New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

The Lessons of the Megalomaniac University President

After burning part of my summer writing "assessment reports," it is a relief to find kindred spirits. In the middle of an epic rant about E. Gorden Gee, Paul Campos writes:

One thing that rarely gets asked in the context of all this getting and spending is: What exactly is that money supposed to be for? In theory, of course, it’s for “education.” In practice, a whole lot of it goes directly into the pockets of a metastasizing cadre of university administrators, whose jobs, as nearly as I’ve been able to determine after being on a research university’s faculty for nearly a quarter-century, consist of inventing justifications for their own existence, while harassing faculty to fill out evaluations of various kinds (in a particularly Kafkaesque twist, many of these evaluations are supposed to be of the administrators’ own job performance).

The thing I hated most about church camp when I was a kid was feeling pressured to partake in totalitarian pretend happiness. Everybody is singing an overwhelmingly hokey and in fact manifestly stupid song like "Rise and Shine" (I refuse to provide a link) while vying with themselves to exceed one another in amounts of phoney enthusiasm for Dear Leader.

As an adult I actually don't feel this way in church any more (the purpose of liturgical conservatism is to prevent the kind of thing manifest in the song to right). And I'm sure part of the reason I became an academic is because it's one of the few places where you might find yourself colleagues with an older Holden Caufield (and s/he's thriving, doing cool stuff and with an equally grumpy spouse). But my God these assessment meetings bring back unhappy memories. Too many otherwise intelligent people go to ridiculous links to demonstrate that they buy into the pretense that God Assessment could possibly intervene to improve the lot of their unit. It's submental.

Feh. Jesus was right, do that kind of stuff in private.

Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?

THIS POST was quite welcome as I entered my second brain-numbing week of writing our annual "assessment reports" for the twelve general education classes we teach.*

I don't want to make too much of this. It could be worse. I could be gluing wet, leathery wallpaper onto crumbling cinderblocks in Brezhnev's Russia. . . 

And there's this from a December Wall Street Journal's article:

Across U.S. higher education, nonclassroom costs have ballooned, administrative payrolls being a prime example. The number of employees hired by colleges and universities to manage or administer people, programs and regulations increased 50% faster than the number of instructors between 2001 and 2011, the U.S. Department of Education says. It's part of the reason that tuition, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has risen even faster than health-care costs.

The Economist's takeaway:

That is to say, students have faced rapidly rising tuition costs not due to large increases in the cost of instruction, but mostly due to the dramatic, rapid growth of the university bureaucratic class, which offers nothing of obvious worth to the education of their universities' increasingly cash-strapped and indebted students.

According to a 2010 study on administrative bloat from the libertarian Goldwater Institute, tuition tripled from 1993 to 2007 at my own school, the University of Houston. Over that period, instructional spending per student changed not at all, while administrative spending per pupil nearly doubled. This is fairly representative of the national pattern. This seems to me to suggest that state university systems might first seek savings in leaner management before outsourcing instruction to glorified versions of YouTube. 

Obviously leaner management isn't going to happen anywhere in this country any time soon, but there's some consolation that even otherwise reliable neo-liberals realize that there might be some limit to how much of our time and wealth our overlords can hoover away from us.

[Notes:

*At some point I'll try to describe assessment processes in all of their surreality and also try to discern the effects on all of us that these various collective dishonesties this kind of bureaucratic makework requires, but right now the whole thing has made me too stupid to say anything intelligent about anything at all.]

The Harvard E-Mail Flap

A while ago, we discussed how the Dean of FAS at Harvard together with the Dean of Harvard College had searched the subject lines of emails sent by resident deans in an attempt to discover which of them had leaked information about student involvement in a cheating case, and, if so, what information had been leaked. The search occurred without first informing the resident deans.

The upshot of our rather constructive discussion was that the high-ups at Harvard had over-reacted.

Yesterday, it was announced that the Dean of Harvard College, Evelynn Hammonds, is "stepping down."

More Depressing Evidence of Modularity

Christ, it's depressing how smart one can be in one area while believing the most transparently idiotic things in others (especially when moral culpability is involved).

Read THIS COLUMN ("MOOC Professors Claim No Responsibility for How Courses Are Used") for yet more evidence concerning the correctness of John Calvin on innate depravity.

Even from a self-interested perspective it's risible. Just how short-termed can one's thinking be? If this continues much longer not enough of their own students are going to be able to get enough good jobs to keep the scam going.

Crap one hopes to get done over the summer

One of the two most persistent misunderstandings of university life is that because we are not teaching over the summer, we "get the summer off."Almost every academic I know actually works harder over the summer than the rest of the time, but none of their extended families or non-academic friends seem to understand this.

In an effort to fight this, for the past few years on my own (now defunct) blog, I've hosted a beginning of summer post where people share what they hope to get done in the ensuing summer. Please contribute to this public awareness campaign by sharing (plus, I'm not the only one interested in what you are working on). My summer plans below the fold:

more attacks on science

"The new chair of the House of Representatives science committee has drafted a bill that, in effect, would replace peer review at the National Science Foundation (NSF) with a set of funding criteria chosen by Congress."

Rothman on whether to go to graduate school

Nice discussion HERE including a cool shout out to friend-of-the-blog L.A. Paul. Most horrifying part:

What percentage of graduate students end up with tenure? (About one in four.) How much more unhappy are graduate students than other people? (About fifty-four per cent of graduate studentsreport feeling so depressed they have “a hard time functioning,” as opposed to ten per cent of the general population.) 

Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.

Chad must be entertained at all costs

The onion dot com breaks story wide-open HERE (hat tip Neil Tennant).

Next they are going to do a story about all of the various accreditor-mandated "assessment reports" about to consume Professor Rothberg's entire month of May.

Is it, perhaps, time to wake up and start raising hell before academia ceases to exist?

From yesterday's Chronicle

Is PEA Soup going to create an ethics monopoly?

The friendly folks at PEA Soup announced the following:

As die-hard PEA Soupers already know, for a while now we have enjoyed a partnership with Ethics in which, relatively soon after each issue of that journal is published, we have a discussion of a paper from that issue kicked off by a commissioned précis of that paper, often a commitment from the author to respond to questions, and several commentators lined up to help launch the discussion. Each paper that gets commented on at PEA Soup is made publically available to all without a subscription.

We are pleased to announce that we have now started up a somewhat similar partnership with Philosophy and Public Affairs, Philosophers’ Imprint, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, and JESP. We are expecting a few more such partnerships to be firmed up shortly. The result will be that there should soon be significantly more critical discussions of first-rate work in ethics, political philosophy, and related matters on PEA Soup. There will be much less “down time” between discussions.

First, it's great that PEA Soup is looking at ways at staying 'live' more frequently. I always enjoy the discussions. So, congratulations are in order! Second, I bet that later generations will wonder, 'what took philosophers so long to develop such partnerships?' Such partnerships are a clever and obvious move in order to develop a forum for (relatively) high quality and highly visible philosophical discussions. 

Even so, I have concerns: I worry about mechanisms in which a relatively narrow group of gate-keepers (however qualified, open-minded, and well-intentioned) will decide for us what is worth our collective attention (a very scarce resource). Given that PEA SOUP Partners (PSPs) are a fantastic group of journals with very high quality 'content,' crowding out of others is quite possible. This is not an idle thought because the post speaks of (a) a 'few more such partnerships' and (b) the web facilitates winner-take-all mechanisms, after all. (Something we have benefited from at NewAPPS!) Anyway, kudos to PEA Soup for being so pro-active. But I do hope some enterprising web-blogs partner with the philosophical alternatives to PSP.

Is Straussianism all wrong, everywhere, all the time?

Given the justified lack of popularity of the neo-cons (and Leo Strauss' purported influence on them), I suspect many of our readers will say 'yes.' Moreover, many of the best historians of philosophy have a deservedly visceral, negative response to Straussians who substitute numerological obsessions and evidence-free arguments about hidden meanings (in which everything is reduced to will to power) for serious scholarship. Let's call what's being rejected "vulgar Straussianism."  

Even so, esoteric readings of our philosophical past crop up in surprising places. For example, consider two recent books emanating at the time from Vancouver. First, in her important book, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford), Catherine Wilson writes (purportedly quoting Malebranche): "that the crux of a philosopher’s doctrine is to be found in those passages where he defends an unpopular thesis; his defense of accepted theses has no informational value." (p. 148) Let's call this "Wilson's Dictum." In context Wilson is commenting on Walter Charleton's use of the dialogue format; a genre that lends itself to multiple readings and, thus, esotericism.

Note that Wilson's is not evidence-free reading; you only get to attribute an unpopular thesis to an author if s/he asserts it once and would have motive not to call repeated attention to it. Primed by Wilson's focus on Epicureanism, I noticed that Adam Smith  states very clearly in his own voice: “Fortune, which governs the world” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments 2.3.1, [p. 104 in the Glasgow edition]) in a chapter which according to its (perhaps now ironic) title describes the "final cause" of our psychological constitution. Of course, a sentence fragment does not settle the matter against a Providentialist interpretation of Smith, but if one takes Wilson's dictum seriously, merely piling on the Providentialist and Deist passages fails to undermine the credibility of the (shall we say) more neo-Epicurean reading of Smith, which was, by the way, Reid's (see this nice paper by David Fate Norton J.C. Stewart-Robertson, although Reid's argument is different). 

BDS, Brooklyn College, and the Daily News

[Please note: Quite a few updates / links are placed below the fold; I will continue to update as events unfold, with those of crucial import above the fold.]

A petition in support of academic freedom at CUNY.

UPDATE, Wed 6 Feb, 12:30 pm CST: The "progressive" pols cut-and-run from their previous letter.

UPDATE, Wed 6 Feb, 12:30 pm CST: Mayor Bloomberg lays it out, plain as day and clear as a bell:

Well look, I couldn’t disagree more violently with BDS as they call it, Boycott Divestment and Sanctions. As you know I’m a big supporter of Israel, as big a one as you can find in the city, but I could also not agree more strongly with an academic department’s right to sponsor a forum on any topic that they choose. I mean, if you want to go to a university where the government decides what kind of subjects are fit for discussion, I suggest you apply to a school in North Korea.

The last thing that we need is for members of our City Council or State Legislature to be micromanaging the kinds of programs that our public universities run, and base funding decisions on the political views of professors. I can’t think of anything that would be more destructive to a university and its students.

You know, the freedom to discuss ideas, including ideas that people find repugnant, lies really at the heart of the university system, and take that away and higher education in this country would certainly die.

This is a city that loves and protects freedom—academic freedom, religious religious freedom, sexual freedom, cultural freedom, political freedom.  We are the freest city in the world, and that’s why we’re the greatest city in the world.

Intimidation of public universities (Turkey & Flanders) and the Rectors that play along

Disturbing stories are ongoing in Turkey and in Flanders: university administrators are eager to accede to demands of the government  (Turkey) or powerful politicians (Flanders) to silence and intimidate student and faculty protests against government policies/proposals.  The more serious one is developing in Turkey, where a student protest turned violent. The linked report claims that ODTU/METU (confusingly, there are two acronyms for same university) students threw Molotov cocktails. However, my Turkish sources claim there is no evidence of that, and have linked to this (Turkish) video, which suggests unprovoked police attacks, although I cannot guarantee, of course, there was no editing. (Maybe some of the police were trained in California?) I should say that the Rector of ODTÜ/METU, one of the most prestigious universities in Turkey, is showing backbone and is meeting with the government today. There is petition to show support here.

In Flanders, the philosopher, Lieven De Cauter, wrote an ill-tempered, satirical (somewhat funny) attack  (it's in Dutch, but enough is in English to understand how silly it all is) on the leading Flemish nationalist politician, Bart De Wever, who has a tendency to name-drop once famous philosophers (e.g., Adorono) in his editorials (this one preparing the way for future cuts in art-subsidies).  Yeah, Europe really is different. De Wever responded in brief to De Cauter. (The email exchange is linked in Dutch.) But what De Wever didn't tell De Cauter is that he also wrote Mark Waer, the Rector of the Catholic University in Leuven (one of De Cauter's employers), who has a poor record defending academics under attack, to complain about De Cauter. Waer responded, meekly, criticizing (I am freely translating) De Cauter's lack of civility. But the sentence that caught my attention was Waer's insistence that "there is also such a thing as academic restraint,"["Maar er is ook zoiets als academische terughoudendheid,"] clearly suggesting De Cauter failed in this duty.

What makes these stories interesting is that (a) the political establishments of both Turkey and Flanders are eager to invest in higher education as a means toward prosperous futures; (b) in both places important democratically elected politicians lack warmth toward an open, critical society (and a university professoriat that they see aligned with a discarded establishment); (c) in both places important parts of the higher education establishment much prefer being at the technocratic core of industry-government investment rather than presiding the kind of creative fertility and tension that is the breeding ground for creative industries (and what passes for independent thought) .

Stand with Erik Loomis

Erik Loomis blogs at Lawyers, Guns, and Money. He wrote in the wake of the Newtown Massacre, "I was heartbroken in the first 20 mass murders. Now I want Wayne LaPierre’s head on a stick." For this, he has been targeted by the bottom-feeders and outrage artists of the right-wing.

The folks at Crooked Timber sum up the reaction and our duty:

We must stand by Loomis’s side and speak up and out on his behalf, for he has become the target of a witch hunt, and as an untenured professor at the University of Rhode Island, he is vulnerable. Loomis needs our solidarity and support, and we must give it to him.

Below the fold, my letter to the President of the University of Rhode Island, who issued the following craven and misleading statement: 

The University of Rhode Island does not condone acts or threats of violence. These remarks do not reflect the views of the institution and Erik Loomis does not speak on behalf of the University. The University is committed to fostering a safe, inclusive and equitable culture that aspires to promote positive change.

I urge you to write to President David Dooley at [email protected], and to sign onto the Crooked Timber statement.

Scaring Monkeys in Madison

The research in question is a new type of maternal deprivation research designed to study anxiety by creating adverse early rearing conditions and then exposing the maternally deprived young monkeys to a snake and other frightening stimuli.  The monkeys will be killed after the experiment is over and their brains will be studied. I believe this experiment is unethical and I also think it violates the spirit, if not the promulgated regulations, of the Animal Welfare Act which explicitly requires that the psychological well-being of primates be promoted (not intentionally destroyed).--Lori Gruen

great Simon Critchley interview (hat tip Andrew Sullivan)

Full interview HERE.

As an outsider, it's pretty depressing how "new Labor's" cult of rule by "management experts" (as if one could be an expert without actually having any particular expertise) just added another layer of awfulness to the Thatcher educational depredations. Some of my British friends had minor hopes that the new conservative government would actually do their job and stand up for what was valuable in Western culture, but as far as higher edumacation, all they seem to be good at is following Napoleon Bonaparte's demand that the bureaucracy must expand to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

Anyhow, Critchley brilliantly describes how this played out while he was in the U.K. and also how it relates to his experience in New York. He also describes what he's done with the New York Times and some of his more recent philosophical work. It's a great interview. Joe Bob says check it out.

More on Regnerus

Commenter Neil calls our attention to this Chronicle piece from 26 July on the Regnerus affair (previously treated here and here at New APPS). 

The peer-review process failed to identify significant, disqualifying problems with a controversial and widely publicized study that seemed to raise doubts about the parenting abilities of gay couples, according to an internal audit scheduled to appear in the November issue of the journal, Social Science Research, that published the study.

The highly critical audit, a draft of which was provided to The Chronicle by the journal’s editor, also cites conflicts of interest among the reviewers, and states that “scholars who should have known better failed to recuse themselves from the review process.”

Neil's comment reminded me of this attempted pre-emptive strike from 23 July, also in the Chronicle (h/t LGM), by Christian Smith of Notre Dame, which in turn reminded me of the old joke about the right-wing version of the First Amendment:

"One Hundred Days of Student Protests in Québec: Printemps Érable or Much Ado About Nothing?"

Philosophers, Carlos Fraenkel and Adam Etinson, weigh in helpfully on "What started as a protest against an ostensibly modest raise of university tuition fees 100 days ago" and which has "become the midwife of a vigorous public debate about the political, social, and cultural physiognomy of Québec."

Recently fired LSU Systems President John Lombardi's fable

Some background. The annual value of targeted tax rebates and cuts in the gret state of Louisiana are now over 7 and a half billion dollars, around a third of the actual state budget, an amount that dwarfs higher education spending. These rebates are often political giveaways that make absolutely no sense, such as Walmart getting one and a half cent per dollar rebate on sales tax remittances.

Also note that the State of Louisiana has the 21st highest GDP of any state in the United States. Given the size of the population, were it a country it would be in the tiny minority of the wealthiest countries in the world. But it suffers the curse of mineral wealth, which is why one of the richest states in the country has the greatest income disparity, greatest poverty, highest per capita prison population, least funded education system, etc. etc. etc.

This information shows just how astute Lombardi's "fable" is (story HERE; please take the time to read it; it's very entertaining).

The last four years under Jindal began with a huge tax cut that rendered the code more regressive, and then continued with an even greater orgy of perpetual targeted tax giveaways. The money lost through these policies have been largely recouped through perpetual cuts to higher education. Some of it has been made up for in tuition and fee increases (four years ago the state funding/tuition plus fees ration was 6 to 4, but now that's reversed), but schools across the state have  fired tenure track faculty, sometimes after declaring exigency, sometimes not. There have been no merit raises for the whole time and for the foreseeable future. And hiring freezes are the norm.

And now, if the current round of proposed cuts actually go through, flagship campus LSU would have to do the equivalent of closing two of its colleges. 

It's just a fact that there is a business cycle, and if you cut taxes every time it's high and cut services every time it's low, then at some point things are going to get very ugly. I think that we are on the edge of this in Louisiana, and in fact would be over the cliff were it not for Federal welfare programs such as Social Security and Medicare putting money in middle class hands.

Weinstock, "Resisting Bill 78 in 15 points"

Resisting Bill 78 in 15 Points

By Daniel Weinstock

Faced with the recent darkness descending upon Québec, I thought it my duty to try to sum up as simply as possible the reasons that make me think that we must resist Bill 78.

1. Individual rights are a fundamental institutional defence protecting citizens from abuses of State power.

2. Even democratically elected representatives can abuse their powers.

3. In a democracy, the rights of association, expression, and protest are utterly fundamental.

4. It must be recognized that all citizens have these rights, especially those who, in a mode that respects democratic and liberal norms, hold points of view that are dissident and unpopular.

5. The fundamental character of these rights requires that they not be circumscribed or limited, except with great parsimony.

6. The present situation in Québec does not call for the sort of draconian limitations that have been imposed by the Liberal government in the form of its odious and shameful Bill 78. By its refusal to democratically engage with the student movement, the government has contributed to the degradation of the social climate. The disturbances that have made themselves felt in this climate, caused in part by the government, can be handled by existing legal institutions, including the criminal code.

7. Whether you agree with them or not on the question of the tuition fee hike, the students’ questions are legitimate and deserve a respectful response.

Quebec's emergency decree (it's hard to call it a "law") 78

This will just be a set of links. Please contribute more links and / or discussion in comments. 

Here is a downloadable PDF of the final (English) version of the bill.

Jacob T Levy's critique of the "banana republicanism" of the bill. (The title of this post is inspired by his critique.)

Aaron Bady's take: "il faut défendre la société contre les étudiants."

[UPDATE 22 May, 7:50 am CDT: Daniel Weinstock, "an open letter to my English-Canadian friends."

[UPDATE 21 May, 8:45 pm CDT: a wonderful Tumblr: http://www.arretezmoiquelquun.com/ ("somebody arrest me!") with lots of great homemade signs: "je désobéis" / "I disobey"]

Here is the Québec Bar Association's press release on Bill 78. [UPDATE: 20 May, 5:20 pm CDT. Below the fold, a brief comment on and translation of the memo, by Iain Macdonald. UPDATE 21 May, 8:40 pm CDT: changing the term from "memo" to "press release."]

Scholarly Intellectual Property Rights

In light of recent discussion on "work for hire" contracts (here and here), a generous reader calls our attention to how The University of Michigan "supports the goal of having its faculty maintain core intellectual property rights when their scholarly works are published." See the University of Michigan Author's Addendum. You may view an explanation of how the Addendum works here.

How Paul's Boutique became illegal

Nice Slate story HERE on how excessive copyright enforcement killed a whole genre of art.

The rich sonic landscape of Paul's Boutique is produced by layering and repeating of over 300 unique samples. But in 1991 the outcome of Grand Upright Music v. Warner Bros. Records was that it became prohibitively expensive to do this, killing the artform. The Slate article concludes:

Even as hip-hop is more mainstream than ever, one of the key musical innovations has been pushed to the margins. That should serve as a reminder that the battles over intellectual property don’t merely pit the economic interests of creators against would-be freeloading consumers. The existing stock of recorded music is, potentially, a powerful tool in the hands of musicians looking to create new works. But it’s been largely cut off from them—for no good reason. Congress could enact a mandatory licensing scheme in which you pay a modest fixed fee to sample an existing recording for commercial purposes. Or it could create a legislative safe harbor, stipulating that samples under some set length automatically qualify as a fair use. But it won’t, because in the music and movie industries, the only kind of copyright laws Congress is willing to pass are ones that give more power to copyright holders, not less.

Unfortunately, every time the copyright on Mickey Mouse is about to expire, Congress responds by limiting fair use even further, and the Supreme Court sides with industry against good sense and the Constitution of the United States.

Hey, it worked for Juan Williams, didn’t it?

[UPDATE, 7 May, 7:05 pm CDT: Schaefer Riley's master plan reaches Stage 2. All that remains is the call to Fox News.]

Feminist Philosophers and Brian Leiter have good posts on the Naomi Schaefer Riley affair at the CHE. 

My theory, which belongs to me, and is mine, is that Schaefer Riley is *trying* to get fired, so she can drive up her lecture fee on the “woe is me, the liberals have deprived me of my First Amendment rights” circuit as well as ditch the Chronicle for the greener pastures of Fox News.

Two updates on Schaefer Riley's vitriol

Faculty at Northwestern have now responded to the shameful attack piece in the CHE.  There is a wonderful response also by the graduate students who were attacked.

My God it stinks to be contingent faculty

Having been non-tenure track for two years after getting my Ph.D, I actually began to perspire about half way through reading THIS ARTICLE.  The author presents ten ways to get yourself fired if you are contingent faculty. Of course some of them contradict each other, but these contradictions just accurately represent the messed up situation.

In addition, ther whole exercise vaguely reeks of Kremlinology. Just as the CIA really had no idea what the various cliques surrounding Andropov were up to, there's something essentially mysterious about people with arbitrary power over you.

My letter gets published in the Baton Rouge Advocate

The letter with all the reader comments is HERE.

The full story is actually even more depressing, the obscenely wealthy using purported education reform  to gin up  the power of the huge vacuum cleaner that sucks up money from the poor and middle class.

We've known how this story ends since the 1980s, but as far as I can tell no one seems to be able to turn the damned thing off.

More background on Philosophers' Imprint.

One of our informed readers provides useful details.

More on the "work for hire" front

Kevin Smith, an attorney and academic librarian who is Duke's Scholarly Communications Officer, offers three reasons why OUP's insertion of "work for hire" language, which vests authorship with OUP rather than with the real author (previously discussed here and here at New APPS, following up on the initiative of Steven Shaviro) is likely to backfire.

First, nothing is more surely designed to make faculty authors angry than to tell them they are not the authors of the scholarship they offer to publishers.  As a group, faculty authors have been pretty docile toward publishers for a long time, but foolish and tone-deaf moves by publishers have begun to stir faculty anger toward presses they once considered friends and colleagues.  If a claim like this, which denies the fundamental dignity of authorship to scholars, becomes widespread, that slow rebellion will speed up very quickly.

Push has come to shove on the "work for hire" front

We previously discussed Steven Shaviro's Jan 11 post in which he expressed his dismay at discovering that OUP had inserted "work for hire" language in his author's contract. Gordon Hull's comments here and at Shaviro's blog were particularly acute, explaining how "work for hire" differs from standard contracts: usually, an author retains various rights of ownership, re-use (e.g., in a later single-authored work), and distribution (e.g. private web archive), and allocates a limited set of rights pertaining to copyright to the press. However, with "work for hire" the author has no rights, as the press claims copyright from the start.

Here Shaviro reports on the developments. More below the fold, but in brief, he will not sign the contract, will not submit his work, will not write for OUP in the future, and will not buy OUP books until the "work for hire" language is dropped from OUP contracts, on the grounds that such contracts spell the end of our status as scholars freely contributing to ongoing discussion in the public interest and its replacement with the status of "knowledge worker" producing privately owned "content."