Feminism --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism

Third Wave Feminism
Gender, Sexualities and Law
Edited by Jackie Jones, Anna Grear, Rachel Anne Fenton, Kim Stevenson
Routledge, 2011
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415574396/

"Women with MBAs from Elite Schools Are More Likely to Drop Out of the Workforce," Harvard Business Review Blog, November 19, 2014

Married mothers who are graduates of elite business schools are 30 percentage points less likely to be employed full-time than mothers who are graduates of less-selective B-schools, according to a study by Joni Hersch of Vanderbilt Law School. The reasons are unclear, but women who hold MBAs from selective schools may have high family incomes, which allow them to take time off from work to raise children. Their lower levels of labor-market participation may have the effect of limiting the number of women reaching high-level corporate positions, because elite workplaces prefer to hire MBAs from elite schools, Hersch says.

SOURCE: Opting Out Among Women with Elite Education ---
http://links.mkt3142.com/ctt?kn=12&ms=OTk1NDAyMAS2&r=MTkyODM0MDg0MAS2&b=0&j=NDIxNTY1NzA4S0&mt=1&rt=0

The Third Wave of Feminism (Gender Studies)
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#Feminism

Bob Jensen's threads on the history of professional women ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#Women

In one century we went from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to offering remedial English in college.
Joseph Sobran as quoted by Mark Shapiro at http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-11-27-07.htm

"Failure in Urban Universities," by Kevin Carey, Inside Higher Ed, October 14, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/10/14/carey 

Most Students in Remedial Classes in College Had Solid Grades in High School Nearly four out of five students who undergo remediation in college graduated from high school with grade-point averages of 3.0 or higher, according to a report issued today by Strong American Schools, a group that advocates making public-school education more rigorous.
Peter Schmidt, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 15, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/news/article/5145/most-students-in-remedial-classes-in-college-had-solid-grades-in-high-school-survey-finds 

College Admissions Officers Urge Dumbing Down of College Admissions Tests (e.g., the SAT and ACT tests)
"Admissions Group Urges Colleges to 'Assume Control' of Debate on Testing," by Eric Hoover, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 22, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/09/4685n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Also see http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/09/22/testing

With just a few words, William R. Fitzsimmons could start a revolution. He is, after all, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard University.

Imagine if he announces one day that his office no longer requires applicants to submit standardized-test scores. Within weeks Harvard's competitors go test-optional, too. Soon less-selective institutions do the same. College admissions is transformed, and high-school students everywhere rejoice.

At least that's what happens in the daydream shared by some testing critics. Reality, however, looks a lot different. ACT and SAT exams support a complex ecosystem in which colleges' needs vary according to size, mission, and selectivity. Even Harvard cannot change that.

Still, people listen to what Mr. Fitzsimmons says. And this week, he plans to say a lot about tests.

Last year the National Association for College Admission Counseling, or Nacac, asked Mr. Fitzsimmons to lead a panel that would examine testing issues and recommend how colleges might better use entrance exams. The dean and his fellow panelists are to present their findings on Friday at the association's annual conference, in Seattle.

Nacac gave The Chronicle an early look at the long-awaited "Report of the Commission on the Use of Standardized Tests in Undergraduate Admission," which stops well short of condemning admissions tests. Nonetheless, it delivers the association's strongest statement to date on one of higher education's most controversial issues. It affirms that colleges and other interested parties have overinflated both the real and the perceived importance of the exams—and proposes how to let some of that air out.

The report urges colleges to regularly scrutinize their testing requirements, to stop using minimum scores for scholarships, and to ensure that admissions policies account for inequities among applicants, including access to test preparation. Moreover, it anticipates a future when admissions tests better reflect what students learn in high school.

"We want to get the word out more clearly than before that tests should not be used in a rigid way," Mr. Fitzsimmons says. "A couple decades ago, people associated testing results with so-called ability. We have come to a clearer understanding that those scores have more to do with opportunities."

'Center of Gravity'

Creating the 58-page report was a test itself. The 21-member panel included admissions deans from an array of institutions, such as Central Lakes College, in Minnesota; Georgetown University; and the University of Connecticut.

"The challenge was to find a center of gravity," says David A. Hawkins, Nacac's director of public policy and research. "We were looking to the collective wisdom of colleges, which have their own proprietary interests and are not always consistent."

High-school counselors, independent consultants, and education-policy experts rounded out the panel, which met four times and communicated frequently via e-mail. Mr. Hawkins had the unenviable task of synthesizing more than 20 hours of notes with the panelists' written contributions.

The commission crafted recommendations that echoed the association's big-tent spirit. "We were realistic," says Mr. Hawkins. "We weren't going to tell people to abolish tests or that they were the greatest thing since sliced bread."

The report does encourage more colleges to consider dropping their test requirement if they find that they can make appropriate admissions decisions without the ACT and SAT.

Each college, the report says, should use its own validity studies to judge whether the tests have enough predictive value to justify their use. Admissions offices should not rely only on national data compiled by testing companies—or on tradition.

The panel encourages Nacac to become an "unaffiliated clearinghouse" of testing information. It recommends that the association create a program to train admissions officials in the ethics and standards of testing. It also asks Nacac to create a way for colleges to share testing research, and to annually publish sample validity studies of the ACT and SAT.

Judgments of the value of such statistics, however, often divided the committee. All members agreed that test scores reliably predict freshman-year grades, but some said that did not justify requiring the tests.

Steven T. Syverson urged his fellow panelists to reach a broader definition of success in college. "We need to start paying better attention to our language," says Mr. Syverson, vice president for enrollment at Lawrence University, in Wisconsin, which does not require standardized-test scores. "Success isn't a grade-point average. I've got lots of students who get C's but who have a fabulous college experience. They develop social skills and leadership skills. Being a good citizen is a successful outcome."

Randall C. Deike agrees. Even so, he brought a more practical view of tests to the discussion.

Vice president for enrollment at Case Western Reserve University, Mr. Deike holds a Ph.D. in educational psychology. He believes that the ACT and SAT are solid tests that help admissions officials do their jobs, especially at large universities with waves of applicants. He repeatedly told the commission not to discount the statistical significance of the exams.

"Why," he recalls asking, "would you throw away good information?"

Mr. Fitzsimmons, the chairman, dubbed Mr. Deike "the canary in the coal mine." When panelists proposed language that struck him as too critical of tests, he would speak up and try to steer them to more-inclusive recommendations.

In the spirit of collaboration, Mr. Deike ended up writing a key passage in the report that encourages more colleges to at least explore the possibility of going test-optional. But he remains unconvinced that such a move is advisable for many. "Too often standardized testing is condemned," he says, "when it's really test misuse that's at issue."

Beyond Numbers

The report takes gentle swipes at several third parties for "possible misuses" of test scores. It urges the National Merit Scholarship Corporation to stop using minimum PSAT scores as a requirement for its awards. It questions why the College Board "appears to condone" that practice. The report also criticizes the use of test scores in U.S. News & World Report's college rankings, as well as in college-bond ratings.

The booming test-preparation industry prompted a vigorous debate among panelists. Some participants say they had hoped that the report would dismiss test prep's value to students. Others, however, argued that the issue looms too large in students' lives to reduce to a short statement. They wanted the report to confront the complexity of what they see: that test prep benefits some applicants but not all.

"I'm not against preparing for tests, but there's now an obsessive compulsion to get the best scores you can," says Marybeth Kravets, a counselor at Deerfield High School, a public school in Illinois. "Therein lies the inequity—those who can afford it can better prepare themselves."

The commission concluded that while test prep is inevitable, its effects remain too mysterious. Could it add 30 points to a student's SAT score, or 100? What distinguishes good prep from bad?

Continued in article

Our underachieving colleges --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Bok

"A Third of Public-School Students in Mass. Need Remediation at College, Report Says," by Beckie Supiano, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 28, 2008 --- Click Here 

More than one out of three students at public high schools in Massachusetts who go on to a public college or university in the state require remedial preparation, according to a report released today.

The “School-to-College Report,” the first of its kind in the state, is a joint effort of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education and Department of Education. The report, to be officially presented to the board on Friday, shows that 37 percent of the public-school students took at least one remedial course during their first semester of college.

The report, which is not yet posted online, was made possible by a new database linking elementary, secondary, and higher education in the state. It used data for students who completed high school and entered college in 2005.

"Black Education," by Walter E. Williams (a black economics professor), Townhall, December 23, 2009 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2009/12/23/black_education

Detroit's (predominantly black) public schools are the worst in the nation and it takes some doing to be worse than Washington, D.C. Only 3 percent of Detroit's fourth-graders scored proficient on the most recent National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) test, sometimes called "The Nation's Report Card." Twenty-eight percent scored basic and 69 percent below basic. "Below basic" is the NAEP category when students are unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and skills fundamental for proficient work at their grade level. It's the same story for Detroit's eighth-graders. Four percent scored proficient, 18 percent basic and 77 percent below basic.

Michael Casserly, executive director of the D.C.-based Council on Great City Schools, in an article appearing in Crain's Detroit Business, (12/8/09) titled, "Detroit's Public Schools Post Worst Scores on Record in National Assessment," said, "There is no jurisdiction of any kind, at any level, at any time in the 30-year history of NAEP that has ever registered such low numbers." The academic performance of black students in other large cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles is not much better than Detroit and Washington.

What's to be done about this tragic state of black education? The education establishment and politicians tell us that we need to spend more for higher teacher pay and smaller class size. The fact of business is higher teacher salaries and smaller class sizes mean little or nothing in terms of academic achievement. Washington, D.C., for example spends over $15,000 per student, has class sizes smaller than the nation's average, and with an average annual salary of $61,195, its teachers are the most highly paid in the nation.

What about role models? Standard psychobabble asserts a positive relationship between the race of teachers and administrators and student performance. That's nonsense. Black academic performance is the worst in the very cities where large percentages of teachers and administrators are black, and often the school superintendent is black, the mayor is black, most of the city council is black and very often the chief of police is black.

Black people have accepted hare-brained ideas that have made large percentages of black youngsters virtually useless in an increasingly technological economy. This destruction will continue until the day comes when black people are willing to turn their backs on liberals and the education establishment's agenda and confront issues that are both embarrassing and uncomfortable. To a lesser extent, this also applies to whites because the educational performance of many white kids is nothing to write home about; it's just not the disaster that black education is.

Many black students are alien and hostile to the education process. They have parents with little interest in their education. These students not only sabotage the education process, but make schools unsafe as well. These students should not be permitted to destroy the education chances of others. They should be removed or those students who want to learn should be provided with a mechanism to go to another school.

Another issue deemed too delicate to discuss is the overall quality of people teaching our children. Students who have chosen education as their major have the lowest SAT scores of any other major. Students who have an education degree earn lower scores than any other major on graduate school admission tests such as the GRE, MCAT or LSAT. Schools of education, either graduate or undergraduate, represent the academic slums of most any university. They are home to the least able students and professors. Schools of education should be shut down.

Yet another issue is the academic fraud committed by teachers and administrators. After all, what is it when a student is granted a diploma certifying a 12th grade level of achievement when in fact he can't perform at the sixth- or seventh-grade level?

Prospects for improvement in black education are not likely given the cozy relationship between black politicians, civil rights organizations and teacher unions.

Dr. Williams serves on the faculty of George Mason University as John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and is the author of More Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well.  

Undergraduate education programs and graduate schools of education have long been faulted for being too disconnected from the realities of practice.
Jal Mehta, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Undergraduate education programs and graduate schools of accounting have long been faulted for being too disconnected from the realities of practice.
Nearly all accounting practitioners have been saying this for years, but accounting educators and especially researchers aren't listening
"Why business ignores the business schools," by Michael Skapinker
Some ideas for applied research ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#AcademicsVersusProfession

Warning:  If you suffer from depression you probably should not read this
"Teachers: Will We Ever Learn?" by Jal Mehta, Harvard Graduate School of Education, April 15, 2013 ---
http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news-impact/2013/04/teachers-will-we-ever-learn/

In April 1983, a federal commission warned in a famous report, “A Nation at Risk,” that American education was a “rising tide of mediocrity.” The alarm it sounded about declining competitiveness touched off a tidal wave of reforms: state standards, charter schools, alternative teacher-certification programs, more money, more test-based “accountability” and, since 2001, two big federal programs, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

But while there have been pockets of improvement, particularly among children in elementary school, America’s overall performance in K-12 education remains stubbornly mediocre.

In 2009, the Program for International Student Assessment, which compares student performance across advanced industrialized countries, ranked American 15-year-olds 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math — trailing their counterparts in Belgium, Estonia and Poland. One-third of entering college students need remedial education. Huge gaps by race and class persist: the average black high school senior’s reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress continue to be at the level of the average white eighth grader’s. Seventeen-year-olds score the same in reading as they did in 1971.

The New York Times OpEd by Jal Mehta on April 12, 2013 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/13/opinion/teachers-will-we-ever-learn.html?_r=2&

. . .

As the education scholar Charles M. Payne of the University of Chicago has put it: “So much reform, so little change.”

The debate over school reform has become a false polarization between figures like Michelle Rhee, the former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor, who emphasizes testing and teacher evaluation, and the education historian Diane Ravitch, who decries the long-run effort to privatize public education and emphasizes structural impediments to student achievement, like poverty.

The labels don’t matter. Charter-school networks like the Knowledge Is Power Program and Achievement First have shown impressive results, but so have reforms in traditional school districts in Montgomery County, Md., Long Beach, Calif., and, most recently, Union City, N.J., the focus of a new book by the public policy scholar David L. Kirp.

Sorry, “Waiting for Superman”: charter schools are not a panacea and have not performed, on average, better than regular public schools. Successful schools — whether charter or traditional — have features in common: a clear mission, talented teachers, time for teachers to work together, longer school days or after-school programs, feedback cycles that lead to continuing improvements. It’s not either-or.

Another false debate: alternative-certification programs like Teach for America versus traditional certification programs. The research is mixed, but the overall differences in quality between graduates of both sets of programs have been found to be negligible, and by international standards, our teachers are underperforming, regardless of how they were trained.

HERE’S what the old debates have overlooked: How schools are organized, and what happens in classrooms, hasn’t changed much in the century since the Progressive Era. On the whole, we still have the same teachers, in the same roles, with the same level of knowledge, in the same schools, with the same materials, and much the same level of parental support.

Call it the industrial-factory model: power resides at the top, with state and district officials setting goals, providing money and holding teachers accountable for realizing predetermined ends. While rational on its face, in practice this system does not work well because teaching is a complex activity that is hard to direct and improve from afar. The factory model is appropriate to simple work that is easy to standardize; it is ill suited to disciplines like teaching that require considerable skill and discretion.

