ACTA's Must-Reads

« August 2005 | Main | October 2005 »

No free speech--or hunting terrorists--at Bucknell

Bucknell students and alumni have been working for some time to convince the administration that speech should be free at the university. But Bucknell has a speech code, and Bucknell enforces it (when convenient). It was convenient just recently. Evan Coyne Maloney explains:

On August 29th, the Bucknell University Conservatives Club sent out a campus-wide e-mail announcing an upcoming speaker: Major John Krenson, who had been in Afghanistan "hunting terrorists." Those two words--"hunting terrorists"--resulted in three students being called to Bucknell's Office of the President by Kathy Owens, the Executive Assistant to the President.

According to the students, when they arrived at the President's Office for the meeting, Ms. Owens held up a print-out of the offending e-mail and said "we have a problem here," telling the students that the words "hunting terrorists" were offensive. For the next half-hour, the three students were given a lecture on inappropriate phrasing.

Maloney, a filmmaker who has put together an excellent documentary on campus political bias that is soon to be expanded into a feature film, notes the double standard:

Last year, while collecting footage for my upcoming film Indoctrinate U, I noticed that the campus was plastered with flyers that screamed "vagina" in large block letters. Although some people might find these flyers offensive, it is protected speech at Bucknell--as it should be--but apparently the phrase "hunting terrorists" is not.

[...]

For years, Bucknell has denied that it has a speech code, the speech-stifling regulations that many schools use to punish political speech they don't like. But if Bucknell isn't in the business of restricting free speech, then why did these students have to spend 30 minutes listening to criticisms of the phrase "hunting terrorists"?

Most students I know would prefer not to spend their time defending their speech in front of highly-placed university administrators. By taking this action, the Bucknell administration is sending a signal to students: say only those things we approve of, or we will hassle you. The long-term effect will be that students will think twice before engaging in political speech that they know will be unpopular with the administration.

As an alumnus of Bucknell, this is all very depressing. Even more so because the recent appointment of Brian C. Mitchell as the new University President was met with optimism from students who have grown tired of fighting the constant battles against campus political correctness. Let's hope this incident is just a minor misstep in a new administration, and not a sign of things to come.

Mitchell would do well to heed Maloney's call. If he's unimpressed by the ethical arguments for repealing Bucknell's policies regulating campus speech, maybe he'll be alive to the financial ones. There are a lot of alumni out there who feel as Maloney does. And a movie is being made that will get the word out about Bucknell--one way or another.

Posted by acta online at 09:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Ideological corruption among university presidents

American University president Ben Ladner may be in the news right now for his outrageous spending and his abuse of fiduciary privilege, and the Ladner story may be a reminder of similar abuses by other college and university presidents in the past. But it would be a mistake to think that behaving like a decadent aristocrat on the school's dime is the worst or most damning manner in which university presidents abuse their office. It is bad, and it is damning. Doing more harm, though, are the petty ideological concessions to campus diversitycrats many presidents make everyday as a condition of doing business.

Victor Davis Hanson tells it like it is in today's Opinion Journal, with a special focus on the recent woes of Harvard president Lawrence Summers, who is now doing expensive penance for offending campus feminists, and ex-University of Colorado president Elizabeth Hoffman, who was so totally cowed by the Ward Churchill scandal that she resigned. Hanson also trains his unforgiving eye on two University of California leaders: UC Santa Cruz chancellor Denice Denton, who has used the rhetoric of diversity to procure a cushy lifetime sinecure for her lover, and UC Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau, whose bad faith attempts to alter the racial makeup of the Berkeley student body reek of intellectual dishonesty and professional incompetence masquerading as activist awareness.

Hanson spells out the stakes of such administrative machinations in devastatingly blunt terms:

In the end, why should we care about a few high-flying administrators who feel that diversity is the engine that runs the university? Because the U.S. is struggling in an increasingly competitive world in which Europe, China, Japan and India vie for global talent and national advantage through merit-based higher education. They don't care about the racial make-up of the teams that create breakthrough gene therapies or software programs, but only whether such innovations are valuable and superior to the competition.
As our own industrial, agricultural and manufacturing sectors decline, and as we suffer from increasing national debt, trade deficits, energy dilemmas and weak currency, Americans have maintained relative parity largely through information-based technology and superior research--all predicated on a superb system of higher education. At some point, Mr. Summers, Ms. Denton, Ms. Hoffman and Mr. Birgeneau might have wondered what precisely was the system that produced their lavish salaries and great campuses--and what protocols of merit, transparency, intellectual honesty and scholarly rigor were necessary to maintain them.

