SCSUScholars

Tuesday, September 30, 2003

How it could be here
 
Some faculty and students ask me what it would take for us to be happier. I don't expect much from faculty, but what I hope for are things like the toughness our College Republicans showed during the Israeli flag affair last year. Another great example is happening at the University of Virginia. John Rosenberg at Discriminations is providing continuing coverage here, here, here and here. Erin O'Connor suggests why most students will blow it off:

most people will decide to compromise themselves in order to get past this requirement and get registered. Most will decide that it doesn't matter all that much that the school is attempting to dictate belief, and most will decide that it's no big moral deal to give the online test the answers it obviously wants them to give in order to pass. Beliefs about race may not be altered by a superficial and transparently agenda-driven online program. But the belief that one's conscience is sacrosanct, and that institutional attempts to impose on one's conscience--however obvious, however well-intended, however poorly conceived--are inexcusable and must be resisted will inevitably be eroded. UVa's mandatory diversity training is more likely to teach lessons in moral expediency than in racial tolerance.

That's why students like our CRs are to be admired. They said 'no' from the start.
Posted by King at 8:22 PM

Diversity essay Cliff Notes
 
Psssst! Hey kids! Need to write a diversity essay for your college application but think the whole thing is bunkum? Peter Wood is with you: "It is also a device to ensure that candidates commit themselves, at least rhetorically, to the campus ideology of diversity." But he offers you advice in case you need it.

The key to a good college-application diversity essay is drama. One of the best approaches is to compose a story that captures the moment at which one of the deep truths of "diversity" crystallized for you. There are three such diversity deep truths (DDTs), and you can choose the one best suits your taste: (DDT 1) the reality of prejudice in American life, (DDT 2) the sheer thrill of encountering cultural difference, and (DDT 3) pride in one's own diversity.

For DDT 1 he suggests starting the essay with a sentence such as "Jimmy Thundecloud and I were shooting hoops one day after school when..."; for DDT 2 try "I didn't know what would happen the night before the big game when my friend Mike decided to tell the other guys on the football team that she was transgendered...", and for DDT 3 you could use "I thought I was just like everyone else until one day when my friend Shirley asked why I had so many freckles" -- even if you aren't a member of a preferred group, because hey, we're all diverse, just like everyone else.

Can I buy stock in Kaplan?
Posted by King at 8:03 PM

What tenure buys
 
Independence. Just ask Erin.

In its present form, the tenure system--in the academic humanities anyway--does less to protect "academic freedom" than it does to reward conformity and perpetuate a closed, insecure system of often unearned, frequently abused privilege. ... Yes, I do have tenure. Yes, I would give it up gladly if the system were reformed along more ethically responsive and responsible lines. Yes, there are plenty of people who say they would not have voted to tenure me if they had known I would become the author of a weblog as offensive to their political sensibilities as Critical Mass is--which proves my point about conformity, and which is one reason why I mistrust the tenure system so deeply and why I hold even my own tenure to be awfully cheap.

RTWT.
Posted by King at 7:46 PM

I want my health ben-nies!
 
Taxes for nothing and your schools for free.

The faculty union budget (and other unions on campus) are the lead headline in the University Chronicle today, and the discussion centers on the lack of money for rising health care costs. Along with a proposal to give promotions to faculty moving from associate to full professors without any increase in their salary (it's not enough money to solve any big issues, IMO, but I'm checking on that), the big issue is health benefits. The article claims that $138.3 million additional would be spent to maintain our health benefits at current levels, money not budgeted by the state Legislature.

The state proposed a new annual deductible of $200-1,000 for families, higher drug co-pays of $17 instead of the current $12 and a higher out-of-pocket maximum for drugs of $2,000 for families, compared to the current $600 maximum. Non-drug annual out-of-pocket maximum would go up to $4,000 from $1,600.

The dental program would be preventative only - no fillings, crowns or orthodontics - with an annual $400 per person maximum for benefits. ...

"It basically boils down to a salary decrease," said Wil Harri, who represents IFO [the faculty union] in the bargaining. ...

