This is my final post and my first attempt at humor. King will be back next week, but I'm hoping that we hear from him this evening, when he may be able to fill us in on conditions in New Orleans, where he is attending a conference.


I've been hearing a lot lately about the effects of global warming. As the ice caps melt, some scientists tell us that sea levels may rise as much as 20 feet globally.

I've got to tell you that this has me plenty worried. As the east and west coast of America vanish under water, what is going to become of the east and west coast liberals???

And then it hit me! They could go to France! Now, think about it. It would be a definite win-win situation. The liberals would be entering an environment where the kind of policies they desire have long been in effect. They could be really happy, while the French would be getting a new, hard -working (at least used to working more than the 35-hr per week norm in France) set of immigrants, that won't have to be assimilated...they already hate the US.

Now, granted, the US liberals would be considered ultra conservative in France, but surely they would be more acceptable than the current set of immigrants that France denies having any problems with.

And then it hit me, and my great idea collapsed in ruin (as so often happens with my great ideas). SHOOT! The very liberal policies espoused by the american liberals and long in effect in France mean that there won't be any jobs for the eager, liberal, potential Frenchmen.

Darn! I hate it when reality gets in the way of a good fantasy.

Then a terrible thought hit me. If they can't go to France, then maybe they would come to Minnesota?

I'll probably lay awake all night tonight worrying about it. Now if they all settled in Minneapolis-St. Paul, or got jobs on college campuses, the chances are that nobody would really notice. But I think that's just too much to hope for.

I think I'm going to have a antacid tablet and then go out and have a beer this evening. After all, pretty soon it will all be wine bars, won't it?

Have a good weekend...and Welcome back, King.

jw

SCSU is preparing for its upcoming accreditation review from our institutional accrediation organization (the North Central Association or NCA). In the College of Business we are also preparing for our latest accreditation report to the AACSB (the oldest accreditation association for schools of business).

If you've ever been through these, you wouldn't wish them on your worst enemy (if you're a nice person, that is ;-)). Sometime in the past, somebody (probably long gone) promised that you would do something within a specific time frame. Now you have to document what you've done.

I've worked at 3 universitites and it appears to be the same everywhere....nobody is even sure of what was promised, let alone what was done to fulfill that promise. In many cases we actually will have implemented a strategy to accomplish the desired goal...now just exactly what was it again?

The part that is raising my ire right now is an upper division writing component. Apparently sometime before I arrived here (7 years ago) it was decided that an upper division class that I currently teach would be designated as an intensive writing class. I wasn't told about it, it doesn't appear in the undergraduate catalog under the description of the class, and nobody has stepped up to tell me exactly what this writing component should consist of. Normally that still wouldn't be a major problem. Students do lots of writing in the class and are evaluated on it. But now the questions I'm being asked deal to how a student would fail the class based on the writing component.

Let me tell you, it's difficult to explain how a student will fail the class based on their writing if you never knew that they were supposed to fail the class based on their writing. For that matter, I can't believe that we ever agreed to that. In order to fail the class based on written skills, the written skills component would have to be worth at lease 40% of the student's grade.


I have a class to run that contains content. I'm supposed to treat that content as being of so little concern that less than 60% of a student's grade is based on it. I can't believe that anyone in the college ever agreed to something like that. In fact, after consideration I don't believe that they ever did.

So we're in passive resistance mode here.

Just like the majority of campus.

If you're in business (I came from business before I got my PhD), you can laugh at what goes on in Academia. But don't laugh too loud...when I think about it I realize that a lot of what went on in the real world was chillingly similar.

jw

Our department is very happy. We just hired a new faculty member for next year!

This doesn't sound like much, does it? Consider the following.

There are approximately 3,500 institutions of higher education in the US. Most of them teach business, though not all of them require a PhD to teach business at their institution.

There were 1,035 Doctorates awarded in all business fields the last year that data are available for.

Of those, only 59% have the right to work in the US. In general, only 65% of doctorates in business want to teach.

Factor in our low salaries offered here, and....I don't even want to go there.

If I have my math right, we're down to fewer than 400 new potential business faculty a year that are eligible to work in the US. Some disciplines are affected more than others. A hire in Accounting or Finance is a cause for a PARTY.

Granted the market for faculty is somehat global, but the numbers are still scary. There are over 600 AACSB accredited schools of business, and this is less than one person available to each university each year...across ALL business disciplines.

SSSSSOOOOO...we're happy.

jw

Yesterday I mentioned a situation that in a perverse way made me feel better about the situation in the US. Here's one at the University of North Dakota that makes me feel better about SCSU.

Believe me, this story has everything. Student walkouts, faculty discord, restraining orders that keep a department from teaching, divorce, deaths under suspicious circumstances....if it were one of those lurid novels it would be a real page turner.

It's easy to write this off as just academic sillyness, but having worked in the real world I can attest that it happens there as well. Did I tell you about the time a colleague's wife came into work and shot him? (I'll skip to the end...he survived and they were still married the last I heard).

But the paragraph above really ignores the real victims of what is going on. I think the article does a good job of illustrating the problems a situation like this causes for students. You would think that professors could act professionally enough to minimize the effects of their personal problems on the primary reasons they are employed...the students. Unfortunately, we have lots of examples that tell us this isn't so...both here at SCSU and, apparently, at UND.

h/t pm by way of kb

jw

As bad as it may seem at times here in the US....how would you like to be a French citizen? The nationwide strikes and repeated violence make me think of things that have been in the news recently.

Recent riots by the children of immigrants result in burning of hundreds of cars, while officials claim that discrimination doesn't exist in France.
A stagnant economy with little employment growth and unemployment approaching 10%.
Unemployment for younger workers at twice that rate.
Fewer and fewer workers to support their generous social benefits system.
A brain drain as younger workers seek opportunity elsewhere.
Decreasing world influence and a president who can't stand to hear English spoken (I'm waiting for the Bush jokes here ;-)).
Antagonistic political relationships with the US and others.
The promise of more strikes in the future.
Criticism from the rest of the EU for protectionism and for scuttling closer EU integration.

And that's just a start.

In a perverse kind of way, the events in France make me feel better. Why? Becasue France was supposed to have it all....the month of vacation, the (nearly) 4 day work week, jobs guaranteed for life, a classless society, etc. Here in the US we don't have any of those things. In addition, we find ourselves working harder and harder to compete globally.

The thing is, that competition is a part of the American make-up. It is part of our culture. And though we are having problems with globalization and increased competition, we still have jobs and a promise for the future if we're smart about how we compete.

The French, on the other hand, seem to have lost the battle and don't even have a clue as to how to respond.

Which would you take? The French future or ours?

jw

Take a look at Mike Adams column at Townhall.com.

I love to read stuff like this because it makes me realize that SCSU is not the only university afflicted in such a way.

jw

Fellow St. Cloud blogger Gary Gross has moved his webpage after the recent troubles of Blogger. Let's hope he moves everything over from his old blog.

I did more reading than writing today, which felt really good, and then did some lecturing tonight which leaves me a little too tired to go back to preparing for a conference this weekend (which is why I'm having jw guestblog for me -- the bothersome office crep got done earlier today.) So a shortish note on Belarus' crackdown and the Ukraine election.

On Russian Mushroom is a translation of a short LiveJournal entry:

I think, as a result of the recent events it's become obvious: in Belarus, there is no opposition, but there is a people. And to defeat the people is impossible.

I think there is an opposition, as I was arguing at length on NARN last weekend. But it was small and it needed fuel to grow. There is nothing like this to do that:
This is a mistake, and a very bad one. Dragging people out of hospital to jail is one thing, impersonating a U.S. diplomat to snatch an opposition politician is another. Seeing the pictures you realize these aren't just students; now it's the students' parents and uncles and aunts.

Today they look south and they see Ukraine holding elections, where they do not turn out well for the president, and there is no violence. Instead, the president tells his current PM to negotiate a new government with the woman he replaced. Ukraine may still have many problems, and you might want to think that Yushchenko is the cause of them, but a country stays together and may have a second peaceful transfer of power in 18 months. 'Round those parts, we call that progress.

LEvko makes an interesting note about that progress:

In the repeated second round of the last Presidential elections held on 26th December 2004, presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych, broadly speaking representing the eastward-orientated portion of Ukraine, obtained 44% of the vote. Yushchenko, leading the westward-orientated Orange forces, and constantly supported by Yuliya Tymoshenko, obtained 52% of votes cast.

Now according to a poll of exit polls, of yesterday's Parliamentary elections, Viktor Yanukovych and other eastward-orientated parties will obtain about 35% of the vote, while Our Ukraine, the Yulia Tymoshenko bloc and other Orange parties will obtain about 45% of votes cast.

The rift between Our Ukraine and the Tymoshenko bloc may be deep and Yushchenko's popularity in decline, but the 'European magnet' seems to be attracting an increasing number of the Ukrainian electorate.

That magnetism, always to the west of Belarus, now beckons from the south as well. Putin will of course remain Lukashenko's friend, but the feeling of isolation must nonetheless grow.

The west would do well to continue to hold out the offer of aid for reforms to counter Putin's development of a client state, even as it ratchets up the rhetoric over the repression of the weekend. Lukashenko lives on the we-versus-they politics of isolation. I would not give him an opportunity to use that line.

Online education is booming. The number of students taking an online class jumped almost 50% from 2002 to 2004, to about 2.4 million. At the same time in Minnesota we are looking at decreasing enrollments of traditional students, so the increase nationwide is really significant.

For-profit colleges and universities are benefitting the most from that increase. Two weeks ago the Star Tribune published an article (no longer available, cached version here) where they documented increases of 1,000% in online classes at Walden in the last two years, and increases of over 100% at Capella since 2002.

But there are numerous people who suggest we should examine online education carefully before jumping wholesale into the practice. The 3/27 edition of the Chronice of Higher Education online contained an article (subscribers only) detailing the efforts of a Congressman from Michigan (a former face-to-face professor at a small private college) to learn more about online studies.

It is difficult to know whether the position he espoused is valid or not. The Chronicle cites him as talking about an unnamed study of online education that was deeply flawed, but used by supporters of online education to support their views. Since the citation wasn't given, we aren't able to identify the study. It might be instructive to speculate, however, why an academic wouldn't have conducted his own search for what he might consider to be a valid study. There are literally thousands of studies of distance education and hundreds of studies of online education...and metaanalyses of those studies. If he hasn't looked, he's probably biased. If he's looked, it wasn't mentioned in the article.

That kind of attitude prevails here at SCSU as well. Continuing Studies (CS) indicates that 70% of students taking CS's online classes are on-campus students. This statistic probably best illuminates our students' desire for the kind of flexibility afforded by online classes and a lack of marketing by MnVU (MnSCU's online arm) to other students (the latter is just a guess on my part).

For many here (and elsewhere) the evidence of demand for online classes for on-campus students and the explosion of online classes at high-priced for-profits don't set off any bells. They don't believe that online pedagody can't provide a quality education and that the problems of teaching online (cheating, plagiarism, etc.) aren't solvable. The interim Dean of the college of business seems to agree with that position, and seems very concerned that faculty are making too much money teaching online classes (?!?!?!?!?).

Facts don't seem to have a place in this debate.

In the meantime, online education grows by leaps and bounds....elsewhere.

jw

There is an article referenced in today's Chronicle of Higher Education online about a Tennessee State University student who lost her tennis scholarship because she decided to attend (on behalf of the university) a journalism conference instead of tennis practice.

Sounds like an open and shut case of athletics trumping academics, right?

Sometimes these things aren't quire as simple as they seem. Certainly the primary purpose of the student's presence on campus is to get an education. The student is on the staff of the student paper and the conference she attended was relevant to that experience. The article doesn't tell us what the student's major is, so going beyond that assessment is difficult. It is possible that the conference was more of a perk than an educational experience.

A question that remains unanswered is what does the student owe the university (and the tennis team) when she accepts a scholarship. Scholarships are awarded for a number of reasons, but in general they are expected to benefit the institution as well as the student. The student was the number 1 singles player on the team...but the team hadn't won a dual meet in the past two years.

Would it make a difference if this was a "breakthrough" season for Tennessee State? Should the allusion in the article to previous problems with the student's attendance at team practices play a part in our evaluation?

I'm a professor now, and I lettered in two sports as an undergraduate. I'm not certain that we can evaluate whether this was a case of athletics trumping academics or just a case of a student not living up to expectations she accepted along with the financial support of a scholarship. Regardless, the instant reaction of somebody perusing the headlines with be that athletics is running wild again.

jw

Universities tend to attract interesting people. At SCSU we have a professor with a PhD in statistics that does research in online gaming. He comes by his interest legitimately...in a previous life he was a card counter (card counting is not illegal) and is at least nominally banned at most of the Las Vegas casinos.

He's fascinating to talk to. After a couple of conversations with him I now win at the slots when I go to Vegas (really!). He's also shown me how some of the online gaming sites aren't sufficiently careful not to allow paired bets that guarantee that you don't lose.

Recently he has been doing research into cyberextortion. In the past few years we've seen a number of well-known companies be attacked by hackers interested in bringing down their online sales functions. It turns out that the online gaming industry is particularly vulnerable to these types of distributed denial of service attacks, where the company's servers are bombarded with enough false "requests" that legitimate business is lost in the shuffle or the servers are brought down.

