"Free Speech in Higher Education": Not about Higher Education, and Not About Free Speech

Those of us in higher education got an earful about one particular bit of President Trump's CPAC speech, regarding his pledge to create an executive order restricting federal research funds to campuses that don't "protect free speech". Here's one story among many from the higher ed press:

Legal Scholars Don’t Know the Details of Trump’s Order on Campus Speech. But They Think It’s a Mistake.

This issue has been buzzing around the political sphere for while now, usually in discussions on the conservative or Republican side. Accusations have been flying about how there is a "crisis" in free speech in higher education.

Here's my take: there is no crisis. This isn't about higher education. And it isn't about free speech.

The poster child for this "crisis" of late has been Hayden Williams, an activist with an organization called Turning Point USA, a conservative group that recruits on college campuses. Williams was at an event on the UC-Berkeley campus last year when he was punched by another individual. The event was captured on camera and broadcast across the internet, where it quickly became fodder among conservative commentators as evidence of the "crisis of free speech" on campuses. The President brought Williams up on stage during his CPAC speech to illustrate the "crisis" he's trying to address.

I think the Williams case is actually the perfect example of the broader issue. Williams is not a student at UC-Berkeley - indeed, he has no affiliation with the university at all. He is a private citizen who came onto the campus from outside to use it as a platform for the message he wanted to promulgate.

The man who punched Williams was also not a student, nor affiliated with UC-Berkeley in any way. He was another private citizen who had come onto campus from outside, presumably to oppose or object to Williams' views. Or maybe he was just passing by.

So this isn't about higher education at all. This encounter could just as well have occurred in a public park, or on a street corner, or in the local post office. If it had, I doubt we would be talking about a "crisis in free speech in our public parks".

Moreover, Berkeley did exactly what any institution committed to free speech would do. It openly permitted Mr. Williams to come onto campus and speak and made no attempt to curtail or constrain that speech. Its police promptly arrested the man who threw the punch. Allowing that UC-Berkeley is a government entity, and that the right of free speech is a right to be free from government interference in speech, there was nothing about this incident that involved what we would consider constraints on free speech. The problem here was about civility, not government (or university) constraints on speech.

Finally, this is nowhere near the definition of a "crisis". There are between 3000 and 4000 institutions of higher education in this country. Every day, in every one of them, there are robust conversations about all sorts of things. If you were to add up all of the public incidents about "free speech" on college campuses over the past year, they wouldn't amount to more than a dozen or two, most involving small groups of students (if they involve students at all). Out of three million+ college students, a couple dozen is a rounding error, not a crisis.

Polls of the broader population show that large percentages of Republican-identifying adults believe that college professors are out to indoctrinate students with liberal ideas and suppress conservatives. These polls are meaningless, because they are asking these questions of a population that isn't actually in college and has no direct knowledge of what's going on on campuses. Moreover, well over 50% of that population has never been to college, so they don't even have their own past experiences to draw on. All these polls show is the power of media persuasion to get people to believe something in the absence of any direct evidence or experience.

So any executive order (if there is one, and if it is crafted to actually be implementable) will be a solution in search of a problem, a symbolic act designed for purposes that have nothing to do with what it's supposedly about. Which is a perfect statement about our politics today: angry, tribal symbolism disconnected from reality - at best, a distraction; at worst, an obstacle to us trying to build the society we really want to live in.

What We Don't Know Can Hurt Us: Higher Education Edition

The old saying has it that "what you don't know can't hurt you". I believe that we are living through an era in which what we don't know about each other is hurting all of us, because that lack of knowledge fuels unnecessary conflict.

This is absolutely true in my industry of higher education. Universities all have varying levels of conflict, of many types. One of the most common is conflict between faculty and administration. Much of this conflict is unnecessary and stems from a lack of knowledge.

I have been reminded of this in many ways in recent weeks, but most proximately by a social media post from a friend which read in part:

My school has an "enrollment management" office with a multi million dollar budget that seems to go up every year. I have no idea what the hell they do, and why that money is spent, especially when my scholarship and other support dollars are at an all time low and will not go up anytime soon. Meanwhile, enrollment at the university as a whole has gone down, and continues to plummet, even while [our department's] enrollment grows each year. ... Bureaucrats will multiply and take all the money, meanwhile, people in [our field] will continue to connect and develop life long meaningful relationships.

To be clear: I have great respect for the faculty member who wrote this post, which also included excellent examples of the work going on in that person's department. I also have great respect for the department as a whole, and the ways in which it has succeeded despite having few resources at its disposal. I think these are excellent people doing great stuff.

My concern, as is often the case, is the characterization of the faceless "they" and the conflict which this needlessly perpetuates. The post above has a few problems caused by a lack of knowledge:

1) The budget of the enrollment management office in question has been going down, not up. The phrase "seems to go up every year" hides the fact that the author doesn't really know, but suspects. Often times, what we suspect to be true isn't. In this case, the office in question has been pushed to do more and more with less and less, just as (perhaps even more than) the academic departments have. And unlike some faculty, nobody in the enrollment office has tenure - many can be (and have been) fired.

2) The phrase "I have no idea what the hell they do, and why that money is spent" is honest, but conveys a suspicion that those efforts are wasted. Not knowing should be an occasion for either humility or research, or both. Negative speculation is harmful.
     In this case, the work of enrollment management is extremely difficult. If it were easy to control enrollments, more universities would do it - most except for the very elite struggle with this constantly. Moreover, the university in question has historically under-invested in marketing itself (an assertion which faculty might dispute but which in fact holds up under scrutiny if you take the time to look comparatively and to understand how marketing works).

3) The claim that "[b]ureaucrats will multiply and take all the money" is both broad and inaccurate. The contrast with the second half of that sentence reveals a broader narrative: faculty are the ones doing the important work of the university, whereas "bureaucrats" are wasted money whose work does not contribute to the education of students or the health of the university as a whole. Professional staff see these comments and know this attitude is out there.

Again, to be clear: faculty DO very important work. I agree that the work that faculty do directly with students is THE work of the university. It is in those relationships that education happens.

But it is also true that without the work of the "bureaucrats", the work of the faculty would be impossible. There is a vast amount of effort that goes into recruiting, admitting, housing, advising, scheduling, and providing for the needs of that student before she ever reaches the classroom. Most of this work is invisible to both students and faculty, as it should be. Ideally, all of this is as seamless and efficient as possible.

But seamless and efficient does not mean free. And while I believe that everyone within a university, at all levels, should be accountable for the quality of their work, the conflicts that arise between faculty and administration often aren't about accountability. They're about tribalism, about them being "them" and us being "us". They are always wrong, and we are always right. And because we are always right, I don't need to know anything about them, because they are wrong anyway, so why learn?

This is the very essence and root of our conflict. Yes, there are disagreements over interests and policy directions and so forth. But if we really understood each other, if we understood how things work on "the other side", and if we ceased doubting (or assuming) each other's motives, the concrete disagreements would be vastly easier to resolve.

Now that I have the position I do, I have few avenues to make these kinds of arguments. Faculty at many institutions are allergic to being "told what to do" by administrators, even if all we're saying is that we would like to develop a common understanding of how the world works. The narratives that drive these conflicts on our campuses are rooted in a fundamental mistrust about motives, but they are fueled and maintained by our steadfast refusal to learn more about each other. That's a problem we can fix - if we want to.

This is, of course, true in our broader society as well. I have previously argued that we don't really have an "America" anymore, but a feuding set of tribes that know less and less about each other. The antidote is always knowledge - not knowledge of facts so much as knowing and understanding people. We claim in our universities to be laboratories for solving society's problems. Perhaps we should start with this one.

