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Take Back the Classroom from PowerPoint
Restrict PowerPoint use in teaching to pictures and videos, writes Jason Fertig. Too much PowerPoint usurps professors' authority and accustoms students to lazy thinking.
Poor PowerPoint use makes good speakers bad, and bad speakers worse. Last week, I expressed my concern with the use of a comic book as a management text. This week, I further my thesis on pedagogical advances that have detrimental effects in the classroom.
The beginning of the fall semester can be a fun and exciting time – new students, new 
classes, new classrooms, and new colleagues. Yet, with all that may be new, there is one thing that is not changing – most of these new classes will involve a song and dance through a sequence of PowerPoint slides.
classes, new classrooms, and new colleagues. Yet, with all that may be new, there is one thing that is not changing – most of these new classes will involve a song and dance through a sequence of PowerPoint slides.PowerPoint can enhance a presentation if integrated properly. Compared to the old slide carousels, PowerPoint is much more efficient for adding images to enhance a presentation. Speakers no longer have to struggle with sequencing tiny, fragile slides in order and lugging around cumbersome projectors. A simple upload from portable storage now produces an endless stream of images. However, as most of us can attest, the majority of PowerPoint presentations across classrooms project much more than pictures. That practice does more harm than good in most cases.
I remember the first time I used PowerPoint in class. The minute my first slide went up, the students’ heads went down and the pens started moving. Pavlov would have been proud, but I was not. Regardless of how many different animations and builds that I tried, the result was the same. As I proceeded to talk, students were more focused on copying down the slides than listening to me speak. If students were so focused on writing down slide contents, why did I have to open my mouth? It would be much easier to walk into the room, play some elevator music in the background, and click through a series of slides.
How to keep students from getting fixated on slide content? Some have suggested that a professor should provide slides beforehand, or that lectures should cover additional information not included on slides. But those are just band-aids to a larger presentation problem: presenters use PowerPoint slides as speaking notes.
Unfortunately, the institutionalized norm across colleges is the projection of the professor’s speaking notes, rather than well-planned visual aids. This manifests itself in several different presentation faux pas:
- Facing the slides for the majority of the time, while occasionally stopping to look at the audience
- The slides driving, rather than the professor. When a lesson takes longer than expected, the professor will feel rushed to get through the next 45 slides in the remaining 5 minutes, thus ensuring that the class will retain neither the rushed content nor the slides that flash through so quickly that there is no chance to make notes.
- (My personal favorite) The projection of a chart that contains either numbers or text in such small font that the speaker resorts to stating, “I know you can’t see this, but….”
The “no speaking notes” point is normally untouched during PowerPoint training, which typically focuses on rules of thumb for content and instructions for animations. These should be secondary to the plan for the slide use in a given presentation. If a professor desires to utilize PowerPoint effectively, he has to take the time to map out the presentation and to determine what visual aids are needed at given points of the lecture. This takes more thought than simply dumping notes into slides and “winging it” in front of class.In addition to weakening the professor’s lecture, PowerPoint accustoms students to lazy thinking. As I noted last week, electronic media has depleted this generation’s ability to read. Feeding students slides only encourages them to read less than they already do. A colleague of mine best described this practice of providing slides and other dumbed-down material (such as comic book textbooks) to students as supplying them with “pre-chewed” material.
Without learning to “chew” material themselves, students can never develop effective reading comprehension skills or critically analyze what they read because their minds simply race through assigned reading. Imagine what Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech would have looked like with PowerPoint projecting on the Lincoln Memorial:
|
I Have a Dream
--- One Day
--- These Truths
|
I witness poor comprehension skills each semester. Over time, I’ve become one of those professors who insist on using original sources rather than texts that spoon-feed pointless terminology (as is often done in qualitative business school classes). Hence, students quickly realize that there are no summary slides or shortcuts for “gaming” my class. In turn, through my assessments (which contain many questions that do not “prime” students with multiple-choice cues), I consistently witness that the biggest difference between my A’s and my F’s is the ability to retain and apply material that was not supplied in bulleted form.
I urge colleagues to replace students’ current academic diet of baby food with a Bit-O-Honey to chomp on for several hours. Provide a discursive essay to read and ask students to draw connections to assigned readings; it will be either sink or swim.
Notorious PowerPoint critic Edward Tufte notes that: “Replacing PowerPoint with [strategically planned handouts] will make presentations and their audiences smarter. Of course full-screen projected images and videos are necessary; that is the one harmless use of PP.” I concur wholeheartedly – PowerPoint has its place in the classroom, but that place is behind the professor, not in front.
Collegiate Press Roundup 9-2-10
Student journalists examine topics from presidential speeches to campus smoking bans.
We present our regular sampling of student journalists and editors, who are gearing up for the new academic year. As most collegiate papers resume regular publication, they weigh in this week on handling miscreant faculty research, President Obama’s
1) The editors of the Harvard Crimson indicate their approval for the university’s handling of a professor found guilty of scientific misconduct.
2) At the
3) One columnist for the Brown Daily Herald welcomes incoming freshmen and urges them to socialize in person, rather than through their Facebook pages.
4) Despite what his predecessors may have done, a staffer for the Daily Texan thinks it’s wrong for
5) As the new academic year commences at the
6) The editors of the Oklahoma Daily are glad that
7) At
8) The monumental proportions of
9) After a summer internship in the Big Easy, a Yale Daily News reporter reflects on the fifth anniversary of hurricane Katrina and the future of
10) The editors of the Florida Independent Alligator take stock of public school students’ limited free speech rights, and note that they don’t pay much attention to
11) In view of increasing public hostility to Islam, the editors of the Emory Wheel urge their university to respond by promoting tolerance and inclusiveness, by showcasing the best that Islamic culture has to offer.
12) At the
Will You Promote Diversity? Virginia Tech Tests Faculty Candidates’ Commitment
A major public university has fashioned a “diversity” litmus test for faculty hiring
Thanks to the diligent reporting of an Argus volunteer, we have an update on the latest efforts to enforce “diversity” on faculty members at Virginia Tech. Before we get to Virginia Tech, however, let’s survey the larger reasons why in September 2010 we are still talking about the effort to advance racial and ethnic understanding by means of this peculiar doctrine.The National Association of Scholars has been a skeptical observer of the “diversity” movement since its emergence in the 1980s as the leading academic rationale for race preferences and other identity-group-based compromises of academic standards. Campus fervor for the diversity ideology has subsided in recent years as trendier causes (such as “sustainability”) have emerged, but the advocates of diversity succeeded over the years in institutionalizing their creed at many colleges and universities. They were especially successful in promoting “commitment to diversity” as a job requirement for college presidents and provosts.
Over time that has given rise to a situation in which higher education administration is dominated to the point of saturation by “diversiphile” administrators. In all too many cases, we encounter college administrators of limited scope and ability whose primary claim to academic authority seems to be their inexhaustible enthusiasm for this spent ideology. We think, for example, of the president of California State University at Chico as the archetype of this kind of college president. He is a man whose scholarship consists of books about baseball and golf, and whose vision of higher education is obsessively focused on promoting “diversity.”
Administrative careers based on recycling this old fad, unfortunately, have real consequences. They end up diverting large amounts of time and money to a pursuit that is at best academically irrelevant and more often destructive. “Diversity” is a doctrine that virtually never delivers what it promises. It promises an intellectually enlivened campus; it promises mutual respect among identity groups; it promises open-mindedness; it promises an abiding spirit of fairness. But it delivers dull and sometimes fearful conformity. It restricts the topics people can discuss. It fosters low-level resentment, self-doubt, and a victim-mindset. It erodes self-confidence and breeds a testy defensiveness among both its supposed beneficiaries and its advocates. It lowers academic standards from the admissions office to the classroom. And it makes the American college campus synonymous with a hypocritical unfairness: an unfairness sensed by nearly everyone, but that few dare to articulate.
What to do when your own career is inexorably tied to promoting an ideology that sounds nice in the abstract but that has proven over three decades of implementation not to work as advertised? Their all-too-typical answer is to blame the faculty and to blame the students for their lamentable lack of zeal in embracing the beautiful ideals of diversity. If only we could get the faculty to really really really embrace diversity, it would work. It would have to! If these diversiphiles sometimes sound like disappointed cultists who can’t figure out why the flying saucer didn’t arrive on schedule, well…
This brings us back to Virginia Tech, where indeed the flying saucer didn’t arrive and the diversiphile administrators who seem to have no other ideas to turn to keep doubling down on their favorite concept.
In the Last Episode
In March 2009 we broke the unwelcome news that the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences (CLAHS) had imposed a political test on candidates for promotion and tenure: candidates were to prove the value of their “contributions to diversity.” We called on Virginia Tech to repudiate this violation of academic freedom. We were joined in our criticism by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), our affiliate the Virginia Association of Scholars, and the editors of the Virginia Tech student newspaper.
Charles Steger, Virginia Tech’s president, seemed to take these admonitions to heart, and he indicated that the college would “rework” its policy. But just weeks after his announcement, the dean of the college, Sue Ott Rowlands, quietly assured the CLAHS faculty that “our commitment to equity and inclusive excellence has never been stronger,” and promised a “soon-to-be-unveiled strategic diversity plan.”
The strategic plan came out in December 2009. We gave it a thorough sifting in “Virginia Tech Reasserts ‘Diversity’ Folly” (Part 1 and Part 2).
A Step Further
Last year Virginia Tech contented itself with trying to make its existing faculty tremble before the gods of diversity. This year, the University is taking it a step further, seeking to ensure that only those who play the game get faculty appointments in the first place. To this end it has fashioned a “diversity” litmus test for faculty hiring. In March, the university issued a 51-page document Faculty Search and Screen Procedures: Resources for Search Committees (Including Sample Forms, Letters, Interview Questions), (FSSP) that put forth techniques intended to boost the number of women and minority candidates for faculty appointment while staying narrowly clear of anti-discrimination laws. In this context, the word “diversity” operates as magical shield—although it won’t stop us.
The FSSP strategies for creating a “diverse pool of applicants” include some old standbys in the diversity industry:
- Use campus-based networks, such as the Black Caucus, Hispanic Caucus, the Advance program, and your college’s diversity committee(s).
- Contact historically Black, Hispanic, Asian & Tribal colleges for new Ph.D. lists.
- Use the Minorities & Women Doctoral Directory, and others like it
- Use author names in journals to identify possible candidates of color and women
Of somewhat greater interest is the list of questions to be used in checking candidates’ references. Search committees are asked, for example, to ask referees to “Describe the candidate’s efforts and successes in recruiting, retaining, and advancing women and minorities in programs or organizations in which he or she has been involved, or in advancing diversity issues in other ways.” A section in the “Resources for Search Committees” document specifies lawful and unlawful questions to ask during interviews. It is unlawful, for example, to ask, “Of what country are you a citizen?” or any questions regarding race. But questions about diversity efforts are legal and operate as a kind of code for finding out what is otherwise forbidden to ask.
How to Detect Unbelievers
Last week the 51-page FSSP gave birth to a new one-page baby. The College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences sent out a memo to employees, “Diversity Related Questions for Search Committees to Consider Using.” The link gives a copy of the original text. Below we offer an annotated (“fisked”) version, with the original text in boxes followed by our out-of-the-box comments.
Diversity Related Questions for Search Committees to Consider Using
Preface
Diversity is a strong value in our college.
Let’s start with an elementary point. What does “diversity” mean in this context? When the memo declares, “Diversity is a strong value in our college,” does it mean:
- “We value the variety in the academic programs we offer – ranging from Air Force ROTC to Music to Science and Technology,” or
- “We value the spectrum of talent among our faculty – some excel at textile manufacturing, some are experts on ‘supervenience and realism,’ and some direct campus plays such as Topgirls,” or
- “We value discussing a number of different and competing viewpoints.”
Of course, it doesn’t mean any of these in the minds of the CLAHS memo-writers or their intended audience. The narrowing of the word “diversity” to mean the promotion of racial, ethnic, and sexual variety is actually a serious loss precisely because it marginalizes all these other—intrinsically more important—forms of diversity.
Just in case Forest Gump, Candide, or another one of nature’s innocents shows up, the CLAHS website does have an official definition of diversity, one that we dissected here.
Below we offer possible questions related to diversity that you may wish to ask during job interviews.
These are “possible” questions that search committees “may want to ask.” We suspect that the members of faculty search committees can take a hint.
Such questions can help identify candidates who will work proactively to increase the diversity of the student body, faculty, and administration and create an environment where diverse people are welcomed and respected.
Actually, the result is likely the opposite. Such questions put every candidate on alert that Virginia Tech will scrutinize them for conformity to this dogma. Putting these questions into the interview is a way of teaching the prospective faculty member what idols to bow to. Job-hungry candidates aren’t usually deterred by such things. Too much is at stake for them to forego potential employment just for the satisfaction of plain speaking. So they do the prudent thing and recite the diversity pledge of allegiance. Does this sound like it conduces to “an environment where diverse people are welcomed and respected”? We would hope that people of all backgrounds would be welcomed and respected on a college campus, where respect is meted out for talent and actual achievement. Instead, Virginia Tech offers pre-fabricated “respect.” Asking questions like the ones CLAHS recommends also assumes that the candidate has already embraced this idea and leaves no room for thoughtful disagreement. There is an affront to freedom of conscience buried in this procedure. Should a public university make commitment to the dogma of diversity a condition of hiring?
Questions
Concepts and attitudes
1. Most University websites say something about an interest in promoting diversity. What do such statements mean to you?
We wonder what would happen to the candidate who misinterprets the code and uses the occasion to express enthusiasm for genuine intellectual diversity. The candidate could say something like, “Website statements such as Virginia Tech’s—‘We affirm the value of human diversity because it enriches our lives and the University. We acknowledge and respect our differences while affirming our common humanity’—encourage me. They let me know that the university is dedicated to the plurality of thought and differing points of view, and civil discussion of controversial and unpopular ideas, provided they are grounded in reasoned argument and evidence. Diversity is an outward measure of academic freedom, and I look forward to working with colleagues who benefit from Virginia Tech’s robust commitment to it.”
Teaching
2. Can you tell us about how you work with diverse students in your classroom?
Let’s continue imagining our Blissfully Unaware Candidate [BUC] fielding these questions. He (or she) answers:
“My students have been extremely diverse. I’ve taught students from Southern farms and Northern cities, libertarians and socialists, hockey players and vegans, virtuoso violinists and single parents, Mennonites and Goths. I teach everyone the same material and give everyone an equal opportunity to debate and disagree.”
3. What readings would you assign in your classes to address issues of diversity?
BUC: “My favorites are Pluralism: the Philosophy and Politics of Diversity,by Maria Baghramian and Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, by Peter Wood.”
4. How does your teaching philosophy reflect your commitment to diversity?
BUC: “I believe a diversity of ideas is essential to the transmission of our civilization’s legacy. Students should read both Nietzsche and Aquinas, learn each side of current public policy debates, and take a variety of subjects. In every course I teach I always present opposing arguments and ask students to weigh them on their merits. Whenever possible I set up in-class debates between students. I keep my own views on controversial matters out of sight to avoid having students attempt to match their opinions to mine and to foster an environment in which students really are free to develop their own assessments. I also challenge students who seem ready to accept a cliché or some popular idea just because it is popular. One of the enemies of intellectual diversity is lazy conformity to common opinion. To promote diversity a teacher needs sometimes to challenge students’ too-easily-achieved agreement with prevailing ideas, especially the ideas prevailing on campus.”
Actions
5. Do you have any thoughts or ideas regarding the recruitment of more diverse students and faculty?
BUC: “People who help increase genuine intellectual diversity on campus should always be welcome. We shouldn’t be afraid to include people we don’t agree with. On the other hand, students and faculty should be recruited strictly on the basis of merit. That can be difficult. Seeing the merit of someone as a teacher and as a researcher who holds views that are very different from one’s own or who perhaps contradicts one of your own cherished opinions requires a certain amount of self-discipline. I’m glad Virginia Tech is so open-minded. Nothing could be worse for a university than its having an ideological filter for faculty appointments.”
6. Do you have any thoughts or ideas regarding retaining diverse students or faculty once they arrive on campus?
BUC: “It’s important for those who hold minority views or who have opinions that some might find provocative to know they are welcomed. A university can’t make students and colleagues respect someone’s ideas. Only good arguments and scrupulous use of evidence accords respect, or that and a winsome attitude. If you argue an unpopular idea, you should expect criticism. A large part of retaining diverse students and faculty members consists not of shielding them artificially from criticism, but ensuring that they have a fair chance to make their cases in a forum that respects the genuine give and take of hard intellectual argument. Those who espouse unpopular ideas don’t necessarily expect to win every argument or to have their ideas adopted by the majority. They thrive when they have the security of knowing they can express and defend their views openly.”
7. What do you see as the most challenging aspects of an increasingly diverse academic community? How would you address them?
BUC: “The two biggest challenges are the instinct to silence unpopular views and the tendency for people to adopt a party line as the path of least resistance. I’ve addressed campus censorship in my classes. I ask students to consider whether it’s ever appropriate to prevent unpopular views from being expressed. They are required to give this some serious thought by looking at case studies, debating one another, and writing papers. Often someone from my class will write about the experience in the student newspaper. Most people ultimately agree that freedom of conscience and freedom of expression should never be stifled by censorship.