But Employee Relations Commissioner Cal Ludeman said there's nothing more he can do.

"To pretend that there's millions of dollars hiding in state agencies or in the state budget available for one more go-around, no there's not," Ludeman told the Star Tribune last week. "We've stretched. I've done everything I can to put together this best offer. We mean it."

Ludeman added that if the state keeps the benefits at the same level it would be too expensive and several hundred employees would be laid off. So far, 940 state workers have already been laid off.

Workers from AFSCME and MAPE have rejected this offer but are not yet threatening to strike. Harri is correct that it's a salary decrease, but that is in fact what has been voted for by the Legislature. Denying reality is not an option. The question is how we will bear the cost. We've already increased tuition 15%, I have no equipment budget, and salaries are 65% of costs, so where else shall we turn? But, as this document from the university shows, the plan all along was for a 5% salary increase and fringe benefits were planned to rise from 29% to 30% of salary costs. There's probably money on the table out there.
Posted by King at 2:44 PM

HURL Follies II: Diversity not served by the escape from poverty
 
At first I thought this HURL offering, the second in our series, would be dull. Here's the course description.

HURL 413/513 Diversity in the Workplace. Examination of institutional policies and personal (sic) practices pertaining to harassment and discrimination in the workplace based on gender, race, national origin, religion, disability, sexual orientation and class. Knowledge and skills to enhance a constructive work environment for respect and equality.

The inclusion of class was kind of strange, insofar as they are not part of the law of workplace harassment and discrimination. But it was only in reading one of the course objectives that its meaning became clear.

Exploration of national and international debates which provide a societal context in which workplace oppression occurs; affirmative action, EEO policies, immingration status, NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), GATT (General Agree on Trade and Tariffs)(sic), export of jobs to other countries, elimination of jobs through technology.

Again, this is a course called "Diversity in the Workplace". In what way is this objective germane? And their proposed course outline has 15% for "NAFTA, GATT export of jobs to other countries, elimination of jobs through technology." Why? Any chance their students would see even The Commanding Heights? Not bloody likely. This never ceases to amaze me. Do they really think child labor is a 20th century phenomenon created by multinational corporations? You have to have a pretty poor grasp of history to think that.

And there's little doubt that they want to turn students towards activism. The last 20% of the course is outlined as "[p]ursuit of descriptive and constructive ways of dealing with conflict and of channeling personal power toward cultural and social structural change in the workplace."
Posted by King at 11:42 AM

Monday, September 29, 2003

Hinkle and civility at 'Cal Porny'
 
"Busy" Eugene Volokh is all over the Cal Poly-Hinkle case. The L.A. Times is covering Hinkle along with a proposed policy on downloading pornography at Cal Poly. In the article Volokh is quoted

Offensive speech is just something you will be exposed to at a university. Universities are inherently messy places and must provide maximum access to ideas, good or bad.

Volokh at his site later links to a copy of the policy on downloads, which it turns out

would have imposed a viewpoint-based restriction on sending or reading "racially or ethnically degarding material" (limited to non-University purposes, of course, but that would presumably cover a wide range of extracurricular student speech). It would have also prohibited any extracurricular sending or reading any description of lewd exhibitions of nudity, sexual excitement, or sexual conduct. (Emphasis in original.)

The proposers of the policy call themselves "Citizens for a More Civil Campus."

N.B.: Civility is viewpoint-based restriction. I wonder if these citizens gave any thought to Hinkle's treatment when he posted his flyer and when they held their hearing.
Posted by King at 6:54 PM

Human Relations follies -- Part I
 
I've decided to run a series of these. This is the Department of the 3.7 GPA's new course proposals going through the university curriculum process. This is not satire -- I'm not that funny. I'll run one each day this week. At some later time I'll let you know if they passed and became actual courses. Odds of our process turning them down about as good as the odds of Terrell Owens appearing in Anger Management 2.

HURL 411/511 Heterosexism. Study of institutionalized heterosexism and homophobia and the impact on LGBTQ people. Prereq. 201 or 497. 3 credits. Demand.

(Note to uninitiated -- HURL 201 is a general education course titled "Non-Oppressive Relationships" which offers "Development of practical skills for eliminating racism, sexism and other oppressive elements from personal, professional and public life." HURL 497 is the same thing for education majors. See their bulletin descriptions. The 4xx/5xx designation means the course can be used as an upper-level undergraduate course or as graduate course.)

The course outline includes 10% on "Coalition building, transgender activism and institutional social change." Others in the outline include "current institutional issues, challenges and changes..." and "cultural stagnation, shifts and mainstream influences." One of the objectives is "to engage in rigorous self-reflection related to students' own socially constructed identities and their relationship to this form of oppression." I'm not sure if the Q is for "questioning" or "queer".

Question to commenters wishing to support this course: How does one differentiate an 'A' from a 'C'?
Posted by King at 11:47 AM

Civility and Censors
 
I've been gone for months, and loved the seclusion. But it's time to get back and add a little to the terrific work King does. And my start was auspicious: Our campus is starting a discussion of "civility" in academic discourse. It appears that some of the faculty and administration are a bit too delicate for the normal discourse that has gone on, and since in contemporary education it's a major sin to offend someone, they want to muffle what we say on university lists. That one professor used the word 'inane,' for instance, referring to a joke posted by someone else, created a major fuss.

I wrote the note below to go out Friday afternoon to our faculty discussion list. But it hasn't yet gone out, the first time a note of mine hasn't made it. It's probably not censorship -- probably just a ghost in the machine. But it's fun to believe I might have been significant enough to censor. I have a student who joined Peace Corps, went to Russia, and then was told to leave by the KGB. Being censored here isn't in the same league, but it's a start. Anyway, here's my note to the SCSU faculty that didn't make it:

Certainly the desire to censor somebody is a perennially human. Nat Hentoff is about the best author on all of this, and his Free Speech For Me But Not For Thee is worth reading, but its tough to go from desire to application. To want to censor is easy; doing it can be hard.

So we hit questions like who is going to determine what constitutes appropriate speech? And how will they make clear precisely what acceptable speech is? Will there be a word list? Will we not say "inane' any more? If 'inane' is forbidden, I can think of a lot of other words with equal or greater force that will have to be forbidden too; this could be a very long list. I'm glad I don't have to make it up. Or will context be important? Can we say some things or people are inane and others not? Or does who one is matter? A double standard has been pretty clear in the past, so would there be people who we can offend and others we can't? Or, if it's a horrific (can I say that?) thing to offend someone else, will acceptable language depend on the proclivity of others to be offended? And how will this be implemented? Will messages have to go through a screening committee before they are posted? (Boy, would I hate that job, though I doubt there's much danger I would be asked to do it.) Will somebody stop messages from going out and doing all their crushing (can I say that?) damage, or will writers merely be punished afterwards? And, of course, what will the punishment be? What's it worth to have offended somebody else, especially the most fragile among us who are most easily offended?

This list of questions could go on, and very well may. But to be honest my advice is to forget this whole business as soon as possible. Let people talk, and if they say something nasty (can I say that?) to you, either say something nasty back, or get a nasty friend to help you say something nasty back, or -- and this is usually my most preferred course of action -- go home and have a slug or two of good whiskey (can I mention whiskey) and blow the whole thing off (can I say that?). Those who aren't given to good whiskey can surely find an equivalent.

Posted by Jack at 11:15 AM

Sunday, September 28, 2003

How old is the gown?
 
Is there any town-and-gown issue more potent for argument than parking? The St. Cloud City Council has instituted permits for "street" parking on streets closest to the campus. Fees are $225 per year, vs. $175 for campus lots (administered by the university) or $100 (about a half-mile off campus, with free shuttle.) There are 133 slots of city street parking but only 93 bought so far. I wonder who set the price? Two quotes illustrate the town/gown problem:

The city's move, which took place in the summer when most students are away, was underhanded, said Cory Lawrence, student government president.

"It'll become a revenue-generating thing for the city," he said. "I think that's wrong. The city shouldn't be out to make money off students."

The city, of course, has a city sales tax, so it already is making money off students.

South Side residents are frustrated with the parking situation, resident Jerry Middelstadt said.

"Students need to have respect for the people that live here," he said. "This is not a college neighborhood. It's a neighborhood near the college."

SCSU was instituted in its present location in 1869.
Posted by King at 4:28 PM

Friday, September 26, 2003

"Kumbaya, my Lord..."
 
... was sung at a high school diversity camp, says The Conservative Crust who wonders, "What about sensitivity to atheists?" Cost of the camp is $165 a head (no word on cookie discounts) making it likely that this camp isn't for rural or working-class kids.

It's ``ludicrous'' and ``absurd'' to devote class time and public school funds to diversity camps when students are still struggling with literacy, said Matt Cox, an education policy fellow with the San Francisco-based Pacific Research Institute.

Richard Valenzuela, a Camp Anytown sensitivity trainer, disagreed.

``We're getting so caught up with academics and testing that we're losing some kids'' to other societal ills, Valenzuela said.

Yes, what we have here is too much academics going on! We're losing kids, Jim. LOSING THEM!
Posted by King at 2:49 PM

SMU responds
 
Officials at Southern Methodist University have issued a press release defending their decision to shut down the bake sale. Curmudgeonly Clerk has more. Simple note: Prices are communication; price controls are censorship. I love how Dwight Lee tells that story. (Hat tip: Eugene Volokh.)
Posted by King at 10:48 AM

Thursday, September 25, 2003

Lawsuit filed in Cal Poly case
 
FIRE has issued a press release announcing they have filed suit for First Amendment rights of Steve Hinkle. FIRE has kept a history of articles about Hinkle's case, which we discussed in July. Cal Poly insists that they support "free, civil and orderly exchange of ideas, values and opinions" on an "open and ordered campus." The money quote from Cal Poly:

Cal Poly offers and supports many venues for freedom of expression, including rallies, impromptu speeches in public areas, and public bulletin boards throughout campus.

Doesn't that seem out of place? Of course it does, but that is in fact what the Hinkle case is about. Apparently they know about chutzpah at Cal Poly.
Posted by King at 2:24 PM

Cookies -- unsafe at any speed
 
What the hell?

Southern Methodist University shut down a bake sale Wednesday in which cookies were offered for sale at different prices, depending on the buyer's race or gender.

The sale was organized by the Young Conservatives of Texas, who said it was intended as a protest of affirmative action. ...

Similar sales have been held by College Republican chapters at colleges in at least five other states since February.

A black student filed a complaint with SMU, saying the sale was offensive. SMU officials said they halted the event after 45 minutes because it created a potentially unsafe situation.

"This was not an issue about free speech," Tim Moore, director of the SMU student center, said in a story for Thursday's edition of The Dallas Morning News. "It was really an issue where we had a hostile environment being created."

It's hostile to offer students of color a discount on cookies?

UPDATE: Best of the Web picked up the story, including this quote from a SMU sophomore:

My reaction was disgust because of the ignorance of some SMU students. They were arguing that affirmative action was solely based on race. It's not based on race. It's based on bringing a diverse community to a certain organization.

Notes BotW, "Doublethink is alive and well in Dallas."

UPDATE 2: Eugene Volokh makes an excellent point: As a private university (unlike SCSU), SMU can do this if they want to, but...

Is SMU the sort of place where students are free to express their political views on one of the leading ethical, legal, and political issues of the day? Or is this the sort of place where complaints that ideas are "offensive" are enough to shut those ideas down? If it's the latter, then SMU might be a place where classes are taught -- but it's not my idea of what a modern university should be.

UPDATE LAST (boy did the blogosphere jump all over this!) You really should read Michael at Highered Intelligence as well with this reaction to the student quote in the first update:

that has to be my least favourite rhetorical maneuver of all time. Republicans, Democrats, and Idiots alike constantly say stuff like this. It's not about what it is actually about, it's about what we want it to be about. It's not about higher taxes, it's about a balanced budget. It's not about race, it's about diversity.

Posted by King at 10:34 AM

Suspicious? Me? You betcha
 
Many fireworks are going off around campus over the civility code. The faculty senate meeting this week had several senators wishing to bring it up but running out of time because of a letter of support for our committee on diversity education and our committee on diversity, anti-semitism and social justice. (The mere fact that there are two committees should speak volumes to how far off the tracks this place has jumped.) Apparently, even they are not happy about the civility code.

Our Committees share a concern about the centrality of "civility" in the drafted Diversity Plan and a grave concern about the proposed "Civility and Academic Freedom Draft" [sic] currently being circulated by the administration. This concern emerges for us from a number of sources. Historically, social concepts like civility have been deployed against people of color, the poor and working classes, against women, GLBT peoples, people with disabilities, Jewish and other religious minorities to silence and punish dissent ... When civilty is used as a principle of etiquette, the righteous anger of those who are subject to racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, sexism and all forms of sexual violence, ableism, and ageism is represented as being inappropriate and impolite.

Yes, they really do talk like that. I'll save the rest for another post to make a different point. It's noteworthy, however, that the concerns they express have parallels in our concerns that the academic freedom that defended these very groups forty years ago are now being eroded by them.

Also in the meeting we received an unofficial set of minutes of a meeting between the union and administration from Sept. 11, 2003, in which the civility code was discussed. The author of the code identifies the primary source of our code as the civility code at the bottom of this bulletin page from IUPUI. They claim it is "in compliance with the AAUP guideline on academic freedom and professional ethics", though I cannot see how this is true, assuming they mean the 1940 Statement. As I noted in my dissection earlier, AAUP's own counsel doesn't seem to support this type of speech restriction, either. There are two statements that need to be seen to be believed.

[union]The contract says that any disciplinary action must result only from just cause. It definse just cause as an action taken with a reason. Do you seek to put lack of civility under that list of reasons?

[administration]Yes. ... I think there are instances where people harass and I think some action should be taken. My understanding is that the administration in the past has been held accountable for not taking action.

If the goal is to prevent harassment, then by all means prevent harassment (though I again refer to Eugene Volokh's commentary on workplace harassment law). But the First Amendment doesn't end at the university parking lot. And it's worth noting that IUPUI's civility code only seeks to buttress existing harassment law -- our draft document goes further to create a class of speech which can be punished that does not necessarily violate harassment law.

[admin]When people threaten or intimidate or are intolerant -- those are things addressed by this proposed policy -- not disagreements or criticisms but the way they are voiced.

How does one judge this? It is far too vague. I am intolerant of people who distort facts. I am intolerant of falseness. If I speak forcefully when people post complete fabrications in order to support, for example, continued antipathy over Bush and Iraq, have I committed an actionable offense? Do the people who fabricate suffer consequences for lying? One might hope the union would see through this, but the best I get from them is this:

I understand the word 'civility.' To me it is non-threatening. Given that we are human beings, it can be misconstrued. Whose interpretation of 'civility' are we to follow? We are all professionals. I have heard the word 'professionalism' here today. Would that be a more benign or acceptable term? ... It is a question of mutual suspicion.

Indeed it is, but the wrong turn you take is "we are all professionals." A professional academic has different aims and a different conception of professionalism than a professional administrator, and both those conceptions differ from the professional activists who inhabit our two committees. You will never get agreement on these; AAUP understood this wisely and decided that the only curative to speech we don't like is more speech.
Posted by King at 6:12 AM

Wednesday, September 24, 2003

Teaching democracy and Montessori
 
Joanne Jacobs quotes a parent who seems to have become frustrated by her children's school textbook adoption process, and offers this:

I now see the similarities between the argument that we cannot impose democracy on Iraq because Iraqis must discover democracy for themselves when they are ready, and the argument that we cannot teach children algorithms for addition and subtraction because children must discover their own algorithms that will make sense to them, when they are ready.

Is there a connection between constructivist and conservative worldviews? I'd suggest a good read of Maria Montessori. The commenters on Jacobs' site seem to think of constructivism as unstructured. My experience watching my daughter's Montessori education is that it's highly structured while permitting choices. Indeed, I'd call it "libertarian". Likewise, libertarianism in a democracy does not necessarily mean anarchy.
Posted by King at 5:56 PM

Flexible, without giving away the store.
 
