find valid and
useful lies in our future. Yet, while many allege that the
rankings influence student and parent decisions
significantly, particularly international students, at the
University of Alberta we have seen no indication of that in
our applications. In fact, our international applications
are up 36 percent over last year.
We feel that if we have succeeded
in advancing our objective (it’s still early and time will
tell) it is because:
- Institutions of all types were
involved, from the leading research institutions to
small liberal arts colleges. None of us could have done
this alone.
- All the presidents involved
had a joint communications strategy with a unified
message, and all stayed on message. We stood united.
None caved at the last moment to his or her own
advantage.
- Students at all 25
institutions were on our side.
- Governing boards, faculty and
staff came on board.
- School counselors were
contacted early on, explaining our position and
supplying them with information on where to find
institutional data on our Web sites.
- We stood united to the end: we
did not react after the issue came out, and all agreed
not to use Maclean’s rankings to promote our
institutions.
Our coalition of the fed up
continues to work together. Our goal: to adopt a common
format for institutional data reporting on the Web so all
those in the ranking business can take what they want and
leave us to our business of research, teaching and service.
Stay tuned to Canada for Part 2 as
we’ve just learned that Maclean’s is introducing an
issue ranking professional schools and graduate programs.
Sound familiar?
Continued in article
An update article on the Canadian scene:
"Truth, Lies and Rankings," by Tony Keller, Inside Higher Education,
April 12, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/04/12/keller
Jensen Comment
Although I see many problems with rankings by the media, it seems to be unfair
to single out US News. Other media outlets provide rankings that would be
difficult or impossible to "boycott." For example, The Wall Street Journal
rankings of MBA programs are based upon recruiters employed by business firms
and other organizations. College officials do not supply the data for those
rankings.
"Unigo.com Gives Everyone a Say About College Picks," by Walter S.
Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal, February 19, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123499498840816053.html
Research
on choosing colleges takes many forms, including
visiting campuses and studying the schools' Web
sites. But for a lot of high-school students and
their parents, finding a centralized resource
containing information about numerous schools still
means buying one of the thick, costly printed guides
to college that have been around for years. The Web
versions of these books are surprisingly dry.
But
there's a new, free Web site that, while overseen by
paid editors, is built on lively content submitted
by current students at the colleges. The information
isn't just words and numbers, but includes numerous
photos and videos for most schools. You also can
create a small social network of people interested
in the same schools or who share other common
traits.
In
other words, this is a college-information resource
built for the age of YouTube and Facebook.
The site,
Unigo.com, costs nothing
to use and supports itself with ads. Although it's
only a few months old, it already covers about 250
colleges and universities, and claims to average
dozens of student-created reviews, photos and videos
for each college. Its sophisticated search engine
lets applicants comb all this material to find just
what applies to them. For example, Unigo would let
you see all content relevant to an Asian-American
female applicant with conservative political views.
. . .
Unigo
also contains articles on general topics, such as
how to decide what size of college is best for you,
and how to get the most out of a college tour.
While
the editors ban personal attacks and nudity, they
don't bar negative comments. Unigo deliberately
seeks out pro and con opinions. Many of the student
submissions are enthusiastically positive, but
plenty are negative comments on campus social life,
the costs, the food, the faculty, the dorms and
other topics.
The
site feels surprisingly full for such a young
venture, but it has some quirks and issues. Coverage
is uneven. For instance, Vassar College in New York
boasts 117 reviews and 42 videos, while the much
larger University of Kansas has only 45 reviews and
three videos. Finding the detailed search feature
can be clumsy, because it's not obvious on the home
page. You can't generate a quick comparison among
colleges, and the site lacks any parent-oriented
sections, although parents are free to use it.
Finally, there are just loads of colleges that
aren't yet included. The first 250 schools were
"seeded," with months of research and solicitation
of student content. Unigo is confident it can get
more schools, but only time will tell.
Still, Unigo is a good example of how user-generated
content can do a lot to enhance an important topic,
and still keep editorial standards.
Find all of Walt Mossberg's
columns and videos online, free, at the All Things
Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at
mossberg@wsj.com
.
Continued in article
Lawyers Don't Like Being Ranked
It's a sunny day in Seattle when two lawyers can bring
a class action suit on their own behalf -- and then see it rejected on First
Amendment grounds. That's what happened last week in the Emerald City, when
Federal District Judge Robert S. Lasnik ruled that there was no basis for
cracking down on a lawyer-rating Web site merely because some of its ratees
didn't like how they were portrayed. The site, called Avvo, does for lawyers
what any number of magazines and Web sites have been doing for other professions
for years. Magazines regularly publish stories that rank an area's doctors and
dentists. There are rating sites and blogs for the "best" hairstylists,
manicurists, restaurants and movie theaters. Almost any consumer product or
service these days is sorted and ranked.
"Judging Lawyers," The Wall Street Journal, December 24, 2007; Page A10
---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119846335960848261.html
Avvo Lawyer Ratings ---
http://www.avvo.com/
Jensen Comment
In fairness most of these ranking systems are misleading. For example,
physicians and lawyers who lose more often may also be willing to take on the
tougher cases having low probabilities of success. Especially note
"Challenging Measures of Success" at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
And some professionals that win a lot may do so because they
do so in unethical ways. And lawyers, like physicians, have different
specialties such that in the realm of a particular specialty, maybe one that
rarely call out, from over 100 specialties, they may be outstanding.
Bob Jensen's threads assessment are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm
America's Best Colleges in 2008 according to Forbes
---
Click here
Business School Ranking Controversies
Question
How is the oligopoly of prestigious European business schools changing?
Hint 1: It's largely a function of gaming for
media rankings
Hint 2: Those top ranking programs are seriously cutting into the U.S.
market for prestige colleges of business
"Insead Out?" The Economist, February 1, 2008, Page 63
---
http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10567518
TIME was when INSEAD in Fontainebleau,
near Paris, was the top business school in Europe, with no competition. In
Europe the only schools that could call themselves rivals were the London
Business School (LBS) and IMD in Switzerland. Its one-year MBA course is
still famous for the experience of mixing with students from a wide range of
countries. Internationally, it holds its head up with the top American
schools, and its 33,000 alumni form a powerful network covering the top
echelons of global business. But now the heat is on for INSEAD, as a crowd
of rivals has come forward, including a new, generously funded school in
Berlin.
HEC, the original French business school
in Paris, with a proud 127-year history, now tops the latest Financial Times
ranking of European schools, ahead of both INSEAD and LBS. In another
ranking of the world's top 100 business schools by the Economist
Intelligence Unit* (a sister company of The Economist), INSEAD comes 17th.
That puts it behind seven other European institutions, including Barcelona's
IESE, Madrid's Instituto de Empresa and Cambridge University's Judge
Business School, which all make it into the top 15.
One INSEAD insider says that the school is
“rattled” by the latest rankings and by all the new competition. The school
is obsessed with rankings, says an employee. Much management time goes on
“gaming” the ratings to ensure a good score. The EIU rankings are based on
student surveys asking about career openings, the overall educational
experience, salary effect and networking potential. Those of the Financial
Times look mainly at return on investment, in terms of the boost to a
salary. Soumitra Dutta, dean of external relations at INSEAD, says that
rankings “are not always most helpful” because of all the different
methodologies used. In other words, they are a nuisance.
This week 30 executives from 13 different
countries are entering their fourth month of the first executive MBA course
at the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin (ESMT).
Germany only got round to founding an international business school in 2002,
and started small MBA classes two years ago. To be sure, a class of 30
students is puny compared with the 920 going through INSEAD this year.
INSEAD's joint campus (it runs a parallel school in Singapore), has 143
teachers compared with ESMT's 22. But the infant German institution has the
financial support to triple the size of its faculty within five years. Its
backers span the alphabet of leading firms from Allianz and Axel Springer
through BMW, Bayer and Bosch to Siemens and ThyssenKrupp. The president of
ESMT is Lars-Hendrik Röller, a former INSEAD professor with a distinguished
academic career on both sides of the Atlantic. He says the strength of the
new school will be business and its interaction with technology and public
policy.
INSEAD also had money on its mind when it
appointed a new dean in 2005. Frank Brown is an American and a former
partner in PricewaterhouseCoopers. A former INSEAD board member, his brief
as dean was to raise more finance for a school that has always struggled
against the financial heft of the Americans. So far, says Mr Dutta, he has
already raised some €170m of the €200m which the school wants to find by
2010.
INSEAD, LBS and IMD face new threats
beyond uppity rivals like the Spanish schools and the universities of Oxford
and Cambridge (both late to embrace business, but rich and rising fast). The
forthcoming harmonisation of European university education, under what is
known as the Bologna Accord, could also upset them. Europe's universities
will soon all adopt a uniform Anglo-Saxon system of bachelors, masters and
doctoral degrees. This is designed to produce greater movement of students
around Europe, and has already generated 299 new management masters degree
courses that students can follow straight after an undergraduate degree. It
was HEC's success in these courses which helped it beat all the other
business schools in the FT rankings. INSEAD and the other established
Eleven Canadian universities refuse to be ranked
Eleven Canadian universities on Monday
jointly announced that they will not
cooperate with this year’s survey by Maclean’s of Canadian higher
education. Maclean’s uses the survey for rankings that — like those
of U.S. News & World Report — are very popular with prospective
students and widely derided by educators. A statement from the
University of Toronto charged that the magazine engages in “misuse
of data in establishing a spurious ‘ranking’ table that is, at best,
useless and, at worst, misleading to students.” An editor of the
magazine told
The Globe and Mail that the data needed
for the rankings are publicly available and that the survey would
continue without the universities’ cooperation.
Inside Higher Ed, August 15, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/15/qt
Question
Where are the most beautiful college campuses in the United States?
Where are the happiest students?
Where are the most politically correct colleges?
What are the 2008 top-ranked party and or jock or weirdo schools in the United
States?
Hint: Chico and North Texas State have fallen from grace.
The No. 1 ranking colleges do not want is Princeton
Review’s annual designation in its college guide of the top party school. This
year’s winner is West Virginia University, followed by the University of
Mississippi, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Florida, and
the University of Georgia. While Princeton Review’s guide is not known for the
quality of its social science research (student surveys are the key tool), it
does win points for creative categories — particularly in playing off of
student’s studious or not-so-studious reputations, and their politics. Clemson
University is named the top jock school. Eugene Lang College of New School
University is named the place that educates “dodgeball targets.” Hampshire
College topped Bard College for the coveted “Birkenstock-wearing, tree-hugging,
clove-smoking vegetarians” award. Macalester College was deemed most accepting
of gay students while Hampden-Sydney won for “alternative lifestyles not an
alternative.” Another tradition about these rankings is for the top party
school’s president to question the ranking. Mike Garrison, president elect at
West Virginia, issued this statement: “I’ve talked to thousands of our students
over the weekend and during the first day of classes, and their concerns are
with their education, with their futures, and with the great year we have ahead
at WVU. I’m focused on the way this university changes people’s lives, the
research that we do, and the service we provide to the state of West Virginia.
This is a special place, and the whole state is proud of it.”
Inside Higher Ed, August 21, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/21/qt
Jensen Comment
There are many other categories at the Princeton Review site ---
http://www.princetonreview.com/college/research/rankings/rankings.asp
|
Check out the categories! |
|
|
|
From the University of Illinois Issues in Scholarly Communications Blog on
November 21, 2006 ---
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/
Top 100 Global Universities
An August 2006 article in the international edition
of Newsweek evaluated universities from around the world on their "globalness",
providing a ranked list of the top 100. We're pleased to see that one of
their criteria was the size of the library.
We evaluated schools on some of the measures used
in well-known rankings published by Shanghai Jiaotong University and the
Times of London Higher Education Survey. Fifty percent of the score came
from equal parts of three measures used by Shanghai Jiatong: the number
of highly-cited researchers in various academic fields, the number of
articles published in Nature and Science, and the number of articles
listed in the ISI Social Sciences and Arts & Humanities indices. Another
40 percent of the score came from equal parts of four measures used by
the Times: the percentage of international faculty, the percentage of
international students, citations per faculty member (using ISI data),
and the ratio of faculty to students. The final 10 percent came
from library holdings (number of volumes).
The top 10 were:
1. Harvard University
2. Stanford University
3. Yale University
4. California Institute of Technology
5. University of California at Berkeley
6. University of Cambridge
7. Massachusetts Institute Technology
8. Oxford University
9. University of California at San Francisco
10. Columbia University
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign came
in 48th, behind other big ten universities such as Michigan (11), U Chicago
(20), Wisconsin (28), Minnesota (30), Northwestern (35), and Penn State
(40). Others from the Big 10 that made the list of 100 included Michigan
State (62), and Purdue (86).
Read the
entire list of the 100 top global universities at MSNBC
as well as a
related story.
Note: You may also be interested in reading the
Times of London's analysis of the "Top
100 Universities", worldwide. By their
accounting, the University of Illinois ranked 58 in 2005 and 78 in 2006.
According to this listing, the top universities are:
1. Harvard
2. Cambridge
3. Oxford
4. MIT
4. Yale
6. Stanford
7. California Institute of Technology
8. UC Berkeley
9. Imperial College, London
10. Princeton
11. University of Chicago
Question
Have you been waiting on pins and needles waiting for Business Week's 2008
rankings of Business Schools?
See
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_10/b4074049186360.htm
Jensen Comment
There are some important things to keep in mind. Firstly, the rankings of
different news services (particularly Business Week versus US News versus
The Wall Street Journal) are largely in the eyes of the beholders these news
services choose for the rankings. US News uses business school deans who
are heavily influenced by research criteria such as whether a business school is
offering compensation to attract the so-called top research faculty. The Wall
Street Journal uses job recruiters who are influenced by what they think
schools offering the "best buys" for top graduates. Business Week uses
80,000 business school graduates and more than 600 corporate recruiters.
It's never clear to me how any evaluator, in particular a graduate of one
particular business school, is capable of ranking more than 100 schools of
business that she or he knows virtually nothing about. Once a school is in the
top 25 it pretty much stays in the top 25 because evaluators rely so heavily on
previous-year rankings. What else do they have to go on?
Actually there are many dysfunctional aspects of college rankings in general.
The media is not really doing education a service here ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
March 5, 2005 reply from hnouri
[hnouri@TCNJ.EDU]
Bob:
I could be wrong but I do not think graduates of a
school rank other schools. According to Business Week
There are five sources for the undergraduate
ranking: a student survey, a recruiter survey, median starting salaries for
graduates, the number of graduates admitted to 35 top MBA programs, and an
academic quality measure that consists of SAT/ACT test scores for business
majors, full-time faculty-student ratios in the business program, average
class size in core business classes, the percentage of business majors with
internships, and the number of hours students spend preparing for class each
week. The test score, faculty-student ratio, and class size information come
from a survey to be completed by participating schools; the internship and
hours of preparation data come from the student survey.
With regard to students' survey, Business Week
notes:
The survey consists of about 50 questions that ask
students to rate their programs on teaching quality, career services, alumni
network, and recruiting efforts, among other things. Using the average
answer for each of the questions and each question's standard deviation, we
calculate a student survey score for each school.
More information can be found at
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/feb2008/bs20080226_182953.htm
US News 2008 Rankings of Graduate Schools ---
http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/grad
"More Than Ivy in U.S. News’ College Rankings,"
AccountingWeb, August 22, 2006 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=102486
Breaking a three year tie with Harvard,
Princeton ranked first among National Universities in U.S. News
and World Report’s annual guide “America’s Best Colleges”. It is
the seventh straight year Princeton had been at least tied for
the top ranking. National Universities are only one of the four
categories of colleges and universities ranked by the guide.
College presidents pay close attention
to the annual rankings but question how much they actually say
about the quality of education at any institution. Betsy
Muhlenfeld, president of Sweet Briar College, a liberal arts
school in Virginia, told the Lynchburg News and Advance that in
many ways the rankings miss the point. “It says nothing about
whether the college actually delivers or whether student
learning is actually taking place.” But, she added, “We want to
make sure that the public perception of the college does not
fall.”
The comprehensive guide ranks 248
National Universities with undergraduate, masters and doctoral
programs, 217 Liberal Arts Colleges, 557 Masters Universities,
which have masters’ degree programs and 320 Comprehensive
Colleges which grant fewer than 50 percent of their degrees in
the liberal arts. The Master’s Universities, Liberal Arts
colleges, and Comprehensive Colleges are also given rankings by
region.