These cyberextortionists contact the company and demand a payment for leaving the company alone for a period of time...or else they will bring down the company's servers during a critically busy time for the company. Companies are left with the decision of whether to pay (and face further blackmail in the future) or fight the extortionists (hiring consultants, buying additional online capacity, etc.) and run the very real risk that this strategy doesn't work and that they lose business during a busy time of year. Naturally these companies are reluctant to go public with their problems and risk losing their customers to competitors. Our cyberextortion researcher tells me that during Super Bowl weekend at least one major gaming site was unavailable...with no explanation forthcoming.

With the Final Four coming up (a good betting weekend, though it doesn't approach the volume of Super Bowl weekend) I'm guessing that the cyberextortionists will be at it again. If you are reading this from somewhere that online betting is legal, you might want to get those bets down early.

Who says that academic research has no application in real life? ;-)

jw.

Work has me swamped for about a week and I need a little time to clear some things off my plate. Ergo I have added a guest blogger for the week, known to you here as reader jw. JW was at the last MOB Road Show and I thought we might get him to blog on his own then, so maybe a taste of it this week might just be the thing that launches him, as it has done for the latest PowerLine blog of the week Big Lizards.

I'll get a post up about the crackdown in Belarus and the Ukrainian parliamentary elections sometime today, and then I expect to disappear for the rest of the week. But check back for jw's insights into academia and politics. JW, the floor is yours!

Volume 2, or the headline act as our devout fans call us, of the Northern Alliance Radio Network will be at the White Bear Lake Superstore today from 1-3 for a live remote. Stop by and see us!

The weekend rally of the Belarussian opposition has not been disappointing:

Demonstrators attempted to return shortly after midday on Saturday, but their path was blocked by police in riot gear and a bumper-to-bumper wall of bulldozers surrounding the square.

The Minsk police closed down the Belarusian capital's underground rail system, in order to interfere with opposition efforts to gather in central districts.

An estimated 4,000 anti-government protestors collected across the street from the October Square. Shoving matches erupted from time to time between demonstrators and special forces police, but by 1 p.m. GMT (3 p.m. local) there had been no major incidents of violence.

Demonstrators chanted 'Long live Belarus!' and 'Lukashenko Shame!'

Russian Mushroom is auditing Live Journals from the area.

I suspect Captain Ed and I are going to have some real disagreement tomorrow on NARN. I completely disagree with this paragraph about the fall of the Belarussian protests at October Square.

The Belarussian opposition let Lukashenko off the hook. By reducing the protests, they killed the enthusiasm for joining them. They also left an opening for Lukashenko to use reasonable force to bring the demonstration to an end without looking like a brutal dictator. Instead of facing tens of thousands of entrenched and joyous demonstrators, they rounded up a couple of hundred isolated and ineffective, though brave, people in a standard raid.

I think this misunderstands the nature of the color revolutions in the xUSSR. The comparisons between Belarus' nascent opposition and the Orange Revolution next door completely misses the history of the Orange Revolution, which took years to create. The Orange Revolution was the culmination of an effort started by mass protests of "Ukraine without Kuchma" (UBK), which came from the grisly murder of journalist Heorhiy Gongadze in September 2000. UBK eventually got protests going in December of that year, which lasted well into 2001. These groups too were relatively small and were attacked repeatedly, though Kuchma was smart enough not to use uniformed police. By the end of 2001, it appeared, Kuchma had solidified power, sent Yushchenko from the prime minister's office into opposition, and was contemplating constitutional changes that would keep him in power indefinitely.

And that's the point: The breakup of protests was not the end of the opposition to Kuchma. It was the beginning of another phase in the development of a real opposition.

The success of UBK was a series of small steps, starting with one television station in Kyiv revolting against its own management that wanted Gongadze's widow kept off the air, the transformation of UBK from street protests to political party (Our Ukraine, headed by Yushchenko). Natalka Zubar explains:

Throughout 2001 a process was underway on “Maidan” of analyzing and making sense of the experience gained from “Ukraine without Kuchma” which was first recorded on 18 May 2001 in our manifesto. In this document of doctrinal significance there is a key phrase: “… we have one current objective: Ukraine in which it’s a buzz to live. Our Ukraine.”

The Name of Viktor Yushchenko’s bloc “Nasha Ukraina” [“Our Ukraine”] appeared two months later, on 15 July 2001.

It would be another three years before the Maidan filled again with people, who by then had been formed into workable groups with a network that would operate even with harrassement by the police. Arresting any group would not have had any effect; even for the OMON to have descended on the Maidan would have not led to the defeat of the movement, though it might have delayed it for a time and would have caused far more bloodshed.

One has to hesitate in drawing parallels between Belarus and Ukraine. The ethnic and cultural distinctions between them, and between each and Russia, are quite different. A substantial share of Ukrainians had seen Russians as oppressors for centuries, so aligning Kuchma with Putin rallied support; there are few in Belarus with this feeling. The role of the independent media that did exist in Ukraine in 2000 (Channel 5 TV, Gongadze's internet paper, diaspora publications) cannot be understated; these do not exist in Belarus.

If the protests were disorganized and unmoving, why did Lukashenko react as he did? Do not discount the timing of this, just before the start of the weekend. He did not wish to risk the possiblility that the protests would be large, would demonstrate resolve. This attack was not an act of strength but of weakness.

Maybe this time it peters out because it's disorganized. Or maybe it's the start of something bigger. I'm not in the political prediction business. But it's really quite preposterous for people to think that color revolutions are easily set off by a simple spark of a stolen election. It takes time to lay down enough tinder for a fire to catch. Just because this will go off the evening news for awhile now is not a sign that the opposition has blown it in Belarus. I'll throw in with Lenin on this one: This is just the beginning. They've got the stomach, Ed, but they also have the brains to keep their powder dry.

The Wall Street Journal notes a program that sends Afghan women to colleges in the US. It pays for the travel, the schools give them a free ride. How many signed up?

In 2002, Yale received a letter from Paula Nirschel, the founder of the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women. The purpose of the organization, begun in that year, was to match young women in post-Taliban Afghanistan to U.S. colleges, where they could pursue a degree. Ms. Nirschel asked Yale if it wanted to award a spot in its next entering class to an Afghan woman. Yale declined.

Yale was not alone. Of the more than 2,000 schools contacted by Mrs. Nirschel, only three signed up right away: Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, Notre Dame College in New Hampshire and the University of Montana, Missoula. Four years later, the program enrolls 20 students at 10 universities...

And it's not like these are bad students who need remedial English. Not one of them has a GPA under 3.5. Notre Dame College -- four blocks from my parents home when I was in high school and college -- closed at the end of its 2002 year; its campus was bought out by So. New Hampshire Univ., where my sister teaches. Sadly they're no longer on the list.

Suppose you really wanted to bring diversity of viewpoints to your campus. All you need to do is give a free ride to an Afghan woman -- certainly a group that's experienced discrimination -- and have her share her life experiences with your students and faculty. Why won't other schools jump at the chance? Why wouldn't we at SCSU?

Nadima Sahar, who will graduate from Roger Williams in May with a political science degree, says: "Staying here has never crossed my mind. . . . We are responsible for making sure our country succeeds, so that future generations don't face problems we did." Mrs. Nirschel expects a "trickle-down effect." The returning students will "influence their family, their community and the country at large." Clearly there is more going on here than the usual search for campus "diversity."

For those who will embrace it.

Categories: higher_ed

Our local paper repeats the story of how much time is lost at work from people surfing the Internet watching the NCAAs, estimating the cost to the US from lost productivity of $3.8 billion.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago-based outplacement firm, estimates that $3.8 billion in production is lost by American companies during the tournament.

They say for every 13.5 minutes the almost 60 million basketball fans spend on the Internet watching March Madness games, the cost to employers in lost wages alone exceeds $237 million.

Carl Bialik researched this number two weeks ago,

Last year, Challenger relied on a survey from the NCAA in 1997 that found 22.9 million Americans are college-hoops fans, meaning about 14.3 million working Americans follow the sport (Challenger used Census stats on the proportion of Americans in the work force). This time, Challenger used an unrelated Gallup poll, conducted in 2004, that yielded a number four times larger than the NCAA's for the proportion of Americans who are fans of the sport.

Gallup's managing editor, Jeffrey M. Jones, told me in an email, "I don't agree with the estimate," citing the concern that not all self-identified fans will surf the Web, even if they can. He added, "To be fair, they probably should compare how much is lost to productivity by surfing the Web or sports sites on a typical day, and subtract that from their estimate since companies probably lose money every day by employees surfing the web, not just during March Madness. They also mistakenly assume that there will be lost productivity over a three week period. There are only two days where there are games during the working day, the rest are at night and on the weekends."

In other words, the number is garbage. The proper number is a net figure. How much additional time surfing do you do that you don't make up staying late at work? Bialik credits David Nicklaus for some of the analysis, as did Phil Miller. Our young SC Times reporter could have used a little more research on this story.

Categories: sports, economics

I walked by some earnest-looking young man at a bulletin board with a stapler. I hate staples in bulletin boards; someone has to take a knife to pull them out. On outdoor ones I can see the risk of having your paper blown away, but this was indoors. I looked at the advert, and it was for summer jobs for the Campaign to Save the Environment, in a bright yellow.

Well, I thought, he's just a leftist who wants to be sure his message doesn't get taken down.

When I came back the other way an hour later, I saw he had stapled up six identical posters. An outdoor board had ten more.

If I'm an environmentalist, wouldn't I think that ten identical posters plastering one bulletin board is wasteful? Maybe he should put them behind a veil.

Categories: politics

In today's New York Times, a story from a college admissions officer watching her daughter get rejection letters, perhaps because she's female.

Why, indeed? She had taken the toughest courses in her high school and had done well, sat through several Saturday mornings taking SAT's and the like, participated in the requisite number of extracurricular activities, written a heartfelt and well-phrased essay and even taken the extra step of touring the campus.

She had not, however, been named a National Merit finalist, dug a well for a village in Africa, or climbed to the top of Mount Ranier. She is a smart, well-meaning, hard-working teenage girl, but in this day and age of swollen applicant pools that are decidedly female, that wasn't enough. The fat acceptance envelope is simply more elusive for today's accomplished young women.

Demographics are part of the issue, but so too is the persistent message to women that higher education is so valuable. Admissions offices and feminist propaganda has shifted the demand curve for women so much that now

The elephant that looms large in the middle of the room is the importance of gender balance. Should it trump the qualifications of talented young female applicants? At those colleges that have reached what the experts call a "tipping point," where 60 percent or more of their enrolled students are female, you'll hear a hint of desperation in the voices of admissions officers.

ACTA Online notes that there's nothing in this article that indicates the admission officer would be concerned if the ratios were reversed and it was high-quality male applicants being waitlisted. That doesn't matter to me as much if it also means admissions offices are beginning to rethink the process by which they achieve gender balance. If you want it, create messages that appeal to both sexes; if you want an equal flow of applicants and you are getting too many female applicants, perhaps you need to think about creating more programs that appeal to males.

Categories: higher_ed, education

Like most people we run a pool hereabouts for the NCAA, in which teams are auctioned off, money gets split from a pool for the best-finishing eight teams. Problem with it was, nobody bids on Southern or Monmouth. So we create incentives by paying out winnings to the lowest-ranked (or lowest-seeded) teams to win one game and two games. It's less than what those other teams get paid, but it's enough to induce some bidding on the lower seeds. Craig Newmark demonstrates what happens when you don't think about incentives enough. (Unlike her pool, ours was designed by economists and originally was for economists, but now more non-economists play.)

And, as an econ blogger with libertarian tendencies, I had to buy George Mason. Winner!

UPDATE: Tyler Cowen might be the bigger winner.

Last week when I wrote about Karen Murdock and the Century College story I mentioned CC was having a forum on Islam. Karen reports that the forum went very well:

Hi, King, I just got back from the panel discussion held here, entitled "Muslims and the Religion of Islam: Misperceptions and the Facts." The title was a bit misleading, but the discussion was suprisingly good. There were 4 speakers on the panel, including a Muslim student from Century ... The other 3 speakers were Muhammad Banyeh (sp?) from Macalester College, who was the most impressive of the group, Hassan Muhammad, imam of a mosque in St. Paul, and Ahad Zamman, another imam and directorof a charter school in Inver Grove Heights (who was a little bit scary).

The room was packed (at least one teacher here required his/her class to attend) and the tone was cordial and respectful. I am sure such a dialogue was the result of the controversy I started here, so I am pleased. Nobody pointed me out or identified me in any way.

Yes, that is very much the whole point. She created a display and got her college to discuss the Religion of Islam in a panel discussion. Of course that will be harder now that the faculty in her division have required approval of displays on bulletin boards out of concerns that it leaves "spaces for ads, inflammatory remarks, profanity, and personal attacks because there is little accountability or structure," according to minutes from the division's meeting. There's no such thing as "enough" free speech; Murdock's display is just one more example of what good can come from more of it.

Categories: higher_ed

A couple of quick notes before I leave for the day:

Regarding the antiwar walkout on Monday, a Minnesotan wonders whether the timing of this to the departure of Minnesota National Guard troops to Iraq. I hadn't really thought of it; I did not see any signs speaking directly to MNG troops in the photos I saw. But it might have come up in speeches. She wonders if they did this the prior two years. I'm sure they did on the one-year anniversary. On the two year in 2005? I think they were still sitting shiva for Kerry.

Taxprof notes a law professor who has banned laptops from her classroom because they are distracting. I see very few laptops; I do teach in labs where each student has a computer, and they've been emailing and IMing for years. There is a piece of software you can put in labs, though, that allows you to put the student's screen on your screen (and if you wish, on the overhead, but I've heard a story of someone finding their student viewing p%rn) or to put on their screen what is on yours and nothing else. I treat this just like the calculator question -- the best way to solve it is to standardize them. We have $2 calculators for our students to use during exams; no problem. This will come in other technologies before long.

