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Campus speech lawsuits in PA

Another development that should not be overlooked in the wake of the Summers scandal at Harvard: lawsuits filed this week by the Alliance Defense Fund alleging that both Penn State and Temple University unconstitutionally restrict student expression.

Penn State forbids "intolerance," which it defines as an "attitude, feeling or belief in furtherance of which an individual acts to intimidate, threaten or show contempt for other individuals or groups based on characteristics such as age, ancestry, color, disability or handicap, national origin, political belief, race, religious creed, sex, sexual orientation or veteran status." Penn State also forbids "unwelcome banter, teasing, or jokes that are derogatory, or depict members of a protected class in a stereotypical and demeaning manner."

David French, who recently left FIRE to work for ADF, explained to the Associated Press that such policies clearly attempts to limit what students can and cannot say. He told The Philadelphia Inquirer that these suits are "the first salvo" in the Alliance Defense Fund's national campaign to fight colleges and universities that have "incorporated ideology into their bureaucracy."

The plaintiff in the Penn State case is a conservative student who worries that the universities policy statements on intolerance could be used to punish him for views that others find offensive. The Temple case centers on a history masters' student who claims his professors delayed his degree multiple times as retaliation for his pro-military politics. Both plaintiffs testified last month at the academic freedom hearings held at Temple.

French told the Chronicle of Higher Education that he is spearheading the lawsuits now in part because he believes those hearings were misguided:

"The goal here is to open up free speech for all students," said David A. French, a lawyer for the group and head of its new Center for Academic Freedom. Mr. French is a former president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a watchdog group that has fought to do away with what it has described as speech codes on college campuses.

Since "the eyes of the academic world" have been focused on Pennsylvania as a result of academic-freedom hearings being held throughout the state, Mr. French said, "we wanted to open this latest round of speech-code litigation in Pennsylvania." He testified in September before a committee of state lawmakers who were holding those hearings. He said that the lawmakers should examine university speech codes, but they have focused on institutions' academic-freedom policies instead.

FIRE has conducted several successful legal campaigns against unconstitutional speech codes, and French appears to be adapting the tactics he used there to his new position at the Alliance Defense Fund.

On the face of it, the masters' student's case appears less clear cut than the case against Penn State. Unless it's possible to document in writing that the student's professors really did try to harm his career advancement because they objected to his beliefs, this one will deteriorate into a he said-she said scenario that benefits no one and proves nothing. One hopes some damning and unimpeachable documentation does underwrite the case.

These will be cases to watch.

Posted by acta online at 05:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

SCOTUS deals a blow to student press

Amid all the uproar this week about Harvard president Lawrence Summers' decision to resign, it was easy to overlook another major and troubling development in higher education: the Supreme Court's decision not to hear the appeal in Hosty v. Carter, a Seventh Circuit case with potentially disastrous implications for campus speech.

The facts are these: In 2000, student editors of a campus paper sued Governors State University after the administration demanded the right to review the paper's content before it went to press; last June, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling that overturned earlier ones, finding that the 1988 ruling in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, which grants high schools the right to prior review of student journalism, may be applied to the collegiate student press. "If private speech in a public forum is off-limits to regulation even when that forum is a classroom of an elementary school ... then speech at a non-public forum, and underwritten at public expense, may be open to reasonable regulation even at the college level," the majority ruling read; "We hold, therefore, that Hazelwood's framework applies to subsidized student newspapers at colleges as well as elementary and secondary schools."

Campus speech advocates were predictably and understandably outraged by the Hosty ruling. This excerpt from a policy statement issued by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is representative of their concerns:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit's en banc opinion in Hosty v. Carter, No. 01-4155 (7th Cir. June 20, 2005), is a poorly conceived opinion that, if upheld, will do serious harm to freedom of speech on campus far beyond the realm of student media.

The Court ruled that a dean of students who exercised prior restraint over a student newspaper--unequivocally because of its viewpoint--is entitled to immunity from liability. It also decided that the logic of Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier--an opinion that has been used to drastically curtail the rights of high school students and teachers--applies to the college media. Applying this decision in the college environment drastically reduces the rights of the college media, which have traditionally enjoyed rights more comparable to their counterparts on CNN or in the New York Times than to their counterparts in high school.

While FIRE opposes the holding of Hosty--that a dean of students was entitled to immunity despite engaging in a brazen and intentional act of censorship--the real damage of the Hosty opinion lies in the fact that it blurs the critical distinction established in Supreme Court precedent between funding from mandatory "student fees" and direct payments from the university. The Seventh Circuit's finding in Hosty would open up virtually any student publication or other student group that receives any benefit from the university to the possibility of heavy-handed content-based regulation by university administrators, thus reviving the Supreme Court-settled issue of whether students can be made to pay fees that go to support expressive activities with which they disagree.