The model for ranking assigns weighted
values to peer assessment, graduation and retention rates,
faculty and financial resources, selectivity and alumni giving.
The most important ranking, given a weight of 25 percent of the
total, is the peer assessment, U.S. News says.
Liberty University’s founder, the
Reverend Jerry Falwell, was pleased that the school was included
in the ranking this year for the first time. The university in
Lynchburg, Virginia, was ranked 105th in the Southern Region
among the Master’s universities and is also profiled in U.S.
News and World Report. “We have worked for years to build our
numbers, to build our finances, to build our athletic programs
and to erect our buildings,” he said, according to the News and
Advance.
Other schools that were less happy with
their ranking included the University of Arkansas, which
remained in the third tier of National Universities this year, a
category assigned to the lowest ranking quarter of each group,
according to a report in the Northwest Arkansas Morning News.
The third tier is not numbered. Arkansas has had a low six-year
graduation rate, 56 percent, and high acceptance rates,
admitting 87 percent of applicants. While faring somewhat
better, with a numbered ranking in the first tier, the
University of Arizona was tied for 98 with several other
schools, hurt this year also by low retention and graduation
rates, the Arizona Republic says.
“Overall, private colleges and
universities do better on several measures in our ranking
model,” U. S. News and Report says, “including student
selectivity, graduation and retention rates, and class size.”
The top-ranked public university was the University of
California at Berkeley.
Graduate programs in business and
engineering are ranked separately. The top business schools
among the national universities were University of Pennsylvania
(Wharton), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan),
University of California – Berkeley (Hass) and the University of
Michigan at Ann Arbor. The last two schools are public
universities.
All of the top colleges, nationally and
regionally, in the Comprehensive Colleges and Master’s
Universities categories offer accounting programs, although
these programs are not ranked. Villanova University in
Pennsylvania, Rollins College in Florida, James Madison
University in Virginia, Calvin College in Grand Rapids,
Michigan, and Carroll College in Montana are among the highest
ranking schools in these categories. Most national universities
also offer accounting programs.
Brigham Young University (BYU) was
cited for its undergraduate accounting program, which ranked
fifth among the unspecified specialty categories, deseretnews
reports. BYU also ranked 12th nationally with students and
graduates having the lowest debt burden. “This is something we
take very seriously at BYU,” spokeswoman Carri Jenkins said. “We
even provide a program for our students that that can analyze
their financial situation and determine if it is wise for them
to go into debt and how much, looking to how much they’ll make
when they graduate and the cost of the debt when they graduate.”
BYU ranked 19th on a separate national
universities list of “Great Schools, Great Prices,” along with
Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, Stanford, Duke and Brown,
deseretnews reports. “We are particularly pleased in the company
we share on that list,” Jenkins said.
U.S. News sends out an extensive
questionnaire each year to all accredited four-year colleges and
universities, and schools report their information directly to
the publication.
Oh Goodie --- I was tired of holding my breath for this
---
http://www.businessweek.com/pdfs/2006/0643_bschools.pdf
"The Best B-Schools Of 2006,"
Business Week Cover Story (Complete with a slide show), October 23, 2006 ---
Click Here
-
The best-ranked programs from previous years
continue to dominate the top of the list. The University of Pennsylvania's
Wharton School, which moved up a notch, to No. 2, did so on the strength of
its core curriculum and extensive elective offerings, as well as unusual
approaches to teaching. One program, for example, teaches leadership as
students climb a volcano in Ecuador. And even though Northwestern
University's Kellogg School of Management lost its grip on the No. 1 perch
it has held since 2002, it fell only two places, to No. 3. Kellogg continues
to win student plaudits for its rigorous academics, top-flight student body,
and support from faculty and career services that one grad called "almost
parental."
Fresh thinking from business school deans has also
allowed several programs to move up in the rankings. Case in point: the
University of California at Berkeley's Haas School of Business, which until
now had never broken into the top 10. Haas catapulted nine spots, to No. 8,
leapfrogging such perennial favorites as Cornell, Columbia, and Dartmouth.
The combination of a small class, exceptional faculty, and a collegial
atmosphere impressed students. "What I was looking for in a school was
getting a real learning experience, not just getting my ticket punched,"
says Anders Geertsen, who is pursuing a banking career. "The students at
Berkeley are there to learn and connect to one another."
Recruiters, meanwhile, were wowed by the quality of
grads. Adobe Systems Inc., (ADBE ) the San Jose (Calif.) software maker,
found more than a third of its MBAs at Haas this year. "Haas produces very
strong, entrepreneurial, innovative-type thinkers," says Michelle A. Smith,
Adobe's manager of university recruiting. "They fit well with our culture
and are able to collaborate effectively."
Berkeley's performance this year shows that, when
it comes to career services, sweating the small stuff is key. Several years
ago, Haas became one of the first B-schools to assign "account managers" to
work directly with individual recruiters. One was even dispatched to New
York to strengthen Haas's relationship with the big financial services
companies. In addition, recruiters who visit the campus now get VIP
treatment. Lunch is on the school, and Dean Tom Campbell frequently drops by
to ask what the school could be doing better. Parking permits for recruiters
are now issued in advance, or someone from the school meets recruiters
curbside with a permit in hand. Abby Scott, the school's executive director
of MBA career services, says recruiters who'd begun skipping Haas are
starting to return.
Indeed, recruiters are noticing the changes. Hieu
R. DeShields, manager of corporate talent acquisition for Safeway Inc. (SWY
), says her Haas account manager helped rewrite Safeway's job postings to
make them more attractive and identified students who might be a good fit.
"She wasn't passive in terms of just posting our opportunities," says
DeShields, who made four of her 11 offers at Haas this year. "She was an
advocate for our business."
The market for MBA talent is subject to the same
laws of supply and demand that roil the business world. With the economy in
turmoil following the dot-com bust, B-school applications swelled, and two
years later graduates flooded the market, driving down salary offers. But as
the economy improved and applications began to skid, the result has been
fewer MBAs on the market this year. And you know what that means: plenty of
competition for talent and, yes, bigger paychecks.
Offers have been flooding in, giving grads more
choices than ever. Among the Top 30 schools, grads received on average
slightly more than two offers apiece, up 20% over the previous year. And the
number of students without a solid job offer by graduation has declined
dramatically. One survey by WetFeet, a San Francisco research company, found
that half of the nation's 2002 grads were still looking for work in May of
that year. This year, only 14% were.
For graduates of top schools who answered our
survey, the average salary is up more than $8,000, or 9.7% over 2004, to
$95,000. And the typical grad at nearly a third of those programs now rakes
in a six-figure paycheck. Total compensation, which includes signing bonuses
and other pay, is even higher. Based on preliminary 2006 data from schools,
graduates of Babson College, Vanderbilt University, and the University of
Michigan all saw double-digit increases over 2004, with median total
compensation for Michigan grads topping out at $130,000. One Chicago grad
surveyed by BusinessWeek had seven offers by graduation, and ultimately took
a job as a research analyst at an asset management company. Estimated
first-year compensation: an impressive $195,000.
For recruiters, a tight market for MBA talent calls
for a change in tactics. With more recruiters on campus, and individual
students receiving more offers, talent scouts have to work harder to stand
out. With new recruits at PricewaterhouseCoopers receiving at least twice as
many offers as last year, PwC has launched a branding campaign to put their
name front and center on college campuses. At on-campus recruiting events,
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM ), which hired 85 MBAs this year, will trot out
alumni who work at the company and have risen through the ranks. The
message: The company is a true meritocracy where hard work is rewarded. The
pitch works, but even so, the competition for the best students makes for a
difficult recruiting environment, says JPMorgan recruiter Danielle Domingue.
"This definitely feels like the feeding frenzy of 2000," Domingue says. "The
students just have more choice."
While the news about the market for MBA talent is
almost uniformly good, B-school deans and faculty are not standing still.
Many are embarking on some of the most ambitious curriculum reforms in
recent memory. Deans around the country have recognized that traditional
programs compartmentalized by discipline no longer match the "flat"
structure currently in vogue at American companies. What's more, managing
has become ever more complex: On any given day, executives must analyze
information from all corners of the globe in real time, and coordinate
resources across borders and time zones.
Seven of the top 30 programs are planning or
undergoing massive curriculum overhauls designed to churn out more competent
grads. And at least that many are innovating around the edges, developing
new programs or courses, or shifting focus. The changes vary in direction
and scope, but many share a common goal: to turn out graduates able to
grapple with the competing priorities that managers must confront every day
and execute on a plan with little or no help from higher-ups. Today,
recruiters say, many grads, weaned on a steady diet of cut-and-dried case
studies, are incapable of deciding on a pricing strategy or a marketing
approach in the face of unknowns--everything from consumer reaction to the
price of oil. And worse: They can't follow through on a decision once it's
been made. Having spent two years in B-school working on teams, where
everyone and no one is in charge, they don't have the leadership and
communication skills they need to take a project from start to finish.
Theoretically, the new programs now in the works will create stronger
decision makers, better problem solvers, more effective communicators--in a
word: leaders.
While such overhauls happen with some regularity,
mainly at lower-tier schools seeking a competitive advantage, top-ranked
schools are leading the charge now. This summer, Stanford University's
Graduate School of Business, ranked at No. 6, scrapped its one-size-fits-all
curriculum and introduced a new model that emphasizes flexibility and
customization. Tailored to students' individual education, work experience,
and goals, courses offered starting next fall will challenge students to
understand more than one academic discipline or managerial function and
develop the critical thinking skills they'll need to make decisions when
information is sketchy and risks are high. In a course called "Critical
Analytical Thinking," students will analyze questions such as what
responsibilities companies have to society, and develop the communication
skills they need to persuade others of their positions. "This is a huge
curriculum reform for us," says Garth Saloner, a management professor who
headed the committee that recommended the changes. "If you could start with
a blank sheet of paper, what program would you put in place that would put
your students in the best position to manage organizations? That's what we
really want to do."
The centerpiece of the new curriculum at the No.
19-ranked Yale University School of Management is a series of eight courses
drawing on the insights of multiple managerial disciplines to solve vexing
problems. One example is a new approach to the customer relationship, from a
company's first contact with a prospective customer, usually in a marketing
campaign, to the last, when the company loses the customer to a
competitor--and everything in between, including customer service. Instead
of treating the customer relationship as a marketing problem, as most MBA
curriculums do now, Yale will treat it as an accounting problem, an
economics problem, an organizational design problem, a psychology
problem--and a marketing problem. A course that blends these disparate
approaches might discuss how consumers choose products, how to identify and
keep the most profitable customers, and how to redesign the organization
itself so that customer feedback gets channeled back into product design.
"Everybody's wrestling with how do we bring management education in line
with the demands of management," says Yale Dean Joel M. Podolny. "Everybody
recognizes there has to be some changes to the standard curriculum." Similar
efforts are under way at Michigan, the University of Rochester, the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Notre Dame, and Kellogg.
Columbia, which ranks No. 10, has a new MBA
offering called the Program for Social Intelligence that borrows freely from
the management playbooks of such corporate giants as General Electric and
Goldman Sachs. The program includes more than a dozen activities--from a
brainstorming exercise to a marketing plan simulation--making use of
existing study teams to teach lessons on team dynamics. It also includes
activities designed to help develop leadership skills and workshops on
managing large organizations. "In developing these leadership skills, you
don't learn it in a group of 60 or 100," says Michael W. Morris, the
management professor who runs the new program. "You learn it by having
experiential exercises in small groups and getting results you can interpret
with the help of a coach."
Of course, the MBA revival has as much to do with
the ebb and flow of the economy as it does the ongoing reform efforts at the
nation's B-schools. But many deans are grateful that the sturm und drang of
recent years got them thinking about how to build a better manager. They
recognize that a reassessment is long overdue and vital if the MBA is to
remain relevant for the next generation of business leaders.
Can you
believe it?
Now Business Week is ranking the top "part-time" MBA programs by
examining whether Business Week’s supposedly top full-time programs have
part-time options ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/nov2007/bs2007111_310993.htm
Also see
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/rankings/?link_position=link4
Jensen Comment
Aside from all the problems of ranking full-time MBA programs, the fact that
some of the top full-time programs have part-time enrollment options does not
ipso facto make them also top part-time programs. For one thing, top
part-time programs often have great evening or distance education courses. Top
ranked full-time programs often do not have evening or distance education
courses, and if they do have such courses, it's unlikely that they assign their
best faculty to teach in such courses.
I think the top-ranked part-time programs might indeed be some
of the ones that have specialized in part-time programs and are not in the 25
top ranked full-time programs or even the top 100 full-time programs.
"Rank Colleges, but Rank Them Right," by David Leonhardt, The New
York Times, August 16, 2006 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/16/business/media/16leonhardt.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
EARLY this morning, U.S. News & World
Report will send e-mail messages to hundreds of college
administrators, giving them an advance peek at the magazine’s
annual college ranking. They will find out whether Princeton
will be at the top of the list for the seventh straight year,
whether Emory can break into the top 15 and where their own
university ranks. The administrators must agree to keep the
information to themselves until Friday at midnight, when the
list goes live on the U.S. News Web site, but the e-mail message
gives them a couple of days to prepare a response.
By now, 23 years after U.S. News got
into this game, the responses have become pretty predictable.
Disappointed college officials dismiss the ranking as being
beneath the lofty aims of a university, while administrators
pleased with their status order new marketing materials bragging
about it — and then tell anyone who asks that, obviously, they
realize the ranking is beneath the lofty aims of a university.
There are indeed some silly aspects to
the U.S. News franchise and its many imitators. The largest part
of a university’s U.S. News score, for instance, is based on a
survey of presidents, provosts and admissions deans, most of
whom have never sat in a class at the colleges they’re judging.
That’s made it easy to dismiss all the
efforts to rate colleges as the product of a status-obsessed
society with a need to turn everything, even learning, into a
competition. As Richard R. Beeman, a historian and former dean
at the University of Pennsylvania, has argued, “The very idea
that universities with very different institutional cultures and
program priorities can be compared, and that the resulting
rankings can be useful to students, is highly problematic.”
Of course, the same argument could be
made about students. They come from different cultures, they
learn in different ways and no one-dimensional scoring system
can ever fully capture how well they have mastered a subject.
Yet colleges go on giving grades, drawing fine lines that
determine who is summa cum laude and bestowing graduation prizes
— all for good reason.
HUMAN beings do a better job of just
about anything when their performance is evaluated and they are
held accountable for it. You can’t manage what you don’t
measure, as the management adage says, and because higher
education is by all accounts critical to the country’s economic
future, it sure seems to be deserving of rigorous measurement.
So do we spend too much time worrying
about college rankings? Or not nearly enough?
Not so long ago, college administrators
could respond that they seemed to be doing just fine. American
universities have long attracted talented students from other
continents, and this country’s population was once the most
educated in the world.
But it isn’t anymore. Today the United
States ranks ninth among industrialized nations in
higher-education attainment, in large measure because only 53
percent of students who enter college emerge with a bachelor’s
degree, according to census data. And those who don’t finish pay
an enormous price. For every $1 earned by a college graduate,
someone leaving before obtaining a four-year degree earns only
67 cents.
Last week, in a report to the Education
Department, a group called the Commission on the Future of
Higher Education bluntly pointed out the economic dangers of
these trends. “What we have learned over the last year makes
clear that American higher education has become what, in the
business world, would be called a mature enterprise:
increasingly risk-averse, at times self-satisfied, and unduly
expensive,” it said. “To meet the challenges of the 21st
century, higher education must change from a system primarily
based on reputation to one based on performance.”
The report comes with a handful of
recommendations — simplify financial aid, give more of it to
low-income students, control university costs — but says they
all depend on universities becoming more accountable. Tellingly,
only one of the commission’s 19 members, who included executives
from Boeing, I.B.M. and Microsoft and former university
presidents, refused to sign the report: David Ward, president of
the nation’s largest association of colleges and universities,
the American Council on Education. But that’s to be expected.
Many students don’t enjoy being graded, either. The task of
grading colleges will fall to the federal government, which
gives enough money to universities to demand accountability, and
to private groups outside higher education.
“The degree of defensiveness that
colleges have is unreasonable,” said Michael S. McPherson, a
former president of Macalester College in Minnesota who now runs
the Spencer Foundation in Chicago. “It’s just the usual
resistance to having someone interfere with their own marketing
efforts.”
