Stop Me Before I Vote Again

A friend of mine, who still works in the belly of the Credentialling Sector beast, sent me the following clip, from a publication with the narcotic name of Inside Higher Education:

Michigan Severs Ties to Controversial Publisher

In September, the University of Michigan Press faced intense criticism from pro-Israel groups... over its distribution of a book called Overcoming Zionism, which argues that the creation of Israel was a mistake and urges adoption of the "one state" solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.... Michigan wasn't the publisher, but it distributed the book under a deal with Pluto Press, a leftist British publisher with extensive lists on the Middle East and international affairs.

Some critics of the book demanded that Michigan stop distributing the book, which it briefly did, and cut ties to Pluto immediately. The university declined to do [cut ties], and resumed distributing the book, citing both contractual obligations to Pluto and concerns that halting distribution because of content would raise issues of academic freedom. By the end of this year, however, Michigan will no longer be distributing the book or have any ties to Pluto Press.....

Among those who publish with Pluto are Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, bell hooks, and Ariel Dorfman....

.... Peggy McCracken, an associate dean at Michigan who is chair of the executive board of the press, said that politics wasn't the issue. She said that... Pluto doesn't have peer review on the Michigan model.... Pluto uses peer review on proposals and chapters, but not the finished manuscript.

....McCracken added that "certainly the free and open exchange of ideas is the foundation of everything we do at the university."

Stories like this -- the next most recent discussed here was the purge of Norman Finkelstein -- always delight me with the contrast between Academia's self-image, as a place for Ms McCracken's "free and open exchange of ideas", and the utter poltroonery with which it nearly always responds to ideological witch-hunts.

Back in the Red Scare days, the Unis obligingly got rid of all their Reds, and nowadays, they can almost always be relied on to cave in promptly to indignant e-mails from Israel fans.

It all leads one to wonder a bit about the concept of "academic freedom". It's a little strange -- isn't it? -- that academics should claim entitlement to some kind of freedom which isn't apparently available to the rest of us.

Presumably the justification is the broader social benefit that accrues to us all from these fearless thinkers and scholars, boldly

Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone

... regardless of conventional wisdom, heedless of prejudice and superstition, willing and eager to challenge all unquestioned assumptions, and so on.

Well, there might me something to say for this idea if the Unis were really anything like that. But of course they aren't; Michigan's servile kowtowing to the Israel lobby is the way Academia actually works, ninety-nine times out of a hundred.

So I say the hell with academic freedom. Let the professoriate get used to the same kind of labor discipline as the proletariat. Away with the fig leaf. Let's candidly say (what is in fact the fact) that Unis exist to indoctrinate the young; to justify inequality with a factitious gilding of "merit"; to defend received ideas, and to call groupthink "peer review".

Let's get Laputa back on the ground again.

For subscribers:

http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/07/3644n.htm

Pentagon's New Social-Science Program Stirs Old Anxieties

In September 1965, not long after news reports spotlighted a controversial Pentagon-sponsored program to study social conflict in South America, the Social Science Research Council played host to a meeting on overseas research.

Feelings were raw. Opposition to the Vietnam War was mounting, and many scholars worried that the Pentagon's research on conflict and counterinsurgency would bring all overseas researchers under suspicion as agents of American military power. According to Seymour J. Deitchman's The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy (MIT Press, 1976), a central theme of that 1965 meeting was whether, if the Pentagon really required research on such topics, it "couldn't be obtained by some independent, 'objective' agency, such as the National Science Foundation."

.... In April, Robert M. Gates, the secretary of defense, announced the Minerva Research Initiative, a Pentagon-financed, university-based social-science program whose purpose is to study the Chinese military, cultural dynamics in the Islamic world, and other topics of interest to the military.

... The president of the American Anthropological Association released a statement urging that such research be funded not by the Pentagon, but by agencies with "decades of experience in building an infrastructure of respected peer reviewers" like the National Science Foundation.

...[O]n Monday afternoon, the Pentagon signed an agreement that will facilitate collaborative social-science projects with the National Science Foundation... The anthropologists' wish has been at least partly granted.

... [T]he program's supporters hope that it will play a... role in rebuilding trust between social scientists and the military. In his speech announcing Minerva, Mr. Gates referred to "academics who felt used and disenchanted after Vietnam, and troops who felt abandoned and unfairly criticized by academia during the same time."

In an interview last month, Thomas G. Mahnken, the Defense Department's deputy assistant secretary for policy planning, said... "We believe that the government will benefit and the nation will benefit if we have a larger cadre of scholars who are conversant in primary-source Arabic documents, for example."

He added that he hoped the NSF's peer-review process would give the program credibility among scholars.

But the best is yet to come:

Among the most visible skeptics is David H. Price, an associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Saint Martin's University and the author of a new history of World War II-era anthropology. Mr. Price says that even when the military solicits social scientists' insights, those insights are often ignored.

Mr. Deitchman ended his memoir with a proposition that almost no one in the current Minerva debate is likely to find palatable. After witnessing a decade of angry Congressional hearings and bitter arguments within social-science organizations, he concluded that publicly financed social-science research was hopelessly politicized and that the federal government should, by and large, wash its hands of the entire business.

No matter whether they work for the Defense Department or for less controversial agencies, government-financed social scientists are in danger of swallowing "the values and outlook of the bureaucracy," Mr. Deitchman wrote. But in a new time of war and cross-cultural conflict, it's impossible to imagine that the federal government will follow Mr. Deitchman's advice and retreat from social-science research. The question now, as in 1965, is which agencies will steer that research.

Ahhh, the magic of peer review:

The ’60s Begin to Fade as Liberal Professors Retire

Baby boomers, hired in large numbers during a huge expansion in higher education that continued into the ’70s, are being replaced by younger professors who [are] less ideologically polarized and more politically moderate.

At Stanford a divided anthropology department reunited last year after a bitter split in 1998 broke it into two entities, one focusing on culture, the other on biology.

[A] new study of the social and political views of American professors [found that] “Self-described liberals are most common within the ranks of those professors aged 50-64, who were teenagers or young adults in the 1960s,” they wrote, making up just under 50 percent. At the same time, the youngest group, ages 26 to 35, contains the highest percentage of moderates, some 60 percent, and the lowest percentage of liberals, just under a third.

When it comes to those who consider themselves “liberal activists,” 17.2 percent of the 50-64 age group take up the banner compared with only 1.3 percent of professors 35 and younger.

“These findings with regard to age provide further support for the idea that, in recent years, the trend has been toward increasing moderatism,” the study says.

The authors are not talking about a political realignment. Democrats continue to overwhelmingly outnumber Republicans among faculty, young and old.

But here's the really good news:

... moderation can be found at both ends of the political spectrum [e.g.] A seminar on great books at Princeton jointly taught by two philosophers, the left-wing Cornel West and the right-wing Robert P. George.

An SMBIVA deep-cover agent, embedded in the bowels of Academe, passed this along, from the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Why Doesn't Plagiarism Matter?
By Jonathan Beecher Field

Like so many of my [academic] colleagues, I have followed Barack Obama's presidential campaign with interest and excitement....

Remembering this sense of exhilaration I sensed in seeing a new field of political possibilities makes the sense of betrayal I feel today even more powerful. By choosing Joe Biden as his running mate, Barack Obama has insulted academics -- students and teachers alike.... it's surprising that Biden's record of plagiarism did not disqualify him from Obama's consideration.

Field, the Chronicle writer, continues:

[But] on Election Day, I will hold my nose and vote for Obama/Biden. I continue to believe Obama offers the United Sates the best chance of escaping from the disaster of the last eight years. A survey of third party candidates reveals that after the vainglorious spoilsport Ralph Nader, the choices get even more marginal at a quick pace.... I don't think I can afford to waste my vote on a gesture.... [though] Obama's choice has made it harder for me, and for my colleagues across the United States, to defend the principles that form the foundation of scholarship.

I don't know which is more risible -- Field's belief that the pettifogging Pharisaism of academic morality constitutes the "foundation of scholarship"; or his conviction that Obama ought to have had more consideration for the parochial guild-pride of Fields' fellow pedagogues(*); or that among Biden's many sins, plagiarism even registers on any thinking person's moral radar; or his sheepish declaration that in spite of all his high dudgeon and the mortal insult to his trade, he will -- of course -- waste his vote on Bidobama anyway.

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(*)Greek for "boy-herder."

Our fearless pwog terrier, Paul Krugman, has won the Swedish bank's pseudo-Nobel prize for "economic science." This rigorous friend of all things small-fry and Bush-battered, champion of long-gone well-hung safety nets, and well-versed anal-solonic regulators, and... and... oh Christ, blah blah blah.

Why him? Well, before he became the relentless tribune of the naked truth, the master of bright-line, gotcha! political arithmetic, over there on the op-ed pages of the Times of Laputa -- before all that, he was an innovative breakthroughish academic econ-conner; in fact, a paragon in his field. It's a field which for the last 60 years or so has required its heros and saints to boldly go where no academic mind has gone before, and formally, simply, and crisply, model some chunk of obvious everyday marketplace reality that has stared us all in the face since Columbus cheated Chief Nugawana at cards, and yet, until the publication of this particular paper, has evaded algebraic capture. Yes, trap it in Greek letters and render it in the toonish galaxy-far-far-away terms that please the rarefied minds of ivydom's Dismalians.

In Paul's case, he took an earlier breakthrough model by Dixit Stiglitz and frigged it around some, and used it, after suitable relabeling, to prove something -- well -- obvious: Toyota and General Motors might rationally choose to sell and produce in each others' home markets -- and profit maximally.

Sound impressive? No? Well, it got him overnight to the top tier of young Turks in trade theory.

But wait! There's more! Not satisfied with his initial earthshaking achievement, about a decade later, Paul built a model of optimal human civilization -- the genesis of urban habitat, those nodes of folks that pimple the market plain, swelling to the point where the economies of agglomeration just nicely balance the costs of transportation. As a lover of such toy train-set worlds, I could go on and on -- but I won't.

Street value of this body of work that won him the Swedish bankers' prize? Somewhere between the value of six mice and one large pumpkin, down at the local cab stand.

http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/10/5086n.htm

Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, long criticized for its workplace policies, is a “more-honest employer” of part-time workers than colleges that employ thousands of adjunct faculty members. That was the harsh message delivered to a group of college human-resources officials here on Monday by one of their own: Angelo-Gene Monaco, associate vice president for human resources and employee relations at the University of Akron.

“We helped create a highly educated part of the working poor, and it’s starting to get attention from outsiders,” he said, noting that unions are trying to organize part-timers....

Yet another of the unlovely realities of academic life, so sharply at odds with the "profession's" exalted self-representation -- you know, the life of the mind and all that.

Note well that Monaco's concern was anything but humanitarian:

If colleges don't improve conditions for part-time instructors, they risk increased unionization efforts, and not just from the groups that have traditionally organized professors, said Mr. Monaco. He mentioned the United Auto Workers and Teamsters as potential organizers of adjuncts. "I'm worried about them. They don't care about the full-time faculty," he said.

Swarthmore has benefited from a continuing tradition of generous philanthropy and has over the years enjoyed exceptional investment success. The College has held prudently to a conservative spending rate on its endowment during years of excellent return so that it would be well positioned in years of disappointing performance....

Nevertheless, the almost 30% decline in the endowment from its June 30 value of $1.4 billion has been much steeper than anyone anticipated....

Effective immediately, the College will pull back from all non-essential construction work, refrain from initiating any new programs, and stringently evaluate any faculty or staff hiring....

Over the coming semester we will develop a contingency plan for more significant reductions in the budget, which the College will begin to implement if by this time next year the College's financial situation has not improved.

It's an ill wind that blows nobody good. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the "current decline in financial assets," as Bloom old-maidishly calls it, ruined every elite private college and university in the nation? Low Library converted to low-rent housing!

Oh I'm licking my chops here. The spirit of '68 walks again, wearing the stolen clothing of Efficient Markets.

It's hard to keep up with the relentless drumbeat of sourly satisfying news about Obama's appointments, actual and potential. I'm only now getting around to reflecting on the glorious possibility that Obie might actually appoint the Childgrinder of Tweed Courthouse, Joel Klein, as secretary of education.

Klein, a corporate lawyer, was put in charge of New York City's schools by that Napoleonic poison toad Mike Bloomberg. The two of them share a religious commitment to standardized testing as the Holy Grail of education.

Of course this is also the Bush administration's approach, embodied in No Child Left Alone -- er, Behind.

In fact there's an almost complete elite consensus viewing education as a kind of industrial operation: a child-processing facility that takes in raw material (sentimentally referred to as "children") of various types and levels of quality, pulverizes them, sifts them, separates the fine-grained from the coarse, and packages them into citizen-units ranging in price from the deluxe to the unlabelled-generic -- and by the way, generates a fairly high proportion of factory-seconds and rejects in the course of its workings.

You can see why a bloodless corporate honcho like Bloomberg might like this picture -- a δημοβόρος βασιλεύς , as Homer says, a people-eating king. But merit babies like Obie are right there with 'em. For folks in this latter category, the only thing more sacred than the Supreme Court is the Scholastic Aptitude Test. (To be sure, these kind-hearted humanists can be counted on, as always, to emit a high faint yesbutnik squeak, if you squeeze them, like one of those toy mice that cats are expected to like. But that, and a high-school diploma, will get you -- bupkis.)

It may not be Klein, of course. It might be Obie's old Harvard and Chicago buddy Arne Duncan, Klein's counterpart in Chicago.

Duncan is easily summed up: he is to Klein as Chicago is to New York.

Beware this creep, Jeffrey Sachs, the Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development at Columbia University.

He is a vicious climbing grasping sanctimonious hollow pine of a grifter, the Geraldo Rivera of development economics, a lamp unto himself alone, a scorpion fire, a sickening soul, a blemish on shame itself.

Once Doctor Shock to both Poland and Bolivia, the smiley face of raw neolib market stampedes that brought misery worthy of the four horsemen in its wake, he's now Doctor African Makeover, the white rain man that wretched sub-Saharan black folks never asked for, but got right up their ass.

In the last decade, this trans-nat limited-liability emerging-economy death-wish incarnate, despite heading for deep cover as a champion of the poorest of the global poor, remains nothing but a babyfaced corporate pimp, ready to facilitate the free range profiteers and various other serial rapists of one backward nation after another.

I'll not trouble you with the details. Just never read a word he writes or believe anything he claims. If he said horse jockeys oughta all be over 7 feet tall, he couldn't get himself one inch further from the truth than he is right now, 24/7.

This undauntable guy's ever-boring, ever-ready ambition will never give up the hustle. His foul spirit wants in on everything, and he'll get in on everything too, if he ain't sent rocketing down to the circle of Hell reserved for oily human corkscrews like him.

On the other hand, this shrewd witty chap --

... Dani Rodrik, despite -- or more likey because of -- an odd Sancho as Quixote side, must have a place waiting for him somewhere up there in God's own sugar bowl.

I quote from a recent light and popular advice piece of his, intended for the same array of emerging states the above Sachs man has tried poisoning, states now obviously confronting a fast submerging "order" here on market Earth:

"First on the agenda must be new rules that make financial crises less likely and their consequences less severe.Left to their own devices, global financial markets provide too much credit at too cheap a price in good times, while they deliver too little credit at bad times. The only effective response is counter-cyclical capital-account management. -- discouraging foreign borrowing in good times, and preventing capital flight in bad. "

But soft! Here entereth the villain --

"Instead of frowning on capital controls and pushing for financial openness, the IMF should be in the business of actively helping countries implement such policies. It should also enlarge its emergency credit lines to act more as a lender of last resort to developing nations hit by financial whiplash. "

"Second, the crisis is an opportunity for achieving greater transparency on all fronts, including banking practices in the advanced countries that facilitate tax evasion in the developing nations. Wealthy citizens in the developing world evade more than a hundred billion of US dollars worth of taxes in their home countries each year thanks to bank accounts they maintain in Zurich, Miami, London, and elsewhere. Governments of these nations should ask for and be given information on their nationals’ accounts."

"Third, developing nations should also push for a Tobin tax (**) – a tax on global foreign currency transactions. Set at a small enough level – say 0.25% – such a tax would have little adverse effect on the global economy while raising considerable amount of revenue. At worst the efficiency costs would be minor; at best the tax would discourage excessive short-term speculation. The revenues collected – which would easily amount to hundreds of billions of US dollars annually – could be spent on global public goods such as development assistance, vaccines for tropical diseases, and the greening of technologies in use in the developing world."

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(**) While we dream -- a Tobin tax rate might work better if structured to move up and down dynamically, like a congestion tax.

Old monster Luce's flagship has a beaut of a piece:

Jobs Are The New Assets

"Remember when jobs weren't worth your small talk? Think back a year or two.... You talked about your house. A new deck! You talked about your portfolio. Gotta go small cap. Did you mention how much pleasure you derived from bringing home a steady paycheck? Probably not.... Land was valuable, and capital was valuable, and labor — who cared?"

Now here at the dawn of die Obamazeit with our cratered 401K/IRA "portfolio" and our house treading the waterline, our shitass jobs are all we got -- again. Its like 1946 all over -- err, only different; we ain't got no CIO.

Let's take the Wayback to the beginning, the time before Reagan time, to the cold war, the one Harry stared and Nixon won by going to visit his co-victor Chairman Mao.

The kulacking of America's blue-ribbon wage earners began with the great migration out of the urban apartment and onto the family house lot in Sprawlville. Okay, so you're still William Bendix, Brookyn wage smurf, but now you got a front lawn and a back yard of your own.

Beats hell out of stickball, rooftop picnics, and the iceman shtupping the wife, eh?

Here's the gimmick turned miracle: by 2006 those house lots -- now owned by Homer Simpson, not Chester A. Riley, are worth megabucks -- or thereabouts. Like a magic tree growing over the years in the back yard, suddenly the fucker's yielding golden apples. The credit line running off that lot's appreciation in value by '06 is getting Homer a 9% "lifestyle raise". Life is sweet!

...That is, until yesterday when the great lot pop exploded. Oh well, I still got my 401K -- except it's now more like a 201K.

Looks like it's back to being just that good old peculiar commodity again. Welcome back, 1946!

It gets me to ruminating. Back then, America's white wage smurfs took a path away from the CIO class model toward the BYOB model -- that is -- the Build Your Own Business model, though the phrase has to be understood in a perverse sense. It means build some other offsite bunch of ass holes' business, by cultivating your inner professional, that guy or gal you make yourself over into, by acquiring skills and, better yet, credentials. That's your business, and it don't matter if you're counter help or a wily commission sales harpooneer.

Your business is best done inside a bigger limited-liability outfit -- BYOB don't mean Be Your Own Boss. Just upgrade yerself, pard.

My grad school idol, Gary "The Pecker" Becker, shown above, turned this caper, this investing in ourselves, this building a deck onto ourselves rather than our house, into a career, and gave it a name -- "building our human capital." In fact he got a Swedish dunce-cap award for his "modeling" of it.

So there you are, all you have-hopers: what'll you be? A commodity or a capital? A "professional" or an honorary wetback?

It's America. You're free to choose, hombre.

I never cease to be amused by the gaping chasm between Academe's bold image of itself as a haven of fearless unfettered inquiry, and the craven reality. Latest instance:

Banned in Boston

The norm for protests over a William Ayers appearance on campus these days is for conservative critics to say that the University of Illinois at Chicago professor shouldn't be given a forum to speak because of the past violence of the Weather Underground, of which he was once a leader.

At Boston College, the debate has taken a new twist -- with the college calling off a talk by Ayers planned for tonight and citing a police killing that has never been definitively linked to the Weather Underground and that Ayers and others insist his group had nothing to do with. Nonetheless, that 1970 police killing is still associated by many in Boston with the Weather Underground and remains a political flashpoint -- as became clear on Friday.

Michael Graham, a local talk radio host, started calling on Boston College to revoke the invitation to Ayers, and he encouraged alumni, donors and others to call the college to demand that it deny Ayers a forum. Graham repeatedly linked Ayers and the Weather Underground to the 1970 killing of Walter Schroeder, the police officer, who was responding to a bank robbery by a group of radical students....

Boston College issued a statement in which it acknowledged barring Ayers.... "As a university, we pride ourselves on the free expression of ideas and on the prestige that Boston College holds as a destination of choice among prominent speakers. But we are also aware of the obligation we hold to be respectful of our host community. The emotional scars of the murder of Boston Police Sergeant Walter Schroeder, allegedly at the hands of the Weather Underground, which left nine children fatherless in the shadows of this campus, was an issue that we could not ignore."

So the college called off the event, the statement said, "out of respect for the Schroeder family and out of concern for the safety and well being of our students. We believe that, in light of these unique circumstances, the appropriate decision was made in this case."

Meet Montgomery McFate.

This improbably-named and improbable-looking creature is America's leading imperial field ethnologist. She's profiled by the exceedingly delightful Davey Price over at Alex's site.

Ever heard of human terrain systems (HTS)? No? I guess you don't get around much more than I do.

HTS, as I gather from Mr Price's piece, "are part of counterinsurgency operations designed to provide military personnel with cultural information that will help inform troop activities in areas of occupation."

That is, a diabolical fusion of boots and mortarboards, both placed firmly on the ground in the same patch of densest darkest insurgent-infested Ethneristan. Want to win hearts and minds? Then obviously you gotta know who yer shootin' through as well as talkin' to.

Eggheads as as embeds -- sociologists, ethnologists, no doubt even cunning linguists and paleo-economists -- and here's where Lady McFate steps forth, according to doc Price at any rate:

"Over the years, Human Terrain’s saleswoman, anthropologist Montgomery McFate, has a adopted a policy of not answering the academic critiques of her many critics regardless of the documentation upon which these critics base their work.

This policy has allowed Dr. McFate to avoid answering some pretty serious questions; questions about her reported involvement in the surveillance of an American gun control group; questions about the unattributed writings of other anthropologists appearing in the new Counterinsurgency Field Manual; questions about why, rather than acknowledging that Human Terrain Teams raise complex ethical issues to be negotiated, she has instead moved forward without even trying to publicly address these issues.

And while this approach works well in the political environment of Washington, D.C., where accountability and memories are short, this is the most non-academic approach imaginable. Academics engage with each other when disputes arise, they answer critiques with data and arguments rather than rely on silence and professionals to spin stories in the press.

Dr. McFate’s position of leaving critiques unanswered appears to have become that of HTS, and a compliant corporate media has followed this lead as it increasingly refuses to report on the problems, corruptions, and complexities of HTS, instead only providing the public with narratives that would have them believe that HTS anthropologists are good caring people trying to lesson harm, while critics are either invisible or portrayed as ivory-tower America-hating kooks."

Coupla weeks ago, Boston College caved in to the cop lobby. Now it's Clark University's turn, intimidated, as colleges nearly always are, by the Israel lobby:

Clark University canceled a campus talk scheduled for later this month by controversial Holocaust scholar Norman Finkelstein, saying his presence "would invite controversy and not dialogue or understanding," and would conflict with a similar event scheduled around the same time.

The Clark University Students for Palestinian Rights, a student-run group on the Worcester campus, had arranged for Finkelstein to speak on April 21....

Finkelstein's address would conflict with a similar conference hosted by the university's Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, scheduled for April 23-26, two days after Finkelstein's speech, Bassett said in his letter. That conference could draw Holocaust scholars who MacMillan said may disagree with Finkelstein.

The dispute came to the attention of college administrators after Hillel, a Jewish campus group, objected to Finkelstein's scheduled appearance.

The grinning vulpine figure shown above is Arne Duncan, Obama's education czar, promoted from the educational stockyards of Chicago to ready the whole rising generation of American youth for efficient corporate slaughter.

Here's the New York Times:

Education Standards Likely to See Toughening

WASHINGTON — President Obama and his team have alternated praise for the goals of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law with criticism of its weaknesses, [but it seems] the Obama administration will use a Congressional rewriting of the federal law later this year to toughen requirements... The law’s testing requirements... will certainly not disappear.

The administration['s] plans are a disappointment to some critics of the No Child Left Behind law, who hoped Mr. Obama’s campaign promises of change would mean a sharper break with the Bush-era law.

“Obama’s fundamental strategy is the same as George Bush’s... it’s the N.C.L.B. approach with lots of money attached,” Diane Ravitch said.... “Obama has given Bush a third term in education policy.”

[One] provision gives Education Secretary Arne Duncan control over $5 billion, which Mr. Duncan calls a “Race to the Top Fund”....

The stimulus requires governors to raise standards to a new benchmark: the point at which high school graduates can succeed — without remedial classes — in college, the workplace or the military.

Of course, education as a feeder industry for the incarceration sector wouldn't sound too good -- even though that is, of course, the fact. You, to college. You, to the mailroom. You, Lynndie England, to the military. And you -- what was your name again? -- to jail. And about time, too.

It gets better. Were you expecting to hear from the "progressive" Center For American Progress? I was, and I was not disappointed:

Cynthia Brown, vice president for education policy at the Center for American Progress, said “They’re putting money and ideas behind what they think are the changes needed in public education... That signals their seriousness about major reform.”

The teachers' unions, which in 2007 fought a bare-knuckle lobbying battle that scuttled Congress’s last effort to rewrite the No Child Left Behind law, are [now] voicing muted concern over a couple of provisions in the stimulus....

Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, said he did not like... part of the president’s speech.

“When he equates teachers with test scores, that’s when we part company,” Mr. Van Roekel said. But he added: “Over all, I just really support Obama’s vision to strengthen public education.”

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said that her union also had concerns about the president’s enthusiasm for data systems, which she said could be misused, but that she would give the new administration the benefit of the doubt.

This just in, from On The Inside, a journal of the incarceration sector -- or no, sorry, that's Inside Higher Education, a journal from the closely-related credentialling sector. So hard to tell 'em apart sometimes. Anyway, here's the story:

Crossing a Line

Everyone involved in the dispute over William I. Robinson talks about lines being crossed....

His critics say that he crossed a line of professionalism by sending e-mail to all of the students in one of his courses material about "parallel" images of Nazi and Israeli attacks. Some students view the material as anti-Semitic, and they quit the course and filed a grievance against him.

Faculty members are in the process of selecting a panel that will consider the charges against Robinson and determine whether to recommend that a standing faculty panel conduct a full investigation of the incident.

There's a web site in support of Robinson --

http://sb4af.wordpress.com/

... where in spite of my prejudice against professors, and my puzzlement at the whole concept of "academic freedom", I signed up, and suggest you do the same. Anybody who takes a whack at Zion, even if he's a professor -- of sociology! -- deserves our support.

It's a bit unfortunate that the pro-Robinson site has fallen into a somewhat niggling proceduralist state of mind. There is much back-and-forth about whether the rules of the university dealing with "inappropriate" faculty conduct were followed.

This would be a hard question to decide, even if one were interested in deciding it, since the rules in question are a bizarre labyrinth of agents and committees that put one in mind of the Venetian republic's palmy days, or the Vatican divorce court. There's the Council of Ten, the Council of Three, the Prothonotary Sensitivus, the Commission of Relevancy, the Tribunal of Standards... it's like Masonic ceremonial.

Still, the outlines are clear enough. Robinson did something that profs do all the time. Unfortunately for him, his actions displeased Israel's defense team. As a result, he will spend a year or two of his life fighting for his livelihood, and bearing, as best he can, the glances-askance of his former friends and colleagues and neighbors who have heard that he's, well, a bit an anti-Semite. No smoke without fire. Why did he send that email, anyway? He should have known better. Must have some kinda bug up his ass about Jews.

He may keep his job -- I hope he does, just to spite the ADL -- but he will certainly have paid a price. And that's really the point, isn't it?

What pleases me about this story is the eagerness of the university to deploy its ponderous enforcement machinery at a snap of the fingers from the ADL. Oh, did I but have the NSA phone taps of all those calls to trustees, and the donation scouts, and the deans, and the department chairs -- it would be as good as the Harman tapes, or better.

(michael hureaux perez, responding to an earlier post here, sent the following fine piece, which I'm delighted to reproduce in full. -- MJS)

The recent gyrations of Obama's basketball buddy Arne Duncan, current whipmaster in chief of American “education”, and his house slaves in the NEA and the AFT bureaucracy, represent no change at all from the previous regime. The agenda remains unchanged. Its purpose is to shift the blame for the hash the owners of our society have made of public education.

That disaster, in turn, is rooted in the the endless effort of public education “reformers” to revitalize the production-freak indoctrination model of education that has been a bloody washout for better than a century.

It's a terrible model. In fact, any people who profess to believe in self-government must create a massively funded, flexible but rigorous education effort that addresses both the concrete needs and the personal passions of every individual from womb to tomb. And that would be a complex effort, full of loud, honest mistakes, costly, but worth it.

Teacher certification and professional development in this country remains mostly locked into bland, lifeless crap. Yes, there are a few programs here and there that are driven by educators and their allies, but most remain a plaything for the corporate padrones of the day.

For a sterling example of the sort of nonsense I’m talking about, google the term Praxis Exam and look at what many of the states use to determine teacher “competency”. Such tests are passable, of course. Anybody with a hair of academic skill, a little drive, and a high tolerance for ideological bias can get through them.

The dogma in the Washington state social studies test, for example, is shameless in its drilling of the burger party line. But if you’re versed in the party theory, you can pass such an exam. Just make yourself forget the qualifying phrases “according to-“ and “in theory”. Because if you remember such caveats while taking a state exam- if you have a sense of nuance, which, according to Whitehead, is one of the principal aims of a comprehensive public education - it can jam you up. Just spit out the party line and you’ll be fine. Certification is a cinch if you know how to pass tests.

But, like the high stakes exams forced upon kids all over this country, such teacher education and professional development exams have very little to with the craft of teaching, as the kids' have little to do with life.

Tests are very often a relatively shallow form of assessment, and the fetish around test scores in both students and their prospective teachers is the big bitch among junkyard dogs, a tired old canine that is both constipated and rabid. The speculators who brought you the international financial crisis and an unending imperial slaughter believe they are best qualified to determine who should or shouldn’t be teaching young people, and that’s just the way it goes.

To be fair, many teacher certification programs in recent years have worked away from exams, tried to find a little “swing” and have used actual video documentation and actual observation of educator performance as part of the criteria for certification and licensing.

The use of technology to document good teaching is a fine idea up to a point, but given the hup-ho dodo-ism which continues to oversee certification in most regions, there’s still not much room for what I call the "mad leap" process of teaching. Most teachers in front of a camera will fall into the trap of trying to look seamless, so that they can get their stuff past both the state reviewers and colleagues who haven’t figured out that it’s okay for teachers to not know everything.

When I use the words “mad leap”, I’m not talking about entertaining the students.

I’m talking about teachers learning to create a classroom environment in which the teacher is also a learner, able to fall on their ass in front of their students from time to time. It’s a long, hard road, but such a maneuver allows room for a freewheeling exchange of roles, the teacher as student and vice versa.

In the long series of DLC-type articles on why the jackassery don't need no stinkin' ignorant white wage guys, feature this:

"For quite a while, polls have been showing public support for immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship, and a relative lack of enthusiasm for an enforcement-only approach. That support should grow over time, as should positive feelings about immigrants and immigration, since the white working class, which has relatively negative feelings in this area, is being supplanted by groups such as Hispanics, white college graduates, and professionals, whose feelings about immigration are far more positive."

Oddly this article itself strikes me as a straggling exemplar of a near-extinct but once-robust 90's species, what with all its age of Erasmus shit -- you know, the prog mind of the college guy and college gal.

I say "make way for the new take" -- I see a future full of sites featuring motif shit like this: from college pride to college prole -- the coming collapse of the great American human capital bubble.

Here's the loudest liberal mouth on economic policy east of the Mississippi and north of the South Pole -- Paul 'arf arf' Krooglemannn -- and surprise, surprise, he's ringing the school bell:

'If you had to explain America’s economic success with one word, that word would be “education.” '

But but but... today after leading the world for 150 years in ever wider and deeper school saturation bombing, my God! We've slipped! -- Right down to mediocrity:

"We have a college graduation rate that’s slightly below the average across all advanced economies."

Imagine a tipping point -- bringing on a new dawn of the great American unwashed -- brain-wise, that is.

One can only marvel at the mad sadistic ingenuity, the compulsive, perseverative overelaboration of torture, the finical luxuriance of bureaucratic cogwheels, worm gears, escapements, and ratchets, that marks the Merit Administration's approach to "education". The program actually has the amazingly sinister name "race to the top". From the New York Times:

[T]he Race to the Top program, which will reward some states undertaking bold school improvement initiatives with awards totaling $4 billion, [requires] states... to prepare applications for a first round of the grant competition, and [then] a second round. Applications must comprehensively describe multifaceted strategies for change....

A perfect application would earn a state 500 points, with 125 points allotted for articulating a perfectly coherent agenda for change; 70 points for adopting higher standards and higher quality tests; 47 points for developing computerized systems to track student academic progress; 138 points for recruiting quality teachers, evaluating their effectiveness, and using the evaluations in tenure and other key decisions; 50 points for turning around failing schools; 30 points for other miscellaneous categories of change; and 40 points for fostering the growth of charter schools.

The New York schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, said the administration had improved the rules dealing with failing schools. The draft rules left states free to choose frequently ineffective halfway measures, like replacing a school’s principal, in outlining their main turnaround strategies. The final rules, he said, require states to use bolder measures in a majority of school overhaul efforts, like replacing entire school staffs or closing a school entirely.

A young friend of mine, now in her third year of high school, recently received the following letter from a functionary at her academic feedlot -- let's call it Creekvalley Prep. The letter is addressed to her and her mom, and far too long to transcribe in full. I'll just give the best bits, with some tactful name-changing:

Dear Giudecca and Ms. Llewellyn:

I am delighted to welcome you to the College Office. Although I have had the opportunity to see many of you... throughout the year, I now can turn my attention -- and the resources of the office -- to you as we enter the formal part of the college counseling process....

We will initiate the counseling process in an exploratory meeting with you and a counselor from our office. This meeting is important and parents should make every effort to attend.... Parents should get a copy of the student's schedule and call Mrs Litotes in the College Office at XXX-XXXX to make an appointment that does not conflict with class obligations. [Underlining in original -- MJS] To make the meeting most productive for all, students and parents are asked to complete the College Information Sheet and College Counseling Parent Questionnaire, both of which must be downloaded from the College Office Conference located on Giudecca's First Class desktop. Please call Mrs Litotes if you cannot locate your icon. Both documents must be returned to her in the College Office three days before your meeting so they can be reviewed in advance....

Each student brings a combination of many traits and talents, and a college environment should meet the full range of those needs....

In your work as a student, Giudecca, strive to develop the best possible academic profile. This record of achievement will be the "bedrock" of your college application. Commit to extracurricular activities that you find meaningful and fulfilling. What is important to you --along with your ability to reflect on that in an articulate way -- is what will make your application distinctive.

Sincerely,

There are, it seems to me, several interesting things to note about the text: its semi-literacy, its vast length (the original is a closely-printed page and a half), and above all its minatory presumptuous tone.

This encyclical emanates from a fairly prestigious New York private day day school. The author is some poor drudge in its placement office. She is addressing people who (except for the scholarship kids of course) make a lot more money than she does; many of them make more money in a week than she will make in her whole life. Others are household names, men and women of repute and renown. They're each paying (except for the scholarship families, again) as much as she gets paid every year to send their offspring to Creekvalley. And yet this schoolhouse appendage, this nematode, this remora, this liver fluke, feels entitled to address her patrons and paymasters de haut en bas.

Isn't it amazing how the colleges and their outriders -- like Miss Scribble above -- have gotten the injun sign on all of us? I don't suppose that any of the movers and shakers who received Scribble's dictatorial missive will resent it a bit. "Yes," they'll say, shaking their expensively-coiffed heads, "this is a serious business. Quite right, that Miss Scribble. Little Giudecca needs to buckle down!"

My rabbi Doug Henwood has a good memory. He writes:

The difference between the parties

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/29/AR2010012903259.html

Education Secretary Duncan calls Hurricane Katrina good for New Orleans schools

Education Secretary Arne Duncan called Hurricane Katrina "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans" because it forced the community to take steps to improve low-performing public schools, according to excerpts from a television interview made public Friday.

---

Wall Street Journal - December 5, 2005

The Promise of Vouchers
Milton Friedman

Most New Orleans schools are in ruins, as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.

Above is the man that out-Nixoned Nixon, Albert Shanker; and here is Shanker's latest avatar, Randi Weingarten:

According to a union barking device from captive think tank EPI, she wants:

"contracts that include systems for fair and balanced evaluation of teacher performance (including, but not limited to measures of student achievement); and for the speedy removal of ineffective teachers, with simplified due process rules, when appropriate support fails to correct inadequacy."

"Evaluation of teachers, including the mentoring of novices and of veterans in need of improvement, requires the employment of many additional supervisors of teachers. Call them master-or mentor-teachers... Schools today are under-administered. Frequently, one principal supervises as many as 30 teachers. No principal can evaluate and mentor this many... The reason we have such terrible "drive-by" teacher evaluation systems, with principals taking perfunctory peeks into classrooms, is that principals have no time (or training) to do it right.

No other profession operates with such inadequate supervision. Can you imagine a nursing supervisor overseeing 30 nurses? A newspaper editor overseeing 30 reporters? A law firm partner overseeing 30 associates? Even an assembly line can't rely on only one foreman for 30 workers."

"Management theorists recommend that no leader should have more than 5 direct-reports. The failure of public education to organize itself around this common-sense principle is the roadblock to fair and balanced evaluation. "

"Blaming teacher unions for this failure is demagoguery...Administrations don't propose such systems mostly because they are very, very expensive."

Personally, I'm all for it, up through grade 6 anyway. Lower school teachers are hot --

... and I bet mentoring teachers are even hotter!