More importantly, we have lost sight of what university presidents are supposed to be. Their first allegiance ought to be to honesty and truth, not campus orthodoxy masquerading as intellectual bravery amid a supposedly reactionary society. In a world of intellectual integrity, Robert Birgeneau would ask, "Why are Asians excelling, and what can Berkeley do to encourage emulation of their success by other ethnic groups?" Denice Denton might wonder whether open hiring, monitored by affirmative action officers, applies to university staff or only those who are not associates of the president. President Hoffman would decry Ward Churchill's crass behavior and order a complete review of affirmative action and the politicized nature of hiring, retention, and tenure practices at Colorado. And Larry Summers? In the old world of the campus, he would defend free inquiry and expression, and remind faculty that all questions are up for discussion at Harvard. And if self-appointed censors wished to fire him for that, then he would dare them to go ahead and try.

The signs of erosion on our campuses are undeniable, whether we examine declining test scores, spiraling costs, or college graduates' ignorance of basic facts and ideas. In response, our academic leadership is not talking about a more competitive curriculum, higher standards of academic accomplishment, or the critical need freely to debate important issues. Instead, it remains obsessed with a racial, ideological, and sexual spoils system called "diversity." Even as the airline industry was deregulated in the 1970s, and Wall Street now has come under long-overdue scrutiny, it is time for Americans, if we are to ensure our privileged future, to re-examine our era's politicized university.

The entire article is well worth a read. And, as Hanson proves, the multiculturalist rhetoric of academic leaders is well worth watching. It tells a story of administrators bowing to a campus orthodoxy that really ought not to affect them, and, in so doing, it reveals just how far higher education has strayed from its ostensible mission. As Hanson notes, Harvard's motto is Veritas, or "Truth." But these days it might more properly be changed to "Capitulation."

Thanks to Erich Schwarz for the link.

Posted by acta online at 08:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Something else for Margaret Spellings

As long as Margaret Spellings has resolved to study American higher education in order to get a sense of where the problems are and how the system might be improved, she would do well to consider an increasingly pressing question: Where are all the men?

USA Today notes that these days, 135 women are graduating from college for every 100 men. The U.S. Department of Education projects that the gap will grow in coming years. Some sobering facts: The unemployment rate for men between the ages of 20 and 24 is 10.1%, or twice the national average. There are almost as many men in jail, on probation, and on parole (5,000,000) as there are men in college (7,300,000). Men with college educations earn an average of $47,000 per year; those whose education ended at the high school diploma earn an average of $30,000. What's happening to young men's prospects in this country is devastating. It's also not surprising, given the manner in which K-12 education has been reshaped to favor girls and disadvantage boys--something Christina Hoff Sommers documents in damning detail in The War Against Boys.

A generation of young men is losing out in a very big way. But there is no real outrage as higher education becomes a feminized system. Indeed, the outrage is still running the other way--we hear continually about the marginalization of women in the academy, and the difficulties women students face. The question of why there are so few women in the hard sciences draws impassioned debate, urgent calls for equity, and lots and lots of money. But the question of why young men are disappearing from campus is not even being widely asked. And it certainly isn't being studied systematically. It should be, and Margaret Spellings has the power to ensure that it is.

Posted by acta online at 10:10 AM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

Harvard plays it safe

Yesterday, Harvard University joined Columbia, Cornell, NYU, Yale, the University of Chicago, and the University of Pennsylvania in filing an amicus brief opposing the Solomon Amendment, which stipulates that federal funding will be withheld from schools that bar military recruiters from their campuses. A separate group of Harvard law professors also filed a brief. But as the Supreme Court prepares to hear Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, and as the Pentagon issues warnings to law schools that continue to bar military recruiters because they find the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy to be discriminatory, Harvard is playing both sides of the street.