The commission urged the Education
Department to create an easily navigable Web site that allows
comparisons of colleges based on their actual cost (not just
list price), admissions data and meaningful graduation rates.
(Right now, the statistics don’t distinguish between students
who transfer and true dropouts.) Eventually, it said, the site
should include data on “learning outcomes.”
Measuring how well students learn is
incredibly difficult, but there are some worthy efforts being
made. Researchers at Indiana University ask students around the
country how they spend their time and how engaged they are in
their education, while another group is measuring whether
students become better writers and problem solvers during their
college years.
As Mr. McPherson points out, all the
yardsticks for universities have their drawbacks. Yet parents
and students are clearly desperate for information. Without it,
they turn to U.S. News, causing applications to jump at colleges
that move up the ranking, even though some colleges that are
highly ranked may not actually excel at making students smarter
than they were upon arrival. To take one small example that’s
highlighted in the current issue of Washington Monthly, Emory
has an unimpressive graduation rate given the affluence and
S.A.T. scores of its incoming freshmen.
When U.S. News started its ranking back
in the 1980’s, universities released even less information about
themselves than they do today. But the attention that the
project received forced colleges to become a little more open.
Imagine, then, what might happen if a big foundation or another
magazine — or U.S. News — announced that it would rank schools
based on how well they did on measures like the Indiana survey.
The elite universities would surely
skip it, confident that they had nothing to gain, but there is a
much larger group of colleges that can’t rest on a brand name.
The ones that did well would be rewarded with applications from
just the sort of students universities supposedly want — ones
who are willing to keep an open mind and be persuaded by
evidence.
Question
What do professors think are the top accounting education programs in the U.S.?
The Public Accounting Report on October 30, 2006 published its rankings
of the universities having the top undergraduate, masters, and doctoral programs
in accounting. The University of Texas hung on to the top rankings in all three
categories ---
http://www.mccombs.utexas.edu/news/pressreleases/PAR_06.pdf
Of course these rankings are subject to all the criticisms of college rankings
in general ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
Be that as it may, these rankings are very important for both fund raising and
student recruiting activities.
Rankings of Top MBA Programs are in the Eyes of the Beholders
The Wall Street Journal released it's 2007 rankings of U.S. and
International MBA Programs on September 17, 2007 ---
http://online.wsj.com/documents/print/WSJ_-R001-20070917.pdf
The best known rankings are from US News at
http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/usnews/edu/grad/rankings/mba/brief/mbarank_brief.php
There is also a video available at the above link about changes from 2006.
Business Week also ranks MBA programs based upon a large survey of
graduates from MBA programs ---
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_43/b4006008.htm?chan=bestbs
The 2006 rankings are at
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/10/bschools/index_01.htm
I did not include the Business Week outcomes in the tables below because on
September 17, 2007 when I'm writing this the Business Week rankings are not yet
available for 2007. In fact, I don't think this is an annual event comparable to
the WSJ and US News efforts for MBA programs.
The rankings differ greatly between the US News, WSJ, and
Business Week outcomes. The reason is primarily due to who does the ranking.
Business school deans rank the US News top schools. Deans are heavily
influenced by reputations of faculty, high GMAT averages, research performance,
and what might be termed a traditional halo effect where some schools rank high
traditionally come hell or high water.
The WSJ rankings come from industry recruiters who try to land the
best MBA graduates they can both attract and afford. Herein lies the primary
difference. Many recruiters view the top ranked schools by US News as having too
much competition for graduates. Landing a top Harvard, Stanford, or Wharton
graduate is often too expensive relative to the top "best buy" schools that
appeal most to many recruiters.
I can't for the life of me understand how graduates of a given MBA program
are qualified to rank other MBA programs in the Business Week surveys.
In any case the results are as follows for 2007:
2007 MBA Program Rankings in the U.S.
| University |
US News Ranking |
WSJ Ranking |
| Harvard |
1 |
14 |
| Stanford |
2 |
19 |
| Pennsylvania (Wharton) |
3 |
11 |
| MIT (Sloan) |
4 |
4 |
| Northwestern (Kellog) |
5 |
12 |
| Dartmouth (Tuck) |
6 |
1 |
| UC Berkeley (Haas) |
7 |
2 |
| Chicago |
8 |
9 |
| Columbia |
9 |
3 |
| NYU |
10 |
17 |
2007 MBA Program Rankings in the U.S.
| University |
US News Ranking |
WSJ Ranking |
| Dartmouth (Tuck) |
6 |
1 |
| UC Berkeley (Haas) |
7 |
2 |
| Columbia |
8 |
3 |
| MIT (Sloan) |
4 |
4 |
| Carnegie Mellon (Tepper) |
17 |
5 |
| North Carolina (Kenan-Flagler) |
18 |
6 |
| Michigan (Ross) |
11 |
7 |
| Yale |
14 |
8 |
| Chicago |
8 |
9 |
| Virginia (Darden) |
1 |
10 |
The WSJ also ranks the top international MBA programs as follows for the top
ten winners:
2007 International MBA Program Rankings
| University |
Rank |
|
ESADE
--- Spain |
1 |
|
IMD --- Switzerland |
2 |
| London Business School - U.K. |
3 |
|
IPADE
--- Mexico |
4 |
| MIT (Sloan) - U.S. |
5 |
| Columbia - U.S. |
6 |
|
Essec
--- France |
7 |
| Instituto Tecnologico
Monterrey (EGADE) --- Mexico |
8 |
|
HEC Paris |
9 |
| Thunderbird - U.S. |
10 |
International, national, and regional rankings of universities, colleges, and
disciplines within schools is increasingly controversial ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
I think the biggest problem is the lack of information that raters have
regarding all the programs they are evaluating and trying to rank. Any college
president, dean, or corporate recruiter may sufficient information about a few
of the programs that she/he is asked to rank. But it is impossible for one
individual to track all the many programs that are to be ranked. These programs
are constantly changing in terms of students, faculty, curricula, and many other
important inputs to a ranking. Whenever a rater has insufficient information,
the "halo effect" comes into play leading to advantages of traditionally
prestigious universities that might have slipped slightly in reality but never
in the minds of naive raters.
Rankings are not taken lightly by either universities or pools of potential
applicants. Not only can some arbitrary choices by raters have short term
effects, there may be huge long term effects in terms of careers, decisions by
donors on how much to give to programs, choices of top faculty regarding where
to seek employment, and alumni praise and criticism. In some instances,
administrative bonuses are given to college and university administrators who
increase media rankings of their programs (such as the bonus plan for the
President of the University of Arizona State University).
Question
Business Week just published its choice of the top 50 undergraduate business
programs in the United States. What are the Top 20 Choices?
Answer ---
http://www.businessweek.com/pdfs/2006/0619_top50b.pdf
"The Best Undergraduate B-Schools," Business Week, May 8, 2006
---
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_19/b3983401.htm
Measuring Merit It's the kind of personal
attention that landed Wharton at the top of Business Week's inaugural
ranking of the nation's best undergraduate business programs. But
the school's merits go well beyond that. To succeed in the ranking,
which incorporates five measures -- of student engagement,
postgraduation outcomes, and academic quality -- schools must be
firing on all cylinders. Clearly, Wharton is, landing in the Top 10
on four of the five ranking measures. Small classes, talented
faculty, top-flight recruiting -- and a four-year format that allows
its ultracompetitive students to delve deeply into business
fundamentals -- lofted Wharton to the No. 1 position. "They are
extremely accomplished students," Souleles says. "It doesn't get any
better."
Wharton celebrates its 125th anniversary
this year and for much of its history has been considered among the
nation's finest. Like many top schools, it has the best of both
worlds: a high-quality undergraduate business program and an MBA
program ranked No. 3 in BusinessWeek's 2004 "Best B-Schools" list.
Indeed, nine of the Top 10 undergraduate programs have highly ranked
MBA programs as well.
In many ways then, Wharton's showing among
the undergraduate schools simply confirms its preeminent status. But
the new ranking also shows just how much good company Wharton has
these days. Schools that had never been thought of as top business
programs, such as No. 18 Lehigh University's College of Business &
Economics, turn out to deserve more recognition. And schools that
have always enjoyed a solid reputation, such as Emory University's
Goizueta Business School and the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza
College of Business, come in among the top five -- and in many ways
rival Wharton for the mantle of best undergraduate B-school in
America.
MBA-like Respect That fact underscores a
curious transformation that has taken place in higher education in
recent years. As the economy rebounded after the dot-com bust,
students have been drawn to college business programs, and
recruiters, seeking to ramp up their diminished ranks of middle
managers, have followed. Under increased pressure from students and
recruiters, business schools have revamped their offerings, putting
more emphasis on specialized classes, real-world experience, and
soft skills such as leadership. Once a refuge for students with poor
grades and modest ambitions, many undergraduate business programs
now get MBA-like respect. For many graduates, these programs are now
so good that the MBA is almost beside the point, an academic
credential for career switchers and those with corner office dreams
but unnecessary for mere mortals.
The undergraduate business degree is now
clearly on the path to respectability. With 54% of employers
planning recruiting trips to undergraduate campuses in 2006 and
undergraduate hiring expected to surge by 14.5% -- its third
consecutive double-digit increase -- starting salaries for grads in
all majors are rising. But business majors have fared better than
any other discipline, with starting salaries up more than 49% since
1996, compared with 39% for engineering students and 29% for liberal
arts grads, according to the National Association of Colleges &
Employers. The typical business grad now earns $43,313, about $8,000
less than engineering students can expect. But for undergraduates at
top schools, the average can easily exceed $50,000.
Hot to Hire Even with rising salaries,
recruiters are relying on undergraduate degree holders to fill more
jobs. In just three years, Microsoft Corp. (MSFT ) has increased its
recruiting on college campuses, including some MBAs, by 60%. Defense
contractor Raytheon Co. (RTN ) plans to hire nearly 1,200 new
graduates this year, and 3 out of 4 will be from undergraduate
programs. To keep the talent pipeline full, Raytheon maintains close
relationships with 26 campuses, assigning executives to each school
to work with key professors to identify the best job candidates.
Even so, with Raytheon's business growing at a double-digit clip,
the company plans to recruit from 120 schools this year, according
to Keith Pedon, senior vice-president for human resources.
It's not just Raytheon, either. When the
Big East career fair took place at New York's Madison Square Garden
in March, there were 81 companies pitching to 1,000 students, and
organizers had to turn away 50 more companies for lack of space.
For a better understanding of the shifting
landscape of undergraduate business education, BusinessWeek last
year undertook an extraordinary research project. The goal: to rank
the best college business programs in America. Among other things,
the project included a survey with Boston's Cambria Consulting Inc.
of nearly 100,000 business majors at 84 of the best U.S. colleges
and universities, a second survey of college recruiters, and a third
survey of the business programs themselves. If one thing emerges
from the data, it's that the programs are, in a sense, all grown up
and evolving in ways that mimic the developmental arc of the MBA
itself.
Like graduate B-schools, the undergraduate
programs are separating into two clearly discernible tiers, with the
50 programs in our ranking standing head and shoulders above the
rest. They're also dividing along the same philosophical split that
now partitions the MBA world. There are those, including many at or
near the top of the list, that are following a rigorously academic
model, with a heavy emphasis on economics, statistics, finance, and
accounting. Programs like Wharton's fall into this group, which
generally do not require -- or give credit for -- internships, even
though many students get them on their own. They also use MBA
teaching methods such as case studies, simulations, and team
projects.
But at the great majority of business
programs, students are exposed to less business theory -- too
little, in the view of some experts -- and a heavy dose of practical
training. A quarter century ago, virtually every business program in
America followed the latter model. At top schools that's no longer
the case. "What you're seeing is a polarization," says Barbara E.
Kahn, director of Wharton's undergraduate business division. "This
is different from what it was 25 years ago. It wasn't the academic
experience it is today."
Few schools typify the scholarly approach
more than Wharton, which landed in the No. 1 spot largely on the
strength of its academic quality. But the same could be said for any
of the schools near the top of the list. At No. 2 University of
Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce, students said the two-year
format left them two additional years to explore the school's
numerous offerings but made for a tough course load in the junior
year and a pressure-cooker atmosphere in which many thrived. At No.
3 Notre Dame, rigorous classes requiring teamwork skills and an
intimate knowledge of economics, calculus, and corporate strategy
earned the school a high grade for teaching quality. The curriculum
works ethics into most classes, requires that half of all coursework
be in nonbusiness subjects, and emphasizes group projects.
One reason undergraduate business programs
are getting better is because the labor market is demanding it. To
make graduates desirable to recruiters, many business programs have
begun making changes. Several schools that had two-year programs,
including No. 21 University of Southern California's Marshall School
of Business, have begun admitting freshmen in recent years. Such
moves permit students to take demanding business courses earlier,
making them more competitive internship candidates. Students are
eagerly embracing these and other changes. When No. 15 Washington
University's Olin School of Business, a four-year program, began
offering a career management elective to sophomores in 2004, more
than 70 students showed up, and a second section had to be added.
Continued in article
Business Week's Executive MBA Rankings and Profiles ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/03/emba_rank.htm?campaign_id=nws_mbaxp_oct10&link_position=link9
"B-Schools Ranked on Social (Responsibility) Studies," Business
Week, November 1, 2005 ---
http://snipurl.com/BENov1
As part of the study, the organizations
rank B-schools based on how well they integrate social and
environmental issues into their curriculum and research. The ranking
weighs a school's commitment in four categories, including the
number of courses offered, the enrollment for those courses, the
quality of the content, and the depth and breadth of faculty
research. Nearly 600 MBA programs participated by responding to a
survey, and 1,842 courses and 828 journal articles from leading
peer-reviewed business publications were analyzed to determine the
top 30 schools.
The top 10 programs as ranked by "Beyond
Grey Pinstripes" are:
01. Stanford University Graduate School
of Business, U.S.
02. ESADE Business School, Spain
03. York University Schulich School of Business, Canada
04. ITESM (EGADE) Graduate School of Business, Mexico
05. University of Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business, U.S.
06. The George Washington University School of Business, U.S.
07. The Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of
Michigan, U.S.
08. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Kenan-Flagler
Business School, U.S.
09. Cornell University S.C. Johnson Graduate School of
Management, U.S.
10. Wake Forest University Babcock Graduate School of
Management, U.S.
Although the business schools surveyed are
making important progress, the report's authors note that teaching
and research on these topics are still limited and not widespread.
Only 4% of faculty at the surveyed schools published research on
related issues in top, peer-reviewed journals during the survey
period, says Mark Milstein, business research director for the World
Resources Institute's Sustainable Enterprise Program.
Global Principles for College Rankings by the Media
Higher education officials from more than a dozen
countries have crafted
a set of principles designed to standardize
what they call “the global phenomenon of college and university rankings.”
The “Berlin Principles,” as the series of good practices are called, touch
on the purposes and goals of such rankings, the design and weighting of the
measures used, collection and processing of data, and presentation. The
principles were drafted at a meeting in Berlin this month convened by the
UNESCO-European Center for Higher Education and the Institute for Higher
Education Policy.
Inside Higher Ed, May 31, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/05/31/qt
Best Academic Program Does Not Always Equate to Highest Media Ranking
Program
Forwarded on January 31, 2006 by David Albrecht
[albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]
"Graduates of Best Business Schools Don't Always Draw Top Pay, Study
Finds," by Katherine S. Mangan, Chronicle of Higher Education,
January 31, 2006 ---
http://chronicle.com/daily/2006/01/2006013102n.htm
Companies pay higher salaries to graduates
of the most prominent business schools, even when they believe that
lesser-known schools offer better educations, according to a study
described in the December/January issue of the Academy of Management
Journal.
The study, conducted by researchers at the
University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, found
that those two variables do not always go hand in hand. In their
analysis of data from a poll of 1,600 professional recruiters, the
researchers found that the business schools considered to be the
most prominent didn't always get top marks for quality.
The biggest bucks went to graduates of
high-profile schools -- the kind that top the charts in national
magazine ratings or have faculty members with lofty pedigrees. A
report on the study does not give the names of any of the schools
mentioned by the recruiters.
"There's an old cliché that nobody got
fired for buying from IBM," said Violina P. Rindova, an assistant
professor of strategy at the Maryland business school and one of the
study's authors. "There's a certain reassurance that if you recruit
someone from a prominent school, the boss won't be upset and that
you'll have a stronger guarantee."
Continued in article at
http://chronicle.com/daily/2006/01/2006013102n.htm
Paid subscription required for access.
Quarterback ranking controversies are not much different than
college ranking controversies
According to the National Football League's
Byzantine system for rating quarterbacks, Eli is only the 18th-best
passer in the league, but a closer look reveals that he has reached the
top rung of pro quarterbacks and is on the verge of superstardom. The
proof is in the bottom line: The Giants are first in the National
Football Conference in points scored and are third in the entire league,
behind only the San Diego Chargers and the Indianapolis Colts, whose
quarterback is the more celebrated Manning, Eli's older brother Peyton.
The NFL's passer rating formula gives too much weight to pass-completion
percentage, which most analysts now realize is a minor statistic. As
football stats guru Bud Goode once asked me, "Would you rather complete
two of three passes for nine yards or one of three for 10?" Eli's pass
completion after 11 games is just 52.5%, the lowest in the NFC, and one
of the lowest among starting quarterbacks in the entire league. But Eli
has passed for 2,664 yards, second in the NFC only to future Hall of
Famer Brett Favre of the Green Bay Packers, and Mr. Manning has more
touchdown passes than Mr. Favre (20 to 19) and substantially fewer
interceptions (10 to 19). In fact, Eli currently has more touchdown
passes than any quarterback in his conference.
Allen Barra, "The Family Business Will quarterback brothers face off in
the Super Bowl?" The Wall Street Journal, November 30, 2005 ---
http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110007614
The entire college ranking system is now considered dysfunctional to
program integrity and is being studied as a huge academic problem by the AACSB (See below)
MBA (Casino?) Games: The house plays the odds and hopes to come
out ahead!
Resorting to contests and prizes shows just
how tough times are for full-time M.B.A. programs. The Graduate
Management Admission Council reports that 72% of full-time M.B.A.
programs experienced an application decline this year as more people
opted to keep their jobs and seek a part-time, executive or online
M.B.A. degree instead . . . Simon's business-strategy contest resulted
from a challenge put to students on the school's advisory council to
concoct ways to improve the M.B.A. program. As an incentive, alumni
kicked in $10,000, half for the students with the best proposal and half
to implement their idea. Several student projects focused on the
application slump, which clearly is the most pressing issue at Simon.
Applications were down 23% this year, following a 24% drop in 2004. This
fall, the incoming class of about 110 students compares with 150 last
year and 185 in 2003. "These are the toughest years in management
education I have ever seen," says Dr. Zupan.
"MBA Program Hopes Online Game Will Lure Recruits with Prizes," The
Wall Street Journal, September 13,
2005; Page B12 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112657077730738778,00.html?mod=todays_us_marketplace
Since curriculum revisions are not working well to reverse the slide of
MBA applications, some universities not happy with their US News,
Forbes, WSJ, and Business Week rankings may turn to gaming
with sizeable rewards
Can an online game offering thousands of
dollars in prizes reverse the slide in master of business administration
applications? The University of Rochester certainly hopes so. Starting
Sept. 26, potential M.B.A. applicants to Rochester's William E. Simon
Graduate School of Business Administration will begin playing a
business-simulation game that promises a full scholarship of more than
$70,000 to the winner, plus smaller scholarships for the runners-up. The
goal is to attract top-notch applicants who may never have heard of the
Simon School but find the game, and the scholarship money, enticing. "We
hope to get a little viral marketing going so that people spread the
word that Simon is an innovative place worth taking a look at," says
Dean Mark Zupan.
"MBA Program Hopes Online Game Will Lure Recruits with Prizes," The
Wall Street Journal, September 13,
2005; Page B12 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112657077730738778,00.html?mod=todays_us_marketplace
The following tidbits were in my August 29 edition of Tidbits:
Earlier threads on the business school ranking controversies
Jensen Comment
These differ somewhat from how business school deans rank business
schools in the rankings ---
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/grad/rankings/mba/brief/mbarank_brief.php
01. Harvard University (MA)
02. Stanford University (CA)
03. University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
04. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan)
Northwestern University (Kellogg) (IL)
06. Dartmouth College (Tuck) (NH)
University of California–Berkeley (Haas)
08. University of Chicago
09. Columbia University (NY)
10. University of Michigan–Ann Arbor (Ross)
The entire ranking system is now considered dysfunctional to
program integrity and is being studied as a huge academic problem by the
AACSB (See below)
Rankings of Finance Doctoral
(and other
finance)
Programs
Because I'm one
of the few bloggers who regularly write about
the life of a finance professor, I get about a
dozen questions a month from people considering
a PhD in finance (Note: if you're interested,
you can read about a finance professor's typical
day
here and
here, and about what's
involved in getting a PhD in finance
here).
The emails are one of the more surprising and
most enjoyable things about writing the blog,
and at least a couple of the folks who've sent
me questions are currently in PhD programs. I
look forward to seeing how their careers
progress, knowing I may have played some small
part it them.
Some of the most frequent questions I get are
along the lines of "How do I find out how well
respected University X's finance doctoral
program is?" or alternately, "Where can a get a
list of rankings of finance doctoral programs?"
I should have done this some time ago, but I'm a
bit slow at times. But, since Unknown Daughter
and She Who Must Be Obeyed are out to a
classmate's birthday party, and Unknown Son is
entranced by a Harry Potter movie, this seems
like a good time to spent a little time on the
Almighty Google. Here are the results:
-
Karolyis and Silvestrini have a piece on
SSRN titled "Comparing the Research
Productivity of Finance PhD Program
Graduates"
here
- Jean Heck
has a similar piece titled "Establishing a
Pecking Order for Finance Academics: Ranking
of U.S. Finance Doctoral Programs
here.
Both it and the Karolyi/Silvestrini piece
analyze productivity on the basis of the
author's doctoral-granting program, but this
one lists a few more doctoral programs than
the other piece. So, it might yield some
possibilities for those looking for less
selective programs.
- Finally,
Arizona State has a ranking of finance
departments (which may or may not have
doctoral programs)
here, while
EconPhD has a similar one covering several
finance areas
here.
Hopefully, these will prove useful. If any of
you are aware of any other rankings that are
relatively recent (i.e. done in the last 4-5
years or so), let me know and I'll update the
list.
Do those dubious college rankings really matter?
"Resigned Over Rankings," by Rob Capriccioso, "Inside Higher Ed,
April 19, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/04/19/dean
In 2002, the University of Houston Law
Center was ranked 50th in the U.S. News & World Report annual law
school rankings.
Today, it’s ranked number 70.
Some faculty members and students at the
institution believe that the downward slide may have been the cause
of Monday’s resignation of Nancy Rapoport, the center’s dean since
2000. Others say that notion — and the rankings themselves — are
phooey.
“After six years as dean, I don’t think
this is a really big deal,” says Michael A. Olivas, a law professor
at Houston and director of the Institute for Higher Education Law
and Governance at the school. “There is a shelf life for deans, you
know. These rankings are definitely not how I measure the success of
a dean.”
But, according to students who attended a
faculty member meeting last week, some professors directly
criticized the dean for the drop. While the U.S. News rankings are
regularly derided by educators as poor measures of quality, many of
those same educators worry about how their institutions fare.
Joy N. Hermansen, who has seven more months
before she graduates from the school, was reluctant to give names of
faculty members who were particularly critical of the dean. “I know
that most deans don’t stay longer than six years, and maybe it was
time for the dean to move on anyway,” she says. “However, I doubt
she would have resigned but for the recent events related to the
rankings because our school is up for accreditation next year.
That’s a really bad time to not have a dean.”
One professor, who wished to remain
anonymous, said that faculty members and student groups had been
meeting regularly since the most recent rankings came out to discuss
what could be done to boost them. The professor indicated that none
of these meetings involved the dean.
Hermansen says that students began to
concurrently rebel against Rapoport. “I’m sure the fact that a few
irresponsible people, not thinking about the consequences of their
actions, posted messages seriously criticizing her and her actions
on public Internet forums bothered her,” says Hermansen.
“Dean Rapoport, as one faculty member
described her, prides herself on being an ‘outside’ dean — one who
spends most of her time meeting with people outside the law school
to try to improve its reputation,” she adds. “This would be in
contrast to an ‘inside’ dean who spends his or her time mingling
with students and is very visible on campus. Therefore, we really
don’t have much insight into her thought processes or most of her
decisions.”
While Rapoport did not respond to calls for
comment for this story, there is evidence that the magazine rankings
have, in recent years, weighed heavily on the minds of
administrators and faculty members. In an article published by
Rapoport in the Illinois Law Review in 2005, she detailed a plan
called Project Magellan, which was begun after the law school
dropped below the 50th spot in the U.S. News rankings.
“Magellan is raising important issues and
forcing us to make some hard choices,” wrote the dean. “In our last
few brown-bag discussions, we’ve talked about making some changes
that may, over time, improve our rankings — at least as long as
every other school above us in the rankings doesn’t make these
changes at the same time that we do. Most of those changes (to
improve placement, to reconsider how we award financial aid, to
change the curriculum slightly, and to encourage different choices
for placement of articles by faculty) are likely to make our school
better than our rankings will demonstrate.”
Donald J. Foss, senior vice president for
academic affairs and provost at the university, cautioned against
putting too much stock in the rankings in a recent Houston Chronicle
story regarding the dean’s departure. In a press release, he stated
that plans to appoint an interim dean and a search committee in the
immediate future.
Olivas also cautions against putting too
much stock in a dean’s ability to affect the rankings of the school.
He says that funding shortcomings resulting from the state’s Enron
scandal as well as continued and rebuilding efforts from Tropical
Storm Allison are challenges that will not soon go away. He says
that these situations have affected the magazine’s ranking of the
school, but that the school is actually doing much better than the
drop would indicate.
Continued in article
From Jim Mahar's blog on August 26, 2005 ---
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/
What's Really Wrong With U.S. Business
Schools?
by Harry DeAngelo, Linda DeAngelo, Jerold Zimmerman:
Wow, it sounds bad. I (Jim Mahar)
am very glad I chose a small university (St.
Bonaventure). However, the choice leads me to not really comment on
the paper since being at a small university removes me from many
(but not all) of the problems cited in the paper. Moreover, I do not
feel I can add any value to what the authors say.
Rather I will only give you the abstract
and link.
Abstract:
"U.S. business schools are locked in a dysfunctional competition
for media rankings that diverts resources from long-term
knowledge creation, which earned them global pre-eminence, into
short-term strategies aimed at improving their rankings. MBA
curricula are distorted by 'quick fix, look good' packaging
changes designed to influence rankings criteria, at the expense
of giving students a rigorous, conceptual framework that will
serve them well over their entire careers. Research,
undergraduate education, and Ph.D. programs suffer as faculty
time is diverted to almost continuous MBA curriculum changes,
strategic planning exercises, and public relations efforts.
Unless they wake up to the dangers of dysfunctional rankings
competition, U.S. business schools are destined to lose their
dominant global position and become a classic case study of how
myopic decision-making begets institutional mediocrity."
Cite:
DeAngelo, Harry, DeAngelo, Linda and Zimmerman, Jerold L.,
"What's Really Wrong With U.S. Business Schools?" (July 2005).
http://ssrn.com/abstract=766404
Jensen Comment:
The DeAngelos and Jerry Zimmerman are leading advocates of capital
market research and positivist methodology. Harry and Linda are from
the University of Southern California and Jerry is from the University
of Rochester. Their business schools rank 23 and 26 respectively in the
latest US News rankings. Their WSJ rankings are 23 and
20.
I think the authors overstate the problem with media rankings and
curricula. I don’t think curriculum choices or PR enter into the
rankings in a big way. Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton will almost
always come out on top no matter what the curriculum or PR budget. What
counts heavily is elitism tradition and alumni networking (helps Harvard
the most), concentration of researchers/names (helps Stanford the most),
and insider tracks to Wall Street (helps Wharton the most). These, in
turn, affect the number of MBA applicants with GMAT scores hovering
around 700 or higher. The GMAT scores, in turn, impact most heavily
upon media rankings. The raters are looking for where the top students
in the world are scrambling to be admitted. Can the majority of
applicants really tell us the difference between the business school
curriculum at USC versus Stanford versus Rochester? I doubt it!
Media
rankings differ somewhat due to differences in the groups doing the
rankings. The US News rankings are done by AACSB deans who tend
to favor schools with leading researchers. The WSJ rankings are
done by corporate recruiters who are impressed by the credentials of the
graduating students and their interviewing skills (which might
indirectly be affected by a curriculum that is more profession oriented
and less geeky).
The major "media rankings" are given in the following
sources as reported in Tidbits on August 19:
Business school rankings and profiles from Business Week
Magazine ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/04/?campaign_id=nws_mbaxp_aug16&link_position=link6
The Wall Street Journal rankings of business schools ---
http://online.wsj.com/page/0,,2_1103,00.html
US News graduate business school rankings ---
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/grad/rankings/rankindex_brief.php
August 27, 2005 reply from Dennis Beresford (University of
Georgia)
Bob,
Thanks for this link. The DeAngelo, DeAngelo, and Zimmerman paper is
quite interesting. Because football season doesn't start until next
week, I had a little time to kill this afternoon and used it to read
this paper.
My own rather short academic experience causes me to agree with the
paper's assertion that MBA program rankings tend to drive much of
what happens at a business school. We recently proudly reported that
we were number 30 in the US News rankings (without
pointing out that there was a 30 way tie for that spot).
And we also trumpeted the fact that the Forbes rankings just out
reported that our MBA graduates earned $100,000 in starting pay vs.
$40,000 when they entered the program. (I think the ghosts of
Andersen must have developed those numbers.)
We went through a curriculum revision a couple of years ago and we
now emphasize "leadership." (I suspect this puts us in the company
of only about 90% of MBA programs that do the same.) Most of our
classes are now taught in half semesters. Perhaps there is good
justification for this but it seems to me to encourage a more
superficial approach. And managerial accounting is no longer a
required part of the curriculum in spite of our pointing out that
most of the elite schools still require this important subject.
While I agree with the premise that MBA programs are focusing too
much on rankings and short term thinking, I believe the paper's
arguments on how to "cure the problem" aren't well supported. In
particular, while I strongly agree with the idea that MBA programs
should primarily help students develop critical thinking and
analytic skills, I think the authors are too critical of the
practical aspects of business education as described by Bennis and
O'Toole in their earlier Harvard Business article. The authors of
this paper seem to feel that more emphasis on research published in
scholarly journals will bring more of a long-term focus to MBA
education and will address the concerns about rankings, etc. I think
a better response would be to balance the practical and theoretical
- although I know that is a very hard thing to do.
As a final note, would you agree that the capital asset pricing
model and efficient markets research "inspired" indexed mutual
funds?
Asserting such a causal connection seems like a pretty big stretch
to me.
Denny Beresford
August 29, 2005 response from Paul Williams at North Carolina State
University
And we all know what rigorous conceptual
framework these folks have in mind. This paper is the knee-jerk
response to the Bennis/ O'Toole paper. This is an argument that has
been going on since business schools were started. It's the on-going
argument over case method vs modeling as the proper way to teach
business.
Odd that such believers in market solutions
should question what is obviously working -- would universities play
this game if it didn't work? Or is it only universities that are
irrational? (I'll bet Rochester and Southern Cal are playing the
game, too. What kind of research do you suppose Bill Simon expects
for his millions?) Passions run so high and retribution is swift.
Note what happen to Bob Kaplan's service on the JAR board when he
suggested (after he got some religion at Harvard) that case studies
might be a worthwhile thing for us to consider.
Denny, et al:
You have made some very good points about blending. A very long time
ago, Aristotle, in the Nichomachean Ethics, described three types of
knowledge: techne, episteme, and phronesis. Techne = technical
knowledge (how to bake a pie). Episteme = scientific knowledge.
Phronesis (the highest form) = wisdom, i.e., the knowledge of
goodness; how to be a good citizen. Business is a practice and the
Harvard approach is one that acknowledges that "wisdom can't be
told" (the title of the classic 1950s essay on the value of the case
approach). Modelers miss a key element of management. It is not a
constrained optimization problem, but a process of intervention.
Experience matters
The ratings game is played because it pays off. Duke didn't have a
graduate program in business until 1970 compared to UNC's, which
predated Duke's by about 25 years. When Tom Keller became dean he
had a stroke of genius and hired a public relations firm to promote
the MBA. Duke always marketed itself from the day it was founded as
the "Harvard of the South" and was able to attract wealthy
Northeasterners not able to get into Ivy league schools. Now Duke is
able to attract highly talented students, high priced faculty and
big donattions (note that Wendy's founder Dave Thomas didn't raise
millions for Eastern State U.).
Marketing works -- look how many pick-up trucks with 1975 technology
under the hood got sold as Sport Utility Vehicles (Pick- up Trucks
with Walls doesn't have the same ring). Half the battle at becoming
the best is telling people you are, a fact every con man knows.
People don't give money to Harvard because it needs it -- they give
to Harvard to say they gave to Harvard. Do you think any of the
terminally vain people who give money to get their names chiseled on
the buildings do so because they have read all of the brillians
academic papers people inside the building have produced? No, they
give it because someone has told them that the people inside the
building are writing brilliant academic papers.
It really becomes a post-modern moment when the people writing the
papers truly believe they are brilliant.
You can read about the Bennis and O'Toole paper at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen//theory/00overview/theory01.htm#AcademicsVersusProfession
September 7, 2005 Update
A report on the
controversial paper by Harry DeAngelo, Linda DeAngelo, and Jerry
Zimmerman now appears in an AACSB report at http://www.aacsb.edu/publications/enewsline/Vol-4/Issue-8/lead-story.asp
The study precedes an upcoming AACSB International report that
calls for the media to change the way it assigns rankings to
business degree granting institutions. The AACSB document, to be
released in September, calls the ranking methods used by
BusinessWeek, Financial Times, U.S. News & World Report, and
other media outlets flawed because of inconsistent and
unverified data, which confuses rather than helps the consumer.
As accounting courses in MBA core are shrinking,
finance courses are increasing
From Jim Mahar's Blog on August 29, 2005 ---
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/
Core Finance Trends in the Top MBA
Programs in 2005 by Kent Womack, Ying Zhang:
Following Friday's mention of the DeAngelo,
DeAngelo, and Zimmerman paper that looks at what is wrong with MBA
programs at some universities, I was sent the following paper by
Womack and Zhang. They survey MBA programs to see what trends exist.
The good news?
More finance! "Five of the nineteen schools responding have
increased hours spent in the finance core substantially, compared to
results of our earlier survey in 2001."
The bad news (at least for students): fewer
electives:
"The recent survey results, however,
suggest in general that most other schools seem to be migrating in
the other direction, towards more required course hours."
The paper is full of many really cool
things. For instance focusing on finance:
"Principles of Corporate Finance by
Brealey, Meyers, and Allen (BMA) and Corporate Finance by Ross,
Westerfield, Jaffe (RWJ), were used by 8 and 6 schools this year
respectively, and remain the prevailing main textbook choices by
most schools." “Average outside class hours expected per session”.
The mean for all schools responding is 4.2 hours, with a wide range
of 2 to 8 hours." "...programs continue to spend significant amount
of time (on average, 9% of in-class time) on Present Value and other
primary background topics. Diverse professional backgrounds and
entry mathematic proficiency levels demand finance professors “level
the playing field” before teaching other challenging topics."
VERY Interesting for anyone in an MBA
program!
The is available from SSRN as well as from
Womack's web site.
Cite: Womack, Kent L. and Zhang, Ying N., "Core Finance Trends in
the Top MBA Programs in 2005" .
http://ssrn.com/abstract=760604
You can read about the Bennis and O'Toole paper at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen//theory/00overview/theory01.htm#AcademicsVersusProfession
The study precedes an upcoming AACSB International report that calls
for the media to change the way it assigns rankings to business
degree granting institutions. The AACSB document, to be released in
September, calls the ranking methods used by BusinessWeek, Financial
Times, U.S. News & World Report, and other media outlets flawed
because of inconsistent and unverified data, which confuses rather
than helps the consumer.
Business Week's 2005 rankings of "Best Business Schools by Specialty" ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/mbainsider/schools_by_specialty.html
Jensen Comment
The above student-based national rankings differ somewhat from how business school deans rank
business schools in the 2005 rankings in US News ---
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/grad/rankings/mba/brief/mbarank_brief.php
01. Harvard University (MA)
02. Stanford University (CA)
03. University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
04. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan)
Northwestern University (Kellogg) (IL)
06. Dartmouth College (Tuck) (NH)
University of California–Berkeley (Haas)
08. University of Chicago
09. Columbia University (NY)
10. University of Michigan–Ann Arbor (Ross)
Every set of rankings differs somewhat from the 2005 MBA recruiter
ranking reported in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) where Harvard and
Stanford don't even make the Top 10. The reason, in part, is that
recruiters are looking for diamonds in the rough, those MBA graduates with high
talent that do not demand the enormous starting salaries given to Harvard and
Stanford MBAs. The WSJ rankings are given at
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB112688234637942950.html
01. Dartmouth College (Tuck)
02. University of Michigan (Ross)
03. Carnegie Mellon Univ.
04. Northwestern Univ. (Kellogg)
05. Yale Univ.
06. Univ. of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
07. Univ. of California/Berkeley (Haas)
08. Columbia University
09. Univ. of North Carolina/Chapel Hill (Kenan-Flagler)
10. Univ. of Southern California (Marshall)
Journal and School Ranking Controversies and Eigenfactor
Scores
From
the University of Illinois blog called Issues in Scholarly
Communication on March 26, 2007 ---
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/
New Journal Ranking Site: Eigenfactor
Eigenfactor
ranks journals much as Google
ranks websites. It is somewhat similar to Thomson Scientific's (ISI)
Journal Citation Index (JCI), though it's dataset is larger.
Some points to note:
* JCI only looks at the 8000 or so journals indexed by Thomson
Scientific while potentially any journal could be included in
Eigenfactor.
* The JCI is calculated based on the most recent 2-year's worth
of citation data; Eigenfactor is based on the most recent 5
years.
* In collaboration with
journalprices.com,
Eigenfactor provides information about price and value for
thousands of scholarly periodicals.
* Article Influence (AI): a measure of a journal's prestige
based on per article citations and comparable to Impact Factor.
Eigenfactor (EF): A measure of the overall value provided by all
of the articles published in a given journal in a year.
* The Eigenfactor Web site also presents the ISI Impact Factors,
so it's possible to compare the
ISI's "Impact Factors" with Eigenfactor's "Article Influence"
* Both simple and advanced searching is available: "You can
search by partial or full journal name, ISSN number, or you can
view a selected ISI category, only ISI-listed journals, only
non-ISI-listed journals or both listed and unlisted."
* Eigenfactor is Free!
From the
Eigenfactor Web site:
Eigenfactor provides influence rankings for 7000+ science and
social science journals and rankings for an additional 110,000+
reference items including newspapers, and popular magazines.
Borrowing methods from network theory,
eigenfactor.org ranks
the influence of journals much as Google's PageRank algorithm
ranks the influence of web pages. By this approach, journals are
considered to be influential if they are cited often by other
influential journals. Iterative ranking schemes of this type,
known as eigenvector centrality methods, are notoriously
sensitive to "dangling nodes" and "dangling clusters" -- nodes
or groups of nodes which link seldom if at all to other parts of
the network. Eigenfactor modifies the basic eigenvector
centrality algorithm to overcome these problems and to better
handle certain peculiarities of journal citation data.
Different disciplines have different standards for citation and
different time scales on which citations occur. The average
article in a leading cell biology journal might receive 10-30
citations within two years; the average article in leading
mathematics journal would do very well to receive 2 citations
over the same period. By using the whole citation network,
Eigenfactor automatically accounts for these differences and
allows better comparison across research areas.
Eigenfactor.org is a non-commercial academic research project
sponsored by the Bergstrom lab in the Department of Biology at
the University of Washington. We aim to develop novel methods
for evaluating the influence of scholarly periodicals and for
mapping the structure of academic research. We are committed to
sharing our findings with interested members of the public,
including librarians, journal editors, publishers, and authors
of scholarly articles.
The Eigenfactor Web site
http://www.eigenfactor.org is still under development.
|
Question: Where do academic accounting research journals rank
among scientific journals according to their eigenfactor scores?
Answer
I think this is an objectively derived ranking leading to
a pile of crap since the research findings of the top-ranked accounting journals
are never authenticated/replicated ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#Replication
Journal Name (multiple listings occur because journals are ranked by date of
issue with some having multiple dates)
1. JOURNAL OF ACCOUNTING & ECONOMICS
2. JOURNAL OF ACCOUNTING RESEARCH
3. ACCOUNTING REVIEW
4. ACCOUNTING ORGANIZATIONS AND SOCIETY
5. CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNTING RESEARCH
6. ACCOUNTING HORIZONS
7. MANAGE ACCOUNTING
8. ACCOUNTING REV S
9. ACCOUNTING BUS
10. ACCOUNTING AUDITING
11. J ACCOUNTING AUDITIN
12. ACCOUNTING MANAGEMEN
13. J ACCOUNTING LIT
14. BEHAV RES ACCOUNTING
15. EUR ACCOUNTING
16. INT J ACCOUNTING
17. ACCOUNTING CHOICE HO
18. BRIT ACCOUNTING REV
19. ISSUES ACCOUNTING ED
20. IN PRESS ACCOUNTING
21. CONT ACCOUNTING
22. RES ACCOUNTING REGUL
23. CONT ENV ACCOUNTING
24. COST ACCOUNTING MANA
25. ACCOUNTING HORIZ
26. ACCOUNTING HORIZON S
27. ACCOUNTING NAT AS
33. INT J ACCOUNTING INF
33. ACCOUNTING FORUM
33. FINANC ACCOUNTING
33. ADV ACCOUNTING
33. ACCOUNTING RESOURCES
33. J ACCOUNTING ED
33. AUST ACCOUNTING REV
33. RES ACCOUNTING ETHIC
33. ACCOUNTING EDUC
33. ACCOUNTING ETHICS
33. ACCOUNTING HORIZ
For more details ---
Click Here
|
Article Influence (AI):
a measure of a journal's prestige based on per
article citations and comparable to Impact Factor.
Eigenfactor (EF): A
measure of the overall value provided by all of the
articles published in a given journal in a year.
|
|
|
Rankings of Academic Accounting Research
Journals
Paying More for a Lower-Ranked University: Where What You Pay is Supposed to
Mean Prestige
"The High-Price Leaders," by Mark Shapiro, The Irascible Professor,
February 20, 2006 ---
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-02-20-07.htm
An "op-ed" piece in the February 18, 2007 issue of
the Los Angeles Times by staff writer Peter Hong caused the IP to do
a double take. Hong pointed out that George Washington University (GW to
anyone who has lived in the Washington, DC area), which is located in the
Foggy Bottom section of our nation's capital, now is the most expensive
undergraduate institution in the United States. At $50,000 a year for
tuition and mandatory fees (including housing), GW now charges the highest
tuition and mandatory fees of any college or university in the country. One
might have expected to find some of the "Ivies" or top-ranked science and
engineering schools such as MIT and Caltech leading the tuition race. But
surprisingly, the highest undergraduate tuition rates last year were found
at places like Landmark College in Vermont, GW, University of Richmond,
Sarah Lawrence, Kenyon, Vassar, Trinity, Bennington, Simon's Rock College of
Bard, and Hamilton University. Most of these institutions are reasonably
well-respected, but not exactly at the top of the heap in academic quality.
Among national universities, GW is tied with Syracuse University for 52nd
place in the 2007 U.S. News and World Report rankings. Among national
liberal arts colleges the University of Richmond tied for 34th place with
the University of the South, Sarah Lawrence ended up in a three-way tie for
45th place with Rhodes College and Gettysburg College, Kenyon tied for 32nd
place with Holy Cross, Vassar did a bit better tying for 12th place with
Claremont McKenna College, Trinity came in 30th, Bennington was rated 91st,
Simon's Rock didn't even make the top 100, and Hamilton came in 17th.
The bottom line is that none of these colleges and
universities that are charging the highest tuition rates in the country were
ranked among the top ten in academic quality. As Hong notes in his "op-ed"
piece, the current median income for US households is slightly more than
$46,000 per year, so only the very wealthiest families can afford to send
their children to colleges and universities with tuition and fees than
approach $50,000 per year. Even relatively well-to-do families with more
than one child in college would be hard-pressed to cover costs this high. To
be sure, most of these pricey colleges and universities offer financial aid
packages to many of their students. For example as many as 40% of GW's
students receive some kind of financial aid. But often that aid includes
substantial student loans at relatively high interest rates, which often
leave the student heavily in debt upon graduation.
Continued in article
"Most Expensive Colleges 2011," Bloomberg Business Week,
November 3, 2011 ---
http://images.businessweek.com/slideshows/20111025/most-expensive-colleges-2011/
Jensen Comment
The slide show controls in this slide show are not immediately obvious. Pass the
mouse over the right or left side of the picture to make navigation arrows
appear.
What's surprising is the number top media-ranked private universities on
academic criteria (US News, The Economist, Business Week, WSJ) that are
not in the Top 20. Perhaps the multi-billion-dollar endowment funds of those
more prestigious universities enable them to charge lower tuition rates than
some really expensive colleges and universities that have lower endowments and
lower academic standing ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
Except for Columbia University at Number 1 and Carnegie-Mellon at Number 9,
some of the other Top Ten most expensive universities are not so highly ranked
on other media rankings on other criteria. In fact a few in the Top Ten
high-priced schools surprise me in terms of what they appear to charge for
tuition. I'm always suspicious of some private universities that charge very
high tuitions and give plentiful scholarships that seem to be more marketing
than academics. \
High School graduates are sometimes lured in by the biggest scholarship
offers they receive. It's a bit like inflated department store asking prices
that are frequently discounted by generous in-store coupons.
Others game for grades
Gaming for a High Grade Average on a Transcript (includes a poem by Bob
Jensen) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GamingForGrades
"Are Elite Colleges (not necessarily the most expensive) Worth It?" by Pamela Haag, Chronicle of Higher
Education, October 30, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Are-Elite-Colleges-Worth-It-/129540/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
"The Truth About Harvard," by Ross Douthat, The Atlantic, March 2005
This may be partly
true, but I think that the roots of grade inflation —and, by extension, the
overall ease and lack of seriousness in Harvard's undergraduate academic
culture —run deeper. Understanding grade inflation requires understanding
the nature of modern Harvard and of elite education in general —particularly
the ambitions of its students and professors.
The students'
ambitions are those of a well-trained meritocratic elite. In the
semi-aristocracy that Harvard once was, students could accept Cs, because
they knew their prospects in life had more to do with family fortunes and
connections than with GPAs. In today's meritocracy this situation no longer
obtains. Even if you could live off your parents' wealth, the ethos of the
meritocracy holds that you shouldn't, because your worth as a person is
determined not by clan or class but by what you do and whether you succeed
at it. What you do, in turn, hinges in no small part on what is on your
résumé, including your GPA.
Thus the professor
is not just a disinterested pedagogue. As a dispenser of grades he is a
gatekeeper to worldly success. And in that capacity professors face upward
pressure from students ("I can't afford a B if I want to get into law
school"); horizontal pressure from their colleagues, to which even Mansfield
gave way; downward pressure from the administration ("If you want to fail
someone, you have to be prepared for a very long, painful battle with the
higher echelons," one professor told the Crimson); and perhaps pressure from
within, from the part of them that sympathizes with students' careerism.
(Academics, after all, have ambitions of their own, and are well aware of
the vicissitudes of the marketplace.)
It doesn't help
that Harvard students are creatively lazy, gifted at working smarter rather
than harder. Most of my classmates were studious primarily in our avoidance
of academic work, and brilliant largely in our maneuverings to achieve a
maximal GPA in return for minimal effort. It was easy to see the classroom
as just another résumé-padding opportunity, a place to collect the grade
(and recommendation) necessary to get to the next station in life. If that
grade could be obtained while reading a tenth of the books on the syllabus,
so much the better.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Are elite colleges (not necessarily the most expensive) worth it?
Definitely even if you can only afford one semester before transferring
elsewhere?
They're worth it if only to prove that you were smart enough just to be
admitted.
And this entitles you to wear an elite college's logo for the rest of your life.
You don't have to put add the statement to your sweatshirt that you only lasted
for one term.
Of course there are reasons other than easy A grades to go to elite colleges.
Probably the most important advantage is networking among former students and
among current students who often remain friends and professional contacts for a
lifetime. Graduating from an elite college can open doors to both admission to
prestigious graduate schools (including medical schools), to industry, and
government. Aren't all the present U.S. Supreme Court justices graduates of Ivy
League universities?