The tendency towards passive conformity is more insidious. Students and even faculty members often don’t realize how much they alter their opinions to match the herd and how much of their own individual freedom and creativity they sacrifice just to get along. The instinct to conform may be the biggest challenge to maintaining a diverse academic community. Conformity is, of course, easier to manage than real diversity, and a lot of academic administrators prefer a situation in which everyone is on the same page. Thank goodness that Virginia Tech isn’t that kind of university.
To combat this tendency towards complacent conformity, I think a faculty member ought to unsettle students’ superficial certainties about matters on where there seems a superficial consensus. That means asking probing questions, assigning readings that go against the prevailing views, and inviting guest speakers who advocate such views.”
8. Please discuss your experiences working with underrepresented groups and your thoughts on working with underrepresented groups.
BUC: “I’m not sure I understand the question. What do ‘groups’ have to do with diversity? We achieve intellectual diversity by being open to diverse ideas, not by taking a census. But I have had some experience with groups that don’t have much of a presence on many college campuses. I worked with ROTC students at my last job; I volunteer at the hospice center in my town; I taught for a while in a prison education program; and I recently advised an evangelical Christian group at a college where they were being denied recognition because of their policy of not admitting non-Christians.
What I’ve learned from these experiences is that you need to forget the labels and treat people as individuals in the full complexity of their personal experiences. People are far more complex than the labels society puts on them. Paradoxically, perhaps, I’ve also learned to see commonalities that the labels mask. We are all human. Treating someone as special or different because he is associated with an ‘underrepresented group,’ is a subtle way of subtracting from his humanity. In any case, no one is ‘underrepresented’ in the university because the university isn’t a representative institution. We are all equal in the search for knowledge and the pursuit of truth.”
9. What has been the impact of your efforts in this regard?
BUC: “I guess I’d have to say that only time will tell. The ROTC students are now mostly in Afghanistan and otherwise on active military duty. My friends at the hospice have passed on. The prisoners I taught all had long sentences and are still mostly behind bars. The Christian group got turned down and is meeting off campus without official recognition. So outwardly there isn’t much to show the ‘impact’ of my efforts. But ‘impact’ seems a funny word for this. I am a teacher, not a windshield. We teachers are sometimes more about trying to cultivate in people a deeper understanding, an emerging awareness of things, a quickening of moral and intellectual insight. That inevitably sounds vague but when it works well, we have profound influence. I’m glad Virginia Tech recognizes the nature of my calling.”
Farewell, BUC
BUC, optimist though he is, probably shouldn’t get his hopes up for a career at Virginia Tech. The interviewer, no doubt, would have stopped him at the first answer with an awkward clarification, “Uh, you know, by diversity I actually mean diversity of race, class, gender; you know, the people who have suffered oppression under the exclusionary practices of the university in the past and who today still suffer the legacy of oppression despite our many good attempts to set things right.”
BUC’s chances at other colleges and universities might not be much better. We have singled out Virginia Tech not because it is necessarily the most egregious offender but only because it has been so astonishingly clumsy in laying out its commitment to elevating identity politics above the interests of educating its students and treating its faculty as serious scholars. Virginia Tech offers an especially vivid case of diversiphile administrators proudly and relentlessly taking their one Big Idea to its logical extremis.
If you’re on the hiring committee side of things, take a look at Roger Clegg’s “Half a Dozen Push-Backs for Faculty Hiring Committees.” For faculty members who understand that hiring for “diversity” is really discrimination, Clegg has some helpful talking points you can use.
CLAHS’s new set of interview questions is troubling. Although hiring committees are apparently not required to use it, that the College would give it a stamp of approval as an aid to advancing what the College considers a “strong value,” means that hiring committees probably will use it because they know that succeeding at their jobs means currying favor with campus bureaucrats.
Virginia Tech officials may protest that these documents are guides, not mandates. That is technically true, but CLAHS’s nine-question “guide” and VT’s 51-page “resource” have institutional heft. Virginia Tech’s administrators have left no uncertainty about what they want and it would take a faculty member free of any concern about administrative favor to ignore this protocol. The University’s obsessive need to prove itself in the eyes of the PC police is evident in its tone of repetitive urgency. Asking search committees to “hire for diversity” is bad for candidates, bad for search committees, and bad for a university. By doing so, Virginia Tech reveals a disdain for academic freedom and for the true ideals of the academy.
We call on the Virginia Tech community to recognize the path the University is on and to insist on a return to academic integrity.
FIRE Educates for Free Speech on Campus
FIRE will offer a Free Speech Seminar in NYC on September 14.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (that’s FIRE of course) needs no introduction on this page. FIRE’s outstanding efforts on behalf of academic freedom and First Amendment rights on college campuses continue to inspire our admiration and gratitude, although it’s also an exceedingly sad commentary that such things would need defending as widely as they do. Anyway, FIRE will be adding a new dimension to its activities on September 14 in
University Speaker Series: Arab Feminism, Black Feminism, and "A Southern Queer Love Story"...No Comment
A program on gender and diversity at the University of Richmond will explore "emancipatory ideas of social justice" this fall.
Today's No Comment item is a speaker series at the University of Richmond brought to our attention by an Argus volunteer. The series is sponsored by WILL (the acronym isn't spelled out on the website), "a nationally recognized program for women interested in exploring gender and diversity issues both in and out of the classroom."
WILL Speaker Series
2010–11: Forging Equality: Rights, Realities, and Social Change
"Honor Killings, Veiled Women, and Miss USA: The Road Ahead for Arab Feminism"
Susan Muaddi-Darraj
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Westhampton Center Living Room, 7 p.m.
Despite the long history of Arab feminism, as well as roots of women's independence in Islamic traditions, it appears to many Western civilizations that Arab women are far from liberated. Many of the issues that the West perceives to be important for Arab women to address (honor killings, the veil, polygamy) are either not considered crucial by Arab feminists or are already being addressed in effective ways. Yet the gap of understanding between Arab and western feminists continues to be unbridged; this talk will explore ways of doing so.
Susan Muaddi Darraj is Associate Professor of English at Harford Community College in Bel Air, Maryland, where she is the managing editor of The Baltimore Review. She graduated from Rutgers University, NJ, with a BA and an MA in English literature.
"Land, Memory & Desire: A Southern Queer Love Story”
Paulina Hernandez
Monday, November 8, 2010
Brown-Alley Room, Weinstein Hall, 7:00 p.m.
Paulina Hernandez is the co-director of Southerners on New Ground (SONG), a 17 year old queer & trans southern regional organization that focuses on building, connecting and amplifying the work, lives, and resiliency of people of color, working class, two-spirit, immigrant, disabled and rural LGBTQ folks living, loving and organizing in the South. Her talk will explore some of the themes of this work, as well as the frameworks, stories, imperatives and conditions from which it was borne.
Paulina Hernandez is an LGBTQ activist and co-director of SONG based in Durham, NC. She has a background in farm worker and immigrant rights organizing, youth organizing, anti-violence work, and cultural work. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Third Wave Foundation and Student Action with Farmworkers.
“Still Brave? The Future of Black Feminism”
Patricia Hill Collins
Friday, April 1, 2011
Jepson alumni Center, 7:30 p.m.
Women's Studies and Gender Studies are at an important crossroads. On the one hand, intersectionality, which calls for examining multiple identities across intersections of race, gender, class, age, sexuality, ability, and nationality, is widely accepted as an important approach within gender scholarship. Yet, at the same time, one might ask whether gender scholarship continues to advance emancipatory ideas of social justice. This talk will investigate the contested relationship between intersectionality and emancipatory knowledge.
Professor Collins, Distinguished University Professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, is a social theorist whose research and scholarship have examined issues of race, gender, social class, sexuality and nation. Her iconic first book, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, published in 1990, won the Jessie Bernard Award of the American Sociological Association (ASA) for significant scholarship in gender, and the C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. In 2008, she became the 100th President of the American Sociological Association.
How Scholarships Morphed into Financial Aid
This excerpt from Jackson Toby's latest book, The Lowering of Higher Education in America: Why Financial Aid Should Be Based on Student Performance, will appear in the forthcoming fall issue of Academic Questions (vol. 23, no. 3).
Jackson Toby is professor emeritus of sociology and former director of the Institute for Criminological Research at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 08901; jtoby@rci.rutgers.edu. This article is a condensed version, prepared by Prof. Toby, of chapter six of his latest book, The Lowering of Higher Education in America: Why Financial Aid Should Be Based on Student Performance (Praeger, 2010), reprinted here with the permission of the publisher. The book was prepared with the support of the National Research Initiative of the American Enterprise Institute. A review by Robert Weissberg of The Lowering of Higher Education in America also appears in this issue.
Before World War II, academically excellent students from families unable to afford college for them could apply for scholarships available to outstanding students, but scholarships were scarce. The federal government itself did not then make direct grants to individual high school students to enable them to attend college, as it does now. Thomas Jefferson would doubtless have approved of scholarships to provide educational opportunities to high-ability students to attend, maybe even federal scholarships. In the course of advocating scholarships for able youngsters at the University of Virginia, Jefferson had written, “By that part of our plan [of education in Virginia] which prescribes the selection of the youths of genius from among the classes of the poor, we hope to avail the State of those talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use, if not sought for and cultivated.” [1] It is unlikely that Jefferson would have favored financial aid to students of lesser abilities. And he probably would have been astounded by “athletic” scholarships. His proposal sought students who were intellectually outstanding. Athletic scholarships are not merit-based scholarships in the Jeffersonian sense of rewarding intellectual achievements and potentialities. Varsity athletes who receive scholarships are merely expected to improve the competitive performance of intercollegiate sports teams. Yet athletic scholarships do not break completely with meritocratic values; athletic scholarships are awarded on the basis of previous personal achievements in football, basketball, soccer, or other high school sports, and these achievements require diligent effort as well as native ability. Faculty and students always knew that athletic scholarships existed, but athletic scholarships appeared to be minor deviations from general practice; and some elite universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton didn’t have them at all. In short, winning a scholarship meant substantial previous academic achievement to most people.
The Shift from Scholarships Based on Academic Achievement to Federal Financial Aid
The federal government initiated the shift from “scholarships” to “financial aid” during World War II. On June 22, 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944—commonly known as the G.I. Bill of Rights—one provision of which gave veterans financial resources to attend college. This provision was an expression of public gratitude, not a congressional attempt to change the basis for admitting students to college. Although the bill as a whole was controversial, the educational benefits were not; World War II was ongoing both in Europe and in the Pacific, with the outcome still uncertain. Meanwhile American troops were dying in combat—ultimately more than 400,000 died, and many more were wounded.[2] Providing educational opportunities for servicemen and women who served and survived seemed only right.
However, few officials anticipated how many veterans would take advantage of these educational benefits. By the time the original G.I. Bill ended on July 25, 1956, 7.8 million of the sixteen million World War II veterans participated in an education or training program.[3] In the peak year of 1947, veterans accounted for 49 percent of college admissions.[4] The president of Harvard, James Conant, and the president of the University of Chicago, Robert Hutchins, worried about the educational consequences of admitting large numbers of students based on military service to the country rather than on substantial academic criteria.[5] Their fears proved groundless. Reports from colleges suggested that World War II veterans tended to be more serious students than students admitted directly from high school and actually improved the educational atmosphere of the colleges they attended. Since colleges could not expand facilities and staff quickly enough to accommodate all of the veterans who wished to enroll after demobilization, colleges probably selected the academically best qualified veterans, at least at first. Nevertheless, a precedent was set for nonacademic criteria for financing attendance at college. The transformation of “scholarships” into “financial aid” had begun.
Once aid was no longer moored to academic excellence, as with traditional scholarships, financial need was an obvious first criterion to use. Most traditional scholarships also require financial need for monetary awards. But scholarships awarded to academically excellent students who are needy differ from scholarships to needy students, whatever their academic accomplishments or deficiencies. Mediocre students have an incentive to apply in greater numbers to unselective colleges because they do not perceive either academic or financial obstacles. However, uncontingent financial aid is not an incentive to prepare in high school by studying and doing homework. Of course, those students who want to attend selective colleges like Princeton or Brown have an incentive to prepare academically in order to have a chance for admission For them, financial aid, though sometimes necessary, is not their major incentive. In any case, unselective colleges far outnumber selective ones.
Participating in community service became another basis for awarding student financial aid. For instance, President Clinton gave a speech in 1993 to an enthusiastic New Jersey audience, including nine thousand students, in which he returned to the theme of “investment” in education, a theme he had sounded when he ran for president in 1992. In return for tuition loans to make college attendance more affordable, “we’ll ask you to…help control pollution and recycle waste, to paint darkened buildings and clean up neighborhoods, to work with senior citizens and combat homelessness and help children in trouble.” The audience cheered. Students at the University of New Orleans also cheered later that year when he offered a more specific version of a national service plan.[6] The national service plan turned out to be a relatively small program: only 25,000 community service jobs in 1994, rising to 150,000 in 1997. Nonetheless, President Clinton, a former Rhodes Scholar, was proposing a basis for college attendance that ignored academic criteria.
Testimonials to the personal and economic obstacles that the student overcame, cited by applicants themselves or by letters of recommendation, constitute still another basis for awarding financial aid.[7] One way of looking at these testimonials is as a measure of “effort.” Instead of assessing achievements directly, the admissions officer assesses how hard the student has tried.
Traditional scholarship programs did not disappear. For example, the National Merit Scholarship Program, begun in 1955, awards each year about 8,200 scholarships of $2,500 each to finalists based on their test scores on the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test and other purely academic criteria in the fifty states; the National Achievement Scholarship Program, begun in 1964, awards each year about eight hundred scholarships of $2,500 each to African American finalists based on their test scores on the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test and other purely academic criteria to “honor academically promising high school students who are black Americans and to encourage them to pursue higher education.” Since African American students can compete for National Merit Scholarships as well as National Achievement Scholarships, black students are not limited to the eight hundred scholarship slots reserved for high-achieving black students. Nevertheless, the National Achievement Scholarship Program guarantees that a substantial number of African Americans receive Merit Scholarships in the National Achievement Scholarship Program where the scores of black students are compared with the scores of other black students in their state.
In the science field the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search rewards scientific achievement in high school students handsomely. In 2007, 1,705 students from 487 schools in forty-four states entered the Intel Science Talent Search; their research usually began years earlier. Each of the 300 students named a semifinalist in the Intel Science Talent Search received a $1,000 award for his or her outstanding science research. The top prize is a $100,000 four-year scholarship. The second-place finalist receives a $75,000 scholarship, and the third-prize winner gets a $50,000 scholarship. Fourth- through sixth-place finalists each receive a $25,000 scholarship; seventh- through tenth-prize winners each receive a $20,000 scholarship.[8]
Despite the continued prominence of traditional scholarship programs like the National Merit Scholarship Program and the Intel Science Talent Search, such traditional merit-based programs have been dwarfed by financial aid programs, eligibility for which does not include academic excellence. U.S. Department of Education financial aid programs, both grants and loans, generally subsidize good students and bad students alike in an effort to promote greater access to college. Money given for merit-based scholarships in 2004 was $7.3 billion compared with $39.1 billion granted for need-based “financial aid.”[9]
Why Colleges Need Financial Aid Offices: Processing Grants and Loans
Federal financial aid to students is a mixture of two kinds of subsidies: grants and loans. Consider grants first. They are gifts from American taxpayers that students do not have to repay. In 1972 Congress established Basic Educational Opportunity Grants, later renamed Pell Grants, which awarded money to college students who demonstrated financial need.[10] The Pell program started modestly. In 1973–1974 Pell Grants expended about $236,000,000 (in inflation-adjusted dollars) to subsidize 176,000 students; the minimum award in constant dollars to a student recipient was $248, the maximum was $2,244.[11] By 2007–2008 the Pell Grant program expended $15,498,000,000 to subsidize 5,543,000 students.[12] The low-income college students received Pell Grants in 2007–2008 averaging $2,796 each, at a cost to taxpayers of more than $15 billion, but 600,000 more applicants asked for grants the following year, requiring an additional $3 billion. The politically popular idea of helping needy students get the chance to go to college produced other grant programs that supplement Pell Grants for various categories of students: the Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant (FSEOG) program for undergraduates who are especially needy, the cost of which was $772 million in 2007; the Academic Competitiveness Grant program for first-year college students who have completed a rigorous secondary school program of study; the National Science & Mathematics Access to Retain Talent Grant (National SMART Grant) Program for students whose college major is physical, life, or computer science, engineering, mathematics, technology, or a critical foreign language, and have at least a cumulative 3.0 grade point average on a 4.0 scale; the Federal Work-Study (FWS) program that provides part-time jobs for undergraduate and graduate students helping professors and college staff, which cost the Department of Education $985 million in 2007; and the Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education (TEACH) Grant Program to students who intend to teach in a public or private elementary or secondary school that serves students from low-income families.[13] Congress delegated the task of determining which of millions of student applicants to these various programs of the Department of Education have low enough incomes to justify grants. This is not a simple task.