Last year, after the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals found for a group of law schools that had sought to overturn the law on First Amendment grounds, Harvard barred military recruiters, and still collected hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money. This year, in response to a warning from the Pentagon that despite the 3rd Circuit ruling, the Solomon Amendment would be enforced, Harvard is allowing military recruiters on campus after all. In a letter sent to all law students Tuesday, Harvard law dean Elena Kagan explained that the university simply could not afford to lose its federal funding. About 15% of Harvard's annual budget comes from government money, much of it going to the medical school and the school of public health.

Harvard's decision speaks to the extraordinarily high stakes of the upcoming Supreme Court case. The brief Harvard filed yesterday in coordination with a group of like-minded elite schools states this explicitly, noting that "modern research universities" can't simply decide not to accept federal funds without also making profound alterations to the shape and significance of higher education: "Universities cannot decline federal funding without fundamentally altering their character and dismantling a significant component of the nation's research and development infrastructure."

Harvard's decision also speaks to one of the defining ironies of this country's higher education system. Private colleges and universities are typically held to be exempt from the kinds of constitutional requirements that public colleges and universities, as government-funded entities, must uphold; they have no obligation to respect First Amendment rights, for example, and can make their own choices about whether to discriminate on the basis of religion, sexual orientation, and so on. The rationale for this is that these schools are not government-funded entities. But the "privacy" of those colleges is in a very real way illusory; as Harvard is currently acknowledging, even the most well-heeled private institutions in the country are profoundly dependent on government dollars to stay afloat.

The fight about the Solomon Amendment is not simply a fight about what is and is not discrimination and what is and is not free expression. It is also a fight about what kinds of obligations schools incur when they accept federal funds, and about whether those obligations can trump an individual school's procedural autonomy. That in turn is a fight about the future character of higher education itself.

Posted by acta online at 09:42 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Losing the idea of liberal education

It has become commonplace to lament the decline of liberal education in the United States. We criticize colleges for abandoning their mission, for becoming excessively corporate, on the one hand, and for pandering to students with inflated grades, country club-like amenities, and dumbed down, unfocussed curricula, on the other. We also criticize students for approaching their college years with a strong careerist instinct and little else--increasingly, college students seem more interested in gaming the system than in getting an education, more concerned with engineering a transcript and a resume that will open doors for them, than with broadening their intellectual horizons and discovering what it means to be a thinking adult citizen of the world.

The Association of American Colleges and Universities has been fighting this trend for a decade now, devoting a great deal of time and energy to a campaign it calls "Liberal Education and America's Promise: Excellence for Everyone as a Nation Goes to College." As part of that campaign, the AACU studied the attitudes of high school and college students toward higher education.

The disturbing but ultimately unsurprising results are summarized in The Chronicle of Higher Education. They are worth quoting at length:

Today's high-school students are largely uninformed about the college curriculum and uncertain about its demands, while the resources available to guide their preparation for college life are very limited. Students do not regard high-school guidance counselors or colleges themselves as trusted sources of information. Operating in a vacuum, they have little understanding of the kinds of learning that either their future employers or their faculty members see as important. While some believe that the college degree is little more than a "piece of paper," most students do recognize that something important goes on during the college years. The problem is they don't really know what that "something" is or ought to be.

We asked our focus groups to examine a list of college outcomes and identify which are the most and least important to them. The rankings produced across the groups are remarkably consistent. What students most value is their own preparation for professional success. They believe that such things as maturity, work habits, self-discipline, and time management are what they need to achieve in college. A few of the college juniors and seniors also recognize the importance of communication, problem solving, and critical thinking. Whether they rank those outcomes high or low, however, none of the students we interviewed identify specific courses, assignments, or activities that help prepare them to meet those outcomes.

The most alarming finding has to do with what both current and prospective students consider the least important outcomes of a college education: values and ethics, an appreciation of cultural diversity, global awareness, and civic responsibility. When we further asked students about the importance of deepening their knowledge of American culture and history, of cultures outside the United States, and of scientific knowledge and its importance in the world -- three staples of a strong liberal education -- each ranked at the bottom of desired outcomes.

