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A telling tale

Sometimes real events take on the contours of moral parables. Here's one about the hazards of politically correct governance.

In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 209, which forbade public institutions from discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or ethnicity. In 1999, California governor Gray Davis appointed San Diego Padres owner and entrepreneur John Moores to the University of California Board of Regents. And almost immediately, Moores began raising questions about whether the University of California admissions office was adhering to the law.

Moores' concern was that UC's admissions practices violated the California state constitution. He started asking questions--and when he could not get straight answers, he commissioned an independent study of UC Berkeley's admissions patterns. What he found was suggestive and shocking. In a 2004 op-ed published in Forbes, Moores argued that Berkeley was flouting California law by giving preferential treatment to black and Hispanic applicants, who were being accepted in larger numbers than white and Asian applicants with better grades and higher SATs.

More shocking still, though, was the UC Regents' reaction to their chairman's discovery. They did not thank him for exposing serious problems at the university in their fiduciary care. Nor did they take steps to further investigate matters, and to rectify problems. Instead, they distanced themselves from Moores, formally voting to censure him for publishing his findings and voicing his concerns. "Because of [Moore's article], there are students that can not walk Telegraph Avenue without being intimidated because of the nature of their ethnicity," one Regent said. The message was clear: A majority of the members of UC's board believed that it was more important not to offend anyone than to determine the facts--or obey the law.

Moores soldiered on, continuing to ask tough questions--and continuing to face stonewalling from UC administrators and fellow Board members. In November, he decided he'd had enough. In a sentence-long letter to Regent chairman Richard Blum, Moores resigned from the Board of Regents more than a year before his term was set to expire.

Official reaction was one of surprise. But as the history outlined above shows, Moores had plenty of reasons to quit. In the words of former fellow Regent Ward Connerly, John Moores is not someone "who walks away from an assignment unless he believes he is wasting his time."

In a thoughtful review of Moores' career on the Board of Regents, Connerly reflects on how the culture of academic governance encourages trustees to develop unhealthy tendencies toward passivity, conformity, and entitlement. Board members, he writes, often "seem to be rubber stamps of the administration. They are frequently more interested in the adulation that accompanies being a trustee, such as getting prime seating at football games and attending the lavish dinners sponsored by the university president, than they are about providing independent oversight of university operations."

Connerly notes that Moores did not buy into that culture--and that his efforts to be a responsible, independent-minded trustee met with resistance every step of the way. "It is my belief that John Moores became frustrated with the incessant attempts on the part of UC's faculty and administration to reinstate some form of race preferences at UC, despite the public's opposition to such practices as expressed by the passage of Proposition 209," Connerly reflects. "Were I now a Regent, I would be sorely tempted to do as John has done."

For those who care about the future of higher education and wish to see trustees take their responsibilities seriously, this is a depressing story indeed, a timely parable in which craven fiduciaries function as ideological yes men, enabling precisely the kinds of administrative behaviors they are charged with preventing, and scapegoating those who try to set things right. We should remember the tale of John Moores and the UC Regents--because unless things change, we are likely to hear variations on it again and again.

Posted by acta online on December 20, 2007 at 12:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Rehearsing intolerance

Earlier this year, University of Wisconsin law professor Leonard Kaplan found himself at the center of one of those campus speech scandals that have become so regular and so stylized that they conform to a predictable script.

The script goes something like this: Professor makes a relevant comment in class on a hot-button issue such as race or sex; someone in the class takes offense and complains; administrators get hold of the issue, and so does the media; scandal ensues. The truth is often lost as concern centers less on the facts than on the feelings of those who were wounded by the professor's words; academic freedom often suffers as administrators rush to quell bad publicity and appease the aggrieved parties, often by censuring the professor. Apologies and punishment tend to be emphasized over clarification and affirmation of robust debate, and the damage is at once cumulative and incalculable.

Nobody wins in such scenarios--not professors, whose ability to handle controversial matters in class is harmed; not students, who are taught to believe they are entitled to avoid difficult ideas; not schools, which undermine academic freedom by indulging ill-advised efforts to police thought; not our society, which depends upon our colleges and universities to model and sustain free inquiry.