The Department of Education assigned part of the task of screening students eligible for federal aid to the colleges in which students planned to enroll or were enrolled—and all of the task of counseling them. However, the Department did not want 3,700 different criteria for federal student grants depending on which of the 3,700 colleges a student was in. So the Department developed a form that students in every institution must fill out every year: The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). The Commission on Higher Education set up by Secretary of Education Spellings described the FAFSA form as “longer and more complicated than the federal tax return.”[14] Once students and their parents fill it out, students must mail it to a federal processing center where an experienced staff person evaluates it according to uniform standards. Then it is sent back to the college attended—or to be attended—by the student, indicating the extent of parental financial responsibility, how much the student is expected to earn during the summer, and how much the student is eligible for in grants and loans. The college is entrusted with the task of verifying the information that the student submitted on the FAFSA form by means of documents, such as the income tax returns of parents, and placing copies of these documents in its files. Some of the information that the student must obtain to fill out the FAFSA form for 2008–2009, taken from the official worksheet of the Department of Education, are:
- Your Social Security Number and your parents’ Social Security Numbers if you are providing parent information;
- Your driver’s license number if you have one;
- Your Alien Registration Number if you are not a U. S. citizen;
- 2008 federal tax information or tax returns (including IRS W-2 information) for yourself (and spouse if you are married) and for your parents if you are providing parent information. If you have not yet filed a 2008 income tax return, you can still submit your FAFSA but you must provide income and tax information;
- Records of untaxed income, such as Social Security benefits, welfare benefits (e.g., TANF), and veterans benefits, for yourself, and your parents if you are providing parent information; and
- Information on savings, investments, and business and farm assets for yourself, and your parents if you are providing parent information.[15]
The second form of federal aid is loans. Most federal financial aid— over 70 percent in 2007–2008—consists of loans rather than grants.[16] Unlike Pell Grants, federal student loans are expected to be repaid with interest. Congress considered the total financial aid needed by college students too expensive to justify as gifts; hence subsidized loans of various kinds were authorized to make up the shortfall. The FAFSA form must be filled out by students to determine their eligibility for federally subsidized loans as well as their eligibility for grants. The only collateral for student loans is the prospect of the student’s future earnings from employment after college, presumably out of the higher earnings students receive after graduating from college with skills enhanced by their education—unless parents are cosigners. Consequently, student loans are inherently riskier than mortgage loans because, in the event that students do not repay them, there is nothing to foreclose on. In order to make it possible for students to obtain loans, Congress subsidized Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFEL) loans made by banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions like Sallie Mae, a hybrid private-public company specializing in student loans. Later Congress also established Direct Loans to students made by the Department of Education through the financial aid offices of the colleges where the students were enrolled. All of these loans carry lower interest rates than personal loans that student borrowers can obtain from banks. For FFEL loans from financial institutions, the financial aid office refers the student to Sallie Mae or to another suggested loan organization, and that organization makes the loan, although the Department of Education guarantees its repayment. For Direct Loans, the financial aid office transmits the student’s application for a loan directly to the Department of Education, which makes the loan. In addition, the Department of Education pays the interest on loans to low-income students while they are in college and for 270 days thereafter on both Direct and FFEL loans; the Department also reimburses financial institutions for 97 percent of the principal of the loans made to students if students default—as well as the accrued interest.
As with grants, different loan programs exist and were established to do a variety of things for a variety of reasons: the Federal Perkins Loan program, a low-interest (5 percent) loan for both undergraduate and graduate students with exceptional financial need, made through a college’s financial aid office with Department of Education money; the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFEL); the William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan Program; and PLUS Loans (Parent Loans). All of these loan programs place limits on the amount that students can borrow under their auspices.
What happens when students need more money for college expenses than they can obtain from these federal loan programs? They can take jobs, and many do. They can try to get private loans from banks—not federally guaranteed subsidized loans—carrying higher interest rates because they are riskier. Students take out these private loans (if they can persuade a financial institution to make them, sometimes with the help of their parents as cosigners), usually when they reach the maximum levels of loan eligibility for various programs of federally guaranteed loans and still need money for tuition and other college expenses. Students also use credit cards as high-cost loans. In 2004 the average graduating senior not only had a diploma and payments due on federally guaranteed loans but also credit card debt of $2,864.[17] It is surely higher today. If their parents are willing to help them, parents can obtain loans, including home equity loans, and depending on their credit ratings, PLUS Loans from the Department of Education. PLUS Loans are limited yearly to the cost of attendance minus any other financial aid received by the student.
These details about grants and loans are the reality underlying the seemingly simple idea of providing government money so that needy students can afford college. Federally subsidized student loans enable many students to obtain loans to pay college costs who might otherwise not obtain them, but choosing the right loan from the available options is perplexing, as are other financial planning decisions faced by undergraduates whose parents cannot simply write checks to cover all college expenses. Consequently, virtually all colleges whose students apply for federal financial aid establish financial aid offices to guide students through the labyrinth of financial aid—as well as making realistic plans for loan repayment. Offices of financial aid need not discuss with students their academic performance. Aside from a few relatively small grant programs, federal financial aid—grants and loans—does not depend on academic performance in high school or college except for the flabby requirement of making “satisfactory academic progress.” Making “satisfactory progress” means only that (1) students must maintain a C average or better and (2) they must demonstrate progress toward graduation—in a four-year program taking no more than six years. Congress was concerned in the enabling legislation that federal financial aid should be given to needy students so as to make higher education accessible for them, but Congress did not address seriously the subject of assessing the ability of students to do college-level work.[18]
Even more objectionable from the viewpoint of encouraging academic excellence are those financial aid programs that have reversed the basic idea behind traditional scholarships and target financial aid to students whose past academic records have been deficient. Academic deficiency was renamed “educational disadvantage” so that financial aid could be given to underprepared students without stigmatizing them.
Unintended Consequences: Diplomas to Nowhere and Defaulted Loans
Loans have worse unintended consequences than grants because of their repayment obligation. Even for students who graduate from college with good enough résumés to qualify for well-paying jobs, loans are burdensome at a time of life when they want to marry, have children, and buy homes. More important than the size of the loans is the ability of graduates to obtain jobs with which to pay them off. For students whose college educations did not prepare them well for the job market, the burden of college loans is heavier than for students who studied engineering or pharmacy as undergraduates and obtained well-paying positions immediately after graduating. Some graduates find that they cannot keep up the payments they promised to make. They may be compelled to “default,” sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. Defaulting on student loans means, according to the part of a website on student loans dealing with defaults:
- Your loans may be turned over to a collection agency.
- You’ll be liable for the costs associated with collecting your loan, including court costs and attorney fees.
- You can be sued for the entire amount of your loan.
- Your wages may be garnished. (Federal law limits the amount that may be garnished to 15 percent of the borrower’s take-home pay.)
- Your federal and state income tax refunds may be intercepted.
- The federal government may withhold part of your Social Security benefit payments. The U. S. Supreme Court upheld the government’s ability to collect defaulted student loans in this manner without a statute of limitations in Lockhart v U.S. (04-881, December 2005).
- Your defaulted loans will appear on your credit record, making it difficult for you to obtain an auto loan, mortgage, or even credit cards. A bad credit record can also harm your ability to find a job.
- You won’t receive any more federal financial aid until you repay the loan in full or make arrangements to repay what you already owe and make at least six consecutive, on-time, monthly payments. (You will also be ineligible for assistance under most federal benefit programs.)
- You’ll be ineligible for deferments.
- Subsidized interest benefits will be denied.
- You may not be able to renew a professional license you hold.
- And of course, you will still owe the full amount of your loan.[19]
If one of the main goals of attending college is to help youngsters from low-income families to achieve middle-class status, defaulting on student loans defeats that goal, at least for the time being. The absence of strong academic requirements for federal student loans enables underprepared —albeit economically disadvantaged—students to gain access to college, not to lay the foundation for responsible post-college careers. Carried away by the desire to increase higher educational access for young people, especially from low-income families, successive congresses and successive presidents authorized grants and subsidized loans for college guaranteed by the Department of Education. They ignored the possibility that some students were bad risks. When students defaulted, the taxpayer became responsible for what were subprime student loans—somewhat analogous to subprime mortgages that caused so much trouble to the financial system.
The Department of Education does not utilize available information on the basis of which fairly good predictions are possible about prospects for loan repayment: good high school academic records, high scores on tests of academic aptitude like the SAT or ACT tests, a good credit card repayment history, and, later, college grades. The default rate on private student loans is half the default rate on federally guaranteed student loans; private lenders use assessments of the likelihood of repayment that the Department of Education ignores.
Exacerbating the default problem are college graduates from earlier years who had obtained jobs and had been repaying their loans but were let go when the sub-prime mortgage crisis hit. The national unemployment rate rose in September 2009 to 9.8 percent, the highest in a quarter century. Inevitably more defaults will materialize the longer the recession continues and the poorer the job prospects for college graduates. Such defaults will swell the federal deficit.
If student loans were contingent on the student’s prospects for repaying them, fewer years at college would be wasted by underprepared students unable to repay their loans and fewer loans would be defaulted on. Guaranteed loans that are defaulted on require a taxpayer bailout. With trillions of dollars of questionable loans of all sorts sloshing around the economy, $750 billion of existing federally-sponsored student loans—the current estimated total of those loans, not including private loans and credit card debt—may sound picayune. Yet with every passing year additional student loans are accumulating—and growing more risky. As the late Senator Everett Dirksen is supposed to have said, “A billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” Yes, defaulted subprime student loans cost real money already, and those costs are escalating. A change to merit-based loans to students more likely to repay them would require a changed direction for federal investment in higher education. Such a change would not only offer better prospects for loan repayment to taxpayers but also less destructive consequences for underprepared borrowers. Worth a try?
[1]Notes on Virginia, 1782, The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia (http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/foley/), Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library.
[2]Congressional Research Service, American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics, updated June 29, 2007, http://www.fas.org/press/_docs/RL32492.pdf.
[3]U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (www.va.gov), “Born of Controversy: The GI Bill of Rights,” http://www.gibill.va.gov/GI_Bill_Info/history.htm.
[4]Ibid.
[5]Keith Olson, The G. I. Bill, The Veterans, and The Colleges (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1974).
[6]“President Clinton Unveils His National Service Program,” All Things Considered, Archives of National Public Radio, April 30, 1993.
[7]Clyde Haberman, “20 Triumphant Spirits Win New York Times Scholarships,” New York Times, March 8, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/08/nyregion/20-triumphant-spirits-earn-times-scholarships.html.
[8]Joseph Berger, “Intel Competition Is Where Science Rules and Research Is the Key,” New York Times, March 7, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/07/nyregion/07education.html.
[9]Allan Finder, “Aid Lets Small Colleges Ask, ‘Why Pay Ivy Retail?’” New York Times, January 1, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/education/01merit.html.
[10]Thomas R. Wolanin, Reauthorizing the Higher Education Act: Issues and Options (Washington, DC: Institute for Higher Education Policy, 2003), chap. 3; Michael S. McPherson and Morton. O. Schapiro, The Student Aid Game: Meeting Need and Rewarding Talent in American Higher Education (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
[11]The College Board, Trends in Student Aid 2009 (Washington, DC: College Entrance Examination Board,2008), table 8 (prepared October 2009), “Federal Pell Grant Awards in Current and Constant (2008) Dollars, 1973–74 to 2009–10,” http://www.trends-collegeboard.com/student_aid/3_2_pell_grants_a.html?expandable=0.
[12]Ibid., figure 12a, “Total Pell Expenditures (in Millions), Maximum Pell Grant and Average Pell Grant in Constant (2008) Dollars, and Number of Recipients (in Thousands), 1976–77 to 2008–09,” 14, www.trends-collegeboard.com/student_aid/3_2_pell_grants.html?expandable=0.html?CollapsiblePanel5#table8.
[13]U.S. Department of Education, The Budget for Fiscal Year 2009, “Office of Federal Student Aid, Federal Funds,” “Student Financial Assistance,” 356, http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2009/pdf/appendix/edu.pdf.
[14]U.S. Department of Education, A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education, A Report of the Commission Appointed by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, Washington, DC, 2006, 18, http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/index.html.
[16]Sandy Baum and Kathleen Payea, The College Board, Trends in Student Aid 2008 (Washington, DC: The College Board, 2008), http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/trends-in-student-aid-2008.pdf.
[17]Nellie Mae, “Undergraduate Students and Credit Cards in 2004: An Analysis of Usage Rates and Trends,” study by Nellie Mae, a Sallie Mae student loan company, May 2005, http://www.nelliemae.com/library/research_12.html.
[18]“Satisfactory progress” was defined in Section 484(c) of the Higher Education Act of 1965 as follows:
(c) SATISFACTORY PROGRESS—
(1) For the purpose of subsection (a) (2), a student is maintaining satisfactory progress if—
(A) the institution at which the student is in attendance, reviews the progress of the student at the end of each academic year, or its equivalent, as determined by the institution, and
(B) the student has a cumulative C average, or its equivalent or academic standing consistent with the requirements for graduation, as determined by the institution, at the end of the second such academic year.
(C) Whenever a student fails to meet the eligibility requirements of subsection (a)(2) as a result of the application of this subsection and subsequent to that failure the student has academic standing consistent with the requirements for graduation, as determined by the institution, for any grading period, the student may, subject to this subsection, again be eligible under subsection (a)(2) for a grant, loan, or work assistance under this title.
(B) the student has a cumulative C average, or its equivalent or academic standing consistent with the requirements for graduation, as determined by the institution, at the end of the second such academic year.
(C) Whenever a student fails to meet the eligibility requirements of subsection (a)(2) as a result of the application of this subsection and subsequent to that failure the student has academic standing consistent with the requirements for graduation, as determined by the institution, for any grading period, the student may, subject to this subsection, again be eligible under subsection (a)(2) for a grant, loan, or work assistance under this title.
Any institution of higher education at which the student is in attendance may waive the provisions of paragraph (1) or paragraph (2) of this subsection for undue hardship based on—
(A) the death of a relative of the student,
(A) the death of a relative of the student,
(B) the personal injury or illness of the student, or
(C) special circumstances as determined by the institution
(C) special circumstances as determined by the institution
Congress apparently provided considerable leeway for marginal academic performance.
[19]FinAid, The Smart Student Guide to Financial Aid (www.finaid.org/), “Defaulting on Student Loans,” http://www.finaid.org/loans/default.phtml.
Common Reading Controversy at Brooklyn College
Is Brooklyn College using freshman reading for ideological goals?
In June NAS published a survey of books colleges assigned this year as “common reading.” One book that didn’t make our list is the one Brooklyn College recently announced, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America, by Moustafa Bayoumi. The assignment of this particular book at a school where more than a quarter of the students are Jewish is remarkable. Controversy arose when several concerned academics individually challenged the College’s decision.
Bayoumi teaches “postcolonial literature” in the English department at Brooklyn College. He went to Columbia University for graduate school, where he studied under and became close friends with Edward Said, the Palestinian-American literary theorist who was famous in his hostility toward the West and toward Israel. Said “taught a whole generation of English professors to search for racism in writers (like Jane Austen) who did not think as the professors do” (Edward Alexander, NAS Forum, October 2, 2003).
Bayoumi embraced Said’s resentment of Israel and the West. His most recent book, Midnight on the Mavi Marmara (subtitle: The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How It Changed the Course of the Israel/Palestine Conflict), is a collection of essays on the May 2010 Gaza flotilla raid. Professor Jonathan Helfand, professor of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College, described the anthology in an email as “at best biased, at worst vile propaganda.”
The book that all new Brooklyn College students should have read by now—classes started yesterday—tells the stories of seven young Arab Brooklynites who faced discrimination after September 11. Such discrimination, Bayoumi writes, includes profiling, detentions, denial of due process, and unwarranted wiretapping.
The title question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” is a quote from W.E.B. Dubois’s book Souls of Black Folk (1903). Bayoumi’s theme is that Arabs and Muslims are “the new blacks.” Edward Alexander, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Washington, wrote in a letter to President Gould that the author is trying “to enable young Arab Americans to latch on to the mournful coattails of the black experience.”
Bayoumi’s seven narratives read sometimes like journalism (“Rasha wouldn’t tell me if any physical abuse befell her eldest brother or father...”) and sometimes like fiction:
“911. What’s your emergency?”
“There’s a white couple on a city bus, I think she has a bomb in her purse. It’s a B63 bus, going up Fifth Avenue. The license plate is...”
She wanted to call. She really did, just to make a point, to make them feel the same way—singled out, powerless, discriminated against, a source of irrational fear. But she didn’t call.
As a whole, the book paints a sympathetic picture of the difficulties young Arab and Muslim people living in America may encounter. It employs emotionally charged stories to engage the reader’s compassion (for Muslims) and outrage (at American prejudice). Even when teenage Rasha has an ugly outburst when she spots her jail keeper post-prison at a Chili’s in Times Square (“you are a f—ing a—hole, and you will always be a f—ing a—hole”), the reader is invited to empathize with her. She and her family have just spent three months in prison for no apparent reason.
The book’s afterword is perhaps its most problematic part. As Werner Cohn, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, wrote to the Brooklyn College president:
I have now had a look at the book in question. While much of it is interesting and informative, the "afterword" is a harshly-worded polemic against US foreign policy and against Israel. To believe the author, the problems of Brooklyn Arabs arise from U.S. imperialism.
Before reading the book, Cohn had written a previous letter expressing his concern. The Dean, Donna Wilson, responded to him, “Rest assured that Brooklyn College values tolerance, diversity, and respect for differing points of view in all that we do.” Cohn wrote on his blog, “Naturally I was happy to learn of Dean Wilson's commitment to tolerance, to diversity, and, most of all, to respect for differing points of view,” and after reading the book, he was even more convinced that students need another perspective.
