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Greenwood still on the payroll

It's been almost a month since University of California provost M.R.C. Greenwood resigned amid allegations that she had accepted inappropriate incentive payments and that she had used her influence to secure jobs for a business contact and her son. And yet, she remains on the payoll, pulling in over $25,000 a month. In the wake of the Greenwood scandal, which in turn touched off controversy about the extraordinary compensation packages received by top UC administrators, UC president Robert Dynes has been promising everyone who will listen that the UC system is going to commit itself to greater transparency and greater accountability. And yet, he somehow managed not to mention to the media that Greenwood was awarded a year's paid sabbatical after she resigned. She'll continue to collect a hefty salary despite the fact that serious concerns have been raised about whether she conducted herself ethically while occupying her post. Greenwood's tactics here are fairly transparent and easy to comprehend--by resigning, she avoided the consequences of an investigation that could have gotten her fired; she also ensured that she would continue to be paid for work she was no longer doing, all on the California taxpayer's dime. Dynes' tactics, however, are not so transparent (though they are readily comprehensible). As such, they suggest that his vow to make the administrative processes of the UC system more accessible--and hence more open to criticism--may not be worth much.

UC spokesmen say that it is usual to give administrators who are returning to their teaching posts a year's sabbatical so that they have time to get back into their research. They aren't commenting, however, on whether it's also usual to give administrators who have compromised themselves and their institutions exceptional financial awards of the sort Greenwood has received.

Posted by acta online on November 29, 2005 at 06:08 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

UC faculty calls for investigation

A petition circulating among University of California faculty members calls for an independent investigation into the question of whether UC administrators are receiving exhorbitant compensation packages and extravagant perks. The petition is a response to the scandal surrounding former UC provost M.R.C. Greenwood's resignation, which was spurred by revelations that she had accepted inappropriate incentive payments and had used her influence to secure jobs for a business partner and for her son. Though UC president Robert Dynes has indicated his intention to create a task force charged with examining the question of how the University of California compensates its employees, critics argue that his plan to form that task force from within the UC Board of Regents creates a conflict of interest. Berkeley professor Bruce Fuller launched the petition, which asks a crucial question: "If such perks have been effective in attracting such wise managers, why have these same individuals made such reckless decisions which now place the university's record of integrity and moral leadership in jeopardy?"

Meanwhile, the UC Regents are set to begin a national search for UCLA's new chancellor. This will be a search to watch--it is an opportunity for for the University of California to begin to repair its tarnished reputation, but it is also an opportunity for the University to sink itself even deeper into disrepute.

Posted by acta online on November 29, 2005 at 08:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

UC corruption in context

Health Care Renewal offers some provocative context for the scandal involving recently-resigned UC provost M.R.C. Greenwood. Roy Poses, a physician at Brown University School of Medicine and an author of the HCR blog, writes to direct our attention to two detailed posts there.

The first covers the question of UC adminstrators' exorbitant salaries, paying due attention to the argument commonly levelled in defense of those salaries: that they are comparatively low, and that the University of California is actually struggling to attract the very best administrators because it cannot compete with peer institutions that pay quite a bit more. This post also documents the typical--and compelling--counterargument: that UC administrators get enormous perks in the form of housing allowances, incentive payments, relocation benefits, bonuses, and so on, that are not part of their official salary but that do absolutely increase the total "worth" of a given job. This post concludes with a damning indictment of administrative lavishness in an era of budget constraints and skyrocketing costs: "During a time when the UC system sustained a 15% cut in state funding, increased student fees by 79% ($3429 to $6141) in the last four years, and froze salaries of lower level employees, these increasingly lavish salaries, other financial compensation, and perks suggest an organization more attuned to benefiting its top leaders than maintaining the morale of its other employees, and fulfilling its mission to its students and other stake-holders (including patients of its teaching hospitals and clinics). Furthermore, leaders splendidly isolated in their fully-staffed dachas may rapidly forget what the interests of ordinary students, patients, faculty, and employees might be."

The second post focusses on the failures of the very administrators whose extravagant compensation is justified by their allegedly extraordinary competence, paying particular attention to problems that have arisen lately at the UC Irvine campus. The story involves a failing liver transplant program at the UCI medical center, a hospital CEO who has been put on (paid) administrative leave after failing to address the program's problems, negligence lawsuits, and a chancellor who was caught unawares by the whole thing long after it had become a massive and possibly irreparable problem. The post notes that the transplant program's scandalous failure is only the most recent of a long list of scandals at UCI's medical school. The post also notes that both the hospital CEO and the chancellor make upwards of half a million dollars a year.

The Health Care Renewal blog makes it clear that lavish overspending on luxurious administrative lifestyles is only part of the problem at the University of California. The other part of the problem is that this spending cannot reliably be proven to buy the capability and competence that it claims to. Calls for greater transparency and greater accountability in the UC system have been made, and they are all very well. So are the promises on the part of UC president Robert Dynes and others that greater efforts along these lines will be made. But words are cheap and--as is well known by now--the salaries justified by them are not.

Posted by acta online on November 28, 2005 at 12:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

You can't make this stuff up

New Jersey's Warren Community College became the scene of ideological intolerance and professorial bullying this week when freshman Rebecca Beach announced that WCC's chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom would be bringing Lt. Col. Scott Rutter to campus to discuss the war in Iraq. Beach coordinated the visit, spending $1000 in student activities fees to finance Rutter's appearance, and sending out a campus-wide email publicizing the event. In response, she received an email from adjunct English professor John Daly noting that "Real freedom will come when soldiers in Iraq turn their guns on their superiors," and threatening "to expose [her] right-wing, anti-people politics until groups like [Rebecca's] won't dare show their face on a college campus." Daly also noted his plan to ask his students to boycott the event.

When asked about his response to Beach, Daly did not back down and did not seem to recognize either that it is inappropriate to threaten a student whose views differ from his or to pressure his own students to become pawns in his own political expression. Instead, he expounded on the dangers of the YAF: "The administration at WCCC believes Rebecca Beach is an innocent student acting alone, but I recognized her literature right away as being part of a national right-wing movement. ... Her group is an ultra right-wing, possibly fascist, group." Founded in 1960, YAF is a conservative youth group whose intellectual origins lie with William F. Buckley and National Review; its founding issues were free-market economics, traditional values, and anti-communism. Daly, it should be noted, is a member of the ultra left-wing ANSWER. ANSWER has strong ties to the Workers World Party and the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

Beach, who founded the WCC chapter of YAF, is unfazed and unimpressed. "We were just celebrating and raising awareness. ... We want free speech and tolerance, and they want it for themselves and not for others. That's just utterly ridiculous."

Daly has every right to disagree with Beach's politics, and even to revile them. He also has a right to respond to her email with vigorous criticism--just as University of North Carolina professor Mike Adams had a right, in the fall of 2001, to vigorously disagree in writing with a student who had mass emailed him a far-left anti-war missive. Adams was wrongfully punished for his expression by a UNC administration that failed to grasp his First Amendment rights; WCC should not make the mistake of punishing Daly for his speech.

However, WCC should be quite concerned by Daly's inability to recognize and respect the line between spirited dissent and professional misconduct. He had a right to repudiate Beach's views. But he should not have threatened to "expose" her, and he certainly should not have involved his students in his own political vendetta.

UPDATE 11/21/05: InsideHigherEd.com has more.

UPDATE 11/28/05: Daly has resigned, and debate about academic freedom, free speech, and civility rages at InsideHigherEd.com and Volokh.com.

Posted by acta online on November 20, 2005 at 07:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Former UC Regent criticizes handling of Greenwood case

In response to the San Francisco Chronicle's November 11 piece on the ethically questionable $125,000 paid to recently-resigned UC provost M.R.C. Greenwood, former UC regent Velma Montoya wrote:

Your article reports UC President Robert Dynes says when the Board of Regents voted on his recommendation that M.R.C. Greenwood be appointed the UC provost at a salary almost $100,000 greater than the former UC provost, Dynes informed the regents in closed session that he also was providing Greenwood a $125,000 relocation payment. That statement is false.

My notes from the UC Regents' Feb. 23, 2004, phone conference meeting show that one of the regents (not myself) questioned why Greenwood's proposed $380,000 salary constituted almost $100,000 over the salary of the previous UC provost. Dynes' answer was that the additional salary constituted a form of housing compensation because the UC provost is not provided with a house. One of the regents (not myself) advised Dynes that the amounts for salary and housing compensation should have been presented separately.

