Friday, May 11, 2007

A different kind of campus censorship 

This just tickled my funny bone.
Two students at Framingham State College have admitted to helping steal several dozen copies of the campus’s student newspaper, The Gatepost, after it ran a photograph of them and five other women at a recent lacrosse game with their stomachs bare. Today’s Boston Globe reported that the students at the Massachusetts college had bared their midriffs and painted letters on them in order to spell out the name of a player.
Was it modesty? No, the article states -- the pictures made the coeds look fat, in their own estimation. I guess I could make a statement about the state of America from this, but I'd rather just smile.

Labels:


Thursday, May 03, 2007

College Graduation 

Many of you know I'm an adjunct instructor of Management Information Systems at Metropolitan State University (MIS) in Minneapolis. This semester, I was asked by a former student to attend her graduation.

It was a most delightful evening. Our students are older, average age is mid-20's. They were excited, proud, and had a wonderful time. Their kids, spouses, parents and other relatives were in attendance. The atmosphere was very upbeat.

Speakers as a general rule kept their remarks short. But we had to have the politically correct (PC) talk about the difficult economy (what's so difficult about 95.5% employment, house ownership at an all time high, etc.), the status of women and race. We need to stop this mantra of looking for doom and gloom amid strength and success. We will never get pass the race/sex issues if we keep throwing them out to people in talks. Tonight there were more female graduates than male and now there are more women in college than men. This lack of men getting higher educations is a far greater problem than any of the race/sex issues. I will cheer the day when we can get through a positive event like tonight without the comments on diversity, men, sex, hard times, etc.

In the meantime, I sent a note to my students encouraging them to participate in their graduation ceremony. It was a night to remember.

Labels:


Nibbling away at excellence 

I should do a series of these. Here's today's example of how the academy is tossing away standards of excellence in return for quite marginal changes to access for historically marginalized groups. A historian proposes a panel for the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. The conference organizers reply that the panel is of high quality and should be in the prestigious meeting, but only if they would put a woman on the panel. Erin O'Connor notes:
Shouldn't the goal be to assemble the best panels and to host the most intellectually vibrant conference possible? Annual meetings of huge scholarly associations are commonly described as "zoos." But in requiring that every panel display a token female--see female historian talk! see female historian think!--the AHA is taking the zoo image to a new level entirely.
Perhaps calls for papers for the AHA should include "women and minorities especially encouraged to present."

Labels:


Is cheating ever worth the bother? 

An article in today's StarTribune talks about using iPods for cheating. Electronic cheating has been around since the first Texas Instruments or HP programmable calculator went into a classroom. The cures are quite simple, though:
Timothy Dodd, executive director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University, said that as far as he knows, no studies have been done on how often students use iPods or other personal digital media to cheat....

"Teachers and faculty have grown with the technology," he said. "When we were in school, we were told to close our books and put our notes away. Now students are told to turn off their cell phones, put the PDAs [small hand-held computers] away and put the iPods away."

Even gadgets such as calculators, which have become increasingly sophisticated and are capable of holding downloaded material such as class notes, have to be watched. [Computer science professor Annette] Schoenberger said some St. Cloud professors ask students to bring their calculators in an hour before an exam to remove any suspect memory.

Jane Kirtley, the Silha Professor of Media Ethics and Law at the U, said her students won't have any questions about what to bring to finals next week. She bans electronic devices from use in her classroom all the time. Cell phones are to be turned off, iPods invisible and laptop computers closed.

Students take notes by hand. If a cell phone goes off, students know they are to leave and not return until the next class period.

I had not tried the trick of bouncing out of class students whose cellphones ring; I think I'll have to try that now. The most common form of cheating, however, is the old-fashioned kind of someone trying to get a copy of the test. Even that can be digital now, with cellphone cameras able to beam a copy of my test given at 8am to the 9am classmate. But scrambling answers and the order of the questions -- something also made easier by technology -- is effective as a deterrent. I hear far more cases of plagiarism -- again, made easier to do and to detect via newer technologies -- than I do of cheating on exams.

Yet my overriding impression from university life is that cheating is almost never worth the bother. The one time I had a final exam stolen from my office, about twenty years ago, I happened to have a backup in a file cabinet; it was an old exam that I had not shared with students as preparation for their final. Easy enough, I went over to the print shop and had 70 whipped up. The reddening face of the guilty party was pleasure enough for me, and the fellow did fail the exam and course without ever having to prove he had stolen the test. Perhaps math, computer science, or language exams are easier to cheat on, but in economics I have yet to see it pay off for someone.

Labels:


Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Textbook less baggage 

The reality check of the budget has put a crimp in the textbook windbaggage that the Minnesota Legislature has been trying to pass. No money for the project, just a bunch of unfunded mandates:
House and Senate negotiators Monday took another step toward controlling the high costs of college textbooks, agreeing to require publishers to disclose textbook costs, formats, return policies, and how much new editions differ from older ones.

...Higher education conference committee members also agreed that public colleges and universities in the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU) system must meet annually with students, teachers and administrators to figure out how to reduce the costs of college course materials. Private colleges and the University of Minnesota would be asked to adopt the disclosure measures.
There might be money forthcoming if the conferees ever get budget figures from the other conference committees charged with setting budget targets. That money would go most likely to pilot textbook rental programs.

As I noted last spring, the problem here is one of an agreement between Professor A and Publisher B that B's textbook will be required of Student C in A's class. A might be made to talk with C about the cost of B's book and alternatives available, but will it be effective in influencing the conversation between A and B? I doubt it. The bill agreed in conference requires B to tell C what are his or her options in buying the book, but doesn't specify which options will have to be available. I suspect that will have to come after a discussion between A and the university, which is having a hard time attracting enough students to keep budgets stable.

Labels: ,


On being a department chair 

My existence beyond this blog and radio show is mostly defined as being a department chair. Todd Diacon of the University of Tennessee writes that it's a hard job, but worth it. (Permalink for Chronicle of Higher Education subscribers.)

As a central administrator I am now tucked away in a fortress on the edge of the campus. Rarely will I encounter the people whose work I administer and whose expectations I help shape. And when such encounters occur they are a) scheduled in advance, and b) thus largely scripted.

By contrast, every week -- if not every day -- as a department head you bump into a professor you have disappointed, or even angered, by some decision. Furthermore, that professor is often a friend, always a colleague, and often admired for his or her excellence in teaching and scholarship.

That tension is painfully unavoidable, for, at a minimum, department heads must evaluate professors every year and divide up the pool of money available for raises.

I am lucky that SCSU does not have merit money for raises, so I never have to do this.

In addition, life is messy, so that at myriad other points in the year tense encounters and situations are likely to occur -- as when you decide that no, the department doesn't have enough money to cover Professor A's third conference travel request. Or, yes, Professor B will have to teach at 9 a.m. on a MWF schedule even though he is a self-proclaimed afternoon person who is most brilliant on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

The nature of the job means that often you please no one, not even your boss, which, in the case of a department head, is the college dean.

Regrettably, this has been more difficult insofar as I'm on my fourth dean in six years and about to get my fifth. Two of them have had to wear the interim tag. The interims have had a better understanding of the university but no payoff to the visioning task that is part of the job (Diacon says that they "see the forest in ways that professors cannot" and that "they have a bigger picture both to paint and to interpret." True, very true.) I've managed somehow to work with all four of them, as well as my department. How? After going through a long list of what makes the job tough, Diacon gets around to why you do it. And it's about the growth of the person who takes the job.
You learn new skills as a counselor, a coach, and a confidant. You learn the importance of fund-raising, and, in the process, meet fascinating people from outside the university.
My experience in talking with people who have been department heads in the past is that they become much more at peace with the life they chose to take up after the PhD. I am looking forward to giving this job up in a couple more years -- I am not of a mind to do anything else in administration as Diacon now will do, but never is a very long time so get back to me on this later -- but I wouldn't trade this experience for fifty trips to conferences and seminars. I'm looking forward to a better academic life.

UPDATE: Of course, I would have loved to have Atomizer's job. But I flunked that test on the back of the matchbook.

Labels:


Monday, April 30, 2007

Do professors have "qualified immunity"? 

On Friday on Phi Beta Cons, David French posted the disappointing outcome of a suit he was trying to protect the rights of former Temple University student Christian DeJohn. French's version of the facts:

In late 2002, Christian was deployed overseas to serve as a peacekeeper in Bosnia. While overseas, Christian received a series of anti-war messages from a university listserv. While Christian didn’t dispute the right of professors or anyone else to protest the war in Afghanistan or the (at that time imminent) war in Iraq, he also didn’t want to receive such messages while in a hostile fire zone. At trial, Christian testified that he wrote back to his department chair and asked to be removed from the e-mail list.

When Christian returned home from Bosnia, he found that he had been expelled from the university. When Christian challenged the expulsion, the university re-admitted him, claiming computer error. What Christian didn’t realize (at the time) was that the attitude of two key professors – his department chair and academic advisor — had dramatically changed towards him.

In university e-mails, these professors variously described him (among other things) as a “fool or liar,” a “gnat,” “mentally unstable,” and “trained to kill by the U.S. Army.” The department chair hoped he’d “self destruct,” and his academic advisor (in a later message that attempted to justify his actions against Christian) claimed that Christian was “obsessed” with “liberal bias.” One of his professors even went so far as to urge the department chair contact key Temple alumni (individuals who would be in a position to hire Christian after he graduated) and tell them that Christian did not represent Temple’s “best and brightest.”

The lawyer for the two members of the history department is quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education (temp link, permalink for Chron subscribers) as finding Mr DeJohn a "marginal learner, barely passing" and that his masters thesis "flabbergasted" the faculty. So while French is certainly trying to bring out the worst of DeJohn's professors' behavior, they aren't exactly hiding their dislike for the student.

Two facts also bear notice: First off, Mr DeJohn was called a "peacekeeper", which I guess is the word of art for a sergeant in the National Guard who pulls overseas duty. So this is potentially retaliation against a member of our military. Second, Mr. DeJohn was someone who testified at Temple during the hearings surrounding Pennsylvania's inquiry into political bias and the possible need for an Academic Bill of Rights.

The judge threw this case out, though. He said there was no evidence that the chair had retaliated against the student -- a finding that I can't judge based on the information received -- but this from the Chronicle raised my eyebrows:
And the judge said that, while the jury may have discerned some evidence that Mr. Urwin had retaliated against Mr. DeJohn, the professor deserved "qualified immunity," which means that he behaved toward Mr. DeJohn in a way that could reasonably be seen as within his rights.
Excuse me? It is within one's rights to retaliate against a student? So if a student is retaliated against by a faculty member and can prove it in a court of law, a faculty member may nevertheless have some kind of immunity from prosecution for violating a student's due process rights?

French has indicated he may appeal the ruling. One hopes the rights of students will be upheld.

Labels:


Thursday, April 26, 2007

Outsourcing professors 

There is a proposal at the University of Illinois to create an online program that could scale up to 70,000 and avoid many of the costs of bricks and mortar ... and mortarboards.
When Global Campus was proposed, in May 2006, officials envisioned it as a corporation that would rely on part-time instructors, and be free of university regulations.

Administrators said the setup would reduce faculty expenses. Operations like payroll and other tasks could be outsourced, presumably allowing the Global Campus to run more efficiently than the regular university. The online institution would be nimble, responding to market pressures with frequent revisions in the curriculum. By comparison, proposed changes in the traditional university curriculum are vetted by many scholars in a time-consuming process.

Faculty members complained that the project treated them as irrelevant.

"It presented a huge danger, not only in and of itself but as a kind of model for the university of the future," says Cary Nelson, an English professor at Urbana-Champaign who is president of the American Association of University Professors.

Faculty members would have had no say in curriculum development or the hiring of instructors, he explains: "It was the development of a whole segment of the university completely outside faculty input and completely outside shared governance."
The university has relented and created a partnership with the faculty union. Yet there are online courses at some of its campuses, such as Springfield. (
Source, hat tip: loyal reader JW.)

What will become of these online programs and why would the universities of Illinois and Maryland, among others, push for them? We turn again to Richard Vedder, reporting from a conference studying collective bargaining in higher education:
The reality is that spending at American universities is not rising as rapidly as in the salad days of the 1950s or 1960s, but it is still growing. It is true that a smaller proportion of that spending is going to the professoriate. To the attendees of the ... meeting, on average, the solution is to get the taxpayers to fund higher education more generously, rather than to reallocate university funds back to historic proportions with respect to spending on instruction.

To be sure, there were pockets of realism and analytical thinking. Dan Julius, the Provost at Benedictine University, called for more serious academic research on labor issues, suggesting good ideas for studies. For example, has the spread in the use of part-time non-tenured ("contingent") faculty led to reductions in academic or instructional quality? What is the relationship between academic quality and unionization? Good questions, deserving serious scrutiny. And Ernst Benjamin, who runs the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), saw a potential dilemma. In pushing hard for higher salaries and fringe benefits for mostly tenure track full time faculty, unions increase the incentives for institutions to hire more adjunct faculty with low pay and fringe benefits. He came close to suggesting that unions are promoting the demise of their own membership by driving universities to lower cost substitutes for their services.
Which takes us to online learning.

Labels:


Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Most interesting thing I read today 

Rich Vedder:
If Becker were right on the economics of higher education, one would expect spending on colleges by governments to positively impact growth rates. The work I am doing, now in conjunction with Tony Caporale and Whiz Kid Jonathan Leirer, convinces me that spending on higher ed by state governments has, at the margin, no positive growth effects whatsoever, and probably even negative ones. As to the other dimensions, do college graduates smoke less (and thus live longer) than non-college graduates because of what they learned in college, or because they are smarter and more disciplined? ...

If James Bryant Conant, former Harvard president, had gotten his way, we would today have perhaps five or at the very most 10 percent of the adult age population with college degrees. Would we be poorer, less healthy, etc.? Maybe, but to me the evidence is very far from clear. As Posner notes, many studies on these issues were based on K-12 results, and the marginal benefits of subsequent education may be quite different than that associated with basic literacy and numeric skills.
Links to Becker and Posner added. I'm hoping Vedder posts this paper of his soon.

Sorry to be shorter today, but a day from hell it was, and now the final papers for senior seminar come tomorrow. Rest is required, though one more blog may come from me tonight if I can extract it from the muse.

Labels: ,


It'll violate your rights just a little 

Several posts by others today on the StarTribune's defense of Minneapolis Community and Technical College's purchase of foot-bathing facilities for its Muslim students. See for example PowerLine. Mitch asks a very good question hypothetically of MCTC's administration:
Since washing feet - the feet of others, in this case - has a tradition in Christianity that was practiced by Christ himself, I’m wondering; would I, a Christian, be able to wash feet in this foot bath (following Christ’s example, I’d be washing the feet of others rather than my own - a typically-Christian model of self-abnegation, if you know what I mean)?
I suspect I know the answer, and there'd be a way for MCTC to differentiate re-enactment of the Last Supper, an annual event, with the five-times-daily washing required of observant Muslims. So perhaps Christians would get access only on Maundy Thursday. To be frank, that'd be enough for me.

But the part that I've been wondering about is in the STrib editorial,
If MCTC were setting some unusual precedent, we might worry. But it's not. St. Cloud State University, the University of Minnesota-Duluth and at least a dozen other colleges around the country have installed small foot-washing facilities for their devout Muslim students -- at modest cost and often using student fees rather than state revenues.
If student activity fees were purely voluntary payments, distributed democratically by a student government, I might agree with the distinction the editors make. But this is a false dichotomy. It takes as little as 7% of the student body to impose fees, and student government elections are typically with less participation than that. After voting a fee, the university takes the money from students and deposits it into an account for them. So the state is involved in enforcing the fee, and the university does have oversight. I think the distinction between student fees and state revenues is less than one would believe.

At SCSU, there are Friday prayers for Muslims in the student union; it is my assumption that to do so requires the washing of feet, and perhaps a facility is provided. It's not clear to me if it is provided by the Muslim Students Association, or the Arab Students Association, or by student government more generally. There are 17 student organizations on campus that are religious, most of them Christian. The question of who paid for the washing basin is not terribly important. That it's just a few dollars, and it comes only from student activity fees, doesn't help us understand the lack of equal access to religious practice on our campuses. The question worth asking, like Mitch does, is whether each enjoy equal access to the fees collected by the state on behalf of a student government that would not pass the test of being representative even if you had Jimmy Carter judging them. I have not heard any reports like this, so I assume nothing has happened, but I do not know. (If you are an SCSU student with an opinion on this and wish to remain anonymous, drop an email at comments-at-scsuscholars-dot-com)

It's not an idle question. FIRE has a list of cases in its past that cover religious liberty on college campuses. Most, though not all -- LSU once tried to not recognize a Muslim student group because it had the requirement that its members be Muslim -- have pointed at restrictions on freedom of religious expression of Christianity. It is that backdrop that causes questions to arise when we find dollars spent on public university campuses in support of religious practices of others.

Labels: , ,


Tuesday, April 24, 2007

John Stossel at the Univ. of MN, Mpls. Campus 

John Stossel of ABC's 20/20 was in MN for a two-day college tour. King wrote about his talk at St. Johns, in Collegeville, MN on Monday, April 23. Tonight, Stossel spoke at Northrup Auditorium in Mpls.

The title of his talk: "Freedom and Its Enemies"

One can summarize his views as follows:
The touted belief/myth that the free market economy is so cruel and unfair that government must take over is simply wrong. Frauds avoid the rules and regulations. But, once it's apparent the fraud will lose, they move on to something else. In the meantime, creative people learn and comply with all the rules. This is creative time wasted; they get stifled by government regs. Companies in business for the long haul pay for all the regulations as do the consumers. Good companies that serve customers well, grow; those that don't, die.

Ralph Nader originated the idea that commercial TV would not do consumer programs because TV would lose advertisers. What happened? Consumer programs thrive on commercial TV and are non-existent on public TV because the PBS regulating boards are too scared to try anything.

People have been told by government and tort lawyers that business is a zero sum gain. In reality, business is a win/win. You buy a cup of coffee, you hand the server your money. You get your coffee, the server gets their money. "Thank you" and both of you are happy.

Free enterprise has lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system.

Fearful and bad reporting encourage people to be fearful.

In summary, in addition to our military heroes, America's other heroes are free people, the inventors, entrepreneurs, the creative geniuses who design, develop and deliver innovation after innovation after innovation - not the government regulators.

Labels:


Friday, April 20, 2007

Higher ed-gasm at the House 

The Minnesota House passed a whopping higher education budget last night that adds $168 million or 14% to the MnSCU base budget. The bill includes the provision that would permit anyone with three years in a Minnesota high school to get the in-state tuition handout from taxpayers regardless of their citizenship or immigration status (the DREAM Act.) Rep. Dan Severson of Sauk Rapids tried to get DREAM pulled out of the bill but his amendment lost 61-71. Rep. Marty Seifert is quoted as saying that provision will draw the governor's veto.

A note from our union's lobbyist in St. Paul included this:
A bipartisan amendment by Representatives Mary Seifert (R-Marshall), Gene Pelowski (DFL-Winona), Morrie Lanning (R-Moorhead), and others, to cut $6 million per year out of the MnSCU central office and use the saving to buy down student tuition, passed by a vote of 97-35. All of the MnSCU legislators, except the Metro State area legislators, supported the move. Needless to say, MnSCU officials are not happy.
Tuition increases were capped in the bill at 2%. Subsidize middle-class children or MnSCU officials? Hmmm, tough call there.

The bill goes to committee now, and we'll see if DREAM and the tuition caps stay in.

Labels: ,


The farm team 

Courtesy Residual Forces, here's the webpage at the University of Minnesota that lists internships for its political science majors. Andy calls it "the monster.com of the DFL". How come Norm Coleman or Jim Ramstad or John Kline internships aren't on this list?

Labels: ,


Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Show your colors 


Virginia Tech is asking people to support its students, faculty, administrators, staff, alumni and friends by wearing orange and maroon this Friday. Given the number of colleagues I've worked with over the years that are from that fine institution, count me in, as long as I can find something in those two colors.

Labels:


Keeping one's promises 

The Chronicle of Higher Education this week published (subscribers' link) a full assault on the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education by Jon Gould, a professor of law and womens' studies at George Mason University. He claims that FIRE has greatly inflated the claims that speech codes on American university campuses are infringing on free speech. Moreover, he says, the demand for speech codes are from the very students bound by them, and that the students come wanting to be restricted. To wit,
It is simply not the case that "free speech no longer exists on American college campuses," a charge made in an American Enterprise article about FIRE several years ago. There is a reason that large majorities of freshman students arrive at their institutions already believing "colleges should prohibit racist/sexist speech." They're developing those attitudes, before they ever set foot on a campus, from a civil society that has supported the restriction of hate speech — not from colleges that are "indoctrinating" their charges.

One sees such general attitudes in public-opinion surveys. Last year, for example, the First Amendment Center found that 55 percent of respondents in a national survey did not believe that the First Amendment right of free speech should allow "people ... to say things in public that might be offensive to racial groups."

But universities have a special place within First Amendment law, and Gould's wrong to extrapolate from a general survey to the special requirements of academia. See for instance Eugene Volokh's summary.

Moreover, Gould's claim arises from the fabrication of taste for multiculti education by the government education establishment. Joanne Jacobs observes, for example, the Seattle government school district sending its students to a "white privilege conference" and holding an "equity summit." Thus the liberal education establishment's control of public tax dollars is used as an excuse to suppress speech on college campuses.

FIRE is running a series of rebuttals on its blog, The Torch. They make several points, but the one I keep returning to is this: All public universities are required to permit free speech, and most private and religious schools promise in their materials for prospective students that they will. Having done so, FIRE argues, the schools have a contract to uphold with students and cannot impose speech restrictions when someone is offended.

UPDATE: The interview with Evan Coyne Maloney from Indoctrinate U that we did last week is up at last (the gerbil that runs the Patriot was tired and stopped turning the wheel.) I suppose Prof. Gould would like to put Maloney's lights out too?

Labels:


Tuesday, April 17, 2007

The price of freedom 

As I read various reactions to the tragedy at Virginia Tech, the common thread seems to be an attempt to read policy prescriptions into the event. More gun control or less, for example? Is campus security strong enough? Are there enough valiant men?

Yet I find instead that most reactions at first are the product of a small sample of relatively rare events. Some people argue that we overreacted to 9/11 because it was just one of those catastrophic moments that can happen in a free society. It is only in piecing back the signs from there that we realize the events are not rare, the risks quite substantial. It's an argument over such boring things as probabilities, elasticities and expected values.

So too with the VT tragedy. What's the relevant sample of possible incidents with disgruntled students, and how many times do they really happen? Glenn Reynolds says not many. What is the increased likelihood of a psychopath gaining a weapon if guns are allowed on campus? Jules Crittenden says "doesn't really matter." What is important is that decisions are done with detachment, with rational assessments of all the boring numbers. And someone, somehow, has to price freedom in the equation.

Grieving comes first; time will allow better decisions to be made.

UPDATE: Found this note by the Dean Dad (via Stephen):
College campuses are incredibly vulnerable places. They're open, they're highly populated, they're lightly patrolled (if at all), and they're full of stressed-out people. In a way, they're almost naive, if it's possible for institutions to be naive. As I've mentioned before, they really aren't built for easy lockdown modes. Most were built before that term was even coined.
Absolutely so. I have never found myself thinking about my own safety in mediating disputes between students and faculty (grade appeals, classroom behavior, cheating/plagiarism), but I guess it will cross my mind for a few weeks now. Then I'll go back to my usual "these are my students, they're good kids" frame of mind. But even good kids can react badly to stress.

Labels:


Friday, April 13, 2007

Tomorrow on the Final Word... 

We are looking forward to a great show with a couple of special guests. Brian McClung, communications director for Governor Tim Pawlenty, will be joining us. The Word has it that McClung is responsible for my favorite line of the 2007 Legislative session, spoken by Governor Pawlenty. If so, praise be upon him. I believe he will be on in the first hour, exact time is still firming up.

We're also please to have at 4:15 Evan Coyne Maloney, whose movie Indoctrinate U will be opening next week in New York. I am going to try to persuade him that his movie would make a good headline for a double-bill with the Penn and Teller episode that featured what one fellow calls "the ground zero of political correctness."

Watch the trailer below, then come listen to Mr. Maloney.

The show will be on 3-5pm on AM1280 the Patriot. The archive afterward should be up here.

Labels: , , , ,


Thursday, April 12, 2007

Standing out is proof enough 

Reading Mary Eberstadt's article about left-wing bias on college campuses reminded me of a story I told a couple of years ago here. I am fortunate that I work in a department where my politics do not stand out as different, because there are a number of people who are conservative here as well as liberal. (Indeed, in the past six years in hiring seven new faculty members, not only have we hired a healthy mix but in two cases I completely missed on my guess of the other's politics -- one in each direction!) But the case I made then remains: A conservative who is accepted on a college campus tends to be treated as a token of the Left's self-perceived "openness".

The students, however, recognize it. Eberstadt's new book, Why I Turned Right, makes the case that famous conservatives become that way after starting out in school as liberal (David Brooks argues that they do it to be cool, to affect a superior attitude to the perceived ignorance of the Right.) That may well be true at more elite institutions. At SCSU, however, a majority of students I see know who the professors are who are putting their political views on display in the classroom, and surprisingly it's not working: On a campus where 90% or more of the faculty are Democrat, a new SCSU Survey of students says only 36% self-identify as Democrat, to 26% Republican.

Johnathan Chait pooh-poohs Eberstadt's collection of stories, likening the conversions of the David Horowitzes and Heather MacDonalds as like joining a cult. He is right insofar as those who publish as leading voices of the new Right tend to be people who knew how to be leading voices of the Left. But focusing on the few in Eberstadt's book misses a broad swath of students at non-elite schools, educated by the second- and third-rate liberals from more elite schools (who alternatively pray for their deliverance from a conservative Midwestern hell and curse the fates), who shrug, chug a beer, and head off to middle class jobs feeling like they are the ones delivered. Indeed, as a number of us were discussing over lunch today, the increased use of two-year schools as feeders for the state university system is just the thing to allow our students to avoid the grips of the displaced, dispossessed leftist's general education course.

Labels: ,


Wednesday, April 11, 2007

USNWR 

University presidents are refusing to fill out a survey of the reputation of their peer institutions that is used as part of the US News and World Report rankings.
Dozens of schools have recently refused to fill out surveys used to calculate ranks, and efforts are now afoot for a collective boycott.

..."This increasing interest in measuring everything – these so-called science-based measures of [educational] outcomes and the like – seems to me to be so misguided that it's now captured the imagination of the leadership in higher education," says Christopher Nelson, president of St. John's College in Annapolis, Md., who heads an association of 124 prestigious liberal arts schools. "This is a bad way of talking about an education. [Students] aren't consumers shopping for a product."

The boycott of the U.S. News rankings could be extended in coming weeks as a draft letter makes the rounds of academia. The letter, formulated by a dozen college presidents and an education activist, calls for others to join them in neither filling out the magazine's survey form nor touting rankings in marketing materials.

The "reputational survey," as it's called, asks college administrators to rank the quality of hundreds of schools on a one to five scale. The data – which critics call a "beauty contest" – account for 25 percent of the overall U.S. News rankings.

It's hard for me to figure out who I side with in this battle. The presidents hardly elicit support when their answer to problems in a third-party ranking system is to try to sabotage it with a boycott.

But I certainly agree that there are many "science-based measures" that are little better than a SWAG at what rankings should be for this or that. As I've mentioned, I'm working on a book looking at measures of things like corruption or rule of law, which are also reputational in nature. Country X is said to be corrupt because a group of businessspeople say it is. That seems pretty circular, and sometimes not really scientific.

Likewise, university president rating universities are relying mostly on a single vague dataset.

Several college presidents suggested that they personally could evaluate only five to 10 schools – a far cry from the hundreds on the list. "We know each other through reputation, but that's different than having the kind of intimate knowledge you should have when you are making a ranking," says Robert Weisbuch, president of Drew University in Madison, N.J., who plans to sign the letter.

The intent of the administrator survey is to capture the opinions of those who are experts inside the industry, says Brian Kelly, executive editor of U.S. News. The survey asks them to rank only those schools with which they are familiar. If that number is only five, says Mr. Kelly, "well, gee, maybe you need to know some more about your competitors."

But why? I really know only so much about my peer institutions. I don't really know that many other economists at other MnSCU institutions. I know people in my own area of research specialization, but it's sufficient specialized that knowing my field isn't that hard to do. And just because I give a school $50,000 to educate Littlest Scholar doesn't mean the school has to give USNWR 50,000 rankings, as Mr. Kelly seems to imply.

Moreover, one thing I always hate about their college rankings is that the weighting scheme is very much one-size-fits-all. Mr. Kelly says that is changing to allow you to use your own weights. But weighted bad data still gives bad rankings.

An objective measurement is only as good as the consensus on what is to be measured. We rely on thermometers' mercury because they correlate with our own perceptions of heat and cold. As long as the market purchases USNWR's college guide you have to assume somebody values the information inside. Maybe it's time university presidents figure out why prospective students need a third-party guide.

Labels:


Personal Finance 101 

As many of you know, I teach a Management Information Systems course in the Cities. For my last lecture I cover futures and security issues related to information systems within organizations and outside the work place.

Last evening included a discussion about software (SW) systems designed to catch fraudulent use of credit cards. As background, consider the following volume of textbook data: Visa has distributed 1,000,000,000 cards, handles $2,000,000,000,000 in transactions/year for 21,000 financial institutions. They rarely make a mistake. However, others can steal the credit cards. Then a student commented, "You know, the MNSCU system is considering mandating Personal Finance 101 for all freshmen."

J (me) - How many of you think this course is necessary?
S (students) - Almost all raised their hands.
J - How many of you would take the course?
S - Two raised their hands.
J - OK, if you think it's necessary for others to take it, why won't you take it?
S - Those freshmen need it; we can handle our finances.
S - We figured out how to use the system.
S - But those banks keep pushing credit cards at you and you spend and you get in debt and it's the bank's fault.
J - Oh? Who used the credit card?
S - Well it's their fault
J - Really. What did you do about it?
S - I got rid of my credit cards.
J - Problem solved - YOU solved it.
S - Well, yes, but....
J - OK, how many of you figured out this credit card problem through the "school of hard knocks?"
S - Over half the class raised their hands.

Our students' average age is mid to late 20's. They learned personal responsibility the expensive way and it tickled me no end that they didn't need the course but "those freshmen did."

Finally I described how financial institutions have put in place a number of automated SW security features to react to charges outside a cardholder's normal geography. One student also mentioned how ATM cards can be coded so an owner's cell-number is dialed automatically every time $N are withdrawn from an ATM - if the card owner hasn't withdrawn the money, the bank can be notified immediately. The SW capabilities to identify possible fraudulent use are extraordinary but the SW only works when the human performs their end of the deal - call your bank and cell carrier before you travel.

Labels:


Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Tuition freezing is expensive 

Among the many places the Legislature wants to spend money, one of them that has special attention around here is the proposal to freeze tuition. For example, SF 773 fully pays for tuition freeze by an additional amount of money in the higher ed bill. The calls for tuition freeze are notably bi-partisan up here, though I think the Republicans have become more muted over the last month. The bill is laying in wait for the omnibus higher ed spending bill that may come up as earlier as next week. It would be part of the goodies used to buy public support for tax increases.

An object lesson comes from Ohio, where a promise to freeze tuition in return for a 5% increase in the state allocation is still leaving state universities in the red. At Phi Beta Cons, Michael O'Brien puts his finger on the problem.

No one is arguing that many large public universities couldn’t stand to trim some fat from their budgets. But the issue at hand, instead, is the Strickland administration’s imposition of what amounts to a price control on the price of higher education in the state of Ohio. As many of the economists at Ohio’s universities could tell you, the imposition of a price control below market value creates an excess of demand for a scarce supply. That is, there aren’t enough resources to meet the demands of increased numbers of students in Ohio’s universities.

Tuition should reflect the market value of education in the state of Ohio. Schools should be free to set tuition rates without having to kowtow to the demands of politicians. Indeed, it can even be prudent to raise tuition rates substantially—just look at Ohio’s up-and-coming Miami University. After raising its in-state tuition to match out-of-state tuition, the school’s academic standards for admitted students increased.

On this campus, the planning documents have an expectation of a raise in tuition revenue from $66 million to $74 million. (See documents here.) It is unlikely we would attract more students, so the increase has to come from more tuition per credit. Now some of this would come from masters and new applied doctoral programs which naturally charge higher tuition. And the nursing and art programs believe their costs are sufficiently higher that they should charge differential tuition rates for their classes. But it is highly unlikely that the university would get that much from those activities. And each 1% increase in tuition here generates about $1.5 million in additional revenue.

This is why the university (and all other MnSCU schools) have staked their hopes on a big budget bill getting through the legislature. Tuition freezes are a way to sell that, but the universities only want that if you pay for it. Our faculty union's chief negotiator, Rod Henry, testified before the legislature in January:
My organization supports a tuition freeze if the inflation request is fully funded, because otherwise institutions will have to come up with the money from employees or some other source.
Full funding begins with you, dear taxpayer.

Labels: ,


Monday, April 09, 2007

Really? They do that? 

The president of Missouri State is shocked, SHOCKED to hear that there's a problem in his College of Social Work. (Temp link, permalink for Chronicle subscribers -- thanks to loyal reader jw for the link!)

The president of Missouri State University has threatened to shut down its school of social work after receiving a searing external review that describes the school as, among other things, hostile to "faith-based beliefs." After reading the report, the president, Michael T. Nietzel, gave the school a year and a half to clean up its act.

"I was embarrassed by the things that were said in this report, but it was not a difficult decision to make it public," Mr. Nietzel said on Friday. "The only way, ultimately, that students and the public will have confidence in you as an institution is if you're public about your problems."

Mr. Nietzel requested the report after the university settled a lawsuit filed by a former undergraduate in the school, Emily Brooker. Ms. Brooker said in her complaint that faculty members in the school had retaliated against her after she refused to complete an assignment in which she was to write a letter to her representative in Congress supporting the right of gay couples to adopt children. Ms. Brooker cited her religious beliefs in her refusal.

Sure enough, the president posted the report. The report includes this assessment of the academic learning environment:

Does the academic environment of the School of Social Work promote learning and stimulate an honest and open dialogue in which intellectual differences are shared and respected among students, faculty and staff?

Many students and faculty stated a fear of voicing differing opinions from the instructor or colleague. This was particularly true regarding spiritual and religious matters however, students voiced fears about questioning faculty regarding assignments or expectations. In fact "bullying" was used by both students and faculty to characterize specific faculty. It appears that faculty have no history of intellectual discussion/debate. Rather, differing opinions are taken personally and often result in inappropriate discourse.

Do the faculty and staff of the School of Social Work model and communicate the CSWE Code of Ethics for students in the program?

There is an atmosphere where the Code of Ethics is used in order to coerce students into certain belief systems regarding social work practice and the social work profession. This represents a distorted use of the Social Work Code of Ethics in that the Code of Ethics articulates that social workers should respect the values and beliefs of others.

A similar story was told here at SCSU fifteen years ago. That program continues; the reviewers at Missouri State virtually plead with its administration to either close the program or find a way to move the offending faculty from the university. Both of those are expensive options; the publication of this report is indicative that the university is willing to pay that price if public demand grows enough to support the payment.

Labels:


Friday, April 06, 2007

Pushed out of the box 

Many of you probably read James Taranto's Best of the Web, and yesterday's edition included the story of a student, Jenny Ballantine, who had asked a question of the Edwardses during their townhall campaign stop at the University of New Hampshire. She asked a question of the would-be first couple asking for the president to "give me something" because she is afraid she might have been "just dumped in this world for no particular reason whatsoever." The story had been covered initially by Rush Limbaugh, who yesterday had Ms. Ballantine on as a guest. The exchange begins rather dully, but Rush is a great interviewer and gets to the heart of the matter. (This is a little long, but you need to read the context of what I am emphasizing.)
RUSH. ... In the first place, you were not dumped in the world for no particular reason. You have every legitimate reason to be here, as does anybody else. You weren't dumped. There is no mystery why you're here. Those of us who have life, it's a God-given gift, and we only get one, and it is to be maximized and enjoyed and however you choose to pursue it: hard work, combined with pleasure, but this business about when I saw that you mentioned "a world full of hate and prejudice and racism and so forth..."

JENNY BALLANTINE: It's really unfortunate. It's just unfortunate. I know that that's the world that we live in, and that's what's going on right now. It's just really unfortunate.

RUSH: Well, it always has, though. There's always going to be racism. There's always going to be prejudice. There's always going to be bad guys. There are always going to be enemies. There are always going to be reprobates.

JENNY BALLANTINE: There's always going to be war, too, and I understand the reason for war. I actually enjoyed Machiavelli, The Prince, very much so, and I really appreciate his philosophies, and that's what a lot of people use when they engage in war and the aftermath of it, and I respect war, and I understand why there is a need for it, and I understand why there's a need to push for democracy, and I understand the gap that occurred and happened -- the widening gap I should say -- with discrimination and so forth. It's all very interesting.

RUSH: But it's not. See, there is no widening gap of discrimination. It's getting better. See, your historical perspective as with most people, most people began the day you were born. You're 22 years old. You're going to have to really study because history education is pretty inept in this country, particularly in high school, but the discrimination that existed in this country in the forties and fifties, even before, is far, far worse. So much progress has been made in all this! Racism is far less than it was. Prejudice --

JENNY BALLANTINE: Maybe it's because of the multicultural theory class I'm taking right now. (laughs) I think --

RUSH: Well, you're exactly right. You are. Way to go. The multicultural curricula is designed to get you feeling full of chaos and --

JENNY BALLANTINE: Right.

RUSH: -- tumult over the unfairness and the injustice of the country, because the teachers -- the people that believe in it -- want that exact thing to happen in your mind.

JENNY BALLANTINE: I hope my professor is not listening to this, but I've always... This is how I feel. She says, "Think outside the box." However, it's "thinking outside the box" on her terms, on her perspective, and the books that we're reading that we're engaged in, it's just full of, as you say, chaos, and it's just full of all these, you know, "This happened and this happened! Oh, God," and it's just like, "Okay, we've addressed that. Why don't we start establishing legislation or whatever else, the Senate, to start working or progress or why don't we go ahead and state what the progress has been since we're just such a screwed-up nation back in the forties and fifties?" I just don't understand the literature that we've been reading, and it's just been frustrating -- and I'm not the only one who feels that way in my class and it's just been really different.
As Rush might say, STOP THE TAPE!!! Notice three key elements in that exchange. First, Ms. Ballantine's lack of historical perspective. There is little understanding of how different the racism of today is when compared to the racism of the 1940s and 1950s. Second, her belief that there should be legislation to fix that. As Thomas Sowell points out, it's government that created the segregated bus that Rosa Parks challenged. Jim Crow was a law. A government powerful enough to enforce equality is powerful enough to enforce inequality, and we all know that power corrupts.

But most importantly is this: I hope my professor is not listening to this, but ... She says, "Think outside the box." However, it's "thinking outside the box" on her terms, on her perspective, and the books that we're reading that we're engaged in, it's just full of, as you say, chaos. Rush points out that this is something that the professor is creating to engage her in the professor's desired actions:
RUSH: ... The United States is the greatest nation, the greatest civilization of free people ever to walk the planet. Now, of course we've had problems, but we are not inherently racist or bigoted or sexist or homophobic or any of that. We have the finest people in the world.

JENNY BALLANTINE: Something that's learned, yeah.

RUSH: No, it is something that's taught to you. It's something that people have been trying to stuff in your skull full of mush and get you to believe this. There's a certain cadre, a certain group of people that want you distrusting your own country. They want you suspecting it. You have more opportunity as a human being here. All you have to do, Jenny, is find out what it is you love, and 22 is not too old for that. You're thinking. I know you're self-absorbed right now, you're self-focused, and you're looking at yourself at 22 and you're thinking, "My gosh, I'm a failure! I'm not going anywhere." You haven't even begun to crack the egg! You've barely hatched yet. All you need to do is find out what it is you really love, whatever that is -- and don't let anybody talk you out of it, and when you find out what that is, talk to people who have done it and who have succeeded at it, and let them mentor on you or motivate you. Don't talk to people that tell you, "You can't do it," or, "It's not for you," or what have you. You know, learn all this stuff that you're learning. Keep an open mind, Understand that everybody teaching you something, including every history book, has an agenda, and don't think that you're an idiot. Don't think that you're not bright. You're capable of learning anything! Whatever you do, don't run around and think that what you think is wrong, or what you think is incorrect.
That's the answer. She wants something because the people teaching her have told her both that she is not "thinking critically," meaning, she hasn't filtered her thoughts through their prism of seeing everything she has as a product of white privilege, that she has earned nothing, she is worth nothing. And when her country tells her she is entitled to the fruits of her own labor they say the country is advancing her privilege and that she doesn't deserve it. So she goes to beg for something from the Edwardses because she hopes they can do for her what she's told she DOES NOT DESERVE to do for herself. They want her to deny her own opportunities for success. Yet humans have an innate sense of what is right, and a natural inclination to truck, barter and exchange. They want to produce for themselves because it feels right. Thus they must be told repeatedly to "think outside the box" by people who do not respect the box, for within the box these teachers see their own failure, their own lack of power, their own lack of control.

"The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap. " -- Ayn Rand. Substitute "academic" or "intellectual" for "leader", and you have the problem of Jenny Ballantine.

UPDATE: Taranto notes this conversation (I took the liberty of sending him this post) and concludes:

The ideologies of "self-esteem" and "multiculturalism" are two sides of the same nihilistic coin. "Self-esteem" devalues achievement and responsibility, which are the sources of genuine self-respect. And "multiculturalism" it is merely a pose of opposition to one's own culture; it entails no real regard for different cultures.

We were too hasty to mock Jenny Ballantine yesterday. What seemed a show of self-absorption was really a sincere if clumsy attempt by a confused young woman to connect with the real world. Three cheers to Rush Limbaugh for helping her along the way.

Absolutely so, and three cheers also for Taranto's recognition of the dangers of the "self-esteem" ideology.

Labels:


Thursday, April 05, 2007

How multi-culti indoctrination is born 

Often it's not out of thin air but from an event. Here's the latest:
Ohio Dominican University will require all students to take a multiculturalism class starting this fall and will take other steps to deal with the aftermath of an outbreak of bigoted vandalism on the campus last summer, according to an article in today’s Columbus Dispatch that describes the recommendations of a report by the university’s Presidential Task Force on Multiculturalism. The vandalism, which included racist graffiti, remains unsolved. The Roman Catholic university also is creating a multicultural-affairs office, and will increase programming and support for minority students.
And use resources that previously went to other academic endeavors. Of course, it's not like anyone ever fakes those things. A reward for $1000 is offered for information on the crimes; if one wanted to get to the bottom of this, I'd think you would juice that bounty.

Labels:


Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Shakedown Cuomo 

The New York attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, has obtained settlements from 36 colleges and universities that received letters threatening lawsuits over student loan practices. Cuomo's office gets $2 million for a fund "to educate students and parents about the student loan industry." What were these schools doing?

In some instances, loan companies made payments to the institutions linked to the number of students who borrowed. One lender invited university officials to an all-expenses-paid Caribbean retreat. At several institutions, students’ questions about financial aid were fielded by call centers that, unknown to the students, were set up and operated by loan companies. Each arrangement, critics say, embodies a conflict of interest.

Lawyers in Mr. Cuomo’s office are in various stages of negotiations with scores more colleges and universities, and with other lenders, seeking compensation to students and signatures on the code of conduct, according to officials in Mr. Cuomo’s office.

Under today’s agreement, N.Y.U. will distribute to students nearly $1.4 million that it received from Citibank over five years. The University of Pennsylvania will distribute $1.6 million that it received over two years. The amounts for the other three universities are much smaller: $164,084 over two years at Syracuse, $80,553 over one year at St. John’s University, and $13,840 at Fordham.

Three more universities have agreed to adopt the code of conduct, but are not making any payments under the agreement: the State University of New York system, St. Lawrence University and Long Island University.

NYU claims that the money it received back from Citibank was used for financial aid and saw nothing wrong with their behavior. From the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscriber link):

But officials at several universities that agreed to settle with the attorney general said they had little choice. Although they defended their student-loan practices and criticized the tone of Mr. Cuomo's investigation, they said going to court over the practices would be costly and would bring more bad publicity.

John Beckman, a spokesman for New York University, said, "We don't think the investigation has been fair with regards to NYU." He said the university saw nothing wrong with how it recommends lenders to students, or with a nonbinding revenue-sharing contract with Citibank that guaranteed the university 0.25 percent of the value of some of the university's loans. Citibank offered the best rates for students in any case, he said.

But he said NYU chose to sign the settlement anyway.

"In the end, we had no interest in further legal proceedings," said Mr. Beckman. "I think every university has to be mindful, from a cost perspective, of engaging in such a thing."

The financial aid professionals are furious with Cuomo's grandstanding. But Cuomo is just following the footsteps of Eliot Spitzer in moving to the governor's mansion from the AG's office. That is one reason why I believe we're better off having AGs appointed by an executive branch.

Labels:


Monday, April 02, 2007

"Subvert the dominant paradigm" 

There's a bumpersticker with that slogan on a colleague's office door. It seems to be the attitude of a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin at Lacrosse who thinks his job is to counter right wing ideology. When a student had the temerity to suggest that a management course that discussed immigration issues might need some balance -- and offered some links to alternative viewpoints -- the professor responded:
I get really tired of right wing stuff. Surely you get enough of it. Do you ask for additional readings in your right wing classes. Obviously not. I resent your insulting assumption that you have the right to teach my class or that students are not familiar with right wing racist crap on immigration. Of course they are. My course is not being taught to reinforce right wing ideology. Don't you get enough of this in other classes, or do you need EVERY class to be consistent with extremist views.
He believes his job is to be the antidote for the "right wing racist crap on immigration" that students "of course" "are familiar with" from their other classes. It is not only demeaning to students but also to his unnamed colleagues.

This from the chair of UWLAX's "Complaints, Grievances, Appeals & Academic Freedom Committee."

Professor Betton, if you'd like to respond to my opinion that this email was unprofessional and undignified (I don't know what ethics require of management professors, but a few read here and will respond if response is needed), the floor in the comments section is yours. Forgive me if I don't wait around for your response.

Labels:


Should savings influence the net price of college? 

I've been puzzling over Richard Vedder's post "Tyler's lament", on whether those who save for college for their children are penalized by university financial aid offices by a reduction in scholarship and loan offers. Vedder writes:
I was struck by Tyler's main point: his family was responsible and saved for college, and as a consequence receives little financial aid. Other kids from families with similar financial circumstances get more assistance -- often because their families were less responsible, spending more through the years and doing less saving for college for their children. Tyler, in effect, said, "my parents are being punished for being responsible." Tyler, of course, is right.
I asked a colleague over the weekend who has a very bright son applying to selective colleges, and who by his own admission is probably not the least profligate parent. He reported back that there was no such effect in his case; his impression seemed to be that income was more important than savings.

My complaint about FAFSA, the common form parents fill out to help their children get financial aid (created by the US Dept. of Education, mind you), is that it is a revenue-creating device that provides every school identical information, likely to be more truthful and more invasive of your financial situation, and allows schools to determine one's ability-to-pay. Savings is perhaps not as relevant. You may not save in accounts specifically for your children, but the net present value of your stream of labor and capital income can be borrowed against to finance the child at any rate. If you view savings as a smoothing mechanism for lifetime consumption, the lump of wealth you have in the kid's education IRA is not a big determinant of your ability to pay.

What about willingness to pay, though? A quick thought experiment: You can use student loans repaid by parents as a way of transferring income to your children. You have two goods to consume -- a good you consume yourself, and the benefit you receive from transferring goods to your children (that I assume you care about.) You do this over a lifetime. Student loans make possible transfers that smooth out the budget constraint -- you can transfer more future income (at lower cost, if student loans have subsidized interest rates) than you might be able to otherwise.

This argument abstracts from any benefit from the education itself. It could be a transfer of income to the kid who will view college as a four-(plus!-) year party. If there is a return benefit to the parent of the child's education, that makes the problem stickier but I don't know if it changes the story. If you think otherwise, comments are most welcome!

Labels: ,


Thursday, March 29, 2007

Tenure is a contract that can be broken, part 2 

Someone pointed out to me at lunch that the Chronicle of Higher Ed had posted a series of blog posts started by Steven Levitt about tenure. In it Levitt says he'd take $15,000 in additional base salary to forgo his tenure. As I argued in another context, one can always buy out tenure but most schools choose not to: It's cheaper to let the deadwood go on being dead than buy them out. And you'd have to make it a blanket offer, and negotiate individually with each faculty member. (Look, if the university came up and gave me a private offer to buy out my tenure without buying out the others, I can pretty well guess what comes next.)

That's in fact what Greg Mankiw is saying as well. You can easily buy out the Steve Levitts of the world because they have an active market for their services. Deadwood faculty know their (lack of) market alternatives and therefore would never sell tenure cheaply. Some schools (for-profits would seem to fit) may instead use the high-pay/low-job-stability model; the question is how one deals with university governance if you had a transition period in which senior faculty with tenure are hiring other senior faculty that are not to have it. Mankiw:
Now, senior hiring is done by existing senior faculty. If those faculty could start firing one another, the political dynamics of hiring would become complicated and probably untenable. (Here is a related paper.) A university without tenure would likely have to move toward a more hierarchical system with a "boss" in charge of hiring and other major decisions. That is, one cannot abolish tenure and expect university governance to remain the same. Deans would likely have more power over hiring. In my experience, anything that gives deans more authority is a step in the wrong direction, for deans have less information about what is going on in the field or in the classroom than the faculty do.
I suspect Mankiw's department has a chair that is not very powerful; these positions could be much more powerful if decisions to hire each year were made for the entire staff rather than just the untenured junior staff. (Chairs here have no such authority, and I'm not sure I would like to have it even if it were on offer. For those of you who work in departments who have chair recommendations for merit pay raises you can only imagine how much more nasty things would get.)

But the point remains: Tenure continues to exist because there are large institutional hurdles to its removal -- I consider that argument Stiglerian in nature -- and that its existence increases the cost of its removal to the point where nobody wants to move first to get rid of it.

Thus when Hank Brown of Colorado argues that that state's university system is reforming tenure after a lengthy process, it is most likely only going to nibble around the edges. A little more lengthy process for post-tenure review, a little tighter procedure for investigating faculty misconduct. But in the end all it means is a faster track to getting a Ward Churchill deal of having your tenure bought out (in his case, at $96,000/year until they actually get around to a final settlement.)

Labels:


Wednesday, March 28, 2007

What do presidents do? 

A letterwriter in the St. Cloud Times isn't thrilled with the compensation schemes of modern universities.
The big print shows the salary of the new president of St. Cloud State University. The next two articles talk about the St. Cloud State hockey coach and the new University of Minnesota basketball coach.

Earl Potter will make up to $253,000 to run an entire university and be responsible for all aspects of our young people's education.

I don't know how much Bob Motzko makes as the hockey coach, but I would bet he's at least in that same range. And Tubby Smith will make up to $1.8 million coaching basketball at the U of M.

What exactly is the purpose of a college or university? I didn't think it was to prepare athletes for professional sports careers or to build extravagant arenas and stadiums for them to play in. I thought it was to teach and to prepare students to step up to the challenges waiting for them in the real world.
Commenter "Corwin" on this blog last week also asked what are the prime functions of university presidents? Let's muse on that a moment.

Academic institutions distinguish between a chief academic officer (either a provost or a VP for Academic Affairs, most of the time) and a president. While presidents sometimes are involved in the academic affairs of a campus, it is most often a negative insofar as issues only come to the president when there is a conflict. Academic programs are usually a collectively delivered product -- I avoid the word team because departments usually aren't teams -- and a collegiate coach is more of a leader of students and athletes than a university president. This is even more true on a comprehensive state university campus than a small private liberal arts institution.

So what does the president do, then? In short, they are advocates for their institutions. Before SCSU was subsumed into the MnSCU system its president had a more direct impact on how much money the legislature provided. Now it is not much. So fundraising has to turn to alumni donations and grantwriting, something which SCSU hasn't done terribly well in the past. If you wanted to provide President Potter with incentives, the best probably would be for some kind of bounty on alumni contributions. That sort of thing is usually frowned upon when done openly, but can arise through appointment to boards of directors, for example.

I think the other thing presidents can do is to present a good face to the public, particularly when your institution depends on state support like ours. Past presidents of this institution have served on numerous non-profit boards (a function that should extend down the chain to the faculty, in my opinion) that builds applications of the university's knowledge to local issues and a base of support for university initiatives. Local residents living near campus of course face a negative externality from noisy students, but that can be offset by a good relationship between the university and the professional community, if you work at it.

If our new president can do those two things, that would be good. And the number of people who can do that is probably greater than the number who can bring the Gophers to basketball excellence. This is why college coaches make more than college presidents.

Labels:


Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Challenging dispositions 

The Chronicle of Higher Ed runs this week a column by Greg Lukianoff of FIRE discussing the use of dispositions theory in the Columbia Teachers College. (Subscribers link; FIRE is providing a copy free for non-subscribers.) See my previous discussions here and here, for example. Columbia has responded to public demands by FIRE and the New York Civil Rights Coalition that it stop requiring students to demonstrate a "commitment to social justice" by saying it doesn't enforce the rule that is written in its web (or, more likely, that it lets students have freedom interpreting that to mean whatever they envision it to mean.) Lukianoff responds:

Vague, subjective, and politicized evaluation standards are dangerous. They invite administrators and faculty members to substitute their own opinions and political beliefs in place of evaluating students' skill as teachers. Many of us can think of teachers and professors whose politics we may not have agreed with but who were nonetheless exceptional educators. Having the "correct" political beliefs no more makes someone a good teacher than having "incorrect" beliefs necessarily makes someone a bad teacher.

Teachers College's standards are disturbingly vague and subjective. Its "Conceptual Framework" states that education is a "political act," that teachers — and hence teachers in training or students — are expected to be "participants in a larger struggle for social justice." At times, however, the standards are remarkably specific: "To change the system and make schools and societies more equitable, educators must recognize ways in which taken-for-granted notions regarding the legitimacy of the social order are flawed." The policy goes on to say that students are expected to recognize that "social inequalities are often produced and perpetuated through systematic discrimination and justified by societal ideology of merit, social mobility, and individual responsibility."

Those may be perfectly fine pedagogical theories appropriate for academic study, but when they are tied to mandatory evaluation criteria, they amount to a political litmus test. Does Teachers College really believe that a student who thinks "social responsibility" and "merit" are positive societal values would not make a good teacher?

It is hard to imagine how one creates an instrument by which one is evaluated.

(h/t: Loyal reader jw)

Labels: ,


What Students are NOT Taught 

Being a member of a college faculty involves other responsibilities besides teaching. One of these is selecting a textbook for a given class. I have taught Management Information Systems (MIS) for most of the past nine years. During that time I have read more than 20 textbooks and served as a listed reviewer/editor on one of them.

My latest meeting centered around discussions for a new text for fall, 2007. Our MIS course is designed to teach the role of information technology (IT) in business. Since an organization can spend up to 50% of its resources on IT, it is very important that non-IT business majors understand this.

Naively, today's students think the entire world runs on personal computers (PCs). True, PCs run many small business and many large businesses have 1000's of PCs. However, PCs don't run the large businesses; large servers, also called mainframes run these institutions. If you have a major credit card, put gasoline in your car, stay at a brand hotel, pay taxes, get cash from an ATM, carry insurance, or perform disease research, you are using applications on mainframe or super computers.

Unfortunately, too many IT textbook authors and publishers devote less than a few paragraphs to anything larger than a personal computer. Instead, they focus on the cute, clever, and cool aspects of PCs while ignoring the massive engines, intricate applications and complexity that are the foundation of an enterprise's technical architecture. Why? Perhaps this omission is because the authors work in university departments using PCs and are unaware of the power behind their desk machines. (Tunnel vision?)

As a result, students are not taught what they need. Employers hire people without the necessary knowledge to do their job. Finally, students who would be interested in pursuing careers on the "big" ideas are denied the awareness this need even exists. Exciting careers are there for the taking yet students and too many universities are missing the mark. We all pay.

Labels: ,


Friday, March 23, 2007

Exactly right 

Clark Patterson explains the conflict between access and accountability in college education:

On the one hand, academia is supposed to do everything in its power to increase access to higher education to a larger cross section of American society, particularly along race and class lines. This means enrolling more first generation college attendees, many of whom might not be ready for college. Yet Washington is willing to increase need-based financial aid in order to browbeat more students from “underrepresented groups” into matriculating.

On the other hand, colleges are under increasing pressure to improve their accountability in the form of quicker and higher graduation rates and greater student performance. A new batch of standardized testing has been proposed for graduating seniors. This Spellings Commission recommendation should be adopted as one objective means of partially determining what is gained from a four-year, $80,000 investment in a bachelor’s degree.

Unfortunately, one unintended consequence of the Spellings Commission’s adoption of both increased access and higher accountability will be grade inflation. If colleges and universities are told that they must increase access for students from historically-underrepresented groups — groups that don’t perform as well academically as whites and Asian-American students — yet the federal aid that colleges receive from Washington is directly tied to student academic success, will anyone be surprised if colleges respond to these conflicting goals by diluting their academic standards in order to graduate more students and maintain or increase their federal financial support?

No, we won't. In some places, it's already happened. So what's likely to happen? Don't be surprised by a push for national testing of college seniors, some day.

Labels:


Thursday, March 22, 2007

Muslim student loans 

In an entry on the Chronicle of Higher Ed's Daily News Blog, a new report is noted that talks about barriers to Islamic students studying in western schools.
The report offers nearly five dozen recommendations for improvements. Among them are retaining Muslim faculty members and offering halal meals, which meet Islam’s dietary restrictions. One of the biggest problems facing Muslim students is the loan-based student-aid system.

“Interest-bearing loans are forbidden in Islam, which means that provincial- and federal-government loans are simply off-limits for many practicing Muslims,” said Mohamed Sheibani, president of the Muslim Students’ Association National of the U.S. and Canada...
The Islamic banking restrictions are familiar, and these countries have developed many instruments that allow for purchase-and-resale transactions that meet Islamic strictures. There's little reason Islamic banking could not create these student loans. But there's also no reason why a western country that engages in assisting the student loan market -- not a great idea in my view, but a widely accepted practice -- should be compelled to create a secondary market for Muslim student loans.

In principle if a university wanted to attract these students it would be possible to create a contract to charge them a higher tuition than non-Islamic students, then have them replay the loan on installment after graduation without interest. The university would receive the same amount of money either way. But could you imagine how the news would handle the idea that Islamic students paid a higher tuition?

Labels:


Wednesday, March 21, 2007

All the world's a campus 

We've reported in the past that this university makes it a habit of enforcing on-campus rules for off-campus behaviors, particularly where move-in day is concerned. But this is extending to the internet. Greg Lukianoff and Will Creeley notice how much enforcement is being done by schools of one's behavior on MySpace and Facebook. I take the public/private distinction to this direction: If you go to a private school and sign off on the school verifying your moral education, this is permissible. I could imagine a religious institution doing this. But a public institution? I should hope not.

Labels: , ,


Tuesday, March 20, 2007

What to do about ranting professors? 

One thing the internet and places like FIRE and NoIndoctrination have done is to let students know that they don't have to put up with faculty who are spouting off their political views in a class and disguising themselves as practicing academic freedom. The recent case at North Idaho College gives an example of this. A freshman comp course, taught by an adjunct instructor (though the instructor says she has taught for 25 years), in which the instructor wants to "spur debate and get students to think critically." As RightWingProf notes, critical thinking as practiced here "has nothing to do with thinking, unless you consider groupthink and parroting the left-wing PC party line to be thinking, and it certainly isn't critical." The student -- a former aide for Rep. Helen Chenoweth, so not your usual student here -- marched out and demanded her money back. The school paid her off.

That's certainly one way to go. But the faculty member complains that she had no idea the student was offended. And while you and I, as people of the right, might think "why should I have to explain to you that lipping off about how Republicans can't read in a classroom is inappropriate?", there are others who would say there has to be some due process given to the faculty member. So if you are a student or parent of a student facing this, here's what I say to do.
  1. Talk to the instructor. I hear complaints about faculty. Until the student and the faculty member have a talk, there's very little I can do. The student will come in and vent, and I will give a sympathetic ear, but I cannot do anything as a department chair on that basis. Frankly, nobody can. Students fear retribution, but until it actually happens there's not much we can do. When retribution does happen, we have ways of dealing with that. Not always effective, but better than you might think.
  2. Document everything. Take good notes, noting the time, what was said, what was the topic being discussed before the rant, what was on the syllabus for discussion that day, etc. Take a tape or digital recorder to class. If your student handbook says you must ask permission first, do so. If it doesn't, put it on your desk and turn it on. Say you're using it to assist note-taking. That may get the faculty member to desist. I've seen it work a couple of times. (There does not appear to be any restrictions on taping here.)
  3. Talk to classmates. Ask them if they hear the same things and if they have similar reactions. That can help verify the complaint. Meeting collectively with the faculty member, in or out of class, may solve things.
  4. When all that fails, go to the mattresses. That means the blogs, the press, the president of the university, everywhere. It is not illegal for the faculty member to indoctrinate, but it's unprofessional behavior. Call them on it, and if it's at a public school whip out the taxpayer card. If it's a private school, mail the link or the newspaper clipping to the trustees.

Labels:


Not guilty not the same as free speech 

While I'm relieved that the College Republicans at San Francisco State will not face punishment, their exercise of free speech should not have been put on trial.
“We are relieved that SFSU has come to its senses and recognized that it cannot punish students for constitutionally protected expression,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. “But the fact remains that the university should never have investigated or tried them in the first place. This was a protected act of political protest and it is impossible to believe the university did not know that from the start.”

Yesterday afternoon, President Corrigan wrote to FIRE with the welcome news that “the Student Organization Hearing Panel (SOHP) unanimously concluded that the College Republicans organization had not violated the Student Code of Conduct and that there were no grounds to support the student complaint lodged against them.”
The trial, however, is a farce. David Frum reviews the history of San Francisco State's bouts of anti-Semitism and concludes:
There is obviously something profoundly wrong on American campuses... Apologists for terrorism receive maximum protection for the most vicious bigotry, for menace and intimidation, and even outright violence. Yet that zeal for free speech vanishes altogether when opponents of terrorism engage in much, much milder forms of protest. This goes beyond double standards. It is a moral collapse.

Labels: ,


Friday, March 16, 2007

Kickbacks 

In a big news story today, N.Y. Attorney General Andrew Cuomo alleges kickbacks from bankers to universities on student loans and many other instances of antitrust violations:
Cuomo said he notified more than 400 colleges and universities nationwide, including all in New York State, to end such deceptive practices. Cuomo said he is actively investigating at least 100 schools. Cuomo would not divulge which schools were being investigated, but they include some Ivy League institutions.

“There is an unholy alliance between banks and institutions of higher education that may often not be in the students’ best interest,” Cuomo said. “The financial arrangements between lenders and these schools are filled with the potential for conflicts of interest. In some cases they may break the law.”
Kickbacks on loans, all-expenses-paid trips for financial aid officers, complimentary computer systems, and lines of credit for schools to use are all alleged. All the lenders interviewed in the AP story deny the charges. Neither has Cuomo named any one institution, or given specific examples of the shady dealings.

Unsurprisingly, Congress wants a "thorough review". Calls for passage of the Student Loan Sunshine Act will increase.

Labels:


Heads up for a hand out 

As our presidential search winds down, not surprisingly, the outgoing president of the university, Roy Saigo is conspicuous in his absence from campus. (Maybe he's down at Xcel today to help protest the UND mascot.) But he appears last night to encourage us to shake the tin cup with state legislators, via a campus e-blast:

It will be important that legislators hear from constituents about why Minnesota State Colleges and Universities are a critical state investment. Your voice can make a difference in the level of support we receive at the Capitol this year. Adequate state funding not only keeps tuition affordable, but also makes important investments in strategic areas. State appropriations are needed to cover inflation, to make critical technology infrastructure improvements to benefit students and to strengthen the state’s competitive edge in four key areas, laid out in the Minnesota budget request:

· Recruiting and retaining more students from groups traditionally underrepresented in higher education;

· Producing more graduates in science, technology, engineering and math;

· Increasing the number of nursing graduates to help avert a predicted nursing shortage;

· Supporting the growth of the state’s burgeoning bioscience industry by establishing a Biosciences Center of Excellence.

For specifics of the request, go to http://www.mnscu.edu/media/publications/pdf/2007budgetrequestbook.pdf.

I realize I sound like a broken record, but if I was a state legislator wouldn't I want to know if our children were learning? And learning what? STEM and nursing are nice, but state universities educate in other areas like business, and teaching.

And, to be blunt, the amount of inflation in the budget is a ruse to increase faculty and staff salaries, since these are the largest part of the budget. While our salaries are declining in relative terms to the rest of the country, wouldn't you think we should demonstrate something of what we've produced before we ask for a little more? When we are down to 40th percentile in pay in many programs (ours included, when you account for the lack of additional compensation for summer research, etc.), how much should I work to get more money for science education? How much faith should I have that the university system has picked the winners in the education market for our students?

UPDATE: The higher education budget passed by the Senate Higher Ed committee has $104 million for inflation, $10 million for technology, and $14 million for the underrepresented students, all put into the base (so that is money to come each future biennium as well.) The STEM and health care money were not in the bill that cleared the committee, nor was Governor Pawlenty's request for $25 million for a “performance bonus” -- i.e., no merit pay.

Labels: ,


Thursday, March 15, 2007

About "my liberal lunch friend" 

The fellow whose obit I linked in the post this AM was that character who I sometimes used on this blog for stories I would tell about SCSU. Kent was not a fan of this blog and tried only twice to listen to NARN, finally saying "it's turning you into a conservative." (Funny, he was always convincing himself that I was libertarian and therefore not a Republican.) So while he'd be embarrassed that I mention him here, I will take a minute now.

Another friend of mine, now retired from the faculty, once noticed how few times the university recognizes a faculty member's accomplishments. You get tenure and promotion usually in your early 30s, and it's not uncommon to be 38 and a full professor. "That leaves 25 years or more for you to sit around without the slightest acknowledgment," he remarked. Other schools have awards, but when you're a unionized faculty we all have to receive the same awards and get them in turn, thus rewarding mediocrity ... and we all know it.

When Kent died, his wife asked for a memorial service for him here at the university. I do not recall us doing this for other faculty, but since he was dedicated to this place -- I leave the office usually after six, and he was one of the few I could find between 4-6 around here even on a Friday -- I thought it an excellent idea. The university, though puzzled by the request, nonetheless came up with a lovely setting for the gathering. I gave a eulogy, this one the hardest I have ever had to do, as nobody this close to me has died in my adult life. (This is why I haven't written much here the last few days.)

The eulogy was good enough -- his senior colleague gave the other, and I think I held up my end of the bargain -- but what amazed me was what came next. You hope a student or two could come up to speak. But they came, alumni and student, one after the other, at least a dozen, to say how Kent had touched them, taught them, and gave them each a bit of himself. Some were tearful. Two students who had just met him this term came to speak about how much they were going to miss by losing him as a professor.

Someone taped it; Kent's parents live far away and are infirm, so they will see the eulogies and remembrances on tape. A friend of mine came up to me and said "they should take that tape and show it to new faculty. This is what you worked for."

It's a shame it can't happen more often; if the progression of praise is associate professor, full professor and posthumous professor, that's not much of an incentive structure. But it was enough for him.

Labels:


About tenure review 

I usually agree with Anne Neal, but I will remind her on tenure review: When I agreed to the salary structure of SCSU, I traded off the ability to get market wages, rewards and bonuses and all kinds of remuneration in return for the guarantee of a lifetime of student papers to grade, committees to fall asleep in, etc. If you'd like to change the terms of employment and take away something I bargained for, I will require compensation. And I'm quite willing to make that bargain, though I suspect the union that protects the driftwood will object. Good luck.

Labels:


Monday, March 12, 2007

Where are your papers, young student? 

An objectivist group at George Mason has had to reschedule a speaker advocating a hard line against Islamic totalitarianism.
John Lewis, who teaches history at Ashland University, was invited to speak in conjunction with an article he wrote in December titled "No Substitute for Victory: The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism."

In the article, Lewis calls for war against the Islamic government in Iran and the "immediate, personal destruction" of Muslim clerics and intellectuals who advocate the formation or support of an Islamic state.

The speech had been sponsored in part by the school's Objectivist Club, which promotes the social philosophies of self-interest of author Ayn Rand. The invitation was pulled after the school received complaints from Muslim students and it was discovered that the club's charter had lapsed.

Lewis said Friday that the speech had been tentatively rescheduled for April, with the university's College Republicans club as a new sponsor. But university spokesman Daniel Walsch said the school had received no notice of the club's invitation.
The Objectivist Club at GMU, a student group that promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, says it had someone else to help book the room on campus after it learned of its oversight in letting the club's registration lapse -- not an uncommon occurrence on a university campus, I assure you -- but the faculty member who helped secure the room apparently backed out when it appears the issue got hot. That faculty member's department "did not want to be involved with any sort of controversial event."

So apparently a group at GMU was able to both 1) use the student government system to disbar a group from holding an event on campus due to paperwork and 2) dissuade faculty from bringing a controversial speaker to campus. This at a public institution. Do the taxpayers of Virginia support this type of behavior?

Labels: ,


Friday, March 09, 2007

No, not THAT flag! 

At San Francisco State University, a school with a rich history of anti-Semitism, College Republicans are being put on trial for hosting a rally in which protestors stomped on the flags of Hezbollah and Hamas.

Why, you might ask, since burning the American flag is considered a protected form of free speech? Because both flags bear the name of Allah.
SFSU’s foray into unlawful censorship began after an anti-terrorism rally held on October 17, 2006, at which several members of the College Republicans stepped on butcher paper they had painted to resemble the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah. Unbeknownst to the protestors, the flags they had copied contain the word “Allah” written in Arabic script. On October 26, a student filed a formal complaint with the university against the College Republicans, alleging “attempts to incite violence and create a hostile environment” and “actions of incivility.” Although the university’s Office of Student Programs and Leadership Development (OSPLD), led by Joey Greenwell, could have settled the matter informally or dismissed the charges outright, the university is instead pressing forward today with a hearing on the charges.
Ah, there's that word again, 'incivility'. But this gets even more bizarre. Once the students were made aware that the name of Allah (copied over so poorly that it was barely legible) was on the paper flags they had made and that it was offensive, the CRs had an offended Muslim student cross out the name. That was insufficient to prevent more protests from the campus radicals and thus the charges the CRs face today.

Bruce Thornton makes a similar point:
Here’s where the double standards and incoherence of much politically correct behavior comes in. On any college campus in this country, every day, inside of class and out, you can encounter speech that is “insensitive,” “uncivil,” or “hostile.” But of course, this speech is directed towards Christians, or “conservatives,” or Israel, or Republicans, or “straight white males.”

Nobody attempts to censor this speech or haul people before tribunals to answer vague charges such as “incivility,” which will be defined according to the subjective standards of the complainants. And if someone does complain, the faculty and administration will immediately go into high dudgeon mode and start preaching the glories of unfettered free speech no matter how offensive. In other words, free speech for me but not for thee.

Labels: ,


Wednesday, March 07, 2007

If it's well done 

Marty reads this article and responds, "I don't believe it." The reason he doesn't believe 'it' -- that a liberal arts education can prepare you for a profession in business or health -- is probably that his conception of a liberal arts education doesn't involve the things on the list of what the article says a liberal arts education does:
In order to analyze information and solve problems you have to get practice in ... analyzing information and solving problems. A traditional liberal art, including the art history major whose story begins the article, may have some ability in that area. I believe you get more of that practice in economics as a liberal art -- more than economics as a business discipline, by the way, but let me just flag that for a future post -- than you do in most liberal arts, but traditional liberal arts programs in psychology or political science can do this, too. I think that's why our majors have a distinct advantage in the workplace.

Labels: ,


Twenty cents on the dollar 

The Chronicle of Higher Education's news blog reports that a new study by two economists at the University of Oregon shows that a majority of the money given by the federal government in Pell grants to students as financial aid goes back to universities as higher tuition (evidence of what's known as the Bennett hypothesis). But this is not true for in-state tuition rates at public universities. From the working paper by Larry Singell and Joe Stone:
Based on a panel of 1554 colleges and universities from 1988 to 1996, we find little evidence of the Bennett hypothesis for in-state tuition for public universities. For private universities, though, increases in Pell grants appear to be matched nearly one for one by increases in tuition. Results for out-of-state tuition for public universities are similar to those for private universities, suggesting that they behave more like private universities in setting out-of-state tuition. Notably, we also find that both higher state appropriations and endowment incomes permit public universities to charge higher out-of-state tuition, presumably because the larger pool of resources makes the university stronger and more attractive to students. Overall, then, there is evidence both for and against the Bennett hypothesis. Specifically, the evidence for in-state tuition charged by public universities tends to reject any substantial or significant effect; alternatively, the evidence for out-of-state public and private tuition tends to support the Bennett hypothesis.

Collectively, the results suggest that the pricing behavior of higher education institutions is sensitive to both political and market interests, as well as, perhaps, to individual institutional objectives with regard to access for needy students. The fact that out-of-state tuition appears to respond to the level of the average Pell grant, while in-state tuition does not, suggests that public universities are either explicitly or implicitly constrained to maintain low-cost access for instate students, but not necessarily out-of-state students.
The effect could be more than 80% of Pell grants being recaptured through higher tuition, so that students get less than twenty cents on the dollar of the money allocated by Congress. They also find little evidence that the Pell grants are changing the relative net tuition price for needy versus non-needy students. The results are relatively new and differ from the received literature (for example Long or Rizzo and Ehrenberg) but appear to use a more complete dataset than the other studies.

Labels: ,


Tuesday, March 06, 2007

I did not know that 

Matt makes a great point on the discussion of ending Wisconsin students' reciprocity with the State of Minnesota.
Given the disparity, some Minnesota lawmakers have called for Wisconsin students to join their Gopher peers in paying Minnesota in-state tuition. Never mind that under the reciprocity agreement, the state of Wisconsin reimburses the state of Minnesota for the difference — except this money goes into the general fund, not to Minnesota's colleges and universities!
Ah, all is now clear. It's a money grab by the U., where Matt shows how tuition has increased more than at Wisconsin. And what value we get for our money!

It is obvious he did not use U.S. News and World Report's 2006 edition of America's Best Colleges. That publication has several different rankings that include both the U of M in Minneapolis and UW-Madison. Its ranking of the top 50 public national universities places UW Madison eighth and the U of M Minneapolis in a four-way tie for 30th place.

In its broader ranking of the best national universities (248 public and private schools), UW Madison is in a three-way tie for 34th and the U of M Minneapolis is in a four-way tie for 74th.

Heckuvadeal.

Labels: ,


Monday, March 05, 2007

Fo academic freedom 

The University of Minnesota is currently running The Pope and The Witch, a play that some consider anti-Catholic. When Catholics complained, President Robert Bruininks replied that there would be a panel to discuss the play ... but the panel had no Catholics. It opened to a half-full theater Friday, a day late (due to the weather) and with 70 seminarians singing hymns and praying outside in protest. But the PioneerPress's theater critic takes the prize for outrageousness today.
The play is an irreverent sprawl, sometimes nonsensical, frequently tangential and generally less ha-ha funny than things-look-weird-in-a-funhouse-mirror funny. Those who find it offensive will not be convinced otherwise, but watching "The Pope and the Witch" suggests a play less interested in sacrilege and more interested in comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.
What's that word again? 'Beclowned'?

Labels:


Friday, March 02, 2007

Dying for your school 

This is just brilliant.

Oklahoma State University announced on Thursday that it has secured $280-million for its athletics program by establishing $10-million life-insurance policies on 28 of its athletics boosters.

The university borrowed $20-million to set up the policies, and will be the sole beneficiary of the plans after the donors die.

The deal is believed to be one of the largest charity-owned life-insurance programs established by a university. Oklahoma State plans to use the money to create an endowment for athletics scholarships and to help pay for its sports facilities and operations. In the next five years, the university expects to spend more than $300-million on six new athletics buildings and an upgrade to its football stadium. All of those plans were in the works before Thursday's announcement.

...Oklahoma State officials appeared incredulous at the deal's potential payoff and what it might do for the university's sports program, which has one of the smallest budgets in the Big 12 Conference.

I am looking forward to the University of Minnesota's "Gas 'em for Goldy" program. (Source: Chronicle of Higher Education, subscriber's link.)

Labels: , ,


Thursday, February 22, 2007

Meet the new boss 

Five candidates for president of the university are coming to St. Cloud State. They get a two-day interview, using a common schedule. Noted entry:
...DAY TWO: ...
11 a.m.-noon: Focused forum on campus diversity, followed by Q&A. (Open to the public), Garvey Commons Peach Room.
You will notice the watermark on our campus home page that the logo we use on stationery is the cupola on Riverview with the slogan on the bottom "excellence and opportunity." Granting that diversity means opportunity -- I'll stipulate the point to avoid that argument -- exactly at what point do we have a focused forum on excellence?

The schedule tells candidates what we're about; is this any way to sell the university's franchise?

Labels: ,


Wednesday, February 21, 2007

It's true for us too 

Doc Palmer makes the point that human capital is also quicksilver.
In the increasingly global economy, or even with increased mobility within Canada, it is not at all clear to me that Canada, especially Eastern Canada, has or should try to develop, a comparative advantage in the production of graduate education. Instead, we should ship our good undergraduate students to the U.S. and elsewhere ..., let the taxpayers of those jurisdictions foot the majority of the bill for the education, and then hire all the people we want (not need!) from those places.
So who has a comparative advantage in producing graduate education? Maybe it's places that experience increasing returns to innovation. But that would mean that there's path dependency -- if Minnesota or Ontario or wherever is lucky enough to get a glop of really bright people at a university, we should continue to fund them because they can attract additional smarties at lower cost than a new university elsewhere. And once you let the pool of talent run out, it's more expensive to rebuild.

Not unlike the Kevin Garnett argument.

Labels: ,


Non monkey non sequitur 

Dear Nick,

{cue the music}

It appears you are confused again.

After tonight, the University of Illinois will still be the Fighting Illini, and the University of North Dakota will still be the Fighting Sioux.

After tonight, Illinois will not have an Indian mascot; neither will UND, as it's not had one for thirty years.

Of course, such fine distinctions make no difference to you, do they?

Or to put it another way -- if UND were to change its nickname to the Fighting Dakotas, would you still love calling Ralph Englestad a Nazi memorabilia collector?

I thought so.

Sincerely,
A member of the right-wing daisy chain

P.S. At least you're more entertaining than this dreadful crep.

Labels: ,


Monday, February 19, 2007

Illinois bows to its NCAA master 

One of the last holdouts against NCAA aggression has raised its own white flag. Wednesday will be the last appearance of Chief Illiniwek.
The decision follows two decades of votes, studies and committee meetings aimed at easing campus division over the mascot, which some American Indians and others view as an insult and some alumni and students see as a cherished tradition.

The NCAA ended up forcing the university's hand.

Friday's decision ends NCAA sanctions that had prevented Illinois from hosting postseason sports since 2005.

Illinois still will be able to use the name Illini because it's short for Illinois and the school can use the term Fighting Illini, because it's a reference to the team's competitive spirit, school officials said.
The University of North Dakota will fight on.
North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem says the decision by the University of Illinois to retire its American Indian mascot Chief Illiniwek will not affect the University of North Dakota's legal case against the NCAA.

UND is trying to retain postseason use of its "Fighting Sioux" nickname and logo, which the NCAA has deemed offensive.

"UND doesn't have a mascot like Illinois has," Stenehjem said. "[Illinois'] decision not to use this chief is a decision UND made a long time ago in deciding not to have any mascot. So they're putting themselves in the same position we're in now."

So if they changed their name to "Fighting (North) Dakotans"...

Labels: ,


Further denials of Banaian's Second Constant 

US students don't riot like their counterparts overseas, but they share the penchant for ignoring budget constraints.
Kara Brockett, a junior at Southwest State University, has piled up $25,000 in college debt. She works four jobs during the year and her parents help out a little when they can, but the fact remains: When she graduates and starts looking for work, she will have to find a job that feeds her debt rather than her ambition.

"It's difficult to get into nonprofit work when your loan payments are as big as your rent," said Brockett, of Omaha.

She's not alone. D.J. Danielson, of Savage, has piled up $21,000 in debt as a Winona State University student. Rick Howden, a Winona State senior, will graduate this year with $48,000 in loans to pay back.

And they all are worried.

"I now have to find a job that will help me pay that off rather than do something I really want to do," said Howden, of Cannon Falls.

Howden, Brockett and Danielson were among several hundred Minnesota State College and University (MnSCU) students who gathered Wednesday, despite the cold, in front of the State Capitol to protest college costs that seem to rise ever higher and are forcing them deeper and deeper into debt. They were encouraged by several legislators from both parties, who pledged to do what they could to rein in college costs this year.

Of course, one reason why you see "several hundred MnSCU students" is because we get notes telling us to let our student go on buses (paid for by student taxes activity fees) to these events. This announcement was sent from our university's media relations office to the campus announcement list:

SCSU Student Government will provide transportation to Rally Day at the state capitol on Wednesday, Feb. 14. Departure time is 9:30 in front of Atwood Memorial Center for the march at 11:30. The student group is supporting the rally in partnership with the Minnesota State College Student Association in an effort to deliver the message that higher education funding is important. Student Government notes that more than half of all SCSU 2005 graduates had debt, an average of $20,431.

The education of a university student consumes scarce resources. It is a question of who pays: the student? her or his parents? a third private party? taxpayers? In very few cases do taxpayers pay zero (Hillsdale comes to mind as an exception that proves the rule.) The question is over the right balance; the students are lobbying for a shifting of costs. The MSCSA is using money appropriated to it through a state university checkoff on a student's tuition bill to lobby taxpayers to pay a larger share. Changing the funding formula doesn't change the cost. But it changes the demand for education if third parties pay more (just as health insurance does.) So MSCSA is lobbying to get more students as well, and more tuition checkoff revenue. And pushing up that demand benefits the university through larger transfers in the future, since our funding is driven by student body size (roughly; you really don't want to know all the details.)

Students could save money better by taking more credits. Think about this: Suppose students take 12 hours per term and work 20 hours a week, earning $150 per week after taxes. Because of their credit-taking pattern, they must stay in school at least five years. The extra year in school costs them the lost increased income they earn post-graduation for one year. (The costs of living while in school the fifth year are not an opportunity cost, since you have to live that year anyway.) Suppose the student was working to get a $40,000/year job. You've lost $26,000 in income four years from now by working 20 hours and taking 12 credits rather than working zero hours and taking 15 credits, and borrowing the extra $21,600 you would have earned working for 36 weeks at $150/wk. At what interest rate does that come out a good deal for you to borrow your living expenses?

Instead they pay money to student government and hold signs in front of the legislature, complaining that their "job ... feeds [their] debt rather than [their] ambition." So the government is supposed to subsidize you to take a career path that doesn't pay for itself? Which would that be? Let me guess.

ADDENDUM: Loyal reader jw sends me this note about "crazy hours" at work. If one devotes more time to work and less to leisure, it must be the case that the perceived return to work is greater. It may be that the perception arises from the increased differential in pay as one rises in the company. That is, a higher differential for CEO/CFO/CIO pay over line managers may induce the latter to work more, to win the tournament for those jobs.

Labels: ,


Friday, February 16, 2007

Selling your university franchise 

I had a chance meeting with someone who is serving on the committee for our university's search for a new president. Happy with the quality of the candidates the committee has reviewed (when isn't this the case?) he said "I hope people remember that a search is a two-way street. We're interviewing them, and they're interviewing us." He implied, of course, that we sometimes don't present ourselves very well in that process.

In today's Chronicle of Higher Education (subscriber's link) are comments by five people identified as targets of the search for the Harvard presidency, a position recently filled) on the reasons they might not take the job. One reason is that you are satisfied with your current job. Hanna Gray, former president of the University of Chicago, said
It is absolutely no reflection on an institution or on a person that the person makes the choice of remaining in a position where his or her investment and commitment are both satisfying and significant in their consequence.
Lawrence Bacow, president of Tufts, echoes that sentiment, saying that since Harvard will be a great institution regardless of who runs it (presumably because of its history and its faculty and its endowment), the marginal return to leadership may be greater elsewhere. That's true, but why is it that presidents would value the perceived marginal value of their product, rather than the prestige of the job they have? Analogous to this, would you rather become head coach of a moribund football team (say, the Arizona Cardinals), a disappointing football team (Dallas Cowboys), or a team with the best record in the NFL (San Diego Chargers)?

Of course, there's more to it than the prestige of the school or the football team's franchise. Thomas Cech, president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, on why he reportedly had turned down a chance to interview for the Harvard job:
To really succeed in the job, to use an overused cliché, you have to make the whole more than the sum of the parts. Many of my friends on the faculty at Harvard currently say the whole is less than the sum.

There is a disconnect between some of the faculty who have a real commitment to reforming undergraduate education at Harvard [and others there]. A lot of bright lights want to make this happen, but somehow it hasn't been incorporated into the fabric of the institution; it hasn't become part of the culture there. ... It's not a Harvard-specific challenge. ... I would say that many institutions have recognized that a number of years ago and have started a culture change. At Harvard the improvements are still mostly in the future.
He didn't see it at Harvard. Do we see it here? The fellow I spoke with this morning said the search committee heard perceptions from the candidates they interviewed that whatever bad reputations we had in the past were largely gone, and that we were "a pretty good state university." I'd settle for pretty good, given where we were. But is there a commitment to reforming undergraduate education? Are we pretty good because we haven't had a lawsuit for a few years that made the newspapers, or was there a cultural change?

Labels: ,


Thursday, February 15, 2007

When you mix the state and education... 

...you can sometimes get strange results. For example, at the University of Missouri at Rolla, the student newspaper is threatening to sue the state for the university's proposal to cut the paper's funding as a First Amendment violation.

The idea for the cuts apparently originated amid complaints of an inordinate number of errors in the newspaper last fall. But the paper’s editor in chief said it was clear that the university did not like articles that had criticized it. It also didn’t like the paper’s sex column.

But the fact is that the newspaper’s budget, which like that of other student groups derives from student-activity fees, is initially determined by the Student Council. The university’s chancellor and governing board only endorsed the Student Council’s recommendation for cuts.

Can a paper demand the revenues of the state -- and in this case, of student activity fees at a state institution -- through the Constitution? The paper's position seems to create an incentive to criticize the school's administration, so that any subsequent budget cut can be cited as an attempt to silence dissent.

The paper's own report says that the reasons the student government cited for its closure were "grammatical errors, opinionated content and printing too many copies." The Student Law Press Center reports that the cuts were to be to student reporter salaries, but that they've diverted money from other places, including printing smaller papers. Does the law require holding the paper and all its employees forever harmless?

Labels:


Charming, that 

I have a student working on a senior project inspired by his own life. He made the choice to go to school without much savings, without parental support, and without wishing to take on scads of debt. Ergo, he works many hours. It's not unusual at SCSU for students to carry 4-5 classes and work 30-40 hours per week. But given Banaian's Second Constant* -- 168, which equals 24 times seven, into which all human activity must fit in a week -- tradeoffs between work and study occur, and thus there's a negative relationship between work and GPA. (Two colleagues of mine have a paper which shows for two Midwestern schools that an increase in parental cash, though, causes an increase in leisure consumption and lower grades. So don't give 'em lots of cash, Dad!

It appears you can fix this, however: Pro forma GPAs.

Now for a student, their GPA is basically the equivalent of a firm’s 4 year trailing cash flows. The number itself carries huge weight in job interviews, yet for decades students have reported GPA exactly as it appears on their transcript. While entirely accurate, this is a huge mistake. Job applicants are now realizing that adjusting their GPAs can give a more accurate misrepresentation of their performance and expected future production.

Why should an employer hire an average of you over the last four years, when what they should be interested is a real misrepresentation of what you could be now if not for certain events?
Sadly, I can imagine someone doing this. I have tried to write letters of recommendation for students like mine who maybe have a 2.9 GPA and a full-time job and are good kids. I don't know that it does any good when the person doing the phone screening tells the student that the firm accepts no one with less than a 3.0. And so you're encouraging this kind of behavior.

* -- the first is also known as a variation of Beckhap's Constant: Brains times Beauty times the square root of Emotional Stability equals a constant > 0. Advice for the lonely on the day after V-Day.

Labels:


Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Wisconsin goes in reverse 

The University of Wisconsin system has told its admissions officers that they may use race and income in decisions on who to admit to their schools to increase diversity.
The goal is to increase diversity among the system's 160,000 students, who are overwhelmingly white and increasingly well-off financially.

But Rep. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, and others have questioned whether the policy complies with a state law that bans race-based tests in admissions. In a statement Thursday, Nass said the regents were ignoring the law and the will of the people.

"The unaccountable Board of Regents has chosen a confrontation with the taxpayers of this state regarding its politically correct admissions policy,'' said Nass, who chairs the Assembly Colleges and Universities committee.
This will be a court fight at some point. I doubt this makes a big difference at the Madison campus, but it will have some impact at other campuses. Perhaps it's an attempt to pick up students who might be dissuaded from Michigan schools by Prop 2.

Labels: ,


We're still popular 

Economics continutes to be a lucrative degree for college students, says Money magazine. The survey for the first time separates economics and finance, and notes these starting salaries as "respectable":Graduates in marketing will see big increases in 2007 versus 2006, while the liberal arts majors are down 1.1% in the survey. (I do wish they would break out those majors in more detail.)

(h/t: Loyal reader jw)

Labels: ,


Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Jolly jokers 

You have to like the book title from which these top ten college pranks come. My favorite is Hugo N. Frye.

Labels:


Email announcment of the day 

This was the subject line of an email broadcast to the campus 30 minutes ago.
[SCSU-announce] Honoring Vagina Warriors on V-Day
These warriors are those who sued the university in a gender equity claim many years ago. No word if cookies will be served.

Labels: ,


Friday, February 09, 2007

New adventures in cookie politics 

Remember the uproar that cookies might be demeaning when used for political messages? Wendy McElroy reported back then that at some places leftists threw down and stomped on "affirmative action cookies".
When the leftists began making threats, one of the cookie rebels had called the police because he feared the discussion -- hitherto civil -- might turn violent. Chambers explained, "Unfortunately, rather than step in and arrest our attackers, the police stood by while the University said we, the peaceful ones, had to shut down because WE were creating an unsafe environment. ... Our protests that the CRs were peacefully demonstrating while the leftists got violent fell upon deaf ears."

The university allowed a handful of violent students to decide which political views could or could not be expressed on campus.
The president of the University of Washington's Board of Regents referred to the CRs bake sale there as "tasteless" and "hurtful".

Well, his reaction to a bake sale on campus here this week might want to re-investigate that.
The buttons are pretty standard fare for your guerrilla feminist, but the cookie to the left is a new creation. Note the strategic position of the heart-shaped candy on the cookie. How clever! How daring!

Here we are today, on a campus where there's another outbreak of moronic whining after someone advertising for a foundation created out of the death of a child to cancer, because the advertisement referred to two hockey tickets being sold at a benefit for the foundation as being between SCSU and the UND Fighting Sioux. That provokes our old friend Miss Median to ask that we "show enough respect to the native peoples of Minnesota and the Great Plains to refer simply to the "UND" hockey team..." But people can walk right by a group selling cl*t cookies to promote a political message, sponsored by an organization funded by public funds, and the passing crowd yawns at the scene.

Nobody on this campus will find this at all abnormal.

Most will find it acceptable.

I will not.

Labels: ,


When colleges breed 

Reorganization of universities happen often. My dear alma mater, Claremont Graduate School (yes, they call themselves a University now, but I am stubborn) divided itself into schools a decade ago. The reasons then, as they are for many places, have more to do with budgets and turf than they do mission. A new department or college means a new dean or director, new stationery, a bigger office, etc. It has precious little to do with mission.

That doesn't mean, though, that some in the school will use the reorganization to make some vision statement or create key performance indicators for a strategic plan that is as vacuous as anything Dilbert could create. Thus David Downing finds the University of Minnesota's new College of Design's mission to be a little, well, unhinged from traditional architectural colleges. He notes from a story:
The College of Design educates students to be leaders in the field of social change via design and to be visionaries for a better future.

...Preparing students to enter the "design economy" and to address the need for a more sustainable and equitable designed environment will focus its attention in the coming years. It will work to connect design disciplines to each other and to other fields not normally thought of as design related.
In other words, it will cease to be a place where one actually does architecture and learns about creating buildings. I'm sure that will enhance the marketability of their students.

Labels:


Class assignment 

OK, if you're an SCSU student who was chapped by NOVA week, you need to read Mike Adams. Then you need to see if the CRs were able to provide any compensation through student activity fees to Col. Joe Repya. Letters are fine, but time for action.

Labels: ,


Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Grade appeal 

Two faculty members at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and their union have sued the state's executive inspector general after they were told they had completed the state's mandatory ethics quiz for state employees. They are seeking to have the rule thrown out; no money is requested. As I reported last month, completing the test in ten minutes is a no-no, but there is no stated rule for how long you should take. But some student managers have learned, according to Stephen Karlson, that stretching it to thirty minutes by multitasking is OK.

Source: Chronicle of Higher Education subscriber's link.

Labels:


[Top]