If this is required reading for all of your students, it needs to be balanced by other points of view. Any other course of action will amount to indoctrination and subversion of education.
Indeed, in the afterword, the author links discrimination against Arabs in America to “U.S. foreign policy interests in the Middle East.” Bayoumi quotes Hannah Arendt on the “’boomerang effects’ of imperialism”: when a country is “colonizing” another country, it tends to turn inward and assert power over the people who came from the colonized country. Bayoumi encapsulates American policy in the Middle East as follows:
For several long decades and through a series of security pacts, arms sales, military engagements, covert actions, and overt wars, the United States has followed a course that supported one dictatorial regime after another, sought control of the natural resources of the region, attempted to forge client states amenable to U.S. interests, and, with the cooperation of native elites, engaged in a policy of neorealist stability at the expense of the aspirations of the vast majority of people who live in the region. The core issue remains the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination.
Abigail Rosenthal, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Brooklyn College, also wrote to President Gould to express her objection. The problem is not the “common reading” concept, she explained, but the message sent to students when they see that the College has endorsed this particular author and his point of view. “It smacks of indoctrination,” Rosenthal wrote.
Why was How Does It Feel to be a Problem? chosen as Brooklyn College’s common reading in the first place? Dean Wilson said the College typically selects “memoirs (a genre familiar to students) set in New York City, often reflecting an immigrant experience, and written by authors who are available to visit campus.” She and those in the English Department who chose the book thought the stories of young Arab Brooklynites “may be familiar to our students, their neighbors, or the students with whom they will study and work at Brooklyn College.” Freshman students are required to respond to the reading by writing about their own experiences.
Perhaps this is a multicultural effort by the college to show sensitivity to Arab and Muslim people. The book fits squarely in the most popular category of common books on NAS’s list: “Multiculturalism/Immigration/Racism.” And Dean Wilson describes the “Meet the Author” event as “a lively discussion about diversity and inclusiveness in Brooklyn and at the College.” But if the concern is for sensitivity and inclusiveness, what about those students who identify with the United States or support the state of Israel? How does it feel to them to be a problem?
We agree with those who find the assignment of this polemical book as common reading troubling. While much of How Does It Feel to be a Problem? seems a straightforward telling of stories, its central purpose is clear. It aims to establish Arab and Muslim Americans as victims and indict American society for making them so. By assigning this book as the sole one to be read by incoming undergraduates, most of whom will have little of the knowledge needed to evaluate its claims, Brooklyn College opens itself to the charge that it is using what should be an important education experience for ideological goals – a charge which the evidence of our study indicates could be made against a great many other colleges and universities as well.
A common reading program should be an occasion to assign books whose intrinsic worth and lasting importance almost every educated person would affirm. The NAS is currently compiling a list of recommended books for college common reading programs. Look for it and an updated edition of the 2010 Beach Books database in September.
We hope Brooklyn College will take a cue from our list and improve its selection next year.
Question of the Week: How Many Colleges Should You Apply To?
To answer, leave a comment on this article, email us, or respond via Facebook or Twitter (no more than 140 characters).
This week's Question of the Week is
How Many Colleges Should Students Apply To?
Last Friday we started a "Question of the Week" series. We'll have a new higher-education-related question every week. To answer, leave a comment on this article, email Ashley Thorne at thorne@nas.org, or respond via Facebook or Twitter. Keep it Twitter length: no more than 140 characters. We'll gather up the answers and post them so you can see what others had to say. And if you answer via Twitter, we'll retweet you!
Readers' responses to last week's question, Why did you choose the college you attended/attend? are posted on the NAS Blog.
Atlas Black Shrugs
The first comic book textbook combines management jargon and theories and packages them into a story about a slacker student's attempt to become an entrepreneur.
College students are studying less and less. The last thing they need is a pat on the back from academics for doing just that. Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened last week at Inside Higher Ed with the site’s positive article on the use of a graphic novel (i.e. comic book) as a management text.
Professors Jeremy Short, Talya Bauer, and David Ketchen authored two comic books titled Atlas Black: Managing to Succeed and Atlas Black: Management Guru in response to what they feel is a market filled with ineffective management textbooks. These comics work the standard principles of management concepts into the comic book story of slacker student Atlas Black’s attempt to become an entrepreneur. While I applaud the authors’ creativity and effort, I contend that the product only lessens the credibility of my already questionable academic discipline.
As a management professor, I do agree that the popular management textbooks are deeply flawed in their content and approach. Successful entrepreneur and master teacher at the Acton School of Business, Jeff Sanderfer, best evaluated such texts over at the
The most notable flaw is the story’s reinforcement of the futility of teaching management to a classroom of undergraduates. The Atlas character is portrayed as disinterested in school; the lessons that he learns are all from his real-world attempts to start a business. To further this point, when Atlas visits his management professor to ask for advice on starting a business, his professor first advises him to get an accountant and lawyer. His professor then picks several words at random from a management textbook glossary, sprinkles in a few articles and conjunctions, and cranks out this memorable quote:
Business school isn’t really about the mechanics of starting a business. The idea of this class is to help you analyze environments for the long haul and to learn how to analyze individuals and conditions related to your firm that might lead to long-term competitive advantage for organizations and their employees.
In other words, “my class is about teaching material to the wrong students at the wrong time with the hope that they will remember the material when it is the right time, but I really don’t care because I have tenure and my research matters more anyway.”
This sounds more like the Onion than a serious attempt to teach management principles.
Atlas’s tale also unintentionally conveys the culture of entitlement and grade inflation that is prevalent in the modern college. The Inside Higher Ed article missed the mark by characterizing Atlas as “a bit of a slacker.” In fact, the Atlas character is a completely clueless immature “boy” – weeks late on rent, sleeps late, does not pay attention in class, and wears t-shirts and jeans to a career fair.
At one point in the story, Atlas needs money and takes a job delivering pizza for Pilgrim Pizza. Part of his new job involves wearing a pilgrim costume on delivery runs, which causes teasing from friends and thoughts of “I have to get a better job.” The job is certainly goofy, but it is also an honest attempt to put money in a college student’s pocket. Given Atlas’s initial weak job history and poor work ethic, he has to start somewhere – an idea lost on many of today’s college cohort. The condescension shown towards his delivery job furthers the message of the inflated worth of college students on the job market.
Grade inflation comes into play with the admission that clueless Atlas has a 2.76 GPA. A friend he annoys in class responds, “I predict you’ll be getting a C on the next exam.” So the Atlas character, who appears to have retained nothing from his classes, is still a “C” student, not an “F” student. I cannot imagine the work it takes to fail a course at his university. Thus, this comic book unknowingly supports the bottom-up phenomenon of grade inflation, which enables students to graduate college without demonstrating much competency in anything.
Aside from the content issues with Atlas, the obvious issue of using comics in higher education cannot go unaddressed. Short justifies the graphic novels as a response to “boring textbooks” and as an attempt to create a text that is “more like a movie,” which will better engage students. The Inside Higher Ed article further cites praise from the authors’ students on how Atlas is “easily comprehendible” compared to other “long-winded” textbooks (while also trying to convey that the comics have some rigor by noting that there are “paragraphs of text on certain pages.”)
But business students have enough visual stimulation. They need more time with rigorous texts instead of facing a steady diet of terminology and in-class videos. But where are the rigorous management texts?
Ideally, “management” has the most value in the classroom when the students are all practicing managers. Yet, most students who enroll in management courses will not practice management for several years, if ever. Imagine how effective a “Principles of Parenting” class would be for a class full of singles. Therefore, I advocate a different approach – the historical perspective.
As business historian Dan Wren notes in his book, The Evolution of Management Thought, it is too lofty to expect the students to learn the concepts of management now and to integrate those fragmented concepts when needed at a much later date. By teaching management through history, students are not expected to be competent managers off the bat. Instead, they receive de facto experience through the stories of management practice from ancient through modern times.
There are many text options to this historical approach. Wren’s text is effective at integrating the practice of management over time with the development of management as an academic discipline. For a more practical approach, Professor H.W. Brands’s book, Masters of Enterprise, offers a series of entrepreneur biographies, from John Jacob Astor to Oprah Winfrey. In the end, the goal of using history in management education is to infuse teaching management with the principles of a good liberal education – providing students with broad knowledge of the world around them, both past and present.
The Inside Higher Ed article states that reading Atlas Black provides students with the “basics of business management.” The book does no such thing. It provides students with the basic academic terminology of the management discipline through a medium that is best suited for a middle school or high school student. The practice of using entertaining texts combined with vapid content further contributes to producing what Mark Bauerlein calls “The Dumbest Generation.”
To be fair, I enjoy the use of entertainment in the classroom when appropriate, and my former students can certainly attest to that. However, I strongly caution against this trend of overdoing it to the point that learning is compromised for a few laughs.
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- Last on 08/27/2010
Collegiate Press Roundup 8-26-10
Student journalists have a look at the Ground Zero mosque controversy, reducing your carbon footprint and the pitfalls of "sexting."
We present our regular sampling of student journalists and editors, who are gearing up for the new academic year. This week, our writers examine perils of “sexting,” opposite views on the Ground Zero mosque and the reasons why college students take longer to mature nowadays.
1) A former staff writer for the Daily Pennsylvanian offers some thoughts on male-female disparities and why some aspects of that matchup will never change.
2) The regular sex columnist for the Cornell Daily Sun tells readers what to expect from her corner of the paper in the coming academic year.
3) At the UNC Chapel Hill, the editors of the Daily Tar Heel assay the state system’s financial straits and the challenges facing the new chancellor just appointed.
4) A staff editorial in UC Berkeley’s Daily Californian cites a poll indicating that, for all of its anti-war activism and liberal politics, the university is surprisingly “military friendly.” This, the editors hope, will help to produce a more “nuanced” public view of the school. Some colorful comments follow.
5) As Dartmouth sophomores prepare to return shortly as juniors, a staffer for The Dartmouth examines their collective maturity level and asks why adulthood seems to take longer to reach these days.
6) For University of Arizona students who are really serious about reducing their carbon footprint’s mark, a columnist for the Daily Wildcat argues that Ecuador provides a sterling example to emulate.
7) As the new school year approaches, a journalist for the University of South Carolina’s Daily Gamecock warns fellow students about the social and legal perils of “sexting.”
8) Just back from her summer as an intern in the British Parliament, a writer for U of M’s Michigan Daily describes the reverse culture shock of her return to life in Ann Arbor.
9) A Miami Student columnist with vivid and painful memories of the 9/11 attacks explains why the proposed Ground Zero mosque should be built elsewhere.
10) A student writing in The Daily Illini at U of I reaches the opposite conclusion, and hails President Obama’s defense of religious freedom.
11) With students about to return for the start of the Fall term, an op-ed writer in UCLA’s Daily Bruin urges the school to get moving on implementing greater equality and gender-neutrality in its undergraduate dorms.
12) A guest columnist in the Indiana Student argues that while capitalism is indeed subject to periodic market failures, the alternative of stifling regulatory bureaucracies would be infinitely worse.
A Regulatory Assault on For-Profit Higher Education
How the attacks on for-profit higher ed are squashing needed competition.
On Friday, June 18, 2010, the U.S. Department of Education published proposed regulations for postsecondary education. Readers submitted eighteen thousand comments. This outpouring of public response reflected surprise and astonishment at the radical 
regulations developed by Deputy Undersecretary of Education, Robert Shireman. After a speech to the national press club by U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), two hearings on for-profit education by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and publication of four years of student loan repayment data by the U.S. Department of Education, the for-profit education industry knew it was in trouble.
regulations developed by Deputy Undersecretary of Education, Robert Shireman. After a speech to the national press club by U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), two hearings on for-profit education by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and publication of four years of student loan repayment data by the U.S. Department of Education, the for-profit education industry knew it was in trouble.These proposed regulations and likely Congressional action are designed to hamper for-profit education companies—many Internet-based—and will have long-term deleterious effects on how higher education is organized, financed, and whom it educates. (Private religious institutions also fear the enhanced interference these new regulations may bring.) It had seemed that such education providers—using new technologies and with access to public capital markets—would help reform of higher education by competition. Those prospects are now very dim.
Beginning in the first months of the Obama administration, Deputy Undersecretary Shireman took control of a process of negotiated rule-making. In doing so he ignored five years of legislative proceedings that in 2008 led to passage of the Higher Education Opportunity Act. Shireman understood that in American public administration, there are two ways to govern: by legislation and by regulation. The rule-making process produced a long list of proposed regulations that bypassed the U.S. Congress and, in effect, proposed a radical new regime with no claim to being representative of accepted practice in American higher education. In that regime there is no place for for-profit education paid for by student loans backed by the U.S. government.
One of those proposals published on June 18 directs the states to develop regulatory procedures that authorize or license degree-granting institutions. The states already require that of institutions authorized by them to offer degree programs. This proposal, however, asks them to engage in licensing institutions not domiciled in their states—i.e. for-profit Internet institutions and any non-profit institutions with online programs. Public universities are exempt.
That particular exemption throws into doubt the constitutionality of regulations aimed at only one sector in a particular industry and may explain why Robert Shireman resigned his position soon after he gave a speech revealing that intention.
In that speech, given on April 28 to the National Association of State Administrators and Supervisors of Private Schools, Shireman observed that the agencies that rate negotiable securities were compromised by the fact that they are paid by the persons who issue them. By analogy, Shireman argued, the system of academic accreditation is fraught with conflicts of interest and “federal and state governments cannot rely on accreditation to assure that consumers and taxpayers are protected…”
Shireman’s solution—perhaps a final solution for for-profit Internet-based higher education—was to utilize a “triad” of regulation that includes the states, the accrediting associations and the federal government.
Then Shireman stated that “we’re working with the inspector general at the department of education, taking a much closer look at data than ever before…”
Those of us who served as political appointees in the U.S. government, as did I in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, are aware that inspectors general do not make agency policy. Shireman was boasting to his audience that he had charged the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Education to threaten to revoke the charter of the largest accrediting association chartered by the U.S. Department of Education. The threat worked, and that association, the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) sent signals to the administration that it would not accredit for-profit Internet institutions and would no longer permit transfer of ownership from failing non-profit colleges to for-profit companies.
Shireman concluded his address by saying “Let’s not shirk our responsibility for regulating the industry.” By “industry,” he was not referring to higher education as a whole. Shireman meant one sector of the “industry”—for profit education.
Other regulations published on June 16 include restrictions on access to Title IV tuition assistance by students attending institutions with high default rates and attempts at defining a standard for “clock hours” of instruction.
In all aspects of his proposals Robert Shireman has revealed his animus toward for-profit education and an enhanced sense of the ability of government to do better what the private sector has proven it does exceptionally well.
The for-profit education industry pays more attention to its students than public institutions do; delivers high quality education products that successfully compete with those same public institutions; and services educational markets that traditional institutions have neglected. No recognition is given to these practices.Private sector education entrepreneurs such as John Sperling (Phoenix), Kaplan (Stanley Kaplan), Bernard Turner (Walden), Glenn Jones (Jones International), Steve Shank (Capella), Herman A. DeVry (DeVry) and literally hundreds of businessman educators have challenged a moribund education establishment to improve its services.
For this Robert Shireman has proposed to hobble them by an additional layer of governance that will increase tuition costs, drive away new companies from entering the education marketplace, and protect public universities from competition.
Robert Shireman may have earned the applause of persons today who share his enthusiasm for an ideology-driven, overreaching government, but current and future generations of parents, grandparents, and students will have to pay a higher price for education because of him.
After his speech on April 28, Robert Shireman became the problem, not the solution, and he resigned. At the time it was said that he intended to resign when he achieved what he set out to do. But, others suggest that he was forced out because he placed the Obama administration’s higher education programs at risk to constitutional challenges and that he gored too many oxen.
The Washington Post, which owns Kaplan Higher Education, saw its stock plummet when the Department of Education published for-profit default rates last week. Others with investments in for-profit education include venture capitalist, Richard Blum (husband of Sen. Diane Feinstein), and University of Phoenix founder John Sperling, who is an associate of George Soros and a supporter of Moveon.org. Then there are the millions of students at for-profit education institutions, not to mention the shareholders of stock in these companies who lost 25% of share value overnight. Within the Obama administration questions are being raised about this attack on for-profit education, which has a high percentage of minority enrollments and is popular with U.S. military personnel. A fighting force ready for immediate deployment doesn’t have the luxury of sitting in classrooms for sixteen weeks.
Traditional higher education’s business model of classroom-based instruction is outmoded and expensive, and by pushing it to accept millions of additional college students will simply cause its collapse—unless there is a relief valve of Internet-based education to service these new students.
Though the technologies that can transform higher education are available to everyone, the culture of higher education is not suited to using those technologies, if they threaten how traditional higher education is governed, conducted and financed. If it suffocates this sector of higher education, the administration will assure the failure of its own education policies.
Richard J. Bishirjian is president of Yorktown University.
New Excellent Programs: Tocqueville Program and Center for Statesmanship
Check out our list of excellent programs as we add new ones at Indiana and Richmond.
One of the ways NAS works for higher education reform is to build and encourage the development of specialized programs that fill a gap in today's college curriculum. Such programs offer courses in subjects that have been largely neglected by mainstream institutions: American history and freedom, Constitutionalism, Western civilization, free markets, Great Books, and civic leadership. NAS has compiled a database of these campus-based programs and lists them on the "Excellent Programs" page on our website. Our chairman Steve Balch helped build many of the nearly 50 listed. We are always updating our Excellent Programs page; check out the newest additions, below. We invite you to browse our list and send the link (http://www.nas.org/polExcellentPrograms.cfm) to interested friends. The list of programs can be accessed by clicking the blue “Excellent Programs” tab on the left sidebar of the NAS homepage. * * *
Directed by Aurelian Craiutu, the program sponsors lectures, prize competitions, round tables to foster an understanding of the central importance of principles of freedom and equality for democratic government and moral responsibility, as well as for economic and cultural life. It seeks to teach students how to ask the right questions about the good society, justice, freedom, responsibility, rights, and duties in light of the ideas that also inspired the Founding Fathers of the American democracy two centuries and a half ago. In the future the program aims to offer undergraduate courses and pre- and post-doctoral fellowships. 
Indiana University – The Tocqueville Program
Website: http://www.indiana.edu/~tcqville/
University of Richmond – The John Marshall International Center for the Study of Statesmanship
Website: http://jepson.richmond.edu/marshall/ 
The John Marshall International Center for the Study of Statesmanship approaches the study and practice of statesmanship through a program that combines scholarly and practical attention to constitutionalism, political economy, politics, and ethical reasoning. At its core is a great-books approach to both understanding and practicing responsible leadership.
The center implements the great-books approach through seminars and conferences and hosts a series of public lecturers from around the world who speak on the problems and prospects of leadership in international perspective. A vital part of the center's work includes visiting post-doctoral fellows who pursue their research within the context of the history of political, legal, economic, and constitutional ideas.
Programs include seminars, conferences, and a series of public lecturers. The center is directed by professors Gary L. McDowell and Terry L. Price.
The Glut of Academic Publishing: A Call for a New Culture
This article will appear in the forthcoming fall issue of Academic Questions (vol. 23, no. 3). A short version of this paper appeared under the title “We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research” in the June 13, 2010 Chronicle of Higher Education.
Academic publishing has already reached a point where too much material of too little substance is being published, and this trend is continuing. The ostensible reason for academic publishing is to communicate useful information to academic peers. But of all papers published in the top scientific journals (i.e., those listed in the citation index ISI Web of Knowledge)—7,279 science and social science journals from 2002 through 2006—only 40.6 percent were cited at least once in the five years following publication.[1] More recent compilations with large databases indicate much the same proportions.[2] Moreover, evidence suggests that social science papers are cited at a significantly lower level. And it should be noted that this includes self-citations: deleting these might lower the number considerably. In 1981, the total number of journals was 74,000 and by 1990 that number had risen to 108,500.[3] By 2003, the total reached 172,000.[4] Yet, we regularly see the creation of new journals in our fields every year. While we have no citation statistics for the large group of lesser journals, it would be a reasonable assumption that they are cited at a much lower level than the 40.6 percent indicated above. And we believe it might be reasonable to ask if some of these journals should continue, or at least be purchased by libraries. This is one area where cost/benefit analysis seems to play no role. One academic at MIT opined that “[i]f the bottom 80% of the literature ‘just vanished,’ I doubt the scientific enterprise would suffer.”[5]The huge expansion of academic publishing has seen a commensurate increase in the number of journals, issues, and pages produced, but with exponential increases in costs. For example, at the UCLA libraries the number of serials increased by 40 percent during the period 1980 to 2000, while annual subscription costs increased by 1200 percent to a staggering $5.8 million (see figure 1). Many university libraries have been forced to cancel a great number of subscriptions or otherwise reduce access to journals. One proposed solution has been to expand online journal production. We have grave misgivings about expanding modes of scholarly output, however, whether print or electronic. Too much literature already exists, much of it weak and redundant, and much of the latter we believe to be encouraged by the widespread de facto policy of academic reward based on bulk rather than on quality. This policy is unethical, is the root of many problems, and should be changed to one that encourages quality and discourages quantity. While our experience is more with science, engineering, medicine, social science, and management, it appears that the humanities have much the same problem. A recent study by Emory English professor Mark Bauerlein, for example, suggests that many articles and monographs in English literature are hardly used.[6]
We view this glut of unutilized and even inconsequential literature as mostly a function of reward systems in universities, research institutes, and funding agencies. Indeed, scholarly publishing may be more about promoting scholars than promoting scholarship.[7] There has long been the notion that “deans can’t read but they can count.” Once confined to research universities, this culture is now prevalent in most institutions requiring publication. Passing the problem to future generations, the urge to publish filters down to trainees such as graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Just as faculty publications are counted as criteria for promotion, students and fellows need to publish to compete in securing their next positions. In some departments at one of our institutions (UCLA), it is actually mandated that a graduate student have two or even three first-author papers published or in press before the dissertation can be approved. The faculty member responsible for these students thus feels a double pressure to proliferate papers from his research group. And as any economist knows, production follows subsidy, the subsidy in this case being academic rewards. This issue has been addressed by several academics, including one of us.[8]
Although the word “crisis” is much overused, we see this glut as already a crisis. Right now there is only a relatively moderate surge, mostly from Europe and North America, but a tsunami of academic papers from China and India written in English is approaching.[9] In 2007, the number of articles from mainland China was 203,016, an increase of 340 percent over the number of articles published in 2000, and this figure is expected to expand as China and India establish world-class universities. [10]
The downsides to the literature glut are manifest:
1. The massive refereeing load that all qualified academics carry. Because there is often so much to review, we suspect that the quality of refereeing is adversely affected. And because of the load, refereeing is now often passed on to less qualified people, even to students.
2. The mountain of redundant and often useless reading one must do to research any topic.
3. The number of dubious/disputable ideas that are published. Because there is far too much to read and carefully consider in contemporary literature, questionable ideas too frequently find their way past referees into print and go unchallenged by immediate commentary in subsequent issues of the journal. We see this dialectic as critical to the search for truth, but some journals do not encourage or even allow commentary. Once an erroneous concept gets into the literature and garners many citations, it becomes much more difficult to correct. And that creates even more glut. For example, an extremely high estimate of the soil erosion rate in Europe appeared in Science. Before it could be corrected, several investigators unknowingly utilized this highly erroneous rate in their own science projects. Close examination showed that the rate was derived recklessly and should have been caught by qualified referees.[11]
4. The financial load on libraries to make all this “information” available to scholars. Continuing to use the present system will mean that libraries will have decreasing resources and some really significant publications may no longer be available (see figure 1).
5. The neglect of the longstanding qualified literature. Because of the headlong rush to publish new material, older literature is not being properly perused. Thus the wheel is continually being reinvented, or perhaps better stated, old wine is being put in new bottles. This lack of attribution to earlier work comes not so much from foolery or knavery as simply from less available time to sift through the extant piles of literature, especially material not yet available electronically.
6. The present system consumes vast amounts of paper. Moreover, the cost of transporting, handling, and properly storing this mass is considerable. The present system is environmentally irresponsible.
7. Most important, the present culture breeds an entrepreneurial careerism, and thence a cynicism that is inimical to the true academic enterprise. Indeed, we find that the present culture to be pseudointellectual because it systematically diverts intellectual activity into more visible but less productive channels.
In short, we find the present system to be inefficient, irrational, unfair, outrageously expensive, and environmentally irresponsible—in two words, unscholarly and unethical.
The entrepreneurial enterprise mentioned above deserves more discussion. It is interesting that some academics who so deplore the entrepreneurial spirit in capitalistic economies can be so entrepreneurial in their own endeavors. And it’s not just for the love of knowledge; it’s often for private gain. As formulated now, the goal of getting many articles into print often becomes more important than making a real contribution. It is thus understandable that new assistant professors tend to ask “How can I get eight (or nine or twelve) publications in the next five years in order to get promotions, tenure and pay increases?” rather than “How can I contribute to scholarship in my field?”
A real contribution to a field often questions conventional wisdom, arguing that some well-established scholars may be in error. Such articles can be difficult to get past referees and editors. Juan Miguel Companario has reviewed many Nobel Prize laureates whose papers were rejected several times before being accepted.[12] These examples range from Svante Arrhenius (1903) to Günter Blobel (1999), and the problem often obtains even for lesser mortals who submit groundbreaking papers.
Methods of producing many papers are well known. The most common is to include just enough contribution to be recognized as such in a single paper—just enough to be reluctantly accepted. These articles are sometimes referred to as “Least Publishable Units” (LPUs). Thus, multiple papers are required to deliver the full message. Rather than being challenged by the work, leaders in the field may in fact be patronized with citations and fawning comments to obtain their favor. The paper is then fleshed out to reach a respectable length. Sequential papers often contain much overlap, a device known as “shingling,” and are usually sent to different journals, sometimes simultaneously. The route to having many papers published can be a low road.[13]
The increasing tendency toward group authorship of papers presents particular problems. While we appreciate the need for teamwork in many instances and applaud the synergy that may accompany that, we recognize that authors are often added as a “courtesy” where an acknowledgment might be more appropriate. No matter how many authors listed, however, we must insist that no paper is worth more than 100 percent. That is, the fractional parts attributed to each author of a paper can add up to no more than one. We sometimes hear empty praise on the order of “X has two hundred publications,” whereas X actually may have only two hundred fractional parts of papers, the sum total being far less than two hundred—and conceivably a very small fraction of that in some instances. However, the cachet of the larger number sometimes overawes academic promotion committees and leaves scholars who write papers on their own at a serious disadvantage.
Much is made, sometimes vacuously, of refereed papers in academia. The fact that a paper is refereed does not necessarily make it good: indeed, there is strong scientific evidence to the contrary.[14] While we hold Science and Nature as role models, poor papers can appear in those publications as well, and classic papers sometimes appear in grey literature. An example in physical geography is a groundbreaking study that changes the way we look at stream processes that was published in a relatively obscure government document.[15] Most journals require only two referees, and there is always a good chance that they may lack sufficient knowledge in the required area or too busy to give the paper their full consideration (as mentioned above) or biased. The latter point is underlined by the recent disclosures of “Climategate.”[16] When the majority of academics in a discipline or field hold a particular view, they may conspire to exclude contrary findings. Indeed, where groupthink and political correctness dominate, a double standard for accepting academic papers for publication may exist.[17] The true worth of a paper is the contribution it makes over a longer period of time, and that’s where citations prove so valuable as a measure of significance for more senior academicians.Because most of the academic enterprise is supported by tax dollars, student fees, and private donations by the public, we believe that as academics we have an obligation, a social contract even, to deliver new knowledge in a rational, reliable, and cost-effective manner. All of this takes on more gravity in the current fiscal crisis in academe. Far beyond the costs of buying marginal journals, universities invest huge amounts to subsidize research (release time, travel, etc.). Perhaps it would be better for those not producing viable research to teach more. And perhaps some institutions should emphasize teaching rather than research.
It is now fashionable to blame commercial publishers such as Elsevier and Springer (the publisher of this journal) for the glut and the expense, but we see this as a symptom of the problem rather than the problem itself, which is an artificial market for often substandard products.[18] Commercial publishers are providing outlets for this flood and doing it well. The limited clientele for many of these highly specialized journals means that the unit cost must be high, another economic reality. Journals like Academic Questions, which come from dues-subsidized and nonprofit professional associations, are often thought to be cheaper, but they too are also becoming expensive. For example, to subscribe to the Journal of Geophysical Research, published by the American Geophysical Union, costs about $6,000 per year. However, we do not give commercial presses a clean bill of health. In conjunction with obtaining the copyright for papers, they often gouge libraries with their monopolistic practices.
The good news in this otherwise dismal picture is that at least two basic quantitative measures of the citation visibility of established journals (as well as the researchers themselves) now exist. The most important is the Citation Impact Factor from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). By this index—essentially an average of how many times an article is cited— Nature and Science score about 30, while most major disciplinary journals score perhaps 1 to 2. But a vast majority of journals score below 1.0, and some are hardly visible by this index. ISI also has another journal index, a “citation half-life” score that indicates the duration of viability of articles—are they classic or ephemeral? Other indices are available, but the ISI is the best known, so we will use it for this discussion.
As with any quantified measures of human ability and accomplishment, there are strong objections to the use of ISI ratings.[19] We quite understand that these measures of journal quality are imperfect (e.g., self-citations, bias by academic specialties, bias for trendy topics such as “critical studies,”), but refinements and improvements continue.[20] However imperfect these numerical measures may be, they are far superior to mere opinions that have too often been colored by self-interest and petty biases. In the departmental setting these dubious criteria were usually those of senior colleagues who made the tenure and promotion decisions concerning younger faculty and advocated the often obscure journals in which the seniors had published.
After ISI ratings became available, it did not escape our notice that there was often little correlation between what ISI indicated to be prestigious and what had theretofore been perceived as prestigious in our departments and universities. Indeed, younger faculty have occasionally been heavily penalized for not publishing in the “right” journals or for choosing the more ethical path of a few meaningful publications in the truly best journals. And conversely, we could point to the thick curricula vitae of senior academics who accumulated publications that propelled them to high rank but contributed very little to the advancement of the academic enterprise.
While we do not endorse discontinuing the publication of journals based solely on ISI ratings, such ratings should be a strong influence. Utility is a commonly accepted criterion and we fail to see much utility in journals that are read, or at least cited, by few people.
It has been widely suggested that new online open access journals will alleviate the situation by taking papers away from the commercial publishers. We doubt it. Again, consider the proliferation of new print journals over the past two decades, which does not seem to have caused a dearth of submissions to already existing journals. We believe that academics can and will supply papers for a seemingly infinite number of journals produced, but at a cost to the quality of the articles published. More ominous are the liabilities peculiar to e-journals that seem to be difficult to overcome. One is the substantial easing of length restrictions due to the elimination of print and paper costs. Science and Nature get much of their clout by the brevity and tightness of article organization and writing, qualities that we strongly suggest other journals emulate. We also wonder if such e-journals will be perceived as “phantom” and ephemeral (indeed, a recent one is actually titled Ephemera). How much time will referees be willing to spend adjudicating such journals, especially if, in the absence of space constraints, their articles become as bloated as we fear they will?
There will then be the problem of rating e-journals, which might take a somewhat different form than print journals. Until then, what scholar would want to invest an outstanding paper in such a risky venture? We also note that e-journals are not necessarily cheap. Authors in the online journal PloS Biology were charged $1,500 for each article in 2003,[21] and the current price has increased to $2850.[22] Such “author pays” schemes have severe long-term financial liabilities, including the fact that the cost to be sustainable will soon rise to $8000 to $25,000 per article, making the whole situation much worse than at present.[23] Finally, there is the problem of archival permanence, whether of e-journals or of regular print journals stored by libraries only in electronic form.
What to do? A new academic publishing culture must arise in which quality looms foremost. On the demand side, one way of dealing with this is to consider ISI journal rankings at promotion time, especially at tenure. Another method (used by Harvard Medical School) of dealing with tenure and major promotions—and one we greatly favor—is to evaluate the candidate’s best, say, five publications, or perhaps a maximum of one hundred pages of writing, for the period considered. This would thus encourage candidates to take what in biological reproduction is termed a “K” strategy: devoting attention to a few publications and ensuring that they are of the highest quality possible rather than producing many lesser pieces. For more senior candidates, citation counts, both journal and personal, could be added to the other evidence considered.
A supplementary route might be closer to the supply end of the problem: using the buying power of a large university library system as a lever. The monopolistically controlled costs of electronic subscriptions are rising steeply. Universities and libraries are experiencing their worst fiscal crisis in decades. The financial glory days of the past decade may never return. Using the massive University of California (UC) library system as an example, we present a scenario that might bring pressure to bear on the publishers of academic journals. A first step would be that UC librarians meet with their chancellors with the plan to have the UC system lead the charge toward a new model of journal publication. The Science/Nature model could serve as the starting point—as already noted, these journals publish very short, dense articles (two to six pages) and have extremely high ISI ratings. In sum, they are very significant. Therefore, the concept of a journal that prints shorter articles but has a vastly higher ISI impact would be the driving concept behind this model, given the reality of rising production costs during a time of financial crisis. Then, the UC system would:
- Focus on the natural sciences first;
- Rank all journals as follows: [20 – (normal page length) ´ ISI score = “page impact score” (PI score)]; e.g., for Science: [(20 – 6) ´ 30 = 420];
- Cancel subscriptions to the bottom 25 percent immediately, giving “advice” that the best way for them to improve their PI-score is to (1) cut article length and adopt the Science/Nature model, and (2) move cut material into required appendices available online at the journals’ website;
- Start working with various library and professional associations to adopt the UC approach;
- See the minimum score for UC subscriptions rise as more and more journals work to improve their PI score;
- Revise, in conjunction with academic senate representatives and administration, promotion criteria to emphasize publications in high PI-score journals;
- See, with possible variations, the Science/Nature model and PI-score approach be embraced by the social science and even the humanities.
A coalition of university systems across several states might produce greater and faster results.
To those who might say that few, if any, institutions or agencies are taking this high road, we ask, why not begin here? We believe this culture would spread and, in the longer term, reduce the number of publications and therefore journals produced and acquired by libraries. But the great advantage of a new culture would be the greatly enhanced quality of scholarly articles and the ethical atmosphere in which we work. We believe our views are widely shared. The authors of this piece come from four very different schools: letters and science, medicine, management, and engineering. The present malaise afflicts us all.