My notes show there were two votes, with 3 out of 9 regents in the combined Educational Policy and Finance committees voting no on the proposed salary, and then 4 out of 12 regents voting no in the full board meeting on the proposed salary.

Given the regents' close votes over Greenwood's proposed salary, any discussion of an additional $125,000 relocation payment surely would have killed her appointment. In his current distortion of the facts in an attempt to avoid responsibility for this unwise appointment, President Dynes has exposed his even more serious misrepresentation of the facts to the UC Board of Regents at the time of the Greenwood appointment.

Dynes has a lot to answer for. He has thus announced his intention to regain the public trust by promising to make the terms of administrative salaries and bonuses more publicly available. Meanwhile, in a feat of bad fiscal timing, the UC Board of Regents voted this week to give top UC administrators a raise. Dynes' salary will rise from $395,000 to $405,000, and an additional raise for UC administrators will be proposed at the Regents' January meeting. Transparency like this, it need hardly be said, is not going to do for the public trust what Dynes wants it to do.

On Thursday, hundreds marched outside the Board of Regents meeting held at the Berkeley campus, protesting the Regents' Wednesday decision to raise undergraduate student fees by 8% and graduate student fees by 10%. The fees are projected to bring in nearly $149 million -- which ought to cover those proposed administrative raises, and then some.

Posted by acta online on November 19, 2005 at 08:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

More on UC corruption

The irregularities surrounding recently-resigned UC provost M.R.C. Greenwood's tenure continue to accumulate. Greenwood resigned because of questions about whether she had inappropriately appointed a close friend and business associate to a lucrative job and used her influence to secure a paid internship for her son. Now it appears that Greenwood also accepted $125,000 in cash to facilitate her move from Santa Cruz to Oakland after she became provost--despite the fact that UC policy prohibits the allocation of relocation costs to UC employees who are moving within the system or who are already California residents. Greenwood not only received $125,000 toward the cost of her Oakland condo, but also got $17,950 to cover temporary housing, $9,527 to cover moving expenses, and a low-interest loan on her condo purchase. The extent of the violation becomes clear when one realizes that even if Greenwood had been eligible for a relocation allowance, UC policy stipulates that such allowances may never exceed 25% of the recipient's base salary. Greenwood received allowances worth 33% of her base salary.

The San Francisco Chronicle has begun asking questions, which only makes things more interesting. UC president Robert Dynes, who made the payment to Greenwood, is scrambling for cover, and is now saying that what he authorized for Greenwood was a "faculty housing assistance allowance"--even though Greenwood is working as an administrator, and even though Greenwood received far more money than that allowance, which is capped at around $50,000, provides. To complicate matters further, Dynes is not explaining why the payment was not reported publicly when Greenwood was hired; the UC regents gave the Chronicle the minutes of the closed 2004 meeting where Greenwood's salary was set and where the payment was allegedly discussed--but the minutes did not mention the payment.

Dynes says he was authorized to make the payment, period. But as Pat Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, told the paper, "These kinds of things don't help the confidence of the public."

Posted by acta online on November 19, 2005 at 09:57 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Three's the charm?

Originally, the University of Colorado committee charged with investigating Ward Churchill's scholarly integrity had five members. Last week, however, two of the committee members resigned in the wake of blogger Jim Paine's revelation that each has gone on record with high praise for Churchill's work.

University of Arizona professor of law and American Indian studies Robert Williams and University of Nebraska-Omaha professor of communication and Native American studies Bruce Johansen both formalized their resignations Friday. Williams has described Churchill as an "important scholar" and has expressed his admiration for Churchill's work as a "public intellectual when it comes to the field of American Indian studies." He also directs Arizona's Rogers College of Law's Indigenous People's Law and Policy Program, which brought Churchill in to speak last year. Johansen and Churchill have exchanged professional strokes--each has publicly praised the other's work.

Paine, whose Pirate Ballerina blog is devoted to the Churchill scandal, contends that each man's tie to Churchill amounts to a conflict of interest that compromises the integrity of the investigation. Questioning whether two avowed supporters of Churchill would be able to evaluate his performance objectively, Paine has reprinted public statements each man has made about Churchill and the investigation. While neither Williams nor Johansen concedes Paine's point, Johansen has said that the "attacks" on him would impair the committee's ability to do its work.

For his part, Johansen has also written to Paine indicating his intention of pursuing legal action against Paine if he does not remove from his website statements that Johansen regards as defamatory. Paine has rephrased his postings, but the gist of the accusation remains.

The University of Colorado has yet to determine whether it will replace the lost committee members.

Posted by acta online on November 14, 2005 at 10:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Whatever

An anecdote from the Raleigh News and Observer's book review editor J. Peder Zane suggests the need for additional documentation:

Over dinner a few weeks ago, the novelist Lawrence Naumoff told a troubling story. He asked students in his introduction to creative writing course at UNC-Chapel Hill if they had read Jack Kerouac. Nobody raised a hand. Then he asked if anyone had ever heard of Jack Kerouac. More blank expressions.
Naumoff began describing the legend of the literary wild man. One student offered that he had a teacher who was just as crazy. Naumoff asked the professor's name. The student said he didn't know. Naumoff then asked this oblivious scholar, "Do you know my name?"

After a long pause, the young man replied, "No."

"I guess I've always known that many students are just taking my course to get a requirement out of the way," Naumoff said. "But it was disheartening to see that some couldn't even go to the trouble of finding out the name of the person teaching the course."

The floodgates were opened and the other UNC professors at the dinner began sharing their own dispiriting stories about the troubling state of curiosity on campus. Their experiences echoed the complaints voiced by many of my book reviewers who teach at some of the nation's best schools.

All of them have noted that such ignorance isn't new -- students have always possessed far less knowledge than they should, or think they have. But in the past, ignorance tended to be a source of shame and motivation. Students were far more likely to be troubled by not-knowing, far more eager to fill such gaps by learning. As one of my reviewers, Stanley Trachtenberg, once said, "It's not that they don't know, it's that they don't care about what they don't know."

It has become customary--even fashionable--to indict colleges and universities for the manner in which they disserve students with their abandonment of a core curriculum, their pandering manner of offering endless "boutique" courses designed more to entertain than to educate, their habit of grade inflation, their reliance on underpaid and underworked adjunct teachers, and their seeming inability to resist the temptation to indoctrinate when they think no one with any legal pull is watching. But there is a flip side to these trendy criticisms, one that takes into account the sensibility of the modern undergraduate and that sees how many of today's college and university students are not bringing all they ought to bring with them to their collegiate years.

As part of her ongoing investigation into American higher education, Margaret Spellings ought to consider the incuriousness of contemporary college students alongside the decline of liberal education and the spiralling costs of a bachelor's degree. It's a difficult, perhaps impossible, thing to quantify, but it is nonetheless a phenomenon that is every bit as current as the declining quality of higher education, and every bit as troubling. If we are to reform American higher education in a meaningful way, it will not be enough simply to reshape curriculum and costs along idealized lines. It will be necessary to envision this reshaping in the context of the modern undergraduate's intellectual sensibility. It cannot be taken for granted that this sensibility is inherently curious, inherently interested in learning, or inherently responsive either to the spirit of inquiry or to the more mundane spirit of intellectual respectability. Liberal education, in its tradition conception, is predicated on the idea that those engaged in it care deeply about questions, about exploring ideas, about discovery; it also presumes that those engaged in it want very much to acquire a breadth and depth of general knowledge that will save them from personal and professional embarrassment later on; it also assumes implicitly that a desire to avoid shame animates on some level students' quest for cultural literacy. Students must bring a certain type of determination, as well as a certain horror of ignorance, to their studies if liberal education is to be successful. In the absence of that determination, it's a real question whether liberal education may properly be said to exist.

Thanks to Maurice Black for the link.

Posted by acta online on November 12, 2005 at 08:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

ACTA weighs in on dispositions

Both the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) and the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) currently require accredited schools of education and social work to evaluate students according to their social and political "dispositions." Couched in the amorphously leftist language of "social justice," the dispositions requirement essentially guarantees that aspiring teachers and social workers must pass an ideological litmus test in order to qualify for their professions. At Le Moyne College, Brooklyn College, and Washington State University, to name a few, the dispositions assessment has erupted in controversy as conservative students and critics have found themselves warned, sanctioned, and even expelled for failing to conform to their institution's pedagogical orthodoxy.

Yesterday, ACTA called on Margaret Spellings and the Department of Education to "disavow" accreditation standards that impose political litmus tests on students. ACTA also called on Congress to hold investigative hearings on how disposition-oriented evaluative standards are being applied in schools across the country.

"The fact that these evaluation standards can be utilized to weed out those students who fail to think 'in the right way' is particularly deplorable at a time when there are serious shortages of qualified teachers," ACTA's letter to Spellings said. "Rather than permitting federal accreditors to engage in social engineering, the Department of Education should demand clearly defined principles which relate directly to a student's future success, namely skills and subject-matter knowledge."

In a press release issued yesterday, ACTA president Anne D. Neal noted that "These amorphous evaluation standards, as applied, undermine students' First Amendment rights and higher education's obligation to instruct rather than indoctrinate. ... They give schools unlimited power to control what their students think and do."

For months now, ACTA has been fighting NCATE's and CSWE's disturbingly ideological demand that accredited schools assess their students according to dispositions theory. In June, ACTA called on the Department of Education, governors, and institutions of higher education to disavow the dispositions requirement. Yesterday's call represents a necessary reminder to DOE and higher education leaders that the problem with dispositions theory is very real, and that the potential of this required assessment program to violate students' civil rights is being actively realized on campuses across the country.

Here's hoping that this time, Spellings, Congress, and higher education officials will pay attention.

Posted by acta online on November 09, 2005 at 12:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

California cronies

The resignation of University of California provost M.R.C. Greenwood is making national news--but Greenwood's story ought not to be treated as an end in itself. Her story is, quite possibly, just the opening chapter of a larger and more damning tale of administrative corruption in the UC system.

Greenwood's resignation came in the wake of accusations of cronyism. She is alleged to have used her pull to help a friend with whom she had close business dealings get hired into a lucrative post and to get her son a paid internship at UC Merced. Greenwood has not responded to the allegations; perhaps, having studied the mess Ben Ladner made for American University when he fought his own investigation and firing, Greenwood has judiciously decided to cut her losses and make the most graceful exit she can make. Certainly, her professional position remains strong: Her tenured position as professor of biology at UC Santa Cruz awaits her return.

But Greenwood's resignation may raise more questions than it answers. Greenwood rose to her provost position from within the UC system's administrative ranks; she was chancellor of the Santa Cruz campus before becoming provost of the entire system. At present, Denice Denton occupies Greenwood's former post as chancellor of the Santa Cruz campus--and Denton, as Victor Davis Hanson noted in the Wall Street Journal earlier this fall, appears to be engaging in the very sort of cronyism of which Greenwood stands accused:

Before her arrival, Ms. Denton arranged the creation of a special billet--ad hoc, unannounced and closed to all applicants but one: Ms. Denton's live-in girlfriend of seven years, Gretchen Kalonji. Most recognize this as the sort of personal accommodation--old-boy networking, really--that Ms. Denton presumably wishes to replace with affirmative action, thus ending backroom deals and crass nepotism.

[...]

Gretchen Kalonji's unusual position pays $192,000 a year. Now, it happens that Chancellor Denton--whose salary is $275,000--was granted $68,750 to subsidize the move into the rent-free University President's House. But Ms. Kalonji, too, received a grant for expenses incurred during her "transition" to the Santa Cruz campus--$50,000, in fact.

The decision to pay $120,000 in public money for moving expenses to a couple with a combined salary of $467,000 can be defended, perhaps, but one group was certainly outraged: the university's maintenance staff, secretaries, and blue-collar workers. UC Santa Cruz's workers had not received a raise in three years.

[...]

Aware of the growing controversy over the hire, Ms. Denton returned to the mantra of diversity to explain her own decision to come to Santa Cruz. "The focus on diversity and social justice is important to me," she emphasized to the Sentinel, recalling how she had spoken out against [Harvard president Lawrence] Summers's remarks [about whether there might be a biological explanation for the dearth of women working in the hard sciences]: "We need to address the issue of equity and access. It requires a cultural change and university presidents have to provide leadership."