And yet many academics have been down this road. Renowned historian and former Harvard professor Stephan Thernstrom was one of the first--in 1987, students in his U.S. history course complained to the administration and the press about his "racial insensitivity," objecting to the syllabus and to comments they alleged that he made. Most recently, there is Brandeis politics professor Donald Hindley. A popular teacher for forty-seven years, Hindley's professional record is solid. But Brandeis investigated him, sentenced him to sensitivity training, placed a monitor in his classroom, and threatened to terminate him after a small number of students complained that Hindley's classroom speech had been discriminatory (other students, and Hindley himself, strongly disagreed with the complainants' version of events). The damage such episodes do to careers--and to the learning environment--is tremendous. One need only look at what the Harvard faculty did to Lawrence Summers after he offered some politically incorrect thoughts on gender to grasp the immense punitive energy that can swell, unchecked, in academic settings when certain topics are raised.

The point here is not that anything goes in the classroom--when professors introduce irrelevant material into class, or when they inject politics in inappropriate ways, students should complain, and administrators should act. But, by the same token, administrators should be working harder to avoid rushing to judgment, to underscore the intellectual necessity of vibrant exchange, and to sidestep the anti-intellectual pitfalls inherent in the idea that hurtful speech should be punished.

The fact that administrators so regularly do not do these things--and that, as a result, cases such as those described above continue to occur on campus after campus, with chilling regularity and predictability, tells us something vital about the manner in which higher education has failed in its mission to promote, preserve, and protect that most liberal of values and that most essential component of liberal education: the free and robust exchange of ideas.

Kaplan was attacked for comments he made about the difficulties some immigrant groups encounter within America's formalist legal system. Outraged by the examples he used to make his point, students circulated a tendentious and unverifiable account of Kaplan's statements. While Wisconsin scrambled to apologize and to accommodate (scheduling discussion forums to address the issue before all the facts were in), Kaplan was pilloried by the media. Kaplan published a reasoned refutation of the accusations, denying that he had said some of the things he was accused of saying, and explaining how other comments had been taken out of context. He also apologized for any pain he caused. But by then, the damage was done.

"There is a fundamental distinction between causing offense gratuitously and invidiously, and causing offense as the by-product of the fair-minded pursuit of truth or constructive criticism," argued a group of Wisconsin faculty:

A university of the caliber of UW-Madison, with its long history and tradition of protecting academic freedom in the 'fearless sifting and winnowing of ideas' for the pursuit of truth, must take this distinction seriously, lest it surrenders its intellectual integrity. ... We fear, however, that the crucial distinction between gratuitous offense and provocative argument has been lost in the public furor over the Kaplan case. We are dismayed at the law school's public response to this dispute, as it has addressed only the school's commitment to sensitivity and diversity, while saying nothing about that institution's fiduciary obligation to train minds to grapple with various sides of controversial and difficult issues. Without serious consideration of the importance and meaning of academic freedom on campus among the members of the university community, how can freedom prevail in the face of pressures from both left and right to make universities conform to one or another model of political correctness?

Kaplan was comparatively lucky. When the uproar died down, his career and his reputation were still intact. But it could easily have been different--and for many, it has been very different indeed.

In an eloquent, searching speech republished last week in Inside Higher Ed, Kaplan outlines what is at stake in cases like his:

We are all harmed if professors avoid controversial material in deference to some accepted or imposed correctness or an apprehension that a topic may offend sensitivities. The law inevitably must resolve questions that many find offensive. If law professors avoid these questions, they no longer teach law. Most of us want security and to be left alone. Learning to question assumptions and values can be painful. But if professors avoid certain issues because they might offend someone's sensitivities, we will cease to be a university in all but name.

Kaplan's piece is well worth reading in full, both for the insights it gives into the uncomfortable paradoxes of genuine pluralism, as well as for the irony it reveals about his own experience: When law students attacked Kaplan for his comments about embattled immigrants, they were revealing their own failure to understand the lessons he was trying to teach that day about how tough it is to strike a balance between respect for cultural difference and the democratic imperative of fair and impartial law.

Posted by acta online on December 18, 2007 at 03:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Fluff Studies

More young adults entered college this fall than ever before. But the fact that they are enrolling does not mean they are prepared.

The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress report makes this painfully clear. More than half of all high school seniors scored "below basic" on U.S. history. When shown an old photograph of a theater sign reading "Colored Entrance," most did not understand what they were looking at. Nearly half could not read a sample ballot correctly, and only 16% could explain how the legislative and judicial branches of government check executive power.