Even dropping out of an Ivy League school can open doors. It probably says
more about you to have been admitted to these schools than to have graduated
from them.
Elite colleges are more apt to use their top researchers in the classrooms
than are some of the top state universities who are more apt to give even
lighter teaching loads to top researchers. Of course "lighter" teaching loads
can be defined in a number of ways. Elite university business and law schools
often limit the number of courses taught to one course per semester, but the
number of students in that course may be 100 or more. Secondly, elite schools
like the Harvard Business School require weekly term papers and essay
examinations that only professors are supposed to grade (not teaching
assistants). In the lesser universities, including flagship state universities,
professors having more than 20 students may be allowed to give multiple choice
examinations and not require term papers.
Elite Colleges. especially smaller elite colleges like Swarthmore ranked high
in prestige but not in research, are likely to have teachers for both education
and inspiration. This is not always the case for highly ranked research
universities that are not necessarily in the "elite" class in terms of teaching.
Thomas Toch and Kevin Carey, "Where Colleges Don't Excel," The Washington
Post, April 6, 2007; Page A21 ---
Click Here
Millions of anxious high
school seniors have been hearing from college admissions offices in recent
days, and if one believes the rhetoric cascading from campus administration
buildings, corporate headquarters and the U.S. Capitol, students lucky
enough to get acceptance letters will be entering the best higher education
system in the world.
Hardly a week goes by without a prominent
politician or business leader declaring America's advantage in the global
battle for brainpower, citing as evidence a study from Shanghai's Jiao Tong
University that
rates17 American universities among
the world's 20 best.
But those rankings are based
entirely on measures of advanced research, such as journal articles
published and Nobel Prizes won -- measures, that is, of the work that's done
mostly in graduate programs. And while advanced research is vital to the
nation's economic competitiveness, so is producing enough well-educated
workers to compete for the high-value jobs of the future.
Undergraduate students are going to make up
the bulk of those workers because only 13 percent of the nation's 17 million
students in higher education are at the graduate level. Yet a hard look at
our undergraduate programs suggests that when it comes to the business of
teaching students and helping them graduate, our universities are a lot less
impressive than the rhetoric suggests.
Seventy-five percent of high school graduates
go on to higher education, but only half of those students earn degrees. And
many of those who do graduate aren't learning much. According to the
American Institutes for Research, only
38 percent of graduating college seniors can successfully perform tasks such
as comparing viewpoints in two newspaper editorials.
And it's an open secret that many of our
colleges and universities aren't challenging their students academically or
doing a good job of teaching them. In the latest findings from the
National Survey of Student Engagement,
about 30 percent of college students reported
being assigned to read four or fewer books in their entire senior year,
while nearly half (48 percent) of seniors were assigned to write no papers
of 20 pages or more.
Ironically, our global dominance in research
and persistent mediocrity in undergraduate education are closely related.
Both are the result of the same choices. The 17 institutions atop the
Shanghai rankings are driven by professional and financial incentives that
favor research and scholarship over teaching. Funding from the federal
government, publish-or-perish tenure policies, and college rankings from the
likes of U.S. News & World Report all push universities and professors to
excel at their research mission. There are no corresponding incentives to
teach students well.
Take the U.S. News rankings. Ninety-five
percent of each college's score is based on measures of wealth, fame and
admissions selectivity. As a result, college presidents looking to get ahead
focus on marketing, fundraising and recruiting faculty with great research
credentials instead of investing their resources in helping undergraduates
learn and earn degrees.
This problem can't and shouldn't be fixed by
government regulation. Independence and diversity make our higher-education
sector strong, and that shouldn't change.
The way to drive higher education institutions
to stop ignoring undergraduates in favor of pursuing research is to provide
more information about their performance with undergraduates to the
consumers who pay tuition bills: students and their parents.
By investing in new ways to gauge the quality
of teaching and learning and by requiring taxpayer-subsidized colleges to
disclose their performance to the public, the federal government can change
the market dynamics in higher education, creating strong incentives for
colleges to produce the caliber of undergraduates we need to compete in the
global marketplace, incentives to make the rhetoric of being first in the
world in higher education a reality.
Thomas Toch and Kevin Carey are,
respectively, co-director and policy manager of Education Sector, a
Washington think tank.
Closing Comment
Are elite colleges (not necessarily the most expensive) worth it?
Definitely even if you can only afford one semester before transferring
elsewhere?
They're worth it if only to prove that you were smart enough just to be
admitted.
And this entitles you to wear an elite college's logo for the rest of your life.
You don't have to put add the statement to your sweatshirt that you only lasted
for one term.
Gaming for a High Grade Average on a Transcript (includes a poem by Bob
Jensen) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GamingForGrades
Commission on the Future of Higher Education Final Report:
The National Education Database and College Assessment Controversy
One by one, the members of the Secretary of Education’s
Commission on the Future of Higher Education offered their support for
the panel’s report except for one dissenting skeptic
In some ways, Ward’s decision was not surprising; the
cautious, evenhanded leader had expressed
uncharacteristically vociferous displeasure about
the first draft of the commission’s report, and some of his constituents —
particularly the nearly 1,000 private colleges that are also members of the
National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, led by its
president, David L. Warren — have aggressively opposed many of the panel’s
ideas. But Ward also knew that opposing the panel’s work could open him and
higher education generally to the oft-heard charge (oft-heard, among others,
from the commission’s chairman, Charles Miller) that colleges are reluctant to
acknowledge their flaws and unwilling to undertake significant change.
Doug Lederman, "18 Yesses, 1 Major No," Inside Higher Ed, August 11, 2006
---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/11/commission
The National Education Database Controversy
The president of the National Association of
Independent Colleges and Universities reiterated its intense opposition to the
federal higher education commission’s proposal to create a federal database of
student academic records in
a letter to the panel’s
chairman Tuesday. David L. Warren, who has been the most persistent and
vociferous critic of the Secretary of Education’s
Commission on the Future of Higher Education, said
the “cradle-to-grave database” would invade students’ privacy and open sensitive
information to security risks. The letter also urges the panel to abandon its
calls to “dismantle” the federal student-aid programs and to try to compare all
institutions using similar measures of student outcomes.
Inside Higher Ed, August 9, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/09/qt
Also see
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/07/unitrecord
Accreditation: Why We Must Change
Accreditation has been high on the agenda of the
Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education —
and not in very flattering ways. In
“issue papers” and
in-person discussions, members of the commission
and others have offered many criticisms of current accreditation practice and
expressed little faith or trust in accreditation as a viable force for quality
for the future.
Judith S. Eaton, "Accreditation: Why We Must Change," Inside Higher Ed,
June 1, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/06/01/eaton
A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education
Charles Miller, chairman of the Secretary of
Education’s
Commission on the Future of Higher Education,
delivered
the final version of the panel’s report to the
secretary herself, Margaret Spellings, on Tuesday. The report, “A Test of
Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education,” is little changed
from the final draft that the commission’s members
approved by an 18 to 1 vote last month. Apart from
a
controversial change in language that softened the
panel’s support for open source software, the only other alterations were the
addition of charts and several “best practices” case studies, which examine the
California State University system’s
campaign to reach out to underserved students in
their communities, the
National Center for Academic Transformation’s efforts
to improve the efficiency of teaching and learning, and
the innovative curriculum at Neumont University (yes, Neumont University), a
for-profit institution in Salt Lake City. Spellings
said in a statement that she looks forward to
“announcing my plans for the future of higher education” next Tuesday at a
previously announced luncheon at the National Press Club in Washington.
Inside Higher Ed, September 20, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/20/qt
|
"Assessing Learning
Outcomes," by Elia Powers, Inside Higher Ed, September
21, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/21/outcomes
“There is inadequate transparency and accountability for
measuring institutional performance, which is more and more
necessary to maintaining public trust in higher education.“
“Too
many decisions about higher education — from those made by
policymakers to those made by students and families — rely
heavily on reputation and rankings derived to a large extent
from inputs such as financial resources rather than outcomes.”
Those are the words of the
Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher
Education, which on Tuesday handed
over its
final report to Secretary Margaret
Spellings.
Less
than a week before Spellings announces her plans to carry out
the commission’s report, a panel of higher education experts met
in Washington on Wednesday to discuss how colleges and
universities report their learning outcomes now and the reasons
why the public often misses out on this information. On this
subject, the panelists’ comments fell largely in line with those
of the federal commission.
The session, hosted by
the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media,
at Columbia University’s Teachers College, included an
assessment of U.S. News & World Report’s annual college
rankings, which critics say provide too little information about
where students learn best.
“The game isn’t about rankings and who’s No. 1,” said W. Robert
Connor, president of the Teagle Foundation, a group that has
sponsored a
series of grants in “value added assessment,”
intended to measure what students learn in college. Connor said
colleges should be graded on a pass/fail basis, based on whether
they keep track of learning outcomes and if they tell the public
how they are doing.
“We
don’t need a matrix of facets summed up in a single score,”
added David Shulenburger, vice president of academic affairs for
the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant
Colleges.
What
students, parents, college counselors and legislators need is a
variety of measuring sticks, panelists said. Still, none of the
speakers recommended that colleges refuse to participate in the
magazine’s rankings, or that the rankings go away.
“It’s
fine that they are out there,” said Richard Ekman, president of
the Council on Independent Colleges. “Even if it’s flawed, it’s
one measure.”
Ekman
said the Collegiate Learning Assessment, which measures
educational gains made from a student’s freshman to senior year,
and the National Survey of Student Engagement, which gauges
student satisfaction on particular campuses, are all part of the
full story. (Many institutions participate in the student
engagement survey, but relatively few of them make their scores
public.) Ekman said there’s no use in waiting until the
“perfect” assessment measure is identified to start using what’s
already available.
Still,
Ekman said he is “wary about making anything mandatory,” and
doesn’t support any government involvement in this area. He
added that only a small percentage of his constituents use the
CLA. (Some are hesitant because of the price, he said.)
Shulenburger plugged a yet-to-be completed index of a college’s
performance, called the
Voluntary System of Accountability,
that will compile information including price, living
arrangements, graduation rates and curriculums.
Ross
Miller of the Association of American Colleges & Universities
said he would like to see an organization compile a list of
questions that parents and students can ask themselves when
searching for a college. He said this would serve consumers
better than even the most comprehensive ranking system.
The
Spellings commission recommended the creation of an information
database and a search engine that would allow students and
policymakers to weigh comparative institutional performance.
Miller
also said he would like to see more academic departments publish
on their Web sites examples of student work so that applicants
can gauge the nature and quality of the work they would be
doing.
Bob Jensen's threads on
assessment are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
|
"The Academic Success Entitlement," by John V. Lombardi, Inside Higher Ed,
September 26, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/blogs/reality_check/
At one time, we imagined that students came to the
university to learn, that they had an obligation to engage their courses and
faculty, read, write, study, take exams, and demonstrate their achievement.
This simple approach placed the responsibility for learning on the students
who we assumed recognized that the privilege of attending a college carried
with it a commitment to the learning process. We expected the faculty to
know their subject, prepare for class, provide support and advice, hold
office hours, give fair and effective examinations, mark papers with care,
and provide a grade that reflected what the students had learned. This
simple formulation has suffered considerable modification over the years.
Today we believe students are entitled to attend
college, that they have a right to achieve a standard level of academic
accomplishment, and that the institutions have an obligation to ensure that
their learning meets this standard by the time they leave. The obligation to
guarantee student learning and graduation is sometimes explicitly
articulated, but more often appears through measures applied to demonstrate
institutional success. Graduation rate, for example, is seen as a measure of
institutional effectiveness and anticipates that the institution will
guarantee student learning at a level acceptable for graduation and
successful entry into the world of work. In this formulation, the students’
responsibilities lie in attendance, but their academic success becomes the
responsibility of the institution. When graduation rates are low or students
fail to meet some testable standard, we assume that the institution failed,
not that the student failed. Indeed, if the student fails, the remedy is to
punish the institution and its teachers.
The academic success entitlement that students
enjoy reflects a broader belief that institutions need to guarantee results
not opportunity. This is a notion borrowed from the manufacturing world
where we demand guarantees that the products we buy be free of defects and
that all products of a certain type perform their functions in the same
predictable and standardized way. This model, while effective for mass
produced items constructed out of standard malleable materials where the
producer controls the conditions of production, has little to do with high
quality education. In a high quality educational context, as we who live
here know, the academic enterprise requires the direct and responsible
participation of student and teacher. Neither can fail, for if the student
is lazy, poorly prepared, or just doesn’t care, the academic result will be
poor no matter how expert the teacher. Similarly, if the teacher is
incompetent, lazy, or unprepared, the academic result will also be poor no
matter how responsible the student. When we place all the responsibility for
academic success or failure on the institution and its teachers, exempting
the student s, we create an engine capable of predictable mediocre
performance.
Our difficulty in restoring the authority of the
university and its faculty in the definition of academic accomplishment, and
the consequent intrusion of external agencies in the measurement of
institutional success, reflects our own ambivalence about measuring and
evaluating our own performance. We know quite a bit about learning and how
it takes place, but most institutions are reluctant to institute programs
that review and assess faculty teaching performance. While the faculty may
well be doing a terrific job, updating their courses every year, adopting
new teaching techniques that leverage technology and research on student
learning, and otherwise performing at a high level, our ability to
demonstrate this effectiveness is minimal. Mostly, what we see are
outstanding examples, drawn from the work of a number of dedicated faculty
with the commitment of teaching resource centers. These wonderful people and
their support enterprise capture the enthusiasm of some subset of faculty,
but we rarely find comprehensive institution-wide faculty teaching
assessments that build confidence in the faculty part of the student-faculty
collaboration. To be sure, we have student evaluations of teaching, but as
almost everyone knows, these are weak tools for measuring instructional
effectiveness although they often identify the outliers (very bad and very
good teachers). More elaborate forms of evaluation that employ expert
reviewers of faculty teaching performance are rare indeed.
We know that such reviews are expensive and time
consuming (although we also know that we do this type of reviewing for
research productivity and effectiveness). We know that absent significant
rewards for faculty teaching performance, few faculty or institutions want
to make the investment or support the controversies that will surround
designing an effective process. But we are also very short sighted in this.
The external constituencies that will demand exit
testing and various other forms of standardized evaluation of institutional
teaching effectiveness will require expensive tests. What they test will
often be the wrong things. The consequences of these tests, which will
stigmatize some institutions as ineffective and their faculty as poor
teachers based on perhaps wrong-headed criteria, will prove expensive for
the institutions and their faculty.
Our failure to take full ownership of the issue of
teaching and learning effectiveness and evaluation, recognizing both the
student and teacher as required partners in producing success, gives
influence to meddlesome bureaucrats with often ideological agenda, empowers
academic entrepreneurs exploiting our abdication of responsibility by
selling us the latest in testing methodologies, and further erodes the
authority of the university and its faculty and their ability to determine
the definitions of academic quality.
"Accreditation: A Flawed Proposal," by Alan L. Contreras, Inside Higher Ed,
June 1, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/06/01/contreras
A recent report released by the
Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education
recommends some major changes in the way accreditation
operates in the United States. Perhaps the most significant of these is a
proposal that a new accrediting framework “require institutions and programs
to move toward world-class quality” using best practices and peer
institution comparisons on a national and world basis. Lovely words, and
utterly fatal to the proposal.
he principal difficulty with this lofty goal is
that outside of a few rarefied contexts, most people do not want our
educational standards to get higher. They want the standards to get lower.
The difficulty faced by the commission is that public commissions are not
allowed to say this out loud because we who make policy and serve in
leadership roles are supposed to pretend that people want higher standards.
In fact, postsecondary education for most people is
becoming a commodity. Degrees are all but generic, except for those people
who want to become professors or enter high-income professions and who
therefore need to get their degrees from a name-brand graduate school.
The brutal truth is that higher standards, applied
without regard for politics or any kind of screeching in the hinterlands,
would result in fewer colleges, fewer programs, and an enormous decrease in
the number and size of the schools now accredited by national accreditors.
The commission’s report pretends that the concept of regional accreditation
is outmoded and that accreditors ought to in essence be lumped together in
the new Great Big Accreditor, which is really Congress in drag.
This idea, when combined with the commitment to
uniform high standards set at a national or international level, results in
an educational cul-de-sac: It is not possible to put the Wharton School into
the same category as a nationally accredited degree-granting business
college and say “aspire to the same goals.”