Teaching requires a professional model, like we have in medicine, law, engineering, accounting, architecture and many other fields. In these professions, consistency of quality is created less by holding individual practitioners accountable and more by building a body of knowledge, carefully training people in that knowledge, requiring them to show expertise before they become licensed, and then using their professions’ standards to guide their work.

By these criteria, American education is a failed profession.

It need not be this way. In the nations that lead the international rankings — Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Finland, Canada — teachers are drawn from the top third of college graduates, rather than the bottom 60 percent as is the case in the United States. Training in these countries is more rigorous, more tied to classroom practice and more often financed by the government than in America. There are also many fewer teacher-training institutions, with much higher standards. (Finland, a perennial leader in the P.I.S.A. rankings, has eight universities that train teachers; the United States has more than 1,200.)

¶ Teachers in leading nations’ schools also teach much less than ours do. High school teachers provide 1,080 hours per year of instruction in America, compared with fewer than 600 in South Korea and Japan, where the balance of teachers’ time is spent collaboratively on developing and refining lesson plans. These countries also have much stronger welfare states; by providing more support for students’ social, psychological and physical needs, they make it easier for teachers to focus on their academic needs. These elements create a virtuous cycle: strong academic performance leads to schools with greater autonomy and more public financing, which in turn makes education an attractive profession for talented people.

¶ In America, both major teachers’ unions and the organization representing state education officials have, in the past year, called for raising the bar for entering teachers; one of the unions, the American Federation of Teachers, advocates a “bar exam.” Ideally the exam should not be a one-time paper-and-pencil test, like legal bar exams, but a phased set of milestones to be attained over the first few years of teaching. Akin to medical boards, they would require prospective teachers to demonstrate subject and pedagogical knowledge — as well as actual teaching skill.

¶ Tenure would require demonstrated knowledge and skill, as at a university or a law firm. A rigorous board exam for teachers could significantly elevate the quality of candidates, raise and make more consistent teacher skill level, improve student outcomes, and strengthen the public’s regard for teachers and teaching.

¶ We let doctors operate, pilots fly, and engineers build because their fields have developed effective ways of certifying that they can do these things. Teaching, on the whole, lacks this specialized knowledge base; teachers teach based mostly on what they have picked up from experience and from their colleagues.

¶ Anthony S. Bryk, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, has estimated that other fields spend 5 percent to 15 percent of their budgets on research and development, while in education, it is around 0.25 percent. Education-school researchers publish for fellow academics; teachers develop practical knowledge but do not evaluate or share it; commercial curriculum designers make what districts and states will buy, with little regard for quality. We most likely will need the creation of new institutions — an educational equivalent of the National Institutes of Health, the main funder of biomedical research in America — if we are to make serious headway.

¶ We also need to develop a career arc for teaching and a differentiated salary structure to match it. Like medical residents in teaching hospitals, rookie teachers should be carefully overseen by experts as they move from apprenticeship to proficiency, and then mastery. Early- to mid-career teachers need time to collaborate and explore new directions — having mastered the basics, this is the stage when they can refine their skills. The system should reward master teachers with salaries commensurate with leading professionals in other fields.

¶ In the past few years, 45 states and the District of Columbia have adopted Common Core standards that ask much more of students; raising standards for teachers is a critical parallel step. We have an almost endless list of things that we would like the next generation of schools to do: teach critical thinking, foster collaboration, incorporate technology, become more student-centered and engaging. The more skilled our teachers, the greater our chances of achieving these goals.

¶ Undergraduate education programs and graduate schools of education have long been faulted for being too disconnected from the realities of practice. The past 25 years have seen the creation of an array of different providers to train teachers — programs like Teach for America, urban-teacher residencies and, most recently, schools like High Tech High in San Diego and Match High School in Boston that are running their own teacher-training programs.

Continued in article

"Black Colleges Need a New Mission Once an essential response to racism, they are now academically inferior," by Jason L. Riley, The Wall Street Journal, September 28, 2010 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704654004575517822124077834.html#mod=djemEditorialPage_t 

President Obama has shown a commendable willingness to shake up the status quo in K-12 education by advocating reforms, such as charter schools, that have left his teachers union base none-too-pleased. So it's unfortunate that he has such a conventional approach to higher education, and to historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in particular.

Earlier this month, Mr. Obama hosted a White House reception to celebrate the contributions of the nation's 105 black colleges and to reiterate his pledge to invest another $850 million in these institutions over the next decade.

Recalling the circumstances under which many of these schools were created after the Civil War, the president noted that "at a critical time in our nation's history, HBCUs waged war against illiteracy and ignorance and won." He added: "You have made it possible for millions of people to achieve their dreams and gave so many young people a chance they never thought they'd have, a chance that nobody else would give them."

The reality today, however, is that there's no shortage of traditional colleges willing to give black students a chance. When segregation was legal, black colleges were responsible for almost all black collegians. Today, nearly 90% of black students spurn such schools, and the available evidence shows that, in the main, these students are better off exercising their non-HBCU options.

"Even the best black colleges and universities do not approach the standards of quality of respectable institutions," according to economist Thomas Sowell. "None has a department ranking among the leading graduate departments in any of the 29 fields surveyed by the American Council of Education. None ranks among the 'selective' institutions with regard to student admissions. None has a student body whose College Board scores are within 100 points of any school in the Ivy League."

Mr. Sowell wrote that in an academic journal in 1974, yet with few exceptions the description remains accurate. These days the better black schools—Howard, Spelman, Morehouse—are rated "selective" in the U.S. News rankings, but their average SAT scores still lag behind those at decent state schools like the University of Texas at Austin, never mind a Stanford or Yale.

In 2006, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the six-year graduation rate at HBCUs was 37%. That's 20 percentage points below the national average and eight percentage points below the average of black students at other colleges. A recent Washington Monthly magazine survey of colleges with the worst graduation rates featured black schools in first and second place, and in eight of the top 24 spots.

The economists Roland Fryer of Harvard and Michael Greenstone of MIT have found that black colleges are inferior to traditional schools in preparing students for post-college life. "In the 1970s, HBCU matriculation was associated with higher wages and an increased probability of graduation, relative to attending a [traditional college]," they wrote in a 2007 paper. "By the 1990s, however, there is a substantial wage penalty. Overall, there is a 20% decline in the relative wages of HBCU graduates in just two decades." The authors concluded that "by some measures, HBCU attendance appears to retard black progress."

Mr. Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have urged HBCUs to improve their graduation rates—Mr. Duncan has said they need to increase "exponentially"—but the administration has brought little pressure to bear and is offering substantial financial assistance to keep them afloat. Howard and Spelman have endowments valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars, but a large majority of black colleges have very small endowments and more than 80% get most of their revenue from the government.

Instead of more subsidies and toothless warnings to shape up, Mr. Obama ought to use the federal government's leverage to remake these schools to meet today's challenges.

Uneconomically small black colleges could be consolidated. For-profit entities could be brought in to manage other schools. (For the past two years, the University of Phoenix, a for-profit college, has conferred more bachelor's degrees on black students than any other school.) Still other HBCUs could be repurposed as community colleges that focus on developmental courses to compensate for the poor elementary and secondary educations that so many black children still receive.

In 1967, two white academics, Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, published a bleak but prescient assessment of black colleges in the Harvard Educational Review. They predicted that these schools are "for the most part, likely to remain fourth-rate institutions at the tail end of the academic procession." Messrs. Jencks and Riesman were called racists, and honest comprehensive studies of black colleges have since been rare.

Black colleges are at a crossroads.At one time black colleges were an essential response to racism. They trained a generation of civil rights lawyers and activists who helped end segregation. Their place in U.S. history is secure. Today, however, dwindling enrollments and endowments indicate that fewer and fewer blacks believe that these schools, as currently constituted, represent the best available academic choice.

A black president is uniquely qualified to restart this discussion. Anyone who cares about the future of black higher education should hope that he does.

Mr. Riley is a member of the WSJ's editorial board.

"My Lazy American Students," by Kara Miller (Babson College), Boston Globe, December 21, 2009 --- Click Here
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/12/21/my_lazy_american_students/?p1=Well_MostPop_Emailed1

It was a student conference I hate.

“I’ll do better,’’ my student told me, leaning forward in his chair. “I know I’ve gotten behind this semester, but I’m going to turn things around. Would it be OK if I finished all my uncompleted work by Monday?’’

I sat silent for a moment. “Yes. But it’s important that you catch up completely this weekend, so that you’re not just perpetually behind.’’

A few weeks later, I would conduct a nearly identical conversation with two other students. And, again, there would be no tangible result: No make-up papers. No change in effort. No improvement in time management.

By the time students are in college, habits can be tough to change. If you’re used to playing video games like “Modern Warfare’’ or “Halo’’ all night, how do you fit in four hours of homework? Or rest up for class?

Teaching in college, especially one with a large international student population, has given me a stark - and unwelcome - illustration of how Americans’ work ethic often pales in comparison with their peers from overseas.

My “C,’’ “D,’’ and “F’’ students this semester are almost exclusively American, while my students from India, China, and Latin America have - despite language barriers - generally written solid papers, excelled on exams, and become valuable class participants.

One girl from Shanghai became a fixture at office hours, embraced our college writing center, and incessantly e-mailed me questions about her evolving papers. Her English is still mediocre: she frequently puts “the’’ everywhere (as in “the leader supported the feminism and the environmentalism’’) and confuses “his’’ and “her.’’ But that didn’t stop her from doing rewrite after rewrite, tirelessly trying to improve both structure and grammar.

Chinese undergraduates have consistently impressed me with their work ethic, though I have seen similar habits in students from India, Thailand, Brazil, and Venezuela. Often, they’ve done little English-language writing in their home countries, and they frequently struggle to understand my lectures. But their respect for professors - and for knowledge itself - is palpable. The students listen intently to everything I say, whether in class or during office hours, and try to engage in the conversation.

Too many 18-year-old Americans, meanwhile, text one another under their desks (certain they are sly enough to go unnoticed), check e-mail, decline to take notes, and appear tired and disengaged.

Of course, it would be wrong to suggest that all American students are the same. I’ve taught many who were hardworking, talented, and deeply impressive. They listened intently, enriched class discussions, and never shied away from rewrites. At their best, American students marry knowledge and innovation, resulting in some astoundingly creative work.

But creativity without knowledge - a common phenomenon - is just not enough.

Too many American students simply lack the basics. In 2002, a National Geographic-Roper survey found that most 18- to 24-year-olds could not find Afghanistan, Iraq, or Japan on a map, ranking them behind counterparts in Sweden, Great Britain, Canada, Italy, Japan, France, and Germany. And in 2007 the American Institutes for Research reported that eighth graders in even our best-performing states - like Massachusetts - scored below peers in Singapore, South Korea, and Japan, while students in our worst-performing states - like Mississippi - were on par with eighth graders in Slovakia, Romania, and Russia.

We’ve got a knowledge gap, spurred by a work-ethic gap.

Which brings me to another grade-challenged student, who once sprinted across campus to talk to me.

“I’m really sorry I missed office hours,’’ he said. “Do you have time to talk?’’

“I have a meeting in a couple of minutes,’’ I said. “But you can walk with me.’’

“OK,’’ he said. “I really enjoy your class, and I think I can do better. How can I improve my grade?’’

I looked at him sideways. “Well, you might start with staying awake.’’

“Yeah,’’ he grinned, looking at his shoes. “Sorry about that. There’s always stuff going on in my dorm late at night. I have to learn to be better about time management.’’

Of course, he had it exactly right. Success is all about time management, and in a globalizing economy, Americans’ inability to stay focused and work hard could prove to be a serious problem.

Nowhere, sadly, is this clearer than in the classroom.

Kara Miller teaches rhetoric and history at Babson College.

Remedial Education:  One of the Most Costly, Frustrating, and Low Success Endeavors in Higher Education

There also is the factor of socialization. Some students want to get into college for reasons other than education. Many college students meet their future spouses on campus. Is there a better selection to choose from on campus vis-a-vis on the job or in a bar after work?

Here's an unexpected way education pays
Mutual fund managers had significantly better returns on investments made in companies led by their former classmates than they did in companies where no such connections existed, according to a recent study. Indeed, investments in so-called “connected” stocks outperformed non-connected stocks by more than 8 percent, the study found.The findings are published in the bureau’s working paper, entitled
“The Small World of Investing: Board Communications and Mutual Fund Returns.”
Jack Stripling, "Another Way Education Pays," Inside Higher Ed, July 29, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/07/31/nber

"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.

From the Carnegie Foundation for Advancement in Teaching in December 2007
Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC) --- http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/programs/index.asp?key=26

Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC) is a partnership of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation. A multi-site action-research project, SPECC focuses on teaching and learning in pre-collegiate mathematics and English language arts courses at 11 California community colleges. These courses, which cover material often termed "developmental" or "basic," serve as prerequisites to transfer-level academic courses. On each campus, faculty members are exploring different approaches to classroom instruction, academic support, and faculty development. Their inquiry into the effects of these approaches engages a wide range of data, including examples of student work, classroom observations, and quantitative campus data. The ultimate goal of their investigations, and of SPECC as a whole, is to support student learning and success through a culture of inquiry and evidence.

Video: Why Singapore Leads The World In Mathematics --- http://www.simoleonsense.com/why-singapore-leads-the-world-in-mathematics/

"Boosting Math Standards," by David Moltz, Inside Higher Ed, December 21, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/12/21/math

My Good Friend Bill Trench
One of my very good friends in my days at Trinity University was mathematics professor Bill Trench. Bill retired several years before I retired, but he's still very active in mathematics research and presentations of his research.
Andrew G. Cowles Distinguished Professor (Retired) --- http://ramanujan.math.trinity.edu/wtrench/index.shtml

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,

INTRODUCTION TO REAL ANALYSIS by William Trench can now be downloaded free --- http://ramanujan.math.trinity.edu/wtrench/misc/index.shtml
A complete solutions manual is available by request to wtrench@trinity.edu  on verification of faculty status

This book was previously published by Pearson Education. This free edition is made available in the hope that it will be useful as a textbook or reference. Reproduction is permitted for any valid noncommercial educational, mathematical, or scientific purpose. It may be posted on faculty web pages for convenience of student downloads. However, sale of or charges for any part of this book beyond reasonable reproduction costs are prohibited.

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

"No Child Left Behind:  New evidence that charter schools help even kids in other schools," The Wall Street Journal, November 4, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703574604574499592392782438.html

Opponents of school choice are running out of excuses as evidence continues to roll in about the positive impact of charter schools.

Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby recently found that poor urban children who attend a charter school from kindergarten through 8th grade can close the learning gap with affluent suburban kids by 86% in reading and 66% in math. And now Marcus Winters, who follows education for the Manhattan Institute, has released a paper showing that even students who don't attend a charter school benefit academically when their public school is exposed to charter competition.

Mr. Winters focuses on New York City public school students in grades 3 through 8. "For every one percent of a public school's students who leave for a charter," concludes Mr. Winters, "reading proficiency among those who remain increases by about 0.02 standard deviations, a small but not insignificant number, in view of the widely held suspicion that the impact on local public schools . . . would be negative." It tuns out that traditional public schools respond to competition in a way that benefits their students.

Imagine that. Competition works.

School choice opponents insist that charters diminish the overall public school system by luring away the best students, the most motivated parents and scarce per-pupil dollars. However, Ms. Hoxby's research has shown that "creaming" can't explain the academic success of charter schools given that the typical urban charter student is a poor black or Hispanic kid living in a home with adults who possess below-average education credentials.

It's true that the growth of charters has reduced enrollment at some traditional public schools in places like Detroit and Washington, D.C. But charters are themselves public schools, albeit without the burden of work rules and other constraints imposed by unions and the bureaucracy. They are hugely popular with parents, and more than 1.4 million kids now attend 4,578 charters in 41 states.

The result has been, on balance, a superior education for the charter-bound kids and pressure on local public schools to improve or lose students. Public schools that must compete with charters are no longer insulated from the consequences for failing to educate their charges. How is that a bad outcome?

One of the most encouraging findings by Mr. Winters is how charter competition reduces the black-white achievement gap. He found that the worst-performing public school students, who tend to be low-income minorities, have the most to gain from the nearby presence of a charter school. Overall, charter competition improved reading performance but did not affect math skills. By contrast, low-performing students had gains in both areas, and their reading improvement was above average relative to the higher-performing students.

President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are using the leverage of federal dollars to promote an increase in charter schools, which are still limited in many states by caps on their number and on funding. State and local policy makers who cave to union demands and block the growth of charters aren't doing traditional public school students any favors.

In Defense of "Traditional" Learning and Assessment

April 27, 2009 message from David Albrecht [albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]

Bob,

Here's another article from the CHE newsletter.

The conclusion from these latest two articles rings true.

Collegiate business courses in general, and collegiate accounting courses, in particular, have taken their fair share of hits in recent years, because of the lack of experiential learning built into the curriculum and so many courses. The traditional approach to collegiate instruction--lecture and (MC) testing--is too frequently assailed because students don't become active participants in the learning process. Never-the-less, accounting students across the country do pick up on the rules of financial and tax accounting, and the logic of cost accounting and auditing. I've frequently wondered where the missing piece is, how a discredited approach to conducting college courses can produce any learning results at all.

My own thinking had begun to focus on the recitation/homework aspect built into so many of our courses, and the results of these two studies seems to it up.

I have made extensive use of homework assignments over the years, to the extent that I write my own problems. A HW set for a particular topic moves from very short "drills" to comprehensive problems that set the topic into a very realistic setting. What I do isn't unique. However, I have my own idea about what is realistic.

Anyway, I find this latest news to be a validation for a part of what we do, and welcome news indeed.

Access to the article below requires a subscription. The part of the article not quoted IS important, as it pertains to real world applications.

Dave Albrecht

******quotation begins******

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i34/34a00101.htm 

From the issue dated May 1, 2009 Close the Book. Recall. Write It Down. That old study method still works, researchers say. So why don't professors preach it?

By DAVID GLENN

The scene: A rigorous intro-level survey course in biology, history, or economics. You're the instructor, and students are crowding the lectern, pleading for study advice for the midterm.

If you're like many professors, you'll tell them something like this: Read carefully. Write down unfamiliar terms and look up their meanings. Make an outline. Reread each chapter.

That's not terrible advice. But some scientists would say that you've left out the most important step: Put the book aside and hide your notes. Then recall everything you can. Write it down, or, if you're uninhibited, say it out loud.

Two psychology journals have recently published papers showing that this strategy works, the latest findings from a decades-old body of research. When students study on their own, "active recall" ¬ recitation, for instance, or flashcards and other self-quizzing ¬ is the most effective way to inscribe something in long-term memory.

Yet many college instructors are only dimly familiar with that research. And in March, when Mark A. McDaniel, a professor of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis and one author of the new studies, gave a talk at a conference of the National Center for Academic Transformation, people fretted that the approach was oriented toward robotic memorization, not true learning.

Don't Reread

A central idea of Mr. McDaniel's work, which appears in the April issue of Psychological Science and the January issue of Contemporary Educational Psychology, is that it is generally a mistake to read and reread a textbook passage. That strategy feels intuitively right to many students ¬ but it's much less effective than active recall, and it can give rise to a false sense of confidence.

"When you've got your chemis-try book in front of you, everything's right there on the page, it's all very familiar and fluent," says Jeffrey D. Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue University and lead author of a paper in the May issue of Memory about students' faulty intuitions about effective study habits.

"So you could say to yourself, 'Yeah, I know this. Sure, this is all very familiar,'" Mr. Karpicke continues. "But of course, when you go in to take a classroom test, or in real life when you need to reconstruct your knowledge, the book's not there. In our experiments, when students repeatedly read something, it falsely inflates their sense of their own learning."

These findings about active recall are not new or faddish or parochial. The research has been deepened and systematized recently by scholars at the University of California at Los Angeles and Washington University in St. Louis (where Mr. Karpicke earned his doctorate in 2007). But the basic insight goes back decades. One of the new papers tips its hat to a recitation-based method known as "SQ3R," which was popularized in Effective Study, a 1946 book by Francis P. Robinson.

So if this wisdom is so well-established ¬ at least among psychologists ¬ should colleges explicitly try to coax students to use these study techniques? And if so, how? That is the question that the authors of these papers are now pondering.

"I think it's a mistake for us to think that just publishing this work in a few journals is going to have a huge impact in the classroom," says Mr. McDaniel.

After a decade of working in this area, Mr. McDaniel feels enough confidence in his findings that he is willing to proselytize about them. He and his colleagues have also been promoting the idea of frequent low-stakes classroom quizzes (The Chronicle, June 8, 2007).

Among other things, Mr. McDaniel has recently collaborated with a network of biology instructors who would like to improve the pass rates in their introductory courses.

One of those scholars is Kirk Bartholomew, an assistant professor of biology at Sacred Heart University. He first crossed paths with Mr. McDaniel at a conference sponsored by a textbook publisher.

"He basically confirmed my ideas ¬ that after you've read something once, you've gotten what you're going to get out of it, and then you need to go out and start applying the information," Mr. Bartholomew says.

The two scholars collaborated on a Web interface that encouraged students to try different study techniques. The first round of research did not turn up any dramatic patterns, Mr. Bartholomew says ¬ other than the unsurprising fact that his students did better if they spent more time studying. But he says that he looks forward to refining the system.

Rote learning?

In March, however, when Mr. McDaniel took his message to the National Center for Academic Transformation meeting, his talk was not entirely well received.

Several days after his appearance, he got a note from Carol A. Twigg, the center's chief executive. "She said, 'We really loved having you, but you created some controversy here,'" Mr. McDaniel says. According to Ms. Twigg's note, some people worried that Mr. McDaniel's techniques might generate rote memorization at the expense of deeper kinds of learning.

Michael R. Reder, director of Connecticut College's Center for Teaching and Learning, had a similar reaction to one of Mr. McDaniel's new papers on studying.

The paper seems perfectly valid on its own terms and might offer a "useful tool," Mr. Reder says. But in his view, the paper also "suggests an old model of learning. You know, I'm going to give information to the students, and the students then memorize that information and then spit it back."

Mr. McDaniel finds such reactions frustrating. One experiment in his new paper suggests that a week after reading a complex passage, people who recited the material after reading it did much better at solving problems that involved analyzing and drawing inferences from the material than did people who simply read the passage twice.

"I don't think these techniques will necessarily result in rote memorization," Mr. McDaniel says. "If you ask people to free-recall, you can generate a better mental model of a subject area, and in turn that can lead to better problem-solving."

And in some college courses, he continues, a certain amount of memorization is impossible to escape ¬ so it might as well be done effectively.

In Biology 101, for example, "you've got a heavily fact-laden course. When I talk to biology instructors at Big Ten universities, they're working really hard to create interesting, interactive courses where they've got 500 or 600 kids in a lecture class. But no matter how engaging you make the course, the students need to have the knowledge base to do the inquiry-based problem-solving activities that you've designed."

continued in article

******quotation ends*******

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

Question
Where can students substitute their college instructors for an online ($399) McGraw-Hill tutor for possible college credit?

An accounting tutor (not for advanced courses)  is listed at http://straighterline.com/courses/descriptions/#accounting1

Other course tutors, including college algebra and English composition, are listed at http://straighterline.com/

"Who Needs a Professor When There's a Tutor Available?" by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 17, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3095&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

An unusual new commercial service offers low-cost online courses and connects students to accredited colleges who will accept the courses for credit. The only thing missing: professors.

The service, called StraighterLine, is run by SmartThinking, a company that operates an online tutoring service used by about 300 colleges and universities. The online courses offered by StraighterLine are self-guided, and if students run into trouble they can summon a tutor from SmartThiking and talk with them via instant messaging. Students turn in their assignments or papers to tutors for grading as well.

“We’re using our tutoring service as the instructional component,” says Burck Smith, CEO of SmartThinking. “Students move through the course, and when they have a problem they click a button and they’re talking with a tutor.”

The courses cost $399 each, which includes 10 hours of time with a tutor. If students need more one-on-one help, they can pay extra for more tutoring.

The courses themselves were developed by McGraw-Hill, and StraighterLine uses Blackboard’s course-management service. So this virtual college is essentially cobbled together from various off-the-shelf learning services.

So far three colleges have agreed to grant credit for the StraighterLine courses — Fort Hays State University, Jones International University, and Potomac College.

The colleges see the partnership as a way to attract new students. “One of the things we hope to do is convert those students to Jones students,” says D. Terry Rawls, a vice chancellor at Jones International. “My expectation is that in reality students will take one maybe two courses with StraighterLine and then the students will take the rest of their courses with us.”

Richard Garrett, a senior analyst for Eduventures, sees the service as part of a broader trend of colleges granting credit for unconventional college experience, provided that the students can pass a test or otherwise demonstrate competency. And that raises the question, he says, “what is the core business of the academy versus what can be outsourced?

 

Jensen Comment
It may well be that colleges and universities may soon have to accept transfer credit for these tutors from such places as Fort Hays State University --- http://www.fhsu.edu/

Bob Jensen's threads on education technology --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm

Free online tutorials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials

Free textbooks and tutorials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Question
What is the winner in the debate between "rote learning" and 'inquiry-based" methods of learning mathematics?
Is there an analogy here in the debate between "rules-based" standards and "principles-based" standards of accounting?

"Washington Legislature Gets an Earful About Freshmen's Woeful Math," by Paula Wasley, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 4, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/news/article/4083/washington-legislature-gets-an-earful-about-freshmens-woeful-math?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Sixty professors at the University of Washington have signed an open letter to the Legislature complaining that college freshmen struggle to solve middle-school-level mathematics problems and are “confounded by simple algebra,” the Associated Press reports.

The faculty members hope that the letter, which was distributed to legislators late last week, will influence efforts to revise statewide math standards for public schools.

Some petitioners worry that the state’s new guidelines for math curricula will be shaped primarily by education experts who tend to favor “inquiry-based” methods of instruction that focus on underlying mathematical concepts rather than rote learning of formulas.

Such methods don’t work, contends Clifford F. Mass, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Washington, and have led to an increase in the number of students taking remedial math classes in college.

Not everyone sees the situation as so dire. No professors in the university’s College of Education signed the letter, and, according to an official in the office of the state superintendent of public instruction, the latest data indicate that only 2 percent of Washington public high-school students end up in remedial classes in college.

“Washington math isn’t a disaster,” Ginger Warfield, a lecturer in the university’s math department told the AP. “By many measures, we’re fine, and relative to the rest of the country, we’re much better.”

Jensen Comment
The phrase "relative to the rest of the country" doesn't give Washington much hope in its K-12 math education. That sigh of relief does not take any state very far.

Too Much Need for Remedial Education in College --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#RemedialNeeds

"The race is not always to the richest," The Economist, December 6, 2007 ---
http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10251324

SPOOKED by the effects of globalisation on their low-skilled citizens, rich countries have been pouring money and political energy into education. In the United States, it has been proclaimed that no child will be left behind. Whether this programme, launched by George Bush in 2002, has raised standards will be a big issue in the 2008 presidential election. Next year Britain will introduce ambitious new qualifications, combining academic and vocational study. For the industrial countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), average spending on primary and secondary schooling rose by almost two-fifths in real terms between 1995 and 2004.

Oddly, this has had little measurable effect. The latest report from the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment shows average attainment staying largely flat. This tome, just published, compares the reading, mathematical and scientific progress of 400,000 15-year-olds in the 30 OECD countries and 27 others, covering 87% of the world economy. Its predecessors in 2000 and 2003 focused on reading and maths respectively. This time science took centre stage.

At the top are some old stars: Finland as usual did best for all-round excellence, followed by South Korea (which did best in reading) and Hong Kong; Canada and Taiwan were strong but slightly patchier, followed by Australia and Japan. At the bottom, Mexico, still the weakest performer in the OECD, showed gains in maths; Chile did best in Latin America.

There is bad news for the United States: average performance was poor by world standards. Its schools serve strong students only moderately well, and do downright poorly with the large numbers of weak students. A quarter of 15-year-olds do not even reach basic levels of scientific competence (against an OECD average of a fifth). According to Andreas Schleicher, the OECD's head of education research, Americans are only now realising the scale of the task they face. Some individual states would welcome a separate assessment.

. . .

Letting schools run themselves seems to boost a country's position in this high-stakes international tournament: giving school principals the power to control budgets, set incentives and decide whom to hire and how much to pay them. Publishing school results helps, too. More important than either, though, are high-quality teachers: a common factor among all the best performers is that teachers are drawn from the top ranks of graduates.

Another common theme is that rising educational tides seem to lift all boats. In general—the United States and Britain may be exceptions—countries do well either by children of all abilities, or by none. Those where many do well are also those where few fall behind. A new feature in this year's study is an attempt to work out how differences between schools, as opposed to differences within them, determine performance (see chart). Variation between schools is big in Germany (to be expected, as most schools select children on ground of ability). But results also vary in some countries (like Japan) with nominally comprehensive systems. In top-performing Finland, by contrast, the differences between schools are nearly trivial.