Granted, a great many high school seniors don't go on to college. It's safe to assume that this fall's college freshmen have greater overall qualifications than last spring's high school seniors. Still, it's clear enough that many students enter college woefully underprepared--and that college isn't doing what it should to correct the problem.

One recent study found that college seniors actually know less about America's history, government, foreign affairs, and economy than they did when they were freshmen--a testament to the manner in which the weak, diffuse curricula common to most schools not only fails to build on existing student knowledge, but also facilitates a deplorable degree of forgetting. ACTA's own research underscores these findings--in a survey of elite college seniors, ACTA found that over 80% could not pass a basic high school-level history test.

Writing at the Chronicle of Higher Education's new Brainstorming blog, Emory English professor Mark Bauerlein reflects on how current college curricula only reinforce the problems they ought to be attempting to remedy. Bauerlein surveys the courses freshmen across the country could take this fall to satisfy the broad general requirements with which most schools have replaced intellectually cohesive core curricula.

At Brown, Bauerlein notes, a freshman composition course taught students how to "read" television shows such as Big Brother, Seinfeld, and Sex in the City; films such as The Godfather, The Hours, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding; and even "architectural spaces" such as Starbucks and shopping malls.

At Wake Forest, a freshmen composition course called "My Friend Flicka: Companion Species in American Culture," focused on the "intimate connection" between Americans and their pets. Bambi and Lassie were specially featured.

At Ohio State, freshman seminar offerings included "Reading Superheroes," which centered on comic books from the 1930s to the present, and "Why Should I Care?: Rewards and Challenges of Community Service." This last, Bauerlein notes, was organized around two ideologically one-sided conceptions of service: "Marxist educator Paolo Freire's vision of community service for oppressed peoples and radical leftist bell hooks's idea of 'Service as a form of political resistance.'"

And so on.

It's not that one can't interpret popular culture--it's a rich and revealing aspect of our world. And it's not that one can't learn a lot from courses on contemporary issues--of course one can. Rather, the issue centers on priorities--on the manner in which colleges and universities across the country are allowing, even encouraging, students with knowledge gaps and questionable skills not to address either. As Bauerlein explains in the comments to his post, the tragedy is the "opportunity costs" of fluffy or politicized courses. "Instead of devoting the precious and limited time of freshman year to The Aeneid and the Federalist Papers, they fill the hours with mass culture and tendentious social themes. What a waste."

Bauerlein's conclusion is a chilling indictment of how American higher ed is failing its students and abandoning its educational obligation. "Despite ... reports documenting vast knowledge deficits among college students," he writes, "departments continue to throw them into trivial and biased classes that won’t remedy the problem one bit. They cheapen the classroom tone and narrow the range of acceptable opinion, and they leave the kids just as ignorant as they were before, and more incurious."

Posted by acta online on December 18, 2007 at 11:42 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Double standards at UC

Earlier this week, the California Aggie published an editorial entitled "Controversial speakers should be heard," reacting to a recent campus visit by Ward Churchill. In response, ACTA president Anne D. Neal made the following statement:

At UC Davis, former Secretary of the Treasury and Harvard president Lawrence Summers was deemed 'too controversial' after he was invited to speak on campus, but documented academic fraud Ward Churchill -- who was fired by the University of Colorado for academic misconduct -- gave a lecture on November 27.

The student newspaper is now editorializing -- correctly -- that it was right to allow Churchill to speak. But that's not the end of the story. The real question is: Why the double standard?

It's clear that UC is confused about one of the core purposes of any good university: ensuring a broad and vigorous exchange of ideas. That's why in September, ACTA called for a comprehensive review of intellectual diversity by the Board of Regents. They have not responded -- and it's worth noting that they themselves disinvited Lawrence Summers back in September.

College campuses should play host to a broad and vigorous exchange of ideas. That doesn't appear to be happening at UC, and not only are the Regents apparently not doing anything -- they seem to be part of the problem. UC's students and faculty -- as well as the California taxpayers who support the university so generously -- deserve better.

By way of background, in early September, UC Irvine chancellor Michael Drake drew widespread criticism for revoking his offer to Dr. Erwin Chemerinsky to head the new UC Irvine law school, seemingly on the basis of inappropriate political considerations. On September 13, ACTA called on the UC Board of Regents to undertake a systematic review of the integrity of the academic hiring process and intellectual diversity.