Now if I could just invent that device that gives a short, sharp electrical shock to the student whose cellphone rings in class...

Categories: higher_ed

Fraters are wondering about the Gophers' first round opponents, College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. Someone asked me whether those of us who went to Catholic colleges in New England root for Boston College in the NCAA basketball tournament. If you grew up long enough ago, you might have rooted for the home of Bob Cousy and Tommy Heinsohn. Not to mention early baseball great Louis Sockalexis.

Truth be told, though, I rooted for PC because of Ernie D. And how can you not root for the team that had a player named God Shammgod! Alas, this wasn't the Friars' year.

This is the scene at October Square in Minsk early this evening (seven hours ahead of us). You become quite depressed, I think, seeing how small the crowd is there. But it's small because the opposition made a decision (Robert Mayer thinks it a mistake) to hold off on the larger protests until Saturday. Visitors to the area are having their bags searched for food, so a frequent technique is for drive-by dropoffs, where people drive up, drop off food and speed away before the cops come.

The Lukashenko government is dismissing the protests as "pathetic". Besides Mayer, my NARN brother Captain Ed is also saying putting off the protests is a mistake:

In order to face down tyrants like this through "people power", momentum has to build continuously until the force of it can no longer be denied. Starting and stopping these kind of demonstrations make them easier to handle and will fail to convince ordinary Belarussians to flock to their standard.

Hopefully those protesting for fair and open elections and real democracy in the last bastion of European dictatorship can pick up the threads of their peaceful revolution on March 25th. If they do, they should take care to continue the effort until it succeeds instead of waiting for the weekends.

I don't agree. The ability of Lukashenko's forces to blockade October Square is already in place, and it may be better to lull them to sleep and organize outside the square than to try to hold people in the square in bad weather. And meanwhile refine techniques, as Veronica reports about the drive-by dropping of food.

Moreover, unlike Ukraine in 2004, there is as of yet no good stories on which to hang the charge of fraud against Lukashenko. It's pretty widely known that before the election his popularity ratings were in the low 60s, so the results of the election, showing Lukashenko receiving more than 80% of the popular vote, are laughably implausible. But statistical statements carry far less weight than stories of ballot stuffing. The OSCE statement, while unequivocal in its conclusions that the vote was fraudulent, allows enough wiggle room with statements like this...

The conduct of voting on election day took place in a calm and peaceful atmosphere. In general, polling was well organized and PECs and voters had a good understanding of voting procedures. Unauthorized persons were seen at 7% of polling stations visited, and in 3% of stations they were directing the PEC in its work.

...to make it harder to claim outright fraud. The cheating occured in tallying ballots, a much more easily hid operation. In general, it appears, the Lukashenko regime has decided to commit fraud knowingly but behind a curtain, and then claim victory when it succeeds in suppressing the opposition rallies.

Mark Almond, a person almost virulent in his Sovietphilia, thinks the results are valid and a triumph for Lukashenko's brand of market reforms. Would that there were any. A gazeta.ru editorial by Anton Semenov, however, offers optimism (courtesy JRL):

The ideology and practices of almost any authoritarian regime presume that the main direction of social development has supposedly been found once and for all and is embodied by the current head of state. Presidency for life, as in Turkmenistan, or a hereditary monarchy, formal or actual, as in Azerbaijan, is the most logical institutional form for such a regime. Could open despotism in Belarus, that is, in Europe rather than in Asia, and without its own reserves of oil and gas besides, as in Turkmenistan itself, be stable, and in these days besides -- that, of course, is another question.

By giving the opposition the possibility, though limited, to express its opinion during the election struggle, the regime came into conflict with itself.

After all, in an authoritarian state, the opposition is brought down to the level of "renegades," "traitors," and "moral freaks" by official propaganda. (The specific habit of the authorities of Belarus, where the memory of the last great war is especially keen, is to accuse the oppositionists of secret or even open sympathies for Nazis and the polizei). Politically disloyal citizens are in effect excluded from the full-fledged members of society. (To show greater contempt, Lukashenka became fond of calling his opponents "thugs".) But when a leader of the "renegades" and "thugs" is registered as a candidate in an election anyway, despite all the pressure, and he is allowed to speak in the regions, and a couple of his speeches slightly distorted by censorship are even shown on the air, the legalization of the oppositionists in social consciousness occurs.

And hence, the myth of a "unified nation" that has gathered around the leader cracks.

Robert Mayer and David Marples are convinced that, regardless of the electoral outcome, this is the beginning of the end of the regime. So am I, and I remind people that the pace at which these things change can quicken without warning.

Jim Paine notices that there's going to be a series of debates between Ward Churchill and David Horowitz. Put this thing on pay-per-view, and I'll bring the popcorn.

After the results of the Belarussian election were announced, with president-for-ever Alexander Lukashenka winning 82% of the vote that the OSCE has said was fraudulent, opposition leaders are trying to set up a tent city in the central square of Minsk, the capital. Fifteen tents are reported to be set up as they attempt to mimic the other color revolutions in the region. The police have made moves on the group, but so far it's not clear they are going to do more than test the protestors and wait them out.

One line of attack on Lukashenka has been to publish far and wide cartoons like this one which are of course forbidden to be shown in Belarus. The website svoboden.org has many others, and those wishing to free Belarus from Europe's last dictator are invited to post these around their blogs or websites (though maybe not at Century College.)

It will be imperative over the next few days that Belarussians come forward to the square and swell the ranks of the anti-government protest, which currently peaks at early evening around 10,000 and falls to 1,500 overnight. Maybe it will help that the Russians have decided the elections were free and fair; they did that twice in Ukraine for Viktor Yanukovych, who eventually lost.

Good updates coming out of Minsk through some LiveJournal entries; take a look at Russian Mushroom FMI. UPDATE: Good photos from October Square (h/t: the ever reliable Neeka's Backlog.)

It takes me about 80 minutes to drive to the station from my house, and I was a little delayed by getting Littlest and two other chess players I coach settled into the city youth tournament. That was fortunate because I might have otherwise missed some of Craig Westover, who said essentially what is written here about Katherine Kersten's Wednesday column.

Yes, there is a "gay agenda," but it is driven by leftist politics, not sexual orientation. Sexual orientation is merely the means of pushing the politics, much like gender is simply the means for leftist politics masking as "feminism." If conservatives are true to the principle of individualism (and do not succumb to group identification), then they shouldn't condemn the one because of the actions of the many.

Hell yes! I say. Kersten and some others of the right have succumbed (good word, Craig!) to trying to intellectually engage the left on the same terms they use. Dennis Prager makes the point about how the left responds to editorials like Kersten's:

The "anti" arguments are effective. Conservatives have to spend half their time explaining that they are not bad people before they can be heard. But the Left has paid a great price. Because they have come to rely so heavily on one-word dismissals of their opponents, they have few arguments.

Which is they rely instead on invective.

The enemy on campuses isn't gay studies, women's studies, area studies, peace studies, or whatever, separately. It is one agenda. It is leftism. It is socialism. Strike at the root, which are most sociology programs in American universities, and the entire edifice crumbles.

Categories: higher_ed, politics

Good reader and colleague sf sent a note on the campus discussion list noting the difference between SCSU's little antiwar protest and a forum at Minnesota-Duluth. There, a teach-in rather than a walkout. There, the teach-in will include a student from College Republicans and is sponsored by the History Department (who seems to get the concept of intellectual diversity.) Here we get a walkout sponsored by "CODE PINK, the Hmong Student Organization, People Uniting for Peace, the Social Work Association and the Women’s Center." There, it appears, someone is trying to teach. Here we hand out toy soldiers and provide a full day of entertainment.

Somehow, I don't think this will be showing up in our promotional videos.

Categories: higher_ed, St._Cloud

I saw that Katie Newmark was flabbergasted over a column by Colman McCarthy suggesting that tests of high school students are "demeaning". I'm not at all surprised, because that's this Colman McCarthy who teaches peace studies. And in that article we found at that Mr. McCarthy uses a staff teacher to issue grades. This came out because students at this school said the class "is headed by an individual with a political agenda, who wants to teach students the 'right' way of thinking by giving them facts that are skewed in one direction." If he never gives a test, and then has the grades given by a proxy, in what sense is his statement true? What he avoids is giving grades.

Grades are important because they assign some responsibility to both the student and the teacher. The student is held accountable for learning the material in the course. Why should a teacher find it demeaning to grade a student's learning? He shouldn't: The grade represents the charge we are given in teaching, not only to instruct and to correct but also to judge.

Mr. McCarthy isn't a teacher at all. He's a lecturer who wants an audience that is uncritical. Students will regard a teacher critically when they know they may receive poor grades, and that's fine. If you can't hold up to the criticism, get the heck out of the classroom. And since he's not a teacher, McCarthy's got no business giving exams and doesn't have an informed opinion on the topic Matthews discussed. Only because of his status as a retired columnist for the WaPo is McCarthy allowed to write to Matthews on its editorial page. What a waste of space.

Categories: education

The latest report on leading economic indicators includes some data revisions that are muddying the results. Besides the 0.3% decline in indicators for February, the reading for January was revised to 0.5% from 1.1%. While many will make a big deal out of this, it comes from downward revisions in two numbers which the Conference Board estimates, so that it can report out the data faster. That is, the Conference Board uses a statistical model to estimate the values in LEI for which they don't have actual data to move the series forward in the economic news cycle. At the bottom of page 3 of the report, they say it is an autoregressive model. We therefore know that an autoregressive model -- meaning that the series is forecasted as a weighted average of past observations -- did not estimate capital goods new (where they made an error more than 18%!) and for the personal consumption expenditures deflator (the price index used to create real M2 money supply, and a number the Fed is said to focus on for its measure of inflation in the economy.) Those two changes alone account for all but 0.04 of the revision to January LEI.

It's really then not news. The revision is not because of new data but due to a mistake in projecting the missing components in LEI. And since we could observe the Conference Board's errors in advance of them happening, the reaction to this report should be neutral or even slight positive.

Categories: economics

I'm excited to report that Joanne Jacobs, an early supporter of and inspiration to the Scholars and arguable the Queen of the Edubloggers, will be our guest at 2pm on the Northern Alliance Radio Network. Her book, Our School, tells the story of a charter school in San Jose, CA, that takes in ninth graders with fifth grade math and reading levels and gets them ready for college. Its success rate with these kids in getting them to college is 100%. How do they do that? Tune in and find out at AM1280 the Patriot, or here to stream if you're outside the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro.

I have a number of friends who watch Jim Cramer's show. I've watched it myself a few times, but frankly watching Law&Order: SVU re-runs is more my style when I'm killing time (particularly the Alexandra Cabot years, for purely professional reasons I assure you, Mrs. S!) But in both cases it's entertainment. I don't take legal advice from actors, and I sure as hell don't take financial advice from entertainers. Here's why.

The problems with following Cramer's 1885 calls on 876 unique stocks giving an average return of basically zero, you'd do just as good throwing darts at the newspaper stock listings and then flipping a coin to see if you wanted to go long or short. If you do buy or sell a stock, there's no clear indication on what to do with it later. And of course each time you trade you pay the broker.

That's why they make those football betting shows they play on Saturday mornings, too. But those guys aren't interesting enough to get on MSNBC.

Over the last week we have received a series of announcements that no doubt relate to the little soldier I got before spring break:

On Monday, March 20, KVSC {the campus radio station -- kb} will suspend regular programming to broadcast a special all-day event entitled, Fight for Peace: A History of Peace and Protest Music - Its Impact on Society and Culture. The event is designed to bring attention to the third anniversary of the Iraqi War. Throughout the day, KVSC will focus on providing its listeners with an intelligent balance of peace-inspired music and topic-related news segments.

March 22nd
Winter Soldier
For the week of the three year anniversary of the Iraq War, the Social Responsibility program is sponsoring this powerful documentary of the testimony of Vietnam war veterans on the atrocities they committed or witnessed. Given the emerging information about the US use of torture, extraordinary renditions, use of chemical weapons, etc., this film challenges what we might think soldiers are taught, what they are expected to do, and what are standard operating procedures during war.

March 20 11:10 am: WALK OUT AGAINST THE WAR, meet at Atwood Mall, march will proceed through Stewart Hall and loop around through the Miller Center and end in Atwood. {note, Stewart Hall is a building with classrooms, and includes my office -- expect photos}

In short, it's antiwar week on campus (which gives it something in common with fifty-one other weeks of the year hereabouts) and the leftist rhetoric will blow with gale force next week. Such events will occur on campuses around America, and the press will undoubtedly give them large megaphones.

And of course campuses are places where such things would happen, but God forbid an affirmative action bake sale. Free speech for me but not for thee, because thy speech is irresponsible.

Categories: higher_ed

One of my maxims in evaluating faculty is this: The more stock a professor takes in his student evaluations, the more concerned I am about the integrity of instruction. Mark Steckbeck, discussing professor ratings now being online, gets at the same concern:

A diploma certifies that a student has some base level of knowledge sufficient to represent the objective(s) of the institution. Therefore, what I am supplying in the form of education is actually an obstacle to what some students ultimately seek: that diploma. I look at most – not all – disgruntled students as individuals who I blocked from obtaining their desired end. My job is to preserve the integrity of the institution by preserving the signal of the diploma. This means evaluating each student’s ability at the end of each class and flunking those who in my estimation have not proven competence in a subject. Their negative remarks are often part of their outburst of anger that results from their failure.

Although some students may have constructive comments about their professor’s performance, the incompatible objectives discussed above lead to too much noise in student evaluations of faculty to make them meaningful. Worse still, if administrators weigh evaluations for tenure and promotion there is a resulting perverse incentive for faculty to degrade the integrity of the institution.

SCSU's contract allows professors to define their own packages for promotion and tenure as they see fit; I cannot compel anyone to include material in their packets, nor can anyone in the administration. But I do not comment on a faculty member's student evaluations in my recommendation for promotion and tenure unless I also have some assessment that education has occurred.

A testable hypothesis: There is a positive correlation between student grades and student evaluations. If you could test this holding knowledge or skills added constant, you'd have an interesting paper. Call it 'evaluation inflation'.

I can't make much out this economic profile of SCSU students. The most striking number is that our graduates in 2003-04 carried an average debt of $19,588 at an institution with tuition and fees of $4,550 per year. There's about a 3:1 ratio of loans to grants in our student aid packages. Students are paying on average $1,053 out of pocket for a full year here at SCSU, and borrowing $2,441. Half of the borrowing is at subsidized rates.

Categories: higher_ed, St._Cloud

God put your brains away from your genitalia for a reason, boys, and here's why.

Victoria was a hoax UCLA co-ed, created by Cal's Rally Committee. For the previous week, "she" had been chatting with Gabe Pruitt, USC's starting guard, over AOL Instant Messenger. It got serious. Pruitt and several of his teammates made plans to go to Westwood after the game so that they could party with Victoria and her friends.

On Saturday, at the game, when Pruitt was introduced in the starting lineup, the chants began: "Victoria, Victoria." One of the fans held up a sign with her phone number.

...The chant "Victoria" lasted all night. To add to his embarrassment, transcripts of their IM conversations were handed out to the bench before the game: "You look like you have a very fit body." "Now I want to c u so bad."

Pruitt ended up a miserable 3-for-13 from the field.

If you play for NC State, stay out of chats, please. I have you in my pool.

(h/t: Newmark's Door)

Categories: sports, NCAA

It's cool when universities hire famous people? Does it make you famous if you're the story in a City Pages article? JB thinks so, and notes that person is coming to SCSU. "They'll give dang near anybody tenure there." Word, brother. Looks like the professor's act is playing well off off Snelling already.

Categories: higher_ed

John Fund has been hammering the administration of Yale about the Taliban student, and now reports that someone in the law school's alumni office has been suspended after emailing two alums who disagreed with the admission of that student. The suspicion is that the official got their email addresses from a private database, and then used an anonymous account to call them "retarded" and "disgusting". I'd say it's to be expected; it's why I try not to leave my address in the hands of alumni offices.

I'm not as bothered as some over admitting the jihadi to Yale. It simply shows once again that elite universities have become incapable of making moral decisions. Readers of this blog will find that no surprise.

Categories: higher_ed

Karen Murdock, the geography professor at Century College who had the cartoons of Mohammed taken down, told me after our interview on Saturday that there was to be a meeting of her division's faculty at the school to discuss the use of bulletin boards. She mailed me her notes early this morning. The conclusion of the meeting was to assign bulletin boards to departments or 'disciplines' within the Social Science division and "make sure that all the faculty within a discipline agreed on what should go on the boards." Prof. Murdock was the only person who voted against the motion.

If you would like to see her notes, click here. Note that she names names. I am not verifying this information, just placing it somewhere for others to read it. But I do have a couple of comments about the discussion.

Note that the reaction of faculty to not having rules about bulletin boards is to claim chaos. "We've opened Pandora's box," says one. And why? Because they fear offending anyone. Prof. Brueggeman says we should not put up just anything on bulletin boards because of mothers bringing their kids to college? Where do the kids go during classes? I have had kids brought to class by their parents, and as long as they are quiet I have no problem ... and I also have no problem promoting debate in that room. But they are fragile, and cannot see some cartoons on a bulletin board?

I note the words "Muslim" and "Islam" appear nowhere in the notes. I have a real problem believing the dust-up isn't directly related to the subject of the cartoons, particularly since the college's mulitcultural affairs office has called for a forum:

Next week Century College will host an educational forum titled Muslims: Misperceptions and the Facts. The forum will address misperceptions about Muslims and the religion of Islam, while also discussing the traditions and customs shared by Muslims across the world. This event will be held on Wednesday, March 22, 2006, from 12:00 noon to 2:00 p.m. in Room W1006.

This event is free, and everyone in the campus community is encouraged to attend.

Prof. Murdock has not been invited to speak, though after the events of the last month I'd think she had an interesting viewpoint for this educational forum. Somehow, I think, this isn't a coincidence.

This paragraph is a simulacrum of what happens when people who are afraid of free speech (and afraid of being seen as censors) try to come to grips with speech that offends:

Gary said that he was all in favor of free speech, but that it should be “responsible speech.” He said, “We have freedom of speech in every classroom” and did not need the bulletin boards outside the classroom to reflect free speech. He felt that the “proper venue” for discussion of such controversial issues should not be in “a public hall” but “in a classroom—or special forums.”

Good debate rolls and rollicks and can be rough. It dishonors your students to think that they cannot handle speech, no more than it dishonors Prof. Murdock to think the negative comments left on her pad to the side of the bulletin board somehow would be "too much" for her. And to call it "responsible speech" is to hide your censorship behind a curtain.

If students aren't going to grow up to deal with speech they find offensive or even hateful on a college campus, please tell me where would you like them to learn it?

Categories: higher_ed

This is worth thinking about.

Suppose you are an employer and are filling jobs for which no credential is required. In other words, for typical white-collar jobs--product design and engineering, sales, marketing, non-CPA accounting work and so forth. Would you pay a steep salary premium for a four-year degree holder versus a high school grad? You might. Perhaps you’d think the four-year degree speaks to the job applicant’s intelligence, along with a certain facility to set goals and finish them.

But what if you could guarantee those qualities in other ways (military service, missionary work, etc.)? See, I think the Harvard or Yale degree is worth plenty, not because of what Harvard or Yale teaches--the postmodern university can do more harm than good; witness Yale’s admission of a former Taliban spokesman. The degree simply puts an official stamp on the fact that the student was intelligent, hardworking and competitive enough to get into Harvard or Yale in the first place. May I present to the jury Bill Gates? He was smart enough to get into Harvard. Then he proved his financial intelligence by dropping out to start a company.

Okay, enough Harvard/Yale whipping. Like oceanfront property, their degrees will always command a premium and will probably pay out a terrific ROI. The same is true of degrees from 10 to 20 other private colleges. But beyond those 10 to 20 schools, I suspect the price of a four-year, private college degree--$100,000 to $175,000--will be money poorly invested.

Where does one go, then, to find a good return? Online universities? Public universities? What is it that these two institutions could provide that would give a young person a positive return on their human capital investment, if not a marker that they were "intelligent, hardworking and competitive enough to get into XYZ State in the first place"? Wish I knew; I'd sleep better if I did.

(h/t: Division of Labour.)

A little birdie has come through for me with answers to the questions relating to my post on remedial math. We took a look at the class of 1999, which admitted 2,546 freshmen. 456 took the basic math concepts tutorial and 320 passed it with a C or better. 54% of them graduated in six years. 273 took the intermediate algebra course; 161 got a C or better; 58% graduated in six years. (There were only 17 students who took both.)

One of the things that teaches is that if you can get them through these classes, there's a success rate there that isn't all that bad. (Our 6-year rate over all is in the 40s, so those passing the tutorial did better than average.) But consider the 248 students who didn't even have the ability to get through the tutorials. That's almost 10% of the enrolled new freshmen that year that could not get into the general education math course and graduate from the university, in whom we invest substantial state dollars. Should we charge back school boards for having students so ill prepared for college?

Joanne Jacobs notes the same type of ill-preparedness in California, where only 45% of new entering freshmen in the Cal State system needed neither English nor math tutorial coursework.

Categories: higher_ed

It's not clear to me why Richard Vedder and others in this article on the cost of faculty sabbaticals think these are exorbitant. Sabbatical is part of the terms of employment, like tenure or summers. These are given in lieu of higher base pay, sort of like throwing plane tickets into a ballplayer's contract when he says he wants his family to be able to fly out and see him (as I recall, the pitcher Kevin Brown had these; I understand the practice is not uncommon.)

Now people think anyone anywhere gets a sabbatical. At SCSU they are contractually obligated to faculty after ten years if the faculty member asks. That's a bit unusual, for in many other places there is a competitive process whereby one offers a plan for study, grantwriting or other academic endeavor to be done during the sabbatical. It's not being paid to sit on your duff but to be reassigned for a year to something outside the classroom. This is of course expensive, but then most of us faculty in fields where there are ample private industry opportunities work at a substantial discount, for which sabbatical, tenure, and June, July and August are repayment.

Do some faculty abuse sabbaticals? No doubt true, particularly when you get them as a contractual obligation. But the gist of the article seems to be that faculty not teaching are being lazy, and that's just not true.

Categories: higher_ed

You know, a guy could get a complex.

HH: You know what's very interesting about Minnesota is that it is a new media state. The Start Tribune, obviously, is going to be against you, because they're just over the left edge of the world. But you do have Powerline, you've got a whole bunch of great bloggers up there, Shot In The Dark, you've got Captain Ed Morrissey. If you can stay away from the Fraters guys, you'll be in good shape, Congressman.

What do those four blogs have in common? What's missing here?

Guess I better open SCSUScholars Radio.

(h/t KvM -- you think you got rain?)

Categories: NARN

Jim Paine notices that the first actions of Jay Bennish, the teacher who involuntarily took a week off from classes after a 20-minute political conniption in a geography class, was to suggest that the student was wrong for taping the lecture.

If Bennish were courageously Speaking Truth To Power, why then was he so eager to condemn the agent of that Truth's broad dissemination? And parenthetically, is anyone besides me just a tad tired of the phrase "speaking truth to power"? The phrase implies brave speech in the face of terrible retribution, but what retribution has Bennish faced? He's back teaching classes, albeit with the apparent promise to present both sides of whatever argument he's discussing (what a huge concession; I had always assumed—wrongly, it turns out—that that was the responsibility of every educator).

Speaking truth to power, besides being an overused phrase, is also absolutely not what we do. When we hear words we do not like, in many places, we react with power and force, be it censorship, taking the offending person to sensitivity training, etc. ACTA Online tells of a great student editorial at Oregon State, on the occasion of the David Irving's imprisonment in Austria as a Holocaust denier. Elizabeth Meyer writes:

This doesn't mean that hate speech must go unnoticed by universities. The universities can respond by holding forums, condemning such speech (but still allowing it) and providing support to student groups attempting to educate the
campus about such issues. An atmosphere where the university just ignores it can easily be closed to minorities and women. But by simply banning it, the university pushes the problem under the rug only to have it rear its ugly head later, once the bigots are finished with school.

Supreme Court Justice Brandeis argues, "the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones." Our society has decided that for a functioning democracy, we must be able to evaluate ideas on our own. Yet if a university shields its students from offensive speech, the targeted students will never learn to defend themselves and the offensive students will not have their views directly challenged.

ACTA notes that while the battle against speech codes is painted as a conservative cause, this is very misleading. For the very same reasons that conservative students look to be more prepared to debate than liberals -- because they are challenged to speak -- so too should we educate those to speak against hate speech. Silence when something needs to be said is a great incentive to learn how to speak to power.

Categories: education, higher_ed

Oops! The College Board now says another 1600 SAT exams need to be looked at for possible scoring errors. And rather than a "minute" number of grades from the original 4,000 erroneously-scored exams being reported as higher than earned, it turns out the number is about 600. Now, that's not a high percentage of the 495,000 exams they score, but it's nonetheless too high an error rate for a test that carries a great deal of importance. Expect more than a few more schools to dump the SAT.

Categories: higher_ed

One of the reasons I was opposed to the blocking of the Dubai ports deal was the signal it sent of protectionism to our trading partners. We see a little bit of that today with the announcement that the UAE will shift some of its reserves from US dollars to euros.

The United Arab Emirates, which includes Dubai, said it was looking to move one-tenth of its dollar reserves into euros, while the governor of the Saudi Arabian central bank condemned the US move as "discrimination".

...The governor of the UAE central bank, Sultan Nasser al-Suweidi, said the bank was looking to convert 10 per cent of its reserves, which stand at $23bn (£13.5bn), from dollars to euros. "They are contravening their own principles," he said. "Investors are going to take this into consideration [and] will look at investment opportunities through new binoculars."

Hamad Saud al-Sayyari, the governor of the Saudi Arabian monetary authority, said: "Is it protection or discrimination? Is it okay for US companies to buy everywhere but it is not okay for other companies to buy the US?"

I was lecturing last night on international capital flows and saving and finance. There's a very simple story one tells in your intermediate (or even principles) macro course where you ask "what happens if the government of a large, open economy discourages foreign investment?" Students draw their savings and investment curves and learn interest rates go up, savings and investment go up, and the dollar to depreciate. Exactly how is this good for the United States?

Of course, you will answer, the UAE is a minor player, but in terms of buying US firms it's not.

“America’s trade deficit hit an all-time high for 2005, and the country is not in the position to start dictating where foreigners can invest,” says financial expert and Daily Reckoning columnist Chris Mayer. “The only way the United States is able to sustain such a deficit is by getting money from abroad, by attracting investment dollars.”

Categories: economics

Mitch is upset that Northwest Airlines is offering to sell aisle seats with a $15 upcharge ver