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DECEMBER 2008
STUDIES FIND STUDENTS AREN'T BRAIN
WASHED BY PROF'S POLITICAL VIEWS
HOW THE IVY LEAGUE BROUGHT US DOWN
Chris Hedges, Truthdig - The multiple failures
that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredded
constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to
our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the
feet of our elite universities. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and
Stanford, along with most other elite schools, do a poor job
educating students to think. They focus instead, through the
filter of standardized tests, enrichment activities, advanced-placement
classes, high-priced tutors, swanky private schools and blind
deference to all authority, on creating hordes of competent systems
managers. The collapse of the country runs in a direct line from
the manicured quadrangles and halls in places like Cambridge,
Mass., Princeton, N.J., and New Haven, Conn., to the financial
and political centers of power.
The nation's elite universities disdain
honest intellectual inquiry, which is by its nature distrustful
of authority, fiercely independent and often subversive. They
organize learning around minutely specialized disciplines, narrow
answers and rigid structures that are designed to produce certain
answers. The established corporate hierarchies these institutions
service -- economic, political and social -- come with clear
parameters, such as the primacy of an unfettered free market,
and with a highly specialized vocabulary. This vocabulary, a
sign of the "specialist" and of course the elitist,
thwarts universal understanding. It keeps the uninitiated from
asking unpleasant questions. It destroys the search for the common
good. It dices disciplines, faculty, students and, finally, experts
into tiny, specialized fragments. It allows students and faculty
to retreat into these self-imposed fiefdoms and neglect the most-pressing
moral, political and cultural questions. Those who defy the system
-- people like Ralph Nader -- are branded as irrational and irrelevant.
These elite universities have banished self-criticism. They refuse
to question a self-justifying system. Organization, technology,
self-advancement and information systems are the only things
that matter. . .
I sat a few months ago with a former classmate
from Harvard Divinity School who is now a theology professor.
When I asked her what she was teaching, she unleashed a torrent
of obscure academic code words. I did not understand, even with
three years of seminary, what she was talking about. You can
see this absurd retreat into specialized, impenetrable verbal
enclaves in every graduate department across the country. The
more these universities churn out these stunted men and women,
the more we are flooded with a peculiar breed of specialist.
This specialist blindly services tiny parts of a corporate power
structure he or she has never been taught to question and looks
down on the rest of us with thinly veiled contempt. . .
Barack Obama is a product of this elitist
system. So are his degree-laden cabinet members. They come out
of Harvard, Yale, Wellesley and Princeton. Their friends and
classmates made huge fortunes on Wall Street and in powerful
law firms. They go to the same class reunions. They belong to
the same clubs. They speak the same easy language of privilege
and comfort and entitlement. They are endowed with an unbridled
self-confidence and blind belief in a decaying political and
financial system that has nurtured and empowered them.
These elites, and the corporate system
they serve, have ruined the country. These elite cannot solve
our problems. They have been trained to find "solutions,"
such as the trillion-dollar bailout of banks and financial firms,
that sustain the system. They will feed the beast until it dies.
Don't expect them to save us. They don't know how. And when it
all collapses, when our rotten financial system with its trillions
in worthless assets implodes, and our imperial wars end in humiliation
and defeat, they will be exposed as being as helpless, and as
stupid, as the rest of us.
NEARLY HALF OF APPLICANTS CAUGHT LYING ON RESUMES
STUDIES FIND STUDENTS AREN'T BRAIN WASHED BY PROFS'POLITICAL
VIEWS
Patricia Cohen, NY Times - Three sets of
researchers recently concluded that professors have virtually
no impact on the political views and ideology of their students.
If there has been a conspiracy among liberal faculty members
to influence students, "they've done a pretty bad job,"
said A. Lee Fritschler, a professor of public policy at George
Mason University and an author of the new book "Closed Minds?
Politics and Ideology in American Universities."
A study of nearly 7,000 students at 38
institutions published in the current PS: Political Science and
Politics, the journal of the American Political Science Association,
as well as a second study that has been accepted by the journal
to run in April 2009, both reach similar conclusions. "There
is no evidence that an instructor's views instigate political
change among students," Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner,
a husband-and-wife team of political scientists who have frequently
conducted research on politics in higher education, write in
that second study. Their work is often cited by people on both
sides of the debate, not least because Mr. Woessner describes
himself as politically conservative.
JULY 2008
COLLEGE GRADS TURN TO NON-PROFIT WORK
MAY 2008
HOW COLLEGES MISLEAD 40% OF THEIR STUDENTS
MARTY NEMKO, CHRONICLES OF HIGHER EDUCATION
Among my saddest moments as a career counselor is when I hear
a story like this: "I wasn't a good student in high school,
but I wanted to prove that I can get a college diploma. I'd be
the first one in my family to do it. But it's been five years
and $80,000, and I still have 45 credits to go."
I have a hard time telling such people
the killer statistic: Among high-school students who graduated
in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions
were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight
and a half years later. . . Yet four-year colleges admit and
take money from hundreds of thousands of such students each year!
Even worse, most of those college dropouts
leave the campus having learned little of value, and with a mountain
of debt and devastated self-esteem from their unsuccessful struggles.
Perhaps worst of all, even those who do manage to graduate too
rarely end up in careers that require a college education. So
it's not surprising that when you hop into a cab or walk into
a restaurant, you're likely to meet workers who spent years and
their family's life savings on college, only to end up with a
job they could have done as a high-school dropout.
Such students are not aberrations. Today,
amazingly, a majority of the students whom colleges admit are
grossly underprepared. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million high-school
graduates of 2007 who took the ACT examination were ready for
college-level work in the core subjects of English, math, reading,
and science.
Perhaps more surprising, even those high-school
students who are fully qualified to attend college are increasingly
unlikely to derive enough benefit to justify the often six-figure
cost and four to six years (or more) it takes to graduate. Research
suggests that more than 40 percent of freshmen at four-year institutions
do not graduate in six years. Colleges trumpet the statistic
that, over their lifetimes, college graduates earn more than
nongraduates, but that's terribly misleading. You could lock
the collegebound in a closet for four years, and they'd still
go on to earn more than the pool of non-collegebound - they're
brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections.
COURT RULES IT'S OKAY TO DENY COLLEGE AID TO STUDENTS
WITH DRUG CONVICTIONS
COLLEGE BOARD FINDS WRITING SAMPLE BEST PREDICTOR
OF COLLEGE GRADES
MARINES
INSISTING ON RIGHT TO RECRUITING ON CAMPUS
STATES SPEND 6 TIMES AS MUCH ON PRISONS AS ON HIGHER
EDUCATION
CALIFORNIA UNIVERSITY FIRES QUAKER TEACHER FOR
MODIFYING OATH OF ALLEGIENCE
AGRIBUSINESS GAINING MORE CONTROL OVER UNIVERSITIES
ACADEMICS LAUNCH CAMPAIGN AGAINST PRO-ISRAELI MCCARTHYISM
STUDENT KICKED OUT FOR OPPOSING PARK LOT
NEW PRESIDENT OF HARVARD TAKES STAND FOR REAL EDUCATION
UNIVERSITY REVERSES BAN ON TUTU
UNIVERSITIES: MORE GREEDY CORPORATIONS
RIAA HARASSERS AVOID HARVARD, HIT STUDENTS AT OTHER
COLLEGES
WELCOME TO FLEECE U - WHERE WE TRAIN YOU TO BE
IN DEBT
FEBRUARY 2008
ACADEMICS LAUNCH CAMPAIGN AGAINST PRO-ISRAELI
MCCARTHYISM
CECILIE SURASKY, MUZZLE WATCH - The Ad
Hoc Committee to Defend the University, led by a number of academic
heavyweights from Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, (formerly) Brown
and UC Santa Cruz, has published a sign-on statement in this
week's Chronicle of Higher Education. No doubt the folks over
at Campus Watch can't wait to cut and paste the entire list of
names so they can send out "monitors" to report on
the "anti-Israel" and "anti-American" teachers.
The committee states:
"In recent years, universities across
the country have been targeted by outside groups seeking to influence
what is taught and who can teach. To achieve their political
agendas, these groups have defamed scholars, pressured administrators,
and tried to bypass or subvert established procedures of academic
governance. As a consequence, faculty have been denied jobs or
tenure, and scholars have been denied public platforms from which
to share their viewpoints. This violates an important principle
of scholarship, the free exchange of ideas, subjecting them to
ideological and political tests. These attacks threaten academic
freedom and the core mission of institutions of higher education
in a democratic society. Unfortunately and ironically, many of
the most vociferous campaigns targeting universities and their
faculty have been launched by groups portraying themselves as
defenders of Israel. These groups have targeted scholars who
have expressed perspectives on Israeli policies and the Israeli
Palestinian conflict with which they disagree.
To silence those they consider their political
enemies, they have used a range of tactics such as:
- unfounded insinuations and allegations,
in the media and on websites, of anti-Semitism or sympathy for
terrorism or "un-Americanism;"
- efforts to broaden definitions of anti
Semitism to include scholarship and teaching that is critical
of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and of Israel;
- pressures on university administrations
by threatening to withhold donations if faculty they have targeted
are hired or awarded tenure;
- campaigns to deny scholars the opportunity
to present their views to the wider public;
- the promotion of efforts to restrict
federal funding for area studies programs and the teaching of
critical languages on political grounds;
- lawsuits in the name of the "right"
of individual students not to hear ideas that may challenge or
contradict their beliefs;
- and demands in the name of "balance"
and "diversity" that those with whom they disagree
be prevented from speaking unless paired with someone whose viewpoint
they approve of.
The suppression of free speech undermines
academic freedom and subverts the norms of academic life. It
poses a serious threat to institutions of higher education in
the United States. The university should be a place where different
interpretations can be explored and competing ideas exchanged.
Academic freedom means not only the right to pursue a variety
of interpretations, but the maintenance of standards of truth
and acceptability by one's peers. It is university faculty, not
outside political groups with partisan political agenda, who
are best able to judge the quality of their peers' research and
teaching. This is not just a question of academic autonomy, but
of the future of a democratic society. This is a time in which
we need more thoughtful reflection about the world, not less.
A study by a Harvard sociologist last summer found that "a
greater percentage of social scientists today feels their academic
freedom has been threatened than was the case during the McCarthy
era." It is time to defend the norms of scholarship and
the best traditions of the academy.
http://www.muzzlewatch.com/?p=322
AD HOC COMMITTEE TO DEFEND THE UNIVERSITY
JANUARY 2008
TERROR JUNKIES TAKING OVER CAMPUSES
MICHAEL GOULD-WARTOFSKY, NATION - From
Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest
watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned
their attention to "violent radicalization and homegrown
terrorism prevention"--as it was recently dubbed in a House
of Representatives bill of the same name--have set out to reconquer
that traditional hotbed of radicalization, the university.
Building a homeland security campus and
bringing the university to heel is a seven-step mission:
1. Target dissidents. As the warfare state
has triggered dissent, the campus has attracted increasing scrutiny--with
student protesters in the cross hairs. The government's number-one
target? Peace and justice organizations.
From 2003 to 2007 an unknown number of
them made it into the Pentagon's Threat and Local Observation
Notice system, a secretive domestic spying program ostensibly
designed to track direct "potential terrorist threats"
to the Defense Department itself. In 2006 the ACLU uncovered,
via Freedom of Information Act requests, at least 186 specific
TALON reports on "anti-military protests" in the United
States--some listed as "credible threats"--from student
groups at the University of California, Santa Cruz; State University
of New York, Albany; Georgia State University; and New Mexico
State University, among other campuses.. . .
2. Lock and load. Many campus police departments
are morphing into heavily armed garrisons, equipped with a wide
array of weaponry, from Taser stun guns and pepper guns to shotguns
and semiautomatic rifles. Lock-and-load policies that began in
the 1990s under the rubric of the "war on crime" only
escalated with the President's "war on terror." Each
school shooting--most recently the massacre at Virginia Tech--adds
fuel to the armament flames. . .
3. Keep an eye (or hundreds of them) focused
on campus. Surveillance has become a boom industry nationally--one
that now reaches deep into the heart of campuses. In fact, universities
have witnessed explosive growth since 2001 in the electronic
surveillance of students, faculty and campus workers. . . The
International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators
reports that surveillance cameras have found their way onto at
least half of all colleges, their numbers on any given campus
doubling, tripling or, in a few cases, rising tenfold since September
11, 2001. Such cameras have proliferated by the hundreds on private
campuses, in particular. The University of Pennsylvania, for
instance, has more than 400 watching over it, while Harvard and
Brown have about 200 each. . .
4. Mine student records. Student records
have in recent years been opened up to all manner of data mining
for purposes of investigation, recruitment or just all-purpose
tracking. From 2001 to 2006, in an operation code-named Project
Strike Back, the Education Department teamed up with the FBI
to scour the records of the 14 million students who applied for
federal financial aid each year. The objective? "To identify
potential people of interest," explained an FBI spokesperson
cryptically, especially those linked to "potential terrorist
activity.". . .
5. Track foreign-born students; keep the
undocumented out. Under the auspices of Immigration and Customs
Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been
keeping close tabs on foreign students . . . As of October 2007,
ICE reported that it was actively following 713,000 internationals
on campuses, while keeping more than 4.7 million names in the
database.
6. Take over the curriculum, the classroom
and the laboratory. . . . DHS has launched its own curriculum
under its Office of University Programs, intended, it says, to
"foster a homeland security culture within the academic
community."
The record so far is impressive: DHS has doled out 439 federal
fellowships and scholarships since 2003, providing full tuition
to students who fit "within the homeland security research
enterprise." . . .
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20080128&s=gould-wartofsky
SEPTEMBER 2007
HIGHEST RANKED COLLEGE
NORML - Warren Wilson College in Asheville,
North Carolina is the nation's most marijuana-friendly campus,
according to The Princeton Review's annual sourcebook, "The
Best 366 Colleges." The report, which is based on candid
survey results from 120,000 students nationwide, ranks hundreds
of colleges in various categories such as academic achievement
and quality of life. Warren Wilson College topped Bard College
(New York), the University of Vermont, the University of California
at Santa Cruz, and Lewis & Clark College (Oregon) to emerge
as this year's top school for "higher" learning. The
US Air Force Academy ranked #1 on Princeton's "Top 20"
list of least pot-friendly campuses. Warren Wilson College was
also ranked by The Princeton Review as one of the most politically
active campuses in America.
OTHER RANKINGS
http://www.princetonreview.com/college/research/rankings/rankings.asp
Missing from most of the coverage of the
University of Florida taser incident is what actually led to
it. This
is the first video we have been able to find that includes
the student's entire statement and questions. The police assault
begins at 1:30 (The question doesn't start until 11 seconds into
the tape). John Kerry couldn't even ask the way to the bathroom
in a minute and half, nor could any senator ask a question of
General Petraeus in that short a period. The police actually
first interfere only 30 seconds into the question
JUNE 2007
BLACK COLLEGES RECRUITING WHITE STUDENTS
KATRINA A. GOGGINS, ASSOCIATED PRESS -
White students are being actively recruited [to historically
black colleges], and attracting them has become easier for a
variety of reasons, including the offer of scholarships and lower
tuitions than those paid at non-black schools. Private, historically
black schools cost an average of $10,000 less per year than their
traditionally white counterparts, according to the National Association
for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education.
The head of the association says lower
costs are not the only thing the schools have to offer. Whites
who attend the schools are preparing for an "increasingly
black and brown world," said Lezli Baskerville, the association's
president and CEO. "If you want to know how to live in one,
you can't grow up in an all-white neighborhood, go to a predominantly
white school, white cultural and social events, go to a predominantly
white university and then thrive in a world that is today more
black, more brown than before," Baskerville said.
White students say they've taken valuable
experiences from their time at black colleges. Skin color, the
students say, is much more of a factor away from the campuses
than it is on them.
http://www.blacknews.com/pr/black_college_whites101.html
MAY 2007
TEACHING AT STILLMAN COLLEGE
[This is not a happy story but well worth
reading. St Petersburg Times columnist and editorial board member
Bill Maxwell "kept a promise to himself, to become a professor
at a small historically black college, to nurture needy students
the way that mentors had encouraged him as a young man. His second
year started with promise but ended in despair."
Many teachers - both black and white -
may find some things familiar in this piece. I was reminded of
two things. One was a talk that John Wilson, a black who was
chair of the DC city council, gave to a group of University of
DC students in which Wilson warned them of the limits of playing
the attitude card in getting through life. I remember thinking
how seldom this wise advice is proffered.
The other was some talks I had given to
local and out of town students over the years during which I
learned not to predict what would happen. For example, talking
to a hundred of students from Oklahoma high schools, I was interrupted
ten minutes in by a large black girl who stood and politely said,
"Excuse me, but you've lost me. Could you go over that again?"
I remember thinking: what courage. I never would have dared do
that in high school. Yet another group of out of town students,
when asked by a teacher to list the branches of the federal government
came up with the FBI, CIA and DEA.
On another occasion, talking to some DC
students concerned about violence and drugs in and out of school,
I was struck by the fact that they didn't even know how to ask
the a question, even about something that truly concerned them.
I asked a friend who had taught in the DC public schools about
this and she said, "They're not meant to ask questions;
only answer them."
Yet a year or so later, talking to another
group of students from the same system but a different high school
I found myself being peppered with intelligent questions about
the city's colonial status, clearly the result of having done
their homework. - Sam]
MAXWELL'S TOUR AT STILLMAN COLLEGE
http://www.sptimes.com/2007/05/20/Opinion/A_dream_lay_dying.shtml/
APRIL 2007
HARVARD TURNS DOWN 1,100 APPICANTS WITH
PERFECT 800 MATH SAT SCORES
SAM DILLON, NY TIMES
- Harvard turned down 1,100 student applicants with perfect 800
scores on the SAT math exam. Yale rejected several applicants
with perfect 2400 scores on the three-part SAT, and Princeton
turned away thousands of high school applicants with 4.0 grade
point averages. . . It was the most selective spring in modern
memory at America's elite schools, according to college admissions
officers. . . Stanford received a record 23,956 undergraduate
applications for the fall term, accepting 2,456 students, meaning
the school took 10.3 percent of applicants. Harvard College received
applications from 22,955 students, another record, and accepted
2,058 of them, for an acceptance rate of 9 percent. The university
called that "the lowest admit rate in Harvard's history."
Applications to Columbia numbered 18,081, and the college accepted
1,618 of them, for what was certainly one of the lowest acceptance
rates this spring at an American university: 8.9 percent.
"There's a sense of collective shock
among parents at seeing extraordinarily talented kids getting
rejected," said Susan Gzesh, whose son Max Rothstein is
a senior with an exemplary record at the Laboratory School, a
private school associated with the University of Chicago. Max
applied to 12 top schools and was accepted outright only by Wesleyan,
New York University and the University of Michigan. "Some
of his classmates, with better test scores than his, were rejected
at every Ivy League school," Ms. Gzesh said.
The brutally low acceptance rates this
year were a result of an avalanche of applications to top schools,
which college admissions officials attributed to three factors.
First, a demographic bulge is working through the nation's population
- the children of the baby boomers are graduating from high school
in record numbers. . . Another factor is that more high school
students are enrolling in college immediately after high school.
In the 1970s, less than half of all high school graduates went
directly to college, compared with more than 60 percent today.
. . The third trend driving the frantic competition is that the
average college applicant applies to many more colleges than
in past decades. In the 1960s, fewer than 2 percent of college
freshmen had applied to six or more colleges, whereas in 2006
more than 2 percent reported having applied to 11 or more
MARCH 2007
ST LOUIS CAMPUS REBELS AGAINST YET ANOTHER
CANNED BELTWAY SPEAKER
INSIDE THE BELTWAY, WASHINGTON TIMES - "Let's not 'Meet the Press,'" blares
the headline of a St. Louis University student editorial, complaining
that the choice of NBC Sunday morning talk-show host Tim Russert
as the school's May 2007 commencement speaker "represents
another selection in a disappointing trend that appears to be
emerging."
"For the past four years, seniors
have been treated to uninspiring politicians or uninspiring pundits
as their speaker at graduation," the editorial states. "Moreover,
the decision on who should be the commencement speaker has been
made without consulting the senior class." Commencement
speakers at the Jesuit-run Catholic university in recent years
have ranged from former President Bill Clinton's secretary of
state, Madeleine K. Albright, to former British Prime Minister
John Major. (Wow, we can relate to the students' concerns.) The
graduating seniors add that Mr. Russert has delivered so many
canned commencement addresses to so many colleges and universities
that when he spoke at Harvard's Commencement in 2005 the graduates
played "Tim Russert Bingo."
"Responding to the fact that Russert
consistently gave similar addresses to all of the graduating
classes that he spoke to, those seniors shouted 'Bingo!' whenever
Russert repeated key phrases from other speeches," the editorial
explains. "The choice of commencement speaker should be
one that seniors will remember, not an excuse to play bingo."
At last count, according to Mr. Russert's biography, the TV host
has received 43 honorary doctorate degrees from American colleges
and universities, no doubt running out of wall space to hang
them all.
FEBRUARY 2007
COLLEGE STUDENTS BECOMING MORE NARCISSISTIC
[Missing from this story is any discussion
of the effects of a quarter century of neo-capitalism that has
increased the gap between success and failure, damaged community
and eliminated safety nets. Growing population has had an impact
as well. Such factors have made it harder being a student these
days, encouraging more competitiveness and less cooperation and
weaker community. Add to that the atomization of life encouraged
by modern media and you've got quite a problem.]
DAVID CRARY, ASSOCIATED PRESS - Today's college students are more narcissistic
and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive
new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could
be harmful to personal relationships and American society. .
.
The researchers describe their study as
the largest ever of its type and say students' inventory scores
have risen steadily since the test was introduced in 1982. By
2006, they said, two-thirds of the students had above-average
scores, 30 percent more than in 1982. . .
The study asserts that narcissists "are
more likely to have romantic relationships that are short-lived,
at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth, and to exhibit
game-playing, dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behaviors.".
. .
The researchers traced the phenomenon back
to what they called the "self-esteem movement" that
emerged in the 1980s, asserting that the effort to build self-confidence
had gone too far. As an example, Twenge cited a song commonly
sung to the tune of "Frère Jacques" in preschool:
"I am special, I am special. Look at me.". . .
The new report follows a study released
by the University of California at Los Angeles last month that
found that nearly three-quarters of the freshmen it surveyed
thought it was important to be "very well-off financially."
That compared with 62.5 percent who said the same in 1980, and
42 percent in 1966.
Yet students, while acknowledging some
legitimacy to such findings, don't necessarily accept negative
generalizations .
PROFESSOR FINDS IT IS UNETHICAL IN ILLINOIS
TO BE INTELLIGENT
INSIDE HIGHER EDUCATION - Certainly not
Tony Williams. After passing a new online test on ethics required
of all state employees, [Tony Williams, a tenured professor]
in the English department at Southern Illinois University at
Carbondale received a notice from his university ethics officer
and from the state inspector general that he was not in compliance
with state ethics regulations, a failure that state officials
said could result in punishment that included dismissal. The
reason? He had completed the test too quickly.
"It's a very simple test designed
for thousands of state employees, and it's more relevant for
people in purchasing or positions of power," he said. "Anybody
with a fair degree of intelligence can get through it quickly."
However, state officials have asked him
to complete another ethics training course for "noncompliant
employees," which they sent him in the mail. The letter
sent to the professors states how long it took them to complete
the test, and reads: "Contrary to instructions, you appear
to have failed to carefully read and review the subject matter
contained in the program's introduction and the lessons."
After completing the course, Williams and others were told to
sign a letter acknowledging their participation in the "ethics
orientation for noncompliant employees.". . .
Drawing a line, he and at least three other
professors at Southern Illinois refused to sign the form by last
week's deadline. "We're going to sue the state for the illegality
of this training," said Marvin Zeman, a professor of math
and president of the faculty union, which is affilated with the
National Education Association.
Zeman has also refused the sign the form.
His letter from the state inspector general charged that he had
completed the test in only 6.18 minutes. . .
"Each question had four choices and
you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out,"
he said. . .
http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/01/23/siuc
Students learn by e-mail
when their laundry is done
STUDENTS LEARN BY E-MAIL WHEN THEIR
LAUNDRY IS DONE
PRESS CITIZEN, IOWA - Thanks
to software installed along with new high-efficiency washers
last fall, the school's dormitory residents can receive e-mail
alerts when their laundry cycles have finished. The school also
has a new Web-based service, called Laundry View, that lets residents
look online for open washers and dryers. . . The school paid
for the $13,000 annual software fee in part by raising the cost
of a load of laundry by about 50 cents, according to Fitzgerald.
The company, Laundry View Monitoring Service, has been providing
the software to colleges and universities since 2004.
USC LIMITS FREE SPEECH TO A FEW ACRES
OF CAMPUS
DAILY TROJAN, USC, CA
- The USC Student Coalition Against Labor Exploitation held a
knit-in in front of the Pertusati University Bookstore to protest
the university's contracts with manufacturers it claims use sweatshop
labor to produce Trojan merchandise, but the knit-in was broken
up minutes after the participants began knitting.
Lori White, associate vice president for
Student Affairs, told SCALE it would have to relocate its protest
to Hahn Plaza, an area near Tommy Trojan and the Student Union
that allows for large group gatherings without informing the
university beforehand.
"It's very clear about where groups
of students can be without having prior approval," White
said. "This group did not have prior approval to be here;
they (could) do it over in (Hahn Plaza), absolutely no problem."
SCALE complied with White's request, but not without questions.
. .
JANUARY 2007
THE COST OF FOOTBALL TO HIGHER EDUCATION
[From Campus Progress]
ANDREW KROLL, WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY
On Nov. 16, USA Today reported on a recent investigation into
the salaries of NCAA Division I-A head football coaches. . .
According to the article, the average head football coach of
a premier program earns $950,000 per year, not including benefits,
incentives, and other perks which include, but are not limited
to: subsidized housing, use of private jets, million-dollar annuities,
and family travel accounts. The study also found that at least
42 of the 119 coaches will earn $1 million or more this year.
The University of Oklahoma's head football coach Bob Stoops makes
a reported $3.35 million per year, highest among Division I-A
coaches.
As the salaries of college football coaches
continue to rise, the overwhelming discrepancy in pay between
coaches and faculty members grows. Universities now pay these
coaches six- and seven-figure salaries along with lucrative bonuses
and incentives, while the salaries of the faculty at the same
institutions of higher learning pale by comparison. For example,
the average salary of a full professor at the University of Oklahoma
is $95,650 - roughly $3.2 million less than head coach Bob Stoops.
InsideHigherEd.com found that the average salary for a full professor
at a four-year institution in 2005-06 was roughly $83,000, $867,902
less than the average head coach's at a premier Division I-A
school. . .
The most prominent example of a group of
universities emphasizing academics over athletics is the Ivy
League. Just after the 1981 season, the eight Ivy League football
teams were downgraded from Division I-A to I-AA due to an argument
with the NCAA over television revenue. Instead of appealing this
decision, the Ivy League presidents gladly walked away from Division
I-A football. A Nov. 17 article in The New York Times examined
the state of Ivy League football 25 years after it made the switch
from Division I-A to I-AA. While several coaches and athletic
directors believe Ivy League football could exist successfully
in Division I-A both academically and athletically, the consensus
among Ivy League university presidents is that the move to Division
I-AA football was the right one. . .
One might think that the revenue these
football programs bring in is split up between both athletic
and academic programs, so it would benefit the academic as well
as athletic programs. Unfortunately that is rarely the case,
as the athletic departments of many NCAA Division I schools actually
operate independently of the university itself, with all athletic
earnings going into a separate budget solely for themselves.
The athletic department then uses these earnings for athletics-only
purposes, such as paying the salaries of their coaches, building
new facilities, and ensuring that all existing sports are fully
funded. . .
Universities ought to reduce coaches' salaries
and stop sending the message that winning football games is 10
times as important as the hard work of higher education. . .
[Andy Kroll is a junior at Western Michigan
University and an NCAA Division I college soccer player]
http://www.campusprogress.org/features/1372/why-coach-should-fly-coach
DECEMBER 2006
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY'S BRAIN-WASHING
PROGRAM UNDER ATTACK
FOUNDATION FOR INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS IN EDUCAITON
- Michigan State University's "student accountability in
community seminar" forces students whose speech or behavior
is deemed unacceptable to undergo ideological reeducation at
their own expense. FIRE is challenging Michigan State to dismantle
this unconstitutional program.
"Michigan State's SAC program is simply
one of the most invasive attempts at reeducation that FIRE has
ever seen, yet it has been allowed to exist at the university
for years," FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. "As
bad as it is to tell citizens in a free society what they can't
say, it is even worse to tell them what they must say. Michigan
State's program is an immoral and unconstitutional program of
compelled speech, blatant thought reform, and pseudo-psychology."
According to the program's materials, SAC
is an "early intervention" for students who use such
"power-and-control tactics" as "male-white privilege"
and "obfuscation," which the university cryptically
defines as "any action of obscuring, concealing, or changing
people's perceptions that result in your advantage and/or another's
disadvantage." Students can be required to attend SAC if
they demonstrate what a judicial administrator arbitrarily deems
aggressive behavior, past examples of which have included slamming
a door during an argument or playing a practical joke. Students
can also be required to attend SAC for engaging in various types
of constitutionally protected speech, including "insulting
instructors" or "m king sexist, homophobic, or racist
remarks at a meeting." When participation in SAC is required,
"non-compliance typically results in a hold being placed
on the student's account," an action that leaves the student
unable to register for classes and thus effectively expelled
from the university. Students are required to pay the cost of
the SAC sessions.
Once in the program, students are instructed
to answer a series of written questionnaires. In their answers,
students must specifically describe how they are taking "full
responsibility" for their offensive behavior and must do
so using language that the director of the session deems acceptable.
Most students will be asked to fill out this questionnaire multiple
times, slowly inching closer to what administrators deem to be
"correct" responses.
In a letter to Michigan State President
Lou Anna K. Simon, FIRE pointed out the stark contradiction between
the SAC program and the values of a free society: "At the
heart of all concepts relating to freedom of the mind is a recognition
of our own limitations - like us, those in power are neither
omniscient nor omnipotent, and therefore have no right to dictate
to others what their deepest personal beliefs must be. Concern
for free speech and freedom of conscience is rooted in the wisdom
of humility and restraint. The SAC program, which presumes to
show students the specific ideological assumptions they need
to be better people, crosses the boundary from punishment into
invasive and immoral thought reform. We can think of no way in
which the SAC program can be maintained consistent with the ideals
of a free society."
FIRE's letter to President Simon also underscored
Michigan State's legal obligation to abide by the First Amendment.
FIRE reminded her of the Supreme Court's decision in West Virginia
Board of Education v. Barnette, a case decided in the midst of
World War II that remains the law of the land. Justice Robert
H. Jackson, writing for the Court, declared, "If there is
any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that
no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox
in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion
or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."
http://thefire.org
NOVEMBER 2006
MORE COLLEGES ON THE TAKE FROM INTELLIGENCE
AGENCIES
RICHARD WILLING, USA TODAY
- The U.S. intelligence community pours millions into higher
education, paying for hundreds of scholarships, intelligence-related
courses and fellowships at nearly a dozen universities, public
documents and interviews with officials show. Last month, the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence more than doubled
the number of schools in its program. The Department of Homeland
Security is also developing a program for nuclear scientists.
The sponsoring agencies, including the
CIA, say the programs help ensure they get enough recruits skilled
to wage the war on terrorism. The programs began in 2004. Agencies
also pay for internships and summer "spy camps" aimed
at attracting high school students to study intelligence. . .
The programs have revived a decades-old
debate about the proper relationship between intelligence agencies
and academia. They have also invited comparisons to the 1950s,
when the FBI sometimes encouraged students to report on professors'
political leanings, and the 1960s, when the CIA paid for the
National Student Association and tapped its members for intelligence
work.
One program, the Pat Roberts Intelligence
Scholars, keeps the identities of its participants secret.
"Secrecy, in particular, is a problem,"
says David Price, anthropology professor at St. Martin's University
in Spokane, Wash., and author of a book on FBI surveillance of
academics in the 1950s. "I've looked at far too many old
FBI documents to ever be comfortable with the idea" of such
agencies funding students, Price says.
Academic and intelligence communities share
a complicated history. During World War II, the Office of Strategic
Services, the CIA's predecessor, recruited historians, anthropologists
and other specialists, according to historian Robin Winks' book
Cloak & Gown. In the 1950s and '60s, faculty members at Yale,
Harvard, MIT and other elite universities served as talent spotters,
steering promising students into intelligence careers.
Intelligence recruiters also liked small
Catholic schools such as Trinity University in Washington, D.C.,
says Robert Maguire, an international relations professor who
coordinates Trinity's intelligence studies program. . .
UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS MAKING HUGE SALARIES
BOSTON GLOBE - About
112 of the 853 public and private university presidents surveyed
said they had pay and benefits packages of more than half a million
dollars, according to an annual report being published today
in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The jump was more prominent
among public university presidents: 42 presidents earned more
than half a million dollars in the current survey, rising from
23 in the previous one. The median pay package for those leaders
was $374,846, about 4 percent higher than the previous median
of $360,000.
Private school presidents continued to be paid more, however.
Seventy of those leaders earned more than $500,000. . .
John Curtis, director of research and public
policy at the American Association of University Professors,
was critical of the trend. "Our concern is that that's not
appropriate, when virtually all of the colleges and universities
we talk about are still not-for-profit organizations, and that
they also supposedly operate for the benefit of society, for
the common good," he told Bloomberg News.
SEPTEMBER 2006
BRITISH COLLEGE STUDENTS TOLD: TURN
UP OR FACE EXPULSION
JAMES MEIKLE, GUARDIAN - Thousands of undergraduate
students are being forced to sign good behaviour contracts with
their universities and warned they could be expelled if they
breach regulations, the Guardian has learned. The contracts put
the onus on students to attend lectures and tutorials, but have
been condemned by the National Union of Students. The NUS claims
the contracts are "one-sided", and do not spell out
what standard of teaching students should expect to get for the
L3,000-a-year top-up tuition fees they are being charged.
Oxford and Chester Universities have introduced
the contracts for students this year and legal agreements are
already in place at Bristol and Nottingham Trent. The NUS believes
it is the start of a disturbing trend that could be adopted by
other universities.
At Oxford, which already makes such demands
of its postgraduates, students must sign a document saying any
breach of regulations or codes of practice about their conduct,
studies and residences "may lead to your expulsion from
the university or other sanctions. . .
The executive of the National Union of
Students is challenging what it sees as a piecemeal, university-by-university
process. It will oppose any arrangements not agreed with students
and is calling for a debate over the obligations on all sides
in an era when most undergraduates in England must use loans
to fund their fees.
Three years ago, a Wolverhampton University
law student received £30,000 in an out-of-court deal after
claiming the course had not lived up to the prospectus.
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,1869544,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=1
SAM SMITH, MULTITUDES - I drifted into
a schedule at Harvard that kept me up drinking - once a whole
fifth of bourbon before bed - and talking much of the night while
sleeping through classes. By the middle of freshman year I received
a postcard from my English instructor: "Mr. Coles requests
the pleasure of your attendance at the next regular meeting of
his course." . . . It has been part of my personal myth
that I never went to class, did most of my studying during the
two-week reading period before exams, and generally eschewed
all academic matters while interned in Harvard Square. While
there is some truth to this, it has been deeply exaggerated.
I did attend and pass a large number of courses, I must have
studied for them (my notes suggest at one point a goal of 20
hours a week, with the current week logging nine and a half),
I truly enjoyed some of my courses and Bart J. Bok scribbled
on one of my papers "Very good summary of the solar prominence
situation." At the same time, however, I recall an exceptional
amount of time spent on the banks of the Charles in the spring
trying to cram 600 pages of information into my head in 48 hours,
being unable to stay awake for more than 20 minutes in one of
the comfortable chairs in Lamont Library, and generally living
on the edge.
I think what finally almost did me in can
be best explained by the analogy of criminality. I had started,
much as the criminal life commences, with some mild offense such
as shoplifting or hubcap stealing. When I found I could get through
courses I didn't like by relying on native wit and a long reading
period, I began to take ever greater risks, stealing, so to speak,
cars and mugging little old ladies. Now it was time to hit the
bank. I don't know why I took "Darkness at Noon," -
as the slide laden Fine Arts 13 was called - although perhaps
it was out of a residual urge to pander to my parents' cultural
obsessions. But how I thought I could pass a course whose substance
consisted of hundreds of slides without actually looking at them
is now beyond any explanation other than the pathological. I
robbed the bank and was caught. I flunked the first semester.
I hold no grudge against the professor or Harvard for this. Any
student who identifies an architectural drawing of Notre Dame's
main floor as a Renaissance garden deserves to flunk. (I sat
in the back of the room and my hangover and lack of sleep truly
gave the columns a bush-like fuzziness).
http://prorev.com/harvard.htm
COLLEGE APPLICANT BUBBLE ABOUT TO BURST
JULIE STEINBERG, DAILY PENNSYLVANIAN -
For the past 10 years, a swell in the number of students applying
to college has made the admissions process extremely competitive.
All that is about to change. Most of the "baby boom letter"
generation -- those born in the 1980s and early 1990s -- will
have degrees by 2009. After that, the number of new high-school
graduates will start to decline.
And a shrinking applicant pool means that getting into many colleges
will get easier.
Though the number of new high-school graduates
is projected to drop 4 percent in 2009, Northeastern states will
experience an even steeper decline. The Department of Education
predicts a 10-percent decline in Pennsylvania. . . Large numbers
of students are still likely to apply to the nation's top schools.
. . Schools that will face challenges will likely be smaller,
private colleges. . .
Some education officials don't expect the
decline to pose a significant problem. . . The National Center
for Education Statistics, for example, projects that undergraduate
enrollment will continue to swell, according to Frank Balz, a
spokesman for the National Association for Independent Colleges
and Universities, an advocacy group. An influx of immigrants
to the U.S., he said, will constitute a "significant portion
of enrollment growth," but are not included in predictions
of the decline in graduating high school students.
http://www.uwire.com/content//topnews090806001.html
THE PRICE OF ADMISSIONS
Daniel Golden
 INSIDE HIGHER ED
- That American higher education is not a pure meritocracy is,
of course, hardly news. But Golden's book has a level of detail
about the degree to which he says some colleges favor the privileged
that will embarrass many an admissions officer. Golden names
names of students - and includes details about their academic
records before college and once there that raise questions about
the admissions decisions being made. For good measure, he attacks
Title IX (saying that the women's teams colleges create favor
wealthy, white applicants), preferences for faculty children
(ditto, although substitute middle class for wealthy), and accuses
colleges of making Asian applicants the "new Jews"
and holding them to much higher standards than other students.
. .
In an interview, Golden said that he became
interested in the issue of preferences for the wealthy while
he was covering the judicial battles over affirmative action
at the University of Michigan. "Everyone was writing about
the boosts [in the admissions process] for minority applicants,"
he said, but he started to realize that there were also explicit
boosts for the extremely wealthy and alumni children. He was
struck, Golden said, by how little attention such preferences
received. . .
Judging from those who have favorably blurbed
his book, Golden is reaching both sides in the affirmative action
debate. Support comes from strong supporters of affirmative action
like Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Lani Guinier, with the latter
saying that the book shows that "the already privileged
are the truly preferred." But the book also wins an endorsement
from Diane Ravitch, a critic of affirmative action, who writes
that while she "didn't want to believe" the book's
thesis, she found the evidence to be "overwhelming."
http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/05/admit
ORDER
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=1400097967/progressiverevieA/
COLLEGE STUDENTS SEGREGATING THEMSELVES
IN THEMED HOUSING
SARAH SCHWEITZER, BOSTON GLOBE - At universities and colleges, students with shared
interests are increasingly funneling into shared living spaces
called thematic housing. The idea took root in the 1970s but
is expanding dramatically on campuses now as students demand
such niche housing, and schools eagerly supply it in a hyper-competitive
college market.
The move, schools say, also has an academic
aspect. By creating housing centered on a theme, colleges can
inject more structured learning into residence halls. Faculty
members are assigned to help students plan and organize campus
events that promote their interests -- be it social justice,
substance-free living, or cooking. . . The themes vary widely.
Some are broad, even amorphous. At Brandeis, for example, in
addition to social justice, the school offers living space centered
on global affairs, health and wellness, and the arts. The themes
were chosen based on focus group input gathered two years ago.
Other schools offer more narrowly focused
themes, often derived from individual student requests. At Colgate
University, students interested in foreign film can live together;
at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., students interested in
recycling and environmental issues share quarters, and at Wesleyan
University, which has 28 themed houses, students interested in
Buddhism have living space to themselves, as do students who
deem themselves "eclectic." Students say a major draw
of the housing is the sense of community it offers, an element
many say was lacking in their previous housing assignments. .
.
Officials at some colleges shy away from
creating themed residence halls, saying they promote self-segregation
and restrict the sort of whimsical learning that happens in an
ad hoc living environment. Williams College , for one, states
unequivocally on its website that the school provides "no
special interest housing.". . .
AUGUST 2006
BERKELEY TO HIRE VICE CHANCELLOR FOR
"EQUITY & INCLUSION" AT NEARLY $300K A YEAR
MATIER AND ROSS, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE - UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau has just
announced he's creating the new post of vice chancellor for equity
and inclusion -- a job that not only has an impressive title,
but an equally impressive salary of between $182,000 and $282,000
a year. Plus an office budget in excess of $4 million.
The goal isn't so much to recruit more
minorities but rather to ensure students, faculty and staff are
"fully respected for their individuality and what they represent,"
Birgeneau said. Birgeneau said the aim is "to prize our
diversity and learn from it and to appreciate people for being
part of the whole but also for what they as individuals bring
to Berkeley.". . . As of last spring, minorities made up
58 percent of UC Berkeley's support staff -- but only 6 percent
of the top campus ranks.
JULY 2006
DO STUDENTS WRITE WORSE NOW?
LAURENCE MUSGROVE, INSIDE HIGHER ED - In
a 1986 study described in College Composition and Communication
under the title "Frequency of Formal Errors in Current College
Writing, or Ma and Pa Kettle Do Research," Robert J. Connors
and Andrea A. Lunsford discovered that "college students
are not making more formal errors in writing than they used to."
They compared error patterns identified by researchers in 1917
and 1930 and found that though the length of paper assignments
had consistently increased over nearly 80 years, "the formal
skills of students have not declined precipitously."
Further they claim, "in spite of open
admissions, in spite of radical shifts in demographics of college
students, in spite of the huge escalation in population percentage
as well as in sheer numbers of people attending American colleges,
freshman are still committing approximately the same number of
formal errors per 100 words they were before World War I.".
. .
In another College Composition and Communication
article, published in 1990 and titled "Frequency of Errors
in Essays by College Freshmen and by Professional Writers,"
Gary Sloan both confirmed the Connors and Lunsford study and
discovered that even though professional writers are often served
up as models for student writers, their writing may contribute
to student confusion about correctness because their essays contain
almost as many errors as first-year themes. Sloan selected 20
published essays from a college composition reader and 20 student
essays composed during the last week of an introductory writing
course. He then analyzed these two samples using an error analysis
technique derived from a grammar handbook commonly used in college
writing courses.
His conclusion? "Connors and Lunsford
found 9.53 errors per essay or 2.26 errors per 100 words; my
figures for the same are 9.60 and 2.04. The professionals have
8.55 errors per writer and 1.82 per 100 words." Further,
given the fact that misspelling was the most common error in
student writing, but absent in professional writing, the student
error count would have actually been less than the professional
average if students had only spellchecked their essays - again
an editing technology not available to many students in 1990.
JUNE 2006
YOUTH DRINKING LAWS: UNCONSTITUTIONAL
AND DON'T WORK
THE WASHINGTON POST RECENTLY ran a complementary
article about efforts by the George Mason University police to
harass and arrest student drinkers. As we have pointed out from
time to time, the prohibition against drinking by citizens 18-20
years old is unconstitutional although no court will admit the
fact. It also doesn't make sense as the study below points out.
STUDY BY THOMAS S. DEE AND WILLIAM N. EVANS
- Behavioral policies such as seat-belt-use laws, minimum legal
drinking ages, and some policies designed to limit drunk driving
have improved teen traffic safety over the past 20 years. However,
these policies appear to explain only a modest fraction of the
enormous gains in teen traffic safety. . . [The evidence] suggests
that experiential learning may be an important component of teens'
maturation through a variety of risky driving behaviors. The
relevance of such learning by doing implies that the new graduated
licensing systems may be an effective policy for generating further
gains in teen traffic safety. Such licensing regulations require
that new drivers acquire experience in low-risk settings before
moving into more complex driving environments.
http://www.youthrights.org/docs/DeeEvansDrinkingAgeStudy.pdf
YOUTH DRINKING FAQ
[From the National Youth Rights Association]
How many countries have a drinking age
of 21?
Only four on the entire planet. Ukraine,
South Korea, Malaysia, and the United States. All other countries(out
of like 200) have lower drinking ages, and many don't have any
drinking age at all.
Did raising the drinking age save 20,000
lives?
No. This is one of the most misguided and
over used statistics circulated by the youth prohibitionist movement.
The truth is, as researchers Peter Asch and David Levy put it,
the "minimum legal drinking age is not a significant-or
even a perceptible-factor in the fatality experience of all drivers
or of young drivers." In an in-depth and unrefuted study
Asch and Levy prove that raising the drinking age merely transferred
lost lives from the 18-20 bracket to the 21-24 age group. The
problem with the 20,000 lives saved statistic is that it looks
only at deaths for people aged 18-20. This is like rating the
safety of a car by looking only at the seat belt and ignoring
the fact that the car frequently tips over while driving. Raising
the drinking age may have reduced deaths 18-20 but resulted in
more deaths among people 21-24. . .
People aren't mature enough to handle alcohol
till you turn 21. Right?
When you are 18 you are judged mature enough
to vote, hold public office, serve on juries, serve in the military,
fly airplanes, sign contracts and so on. Why is drinking a beer
an act of greater responsibility and maturity than flying an
airplane or serving your country at war?
Doesn't your body develop up till the age
of 21?
Youth prohibition activists ignore the
fact that maturity is a gradual but uneven process that continues
throughout life and is not complete on one's twenty-first birthday.
Moreover, they ignore the proven medical fact that the moderate
consumption of alcohol is associated with better health and greater
longevity than is either abstaining or abusing alcohol. The simplest
way to prove this argument is for you to look in your medicine
cabinet or go to the drug store. Every single over the counter
medication defines an adult dose for ages 12 and up. Not 21,
but 12. If the FDA can determine that a 12 year old is developed
enough to have an equal dose of Tylenol, or Sudafed, or Dramamine,
or Zantac 75, then an 18 year old is developed enough to have
a glass of wine with dinner.
NYRA argues that a strict no-use policy
towards alcohol causes many problems. How will simply lowering
the drinking age from 21 to 18 change this?
The National Youth Rights Association doesn't
just feel we should lower the age from 21 to 18 and change nothing
else. We feel larger change must occur for people under 18 as
well. Alcohol must be introduced gradually and at younger ages
(12 perhaps) as they do in Europe. Young people must be allowed
to get their feet wet through the introduction of alcohol in
small amounts in safe environments like the home. Any permanent
change to alcohol policy must stress this above all. NYRA feels
this period of gradual introduction to alcohol may take a few
years, but in no way should it last until 21. If an ending year
for introduction is to be named, 18 is far more reasonable.
I'm over 21, do I have a reason to care
about the Drinking Age?
Yes. The strict and blind enforcement of
the drinking age creates many victims over and under 21. Problems
for people over 21 include the hassle of being carded at bars
and restaurants, and the problem of social segregation. When
going out with friends the drinking age drives a wedge between
friends over and under 21. Often they are unable to hang out
at the same places. Most troubling is what happens to parents
who recognize the inevitability of underage drinking will try
to provide safe, supervised places for high school students to
have parties. These parents can be punished to ridiculous lengths
for their attempts to allow safe drinking. In February 2003 Elsa
and George Robinson were sentenced to 8 years in prison for providing
alcohol at their son's birthday party. That's right, 8 years.
The harsh drinking age ruins more lives than it helps.
http://www.youthrights.org/dafaq.shtml
STUDENTS PREFER INTERNET TO LIBRARIES
JAMIE VANGEEST, MINNESOTA DAILY - College
students use libraries more than most people, but according to
a new report, the Internet still comes first when looking for
information. The findings evaluated 396 college students' views
about libraries and information resources. The report found that
college students use library resources more than the general
population, but the Internet is the first place students go for
information. . .
Eighty-nine percent of students use Internet
search engines such as Google and Yahoo, while 2 percent start
an information search with a library Web site, according to the
report released this month. . . Eighteen percent of college students
use a public library weekly while only 13 percent of the respondents
overall do, according to the report. . . The numbers for library
use were consistent across the six countries in the study.
http://www.uwire.com/content//topnews061406002.html
LIFE COACHES FOR 20-SOMETHINGS
PATRIK JONSSON, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
- Life coaches are the upbeat advice-givers known for helping
harried CEOs acquire work-life balance. But today, more of them
are playing Dr. Phil for 20-somethings. In some ways, it's a
natural tactic for a generation that grew up watching their parents
pay people to solve their problems. But critics wonder whether
such shortcuts undermine the value of real, sometimes bitter,
experiences in building character. . .
It's a growing industry, featuring numerous
book titles, Internet discussion boards, life coaches, and workshops.
Television networks are getting hip, too. "How To Get The
Guy," a new ABC reality show that premieres June 12, employs
life coaches to help young women score the perfect mate. . .
Experts say today's college graduates -
the front end of Generation Y - differ from their baby-boomer
parents, who developed a reputation for navel-gazing. Neither
do they have the same independent, sometimes cynical streak that
defined their Generation X predecessors. The current crop, observers
say, is coddled, accustomed to their parents hiring tutors or
college-application consultants.
"This group isn't about hard knocks;
they're an overscheduled generation that had piano lessons and
tutors and very little free time to make mistakes," says
Ms. Sopp. "It doesn't surprise me that they would seek advice,
because they don't have a lot of experience.". . .
There's another factor in the rush toward
life consultants, experts say: parents. Human resources managers
are increasingly noticing that parents are accompanying their
children to job interviews, according to a COE survey. Indeed,
several attendees at the Atlanta sessions were there at the behest
of mom and dad.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0605/p01s04-ussc.html?s=hns
MARCH 2006
HOW HARVARD HELPED TO KILL AMERICA'S
ENJOYMENT OF SOCCER
MARK SALISBURY, AMERICAN SOCCER HISTORY
ARCHIVES - Many have suggested that baseball and football are
solely American inventions. Yet soccer, football, and baseball
evolved in virtually the same way. Just as baseball developed
out of modifications made to the British game of rounders (the
Abner Doubleday myth has been proven thoroughly unfounded), and
football evolved from an unorganized version of English rugby,
so soccer grew out of informalized versions of a game that had
been played for centuries on both sides of the Atlantic. The
same precursor to soccer played in England was recorded in Boston
in 1657. The first recorded soccer club formed in the U.S. was
the Oneida Football Club, which played on Boston Common from
1862-1865. This predates the formation of the English Football
Association in 1863. The idea that soccer is originally less
American than baseball and football was invented much later,
with little basis in historical fact.
Though soccer made a brief appearance as
an intercollegiate sport in the Ivy League between 1869 and 1875,
Harvard had refused to compete under the soccer rules, proclaimed
the rugby rules more "manly." Harvard had been the
center of the Muscular Christianity movement since the 1850s,
and their inclination toward more physical games had long been
demonstrated in the annual "Bloody Monday" - a free-for
all brawl between sophomores and freshmen. In a powerful display
of Harvard's prestige, Princeton, Columbia, and Yale coalesced
and switched from soccer to rugby at the 1876 formation of the
Intercollegiate Football Association in order to compete with
Harvard. By 1900, Ivy League rugby had metamorphosed into American
football, which Walter Camp, the father of American football,
hailed in Harper's Weekly as a great scientific advancement over
the unorganized kicking game that was football's predecessor.
The popular press was quick to glamorize
American football as the crowning portrayal of America's cultural
and intellectual superiority over the rest of the world - particularly
its English forbearers. Newspaper and magazine articles regularly
compare American football and English football - and invariably
found the American game more manly and more progressive. They
took incredible license in concocting tales to prove football
the ultimate American game. The New York World claimed in 1885,
just nine years after rugby rules had been adopted by the Intercollegiate
Football Association, that "when George Washington's father
was a boy learning his ABC's the lads of Yale College used to
play foot-ball. Long before the blue stars of the American flag
were born the boys of Princeton played the same game." In
1889, the New York Evening World even published an illustration
of what it claimed to be "The Original Football Game, 4-11-44
B.C.," complete with the markings of aged parchment. Football
games were turned into fashionable spectacles for the trendy
social elites, and anyone wanting themselves identified as truly
American was strongly encouraged to cheer on their favorite Ivy
League team.
Such outlandish attempts to prove football's
supreme destiny served to relegate soccer to insignificance.
While coverage of six or seven college football games every fall
averaged 3-4 full pages each including illustrations by 1895,
the hundreds of amateur soccer teams throughout the northeast
garnered no more than 2-3 column inches in the local paper.
But just because soccer had vanished from
the college campuses did not mean it did not exist. On the contrary,
soccer continued to be passionately played and followed by millions
of first or second generation Americans, sponsored by social
clubs and industries scattered throughout the major industrial
centers. Even in San Francisco in 1909, senior league matches
drew crowds between six and seven thousand. Teams like the Brooklyn
Wanders, Fall River Rovers, and Bethlehem Steel Football Club
regularly produced great teams and great players from both American
and foreign-born stock. Fall River beat the legendary Corinthians
of England 3-0 in front of 8000 fans in 1906. An American player
who starred on one of these teams often found a professional
career waiting for him in England or Scotland.
But despite the number of American-born
soccer players and youths who had learned the game in the states,
soccer was continually tagged as an ethnic sport. As early as
1915, a New York Times article quoted the physical director at
Northwestern (IL) saying, "We do not believe in its [soccer's]
success in the ordinary college community. It takes a leaven
of good Scotch, English, and Scandinavian boys to make it a success."
The derisive "ethnic" tag continues to be a stumbling
block to the success of soccer in the mainstream. . .
While football was portrayed as a manly,
virile game representing all that was good about capitalist America,
soccer was reintroduced as a return to the gentlemanly ideal
of amateur sportsmanship. Football was often called "a moral
agent" or "a training for life." In a 1905 editorial
in The Independent, the author proclaimed football to be the
very "epitome of our commonwealth, the real national game,
the symbol of our civilization." . . .
However, football was never a participation
sport. It was a battle for survival, weeding out the lesser men
through a contest that demanded stature, strength, character,
and the ability to play with pain. Soccer was all-inclusive;
a game where everybody could enjoy the benefits of outdoor, physical
exercise. Though it was a good argument for a gym class, it stripped
soccer of its ability to create collegiate heroes like the football
gods worshipped weekly in the popular press. Soccer could not
embody the essential American character traits because it was
either ethnic or exercise. Had soccer been presented as a fiercely
contested game that taught the fastest, strongest, most intelligent
team how to win through determination and teamwork, the history
of soccer in this country might have been much different.
http://www.sover.net/~spectrum/hist1.html
FEBRUARY 2006
WAR ON THE YOUNG: STATES CHARGE YOUTHS
FOR ALCOHOL CONTENT EVEN WITHOUT DRINK IN HAND
DAVID A. FAHRENTHOLD WASHINGTON POST - In New Hampshire. . . minors can be arrested for
what is colloquially called "internal possession" of
alcohol, to the point of being intoxicated. In a break with legal
tradition, an underage person with drinks in his or her system
often faces the same charge as one with a drink in hand. Similar
statutes are now on the books in a handful of other states. Together,
they've taken the campaign against underage drinking to a place
it has rarely been before: down the gullet and into the bloodstream
of teenage imbibers. But they have also spawned criticism from
some legal scholars, who say the laws are pushing the definition
of a real possession charge.
"When the law makes the offense simply
a biological fact, of simply having a certain chemical in one's
body, that steps over a line in the law that has been traditionally
accepted," said Richard J. Bonnie, a law professor at the
University of Virginia who has studied underage drinking. Under
the new law, police didn't have to establish when and how a minor
had become intoxicated. They needed only to determine that the
minor was intoxicated, with the alcohol inside them.
COLLEGE STUDENTS FORM THINK TANK
STUDENTS AROUND the country are forming
chapters of something called the Roosevelt Institution (after
Franklin, Eleanor and Teddy), campus think tanks staffed by the
young to compete with the hallowed halls of academic anachronism
already sprinkled across this land and in your nation's capital
According to the group, "We're hopeful,
passionate, pragmatic, and bright. We don't have ideological
or political debts. The future is ours and we get it. We write
theses about how to reduce carbon emissions, volunteer to help
improve public education for low-income youth, and raise money
to fight AIDS in Africa. We have access to our faculties, to
the world's best research tools, to unique interdisciplinary
programs on each campus -- and to each other.
"But our intellectual capital is an
underutilized asset -- we don't have access to the policy process.
The Roosevelt Institution is a national network of student think
tanks that provide the organizational infrastructure to get student
ideas into the public discourse. We have standing relationships
with politicians and policymakers, media outlets, foundations,
and other think tanks, and are building more by the day."
So they certainly have the unabashed self
esteem of a think typical tanker, but we confess to some concern
that it is not the absence of ideas that has the country in such
a mess, but a lack of action of their behalf. The idea of college
students setting out to change the world by just doing more thinking
is actually quite depressing, especially when you consider some
of the very Washington and unstudent-like language they're using:
"Giving fellows access to a group and a discussion forum
can allow us to see niches in the policy discourse that we can
fill.. . . In the demand-driven third research model, fellows
turn to outside experts for advice on policy papers that will
be effective and will find a market in the outside world. Advocacy
organizations, policymakers, and fellows at other think tanks
will have a strong sense of high-salience issues that are not
being addressed."
Perhaps the students should consider what
Teddy Roosevelt said at the Sorbonne in 1910, "It is not
the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong
man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose
face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly,
who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is
no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great
enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy
cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high
achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he
fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be
with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor
defeat."
http://rooseveltinstitution.org/
ADVISORY BOARD
http://rooseveltinstitution.org/advisoryboard
JANUARY 2006
PENTAGON SAYS BERKELEY, NYU AND UNIVERSITY
OF WISCONSIN POSSIBLE THREAT TO NATIONAL SECURITY
MEG RAFFERTY, BOSTON UNIV DAILY FREE PRESS
- According to the Pentagon, several universities in the U.S.
may pose a danger to national security.
On-campus protests against military recruitment landed eight
national universities, including New York University and University
of California-Berkeley, on a Pentagon watch list for being threats
to national security. . .
According to the document, all of the campus
protests were aimed at campus recruiters and were held at the
New York University, the State University of New York at Albany,
Southern Connecticut State University, City College of the City
University of New York, UC-Berkeley and UC-Santa Cruz, an unspecified
campus of the University of Wisconsin and "a New Jersey
university."
"We were surprised, to say the least,
that our university was on the list," said Josh Taylor,
a New York University spokesperson. "We were a bit concerned,
understandably, because we are not entirely clear how we wound
up on it.". . .
After Sept. 11th, 2001, the Department
of Defense developed a database of "unfiltered" threat
information called the Threat and Local Observation Notice, or
TALON. . . According to an unclassified Pentagon document, the
TALON report is a web-based entry form that lists reportable
events, or "non-specific threats to DOD interests."
These threats include: suspected surveillance of DoD facilities
and personnel, threats of security, bomb threats and unusual
repetitive activity. The only university to be deemed as a "credible"
threat in the expansive DOD document was the UCSC.
The targeted event, a non-violent Students
Against War protest at UCSC, was held on April 5 and drew more
than 250 students and some faculty who were opposed to military
recruiting at an on-campus college career fair.
http://www.uwire.com/content//topnews012406001.html
TEXTBOOK COSTS RISING BEYOND STUDENTS'
REACH
SUSAN KINZIE WASHINGTON POST
- Textbook prices have been rising at double the rate of inflation
for the past two decades, according to a Government Accountability
Office study. In Virginia, more than 40 percent of students surveyed
by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia said they
sometimes just do without. That's been increasing, said Jennifer
Libertowski of the National Association of College Stores; recently,
the group found that nearly 60 percent of students nationwide
choose not to buy all the course materials. . . Students at four-year
schools spent, on average, about $900 for books and supplies
in 2003-04, more than a quarter of the cost of tuition and fees.
At community colleges, the GAO study found, the books amounted
to almost three-quarters of the cost.
AP - Nearing a diploma, most college students
cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding
credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food. Those
are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses,
the first to target the skills of students as they approach the
start of their careers. More than 50% of students at four-year
schools and more than 75% at two-year colleges lacked the skills
to perform complex literacy tasks. That means they could not
interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand
the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers
with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results
of a survey about parental involvement in school.
THE DUMBING DOWN OF COLLEGE EDUCATION
MICHAEL KRYZANEK IN BOSTON GLOBE - A recent study by the National Center for Education
Statistics found that only 31 percent of college graduates could
read a ''complex book and extrapolate from it." Furthermore,
the study found that far fewer college graduates are leaving
school with ''the skills needed to comprehend routine data, such
as reading a table about the relationship between blood pressure
and physical activity." What's most disturbing, according
to Mark Schneider, the commissioner of education statistics,
is that, ''the assessment is not designed to test your ability
to understand Proust, but to test your ability to read labels."
I would be lying to you if I said that
I was surprised by the data. My more than 30 years of teaching
in higher education at Bridgewater State College and elsewhere,
and frequent discussions with colleagues from a wide range of
colleges and universities, both public and private, tell me the
findings are accurate. . .
Behind the dismal data on college graduate
literacy is the new reality of higher education in America. Students
today have little interest in what past generations of college
students accepted as an essential education. Reading the literature
of ''dead white guys," studying the relevancy of a 400-year-old
historical event, and thinking about the meaning of life's mysteries
are not of great interest to a growing number of college students.
. .
mkryzanek@bridgew.edu
DECEMBER 2005
MORE THAN HALF OF COLLEGE PRESIDENTS
WOULD TRASH TENURE
STEVE CALDERWOOD, CRESCENT (U. EVANSVILLE)
- More than half of college presidents want to see tenure replaced
by a system of long-term contracts, according to a survey of
about 750 presidents conducted by the Chronicle for Higher Education.
But University of Evansville President Stephen Jennings, who
participated in the survey, is among the 39 percent who support
tenure. "Tenure is the bedrock of education," he said.
"You don't get great faculty and academic freedom without
tenure." . . .
Perhaps the most common complaint about
tenure and one highlighted by the Chronicle's survey is that
tenure makes faculty lazy. "There will always be people,
because they are protected from firing without cause, who'll
just coast," Underwood said.
http://www.uwire.com/content//topnews121605001.html
A TEACHING ASSISTANT EXPLAINS WHY SHE
IS ON STRIKE
MICHELLE FAWCETT, NYC INDYMEDIA - When
I moved to NYC to start a Ph.D. program at NYU in 2000, my biggest
concern was not the rigors of graduate study or the challenge
of moving to another new city alone. It was the fear of being
unable to survive economically. Sure, I was going to work in
addition to being a student: as a graduate assistant, or GA,
for my department. GAs work as research assistants or teaching
assistants .
The work of an RA might include co-editing
an article with a professor, but often it consists of administrative
duties such as making copies. I once moved a professor's office
furniture on a dolly down the middle of Broadway. We also teach.
Teaching assistants in my department attend the course lecture
(75% of more taught by adjuncts across the university) and may
teach several recitations, which are sub-sections of the lecture.
I have had as many as 80 students across 3 recitations that met
weekly, for which I would prepare lectures, host discussions,
hold office hours, and grade stacks of papers throughout the
semester.
Prior to the union contract, I received
$10,000 a year in the form of biweekly paychecks. (Not sure where
the rest of the approximately $3,000,000 that my 80 students
paid annually in tuition went.) As the recipient of a wage income
and therefore a worker according to the IRS, I paid taxes on
that $10,000.
Obviously, this was not enough to live
on in NYC, so I had to find other forms of support. . . Being
the first to attend college in my working class family, I had
no economic cushion to fall back on, so I applied for federal
student loans. Since NYU counted my free tuition as "income,"
however, I was eligible for only a small loan. . .
Why do we struggle so? Because, unlike
President John Sexton and the NYU brass, we truly are passionately
devoted to academic freedom and advanced intellectual inquiry,
and we think the university should be the place where we can
pursue that. But we need a living wage for our work, to do so
we need to be recognized as workers to get that wage, and the
union is our only voice to negotiate on equal terms with a powerful
and vastly wealthy institution. NYU cannot advocate for us, nor
can any form of "student government." It's that simple.
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2005/12/61614.html
SEPTEMBER 2005
COLLEGE STUDENTS MAKE GOOD VOLUNTEER
FIREFIGHTERS
MAREK FUCHS, NY TIMES
- When Mike Stahl was a high school senior touring some of the
best liberal arts colleges in the nation, he also visited the
firehouse here to ask if it accepted college students as volunteers.
At the Clinton Fire Department, just down the hill from Hamilton
College, he was told he would be more than welcome. That was
when Hamilton vaulted to the top of his list of colleges.
Mr. Stahl, 21, now a senior at Hamilton
who can often be found doing his schoolwork in the firehouse,
was named the volunteer department's most dedicated member in
the spring. He answered more than 200 calls in his junior year,
including fires, car accidents and false alarms in Clinton, a
village that is a 15-minute drive from Utica. . .
College students can play an important
role in volunteer fire departments, which have been depleted
in many areas by full-time careers, strict entry requirements
and the shifting priorities of parental duties. College students
are on many levels the perfect solution. They tend to be young
and able-bodied and are around during the day, if not always
awake. They are also free of the family commitments that can
make responding to emergencies harder for older firefighters.
The lure of joining a volunteer fire department
can be considerable for undergraduates, who as part of the 9/11
generation tend to hold firefighters in particularly high esteem.
They may also be seeking to take part in some real-world action
as a change of pace from the theories of classroom academics.
. .
Diann Lynch, a nurse who coordinates the
intensive class, said about a dozen students took it annually.
Graduates of the class have given the Clinton Fire Department
a new and steady supply of qualified E.M.T.'s, said Bill Roberts,
chief of the department.
SAM SMITH'S GREAT AMERICAN POLITICAL REPAIR
MANUAL, 1997 - When fifty percent of a city's welfare recipients
have a high school diploma, there is a strong hint that something
is very wrong other than the educational system. Further, the
word gets around. Politicians and the media may have abstract
fantasies about the value of education; kids tend to be a bit
more realistic.
So the most important first step towards
a better urban school system is a better urban economy. The second
step is to stop treating our young as an accident or crime waiting
to happen and to begin respecting, helping and needing them.
We could, for example, use older students more as tutors and
teachers of younger kids. We could use high schoolers as community
organizers.
We could even teach students to become
emergency medical technicians and community social service aides.
Imagine if every urban high school had an emergency squad that
was not only medically trained but was able to provide assistance
to the elderly and infirm of the community and help staff clinics,
schools, and recreation centers. With a classy uniform, good
training and equipment (along with a few perks like being on
call on a rotating basis during the class day), schools and communities
might find themselves with some impressive new role models. Can't
be done? Well, it has been. On one Indian reservation, a high
school developed its own search & rescue squad, which has
become a well-regarded part of the area's emergency services.
ORDER THE REPAIR MANUAL
http://prorev.com/order3.htm
JUNE 2005.
. .
CULTURE OF IMPUNITY AT COLORADO U NOT LIMITED TO
FOOTBALL PLAYERS
TODD HARTMAN AND KEVIN VAUGHAN, ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS - Whenever
the University of Colorado regents held budget retreats in the
past six years, they holed up in some of Colorado's finest locales,
including Aspen's St. Regis Resort and the famous Stanley Hotel
in Estes Park. They spent at least $20,000 combined on five gatherings
to honor former regents: retirement and "emeritus"
parties that included past and present regents and a host of
top CU officials.
Even when they met in Denver, some regents
resided at the four-star Hotel Teatro, "Denver's only luxury
boutique hotel," according to its Web site. In all, regents
have spent more than $10,000 there since 2000, records show.
One regent has stayed there at least 30 times. . .
That move came as the university's leaders
continued to grapple with cuts in state funding from the legislature,
declining out-of-state enrollment, the lingering effects of 18
months of scandal surrounding the football program and more recent
debate about controversial professor Ward Churchill.
Among the regents' purchases in recent
years:
- Tens of thousands of dollars for regents
and their spouses to attend CU football games in Seattle; Southern
California; Austin, Texas; and Tallahassee, Fla. That doesn't
include money spent to send regents and spouses to bowl games.
- Nearly $3,000 annually for memberships
in CU's Fastbreak Clubroom at the CU Events Center, where regents
gather for food and a coaches' talk before men's basketball games.
. .
- Hundreds of dollars for a variety of
gifts, including crystal buffaloes, wine glasses, watches and
other items. In one case, the gifts went to retiring regents
and their spouses. In another case, the gift was for a retiring
university administrator.
BUSINESS SCHOOLS DUMPING ETHICS COURSES
MARJORIE KELLY, BUSINESS ETHICS - In the
wake of recent ethics scandals, one might imagine that business
schools would be deepening their attention to business ethics.
But at many schools the reverse is happening. A slow, drip-by-drip
erosion of business ethics teaching has been going on in MBA
programs throughout the 1990s--and it seems to be getting worse
today. A case in point is the Katz Graduate School of Business
at the University of Pittsburgh, which has dropped a required
ethics course from its full-time MBA program beginning next year.
William Frederick, professor emeritus at the Katz School and
past president of the Society for Business Ethics, said via e-mail
that the ethics course "has been under pressure for either
elimination or downsizing almost from its inception in the early
1960s." . . .
The University of Pittsburgh is not alone
in its downgrading of ethics. At Virginia Polytechnic Institute
and State University in Blacksburg, Va., a required business
ethics course was dropped from the MBA curriculum within the
last two years. The State University of New York at Albany dropped
the business ethics requirement from its MBA a number of years
ago, and now doesn't even offer it as an elective, said associate
professor Paul Miesing. At Marquette University in Milwaukee,
Wisc., a social issues in management course required of MBA students
was downgraded from three to one-and-a-half credits, and students
can opt to skip it entirely and take a law course instead. .
.
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
the business school has lost a series of business ethics faculty
since 1997 and no longer has an occupant for its endowed chair
in that area. Today its business ethics class is taught by a
professor trained in transportation economics.
MAY 2005.
. .
ONE IN TEN COLLEGE STUDENTS SERIOUSLY CONSIDERS
SUICIDE
WASHINGTON POST -
"The number one medication in college is antidepressants,"
said Richard Kadison of Harvard University, whose book about
the growing mental health crisis at colleges was published last
year. . . "It's surpassed birth control pills."
In the past 25 years or so, Kadison said, the likelihood of suffering
depression on campus has doubled, serious thoughts about committing
suicide have tripled and sexual assaults have quadrupled. Now,
one in 10 students seriously considers suicide in college. Nearly
half get so depressed that they can't function, according to
the American College Health Association, and every year, about
1,400 college students die from injuries related to drinking
alcohol.
RESEARCH: THE EFFECTS OF INAPPROPRIATE
HIGHLIGHTING OF TEXTBOOKS http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,1469811,00.html
MARC ABRAHAMS, GUARDIAN - Vicki Silvers
and David Kreiner, of Central Missouri State University, [have
written a] study called The Effects of Pre-Existing Inappropriate
Highlighting on Reading Comprehension. "Textbook highlighting
is a common study strategy among college students," Silvers
and Kreiner wrote. Then they described their experiments.
First, they had students read a passage
of text. Some students had text that was highlighted appropriately.
Some had text that was highlighted inappropriately. Others had
spartan, un-highlighted text. Silvers and Kreiner then tested
how well the students comprehended the text. Those with the inappropriate
highlighting scored much lower than the others. A second experiment
showed that even when students were warned about the inappropriate
highlighting, they had trouble ignoring it.
In 2002, Silvers and Kreiner were awarded
the Ig Nobel literature prize. At the awards ceremony, they offered
one piece of advice: "Don't buy a textbook that was highlighted
by an idiot."
APRIL 2005
STUDENT LIVING WAGE ACTIONS
FEBRUARY 2005
SCENES FROM THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION
[By Mike Rosen, Rocky Mountain
News]
In this great Cultural Revolution, the
phenomenon of our schools being dominated by bourgeois intellectuals
must be completely changed. -Central Committee of the Communist
Party of China Resolutions of the Eleventh Plenum August 1966
I have undertaken the task of organizing
conservative students myself and urging them to protest a situation
that has become intolerable. - David Horowitz The Campus Blacklist
April 18, 2003
Mao came forward with the new slogan: "Rebellion
is justified," which encouraged [students] to assault officials
and institutions indiscriminately." - Stanley Karnow
Mao and China 1972
It is refreshing that conservative students
are increasingly fighting back against academic intolerance.
Some conservative students at the University of Texas have begun
compiling a "Professor Watch List" to warn students
about professors who use their classes for liberal indoctrination.
- Phyllis Schlafly Confronting The Campus Radicals January
12, 2004
MUCH MORE. . .
STUDENTS DON'T WANT WORDS WITHOUT GRAPHICS
http://www.detnews.com/2005/metro/0501/30/B01-73841.htm
LAURA BERMAN, DETROIT NEWS - The scene:
A college classroom at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. The
subject: Writing the newspaper column. The question: "Can
any of you name a columnist you read -- in a newspaper or magazine
or online -- on a regular basis?" In response: Dead silence.
Slowly, one hand rises. A sports columnist
is mentioned. . . "My generation is very visually oriented,"
explains Ryan Schreiber, a U-M Dearborn junior from Dearborn
who -- like most in the class -- is majoring in journalism but
doesn't read much of it. "My generation grew up watching
MTV. We are used to short spurts of words, lots of images...We're
used to immediate gratification.". . .
In another journalism class down the hall,
the instructor annoyed his students. After asking how many read
a newspaper regularly -- four or five out of 35 said they did
-- he required them to bring a newspaper to class twice a week.
"The students don't like it," says Laura Hipshire,
one of the journalism students. . .
I envision a 12-Step Program for the Non-Reading
Generation, as its members fight to recover from an addiction
to color graphics and quick bursts of information. But no one
in this class -- or in others I've faced in recent months --
seems to disagree: Words on a page are, like, kind of hard to
read when you have "a fast-paced lifestyle," as [one
student] put it. Or when you have "four kids and you're
going to college," as Hipshire says. . .
What's intriguing is that these kids say they plan to write for
newspapers and magazines. They're planning journalism careers.
They're dreaming of careers creating products nobody they know
uses much.
ONE IN THREE STUDENTS SAY PRESS SHOULD
BE RESTRICTED
GREG TOPPO, USA TODAY -
One in three U.S. high school students say the press ought to
be more restricted, and even more say the government should approve
newspaper stories before readers see them, according to a survey
being released today.
The survey of 112,003 students finds that 36% believe newspapers
should get "government approval" of stories before
publishing; 51% say they should be able to publish freely; 13%
have no opinion.
Asked whether the press enjoys "too
much freedom," not enough or about the right amount, 32%
say "too much," and 37% say it has the right amount.
Ten percent say it has too little.
JANUARY 2005
CIA PUTTING SPIES IN U.S. COLLEGE CLASSROOMS
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/2/2005/1051
ALEXANDER COCKBURN, FREE PRESS - After
disclosure of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's effort to set
a new and spectacularly unaccountable version of the CIA in the
Pentagon, the sprouting forest of secret intelligence operations
set up in the wake of 9/11 is at last coming under some scrutiny.
Here's a sinister one in the academic field that until this week
escaped scrutiny.
Dr. David Price, of St. Martins College,
in Olympia, Wash., is an anthropologist long interested in the
intersections of his discipline with the world of intelligence
and national security, both the CIA and the FBI. Now he's turned
the spotlight on a new test program, operating without detection
or protest, that is secretly placing CIA agents in American university
classrooms. With time these students who cannot admit to their
true intentions will inevitably pollute and discredit the universities
in which they are now enrolled.
Even before 9/11, government money was
being sluiced into the academies for covert subsidies for students.
The National Security Education Program siphoned off students
from traditional foreign language funding programs and offered
graduate students good money, sometimes $40,000 a year and up,
to study "in demand" languages, but with payback stipulations
mandating that recipients later work for unspecified U.S. national
security agencies.
When the NSEP got off the ground in the
early 1990s, there was some huff and puff from concerned academics
about this breaching of the supposed barrier between the desires
of academia and the state. But there wasn't even a watch-pup's
yap about Congressional approval for Section 318 of the 2004
Intelligence Authorization Act, which appropriated $4 million
to fund a pilot program known as the Pat Roberts Intelligence
Scholars Program, named after Senator Pat Roberts (R.-Kan., Chair,
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence).
PRISP is designed to train intelligence
operatives and analysts in American university classrooms for
careers in the CIA and other agencies. The program now operates
on an undisclosed number of American college and university campuses.
Dr. Price has discovered that if the pilot phase of the program
proves to be a useful means of recruiting and training members
of the intelligence community, then the program will expand to
more campuses across the country. . .
PRISP students receive financial stipends
ranging up to $25,000 per year, and they are required to participate
in closed meetings with other PRISP scholars and individuals
from their administering intelligence agency. Dr. Price has determined
from his inquiries that less than 150 students a year are currently
authorized to receive funding during the pilot phase as PRISP
evaluates the program's initial outcomes. PRISP is apparently
administered not just by the CIA, but also through a variety
of individual intelligence agencies like the NSA, MID or Naval
Intelligence. . .
Dr. Price says, "The CIA makes sure
we won't know which classrooms PRISP scholars attend, this being
rationalized as a requirement for protecting the identities of
intelligence personnel." But this secrecy shapes PRISP as
it takes on the form of a covert operation in which PRISP students
study chemistry, biology, sociology, psychology, anthropology
and foreign languages without their fellow classmates, professors,
advisors, department chairs or presumably even research subjects
knowing that they are working for the CIA, DIA, NSA or other
intelligence agencies.
DECEMBER 2004
U.S. NO LONGER ATTRACTING WORLD'S BEST
STUDENTS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/21/national/21global.html
SAM DILLON, NY TIMES - American universities,
which for half a century have attracted the world's best and
brightest students with little effort, are suddenly facing intense
competition as higher education undergoes rapid globalization.
The European Union, moving methodically to compete with American
universities, is streamlining the continent's higher education
system and offering American-style degree programs taught in
English. Britain, Australia and New Zealand are aggressively
recruiting foreign students, as are Asian centers like Taiwan
and Hong Kong. And China, which has declared that transforming
100 universities into world-class research institutions is a
national priority, is persuading top Chinese scholars to return
home from American universities. . .
Foreign students contribute $13 billion
to the American economy annually. But this year brought clear
signs that the United States' overwhelming dominance of international
higher education may be ending. . . Foreign applications to American
graduate schools declined 28 percent this year. Actual foreign
graduate student enrollments dropped 6 percent. Enrollments of
all foreign students, in undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral
programs, fell for the first time in three decades in an annual
census released this fall. Meanwhile, university enrollments
have been surging in England, Germany and other countries.
AUGUST 2004
PRINCETON REVIEW BEST COLLEGES
[Based on student responses]
Non-discrimination against homosexuals
1 Eugene Lang College 2 New York University
3 Sarah Lawrence College 4 New College of Florida 5 Brandeis
University
How smoothly is your school run?
1 Middlebury College 2 Whitman College
3 United States Military Academy 4 Williams College 5 Davidson
College
Biggest jock schools
1 University of Florida 2 Penn State University
Park 3 Florida State University 4 University of Notre Dame 5
Clemson University
Best party schools
1 SUNY at Albany 2 Washington and Lee University
3 University of Wisconsin-Madison 4 West Virginia University
5 Ohio University-Athens
Cold sober schools
1 Brigham Young University (UT) 2 Wheaton
College (IL) 3 United States Naval Academy 4 Franklin W. Olin
College of Engineering 5 Webb Institute
Happy students
1 Pomona College 2 William Jewell College
3 Stanford University 4 New College of Florida 5 Dartmouth College
Least happy students
1 New Jersey Institute of Technology 2
SUNY at Stony Brook 3 SUNY at Albany 4 Seton Hall University
5 United States Coast Guard Academy
JUNE 2004
HANAH METCHIS, HIT & RUN - Those
of us who went to elite four-year colleges and universities are
prone to forget that most people don't. In the Washington
Post, a community college professor writes about the differences
between the experience her community college students are having
on the one hand, and the experience her daughter had at an elite
college on the other:
You go to community college because you are an
ambitious kid whose parents don't have professional jobs. Because
you are a girl in a family whose culture for thousands of years
has valued education only for boys. Because you come from a family
that never really thought about college for anyone, never saved
for it or steered you toward it. You go to community college
because you had a significant trauma during your adolescence:
Perhaps you had an alcoholic parent, lost a sibling, lived in
a household of chronic anger, suffered from depression or anorexia,
did too many drugs. So you failed some of your high school courses,
and the "good" colleges won't take you. You go to community
college because you were born in another country and came to
America too late to pick up English very easily. Because you
landed a good job or gave birth to a beautiful baby right out
of high school, and didn't look back for 10 or 15 years, when,
suddenly, you thought about college. You go to community college
because you have a learning disability, undiagnosed or untreated,
that pushed you to the sidelines in school. Because you started
at a four-year school and discovered that you weren't ready to
leave home. And you go to community college because you believe
that America is a society where intelligence is rewarded, and
since you're such a fine, intelligent person, it's unnecessary
for you to actually do any homework in high school, and suddenly
you have a C average and your SATs are pretty good but, frankly,
so are a lot of other people's, and the best offer you got from
four-year colleges was their wait list. Very interesting, and
worth reading the whole thing.
ROBERT M. KAHN, CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION - In recent years, I have observed an increase
in ridiculous titles. . . An upsurge in unconventional titles
also is apparent in the pages of this newspaper - names that
cry out for clarification, editing, or exorcism.
Silly titles that appear in The Chronicle seem to fall into four
categories:
- PRODUCTS OF DOWNSIZING. Apparently new college presidents gain
both the immediate fealty of business-minded trustees and the
approval of faculty members by performing a single act -- slashing
the ranks of the administration. Presidents promote the belief
that one person can do two administrative jobs, even if the two
jobs are clearly unrelated. For example:
Dean of Natural and Social Sciences and Professional Studies.
It's a dead give-away that downsizing has occurred when you find
a title like that one, which contains the word "and"
more than once.
Division Chair for Engineering-Related Technologies, Health,
Mathematics, Nursing, and Sciences. Would you have liked to have
been there for the discussion of whether nursing could be subsumed
under "health"?
Dean of Matriculation/Assessment. Note the slash.
Chair, Department of General Studies/Director, Center for Faculty
Development. Congratulations to the new chair/director for taking
command of the department/center.
Dean of Student Development and Marketing. Which job do you suppose
gets priority?
- PRODUCTS OF AN EGOTISTICAL ATTITUDE. There are egotists among
us who believe that the titles of positions at their institutions
should be unique, much the way that a socialite wants her outfit
to stand out at a party. Such titles use terminology in capricious
combinations that are reminiscent of what one might find in a
parallel universe. One thinks of Monty Python's Ministry of Silly
Walks. For example:
Assistant Director of the Underclass. No doubt working somewhere
in the underbelly of the university.
Scholarship Steward. Sounds like a job on the Love Boat.
Assistant Professor of Nonformal Educational Processes. How many
meetings did it take before the champions of "nonformal"
won out over the supporters of "informal"?
Coordinator of Student Involvement. The job is daunting when
one recalls that students are involved with members of the opposite
sex, members of the same sex, blogs, Star Wars memorabilia, fashion
accessories, and quantum physics.
Residence Education Coordinator for Leadership. Does it help
to know that the person who holds this job reports to the campus's
department of housing and judicial programs?
- PRODUCTS OF MUDDLED POLITICAL CORRECTNESS. These titles rest
on the beguiling principle that it is better to be obscure and
inoffensive than communicate what a job really entails. . . For
example:
Director of the Inclusive Elementary Education Program. Begs
the question of what's being included now that was excluded before.
Gender Faculty Specialist. I am not sure what that title means.
But if this specialist is somehow responsible for determining
the gender of faculty members, I would urge extreme caution.
Director of Social Equity. The weight of the world seems to rest
on this administrator's shoulders.
Community Prevention Coordinator. So what is being prevented?
Community? The coordinator is listed as part of the Juvenile
Center Prevention Center.
- PRODUCTS OF ADJECTIVAL IMPAIRMENT. Adjectivally prone or adjectivally
impaired individuals operate on the principle that if one adjective
is good, two or three must be better. Too much emphasis is placed
on modifiers in place of more concrete parts of speech, like
nouns. It may be that these types of titles sprout on campuses
that lack English departments, whose members might suggest a
little editing. For example:
Director of the Office of Academic Student Instructional Support.
A criminal case of overkill.
Coordinator of Liberal/General/Interdisciplinary Studies. A mad
slasher has discovered adjectives.
Coordinator of Student Development in the Student Volunteer and
Community-Service Learning Programs. Was all that really necessary?
Coordinator of Organized Research. OK, it's only one adjective.
But what are they trying to accomplish -- to distinguish organized
research from disorganized research?
MAY 2004
FOUNDATIONS SET ANTI-ARAB STANDARDS
JUSTIN POPE ASSOCIATED
PRESS - When evidence surfaced last year that grants from a prominent
charitable foundation had funded a Palestinian group accused
of anti-Israel activities, Jewish leaders called for new restrictions
to prevent grant money from being used to support terrorism.
But now, some top universities are protesting language the Ford
Foundation has added to its grant conditions, saying the changes
could threaten academic freedom by inhibiting campus presentations
of partisan lectures or films.
In a letter sent to the
New York-based foundation last week, the provosts of nine prominent
schools - including the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard,
Yale, Princeton and MIT - said they were not in a position to
regulate everything said by students and faculty members who
benefit from Ford grants. "Whatever university administrators
may think of the merits of the political views expressed, these
fall under the protection of freedom of academic speech,"
they wrote.
Several schools, including
the University of Michigan, have privately raised similar concerns,
though the Ford Foundation said more than two dozen universities
had signed the new grant agreements without comment.
A similar protest was lodged with the smaller Rockefeller Foundation,
which implemented similar changes in its policy. The two foundations
donated a combined $50 million to U.S. higher education last
year.
~~~ In November, after
meeting with Jewish leaders, Ford announced it would cut funding
for a group called the Palestinian Society for the Protection
of Human Rights and would add language to grant agreements prohibiting
recipients from promoting violence, terrorism, bigotry, or calls
for the destruction of any nation-state.
GOOD READS
THIS
PRO-FRO'S A NO-GO
HOW NOT TO WOO ME TO YOUR UNIVERSITY
SARAH BALL, WASHINGTON
POST - It was somewhere between picnicking in the California
sunshine and sitting (or splashing) through four hours of obligatory
"bonding" activities that I had an epiphany: This was
not just an admitted-student weekend at Stanford University that
I was attending, as I had originally thought. No, this event,
specifically designed to convince hundreds of prospective freshmen
(or, in Stanford-speak, "pro-fros") like me to enroll,
was nothing but an overblown sales pitch -- complete with glitzy
packaging, superficial presentation and the ever-peppy salespeople.
Like any respectable car
salesman, the Admit Weekend student staffers had hit hard and
fast when they saw me coming. "Everybody, let's give a warm
Stanford welcome to Sarah Ball from Alexandria, Virginia!"
one undergrad screamed into a microphone upon my arrival at check-in.
Dumbfounded, mortified and struggling under a load of luggage
in front of more than 100 people, I barely had time to catch
my breath before I was inundated with maps and schedules for
a full day of activities. After being reminded that I was to
meet my Ro-Ho (room host) at 5 p.m. sharp for dorm activities
and a night's lodging, I was lassoed with a name tag on a string
lanyard and sent scooting on my way.
One campus tour, a picnic
lunch and two special seminars later, I found myself sitting
in a circle with eight other pro-fros passing around a roll of
toilet paper. "Take as much as you think you'd need for
one day of camping in the woods, and count how many squares you
have!" chirped our group leader. The point was oh-so-predictable:
In summer-camp fashion, we were required to say one "interesting
thing" about ourselves for each square of toilet paper.
Our leader must have seen the are-you-kidding look on my face
as I clutched my wad of 36 squares; despite the high-fives between
a few guys who had taken one square each, she imposed a five-fact
limit on our speeches.
APRIL 2004
COLLEGE TEXTBOOK COSTS SOAR TO $900
SAN DIEGO UNION - A study spearheaded by
students in Oregon and California found that the cost of textbooks
has skyrocketed because of the bundling of ancillary products
like CD-ROMs. It also claims that publishers roll out new editions
year after year, forcing students to buy new books although the
content scarcely changes. Pat Schroeder, president of the Association
of American Publishers and a former congresswoman, said the report
was one-sided and flawed. . . According to the study, college
students today spend about $900 on textbooks every year. On average,
textbook publishers keep books on the shelf for 3½ years
before issuing a new one. Over half of faculty members surveyed
said the new editions are "rarely" to "never"
justified.
NOVEMBER 2003
MASSACHUSETTS NOW SPENDING MORE
ON PRISONS THAN ON HIGHER EDUCATION
MARCELLA BOMBARDIERI, BOSTON GLOBE - For
the first time in at least 35 years, Massachusetts is spending
more on prisons and jails than on public higher education, according
to a report released yesterday. This year's state budget included
$816 million in appropriations for campuses and student financial
aid, and $830 million for prisons and jails, said the report
from the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation.
"It says something very striking about the way that priorities
have crept up on us," said Cameron Huff, senior research
associate at the business-backed fiscal watchdog group. "You
don't see the same cuts in corrections because there's nobody
to shift the cost onto. In higher education, it's been students
and parents who've been the shock absorbers."
Deep cuts to state spending on higher education
have left the system of state colleges and universities in "profound"
disarray, the report said, citing two eras of deep cuts that
reduced state support to the same level as three decades ago
when adjusted for inflation. Higher education appropriations
were cut 29 percent between 1988 and 1992, and 27 percent between
2001 and 2004. Spending on higher education dropped from 6.5
percent of the state budget at its peak in 1988 to less than
3.5 percent for the 2004 fiscal year, the foundation said.
At the same time, spending on prisons grew
an average of 8.4 percent per year from 1992 to 2001, although
growth has slowed to 1.3 percent per year from 2001 to 2004.
Despite the spending increases, the report said overcrowding
is an ongoing problem, with the state's prisons and jails operating
at 138 percent of capacity in the first quarter of 2003.
SEPTEMBER 2003
STUDY: 40% OF STUDENTS PLAGIARIZE
KELLY HEYBOER, NEWARK STAR-LEDGER - Nearly
40 percent of college students have plagiarized papers by using
the cut-and-paste function on their computers to lift text from
the Internet, according to a new nationwide cheating study. The
survey, conducted by a Rutgers University professor, is believed
to be the largest ever undertaken to measure the growing problem
of Internet cheating. Researchers interviewed 18,000 students
on 23 college campuses and found nearly half do not consider
plagiarizing off the Internet to be cheating at all.
Other students consider cheating in college
to be trivial in a world where they hear about corporate and
celebrity scandals on a daily basis, said Don McCabe, the Rutgers-Newark
management professor who headed the study. Many students cited
corporate and political figures -- including President Clinton,
Enron executives and historian and accused plagiarist Doris Kearns
Goodwin -- when justifying their dishonesty. "It amazes
me ... how frequently students would cite what's going on in
the 'real world,'" McCabe said. "Students are saying,
'People cheat. Get over it.'"
JULY 2003
THE CHANGING NATURE OF HISTORY IN SCHOOLS
HOW COLLEGE ADMISSIONS WORK
WHAT LIFE IS REALLY LIKE AT COLLEGE
CALIFORNIA STATE ORION - For John and A.J.,
the showers are extremely accessible. Room 214 is directly across
from the men's bathroom. "It seems like a good thing at
first," says Kirsch, slinging a dirty pair of Union Bay
jeans under his unmade bed. "But you realize what a pain
it is at night when you're trying to sleep and all you can hear
is people puking in the bathroom. Lots of times they don't even
bother to use the toilets." Vomiting in the showers is seemingly
a common occurrence in residence halls, and that is another factor
that contributes to the relatively high number of students who
don't shower daily. It also forces students to wear shower sandals.
"I wear sandals because I don't want athlete's foot or rabies
or something," says Kirsch. "God knows what happens
in those showers." Brian Dodd, a Shasta Hall resident, agrees.
"We slosh through puke every day," says Dodd. "The
shower curtains change colors randomly. |