On approximately September 15, after faculty had circulated a petition calling him someone "who has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice in academia," Lawrence Summers was uninvited as the speaker at an upcoming Board of Regents meeting at UC Davis.

Irvine subsequently re-extended the offer to Chemerinsky, and on September 17, he accepted it.

On November 27, Ward Churchill spoke at UC Davis on the topic "Zionism, Manifest Destiny and Nazi Lebensraumpolitik: Three Variations on a Common Theme." When one student challenged Churchill in the Q&A period, Churchill told him to "shut up" and deemed his contentions "disingenuous bullshit."

The Aggie is right: Controversial speakers should be allowed to come to campus. But as things stand now, former Secretaries of the Treasury seem to be just too controversial for UC. That's not a state of affairs of which the Regents -- who have ultimate fiduciary authority over the university system -- ought to be proud.

Posted by cmitchell on December 07, 2007 at 01:21 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Refuse the parachute

It's common practice, when ousting university presidents for cause, to compensate them richly--as if being fired were hard work requiring a hefty bonus.

In recent years, presidents at American University, Boston University, Connecticut College, and others were all removed from office--and all received substantial "golden parachutes." Legitimate outrage followed. When American's Ben Ladner, fired for using university funds to finance an extravagant lifestyle, walked away with $3.75 million, he even attracted the investigative attention of the Senate Finance Committee.

But just because something is common practice doesn't make it right. And those who do the right thing in the face of pressure to do otherwise deserve special praise.

Consider the trustees at the University of Mary Washington.

Last spring, President William Frawley sank his presidency in a single weekend with two DUI arrests. His subsequent unwillingness to take responsibility for his actions sealed his fate with the trustees. They fired him, and, as Frawley indecorously complained in a self-pitying op-ed in the Washington Post, they did so "with no salary or benefits, no severance, no tenure."

In other words, Mary Washington's governors resisted the pressure to follow the crowd; instead of focusing on the questionable goal of easing Frawley out of his job in a manner that would ensure his economic comfort and academic security, they concentrated on doing what was best for the university entrusted to their care: They removed a leader who was a liability, conserving essential resources (time, money, patience, care) for the constructive, necessary work ahead--ensuring the stability of the school while locating and integrating a new president.

That sort of fiduciary clarity is exceptional and admirable. And it deserves recognition and praise.

Posted by acta online on December 06, 2007 at 06:02 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Happy Birthday, Jacques Barzun!

ACTA National Council member, eminent scholar and public intellectual Jacques Barzun turned 100 last Friday--and America is throwing him a wonderfully contemporary party. Toasted in the established pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New Criterion, Barzun is also being celebrated in the newer electronic corners of our public culture: a blog entitled "Barzun 100" contains numerous tributes from people who cherish their associations with Barzun, whether as students, colleagues, readers, or friends.

Born in France and sent to prep school in the U.S. by a father bent on securing the best opportunities for his son, Barzun studied at Columbia during the 1920s. Later, as a Columbia professor, Barzun taught for many years within the core. A specialist in history, he and literary scholar Lionel Trilling frequently co-taught the Great Books course for which Columbia is justly recognized.

In 2006, ACTA's Institute for Effective Governance published Barzun's essay, "The Columbia Core: A Look Back." Written, as Barzun put it, in response to "academics (and even more alumni) [who] have become alarmed by the narrow and politically tendentious courses that make up the whole offering at many colleges, including some of the reputed best," the essay describes how, in the wake of World War I, Columbia set out to create a curriculum that would "teach the new generations the ideals and history of Western Civilization in hopes that when they were leaders of opinion and makers of policy they might avoid the ghastly mistakes that had brought the Continent to self-destruction in total war." Today, the need for such curricula remains as strong as ever.

An eloquent advocate for common culture and "collective enjoyment" (his phrase for democratically shared delight in the arts), Barzun worked hard to make great works and great ideas accessible to all in his teaching and his writing. Barzun's expertise ranged widely--his forty books span literature, history, science, art, music (he is a renowned expert on Berlioz), and even sports (baseball, he declared, reveals the heart and mind of America). Able to reach both scholarly and lay audiences, Barzun ably translated what Sidney Hook called his "luminous common sense" into a readable idiom that has made him one of our most treasured public intellectuals.

Barzun's 1959 classic, Teacher in America, remains a timely and cogent critique of the American educational system. Despite Barzun's warning that "education is the dullest of subjects," the book delivers a wise analysis of issues that remain at the forefront of academic debates today, including the importance of academic freedom, the value of the canon, the art of teaching well, the danger to education posed by teachers who use the classroom to proselytize, and the danger to knowledge presented by scholars who are too narrowly specialized.

Barzun's lifetime of patient, interested study has culminated in a work that exemplifies the spirit of broad yet deep inquiry that he has championed throughout his life: From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (2000) was widely hailed as a masterpiece of engaging, intelligent synthesis.

A prominent voice of the twentieth century, Barzun's is also a voice for the future.

Happy birthday, Professor Barzun, and thank you.

Posted by acta online on December 05, 2007 at 11:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Reviewing Oral Roberts

At the heart of every scandal lies opportunity. The University of Colorado recognized this when the Ward Churchill affair broke--it is now instituting major policy reform regarding its tenure system. Likewise, when the Washington Post exposed American University president Ben Ladner's lavish and inappropriate spending habits, the board fired Ladner and initiated comprehensive governance review. In both cases, a university's governing board turned devastating findings about internal corruption into the occasion for systematic internal review, greater accountability, and positive change.

Now Oral Roberts University faces similar scandal--and has a similar opportunity. In the short space of two months, much has happened at the Tulsa-based school: Lawsuits have been filed against the university by faculty, staff, and students alleging financial malfeasance and ethical misconduct on the part of President Richard Roberts; faculty have overwhelmingly passed a "no confidence" vote in Roberts; and Roberts has resigned.

The campus is reeling, and students are reacting strongly to the news that their leaders have not necessarily held themselves to the moral and behavioral standards to which they hold students. Oral Roberts students sign contracts committing to observe a dress code, a curfew, and strict rules about such things as swearing, drinking, and lying. Allegations that Richard Roberts used university resources to--among other things--finance cars, horses, vacations, and a swanky Beverly Hills home aren't sitting well with them.

But opportunities for repair and reform are already emerging. In response to the accusations, the board promptly commissioned an independent audit of ORU's finances so that it could assess the facts. Last week, the board met to hear the results of the audit; it also used the meeting to begin discussions of what to do about the University's $52 million debt (largely incurred when a hospital project failed during the 1980s), and about a problematic leadership structure in which the University's finances and overseers are indistinct from those of the Oral Roberts ministry, a situation that has compromised accountability and endlessly confused the issue of spending. On the strength of that meeting, the board has announced its intention to separate ORU from Oral Roberts Ministries, and to commence a major overhaul of the University's finances and governance structure.

Central to these initiatives is a governance-minded benefactor named Mart Green. Green--who is not himself an ORU alum--has donated $8 million to ORU to help it through the immediate crisis, and has offered $62 million more on condition that the University make necessary changes to its fiduciary and fiscal arrangements.

Good governance is always an ongoing process, and the most successful institutions are capable of responding constructively to the need for change. ORU has a history of failing to respond to that need--former trustee Harry McNevin resigned in 1987 because he could not abide the board's refusal to address misspending, and an independent investigation of ORU during the 1990s revealed spending patterns very like those currently at issue.

But now--at what might be its moment of greatest extremity--the University has a chance to make good on its obligations to its mission and its students. Here's to a substantive, responsible program of governance reform at Oral Roberts--one that eliminates conflicts of interest, establishes strong imperatives for transparency, and implements clear paths for fiduciary and fiscal accountability. The students deserve no less.

Posted by acta online on December 04, 2007 at 03:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Now hiring...

ACTA is currently seeking applicants for two key positions:

Program Officer for Alumni Affairs

Program Officer for Institutional Advancement

We're looking for individuals who are well organized, detail oriented, and motivated; have the highest degree of personal responsibility, accountability, and honesty; and are passionate about ACTA's mission of promoting academic excellence, academic freedom, and accountability in higher education.

Salaries for each position will be commensurate with skills and experience, and ACTA is an equal-opportunity employer. Candidates should send a resume, cover letter, salary requirement, and contact information for two references -- as well as any questions -- to jobs [at] goacta [dot] org. No calls, please.

(This post was updated on February 5, 2008.)

Posted by cmitchell on December 04, 2007 at 02:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack