Recently in Academics Category

Last April Mark Taylor, chairman of the religion department at Columbia, published a very provocative op-ed in the New York Times. His piece began like this:

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

His complaints? Narrow scholarship and underpaid graduate students. I won't argue with him about underpaid graduate students, but narrow scholarship? Give me a break.

I'm sure Professor Taylor is a respected scholar, but when I read a piece by a respected scholar,¹ I expect to see evidence for the major assertions -- even in a short op-ed piece. The evidence for "rapidly rising cost" and "sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans"? Even though I said I'm not going to argue the point, you just read all of the evidence for those assertions.

His evidence for narrow scholarship?

A bubble in higher education:

With tuitions, fees, and room and board at dozens of colleges now reaching $50,000 a year, the ability to sustain private higher education for all but the very well-heeled is questionable. (emphasis added)

Notice the emphasis on the word "private". Public universities and colleges have much lower tuition and fees.¹ The rest of the article focuses on challenges to private institutions. Maybe Dan Drezner was right. Maybe the downturn is going to "hammer the schools with the biggest endowments." But I remain skeptical (see my comments on Dan's post).

Twenty years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a report for CERN, the Euorpean Organization for Nuclear Research, that his boss, Mike Sendall, described as "vague, but exciting." The report concerned "the management of general information about accelerators and experiments at CERN," and it "discusse[d] the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems and derives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system."

Why do I mention nuclear research and management of information about accelerators? Well, if the name Tim Berners-Lee rings a bell, you already know that the answer has something to do with the web. What you may not know is that the web turns 20 today. That report described what would become the web, and CERN is hosted a celebration of its 20th anniversay earlier today.

I first encountered the web in 1993 or 1994 when I heard of this thing called Mosaic. There wasn't a lot available then, but I could see that it was likely to be useful, but I never imagined how ubiquitous it would become and how it would change the way that I do my work.

So if anyone ever asks you about serendipitous inventions that spring from basic research and have large practical effects, ask them how long it has been since they looked at their bank statement on the web or since they bought a book or since they downloaded a track from iTunes or since they watched a video on YouTube or since they read a newspaper or magazine in their favorite web browser or....

A couple of weeks ago Stanley Fish described the case of a physics professor at the University of Ottawa who faces "dismissal with cause". He announced on the first day of class that he was giving everyone in his course an A+, and he changed a course on physics and the environment a course encouraging political activism. He regarded insubordination as his job and believed that academic freedom entitled him to do as he pleases.

In a post the following week, Fish argues

[S]ince it is the job of the academy to transmit and advance knowledge, there should be no pre-emptive anointing or demonizing of any particular viewpoint or line of inquiry; not because such pre-emptings would be an assault on truth, but because they would impede the doing of the job. Free inquiry means free in relation to the goals of the enterprise, not free in the sense of being answerable to nothing.

Those who hold to an expansive view of academic freedom will find his conclusion satisfying. But in addition to the practical matter of what courts have decided on the issue,¹ there's the issue of principle about what academic freedom is.

In the United States, the 1940 Statement on Principles of Academic Freedom and Tenure from the American Association of University Professors is generally taken as one of the best expressions of the principles of academic freedom and the justification for it. And what does it have to say?

Last month Brandeis University announced that it would close its art museum and sell its collection (boston.com). Reacting to the news, Holland Carter had this to say in the New York Times:

Cease and desist is the advice I give university administrators toying with thoughts of closing their campus museums and peddling the art, as Brandeis recently threatened to do. Just stop. Period. Bad way to go.

If it helps, consider your museum and its collection in purely materialistic terms, as a big chunk of capital, slowly and fortuitously accumulated. Once spent, it is irrecoverable. Your university can never be that rich in that way again. Or view the art in your care as something that doesn't belong to you. Like any legacy it belongs to the future.

These thoughts strike close to home, because this morning I learned that President Hogan is considering whether to close the William Benton Museum of Art and the Connecticut State Museum of Natural History at the University of Connecticut. According to the Hartford Courant, "Hogan estimates that the university would save $1.25 million a year by closing the museums." We could be facing a $35 milliion budget gap next year, and the president argues that we "have to look pretty hard at the things that are not at the center of the academic mission."

Ever since the financial meltdown started last fall, I've been wondering just how hard the University of Connecticut would be hit. Well, a little of the uncertainty is now lifted. The news is not good, but it's not nearly as bad as I feared it might be.

Governor Rell presented her budget plan to the state legislature yesterday. It includes

• Layoffs for 400 current state employees and $275 million in wage & benefit concessions from state unions.¹
• A one-year freeze on new construction at UConn and other state-supported universities.
• A 5% cut in state support for higher education.

A 5% cut in state support is not something anyone would wish for, but given that new unemployment claims² are at nearly 600,000 in one week, I am grateful that the Governor is not proposing anything worse.

Maybe she's been reading UConnomy.

I'd really like to believe Dan Drezner¹

Until recently, the standard lament from the "public Ivies" on down had been that the endowment explosion from the elite private schools had opened up an appreciable gap in resources between public and private schools.
 
No longer. The downturn is going to hammer the schools with the biggest endowments. Those with the smallest -- that would be public schools -- should be better equipped to ride out the downturn. (my emphasis)

True, Harvard's endowment lost $8 billion (22% of its value) between June and early December, and it could lose much more by the end of its fiscal year in 2009. True, Harvard isn't alone. Many other private universities and colleges are suffering similar losses. Some may suffer even more. True, public universities rely less on endowment income that Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Williams, Amherst, and the like. True, "due to budget constraints, public universities are about to get an influx of better students" (Dan Drezner in a followup post).

But public funds and tuition will do little to cushion the blow at public universities.

In December 2005 the Honorable Judge John E. Jones, III wrote:

A significant aspect of the IDM [intelligent design movement] is that despite Defendants' protestations to the contrary, it describes ID as a religious argument. In that vein, the writings of leading ID proponents reveal that the designer postulated by their argument is the God of Christianity. (Kitzmiller v. Dover)

NOVA produced a special on the trial, Judgement Day. Now you can read an interview with Judge Jones in PLoS Genetics. Here are just a few of the highlights (all quotes from Judge Jones):

• Another remarkable moment on the science side was Michael Behe, who was the lead witness for the defendants, and a very amiable fellow, as was Ken Miller, but unlike Miller, in my view, Professor Behe did not distinguish himself. He did not hold up well on cross-examination.
• In the realm of the lay witnesses, if you will, some of the school board witnesses were dreadful witnesses and hence the description "breathtaking inanity" and "mendacity." In my view, they clearly lied under oath. They made a very poor account of themselves. They could not explain why they did what they did. They really didn't even know what intelligent design was. It was quite clear to me that they viewed intelligent design as a method to get creationism into the public school classroom. They were unfortunate and troublesome witnesses. Simply remarkable, in that sense.
• They gave me the last word in "Judgment Day" [a NOVA program on the trial] and I said this is not something that will be settled in my time or even in my grandchildren's lifetimes. It's an enduring, quintessentially American, dispute.

I was trying to get ready for this morning's lecture on statistical phylogeography, and I was planning to use this paper as part of my lecture.

The last time I taught this course (in 2006), I had a link to the paper that worked like a charm using a digital object identifier (DOI). DOIs are supposed to provide a stable link to electronic objects, like published journal articles. Well, when I clicked on the link this morning it didn't work. That's bad. It should still be working, even two years later, and even though Blackwell (the original publisher) has been acquired by Wiley. This is also probably the second or third time this semester I've had this problem.

But it gets worse.