The Harvard College Freshman Pledge

This is a fascinating report, from Virginia Postrel, "Harvard Now Values ‘Kindness’ Not Learning." For example:

Kindness isn’t a public or intellectual virtue, but a personal one. It is a form of love. Kindness seeks, above all, to avoid hurt. Criticism -- even objective, impersonal, well- intended, constructive criticism -- isn’t kind. Criticism hurts people’s feelings, and it hurts most when the recipient realizes it’s accurate. Treating “kindness” as the way to civil discourse doesn’t show students how to argue with accuracy and respect. It teaches them instead to neither give criticism nor tolerate it.

And at Bits and Pieces (the blog of Harvard Professor Harry Lewis, "The Freshman Pledge":

Its purpose is to make people think and to induce conversation on the important matter of civility and generosity. I am assured that the intention is not to make anyone feel compelled to sign the pledge.

In this case, alas, the line between an invitation and a compulsion is exceedingly narrow, and I doubt those who explain it to students can consistently do so with the required nuance. The pledge is delivered to students for signing by their proctors, the officers of the College who monitor their compliance with Harvard rules and report their malfeasances to the College's disciplinary board. Nonconformists would have good reason to fear that they will be singled out for extra scrutiny. And their unsigned signature lines are hung for all to see, in an act of public shaming. Few students, in their first week at Harvard, would have the courage to refuse this invitation. I am not sure I would advise any student to do so.

The substance of the pledge is critically important. This is not a pledge to refrain from cheating, or to take out the garbage. It is not a pledge to act in a certain way. It is a pledge to think about the world a certain way, to hold precious the exercise of kindness. It is a promise to control one's thoughts. Though it refers to sound institutional values affirmed at Commencement, the pledge pretends to affirm them not through the educational process to which the Dean testifies, but through a prior restraint on students' freedom of thought. A student would be breaking the pledge if she woke up one morning and decided it was more important to achieve intellectually than to be kind.

Chilling. Our very highest institution of learning, once again seen as among the most totalitarian.

Via Maggie's Farm.

Jennifer Perez and Nadege Tandoh

Those are the names of the two Widener University law students who made egregious allegations against Professor Lawrence Connell. They are identified at the Delaware Law Weekly, "Controversy Continues at Widener After Connell Suspension" (via William Jacobson).



Also at Newsworks, "Delaware law professor sues two students and Widener Law."



PREVIOUSLY: "The Claims of Grievance-Bearing Identity Groups Will Always Prevail Over Fairness," and "Charlotte Allen: 'The Mess at Widener Law School'."

College Rape Accusations and the Presumption of Male Guilt

Oh boy, Peter Berkowitz is opening it up with this one, at Wall Street Journal, "Pressured by the Obama administration, universities abandon any pretense of due process in sexual assault cases":

Late August and early September bring recent high school graduates, bright and eager, to campuses around the country. Carefully planned orientation sessions will impress upon freshmen the paramount importance of sensitivity, of avoiding offensive words and ideas, and—notwithstanding that in recent years approximately 55% of matriculating freshmen nationally have been female—the urgency of maintaining a campus atmosphere friendly to women.



But parents who might expect this orientation to include an introduction to the moral and political purposes of liberal education—including respect for liberty of thought and discussion, and due process of law—will be sorely disappointed.



The neglect at freshmen orientation of the aim of liberal education and how it undergirds and is undergirded by the principles of freedom is not an accident. It is emblematic of college as a whole. Our universities impair liberal education not only by what they teach and do not teach in classrooms but also by the illiberal rules they promulgate to regulate speech and conduct outside of class.



The Obama administration has aggravated the problem. On April 4, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali, head of the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR), distributed a 19-page "Dear Colleague" letter to "provide recipients with information to assist them in meeting their obligations."



At the cost of losing federal funding—on which all major institutions of higher education have grown dependent—colleges and universities are obliged under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act (which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex) to thoroughly investigate all allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault on campus, including the felony of rape. They are also obliged, according to Ms. Ali, to curtail due process rights of the accused.

Keep reading.



And following the discussion takes you right to the neo-Marxist legal and educational "reforms" of the last couple of decades, those instituting a sexual harassment regime of radical feminist ideological totalitarianism. And that's what today's "liberal" education is really all about. Isn't that sick?

Professor Lawrence Connell's Hypotheticals

ICYMI, be sure to read my earlier entry, "Charlotte Allen: 'The Mess at Widener Law School."



I've been thinking about the case and will have more later. Mostly, I'm trying to figure out Deans Ammons' animosity toward Professor Connell. Charlotte Allen notes:

Connell’s most egregious offense ... and probably the offense that brought down the full-bore wrath of Ammons upon him, was a series of classroom hypotheticals. The scenarios involved Ammons herself and Connell’s efforts to kill her (hypothetically) after she threatened to fire him (hypothetically) for parking his car in her parking space. In one of the hypotheticals Connell rushed into Ammons’ office with his .357 magnum and shot her in the head—except that the “head” turned out to a pumpkin artfully painted to look just like the dean. The idea was to ask the class whether under prevailing legal rules he should be tried for attempted murder—or not, since no harm actually befell her. Imaginative and macabrely humorous hypotheticals, often pitting professors against deans and other campus authority figures, are a standard feature of Old Law School pedagogy. The idea is that the students will absorb and remember the underlying legal principles better in a context of humorous narrative. Hypotheticals show up not just in law school classrooms but in exam questions and moot-court competitions. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan was repeatedly murdered in classroom hypotheticals when she was dean of Harvard Law School.

Indeed, as Professor Jonathan Turley indicates, "Widener Law Professor Suspended For Using Dean In Hypotheticals":

I must confess that I routinely incorporate the Dean at our school in the same type of hypotheticals as well as any contract professors. Indeed, my final every year involves some struggle between myself and the Dean and contracts professors. Absent something more, I fail to see the basis for such disciplinary action. Other professors have raises objections to the case on sites like Volokh.



In his letter, [Widener Vice Dean J. Patrick] Kelly accuses Connell of an “outgoing pattern” of misconduct, and cites his use of such hypotheticals, including “cursing and coarse behavior, “racist and sexist statements” and “violent, personal scenarios that demean and threaten your colleagues.” Without more, the allegations raise serious concerns over academic freedom and privilege.



I am most disturbed by the statement of Gregory F. Scholtz, associate secretary and director of the American Association of University Professors. AAUP is organization that is expected to defend academic freedom. Yet, Scholtz is quoted as saying “Education is all about pushing the boundaries, and it’s all about controversial ideas, but the question always is when does it cross the line. Given our modern culture and the violence that exists, you’re really asking for trouble when you talk about killing people.” Really? That is news to those of us who teach torts and criminal law. It is common for faculty to incorporate colleagues into hypotheticals as good-humored jokes. At my school, contracts professors respond by incorporating me into their own hypotheticals. I have never found it even remotely bothersome or insulting. It keeps the attention of students and adds a needed element of levity in lectures.

It's routine. And Turley has more on how chilling the Lawrence case is for academic freedom.



Also, at Volokh, "Interview With Lawrence Connell, the Criminal Law Professor Suspended for His Hypotheticals":

Q: Can you give me an example of a hypothetical you might have used in class, to which the students who complained might have been referring? Can you describe the context in which you would have used it?



A: Yes, here is one: The Dean has threatened to fire me if she comes to school one more time and finds that I have parked in her designated parking space. Upset about the possibility of losing both my job and the parking space, I bring my .357 to school, get out of my car, put the .357 into my waistband, walk to the top floor where her office is located, open the door to her office, see her seated at her desk, draw my weapon, aim my weapon, and fire my weapon directly into what I believe to be her head. To my surprise, it’s not the Dean at all, but an ingeniously painted pumpkin — a pumpkin that has been intricately painted to look like the Dean. Dick Tracy rushes in and immediately wrestles me to the ground. I am charged with the attempted murder of the Dean.



The hypothetical raises various issues about attempted crimes that might entail discussion that spans more than one class. Some of the classroom discussion in the first, for example, will address the two basic philosophical problems of why we punish attempts, which are failed efforts at crime, and why we punish attempts less than successfully completed crimes.



A retributive argument, on the one hand, is that the attemptor has demonstrated his moral culpability by his bad conduct, and the degree of his punishment should not depend on a fortuitous turn of luck. On the other hand, a retributivist might argue that punishment in the absence of harm is unjust. For retributive purposes, has Connell demonstrated his moral culpability by shooting what he believes to be the Dean? Or does the fact that he merely destroyed a pumpkin suggest that his punishment would be unjust?

It's obviously a powerful heuristic.



More on this tonight. I'm checking around for more on Deans Ammons' motivations to persecute Professor Connell.

Charlotte Allen: 'The Mess at Widener Law School'

At Minding the Campus (via Glenn Reynolds):

Old Law School culture revolves around a traditional curriculum—those torts and contracts courses—and the Socratic method of instruction, with its pointed and rigorous give-and-take between professors and students. Old Law School assumes that the process of training lawyers is training them to a centuries-old Anglo-American tradition of lawyerly thought, which rests on the careful crafting of legal arguments and the relentless challenging of those arguments, often by the professor in the classroom. Old precedent-setting cases may be supplanted by newer cases, and legal principles may shift, but the underlying methodology of close analysis of written court opinions and the arguments on which they rest, along with certain assumptions underlying the American legal systems—that human beings are generally capable of exercising reason and free will and thus should be held responsible for their actions—are Old Law School constants.



New Law School culture, growing out of the Critical Legal Studies movement that first surfaced in law schools during the 1980s, is quite different. In New Law School thinking, the law does not embody a rational system of justice—or even strivings toward such a system—but is essentially a political construct that has historically operated to keep the rich and powerful in their places of wealth and power and other groups—women, racial minorities, the disabled, and the poor—in their socially subordinate places. If this characterization sounds Marxist, that is because Critical Legal Studies—and its intellectual progeny, Critical Race Theory and Feminist Legal Theory—grew out of the New Left radicalism of the 1960s, which viewed American governmental and social structures as systems of oppression. It has also been influenced by postmodernist literary theory, with its assumptions that there is no objective truth or reality. In New Law School thinking, reason, free will, and personal responsibility are illusions, for all legal battles are actually struggles of race, class, and gender, in which power, not justice, is the ultimate goal. In New Law School scholarly writing, rigorous analysis of court opinions and the drawing of fine distinctions underlying legal arguments have been supplanted by “story telling": personal narratives typically involving the law professors’ own experiences as members of an oppressed group with the race-gender-class matrix that is the source of their oppression. Since a shift in the power structure, not justice, is the goal, any tactic that coerces the recalcitrant into conforming to the new power regime is permissible in New Law School thinking.

Continue reading. Especially good is Allen's discussion of Linda Ammons. I wrote briefly along the same lines here, "Widener's Dean Linda Ammons Goes After Law School Professor Lawrence Connell."



And from Allen's conclusion, she notes that Professor Lawrence Connell was exonerated of the allegations against him, yet Ammons still prevailed on her preposterous charge that Connell "retaliated":

What is appalling is that, despite both exonerations, Ammons appears to have gotten her way in the end after all, exacting sanctions against a tenured professor that are not only costly but humiliating (he is supposed to apologize to the complaining students. The charge of retaliation, based on a vague prohibition in the faculty handbook, seem especially flimsy. Connell’s e-mail to his students in December neither named his accusers nor referred to them in any way. As for the lawsuit, Connell never waived his right to seek redress in court against individuals whose false accusations have already cost him quite a bit of money and promise to cost much more. But that is the way of New Law School. It is perhaps only Old Law School, with its emphasis on fairness, reasonableness, and color-and gender-blind justice, that would find something totalitarian in Widener’s treatment of Connell and accordingly demand Linda Ammons’ resignation. In New Law School thinking, where power is everything, and the claims of grievance-bearing identity groups will always prevail over fairness, it is perfectly fine to strip your perceived opponent of his livelihood and to consign him to the ministrations of your own Nurse Ratched—and there is no such thing as abuse of power.

'All Summer Long'

My summer's been long but is almost gone. School starts back at my college next Monday.

And we were trying different things

We were smoking funny things

Making love out by the lake to our favorite song

Sipping whiskey out the bottle, not thinking 'bout tomorrow

Singing Sweet home Alabama all summer long

Singing Sweet home Alabama all summer long...

Lessons in Handling Plagiarism From Professor Panagiotis Ipeirotis

I had a nightmare class at UCSB in 1999, the second lecture class I taught as in independent instructor. It was a Black Politics class. I had a running battle with radical students throughout the quarter. I even had one dude pull me aside to say, "Hey, man, this is how you teach the class." I wasn't down hard enough on the Man, apparently. This dude, and some of his allies, wanted a course in victimology and racial recrimination. And I was doing straight civil rights developments and the political science of voting rights and redistricting. It started to be a nightmare. Students complained to the department that I graded their midterms "too hard." It was a big learning experience. And the final exam was the kicker. I caught a couple of black women cheating. They were passing their exam sheets back and forth with notes they'd written while writing their essays. They had arrows and diagrams tracing arguments. It was involved. When one of them turned in the exam I asked for the question sheet and she wasn't about to give it to me. I was like hello? This is what you do. So she reluctantly gave to me and later I turned the students over to the vice chair of the department. Within a couple of days I was called into the chair's office, Professor Lorraine McDonnell, who no one liked, and who had a reputation, basically, of piggy-backing off her husband, Professor M. Stephen Weatherford, a nice guy and sought-after research "quant" (a numbers and methods guy who sharpened research knives, which is hip in political science, a field that remains envious of the economics discipline for its much more formal and recognized academic rigor). Professor McDonnell threw me under the bus. (I ended up assigning grades to all students and being done with that class, and I moved on after that semester to teach at Fresno State.)

Anyway, check this piece at Inside Higher Ed, "Who Is Punished for Plagiarism?" (via Glenn Reynolds):

Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis has taken down the controversial blog post, but the debate is raging on without the original material.

Ipeirotis, a computer scientist who teaches at New York University's Stern School of Business, wrote a post on his blog last week called "Why I will never pursue cheating again." In it, he told the story of how he found that about 20 percent of a 100-person class had plagiarized -- and described the fallout from his accusations. While Turnitin led to his initial suspicions, and gave clear evidence for some of the students, it only cast doubts on other students. Many of them confessed only when Ipeirotis told the class that if he didn't hear from those who had cheated, he would report the incident immediately -- whereas in the end he included in his report the information that students had admitted what they had done.

So why does Ipeirotis consider the experience a failure? His students became antagonistic, he wrote on the blog post, and gave him lower teaching evaluations than he had ever received before. And those poor teaching evaluations were cited in a review that resulted in the smallest raise he had ever received.

Keep reading.

Ipeirotis' post is taken down temporarily. But Ruan YiFeng's Blog has excerpts. I like this:

“The process of discussing all the detected cases was not only painful, it was extremely time consuming as well.

Students would come to my office and deny everything. Then I would present them the evidence. They would soften but continue to deny it. Only when I was saying “enough, I will just give the case to the honorary council who will decide” most students were admitting wrongdoing. But every case was at least 2 hours of wasted time.

With 22 cases, that was a lot of time devoted to cheating: More than 45 hours in completely unproductive discussions, when the total lecture time for the course was just 32 hours. This is simply too much time.”

Students, in general, are inveterate liars when it comes to grades and classroom performance. I'd need more information, but this sounds like Ipeirotis' crucible from the trenches. You can't be an excellent teacher without failing a few times. And in this case there was something wrong, very wrong, with the course design. Exams and paper assignments have to be designed to prevent cheating. If he's doing research papers, there's got to be a way to create a project that students can't easily off load from the web. I still catch about one student plagiarizing a paper every year in World Politics, and usually a couple in American Government. And technically, you can't just fail them without due process. And to provide due process requires a formal administrative review and possibly hearing, and most professors don't even grasp the legal significance of the process. Since I've been a "traditional" professor on the issues, I had some experience dealing with problems at my college and soon I ended up leading a couple of workshops on academic discipline. It's the same stories over and over again. A lot of things you hear are just like what Professor Ipeirotis recounts. And that's why each professor has to develop an assignment regime that makes cheating hard, but they've also got to be ready to uphold standards. For the most part, my college today backs professors. Maybe students at community college aren't as powerful --- or their parents have less resources --- as students at competitive universities, but it pays to lay the administrative groundwork for upholding policies inside the classroom. Without that backing, teaching, inevitably, will be no fun.

Community College Worries and Challenges

At the annual meeting of the National Association of College and University Business Officers. See Chronicle of Higher Education, "Community-College Officials Swap Notes on Common Worries and Challenges."

And at New York Times, "At Two-Year Colleges, Less Scrutiny Equals Less Athletic Equality."

Los Angeles Southwest College has a new athletic field house and football stadium, but almost no female athletes.

Women make up more than two-thirds of students at this community college in the city’s South Central neighborhood, but less than a quarter of its athletes. The college’s decision to suspend the track team this year left women who wanted to play a sport with a single option: basketball.

Henry Washington, the college’s athletic director and head football coach, acknowledges that his program is most likely violating federal law by failing to offer enough roster spots to women. But he said many of the female students are also juggling jobs and child care, and do not have time to play sports. Then there is the question of money. “I just keep my fingers crossed that we can keep what we have,” he said...

The situation at Los Angeles Southwest, without question, more closely represents the norm among community colleges around the country. Even as they play an increasingly vital role in American higher education — enrolling more than eight million students nationwide last fall, a 20 percent jump since the fall of 2007, just before the start of the recession — community colleges are routinely failing to provide enough athletic opportunities to women, as required under Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination in education. Many community colleges offer an array of options for men but just a single team for women. And dozens of colleges over the years had no women on their athletic rosters, according to federal education statistics.

No one disputes that community colleges face distinct challenges, with a lack of money paramount. But Pensacola, one of the rare exceptions among community colleges, offers evidence that the demands of the law can be met.

Continue reading. And note the comparison to Pensacola State College in Florida. This is all about state money. Those states, like California, deeply in the hole aren't going to be able to provide the opportunities required by law. The question becomes one of enforcement. Seems like California colleges would welcome the scrutiny if it forced state officials to better fund the institutions.

College is Too Easy

Bird Dog links to Mark Bauerlein's discussion of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's research on student learning and college performance. And that reminds me of the Arum and Roksa piece that ran in Friday's Los Angeles Times, "College, too easy for its own good":

We recently tracked several thousand students as they moved through and graduated from a diverse set of more than two dozen colleges and universities, and we found consistent evidence that many students were not being appropriately challenged. In a typical semester, 50% of students did not take a single course requiring more than 20 pages of writing, 32% did not have any classes that required reading more than 40 pages per week, and 36% reported studying alone five or fewer hours per week.

Not surprisingly, given such a widespread lack of academic rigor, about a third of students failed to demonstrate significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing ability (as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment) during their four years of college.

The students themselves must bear some of the blame for this, of course. Improvement in thinking and writing skills requires academic engagement; simply hanging out on a college campus for multiple years isn't enough. Yet at many institutions, that seems to be sufficient to earn a degree. At many schools, students can choose from a menu of easy programs and classes that allow them to graduate without having received a rigorous college education. Colleges are complicit, in that they reward students with high grades for little effort. Indeed, the students in our study who reported studying alone five or fewer hours per week nevertheless had an average cumulative GPA of 3.16.

To be sure, there were many exceptions to this dismal portrait of the state of undergraduate learning. Some academic programs and colleges are quite rigorous, and some students we followed pushed themselves and excelled. In general, traditional arts and science fields (math, science, humanities and the social sciences) tended to be more demanding, and students who majored in those subjects studied more and showed higher gains. So too did students attending more selective colleges. In addition, at every college and university examined, we found some students who were applying themselves and learning at impressive levels.

These real accomplishments do not, however, exonerate the colleges and universities that are happy to collect annual tuition dollars but then fail to provide many students with a high-quality education.

There's more, especially the discussion of why higher education got off track. Still, it'd be worth checking the book itself, for in my experience it's the absence of skills and the culture of anti-intellectualism that's most detrimental to college learning. I'm tempted to say I struggled with maintaining high standards when I first started at LBCC. But that wouldn't be quite accurate. Over time experience has shown how I can better maintain high standards AND improve student performance (it requires intensely personalized instruction, which is hard to do with hundreds of students). That said, I'm less rigid than I was 8 or 9 years ago, and in some cases that means I'm just plain easier (flexibility is key, which sometimes might mean "easier"). Professors are dealing with a range of abilities starting with students who'd be doing just fine at Berkeley or UCLA to those who can barely string a couple of correct sentences together. I'm sad sometimes when I meet students who literally can't read. I largely quit having students do expository reading in class (reading aloud) because I felt bad for the students who struggled to read through a paragraph from the textbook. It's not one particular demographic in particular, although a lot of Latino students are ESL and a lot of blacks demonstrate something of a stunted degree of formal learning, and I'm talking rudimentary basic skills acquisition. And worse, with the exception of the odd student here or there, black kids generally don't seem to care. (Don't even get me going about the black student athletes.)

Soak the High Achieving Students

From each according to ability, to each according to need:

And don't miss William at Pirate's Cove, who has video from the petition drive at UC Merced to redistribute grades. Not going over too well, (un)surprisingly: "Libs Love Redistributing Everything But What Is Their Own."

Facebook Revolution: The Democratization of Egypt and Changes in the Middle East

A panel discussion at my college today:

The college may upload the talk to YouTube, and if so I'll post it here.

Republican Party of Wisconsin Seeks E-Mails From UW-Madison Professor William Cronon

This is fascinating.

The background's at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, "GOP seeks e-mails of UW-Madison professor." The state GOP wants History Professor William Cronon's e-mails --- those sent on university servers --- going back to January 1st. It's a legitimate open-records request, and the university also has a policy against the use of institutional resources for partisan purposes. I'd personally like to see Cronon's communications. I read his super long response to the party's request this morning: "Abusing Open Records to Attack Academic Freedom." Cronon published an op-ed at the New York Times last weekend: "Wisconsin's Radical Break." I read this at the time and was unsurprised by his progressivism. But check Cronon's blog post. He suggests that the GOP open-records request is pure intimidation, and perhaps it is. But I'd think anyone doing some serious writing and organizing on these issues would be exceedingly careful to segregate teaching and research functions (on university equipment) from political activism likely to raise questions of controversy. Ann Althouse writes on this, suggesting that she's careful to use private e-mail for political advocacy, although she posts a defense of Cronin from UW Chancellor Biddy Martin.

And on top of all this comes Nobel Prize-winning economist and blogging Princeton Professor Paul Krugman, "Academic Intimidation" (via Memeorandum):

Cronon has a wisconsin.edu email address — but nobody, and I mean nobody, considers such academic email addresses something specially reserved for university business. Actually, according to Cronon he has been especially careful, maintaining a separate personal account — but nobody would have considered it out of the ordinary if he mingled personal correspondence with official business on the dot edu address. And no, the fact that he’s at a public university doesn’t change that: when my students take jobs at Berkeley or SUNY, they don’t imagine that they’re entering into a special fishbowl environment that they wouldn’t encounter at Georgetown or Haverford.

But then, we know perfectly well what’s going on here. Republicans aren’t looking for some abuse of Cronon’s position; they’re hoping to find some statement that can be quoted out of context to discredit him. At the very least, they hope that other academics will henceforth feel intimidated.

What I'm loving about this is not that Cronon's getting hassled, but the beautiful hypocrisy that's raised by the obvious counterfactual hypothesis: Had Cronon been a conservative professor and tea party activist, progressives would be cheering the perfect justice of a state Democratic Party open-records request. But Cronon's a big-time leftie, so the big guns like Paul Krugman are coming out in his defense. It's predictable and pathetic. And of course there's nothing secret about leftist professors and union organizers abusing public facilities for their political activities. Warner Todd Huston had a report this morning: "Michigan: Teachers Trying to Hide Union Activism in School Email Accounts."

At my college political communications on the district's server had long been routine, but after progressive faculty members successfully lobbied against my office bulletin board (to censor a GOP campaign bumper sticker), which later resulted in a full-blow investigation, I stopped looking the other way. Here's the policy at the California Community College Chancellor's Office (via):

"The use of district resources to support or oppose ballot measures or candidates is restricted. The fundamental reason for the restriction is that public money cannot be used for partisan activities. Put another way, resources that have been obtained for the district's support from all taxpayers must not be used "to take sides." Therefore, district employee time, equipment, supplies, or other public resources may not be used in advocating for either side of a ballot measure or to support or defeat any candidate. These restrictions are largely set out in an article in the Education Code entitled "Political Activities of School Officers and Employees" that encompasses sections 7050 through 7058."

It pisses the hell out of my communist colleagues, but I'll no longer stand for the despicable double standards. It used to be live and let live regarding campus political activities. But it's to the point of intimidation now. Progressives are thugs --- especially union-backed college professors --- and I'm hardly one to take it lying down.

RELATED: See William Jacobson, "Strange What Gets Them Excited in Wisconsin."

California's Public Pensions Crisis

From Steven Greenhut, at O.C. Register, "Pensions Pushing California to the Brink":

There's no getting away from the pension issue these days or from the fact that the state's pension system is on the brink of disaster unless pensions for state and local workers are pared back dramatically. The only people in denial these days are the Brown administration and the state's legislative leaders, as their response to a prestigious government report makes clear.



The well-respected and non-partisan Little Hoover Commission drew some conclusions that even many pension reformers have been reluctant to make – namely, that pensions must be reduced for current employees. The state's unfunded liabilities, or pension debt, is estimated as high as a half-trillion dollars. That is the amount taxpayers will owe to make good on pension for current retirees and employees. Most of the debate has centered on reducing formulas for new hires, but as Little Hoover explained, that won't put a dent in the problem.

More at the link.



I'll be heading to Sacramento if anarcho-communists stage an occupation of the state capitol. Of course, we've got Governor Jerry Brown, so lefties should be well taken care of. Still, some of the anarchists don't care who's in power, so that'll make things tough for the SEIU commie thugs, who'll end up beating on folks who're basically on the same side.



RELATED: AT LAT, "GOP senators claim 'impasse' in budget talks with Gov. Jerry Brown."



Photo Credit, "Anne Stausboll, chief executive officer for the California Public Employees Retirement System, testifies on the state retirement system during a legislative hearing at the Capitol in Sacramento, Calif., Wednesday, March 2, 2011," Albany Times Union, "Democrats cool to targeting workers' pensions."

Green Energy Plan Wastes Millions at L.A. Community Colleges

I've been busy and meant to post on LAT's series on the bond program boondoggle at the Los Angeles Community Colleges, but this one's too good to postpone. See, "Colleges Green Energy Plan Proves Wildly Impractical; Blunders Devour $10 Million":

Larry Eisenberg had a vision. "Amazing," he called it. "Spectacular."

The Los Angeles Community College District would become a paragon of clean energy. By generating solar, wind and geothermal power, the district would supply all its electricity needs. Not only would the nine colleges sever ties to the grid, saving millions of dollars a year, they would make money by selling surplus power. Thanks to state and federal subsidies, construction of the green energy projects would cost nothing upfront.

As head of a $5.7-billion, taxpayer-funded program to rebuild the college campuses, Eisenberg commanded attention. But his plan for energy independence was seriously flawed.

He overestimated how much power the colleges could generate. He underestimated the cost. And he poured millions of dollars into designs for projects that proved so impractical or unpopular they were never built.

These and other blunders cost nearly $10 million that could have paid for new classrooms, laboratories and other college facilities, a Times investigation found.

RTWT. The incompetence is astounding.

And the full series is here: "Billions to Spend: Complete Coverage." And columnist Steve Lopez has this: "Times community college investigation unearths shameful waste."

The district's bond program had incentives for corruption built in from the beginning. There was literally no independent oversight from outside citizens' groups. See the intitial report, "The price of poor planning, weak oversight." Years ago, when my college got its bond program approved by the voters, the administration ended up going with a new contractor after just about a year. I heard all kinds of stories of lush spending with the bond money, for food and Starbucks coffee, and it was probably worse, but should news like that get out to the community there'd be hell to pay. As it is my college's South Quad complex is often ridiculed as the Taj Mahal amid state budget cuts that have put student needs on the backburner. As for the Los Angeles District, it's like an early-20th century big-city machine --- and a Democrat thing, dontcha know! The Democratic Party of the San Fernando Valley held fundraisers for board member Miguel Santiago: "Reelect Miguel Santiago--Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees." And the L.A.'s Democratic Party & Courage Campaign endorsed longtime board member Mona Field: "March 8 Election Recommendations from Pacific Palisades Democratic Club." And get this, Mona Field's got a long record of corruption: "Incompetence and Corruption at LA Community College District Must End":

We have lived through an era where public officials and union leaders lost – indeed gleefully destroyed – their moral compass. The cities of Los Angeles, Inglewood, and others teeter on the brink of bankruptcy because elected city officials and public unions have engaged in years of “mutual money massage”.

The public unions commit funds and campaign resources to “friendly” candidates and those candidates, when elected, have given away the public treasury in the form of outrageous pay hikes and rich pension plans no longer seen in the private sector.

And "LACCD Board President Mona Field Admits to Misuse of Bond Funds."

Added: "Candidates for L.A. Community College District board urge greater scrutiny of system."

Kinda like Chicago and the Obamacrats.

PHOTO CREDIT: "The clock tower at East Los Angeles College was built crooked. It cost an additional $157,000 to fix. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times / November 3, 2010)."

Three-Fourths of New York Community College Students Have Remedial Issues

Hey, tell me about it.

At New York Times, "CUNY Adjusts Amid Tide of Remedial Students":

The City University of New York has long spent much of its energy and resources just teaching new students what they need to begin taking college-level courses.

But that tide of remedial students has now swelled so large that the university’s six community colleges — like other two-year schools across the country — are having to rethink what and how they teach, even as they reel from steep cuts in state and local aid.

About three-quarters of the 17,500 freshmen at the community colleges this year have needed remedial instruction in reading, writing or math, and nearly a quarter of the freshmen have required such instruction in all three subjects. In the past five years, a subset of students deemed “triple low remedial” — with the most severe deficits in all three subjects — has doubled, to 1,000.

The reasons are familiar but were reinforced last month by startling new statistics from state education officials: fewer than half of all New York State students who graduated from high school in 2009 were prepared for college or careers, as measured by state Regents tests in English and math. In New York City, that number was 23 percent.

Many of those graduates end up at CUNY, one of the nation’s largest urban higher-education systems, which requires its community colleges to take every applicant with a high school diploma or equivalency degree.

To bring thousands of students up to speed, those colleges spent about $33 million last year on remediation — twice as much as they did 10 years ago. They are expanding an immersion program that funnels hundreds of students exclusively into remedial classes.

But there is concern that the effort is diverting attention from the colleges’ primary mission.

“It takes a lot of our time and energy and money to figure out what to do with all of these students who need remediation,” said Alexandra W. Logue, the university’s executive vice chancellor and provost. “We are doing some really good things, but it’s time that we’re not thinking about our other wonderful students who are very highly prepared. We need to focus on them, too.”

More at the link. And be sure to RTWT. The article rightly notes that this is a national problem, and professors are complaining that community colleges have been transformed into institutions of extended education --- 13th grade, as my wife likes to remind me. And sure, while the problem isn't new, the shockingly high and rising levels of those needing remediation is generating heightened attention. I've discussed this at length on my campus, especially during the collective bargaining negotiations where most of the institutional discussion has been on wages and benefits. And that's not new either. Just about every year a new report comes out in California on the declining numbers of students who graduate in normative time. It's especially bad for minorities, who of course are those most disadvantaged historically and most in need of education and workplace skills. But community college accreditation authorities are obsessed with establishing institutional learning objectives (SLOs) as measures of college effectiveness. It's crazy. Ask any professor in a transfer-level GE offering and they'll tell you skills are lacking, discipline is compromised, social and technological changes have created debilitating distractions for many, and large numbers of students are overwhelmed with work and family issues (and too many young students are having babies themselves). But hey, don't touch my benefits!

A Quest to Explain What Grades Really Mean

At NYT:

It could be a Zen koan: if everybody in the class gets an A, what does an A mean?

The answer: Not what it should, says Andrew Perrin, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “An A should mean outstanding work; it should not be the default grade,” Mr. Perrin said. “If everyone gets an A for adequate completion of tasks, it cripples our ability to recognize exemplary scholarship.”

As part of the university’s long effort to clarify what grades really mean, Mr. Perrin now leads a committee that is working with the registrar on plans to add extra information — probably median grades, and perhaps more — to transcripts. In addition, they expect to post further statistics providing context online and give instructors data on how their grading compares with their colleagues’.

“It’s going to be modest and nowhere near enough to correct the problems,” Mr. Perrin said. “But it’s our judgment that it’s the best we can do now.”

RTWT.

The article cites RateMyProfessors, a resource so overrated and prone to abuse it's beyond ridiculous.

And no more than 35 percent A grades at Princeton? I'd be pleased to give 3 percent in most of my American Government classes. Grade inflation is the least of my worries, although I'm not scratching to maintain a teaching gig nor to maintain the enrollment at the college. Students complain, sure, but the sense of entitlement at college is proportionate to the prestige of the institution. Some of the most whiny students I encounter are those who've attended university or who'd been pampered in affluence. Disadvantaged students not only haven't been marinated in entitlement, they haven't been provided an education decent enough to give them voice in the first place. And that's not entirely the fault of the schools. Parents and the popular culture should come in for the bulk of the blame. Basic skills are non-existent for many of my students. They can't compose a decent sentence, much less a paragraph. I don't seem to stress it as much as I used to, in any case, since I've adapted my teaching to accommodate students, for their disinterest and for the academic deficiencies. I'd like to see more students reading books, on their own, and of their own interest.

I should write more on this ... perhaps later?

Plagiarism Online

Via Glenn Reynolds, I'm seeing this piece from last summer on classroom plagiarism. I'm pretty sure I saw it at the time, but didn't write about it. Now though I'm almost finished grading fall papers, and I've found three students plagiarizing with direct cut-and-paste from web articles. Check the comments at "Adjunct Law Prof Blog." One suggests "it's a losing battle," but only if professors give up the fight. Obviously most students don't write nearly as well as a New York Times correspondent (or a Wikipedia editor for that matter), and if I sometimes find, while reading through a student summary, inconsistent styling from one passage to the next (often pretty blatant), I just type in the text at Google and up pops the original article. Still, while one of my students literally swiped entire paragraphs (on some California ballot initiatives from Ballotpedia), it's not as common as one might expect. I'm always pleasantly surprised this time of year to find a large batch of students who are very good writers. It's poor students who're tempted to cheat, at least at my college. They simply can't write that well, even two or three paragraphs at a time. It's quite frustrating as a teacher. Some kids come from immigrant homes, including many Latinos, and the schools haven't always picked up where families have left off. It's kinda sad sometimes, but not uncommon. And these kids are in the workforce and often starting their own families. Things will get worse before they get better. Schools are stretched thin at all levels, and to the extent that administration and faculty discuss challenges on campus, it's usually over budgets and contract negotiations. Amazing sometimes how the education of the students, the reason all of this exists to begin with, is filed away as an afterthought. I'm not going to overstate the case, but it's a problem. And there aren't any Chris Christies around to help restore priorities. Teachers are on the front lines, and they gotta keep pushing, looking out for the kids as best they can. That's all you can do sometimes, besides holding on to a bit of sanity.

'Blood On Your Hands' — LSU Astronomy Professor Warns Conservative Students On Greenhouse Gases

I found this at Inside Higher Ed, which links to CampusReform.org:

And at Fox News, "Global Warming Debate Ignites LSU Classroom."

Professors Engage — and Monitor — Students with Hand-Held Devices

I came across this story by accident this morning, "More Professors Give Out Hand-Held Devices to Monitor Students and Engage Them." Just before my 9:00am class — and a lecture on Congress — I was looking for an article on Charles Rangel's ethics trial. I found that, but also this story on hand-held devices in the classroom. And it was funny because at the end of last week's 9:00am class a student stayed after to complain about some of the students in the back. They were talking so much that she couldn't hear. I apologized at the time. I mentioned that I had just dismissed a couple students from my 7:30am class, so it wasn't as though I was indifferent to disruptions. Anyway, I joked this morning that I needed some of these monitors for 9:00am to keep students on task. And as I did, two other students raised their hands to indicate that they'd actually used these devices at universities they'd attended previously. I guess I'm out of the loop, since this is the first time I'd heard of them:

If any of the 70 undergraduates in Prof. Bill White’s “Organizational Behavior” course here at Northwestern University are late for class, or not paying attention, he will know without having to scan the lecture hall.

Their “clickers” will tell him.

Every student in Mr. White’s class has been assigned a palm-size, wireless device that looks like a TV remote but has a far less entertaining purpose. With their clickers in hand, the students in Mr. White’s class automatically clock in as “present” as they walk into class.

They then use the numbered buttons on the devices to answer multiple-choice quizzes that count for nearly 20 percent of their grade, and that always begin precisely one minute into class. Later, with a click, they can signal to their teacher without raising a hand that they are confused by the day’s lesson.

But the greatest impact of such devices — which more than a half-million students are using this fall on several thousand college campuses — may be cultural: they have altered, perhaps irrevocably, the nap schedules of anyone who might have hoped to catch a few winks in the back row, and made it harder for them to respond to text messages, e-mail and other distractions.

In Professor White’s 90-minute class, as in similar classes at Harvard, the University of Arizona and Vanderbilt, barely 15 minutes pass without his asking students to “grab your clickers” to provide feedback

Though some Northwestern students say they resent the potential Big Brother aspect of all this, Jasmine Morris, a senior majoring in industrial engineering, is not one of them.

“I actually kind of like it,” Ms. Morris said after a class last week. “It does make you read. It makes you pay attention. It reinforces what you’re supposed to be doing as a student.”

More at the link.

David Horowitz Interviewed at PJTV

Via Instapundit. Click the image to watch:

And check out the book: Reforming Our Universities: The Campaign For An Academic Bill Of Rights.