When confronted with behavior that seemed to reek of favoritism, Denton defended herself by arguing first that lots of people in the corporate world act the same way ("It's a typical practice ... in the corporate world or academia"), and second by claiming that she and her partner deserved special consideration because they were the victims of oppression in a homophobic world that does not accommodate their lifestyle: "We got caught in the middle of national forces, gay marriage, red-state/blue-state issues and a state ruling. It's a hot item right now, and it heightened the tension."

Denton brings a sense of entitlement to her office that ought to give pause to those concerned about administrative probity in the UC system--not least because she now occupies the position where, presumably, Greenwood honed the administrative etiquette that has now cost her a high-powered and high-paying post. Perhaps those who would clean up the UC system would do well to look more closely at the campus where Greenwood was chancellor from 1996 to 2004. Denton, who assumed the Santa Cruz chancellorship when Greenwood ascended to the provost post, seems to be following in her predecessor's footsteps a little too closely.

Posted by acta online on November 07, 2005 at 12:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

How not to protest

A small group of people gathered at the Amherst Town Common Wednesday to protest the Bush administration. Entitled "Naked Anti-Bush Demonstration," the protest sought to enlist a raunchy pun in the service of dissent; organized by two Mount Holyoke students, the aim of the protest was to convince thirty people to get naked and lie down on the green together to spell out "No Bush." "People are outraged, especially the women are outraged, that their rights have been taken away from them by Christian fascists," said one of the organizers, adding that "Your government is moving each day closer to a theocracy, where a narrow and hateful brand of Christian fundamentalism will rule. Your government suppresses the science that doesn't fit its religious, political and economic agenda, forcing present and future generations to pay a terrible price."

After an hour of inspirational speechifying, the organizers urged the audience members to get naked and commit their bodies to spelling out their position on the current administration. Thirty naked people were needed to spell out "No Bush," but only sixteen were willing to disrobe in the chill Massachusetts air for their cause. The organizers adjusted, asking them to spell out "No W" with their bodies, but admonishing their naked human alphabet to be careful how they spread themselves across the grass: "Make sure you separate the 'o' and 'w' with enough space so that it doesn't spell out 'now,'" one of them advised.

The end result of the "Naked Anti-Bush Demonstration" may be seen here. Despite the organizers' warnings, the sixteen people nudely arrayed on Amherst Town Common look like they are spelling out the word "Now." As such, they appear either to be advocating for the National Organization of Women or, more simply, for the existential joys of living in the moment--no matter how cold that moment might be.

The "Naked Anti-Bush Demonstration" drew students from all of the Five Colleges. But it did not make a coherent point; indeed, it did not even succeed in making the incoherent point it had planned to make. The protest may, however, have succeeded in making its participants feel good about themselves, and perhaps that was really the point. Getting naked in public, in fifty degree weather, and then lying down on the ground with strangers to cooperatively spell out words may act as a metonymy for something like "stating their position" and "taking collective action." Certainly, the people who participated can say they did something. But if they think what they did counts as a substantive statement of anything besides their own self-absorption--their own misguided belief that their unclothed bodies are inherently powerful political statements--they are fooling themselves.

Posted by acta online on November 04, 2005 at 08:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Vermont Law School gives up federal funding

Last week, Vermont Law School became one of only three schools in the country to relinquish their federal funding in order to ban military recruiters from campus. While many schools are trying to have it both ways--seeking to ban recruiters while still accepting Defense Department funding as well as grants and contracts from other federal agencies covered by the Solomon Amendment--a very few are choosing to free themselves from a constraint that they find oppressive by simply severing the financial ties that bind them.

Vermont Law School is one such school. Warned by the Pentagon that failure to allow recruiters on campus would result in a loss of the school's federal funding, Vermont Law School chose to accept that penalty rather than compromise its institutional conviction that the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy is discriminatory. The other two schools that have gone this route are also law schools: They are New York Law School and William Mitchell College of Law, located in St. Paul, MN.

Whatever one's opinion of either the Solomon Amendment or "don't ask, don't tell," one has to respect the moral clarity with which these schools have negotiated the issues. Of course, one must also recognize that it's far easier for a school that only receives $500,000 a year in federal funding, as Vermont Law School does, to act with moral clarity than it is for schools such as Harvard, Stanford, or the University of Pennsylvania, which all receive hundreds of millions of dollars a year from the federal government.

Posted by acta online on November 02, 2005 at 08:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack