ACTA's Must-Reads

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Did we get it?

In his first address to Congress and the nation at large, President Obama laid out his economic recovery plan. While the nation is busy debating its efficacy, it's worth asking: How much of it did we actually understand? The President may not have delved into the complexities of asset-backed mortgage securities, but the entire first half of his speech was devoted to the basics of economics -- a subject about which Americans know little and which our leading universities almost never require. Indeed, as we discovered in our survey of a 100 leading universities, only one -- the University of Alaska in Fairbanks -- has an economics requirement.

The current crisis offers the perfect opportunity for universities to recognize the importance of economics and make sure that the voters -- and leaders -- of tomorrow are able to make sense of a complex world and respond to future challenges.

Posted by David Azerrad on February 26, 2009 at 09:31 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

ROTC reemergence

Colgate University's student newspaper recently reported that the university re-launched its ROTC program this semester (it had been disbanded during the Vietnam War). Although it only has three students right now, another four have already expressed interest. In the words of Army First Sergeant Ken Alcorn, who came to Colgate to lead its program after building up a successful one at Utica College: "To grow an ROTC program in my opinion is not done by the cadre or the people who are running it; it's done by the students. If the program is good, they enjoy it and talk about it and then other people want to do it. The best recruiters are the college students."

As ACTA has heightened public awareness of ROTC's absence from the campuses of many elite universities, administrators have repeatedly used the excuse that ROTC has always been welcome but students are simply not interested in participating. To blame low student interest on a campus with no ROTC presence and, in certain cases, no information whatsoever about the program, necessarily begs the questions of whether a visible presence on campus might not induce more students to participate. Sergeant Alcorn's remarks suggest that this is not in fact an insoluble chicken and egg problem.

Posted by David Azerrad on February 25, 2009 at 03:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

He's fascinated

"One of the elections I'm fascinated with this year is for . . . Harvard's Board of Overseers." That's how Scot Lehigh of the Boston Globe begins his column today. His focus is on the two reform-minded petition candidates, Robert L. Freedman and Harvey A. Silverglate. It is well worth a read.

Posted by Charles Mitchell on February 25, 2009 at 10:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Those other highly-paid administrators

While a great deal of attention has been paid of late to the lavish compensation packages of university presidents, there has been less focus on the pay of other officials, including chief financial officers, medical school heads, athletic directors, and coaches. The Chronicle of Higher Education looked through the financial reports that universities filed with the Internal Revenue Service for the 2006-7 fiscal year to find the highest-paid university employees. The resulting report showed that while presidents and chancellors had the highest percentage of $500,000-plus salaries, medical school administrators and research professors, coaches and athletic directors, and investment and financial officials were not far behind.

While one can appreciate the work done by medical school researchers and athletic coaches, it's worth pondering what these statistics say about the institutions' priorities when it comes to the teaching of undergraduates. In ACTA's report cards on state higher education, we evaluate the growth in administrative vs. instructional spending--and suggest that these figures should reflect the supreme importance of giving students a strong liberal education. But quite often, we find administrative spending is outpacing instructional. While ACTA does not presume to say what is an "appropriate" salary, we do believe that institutions have a duty to examine whether or not their spending reflects their core mission--especially in this economy.

Posted by Sandra E. Czelusniak on February 24, 2009 at 04:03 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Kudos to Catholic U.

Provost James Brennan of the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. has unveiled a plan for a first-year curriculum geared toward boosting retention rates and building a common intellectual foundation for its students, according to a report from Inside Higher Ed. At its December meeting, CUA's Board of Trustees approved the First-Year Experience program, which will put freshman students into small living-learning groups centered on a common university-wide humanities core.

These core classes, which will be voluntary next academic year but will become mandatory for all freshmen the following year, have as their backbone the great works of Western civilization--including such enduring authors as Homer, Augustine, and Dante. This common core course, along with its accompanying mentorship and advising program, is designed to foster connections among the students, and between students and faculty. It is a superb proposal, and the Board should be commended for supporting Provost Brennan in this effort. For all trustees looking to improve retention through the strengthening of teaching and learning, CUA provides a promising model.

Posted by Sandra E. Czelusniak on February 23, 2009 at 02:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Ohio State University president: Reinvention key to survival

At the recent annual meeting of the American Council on Education, Ohio State University president E. Gordon Gee gave a provocative keynote address in which he admonished colleges and universities to reform themselves in order to avoid "slouching into irrelevance." Gee argued that with the mounting economic pressures, universities must revisit practices related to faculty tenure and promotion, rewards for scholarship, and institutional leadership. And he cited OSU's recent decision to hire former Johnson & Johnson vice chair Christine Poon as business school dean as one example of doing things differently. Hiring leaders without academic backgrounds is unconventional, but often leads--as one can see with former University of Colorado president Hank Brown--to excellence and independent thinking.

Gee is right: The current economic downturn provides opportunities to re-orient and reform higher education so that it fulfills its time-honored mission of transmitting knowledge while meeting the needs and demands of the twenty-first century. One need not agree with Gee on all the details to recognize that he is right, in the present climate, when he notes that "more of the same" is not a winning prescription for trustees. With this in mind, his speech is well worth a read.

Posted by Sandra E. Czelusniak on February 20, 2009 at 09:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Getting a grip on the other type of inflation

On the day that we released our guide to help trustees tackle grade inflation, The New York Times had a story about the widespread sentiment among students that they are entitled to good grades if they simply show up and put in a good effort. The "A for effort" mentality is ultimately only a part of the problem. Students may believe they are entitled to receive top marks, professors may dish out A's liberally to become more popular with students, but it is the trustees who must step in if grade inflation is out of control at their university.

The guide, which was made possible by a grant from the D.W. Gore Family Foundation, brings together and assesses various strategies that universities across the country have adopted to address grade inflation. It concludes with a number of steps institutions can take to get a grip on grade inflation -- and, as Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield outlines in his cover letter to trustees, help return integrity to the academic enterprise.

Posted by David Azerrad on February 19, 2009 at 05:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Bravo, Maryland

The University of Maryland Board of Regents has approved a smart new policy on textbook purchasing that will enable students to save several hundred dollars per year--a small step towards common-sense college affordability. According to the Annapolis Capital, the policy will require that textbook information--including ISBN, title, author, and edition--be published well before course registration deadlines. This policy follows up on the new requirements in the recently reauthorized Higher Education Act--about which more here--and is a commendable example of boards taking action to reduce costs in a straightforward and transparent way. Let's hope other boards follow this good example.

Posted by Noah Mamis on February 19, 2009 at 11:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Silverglate and Freedman in Harvard Law Record

This morning, the Harvard Law Record features a wide-ranging interview with Harvard Board of Overseers petition candidates Harvey A. Silverglate and Robert L. Freedman. It is indeed a must-read. Perhaps most interesting from ACTA's perspective are Mr. Silverglate's full-throated condemnation of speech codes and Mr. Freedman's telling observation that his law firm encounters Harvard Law School graduates who do not know how to write.

Posted by Charles Mitchell on February 19, 2009 at 10:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Taking the Four-Year Pledge

Despite the fact that the bachelor's degree in the United States is designed to be completed in four years, the actual percentage of students nationwide that graduate within that time frame is a distressingly low 37 percent. This has serious ramifications: Students who drop out still carry loan debt with no diploma to show for it, institutions are burdened with the costs of students who do not finish their academic programs, and parents and taxpayers have to foot much of the bill. But one university in Georgia is trying to reverse this trend on its own campus. On Monday, Mercer University unveiled a new initiative called the Mercer Four-Year Pledge, in which participating students carefully map out their academic programs with the help of advisors in order to graduate in four years. And most notably, if students follow the stipulations of the program but are still unable to graduate on time, then the university will cover the additional costs of attendance. Trustees should take note of this promising new effort in both controlling college costs and improving students' academic discipline.

Posted by Sandra E. Czelusniak on February 18, 2009 at 11:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Making sense of the crisis

The Washington Post reports that the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business has created a new nine-month program designed to give students the knowledge of finance and banking necessary to understand the current crisis. This is great news indeed, but why stop there? If UM rightly thinks business students should understand the crisis, should it not also ensure that the general student population understands basic economics? UM could in fact set a national standard for economic literacy by instituting an economics requirement. As things stand, only one of the flagship public universities requires economics of its graduates (the University of Alaska at Fairbanks). Perhaps if our students learned the basics of supply and demand, we wouldn't have to worry about teaching them about collaterized debt.

Posted by David Azerrad on February 17, 2009 at 03:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Administrative spending and the importance of priorities

According to the Houston Chronicle, the budget for highly paid administrators at the University of Texas at Austin rose nearly 40 percent between 2004 and 2008. These pay raises were accompanied by the steep tuition hikes common in higher education today -- UT's per-semester tuition and fees rose 57 percent between 2003 and 2008. These UT numbers are one small part of a larger story: the increasing gulf between administrative and instructional costs on campuses across the country. In ACTA's state report cards profiling Georgia and Missouri, for example, we found that the increase in administrative spending far outpaced the increase in spending on instruction. This points to a need for trustees to engage in some bold reform by controlling the administrative budget and refocusing on the core mission of the university: teaching and learning.

Posted by Sandra E. Czelusniak on February 17, 2009 at 03:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The transformation of UDC

When the University of the District of Columbia's trustees hired Allen Sessoms to be the university's president last September, they wanted a transformative leader who could bring genuine change. And change is exactly what UDC needs; a public university with open enrollment, the school has long suffered from low academic standards and a lack of a coherent vision. But as the Washington Post reports today, UDC is about to undergo some serious shakeup, with the board having approved Sessoms' plans to split the university into two institutions. The first would be an open-enrollment two-year community college consistent with the university's core mission of accessibility, while the other would be a four year "flagship" university with admissions requirements and revamped academic programs. ACTA applauds this bold move towards academic excellence at the University of the District of Columbia.

Posted by Sandra E. Czelusniak on February 10, 2009 at 04:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Executive pay is an issue for boards, too

Executive compensation is much in the news these days. And it has been a continuing focus of the higher education press, as well, as the Chronicle of Higher Education illustrates today. In one of the most notable recent cases, the president of Ohio University received a contract extension before his performance review was completed. Boards, take note: As ACTA points out in our trustee guide Assessing the President's Performance, such evaluations are one of your primary responsibilities, second only to selecting the president, and should certainly be done before awarding raises or extending contracts.

Posted by Charles Mitchell on February 06, 2009 at 04:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A new community college for CUNY

The City University of New York has unveiled plans for a new community college, and it looks promising. According to Inside Higher Ed, the college will have a narrow, pre-determined core curriculum with focused academic and pre-professional programs aimed at giving the students the education and training they need--and in a timely manner. The concept paper calls for all first-year students to attend full-time, allowing for "more sustained time to develop, practice, and demonstrate beyond the level of minimum proficiency the skills and knowledge they will need for associate degree completion, baccalaureate transfer and/or workplace readiness." The entire report is here.

This is not the first time that CUNY has shown what inspired leadership can achieve. It was CUNY chancellor Matthew Goldstein and the CUNY Board of Trustees (along with a group of concerned and dedicated alumni, parents, and citizens) that some years ago faced down opponents of higher standards to demand an end to open admissions and for limits on the number of remedial classes. And it is this same combination of administrators and trustees that has overseen the development of the stellar Macaulay Honors College, which continues to build its reputation for high admissions standards.

The fact is: The higher education landscape is changing, and institutions that are flexible and responsive to student needs and that bring an entrepreneurial spirit to the challenges at hand will be those most likely to succeed. CUNY deserves praise for giving students more options--and the higher education community a model in their proposed new community college.

Posted by Sandra E. Czelusniak on February 06, 2009 at 04:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The right response

George Washington University president Steven Knapp deserves applause for his strong and unequivocal condemnation of recent student vandalism of anti-abortion crosses on campus. Knapp issued a statement denouncing the vandalism as "unacceptable and utterly incompatible with the spirit of mutual respect that is essential to the life of an academic community."

President Knapp's response was reported in a Washington Post article that suggested the incident was not isolated and outlined broader student concerns about the intellectual climate on campus. Given these concerns, the GW Board of Trustees should take up the issue -- as we outline in a letter urging the board to follow our recommendation in Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action and conduct a survey of the intellectual climate. In doing so, they would join a growing number of boards across the country who are modeling best practices by ensuring the free exchange of ideas -- practices to be featured in an upcoming ACTA trustee guide.

Posted by David Azerrad on February 05, 2009 at 10:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

College costs: The public weighs in

Public Agenda and the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education have just released a report outlining the results of a recent poll of the American public. The survey results show a dramatic increase in the percentage of Americans who believe that a Bachelor's degree is a necessity for success--55 percent in 2007 versus only 30 percent in 2000.

Of even greater concern, however, is the following finding:

"Our research also confirms that significant numbers of Americans have questions about whether these cost increases are justified and whether colleges are operating in the most cost effective manner. More than half of Americans (53 percent) say colleges could spend less and still maintain a high quality of education. Fifty-five percent say that higher education today is run like most businesses, with more attention to the bottom line and the educational mission of secondary importance."