FIRE went on the file an amicus brief in October.

The Supreme Court's decision not to hear the Hosty appeal is as inexplicable as it is worrisome. InsideHigherEd.com notes that California State University is already exploring how the ruling may give CSU admins "more latitude than previously believed to censor the content of subsidized student newspapers."

Posted by acta online at 10:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

South Dakota rejects intellectual diversity bill

Yesterday, the South Dakota senate voted down a bill that would have required state universities to publish annual reports documenting their commitment to intellectual diversity. Opponents of the bill argued that it would have damaged the national reputation of South Dakota's schools, signalling a "closed system of thought" that would repel prospective students and faculty. The notion that the bill, which was designed to protect academic freedom, was in fact hostile to it, seems to have taken root in South Dakota, where opposition to the bill hinges on the interlocking convictions that it would have crippled the free exchange of ideas on campus, and that this is the hidden goal of a bill that is the brainchild of an "out-of-state group that seeks to promote conservative ideas on college campuses." That last phrase is the brainchild of the Associated Press, which appears in this moment to be more interested in reporting the mischaracterizations of the bill's opponents than in properly characterizing the bill itself. ACTA would be the "out-of-state group" referred to in the piece--but it is a mistake to argue that the bill ACTA helped conceptualize is intended to limit academic freedom while advancing conservative views. The bill is a non-partisan one, designed to protect the viewpoints of everyone on campus--liberals and conservatives alike. It arises from ACTA's December report on intellectual diversity, which in turn arises from ACTA's careful study of how campuses across the country are failing to fulfill their fundamental obligation to encourage the robust exchange of ideas and to prevent viewpoint discrimination. Read the report here.

Posted by acta online at 07:31 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Summers postmortem continues

Commentary on Harvard president Lawrence Summers' decision to resign is everywhere right now, as mainstream media coverage merges with opinion pieces in the papers and on blogs, and as factual reports merge with analysis, speculation, and even gossip about what really went wrong at Harvard, about what Summers' failure there means for the institution, and about what the entire fracas says about higher education in America. Here are some excerpts from the better writing that has appeared on the subject over the past few days.

Writing for The Boston Globe, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz deplores the bullying means by which a doctrinaire segment of the Harvard faculty crippled Summers' ability to work effectively and eventually hounded him out of office:

A plurality of one faculty has brought about an academic coup d'etat against not only Harvard University president Lawrence Summers but also against the majority of students, faculty, and alumni. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which forced Summers's resignation by voting a lack of confidence in him last March and threatening to do so again on Feb. 28, is only one component of Harvard University and is hardly representative of widespread attitudes on the campus toward Summers. The graduate faculties, the students, and the alumni generally supported Summers for his many accomplishments. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences includes, in general, some of the most radical, hard-left elements within Harvard's diverse constituencies. And let there be no mistake about the origin of Summers's problem with that particular faculty: It started as a hard left-center conflict. Summers committed the cardinal sin against the academic hard left: He expressed politically incorrect views regarding gender, race, religion, sexual preference, and the military.

At Cliopatria, Brooklyn College history professor KC Johnson agrees that politics played a huge role in Summers' troubles, while James Traub, George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan, and and Swarthmore historian Tim Burke argue that politics was not everything here, that Summers' managerial style had a great deal to do with alienating the Harvard faculty.

Burke's analysis is particularly good, not least because it is followed by an exceptionally sharp and penetrating exchange with a reader who feels Burke unfairly downplays the ideological aspect of the Summers affair. Burke argues:

The unsuccessful tenure of Larry Summers at Harvard is first and foremost a story about the details of leadership and management. Some people can't transfer their formidable skills between different kinds of environment, and Summers appears to be one of them. That's too bad, and I hope he has a chance some day to return to the kinds of institutional and political worlds where his undeniable intellect and energy are best expressed. That's a more boring and particular story than the narrative that the culture warriors might prefer, but I think that's the main issue in this case.

And a commenter responds:

Here, as elsewhere, you have a tendency to imply (say outright?) that the existence of complications, details, local rivalries, personal tensions, somehow diminishes the importance of the grand ideological analysis. The point of ideology is that it does indeed unify a host of particulars toward a common goal, aligning all the local details within a common narrative. Ideology is so important, and so influential, precisely because it does operate through human clay, and is so remarkably effective despite the intractable material. And when you attack the culture warriors, the ideologues, for not having a sufficient grasp of the local, you are attacking a straw man: all intelligent analysts of ideology (which I assume exist on all partisan points on the spectrum) know that the local and the general interpenetrate. Yes, Summers is a local case, but the local case still follows the pattern of the larger ideological war.