Why the Administration's "Advice" on Affirmative Action Doesn't Matter

There is lots of concern on the left about this recent headline story:

Trump administration reverses Obama-era guidance on use of race in college admissions

As someone who works in higher education administration, this is the least concerning thing the Administration has done in months. There are several reasons why this isn't worth our time and attention:

1) It's pointless as a symbolic gesture. I've heard it argued that one reason why folks on the left are upset about this is the symbolic message is sends, that the Administration is hostile to the rights and welfare of minorities. I would have thought that referring to neo-nazis and white supremicists as "fine people" was more that sufficient to make that point. As a symbolic message, this doesn't say anything Donald Trump hasn't been saying for decades.

2) It's non-binding advice. The "guidance" in question doesn't change the law, or the boundaries of the law. There may be a message in here about what this Justice Department is or isn't willing to argue in court cases that may come up, but again we already knew that (see #1 above). Otherwise, this just amounts to a set of suggestions that universities are free to do with as they please.

3) This only applies to institutions that are selective enough for these kinds of things to matter. If you only read the New York Times, you would get the impression that higher education in the United States consists of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and a few other schools here and there. But the reality is that genuinely selective schools are only a very, very small slice of the higher education landscape. Most schools, public and private alike, are desperate enough for students that they will happily accept as many qualified students as they can find, even as they also want to admit diverse groups of students. The number of schools that might conceivably turn away a white applicant in favor of a black or Latino one is extremely small.

4) Because of #3, we need to understand that this isn't about creating a more racially just society in any broad kind of way. This is a rich people's argument, because only the very well-off can afford to send their kids to the kinds of schools for whom these sorts of decisions are relevant. Yes, every year Harvard or Yale or Williams or Stanford will let in a handful of minority students on full ride scholarships. That number is a fraction of a drop in the bucket. For the vast majority (95%+) of minority families who pin their hopes on higher education to lift them out of poverty, their kids aren't going to go to those schools. They're going to go to regional public institutions for whom this argument is irrelevant.

If you care about a more racially and economically just society, and if you believe that higher education is a means to that end, don't spend your time agonizing about this "guidance". Focus that energy on getting your state legislatures to re-fund their public higher education systems, gutted and increasingly expensive after decades of budget cuts. Don't get distracted by red herrings. Focus on what matters.

Fear - on a College Admissions Tour?

Some have suggested that college campuses are just a reflection of the society we serve. That certainly proved to be the case at Colorado State this past week:

The Admissions Tour That Went Horribly Wrong

I encourage you to read through this article, or at least the facts at the top. The basic facts are these:

1) A parent on an admissions tour at Colorado State University called campus police to report two people (both Native Americans) who came late to the tour, whom she considered out of place
2) The campus police arrived, briefly detained the students for questioning, and then released them. The students were cooperative throughout.
3) Because of the delay, the students missed the tour and returned empty-handed to New Mexico - a seven hour round trip essentially for nothing.

Lots of the issues we're used to seeing these days surface here, including the selective use of law enforcement and the apparent pervasiveness of racism in our society. None of this is particularly new.

I call attention to this story only because it points once again to the root problem: Fear. This woman called police because she was afraid - afraid of people who looked different, who dressed different, who acted in ways she did not expect. Afraid, in her mind, of what they might do if allowed to roam unchecked. This was nothing but simple, irrational, soul-crushing fear.

In one sense, I feel sorry for this woman. What must it be like to go through life so afraid of your fellow human beings - your fellow Americans who walk the same streets, shop in the same stores, visit the same college campuses - that you feel the need for police protection simply because someone is near you? That must be absolutely awful.

And although she likely doesn't see it this way, it's a condition that's entirely self-inflicted. She can walk away from her fear at any time. Nothing needs to change - only her way of seeing the world.

I know that's not easy. But it's far easier than many of the other things we strive for. For each of us, our fear is entirely under our own control - if only we can see it that way.

Not for nothing, I suspect, is the most common commandment in the Bible: "Do not be afraid". No one ever made a good decision out of fear. This woman certainly didn't.

And so again is Yoda proved right:

Good Faculty Governance: The Power of the Policy Wonk

My last blog post, "In Defense of the Dark Side," set off a lot of good conversation among friends across academia. One common refrain: there are indeed terrible administrators who make poor (usually unilateral) decisions that have seriously bad consequences for the faculty, and (more importantly) for the universities where they work and the students they serve.

This led to other side conversations about the selection processes that go into picking administrators, the benefits of "cross-cultural marriages" (faculty married to administrators), and other such things. This is what happens when you get a lot of well-educated people talking about stuff they care about.

One question that occurred to me as I read through the various threads: given the common occurrence of "bad administration", what can faculty do about it? "Shared governance" is supposed to provide a bulwark against excesses of power, but it often doesn't. Besides complaining (or snarking) on the internet, what can be done?

In answer, I want to trumpet the value of the often-underappreciated oddball: the policy wonk. A true policy wonk is someone who doesn't just care about the policy outcomes; they immerse themselves in the rich details of how policies are made. Unlike most, they really do want to see (in Bismark's words) how the sausage is made.

Why do policy wonks matter? Because the chief problem that faculty everywhere are trying to solve is, How do we hold administrators accountable? The reason why this is so difficult to do most of the time is that there is no good answer for the question, accountable for what?

Usually, faculty want to hold an administrator accountable after the fact for a decision they feel was a bad one - that is, for a policy outcome. But whether decisions are truly good or bad in their effects is often not known until significantly later. Prior to that, people can express opinions but it's hard to hold someone accountable because they have an opinion different from yours.

Much better if you can hold administrators accountable for how decisions are made - that is, for the process rather than the outcome. The reason why this is a more promising field is that process can be agreed upon ahead of time. We can't necessarily agree with the Dean on what decisions she will make next year, because we don't know what those decisions will be or even what they will entail. But we can agree on the rules by which those decisions will get made.

This is where the policy wonk comes in. Policy wonks love process, and in particular they love to codify process in policies and procedures. They are the folks who will delve into the details of your university's policy manual (which no one else ever reads).

The keys to accountability are simple: agree ahead of time on the process by which decisions will be made, and write those agreements down. That seems really boring when you're doing it, but it comes in great handy later on.

Take an example one of my friends brought up: a senior administrator decides to break a College of Arts & Sciences up into multiple units (a College of Science and one or more Colleges of Other not-Science Stuff). If there is no policy written down about how such a decision should be made, then the administrator is unconstrained. You may not like the idea of breaking up the college, but how do you hold someone accountable just because you disagree?

This was actually a problem for my current employer in the past. Colleges were broken up, renamed, and recombined with astonishing rapidity. The running joke was that you had to check in every morning to see who you were working for that day. Faculty, unsurprisingly, were not amused, especially because they were often not consulted.

In response, we (the administration and faculty together) wrote a policy that guides decisions about recreating or changing academic units - everything from renaming an academic department to restructuring colleges. The policy provides for thorough consultation at every level, including all affected faculty as well as all relevant administrators. This consultation has to proceed in order, starting with the faculty in the affected department(s). Only when all of the steps of the process have been followed can a proposal move forward.

It's not a perfect policy - a Provost determined to cram change down the faculty's throats could still do so. But she would first have to listen to everyone's objections, and document them. You can't walk in tomorrow to find you're in a different college or department without knowing about it. And if the process isn't followed, faculty have a set of rules in writing - rules which the administration agreed to - to which administrators can be held accountable.

It's not necessary that all faculty become policy wonks. But they should identify, and value, the wonks among their number, and use their wonk powers in the service of accountability. A reasonable administration will welcome such an effort. And if the administration resists, you will at least have shifted the conflict to a far more important set of questions.

Go forth and wonk!

In Defense of the Dark Side (Academic Administration)

Since I have spent my entire career in higher education across six different institutions, I have many friends in many places. Since I built most of that network as a faculty member, and continue to attend faculty conferences, many (most?) of those friends are faculty. One of the constants of having a broad network: there are always at least a few institutions in my circle of friends where faculty-administration relations are terrible.

These situations are always worse when budgets are bad, when cuts are happening, and/or when a new contract is at stake. Given the condition of higher education these days, some confluence of these circumstances is pretty common. Why this is true is the subject of another day (or of previous posts - see here and here for examples).

What I'm interested in today is the kind of tribal circling of the wagons that these conflicts create - and how that behavior makes finding solutions harder. Recently I have witnessed a significant amount of internet chatter among friends (at an institution other than my current employer) complaining about their university in the midst of both budget-cutting and negotiating a new contract. Many of these comments are laced with snark aimed at various generic vice presidents and associate provosts and senior executive VPs who want to fire half the faculty and take away the printers from the other half.

This is an old trope in faculty circles - that universities hire too many high-salary administrators and not enough faculty to actually teach the students. It feels good for faculty to repeat this narrative, in much the same way that it feels good for Rush Limbaugh dittoheads to fulminate about "libtards" who want to destroy the American way of life.

The comparison is intentionally aggressive. In both cases, the purpose of the name-calling is not to make an argument for why one is right, but to feel good in the company of others of one's own ilk. We are comforted in knowing that we are members of the tribe, different from Those Evil Ones over there who would destroy us. We feel righteous and secure at the same time.

In both cases it is also true that the accusations being flung about are based largely on ignorance. In most cases, those sharing the snark do not actually know the people on "the other side", nor do they understand much about their motives. Malice is assumed, not on the basis of objective evidence, but because it feels right.

This tendency to rally the troops around snark has a couple of unfortunate consequences. First, in this age of broadband communications very few messages only reach their target audience. Hyperbolic statements meant primarily for internal consumption can become external positions in public. If you've been denigrating the other side in full view of everyone, it's much harder to compromise with them when compromise would create a solution.

The second and more lasting problem is that snark becomes a cultural habit. Long after the new contract has been negotiated, after the finances are righted and the budget cuts stop and faculty hiring resumes, faculty who engage in anti-administration snark will be left with a lingering feeling that "they" can't be trusted, they are evil, they have malicious motives. That emotional poison takes a long time to work its way out of the system. And long before it can, another conflict will come along to reinvigorate it, perpetuating the cycle.

I am not about to argue that all administrators are flawless and of pure intent. I have seen (and suffered under) some truly terrible ones in my career, just as I have encountered lazy and malicious faculty. But to seize on the bad examples and assume this must be true for the entire class is intellectual and ethical nonsense. Moreover, it's counterproductive nonsense because it generates conflict where there need be none.

Faculty who look around and wonder why the environment at their university is so toxic need to include self-examination in that mix. Yes, Presidents and Provosts have a lot of power and influence. But the average length of service of a tenure-track faculty member is FAR longer than that of the average administrator, and there are far more of the former than the latter. Who has the greater influence on the culture, the many who are there for decades or the few who are there for a half dozen years?

By all means, hold administrators accountable - especially the bad ones. But retire the snark. It's not doing you any good, and in the end makes things worse for everyone. If you want things to be better, help make them better. You may be surprised at how much you can do.

Free Speech, the First Amendment, and the Rise of Conservative Libertines

Another day, another higher ed-related First Amendment issue:

University of Alabama may have violated First Amendment by kicking out racist student

This has become a popular battle in the Culture Wars of our day. Conservative student or speaker says something shocking and offensive, backlash ensues, defenders rush in crying "First Amendment!", and everybody ends up upset.

I don't envy the administration at Alabama in this case. There's no way to win in these situations - whatever you do, one tribe or another will be ticked off. If they expel the student, every culture-war conservative organization in the country will come down on them. If they don't punish the student, they'll catch fire from both their own African American student population as well as liberal groups from around the country. None of this is Alabama's fault, but they're stuck in the middle of it.

Side note to faculty: If you want good presidents and administrators at your institutions, you need to start helping your administration in these cases. Too often faculty take sides and take shots at their own administrations - and then wonder why more smart people don't want to be university presidents. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

I'm perfectly willing to accept the legal analysis in the article linked above. Courts have ruled that public institutions (though not private ones) are covered by the First Amendment's meaning of "government", and that speech by itself (though not speech that threatens violence or harm) is protected and cannot be proscribed or punished. This is probably why conservative agitators and firebrands tend to pick on public schools more than private ones.

I support the First Amendment and think it's in place for very good reasons. Likely the student should not, on legal grounds, have been expelled.

What's more interesting to me is the culture war behind this. In recent years it's mostly been conservatives taking up the Free Speech banner, part of their larger narrative that they are discriminated against on university campuses (a narrative debunked in research conducted by my friends Matt Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner; you can see an example here). This is really just a cover to "win" and to score points against their enemies, of course - tribal conservatives are just as likely as tribal liberals to object to speech they don't like.

This strikes me as just another way that the conservative movement has wandered so far from its roots as to be unrecognizable. When I was young, conservatives planted their flag on a series of propositions about values and ethics. One of these was the importance of personal responsibility, and the connection between rights (individual freedoms) and the responsibilities to use those rights appropriately and well to the betterment of society.

During the 1960s, conservatives decried the excesses of liberty which they saw in the liberal hippie/flower power/free love movements of the day. To conservatives, hippies weren't exercising liberty so much as engaging in libertine behavior - individual freedom with no thought to those around you, or for society as a whole. Conservatives saw the liberal cultural waves of feminism, free love, and revolutionary fervor as undermining important values that serve as underpinnings of social cohesion.

Now people who call themselves "conservatives" are busy defending people like this Alabama student who spits in the face of society, who uses her freedom in vile ways that undermine social cohesion. What is "conservative" about this student's language? Hatred and racism have no more place in conservative thought (at least, as it used to be expressed) than they do in liberal thought.

I am waiting - possibly in vain - for a genuine conservative resurgence, a return of traditional conservative values that actually care about the community. In the meantime, we're stuck with these hatred-fueled sideshows that are all about destruction and anger, and that offer no positive vision for society or the future.

Cynicism and Assessment: Asking the Wrong Questions in Higher Ed

Recently, a Facebook conversation was kicked off among some of my higher ed friends and colleagues in response to this article:

An Insider's Take on Assessment: It May Be Worse Than You Think

The article itself is a commentary on another article written by a higher ed assessment professional and published here. This latter piece is a very interesting and significantly deep dive into a recurrent challenge: how to actually measure student learning in a way that can be useful. This is much harder than it seems at first blush, and is therefore often done poorly on university and college campuses.

The former commentary piece takes this discussion in a somewhat more cynical direction, suggesting (if only indirectly) that efforts to assess student learning may be a waste of time, money, and energy. This is certainly where my colleagues took the discussion, along with an added dose of attacks on the people who work at accrediting agencies as "true believers" focused exclusively on "noncompliance" and engaged in "groupthink".

I suspect many faculty feel the same way - that the people who work in regional accrediting agencies are out-of-touch busybodies and that "assessment" is a colossal waste of time and energy. Conclusion: we (colleges & universities, and especially faculty) would all be better off if we just chucked the whole thing and went back to the "way things were" - before the "assessment craze" came along.

I understand this point of view. I spent much of my career as a teaching faculty member, and I have myself taught many students and many classes. I understand the sometimes perplexing challenge of being told to do new things, or to do things a different way, especially if it involves (or appears to involve) doing more work than one is currently doing. I have a deep appreciation for the culture of independence which drives many faculty, and which is one of the chief attractions of the profession.

The only problem is that the cynical take on assessment is wrong. Yes, there are measurement problems (of both the reliability and validity kind). And yes, assessment is often done poorly. But the conclusions that the people "pushing" assessment are evil, and the whole thing should be scrapped, does not follow from these observations.

First, let me dispense with the rote ad hominem attacks on accrediting bodies and the people in them. I only have significant experience with one such organization - the Higher Learning Commission, which oversees 19 states in (broadly speaking) the American midwest. HLC is the largest of the regional accrediting bodies, and probably the most influential.

I have been through HLC accreditation processes with universities I worked for, and I have also been through HLC Peer Reviewer Corps training myself. I have met a great many people employed by the HLC as well as those who have dedicated years to working as volunteers in the accreditation process (most accreditation work is in fact done by volunteers, as is the work of reevaluating and assessing standards). These people are universally dedicated to trying to make higher education work better, always and especially for the students. Many of them have been faculty themselves, and they have a deep appreciation for the importance of higher education and the impact it has on our students' lives. They care deeply about the same things my colleagues and friends do.

So the accreditation process is not populated by people wearing horns and tails. What of the other conclusion - that assessment is not being done right, therefore it can't be done right, therefore we should just chuck the whole thing? This is not only wrong - it's dangerous. And it's really a betrayal of what we say we believe as faculty.

At its core, the assessment process is an attempt to answer a simple question: are our students learning what we say we want them to learn? If we deliver an educational experience and have no idea if anybody learned anything, then what are we doing? Not assessing learning turns higher education into a circus, another form of entertainment: pay your money at the door and we'll let you into the tent. What you get out of it - well, that's your problem.

That's clearly not a viable answer. We have to try to assess whether students are learning. And if that assessment effort tells us - reliably and validly - that some students aren't learning what we want them to learn, then we need to make changes. We either need to conclude that some students cannot learn what we're trying to teach, and stop admitting those students to our programs. Or we need to do a better job of teaching.

That's what assessment is all about. It's about finding out how well we're doing at the very core of what we say we're about, so we can do it better next time.

Note that there's a dimension that's often left out of these conversations: what learning are we trying to measure? "Learning outcomes" may be a catch phrase, but it also connotes something really important. We can't measure something if we don't know what it is in the first place. This is where a great many assessment efforts fail, because the things we're trying to measure aren't right in the first place.

Learning outcomes can be developed well. There are folks who know a lot more about this than I do; many of them work on college and university campuses as consultants to faculty. Unfortunately, many faculty have never had the benefit of their help (on smaller campuses, there may be no such people, and on larger ones they are often ignored). I wish that earlier in my career I had access to such support, because looking back I realize that I had only the vaguest notion of what my students were supposed to be learning, beyond working familiarity with some specific content in my field (a gussied-up form of memorization).

If you've got good, active learning outcomes (the kinds of things that can map onto Bloom's taxonomy), then you need to figure out how to measure them. This is where "assessment as an extra chore" is often a problem, because measurements can be made up for the purpose of checking a box instead of actually trying to measure. If your goal is to put as little effort as possible into assessment, that pretty much guarantees that it won't be any good.

Many faculty suggest (as my colleagues have) that assignments and course grades should be the relevant assessments. I agree - course grades can be a measure of assessment of student learning, if the course has good learning outcomes and if the tools for measuring those outcomes (quizzes, tests, papers, presentations, etc.) are genuinely good measures of those LOs. If all of that is true, then the grades should indeed reflect the level of student learning.

But saying that "grades are enough" does not get faculty off the hook from doing the work of designing good student learning outcomes, building the course and its assessment tools around them, and then demonstrating their work to their employing institution. It's this last point that, I suspect, secretly angers many faculty - the need to demonstrate to someone else (often, an administrator outside their department) that they've done good work.

This is where we (and I count myself in this crowd, because I've been guilty of the same mistake) can get ourselves in trouble. We want to fall back on the defense of "they can't possibly understand my course, because they have no background in <insert field here>." That's a flawed logic, however. If a well-educated individual with a PhD in a different field can't understand what you're doing, how can a student with no such background and no degree be expected to get it?

One of the root issues here is accountability. Faculty understandably are reluctant to make themselves accountable for their work to people outside their field or their department. Academic units often serve as protective shelters in which we can insulate ourselves from having to explain what we do to others.

This goes well beyond having to explain oneself to a Dean or a Provost. Faculty are quick to blame accrediting bodies, but the demand for accountability and transparency of student learning comes from a wide range of sources: state legislatures (which provide our funding, often to private as well as public institutions), businesses (which employ our graduates) and the general public (who send us their sons and daughters and, often, become students themselves). These people all want to know: what are students going to learn at your institution? It's a reasonable question.

The answers can be broad, and can include citizenship, civic perspective, values, and a great many other non-economic things beyond "job-ready" skills. For those who believe (as I do) that higher education isn't merely job training, there's plenty of room for students to learn higher and more important things. We just have to articulate what those actually are, and demonstrate that they actually do.

So by all means, let's critique the methods of assessment. Most administrations I know (mine included) would welcome robust faculty involvement in helping us design better, more reliable, more valid ways to measure what our students are learning, just as we would also welcome robust discussions about what our students are supposed to learn (a topic almost entirely in the hands of the faculty). Where systems are broken, let's fix them. The only thing we can't do is give up and quit.

Wheaton and the Challenge of Modelling Christian Community in Higher Education

This story crosses two of my interests - higher education and Christianity:

Wheaton Gives Community Service to Players Facing Felony Charges

Wheaton is an avowedly Christian school. It advertises this widely, makes its identity clear on all of its communications from its website to the signs on its campus, and presumably recruits students for whom living in a Christian community is a part of what they want in a college. The college also has a code of student conduct rooted in Christian theology and ethics.

The behavior described in this article is thus doubly disturbing. This would be unacceptable on any campus, and at a state school would likely lead to suspensions from the football team if not expulsion from the university as a whole. Due process must be followed, of course, and it would be appropriate for any college or university to follow that process before deciding on consequences for the perpetrators.

It appears that Wheaton has already followed whatever on-campus process they are going to follow, and has chosen to mete out what looks on the surface to be a fairly minimal punishment: the students in question have been assigned to write an essay, and to some hours of community service. This seems pretty minor even in a secular context.

There are obviously a lot of details missing here, but the optics are terrible for an institution that claims to be an intentional Christian community. This kind of assault, in that context, is a fundamental violation of trust and a gross offense against any reasonable sense of Christian ethics. Because of the nature of the community, it is an offense not only against the assaulted individual but against the entire community. And it sends a signal to the rest of the world: those "Christians" over there aren't any different from anybody else. Their faith doesn't mean anything.

If you were particularly inclined to be uncharitable, you could conclude that they have revealed their true religion: football. In that sense, they're not very different from the rest of the world.

Here's another unfortunate comparison: some avowedly Christian colleges (not Wheaton, but schools with a similar identity) have been known to expel students for having (consensual) sex outside of marriage, or for declaring a different sexual identity. Those things are unacceptable, but kidnapping and assault is OK?

What would a Christian response look like? It's not so much about the punishment - if anything, a Christian response should leave far more room for forgiveness than the world usually wants. But it is about repentance, examination, and transformation. And since the offense was against the community, some parts of that should be visible to the whole community.

Administrators at Wheaton will undoubtedly cite FERPA and a range of other laws and regulations protecting privacy and due process. Those regulations are good things, but they are not the only thing.  What the college chooses to do in terms of its community process is up to it. At minimum, student offenders can be offered a choice: based on a finding of facts, participate in a process of repentance and reconciliation - one that is visible - or leave.