Continued in article

"Let's Get Back to Education in Education," by Rick Fowler, The Irascible Professor, December 11, 2007 ---
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-12-11-07.htm

Education gurus have advocated and public schools have incorporated many new trends aimed at increasing the rankings of U. S. students in many standardized tests given in countries around the world.  From the ideas of writing gurus Glasser and Collins, to portfolios to state guidelines; from literature-based to whole language reading programs; from mapping to thematic approach, from weighted grades to tracking.  However, many if not most of these "cutting edge" programs and quick fixes for educators and education too often end up on the cutting room floor.  These "recipes for success" have cost public schools literally millions of dollars since my first day as an English teacher almost 30 years ago.

Too often "keeping up with the Joneses" is taking precedent over the real problem of maintaining adequate basic education.  Case in point, President Bush and many other politicians seem to believe that the No Child Left Behind act is of utmost importance in improving the performance of our students.  Yet I liken his reasoning to an analogy recently posted on the web:

No Child Left Behind: The football version

1.  All teams must make the state playoffs, and all will win the championship by the year 2014.  If a team does not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be held accountable.

2.  All kids will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time and in the same conditions.  No exceptions will be made for interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities.  ALL KIDS WILL PLAY FOOTBALL AT A PROFICIENT LEVEL.  

3.  Talented players will be asked to work out on their own without instruction.  This is because the coaches will be using all their instructional time with the athletes who aren’t interested in football, have limited athletic ability or whose parents don't like football.

4.  Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept in the 4th., 8th and 11th games.

5.  This will create a New Age of sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimal goals.  If no child get ahead, then no child will be left behind.

I  cringe every time I read about a new educational savior or new educational tool which is introduced supposedly to bring the United States back to respectability in the global markets of learning.  I also think parents and taxpayers would cringe if they knew of the cost of bringing this expert or plan into the district, explaining its merits, and then failing to implement the program because of money restraints or because staff will not buy into it.

What is the matter with traditional methods?  I realize that the computer has been an asset in the classroom.  Yet, it also has led to the near demise of the personal letter, to little or no proofreading, and to a myriad of excuses on deadline day.  Kids are sometimes aghast when I ask them to hand in their rough drafts hand-written and in ink.  I sometimes require  research papers with the title page, body and works cited that must be completed on notebook paper in ink, and either printed or written by hand.  By the looks on their faces it's as if I had assigned the complete memorization of Hamlet's soliloquy, Antony's funeral speech and Shylock's dissertation at the trial to be due in an hour.

. . .

We need to have a complete turnabout as far as knowing what's best for the students in our public schools. Without this change of thought, the implications are indeed frightening.

Continued in the article

Read about dropout rates at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#DropoutRates

Also see Too Much Need for Remedial Learning in College

Does going to college make students better-educated citizens? A new study of more than 14,000 randomly selected college students from across the country concludes that the answer is often no. Not only did many respondents at the 50 participating colleges fail to answer half of the basic civics questions correctly, but at such elite schools as Cornell, Berkeley and Johns Hopkins, the college freshmen scored higher than the college seniors. Josiah Bunting, III, chairman of the National Civic Literacy Board of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), the nonprofit that funded the study, decried “the students’ dismal scores” as providing “high-quality evidence of … nothing less than a coming crisis in American citizenship.” Mike Ratliff, a senior vice president at the ISI spoke to NEWSWEEK’s Pat Wingert about the study’s findings, which were released today.

. . .

How did you pick the participating schools?
We surveyed 14,000 students at 50 schools as part of the largest study ever done on this topic. The University of Connecticut’s Department of Public Policy picked 25 schools on a random basis. Then we oversampled among the most selective schools, and added 25 schools like Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

What did you find?
Basically, we found that the freshmen arriving on campus were not very well prepared to take on their future responsibility as citizens. They earned a failing grade on our test. [The average participating freshman got 51.7 percent of the questions correct.] But after four to five years in college, we found that seniors, as a group, scored only 1.5 percent better than the entering freshmen.

What was most surprising was the finding that at 16 of the 50 schools, the freshmen did better than the seniors. We were startled by the extent of what we call “negative learning.” When courses are not offered or required, the students forget what they knew when they entered as freshmen, and that 16 included some of the best schools in the country, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, Duke.

Continued in article

"We Must Teach Students to Fail Well," by Leah Blatt Glasser, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 1, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/We-Must-Teach-Students-to-Fail/5105/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en 

A poster titled "Freshman Counseling" hangs on the wall in the least conspicuous corner of my office. I inherited it from my predecessor as she gleefully departed. The image, in dungeon-and-dragon style, is daunting.

A tall guard, perhaps the executioner himself, stands masked and towering above a meek first-year student. The guard holds the end of a long chain around the student's neck; on the other side of the desk sits the homely and obese dean in hooded medieval garb, hunched

I recall one semester when that poster, merely a source of amusement for me on my busiest days, took on new meaning. On the first day of classes, I sat in my office on the third floor of the imposing ivy-covered administrative building at Mount Holyoke College, awaiting my first "probationer." The student — let us call her Emily — entered with her head hanging low. Her eyes avoided mine quite deliberately as she gripped the letter outlining her poor performance and the terms of academic probation.

Emily was already shrugging her shoulders and expressing despair, shame, and apology, even before reaching the seat on the other side of my desk. She glanced over at the poster. Ironically, the ominous image served to put her at ease, and we had a good laugh for a moment. "I feel just like that kid," she said. What she learned over the course of the next six months was how to get rid of the executioner and the chain around her neck, the one she had conjured up in her imagination as a result of her failure.

In my role as an academic dean, I frequently meet with students on probation who have not yet learned how to fail and are consequently paralyzed academically. One of the most pivotal skills for a student who wishes to succeed in the academic arena is the ability to fail well.

"Good failing" requires the strength to make use of a self-generated mess. As Anne Lamott explains in Bird by Bird, "perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life." She urges her writers to "go ahead and make big scrawls and mistakes. Use up lots of paper. Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend. ... We need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here."

Of course after the mess, the learning can begin, and that is precisely what the students whom I work with discover. It is a lesson more valuable than the lessons learned in the courses in which they will ultimately earn A's. The energy, even courage, to rethink a failed piece of work, write, rewrite, inquire, and respond to the comments and questions of a critical reader is crucial for anyone aiming to excel in college. Moreover, the shame and embarrassment of producing a less-than-perfect paper or exam becomes a handy shield against the hard work it takes to build on failure.

Unfortunately, more often than not, students placed on academic probation because of a poor performance in their first semester of college resisted turning in an imperfect paper, completing a flawed exam, or appearing in subsequent classes because they were too paralyzed by criticism to prepare or move forward. Their self-defeating actions stem from fear of criticism. In short, they are bad at failing.

How can we turn such students around? To be sure, no matter how much we advise, they may continue to perform poorly in a discipline that doesn't tap their interests or abilities. But the first year of college is a time to discover strengths and weaknesses. The role of a good adviser or dean is to engage the student in dialogue, to encourage her to examine the causes of failure, to give her room for honest self-assessment, and then to guide her toward taking responsibility for improvement.

Simple questions work: What do you think went wrong? What will you do differently? Did you meet with the professor or only communicate through e-mail messages? Did you go to the writing center? Seek the help of the reference librarian? The goal is to help students listen to themselves and make the needed connections so that their failure fuels success.

A good example of "bad failing" is the pattern Emily confessed as she sat before me in shame during our first meeting. In her first semester, Emily said, she had stared in shock at the grades for her papers and exams in each course, and subsequently internalized the low grades (not yet F's) as symbols of her inadequacies rather than as opportunities for growth. While on probation, Emily learned that criticism is the best gift college can provide. Failure can and should be the key impetus for success. A quick review of her experience will serve to demonstrate my point.

I asked Emily which of the courses from her first semester was her favorite. She selected the course for which she received a C-minus. That impressed me. "Great Books," a first-year writing-intensive seminar, opened Emily's eyes to a range of interpretations and analyses of classical texts, and challenged her to read and write more often than she ever had in high school. She loved the reading but dreaded the writing. When her first paper came back with exclamation points and question marks in the margins, and the words "we need to meet" at the top of the first page, Emily hid. Her professor continued to urge her to come in, but that was the last thing she could imagine doing. To her mind, he was the equivalent of the judgmental figure behind the big desk in my poster, and only some guard pulling her along with a chain could have gotten her to that office. Avoiding the professor was her way of erasing the reality of those marked-up papers.

It was as if she had convinced herself that if she ignored the comments on her papers, somehow they weren't really there. So she dutifully continued to hand in her assignments, and each one was worse than the one that came before. Her final grade seemed to her something tragic from which she might never recover. Literature was, after all, the field in which she hoped to major.

A decision had to be made now about whether or not to continue into the second semester of the seminar with the same teacher. "How will you feel if you drop it?" I asked. "Will you miss the discussions and the readings? Were you excited about what you were learning even though the grades were low? Tell me about what you learned."

Continued in article

Tracking undergraduates into graduate school and into adult life
By 2003, 10 years after they had graduated from college, 40 percent of bachelor’s recipients in 1992-3 had enrolled in a master’s, first professional, or doctoral program, according to ” Where Are They Now? A Description of 1992-92 Bachelor’s Degrees Recipients 10 Years Later,”  ( http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2007/2007159.pdf ) a report released Tuesday. The study, by the National Center for Education Statistics, looked a variety of demographic, educational, and employment characteristics, and surveyed graduates. The report also found that about three-fifths of the graduates viewed their undergraduate education as very important to their lives.
Inside Higher Ed, November 1, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/01/qt
Jensen Comment
I have to wonder why about 40% of those surveyed did not find their college education as important in their lives. The report suggests that undergraduate business majors are less likely to return to campus for advanced studies, which when you think about it is not surprising. Of course this no longer applies to accounting majors who must now enroll in graduate programs in order to sit for the CPA examination in most states.

Seven-Course Certificate in Leadership Studies from the University of Iowa
"Teaching a Leader," by Jennifer Epstein, Inside Higher Ed,  June 15, 2010

Career-minded college students (or their concerned and hovering parents) are always in search of surefire ways to make their résumés and transcripts stand out as they try to elbow out classmates for full-time jobs after graduation.

Beyond the grades, internships, student organizations, majors and minors that give employers a sense of what students have learned and what they might be able to do, the University of Iowa will this fall add a seven-course certificate in leadership studies, aimed at making students more attractive to hiring managers in a down

“Leadership is one of the top skills employers say they are looking for looking for,” said Kelley C. Ashby, director of the Career Leadership Academy in the university’s Pomerantz Career Center, which already offers four classes on leadership. “We want students to have the academic component -- various theories of leadership -- and we also want students to have practical experience to apply what we’re teaching them.”

Though the university and its College of Business had for years offered courses on leadership to undergraduates, students and parents seemed to want more, “to know that classes and experiences could translate into something tangible on their transcript,” said David Baumgartner, assistant dean and director of the career center.

Other institutions, including Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, have in the last decade or so introduced leadership certificates open to undergraduates in more than just their business schools.

At Iowa, the certificate will consist of 21 credits -- the equivalent of seven standard Iowa courses. All students will be required to take a core course, “Perspectives on Leadership: Principles and Practices,” developed by faculty in the university’s business, communication studies, education, political science and philosophy departments, as well as by Ashby and a representative of the university’s Office of Student Life. They will also have to choose one pre-approved course from each of the following areas: self leadership, group leadership, communication, cultural competency, and ethics and integrity.

After a student has taken at least three courses, he or she can take on three credits of “experiential course work” -- an internship, on-campus leadership position, or service-learning course. The hope is that the theories of leadership that students learn in the courses will be put into immediate use in leadership positions.

While students generally dive into internships, resident assistant positions or student group presidencies without any specific knowledge on leadership, Ashby said, “we want there to be more intention about why they do what they do when they’re in those positions.”

Ashby said she anticipates that about 50 students will sign up for the core course this fall, but expects that, within a few years, as many as 300 undergraduates might be pursuing the certificate at any one time. So far, she added, there’s no clear pattern of who’s expressing the most interest -- no glut of liberal arts majors hoping to make themselves more employable, and no onslaught of hypercompetitive business majors.

“It’s for students where it’s difficult to see, ‘Where’s my first job?’ and not just for the management majors,” she said. “It’s for the nursing major trying to connect the dots, the student interested in nonprofit management.” The program is being housed in University College, which she described as Iowa’s “kind of miscellaneous college,” rather than being pigeonholed into the College of Business, where the career center is based.

Debra Humphreys, vice president for communications and public affairs at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, said that while “a lot of employers aren’t going to know what this leadership certificate means, a student’s ability to describe or demonstrate what they’ve learned and done could be useful.” At the same time, she added, the certificate could “help the student convey to the employer what they can do.”

But leadership isn’t employers’ top priority in hiring recent graduates, said Ed Koc, director of strategic and foundation research at the National Association of Colleges and Employers. In his group’s latest survey of employers, leadership skills ranked “about 10th on the list -- there are other things employers find more important.”

While the certificate could be “a good idea to the extent that employers looking for leadership would point to the certificate on your resume to say that you ‘have it,’ ” Koc said, “it doesn’t give you a big leg up unless it’s something you’re able to leverage in your interview, if you get one.”

Jensen Comment
One of the main complaints we hear from CPA firms and business corporations that hire accounting graduates is that we're producing graduates with little leadership aptitude and skills.

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.

Video:  Why Accountants Don't Run Startups ---
http://www.justin.tv/startuplessonslearned/b/262670582#r=zWvHyWU~&s=li

ROTC and Military Recruiting and the Solomon Amendment

"Appeals Court Upholds Military Recruiting," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, September 19, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/19/yale

The Solomon Amendment has won another round in court, and the only remaining push against it may have suffered a fatal blow this week when a federal appeals court upheld the constitutionality of the controversial measure.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Solomon Amendment did not infringe on the First Amendment rights of law schools that objected to it. The law threatens to withhold federal funds from institutions that limit military recruiters’ access to campuses, which many law schools historically have done to protest the Defense Department’s discriminatory policies toward gay people.

While Supreme Court rulings on specific laws generally settle matters, a group of Yale University faculty members had a separate challenge to the Solomon Amendment and they won in federal district court, where they focused on the First Amendment protections for academic freedom. The Pentagon appealed that ruling, but the case was on hold during the Supreme Court review. Some critics of the Solomon amendment hoped they had an argument that might work, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit disagreed.

The appeals court ruled that the Supreme Court’s decision last year “almost certainly” rejected the academic freedom argument put forth by the professors. And if it didn’t, the appeals court found that the argument “lacks merit.”

On the question of whether last year’s ruling covered the academic freedom argument, the appeals court noted that — even if not addressed explicitly in the decision — there is evidence that the justices were aware of the argument and were not moved by it. Briefs filed in the case raised the issue, the appeals court said. And the Supreme Court decision noted attempts by critics of the Solomon Amendment “to stretch a number of First Amendment doctrines well beyond the sort of activities these doctrines protect.”

Thus it is “much more likely than not” that the Supreme Court rejected the academic freedom argument, the appeals court said.

On the merits of the argument, the Yale professors didn’t far much better. They had argued that their academic freedom was being violated when they are forced to allow discriminatory employers (in this case the military) to have access to the campus for recruiting. Allowing such discrimination, the professors said, interfered with their academic goals of having a diverse student body and promoting equal justice among their students.

Continued in article

"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

"Getting Our Arms Around Military Education," by Clifford Adelman, Inside Higher Ed, February 29, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/02/29/adelman

Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) has been at it for a while on the inadequacy of veterans’ educational benefits, and is now joined by other lawmakers in a tussle with the Bush administration (http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/02/14/veterans) over ways, and budgets, to ensure subsequent higher education for those who have served the country. The administration would rather expand the transfer of education benefits to spouses and children, and the Department of Defense argues that higher veterans’ benefits would dampen re-enlistment and interfere with something called “force management.” John Merrow recently gave us a fine PBS documentary — with all its biting ironies — on the dilemmas of veterans facing today’s college expenses, and the higher education trade press has followed suit.

But we’re missing something here — on both sides — and Inside Higher Ed’s coverage of the annual meeting of the Council for College and Military Educators this month went a long way to open it up: acknowledgment of the scope and nature of the Voluntary Education Programs of the armed forces. The course taking and degree completion by active duty military while they are on active duty, i.e., before they become veterans, is a huge enterprise, and very much part of “force management.”

How big? Whether the 2006 Voluntary Education enrollment number was the 840,000 Inside Higher Ed was told or the 700,000 figure I’ve been carrying around from the Servicemembers Opportunity Colleges, that’s about 5 percent of total U.S. postsecondary enrollment at all levels—nothing to sneeze at. Nor is the persistence reflected in 28,000 associate degrees, 8,000 bachelor’s degrees, and 9,000 graduate degrees awarded to active duty military in 2006.

But beyond those numbers, standard IPEDS-type information is hard to come by. A significant portion of those 700,000–840,000 enrollments are not counted at all in U.S. Department of Education data because they took place at locations outside the U.S. And virtually none of those who earned degrees are credited with completion under the silly graduation rate formula of the Student Right-to-Know Act because active duty military are part-time students (who are excluded from our Congressional graduation rate formula) who take an average of 7 years to complete associate degrees (our Congressional formula cuts them off at 3 years) and 12 years to complete bachelor’s degrees (our formula cuts them off at 6 years). We can send them to Iraq and Afghanistan to risk IEDs, but God forbid Congress should acknowledge their persistence in learning!

Continued in article

"For-Profit Colleges Are Projected to Sharply Increase Their Share of Adult Students," by Kelly Truong, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 14, 2010 --- http://chronicle.com/article/For-Profit-Colleges-Are/65942/ 

"Want a Higher G.P.A.? Go to a Private College:  A 50-year rise in grade-point averages is being fueled by private institutions, a recent study finds," by Catherine Rampell. The New York Times, April 19, 2010 ---
http://finance.yahoo.com/college-education/article/109339/want-a-higher-gpa-go-to-a-private-college?mod=edu-collegeprep
 

Bob Jensen's grim threads on for-profit universities and the gray zone of fraud ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ForProfitFraud

Some Doctoral Programs Are in Need of Big Change

Jensen Opinion
Accounting educators should closely watch the changes taking place in both the Ed.D.  and Ph.D. programs in colleges of education.

Why can't professional schools of business and political science consider new innovative types of doctoral programs rather than the non-creative (quantitative social science) doctoral programs that dominate the landscape?

Why can't students who aspire to become leaders of schools of business and political science find more relevancy in their doctoral studies and research?

"Doctoral Degrees Rose in 2011, but Career Options Weren't So Rosy," by Stacey Patten, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 5, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Doctoral-Degrees-Rose-in-2011/136133/

American universities awarded a total of 49,010 research doctorates in 2011, a 2-percent increase from 2010, according to an annual survey by the National Science Foundation.

A report describing the survey's findings, released on Wednesday, says that almost three-quarters of all doctorates awarded last year were in science and engineering fields, a proportion that increased by 4 percent from the previous year. During the same period, the number of doctorates awarded in the humanities declined by 3 percent.

That decline was attributed in part to the reclassification of most doctor-of-education degrees as professional rather than research doctorates. Without that decrease in education degrees, the overall number of research doctorates awarded would have exceeded 50,000, said Mark K. Fiegener, a project officer at the NSF.

Mr. Fiegener noted that certain trends were continuing. "There's increased representation of women in all fields, with greater numbers in the hard sciences and engineering," he said. "The same is true with race and ethnicity, but to a lesser degree."

Women continue to become more prevalent with each cohort of doctorate recipients, according to the report. They earned 42 percent of doctorates in science and engineering in 2011, up from 30 percent 20 years ago. The share of doctorates awarded to black students rose to over 6 percent in 2011, up from a little over 4 percent in 1991. And the proportion of Hispanic doctorate recipients increased from a little over 3 percent in 1991 to just over 6 percent last year.

Despite the gains in degree attainment, trends on postgraduate career opportunities appear to reflect the broader economic malaise. The proportion of new doctoral recipients who reported having definite job commitments or a postdoctoral position fell in both the humanities and sciences, and was at the lowest level in the past 10 years.

Meanwhile, the proportion of students who planned to pursue postdoctoral positions continued rising, especially in engineering and social-science fields. Last year more than two-thirds of doctoral graduates in the life sciences, and over half of those in engineering, took postdoctoral positions immediately after graduation.

Five years ago 33 percent of graduates in the humanities had no employment or postdoctoral commitments upon completion; that number rose to 43 percent in 2011.

The report, "Doctorate Recipients From U.S. Universities: 2011," is available on the National Science Foundation's Web site.

"Chemistry Ph.D. Programs Need New Formula, Experts Say," by Stacey Patton, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 10, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Chemistry-PhD-Programs-Need/136235/

The humanities disciplines are not alone in grappling with how to stay relevant and prepare graduate students for jobs that meet the demands of a rapidly changing labor market. Doctoral programs in chemistry need to be overhauled, too, including by reducing students' time to degree, the American Chemical Society says in a new report.

The chemical society released the report on Monday at news conference here at which speakers discussed ways that doctoral training needed to change to meet pressing societal needs and play a greater role in producing new jobs. The report, "Advancing Graduate Education in the Chemical Sciences," focuses on five key areas of graduate education the society says need to be overhauled: curricula, financial support, laboratory safety, career opportunities, and mentoring of postdoctoral students.

Among the recommendations are that programs need to be changed so that students can complete their Ph.D.'s in less than five years and that the chemical society collect and publish data on student outcomes in Ph.D. and postdoctoral programs.

The report is the result of a yearlong review that was conducted by 22 scientists and other experts, mostly from universities but also from industry, that the chemical society appointed to a commission. Bassam Z. Shakhashiri, the chemical society's president, said at the news conference that the report was "long overdue."

According to data from the society, nearly 25,000 jobs have been lost in chemical-manufacturing companies in the United States since 2008, and layoffs continue. Employment patterns are also changing, as chemical companies are hiring fewer new graduates of chemistry Ph.D. programs than in the past. Small businesses are continuing to hire more new chemistry Ph.D.'s but at slow rates.

Experts in the field say they face a conundrum: Innovation in chemistry is declining at the very time that society needs scientists to come up with solutions to problems like climate change and obesity, to further drug discoveries, and to help find ways of improving food generation, infrastructure, and water supplies.

Graduate education in the American sciences, speakers at the news conference said, has not kept pace with global economic, social, and political changes since World War II, when the current graduate-education system evolved.

Among the members of the commission that drafted the recommendations were Larry R. Faulkner, president emeritus of the Houston Endowment and former president of the University of Texas at Austin, who was the panel's chair; Paul L. Houston, dean of the College of Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology, who was the panel's executive director; Hunter R. Rawlings III, president of the Association of American Universities; and Peter J. Stang, a professor at the University of Utah, the 2013 Priestley Medal winner, and editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

 

The commission recommended that:

• Curricula be refreshed to sufficiently prepare students for careers once they graduate. That includes cutting time-to-degree to less than five years, closing gaps in students' ability to communicate complex topics to both technical and nontechnical audiences, teaching students to work more collaboratively across disciplines, and requiring students to learn new science and technology outside of their academic training. Departments also need to be more transparent about the kinds of career opportunities available to their Ph.D. students.
• The current system of financial support for graduate students be overhauled. While student debt was not discussed at length because most students in the field receive research grants and fellowships, the speakers said that the support system now in place rests too heavily on individual research grants and involves serious conflicts between the education of graduate students and the needs of grant-supported research. The committee recommended that federal and state agencies, private foundations, and universities take steps to "decouple" more student-support funds from specific research projects so that students will have better balance between their teaching responsibilities and their research as they seek to finish their degrees in less than five years.
• Departments review the size and mix of students in their programs. While the speakers said it was important to welcome international students, programs need to place a high priority on building "the domestic fraction of their graduate enrollments," especially students from underrepresented minority groups.
• Academic chemical laboratories adopt best safety practices to protect students and other workers. Noting the heavy publicity that laboratory accidents and findings of safety violations have drawn, speakers said that faculty need to lead by example and create a "culture of safety" in campus labs. They also called for uniform lab-safety standards across campuses.
• The American Chemical Society collect and publish data on Ph.D. and postdoctoral student outcomes, organized by department, on time-to-degree, types of job placements, salaries, and overall student satisfaction with the graduate experience and employment outcome.
• Institutions, departments, and faculty mentors take greater responsibility for ensuring that postdoctoral students are integrated into the fabric of the faculty and receive better mentoring to support their professional development.

"This won't be a report that sits on the shelf," said Mr. Shakhashiri. "The ultimate goal is to have action taken."

The chemical society's board has already committed $50,000 for "dissemination activities" to get the word out to faculty, deans, college presidents, policy makers, agencies that provide financial support, industries that employ chemical scientists and engineers, and professional societies. The next phase will begin in 2013

"The Ph.D. Problem On the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy’s self-renewal," by Louis Menand, Harvard Magazine, November/December 2009 ---
http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/11/professionalization-in-academy

Reprinted from The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand. Copyright © 2009 by Louis Menand. With the permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Bass professor of English Louis Menand is a literary critic and intellectual and cultural historian—author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Metaphysical Club and a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He is also a scholar of his discipline (he co-edited the modernism volume in the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism) and of the very notion of the academy itself (Menand edited The Future of Academic Freedom, 1997). His new book, The Marketplace of Ideas, to be published in December by W.W. Norton, is informed in part by his recent service as faculty co-leader in the development of Harvard College’s new General Education curriculum, introduced this fall (the book is dedicated to his colleagues in that protracted task).

In this work, Menand examines general education, the state of the humanities, the tensions between disciplinary and interdisciplinary work, and, in chapter four, “Why Do Professors All Think Alike?” The following excerpts, from the third and fourth chapters and his conclusion, probe the professionalization of a research-oriented professoriate and the practice and consequences of contemporary doctoral education, and the resulting implications for liberal-arts colleges, universities, and the wider society. ~The Editors

It is easy to see how the modern academic discipline reproduces all the salient features of the professionalized occupation. It is a self-governing and largely closed community of practitioners who have an almost absolute power to determine the standards for entry, promotion, and dismissal in their fields. The discipline relies on the principle of disinterestedness, according to which the production of new knowledge is regulated by measuring it against existing scholarship through a process of peer review, rather than by the extent to which it meets the needs of interests external to the field. The history department does not ask the mayor or the alumni or the physics department who is qualified to be a history professor. The academic credential is non-transferable (as every Ph.D. looking for work outside the academy quickly learns). And disciplines encourage—in fact, they more or less require—a high degree of specialization. The return to the disciplines for this method of organizing themselves is social authority: the product is guaranteed by the expertise the system is designed to create. Incompetent practitioners are not admitted to practice, and incompetent scholarship is not disseminated.

Since it is the system that ratifies the product—ipso facto, no one outside the community of experts is qualified to rate the value of the work produced within it—the most important function of the system is not the production of knowledge. It is the reproduction of the system. To put it another way, the most important function of the system, both for purposes of its continued survival and for purposes of controlling the market for its products, is the production of the producers. The academic disciplines effectively monopolize (or attempt to monopolize) the production of knowledge in their fields, and they monopolize the production of knowledge producers as well. This is why, for example, you cannot take a course in the law (apart from legal history) outside a law school. In fact, law schools urge applicants to major in areas outside the law. They say that this makes lawyers well-rounded, but it also helps to ensure that future lawyers will be trained only by other lawyers. It helps lawyers retain a monopoly on knowledge of the law.

Weirdly, the less social authority a profession enjoys, the more restrictive the barriers to entry and the more rigid the process of producing new producers tend to become. You can become a lawyer in three years, an M.D. in four years, and an M.D.-Ph.D. in six years, but the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities disciplines is nine years. And the more self-limiting the profession, the harder it is to acquire the credential and enter into practice, and the tighter the identification between the individual practitioner and the discipline.

Disciplines are self-regulating in this way for good academic freedom reasons. The system of credentialing and specialization maintains quality and protects people within the field from being interfered with by external forces. The system has enormous benefits, but only for the professionals. The weakest professional, because he or she is backed by the collective authority of the group, has an almost unassailable advantage over the strongest non-professional (the so-called independent scholar) operating alone, since the non-professional must build a reputation by his or her own toil, while the professional’s credibility is given by the institution. That is one of the reasons that people are willing to pay the enormous price in time and income forgone it takes to get the degree: the credential gives them access to the resources of scholarship and to the networks of scholars that circulate their work around the world. The non-academic writer or scholar is largely deprived of those things. This double motive—ensuring quality by restricting access—is reflected in the argument all professions offer as their justification: in order to serve the needs of others properly, professions must be accountable only to themselves.

A national conversation about the condition and future of the Ph.D. has been going on for about 10 years. The conversation has been greatly helped by two major studies: “Re-envisioning the Ph.D.,” which was conducted by researchers at the University of Washington, and “Ph.D.s—Ten Years Later,” which was carried out at Berkeley. Both studies identified roughly the same areas where the investigators thought that reform is desirable in doctoral education. These are: interdisciplinarity, practical training, and time to degree.

The studies were necessary in part because data on graduate education are notoriously difficult to come by. Until very recently, departments tended not to track their graduate students very assiduously. Departments knew how many students they admitted, and they knew how many they graduated; but they did not have a handle on what happened in between—that is, on where students were in their progress through the program. This was partly because of the pattern of benign neglect that is historically an aspect of the culture of graduate education in the United States, and it was partly because when some students finish in four years and other students in the same program finish in 12 years, there is really no meaningful way to quantify what is going on. “Are you still here?” is a thought that often pops into a professor’s head when she sees a vaguely familiar face in the hall. “Yes, I am still here,” is the usual answer, “and I’m working on that Incomplete for you.” There was also, traditionally, very little hard information about where students went after they graduated. Graduate programs today are increasingly asked to provide reports on job placement—although, for understandable reasons, these reports tend to emit an unnatural glow. An employed graduate, wherever he or she happens to be working, is ipso facto a successfully placed graduate, and, at that moment, departmental attention relaxes. What happens to people after their initial placement is largely a matter of rumor and self-report.

English was one of the fields surveyed in the two studies of the Ph.D. It is useful to look at, in part because it is a large field where employment practices have a significance that goes beyond courses for English majors. What the surveys suggest is that if doctoral education in English were a cartoon character, then about 30 years ago, it zoomed straight off a cliff, went into a terrifying fall, grabbed a branch on the way down, and has been clinging to that branch ever since. Things went south very quickly, not gradually, and then they stabilized. Statistically, the state of the discipline has been fairly steady for about 25 years, and the result of this is a kind of normalization of what in any other context would seem to be a plainly inefficient and intolerable process. The profession has just gotten used to a serious imbalance between supply and demand.

Up to half of all doctoral students in English drop out before getting their degrees (something that appears to be the case in doctoral education generally), and only about half of the rest end up with the jobs they entered graduate school to get—that is, tenured professorships. Over the three decades since the branch was grabbed, a kind of protective shell has grown up around this process, a culture of “realism,” in which exogenous constraints are internalized, and the very conditions that make doctoral education problematic are turned into elements of that education. Students are told from the very start, almost from the minute they apply to graduate school, that they are effectively entering a lottery. This has to have an effect on professional self-conception.

The hinge whereby things swung into their present alignment, the ledge of the cliff, is located somewhere around 1970. That is when a shift in the nature of the Ph.D. occurred. The shift was the consequence of a bad synchronicity, one of those historical pincer effects where one trend intersects with its opposite, when an upward curve meets a downward curve. One arm of the pincer has to do with the increased professionalization of academic work, the conversion of the professoriate into a group of people who were more likely to identify with their disciplines than with their campuses. This had two, contradictory effects on the Ph.D.: it raised and lowered the value of the degree at the same time. The value was raised because when institutions began prizing research above teaching and service, the dissertation changed from a kind of final term paper into the first draft of a scholarly monograph. The dissertation became more difficult to write because more hung on its success, and the increased pressure to produce an ultimately publishable work increased, in turn, the time to achieving a degree. That was a change from the faculty point of view. It enhanced the selectivity of the profession.

The change from the institutional point of view, though, had the opposite effect. In order to raise the prominence of research in their institutional profile, schools began adding doctoral programs. Between 1945 and 1975, the number of American undergraduates increased 500 percent, but the number of graduate students increased by nearly 900 percent. On the one hand, a doctorate was harder to get; on the other, it became less valuable because the market began to be flooded with Ph.D.s.

This fact registered after 1970, when the rapid expansion of American higher education abruptly slowed to a crawl, depositing on generational shores a huge tenured faculty and too many doctoral programs churning out Ph.D.s. The year 1970 is also the point from which we can trace the decline in the proportion of students majoring in liberal-arts fields, and, within that decline, a proportionally larger decline in undergraduates majoring in the humanities. In 1970-71, English departments awarded 64,342 bachelor’s degrees; that represented 7.6 percent of all bachelor’s degrees, including those awarded in non-liberal-arts fields, such as business. The only liberal-arts category that awarded more degrees than English was history and social science, a category that combines several disciplines. Thirty years later, in 2000-01, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in all fields was 50 percent higher than in 1970-71, but the number of degrees in English was down both in absolute numbers—from 64,342 to 51,419—and as a percentage of all bachelor’s degrees, from 7.6 percent to around 4 percent.

Fewer students major in English. This means that the demand for English literature specialists has declined. Even if a department requires, say, a course in eighteenth-century literature of its majors, the fact that there are fewer majors means that there is less demand for eighteenth-century specialists. But although the average number of credit hours devoted to courses in English literature has gone down over the last 20 years, the number-one subject, measured by the credit hours that students devote to it, has remained the same. That subject is English composition. Who teaches that? Not, mainly, English Ph.D.s. Mainly, ABDs—graduate students who have completed all but their dissertations. There is a sense in which the system is now designed to produce ABDs.

The same trend can be observed in most of the liberal-arts fields. In 1971, 24,801 students received bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and statistics, about 3 percent of all bachelor’s degrees. In 2001, there were 11,171 undergraduate degrees in those fields, less than 1 percent of the total number. Again, it is not that students do not take math; it is that fewer students need specialized courses in mathematics, which are the courses that graduate students are trained to teach. There was a similar fall-off in bachelor’s degrees awarded in the social sciences and history. There was upward movement in only two major liberal-arts areas: psychology and the life sciences. American higher education has been expanding, but the liberal arts part of the system has been shrinking.

The Berkeley study, “Ph.D.s—Ten Years Later,” was based on lengthy questionnaires sent to just under 6,000 people, in six fields, who received Ph.D.s between 1982 and 1985. One of those fields was English. People who received their Ph.D.s in English between 1982 and 1985 had a median time to degree of 10 years. A third of them took more than 11 years to finish, and the median age at the time of completion was 35. By 1995, 53 percent of those with Ph.D.s that had been awarded from 10 to 15 years earlier had tenure; another 5 percent were in tenure-track positions. This means that about two-fifths of English Ph.D.s were effectively out of the profession as it is usually understood. (Some of these people were non-tenure-track faculty, and some were educational administrators. Most of the rest worked in what is called BGN—business, government, and NGOs.) Of those who had tenure, less than a fifth had positions in the kind of research universities in which they had been trained—that is, about 5 percent of all English Ph.D.s. Ph.D.s who began in a tenure-track position took an average of 6.1 years to get tenure. Ph.D.s who began in non-tenure track positions but who eventually received tenure, which about half did, took an average of 8.1 years to get tenure.

The placement rate for Ph.D.s has fluctuated. Between 1989 and 1996, the number of starting positions advertised in history dropped 11 percent; in art and art history, 26 percent; in foreign languages, 35 percent; and in political science, 37 percent. Yet every year during that period, universities gave out more Ph.D.s than they had the year before. It was plain that the supply curve had completely lost touch with the demand curve in American academic life. That meant if not quite a lost generation of scholars, a lost cohort. This was a period that coincided with attacks on the university for “political correctness,” and it is not a coincidence that many of the most prominent critics of academia were themselves graduate-school dropouts: Dinesh D’Souza, Roger Kimball, Richard Bernstein, David Lehman. Apart from their specific criticisms and their politics, they articulated a mood of disenchantment with the university as a congenial place to work.

There were efforts after 1996 to cut down the size of doctoral programs, with apparently some positive effect on the job market. But time-to-degree numbers did not improve. In the sixties, the time-to-degree as a registered student was about 4.5 years in the natural sciences and about six years in the humanities. The current median time to degree in the humanities is nine years. That does not include what is called stop-time, which is when students take a leave or drop out for a semester or longer. And it obviously does not take into account students who never finish. It is not nine years from the receipt of the bachelor’s degree, either; it is nine years as a registered student in a graduate program. The median total time it takes to achieve a degree in the humanities including stop-time is 11.3 years. In the social sciences, it is 10 years, or 7.8 as a registered student. In the natural sciences, time-to-degree as a registered student is just under seven years. If we put all these numbers together, we get the following composite: only about half of the people who enter doctoral programs in English finish them, and only about half of those who finish end up as tenured faculty, the majority of them at institutions that are not research universities. An estimate of the total elapsed time from college graduation to tenure would be somewhere between 15 and 20 years. It is a lengthy apprenticeship.

That it takes longer to get a Ph.D. in the humanities than it does in the social or natural sciences (although those fields also have longer times-to-degree than they once did) seems anomalous, since normally a dissertation in the humanities does not require extensive archival, field, or laboratory work. William Bowen and Neil Rudenstine, in their landmark study In Pursuit of the Ph.D., suggested that one reason for this might be that the paradigms for scholarship in the humanities have become less clear. People are uncertain just what research in the humanities is supposed to constitute, and graduate students therefore spend an inordinate amount of time trying to come up with a novel theoretical twist on canonical texts or an unusual contextualization. Inquiry in the humanities has become quite eclectic without becoming contentious. This makes it a challenge for entering scholars to know where to make their mark.

The conclusion of the researchers who compiled the statistics on English Ph.D.s for the Berkeley study was, See? It’s not so bad! The reason they give for this is the reason that is often heard when the issues of time-to-degree and job placement are raised, which is that most people who get Ph.D.s, whether they end up teaching or not, report high job satisfaction. (Job satisfaction is actually higher among Ph.D.s with non-academic careers than it is among academics, partly because spousal problems—commuting marriages—are not as great outside academia.) And the majority say that they do not regret the time they spent in graduate school (although they have a lot of complaints about the quality of the mentorship they received). Students continue to check into the doctoral motel, and they don’t seem terribly eager to check out. They like being in a university, and, since there is usually plenty of demand for their quite inexpensive teaching, universities like having them. Business is good. Where is the problem?

The effort to reinvent the Ph.D. as a degree qualifying people for non-academic as well as academic employment, to make the degree more practical, was an initiative of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation when it was headed by Robert Weisbuch. These efforts are a worthy form of humanitarianism; but there is no obvious efficiency in requiring people to devote 10 or more years to the mastery of a specialized area of scholarship on the theory that they are developing skills in research, or critical thinking, or communication. Professors are not themselves, for the most part, terribly practical people, and practical skills are not what they are trained to teach. They are trained to teach people to do what they do and to know what they know. Those skills and that knowledge are not self-evidently transferable. The ability to analyze Finnegans Wake does not translate into an ability to analyze a stock offering. If a person wanted to analyze stock offerings, he should not waste his time with Joyce. He should go to business school. Or get a job analyzing stock offerings.

It may be that the increased time-to-degree, combined with the weakening job market for liberal arts Ph.D.s, is what is responsible for squeezing the profession into a single ideological box. It takes three years to become a lawyer. It takes four years to become a doctor. But it takes from six to nine years, and sometimes longer, to be eligible to teach college students for a living. Tightening up the oversight on student progress might reduce the time-to-degree by a little, but as long as the requirements remain, as long as students in most fields have general exams, field (or oral) exams, and monograph-length dissertations, it is not easy to see how the reduction will be significant. What is clear is that students who spend eight or nine years in graduate school are being seriously over-trained for the jobs that are available. The argument that they need the training to be qualified to teach undergraduates is belied by the fact that they are already teaching undergraduates. Undergraduate teaching is part of doctoral education; at many institutions, graduate students begin teaching classes the year they arrive. And the idea that the doctoral thesis is a rigorous requirement is belied by the quality of most doctoral theses. If every graduate student were required to publish a single peer-reviewed article instead of writing a thesis, the net result would probably be a plus for scholarship.

One pressure on universities to reduce radically the time-to-degree is simple humanitarianism. Lives are warped because of the length and uncertainty of the doctoral education process. Many people drop in and drop out and then drop in again; a large proportion of students never finish; and some people have to retool at relatively advanced ages. Put in less personal terms, there is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get. Unfortunately, there is an institutional efficiency, which is that graduate students constitute a cheap labor force. There are not even search costs involved in appointing a graduate student to teach. The system works well from the institutional point of view not when it is producing Ph.D.s, but when it is producing ABDs. It is mainly ABDs who run sections for lecture courses and often offer courses of their own. The longer students remain in graduate school, the more people are available to staff undergraduate classes. Of course, overproduction of Ph.D.s also creates a buyer’s advantage in the market for academic labor. These circumstances explain the graduate-student union movement that has been going on in higher education since the mid 1990s.

But the main reason for academics to be concerned about the time it takes to get a degree has to do with the barrier this represents to admission to the profession. The obstacles to entering the academic profession are now so well known that the students who brave them are already self-sorted before they apply to graduate school. A college student who has some interest in further education, but who is unsure whether she wants a career as a professor, is not going to risk investing eight or more years finding out. The result is a narrowing of the intellectual range and diversity of those entering the field, and a widening of the philosophical and attitudinal gap that separates academic from non-academic intellectuals. Students who go to graduate school already talk the talk, and they learn to walk the walk as well. There is less ferment from the bottom than is healthy in a field of intellectual inquiry. Liberalism needs conservatism, and orthodoxy needs heterodoxy, if only in order to keep on its toes.

And the obstacles at the other end of the process, the anxieties over placement and tenure, do not encourage iconoclasm either. The academic profession in some areas is not reproducing itself so much as cloning itself. If it were easier and cheaper to get in and out of the doctoral motel, the disciplines would have a chance to get oxygenated by people who are much less invested in their paradigms. And the gap between inside and outside academia, which is partly created by the self-sorting, increases the hostility of the non-academic world toward what goes on in university departments, especially in the humanities. The hostility makes some disciplines less attractive to college students, and the cycle continues.

The moral of the story that the numbers tell once seemed straightforward: if there are fewer jobs for people with Ph.D.s, then universities should stop giving so many Ph.D.s—by making it harder to get into a Ph.D. program (reducing the number of entrants) or harder to get through (reducing the number of graduates). But this has not worked. Possibly the story has a different moral, which is that there should be a lot more Ph.D.s, and they should be much easier to get. The non-academic world would be enriched if more people in it had exposure to academic modes of thought, and had thereby acquired a little understanding of the issues that scare terms like “deconstruction” and “postmodernism” are attempts to deal with. And the academic world would be livelier if it conceived of its purpose as something larger and more various than professional reproduction—and also if it had to deal with students who were not so neurotically invested in the academic intellectual status quo. If Ph.D. programs were determinate in length—if getting a Ph.D. were like getting a law degree—then graduate education might acquire additional focus and efficiency. It might also attract more of the many students who, after completing college, yearn for deeper immersion in academic inquiry, but who cannot envision spending six years or more struggling through a graduate program and then finding themselves virtually disqualified for anything but a teaching career that they cannot count on having.