A professor on campus set along a story about Cambridge College, a school that seems intent on helping teachers get a masters degree and the increased pay that comes from it. The story in the WSJ (subscribers only) suggests the problem is the desire for credentials.

With the federal government and many states demanding more advanced degrees of teachers -- and providing financial incentives -- Cambridge is one of many schools that have significantly sped up access to the master's degree in education through nontraditional schedules and other accommodations.

Some fear that all the shortcuts are putting too much emphasis on credentials as an end in themselves -- instead of focusing on what's best for students. "We ought not automatically reward teachers with a salary increase for master's degrees," says Jennifer King Rice, an education professor at the University of Maryland, who recently wrote an analysis of 80 studies on teacher training. "We should reward instead specific, demonstrated mastery of content and teaching methods."

Cambridge administrators say the urgent social need to train teachers justifies helping them in scheduling, grading and admissions. "We try to be as flexible as we can without giving away the store," says Jorge Cardoso, the 51-year-old director of the summer program, called the National Institute for Teaching Excellence.

Some research suggests that a teacher's gaining an advanced degree, particularly in education rather than in a specific subject taught, such as math or science, has little bearing on student performance. More vital are a teacher's intelligence, experience and mastery of the subject. The 2001 "No Child Left Behind" law, which requires that all teachers be "highly qualified" as a condition of federal aid to public schools in high-poverty areas, specifies that a graduate degree would be one way to meet that standard.

The area has been a boon to online and for-profit schools like University of Phoenix and Lesley College in Cambridge.
Posted by King at 5:43 PM

I'm on board
 
Schwarzenegger's piece in OpinionJournal vindicates my view that he is actually quite libertarian. A major political candidate cites Friedman and Smith as his influences and sends them the book that spawned the video I use in class? He's my guy now. He doesn't diss McClintock, but it's clear now that the Tombots cannot get to his right on fiscal issues. Here's a guess that this, plus the debate tonight, drives McClintock into the 5-7% range and lets Arnold squeak by Bustamente by 2%.

EDIT: Keep forgetting to change the title that Blogger picks up on the blogthis script. Note to Blogger: I don't like that feature.
Posted by King at 10:06 AM

Off the mark
 
Tongue Tied notes that in England, you can't fail the national standardized tests; you get an 'N' instead for 'Nearly'.

People who grade tests have also been instructed to stop marking math questions as right or wrong, but instead use the terms ‘creditworthy’ or ‘not creditworthy.’

Apparently, HURL is branching out. (Hat tip also to Helloooo Chapter Two for noting this "we're done as a society when..." moment.)
Posted by King at 9:54 AM

Tuesday, September 23, 2003

Students get a peek
 
The campus newspaper tries to explain the tenure system in a long piece today. The criteria discussed is within this article in the faculty contract. (See section B.) The paper's editorial, predictably, doesn't think tenured professors are involved enough with students.

Good though they may be, the MnSCU evaluation standards still do not quite cover all bases. Nowhere is there a specific area for evaluating people skills. This might fall under "teaching" if interpreted broadly, but the editorial board would like to see professors held accountable for their finesse for person-to-person interaction. No one should presume that professors have the most excellent or perfect people skills, of course, but students should expect that their professors can be lively in the classroom. Professors should be excited to promote learning. Tenure evaluations already touch on this subject, but more emphasis should be placed on the professor's ability to interact with people, both on a professor-to-student and a professor-to-classroom basis.

Posted by King at 8:20 PM

Someone gets it right
 
At the University of Alabama, the proposed speech code mentioned here earlier has now been shelved, says Liberty & Power.

Defenders of free speech showed up to fill the meeting room. They included students from the residence halls, members of the Alabama Scholars Association, and others who brought a variety of flags, including the U.S., Israeli, Italian, and Christian. The demonstration effectively showed the absurdity of the ban and illustrated the general threat that it posed to free speech.

Posted by King at 10:33 AM