This, of course, is what ACTA has been saying for quite some time: As the price of higher ed continues to rise, Americans are frustrated. They believe that instruction is taking a back seat to administrative costs--and that parents, students, and taxpayers are left shouldering the bill. In these challenging economic times, trustees have an ideal opportunity to look long and hard at their institutions' budget priorities, renew their institutions' focus on teaching and learning, and thoughtfully allocate campus resources. By doing so, trustees can help universities weather the current economic storm, ensure a quality and affordable education, and respond to the growing concerns of the American public--who make higher education possible.

Posted by Sandra E. Czelusniak on February 04, 2009 at 04:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

"What are you doing about that?"

As the economic crisis shows no signs of abating and budgets everywhere are slashed, we've heard much from universities about the need to fund higher ed properly. In December, a group of college associations even wrote to Congress demanding a piece of the stimulus pie. Where universities have not been so vocal is in explaining what part they can play in helping the nation address the economic problems it faces.

Speaking at the annual meeting of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (one of the signatories of the December letter to Congress), David M. Walker raised this most pertinent question. After detailing all that ails the economy and noting the widespread financial illiteracy among Americans, Walker, the former US Comptroller General who now heads the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, asked the college officials in the room: "What are you doing about that?"

Walker challenged colleges to be part of the solution and called on them to make sure students graduate understanding the basics of finance. Walker's remarks echo the findings and proposals put forth by ACTA research fellows Erin O'Connor and Maurice Black in an article published last week on economic illiteracy, as well as ACTA's study of economic requirements at leading colleges. A survey of 100 universities revealed that only school--the University of Alaska in Fairbanks--requires its students to take an economics class.

Posted by David Azerrad on February 04, 2009 at 09:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Neal, Kimball and Johnson

ACTA president Anne D. Neal appeared on the Chicago radio show Extension 720 with Milt Rosenberg last Friday, alongside Roger Kimball, author of Tenured Radicals, and KC Johnson, professor of history at Brooklyn College. In this excerpt in which the three discuss the idea of a university, Neal says: "a university is a place that liberates the mind, hence the term liberal education, and ones that provides an education for students so that they can be informed citizens, effective workers and lifelong learners."

Posted by David Azerrad on February 03, 2009 at 04:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The heckler's veto and trustees

Academic freedom and free speech are not generally the focus of The New York Times obituary page, but today is an exception. There it notes the passing of the first recorded victim of the "heckler's veto"--Irving Feiner, 1924-2009. In 1949, Mr. Feiner, then a student at Syracuse University, was giving a speech, "castigating the Syracuse mayor, the local political system and the American Legion"--when he was heckled. Fearing violence, a police officer ordered him to stop. When Feiner refused, he was arrested and convicted of disorderly conduct. While his appeals up to the Supreme Court were futile, and his conviction was upheld, Justice Hugo Black's dissent remained: "I understand that people in totalitarian countries must obey arbitrary orders. I had hoped that there was no such duty in the United States." In later cases, the ruling would be effectively overturned, creating a central principle of free speech on campus--and one that trustees should uphold.

In Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action, ACTA urged trustees to "establish clear campus policies which ensure that hecklers or threats of violence do not prevent speakers from speaking." As we pointed out, "Allowing coercive tactics to shut down free debate directly contradicts what the university is all about... The 'heckler's veto' should not be tolerated. And the university should provide adequate security to protect freedom of speech." This is a good principle and an important one. Thank you, Mr. Feiner!

Posted by Noah Mamis on February 03, 2009 at 03:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Silverglate in The Wall Street Journal

Harvey A. Silverglate, who is running for the Harvard Board of Overseers as a petition candidate, published an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal on the Securities and Exchange Commission's decision to investigate Apple for failing to completely disclose Steve Jobs's health situation. Silverglate's website lists all his recent publications, many of which deal with higher ed, as well as his Overseer candidacy statement.

Silverglate is running alongside fellow Harvard alumnus and accomplished attorney Robert L. Freedman, a Philadelphian who came within a handful of votes of being elected last year. Harvard alums, as well as those interested in higher ed, may want to have a look at each candidate's website for refreshing ideas on how to reinvigorate Harvard.

Posted by David Azerrad on February 02, 2009 at 04:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack