ACTA's Must-Reads

Making good decisions requires good information

Trustees have an obligation to act in the best interest of students, parents and taxpayers. And it's important that they have the most complete information available. It appears many of the Trustees at the University of Delaware will vote next Monday on the status of a controversial residence life program having only seen an executive summary. To help the Board make an informed decision, ACTA has sent all of the members a copy of the full proposal along with a memo outlining serious concerns.

Activities in college dorms are often quite different from those trustees remember from their college days. This memo shows how.

Try again, CU

Today's Wall Street Journal reports on the University of Colorado at Boulder's attempts to raise funds for a Professor of Conservative Thought and Policy position. While CU deserves great credit for attempting to address the issue of intellectual diversity -- and its Board of Regents has done so fruitfully in other ways -- ACTA has concerns about this particular approach. ACTA president Anne D. Neal enumerates them in a post on National Review Online's "Phi Beta Cons" blog.

Indoctrination in the dorms

Today at Minding the Campus, John K. Wilson and Adam Kissel are debating the University of Delaware's residential life practices, and trustees should pay close attention. UD is deciding what should take place in its dorms next year, in the wake of revelations of indoctrination in last year's program -- which are outlined extensively in Kissel's piece. As the example of UD shows, today's residence halls bear little resemblance to those most trustees and alumni remember. RAs are being tasked with much more than pizza parties and making sure students are physically safe -- and their new responsibilities often take politicized and troubling forms. And it costs real money -- UD's program, for instance, employs about 250 individuals.

If you are a trustee, are you aware of exactly what your university is doing in its residence halls? Is it appropriate? Is it the best way to spend your institution's limited resources? These are questions worth asking -- before your college makes the kind of bad headlines UD has.

The core of the issue

Our friends at the National Association of Scholars have published an incisive piece on the University System of Georgia's pending curricular changes. As they point out, the current USG curriculum -- while not perfect -- "does present an accessible combination of math, science, English, the humanities, and fine arts." That's quite similar to the assessment in ACTA's recent report card on public higher education in Georgia, Shining the Light, where we gave the curriculum a passing grade but noted its deficiencies in a few key subjects. We also agree with the NAS that the proposals that have come forth to replace the current curriculum would be steps backward, not forward. While the goal of the review ("to ensure that we are providing students with the knowledge and abilities they will need to meet the challenges of our rapidly evolving, technologically interconnected global world") is sound, the best way to get there is to beef up the curriculum -- adding an economics requirement, for instance -- not water it down.

Trustees in and out of Georgia would be well advised to read up on this controversy, as curricular reviews are a frequent occurrence on campus, and it's critical that they be done right.

On this April 16th

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni remembers with sadness the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech just one year ago. We offer our prayers for the families of those whose lives were lost -- and for all those affected.

Undergraduate education: Taking a backseat

Short and to the point, Stan Katz, professor of public and international affairs and director of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, reminds us that the building blitz on college campuses may be coming at the expense of undergraduate education and student learning. Perhaps we should consider his caution.

Addressing Intellectual Diversity From Within

In his essay, When Donors Pick the Courses, Professor Don Downs joins a growing chorus of academics troubled by the academy's failure to live up to its core educational purpose. Acknowledging the role that donors can play in bringing alternative -- and important insights -- to the often one-sided and politicized academy, Downs nevertheless finds that such funding offers an "imperfect remedy to an underlying disease." Admitting that the "perfect should not be the enemy of the possible," Downs joins ACTA in his call upon universities to rededicate themselves to "an ethical form of liberal education beyond politics."

Emphasis on diversity shortchanges fundamentals

Diversity and cultural awareness -- while laudable goals -- often trump more fundamental topics at schools of education, say Jay P. Green and Catherine Shock. In a new article entitled "Students Lose When Diversity is Main Focus," Greene, head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and Shock, a research associate in the same department, compare the number of courses at the nation's top 70 ed schools focusing on social and political goals versus basic skills. Finding a significant imbalance in favor of the former, they suggest that a greater emphasis on math is in order.

Keep reading

Mark Bauerlein reflects on a recent talk by Jean-Pierre Garnier, CEO of GlaxoSmithKline, to young professionals about the value of a liberal arts education -- no matter the profession chosen, including business.

The anti-intellectual antidote

Some might call Susan Jacoby a curmudgeon. However, according to a recent article in the New York Times, "Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?" Jacoby's outlook is a product of what she sees as a growing anti-intellectualism and down right hostility to scientific rationalism in America today. Jacoby joins a growing number of critics who lament the state of civic, scientific, and humanistic knowledge from elementary school all the way up to the university level.

Isn't one transcript good enough?