The commission attempts to build a paper wall
around this problem by paying nominal rhetorical attention to the notion of
differing institutional missions. However, this is a classic
question-begging situation: if the missions are so different, why should the
accreditor be the same for the sake of sameness? And if all business schools
should aspire to the same high standards based on national and international
norms, do we need the smaller and the nationally accredited business
colleges at all?
The state of Oregon made a similar attempt to
establish genuine, meaningful standards for all high school graduates
starting in 1991 and ending, for most purposes, in 2006, with little but
wasted money and damaged reputations to show for it. Why did it fail?
Statements of educational quality goals issued by the central bureaucracy
collided with the desire of communities to have every student get good
grades and a diploma, whether or not they could read, write or meet minimal
standards. Woe to any who challenge the Lake Wobegon Effect.
So let us watch the commission, and its
Congressional handlers, as it posits a nation and world in which the desire
for higher standards represents what Americans want. This amiable fiction
follows in a long history of such romans a clef written by the elite, for
the elite and of the elite while pretending to be what most people want.
They have no choice but to declare victory, but the playing field will not
change.
As David Bartholomae observes, “We make a huge
mistake if we don’t try to articulate more publicly what it is we value in
intellectual work. We do this routinely for our students — so it should not be
difficult to find the language we need to speak to parents and legislators.” If
we do not try to find that public language but argue instead that we are not
accountable to those parents and legislators, we will only confirm what our
cynical detractors say about us, that our real aim is to keep the secrets of our
intellectual club to ourselves. By asking us to spell out those secrets and
measuring our success in opening them to all, outcomes assessment helps make
democratic education a reality.
Gerald Graff, "Assessment Changes
Everything," Inside Higher Ed, February 21, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/02/21/graff
Gerald Graff is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago
and president of the Modern Language Association. This essay is adapted from a
paper he delivered in December at the MLA annual meeting, a version of which
appears on the MLA’s Web site and is reproduced here with the association’s
permission. Among Graff’s books are Professing Literature, Beyond the
Culture Wars and Clueless in Academe: How School Obscures the Life of the Mind.
Higher education in the United States is on the brink of change and they
desire to be the leaders of tomorrow
My students realize that higher education in the United
States is on the brink of change and they desire to be the leaders of tomorrow.
They have read the drafts, and now the final version of the Commission on the
Future of Higher Education report. They want to guide higher education through
reform and they have just asked me who their role models should be.
Marilee Bresciani, "‘We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For’," Inside
Higher Ed, October 27, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/10/27/bresciani
"Lessons From Middle East ‘de Tocquevilles’," by Richard A. Detweiler,
Inside Higher Ed, October 30, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/10/30/detweiler
What differentiates “American style higher
education” from the modes more typically seen in their own nations? What are
the most fundamental attributes of this preferred approach to learning? As I
understood them, these de Tocquevilles from Muslim majority countries
identified three essential and interrelated attributes of an American-style
higher education – attributes that, though undoubtedly idealized, they
believe create a better approach to college education. These attributes are,
in fact, very obvious ones once stated; yet they are, like the air we
breathe on a clear day, so obvious we often forget to pay attention to them:
- Our Purpose. Higher education’s purpose is to
accomplish the long term goal of preparing a person to contribute and be
successful over a lifetime, not just preparation for a job after
college. This purpose has societal value, for it creates societally
leading intellects who question the assumptions of society and lead
their societies forward; it has intellectual value, as it creates people
who know how to formulate questions and think about the implications of
knowledge and who are open to new ways of thinking; and it has
individual value, as it develops the whole person, socially, personally
and maturationally.
- Centrality of Students. Students are the first
priority; they are partners in the educational experience. Decisions
about educational practices and priorities are based on what best serves
the education of the students, not on the self-serving concerns or
priorities of faculty, disciplines or professions. Further, respect for
the student is role-modeled in every context; student thinking is valued
even when it is flawed, with their errors used as opportunities for
educational growth.
- Role of Faculty. Faculty, while respected, are
not viewed as fully informed experts who transmit their knowledge, but
as professionals who must themselves be constant learners. Their
capabilities and effectiveness, whether in their disciplinary expertise
or their pedagogical effectiveness, must be grown and developed through
institution-supported programs, workshops and policies.
These “obvious” characteristics of American-style
higher education are troubling because of where I see us heading right now.
They are contrary to the current regulatory emphasis on bringing K-12-style,
fact-oriented outcomes assessment to higher education; they are unrelated to
the U.S. News-type assumptions underlying the prestige-based competition
among institutions that consumes ever-greater amounts of their attention and
resources; and they run counter to the growing emphasis on technical and
professional education that seems to be consuming every undergraduate
institution – including many liberal arts colleges.
Most fundamentally, these insights from Muslim
educators don’t support several trends that are currently most fashionable
in higher education in the United States, including the idea that a good
higher education is one that results in a job; the arms race-like rivalries
that require that each institution to spend more resources every year to
build prettier or larger athletic and other facilities; the emphasis, even
at teaching institutions, of having faculty measured according to research
productivity, even though that attribute seems more related to institutional
prestige than student learning; and the priority so many parents (and their
children) place on attending the best-ranked school rather than the one that
seems best suited for an individual student’s learning.
Are these educators from Muslim countries merely
describing American higher education as it was rather than as it should
appropriately be for today’s world? Their answer, I believe, would be “no” –
what has made American-style education the best in the world is not the
pursuit of prestige, the delivery of job-ready graduates, nor the provision
of unrivaled facilities. It is a context for learning that is without
parallel in most other nations’ higher education traditions, and involves
long term good for humanity and for a nation, a respectful focus on the
development of the student, and an honest view of the role and needs of the
faculty.
This “American style” approach is in contrast to the educational traditions
in many other countries that have involved the provision of a few
institutions of prestige where only the “best” are allowed to enroll, and
where graduation is intended to certify a level of knowledge about a topic
that makes graduates immediately employable in a particular profession. To
paraphrase what a business executive in one of these Muslim nations once
said to me: “Give me a graduate of an American-style university who knows
how to think and learn and make decisions, for those are the competencies
necessary for long-term success; within a few months I can teach them the
specific knowledge they need to start their job, though with the reality of
constant change people will need to continue to learn throughout their
career.”
Continued in article
Question
What's wrong with "earmarked" research funding?
"K Street and Colleges," by David Epstein, Inside Higher Ed, August 9,
2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/09/earmarks
Four million dollars goes a long way at Glenville
State College. It may seem unlikely that the tiny West Virginia institution
would see that much federal money in a single spending bill, but that’s
about what Glenville got in the 2006 appropriations legislation for science
and other programs.
That was just one of dozens of earmarks in the
bill, and one of several that set aside more than $1 million for
institutions from Mississippi and West Virginia, homes of the Republican
chairman and the ranking Democrat, respectively, of the Senate
Appropriations Committee.
Whether earmarks — funds that a member of Congress
directs to recipients without the peer-review process that federal agencies
use to dole out most research funds — are dangerously and increasingly
undermining peer review, or simply a way that legislators can look out for
constituents, depends on who’s talking.
The question, however, has been put into greater
relief for higher education officials in the wake of a letter from Sen. Tom
Coburn (R-Okla.) asking 111 institutions (a list is available here) to send
him information on all of the money they have received from earmarks since
2000, and whether they have considered paying lobbyists to help secure the
earmarks.
The letter from Coburn, a vocal opponent of
earmarks, has been interpreted by some experts as an attempt to find
examples of wasteful earmarks that might be used to combat the practice of
earmarking — often derided as “pork-barrel spending” — altogether. John
Hart, a spokesman for Coburn, said that the senator is particularly
interested in finding out whether there’s a “pay to play” system that forces
colleges to waste money by “spending extravagantly” on lobbyists.
Kei Koizumi, director of the R&D Budget and Policy
Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said
that AAAS’s position is that peer review is the “highest quality way to
allocate funds,” he said, “but we recognize that there are many different
ways to allocate funds.”
Koizumi added that some federal objectives, such as
building research capacity in geographical areas wihout huge research
infrastructures, may not have the possibility of getting funded through a
competitive grant process.
The Glenville State money, for example, was for
science laboratories, equipment and programs, according to the legislation.
Continued in article
Question
Does the author of this article needs more formal education in statistical
analysis?
"Suffering Schools Gladly," by George C. Leef, Tech Central Station,
October 13, 2006 ---
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1718666/posts
Last year's National Assessment of Adult Literacy
showed that just 31 percent of college graduates could be regarded as
"proficient" in their ability to read prose. When the NAAL was done in 1992,
the figure was 40 percent, which seems to support the widespread anecdotal
evidence that academic standards have been declining under the pressure to
retain students who don't have much interest or ability in academic
pursuits. The NAAL also shows weakness among college graduates in their
ability to do simple math problems and the 2003 report of the National
Commission on Writing found widespread dissatisfaction among employers with
the writing skills of graduates.
So are Americans "less prepared" just because they
have fewer college degrees -- or because there has been an erosion of
academic standards deep into our entire educational system? More to the
point, though, just how much does it matter to our national economy that our
"educational attainment" is sliding?
So far, it is hard to see that it has any adverse
impact. The U.S. economy remains one of the world's most robust, outpacing
nations where the percentage of people with college degrees is rising.
Canada and Japan, the two nations at the top of the list for college degrees
among younger people, have 2005 GDP growth rates of 2.9 percent and 2.7
percent respectively. For the U.S., it's 3.5 percent. Barely behind the U.S.
in the percentage of college degrees held by younger workers is France,
which has a very anemic 1.4 percent growth rate. If there is any connection
between college degrees and economic performance, it's a very loose one.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Millions of variables impact economic performance of a nation across a given
year. It is misleading to single out any small subset of variables (such as
academic literacy or math proficiency of recent graduates) and conclude that
they are important or unimportant in and of themselves. There is also the matter
of time. Executives making current decisions went to school in a different
generation, perhaps one in which academic standards were higher. Even if future
executives come graduate from schools with lowered standards, the rise to the
top for these executives filter out most (not all) of the dummies. One thing is
certain --- each new crop of executives if proficient in math to an extent they
know who to manipulate the numbers to give themselves outrageous compensation.
They're no dummies in the executive suites!
"Bookmarks," The Wall Street Journal, August 4, 2006; Page W4 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115465609118226575.html?mod=todays_us_weekend_journal
THE DECLINE OF THE SECULAR UNIVERSITY, By C. John Sommerville, Oxford,
147 pages, $22
Conservative critiques of higher
education often take one of two forms. The first is a lament that
universities no longer teach the Great Books or help students answer the
Important Questions: What is good? What is true? What is just? Allan Bloom's
"The Closing of the American Mind" (1987) is probably the most forceful
expression of this point of view. The second is a lament that universities
are out of touch with the populace and that tax dollars should not be
funding subjects as obscure as transgender studies or professors as
offensive as Ward Churchill, the man who cheered the 9/11 deaths of the
World Trade Center's "little Eichmanns."
The two critiques are not always
compatible. (A public referendum on college courses might favor "Thelma &
Louise" over Thucydides.) But sometimes they are. In "The Decline of
the Secular University," C. John Sommerville, a professor emeritus
of history at the University of Florida, attempts both lines of attack
simultaneously. He argues that universities today are increasingly
irrelevant to the wider culture precisely because they are not asking the
Important Questions.
It is secularism that has put higher
education in this bind, Mr. Sommerville claims: As it has moved away from
its religious origins, it has lost a certain confidence. The task of
instilling a moral vision in students, or of imposing a rigorous curriculum,
is much harder from a position of relativism and ambivalence.
Mr. Sommerville does not suggest that
universities today align themselves with a particular religious
denomination. But they must entertain religious questions again. Not with
more religious-studies departments, God forbid, but with a more careful --
and theological -- inquiry into the subjects they already teach.
The "inspiration of religion," Mr.
Sommerville notes, produced some of "the world's great music, art,
architecture, poetry, drama and fiction" and, he says, it is doing so even
now. As for government, its central problem is a "theological one, being the
question of individual and social well-being." The central question of
science is religious, too: "what use to make of our knowledge."
Mr. Somerville's diagnosis of the
problem is certainly sound -- that universities now shy away from a
religious approach to study, perhaps out of a concern for the cultural
sensitivities of their students and faculty. But what of his solution? It is
no easy feat to create a university that both addresses the timeless
questions and proves relevant to modern life. One senses the challenge when
Mr. Sommerville criticizes a college president for telling his freshmen to
read, in the summer before they arrive at school, the Washington Post. Why
the Post, Mr. Sommerville complains, when students have "all the world's
literature to choose from"? It's an understandable sentiment, but surely
newspapers touch on the timeless questions too.
Prestige Competition from U.K. Universities: "Who Needs Harvard or
Yale?"
"Who Needs Harvard Or Yale? U.S. students are discovering the advantages
of elite British universities," Business Week, September 25, 2006 ---
Click Here
If you're into prestige as well as a top-notch
education, Oxford is right up there with Harvard. Yet consider this: An
incoming freshman at Harvard College is looking at an estimated $185,800 for
tuition and room and board over the next four years. The same student can
earn a degree at Oxford in just three years for about $112,000 -- and that
includes all school expenses, plus travel to and from the States.
The Oxford deal was too good to pass up for
Christopher Schuller, a 20-year-old Nashville native who is starting his
third year there with a double major in law and German law. "Even with
overseas fees and the high exchange rate, Oxford is still cheaper," says
Schuller, who found a similar cost advantage in the British school over his
top stateside pick, the University of Chicago.
Who needs the Ivies, or any other elite U.S. college, when your kid can hop
across the Atlantic for an excellent educational adventure? Besides lower
costs, prestigious British universities offer the excitement of living
abroad. Plus, they have less stringent entry requirements than Ivy League
schools. For example, the University of St. Andrews, Scotland's top-ranked
university, expects applicants to have SAT scores of around 1,300, compared
with 1,500 for most Ivies. The London School of Economics and Political
Science (LSE) doesn't even use the SAT, instead requiring four advanced
placement (AP) tests with scores of 4 or 5.
More U.S. students
are noticing such advantages. According to Britain's Universities & Colleges
Admissions Service (UCAS), 2,201 U.S. high school students applied to
full-time undergrad programs at British universities last year, a fourfold
increase since 1996. Some 948 were accepted. "Students get the chance to
engage with a different culture while getting a top-of-the-line academic
experience," says Marsha Little, director of college counseling at the
Lovett School, a prep school in Atlanta.
COMPETITIVE EDGE
A degree from a top British university can also offer that extra edge in an
increasingly competitive and global job market. Alex Dresner, a 20-year-old
sophomore at the LSE from Washington, D.C., believes the experience he's
gained while studying overseas helped him land an internship at a
communications consulting firm this summer. Shaun Harris, adviser at the LSE
career service, thinks the school's pedigree plays well with employers. "We
have a pretty good reputation with Goldman Sachs (GS
) and Morgan Stanley (MS
), as well as the White House and the Pentagon," he
says.
The British approach to higher education may not
appeal to everyone. Unlike the broad liberal arts curriculum offered by U.S.
schools, British universities require students to specialize from their
freshman year. For example, a biology major would take only classes related
to the degree, and it would be difficult to branch out. Switching majors, in
effect, is starting over.
A DIFFERENT WORLD
The chance to specialize at such an early stage can be a bonus in many
professions. When Schuller finishes his degree at Oxford, he will be able to
qualify to take the New York State Bar exam upon completing a U.S. law
refresher course. That will save him tens of thousands of dollars on the
cost of law school, plus he'll have the opportunity to earn money during the
three years he would have been in school.
Even though Britain and the U.S. share a
language, Americans studying in Britain have to adjust to a different
culture, a task harder than it might seem. Class hours, for example, are
kept to a minimum, typically less than 10 per week, with students splitting
their time between small seminars and larger lectures. Independent study is
the name of the game; there is typically no set homework, and students must
motivate themselves rather than rely on professors. Most schools start in
late September or early October, and run over two or three semesters until
mid-June. "American students struggle in the first term with the different
type of learning," says Tao Tao Chang, head of Cambridge's international
office, who adds that most go on to thrive at the university.
Social life also differs from U.S. schools. With no fraternities,
sororities, or large-scale college sports, extracurricular life revolves
around student unions: campus-based organizations that run everything from
school elections to parties and help students with academic and personal
problems. Societies, or student clubs, also play a part. There's usually
something for everyone, ranging from sports and charity organizations to
drama and political groups.
The application
process will be foreign to U.S. students. They apply through UCAS (ucas.ac.uk),
not directly to the schools. (The one exception is St. Andrews, which offers
a special form similar to those for U.S. colleges.) Early in the fall the
application becomes available online, and includes a personal statement and
one teacher reference. You can apply to six universities in total for a flat
fee of $30. The deadline for Oxford and Cambridge is Oct. 15 because both
require an in-person interview. For any other school, the deadline is June
30, with most sending out acceptance letters by mid-August.
British schools have little scholarship money available, so most U.S.
students must pay their own way. Those in need of aid can apply to Sallie
Mae International for student loans, just as if they were going to a U.S.
school (salliemae.com/international;
877 456-6221).
When it comes to bang for your buck, going
abroad for college can be a smart idea. But will a degree from a British
university help American students when they go home? For Zahra Nawaz, a
23-year-old LSE graduate from Alexandria, Va., it definitely has. After
returning to the U.S. in 2004, she was accepted into a master's program in
security studies at Georgetown University and began working part-time at the
Homeland Security Institute, a think tank of the U.S. Homeland Security
Dept., in Washington. Nawaz has some advice for any student thinking about
taking the British path to college. "Be open, consider everything, and don't
be afraid to get out of your comfort zone," she says. "In the end, the
different cultural experience you'll get is an education in itself."
Long Lines at Accident Scenes: Law Schools Proliferate and Law
Graduates Proliferate
For graduates of elite law schools, prospects have
never been better. Big law firms this year boosted their starting salaries to as
high as $160,000. But the majority of law-school graduates are suffering from a
supply-and-demand imbalance that's suppressing pay and job growth. The result:
Graduates who don't score at the top of their class are struggling to find
well-paying jobs to make payments on law-school debts that can exceed $100,000.
Some are taking temporary contract work, reviewing documents for as little as
$20 an hour, without benefits. And many are blaming their law schools for
failing to warn them about the dark side of the job market.
Amir Efrati, "Hard Case: Job Market Wanes for U.S. Lawyers: Growth of
Legal Sector Lags Broader Economy; Law Schools Proliferate," The New York
Times, September 24, 2007; Page A1 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119040786780835602.html?mod=todays_us_page_one
Bob Jensen's threads on careers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
College Residence Hall Fire Risks are Flaming Up
Fire safety probably is the last thing on the minds of
parents when they send their sons and daughters off to college. However, a
recent report [1] from the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) notes
that fires in campus residences are on the rise at the same time that the number
of structure fires, in general, is falling. Over the past three decades
structure fires in the United States have declined from just over a million per
year to around 500,000 per year thanks to improved building codes, stricter code
enforcement, and better construction techniques. The number of fires in college
residence halls, and fraternity and sorority houses declined at a slower rate
from 1980 to 1998 (from about 3,200 per year in 1980 to about 1,800 per year in
1998). However, since 1999 the number of residence hall and fraternity/sorority
fires has risen to the 3,300 per year range. On average seven civilians die and
46 civilians are injured in these fires each year, and they cause some $25
million in direct property damage.
Mark Shapiro, "Residence Hall and Fraternity/Sorority House Fires a Growing
Threat," The Irascible Professor, August 30, 2007 ---
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-08-30-07.htm
Executives' accountability and responsibility?
Audit Scandal at California State University - Fullerton: University's CFO
rewarded for "waste, fraud, and abuse"
October 27, 2006 message from Mark Shapiro ---
http://irascibleprofessor.com/breaking-news-10-26-06.htm
The Irascible Professor has learned that in
response to several allegations of waste, fraud, and abuse in the Business
and Financial Affairs Office at California State University, Fullerton the
CSU Chancellor's Office has conducted a lengthy audit of the university's
business and financial practices at the university. The CSU auditor recently
posted a scathing audit report on the operations of Fullerton's Business and
Financial Affairs Office on his website.
More details are available at
http://www.calstate.edu/audit/Audit_Reports/special_investigations/2004/0491SpecialInvestigationFullerton.pdf
The Irascible Professor also has learned that the
former Chief Financial Officer who was mentioned in the report was
transferred to another high-paying position in the university after the
improprieties came to light. She was allowed to remain in this position,
which had few substantive duties, until she reached minimum retirement age.
When she recently retired, she was granted emeritus status at the
university. Emeritus status at Cal State Fullerton is routinely awarded to
faculty members who retire with ten or more years of service to the
university. However, emeritus status is not routinely granted to retiring
staff members or administrators unless they have had a long tenure with the
university and have -- in the eyes of their supervisors -- provided major
contributions to the university.
In the past five years, the campus initiated a
stand-alone data warehouse. The purpose of the warehouse was to centralize
reports of accounting data. BFA did not regularly and consistently reconcile
accounting data to the warehouse. As such, we evaluated certain controls in
place over accounting data in order to assess its accuracy and completeness. We
found that accounting records were maintained in several different electronic
data systems. The general ledger was in the Financial Reporting System (FRS).
This data is audited by the campus’ external auditors and reported to the state.
However, neither these FRS records nor information in other subsidiary
accounting systems (i.e., accounts payable) was regularly reconciled to the data
warehouse records. Information in the data warehouse was utilized by campus
managers; but without regular reconciliations between the systems, the
reliability of the data was diminished.
"SPECIAL INV E S T I G A T I O N: CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON,"
Report Number 04-91 October 11, 2006 ---
http://www.calstate.edu/audit/Audit_Reports/special_investigations/2004/0491SpecialInvestigationFullerton.pdf
Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
At the same time, health care benefits are
denied other part-time workers such as adjunct professors
The trustees argue that providing
health benefits to members of the board — many of whom are
retired and most of whom have other part-time jobs or are
self-employed — is essential for attracting candidates whenever
a seat opens up. Those opposing the expansion of health
coverage, who say they are against any benefits for board
members, believe that being a trustee should be a privilege in
itself rather than a collection of perks. They also disagree,
citing recent elections with multiple candidates, that benefits
are necessary to entice candidates.Members of the board
currently receive $240 a month plus reimbursements for
work-related travel, in addition to the health benefits that
five of the trustees have. In California, community college
districts are unusual in that they are authorized by the state
(in
section 53201 of the government code)
to offer benefits to board members. “That clearly is different
from most other states,” said J. Noah Brown, president of the
Association of Community College Trustees.
Andy Guess, "Helping the College, or Just Themselves?" Inside
Higher Ed, September 14, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/14/trustees
In an educational system strapped for money and increasingly ruled by
standardized tests, arts courses can seem almost a needless extravagance, and
the arts are being cut back at schools across the country
"Art for our sake: School arts classes matter more than ever - but not
for the reasons you think," by Ellen Winner and Lois Hetland, Boston Globe,
September 2, 2007 ---
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/09/02/art_for_our_sake/?page=full
In an educational system strapped for money and
increasingly ruled by standardized tests, arts courses can seem almost a
needless extravagance, and the arts are being cut back at schools across the
country.
One justification for keeping the arts has now
become almost a mantra for parents, arts teachers, and even politicians:
arts make you smarter. The notion that arts classes improve children's
scores on the SAT, the MCAS, and other tests is practically gospel among
arts-advocacy groups. A Gallup poll last year found that 80 percent of
Americans believed that learning a musical instrument would improve math and
science skills.
But that claim turns out to be unfounded. It's true
that students involved in the arts do better in school and on their SATs
than those who are not involved. However, correlation isn't causation, and
an analysis we did several years ago showed no evidence that arts training
actually causes scores to rise.
There is, however, a very good reason to teach arts
in schools, and it's not the one that arts supporters tend to fall back on.
In a recent study of several art classes in Boston-area schools, we found
that arts programs teach a specific set of thinking skills rarely addressed
elsewhere in the curriculum - and that far from being irrelevant in a
test-driven education system, arts education is becoming even more important
as standardized tests like the MCAS exert a narrowing influence over what
schools teach.
The implications are broad, not just for schools
but for society. As schools cut time for the arts, they may be losing their
ability to produce not just the artistic creators of the future, but
innovative leaders who improve the world they inherit. And by continuing to
focus on the arts' dubious links to improved test scores, arts advocates are
losing their most powerful weapon: a real grasp of what arts bring to
education.
It is well established that intelligence and
thinking ability are far more complex than what we choose to measure on
standardized tests. The high-stakes exams we use in our schools, almost
exclusively focused on verbal and quantitative skills, reward children who
have a knack for language and math and who can absorb and regurgitate
information. They reveal little about a student's intellectual depth or
desire to learn, and are poor predictors of eventual success and
satisfaction in life.
As schools increasingly shape their classes to
produce high test scores, many life skills not measured by tests just don't
get taught. It seems plausible to imagine that art classes might help fill
the gap by encouraging different kinds of thinking, but there has been
remarkably little careful study of what skills and modes of thinking the
arts actually teach.
To determine what happens inside arts classes, we
spent an academic year studying five visual-arts classrooms in two local
Boston-area schools, videotaping and photographing classes, analyzing what
we saw, and interviewing teachers and their students.
What we found in our analysis should worry parents
and teachers facing cutbacks in school arts programs. While students in art
classes learn techniques specific to art, such as how to draw, how to mix
paint, or how to center a pot, they're also taught a remarkable array of
mental habits not emphasized elsewhere in school.
Such skills include visual-spatial abilities,
reflection, self-criticism, and the willingness to experiment and learn from
mistakes. All are important to numerous careers, but are widely ignored by
today's standardized tests.
In our study, funded by the J. Paul Getty Trust, we
worked with classes at the Boston Arts Academy, a public school in the
Fenway, and the private Walnut Hill School for the arts in Natick. Students
at each school concentrate on visual arts, music, drama, or dance, and spend
at least three hours a day working on their art. Their teachers are
practicing artists. We restricted ourselves to a small sample of
high-quality programs to evaluate what the visual arts could achieve given
adequate time and resources.
Although the approach is necessarily subjective, we
tried to set the study up to be as evidence-based as possible. We videotaped
classes and watched student-teacher interactions repeatedly, identifying
specific habits and skills, and coding the segments to count the times each
was taught. We compared our provisional analysis with those the teachers
gave when we showed them clips of their classes. We also interviewed
students and analyzed samples of their work.
In our analysis, we identified eight ``studio
habits of mind" that arts classes taught, including the development of
artistic craft. Each of these stood out from testable skills taught
elsewhere in school.
One of these habits was persistence: Students
worked on projects over sustained periods of time and were expected to find
meaningful problems and persevere through frustration. Another was
expression: Students were urged to move beyond technical skill to create
works rich in emotion, atmosphere, and their own personal voice or vision. A
third was making clear connections between schoolwork and the world outside
the classroom: Students were taught to see their projects as part of the
larger art world, past and present. In one drawing class at Walnut Hill, the
teacher showed students how Edward Hopper captured the drama of light; at
the Boston Arts Academy, students studied invitations to contemporary art
exhibitions before designing their own. In this way students could see the
parallels between their art and professional work.
Each of these habits clearly has a role in life and
learning, but we were particularly struck by the potentially broad value of
four other kinds of thinking being taught in the art classes we documented:
observing, envisioning, innovating through exploration, and reflective
self-evaluation. Though far more difficult to quantify on a test than
reading comprehension or math computation, each has a high value as a
learning tool, both in school and elsewhere in life.
The first thing we noticed was that visual arts
students are trained to look, a task far more complex than one might think.
Seeing is framed by expectation, and expectation often gets in the way of
perceiving the world accurately. To take a simple example: When asked to
draw a human face, most people will set the eyes near the top of the head.
But this isn't how a face is really proportioned, as students learn: our
eyes divide the head nearly at the center line. If asked to draw a whole
person, people tend to draw the hands much smaller than the face - again an
inaccurate perception. The power of our expectations explains why beginners
draw eyes too high and hands too small. Observational drawing requires
breaking away from stereotypes and seeing accurately and directly.
We saw students pushed to notice what they might
not have seen before. For instance, in Mickey Telemaque's first design class
of the term at the Boston Arts Academy, ninth-graders practice looking with
one eye through a cardboard frame called a viewfinder. ``Forget that you're
looking at somebody's arm or a table," Telemaque tells his students. ``Just
think about the shapes, the colors, the lines, and the textures." Over and
over we listened to teachers telling their students to look more closely at
the model and see it in terms of its essential geometry.
Seeing clearly by looking past one's preconceptions
is central to a variety of professions, from medicine to law. Naturalists
must be able to tell one species from another; climatologists need to see
atmospheric patterns in data as well as in clouds. Writers need keen
observational skills too, as do doctors.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen Comment
Some of my best students in accounting over the years had dual majors in music,
math, and languages. Most of my top students were very active in extracurricular
activities as well such as choir, orchestra, athletics, and part-time jobs.
Their success with grade averages correlates with my own life experiences where
I found that I was most productive when I was busy juggling a lot of things at
the same time. My least productive times were two years spent in think tanks
where my life was shielded from most outside duties. I was free to just "think"
at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences on the Stanford
University campus.
It seems like when I came to forks in the road in a think tank I was free to
waste a lot of time exploring dead end trails. Sometimes pressure for closure is
a good thing. Perhaps its a good thing that doctoral students are not give 20
years to write a dissertation in a think tank. Then again who knows. It is a
fact that Nobel prizes for creative discoveries tend to go to researchers with
very long publication records. In other words, Nobel Laureates are active
scholars with noted closure abilities.
Differences between "popular teacher"
versus "master teacher"
versus "mastery learning"
versus "master educator."
This section was moved to
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#Teaching
Miscellaneous Tidbits
In Harvard's new flexible curriculum there are no public speaking courses
to choose from
Whether or not your college or university offers a
course in public speaking probably has escaped your notice. Nevertheless, it
might be worthwhile to give the matter a minute or two of consideration. You
might find that the availability or unavailability of this course says something
about how diligently a college meets its students’ needs, and also about how
robust are its humanities offerings . . . Up until the beginning of the 20th
century, rhetoric was the most important course of study for young men who
wanted to get ahead in the world. In Classical Greece, it was the only one. In
the agora, if you found yourself a good sophist, you were a made man. So what if
being rhetorically trained and well spoken disqualified you from becoming
Plato’s philosopher-king. Plato was telling a morally edifying fairy tale for a
mundus imaginalis, while the sophists were teaching Athenians to communicate
effectively with fellow citizens in the real world.
Margaret Gutman Klosko, "No Public Speaking at Harvard," Inside Higher Ed,
August 18, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/08/18/klosko
Trends in Foreign Graduate Enrollments
Following 9/11 and the tightening of visa rules, the
number of foreign students coming to the United States
for graduate school plunged. But a new report by
the Council of Graduate Schools finds that foreign graduate student enrollment
has finally started to climb. Most foreign graduate students entering this year
came from China and India, which have burgeoning populations of undergraduates
to feed into graduate programs.
Paul D. Thacker, "Foreign Graduate Enrollments Up," Inside Higher Ed,
November 1, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/01/foreigngrads
Trends in Foreign Graduate Enrollments
| |
New Enrollment,
2004 -5 |
New Enrollment,
2005 -6 |
Total Enrolled,
2004-5 |
Total Enrolled,
2005 -6 |
| International total |
1% |
12% |
-3% |
1% |
| Country of origin |
|
|
|
|
| China |
3% |
20% |
-2% |
-2% |
| India |
3% |
32% |
-4% |
8% |
| South Korea |
5% |
5% |
-4% |
-3% |
| Middle East |
11% |
-1% |
1% |
1% |
| Discipline |
|
|
|
|
| Business |
7% |
10% |
-3% |
1% |
| Engineering |
3% |
22% |
-6% |
3% |
| Humanities and Arts |
-2% |
-6% |
1% |
-7% |
| Life Sciences |
-1% |
2% |
-5% |
-1% |
Privatization Issues
Admissions and Financial Aid Controversies
Universities in the Marketplace: The
Commercialization of Higher Education
Business School Ranking Issues
Differences between "popular teacher"
versus "master teacher"
versus "mastery learning"
versus "master educator."
Part 1 of This Document---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on teaching evaluation controversies and grade inflation
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#GradeInflation
Bob Jensen's threads on technology in education ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Bob Jensen's advice to new faculty ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/newfaculty.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on fraud ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm
Bob Jensen's home page ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/