The entire exchange is unusually interesting, well-written, and civil. Well worth a look.

Also worth thought: the college presidents who spoke with InsideHigherEd.com's Scott Jaschik, but did not want their names to be publicized:

Several college presidents whose politics are not notably conservative agreed that Summers was punished for his views--and said that they worried about the message that sent to other presidents. "Summers as an individual may have been too strong-minded, too clear, and too disrespectful of the Harvard elite to survive," said one president. "One thing is sure, and that is that the academic elite do not tolerate dissent that deviates from well known and narrowly defined boundaries, and the academic elite in particular does not tolerate dissent that carries with it the threat of implementation."

Another president--who like all the presidents interviewed for this article wanted their names kept out of it--said that the downfall of Summers struck her as "political correctness to the nth degree." She said that she "wasn't offended" by the questions Summers raised--even those about women and science--even when she didn't agree with his conclusions. "It's too bad presidents have to be so circumspect these days," she said. "Everyone laments that presidents can't use the bully pulpit, but here's one that did."

The president of a leading research university, however, said that while he did not believe for a minute that Summers is a sexist, he thought the lesson of Summers wasn't to avoid speaking out, but to avoid being "too direct and abrasive." Presidents may prefer to think that they don't have to be pay attention to different campus groups, this president said, but they do.

"These are jobs in which you have to be a politician and a diplomat, and work with your various constituencies and be careful about what you say--that's a price of the job in my view," he said. "You have to accept that. These are very difficult management jobs, with many constituencies, each of which thinks they run the place."

The president added that it's important to understand that faculty members expect to be treated with respect and to have their independence upheld. At the same time, he said, "there's obviously a huge tension for all of us in these roles of how you get things done."

These anonymous quotes from people whose job it is to be leaders in higher education speak volumes about the climate of contemporary academe, as well as for the instantaneously chilling effect Summers' resignation appears to have had on the willingness of other higher education officials to speak up about issues central to their field. The views expressed above ought to have names attached to them. But college presidents appear to be running scared these days, and with good reason.

Posted by acta online at 07:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

No confidence in Harvard faculty and trustees

In the wake of Harvard president Larry Summers' decision to resign rather than face a second showdown with the Harvard faculty, one thing is clear--a vote of no confidence is in order, but not for President Summers. Rather, it's the faculty who deserve a vote of no confidence--along with members of the Corporation who would rather run than fight.

During his tenure, Summers had become the unmistakable target of the humanities faculty, who in 2005 voted no confidence in the highly-accomplished professor and administrator.

From press accounts, the earlier vote was all because of Summers' off-the-record remarks regarding women in math and sciences. But a look at the actual list of faculty grievances reveals a more troubling subtext, one that offers penetrating insight into the problems of the modern academy.

Since taking office, Summers has done just what the Corporation wanted. He has challenged many of the sacred cows of the academic left and he has also addressed key issues affecting Harvard University and institutions across the country--the lack of intellectual diversity and academic freedom, the dissolution of general education, the academy's pervasive hostility to the military, to name only a few. In speech after speech, Summers was willing to take on the PC orthodoxies of the day, offering contrasting perspectives that, at least until recently, were understood to express the very essence of a liberal education.

But there's the rub. Diversity, and the conviction that it will foster open-minded exchange and free inquiry, has been a shibboleth of American higher education for upwards of three decades. But, as Summers' remarks about women so clearly emphasize, higher education's commitment to "diversity" only goes so far. The avatars of political correctness are only interested in an exchange of ideas when all involved already agree with the party line. Last year's kerfuffle over Summers' comments not only provided a sad commentary on the intellectual rigidity of many faculty at Harvard and elsewhere, but also clearly showed why Larry Summers should have been more outspoken, rather than less.

But that's only the tip of the iceberg. President Summers dared to speak the unspeakable when he noted the divide that separates university elites and mainstream America. He acknowledged at a press conference that "The post-Vietnam cleavage between coastal elites and certain mainstream American values is a matter of great concern." And he implicitly drew attention to the Harvard community's negative attitude about the military by noting, "It is all too common for us to underestimate the importance of clearly expressing our respect and support for the military and individuals who choose to serve in the armed forces of the United States."

While these observations surely are within the purview of a university president, and while they would seem to have little bearing on the classroom, that's not what the Harvard faculty thought. Indeed, when Harvard's faculty passed its "no confidence" vote last year, Summers' support for ROTC was cited as one of the three main objections to his leadership. Faculty stridency on this issue, of course, has nothing to do with academic responsibility, and everything to do with the political and social agenda of faculty activists.

In the latest battle, the faculty is up in arms because of the resignation of Arts & Sciences Dean William Kirby. Kirby led the widely-ballyhooed faculty review of Harvard's core curriculum--an exercise that was watched with considerable attention by institutions across the country. Early on, Summers outlined his hopes that the faculty would "think more rigorously about the level of mastery we ask of our students," noting that "achieving knowledge in key areas would be a crucial element in the general education component."

Despite clear and commonsense guidance--made, it should be noted, in response to substantial student discontent about the inadequacy of the existing curricular core--Kirby and the faculty produced virtually nothing. The final sorry report was justly ridiculed by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and the Carnegie Foundation for being more of a faculty wish list than a thoughtful curricular framework that--it hardly needs saying--would mean more work for the faculty.

Is it any wonder, then, that when the Crimson polled students this week, three out of every four Harvard undergraduates said they wanted Summers to remain as president? In a comment that is striking in its honest analysis of realpolitik, Derek J. Horton '08 outlined the real rub: "I know the faculty hates him, but I think he's kind of running Harvard like a business--and I respect that."

At a time when the public is increasingly concerned about the value of higher education, the sorry state of student learning vis a vis international competitors, and the coercive atmosphere in the classroom, President Summers has been willing to take on these issues at the highest level. What Summers has been saying, and what the faculty dislike, is the not-so-secret fact that colleges and universities have lost their way, and that this has much to do with the fact that too often, faculty activists have put perks and politics ahead of their primary responsibilities, teaching and research.

Academic freedom and the special autonomy that faculties are granted are premised on the condition that professors perform according to professional scholarly standards. But the sad reality is that at places like Harvard, PC ringleaders-- most of them with lifetime tenured positions--are more interested in focusing on their own personal agendas than their academic obligations.

Rather than collapsing before the activists, whose views are not uniformly shared by everyone in the university, the Corporation had an opportunity to take a stand. But by cutting and running, by listening to the academic critics whose self-indulgence and corruption Summers well recognized, the Corporation has made one thing eminently clear. As Harvard begins its search for a new president, reformers need not apply.

--Anne Neal, President, American Council of Trustees and Alumni

Posted by acta online at 03:25 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

The good faith graduate program

Kudos to Princeton historian and American Historical Association vice president Anthony Grafton for his perceptive and compelling "What We Owe Our Young: Honest Information about Placement." Grafton writes from the perspective of an established senior scholar who feels it is imperative for the discipline of history to build truth in advertising into its doctoral programs. Not to do so, he argues, is to collude in the unconscionable misdirection, waste, and ruin of not only intellectual talent, but individual careers and personal lives.

Grafton opens his article with a story that is well known to those familiar with the academic corners of the blogosphere, but ought to be more widely considered:

On March 23, 2004, a young historian announced that she would take down her blog, Invisible Adjunct. "Gentle Readers," she explained,

A few months ago, I made a vow to myself that this would be my last semester as an invisible adjunct. Since I've failed to secure a full-time position in my final attempt at the academic job market, what this means, of course, is that I made a vow to leave the academy. Six more weeks of teaching, and I head for the nearest exit.

Many readers greeted this decision with dismay. Invisible Adjunct had won a wide readership with entries couched in precise and elegant prose, discussions conducted with a high degree of civility, a sense of humor that no experience, however depressing, could quite extinguish--and a sharp eye for the foibles and vanities of established historians.

In her mirror, I felt, I saw myself and other senior scholars from a new angle--and one I didn't like very much. For Invisible Adjunct devoted much of her space to arguing that senior historians have played an academic con game with their best students. They--we--portray history to vulnerable undergraduates as an intense, engrossing discipline. They--we--encourage particularly bright and engaged students to study for doctorates. Then they--we--fail, as we knew we would, to find tenure-track jobs for most of them, leaving them to scramble for adjunct positions in which they became, as she explained, largely invisible to colleagues and staff, even when students depended on them. The doctoral degree in history, as Invisible Adjunct and some of her favorite fellow bloggers, like Erin O'Connor and Timothy Burke, portrayed it, seems less a form of higher education than an attractive nuisance, an intellectual Greenland.

These critics of the established order have sometimes overstated their case. But in one respect in particular, they had, and have, a strong point. Every year, thousands of undergraduates across the country apply to graduate programs in history. Many, perhaps most, of them have mentors actively engaged in the profession, who can tell them a great deal about programs and professors, stipends and teaching requirements at universities from Connecticut to California. But what can they--what can I--tell an undergraduate who wants to know her chances of finding work in the historical profession if she obtains a PhD at Great Public I or Ivy II? What can applicants themselves learn from publicly available information about the usual outcomes for those who enter a given program? Note that any reasonable applicant should have two practical questions in mind, along with the more appealing ones about departmental strengths, library resources, and intellectual community: how many of those who enter actually end up with a doctorate, and what sorts of job do they then find.

Grafton goes on to conduct a revealing survey of the websites of a range of doctoral programs in history, noting which departments provide clear information about attrition and job placement, which departments offer distorted or partial pictures of these phenomena, and which ignore them completely. It's a telling list derived from a simple but revealing method of inquiry that could just as tellingly be applied to other disciplines that are known for their shrinking job markets and their increasing reliance on adjunct labor. English, in particular, would seem to be well worth the sort of scrutiny Grafton applies to history.

Via Cliopatria.

Posted by acta online at 01:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The entitlement complex

This blog recently reflected on how, in bribing students to attend class, American schools are encouraging and exacerbating the overweening sense of entitlement that, unfortunately, has become a marker of American youth. Shortly afterward, InsideHigherEd.com published a piece on how the "all must have prizes" mentality of American youth sports is corrupting an entire generation's understanding of when it is and is not appropriate to be recognized and rewarded--and how, as a result, it has become quite difficult to educate that generation. Now, Fast Company reports on what happens when the entitlement complex enters the workplace:

Beverly Hills psychiatrist's office is an unlikely triage center for the mash-up of generations in the workforce. But Dr. Charles Sophy is seeing the casualties firsthand. Last year, when a 24-year-old salesman at a car dealership didn't get his yearly bonus because of poor performance, both of his parents showed up at the company's regional headquarters and sat outside the CEO's office, refusing to leave until they got a meeting. "Security had to come and escort them out," Sophy says.

A 22-year-old pharmaceutical employee learned that he was not getting the promotion he had been eyeing. His boss told him he needed to work on his weaknesses first. The Harvard grad had excelled at everything he had ever done, so he was crushed by the news. He told his parents about the performance review, and they were convinced there was some misunderstanding, some way they could fix it, as they'd been able to fix everything before. His mother called the human-resources department the next day. Seventeen times. She left increasingly frustrated messages: "You're purposely ignoring us"; "you fudged the evaluation"; "you have it in for my son." She demanded a mediation session with her, her son, his boss, and HR--and got it. At one point, the 22-year-old reprimanded the HR rep for being "rude to my mom."

The patients on Sophy's couch aren't the twentysomethings dealing with their first taste of failure. Nor are they the "helicopter parents." They're the traumatized bosses, as well as the 47-year-old woman from HR who has been hassled time and again by her youngest workers and their parents. Now the pharmaceutical company that employs her has her in therapy, and she's on six-month stress leave.

Fast Company's focus is necessarily pragmatic. Noting that the 76 million children of the baby boomers are simply going to be the workforce of the future, the article reflects on how the corporate world can adjust to the kinds of expectations, limitations, and abilities that Generation Y is bringing into the workplace. The assumption here is that the personalities of Millennials are already formed, and that the employers have no choice but to find ways to work with those personalities, however disruptive and unproductive they may sometimes be.

But educators need not--and should not--approach the problem in the same way. Their willingness to pander to the entitlement complex has much to do with why companies are finding themselves devoting significant time and resources to coddling workers and their parents.

As Margaret Spellings' commission continues to debate what must be done to ensure the effectiveness of American higher education, its members might want to consider carefully the link between graduates' lack of preparation for the workplace and the relaxed standards, grade inflation, and taboos against causing offense that characterize vast swathes of undergraduate education, particularly in the humanities. We already know that skills are not being taught and that knowledge is not being imparted; we now need to ask how our collective attitudes about self-esteem and our hesitancy to give honest feedback figure into the problem.

Via Joanne Jacobs.

Posted by acta online at 09:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Derek Bok's new book

David Horowitz's The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America has set the tone for recent debate about the state of higher education. But it's worth noting that Horowitz is not the only public figure offering explanations for the problems that plague academe. Former Harvard president Derek Bok's December 2005 study, Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More, has gotten a bit lost in the shuffle -- but it should not have.

Bok summarized some of his arguments in a Boston Globe piece last December:

It is unfortunate that college professors pay so little heed to the research about undergraduate education. If they did, they might encounter some provocative findings, such as the following.

-Despite the hours spent debating different models of general education, the choices faculties make rarely lead to any significant difference in the cognitive development of undergraduates.

-Most college seniors do not think that they have made substantial progress in improving their competence in writing or quantitative methods, and some assessments have found that many students actually regress.