It is unlikely that the opinions of the professoriate will ever be a true reflection of the opinions of the public; and, in any case, that would be in itself an unworthy goal. Fostering a greater diversity of views within the professoriate is a worthy goal, however. The evidence suggests that American higher education is going in the opposite direction. Professors tend increasingly to think alike because the profession is increasingly self-selected. The university may not explicitly require conformity on more than scholarly matters, but the existing system implicitly demands and constructs it.

My aim has been to throw some light from history on a few problems in contemporary higher education. If there is a conclusion to be drawn from this exercise, it might be that the academic system is a deeply internalized one. The key to reform of almost any kind in higher education lies not in the way that knowledge is produced. It lies in the way that the producers of knowledge are produced. Despite transformational changes in the scale, missions, and constituencies of American higher education, professional reproduction remains almost exactly as it was a hundred years ago. Doctoral education is the horse that the university is riding to the mall. People are taught—more accurately, people are socialized, since the process selects for other attributes in addition to scholarly ability—to become expert in a field of specialized study; and then, at the end of a long, expensive, and highly single-minded process of credentialization, they are asked to perform tasks for which they have had no training whatsoever: to teach their fields to non-specialists, to connect what they teach to issues that students are likely to confront in the world outside the university, to be interdisciplinary, to write for a general audience, to justify their work to people outside their discipline and outside the academy. If we want professors to be better at these things, then we ought to train them differently.

Still, as is the case with every potential reform in academic life, there are perils. The world of knowledge production is a marketplace, but it is a very special marketplace, with its own practices, its own values, and its own rules. A lot has changed in higher education in the last 50 years. What has not changed is the delicate and somewhat paradoxical relation in which the university stands to the general culture. It is important for research and teaching to be relevant, for the university to engage with the public culture and to design its investigative paradigms with actual social and cultural life in view. That is, in fact, what most professors try to do—even when they feel inhibited from saying so by the taboo against instrumentalist and presentist talk. Professors teach what they teach because they believe that it makes a difference. To continue to do this, academic inquiry, at least in some fields, may need to become less exclusionary and more holistic. That may be the road down which the debates I have been describing are taking higher education.

But at the end of this road there is a danger, which is that the culture of the university will become just an echo of the public culture. That would be a catastrophe. It is the academic’s job in a free society to serve the public culture by asking questions the public doesn’t want to ask, investigating subjects it cannot or will not investigate, and accommodating voices it fails or refuses to accommodate. Academics need to look to the world to see what kind of teaching and research needs to be done, and how they might better train and organize themselves to do it. But they need to ignore the world’s demand that they reproduce its self-image.

Reprinted from The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand. Copyright © 2009 by Louis Menand. With the permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

This material may not be reproduced, rewritten, or redistributed without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Fewer students major in English. This means that the demand for English literature specialists has declined. Even if a department requires, say, a course in eighteenth-century literature of its majors, the fact that there are fewer majors means that there is less demand for eighteenth-century specialists. But although the average number of credit hours devoted to courses in English literature has gone down over the last 20 years, the number-one subject, measured by the credit hours that students devote to it, has remained the same. That subject is English composition. Who teaches that? Not, mainly, English Ph.D.s. Mainly, ABDs—graduate students who have completed all but their dissertations. There is a sense in which the system is now designed to produce ABDs.

The same trend can be observed in most of the liberal-arts fields. In 1971, 24,801 students received bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and statistics, about 3 percent of all bachelor’s degrees. In 2001, there were 11,171 undergraduate degrees in those fields, less than 1 percent of the total number. Again, it is not that students do not take math; it is that fewer students need specialized courses in mathematics, which are the courses that graduate students are trained to teach. There was a similar fall-off in bachelor’s degrees awarded in the social sciences and history. There was upward movement in only two major liberal-arts areas: psychology and the life sciences. American higher education has been expanding, but the liberal arts part of the system has been shrinking.

The Berkeley study, “Ph.D.s—Ten Years Later,” was based on lengthy questionnaires sent to just under 6,000 people, in six fields, who received Ph.D.s between 1982 and 1985. One of those fields was English. People who received their Ph.D.s in English between 1982 and 1985 had a median time to degree of 10 years. A third of them took more than 11 years to finish, and the median age at the time of completion was 35. By 1995, 53 percent of those with Ph.D.s that had been awarded from 10 to 15 years earlier had tenure; another 5 percent were in tenure-track positions. This means that about two-fifths of English Ph.D.s were effectively out of the profession as it is usually understood. (Some of these people were non-tenure-track faculty, and some were educational administrators. Most of the rest worked in what is called BGN—business, government, and NGOs.) Of those who had tenure, less than a fifth had positions in the kind of research universities in which they had been trained—that is, about 5 percent of all English Ph.D.s. Ph.D.s who began in a tenure-track position took an average of 6.1 years to get tenure. Ph.D.s who began in non-tenure track positions but who eventually received tenure, which about half did, took an average of 8.1 years to get tenure.

The placement rate for Ph.D.s has fluctuated. Between 1989 and 1996, the number of starting positions advertised in history dropped 11 percent; in art and art history, 26 percent; in foreign languages, 35 percent; and in political science, 37 percent. Yet every year during that period, universities gave out more Ph.D.s than they had the year before. It was plain that the supply curve had completely lost touch with the demand curve in American academic life. That meant if not quite a lost generation of scholars, a lost cohort. This was a period that coincided with attacks on the university for “political correctness,” and it is not a coincidence that many of the most prominent critics of academia were themselves graduate-school dropouts: Dinesh D’Souza, Roger Kimball, Richard Bernstein, David Lehman. Apart from their specific criticisms and their politics, they articulated a mood of disenchantment with the university as a congenial place to work.

There were efforts after 1996 to cut down the size of doctoral programs, with apparently some positive effect on the job market. But time-to-degree numbers did not improve. In the sixties, the time-to-degree as a registered student was about 4.5 years in the natural sciences and about six years in the humanities. The current median time to degree in the humanities is nine years. That does not include what is called stop-time, which is when students take a leave or drop out for a semester or longer. And it obviously does not take into account students who never finish. It is not nine years from the receipt of the bachelor’s degree, either; it is nine years as a registered student in a graduate program. The median total time it takes to achieve a degree in the humanities including stop-time is 11.3 years. In the social sciences, it is 10 years, or 7.8 as a registered student. In the natural sciences, time-to-degree as a registered student is just under seven years. If we put all these numbers together, we get the following composite: only about half of the people who enter doctoral programs in English finish them, and only about half of those who finish end up as tenured faculty, the majority of them at institutions that are not research universities. An estimate of the total elapsed time from college graduation to tenure would be somewhere between 15 and 20 years. It is a lengthy apprenticeship.

That it takes longer to get a Ph.D. in the humanities than it does in the social or natural sciences (although those fields also have longer times-to-degree than they once did) seems anomalous, since normally a dissertation in the humanities does not require extensive archival, field, or laboratory work. William Bowen and Neil Rudenstine, in their landmark study In Pursuit of the Ph.D., suggested that one reason for this might be that the paradigms for scholarship in the humanities have become less clear. People are uncertain just what research in the humanities is supposed to constitute, and graduate students therefore spend an inordinate amount of time trying to come up with a novel theoretical twist on canonical texts or an unusual contextualization. Inquiry in the humanities has become quite eclectic without becoming contentious. This makes it a challenge for entering scholars to know where to make their mark.

The conclusion of the researchers who compiled the statistics on English Ph.D.s for the Berkeley study was, See? It’s not so bad! The reason they give for this is the reason that is often heard when the issues of time-to-degree and job placement are raised, which is that most people who get Ph.D.s, whether they end up teaching or not, report high job satisfaction. (Job satisfaction is actually higher among Ph.D.s with non-academic careers than it is among academics, partly because spousal problems—commuting marriages—are not as great outside academia.) And the majority say that they do not regret the time they spent in graduate school (although they have a lot of complaints about the quality of the mentorship they received). Students continue to check into the doctoral motel, and they don’t seem terribly eager to check out. They like being in a university, and, since there is usually plenty of demand for their quite inexpensive teaching, universities like having them. Business is good. Where is the problem?

The effort to reinvent the Ph.D. as a degree qualifying people for non-academic as well as academic employment, to make the degree more practical, was an initiative of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation when it was headed by Robert Weisbuch. These efforts are a worthy form of humanitarianism; but there is no obvious efficiency in requiring people to devote 10 or more years to the mastery of a specialized area of scholarship on the theory that they are developing skills in research, or critical thinking, or communication. Professors are not themselves, for the most part, terribly practical people, and practical skills are not what they are trained to teach. They are trained to teach people to do what they do and to know what they know. Those skills and that knowledge are not self-evidently transferable. The ability to analyze Finnegans Wake does not translate into an ability to analyze a stock offering. If a person wanted to analyze stock offerings, he should not waste his time with Joyce. He should go to business school. Or get a job analyzing stock offerings.

It may be that the increased time-to-degree, combined with the weakening job market for liberal arts Ph.D.s, is what is responsible for squeezing the profession into a single ideological box. It takes three years to become a lawyer. It takes four years to become a doctor. But it takes from six to nine years, and sometimes longer, to be eligible to teach college students for a living. Tightening up the oversight on student progress might reduce the time-to-degree by a little, but as long as the requirements remain, as long as students in most fields have general exams, field (or oral) exams, and monograph-length dissertations, it is not easy to see how the reduction will be significant. What is clear is that students who spend eight or nine years in graduate school are being seriously over-trained for the jobs that are available. The argument that they need the training to be qualified to teach undergraduates is belied by the fact that they are already teaching undergraduates. Undergraduate teaching is part of doctoral education; at many institutions, graduate students begin teaching classes the year they arrive. And the idea that the doctoral thesis is a rigorous requirement is belied by the quality of most doctoral theses. If every graduate student were required to publish a single peer-reviewed article instead of writing a thesis, the net result would probably be a plus for scholarship.

One pressure on universities to reduce radically the time-to-degree is simple humanitarianism. Lives are warped because of the length and uncertainty of the doctoral education process. Many people drop in and drop out and then drop in again; a large proportion of students never finish; and some people have to retool at relatively advanced ages. Put in less personal terms, there is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get. Unfortunately, there is an institutional efficiency, which is that graduate students constitute a cheap labor force. There are not even search costs involved in appointing a graduate student to teach. The system works well from the institutional point of view not when it is producing Ph.D.s, but when it is producing ABDs. It is mainly ABDs who run sections for lecture courses and often offer courses of their own. The longer students remain in graduate school, the more people are available to staff undergraduate classes. Of course, overproduction of Ph.D.s also creates a buyer’s advantage in the market for academic labor. These circumstances explain the graduate-student union movement that has been going on in higher education since the mid 1990s.

But the main reason for academics to be concerned about the time it takes to get a degree has to do with the barrier this represents to admission to the profession. The obstacles to entering the academic profession are now so well known that the students who brave them are already self-sorted before they apply to graduate school. A college student who has some interest in further education, but who is unsure whether she wants a career as a professor, is not going to risk investing eight or more years finding out. The result is a narrowing of the intellectual range and diversity of those entering the field, and a widening of the philosophical and attitudinal gap that separates academic from non-academic intellectuals. Students who go to graduate school already talk the talk, and they learn to walk the walk as well. There is less ferment from the bottom than is healthy in a field of intellectual inquiry. Liberalism needs conservatism, and orthodoxy needs heterodoxy, if only in order to keep on its toes.

And the obstacles at the other end of the process, the anxieties over placement and tenure, do not encourage iconoclasm either. The academic profession in some areas is not reproducing itself so much as cloning itself. If it were easier and cheaper to get in and out of the doctoral motel, the disciplines would have a chance to get oxygenated by people who are much less invested in their paradigms. And the gap between inside and outside academia, which is partly created by the self-sorting, increases the hostility of the non-academic world toward what goes on in university departments, especially in the humanities. The hostility makes some disciplines less attractive to college students, and the cycle continues.

The moral of the story that the numbers tell once seemed straightforward: if there are fewer jobs for people with Ph.D.s, then universities should stop giving so many Ph.D.s—by making it harder to get into a Ph.D. program (reducing the number of entrants) or harder to get through (reducing the number of graduates). But this has not worked. Possibly the story has a different moral, which is that there should be a lot more Ph.D.s, and they should be much easier to get. The non-academic world would be enriched if more people in it had exposure to academic modes of thought, and had thereby acquired a little understanding of the issues that scare terms like “deconstruction” and “postmodernism” are attempts to deal with. And the academic world would be livelier if it conceived of its purpose as something larger and more various than professional reproduction—and also if it had to deal with students who were not so neurotically invested in the academic intellectual status quo. If Ph.D. programs were determinate in length—if getting a Ph.D. were like getting a law degree—then graduate education might acquire additional focus and efficiency. It might also attract more of the many students who, after completing college, yearn for deeper immersion in academic inquiry, but who cannot envision spending six years or more struggling through a graduate program and then finding themselves virtually disqualified for anything but a teaching career that they cannot count on having.

It is unlikely that the opinions of the professoriate will ever be a true reflection of the opinions of the public; and, in any case, that would be in itself an unworthy goal. Fostering a greater diversity of views within the professoriate is a worthy goal, however. The evidence suggests that American higher education is going in the opposite direction. Professors tend increasingly to think alike because the profession is increasingly self-selected. The university may not explicitly require conformity on more than scholarly matters, but the existing system implicitly demands and constructs it.

My aim has been to throw some light from history on a few problems in contemporary higher education. If there is a conclusion to be drawn from this exercise, it might be that the academic system is a deeply internalized one. The key to reform of almost any kind in higher education lies not in the way that knowledge is produced. It lies in the way that the producers of knowledge are produced. Despite transformational changes in the scale, missions, and constituencies of American higher education, professional reproduction remains almost exactly as it was a hundred years ago. Doctoral education is the horse that the university is riding to the mall. People are taught—more accurately, people are socialized, since the process selects for other attributes in addition to scholarly ability—to become expert in a field of specialized study; and then, at the end of a long, expensive, and highly single-minded process of credentialization, they are asked to perform tasks for which they have had no training whatsoever: to teach their fields to non-specialists, to connect what they teach to issues that students are likely to confront in the world outside the university, to be interdisciplinary, to write for a general audience, to justify their work to people outside their discipline and outside the academy. If we want professors to be better at these things, then we ought to train them differently.

Still, as is the case with every potential reform in academic life, there are perils. The world of knowledge production is a marketplace, but it is a very special marketplace, with its own practices, its own values, and its own rules. A lot has changed in higher education in the last 50 years. What has not changed is the delicate and somewhat paradoxical relation in which the university stands to the general culture. It is important for research and teaching to be relevant, for the university to engage with the public culture and to design its investigative paradigms with actual social and cultural life in view. That is, in fact, what most professors try to do—even when they feel inhibited from saying so by the taboo against instrumentalist and presentist talk. Professors teach what they teach because they believe that it makes a difference. To continue to do this, academic inquiry, at least in some fields, may need to become less exclusionary and more holistic. That may be the road down which the debates I have been describing are taking higher education.

But at the end of this road there is a danger, which is that the culture of the university will become just an echo of the public culture. That would be a catastrophe. It is the academic’s job in a free society to serve the public culture by asking questions the public doesn’t want to ask, investigating subjects it cannot or will not investigate, and accommodating voices it fails or refuses to accommodate. Academics need to look to the world to see what kind of teaching and research needs to be done, and how they might better train and organize themselves to do it. But they need to ignore the world’s demand that they reproduce its self-image.

Reprinted from The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand. Copyright © 2009 by Louis Menand. With the permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

This material may not be reproduced, rewritten, or redistributed without the prior written permission of the publisher.

. . .

Still, as is the case with every potential reform in academic life, there are perils. The world of knowledge production is a marketplace, but it is a very special marketplace, with its own practices, its own values, and its own rules. A lot has changed in higher education in the last 50 years. What has not changed is the delicate and somewhat paradoxical relation in which the university stands to the general culture. It is important for research and teaching to be relevant, for the university to engage with the public culture and to design its investigative paradigms with actual social and cultural life in view. That is, in fact, what most professors try to do—even when they feel inhibited from saying so by the taboo against instrumentalist and presentist talk. Professors teach what they teach because they believe that it makes a difference. To continue to do this, academic inquiry, at least in some fields, may need to become less exclusionary and more holistic. That may be the road down which the debates I have been describing are taking higher education.

But at the end of this road there is a danger, which is that the culture of the university will become just an echo of the public culture. That would be a catastrophe. It is the academic’s job in a free society to serve the public culture by asking questions the public doesn’t want to ask, investigating subjects it cannot or will not investigate, and accommodating voices it fails or refuses to accommodate. Academics need to look to the world to see what kind of teaching and research needs to be done, and how they might better train and organize themselves to do it. But they need to ignore the world’s demand that they reproduce its self-image.

Continued in article

"Harvard Offers New Doctorate for School Leaders Who Aim to Shake Up Status Quo," by Peter Schmidt, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 15, 2009 --- Click Here
http://chronicle.com/article/Harvard-Offers-New-Doctorate/48411/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en 

Harvard University today announced a new doctoral program in educational leadership that, in partnership with prominent organizations pushing for change in elementary and secondary schools, will seek to train people capable of bringing about major school reform.

Harvard's new Doctor of Education Leadership Program will be based at its Graduate School of Education and will involve faculty members of that school as well as Harvard's business school and John F. Kennedy School of Government. In their third and final year in the program, students will enter a yearlong residency with a partner organization such as Teach for America, the National Center on Education and the Economy, or one of the nation's largest urban school districts.

The program's mission will be to train top officials of school districts, government agencies, nonprofit groups, and private organizations who will be equipped to shake up the status quo in elementary and secondary education.

"Our goal is not to develop leaders for the system as it currently exists; rather, we aim to develop people who will lead system transformation," Kathleen McCartney, dean of the Graduate School of Education, said in written statement.

The Wallace Foundation has provided Harvard a $10-million grant for the program, enabling the university to operate it tuition-free and to offer its students a cost-of-living stipend. An initial cohort of 25 students is expected to enroll in the program in the fall of 2010.

Bob Jensen's threads on the sorry state of accounting doctoral programs are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms

All is Not Well in Programs for Doctoral Students in Departments/Colleges of Education
The education doctorate, attempting to serve dual purposes—to prepare researchers and to prepare practitioners—is not serving either purpose well. To address what they have termed this "crippling" problem, Carnegie and the Council of Academic Deans in Research Education Institutions (CADREI) have launched the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED), a three-year effort to reclaim the education doctorate and to transform it into the degree of choice for the next generation of school and college leaders. The project is coordinated by David Imig, professor of practice at the University of Maryland. "Today, the Ed.D. is perceived as 'Ph.D.-lite,'" said Carnegie President Lee S. Shulman. "More important than the public relations problem, however, is the real risk that schools of education are becoming impotent in carrying out their primary missions to prepare leading practitioners as well as leading scholars."
"Institutions Enlisted to Reclaim Education Doctorate," The Carnegie Foundation for Advancement in Teaching --- http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/news/sub.asp?key=51&subkey=2266

USC Enters the Picture
Not too long ago, officials at the University of Southern California’s education school approached Katzman about endowing a chair in educational entrepreneurship. Katzman laughed out loud, he admits, about the idea of a chair in “entrepreneurship” housed at an education school, given the reputation of teacher training academies as innovation backwaters. But Gallagher, who has sought to remake the Rossier school since becoming dean at USC in 2000, ultimately sold Katzman on her vision of an innovative education school, noting among other things that she had eliminated both its Ph.D. and Ed.D. programs, refashioned the Ed.D. and re-established a tiny Ph.D. program, and wiped out the college’s undergraduate teacher education program in favor of its master’s program. “We’re not afraid as a faculty to make decisions that are innovative, that we think can solve specific problems, even if no one else is doing them,” Gallagher says. One of those “problems,” she notes, is the “sense of urgency about coming up with innovative solutions to the shortage of teachers in high-need schools.”
Doug Lederman, "Online Learning, Upscale (and Scaled Up)," Inside Higher Ed, September 12, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/09/12/2tor
Jensen Comment
This article also deals with the controversy of for-profit higher education.

Bob Jensen's threads on the current turmoil in various doctoral program areas (e.g., education, accounting, business, and nursing) are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms

How to get more science majors:  Don't be so tough on grades and academic standards
Huge Differences Between Grades in English versus Math Courses
Science students get worse grades than non-science students. No comprehensive data for the distribution of grades around the nation by discipline exists, but in 1998 the College Board surveyed a representative sample of 21 selective institutions to find out how students who took Advanced Placement courses in high school were performing in college. The data show that, when students who got AP credit and were taking second-level college courses (as opposed to intro classes) were compared, non-science students got much better grades. In English courses surveyed, 85 percent of those high-achieving students that were surveyed received A’s or B’s. That’s compared to 54 percent of those students in math courses.Paul Romer, an economics professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, who has studied the issue, wrote in an article for Stanford Business that “the grades assigned in science courses are systematically lower than grades in other disciplines, and students rely heavily on grades as signals about the fields for which they are best suited.” Thus, he concluded, students usher themselves out of the science track.
David Epstein, "So That’s Why They’re Leaving," Inside Higher Ed, July 26, 2006 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/26/scipipeline

What are American universities doing? Many appear to be shifting — rapidly — away from systems that have been widespread in the past, in which three-year degrees were automatically rejected or in which graduates of three-year programs were granted provisional admission, on condition that they take certain courses or perform at certain academic levels.

Daniel D. Denecke, director of best practices for the Council of Graduate Schools, presented data from a recent survey showing that more institutions are shifting to policies in which degrees are evaluated for comparability or applicants are evaluated for whether they can do the work.

Graduate School Policies on 3-Year Degrees

Policy	2005	2006
Do not accept	29%	18%
Provisional acceptance	9%	4%
Evaluate degree for equivalency	40%	49%
Evaluate candidate for competence	22%	29%

The council also asked a question about non-European three-year degrees. The results indicate the universities with the largest foreign graduate populations are more likely to be open to accepting such degrees than are other institutions.

Graduate School Policies on Non-European 3-Year Degrees, 2006

Policy	25 Largest Institutions	Other Institutions	All
Accept	56%	44%	45%
Don’t accept	44%	56%	55%

To non-Americans, the figures suggest that American graduate schools just need to learn more about the qualities of foreign students. Joe Hlubucek, counselor for education and science at the Australian Embassy, said that students from his country generally have no difficulties getting admitted to American graduate programs that have had a decent number of Australians enrolled over the years. “They are very well prepared,” he said.

The skepticism tends to come from an institution that hasn’t had many Australians.

In most of the public sessions, the general theme was one of the need for American flexibility.

Continued in article

Report offers new analysis of strengths of countries in attracting the best foreign talent for higher education

"The Mobile International Student," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, October 10, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/10/mobile

Dear Bob,

One of my colleagues on your ACEM listserv forwarded me the below E-mail, and I wanted to add to some of your responses. This past month, I completed my PhD in accounting from Walden University, one of the schools that you classify into category 4 of online programs. A few things I’d like to add based on personal experience:

Though called an ‘online’ program, the program is more than just online independent study via the internet. As part of the degree requirements, students are required at various points in the program to attend mandatory face to face residencies in which they attend intensive format classes/seminars and take part in research based colloquia with other students in the same program. Students are in close interaction with each other on an academic and social level, including your reference of ‘having a beer together’ which some type 4 programs may lack. A vast majority of the faculty I worked with all have PhD’s from schools that are considered ‘top tier’ business schools. Not only did they hold their degrees from ‘top tier’ schools, but they also hold full-time senior faculty appointments at other top tier major business schools. These faculty members have their own reputations to uphold, and wouldn’t be involved in this type of program signing off on dissertations if they didn’t believe in the quality of the work and quality/merit of this type of program. I would also agree that at present, many people may not recognize this type of education as comparable and put someone starting out at a disadvantage if looking at major schools for tenure-track placement, but the number of people who DO recognize it as comparable is growing at a good clip. Over the long-run I do feel that at some point it will be equally recognized. As anything different, it will just take time and a concentration of alumni to show that their teaching/research skills are comparable, if not better, as you state in your post.

As someone who has been through this program, I would wholeheartedly recommend it for someone who needs/desires a PhD but can’t enroll into an onsite program because of whatever the personal reason may be.

Regards,

Mitch Franklin

 Jerry Trites pointed out that the Walden faculty listing is at http://www.waldenu.edu/c/Schools/Schools_294.htm

April 6, 2007 reply from Steve Doster [sdoster@SHAWNEE.EDU]

I graduated from Argosy’s DBA program (management major—the accounting major was added a few years later) in about 2002 and was very pleased with the program. My experience was that the 1 to 2 week on-site course format that involved a considerable amount of pre and post study was much more useful, less work, and more satisfying than the exclusively on-line courses. Two of my colleagues have since enrolled Argosy’s DBA—Accounting program and are satisfied with program.

Steve Doster, DBA, CPA, CMA
Professor, Accounting & Management
Shawnee State University
Portsmouth, OH 45662

Hello Richard,

Thank you for your message. I apologize for the delayed response.

You can view a sampling of faculty for Walden's School of Management at: http://www.waldenu.edu/c/Schools/Schools_294.htm 

Unfortunately, I do not have access to personal information on our alumni. However, all of our dissertation are published through ProQuest and I suggest a search with the keyword "walden" for recent works.

I would suggest starting with About Walden: http://www.waldenu.edu/c/About/About.htm  to get a better sense of what the university is about and our students. Under Publications, you can access Walden Ponder (university newsletter) and Walden (alumni magazine). I've also attached a copy of a recent edition of our alumni accolades from the School of Management:

KAM Curriculum Guides: http://inside.waldenu.edu/c/Student_Faculty/StudentFaculty_2149.htm 

I hope this information is helpful. Please let me know what additional information I can provide for you.

Richard J. Campbell
School of Business
218 N. College Ave.
University of Rio Grande
Rio Grande, OH 45674
Voice:740-245-7288
http://faculty.rio.edu/campbell 

In the modern age of technology and distance education, Europe has led the United States in the granting of "professional doctorates." It's important in disciplines where there are extreme shortages of doctoral graduates, such as accountancy, finance, and nursing, to keep a close track on this trend in Europe. Some of Europe's programs are of questionable academic quality from the standpoint of research and scholarship. Everybody has life experience. Academic credentials require a whole lot more. Those prepared for "careers outside academia" may soon apply for jobs "inside academia." Vanity doctorates are not the same things as Vanity Press publishing.

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:

1. 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
    
2. 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
    
3. 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
    
4. 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
    
5. 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

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.

"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.

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

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

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

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.

"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

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

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.”

William M. Chace is professor of English and president emeritus of Emory University. He is the author of The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot and Lionel Trilling: Criticism and Politics. Princeton University Press has just published his autobiography, One Hundred Semesters: My Adventures as Student, Professor and University President, and What I Learned Along the Way. This essay is adapted from the autobiography, covering the period that Chase was president of Wesleyan University. The essay is published here with the permission of the Princeton University Press.

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

"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

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."

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

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

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?

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

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:

• A federal appeals court barred Southern Illinois University’s law school from enforcing its anti-bias rules against a Christian legal group.
• A federal judge’s orders led the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to change its anti-bias rules so that they would not preclude recognition of a Christian fraternity.
• The Universities of Georgia and Missouri at Columbia, facing legal threats, recognized Christian fraternities that had previously been considered in violation of anti-bias policies.
• Suits arguing that Christian groups are facing discrimination are pending against the Georgia Institute of Technology and Savannah State University.

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).

“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

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 The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons (Hardcover) Changing Practices in Evaluating Teaching: A Practical Guide to Improved Faculty Performance and Promotion/Tenure Decisions (Hardcover) Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education: Preparing Stewards of the Discipline - Carnegie Essays on the Doctorate (Hardcover) Administration & Policy On Becoming a Woman Leader: Learning from the Experiences of University Presidents (Hardcover) by Susan R. Madsen The Academic Chair's Handbook, 2nd Edition (Hardcover) by Daniel W. Wheeler, Alan T. Seagren, Linda Wysong Becker, Edward R. Kinley, Dara D. Mlinek, Kenneth J. Robson Faculty Incivility: The Rise of the Academic Bully Culture and What to Do About It (Hardcover) by Darla J. Twale, Barbara M. De Luca Assessment Update, Progress, Trends, and Practices in Higher Education, Volume 19, No. 4, July-August 2007 (Paperback) by AU, Trudy W. Banta and Associates (Editor) Economically and Educationally Challenged Students in Higher Education: Access to Outcomes: ASHE Higher Education Report, Volume 33, No. 3 (Paperback) by Marybeth Walpole

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