Death of Keynesianism? Not for Paul Krugman

Some have been speculating on the death of Keynesian economics, but folks need look no further than Paul Krugman to see how strong a grip discredited academic theories still hold on the establishment class. See Krugman's essay this morning, "Macroeconomic Folly":
All of a sudden, people seem to have noticed that policy is moving in exactly the wrong direction. We’re getting headlines like this: Debt Deal Puts U.S. on Austerity Path as Economy Falters.

I’ll need to write up my thoughts here at greater length, but let’s just say for now that what we’ve witnessed pretty much throughout the western world is a kind of inverse miracle of intellectual failure. Given a crisis that should have been relatively easy to solve — and, more than that, a crisis that anyone who knew macroeconomics 101 should have been well-prepared to deal with — what we actually got was an obsession with problems we didn’t have. We’ve obsessed over the deficit in the face of near-record low interest rates, obsessed over inflation in the face of stagnant wages, and counted on the confidence fairy to make job-destroying policies somehow job-creating.

It’s a disaster – and maybe not only an economic disaster.
Fears of far-right rise in crisis-hit Greece...
Well, that's fear alright ... fear-mongering.

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Social Media Consumer Report

If I was on the job market I wouldn't do what I do online. And I know certain progressive academic bloggers who ought to be more careful, and they know it, although I can't name names at the moment.

See: "I Flunked My Social Media Background Check. Will You?" (via Kathy Shaidle).

FLASHBACK: "Academic Tenure and the 'Damascus Conversion to Unpopular Views'."

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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.

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Academia's Crisis of Irrelevance

From Naomi Schaefer Riley, at Wall Street Journal, "As more students question rising college costs, professors defend useless research and their lack of teaching."

Read it at the link. The key is academe's divorce from the real world, and I'd pile on about how this is killing the education of waves of students.

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Professor Daniel Drezner Five Years After University of Chicago Tenure Denial

I first started reading blogs seriously around 2002 or so, when Professor Daniel Drezner published an essay on academic blogging at Foreign Policy. He's now a blogger at Foreign Policy, and there's no way I can find that old article through search. I have the hard copy in my office somewhere, so I'll go find it and search by exact title later. Anyway, he's got a new essay at the Chronicle of Higher Education, published with his wife, to commemorate his denial of tenure at the University of Chicago in 2005: "A Professor and His Wife on Absorbing the Shock of Tenure Denial."

In 2005, Drezner wrote a blog post on the news that he'd been turned down, "So Friday was a pretty bad day...." This was a pretty big sensation at the time, especially the hypothesis that he was denied tenure because he was a blogger (and hence not a serious scholar, etc.). I knew Drezner wouldn't have a hard time landing a new post, and in fact he was hired right away at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. I started my own blog shortly after this time (my first blog was Burkean Reflections, which I retired after I figured out I wasn't Burkean). I was tenured by then, but I was hesitant and tentative in my blogging, primarily because I hadn't figured out my own identity as a political scientist. Once I'd started American Power I'd figured out what I was doing in both blogging and life. And I don't worry about any backlash from blogging because blogging's my identity now, and teaching and activism. I couldn't have gotten to this point in my writing and commentary without being tenured, so if young untenured scholars come across this post my advice is don't do it --- especially if you're conservative (the academic neo-communist intelligentsia will seek to destroy you for deviating from the accepted narrative).

Anyway, read the essay from Drezner's wife Erika, "My Confident Husband, Suddenly Full of Self-Doubt." I like this part:
Things turned out well for us. We were lucky—my husband found a job, with tenure, and we moved to Boston, which just happens to be my favorite city. Our kids were young enough to move without much difficulty. I know that other people have had it a lot harder. They've struggled to find work, relocated to less desirable places, and have painfully disrupted family life. This is particularly difficult for couples in which both are academics. Those of us in more "portable" careers should be grateful to have avoided the two-body problem.
Exactly. Things have turned out better for them having Daniel been denied. (But of course it's gotta be an extremely painful experience, and academic tenure review is one of the most stressful experiences in anyone's career.)

Side Note: I stopped reading Daniel Drezner's blog years ago, when I noticed that he refused to stand up for Israel in his writing. He'd post the news but wouldn't offer any opinion, obviously worried about alienating powerful colleagues and fellow political scientists across the academy. He also co-authors academic papers with communist political scientist Henry Farrell, and thus Drezner's revealed he'll put professional mobility above moral clarity. I don't do that. It's costly, but I don't have to worry about peer recognition from inbred academic committees who hate America and disdain the real world.

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Budget Cuts Hammer University of California Star Faculty Retention

I thought about this recently, having traveled to UCLA for both the Noam Chomsky and David Horowitz events, not to mention my coverage of Students for Justice in Palestine.

The Westwood campus is awesome. Too much construction, but it's a great feeling being on a research campus again. It feels so promising. And I was a little surprised at the vitality, since there's been so much talk of decline at the UC system. Anyway, certainly things aren't going as well as state leaders would like, and that's keeping in mind that UC is more insulated from budget crises than both Cal State and the community colleges. But this report at Los Angeles Times shows a real drag on maintaining quality and prestige. See: "UC fears talent loss to deeper pockets: The departure of three star scientists from UC San Diego has officials worried about a possible brain drain tied to budget cuts."

Read the whole thing at the link. I found fascinating the salaries of the three UCSD scholars lured away to Rice Univerity:
[Jose] Onuchic, who is co-director of UC San Diego's Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, said he was drawn to Rice mainly for the research funds and new building, along with the chance to work with cancer experts in Houston. "The opportunities were spectacular," said Onuchic, whose research focuses on protein movement and chemical reactions in gene networks. His UC salary, including summer grants, is $265,000; he and his colleagues said Rice would give them 40% increases.

The three scientists are expected to take with them much of their National Science Foundation grant, which has paid $6.6 million since 2008 and is expected to provide several million more over the next two years. At Rice, their funding will also include a $10-million grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, created with a $3-billion state bond issue approved by voters in 2007.

[Herbert] Levine, 55, who has been at UC San Diego for 25 years and earns $187,000 a year, said Rice's new and larger lab space and extra administrative support was too good to turn down. Another factor is that Rice, which has a fifth of UC San Diego's 27,417 students, is much less bureaucratic, he added.

[Peter] Wolynes, 58, is a 10-year veteran of UC San Diego and earns $330,000 a year. Moving together keeps the team intact — it's a "Three Musketeers situation," he said — and the Texas cancer money will mean less hustling for grants. He still greatly admires UC, he said, but believes its "period of expansion" may be over.
These are accomplished scholars, and well-compensated. And it's no surprise that they'd be able to make much more money elsewhere. There's a market for top academics. And public universities struggle to stay competitive in tough economic times.

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'What Third World Women Want'

"According to First World Feminists," by Charlotte Allen, at Weekly Standard.

It's about an academic conference, "Driving Change, Shaping Lives: Gender in the Developing World." I love this part, especially the "Battle of the Filipina Hostesses":

The first speaker was Valerie M. Hudson, a political science professor at Brigham Young University, leading off a panel titled “Shifting Populations.” Hudson delivered a genuine population-shift shocker: In China and India, which between them account for about 40 percent of the world’s 7 billion people, women, who in the West slightly outnumber men because they tend to live longer, are outnumbered by the male sex to the tune of 33 million in China and 28 million in India. The reason? As Hudson explained, it was the female-lethal combination of sex-selection abortion following the advent of fetal ultrasound during the 1980s and China’s longtime one-child policy, which has resulted in widespread female infanticide along with many forced abortions. As she rattled off disturbing statistics​—​120 boy babies for every 100 girl babies in China in 2005, and 121 for every 100 in India​—​Hudson pointed out that sex-selection abortion and female infanticide are illegal in both countries, but the laws on the books have failed to dent the cultural phenomenon of “son preference” in Asia, in which sons are valued because they’re expected to support elderly parents, whereas daughters often cost dowry money. “That’s 90 million missing women,” Hudson said.

In 2004 she and Andrea den Boer, a lecturer in politics and international affairs at the University of Kent, had published a book, Bare Branches, about the negative repercussions for a society, such as in China, that produces large numbers of surplus young men who cannot find wives and form families. “Those who don’t marry tend to have no skills and no education,” Hudson explained. “They are already at risk for violent behavior, since young men without stable social bonds tend to commit most violent crimes. They tend to be targets for military recruitment, and societies with surplus males tend to be marked by an aggressive foreign policy and ethnic groups pitted against each other.”

Maybe it was because abortion makes women’s studies people skittish, but Hudson’s ominous statistics​—​and indeed her entire presentation​—​were promptly forgotten, submerged in what might be called the Battle of the Filipina Hostesses. The combatants were Hudson’s two fellow panelists, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California and self-described former Filipina hostess, and Amy O’Neill Richard, a senior adviser in the State Department’s Office of Trafficking in Persons, a priority project of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. During the 1980s and 1990s tens of thousands of young women were imported into Japan by labor contractors from the chronically impoverished Philippines to sing, dance, flirt with, and coax drink purchases from stressed-out salarymen in bars and nightclubs​—​until a 2005 crackdown by the Japanese government reduced the hostesses’ numbers by 90 percent, from 80,000 in 2004 to 8,000 in 2006. Few of the Filipinas, it seemed, had any training as the professional entertainers that their visas said they were. The Japanese government maintained that most of them were actually prostitutes or near-prostitutes, pushed into long hours of dubious servitude by the contractors and the clubs, many of which had ties to yakuza mobsters. A spate of brutal murders of hostesses​—​along with some murders committed by hostesses of their pimps​—​fueled the drive to clamp down on the hostess business and send most of the women back to the Philippines.

Taking the podium after Hudson, Parreñas went on the warpath. She announced that she had no intention of abiding by the 10-minute presentation limit for panelists and then proceeded to read a fiery 20-minute paper that she titled “Migration as Indentured Mobility: The Moral Regulation of Migrant Women.” The paper blasted the hostess crackdown as part of “a U.S.-backed war” against “sex work” fueled by “moral imperialism and conservative values” (the U.S. government funds anti-trafficking programs in about 70 countries). In the crackdown the hostesses were “stripped of their livelihood,” Parreñas lamented. “They go to Japan of their own volition​—​they’re not drugged or forced to go. They find it empowering to be a hostess.” Parreñas’s theory was that “there are multiple moralities in society,” and that some Filipinas’ moral codes happened to permit “paid sex with the men they call their boyfriends.” The problem, as Parreñas saw it, was that many Japanese clubs tended to have a different “moral culture” from that of the hostesses who worked there, but the hostesses couldn’t quit until their indentures were up. Nonetheless, Parreñas insisted, “most of them resent the United States, and they resent being rescued” from the hostess life by being kicked out of Japan. Her solution to the hostess problem: open immigration in the West for developing-world sex workers so they could get jobs in, say, the Netherlands, where prostitution is legal.

Parreñas proved to be a tough act to follow. Richard, the human-trafficking expert from the State Department, seemed dumbfounded. “I think America is a wonderful country,” she said. She rattled off some information about the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 2000, along with some alarming-sounding numbers: 70 percent of the estimated 12 to 27 million human-trafficking victims in the world these days are women and girls, most of whom end up in bondage, often sexual bondage, in East Asia and the Middle East. Parreñas was having none of that. “It’s quite tricky to lump all trafficked people together,” she sniffed. “Most migrant workers are domestic workers, and many countries, including the United States, don’t even count domestic work as an occupation.” Nor did Parreñas have any positive words for Hudson and her bare-branches research. “Did you interview any of those single men you describe as psychopathic and poor?” Parreñas demanded of Hudson. “Did they see themselves as unmarriageable?”

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'Why is David Epstein Still a Columbia University Professor After Incest Plea?'

Good question.

A Columbia Professor of POLITICAL SCIENCE?

See The Other McCain for the reply.

Epstein's homepage is here.

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Back to Teaching at California State Universities

From Naomi Schaefer Riley, at Los Angeles Times, "Cal State system: It's time to get back to teaching."

There's no quick quote to capture the essence here. Full-time faculty don't do much teaching, it turns out, or at least not "the bulk" of it. Mostly adjuncts nowadays. It's weird, though, because I had the best professors at Fresno State. I think I had one grad student TA, in math. And the professor referred all questions to him, and while the TA was a good guy, proficient, etc., that's probably not the best example of cutting-edge teaching. The Political Science Department was great though. So much better than the University of California, in terms of access to the professors. I mentioned previously that the more hands on attention professors provide, the more they'll help their students. That's what happening in my classes, and I still can't do enough to overcome the skills deficits kids bring to college. So yeah, focus on teaching at Cal State. (And check that link: Schaefer Riley notes that Cal State's at risk of closing ten campuses and turning away 100,000 students --- seems unreal.)

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David Protess of the Innocence Project Now Defends Himself

Read this piece, at New York Times, "A Watchdog Professor, Now Defending Himself." (At Memeorandum.)

A key passage:
It is often said that academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low, but in the matter of Mr. Protess and the wrongly convicted men he helped to free, the stakes could not have been higher.
I know something about academic politics and high stakes. A few days back I mentioned that I'd have a report on some of the bloggers at Lawyers, Guns and Money, and not Dave Brockington (about which, here). I'm still waiting, because attorneys are involved, but this is going to be blockbuster when I can write about it.

Anyway, I don't know anything about David Protess, but I can see that he developed some powerful enemies in his work, people who want to destroy him. Again, I know the feeling, although I haven't gotten anyone released from death row. But some people have been extremely threatened by the things that I write here, and allegations and high-level threats have been made. I'm not kidding when I say high level. Seriously. Readers are going to be blown away when this comes out.

Stay tuned.

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Bush White House Sought CIA Probe for 'Damaging Personal Information' on Leftist Professor Juan Cole?

Wow.

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Honestly, though, arrest him if there's evidence of aiding and abetting terrorism. But don't just smear the guy using the CIA. Sounds like something from the Nixon years.

At New York Times, "Ex-Spy Alleges Bush White House Sought to Discredit Critic":
WASHINGTON — A former senior C.I.A. official says that officials in the Bush White House sought damaging personal information on a prominent American critic of the Iraq war in order to discredit him.

Glenn L. Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was a top counterterrorism official during the administration of President George W. Bush, said the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information on Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who writes an influential blog that criticized the war.

In an interview, Mr. Carle said his supervisor at the National Intelligence Council told him in 2005 that White House officials wanted “to get” Professor Cole, and made clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to collect information about him, an effort Mr. Carle rebuffed. Months later, Mr. Carle said, he confronted a C.I.A. official after learning of another attempt to collect information about Professor Cole. Mr. Carle said he contended at the time that such actions would have been unlawful.

It is not clear whether the White House received any damaging material about Professor Cole or whether the C.I.A. or other intelligence agencies ever provided any information or spied on him. Mr. Carle said that a memorandum written by his supervisor included derogatory details about Professor Cole, but that it may have been deleted before reaching the White House. Mr. Carle also said he did not know the origins of that information or who at the White House had requested it.

Intelligence officials disputed Mr. Carle’s account, saying that White House officials did ask about Professor Cole in 2006, but only to find out why he had been invited to C.I.A.-sponsored conferences on the Middle East. The officials said that the White House did not ask for sensitive personal information, and that the agency did not provide it.

“We’ve thoroughly researched our records, and any allegation that the C.I.A. provided private or derogatory information on Professor Cole to anyone is simply wrong,” said George Little, an agency spokesman.
More at that link at top.

And what the heck? Check over at Juan Cole's, the freak: "Ret’d. CIA Official Alleges Bush White House Used Agency to “Get” Cole," and "Cole on Goodman & CIA Surveillance."
And, "Repeal the PATRIOT Act is the Lesson of Bush White House Spying."

Nope, not going that far. Patriot Act does not authorize CIA spying domestically. It simply allows coordination of intelligence gathering activities. Longstanding bureaucratic norms would still drive domestic surveillance operations, and frankly, the legacy of the 1960s and 1970s still contributes to a culture of legal safeguards that obviously make cases of spying --- like that alleged against Professor Juan Cole --- beyond the pale. Bust him if he's a treasonous dirtbag. Otherwise, let him spew his bilious hatred. No doubt he's earned some enemies on that basis alone.

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Conservative Law Professor Denied Emeritus Status at University of Montana

It's hard out there for the good ones.

At TaxProf Blog, "Conservative Law Prof Decries Faculty's 'Petty' Decision to Deny Emeritus Status." ( via Volokh).

More at the Missoulian, "Former UM law professor Natelson denied emeritus status by faculty."
Former University of Montana law professor and outspoken conservative Rob Natelson has been denied his request for professor emeritus status, a decision he called "petty" and "inexplicable."

Natelson, who retired in May 2010 after serving 23 years as a professor in the law school to take a job as a senior fellow with the Independence Institute, was informed upon his return to Montana in June that the law school faculty had voted against granting the constitutional scholar emeritus status.

Emeritus status is granted to a retiring professor whose colleagues feel he or she is worthy of the academic recognition and prestige based on the faculty member's research, service and instruction during his teaching tenure.

"Emeritus status for retirees is pretty routine and almost always given," Natelson said. "I find the whole thing very peculiar. Even though there's a history here, this thing seems so petty, so small."
Natelson was apparently one the most published professors on the faculty. Denial of emeritus status was clearly driven by ideological hatred. Progressives suck.

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Yale Kills Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism

From Abby Wisse Schachter, at New York Post, "Yale's Gift to Anti-Semitism":
Yale University last week killed the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplin ary Study of Antisemitism -- the only program of its kind in the country, an academically stellar one-stop anti-Semitism research shop. Worse, it almost certainly did so because YIISA refused to ignore the most virulent, genocidal and common form of Jew-hatred today: Muslim anti-Semitism.

Citing an official review by a faculty committee that it refuses to identify, Yale will shut down the program at the end of next month. The university's top flack, Director of Strategic Communications Charles "Robin" Hogen, wrote an e-mail claiming that YIISA had failed a key test: It was supposed to "serve the research and teaching interests of some significant group of Yale faculty and . . . be sustained by the creative energy of a critical mass of Yale faculty."

Funny, last year, at YIISA's hugely successful inaugural conference on global anti-Semitism, Yale Deputy Provost Frances Rosenbluth said just the opposite, noting that YIISA was "guided by an outstanding group of scholars from all over the university representing many different disciplines," including professors of history, sociology, comparative languages, psychiatry, economics and political science. Actually, Hogen's e-mail itself contradicts Yale's stated excuse: He notes that "the steering committee did express continued support for the faculty reading group on anti-Semitism." Plus, "institutional support will remain for the group of faculty who wish to continue their scholarly exploration of this important subject."
Which is it -- no faculty interested in studying anti-Semitism, or lots of faculty interest in studying anti-Semitism?
Well, depends on what kind of anti-Semitism. Can't be studying the Islamic kind, now can we?

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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.)

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Sociology and Other 'Meathead' Majors

From Harvey Mansfield, at Wall Street Journal (and here, in case it's behind the paywall).

Substituting "political science" for "economics" at the essay also works. (Recall this post.)

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Sociology and Other 'Meathead' Majors

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Disgruntled Student Sues Her Law School Over 'False' Employment Statistics After Taking Out $150,000 in School Loans

And it's a $50 million class action lawsuit. I guess she needs the money. At The Tax Prof's Blog, "Grad Files $50m Class Action v. Law School for Misrepresenting Placement Data." Her name's Anna Alaburda. She's working as a "document reviewer," whatever that is. Also, at ABA Journal:
Filed by attorney Brian Procel of Miller Barondess, the suit seeks class action status and compensatory damages of $50 million for a claimed class of some 2,300 TJSL attendees.

Beth Kransberger, who serves as the law school's associate dean for student affairs, tells the legal publication there was no misrepresentation and says TJSL followed guidelines set by the American Bar Association when reporting its employment statistics..

"We've always been accurate in what we report, and we've always followed the system given to us by the ABA," she says. "This lawsuit is very much about a larger debate. This is part of the debate about whether it's practical to pursue a graduate degree in these difficult economic times."
Hat Tip: Instapundit.

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Disgruntled Student Sues Her Law School Over 'False' Employment Statistics After Taking Out $150,000 in School Loans

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Student Activism at AIPAC

The video is especially interesting after 6:00 minutes.

And Barbara Efraim touched base with me yesterday, the first chance she's had since getting back from AIPAC in D.C. I already posted Barbara's recent commentary piece at The Daily Bruin, but she wanted to give me a heads up on this comment at the article:

Equating Noam Chomsky – a world-renowned public intellectual, linguist, writer, and emeritus professor at one of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world – to some marginal, goblin-like hate-monger as Horowitz is just plain foolish.

What “threat” of Sharia Law do you speak of? What Israeli “democracy” do you speak of? Your rhetoric is tired and ineffective.

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Harvard's Stephen Walt Speaks at Code Pink's Move Over AIPAC! Summit, May 21, 2011

Alana Goodman had the heads up last month: "Move Over AIPAC, Here Come the Geriatric Anti-Semites."

It's shameful. The schedule is here. And check the group's list of ORGANIZATIONAL ENDORSEMENTS & PARTNERS. It's a one-stop shop for the global left's international solidarity movement. And of course Code Pink's the premiere fifth column organization working against both American interests and Israel's existence.

It's shameful for Stephen Walt, and it's shameful for Harvard and the political science profession.
RELATED: "Stephen Walt, Harvard's Israel-Bashing Political Scientist, Implicated in Libyan Influence-Peddling Scandal."

EXTRA: While enjoying sensational success on the anti-Israel left, Walt's book, The Israel Lobby, hasn't held up well to scholarly scrutiny. See Itamar Rabinovich, "Testing the 'Israel Lobby' Thesis."

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Scott Eric Kaufman Awards Students Who Like to Say F**k!

Well, it's no big f**king deal if you're a scumbag postmodern academic like UCI Composition Lecturer Scott Eric Kaufman. Nope. No qualms about it. See: "Fuckity fuck fuck. Fuck fuck fuckity fuck. Q.F.E.F.D. (F.F.)." I guess that's where Dolt Douche Thers gets HIS oeuvre. But hey, five'll get you ten SEK calls his buddies "cocksuckers" in private, or well, maybe that'd be more of Carl Salonen's patter.

In any case, check Scott "F**kity f**k" Kaufman's winning submission for the comic Scott McCloud assignment, "Every quarter I present my students with five panels from McCloud..." And get this: The winner "wishes to remain anonymous." Well, yeah. Scoring GPA points for profanity probably isn't the highlight of the grad school/law school apps (or, well, it's been a while since I took the GRE, so who knows?). The student's a beam in SEK's eyes, apparently: "Congratulations! I hate you! You're awesome!" At least he didn't say "I'll end you"!!

Freakin asshat.

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David Horowitz at UCLA, 'Intellectual Terrorism: The Left's War on Free Speech'

From Mark Tapson, at FrontPage Magazine, "Horowitz and Intellectual Terrorism at UCLA":

Last Wednesday, evening the Freedom Center’s David Horowitz gave a much anticipated and ferociously opposed presentation before a crowd of more than 300 people at Moore Hall at the University of California at Los Angeles. The event was hosted by the Bruin Republicans, self-described as “the only officially right-of-center organization on the UCLA campus” – which is a good, albeit disheartening, indicator of the very issue Horowitz has been addressing on hundreds of campuses across this country, and which was the evening’s topic: the fact that our institutions of supposedly higher learning are utterly dominated by intolerant progressive academics who are ill-serving and mentally straight-jacketing their students.

Horowitz’s speech was as blunt as the title of his presentation – “Intellectual Terrorism: The Left’s War on Free Speech.” Pacing back and forth at the front of the hall, he was revved up right out of the gate and became even more impassioned as he went on. He began the wide-ranging, forty-minute speech with a condemnation of academics who indoctrinate rather than teach (“The students who suffer most are those of you who are on the left, because your assumptions are never challenged.”) Among other topics, he went on to decry campus anti-Semitism and to identify Islam as the greatest oppressor of women and gays in the world today. He delivered a myth-busting history of “Palestine” and a concise explanation of his opposition to slavery reparations a hundred years after the fact. And he attacked the Muslim Student Association, ubiquitous on major college campuses, as a creation of the Muslim Brotherhood, a supporter of the terrorist organization Hamas and the sponsor of Israel Apartheid weeks across the country.

He was flanked throughout the speech by very visible security – a tragic necessity for Horowitz, who is a lightning rod for some of the most bilious hatred that has ever been directed at a conservative public figure. He regularly receives threats prior to speaking engagements and has in fact been physically attacked. This is the inevitable result of his having once been a radical leftist himself, for the Left is only marginally more forgiving of its apostates than fundamentalist Muslims are of theirs.
RTWT at the link.

I mentioned Horowitz's security earlier: "Tense Atmosphere at David Horowitz Lecture at UCLA."

Plus, from Thursday morning: "VIDEO: David Horowitz at UCLA, "The Left's War on Free Speech," May 11, 2011."

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