Mar 122018
 

More vignettes from the front lines of diversity and open discussion from Heather MacDonald. And the messaging isn’t promising for our future.

That discussion offers a backdrop for When two tribes go to war, an article that paints an even more stark picture of intolerance on campus. (That article in turn links to what seems to me to be a classic example of how campuses have failed to help students learn about communication and growth. There is no substitute for just seeing and hearing for yourself.)

 Posted by at 9:15 am on March 12, 2018
Jan 172018
 

While we all try to ward off the winter chill, I flag for your reading list an article that has made something of a stir, Higher Education Is Drowning in BS. Most of the author’s messaging will reprise a familiar theme here, where indeed so much of what is handed down from Main Admin wouldn’t pass for butterscotch pudding. We lack accountability; we lack transparency; we lack genuine shared governance. And in the absence of these cleansing agents, equity is lost, quality diminishes and costs keep going through the roof.

In other words, we are indeed drowning in BS.

 Posted by at 11:42 am on January 17, 2018
Dec 292017
 

It seems fair to say that higher education has become an intellectual mosh pit, where young people who are charged top dollar to get in are free to bash into one another as they like while sages on the stages can perform to themselves and the venue owner cheerfully looks the other way so long as he’s getting paid.

It didn’t have to be this way. Stories of how we came to this point are the stuff of another day, but as to what comes next we’re starting to see signs that other people than the performers and venue owners are thinking hard about the future. Maybe market forces will have their sway after all.

The world might be better off without college for everyone is the banner in the recent Atlantic article, which talks openly about credential inflation that is running rampant in higher ed these days. And F.H. Buckley weighs in on the matter of tax credits for universities, asserting that it might be time to stop subsidizing the hard-left practices which are endemic here; doing otherwise, he asserts, would be the wrong way to save academia. Let market forces work their will.

We haven’t cleaned up our campus system. At some point the people who clean it up for us will be neither our customers nor our friends.

 Posted by at 1:26 pm on December 29, 2017
Nov 262017
 

The NCAA season starts with sleaze and scandal, observes columnist George Will, who goes on to observe just how much cash is associated with collegiate sports. Enough, apparently, that some of the taller hogs at the trough went past bad taste and into violations of the law. At least that is what we see in the FBI investigation on several campuses and the indictments for corruption.

Campus leaders have a business interest in looking the other way, since there’s a pretty penny to be made by (pardon the analogy) playing the game. [Best quote from the linked article refers to a case of yesteryear: “At the University of Washington, Don James resigned as head [football] coach after failing to notice that his quarterback owned three cars.”]

So far no suggestion that investigators are looking at Maryland yet.

 Posted by at 3:38 pm on November 26, 2017
Nov 232017
 

How business bullshit took over is required reading for students who would like preparation to make meaningful contributions to the world rather than serve in the cycle of production, distribution and consumption of bullshit.

The article will tell you where the cartoon Dilbert came from, and goes on to explain how ideas that may be weak on their merits can be plumped up for sale by wrapping them in novel language, slathering on generous portions of hucksterism and blending in a pinch of mysticism (or just plain elitism for the agnostics among us.)

Most of what the author treats involves industry as a whole, but his points apply equally well in the education industry. And indeed, much of what we do on campus involves performing tasks that both feed and result from the ‘culture of bullshit’ – tasks that, when objectively portrayed, can’t be firmly connected with core missions which might have inspired a university system in the first place. We measure ourselves with elastic yardsticks that reward make-work yet often don’t stand up well as predictors of students’ success, generation of knowledge that others usefully apply in science, or development of products (or services) that capture markets.

Preference for an elastic yardstick is understandable. Our campus lacks accountability so mostly we have freedom to define our own success criteria. Why not make the yardstick fit what we do rather than what we aspire to do? It sure is easier to sell students “experiences” rather than prepare them to perform hard tasks. Doing the latter would get them – and us – out of our comfort zones. Ewww … that makes for tough teaching reviews and a rockier time promoting like-thinking friends.

And look what happens to heretics who try to pierce the language barrier and figure out what practices generate intrinsic (instead of virtual) value? There’s always one who politely points out how the Emperor has no clothes, and then it gets ugly. The masses quickly recognize the importance of going along to get along. Keep your head down and keep the system going.

Speaking as one of the heretics, I hope students take a lesson from the linked article. Get past the educational leet speak, push yourself out of the linguistic comfort zone we build in our majors and learn how to tell when you’re getting served content of genuine value instead of a big cup of tasty, well, you know.

 Posted by at 7:59 am on November 23, 2017
Nov 142017
 

A Cambridge University physical sciences professor had his moment of fame after being caught advocating hard work. And at expense of a social life, no less!

How dare he!

Fortunately (judging from the article) his campus leadership rallied around students and reassured them that “balance”, booze and convivial behavior are still encouraged. Meanwhile, College Park shows its mettle in promoting such temperaments, so now that we’re a Big Ten school and offer booze at big events, we may soon offer napping pods in the library. Take that, Cambridge!

 Posted by at 7:34 am on November 14, 2017
Nov 062017
 

Keeping up with the many projects on campus at the moment is still taxing, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t trying to keep an eye out for others’ content worthy of our study. And some exceptionally thoughtful writing about campus speech is found over at Vox in a pair of articles.

Robert Post offers There is no 1st Amendment right to speak on a college campus while Erwin Chemerinsky asserts Hate speech is protected free speech, even on college campuses – obviously messages in opposition to one another, and very timely for what’s happening on many campuses.

An aggressive piece over at Spectator looks past discussion about the basis for speech on campus to the (flawed) practices: Free Speech for Me, But Not for Thee, by commentator Mark Pulliam.

 Posted by at 3:23 pm on November 6, 2017
Sep 282017
 

This campus recently adopted a Web Accessibility Policy, which earlier today Provost Mary Ann Rankin reminded us of by means of a memo to campus administrators. Soon “all university Web pages used for academic and business purposes must be compliant with applicable state and federal regulations, specifically, Sections 504 and 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990.”

The essence of her memo was to alert campus stakeholders to this and offer guidance on how to move forward, for which one of the helpful links given is to a campus Web Accessibility page whose sole apparent purpose is to then offer the reader a chance to click through to another campus Web Accessibility page.

Awkwardly, and as of the point I blog this morning, neither of the pages to which Provost Rankin refers us for 504, 508 and ADA compliance is actually 504, 508 or ADA compliant, at least according to freely available web tools which one can use for checking. (There are also broken links – that’s business as usual for the Provost site – and W3C compliance problems.)

We always appreciate how leadership offers us teaching examples for our students.

 Posted by at 10:01 am on September 28, 2017
Sep 182017
 

A roll up of some recent articles we hope you have already found to your morning browsing sessions …

The Assault on Free Speech (sorry about the pay wall at WSJ) points out the irony that public pressure caused China to walk back its censure of many academic materials which might have proven embarrassing to the state, yet at the same time US academics are championing censorship by purging campuses of opportunity for open and scholarly speech on hard topics. (On my campus there are generally no hard feelings in speech because leadership is careful who they invite to speak in the first place.)

The Atlantic weighs in with debate about the role of universities in fostering a commitment to the open exchange of ideas, and a NY Times article similarly advocates for some genuine diversity of views on behalf of our students.

Sometimes the problems on a campus are not just ones of leadership cherry picking who gets to speak but also of indulging in bad science in order to reach conclusions they sought based on prejudice. (“We’ll see it when we know it” science is not science.)

An article with subtitle the roots of the current campus madness talks of the costs of quashing discussion and our failure to teach scholarly debate. It closes with a quote that by itself makes following the link worth your while: “If you teach students to be warriors against all power asymmetries, don’t be surprised when they turn on their professors and administrators. This is what happens when you separate facts from values, empiricism from morality, science from the humanities.” Indeed.

 Posted by at 5:34 pm on September 18, 2017
Sep 072017
 

As alerted to us at Slashdot, Harvard’s Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris went to the popular CS50 programming course to beg students please don’t cheat. This comes hard on the heels of a course change in order to suggest that students should consider attending class. A year at Harvard now costs north of $70,000.

Taken together, these offer a new definition of the word pathetic.

 Posted by at 8:48 pm on September 7, 2017