Today's students understand that college is important to their success in the work force, but they do not recognize its role in preparing them as citizens, community participants, and thoughtful people. They do not expect college to enable them to better understand the wider world; they view college as a private rather than a public good.

As a result, they also seem to believe that learning is mostly about individual development and simple information transfer. That is why they tend to think that if they have already studied a topic in high school (for example, American history or science), there is no logical reason to ever study it again. Moreover, we found little difference between the outcomes valued by high-school seniors and those valued by college students. That suggests that colleges are not conveying the importance of liberal education to their students.

Indeed, our focus-group findings indicate a profound lack of understanding about the tradition of liberal education. We found that high-school students are almost entirely unfamiliar with the term "liberal education" and that college students are only somewhat familiar with it. Some of those who have heard the term tend to associate it only with traditional liberal arts and sciences, rather than with a broader philosophy of education important for all students, whatever their chosen field of study. Some think it occurs only in the arts and humanities, rather than in the sciences. Among those students who associate liberal education with learning critical thinking, almost all see it only as something that happens in those parts of the curriculum considered "general education," rather than in detailed studies in particular fields.

The confusion goes on. For some students, a liberal education is one that is politically skewed to the left. As one college student put it, it is "education directed toward alternative methods, most often political in nature." Another college student remarked, "Initially, I thought and heard of 'liberal' as in Democrats and politics. I am conservative, so my initial reaction was to brace myself, set up a defense of my values."

As speculation mounts regarding what Margaret Spellings' commission will actually do, the AACU study stands as an important document about the present state of higher education in this country. Spellings justified her decision to form the commission in part by citing concern about America's ability to compete with other countries. The AACU report suggests that one reason American students are less rounded and less prepared for life after college is, ironically, that all they really do in college is try to prime themselves for life in the global economy. The intellectual impoverishment of that approach to undergraduate education, which increasingly sees college as a time for resume building, networking, and personal advancement, is taking its toll on a generation of young people who emerge from their undergraduate years well versed in gamesmanship but not particularly knowledgeable about anything else.

Will the Spellings commission focus exclusively on bottom lines--costs, rising enrollment numbers, the need to prepare a globally savvy workforce--or will it take a broader, longer, less quantifiable view of what American higher education needs? Whatever the commission does, it will be telling, indicative of the national mood and, possibly, of a national willingness to abandon the core principles of a style of learning, and a kind of education, that is clearly disappearing from this country.

Posted by acta online at 10:07 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Federal focus on higher ed

The federal government is responsible for about a third of higher education spending in the U.S., which it does in the form of research grants and student financial aid programs. That investment is far greater than the government's investment in K-12 education (which amounts to about 10%), and yet governmental interest in quality control and standardization has thus far focussed on K-12 in the form of NCLB. Today may mark the beginning of a change, however.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is scheduled to speak today at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and she intends to use her speech to unveil plans for "a comprehensive national strategy for postsecondary education." Spellings says she is "not advocating a bigger role for the federal government in higher education" but stresses, too, that the country ''needs a coordinated approach to meet rising enrollment numbers and new economic demands." It's hard to see how the one can be achieved without the other, and it's easy to see how rhetoric may be operating here to anticipate and appease the most obvious and most damning criticism that Spellings' plan invites: that hers is an intrusive, impractical, and potentially undemocratic blueprint for governmental intervention in the expressive individuality and procedural autonomy of America's colleges and universities.

At the same time, Spellings is pinpointing an increasingly prohibitive national problem. We simply don't know much about what's happening on campus these days. We have plenty of suspect rankings systems, plenty of stories about overpaid presidents and misguided use of funds, plenty of studies documenting the overwhelmingly liberal bent of the American professoriate, and plenty of complaints about schools overcharging their students, inflating their grades, dumbing down curricula, and substituting politically biased proselytizing for genuine liberal arts education. But we have little in the way of systematic knowledge, and because of that it is just about impossible to talk constructively about how to address what many are beginning to regard as a crisis in higher education. Spellings proposes to gather--or at least to begin to gather--some of the information we all need if we are to understand the nature of the problems higher education faces.