Sometimes, Christian communities come together and behave in ways that really do show the world that faith matters. Several years ago after a tragic shooting in the Amish community of Nickel Mines, the community came together and publicly forgave the perpetrator and his family. The process of that conversation was difficult but also moving. They did it in public, not because they cared about the publicity or what anyone else thinks of them (the Amish are famous for being indifferent to what we English think), but because it was the right thing to do.

I think Wheaton missed a real opportunity here to live out its faith in public. Perhaps they will reconsider, as I suspect they're going to be facing negative publicity for a while.

Missing the Key Issue on Affirmative Action

I wrote last week about the Department of Justice memo regarding a new effort to "crack down" on "reverse discrimination" against whites (and Asians) in college admissions. As I explained in that piece, this effort is entirely about symbolic politics, with little to no practical impact on either college admissions or on most people's lives. I urged my colleagues in higher education, most of whom are dedicated to the ideal of diversity, not to panic, because most of our universities aren't going to be affected no matter what DOJ does.

Since most people don't read my blog, however, the ongoing conversation has continued as one might expect. People of color and their allies are understandably concerned about any effort to "target" affirmative action, which they see as a step towards turning back the clock towards a more openly racist past. Given all of the other openly racist things that have happened in the last six months, this is a reasonable concern even if this particular effort is of no consequence.

I have a number of friends in this group, and it is to those friends that this post is addressed. My argument is simple: we're missing the boat. This DOJ initiative on "reverse discrimination" is distracting us from something much more important.

Affirmative action in higher education is a big deal for those who want to advance the cause of underrepresented minorities, because higher education has tremendous potential as a social equalizer. For folks who have been permanently stuck in the economic and social underclass, getting a college degree can be a ticket to a better job, a better neighborhood, a better life. It can break the cycle of poverty and put families on a completely different trajectory for generations to come.

I'm a big believer in the transformative power of higher education, which is why I've devoted my career to it. I've watched single mothers with little support system go on to become Vice Presidents at Fortune 500 companies. I've seen how exposure to educated African Americans and Latinos changes white attitudes about who belongs and who doesn't. Access to higher education is one of the most important tools we have to help people help themselves, and to lift our entire society in the process.

But here's the reality: the kind of "who gets in and who doesn't" arguments about affirmative action and college that the Right wants to fight about don't have an impact on the broader societal problems we want to solve. If you want to lift families of color out of the cycle of poverty, having a different set of rules about who gets into Harvard or Michigan isn't the way to do it.

What's the real barrier? Money.

The vast majority of college students in the United States attend public regional universities. These aren't the schools that the New York Times writes about, but they are where people actually go. In particular, they are the primary recipients of first-generation students who are the key to altering family trajectories.

These universities don't have an affirmative action issue. Most of them accept 90%-95% of their applicants, and those they don't accept aren't decided by race but by basic capability factors (generally, high school GPA and ACT or SAT score). The Wright States and Millersvilles and SW Missouri States and Wisconsin-Green Bays of the world will take any and all students they can get who qualify. They are truly race-blind in admissions.

(As an aside, this is also true of a lot of private schools, who struggle to get the number of students they need to keep themselves going. Even the University of Dayton, a very good Catholic research institution, admitted as much recently - if they get two applicants, one white, one black, both equally qualified, they'll take them both.)

What keeps minority students from attending regional public universities isn't that they can't get in. It's that they can't afford it. And while there are lots of arguments about what is driving the cost of higher education, for regional publics the primary barrier to affordability has been the long, slow, inexorable march by most state legislatures to defund their higher education systems.

Case in point: 25 or so years ago, Wright State (a very typical regional public institution) got $2 of subsidy from the state for every $1 they collected in tuition from their students. Students had "skin in the game", but the amount they had to pony up was significantly decreased by state investment. Today, that ratio has flipped: WSU now gets less than 50 cents from the state for every dollar they get in tuition.

If you believe in higher education as a pathway to success for families of color, this is the battle you need to be fighting. Forget about admissions rules and arguments about whether race can or can't be included in deciding who gets in to college. If you want to really move the needle on societal equality, and lift millions of disadvantaged people out of the poverty trap, get more public money put into higher education.

I don't for a minute believe that this is an easy task. But as folks are marshaling political resources for a mostly symbolic battle of little practical significance, I ask them to consider focusing those resources instead on the battle that has the greatest impact on people's lives. Don't fall for the bait of arguing about Harvard's admissions practices. Harvard isn't going to solve our problems. But more money in public higher education just might.

Affirmative Action in Universities: Don't Panic

There has been a lot of buzz in the last couple of days about an internal Justice Department memo seeking lawyers for a new initiative to go after universities for "reverse discrimination" in admissions. This is an old conservative argument that claims, to whit, that white students (they now add Asians to this group) are denied admission to universities in favor of less-qualified black or Latino applicants.

In a country with thousands of universities and millions of university students, I'm sure that there are a few cases where this can be credibly argued to have happened. It is hardly an epidemic, or even a problem of any significant size, judging by the racial profiles of pretty much every university (outside the HBCUs) in the nation. On its face, this is a non-problem.

The political utility of the argument, however, is easy to see. It feeds a broader narrative of tribal white resentment. It also plays well to the more conservative philosophical point of view that everything is about the individual, that the individual is sovereign, and that when the rights of a single individual are trampled that's a terrible thing (though that argument seldom gets extended to individuals of color...)

Setting aside whether this sort of initiative within the DoJ is a good or a bad thing - people can form their own opinions on that subject - I can say from inside higher education that this effort, if it ever gets off the ground, will be far less significant than it might appear. There are relatively few institutions vulnerable to this kind of investigation. Most universities will be ignored, because admissions works very differently in different kinds of places.

The wealthy private elite institutions - the kinds of places that the NY Times writes about whenever it talks about "higher education" - have long ago insulated themselves from this charge by adopting very complex wholistic admissions practices. Race is but one consideration among many, and so much of their process is subjective that being able to credibly argue that any given student was turned away primarily because she is white will be impossible. Yale, Harvard, Amherst and Williams turn away thousands of students every year who are just as qualified as the ones they admit - that's the nature of the game. No investigating lawyer is going to wade into that world, because there is no victory to be had there.

Over in the public university area, the vast majority of public institutions are regional and desperate for students. Two that I have worked for, Wright State and the University of Toledo, will take any and all qualified applicants. They and a host of similar schools - Youngstown State, SE Missouri State, Millersville University, most of the SUNY campuses, Central Florida, and a thousand more - are enrollment and tuition-driven. The notion of having to select some students over others on the basis of race - or anything else - is irrelevant to these schools. When you're admitting all qualified applicants (and often, many who are marginally so), there's no danger that you're discriminating against anyone. Keep in mind, too, that these schools are where the vast majority of university students in the United States go.

That leaves only two classes of schools - small second and third tier private schools, and public flagships. The former are unlikely to be targeted in part because they, too, tend to be enrollment and tuition driven and are therefore less selective than their elite counterparts, and in part because nobody outside of their immediate area has heard of them. Regardless of the merits or demerits of affirmative action processes, any investigative effort is going to want to go after universities or colleges with national name recognition, because they're trying to make a political point. No investigator is going to focus on Lebanon Valley College (sorry, LVC!) They and several hundred of their brethren can rest easy.

The for-profit sector, of course, is immune to this kind of charge for the same reason regional publics are - they'll take anybody who qualifies to get in and is willing to pay (or borrow). Phoenix doesn't have an affirmative action problem.

That leaves only the flagship public universities like Michigan and UT-Austin. It's no coincidence that the major affirmative action cases in the last two decades came from those two schools. These schools, and a handful of others around the country (Ohio State, Missouri, Alabama, Georgia, Florida or Florida State, Ole Miss, Penn State, Minnesota, UW-Madison, etc.) have enough cache and status that they get a lot more applicants than they can accept. They do care about diversity (which, according to the Supreme Court, they are allowed to do), and they do take race into account. Because of the Fisher case and others, all of them have long ago adopted admissions procedures that stay well within the boundaries of what the court says is Constitutionally permissible.

So we're really talking about a small handful of universities here - maybe 30 in all - that are potential targets of any kind of DoJ effort. And all of them have spent years making sure that their admissions processes can withstand legal challenges. They don't get caught up in the kind of accusation leveled against UT-Austin so many years ago.

In other words, this "effort" is unlikely to affect 99% of America's universities, and it is unlikely to actually change much even in the few that might be targeted. This is pure symbolic politics - sound and fury signifying nothing, to borrow from the Bard. To my colleagues in higher education: don't panic. This, too, shall pass.

The Limitations of Surveys

In perusing the higher education press this morning, I came across this story:

Americans see value in higher education, survey finds, but are unhappy with current system

The results of this survey are likely to be seized on by various constituents and interests. No doubt state legislators will see it as further evidence of the need for "reform" in higher education.

I don't intend to argue here about whether universities need to reform or not. In a certain sense, that's a silly question - all universities at all times can do things to make themselves better, and should. We can all find ways to better serve our students, to help our students learn and grow more, to be more efficient and cost-effective, and so on. This is the normal state of affairs.

One thing state legislatures and the general public don't often realize is that, despite our desire for simple answers, the kinds of change needed are usually university-specific. Even within one state or public university system, the issues and challenges facing any two universities within that area are likely to be very different. I have recently made the transition from one public university in Ohio to another. Both are sizable comprehensive universities serving metropolitan areas that in many ways are mirror images of each other. Both need reform. The kind of reform each needs, however, is radically different.

So a survey that says "things need to change!" isn't useful at all. Very few doubt the need for change on any campus, and those who do tend not to be in positions of authority or influence. Yes, there are rear-guard actions by groups of faculty or (less frequently) staff, but these are increasingly ineffective. Most good faculty leaders I know understand the need for reform. We just need to agree on what kinds of reforms are needed.

But the survey referenced above isn't just useless because it makes an obvious point. The observation that "58% believe colleges put their own interests ahead of students", or that "just one in four respondents feel higher education is functioning fine the way it is", reflect genuine opinions. But where do those opinions come from? As has famously been said, everyone is entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts.

Legislators or others with an agenda will argue that these opinions are evidence that things have gone wrong in higher education, that there is a "crisis". They assume, in other words, that people's opinions reflect reality. Unfortunately, that's not true.

If you call me up and ask me what I think of the nature of the health care system in the US, I have to construct an opinion on the spot. Like most Americans, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about "the health care system". I occasionally interact with that system, because (like most Americans) I tend to be generally healthy. Moreover, even if I like my particular doctor, I may not see that one data point as representative of the system as a whole. I'm likely to simply think that my doctor is a good fellow, or that my doctor's office is a nice and reasonably well-run place.

So where does my opinion come from? If I read stories all the time about how health care is "failing", how people can't get treatment, how drugs are too expensive, how hospitals are terrible, and so on - those things are likely to be "top of mind" for me when the pollster calls. We have known for a long time that in public opinion polling, people base their answers on the most recent relevant information in their memory banks, even if that information isn't that representative or even all that relevant.

So when somebody does a poll of 1600 people nationwide and asks their opinions about college, I know that the vast majority of those respondents are unlikely to have had a significant interaction recently with a college. Moreover, even if they have, we tend to differentiate the individual cases we know from the broader "system" we're being asked about. This is the same dynamic that leads most Americans to despite Congress, yet like their own individual representative. So the "raw material" we're likely to base our opinion on when asked about "the higher education system" is the general stream of stories and headlines we're exposed to in media coverage and our social media streams.

Polls like this, in other words, are self-fulfilling prophecies for politicians who have been railing against higher education for years. They don't reflect the reality of higher ed; they don't even reflect the reality of individuals' experience with higher ed. They reflect the narrative we have constructed of a "system in crisis" - a narrative that has been built to serve specific interests, mostly in service to political ambition.

The media (including the higher ed press and the social media sphere - bloggers included!) play into this. A handful of stories about interrupted speeches on college campuses created a narrative that we have a "crisis" of free speech on campus. Stories of free speech rights being appropriately exercised and protected don't make the news or the blogs, although I have personally seen more of that than of the "bad" cases. In my own small way, I'm guilty of perpetuating the problem here.

None of this is news. We know this is the way public opinion works, and have at least since John Zaller published The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion back in 1992. But polls make good headlines, which then further feed narratives.

For those of us in higher education: we need to stop playing defense and responding to specific charges, and build a different narrative. We have the tools and we have the facts. The reality is that American higher education is the envy of the world, which is why the United States brings in far more students from overseas than any other country. We need to tell that story, and enlist allies to help us tell it broadly and publicly.

For the broader public: we need to develop the skills that everyone keeps saying we need - critical thinking. The level of education needed to develop a little critical distance and not swallow a particular story wholesale is not unattainable. It probably doesn't even require a bachelor's degree. What it does require is training and practice (which higher education are designed to provide), and a willingness to think a little. That latter point is up to the rest of us.

No Confidence Votes: Still In Style

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post about the pointlessness of no-confidence votes by faculty against their university administrations. At the time I argued that such votes advance no practical or real purpose, and may in fact be damaging to ongoing discussions about a difficult situation.

In further proof that the readership of this blog is negligible, we get this news from today's Chronicle:

Quincy U. Faculty Votes No Confidence in University's President

The story here is a familiar one: university in difficult financial circumstances, some of which may be attributable to decisions made by the administration (I don't know anything about Quincy, so I'm speculating there; there are certainly outside forces at work as well over which the president has no control). Subsequent budget measures affect things faculty care about, faculty get mad, lash out at the administration.

My own campus is likely to see a rash of these things before the year is out, because this describes our story pretty well, too. The problem with such efforts is not that the faculty are wrong - they usually do have a point. Financial distress is often caused by poor, even disastrous, decisions made by senior administrators. In other cases, the causes may be more complex but administrators have not handled the relationship with faculty well (lack of transparency, lack of openness to dialogue, arbitrary decision-making, etc.) So I certainly get why faculty are upset.

Even when all of that is true, however, the votes are generally a waste of time and energy. It is stunningly rare for a Board of Trustees (or a President) to remove an administrator because of a faculty vote. When those two events correlate, there are usually a lot of other forces pushing that person out as well. The statements presented in these votes often offer a litany of complaints and concerns, but are usually short on ideas for how to solve them. They represent poor negotiating strategy, because they don't signal what the faculty want - and if they did, they would be doing so in a pretty ham-handed way.

I have no doubt that these events will continue to be popular. I also don't expect them to produce anything useful. Which is a shame - all of that time and energy could be put to better use in helping the university improve its circumstances and the lives of its students.

Sweet Briar College - The Long, Lingering Twilight

You have to applaud the folks who have worked so hard over the past year+ to keep Sweet Briar College alive. When a previous administration and board thought they saw the writing on the wall and tried to close the institution with some dignity, a group of alumni and other supporters banded together, raised $22 million, hired a new administration and a new board, and vowed to bring the honorable but ailing school back to life.

Now comes this news:

Sweet Briar Budgets $20M in Donations for 2017

Note that their budget for this next year calls for $20 million in donated money to help fund a $33 million budget. That's right - roughly 2/3 of the budget will have to be donated by outsiders.

This comes a year after the enthusiastic backers of the school pulled out all the stops to raise $22 million in donated funding. There is a finite pool of people who have a connection to Sweet Briar or who would otherwise be interested in helping it stay alive, and those people have a finite pool of resources. Looking for another $20 million from the same pool from which you pulled $22 million just a year before is a nearly impossible task.

And if they manage to pull off the impossible, what then? Do they raise yet another $20 million the following year, and the year after that? The college has yet to hit enrollment targets since it reopened, and its discount rate remains a staggering 64%. None of this is surprising - parents and students are understandably reluctant to commit time and resources to a place that could very well cease to exist within the next four years. That same concern is even stronger for donors, who have many requests for their philanthropy and who generally want to make a lasting difference in the world.

I understand and appreciate the emotion that drives efforts like this. For those most committed to the cause, it is a labor of love. But sometimes, love is not enough. Passion is not a business model. I'm afraid that in another year or two, Sweet Briar will see yet another closure - the next one less dignified and graceful than the first.

The New York Times and Why the Ivy League Won't Fix Socio-Economic Inequality

Last January Frank Bruni of the New York Times wrote a piece on how many elite colleges are rethinking their admissions processes. You can read the piece in its entirety here; it's informative reading if you have any interest in college admissions at highly selective schools.

Unfortunately, Bruni wants this to be a piece not about the narrow technical world of college admissions, but about the much broader goal of fixing the nation's social and economic inequality problems. In so doing, the article suffers from the myopia typical of everything that the NYT publishes regarding higher education. In Frank Bruni’s world (and, to be fair, that of most of his colleagues), “higher education” means the Ivy League and a handful (no more than 100) of other institutions that actually get mentioned in national newspapers. These are name-brand, prestigious schools - like UNC-Chapel Hill and Michigan (which, along with Harvard, Yale, and MIT, are the only schools he mentions by name). 

It is true that the admissions systems in many of these schools have been pretty messed up for a while, with weird incentive structures that lead prestige-seeking families to sacrifice a lot of money, time, and sanity in a desperate attempt to get their kids into Harvard or Yale. The fact that the families doing so are overwhelmingly upper middle class (and who are likely to read the NYT) reinforces the information flow here, since the Times annually publishes stories about how much harder it is to get into Ivy-level schools today than in the past.

It is also true that the vast majority of the kids who go to these schools are from privileged backgrounds, which does tend to reinforce inequalities in society - but not nearly as much as you’d think. Take the top 80 schools and assume that each one, on average, admits 1000 students per year (some smaller ones, like Williams College, rather less, other larger ones somewhat more). Assume further that those schools could, if they stretched their resources, each afford to give full-ride scholarships to 300 out of those 1000 students (they need varying levels of tuition from the rest in order to keep operating). That’s 24,000 kids from disadvantaged backgrounds per year that will get to go to elite schools (keep in mind, some fraction of that number already does).

That sounds great, and it certainly would be for the individuals lucky enough to hit the jackpot. But in a country of over 300,000,000 people, where the middle class is shrinking, the lower classes are expanding and falling farther behind, and the rate of college degree holding is 35% among adults, how much of a dent is 24,000 going to make? Not much.

So I think there are probably a lot of good ideas in this effort to redo Ivy-level admissions policies. I just don’t think they’re going to matter very much in the grand scheme of things. If higher education is the answer to society’s inequality problems, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton aren’t going to be part of the solution - they’re too small. The real solution lies in public two- and four-year institutions across the country where the vast majority of Americans go to college. In those institutions (my employer included), this conversation about hyper competitive admissions is irrelevant. The real conversation is about funding - states have been de-funding higher ed for many years, and that’s unlikely to change. The problem isn't that people can't get in, it's that we can't afford to provide a good education to as many students as we could serve.

I’ve been frustrated for years that Frank Bruni and his NYT colleagues don't seem to understand any of this. They don't get that the secret to solving the social mobility problem isn’t letting more poor kids into Harvard. If you really want to make a dent, do what we did the last time we had real social mobility in the 1950s and 1960s - make public higher education a serious investment and put resources into it. Tinkering with the way Harvard and UNC admit their students is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Drowning Bunnies, Firing Faculty - For What? RANKINGS?

There's been a lot of Sturm und Drang about an unfolding disaster at Mount St. Mary's College in Maryland. The current focus is on the college president's decision to fire a tenured professor for "disloyalty", which is pretty much guaranteed to bring down the wrath of the scholarly community. Anytime the AAUP and FIRE agree on something, you know you have a problem.

Lost in the current uproar, however, is the idea that started the whole argument, which had something to do with freshman retention. What caught national attention was the president apparently saying to a group of faculty, "This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can't. You just have to drown the bunnies ... hold a Glock to their heads."

Talking about students as bunnies to be drowned is no way to win faculty favor either. Behind the unfortunate choice of words was an apparently concrete goal the president had established, which was to have 20-25 freshmen leave the college before Sept. 25. After that point, they would have to be reported as "dropouts" and would count in the retention data. Before that, they would disappear off the books.

Now, this is a terrible thing - admitting students and then, within the first few weeks of the semester, trying to get some of them to leave. The president and the Board, which is apparently backing him, have been roundly criticized for such a plan. What I haven't seen, however, is anyone asking why? Why would any college want to do such a thing?

The answer lies hidden in an early Chronicle article written about the controversy (before people started getting fired). You can find the article here; the key point is this:

Late in September, at an impromptu meeting that included Mr. Newman [the president], Mr. Murry [a key faculty member], and several others, Mr. Murry said the president "explicitly argued that getting students to leave was necessary in order to prevent a drop in the rankings." The discussion, he said, "involved proposals for both convincing students to voluntarily withdraw and using involuntary dismissal." Mr. Murry said Mr. Newman also asked him for a list of freshmen who could be encouraged to leave.

There's the key, right in the middle of the paragraph. All of this - the unfortunate metaphor of "drowning bunnies", the angst and drama about a student survey and various strategies for freshmen retention, the subsequent firing of a provost and two faculty members - all of it is in the service of propping up Mount St. Mary's position on a US News list.

Henry Kissinger was famously quoted as saying that academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small (a variation of Sayre's Law). This case seems to be the ultimate vindication of that observation - lives are being ruined because of a rating in a publication that means less and less each year. And for all of the college's other transgressions, this to me seems the greatest sin.

Going Out On a Limb on Race

Let me state the obvious up front: I'm a white man in a privileged position. I have tenure, rank, and an administrative position of some authority within a university. I have a social position within my community that is comfortable and oftentimes even respected.

So from some points of view, I may not be the best person to engage the current discussion about race, racism, and higher education. On the other hand, there are a lot of people like me running universities and colleges across the country. So if we don't engage, then solutions will be difficult to find. So I dip my foot in these waters tentatively, with humility and understanding that mine is a particular perspective.

A number of articles have been written of late that are well worth reading. There is Nicholas Kristof's excellent piece in today's NYT. There is a very good article in the Atlantic in defense of civility and against censorship. There is this blog post about racism written compellingly from a young black man's perspective.

In the midst of all of these conversations about clashing free speech and racism concerns, I appreciate these perspectives. In particular I appreciate the voice of the young blogger trying to explain what racism really is to those who never experience it. It is powerfully put and I believe sincere. He isn't attacking anyone in particular, but a broader problem in general. This is the kind of thing that can contribute to a conversation.

In order to actually push that conversation forward, however, it is not enough to hear from the victims of racism about the pain it causes. We need to know more - not about those who suffer from these indignities and injustices, but about those who perpetrate them.

Not all whites (or members of any group, for that matter) are racists. But some are. How do we address those who engage in these behaviors? How do we identify them, engage with them, and ultimately persuade them to change? That, it seems to me, is the real challenge. Beyond the protests and the screaming and the back-and-forth internet trolling, this is what real leadership (from wherever it emerges) needs to do.