We thank Sharon Farb and Cynthia Shelton of the UCLA Library and also the UCLA Library Committee on Scholarly Communication for critical readings and commentary.
Figure 1. Number of serials and total cost of serials, UCLA libraries, 1975–2001.
From 1988 to 2001, the number of serials held steady because of subscription curtailments but the cost approximately doubled and continued to climb. (Statistics accessed January 15, 2007, Association of Research Libraries, University of Virginia, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/arlbin/arl.cgi?task=setupgraph.)
Stanley W. Trimble is professor of geography at the University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1524; trimble@geog.ucla.edu. He is the co-author with Andy D. Wardof Environmental Hydrology, 2nd ed. (CRC Press, 2004) and editor of The Dekker Encyclopedia of Water Science (CRC Press, 2008). From 1996 to 2006 he was joint editor-in-chief of the Elsevier journal Catena. He is presently writing an environmental history of the upper Midwest. Wayne W. Grody, M.D., Ph.D., is Professor of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, Pediatrics, and Human Genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095-7035; wgrody@mednet.ucla.edu. He is the director of the Diagnostic Molecular Pathology Laboratory within the UCLA Medical Center, one of the country’s first facilities to offer DNA-based tests for diagnosis of a variety of genetic, infectious, and neoplastic diseases. He is an attending physician in the Department of Pediatrics specializing in the care of patients with or at risk for genetic disorders. He has been one of the primary developers of quality assurance and ethical guidelines for DNA-based genetic testing for a number of governmental and professional agencies. Bill McKelvey is Professor of Strategic Organizing and Complexity Science at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1481; mckelvey@anderson.ucla.edu. HisOrganizational Systematics (University of California Press, 1982) remains the definitive treatment of organizational taxonomy and evolution. He is co-editor, with Peter Allan and Steve Maguire, of the Sage Handbook of Complexity and Management (Sage, 2010).Mohamed Gad-el-Hak has taught and conducted research at the University of Southern California, the University of Virginia, the University of Notre Dame, the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, the Université de Poitiers, the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, the Technische Universität München, and the Technische Universität Berlin. He has lectured extensively here and overseas. He is currently the Inez Caudill Eminent Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA 23284; gadelhak@vcu.edu. He was named the Fourteenth ASME Freeman Scholar in 1998. In 1999 he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize and in 2002 was named ASME Distinguished Lecturer and inducted into the Johns Hopkins University Society of Scholars.
A short version of this paper by Mark Bauerlein, Mohamed Gad-el-Hak, Wayne W. Grody, Bill McKelvey, and Stanley W. Trimble appeared under the title “We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research” in the June 13, 2010, Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com/article/We-Must-Stop-the-Avalanche-/65890/.
[1]Peter Jacsó, “Five-Year Impact Factor Data in the Journal Citation Reports,” Online Information Review 33, no. 3 (2009): 603–14.
[2]Philippe Baveye, “Sticker Shock and Looming Tsunami: The High Cost of Academic Serials in Perspective,” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 41, no. 2 (2010): 190–214.
[3]David P. Hamilton, “Publishing by—and for?—the Numbers,” Science 250 , no. 4986 (December 7, 1990): 1332. Interestingly, for the period 1981 to 1985, Hamilton identified 4,500 top journals and found that only 45 percent of the articles were cited in the five years after they were published (as compared to 40.6 percent found by Jacsó for 2002 to 2006). Thus, different authors (Jacsó, Baveye, and Hamilton ) at different times have found similar citation patterns in what they consider to be the best journals. The significance of the decrease in articles cited between the two periods from Hamilton and Jacsó is uncertain but certainly suggests that matters are not improving.
[5]Hamilton, “Publishing by the Numbers,” 1332.
[6]Mark Bauerlein, “Professors on the Production Line: Students on Their Own” (Working Paper 2009–01, Future of American Education Project, American Enterprise Institute, Washington, DC, 2009).
[7]Ursula M. Franklin, “Does Scholarly Publishing Promote Scholarship or Scholars?” Scholarly Publishing 24 (July 1993): 248–52.
[8]Mohamed Gad-el-Hak, “Publish or Perish—An Ailing Enterprise?” Physics Today 57 (March 2004): 61–62, http://www.people.vcu.edu/~gadelhak/Opinion.pdf.
[11]The complete story of the error is told in John Boardman, “An Average Erosion Rate for Europe: Myth or Reality,” Journal of Soil and Water Conservation 53, no. 1 (January 1998): 46–50.
[12]Juan Miguel Companario, “Rejecting Nobel Class Articles and Resisting Nobel Class Discoveries,”http://www2.uah.es/jmc/nobel/nobel.html; Editorial, “Coping with Peer Rejection,” Nature 425 (October 16, 2003): 645–46, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v425/n6959/full/425645a.html.
[13]Thomas H. Berquist, From the Editor’s Notebook, “Duplicate Publishing or Journal Publication Ethics 101,” American Journal of Roentgenology 191, no. 2 (2008): 311–12, http://www.ajronline.org/cgi/content/full/191/2/311.
[14]Hans-Dieter Daniel, “Publications as a Measure of Scientific Advancement and of Scientists’ Productivity,” Learned Publishing 18, no. 2 (April 2005): 143–48.
[15]Stanley W. Trimble, “Classics in Physical Geography Revisited: S.C. Happ, G. Rittenhouse, and G. Dobson, ‘Some Principles of Accelerated Stream and Valley Sedimentation,’ U.S. Department of Agriculture, Technical Bulletin 695,” Progress in Physical Geography 32, no. 3 (2008): 337–45.
[16]Stanley W. Trimble, “An Environmental Scientist Parses Climategate: Why Stoop if the Science Is Solid?” Academic Questions 23, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 54–56.
[17]Stanley W. Trimble, “The Double Standard in Environmental Science,” Regulation 30 (Summer 2007): 16–22, http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv30n2/v30n2-1.pdf.
[18]Stephen P. Boyd and Andrew Herkovic, Crisis in Scholarly Publishing: Executive Summary, report, Subcommittee of the Stanford Academic Council Committee on Libraries, May 18, 1999, http://www.stanford.edu/~boyd/schol_pub_crisis.html.
[19]M.H. MacRoberts and Barbara R. MacRoberts, “Problems of Citation Analysis: A Critical Review,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 40, no. 5 (1989): 342–48; T. van Leeuwen, H.F. Moed, and J. Reedijk, “Critical Comments on ISI Impact Factors: A Sample of Inorganic Molecular Chemistry Journals,” Journal of Information Science 25, no. 6 (1999): 489–98; David Colquhoun, “Challenging the Tyranny of Impact Factors,” Nature 423 (May 29, 2003): 479; Editorial, “Not So Deep Impact,” Nature 435 (June 23, 2005): 1003–1004, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v435/n7045/full/4351003b.html.
[20]Aline Solari and Marie-Helene Magri, “A New Approach to the SCI Journal Citation Reports. A System for Evaluating Scientific Journals,” Scientometrics 47, no. 3 (2000): 605–25; Wolfgang Glaenzel and Henk F. Moed, “Journal Impact Measures in Bibliographic Research,” Scientometrics 53, no. 2 (2002):171–93.
[23]Ibid.
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- Last on 08/25/2010
Building a 21st Century Syllabus
Professors these days have to cover their backs when writing syllabi, writes David Clemens.
Fall semester brings some familiar rituals: the Buying-of-the-Spiral-Notebooks, the Checking-of-the-Book-Orders, and, most importantly, the-Tweaking-of-the-Syllabus. At one time, my syllabus was a single sheet of ditto paper; now it’s 15 pages bristling with warnings, caveats, and disclaimers. Advancing technology, eroding civility, changing pedagogy, frequent litigation and demands for accountability oblige teachers to cover their . . . policies. Professor Terry Caesar observes thata professor faces opening day before students like a defense attorney preparing an opening statement to the jury.
That’s why it’s important for students to understand that a syllabus is a set of mutual obligations. From my end, I see the syllabus as an extension of the college Academic Freedom Policy which I quote in several places, beginning with “[t]he purpose of this policy is to define 'academic freedom’ so as to protect the institutional neutrality of Monterey Peninsula College (MPC) in its practice of intellectual pluralism and to defend faculty, students, and the curriculum from the influence of any current or future political fashion or orthodoxy.” With this, I hope to allay the fears of students whose antennae are tuned to detect indoctrination.
Remember that students these days are savvier than ever. Students for Academic Freedom, RateMyProfessors.com, Campus Freedom Network, CampusWatch, et al. encourage students to speak up, and they don’t hesitate to do so. And while it’s true that some of their comments can be helpful, many others reflect the schoolyard snark that comes with the “student-centered” or “student as customer” institutional models. A good syllabus, I think, can head some of this off.
To the customary Grading and Attendance policies, I’ve also added a classroom Decorum Policy. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan noted that “no one knows how to act anymore. The result is that everyone is getting on everyone’s nerves.” The classroom is no exception. According to the Academic Freedom Policy, students have a right to “a decorous classroom” and “in order that students may choose from a representative `marketplace of ideas,’ MPC promotes robust intellectual pluralism practiced in an atmosphere of objectivity, respect, and civility.” A Decorum Policy will hopefully foster civil discussion and courteous behavior.
An Electronics Policy is mandatory these days. Mine says: turn off cell phones, no laptops, no texting, etc. This usually eliminates the multiple distractions of, tweeting, gaming, surfing, Facebooking. I also prohibit audio or video recording of the teacher or other students.
Today’s syllabus also needs a straight-up Plagiarism Policy. The offense has become both broader and vaguer: Google, Wikipedia, and the cut-and-paste function often mislead many students into thinking they are “researching” or “collaborating” rather than plagiarizing To be crystal-clear about this, I cite the MLA plagiarism definition and tie it to concrete warnings and guaranteed penalties.
Many professors imagine “free speech” and “academic freedom” give them free rein (and reign) in the classroom. That can be a foolish assumption. What “academic freedom” means may be the most contested definition in higher education, one that undergoes almost case-by-case modification. Some professors are genuinely flabbergasted when they discover that a profane or abrasive teaching style or method “does not rise to the level of protected expression . . .” (Dambrot vs. Central Michigan). Even the choice of materials such as books and films is constrained because courts consider a class to be a “captive audience.” This makes it essential to include a syllabus warning that the class is for adults and may include material that some may find offensive (a safe bet someone will, since everything from Danish cartoons to Goya’s Naked Maja, from anatomical diagrams to life drawing, have been found “offensive” at one time or another). Prior notice can alert the sensitive to change sections and shield the professor from possible litigation or complaint. Here’s mine, typical for my composition and literature courses:
WARNING: This course is intended for adults and includes films, ideas, language, and/or images which some people may find offensive or disturbing. While our consideration of this material is strictly academic, if you are sensitive to profanity, violence, harsh language, and/or sexual content please use caution and proceed at your own risk.
Since accreditation now demands that we include official Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) on our syllabi, I make sure to include my personal SLO disclaimer. As this indicates, I have some major problems with SLOs, since they often seem to promise what students will be able to do after completing a course. I’d never offer a guarantee like that on my own, so I think it’s especially important to attach a clear disavowal.
Finally, every syllabus needs a closing statement to the effect that “Under the intent of the parties’ principle, your continued attendance after reviewing these policies implies your willingness to view/hear/read these materials of your own free will and to allow others to discuss them.” In today's litigious climate, some professors even have students make affirmative assent and sign off on their acceptance of the class’s requirements. Things definitely ain’t what they used to be. If you haven’t put together your syllabi for your fall courses yet, I’d suggest that you get started ASAP.
David Clemens is an English professor at Monterey Peninsula College.
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- Last on 08/20/2010
Question of the Week: Why Did You Choose Your College?
We're starting a new "Question of the Week" series. We'll have a new higher-education-related question every week. To answer, leave a comment on this article, email us, or respond via Facebook or Twitter (no more than 140 characters).
We'd like to hear from you:
Why did you choose the college you attended/attend?
We're starting a new "Question of the Week" series. We'll have a new higher-education-related question every week. To answer, leave a comment on this article, email Ashley Thorne at thorne@nas.org, or respond via Facebook or Twitter. Keep it Twitter length: no more than 140 characters. We'll gather up the answers and post them so you can see what others had to say. And if you answer via Twitter, we'll retweet you!
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- Last on 08/20/2010
Dictatorships and Double Standards, Part II
Professor Paquette responds to the controversy generated this summer after Hamilton College sought to censor his NAS article.
“In a democracy, where a multitude of people exercise in person the legislative functions, and are continually exposed, by their incapacity for regular deliberation and concerted measures, to the ambitious intrigues of their executive magistrates, tyranny may well be apprehended, on some favorable emergency, to start up in the same quarter.”
James Madison, Federalist #48
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“By a faction,” James Madison wrote in Federalist #10, “I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuatedbysome common impulse of passion, or of interest.” Madison, like most of the other framers of the Constitution, had serious concerns about the operation of pure or extreme democracy on minorities. Perform this test, which you can be reasonably sure most elite liberal arts colleges no longer require their undergraduates to perform. Read The Federalist cover to cover, all eighty-five essays. The word “democracy” appears about ten times, and usually in pejorative contrast with republican government. “Ambitious intriguers,” as Madison, Hamilton, and others fully understood, could rather easily whip an unreflecting multitude into frenzy and turn democracy into majoritarian tyranny. Lest we forget (and who could deny the architected amnesia pervasive on the postmodern campus) the framers drafted the Constitution as a great experiment in republican government precisely because it had certain refining or protective features that mitigated the problem of King Numbers.
The Article
In “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” published by NAS on 19 April, I suggested how on many college campuses, including my own, the “progressive” establishment—another name really for a left-liberal majority faction—can use the democratization of process to create department by department a deterrent political culture for right-of-center scholars as well as right-of-center students. When it comes to vital issues of curriculum and faculty appointment, deans and presidents surely have the power to act in a refining role to promote intellectual diversity. Typically, whether out of fear, sympathy, or expediency, they prefer not to go against the grain. As evidence, I cited the example of my former colleague Chris Hill, a young, gifted libertarian teacher/scholar. The central questions, as a few perspicacious souls have noted in following the media coverage of Hill’s case, are not whether Professor Hill should have been handed the tenure-track position in medieval history but why was he eliminated from the search early on and was there any reason for the administration to intervene, in effect, to act as a refining element, in the search?
Before coming to Hamilton College, Professor Hill had published a prize-winning novel. During his four-year term at Hamilton, he completed his dissertation; created six new courses, including a magnificent primer in the Western legal heritage; published in the Wall Street Journal, and eventually taught more undergraduates than any other member of Hamilton’s history department. Hamilton College’s own faculty handbook, it should be noted, emphasizes (p. 29), that “The quality of teaching is to be the most heavily weighted criterion for reappointment, tenure, and promotion.” A few weeks before Professor Hill departed the campus with a terminated contract, Hamilton’s student assembly intervened to award him, arguably, the College’s most distinguished teaching prize, one that goes to a faculty member "who is recognized as a mentor and active participant within the Hamilton community." And there is more good news. Thanks to foundational grants and to donations to my independent Alexander Hamilton Institute from concerned Hamilton students and alumni, Professor Hill has accepted an invitation to join the AHI as a resident fellow. He will be teaching his first class at the AHI starting in September.
The Penalty
My NAS piece also resulted in another kind of academic achievement award, for which I am truly grateful, since, as I will now explain, it substantiates points in the original posting about the problem of majority faction. On Tuesday afternoon, 4 May, I received at my home a letter from Dean Urgo announcing his punishment of me for alleged violations of the College’s confidentiality policy. On Tuesday morning, I learned from a colleague that Hamilton’s faculty LISTSERV, to which I do not subscribe, was humming with an orchestrated movement of ambitious intriguers, led by a member of my department (also a diva of the Diversity and Social Justice Project), to have me formally censured at the next faculty meeting for alleged violations of confidentiality in the Chris Hill case. Her communication to colleagues droned on about all manner of distress and harm to the world my NAS piece had inflicted on faculty, students, the College as a whole and, no doubt, on the Longdong Stream Salamander as well. Although Dean Joseph Urgo (now president of St. Mary’s College in Maryland) had previously urged faculty using this particular LISTSERV to confine themselves to curricular matters, he and the Academic Council opened throttle on this mass mailing site to full discussion of the range of punitive actions that could be applied to the unnamed perpetrator—me. The movement’s chief challenged Urgo to take action: “To date,” she pronounced, “I am unaware that my colleague has been rebuked for this breech [sic] of confidentiality.”