In "Beware the Second Transcript," University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor -- and author of Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus -- Donald Downs offers up his thoughts on a new proposal by the UW administration to create a second, "extracurricular" transcript for students monitored by faculty members. As professor Downs sees it, this is a poor idea that will open the door for favoritism and discrimination against students not engaged in activities that coincide with faculty interests. Moreover, such transcripts will detract from UW's main pedagogical mission of imparting knowledge. Trustees should be on the lookout for such troubling developments at their own universities.

Bold change vs. the status quo

In a recent edition of The Politico, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings takes Congress to task for failing to address critical problems of higher education quality and accountability at a time when the U.S. is losing its competitive edge. She reflects on a meeting of the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, where U.S. business leaders raised concerns about how America is lagging behind many competitor nations in student achievement and graduation rates. She laments the contrast between business leaders, who recognize the need for bold change, and the U.S. Congress, which -- in reauthorizing the Higher Education Act -- has defended the status quo and refused to adopt changes necessary to reform an ailing higher education system.

Fitzhugh on "The Whole Child"

Writing in Ed News, ACTA friend Will Fitzhugh -- founder of The Concord Review and other organizations emphasizing the learning of American history -- has penned an excellent piece entitled "The Whole Child." Fitzhugh's article sounds a call for a re-emphasis of the core mission of any school, namely academics. That's a call worth hearing for trustees, alumni, and policymakers in higher education and beyond.

Pardon our absence

ACTA is currently redoing its web presence -- including this humble blog. As a result, posts here have fallen off, and for that we ask your forgiveness. Please stay tuned for a new, retooled ACTA website and blog in the coming weeks. And if you're looking for commentary from ACTA senior fellow Erin O'Connor, you can find her at her personal blog, Critical Mass, as well as Minding the Campus and Phi Beta Cons (where ACTA president Anne D. Neal also writes).

A year of accountability

2008 is bound to be a watershed year for higher ed accountability. Momentum has been growing for years, and in recent months the pressure on colleges and universities to document that they are ensuring educational quality and fiscal oversight has grown intense. And much of that pressure centers on governing boards, which hold the ultimate fiduciary responsibility for the institutions in their care.

In 2005, ACTA published a comprehensive report on the University of North Carolina governance system. Centered on accountability, the report recommended streamlining measures that would both concentrate and decentralize authority in appropriate and necessary ways.

The sixteen-campus UNC system, the report argued, should maintain a governing board of no more than 15 members (UNC's board has 32 members). "A smaller board would facilitate a focus on central issues, allow thorough discussion and increase each member's accountability," the report stated. The trustees of individual campuses should, in turn, have more authority to make local decisions.

Similarly, the report recommended that the governor should be the one who appoints people to the system-wide Board of Governors--and not North Carolina's General Assembly. "Essentially, it's an issue of accountability," ACTA president Anne Neal said. "The governor is essentially not at the table. ... The power to appoint is the power to lead. This (would allow) one person to set the agenda and take responsibility."

At once a set of specific recommendations to UNC and a statement about best practices, the study attracted strong media attention--and charted a clear, reasonable course of change.

Real change is slow, of course, and substantive recommendations can take some time to assimilate into existing systems. But it does happen.

So it is encouraging--but not ultimately surprising--to see an editorial in South Carolina's Columbia State calling for changes very like those ACTA urged North Carolina to undertake. "Single Board of Regents Should Control Colleges" is simple and to the point:

On the University of South Carolina's "Bridge" program, Dec. 22: We thought it was pretty cool a couple of years ago when Clemson announced it would let students who barely missed being admitted instead spend their freshman year in a special program at a local technical college and then automatically transfer to the university as sophomores.

The invitation-only "Bridge" program gave students access to academic programs and resources from Trident Tech and Clemson in order to provide the seamless transition to the university that is too often an elusive goal for technical- and community-college students. ...

About the only thing we can think of that would be better still is if we didn't have to be surprised and delighted by such news, if the idea of all of our state's 33 colleges and universities working together as a system to meet the needs of students and of the state were something we could take for granted. Although we're fortunate, for the first time ever, to have leaders at several of our colleges who embrace that idea, that could change in a flash when those leaders leave.

The best way we can think to prevent the return of the notion of colleges as independent fiefdoms that exist solely to serve themselves is to turn our higher education system into an actual system--one controlled by a single board of regents, preferably answerable to the governor.

Indeed. South Carolina's Board of Trustees should be looking hard at ACTA's report--and listening closely to the reasonable demands of citizens.

Worth noting: the State's call for a restructuring of university governance was reproduced in the Charlotte Observer--where it will undoubtedly draw the attention of North Carolinian taxpayers, legislators, trustees, students, and parents.

These are good signs for the coming year.