-Students who start college with average critical thinking skills only tend to progress over the next four years from the 50th percentile of their class to approximately the 69th percentile. Most undergraduates leave college still inclined to approach unstructured ''real life" problems with a form of primitive relativism, believing that there are no firm grounds for preferring one conclusion over another.

-Although most colleges require students to take classes in another language, fewer than 10 percent of seniors believe that they have substantially improved their foreign language skills, and fewer than 15 percent are enrolled in an advanced class.

-Substantial groups of students, including African-Americans, Hispanics, and recruited athletes in major sports, perform well below the levels one would expect based on their high school grades and SAT scores. Although a few colleges have developed successful programs to overcome such underperformance, most do not even try, despite the commitment expressed in many college brochures to ''help each student develop to his or her full potential."

Further studies indicate that problem-based discussion, group study, and other forms of active learning produce greater gains in critical thinking than lectures, yet the lecture format is still the standard in most college classes, especially in large universities. Other research has documented the widespread use of other practices that impede effective learning, such as the lack of prompt and adequate feedback on student work, the prevalence of tests that call for memory rather than critical thinking, and the reliance on teaching methods that allow students to do well in science courses by banking on memory rather than truly understanding the basic underlying concepts.

Critics of American colleges typically attribute the failings of undergraduate education to a tendency on the part of professors to neglect their teaching to concentrate on research. In fact, the evidence does not support this thesis, except perhaps in major research universities. Surveys show that most faculty members prefer teaching to research and spend much more time at it. The problem is not that faculty are uninterested in their students but that they do too little to explore new and possibly more effective ways of teaching and learning.

Bok's article does not discuss the culture wars, nor does it address the work of organizations such as FIRE and ACTA, whose missions center on ensuring that the political agendas of professors or administrators do not limit students' expressive freedoms and educational opportunities. But it's not hard to guess that one reason at least some college professors and administrators are not as focussed on educational outcomes as they might be is that they are more concerned with ideological outcomes.

Debates about the actual effectiveness of higher education have become strangely divorced from debates about the political climate of the contemporary college classroom. Critics who deplore academe for its ideological slant tend not to concern themselves with questions about what college students actually learn, or about whether they graduate with the knowledge and the skills they need to become functional adults. Conversely, critics who are concerned by, say, the disturbingly high attrition rates among college students, or by studies showing that a significant majority of college graduates lack essential literacy skills, tend not to ask whether these phenomena owe anything to political correctness.

These issues are connected, however. To focus exclusively on academic politics, as if the only significant problem in American higher education is ideological, is to collude with higher ed's failure to ensure the literacy and numeracy of a vast number of its students. Likewise, it's not possible to grasp fully how it is that so many college students don't manage to graduate with even baseline knowledge and skills without taking into account how doctrinaire pedagogy and policy shape college students' experiences. These issues are intertwined. They should be studied as such.

Posted by acta online at 08:59 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

South Dakota passes intellectual diversity bill

Today marked a landmark moment in the struggle to restore intellectual diversity to American higher education as the South Dakota legislature voted overwhelmingly and bi-partisanly to approve a bill requiring state colleges and universites to report annually on the state of intellectual diversity on their campuses. It was also a landmark moment for ACTA, which has played a crucial role in shaping the bill.

ACTA's press release has the details:

ACTA VICTORY in SOUTH DAKOTA: "INTELLECTUAL DIVERSITY" BILL PASSES IN HOUSE

ACTA TO ASSIST LEGISLATORS IN OTHER STATES


PIERRE, South Dakota (Feb. 8, 2006)--In a major victory for academic freedom and intellectual diversity, the South Dakota House of Representatives today approved a bill requiring all higher education institutions to report annually on concrete steps taken to ensure the free exchange of ideas on their campuses. The bill comes in the wake of a national initiative, launched by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), to ensure the free exchange of ideas on college and university campuses.

"This is a Tipping Point moment--one that offers the promise of a cultural transformation in American higher education," said ACTA president Anne Neal. "The South Dakota House has signaled that intellectual diversity matters and their bill is a model for the nation. HB 1222 affirms the importance of intellectual diversity while remaining sensitive to the principles of academic freedom and shared governance. We intend to move forward in other states with similar legislation."

The bill passed overwhelmingly in the House, with bi-partisan support, and is the first of its kind to pass anywhere in the nation. HB 1222 was filed by Rep. Phyllis M. Heineman, chairman of the House Committee, "to ensure and promote intellectual diversity and academic freedom." Although it offers possible measures to promote intellectual diversity, the bill leaves the contents of the report--which will be made public--up to each reporting institution. 

ACTA President Anne Neal appeared on Tuesday before the South Dakota House Education Committee to praise the bill and urge its adoption as model legislation. Neal addressed the committee at the request of Rep. Heineman who publicly thanked ACTA for providing advice and counsel on the drafting of the legislation. 

"The fact is, saying one believes in intellectual diversity is not enough," said Neal. "Indeed, if all existing practices and policies were sufficient, there would not be the volume of studies and surveys showing there is a serious problem. Rep. Heineman and her South Dakota colleagues have found a model legislative answer to a serious problem," said Neal.

The bill places the obligation of ensuring intellectual diversity on the trustees. In a distinct departure from other legislative efforts, the bill focuses on implementation--actual steps taken to ensure diversity--rather than policy statements.

In a report released last month, Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action, ACTA outlined steps universities could take to encourage a mix of ideas on campus and to respond to the growing public concern about the lack of intellectual diversity. Those suggestions are incorporated into the text of the South Dakota bill.

The report, testimony, and text of the bill can be found on ACTA's website at: www.goacta.org.

Posted by acta online at 06:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

South Dakota approves intellectual diversity legislation

ACTA's latest press release gives the details of South Dakota's landmark legislation:

SOUTH DAKOTA EDUCATION COMMITTEE APPROVES LEGISLATION REQUIRING ANNUAL REPORTS ON INTELLECTUAL DIVERSITY

ACTA President Testifies, Calling HB 1222 a National Model for Ensuring a Free Exchange of Ideas on Campus


PIERRE, SOUTH DAKOTA, (February 7, 2006) -- The South Dakota House Committee on Education today approved House Bill 1222, a bill which requires higher education institutions to report annually on concrete steps taken to ensure the free exchange of ideas on their campuses. The vote came after testimony by ACTA president Anne Neal, who called the bill a national model. "By passing HB 1222, legislators will fulfill their responsibility to make certain that students receive the best education possible through an open and free exchange of ideas, and do so in a way that fully protects academic freedom, shared governance, and academic standards," Neal told the legislators.

"This bill is a national model," Neal continued, "since it understands that issues concerning intellectual diversity should be addressed first and foremost by colleges and universities themselves and that governing boards have the ultimate obligation to address those concerns."

HB 1222 was filed by Rep. Phyllis M. Heineman, chairman of the House Committee on Education, and mandates that the South Dakota Board of Regents require institutions they govern to report on specific steps taken "to ensure and promote intellectual diversity and academic freedom." The bill suggests a variety of measures institutions can take, but leaves the contents of the report--which will be made public--up to each reporting institution.

More than 30 legislators co-sponsored the bill, including both Democrats and Republicans. Full floor consideration is expected later this week.

The bill comes in the wake of a national initiative, launched by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, to ensure the free exchange of ideas on college and university campuses. In a report released last month, Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action, ACTA outlined steps universities could take to encourage a mix of ideas on campus and to respond to the growing public concern about the lack of intellectual diversity. These suggestions are incorporated into the text of the South Dakota bill.
Neal addressed the committee at the request of bill sponsor Heineman, who publicly thanked the American Council of Trustees and Alumni for providing her advice and counsel after a constituent raised concerns.

Read ACTA's December report, Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action, here.

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Train of thought

The New York Times reports that schools have begun using bribes to entice students to come to class. Dismayed by poor attendance, schools are now discouraging absenteeism by offering cash and material rewards for perfect attendance. At Boston's Chelsea High School, students get $25 for each quarter of perfect attendance, plus a $25 bonus if they don't miss a day all year. But that's a comparatively modest deal. Chicago's public schools offer the families of students with perfect attendance substantial help with groceries, mortgages, and rent. Students across the country have won cars, iPods, computers, trips to Disneyland, and thousands of dollars in cash prizes, all for simply showing up.

Pragmatists celebrate the advent of attendance bribes, arguing that whatever works must be right. They point to improved attendance across the board (except at Chelsea, where students feel the rewards are too small to bother with), and to rising test scores. Critics, by contrast, lament how readily educators seem to have accepted the idea that kids should expect to be paid for living up to minimal expectations. Most disturbing are the rationalizers, who argue that it is actually appropriate to pay students to show up for class, since "incentives ... parallel the working world, where employees are given financial incentives to work harder or better."

One can only speculate about how a K-12 culture of bribery, in which kids learn to expect material rewards for doing what ought to be its own reward, will affect the already troubled undergraduate culture of American colleges and universities. For years now, campuses have been competing for students not by touting their strong academics, but by flaunting their amenities. Multi-million dollar rec centers, luxury dorms, saunas, climbing walls, skating rinks, golf courses, massage studios, and video arcades have all become commonplace on campuses where catering to students' comfort has become more important than cutting skyrocketing costs or improving educational opportunities. The message many schools are already sending is clear--today's finest colleges double as country clubs; a school's quality can be measured by the excellence of its leisure facilities. In the present climate, abdication of academic responsibility--as documented in rampant grade inflation and growing numbers of graduates who are functionally illiterate--goes hand in hand with the most cynical sorts of pandering. The extension of similar attitudes to K-12 education will only result in students coming to college with an even greater sense of anti-intellectual entitlement than many arguably already do.

That's not going to be good for anyone--and the folks who are teaching kids that they should be paid for attending to their own interests, as if education is not itself a priceless acquisition, should be able to see that.

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Intolerance at LSU

In the face of intense public pressure, the University of North Carolina has begun taking steps to bring some of its unconstitutionally repressive policies in line with the Bill of Rights. Most dramatically, FIRE announced earlier this week, UNC Greensboro has agreed both to respect the associative rights of conservative students and to end its practice of requiring student protestors to confine their activities to the campus' designated "free speech zone."

But other schools have not been so responsive to such pressure, and seem almost to revel in the bad press they make for themselves when they flagrantly disrespect the principle of free expression. Depaul University is a case in point. In the past year alone, Depaul has suspended and defamed a professor for offending a group of students, punished a conservative student group for protesting Ward Churchill's visit, and shut down an affirmative action bake sale because it was deemed to be "harassment." FIRE recently put the screws on the UNC system with a report documenting rampant disregard for the First Amendment across its several campuses; Depaul could use a similar wakeup call.

So, it seems, could Louisiana State University, which is presently punishing a student--even threatening him with expulsion--for daring to suggest that LSU could do a better job of living up to its stated commitment to multiculturalism. Collin Phillips is being defended by the ACLU--and by a lone and outspoken LSU administrator, Angeletta Gourdine, who directs LSU's African and African American studies program. While the university's position is that Phillips violated the student code of conduct when he criticized LSU, Gourdine's position is that LSU "should be a laboratory of democracy where students not only learn about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but where they get to fully exercise and try it out. ... a free market for the exchange of ideas." Gourdine is on record as remarking that "This situation appears to challenge that larger institutional history of what universities are for and mark LSU as hostile to the idea that students should be able to participate in the university marketplace free from coercion and intimidation." She's right.

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On upheavals at Harvard

Harvard's dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, William Kirby, has resigned after a difficult tenure spent navigating tensions between Harvard faculty and Harvard president Lawrence Summers. One casualty of Kirby's turbulent past year is his plan to revamp Harvard's undergraduate curriculum, an important opportunity that appears to have been squandered by lack of strong leadership and distracting political squabbles. InsideHigherEd.com has the details. In the comments to that article ACTA president Anne Neal has weighed in on Harvard's unfortunate failure to follow through on a restructuring that is not only seriously needed at Harvard, but also needed nationwide:

In the midst of the Second World War, Harvard president James Bryant Conant decided education was more than just taking courses. Witnessing the onslaught of the Nazis, Conant sought to define a unified concept of general education - a broad vision of education for all Americans. The outcome of this commendable effort was the so-called "Red Book" of 1945 which described general education as "that part of a students' whole education which looks first of all to his life as a responsible human being and citizen."

As a result of that effort, institutions across the country took Harvard's lead and subsequent generations benefitted from a cohesive and rigorous core curriculum.

That's why Harvard's recent report on its curricular review is so disappointing. At a time of breathtaking change in our society, Harvard had the opportunity--just as it did in 1945--to establish a vision of general education in the 21st century.

Instead the elephant has produced a mouse--a report with many good ideas but lacking in the courage and foresight of Conant's Red Book. Harvard's explicit focus on international study and science are to be commended. But by allowing choice to be a lodestar for curricular design, the faculty has opted for the path of least resistance when it comes to general education. The great promise of the proposed Interdisciplinary Courses--what appears to be a sort of optional core curriculum--is severely undermined by the faculty's insistence on retaining distribution requirements as an alternative approach to general education, something that we address more fully in our report, The Hollow Core.

This does a disservice to those of us who care deeply about general education and who hoped that Harvard's efforts would prompt a penetrating national conversation on the nature, structure, and importance of "general education" in free society.

I don't know whether Kirby's departure will make a difference. But I hope that his departure will provide an opportunity for the faculty and President Summers to revisit the very valid criticisms which have been raised about the curricular panel's efforts to date.

Read about ACTA's Hollow Core report here, and request a copy here.

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