Pressure on Dean Urgo to punish me had been mounting for weeks, ever since I had written a letter praising Chris Hill to the editor of the campus newspaper. At the faculty meeting, one person preached about the need for “extraordinary action” against the “extraordinarily unprofessional behavior” of this dangerous man. Another colleague—who has openly referred to me as a McCarthyite after I led the public opposition a few years before to a campus visit by Ward Churchill—came prepared to drum up support for the spectacle at hand by distributing copies of my NAS piece to all the attendants. The irony of her own role in stoking bullying, persecutory behavior, it seems, was lost in the swill of that heady moment in the people’s court. After the demand for punishment had been issued, “Many faculty,” as reported in the faculty minutes, “stood to register their concern.” Such displays, a common campus tactic usually prearranged by the majority faction, have proven effective in buckling the knees of our administrative profiles in courage. Where were the calls for equity, fairness, and process? During this entire episode, Dean Urgo never once contacted me or invited me into his office to discuss the matter. No attempt—I repeat, no attempt—was made by Dean Urgo to contact me from 19 April, the date of the NAS posting, to 3 May, the date of my punishment letter. Had he done so, he might have learned that I was not in fact at the meeting in which Professor Hill’s fate was deliberated. The chairman of the department had cast my vote in absentia. In an ardent letter, dated 11 November 2009, to President Stewart and Dean Urgo, Professor Hill raised questions about the history department’s majority decision, whether it involved bias and the application of double standards. Revealingly, the administration sat on its hands, not even acknowledging the receipt of the letter. Dean Urgo fiddled despite the fact that a distinguished senior professor (not me) entered Urgo’s office after the decision on Hill was made and pleaded for his intervention into a department that in recent years had become obviously dysfunctional to even the most casual campus observer. Please note: At no time from day of his arrival in 2006 to assume the deanship to the day of my punishment (3 May 2010) did Dean Urgo see fit to meet with the history department on any issue, including the raging matter of whether courses in American history and the history of Western culture should be required of Hamilton’s history majors given that they must take at least three non-Western history courses to graduate.
The last time I received a phone call from Dean Urgo during his five years at Hamilton College was in 2007. During the spring semester, he had learned from a senior Hamilton administrator that I had discovered the College’s behind-the-back attempt to trademark the name “Alexander Hamilton Center” after the College had publicly announced it was no longer going forward with the project. He left a message: he wanted to assure me that there was no reason for me to get upset. Out of curiosity, I have searched my computer for the dates of Dean Urgo’s last few email messages to me. One, dated 25 November 2009, deals, curiously enough, with the issue of confidentiality. A sub-committee of Hamilton’s Committee on Academic Policy had announced another diversity initiative. At 9:49 a.m. I sent Urgo an email, which included a confidentiality footer, that I would in no way back the proposed initiative. Less than an hour later, I received from a senior African-American professor involved in the initiative another email, explaining that Dean Urgo had forwarded my email—the confidentiality footer notwithstanding—to him. The professor was extending to me the much appreciated courtesy of alerting me that he had taken notice of the confidentiality footer and would be deleting the communication that Urgo had improperly forwarded.
In his punishment letter, Urgo announced that because of alleged violations of Hamilton’s policy regarding confidentiality in the Hill case, I “will be barred from participation in future searches until and unless your colleagues can convince the Dean’s office” that I “will adhere to College policies regarding faculty recruitment. Along the same Orwellian lines, Dean Urgo also asked that I remove “the essay as a whole” from the NAS website, finding the content, which was only partially related to the Hill matter, “unworthy” and “unbecoming” of a professor. The same leadership that a few years past had defended in virtually absolutist terms the academic freedom of the likes of Susan Rosenberg and Ward Churchill to come to campus to pour forth their noxious effluvium was demanding the faculty’s lone out-of-closet conservative to white out an article that was in essence attempting to explain why so few conservatives populate this country’s elite institutions of higher learning.
Media Buzz
National media have taken notice of this controversy. Mark Bauerlein of Emory University devoted three postings to it on the website of the Chronicle of Higher Education (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). They generated considerable discussion. Many bloggers have asked for additional information, and, indeed, much more remains to be said and clarified. For starters, let me correct three significant errors that appeared in an article, “When Faculty Aren’t Supposed to Talk,” published by Scott Jaschik on 22 June in Inside Higher Ed.
1. Mr. Jaschik: “Via e-mail, Paquette did not dispute that Hamilton's rules [of confidentiality] cover him even as someone not on the committee or attending the meeting in question.”
Not true. In an email to Mr. Jaschik, I said, “I reject the dean's contention that I violated strict confidentiality.” In responding to the charges and punishment, I wrote two letters to Dean Urgo, both sent registered mail, return receipt. He responded to neither of them. My letter of 11 May includes the following paragraph:
Your reliance [Dean Urgo] on the Departmental Chair Guidelines is improper for a number of reasons: First, the ‘Departmental Chair Guidelines’ apply to departmental chairs. Nowhere do the Guidelines state that they apply to a member of the department who is not a department chair. I am not a department chair. Second, the above underlined provision dealing with ‘strict confidentiality’ applies to search committee members only. By its clear language, ‘strict confidentiality’ does not apply to members of the department who are not members of the search committee. I am not a member of the search committee, only a department member. Therefore, the underlined language does not apply to me. Third, even if I was bound by strict confidentiality pursuant to the underlined language (which I am not), ‘strict confidentiality’ only applies to ‘discussions, conversations and exchanges.’ The snippet from the article on the National Association of Scholars website you rely on (see below) does not involve ‘discussions, conversations and exchanges.’ In sum, I violated no rule, and thus there is no justification for the punishment you have levied against me. Therefore, one must ask ‘why are you attempting to punish me?’ I dare say we both know the reason why.
2. Mr. Jaschik cites as contained “in the faculty handbook” the following passage and offers what he claims is a link to it:
Along with the Chair, the members of the department or the search committee are expected to maintain the highest level of professionalism in ensuring the integrity of the search. All discussions, conversations and exchanges among search committee members should be considered strictly confidential, unless indicated otherwise, and colleagues should comport themselves appropriately. Communications with prospective candidates should be made through the Chair. Any deviations from these guidelines should be brought to the immediate attention of the Dean.
Not true. Perhaps misled by Hamilton’s Acting Dean of Faculty, Mr. Jaschik quotes not from the faculty handbook but from the “Dean’s Guidelines for Chairs.” A link to the faculty handbook can be found here: http://www.hamilton.edu/college/DOF/2009%20Faculty%20Handbook.pdf. The faculty handbook contains no such words on confidentiality.
3. Mr. Jaschik: “[H]e [Paquette]said that he still shouldn't have been found in violation of the confidentiality rules because the ‘information in my NAS piece was either obvious or a matter of public record long before I wrote the piece.’ He cited an article in the college's student paper, which shared the news that Hill applied for and didn't get very far in the search for the tenure-track job (but lacked the detail of Paquette's article).”
Not quite true. As I pointed out to Mr. Jaschik, not one article but multiple publications had appeared before the date of my article to provide details about the Hill case. In support of Professor Hill, students had, for example, created a Facebook site, which eventually attracted several hundred subscribers, to discuss the matter. Moreover, as I also informed Dean Urgo, Professor Hill, once informed of the majority vote of the department, owns that information as his private property, and in Hill’s unanswered letter to the administration of November, he made abundantly clear to Dean Urgo and President Stewart that he intended to discuss openly and “loudly” what had happened to him at Hamilton. In the days ahead, Professor Hill had to set straight a number of “sympathetic” colleagues who had questioned him about his fate because, mirabile dictu, they had somehow readily swallowed a story bruited about the campus that I had led the campaign to jettison him from the applicant pool.
Dean Urgo, in justifying punishment of me, cited two sentences in my NAS piece:
A majority faction, similar in composition and outlook, to the one responsible for the abolition of the Western civilization requirement, determined, despite the dissenting voices of four senior members of the department, that Professor Hill was largely unworthy of serious consideration for the tenure-track position. Indeed, because of King Numbers, he didn’t make it out of the blocks past the first lap of consideration.
Peruse the two sentences. The second divulged no new information because Hamilton’s own campus newspaper in a substantial article dated 11 February reported, “[W]hen Hill applied for the tenure position, he did not make the first cut of applicants, meaning he would not get the chance to interview for the job.” In the sentence about the four “dissenting voices,” put aside for the moment the question of whether “voices” meant “votes.” Which denizen of the modern academic campus does not know that majority vote stands as the “industry standard” for appointment and promotion? As one principled senior colleague wrote to Urgo in response to his action against me, “Does ‘strict confidentiality’ mean that a faculty member may not tell an unsuccessful internal candidate for a job or an unsuccessful candidate for tenure and/or promotion how he voted on her candidacy and why? Does ‘strict confidentiality’ mean that a department chair or an individual faculty member may not tell an unsuccessful internal candidate for a job or an unsuccessful candidate for tenure and/or promotion what the number of yeas and nays were on his candidacy?” If not, then any number of senior Hamilton faculty at Hamilton, I can assure you, have over the years violated the majority faction’s understanding of confidentiality postured with great success at Hamilton’s May faculty meeting.
Hypocrisy at Hamilton
Because my registered letter of 11 May elicited no administrative response, I sent another a few weeks later, asking once again that the punishment be immediately rescinded. In this letter, I asserted as an example of double standards on Urgo’s part, his own published references in a 2006 essay in the journal Symploke to deliberations in a tenure case over which he presided as chairman of the English department at the University of Mississippi. This issue also surfaced in the third of Mark Bauerlein’s blogs on my case in the Chronicle of Higher Education. To deflect the charge, Urgo (or one of his surrogates) contacted Professor Bauerlein to note that Urgo had slipped into his essay one footnote (on p. 37), which contains the following disclaimer: “In this and in all subsequent anecdotes, I have combined and rearranged actual events to protect the privacy of the real persons involved. None of the anecdotes are wholly factual, but each considered an aggregate representation of an idea.”
None of the anecdotes are wholly factual? On the one hand, thoughtful readers might wonder how could much of anything in Urgo’s essay, including his rendering of the “aggregate representation of an idea” (whatever that means), be taken seriously with such a slippery disclaimer about evidence. On the other hand, Urgo’s description of departmental deliberations seems to be of such an intimate character as to make it unlikely that relevant senior members of Mississippi’s English department could not identify the brilliant but unlikable colleague who had stood for tenure. No matter. If Dean Urgo thinks he has escaped with clean hands from hoisting on Professor Bauerlein’s petard, let him, however, be hoisted on another. Ever since the collapse in November 2006 of the initiative to establish an Alexander Hamilton Center, persons have wondered how I was able to identify the several members of Hamilton’s board of trustees who joined the majority faction of Hamilton’s faculty in opposing the original signed agreement between the founders and Hamilton’s administration. As I’m sure Hamilton’s administration would admit, the cloak of strict confidentiality covers formal deliberations of the board. From whom did I learn on 14 October 2006, the day of a board meeting about the Alexander Hamilton Center, the names of members who had emerged as obstructionists to implementing it? Why, it was none other than Dean Joseph Urgo.
Several years ago, during the Susan Rosenberg episode at Hamilton College, a venerable (and venerated) economics professor who had dedicated his adult life to the College stopped me at the campus mail center. He said, “Paquette, a dog doesn’t p--- in his own house.” “Sid,” I answered, “what if the house is on fire and there is no water around.” My next NAS posting will address the incendiaries on Hamilton’s campus and elsewhere and whether the fires can be extinguished or contained.
Robert L. Paquette is Publius Virgilius Rogers professor of American history at Hamilton College and co-founder of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization.
Real Ethics Education
Ethics courses should make moral decisions personal, argues Jason Fertig.
It takes a real “enlightened” individual to think that students’ ethical behavior can be dramatically influenced by a single ethics course. An ethical framework is created through religion, family values, peer groups, in addition to studying great works like the Bible, Aristotle’s Ethics, or recent works by Milton Friedman or Peter Drucker which question the nature of “Business” Ethics. If a single college course is going to influence students’ behavior at all, this course has to force students to evaluate gray areas that they presently encounter in the micro.
Every time a major business-related crisis strikes (e.g. Enron’s implosion, the housing market unraveling, BP’s oil spill, etc.), business schools are pushed to educate students to ensure that such calamities never occur again. The push to create more responsible managerial decision-making has lead to the addition of mandatory business ethics courses in the undergraduate business core and to the inclusion of ethical decision-making in all business textbooks ranging from accounting to marketing.
In theory, there is nothing wrong with the increased focus on ethics. However, in practice, the standard business ethics courses focus on academic theories, corporate scandals and politicized sustainability. Students in these ethics courses are given an academic framework for ethical decision-making – such as Kohlberg’s stages of moral development – and then they are taken on a journey through various crimes committed by corporations over the years and the assortment of ways that different organizations do their part to “save the environment.” Ultimately, the take-home message is that ethics means live sustainably and don’t do anything that can get you raided by the FBI.
This approach to ethics education addresses ethical behavior at a level that is disconnected from the average undergraduate student’s daily life decisions. The sustainability approach to ethics may even lead to adverse results. Earlier this year, for example, the Guardian cited a study which provided evidence that “green” consumers are more likely to cheat or steal than conventional consumers.
Even for MBA courses, reading The Smartest Guys in the Room will not prevent the next Enron. While graduate students are likely making more managerial decisions than the average undergraduate, teaching ethics using large scale deviant corporate behavior normally only produces socially desirable head nodding.
Thus, I advocate having ethics courses require students to clarify their framework for right and wrong in everyday life, with the aim of having that framework transfer into their decision-making elsewhere.
Consider the following two questions I have used in management courses as written assignments or as class discussions in seminars.
“If you have illegally downloaded digital media files on your personal computer, why don’t you delete them if you know they violate copyright law?”When I ask this question to a classroom, it is usually met with giggling or smirking. Repeating the question, “do you realize that most of you are violating copyright law?” is usually followed with the expected nods of indifference. When I repeat my question asking which students are now going to delete their media because they have just admitted to breaking the law, the question is met with a silent “nay.”
Having established their indifference to illegal actions, I ask ,“How do I know that you won’t make unethical decisions at work, knowing that you do not blow the whistle on yourself with the downloading issue?” The initial response is normally, “but those are two different things.”
This dialogue can lead to a fruitful discussion that forces students to think about whether it is better to justify why they downloaded the content or to show that the temptation to acquire free music and movies was there, but the student decided against it on moral grounds. Another good follow-up discussion is whether there are “sinful” actions that would not be a red flag for future ethical breaches.
“What are your rights and responsibilities as a customer in a store?”
I like this question because it is a prototype for an issue that appears purely legal (don’t steal), but it also has moral factors that are rarely considered.
I first learned of this issue on Dennis Prager’s radio program, and I was happy to see that he now has a YouTube video on it as well. Is it unethical for a shopper to get a full product education from a retail store employee, then leave the store and purchase the product cheaper online? Is there such a practice as stealing the time of an employee or store?
As a person who spends much of my time in bookstore coffee shops (in fact, I am writing this now at my local Borders with Seattle’s Best in hand), I am fascinated at how the patrons of bookstores treat the merchandise like library books. A visitor to a bookstore is likely to find other people throughout the store reading books for lengthy periods of time and returning the books to the shelves. To be fair, there certainly are patrons who are previewing a book to see if it is worth buying, but those people do not appear to be in the majority. The practice is even more egregious with the magazines, if the stacks left on window sills or trash receptacles are any indicators. I urge students to convince me whether these consumer behaviors signal potential unethical behavior at later times. Similar to the downloading issue, who would make the better executive, a person who respects the merchandise at a bookstore (or at least buys a coffee when spending considerable time at the store) or one that tries to justify reading GQ cover-to-cover in the store, when there is a copy at the local library that is available for free use?
Some additional potential topics for classroom use are buying clothes, wearing them once to a function, and returning them; or buying an identical product to replace a broken one, then returning the broken product to the store in the new box.
My objective is to convey that ethical decision-making is deeper than having the right stance on political issues. It is about knowing how to battle your own flaws – knowing when to blow that whistle on yourself when no one else will. No teaching method is ideal, as later life decisions rest on a multitude of variables. However, if the bulk of discussions are somewhat personal to students, there is a greater chance of influencing their behavior (in addition to having a more engaged classroom).
Ultimately, who would you rather have run your company: a person who means well but practices moral relativism or one who takes a stance against illegal downloading and respects the businesses where he shops?
Collegiate Press Roundup 8-18-10
Student journalists tackle gay marriage, weird psycholgy studies and state liquor regulations.
We resume our regular sampling of student journalists and editors, who are staying on the job through the summer. This week’s selections assess a federal judge’s ruling against California’s Proposition 8, missing the point about a proposed mosque in New York city and useless psychology surveys from Michigan.
1) Although UCLA is one of the most gay-friendly campuses in the country, an op-ed writer in the Daily Bruin argues that there’s still a lot of work to be done. Not just tolerance, but acceptance should be the goal of campus policies.
2) A staffer for the Harvard Crimson describes his experience in a small Parisian suburban town with a lingering sense of its dark past.
3) A guest columnist for The Dartmouth wishes that the uproar over the proposed Ground Zero mosque in New York would go away. It’s just a lot of political grandstanding and opportunism that’s deflecting attention from more substantive issues such as the sinking economy and high unemployment.
4) In the Daily Kansan, an editorialist applauds Kansas governor Mark Parkinson’s decision not to enforce an archaic and encumbering liquor regulation.
5) The editors of UC Berkeley’s Daily Californian salute a federal judge’s ruling against California’s Proposition 8 as a major step forward toward marriage equality, but note that it’s not time for complacency. A lively discussion follows in the comments thread.
6) A writer for the Indiana Daily Student agrees, but wants much more than marriage equality. Let’s keep going, he argues, and get rid of marriage altogether, as Plato wisely proposed long ago.
7) As they anticipate the onset of the Fall semester, the editors of the Daily Iowan offer some reflections on the big news stories which dominated the summer months.
8) From somewhere on the road, a columnist for the Stanford Daily just had to send in an iphone piece to explain why so many psychology studies – especially if they come from Michigan – drive him simply nuts.
9) The editor-in-chief of the Crimson White at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa explains to incoming freshmen why they should consider becoming staffers at his newspaper.
10) An opinion blogger at the U of I’s Daily Illini takes look at the case of religion professor Kenneth Howell, and wonders what actually went on in his classroom discussion of Catholic moral teaching and homosexuality. The comments response indicates that the issue is a live wire with her readers.
11) The editors of the Minnesota Daily demand an apology from the state’s governor Tim Pawlenty, whose rising presidential ambitions led him to make regrettable “anti-Islamic” remarks.
12) An op-ed columnist for UT/Austin’s Daily Texan thinks President Obama was absolutely right to duck a meeting with Texas governor and GOP presidential hopeful Rick Perry.
5 Consequences of Administrative Bloat
What happens to higher education when universities are dominated by administrators?
Everyone wants to know: why is college so expensive? And is it worth the cost? Today, the Goldwater Institute has an answer: administrative bloat has triggered high costs and cheapened the quality of higher education.
According to a new study headed by Jay P. Greene, “between 1993 and 2007, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students at America’s leading universities grew by 39 percent, while the number of employees engaged in teaching, research or service only grew by 18 percent.” The study evaluated 198 top universities (see Appendix B for charts) using data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), and compared institutions’ proportions of enrollment, employment, and spending.* Two years ago NAS took note when IPEDS data showed that the proportion of full-time college administrators exceeded the proportion of full-time faculty members. At the time NAS president Peter Wood wrote:
In this sense, there are about 1.6 full-time administrators for every full-time instructional faculty member in American higher education. And the imbalance appears to be growing. Keep this in mind when next you read about the creation of new positions for ethnic counselors or senior vice provost for diversity. The rhinoceros of higher education administration grows thicker by the day.
Now, Dr. Wood has argued that administrators, along with faculty members and students, deserve the protection of academic freedom. And several universities in the Goldwater Institute’s study defend their expansion of administration as necessary for academic progress. “We are confident that any growth in administration has brought value and support to the university's primary missions of education, research and service," a University of Texas vice president told the Dallas Morning News.
This may be true, but NAS has also paid attention to what happens to higher education when the seesaw is tipped in administrators’ favor. Here are five consequences we’ve identified:
1. Therapeutic U
Rather than challenging students to meet high academic standards and stretch themselves academically, universities dominated by administrators have adopted a coddling culture that pampers students’ feelings and self-esteem. This breeds an entitled, consumer attitude in students, hampers educational progress, and fosters the “five-year party” mindset. See Tom Wood’s “Slouching Toward the Therapeutic University,” Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
2. Reeducation
In the last two decades there has been a movement in which administrators see themselves as educators on equal levels with faculty members. As NAS wrote in a statement, “The movement goes by several names: ‘educating the whole person,’ ‘the residential life revolution’ and ‘the student learning imperative.’ Because many administrators perceive their role to be to help students become good and active “citizens” and overcome their biases, they take it upon themselves to reeducate them. This was the case at the University of Delaware, whose Big-Brother-esque ideological residence life program for freshman NAS and FIRE exposed in 2007.
3. Censorship
“That is where the problems are coming from: the administrators,” FIRE president Greg Lukianoff said at the 2009 NAS conference. FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) works to protect First Amendment rights on campus. FIRE especially targets speech codes—rules forbidding certain kinds of speech—which are generally created by administrators who “have taken up this issue as a moral imperative.” They believe their job is to protect students from being offended, when in fact such protection violates the right to freedom of speech (and it’s not their job).
4. Ideology
“To please political constituencies, universities need more diversity administrators, sustainability administrators, or anyone else who might improve the prospects for subsidies from politicians,” the Goldwater Institute study asserts. Indeed, colleges and universities are hiring more and more chief diversity officers, “green deans,” and staff to support them. See AASHE’s directory of campus sustainability officers and the list of members in the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education (NADOHE). Colleges have also discovered how to get cheap labor out of eco-enthusiastic students: hire them as sustainability administrators (sustainabullies) when they graduate. The cycle of indoctrination can then continue. See NAS’s takedown of the campus diversity industry in “What Does a Chief Diversity Officer Actually Do?”
5. Mission Fail
All these things combine to form a massive distraction from the real reason colleges exist in the first place. Education is being crowded out by all the other stuff to which administrators are directing students’ and faculty members’ attention. This refocusing of attention has led to a re-centering of higher education’s ultimate mission: it’s now less about intellectual growth and more about advocacy for trendy causes. See “Beating the Apple Tree: How the University Coerces Activism,” Academic Questions, vol. 23, no. 2.
These five are among the most prominent problems that arise from having a lopsided ratio of faculty members to managers. How did we get here? The Goldwater Institute study suggests that government subsidies are the main reason for administrative bloat and skyrocketing costs in higher education:
Being non-profits, [universities] do not return excess profits to shareholders; instead, they return excess profits to their de facto shareholders, the administrators who manage the institutions. These administrators are paid dividends in the form of higher compensation and more fellow administrators who can reduce their own workload or expand their empires.
“The primary solution,” say the authors, “is to reduce the rate of government subsidies. We need to stop feeding the beast.”
*Interestingly, Baylor University had the highest growth rate in administration (a 149.7% increase from 1993 to 2007) of the 10 Texas schools surveyed, and one of the highest growth rates overall. Yet only yesterday, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) found Baylor to be one of 16 “A List” schools on WhatWillTheyLearn.com. This means Baylor is one of the few four-year institutions—out of a total of 714 surveyed—that requires students to take at least 6 core subjects. The core subjects ACTA looks for are Composition, Mathematics, Science, Economics, U.S. Government or History, Literature, and Foreign Language.
Ravitch Repentant
Peter Cohee reviews Diane Ravitch's book, a partial volte-face, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.
Diane Ravitch certainly deserves respect for her lifetime of hard scholarly work exposing humbug, hokum, and hyperbole in American public education reform[1] and for her service in the cause of public education. But her latest, a partial volte-face, lets down. [2] Much of her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education, is common sense. The remainder is often self-contradictory. The whole is sententious. Here's the two-minute summary:
Milton Friedman started trouble in 1955 with a libertarian argument for family-based school choice through vouchers.[3] During the 1960s and 1970s school choice was entangled in debates over parochial schools and de facto segregation, white parents opting for private schools to avoid forced integration. A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform appeared in 1983; everybody freaked. Reagan, a Friedman fan, promoted first vouchers (with limits) then school choice. Conservative think-tankers then ran the Gipper's play. 1990 was a watershed year: Chubb and Moe issued an important book;[4] Milwaukee instituted the nation's first voucher system; and the charter school movement took off, largely replacing voucher proposals -- the latter two supported by Republicans, businessmen, and industrialists. Shanker had already proposed charters as in-school labs for helping under-achievers;[5] but he abandoned his support as school choice became overrun by opportunistic anti-union educational buccaneers. Clinton signed Goals 2000 into law in 1994. This meant chiefly outcomes-based policies and exploitation of computer technology. Jump to 2002. Bush II, with bipartisan support, signs No Child Left Behind (NCLB).[6] This places heavy emphasis on reading and math skills, checked by (state-determined) standardized testing, and mandates sanctions for failure. Two consequences: schools cut back on other academic areas; and charters proliferate. As a result of the former, schools narrow their curricula and teach to the test. Charters have a mixed rep: good if they select the most capable and motivated students and make them do their work; not so good if they can't. This translates into re-segregation. Public schools are left to deal with the problems charters don't want. NCLB unfairly punishes teachers, schools, and school districts. Billionaires are buying American school policy. That darned achievement gap is still not closed.
Ravitch renounces recent attempts to reform American education through quasi-market mechanisms: school choice (vouchers and charters), standardized testing, accountability, business-style management, and the meddling of wealthy men. She does so because she believes these influences and tendencies will weaken that education's ability to shape and keep our democratic society. Apparently this was no free and democratic nation until Horace Mann established Prussian-style compulsory state education (Massachusetts, 1852). And evidently free-market initiative and personal consumer choice are incompatible with a democratic polity and healthy community life.
Ravitch fails to give critical attention to the illogical dogma that a free democratic polity somehow depends on comprehensive state- and union-run public schools. She wants big education – indeed, the bigger the better – pretending that this is possible without the centralized control and standardization that huge bureaucracies require and always tend toward. We read of all the high-level positions she's held and the times she's been at the White House and the Presidents she's met. Ravitch is a true believer in statist management. As such, she herself is as guilty of setting too-high academic, social, and political expectations on public education as NCLB does.[7]
Well, let's rewind and parse Friedman more closely than she seems to have done. "A stable and democratic society is impossible without widespread acceptance of some common set of values and without a minimum degree of literacy and knowledge on the part of most citizens. Education contributes to both." Thus:
widespread acceptance / of certain shared values;
most citizens have / some minimum literacy and knowledge;
education contributes to both.
Education (not necessarily public) contributes to these values and forms of knowledge. (But other forces do as well: family, friends, religions, private clubs and associations, daily living and learning.) It contributes, it doesn't guarantee. Further, most citizens have a minimum degree of literacy and knowledge. Not all achieve academic excellence, but most share a foundation. [8] Simply put, education generally preserves and transmits those common values and basic forms of knowledge that make a stable republic more viable. True, if trivial. It's a mighty leap from there to say that universal and compulsory state education is a sine qua non of a free society. Tyrannies, too, have state school systems. And, as Kenneth Minogue has recently argued, our present notions of democracy are hardly those of only a century ago.[9]
People in the U.K. and U.S. got along tolerably well with home-schooling and for-profit schools of family choice until about 1870, through periods of enormous social, political, economic, and technological change. The original "gap" in education, with which the state then first became involved, was that between different forms and qualities of private schooling.[10] As John Derbyshire puts it, "A huge chunk of education theory is about gaps."[11] One might also add, "I always enjoy visiting La La Land, where a gap-free society defines the goal of human striving."[12] More about gaps later.
Further, Ravitch makes the same fundamental mistake as all who do not teach in schools: that a school's quality is independent of its student population. In the bureaucratic mind, a school is "good" if it has the right administrators, faculty, curriculum, paperwork and infrastructure. Take the neediest students through this school and they will succeed, nay, exceed! But it doesn't work that way. Sure, competent personnel, a functioning building, and classroom tools and materials are necessaryfor good education; but they aren't sufficient. Students themselves and their families define the real quality of any school.
When she laments the siltation of the least capable, least energetic, least prepared in public schools (better students having been skimmed off to charters), when she decries the unfair advantages that, e.g., KIPP schools thus enjoy, Ravitch herself almost admits this; but she doesn't follow it to its painful conclusion. Look, remove all students from a "bad" school (i.e. one with an incompetent crew, crumbling edifice, poor attendance and scores) and put them in a "good" school whose regular students have also been removed. Prest-o change-o, the latter will soon be another "bad" school. More talented teachers and administrators will grow increasingly annoyed and frustrated; having better options, they will take them. CNN recently ran a piece about the Raleigh school board's vote to end integration by forced busing, resulting in what protesters considered deliberate re-segregation, "leaving black students in underachieving schools and white students in higher quality schools."[13] Full implications of that phrase are less than pleasant. Definition is our big problem: what do we mean, exactly, by "underachieving" and "higher quality" schools?
There's a rough calculus here: the greater the proportion of the least ready and most unruly students, the lower the overall quality of the academy. I'm going to say, based on nothing else than years of daily, hourly observation and experience, that you can't have more than about five percent of such students in a class or school without diminishing the education of the rest; the greater the percentage, the more deleterious their effect. This might be the flip side of J. Coleman's theory, that a majority of capable students will be intellectual and motivational leaven for the disadvantaged, a version of which Ravitch offers to defend universal public schooling.
Yet she also seems to accept Al Shanker's startling declaration that it's only about twenty percent of students "who are able to learn in a traditional system, who are able to sit still, who are able to keep quiet, who are able to remember after they listen to someone else talk for five hours, who are able to pick up a book and learn from it."[14] Horripilation! Eighty percent of our students can't behave themselves, pay attention, remember what they've heard or read on their own, and need special handling? If we assume for the moment that this wasn't alarmist speechifying, it reveals a problem for Ravitch's argument. For the leaven to work, as she appears to agree, we need a majority of successful students (precise ratio yet to be defined; keep those buses running). But Al's numbers would mean that in a class of 30 students only six would be capable, the rest requiring extra time, attention, energy, and "non-traditional" accommodations. Excuse the six if they and their parents skedaddle out of there, pronto.
Why not let families decide for themselves where their children should be schooled? Parents are choosing charters with other bright and hardworking kids so that their own won't have to endure daily annoyance from the dim and disruptive. Why not take them seriously? Ravitch and her new NEA and AFT fan clubs will have a tough time convincing everyone else that the home- and privately-schooled are less democratic as citizens because of the mode of their education. Ultimately, I suspect, her concern is not for the deep-abiding principles of our cherished way of life per se but arises from the mental reflexes of the educrat and theorist: We're the experts; we know best and will save you from yourselves to make a better society.[15] We'll certainly have to consider the consequences of living increasingly in our doofer culture: "Here, let us do that for you."
Finally, Ravitch complains about the directions that testing is moving in, its effect on curricula, and the uses to which test results are or might be put.
Her criticisms of the narrowing effect of NCLB on the academic focus of schools are mostly just. Much of the rest of what she says on this point is mere common sense. On the other hand, those who toil in the academic vineyard know very well that, if students have lousy reading skills, they will have a very hard time learning history or anything else. If their math skills are zilch, they'll wipe out in physics class. Literacy and numeracy are fundamental; it's not so bad a thing to make those two abilities the most important parts of any public examination system. Back we go to the medieval trivium and quadrivium. Of course you have to go beyond reading and math. But they are the minima. And no one really minds teaching to a good test. A badly-written or a dumbed-down one, the results of which will have no bearing on individual students' grades, is a short mark to shoot at. But Ravitch's discomfort with competition and its consequent inequalities, latent under other headings, is here most patent.
One suspects that she defends the melting-pot mythology so vehemently because, as the "collaborative learning" so adored by progressive-ed theorists, public schools (as she imagines them), if they can maintain the right ratios of capable students with the less so, will present acceptable averages and conceal embarrassing intellectual differences—or, in edspeak, disparities—between the best and the worst. How we will keep those distributions of ability in compulsory neighborhood schools without denying families some fundamental freedoms she does not answer.
Was there ever a Great American School System? I don't think so. There was a dynamic young nation whose energies, opportunities, and ambitions once appeared in schooling as in so many other endeavors. Much of that has dissipated, along with the family and social bonds that held it together, gone with the one-room schools of fable and fond memory.[16] I do think Ravitch has missed an emerging opportunity for American education, though, one staring her right in the face: why not support public schools to accommodate special student conditions and let charters proliferate for the sake of those who desire and are ready for more strenuous learning? And readers, take note: special needs students are or very soon will be the new focus of "achievement gap" concern.[17] That might make it politically easier to justify some rejigging of NCLB's strictures and relieve some of the testing-for-dollars pressure. I'm not sure how many of her new NEA and AFT fan club members will warm to this suggestion, but in fact it's just Al Shanker's idea on a bigger scale.
"People's second thoughts are better somehow."[18] It seems a useful motto. But context matters. This bit of deceptive sophistry by her well-intentioned Nurse brought destruction on Phaedra and her whole household. Diane Ravitch's second thoughts of late are certainly well-intended, nor are they deliberately deceptive, tragic, or catastrophic. But neither should we fall for them.[19]
Peter Cohee teaches in the Classics program at Boston Latin School in Boston,
[2] The Death and Life of the Great American School System. How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education. Basic Books, 2010.
[3] "The role of government in education," in Economics and the Public Interest, ed. Robert A. Solo, Rutgers Univ. Press.
[6] Personal bias alert! on 8 January 2002, after signing NCLB into law, President Bush, together with the late Sen. Kennedy, appeared at Boston Latin School -- where I've worked since 1999 -- to proclaim the good news to the world. I had an invitation to attend the tightly-secured celebration (four months after September 11). I declined. I didn't like the law then and I still don't, though generally for reasons other than Ravitch offers.
[7] see C. Murray, Real Education. Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality. Crown Forum, 2008.
[8] Friedman goes on to distinguish between a modest general education for citizenship and a much more rigorous vocational/ professional training for a few -- a crucial distinction now ignored. Now everyone has a right to a four-year college education, and the nation will cease to be strong and competitive if they don't all get one.
[9] "Morals and the servile mind. On the diminishing moral life of our democratic age," The New Criterion 28 #10 (June 2010).
[10] E. G. West, Education and the State: A Study in Political Economy. 3rd ed. Liberty Fund, 1994 (1st ed. 1965).
[12] 'Prodigy' in "The Math Sex Gap Revisited: A Theory of Everyone," La Griffe du Lion, 10.1 (2008) http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math2.htm.
[13] "Arrests highlight education busing issues," 21 July 2010: http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/07/19/ncschools.resegregation.rally/index.html.
[15] Julian Le Grand, Motivation, Agency, and Public Policy. Of Knights & Knaves, Pawns & Queens (Oxford 2003) and The Other Invisible Hand. Delivering Public Services through Choice and Competition (Princeton 2007).
[16] Jonathan Zimmerman's Small Wonder. The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory (Yale 2009), though disorganized and repetitive, is a fresh assessment.
[17] E. g., Boston's Education Pipeline. A Report Card (The Boston Indicators Project 2008), on almost every page.
[19] See the review by Peter Wood,"Is Our Children Learning?" on 04/01/2010.
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