Spellings' commission will be spearheaded by Charles Miller, former chair of the University of Texas Board of Regents. Others who will serve include Jim Hunt, governor of North Carolina; David Ward, president of the American Council on Education; and Jonathan Grayer, CEO of the Kaplan test prep company.

Posted by acta online at 09:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Lack of transparency at Cornell

Last spring, Cornell University president and alumnus Jeffrey Lehman stepped down after only two years on the job. The decision came as a shock to many, as Lehman had presided over a number of positive developments, among them soaring applications and unprecedented alumni support. Though the precise reasons for his decision to quit were shrouded in secrecy, Lehman did acknowledge that they had to do with his rocky relationship with the Board of Trustees. And, at the time, that was that.

Now, however, the Cornell faculty senate is expressing deep discomfort with the lack of transparency surrounding Lehmann's departure. Yesterday, the senate passed by a strong majority a "Resolution Urging the Administration and the Board of Trustees to Engage in a Frank and Open Dialogue with the Faculty Regarding the Resignation of President Jeffrey Lehman." The hope, according to physics professor Peter Stein, who presented the resolution, is that it will "convince the trustees to open a dialogue with Lehman in order to get the information out."

Stein and others are hoping to press past the confidentiality agreement Lehman and the Board entered into upon Lehman's decision to step down. That seems unlikely--but at the same time, the faculty's discomfort with the manner of Lehman's departure is quite legitimate, and speaks to an entirely reasonable desire to know exactly what the nature of Cornell's evident problems with governance are. If the Board fails to honor the resolution--and there appears to be every possibility that it will--those problems will only deepen.

Posted by acta online at 11:01 AM | Comments (0)

Speech codes and journalistic ethics

Last spring, the University of New Hampshire found itself at the center of a highly publicized controversy when a student journalist repeatedly posted material on his blog that offended and frightened his teachers and fellow students. He wrote about raping women and shooting students; he posted a fantasy about sexually assaulting a vocal and controversial campus feminist--and was fired from the student paper as a consequence; he posted another entry detailing how he would like to shove his his penis through his English teacher's eye socket--and was banned from the class. Gagnon was advised to get psychiatric help, and UNH looked into what kinds of legal recourse it might have against Gagnon. It is not known whether Gagnon was further sanctioned, but what is clear is that UNH is now attempting to prevent similar future scandals by pre-emptively chilling student expression.

The Gagnon scandal was part of a larger campus uproar over a campus magazine's "sex survey." As part of that survey, the same campus feminist Gagnon dreamt of raping was named as the "celebrity" students would "most like to have sex with." The Feminist Action League protested this as "pornographic" and "sexually threatening," and adminstrative action was eventually taken.

Now, UNH is taking a two-pronged approach to preventing similar events in the future:

In May, the UNH Student Senate unanimously passed a resolutions condemning Main Street Magazine for printing Williams' name in an inappropriate context and recommended all student publication adopt the Society of Professional Journalist Code of Ethics in their charters.

Since then university officials have been discussing online journals, or blogs, as they are commonly called, and want students to know what they write can lead to action being taken by the university, Lawing said. This could range from a warning to suspension.

The Student Senate resolution is harmless enough, though it would have been nice if it had acknowledged the importance of a free press. It would also have been nice to see the Senate distance itself from the Feminist Action League's excessive and censorious reaction to the magazine's sex survey. But you can't have everything.

Of greater concern is the UNH administration's interest in monitoring student blogs and websites with intent to punish students for content the administration deems unacceptable. It's not clear whether the university will extend its monitoring to sites maintained by students on non-university servers, nor is it clear that the university appreciates that the First Amendment covers online student expression at public universities. UNH says it will only pursue students whose online writing violates the student code of conduct or threatens some member of the community--but "threat" does not appear to have been defined, and the student code of conduct is, in fact, an illegal speech code.

Does the University of New Hampshire have a problem respecting student expression? Yes.

Last year, UNH made headlines when it evicted dorm resident Timothy Garneau for posting a flyer recommending that women students avoid gaining the "freshman fifteen" by taking the stairs rather than the elevators. Garneau was charged with violating affirmative action policies, harassment, and lewd and disorderly conduct, was placed on disciplinary probation, was sentenced to counseling, was required to write a 3000-word essay reflecting on his therapy session, and was also required to publish a public apology in the dormitory's house newspaper. Garneau appealed to no avail. The university only dropped the charges and moved him back into the dorms after FIRE went public with the manner in which UNH had utterly disrespected Garneau's rights.

From the looks of things now, UNH still hasn't grasped its obligations to the Bill of Rights.

Posted by acta online at 04:00 PM | Comments (0)

It's official

The University of Colorado announced yesterday that it will proceed to launch a full-scale investigation of ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill. Churchill was the subject of a preliminary investigation over the summer, during which time some of the less credible or relevant charges against him--that he falsified his ancestry in order to pass himself off as a Native American, that he misreported certain information in the preface to a book by his ex-wife--were dropped. The seven charges that remain are more serious, and center on whether Churchill has plagiarized or otherwise misused others' work and on whether he has misrepresented and even invented historical events,

The University must now appoint an investigative panel, to consist of between three and five people who know Churchill's field and can therefore assess the charges against him more accurately than the preliminary investigative committee could. Who those people are is wide open--they can be from the University (though not from the preliminary committee), but they don't have to be. The investigation may last for as long as four months, and will result in one of three possible findings: Churchill could be found guilty of misconduct, or he could be found guilty of research error, or he could be absolved of both misconduct and error.

Churchill, who has threatened to sue the University if it continues to defer responding to his request for a sabbatical next semester, claims to be unconcerned. His present defense is a classic example of moral and intellectual relativism. He told the Associated Press this week that the issue is not one of right or wrong, or of fact versus fiction, but of interpretation: "I interpreted data differently . . . Truth is the best defense. I'm not concerned in the least."

Posted by acta online at 08:23 AM | Comments (0)

Small victory for Churchill

Last month, the University of Colorado committee investigating Ward Churchill's academic conduct dropped one of the more damning charges against him: that he falsified his ancestry in order to present himself as Native American when he is nothing of the kind. Now the committee has dropped another charge alleging that Churchill tampered with the facts in the preface he wrote to a book by a former wife. As with the first dropped charge, it was not so much that the committee had absolved Churchill of wrongdoing, but that it had decided that adjudicating this particular accusation was beyond its investigative purview. Reportedly, the chair of the investigative committee wrote to Churchill that "these allegations, even if true, do not represent research misconduct. It is not the function of the committee to address any inaccuracies that may exist in a faculty member's writings." Though this most recent decision marks a minor reprieve for Churchill, he still faces six more charges of research conduct. The remaining charges are the most serious ones; they are also the most purely academic ones. Backed by credible scholars who share Churchill's basic perspective on how the U.S. has historically treated Native Americans, and involving accusations of plagiarism and misrepresentation of facts, the six remaining charges form the meat of the Churchill case. It is unlikely that the Colorado committee will refrain from adjudicating on them.

Posted by acta online at 07:28 AM | Comments (0)

Back to basics

In 2004, ACTA released a report on the disingenuousness of American higher education's claims to provide a strong, broad educational grounding for all students. Entitled The Hollow Core: The Failure of the General Education Curriculum, the report demonstrated how the vast majority of colleges and universities had abandoned any real commitment to ensuring that students receive a liberal arts education, showing instead how schools have adopted a "smorgasboard approach" that substitutes a glut of disconnected choices for a focussed concentration on a precisely defined set of core requirements. What most schools offered, in practice, was a lot of lip service to the idea of a liberal education, and not a lot more: no real direction, no real emphasis on what knowledge is essential, no real effort to ensure that crucial skills are acquired.

Jay Mathews' current piece in the Washington Post suggests that at some schools, anyway, the core may be making a comeback--and that students are very happy that this is so. At Pennsylvania's Ursinus College, all freshmen take a course called Common Intellectual Experience that exposes them to essential works by such writers as Plato, Montaigne, Locke, and Nietzsche. The response to the requirement, which was instituted six years ago, has been enormously positive. It has created a more intellectual atmosphere on campus (where students have been known to choose Nietzsche over TV), and it has taught young adults how important it is--as citizens of a democracy, and, more basically, as human beings--to study the history of ideas.

Only about 65 colleges in the country require freshmen to take the same core course or courses, among them Reed College, Columbia University, Colgate, and George Washington. More often, schools let freshmen choose from a wide range of "freshman seminars" that cater to whatever special interest or curiosity a given student may have, but that do nothing to create a common intellectual culture or to provide a shared basis for thoughtful discussion. At Northwestern, for example, freshmen can choose among seminars on the cop show Law & Order, the anthropology of food, the search for extraterrestrial life, the history and economics of coffee, earthquakes, and more. All sound very interesting; none sounds like it offers anything in the way of a solid, educational core.

Mathews spoke to ACTA president Anne Neal about these courses:

Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, said one reason why most colleges do not have a common course for freshmen is because "it's much easier not to." The number of courses at all schools has grown rapidly, each with its advocates.

Faculty commitment to research also plays a role. "Professor Jones is researching Tibet, so he wants to teach a course on Tibet," Neal said. "But the reality is that faculty are there to teach students, and the question is, what do our students know when they graduate? Have they received a coherent and rigorous education, or have we simply given them a patchwork of classes and a curriculum where everything goes?"

Neal points to one of the great ironies of today's "student-centered" college curriculum: Under the guise of offering students choice, colleges and universities are in fact enabling faculty to abdicate responsibility for ensuring that they provide a meaningful and coherent education for undergraduates. The "smorgasbord" approach may look good to students, but those who really benefit are the teachers who never have to stretch beyond their own immediate interests.

The Post has partnered with Technorati to track blogs that are talking about its articles. There are some glitches yet--not all the links work--but the list is worth watching all the same to see what kinds of responses Mathews' timely piece provokes.

Posted by acta online at 08:19 AM | Comments (0)

NCAA faces more appeals

The NCAA's attempt to pressure schools to abandon Native American team nicknames and mascots has run into another wrinkle: The University of North Dakota, whose "Fighting Sioux" moniker earned it a position on the NCAA's list of schools that would be banished from post-season competition for having offensive team names, is filing an appeal.

The NCAA has said that appeals will be given greater weight if a school can show that it has tribal backing for its use of Native American names and mascots. But in the predictable manner of attempts to adjudicate speech, that edict is already being thoroughly complicated by circumstances. UND, for example, has received the official support of a local Chippewa tribe. Ken Davis, the chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band, issued a prepared statement yesterday declaring that UND has made "good use" of its "Fighting Sioux" nickname and its logo, which depicts an Indian brave in profile. Davis, a UND alumnus who founded the UND Indian Association while he was a student, said that UND has used its nickname "as an opportunity to promote awareness of the culture of all Indian nations, not just the Sioux. ... UND has made a commitment to use the nickname and logo in a positive manner not offensive to Indian people. I accept that commitment and their efforts." Can one tribe vouch for a school's respectful treatment of another's image? Does it matter?

To complicate matters further, the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation will be opposing UND's appeal, as will the Spirit Lake Tribal Council. The latter is reversing a position it took in 2000 supporting UND's nickname and logo on condition that UND subject all students to sensitivity training, rework its logo (which was designed by a member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe, and which is said to look less like a Sioux than like Chief Blackhawk, whose Musquakie tribe have historically been enemies of the Sioux), and send university officials to visit all North Dakota reservations. According to the Spirit Lake Tribal Council, UND did not comply with any of these conditions. Would the Spirit Lake Tribal Council lend UND its support if UND did agree to comply with these demands? Does it matter?

Phil Harmeson, senior associate to UND's president, says he has no knowledge of the conditions the Spirit Lake Tribal Council allegedly placed on its blessing. Regardless, he sees the issue as one of expressive freedom, and has indicated that UND is prepared to fight for its rights: "Whatever the (NCAA's ) decision is I am still of the opinion that this issue is not over," he said. "If they reverse the edict - we're still the Fighting Sioux and there are still people who don't want us to be. ... It's my hunch we will purse legal action to who really owns those words in the public domain."

Posted by acta online at 12:51 PM | Comments (0)