Earlier today I likened the ongoing protests (some of which are occurring on my campus today, in solidarity with others) to a conflict. As a conflict scholar, the steps towards resolution are clear:

- Identify the essentials of the conflict. Who are the players? What are their interests, and what are they fighting about? What are the rules of the surrounding environment that shape how the conflict is conducted?

- Decide on the desired end goal. If the conflict were over, what would you want that to look like? What resolution do you seek, and what does that resolution look like for ALL of the actors involved?

- Evaluate and choose a strategy for achieving that goal. Can I get there through unilateral action, or do I need the cooperation of those with different views? Can I engineer a solution that meets my needs regardless of what the other side wants, or do I have to persuade others to join with me in a mutually-agreed settlement?

I don't think we've yet had much clear thinking about any of these things. Conflicts often arise between aggrieved students and university administrators or faculty, which is an example of the lamppost fallacy: tackling what you can see, rather than going where the problem really is. The fundamental conflict is between members of minority groups (blacks, latinos, transgender, etc.) and members of the majority group who want to discriminate against and oppress them. If that is the core of the conflict, there is no unilateral solution - neither group can wipe the other out, both must continue to live in the same society together. The question is, how?

I don't have any good answers. I don't know how you identify who the racists are, much less how you draw them into a political process designed to address their real interests and fashion a mutually acceptable solution. All I know is that until we do so, we are likely to be stuck in the ugly stalemate of today - sometimes quieter, sometimes louder, but with very little progress towards a better future.

Power on University Campuses

There has been a lot of struggle and conflict on college campuses lately over a variety of issues, particularly racial tensions and ongoing problems with minority and marginalized persons. These issues affect some campuses more than others, and some (Yale & Missouri) have become national flashpoints.

Today we get word that, one day after saying that he would NOT resign, University of Missouri President Tim Wolfe has stepped down as President there.

What brought national attention to Wolfe's situation, and what may have led to his ouster, was a threatened strike by their football team (over 50% of which is African-American). The university stood to lose upwards of $1 million in TV revenues if it doesn't play next Saturday's game.

There you have about as stark a statement of power on campuses as I can think of. Student movements, even some fairly sizable ones, haven't accomplished much of anything. A Mizzou student has for over a week been on a hunger strike, vowing to starve himself to death. None of this moved the needle much. But when the football team threatens to cut into the university's revenue ... well, that's a different story.

For those that claim sports don't run Div I universities - do you still think so?

Defense Spending: We Used to Have a Real Debate

Yesterday I posted a brief discussion about conservatives (or the lack thereof) in academia, in response to a Facebook conversation I had gotten into with some friends. Nothing earth-shatteringly insightful, just some noodling with ideas on an old question (and an opportunity to plug the much better work of some friends of mine).

That blog post led to another FB exchange, which I reproduce here:

[Name Removed] As usual I enjoy reading your blog and admire your knowledge and reasoning skills. But I would contend that there is something inherently ideological in, for example, designing military hardware, bombs, or the circuitry that can operate a drone or deliver an intercontinental missile with a warhead attached, as opposed to designing an artificial limb or artificial womb for premature babies or a convection oven. Funding decisions get made and engineers decide to put themselves in the way of specific types of funding that come from a particular ideological position about the value of, for example, random strangers' lives in comparison to personal or national objectives. We don't tend to see these things as ideological because we have so deeply absorbed a belief system that says, of course the state can only enforce its will through violence. Physicists can imagine a death ray, engineers build it, business people figure out how to make a profit from it; but it takes the liberal arts to say, "Gee, is building a death ray a good idea?"

R. William Ayres You make an excellent point. It takes a humanities perspective to see the fundamental ideological assumptions that underlie many of our systems, structures, and activities. At this point, there is little disagreement between "liberals" and "conservatives" about the military or militarization, which is a sad indication of how far our ideological goalposts have moved. Of course, that may be partly due to living next to a really big Air Force base...

There's a broader political observation here that has gone almost totally unremarked upon. I don't think this is just the result of living next to a massive AF base, in an area whose regional economy is substantially tied to defense spending. I think this is a national phenomenon.

The observation is this: we have long since ceased to talk about the defense budget. Once upon a time, there were significant policy differences and debates around the issue of defense spending as a component of both the US budget and US foreign policy. There were "hawks" and "doves" (and, to hear some tell it, "owls") who had different preferences about how much money the US should spend on defense and what that money should go towards. This debate was a significant part of the American political landscape, regularly featured in Presidential addresses and press conferences and almost always a topic for debates in Presidential election years. Candidates were asked their opinion, not only of the defense budget as a whole, but of individual weapons systems.

Today, despite broad public interest in the US federal budget, there is no discussion of defense spending at all. Zip. Zero. Zilch. From an economic perspective, this is astounding - depending on whose numbers you use defense spending takes up between 19% and 25% of the US federal budget, roughly equal to the entire expenditure on Social Security and larger than all other discretionary spending put together. Politicians will talk about Medicare & Medicaid reform (23%) and even Social Security reform (20%). But nobody talks about possibly cutting defense spending.

This is also crazy given the state of the world. According to the latest data from SIPRI, the United States in 2014 spent a little more than $600 billion on military expenditures. That is almost 50% more than the entire continent of Asia (including both China and India), more than 50% greater than all of Europe put together, and more than three times the combined expenditures of every single country in the Middle East (friend and foe alike). It dwarfs Russian military spending by a factor of more than 7, and Chinese spending by more than 2.5. The entire world in 2014 spent about $1.7 trillion on military expenditures; the US accounted for more than 30% of that total.

Even in the waning days of the Cold War, when we were outspending the Soviets, the margin wasn't this large. This isn't just being out front or staying ahead of the competition; this is utter and complete domination in the category of buying weapons.

And yet, to hear our politicians tell it, the US has never been less secure militarily than it is today. Most of this criticism is coming from blowhards running for President who would criticize the current administration if it said the sky is blue, and so shouldn't be taken seriously. Unfortunately, this is what the American people hear.

More importantly, there is no countervailing view. The Obama administration has shown no signs of suggesting that the US spend less, and there is no indication that anyone in Congress (Republican or Democrat) would be willing to vote that way anyway. There's a lot of vague, one-sided language about "keeping America safe" and "supporting our troops", but nothing like what you would call a discussion. It's pretty much just radio silence.

I framed this on FB as part of a broader political shift to the right, and I think that's partly true. But closer to the truth is that this silence represents the ultimate triumph of the military-industrial complex which President Eisenhower warned us about back in 1960. Those structures - the businesses and government agencies which together make up the nation's defense machine - have always done extremely well. But they used to have to at least compete for their share of public dollars in the public arena. Now, we just write them a (very large) check, quietly and without comment.

This goes far beyond liberal/conservative or Democrat/Republican (since all are now singing from the same page of the hymnal). This is what it looks like to be an empire, simultaneously fearful of the world and utterly unconcerned about how it responds to those fears. We the people have conceded somewhere between 1/5 and 1/4 of the entire US government to a system that, from an economic point of view, is largely pointless. A small fraction of that $600 billion could be spent in myriad ways that would have a far greater positive impact on the American people. But we say nothing.

I don't expect this to change - not soon, not later, not in my lifetime. The systems that hold this in place have been decades in the making. They are powerful economically, politically, and (as my colleague pointed out above) philosophically. They are rooted in deep assumptions that have been developed over generations.

Because I don't expect this to change, I don't have any solutions to suggest. Really, I just find it sad that we have so abandoned one of the most fundamental questions of public policy. Maybe Mearsheimer had the right title, even if his argument was wrong - in this way, at least, I really do miss the Cold War.