In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood

More on Academic Shantytowns -- III

Marc Moffett says in a comment to my "More on Academic Shantytowns -- II" post from yesterday, "It sounds to me like you think you somehow have greater understanding of the issues than the people you oppose. Your ideas are obvious and legit; theirs, slip-shod, spotty scholarship. Apart from the fact that your ideas are yours, why the asymmetry?" Among other things, Marc seems concerned that Herr Dr. Prof. Lessenich may have ". . . published three papers in top journals that bear directly on the issue. Or maybe Lessenich is simply taking the opinions of his trusted colleagues for granted (and they have published on the issue). Or... But in the end, the only way to settle the issue is to convince others of your ideas by publishing them in a peer-reviewed journal."

Here, I think, is an area where the world is changing. Marc feels the gold standard of ideas is peer-reviewed professional publication, but I think this is less and less true, for three reasons. First, peer review is an assurance of very little. Second, the web has created a democratization of ideas, where they can be disseminated without intermediaries of one sort or another. Third, even universities are de facto de-emphasizing the culture that includes peer review; we may assume the institutions themselves value it less and less highly.

Nor do I think this is a bad thing. For instance, many people who serve on jury duty find that it is a surprisingly influential experience -- I certainly did. The voir dire process, where prospective jurors are asked about possible bias that might disqualify them, made me rethink some of the assumptions I had about education and citizenship. "Number six, just because a policeman says something, even if he's wearing his uniform, do you think it's true?" is a typical question. Another typical question is, "Number eight, we're going to be hearing testimony from a college professor in this case. Just because a college professor says something, even if he's written half a dozen books on the subject, do you think it's true?"

"Number five, let's say this college professor says something is true. How are you going to look at that, as a juror?"

"I'm going to look at that along with all the other evidence in the case, and I'm going to apply my own common sense to it, to see if it fits what I know about life."

"That's right, number five. . . . oh, number nine, where did you say you worked?"

"UCLA."

"And what do you do at UCLA, number nine?'

"I'm a researcher."

"Your Honor, we move to excuse panelist number nine."

"Thank you, number nine, you may go."

These are just a few vignettes of what I saw in voir dire. If a key reason for education is to prepare people for citizenship, and a key responsiblity of citizenship is jury service, then I think we have in these vignettes some version of how the informed, hard-headed general public sees, and ought to see, the educational system.

If Prof. Whorlibord, testifying under oath, asserts that his articles and books are peer reviewed, this is going to be of little consequence to a jury trying to establish a set of facts. Nor should it be of consequence. My job (as I see it) as an educated citizen is to apply something like the sense of hard-headed skepticism to all issues that we expect of jurors.

Nor should we ignore the strong implication that, in the opinion of the counsel conducting the voir dire, the capacity of someone closely associated with a respected institution of higher learning to perform the duties of citizenship without bias was a matter of considerable doubt. They dinged that panelist off the jury pool so fast my head spun.

Peer review in this context doesn't mean much -- it may determine a scholar's standing among other scholars. But Michael Bellesiles's writings, found fraudulent, were peer-reviewed. Ward Churchill's writings, very few if any peer-reviewed, seem venerated among much of the academy as though they were. A recent article in a professional journal of record alleges that there are now so many allegations of plagiarism and academic fraud that professional associations have stopped investigating them, because they don't have the resources. We may assume that some proportion of the articles slipping through the screening process in this way are, at least ostensibly, peer-reviewed.

My second point is that pretty much only within the last five years, with the advent of the web and then the advent of widespread blogging, could Marc Moffett and I have had anything like this dialogue. Letters to the editor of the Wyoming campus daily, even dueling op-eds, wouldn't have had the same effect on either of us. In the early 1970s the editor of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine told me specifically that his publication wasn't the place for ongoing dialogues on the purpose of education -- but now we have a dozen or more Dartmouth-related blogs doing just that, discussing as well a very lively campaign for alumni trustees that's also being conducted in large measure via the web.

JTO, the respected, peer-reviewed Journal of Trivial Observations, occupies proportionally a much smaller space in this deomocratized dialogue. Marc gives a certain implicit deference to Herr Dr. Prof. Lessenich simply due to Herr Doktor's professional standing and his numerous publications, but I would submit that as an educated member of the general public, possessing the hard-headed skepticism that's expected of me in elections and jury trials, I'm under no special obligation to reverence his statements. Marc, as a member of a profession, may feel some obligation here that I don't, but that doesn't make me wrong. I'm expected, for instance, as a responsible patient, to query my physician and actively interrogate his recommendations for my treatment, even if the physician (as he often does) finds this an irritation and an impertinence.

So I don't think, as Marc does, that the only way to convince anyone of anything is to get it into a peer-reviewed journal. I think more accurately that this is one way to get tenure and promotion, though as Ward Churchill shows, by no means the only way. In a democratic marketplace of ideas, that extends beyond simply the academy, peer review is of little consequence. The people who, via the new democratic medium of blogging, successfully challenged Michael Bellesiles's fraudulent scholarship were working in opposition to peer review.

Third, the academy itself clearly demonstrates declining esteem for peer review. Insofar as peer review is a creature of the current tenure-based academic model, institutions have been increasingly reluctant to support that model even at a rate that would replace tenured faculty who retire. Institutions are finding they can't afford tenure, for reasons I've already outlined here. But the defenders of tenure who've responded to the points I raise make it plain that "research" is a most desirable consequence of tenure. Adjuncts by and large don't do "research" as understood by Marc except in the expectation that they might land a tenure-track job. And if you look at the actual "research" product, especially in the humanities, it's not difficult to see why universities, forced to choose how they'll apply scarce resources, choose not to spend them on the tenure-research faculty model.

So I think, contra Marc, that my attitude toward research is appropriate for an educated citizen in the early 21st century.

UPDATE: Tom H. raises a point in a comment that's worth talking about here. Certainly an uninformed observer's off-the-cuff observations about the hard sciences are going to be worth what he's paid for them. However, one object of a liberal education, even for someone who doesn't major in the hard sciences, ought to be to inculcate enough of a feeling for the scientific method -- and respect for what one doesn't know -- that this should also be an internalized feature of an educated citizen's "common sense". But a liberally educated classics major should also have enough understanding of science to mistrust the claims of bogus practitioners, for instance, and to have some sense of how to investigate any such hunch more fully -- I'm sure educators would be almost unanimous on this point. And it's bogus practitioners I'm referring to here.

PhD Overproduction and Deceptive Hiring

I hadn't meant to keep revisiting the PhD overproduction issue -- I'm not sure, though, why I thought Invisible Adjunct had put the whole thing to bed last year. In a post on Conscientious Objector, Marc Moffett presents a series of options for resolving the perceived PhD overproduction problem: Marc feels the options are

1. Expand the number of jobs until the demand matches the supply.
   
2. Systematically shrink the supply through ruthless attrition at early stages.
   
3. Make teaching so unpleasant that the supply dries up on its own.
   
4. Live with it.
   

The second option would be the realistic one if the early investors (current tenured faculty) had a serious interest in prolonging the existing state of affairs past their own retirement, but it's not going to happen. CO himself suggests some type of national cartel would be needed, but this ignores the "tragedy of the commons" aspect to PhD production -- it's always to the advantage of every institutional participant to produce one more of its own PhDs, and cartels themselves are notorious for cheating on quotas. This is a big reason for the current state of affairs.

The two other options besides "live with it" are, I think, facetious. My own guess is that if you required PhD candidates to amputate one of their own arms in order to qualify for tenure track jobs, you'd still have an oversupply, because what's being offered -- tenure, a guaranteed lifetime sinecure -- is almost indistinguishable from a lottery jackpot, with a discounted present value at age 30 or 35 in the multimillion-dollar range.

The option Marc and CO both leave out is the Big Lawsuit, though. Jeff in the comments says the current system is "creating a large number of very articulate and disgruntled people". Yes indeed. At some point, someone is going to be so disgruntled that s/he sues. I've discussed the legal issues generally before, but I double-checked with my wife, a corporate attorney, who says there is such a thing as "deceptive hiring". It isn't her specialty, so I didn't prompt her further, but I did go hunting for the term on Google and found a roughly parallel example to the TA/PhD scheme: the 2000/2001 case of Linuxgruven:

[I}n March, 2000, the Better Business Bureau opened a file on Linuxgruven. The Bureau's records indicate "this company has an unsatisfactory business performance record with the Bureau, due to a lack of response to customer complaints that were brought to Linuxgruven's attention by the Bureau."

Linuxgruven offered to give anyone who could pass its Linux training course an entry-level position in its technical support business. But many people failed the certification test, and those who did become employees were often turned into trainers. The company's human resources people were paid on commission for recruiting new hires.

The company became entangled in investigations of its business practices, which began in February 2001 by the Missouri Attorney General's Office, local law enforcement and the Better Business Bureau.

Interviewees said that they were asked to pay $3,900 for the eight-week training course, and most said that they had the impression that they would be hired only if the fee was paid.

"Essentially they were selling training, but they found a novel way of doing that -- they told you that you had a job, but then said you needed training to do that job properly," said Michael Browner, who applied for a job with Linuxgruven.

In other words, hiring people with a promise, however vague, of getting training for a "real job" can lead to legal problems. Playing games with "trainee" status can lead to legal problems. Not having the job that was promised after "training" can lead to problems. The parallels here aren't exact, but I would think they'd be enough to interest a creative attorney. Remember, you're suing deep pockets here, Harvard and Yale and a bunch of others.

My wife has said in the past that attorneys often aren't creative. They need someone to establish a model for a certain kind of lawsuit -- sexual harassment, product defect, whatever. But once someone establishes the model, look out. She thinks this situation is simply waiting for an articulate disgruntled plaintiff and a creative attorney.

Should this happen, my guess is that numerous second-tier graduate schools would likely evaluate the legal and financial risks of their PhD programs as being too high to continue under the existing job market. At that point, you wouldn't have a cartel so much as a class of producers who decided to leave the business, thereby reducing supply. However, it wouldn't correct the perceived inequities in the academic work structure (as the reports I've recently linked have already discussed) -- but it would have the temproary effect of reducing PhD supply and stabilizing the market. Fear of additional lawsuits could prompt reform in the work structure as well.

More on Academic Shantytowns -- II

A week or so ago, I said I would post on my dissertation director (the dissertation itself never got past an early squabble on the dissertation committee), the late Donald Greene (scroll down to obituary). Greene, as the obituary points out, was one of the major twentieth century Samuel Johnson scholars, having edited the Yale edition of Johnson. He was well known for his iconoclasm over the conventional wisdom in literary studies, especially as it applied to stereotypical portrayals of the eighteenth century and figures like Johnson.

Here is an excerpt from his book The Age of Exuberance (New York: Random House, 1970), which should give a flavor of his approach:

For many decades questions of eighteenth-century English artistic and literary taste and sensibility have usually been discussed in terms of two potent concepts, "neoclassicism" and "romanticism". A rough, but not too inaccurate, outline of the history of the English aesthetic from 1550 to 1850, as given in the great majority of literary histories from about 1870 onward, runs as follows: Three great movements can easily be discerned in the literary and artistic activity of the time, movements of, successively, action, reaction, then action again. . . . To document the currency of such a picture from late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century textbooks of the history of English literature would be superlatively easy. One quotation will suffice here to illustrate it, the title of a lecture series given in the United States in 1884 by Edmund Gosse, From Shakespeare to Pope: A History of the Decline of Romantic Poetry.

Childish as this sketch appears when presented thus baldly, . . . its essential elements still hold a powerful sway over the minds of students. . . . The great writers of the eighteenth century, Dryden, Pope, Johnson (Swift has always been treated as an exception, sometimes even being termed a "Romantic" out of his time) were entirely unaware that they were "neoclassicists"; they did not use the term or any equivalent, nor is there any evidence that they thought of themselves as playing the role Arnold and others cast them in. . . . The history of the genesis and propagation of the concept of a "neoclassical age" needs thorough investigation. It seems safe to say, however, that it was mainly an invention of the obscure academics and journalists who, from around 1840 to 1870, wrote the pioneering textbooks of the new school subject of English literature. . . and who felt a compulsion to provide a set of historical facts about the subject on which students could be examined. In short, the credentials of the concept are not so imposing that modern students need be frightened away from asking themselves whether, in spite of its wide currency, there is any compelling historical reason for accepting the hypothesis as valid. (159-160)

Whoa! Hold on! What's he saying here? The idea that "Renaissance" English literature had special qualities distinct from "Neoclassical" English literature, which in turn had special qualities distinct from "Romantic" English literature, is bunkum??? Yup. Sure is. To some extent, Greene took this position in order to protect Samuel Johnson, whom he thought was a highly underrated figure, from the kind of attack that follows here -- "The 'Metaphysicals': English Baroque Literature in Context" a recent paper by Rolf P. Lessenich at the University of Bonn:

In 1779, Samuel Johnson wrote a short biography of Abraham Cowley. This was the first of a series of biographical and critical prefaces to his anthology of Works of the English Poets (1779-1781), a book firmly based on Neoclassical principles. His judgement and terminology followed Dryden's:

About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the Metaphysical poets [...].

In a rather haphazard enumeration Samuel Johnson accused these 'unnatural' poets of a great many offences against reason and nature: exhibiting artificiality instead of concealing art, the desire for originality at the expense of the mimesis of nature, unpolished stylistic carelessness, abstruse conceits arbitrarily yoked together in a kind of discordia concors, enormous hyperboles, gross absurdities, and horrible obscenities often conveyed in puns and quibbles. The Rationalistic and Neoclassical purification of the language, as propagated by the Académie Française after 1634 and by the Royal Society after 1668, tolerated no multiple meanings of words that would confuse the understanding, and thus radically inverted the dynamic expansion of the Renaissance and (even more so) of the Baroque vocabulary prominent in Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Donne. Shakespearean and Metaphysical puns and quibbles offended against the most basic Neoclassical rules of reason, the rule of clarity and the rule of decorum.

Smack that bad boy! Lessenich leaves out what an undergraduate who's been to most of the eighteenth century lectures should know, that Johnson in the preface to his own Dictionary concluded that the meanings of words could not be fixed -- he followed the modern practice of defining words by giving their use in context, with the result that words could have both multiple and imprecise meanings. Note how Lessenich elides the opinions of French thinkers a hundred years earlier with Johnson, neglecting to point out that Johnson's own published opinions were diametrically opposite. Note also the assumption that there is such a thing as a Rationalistic and Neoclassical purification of language (against which, apparently, Johnson must struggle in vain). The point Donald Greene makes is that these critical hypostatizations have little basis in the textual or historical record, other than the repeated assertions of scholars that they're true.

This struck me as a compelling argument when I was a graduate student, and as I revisit this issue now, I think it's just as compelling. When I was a graduate student, I thought that if you took Greene's suggestion that many common assumptions about esthetic and literary history needed to be fundamentally reexamined, then you actually came up with some radical ideas. Did all the "Elizabethans" share a belief in E.M.W.Tillyard's Elizabethan World Picture? I successfully debated an assistant prof on this subject; probably at least in part because he lost a debate with a graduate student, he was turned down for tenure (a service for which USC has never given me the appropriate recognition, in my opinion).

Or what of T.S. Eliot's assertion that a "dissociation of sensibility" accounts for a rift in the very nature of literary thinking between the "Romantic" Metaphysical poets and those nasty Neoclassicals? If the very idea of "Romantic" and "Neoclassical" is subject to question, it's another reason, in my view, to downgrade T.S. Eliot's literary standing, for which there are ample other grounds.

It seems to me that this is the kind of give-and-take overhaul of scholarly thinking that ought to have been taking place in the academy all along. As we can see, though, scholars since 1970 have proceeded just about as they had before, and in fact the various "deconstructionist" approaches build heavily on prior generations' unquestioned assumptions about the "Romantic" and the "Neoclassical". Why?

UPDATE: In answer to Marc's comment, it appears that Herr Dr. Prof. Lessenich is quite prolific, on the topics one would expect. "Aspects of Watchfulness and Command in the 1590s Military Camp and Shakespeare's Henry V". "Ideals Versus Realities: Nineteenth-Century Decadent Identity and the Renaissance". Can't wait to get to it. Though it sounds like it's built on the whole Romantic versus Neoclassic model that Greene thinks we should be moving beyond. I'll say more about this tomorrow.

The Colorado University Churchill Report

There's been surprisingly little reaction to the release -- several weeks behind schedule -- of CU's preliminary report on the Ward Churchill affair. Thanks to Pirateballerina.com for the link to the full text and its own summaries and analysis.

The report was originally to have been delivered in early March, but the delivery date was postponed at least twice. It's a puzzle to me that the CU administrators needed so much extra time, as the whole thing seems pretty predictable at this point. The basic conclusions are that Churchill's right to "academic freedom" is absolute (this despite clear wording to the contrary in the AAUP canons, precedents for discipline and termination under that wording, and the Leonard Jeffries legal case). "Academic freedom", as astute observers point out now and then, is simply a code phrase for "guaranteed lifetime job", not the same thing as free speech as we ordinarily understand it. The clear refusal, over a dozen years, of CU to address any issue of Churchill's misconduct, speech related or not, shows this.

The report lists six allegations of research misconduct against Churchill, one of which is apparently new to the public record, though it dates from 1992 -- a plagiarism charge from Rebecca L. Robbins PhD, possibly as part of the same book that led to the Dalhousie University charge. Interestingly, of the six charges listed, three were publicly known prior to January of this year, when Churchill became prominent; the LaVelle charges had been published in a journal that appears to be peer-reviewed. CU's reaction is

The inquiry into allegations of research misconduct is a function assigned to the faculty. The University of Colorado at Boulder Standing Committee on Research Misconduct (the "Committee") has the duty to review, inter alia, allegations of "[f]abrication, falsification, plagiarism and other forms of misappropriation of ideas, or additional practices that seriously deviate from those that are commonly accepted in the research community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research." Allegations of research misconduct that are not frivolous are reviewed by the Committee. With the exception of Rhonda Kelly's allegations, with respect to which the reviewers were unable to obtain independent verification, the referenced allegations meet that minimum standard and will be referred to the Committee for further inquiry.

The LaVelle charges date from 1996. It has taken CU nine years to apply its existing policy on research misconduct. It likely would never have taken official notice without the widespread publicity Churchill got as a result of the Hamilton College speaking engagement. The report gives no reason for the delay, but the cynicism simply hangs in the air here.

I continue to see a parallel in the John Mack case that I discuss just below. First, it seems fairly plain that academic culture simply gives a "bye" to its early investors -- tenured faculty -- on even the most flagrant issues of incompetence, fraud, and misconduct. In the case of John Mack, the nudge-nudge wink-wink that emanates from the chairman of Harvard's review committee is palpable. Heh, heh, the guy is bouncin' off the walls, but we can afford it -- academic freedom, you know. Any of us could go round the bend like that. Who'd want to have to retire just because he'd started blathering about flying saucers?

I see very much the same self-protection occurring with Churchill. Academic culture doesn't like pesky things like accountability -- the report carefully sidesteps, for instance, the whole question of how Churchill got tenure in the first place, and invokes the "old news" defense on Churchill's fraudulent claim to be a Native American, as well as accusations that he retaliated against students by lowering their grades. In effect, it says that CU dithered over these reports when they were made, but now they happened too long ago to investigate.

As I see it, the only people who are being protected here are faculty who currently have tenure. Every case like this is going to make it harder and harder for administrators to approve new tenured hires. What's happening is a big public show where the CU administrators (who, I suspect, are now short-timers just like soon to be ex-President Hoffman) defend "academic freedom", but every college and university dean privately sees this tableau and shudders at the possibility of a Churchill on his or her own campus. So tenured hires, now estimated at somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of new faculty positions, will continue to decrease.

The early investors stay in the game and protect each other, but the actuarial tables will continue their work. Churchill and those of his generation are in their late 50s; most of the professors I had when I was in college are retired. Those new to the business aren't getting the same deal the prior generation did -- the next generation of scholars will have far fewer opporunities to be like John Mack or Ward Churchill. This may be why public indignation at the CU report seems so muted.

Blogger is Having Major Problems

More on Academic Shantytowns

Marc Moffett, in a series of comments on a post at
Conscientious Objector, has challenged me to clarify and expand my views about academic shantytowns and the "destructive testing" (Stephen Karlson's phrase, which I've picked up) of academic ideas. Marc characterizes my views as follows:

John isn't advocating the **continual** rough handling of ideas. Rather, John is advocating "cleaning house" of academic "shanty-towns". The idea of destructive testing is to blow-up a given theory (say, transformational grammar) and then *get rid of it*, move on to bigger and better things. (Recall, he advocates dismantling the MIT linguistics department because the views of many of the professors there have been, in his mind, refuted and I suppose are merely being kept alive by intellectual bullying!!) And while nobody, but nobody, disagrees with those sorts of developments over the very long run, it would just be assinine to think that this is a plausible course of action over the span of a few decades.

I would say, on reflection, that while my agreement with Marc that the MIT Linguistics Department might be dismantled if generative linguistics were discredited was facetious, Marc's overall summary of my views is actually pretty accurate. It sounds as if our differences are mostly in timespan: Marc thinks over a "very long run" it might be OK for such things to happen, but "a few decades" is apperently too short a time.

I don't believe the idea that someone other than Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare is seriously embraced by anyone now teaching in an applicable field at a major university. There are amateurs outside the academy who press this view, but by and large, people in English Lit (quite correctly, in my opinion) regard those who doubt Shakespeare's authorship of Hamlet as hobbyists or harmless cranks. I'm not sure how far anyone who ever studied or taught English as an academic professional embraced these views, which in the history of Shakespeare scholarship are relatively recent, dating from the mid-19th century, as I understand it.

However, let me put this model forward for Marc's consideration as a desirable "end point" for areas that may be the subject of a "successful" "destructive testing". In other words, we take a given academic school of thought, such as Frazerian "myth and ritual" theory, subject it to a wide-ranging give-and-take discussion, and if the idea can be reduced to absurdity (or discredited via other established techniques), the field would be left to hobbyists and amateurs, but its views would be no more likely to be accepted in a peer-reviewed publication than the idea that Shakespeare was really Sir Walter Raleigh. I don't believe anyone enforces the view that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare in any formal or informal sense. The possibility that Shakespeare was really the Earl of Essex is simply accepted by knowledgeable people in their fields as a dumb idea, or perhaps something William James might identify as not a "living option" for belief.

I'm going to open my discussion with a case of an academic shantytown that couldn't be much more clear-cut. Actually, it isn't so much a shantytown as a single tarpaper shack that the city fathers decided to tolerate: the late Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John Mack, who, after discussing accounts of alien abductions with individuals who claimed to have been kidnapped by space aliens and taken into flying saucers, decided beginning in the early 1990s that these accounts were credible, and the people involved were recounting things that had really happened. Mack explained some of his own research conclusions in this link:

They feel themselves being removed from wherever they were. They floated through a wall or out a car, carried up on this beam of light into a craft and there subjected to a number of now familiar procedures which involve the beings staring at them; involves probing of their body, their body orifices; and a complex process whereby they sense in the case of men, sperm removed; in the women, eggs removed; some sort of hybrid offspring created which they're brought back to see in later abductions. That's the sort of literal experience.

Now, the effect of that is -- or what seems to be going on there, in a number of abductees -- not just people I see, but the ones Budd Hopkins and other people see -- is to produce some kind of new species to bring us together to produce a hybrid species which -- the abductees are sometimes told -- will populate the earth or will be there to carry evolution forward, after the human race has completed what it is now doing, namely the destruction of the earth as a living system.

In 2002, long before I started this blog, I read a post on Instapundit saying favorable things about Lawrence Summers's start as President of Harvard. Summers had just taken Cornel West to the woodshed for, among other things, doing a rap album and handing out too many As. With a level of skepticism that I now think shows some prescience, I e-mailed Glenn Reynolds:

I'll agree that Lawrence Summers is saying and doing many of the right things at Harvard, to a point. I'll REALLY believe it when he does something about John Mack, the Harvard psychiatrist who has been peddling fantasy nonsense about alien abduction for many years. If Summers can get rid of this blot on Harvard's good name, maybe I'll send them some money!

Mack remained on the Harvard Medical School faculty until his death in a traffic accident in 2004. Reynolds replied, by the way, that the President sets the tone, but the deans and department chairs have to deal with people like Mack -- OK, but the tone still wasn't set here. Rap albums and a few too many As are one thing; space aliens are another, but West is gone, Mack stayed (and, barring the traffic accident, could have stayed longer, though he was 74 when he was killed). Some might say that West, who was a University Professor, was responsible directly to Summers, while Mack was not -- fine; President Summers, go ahead and set the tone. You really should have gotten rid of Mack before you did anything about West, it seems to me.

This, however, is what Harvard did do, apparently in 1994, some years before Summers arrived:

“[Mack] enjoys ... being the center of attention,” sighs Arnold S. Relman, professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School, who seven years ago led a formal academic probe of Mack's work on behalf of the medical school dean. The investigation, Relman said, concluded that Mack should widen his professional circle of research associates and adopt a more detached attitude toward his subjects.

“He's not taken seriously by his colleagues anymore,” Relman said. “But in the interests of academic freedom, Harvard can afford to have a couple of oddballs.” Mack replied through an aide that he wouldn't resort to name-calling, but he and Relman simply disagree over the meaning of subjective reality when applied to experiencers.

Relman is saying Harvard can afford Mack, and maybe a couple of others like him. What he's actually saying is that Harvard is working on the assumption that parents, alumni, donors, lenders, and all others with a financial stake in the institution won't notice that some portion of Harvard's escalating tuition and fees are going to pay the salary and overhead of John Mack, whose colleagues have said, about as politely as can be done, that he is barking mad. Putting Mack's salary at roughly $100,000 a year for the sake of argument, 15 years of salary after he went bonkers about 1990 is $1,500,000; counting 50% overhead, that's $2,250,000. To look at a futile expenditure on that scale and say "Harvard can afford it" (and a couple of others as well) is to begin to explain the repeated financial scandals that occur at our colleges and universities, as well as their apparent inability to set real-world financial priorities.

We may also assume that there are some dozens (at least) of people who would like to get on the PBS Nova program (from which the quote above was taken) to outline their theories on space aliens, why they want to breed with us, and the future of the planet. We may assume that all of these dozens have been politely deflected from their purpose. Not John Mack. He regularly got media platforms that other amateurs and hobbyists in this area were denied. Why? He was a professor at Harvard.

Presumably because it would have been too much trouble to dismiss Mack for cause (though barking mad and thus, in AAUP phraseology, "gravely unfit" for his position by any reasonable definition), Harvard continued to pay him and whatever part of the heating, custodial, and secretarial bill accrued to him -- and not only that, they let him continue to distort public debate, using the prestige of his Harvard position to gain media access that nobody else with his views could conceivably get.

But Harvard, and by extension the academic establishment, is acknowledging in the case of John Mack that there is a class of academic practitioners that is not taken seriously by peers, but is for whatever reason tolerated -- and, since Harvard did not withdraw its formal endorsement (for reasons that can only be interpreted as cynical), it is up to the informed public to apply its own criteria for valid scholarship, since Harvard in so many words, abdicated its responsibility here. Caveat emptor, so to speak, or maybe cave canem.

There's an unavoidable parallel to Ward Churchill here, too. "Academic freedom", we're told, covers the ability of professors bravely to maintain that the earth is not flat, that the planets revolve around the sun. Yet the "academic freedom" cases we're much more likely to encounter -- indeed, the little "teachable moments" that purport to explain it all to the rest of us -- involve the professor who must be allowed to continue to teach that the little green men do in fact take sperm samples from our neighbors in their flying saucers, or that the poor guy who reported for work that Monday morning in September to take the backups in the World Trade Center deserved what he got, because he (quite possibly brown skinned himself) was waging genocide against brown skinned babies. Those of us in the informed general public might not resent being talked down to over "academic freedom" in this way if the academy were serious at all about enforcing its own professional canons -- but instead, as we see in the case of John Mack, the profs don't want to bother, and "academic freedom" becomes a beard for inertia.

Let's not get our knickers in a knot, guys. It's a lot of trouble to deal with flagrant incompetents. We can afford to keep 'em around another 20 years. I would suggest that neither Harvard nor Colorado can, in fact, afford to tolerate frauds and crazies under the guise of "academic freedom". But I would say the range of academic ideas that ought to be systematically questioned extends farther than this. The question is how far, and how we tell what ideas really shouldn't have formal academic support. I don't think, on balance, that it's a good thing that Harvard lends its name to assertions that space aliens kidnapped Aunt Flossie and stole her eggs -- but where do we draw the line? Joseph Campbell, for instance, is not much more credible than John Mack if you want to go into his assertions at any depth. What can we do here?

I think some combination of laziness and the very real fear that if we open the door to questioning whether John Mack should be able to use Harvard's name, what might become of those of us in the English Department who follow Campbell, is responsible for the extreme tolerance of discredited ideas that currently exists in the academy. I'll have more to say on this, of course.

Yet More on PhD Overproduction

Thanks to "Miles Archer", who's left comments on this site now and then, I find this column in ars technica, citing a recent report by the US National Institutes of Health:

The postdoc is arguably the backbone of research these days. A state between working for a PhD and landing a faculty position, where once postdoctoral fellowships were less common and short lived, now it is common for a scientist to spend 5+ years as a postdoc before landing that prize, a research grant. First a few figures: In 1980, about 1/4 of all RO1 grants awarded by the NIH went to researchers under the age of 35. As of 2003 the figure was less than 4%, despite an increase in the total number of grants awarded.

The number of PhDs continues to increase, whereas the faculty positions for them to go into have not. In addition, the trainee status of a postdoc as opposed to being an actual employee makes hiring them cheaper than technicians, as well as freeing institutions from pesky things like severance pay, or in many cases, health insurance. Increasingly postdocs are working as underpaid technicians on their Principal Investigators (PI) projects without the time or necessary training to develop as independent researchers.

The story quotes the head of the National Postdoctoral Association:

I don't think that every recommendation [of the NIH report] will be acted upon, and even if they were I don't think it would address the real pipeline issues facing the community. There are far more Ph.D.s being produced compared to the number of new faculty positions being created.

In summary, the problem is growing; the numbers aren't what they were 25 years ago. The NIH, a reputable organization, recognizes the situation. There are in fact too many PhDs being produced, even in the hard sciences, and the result is a remarkably hypocritical -- and even exploitive -- work structure. People with six or eight years of graduate school and a PhD are called "trainees" to justify pay, job security, and benefits lower than a supermarket checker -- but for all that, they don't get the "training" they supposedly lack. The funding agencies are complicit.

Meanwhile, tenured faculty like Michael Drout and Jim Hu insist that these conditions are somehow the figment of someone's imagination. While Michael and Jim aren't among those who denounce the rest of US society from their tenured positions in the academy, it needs to be pointed out that colleges and universities do in fact treat postdocs and contingent faculty, not to mention food service and custodial workers, as poorly as any workers in the US, and in some cases, such as the principal research sponsors, the faculty is directly complicit in, and profits from, these arrangements. And even where faculty doesn't directly benefit financially, we simply don't see tenured professors exercising their vaunted "academic freedom" to critique how the university treats these employees, or recommend reforms.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- LXXIII

Jeffrey Hart is a political creature and a conservative. He was a speechwriter for both Nixon and Reagan, and he is a Senior Editor of The National Review, having been closely associated with William F. Buckley, Jr., since the 1950s. On the other hand, his intellectual roots aren't entirely with the right. There's a fair amount of autobiographical material in When the Going Was Good!, and Hart discusses at some length his intellectual mentor Lionel Trilling:

[I]t was The Liberal Imagination that made him the premier American intellectual of the Fifties. Intellectually, it was a high-risk enterprise. In effect, Trilling was declaring that in 1950 liberalism was intellectually and emotionally bankrupt, even while occupying all the seats of power -- but that he, Trilling, could save it. He thus established himself as a powerful critic of liberalism, but he did so while remaining within liberalism. He wished to clean out of liberalism its Stalinist residue, which was still a strong presence in 1950. . . . But Trilling also wanted to deepen and complicate the liberal tradition that had come down from the British and American nineteenth centuries, eliminate its simplicities and sentimentalities. He undertook to do this by bringing to bear upon liberalism a literary and intellectual tradition which was nonliberal and even antiliberal. . . . Trilling's title, The Liberal Imagination, was something of a joke, since the central point of the book was that liberalism did not have much imagination at all.

I think there's some implication in Hart's highly sympathetic discussion of Trilling that, as Hart puts it, "I am not sure that he fully understood how drastic the transformation would have to be, nor am I certain that he entirely believed that the patient could really be saved." So far as I've seen in Hart's own writing, he doesn't speak of any journey, however small, that may have taken place in his own outlook. He started as a student and friend of Trilling, apparently while still an undergraduate at Columbia, but by the mid-1950s he was writing for Buckley's National Review. Exactly what happened here, we don't yet know. Hart tells this story, howevet, of a dinner he had with Trilling:

I actually had a book review in the mail to Buckley. I still remember the book, Aldous Huxley's prescient account of chemically induced mysticism, The Doors of Perception. In the midst of this conversation, Trilling said:

"You wouldn't ever write for National Review, would you?"

This was an intimidating question. My review had been mailed. I did not have tenure at Columbia. And Trilling was a very senior and powerful professor, even a world figure.

Hart, of course, cast his lot with what turned out to be the winning side, the internationalist, big-government, intellectual center-right -- for which Buckley was a defining figure -- though this governing consensus came into being in large part due to the fragmentation and collapse, that Trilling seems to have predicted, of center-left Jeffersonian and Jacksonian liberalism. Had Trilling lived longer, he might have become a neoconservative like many of his colleagues.

Nevertheless, if the US political center has moved rightward over the past generation, no equivalent migration or renewal has taken place in our intellectual or academic life. Hart, to preserve his sanity, may have had no choice but to look toward politics as an area where his efforts could have some visible effect. Equivalent energy directed in a frontal attack on the corrupt and inward-looking cultural and academic establishments would be a disastrous waste of talent.

Even so, When the Going Was Good!, Hart's best book, is far more than a scholarly or historical work. In its depictions of Hemingway, Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and the Columbia figures, it occupies literary territory somewhere between Paul Johnson's Intellectuals and Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and it fills in more of the picture those books begin to draw. In fact, with those other books, it starts to map out a route toward making some coherent sense of US intellectual life since the 1930s. Beyond that, this account of the friendship that developed between him and Allen Ginsberg shows that it's not really possible to pigeonhole Hart as a conservative -- not even of the cultured National Review sort:

I found that Allen was actually good company and that I rather liked him. We took to having lunch once in a while, favoring Paone’s Italian restaurant, a sort of National Review hangout. The rather macho waiters had to get used to Allen bringing some food of his own, several kinds of rice, some dry fish and so on. He told me he had to be careful because of diabetes, and lined up a row of pills on the table. His blood pressure was bad, too. You just had to accept the fact that with Allen things were always going to be a bit out of the ordinary.

His manner was very sweet and paternal. He disapproved of martinis, of meat, of cholesterol. Norman Podhoretz has testified that his sweetness came with his Buddhism, and that as a younger man he was a shouter and an angry abuser, enrage. I saw nothing like this.

We had Columbia in common, Trilling, Van Doren, Barzun, all of whom he claimed to like, but in an oblique way of his own, and I knew some of the poets of his generation at Columbia, such as Richard Howard and Louis Simpson. Allen turned out to be very literary, extremely well read.

Hart concludes his account of Ginsberg by saying,

When I retired from teaching at Dartmouth, I presented the College with [an edition of Ginsberg's poems elaborately inscribed to Hart by Ginsberg in Chinese characters] at the English Department banquet. Of course this was shocking. That I had known Allen was difficult to handle, but that he evidently had liked me was completely inassimilable, off the charts. Today the book is in Dartmouth’s Special Collections. (Perhaps I had better have someone translate those Chinese ideograms for me.)

What strikies me about Hart as a writer is that, at his best, he speaks not just as an observer, but as a participant.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- LXXII

After I graduated from Dartmouth in 1969, I tried twice to get into the Peace Corps. The first time, I was simply rejected; the second time, they canceled the program I was supposed to work on a day or so before I was to report for training. I'd already turned down a job offer expecting to go into the Peace Corps. It was August. I'd already received a notice to report for my Selective Service physical. That meant nobody was going to give me more than a short-term job (and in fact, for a while that summer I delivered phone books).

So my mother suggested I go to graduate school to fill in the time. No matter how late it was in the summer, the University of Southern California was still taking applications, and despite my indifferent grades, they accepted me (I had to take the Graduate Record Exam after the fact, I recall). I was no prize, but I was paying my own way, or actually, my parents were paying my tuition while I lived at home.

So I'd only been on campus a few days when one of the professors, who later became my graduate advisor, pulled me into his office to get some idea of what they'd gotten. He must have been looking at my Dartmouth transcript in my folder, and he had only one comment:

"You did a lot of work with Hart, didn't you?"

For a moment I wasn't even sure who he meant. "Jeffrey Hart?" I asked.

The prof nodded grimly. He shuddered, too. "I got into a real fight with him at a conference once," he said. "Hart is really hard core." I can't remember how many courses I'd taken from Hart, in fact; it wasn't all that many. In the 1960s, I don't think he was teaching much more than the sophomore survey and the eighteenth century courses.

So then the prof kept on grilling me. "Who did you have for the Shakespeare courses?" he asked.

"Robert Hunter," I answered, with even a slight tone of pride (I was apparently still residually impressed with his gaze over the horizon). I may as well have said Elmo P. Flickworthy. The prof registered no recocnition of the name. He kept on.

"Who did you have for American Lit?"

"Henry Terrie." Another null reaction.

"Romantics?"

"Harold Bond." The prof shook his head.

"I don't know any of these."

"Well -- have you heard of Chauncey Loomis?" You can imagine how the discussion went. I saved myself with this prof in my class work, but for a while, it didn't look good. The only English professor he'd heard of at Dartmouth was Jeffrey Hart, and considering his own political persuasion, that was about as bad a recommendation as you could have.

So far, there hasn't been an adequate single account of Jeffrey Hart. I'm in no position to write one here, but as I put together my experience of the Dartmouth English Department, I can't help thinking of my sometime graduate school mentor's reaction -- in the 1960s, the English Department was basically Jeffrey Hart and a bunch of nonentities and burnout cases. And Hart at that time hadn't peaked by any means: he was still an Associate Professor who dressed in ordinary blue blazers and rep ties. The accounts I've read of a yellow seersucker suit with walking cane, a raccoon coat, and a perennial Budweiser tie were well in the future.

One difference between Hart and James Heffernan, whom I discussed yesterday, is that Heffernan's work can be found listed on his web page. Hart's is far too scattered and voluminous for that -- it will be the making of a bibliographer's career, at some point, to assemble a complete record of Hart's writings. Some of it is scholarly, but very little of it fits the carefully circumscribed parameters of a James Heffernan.

Let's look at some of Hart's comments on Hemingway, for instance, a writer he discusses with some frequency (this from When the Going Was Good!):

By the Fifties, Hemingway had become a world figure, a legend, an American Byron who had gone to the wars of the twentieth century, who had hunted, deep-sea fished, fought bulls, had four wives and innumerable mistresses, besides writing several American classics. Hemingway had not only invented Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley, he had invented Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Edward R. Murrow, and John O'Hara. By the Fifties, Hemingway was supposed to be finishing the Big Novel that would also be his culminating masterpiece. He stood at the pinnacle of contemporary American writing, its dominating presence.

The presence of the absent mother in Wordsworth's Prelude indeed. If you went to a Hart lecture, this was what you heard.

Overproduction of PhDs?

Michael Drout has raised additional skepticism that there is even such a thing as "overproduction" of PhDs:

I read a lot of the calls to reduce "overproduction" of Ph.D.s to be a thinly-veiled attempt to get rid of those hustling kids Missouri or Wayne State or Arizona or Notre Dame who are taking the jobs that rightfully belong to the graduates of the elite schools. For, make no mistake, if "overproduction" of Ph.D.s is somehow to be reduced by some kind of cartel system, it won't be the Ivies that will be asked to produce fewer graduates, and it won't be the Ivy programs that are shut down.

Brief point of fact: Notre Dame awards very few PhDs; Wayne State does have PhD programs, but many state teaching universities, like those in California, are often limited to terminal MAs -- however, in light of Michael's later advice that grad students should "follow the rules. . . get into a good graduate school", I'm not sure what his point is here, since he wouldn't advise anyone to go to the places he lists if they want an academic job in any case.

The use of scare quotes around "overproduction" suggests that Michael doesn't believe this takes place. He also says, "I see no evidence that professors are dependent upon low-wage graduate assistants in the way that John is suggesting here." Well, for starters, I'm not the only one suggesting it, and I've been linking and quoting other respectable opinions here all along. For instance, a quick Google search brings up a 2001 conference on "Policy and Data Issues of the Scientific Workforce" sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The Table of Contents refers to "The Perennial Shortage-Surplus Debate", with references to articles published in The Scientist, "Another Study Raps PhD Overproduction,” and Science, “Congress: Was the ‘Shortfall’ Phoney?” Even in the sciences, as I've already pointed out, there is a perceived oversupply of PhDs.

When I first started reexamining this question recently, I was surprised to see so much discussion of the problem in the sciences -- I've already linked and quoted a discussion of PhD oversupply in Physics that refers to the problem as a "tragedy of the commons". Browsing the web today in response to Michael's latest post, I ran across this discussion of an equivalent problem in Biology:

The main theme of our analysis is that the disconnect results from the way careers for biologists are organized, rather than from any short term supply-demand imbalance. We argue that the incentives to principal investigators and other participants in academic bioscience create a self-perpetuating "tournament style market" where small laboratories compete for research grants through extensive hours of work and inexpensive graduate student and post-doctorate labor. This situation is unlikely to change unless the main stakeholders in biological research seek ways to reform the tournament, and NIH provides the extra research support that any reform will require. Stabilizing PhD production will reduce supply pressures in the market but not reform the career structure.

This discussion is referring to the same problem as earlier discussions I've linked: there is a disconnect between PhD production and market demand for finished PhDs because (as mentioned in the link just above) the academic and research labor systems rely on low-cost graduate student labor. This is mentioned in study after study, including those I've linked here, and is taken as almost a truism in such studies.

In just a short time on the web this afternoon, I've cited several references -- I didn't make them up -- describing a phenonmenon called PhD overproduction, and relating that problem to the academic labor system's need to fund itself using cheap graduate student labor. At worst, some references refer to a "controversy", but none dismisses the phenomenon outright.

I'm also puzzled that Michael says, "But at Missouri, for instance, more than 75% of the English 20 (=English 101) TA's are M.A. students, mostly high-school teachers who are getting an additional credential to improve their salaries." Michael doesn't provide a link on this (I provide links when I make this kind of assertion), but the story doesn't sound quite right to me. High school teachers going for MAs, in my observation, rely on tuition reimbursement programs from their day jobs to take a few night courses at a time to earn MA credit. They would have no need to give up their public school teaching jobs to become TAs in order to fund their Master's degrees (which would often be in Education, in any case, not English). TAs by and large can't hold full time jobs elsewhere, as they must teach ordinary daytime sections, as well as maintain the required graduate course load. A schoolteacher who became a TA would give up seniority and benefits s/he'd retain by keeping the day job, and s/he could fund the course work through tuition reimbursement -- so Michael, I'd appreciate a link to the story.

I'll be happy to discuss this further with Michael, though I'd like to avoid some of the problems I've seen among the other tenured faculty who discuss the issue. I hope Michael, and others if they'd like to join, will consider these points and ask if there might be better ways to spend their time (and mine) if they don't feel they can agree with them:

1. If you feel "PhD overproduction" doesn't exist, please discuss in detail the shortcomings you find in formal studies of the sort I reference here, which, as scholarly articles, cite statistics in support of their positions. Please stop referring to the probem as something "John" sees, and take it out of scare quotes.
   
2. Let's focus on specific parts of the problem, or if we need to look at it that way, specific parts of how I argue the issues. Michael's most recent post has, it seems to me at least, some of the problems I found frustrating with Jim Hu's posts: Jim would put up long, rambling discussions of a few of my points, but basically pick and choose what he was going to refute, while ignoring the rest. Michael in this case argues, much like Jim, that there really aren't excess PhDs in English, but doesn't discuss at all the articles I link that point to MLA statistics that only 20 percent of PhDs in English will ever get tenure track jobs. What's the point of both linking to and quoting scholarly work in support of my points if Michael simply responds, in the face of that, "I see no evidence that professors are dependent upon low-wage graduate assistants in the way that John is suggesting here." Reminds me, as I've said before, of some profs I had way back when.
   
3. If necessary, I'll resort to numbering my paragraphs or any other way to be sure we're on the same page. But I'm a little surprised at Michael, who should know better from rhetoric and argumentation.
   
4. In that context, let's avoid ad hominem. If someone cites statistics and relies on support from academic studies, let's not suggest they're somehow disappointed Ivy League snobs, OK? It tends to diminish my respect for Stanford PhDs.
   

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- LXXI

In contrast to the various underperformers I listed in my last two posts is a very different sort of English professor, James A.W. Heffernan. As best I can make out, he came to Dartmouth in 1965 as an Assistant Professor, having acquired a PhD from Princeton in a remarkably short four years. His rise at Dartmouth was also rapid; he succeeded Henry Terrie and Noel Perrin as Chairman of the English Department. I took a course in the Victorian novel from him in the spring term of 1969 as I was just about out the door.

Heffernan was remarkably buttoned-down and horn-rimmed, even for Dartmouth. He's older in his photo on the Dartmouth English Department web site, of course, than he was when I took Victorian from him, but the earnest, tight-lipped, well-combed look is still there -- though somewhere in the intervening years he must have dropped the Brooks Brothers (or equivalent) suits. In the 1960s, he looked very much like the Shepherd Mead cartoons in the original How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. I'm almost certain he carried his lecture notes and papers to class in an attache case like what one might expect of a commuter waiting for his train at New Rochelle. A career at Dartmouth, one might conclude, was not much different in his mind from a career at Seagrams or GE.

And in 1969, I would have left it at that: a professor with a remarkably corporate style. But now I look back on what I knew of him then, what I learned in graduate school, and what I understand now about his career, and I have to revise my judgment: I would say his clothing was very corporate, but I would now call his style "hyperactive graduate student", or perhaps "graduate student on speed". There was some benefit in this to undergraduates. The older, laid back, good ol' boy, prep-school-and-golf-course style of Dartmouth faculty lent itself, in people like Harold Bond, to remoteness and bullying. Heffernan, at least, wasn't a bully, and that was saying something, since Assistant Professors, so soon out of graduate school themselves, are often even more intensely status-conscious than senior faculty.

I found Heffernan likeable as a professor, maybe because the Brooks Brothers routine suggested some kind of insecurity, which I found sympathetic, and with which I identified (I went through a Brooks Brothers phase myself). He was likeable even when he told me I was getting a B for his course; I was about to graduate, and I'd stopped caring. But I say this because there's another part of me that went to graduate school, and it's had its hand in the air for several paragraphs here, insisting on being heard.

Heffernan strikes me as the kind of graduate student who'll hang around with three or four others in the quad, exchanging general baloney -- how's Whorlibord's course on critical theory? You mean Throckmorton's marrying one of his students? [He is, by the way; Cissie is his fourth wife.] That kind of thing. Heffernan (assuming he's got nothing else to do) will join in that discussion like a good fellow -- until he sees Whorlibord heading their way. Whorlibord, you understand, is the Graduate Studies Chair. As soon as someone like Heffernan sees Whorlibord, he'll carefully edge away from the others, and he'll be the first to greet Whorlibord as he approaches. In fact, he'll monopolize Whorlibord. The others won't count. He wasn't really with them anyhow.

You ask how Heffernan got a PhD in four years? I think I know. His eager-to-please-the-big-shots manner, and his hyperactivity, may in fact also be symptoms of the change in the PhD market that was taking place. There were beginning to be more PhDs produced each year than jobs, and competition was increasing. Heffernan is the first Dartmouth faculty member I've discussed here who has a substantial list of publications, though most of those are from the 1980s and later, well after he would have needed them for tenure or advancement (there is a 1969 book on Wordsworth, likely based on his dissertation). Chauncey Loomis, perhaps half a dozen years older than Heffernan, doesn't have anything like it; his only book, as I've mentioned, is popular non-fiction outside his academic field.

That list of publications also reflects a greater homogeneity in US academic culture. It's hard for me to avoid thinking a big ingredient for success on the Dartmouth English faculty before, say, the mid-1960s, was to have gone to the right prep school, to play golf, to be part of an old-boy network that was placing a remarkable number of Princeton PhDs at Dartmouth. All of a sudden that's not enough, and we begin to see Dartmouth faculty joining the national publishing frenzy, if perhaps a little belatedly.

Even so, the only good about the spread of homogeneous academic culture to Hanover is that it's better than what went before, the polar expedition, the electric car, the senior open. Many of Heffernan's publications seem conventional and predictable: "The Presence of the Absent Mother in Wordsworth's Prelude". As a non-professional in the field, I can't say as I'm anxious to get into that piece. It also bothers me that if a student wrote a paper, equally tedious, on such a topic, Heffernan would likely award it an A. I'll have more to say on this when I get back to Harold Bond; I think there's a flaw in how students are expected to respond to something like Wordsworth.

But my final concern about Heffernan is that, late in his career, he seems to have taken on the special cause of freshman comp. I won't disagree that something needs to be done about freshman comp. I probably hated teaching freshman comp more than anything else I ever did, except possibly rowing in crew and the Army ROTC. But what's his contribution to the field? He's a co-author of Writing: A College Handbook, fifth edition. New York: Norton, 2001. In other words, he's got his name on More of the Same, a standard freshman comp text. The problems of freshman comp, as I saw them 35 years ago, and as I read on the web now, are twofold. The first problem is that freshman comp and related courses don't do a very good job teaching students to write. Period.

The second problem, possibly one cause of the first, is that plagiarism in these courses is so common, and the effort at policing it so disproportionately expensive (especially in instructor time), that a freshman comp instructor is doing little more than going through the motions, awarding grades other than failing to papers that are almost certainly plagiarized, simply because the time required to prove the plagiarism for all such cases would be more than the hours in the day. (A big reason the plagiarism problem goes unnoticed is that instructor time is so cheap -- no organization that paid its staff wages comparable to those in the private sector could tolerate such a waste of time on something that shouldn't be happening in the first place.)

I don't see, at least in the list of publications, any recognition of these problems on Heffernan's part. He retired from an endowed professorship, the Frederick Sessions Beebe '35 Professorship in the Art of Writing, that he must have received due to his interest in freshman comp -- but I see no innovation, just a blending in to the tired, feckless norms that have characterized the field for generations.

It seems to me, an interested observer with some experience in the field, that a new approach with some chance of improving the horrible current state of affairs would require extensive use of computers, including widespread adoption of computerized plagiarism detection tools that are now available, as well as software that could pre-screen for common errors, in effect more sophisticated versions of spellchecks and grammar checks that appear in products like MS Word. I see no indication in Heffernan's background that he's interested in or familiar with any such things. In fact, computerized plagiarism checks and programmed pre-instruction would likely change the freshman comp field so much that conventional texts like the one Heffernan co-authored would be obsolete.

So I'm inclined to say that Heffernan reflects many of the norms common to his scholarly generation. In fact, my impression is that he enthusiastically embraced those norms, to the point of hyperactivity, but at the sacrifice of originality. I don't see him stepping much beyond the boundaries of conventional wisdom. He did everything he needed to do to collect the whole set professionally, which suggests that his skills were primarily in satisfying the system's existing expectations. In comparison to the professors I've mentioned earlier, he's a little better -- he wasn't a bully, he was interested in his field, he could actually talk one-on-one to students -- but I'm sorry that's the best Dartmouth has been able to do.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- LXX

Someone reading my account of Professors Terrie, Perrin, and Loomis may respond that these gentlemen must certainly be scholarly zombies, but what of their teaching ability? Did they inspire generations of students? In some ways, I hope not; I think of Miss Jean Brodie's inspiration that sent one of her students off to fight for Franco.

In fact, the inspirational English prof at Dartmouth when I was there was someone else, Robert G. Hunter. Hunter taught Shakespeare. I suppose the stereotypical undergraduate program requires an inspirational Shakespeare professor after the manner, say, of Norman Maclean at Chicago or George Lyman Kittredge at Harvard. If you can bring it off the way Kittredge or Maclean did, then all the sublime stuff the great readers find in Shakespeare will come tumbling out, and it will thrill generations of students. In fact, the Shakespeare specialists seem to come in for a high proportion of teaching awards; certainly this was the case at the University of Southern California, where I went to graduate school -- Charles Berryman there richly deserved it.

And Hunter was a Shakespeare prof in that classic mode. He would stand at the podium, gaze out over the heads of the class -- gaze out, in fact, as if there were no wall at the rear of the lecture hall, gaze out as though he were looking to the horizon, and past the horizon, and he would begin to lecture. The lectures would be full of catharsis and identity and redemption and healing and wholeness and forgiveness and recognition, all very, very inspiring stuff. You'd come out of the Shakespeare lectures exactly the way an undergraduate should, feeling as if Robert G. Hunter had made you see the world in a new way, catharsis, identity, redemption, healing, wholeness, forgiveness, recognition, the whole lot of it.

Once I ran into Hunter in the lobby of Baker Library. I wasn't looking for him, and I wasn't hoping he'd notice me, and it was just as well. His gaze was the same as his gaze in the lecture hall, looking just a bit upward, past me, past the circulation desk, past the old card catalogs, just a bit beyond what was in front of him, as if there were no wall in the library lobby, gazing out as though he were looking to the horizon, and past the horizon -- and I wondered what he was doing at all in such a mundane place as the library, wandering among the old card catalog drawers; his gaze was fixed permanently somewhere else.

I registered this somewhere in the back of my mind, in fact, too far back, it seems: soon after that, I apparently decided that professors' office hours were for students to pay a visit. The immediate cause was another of Hunter's lectures. I forget what play we were covering. It didn't really matter.

"Consider," intoned Hunter as he began his lecture, gazing out past the horizon, somewhere far beyond Quebec, beyond Labrador, beyond Greenland, beyond Chauncey Loomis's polar expedition, I'm sure -- "the infant solipsist."

As I say, he could have begun almost any lecture with that sentence: Hamlet, As You Like It, The Tempest, King Lear, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Timon of Athens -- you could work an infant solipsist into any of this if you were good, and Hunter was good; he was very good. And something in it got my own mental wheels turning. He had only himself to blame for it, of course, but as I began to turn over the issue of the infant solipsist as it applied to whatever it was we'd been reading, I felt compelled to pay a visit to the great man during his office hours.

His office in Sanborn House was the filthiest small room I'd ever seen. He sat in the middle of unkempt stacks of books and papers, a cold fireplace with ashes overflowing all over the floor. There was a place for a student to sit, but it wasn't intended to be comfortable. When I knocked at the doorframe, he looked up -- but he didn't just look up, he looked past me, and not just past me, but past everything, as if there were no wall in Sanborn House, as though he were looking to the horizon, and past the horizon -- I suddenly realized that was how he looked at everything. I fumbled with my books and haltingly started to say something about that day's lecture, something about the infant solipsist.

"Oh yes," said Hunter. "Professor Saccio told me as soon as I'd finished the lecture that I'd be sorry for that phrase." (This was Saccio's first year at Dartmouth; he was team-teaching the Shakespeare course with Hunter.) And Hunter kept gazing a little upward, out over the curvature of the earth, as though he expected an important comet to arrive at any instant. And here I was instead, the predicted retribution, in Hunter's eyes, for using the phrase "infant solipsist", an eager undergraduate appearing in his office in hopes that he'd parse it further. No important comet would show up that hour, just a grubby sophomore with the usual inchoate reactions to whatever he'd been reading.

Hunter quickly got rid of me with a few unresponsive grunts to whatever questions I'd asked. I felt humiliated; it took me a fair amount of reflection, off and on, as well as some teaching experience of my own, to understand more fully what had happened. Hunter could put together a great lecture. His gaze out over the horizon worked perfectly at wholesale. At any sort of educational retail, he was a disaster. In any case, he left Dartmouth at the end of that year. He went on to Vanderbilt, where the record reflects that he won a teaching award, but then he left Vanderbilt as well. He finished in an endowed chair as the DD Frensley Professor of English Literature at Southern Methodist University.

Dartmouth didn't have a teaching award at the time; perhaps he went to Vanderbilt to get one, and once he'd done that, maybe he felt the need to have an endowed professorship. In short, he collected the whole set.

Hunter published a book, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness, in 1965, and another, Shakespeare and the Mystery of God's Judgments, in 1976, but this is a small overall product for a career. Academic stars move from one place to another the way Hunter did -- most professors stay where they first got tenure -- but the overall slim record suggests Hunter wasn't actually a star. Of the professors I've had whom I've googled to look at their subsequent careers, the hits for Hunter are among the fewest.

When I started graduate work at USC, I was puzzled that nobody on the faculty there had heard of anyone on the English faculty at Dartmouth (Jeffrey Hart, whom I'll get to, was the only exception). Hunter was the one who puzzled me most at the time. Considering his overall record -- and the fact that, in hindsight, we was either unwilling or unable to extend minimal courtesy to a student who'd paid him the compliment of wanting to hear more -- I'm no longer surprised. But that was Dartmouth in the 1960s, academically a remarkably overrated place.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- LXIX

I've always connected my decision to major in English with a course taught by Harold L. Bond. Not that Bond was any sort of inspiration. I made my decision in spite of him. Nevertheless, Bond somehow represents the Dartmouth English Department as far as I'm concerned. Bond was, in fact, a tenured mediocrity of the sort that I found in considerable numbers at both Dartmouth and in graduate school. Tenured faculty who defend that institution these days maintain that Harold Bonds are a rare aberration, but in an effort to be fair to Bond and Dartmouth, I decided to look a little farther into Bond's record and that of his colleagues at Dartmouth in the 1960s.

Bond appears to have had a good start. His one scholarly book (he also published a volume of World War II memoirs), The Literary Art of Edward Gibbon (1960), was apparently based on his PhD dissertation at Harvard (I'm relying on the reference in the link here; no vita appears to be on line). But then the Google results peter out. With Thaddeus "Dad Thad" Seymour, whom I've already discussed at some length, and another professor, he was the author of Dartmouth's student plagiarism guide (the one they make you buy for $3.00 in the bookstore) -- and that's about it as far as scholarly output is concerned. I'll have more to say about Bond after I look at his colleagues.

In contrast, a Google search on Henry Terrie, who was the Chairman of Dartmouth's English Department at the time, brings up more hits, though I also find it significant that those hits seem far more numerous in connection with his activities as a country club member than as a Professor of English. His scholarly specialty at Dartmouth appears to have been Erskine Caldwell (Erskine Caldwell???). Late in my time as an undergraduate, I went to a ceremony at which Terrie formally received the donation of Caldwell's papers to the College library from Caldwell himself. I guess I wanted to see what Caldwell looked like (he was tall, slim, and had a buzz cut). But Tobacco Road is ersatz stuff. At the time I thought Dartmouth and Terrie were being polite in accepting the papers, but reviewing the record now, it appears that getting the Caldwell material was Terrie's special project. Among Terrie's few publications is a five-page piece in The Southern Quarterly, "Caldwell at Dartmouth".

In fact, I find in the link above Terrie's own account of what he was doing right around the time I was being thrown out of the Army ROTC:

My introduction to golf course architecture began in 1967 on my first trip to Scotland when I played many of the classic courses: Turnberry, Troon, Prestwick, Hoylake, Birkdale, Formby, Gleneagles, The Old Course, Muirfield, Carnoustie, Dornoch. In the next few years I became increasingly aware of mismanagement on the courses at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. First, there was a charming little nine-holer designed for the College in 1927 by Ralph Barton, an alumnus who had learned his trade from Charles Blair Macdonald and Seth Raynor. . .

Ah, yes, the joys of pursuing literary studies in the Ivy League, with lots of time off for golf. Terrie drove, as I recall, an Oldsmobile Toronado, a very pretentious car, indeed a muscle car for the middle-aged, with the vanity license plate TERRIE, which was how I knew it was his. No doubt he liked the roomy trunk, where he could stow his golf clubs.

Then there was Noel Perrin, whose literary output, as described in his recent obituary, covered "subjects as varied as feudal Japanese history, life in rural New England and his adventures with an electric car". Not much English lit there, of course, though he was a prolific writer of chaming New Yorker type stuff.

A search on Bond's and Terrie's colleague Chauncey Loomis reveals that his major achievement at Dartmouth was to mount an expedition to exhume the body of Charles Francis Hall, a 19th-century arctic explorer murdered in Greenland, in 1960. Loomis's account of this expedition is the only publication of any sort that I can find for him. However, the same Google search that brings up references to Loomis's book on Hall also finds many, many genealogical references to Chauncey Loomises throughout New England history, something I suspect is not a coincidence. I have the impression that Dartmouth, at least at the time, wanted the right sort on its faculty; interest in the scholarly field must have been a secondary consideration.

The overwhelming pattern I see in these senior professors on the Dartmouth English faculty is a tendency toward gentlemanly amateurism. They were professors, but they seem to have spent much of their time dabbling in polar expeditions, golf course design, and electric cars, to the point that their scholarly publications were almost nil. In fact, it appears that once they were safely tenured, they had as little as possible to do with formal scholarship. I did horribly on the Graduate Record Exam in English when I finally took it, and at this remove, I'm beginning to understand why.

"Big changes are coming. . ."

This is the conclusion to a post by Robert Shibley at The Torch, the Foundation for Indivual Rights in Education's blog (thanks to Stephen Karlson). Shibley says,

. . . the American press and public are increasingly taking a look at the state of academia—and they don’t like what they see. A vast number of factors are coming together to prompt people to ask the question “What’s wrong with our colleges?”

However, the list of reasons Shibley gives strikes me as symptoms, and minor ones, rather than reasons. He cites Churchill and Lawrence Summers, for instance. Churchill is certainly a symptom of a much larger problem, and Summers, in this piece in the Weekly Standard, comes off as something of an enfant terrible throughout his career, who never had to stop and learn people or leadership skills during his climb to the top. His background as a precocious and apparently spoiled faculty star suggests that his managerial style derives mainly from the bullying he saw among, and must have learned from, those around him. To that extent, the academic world deserves what it's got -- as I've already said, the more I've seen of Summers, the less impressed I've been. He's certainly not an attractive or sympathetic figure, and I doubt if public perceptions of academe are being, or will be, much affected by his fate, whatever it is.

Shibley lists speech codes (of course, as a FIRE spokesperson), financial scandals, and spiraling college costs as other causes. The scandals and escalating costs are more credible, though the real issue, I think, is that consumers are beginning to suspect they aren't getting what they thought they were paying for. It's interesting that Hugh Hewitt, not a Dartmouth alum, has now addressed the Dartmouth alumni trustee election issue, further evidence of national interest in the story. One of the problems that's being discussed at Dartmouth is the difficulties students there are having trying to sign up for popular courses, when both Dartmouth's own pitches to prospective students and its US News ranking, not to mention its annual cost, would strongly imply that this shouldn't be happening.

Tenure, though, is the elephant in the faculty lounge in every one of the discussions I've seen, though not the only pachyderm-in-residence there. Shibley at FIRE steps very, very carefully around the cracks in the sidewalk where Ward Churchill's supposed "academic freedom" to denounce people as "little Eichmanns" is concerned; as David Kopel has pointed out, there are numerous precedents that say "academic freedom" doesn't extend that far. Shibley does acknowledge the problem Colorado has if it fires Churchill for plagiarism or violent threats and not for unprotected speech, but, perhaps understandably, he won't cut that Gordian knot. It's remarkable that in the whole post reviewing what the public may think is wrong with higher ed, he doesn't mention the t word once.

Yet if the Churchill case represents anything to the public, it's the absurd shilly-shallying that tenure has forced, not only on CU, but on the whole academic establishment, which must pussyfoot itself into pretzels on the issue of Churchill's right to shout fire in a crowded theatre, while nevertheless finding itself unable to deal with the guy's clearly criminal conduct. So far, they can't even make up their minds to buy him out! What can the public conclude from this besides the need for tenure reform?

The other elephant is, as I've mentioned, the intellectual shantytowns that have grown up on campus. Stephen Karlson has said, "Underwriters Laboratories destructive-tests toasters so as to better calculate insurance premiums. There is no comparable destructive-testing of ideas in the academy." He's right in general, but the specific case he's talking about is Ward Churchill, and here's the problem I see with every tenured faculty member I've seen discussing this issue. Stephen, Jim Hu, King Banaian, Michael Drout, and others all see Ward Churchill as some sort of aberration. If we can just get the Ethnic Studies Department off campus, we can go on in our own more established departments just as before, undisturbed, in our important research.

Sorry, Professors. The problems are in the established departments, too, and the unwillingness of professors in Economics, English, Psychology, Physics, or wherever else, to "destructive test" the more established shantytowns (I've enumerated those already; they include, in my view, Frazerian "myth and ritual", Chomskyan or generative linguistics, and evolutionary psychology, among others) is contributing to the longer-term decline in the academy. Erin O'Connor, by her own admission, built quite an impressive career on another bit of arrant humbuggery, "Body Image Studies", a trendy field in English.

So, in the view of the established scholars who are blogging on this issue, we can "destructive test" Ethnic Studies, I guess, but not -- oh, no, not at all -- the silly panel topics at the MLA. Somehow I get the feeling that those in the academy, whatever they may feel about Ward Churchill, aren't goinig to be much help in solving the real problems. Stephen, Jim, and others -- drop the whining about Victim Studies. You're pointing to the mote in your neighbor's eye, when the problems are closer to home. If I'm representative of the informed public, you aren't convincing anyone. Not by a long shot.

UPDATE: In response to Stephen Karlson's ("The Superintendent") comment below, I would cite only this post on a "Division of Cooling Out the Mark" which, I think a reasonable reader would conclude, finds the main problems in the academy related to Communications and Ethnic Studies Departments. For instance, he refers to the

. . . ethnic studies program, which, if our administrators were honest con men, would be acknowledged as serving the function of "cooling out the mark." In this case the con is the invitation to enroll in university -- the fiction of admitting unprepared students and calling it access -- and the cooling out is the provision of a program that provides something resembling a degree.

I think a fair summary of the entire post is that the Ward Churchill phenomenon is a result of a relaxation of standards in non-traditional areas of the academy, such as ethnic studies. This relaxation is beginning to affect other, more traditional areas, such as Economics. However, the blame lies with ethnic studies. We need to get back to doing things the way they used to be done.

Stephen apparently liked the post, since he's linked to it several times. I hold no brief for ethnic studies, but I would suggest that if that were the only problem area in the academy, things would be in great shape indeed. As an interested member of the public who found much wrong with his experience of the academy before most ethnic studies departments existed, I disagree strongly with the idea that the problems are new or unrelated to traditional academic institutions.

I repeat, Stephen, stop whining about Victim Studies, there's more serious work to be done.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- LXVIII

I never really believed the explanation the Dartmouth Army ROTC gave me for why I was being thrown out, but the bureaucratic sound of it, that the Army somehow had some small number of excess cadets, in consequence of which I had been designated supernumerary, was very useful to me in explaining the situation to my father. There would be no way in which he could go back to Colonel Ditherspoon and try to have me reinstated; the decision was bigger than any of us.

But recognizing that the explanation they gave likely glossed over the real reasons for throwing me out, it was still hard for me to think the actual cause through. If the Army had any true inkling of what the SDS had in mind for the Armed Forces Day review -- that I'd at least been pressured to throw down my ceremonial M1 and break ranks as a Viet Nam protest -- I would think that the prudent thing would have been to throw me out before the day, not afterward.

So I seriously doubt that they had any information on what the SDS had asked me to do. On the other hand, when the ROTC officers grilled me over my opinions on the war, they must have had some basis for thinking I opposed it. Actually, while many of my peers were in fact against it, I was still undecided -- even at this remove, I think the major problem with the Viet Nam War was that it was an abuse of the government's conscription power. The availability of draftees postponed the Johnson Administration's need to account for its halfway measures. I was completely sincere at the time in saying that I would follow any orders I was given.

I suspect that what was really going on was that one or more of my ROTC peers decided to tell those in authority that I was hanging out with the wrong crowd. It was probably a way to gain favor, and with that group, it likely worked very well. In fact, it worked well all around. I was out, with an explanation I could conveniently give my father. The explanation was final enough that he wouldn't be going back to the ROTC to have me reinstated. I would no longer be required to polish my shoes, cut my hair, and march around the football field on Wednesday afternoons. Whatever would happen to me in the draft when I graduated in a couple of years was where it belonged: in the future.

Lawrence Summers's Remarks to Students at Harvard

I thought Lawrence Summers got off to a good start at Harvard, but he's been more of a disappointment since then. I agree with what I think is Timothy Burke's position that the President of Harvard didn't need to get himself embroiled in the controversy he did over women's relative abilities in the sciences -- we expect people at that level to be a little more careful, to have some sense of when they're about to step in a cow patty.

On the other hand, James Taranto yesterday pointed to a Harvard Crimson story that seems a little more encouraging. I found Summers's remarks refreshing in two areas. He began to propose changes in the tenure model:

First, Summers said, scholars should be allowed to spend more years as assistant professors before the University issues a final decision on their tenure fate.

Second, Summers said Harvard should allow professors to pursue flexible work arrangements, including part-time options, while they juggle family responsibilities.

Third, Summers said the University should subsidize day care for faculty members with children under age six-just as it offers interest-free loans to cover tuition costs for professors with college-aged kids.

Fourth, Summers said the University should provide "an extra little bit of assistance" to scientists with young children-in the form of a technician or a research aide-so that faculty members can spend less time in the laboratory and more time with their families.

I'm skeptical that adding more years to a probationary status is going to help -- it's like proposals from Jim Hu and others that there should be more time in grad school or postdoctoral programs. How in the world is it going to help to have people still apprenticed at their career paths at age 40, when previously it had been only 35? Even so, any questioning of the paradigm is worthwhile, because it will hasten the arrival of a new one.

The rest of the proposals reflect a certain namby-pamby response to what appears to be a ferocious sense of entitlement on the part of Harvard faculty. Some private sector companies -- like my former employer DDT -- offer elaborate child-care benefits, including a free day-care center at company headquarters. However, this is entirely meant as a cost-effective way to retain employees who might otherwise leave the company due to low salary and poor working conditions. "If it weren't that we'd have to pay an extra $xxx a month for day care, I'd quit in a minute. . ."

But all this sensitivity toward professors (who, of course, are already far better able to juggle their at-home schedules than private-sector workers) who may need more time, or more flexibility, or more money, or more sympathy, or whatever, due to their children -- wait a minute, this is at Harvard, the kind of place where, as we've already discussed, there are hundreds of applications for each tenure-track job opening, and where faculty needs to be on campus for near single-digit totals of hours each week. The private sector looks at its work force and decides day care or child care options might be a cost-effective way to attract and keep employees. Harvard, with no problem attracting faculty, decides to give them extra and apparently unnecessary benefits -- well, because they're entitled to them.

Keep in mind as well that Summers's background is in Economics, where we might expect him to have a better sense of how supply and demand affect price. And beyond that, keep in mind that the faculty for whom he's proposing these apparently unnecessary, and even extravagant, new benefits voted earlier that same day to censure him. (Whoops, sorry I misspoke about ladies and the hard sciences; I'll make it up with a little more child care to attract those same ladies so they won't have to spend so much time in the lab. . .)

On the other hand, what Summers is really broaching here, like it or not -- more time toward tenure (eventually all the time you could ever want, because there ain't gonna be a tenure), part time option, that kind of thing -- well, of course, that's another way of saying you're all going to be more like adjuncts. I don't know if Summers has that in mind or not. However the pill needs to be sweetened, somebody's got to start sweetening it. Summers seems to be blundering into that role, I think. But what would happen if Paul Wolfowitz were made President of the University of Chicago after he leaves the World Bank?

Then the students raised their concerns:

A chorus of Matherites complained about the poor quality of academic advising and a lack of interaction between students and tenured professors.

When Summers asked the crowd whether "two senior faculty know you well," barely a quarter of students raised their hands.

"There are a surprising number of students who would like to have more contact with senior faculty-and a surprising number of senior faculty who would like to have more contact with students," Summers observed.

We're back to the simmering problem Dartmouth has, charging a heavy premium for being a prestigious residential liberal-arts school where class sizes are represented as being small enough to give students greater contact with faculty -- but at Dartmouth, the reality is the most popular courses are oversubscribed. It sounds like Harvard has a similar problem.

There isn't an easy solution. My experience was that the students who got the most contact with faculty were, in any case, the most charming and adept at self-promotion, and not only that, if the faculty are inhabitants of the various intellectual shantytowns that flourish on campus, it may do students more harm than good to have too much contact with them. Nevertheless, when we hear so many blog-scholars saying that no matter what universities may say, the important component of their work is research, then we can see a source of student discontent. And we ought to keep in mind how much of the "research" is useless -- each year, after all, there's a derisive recitation of the panel topics at the MLA convention. It's like the parent who claims his or her job limits family contact, but on closer examination, the 12-hour days are spent at useless tasks that shouldn't require that much time. The job, like the research, begins to sound like an excuse, not a reason.

So Summers is just skirting the problems, and I'm not sure if he's even fully aware of what he's implying. I'd rather think about what might happen if Wolfowitz went to Chicago.

Our Hope for Academic Integrity

Stephen Karlson (if necessary, scroll to "How Others See Us") links to the Center for Academic Integrity in his discussion of press reactions to the Ward Churchill case. I was probably browsing that site around the same time that Stephen was writing his post, and it's a very frustrating site, because you can get almost no information on academic integrity from it (you apparently need to become a member to get deeper into the site, kinda like National Review Online, which makes you subscribe to read the more interesting articles).

Still, we can discover for free that "The Center for Academic Integrity is affiliated with the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. We gratefully acknowledge their financial and programmatic assistance, as well as funding from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation." A sibling beneficiary, in other words, of NPR and all the rest, though such a thing as a "Kenan Institute for Ethics" has more than a faint irony to it.

The name Kenan appearing in connection with North Carolina philanthropy can mean only one person: Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Bingham (1867-1917). (Stephen, you must know about this, right?) Kenan was the third wife of Henry M. Flagler (1830-1913), a partner of John D. Rockefeller in Standard Oil, who later in life changed his focus, became somewhat less acquisitive, and specialized in developing Florida. (Ida Tarbell's The History of the Standard Oil Company, by the way, is a neglected modern classic. Flagler's partner Rockefeller comes off only a little short of Milton's Satan.) We find, however, that "Flagler's second wife, the former Ida Alice Stroud, had been institutionalized for mental illness since 1895. In 1901, the Florida Legislature passed a bill that made incurable insanity grounds for divorce, opening the way for Flagler to remarry." The third marriage, also in 1901, was to Mary Lily. However, Mary Lily had been Flagler's traveling companion for some years prior to the marriage, and other accounts indicate that her status as a special Flagler consort started in her early teens. All I can say about Flagler, especially in a pre-Viagra age, is you dog, you!

What we know of Mary Lily's life makes me think it can't have been very happy. After Flagler's death, she became "the richest widow in America," and ". . . she married Colonel Robert Worth Bingham, a member of a North Carolina family of aristocratic pretensions, in 1916. She died eight months later under much-disputed circumstances -- there were whispers of drug addiction, medical neglect, syphilis, poisoning " Mary Lily's pre-nup appears to have been ironclad, and only five million went to Bingham; much of the rest -- a major piece of the Standard Oil fortune -- went to perpetuate the Kenan family name via philanthropies. Thus are our most respectable institutions endowed. How grateful we must be for the Kenan Institute for Ethics!

In addition to the Standard Oil money that allows the Center for Academic Integrity to keep our colleges and universities on the straight and narrow, I may join as an individual member for the quite nominal sum of $100 per year. It appears, though, that few benefits of the Center's estimable programs redound to those in the public who are not, etiher themselves or via their institutions, paying members. Unlike, say, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the Center doesn't do much to publicize cases of abuse or pressure institutions to resolve flagrant mendacities, of which we've had not a few in recent years. In fact, unlike FIRE, which is a much better example for an institution trying to reform the academy, CAI's site contains only bromides on the issue of student cheating. No serious mention is made on the site of faculty plagiarism, a problem big enough that professional bodies now refuse to investigate allegations, since there are too many.

Under "CAI Research", there is a large photo of CAI Founder and First President Donald L. McCabe, attempting, shall we say, to look youthful, determined, and optimistic as he stares for the camera into what must be the upper left corner of the room. Dr. McCabe, it is asserted, has found that "[o]n most campuses, over 75% of students admit to some cheating. In a 1999 survey of 2,100 students on 21 campuses across the country, about one-third of the participating students admitted to serious test cheating and half admitted to one or more instances of serious cheating on written assignments."

My gracious! Who would have known? You mean the Center for Academic Integrity has spent heaven knows what to give us the kind of vague statistics that have been making the rounds for 40 years at least? And we learn,

Academic honor codes effectively reduce cheating. Surveys conducted in 1990, 1995, and 1999, involving over 12,000 students on 48 different campuses, demonstrate the impact of honor codes and student involvement in the control of academic dishonesty. Serious test cheating on campuses with honor codes is typically 1/3 to 1/2 lower than the level on campuses that do not have honor codes. The level of serious cheating on written assignments is 1/4 to 1/3 lower.

This is simply counterintuitive. I believe other surveys have shown that students, if asked, can't say for sure if their school has an honor code or not, nor, if one exists, what's in it. This was the thrust of a Dartmouth Alumni Magazine article several years ago, and that sounds much more credible to me. In that same article, students simply said they wouldn't turn in a fellow student for cheating -- which is the heart of many such codes.

So all I can say is, this is the Center for Academic Integrity, which seems at the moment to be a vehicle for the aggrandizement of one Professor McCabe and little else. O brave new world.

Mimicry

I keep thinking about the Chronicle of Higher Education piece on faculty plagiarism that I discussed in my post last week, because the implications keep expanding, as I see them. The chief example in the article is the disgraced former Oklahoma State University Regents Professor George Carney, but there's a second case that's a real sleeper, or maybe a sleep-destroyer:

Like many students at Harvard University last December, Todd Fine was frantically trying to finish the proposal for his senior thesis. Sitting on his futon with piles of books about Libya and foreign policy around him, he began skimming European Crisis Management in the 1980s, a 1996 book by Neil Winn, a professor at the University of Leeds, in England.

Interested in some of its theoretical aspects, Mr. Fine found related articles in an online database. One of them, however -- a 1992 paper in the International Studies Quarterly -- seemed familiar.

Mr. Fine searched the two texts. Five pages -- more than 1,100 words -- of the introduction to Mr. Winn's book were essentially identical to the journal article. Mr. Winn did little more than switch to the occasional British spelling. For example, "crystallize" became "crystallise." With the exception of those and other extremely minor changes, the words were the same.

When I first read this, I was thinking, gee, that's interesting, and it shows how random and hard to discover these things are. You've almost got to find the two passages by chance. And the chance identification of the one passage, of course, may suggest that Winn's whole book was stitched together with plagiarized passages, all nearly impossible to identify.

Then I spent several days reading claims by tenured professors (and others) that, no matter how a university or a department or a search committee may say for public consumption that teaching is important, research pays the bills, and all candidates for jobs or tenure must show a great deal of research.

And then I started thinking back to graduate school. By the third or fourth year of grad school course work, a grad student should have focused on a speciality and sub-specialty, as I understand it. Let's say, in English, a grad student would choose the Victorian period, and within that period a focus on Matthew Arnold. We may assume the student's dissertation will cover Arnold, but we may also expect that the student has written major papers on Disraeli and George Eliot as well.

Via her dissertation and other major papers, a graduate student worth her salt has had to cover every major scholarly book and article that can be found on these figures. Not only that, but the student may be expected to have a pretty good familiarity with the major scholars in the whole Victorian field, their most important views, and the overall shape of studies in Victorian literature, ever since someone decided Victorian literature was worth studying, which of course wasn't all that long ago. Certainly that was what I was trying to do, and what my graduate advisors simply expected of me, though not in Victorian.

On top of that, as Daniel Drezner and others have said, if you want to go into the academy, you've got to like gossip, because every field is enormously ingrown. All the scholars share the little stories about how Blatchworthy's wife spilled her tea on Lapstraker at the conference in 1978, and it likely wasn't an accident. And that was before Lapstraker went to Syracuse! It's a very, very small world, with very, very few surprises.

So now let's focus back on Todd Fine, a Harvard senior working on an honors thesis or something like that when he discovered Neil Winn's plagiarism. It sounds as if Fine, a little advanced for an undergraduate, was doing roughly what you would expect any competent graduate student to do. He was certainly doing what any journeyman associate professor would do who was writing a review essay for a scholarly journal. "Now we turn to Prof. Neil Winn's important reexamination of blah blah blah." As far as I can see, if Todd Fine was working his way through a body of recent scholarly opinion for the first time, he was simply introducing himself to what we ought to expect some dozens of tenured faculty to have internalized.

In other words, if I, as a grad student not fully familiar with the field on which I'm taking a class, write something like, ". . . it seems that Matthew Arnold's understanding of serrated kerwoffery in Dover Beach is not unlike Carlyle's earlier expression of . . . " my journeyman professor would write an angry comment something like, "ABSOLUTELY NOT!!! Look at Pifflesmith's article in PQ on this very topic, and Whorlibord's discussion of Carlyle's quasi-kerwoffery in PMLA. . ."

So I'm scratching my head that it took a naive beginner to discover this plagiarism, when we would expect a specialist peer-reviewing a scholarly book to have a much better understanding -- if not a verbatim memory of passages in a journal article, at least a sixth sense that something is hinky here. Certainly when I read student papers as a TA, the sense that something wasn't right in a paper would come over me in a very creepy way.

As I've said now and then, a big reason I found myself losing interest in scholarly work was the sense that I was reading so many plagiarized student essays, with no effective way to hold even a small number of violators accountable, that this was a futile effort, I was just going through motions. I would look at a paper I was sure was plagiarized, with sophisticated locutions of which the student was clearly incapable, realize it must be plagiarized but find no way to give it less than a B. I decided this wasn't going to be a good way to spend my life.

So, looking back at my own experience, I've got to ask questions about the scholars in International Relations who worked in the field covered by the book and article where Todd Fine found the plagiarism. Here are some of my questions:

This can't have been the only plagiarism in Winn's book. An otherwise sound piece of work doesn't suddenly have 1100 words cribbed inadvertently from another source ("Oh, sorry, my research assistant must have had a slip of the mouse. . ."). No. From the real world examples we see with Carney, Goodwin, and Ambrose, there are multiple instances throughout the book, and logically, this would follow. If you feel your own work is so weak you have to steal other work, then 1100 words is de minimis. You're stealing because you can't, or don't want to, put together 60-100,000 of your own words, which means the borrowings are going to be much more extensive.

This in turn means the single borrowing Todd Fine found can't have been the only one in the book. In fact, a plagiarized book has got to be a time bomb, with passage after passage waiting to be discovered by a random reader like Fine. But what bothers me is that Fine was a newbie and found a passage while apparently pulling an undergraduate all-nighter. How many more such passages ought to have been caught by graduate students and journeyman specialists in the field?

I can see only two explanations for why such passages weren't found sooner, by referees, early reviewers, or grad students. One explanation is that the professionals knew what was going on, but chose to ignore it and act as if there were no plagiarism. The other is that the professionals were so deadened by what passed for "research" or "scholarship" in their field that they didn't notice, because they were hardly aware of what they were reading.

Either explanation, it seems to me, gives a real sense of how the scholarly profession actually values "research", which is not at all. It's a way to go through the motions, and in fact a way to claim "well, these philistines in the web who say we only spend a few hours a day in the classroom, they don't take into consideration all the research we're required to do. . ." blah blah blah.

Blah blah blah. I'll believe the opposite when some scholars begin to use their much-vaunted "academic freedom" to challenge what appears to be rampant plagiarism and fraud among their colleagues.

"It's Just Like Sports or Acting or Music or. . ."

I see with some frequency the argument, always from tenured faculty, that to say there's something unfair about the academic economy if it overproduces PhDs is wrong, since there's no difference between the pyramidal food chain in academics and the same pyramid you see in sports, acting, music, art, and so forth. In other words, Hollywood (say) is full of wannabes. Only a few of those wannabes turn into Humphrey Bogart or Meryl Streep or Brian Dennehy. Thus, there are thousands of adjuncts, tens of thousands of TAs, and if the great majority never make it to tenure, that's no different from the minor league ball players who never become Joe DiMaggio.

Well, first, I can see why your average tenured prof would like this argument. It makes him or her into Maggie Smith or Ted Williams or Van Cliburn or Mary Cassatt or Ernest Hemingway. In fact, this is a real problem I see with this way of thinking. Nobody who says this is even remotely at the top of a talent-based pyramid. Nor is any of their colleagues, save only the Nobelist three states over. The fact that you got tenure, Prof. Throckmorton, makes you neither Leonardo DiCaprio nor Bruce Willis. You are instead an ordinary working stiff with pretensions beyond your station. No professor who hasn't shaken hands with the King of Sweden rises remotely to the merit of a top athlete or artist, and much as you'd like to think so, tenure isn't equivalent recognition. So let's get that out of the way.

Next, how do the top athletes and artists earn their money? Basically, with some version of box office. They sell movie or theatre or concert or sports event tickets. They sell DVDs. They sell books. They sell paintings at the gallery. Right? You may say that Frieda D. Crickles, Associate Professor of Music at State, plays concerts as well, and has six CDs -- and Anthony Bluebell, an adjunct in the Art Department, has his paintings at the Hasenpfeffer Gallery, where one went for $1000 just last week.

Sorry. These are not people making serious money off their talent. At best, they're amateurs picking up a few spare bucks here and there, maybe even wangling a visit to Des Moines over the break, but they are professors, teaching classes and keeping office hours to put food on the table. So let's get that one out of the way, too. The fact is that if you are at the top of an artistic/athletic pyramid, you're earning money based exclusively on your talent. Mozart died poor, but he died a composer. The source of the income is important, because it says a lot about what's really happening economically.

Hollywood was full of extras, wannabes, journeymen, stagehands, what-have-you in 1943, but Humphrey Bogart would have made Casablanca with or without the numbers lower down on the pyramid. He made the film, and made his money, because people were willing to pay to see it. This is a key difference between a star and a professor, because a professor doesn't make money that way.

A professor makes money via a cut the university gives her from tuition. At the lower levels, this isn't too much different from the film business: it's based in large part on box office. If Prof. Throckmorton teaches the sophomore survey, he gets what in effect is a straight cut from tuition. We know this, because if not enough students sign up, the dean will cancel the course (as has happened to Throckmorton more than once, I'm sorry to say). If his class doesn't make enrollment, then the chairman has to re-jigger things so Throckmorton will get a class to teach, and thus get paid. Hollywood doesn't work that way; if not enough people pay to see Joe Blow, the studio can't rejigger things to make people who thought they were getting Humphrey Bogart pay to see Joe Blow instead (an understudy goes on if the star is sick, not if the star kills the show).

But this model applies to undergraduate courses. The higher a professor is on the scale, the more graduate students or research assistants the professor has. These bring money to the department and the professor via a completely different, more indirect model. Graduate students mostly don't pay their own tuition; instead, they're "funded", either by being TAs, via some type of fellowship money, or via a research grant. The funding pays them subsistence wages while they're in graduate school, but more important to their department, the funding also pays their graduate tuition, which is what pays the professor's salary. No funding, no students, no income, no graduate courses, no graduate professors.

So at the graduate level, the most prestigious, the box office model starts to break down. The people who buy tickets to The Big Sleep don't work for the studio and don't owe Bogey a thing. They're taxi drivers, waitresses, short-order cooks, dogcatchers, shoe salesmen, department store managers, housewives, city councilmen, whatever. They pay to see Bogey because they would rather do that with the money than anythiing else right then.

The graduate students are different. They'll lose their jobs unless they enroll in the graduate courses taught by Prof. Throckmorton and his colleagues. It would be as if the people who went to see Bogart all worked for MGM, and part of their pay was in film ticket credits. They could go see Bogart or some other MGM star, but they had to see one of them every night, and if they didn't, they'd be fired. There's a very big difference here. Also, if Bogart were like Throckmorton (and it's in the student course guide that you can get a better grade by telling Throckmorton who he reminds you of), Bogart would be making a good part of his money off the captive audience of studio employees, not from ticket sales to the general public.

And graduate school needs the low-paid workers. They justify grant or subsidy or fellowship money, or they bring in tuition money by teaching high-margin lower-division courses. That "profit" from the lower-division courses goes via the university's accounting system to pay the professors who teach low-enrollment graduate seminars. If the "profit" weren't there, the professors wouldn't get paid. As the Physics presentation I quoted below says, the staffing levels of TAs and RAs reflect the income needs and opportunities of the department, not the market for PhDs. These two factors are unrelated, so the number of graduate students is greater than the PhD job market can absorb, and there's no feedback mechanism to regulate graduate student admissions to match the market for PhDs.

So if the academic labor market economy doesn't really resemble Hollywood or major league sports, what does it resemble? A much better parallel, I think, is multi-level marketing or pyramid sales schemes. A Hollywood star or a concert performer sells a product. A graduate program doesn't sell a product. Instead, it sells franchises to graduate students. After a certain number of years working at low-wage internal jobs, the graduate students are entitled to become franchisees themselves and receive PhDs.

The parallel to pyramid schemes isn't exact, but according to this site:

The key identifiers of a pyramid scheme are:

1. A highly excited sales pitch
   
2. Vaguely phrased promises of limitless income potential
   
3. No product, or a product being sold at a price ridiculously in excess of its real market value.
   
4. An income stream that chiefly depends on the commissions earned by enrolling new members or the purchase by members of products for their own use rather than sales to customers who are not participants in the scheme.
   
5. A tendency for only the early investors/joiners to make any real income.
   

The one element that's missing in our parallel is the "highly excited sales pitch", though recruitment for graduate programs is probably more effective the way it's really done in universities, rather than the way pyramid sales schemes do it at the Holiday Inn: naive teenagers see their professors and their frequent sanctimonious posturing in front of the classroom as admirable. They want to be like them, which is to say, superior to those who are driven by mere commercial greed. They also can't help but see the professors' minimal work schedules and hear talk of "tenure", which combine to sound like a very good deal. The result, it seems to me, can be construed as a sales pitch and a very convincing suggestion that there's real "income" potential here, which is seen as a lifetime sinecure, with salary sufficient to drive a Volvo or Saab, in an arcadian environment. Who wouldn't, at age 20 or so, consider such a possibility?

So then we get to the "product", which is nothing but the incestuous ability to stand in front of a class a few hours a day, just like the professors do. In many cases, the "product" is in fact tacitly recognized as non-existent: look at the extent to which plagiarism and cheating are acknowledged to take place, widespread among students, increasingly identified even among faculty. Like it or not, Bogart and DiMaggio had a product. Throckmorton does not.

But insofar as Throckmorton teaches mainly graduate students, his income stream depends on internal sales of the non-existent or overpriced "product", graduate students paying him via the rake off their funding for their tuition, and the payment being for the future right to engage in the same activity as Throckmorton, which is making money off internal sales of the "product". We know that, embarrassing to Throckmorton, when he teaches undergraduate courses that aren't required for the major, sometimes they don't make enrollment. As a result, he must concentrate on internal franchise sales, not on external sales of product.

Finally, we get to the biggest parallel to pyramid sales schemes: the profits go to the early investors. This is, in fact, becoming more literally true in the academic labor model. When mandatory retirement was eliminated, something mentioned in the Penn State discussion of PhD oversupply below, the average age of tenured faculty rose by a dozen years over the following decade, and new tenure-track openings fell below replacement rate. In other words, if you've wangled your way into tenure, you become an "early investor", and you can spend the rest of your career receiving income from the downstream franchise holders, or graduate students. Every estimate says that well under half of these students will make any real income from the scheme; the others will either have to work at subsistence pay selling product as adjuncts, or they will drop out of the scheme, nursing their losses.

Let me repeat the big difference between Hollywood, baseball, and academic labor: Humphrey Bogart and Joe DiMaggio rise to the top of the pyramid selling product. Prof. Throckmorton rises to the top of a different kind of pyramid selling franchises, not product. And Bogey and Joltin' Joe didn't get rich by keeping other folks poor. Throckmorton does. He makes the lease payment on his Saab entirely on income derived from tuition credits paid by low-wage downstream franchisees, many of whom are working based on an illusory expectation of later profits, which are arithmetically impossible. If Throckmorton were selling soap that way instead of graduate degrees, he'd be in prison.

Gaining tenure is just like Hollywood? Don't make me laugh.

The Circle Jerk

I was amused to see Conscientious Objector refer to the "circle jerk that is the discussion of John Bruce's posts on academia". I'm definitely starting to get the feeling things are going around in circles (but without the presumptive reward you're supposed to get from such an exercise), though as CO says in the comment to his post, "It's too much to ask commenters to be convinced; it's enough to ask them to take you seriously." Fair enough.

But here's my problem with Jim Hu: he's making things up, as far as I can see, as he goes along. The other day, I quoted him thus: "For all the complaints about PhDs, there is not an oversupply of professor-grade PhDs. . .". So I went and found a couple of sites that flat out said there was an overproduction of PhDs and gave numbers that suggested it very strongly: ratios of PhDs (not ABDs, not wannabes of any other sort, but PhDs) in both Physics and English produced each year in ratios that Jim himself characterizes as 2.5 to 1 for available tenure-track jobs. As both sites indicate, the 150 new PhDs who don't get the 100 tenure track jobs in their field each year (plus overhang from previous years) don't just go away; they keep re-entering the job market in subsequent years, resulting in an actual pool of far more than 250 applicants for each 100 openings. This phenomenon is generally acknowledged and discussed on the sites I linked in my last post, as well as (astonishingly) the sites Jim says don't support my points.

So what's Jim's reply? He now says he wasn't saying "there is not an oversupply of professor-grade PhDs" [quote corrected to insert "professor-grade", per comment below, an inadvertency]. He says (in the comment to my last post) that he was claiming "that there are local shortages of qualified applicants for faculty positions at many universities." Now, just a minute. I referred in good faith to Jim's absolute assertion that there is not an oversupply of professor-grade PhDs [paraphrase corrected, as above]. In the passage I quoted, Jim didn't say anything about local shortages. He said absolutely that "the 200 applicants applying for each tenure-track position are heavily overlapping, and there are dozens of positions out there for the PhDs who aren't restricting their job hunting to small subsets of the schools on the two coasts." He clearly referred to what he felt was the situation in the national market, referring to two coasts and places in between, making the assertion that the 200 applicants for each job "are heavily overlapping". I quoted statistics that support what is a generally recognized position, that there are far more PhDs, professor-grade or what-have-you [added in response to Jim's comment], on the job market than can remotely get tenure track jobs, now or in the future, since each year the extra PhDs take adjunct or postdoctoral jobs, equivalent new cohorts of excess PhDs join them.

Jim may want to insist that this PhD overhang consists entirely of unqualified people, but I simply find that assertion unbelievable. I think Conscientious Objector has the right of it when he attributes the highly uneven results of the hiring process to its lottery-like nature. Neither he nor I is unique in this observation. On the other hand, to insist that the 150 new PhDs each year, plus adjunct/postdoctoral overhang, who aren't hired for each 100 tenure-track openings are uniformly unqualified is novel, unique, and counterintuitive. The numerous descriptions one reads of job-seekers' experiences each year at meetings like the MLA and AHA would suggest that the hiring process is anything but systematic and merit-based. I think it's incumbent on Jim to provide more support for this position than anecdotal evidence of "turkeys".

At this point, I think Jim is trying to change what he said after the fact. I can only answer what Jim writes. I can't allow for what Jim might have meant to say but didn't. Insofar as Jim continues to argue this way, I'm not going to reply to his points, but I'm going to continue discussing academic culture.

UPDATE: The American Polite Blogging Association has received two specific allegations of "snarkiness" against John Bruce, one in a comment, the other in an actual blog post. Let it be known that the American Polite Blogging Association, in company with other professional groups, strongly opposes snarkiness. However, like other professional groups, we receive so many allegations of so-called "snarkiness" that we are unable to deliver formal determinations that snarking has taken place within a reasonable time frame. Prof. Hu should be assured that the allegations will be taken very, very seriously, reviewed, and if necessary, a three-person panel will be appointed to determine if those allegations of snarkiness represent a violation of established blog canons of professional ethics. The APBA is clearly on record as being shocked -- shocked -- at any blogger resorting to snarkiness. If the allegations do in fact result in the appointment of a three-person panel, we expect that panel to deliver its results in due course. Given our current backlog, it will be in the year 2253.

PhD Oversupply

I stirred up a hornet's nest the other day with my partial bill of particulars against academic culture, but what's surprised me is the reaction I've had to what I thought was the easy pickin' on the list: PhD overproduction. This may be the aftereffect of the discussions that took place a year ago on the old Invisible Adjunct blog. In fact, when IA stopped blogging, I decided the important points about academic life had all been made, and I started telling stories about DDT and Cadovra.

I was all wet. Faculties, even a year after IA explained it all, appear to be full of agnostics on the subject of PhD overproduction. Most recently, Jim Hu says, first, there's no such thing as an oversupply (it's just the new PhDs are so picky they'll only work at Hopkins or UCLA),

For all the complaints about PhDs, there is not an oversupply of professor-grade PhDs, and John's other complaints reflect that more than they reflect some willful hiring of bad teachers who do useless research. Yes, there are often a couple of hundred applicants for each tenure-track position, and the competition can be fierce for the most attractive jobs. But the 200 applicants applying for each tenure-track position are heavily overlapping, and there are dozens of positions out there for the PhDs who aren't restricting their job hunting to small subsets of the schools on the two coasts.

Second, if the oversupply exists (though it really doesn't, it's just the grad students are all so picky), it's the fault of the dummies that sign up for graduate work.

But by and large the notion that academics could hide the math from PhD-worthy grad students is laughable. The numbers just don't add up. Unless you get a deal like Ward Churchill's, a terminal degree is necessary to get a faculty job, but it's not sufficient. In the abstract, every incoming grad student must know this. The odds are not in your favor, just as the odds are not good that a talented high school pitcher will get that big major league contract someday. But some do, and if you don't play your odds drop from slim to none.

But not only are the grad students dummies and completely unrealistic about their prospects, they actually aren't even worth hiring:

Every year, there are faculty searches that do not hire anyone because the acceptable candidates have taken positions elsewhere.

Humm, Jim -- might that be because they only wanted top-5 PhDs, and those went to Hopkins and UCLA, and the searches that didn't get them were such snobs they didn't want to take someone else? Sure sounds like it to me. But let's get to the meat of the problem, the numbers. What strikes me about Jim's post is that it doesn't go to any external sources for numbers. If the numbers were on his side, it would be the easiest thing in the world for Jim to say something like, "I appreciate John's interest in this problem, but let's look at what really happens. Total PhD production in the US each year is approximately 5,000 [I made that up]. Total tenure-track job openings each year, according to the Unofficial Blogger Source For Bogus Statistics, are approximately 4,800. Allowing for those who may seek a PhD for non-academic reasons, and those who simply don't meet the standards of the job market, there should be ample tenure-track positions available for anyone who wants one. Sorry, John, that's how it is."

The trouble is, that's not what Jim ever says. While, as I've shown below, few bloggers since Invisible Adjunct have looked closely at the PhD overproduction problem, that doesn't mean there's not a lot of other material available on the web. I'm just going to take some examples of numbers I find in various sites near the top of my Google results (as I said, if you leave blogs out of the search parameters, you get many, many more hits). Here's a 1996 analysis of what happens in the PhD job market for Physics:

So the number of faculty slots for faculty at major research universities is around 160 (assuming foreign PhDs were specially hired for their positions, meaning those jobs weren't open to competition). The total number of slots in the above is about 350, which is about 1/4 US PhD production.

But there's additional competition by several years' worth of PhDs in postdoc holding patterns, so the odds dwindle, especially since new PhDs have less experience than the postdocs.

Meanwhile, earlier employent predictions (the so-called "science shortage") have not materialized, as reflected in the average age of US university physics departments (52 in 1989 vs. 41 in 1974). This is due to the end of mandatory retirement and the fact that faculty who do retire are not always replaced on a 1-1 basis.

Other pressures come from PhDs coming from corporations as a result of downsizing (particularly in basic research), and some from engineering PhDs. So projected needs are about 200 at PhD universities, 200 in non-PhD universities, 200 (or less) in national labs, and decreasing numbers in industry.

OVERPRODUCTION:

That's 600 or so jobs for 1400 people.

It is a fact of instituional life that university departments and researchers are rewarded for producing PhDs, without regard for whether this "product" is needed.

And this is a discussion of the problem in Physics, a scientific field where the conventional wisdom has it that new PhDs have a better chance in the job market. Let's look at a much-discussed article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by the pseudonymous Thomas Hart Benton:

Last year, the total number of advertised jobs in English dropped from 983 to 792, and only about half of those jobs are on the tenure track. Remember that the 977 doctorates produced in 2000-2001 will have to compete with hundreds of job-seekers from previous years, to say nothing of all the adjunct faculty members who are looking for full-time, tenure-track work.

The Modern Language Association's own data -- very conservative and upbeat in my opinion -- indicate that only about one in five newly-admitted graduate students in English will eventually become tenure-track professors.

I think it's unfair to the folks who do seriously look for academic work to say they're too picky to take the jobs available. That's not what easy-to-find numbers say, Jim. When I went on the PhD job market, I sent, as instructed by my graduate advisors, hundreds of vitas and cover letters all over the country. I had no illusions of going to Hopkins, and I suspect few ever do. I knew no one who had any such illusions in grad school. I think it's also unfair to the people looking for work in this kind of job market to suggest the ones that don't get tenure track jobs aren't any good.

The only way you could possibly say that would be to imply that PhD programs nationwide are pumping people through their programs -- based on these real-world numbers, huge percentages, maybe 60 percent (Physics) or 80 percent (English) -- of people who simply aren't capable of doing the work they're trained for. If you say that (which is the only conclusion I think you can draw from numbers like these, if your theory is correct), then you've got to ask why graduate programs are wasting the time they must be, on scores of thousands of people who'd be better off flipping burgers. You'd still be looking at an enormous problem of some kind, even if every word Jim Hu says is correct. So I challenge Jim to explain this discrepancy -- I'll grant, for the sake of argument, that the tenure track hiring process as he describes it selects 95 percent philosopher-kings. Why would they, who've done such an outstanding job selecting their own peers, fail so terribly in selecting grad students?

The fact of the matter is that graduate programs are hugely oversubscribed. Before I saw the figures on Physics, I would have been more likely to say "graduate programs in the humanities". You can certainly say, as you do, that many who go to grad school should have had these numbers in mind before they decided to go. But what if, say later this spring, several thousand prospective grad students suddenly got smart and said, "you know, the railroads are hiring assistant conductors. It's hard, healthy outdoor work for dedicated folks who don't mind getting their hands a little dirty. Sounds better to me than Pope and Dryden, huh?"

Let's say eight or nine thousand prospective grad students said thanks but no thanks in May or June and went railroading, and as a result, national PhD production began to fall to simple replacement level. That would be ideal to your way of thinking, right? The dummies would be finding work they liked, and the job market could stabilize (though in your argument, there actually isn't a problem there).

In fact, the system has necessary use for the number of grad students it takes in. As the Penn State discussion on the Physics job market says,

This is analogous to the "Tragedy of the Commons" (after Garrett Hardin's article (_Science_ 162:1243 (1968)) where the common grazing land in England was overgrazed. Suppose that the farmers using the land can sustain a herd of 10 cows each, and that the farmers are paid per cow (for meat or milk production (proportional to number of cows)). Then one farmer realizes he can make more money by adding an 11th or 12th cow, and if there are 10 farmers an increase of 1 or 2 % won't hurt much. When every farmer comes to that conclusion, the number of cows is increased by 10-20% (or more) and the land is ruined by overgrazing.

The analogy is in the researcher who gets another grant and gets another RA or two (it can't hurt), multiplied by every department.

Graduate students are "hired" (admitted) to an extent on how many RAs and TAs are needed to staff departmental needs. Most (or all) are capable of doing the work, so the number of PhDs produced is determined more by the number of thse kinds of positions than by the demand for PhDs at the other end of the process.

This decoupling means there is very little feedback for self-correction in the process.

If the number of grad students who enrolled next fall suddenly fell to meet the likely future PhD job openings, how many graduate programs would be hurting? How many courses in English 586, Body Image and Proto-Feminist Discontent in Jacobean Tragedy, wouldn't make enrollment? How many of those associate profs would be teaching three sections of bonehead English instead?

The Penn State discussion uses the "Tragedy of the Commons" example; in last year's Invisible Adjunct discussions, I thought another parallel was to multi-level marketing (MLM). MLM schemes pay off a small number of early investors by selling options in the scheme to later investors, using calculations of the later investors' potential profits that are arithmetically impossible. When the later investors find that their investments don't pay off, the early investors, who've meantime pocketed that money, tell the later investors their investments didn't pay off because they didn't work hard enough, didn't think positively enough, didn't have enough faith, whatever.

Psychology is such that many people bilked in such a scheme will accept that explanation. Jim is partly correct in saying people should be on their guard against MLM schemes, but that doesn't make it right to try to take people's money in one. The grad school scheme is similar, except that instead of taking a cash investment up front, it relieves most grad students of the opportunity costs lost from not choosing a better career in the first place, and it relieves them of several years spent at low-wage work in anticipation that the investment would later pay off in a better job.

Every professor at a research university has a vested interest, and is complicit, in this system that has serious parallels to multi-level marketing schemes. This is the cause of the soul-searching Erin O'Connor went through when she left Penn last year, as far as I can interpret the statements she made on her blog at the time. As she said,

That means that it is not only easy for tenured academics to theorize the problem of academic labor (they risk nothing by doing so, and actually gain academic street cred by showing that they understand and deplore the system that has been good to them), but also strangely conservative (as long as it all stays at the level of theory, nothing changes). . . . How many would actually stir themselves to bring about actual change? How many would be willing to give up their own tenure, or even simply to teach more, if these things were necessary to reform the system?

I'm not sure if everyone has to take her solution to the problem (and I'm still not sure if her decision is final; as she said, "Penn gave me the option of returning to my university teaching job in a year's time," an option she says she took), and it's odd that Critical Mass has been on test pattern lately, but the moral issues demand a serious thinking-through, it seems to me. It's one reason I'm glad I don't have that particular set of choices.

UPDATE: There are a couple more replies on Jim Hu's site, which I'll get to later today. For now, I share Steve M.'s puzzelement in the comments here, that Jim appears to take a small part of my argument, even in a single post, and feels he's refuted the whole thing, even when I've granted exactly what Jim feels he's argued. It also bothers me that Jim claims he can't find statistics that match mine, but when I go to the link he gives me, I find detailed statistics saying unemployement is rising among math PhDs, and job prospects are terrible. I could just as easily add that link to my post here on Physics and English, but Jim thinks it doesn't show exactly what he wants to see on who wasn't hired for exactly what reason. I hate to say this, but this is starting to sound like what I've come to expect from tenured faculty in the public forum.

You, Noam Chomsky

My faith in the Web is confirmed.

More Churchill Plagiarism

Apropos of two subjects I've been writing about here, the Rocky Mountain News carries a new Churchill plagiarism allegation this morning (via Pirateballerina.com) (ellipsis in original):

Officials at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia sent CU an internal 1997 report detailing allegations about an article Churchill wrote.

"The article . . . is, in the opinion of our legal counsel, plagiarism," Dalhousie spokesman Charles Crosby said in summarizing the report's findings.

This is the second formal academic allegation of plagiarism against Churchill; the first, which I've discussed below, is by John LaVelle. But in addition,

Dalhousie began an investigation after professor Fay G. Cohen complained that Churchill used her research and writing in an essay without her permission and without giving her credit. Although the investigation substantiated her allegations, Cohen didn't pursue the matter because she felt threatened by Churchill, Crosby said.

Crosby said Cohen told Dalhousie officials in 1997 that Churchill had called her in the middle of the night and said, "I'll get you for this."

Cohen still declines to talk publicly about her experience with Churchill, but she agreed the Dalhousie report could be shared with CU officials, Crosby said, because "whatever concerns she may have about her safety are outweighed by the importance she attaches to this information getting out there."

Academic freedom indeed. As I've been saying, my working hypothesis that Churchill is a psychopath would predict more instances of plagiarism and criminal behavior, such as violent threats, coming to light. The question that stays in my mind is how academic culture allowed this to continue. We're for freedom, open debate, tolerance, all that stuff, except we sorta-kinda have these black shirts that we keep enabling, and we always look the other way when they get out of line. I have a feeling that more CU administrators will be gone before much longer.

UPDATE: This story says a buyout deal between CU and Churchill is stalled due to the new allegations. Another source I saw estimated the buyout in the $300-400,000 range, which would be roughly the discounted present value of his salary until retirement, something I predicted earlier. I'm a little puzzled that allegations of plagiarism and violent threats would stall negotiations now, though, since these contain nothing new that they couldn't have nailed him over with earlier information.

Faculty Plagiarism

One of the points I raised in yesterday's post on the less well-covered problems in academic culture is the issue of faculty plagiarism. This came up in a Chronicle of Higher Education article last December, entitled "Four Academic Plagiarists You've Never Heard Of: How Many More Are Out There?"

The article, which came out before the Ward Churchill controversy, is actually a bombshell:

While this article delves into a few cases we uncovered, our reporting suggests that what we found is not exceptional. Indeed, an editor at History News Network receives so many tips about purported plagiarism that he now investigates only those involving well-known scholars. A professor at Texas A&M International [sic] University was bombarded with hundreds of e-mail messages after writing about being plagiarized. Many of them were from graduate students and professors who believed that they, too, had been victims.

To continue with the dialogue that began yesterday about what academic blogs actually cover, as far as I know, this story was picked up only by University Diaries, in this post and one other. That, in fact, is where I found the reference. It's a fun blog, but not one of the academic biggies -- it gets slightly fewer links from other blogs than I have on technorati.com (and I don't regard myself as a full-time academic blog), but while it's only recently begun to log its statistics, it seems to have around three times my traffic (that is to say, not exceptional). I've also found a resource called The Plagiarism Blog, but as far as I've been able to see so far, it simply prints excerpts from articles on plagiarism from the web and media sources without other comment. According to technorati.com, it has only one link from another blog, and no traffic statistics are available (It now has two links; I've added it to my blogroll).

But let's look at the Chronicle story. The piece focuses on George O. Carney, until a few weeks ago a Regents Professor at Oklahoma State University, who is now known to have plagiarized freely throughout his career, and, in spite of incidents and warning signs in many ways equivalent to what we see with Ward Churchill, was allowed to continue. Here is just one example of what the Chronicle piece cites:

Last year the fourth edition of The Sounds of People and Places, a book on the geography of American music, was published by Rowman & Littlefield. Mr. Carney edited the book and contributed five essays. A blurb on the back cover dubs the professor "American geography's leading musicologist."

In the book, American geography's leading musicologist steals from no fewer than three authors. He even takes the very first sentence of his essay "Music and Place" from an essay a decade earlier by Salvatore J. Natoli, the former director of publications for the National Council for the Social Studies.

Mr. Carney doesn't stop there. On the following page, he takes more than 350 words from an introductory-geography textbook. Later in the same essay, along with copying still more sentences from Mr. Natoli, Mr. Carney pilfers a good-size paragraph from "Place and the Novelist," a 1980 essay by D.C.D. Pocock, then a senior lecturer at the University of Durham, in England.

The sources of the verbatim quotes were neither footnoted nor listed in the bibliography. The story continues through discovery, but without penalty:

His long list of literary transgressions is troubling enough, but even more worrisome is his ability to get away with it for so long. The closest he has ever come to getting caught was when, in 1994, he lifted a couple of sentences from an essay by William W. Savage Jr., a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma. Mr. Savage complained to the editor of The Chronicles of Oklahoma, the journal that had published Mr. Carney's work. Mr. Carney wrote a letter, published in a subsequent issue, apologizing for the "oversight."

But Mr. Carney again plagiarized the very same two sentences in the very same journal in 2001. This time there was no public contrition, although he did write a personal apology to Mr. Savage at the request of the journal's editor. "It is not my intent to plagiarize research or wording from other authors," he wrote.

University Diaries then cites an AP story that appeared just after the Chronicle story:

OSU spokesman Nestor Gonzales said the case was turned over to Stephen McKeever, vice president of research, who has assembled a three-member committee to examine the allegations.

McKeever wouldn't comment on the investigation or say when it may be finished. Carney, a regents professor, is continuing to serve as a professor and is scheduled to teach three classes next semester.

"These are only allegations contained in a newspaper article," said Gonzales."

However, University Diaries had no other update. I was able, via Google, to find the resolution. In late February, according to The Daily O'Collegian, Carney

. . . received a letter from the vice president of research and technology transfer Feb. 12 informing him that the university had determined he had committed plagiarism, . . . The letter followed an investigation by a three-professor committee into allegations that first appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education in December. The university will bar Carney from teaching or advising students and remove his title of regents professor, according to the AP.

I suspect that only the publicity from the Chronicle piece drove OSU to these measures. The article covers three other cases. Googling the name of Neil Winn, another offender, with "plagiarism" brings up no similar disposition. The University of Leeds, where Winn still teaches, told the Chronicle that Winn had been disciplined, but made no other comment. Benson Tong, another plagiarist covered in the story, lost his bid for tenure at Wichita State University when his victim contacted his department about the plagiarism, but he subsequently got a job at Gallaudet College, where his new department was unaware of the previous charges and has apparently taken no action against him. Tong's victim also referred the case to the American Historical Association.

The process was difficult and tiresome, just as some of her colleagues had predicted. In the end, the historical association ruled in her favor, finding that Mr. Tong "appears to have borrowed most of his research and overall analytical framework from Ms. Wu's work without sufficiently indicating the extent of his indebtedness." The group concluded that Mr. Tong had indeed committed plagiarism. Not long after, the association stopped investigating plagiarism cases, saying it was not a good use of its resources.

Donald Cuccioletta, the fourth example, was terminated as an adjunct by the University of Quebec, though he apparently continued to teach at SUNY Plattsburgh, where he was also an adjunct, though he was removed from an administrative post there two years after the plagiarism allegations first surfaced.

It's plain that, as with a number of prominent recent cases of academic misconduct, it requires national publicity and the threat of near-cataclysmic repercussions to the institutions involved for them to act on allegations, even, as in cases of plagiarism and academic fraud, when the evidence couldn't be much clearer. At the same time, it's a major professional risk and distraction for the victims to bring charges.

As I said in my partial bill of particulars the other day, it appears that professional bodies, in this story the American Historical Association and the International Studies Association, are now abandoning their responsibility to enforce professional canons. Someone else, maybe the publishers, maybe the departments, maybe the institutions, will have to investigate and punish plagiarism, but the professional bodies don't have the time or the staff. This, apparently, is because the problem is so big and its potential impact so devastating: if the History News Network doesn't know what to do with the volume of faculty plagiarism allegations it gets, that's worth thinking about.

How many books and articles submitted in support of job or tenure applications have been plagiarized? Here, it seems to me, is another area where the academic profession is devaluing its own product. Marc Moffett, an Assistant Professor at the University of Wyoming, has been prompting me in recent comments to acknowledge that academic problems are no worse than those, say, of the Catholic Church or the US business community in the wake of Enron. My reply would have to be that in both those cases, the extent of the problem has come to light, and the problems have been examined at length in the legal system and the media.

The church, the SEC, and the legislative process have recognized them and have adopted measures like the Sarbanes Oxley Act, which I mentioned the other day. In fact, it appears that Sarbanes Oxley led to Boeing's enforcement of its ethics policy, firing an otherwise successful CEO. In addition, those responsible for the worst abuses in both the church and business corruption have received due process (or are receiving it) and have been, or will be, held as fully accountable as they can be. Confer the ex-priests now doing the hardest of hard time as child molesters, one already killed by fellow inmates. Confer Martha Stewart and a number of other prominent figures in the corporate scandals. Ward Churchill, in contrast, will likely walk away counting his money; we haven't even started to think about what other prominent scholars may have stolen their reputations, and Doris Kearns Goodwin is still on Harvard's Board of Overseers.

The university system hasn't even taken the first step, which is to acknowledge that it has a major problem with faculty plagiarism -- so big that by their own admission, the professional bodies can't address it. This would be the equivalent of the Archdiocese of Boston saying sorry, we'd like to help you with your complaint about Father Flanigan, but we get so many like it that we don't have time. Bad as they were, they never quite got to that point. This apparent denial is one reason I'm interested in how few blogs from academics appear to address in any serious way the problems I listed the other day -- it's an indication of how unaware those working in the institutions are of their problems.

So, What Are Academic Blogs Talking About, Anyhow?

Wolfangel poses a challenge to my last post in the comment, where I say, following my partial bill of particulars against academic culture, "most blogs that identify themselves as academic or educational blogs don't have much to say on these matters." She replies, "To argue that these topics do not come up on academic blogs is strange, since many of them come up quite a bit." She says, though, that there are too many to link.

Well, just for fun, I googled "'PhD overproduction' blog" and got this result, three entries, none current. I googled "adjunct 'work force' exploitation blog" and got this result, a little better, 50 entries total, though not much for a google search.

For comparison, going by my assumption that most academic bloggers actually talk more about the weather (or its equivalent) than most other things, I googled "campus trees weather blog" and got this result, close to 100,000 hits. I do try to avoid running off at the mouth here, I hate it when other people do, and I acknowledge that nobody's perfect, including me. I seriously considered modifying my post to accommodate Wolfangel's concerns, but to tell the truth, I now think I've provided enough support for my assertion that I don't feel the need to qualify it. Naturally, my google search results may not match results from another combination of words. Others may still disagree, and I'll be happy to consider their points.

More on some of the points I've raised tomorrow, assuming Blogger will permit this.

There's More To The Critique of Academic Culture Than Tenure

I've spent some time lately talking about tenure, partly because the Ward Churchill case has raised the visibility of the institution in recent public discussion. However, as I've said here, the institution is dying, with most estimates saying that a majority of faculty positions in universities now are not tenure-track. As a result, while tenure is interesting as a perspective on a dying way of life, perhaps in the same way that the antebellum South is interesting, I think there are other reasons to criticize academic culture. Note that I'm leaving two issues off my list, the political party affiliation of the faculty and speech codes, mostly because I don't think they're very interesting. I will leave those to David Horowitz and FIRE. They're distractions from many other problem areas that we need to bring to public attention. These include:

• Extravagant overproduction of PhDs in non-technical fields. This is a serious social problem, since young workers are being encouraged to spend six or eight years training for non-existent jobs, while their hypertrophied scholarly skills are not easily transferrable to other occupations.
  
• The related exploitation of the contingent job market. PhDs unable to find tenure-track jobs are forced to work at subsistence pay, semester to semester, with no benefits. Meanwhile, the university faculty and administrators who perpetuate this situation, certainly as bad as any 19th century robber baron could dream up, denounce mainstream American culture as callous and exploitive
  
• The tolerance and perpetuation of intellectual shoddiness, both in traditional departments and in new programs. Intellectual shantytowns given respectability by the academy include Frazerian "Myth and Ritual" studies, "Evolutionary Psychology", radical behaviorism, Chomskyan linguistics, "Postmodernism", and so forth. The amount of free discussion within the academy on the merits of such pseudo-fields varies enormously. At minimum, professors need to take their commitment to academic freedom seriously enough to be able to question strenuously the continued claims of these fields to intellectual respectability
  
• The widespread tolerance of cheating by undergraduates and the less publicized and less understood, but apparently prevalent, instances of plagiarism and academic fraud among the faculty
  
• The inability of policies and ethical canons, both in individual universities and across professional disciplines, to deal with abuses and conflicts of interest that are common on campuses, including student-faculty liaisons, nepotism, and other petty corruption. Even where policies exist, they are routinely ignored, as the Ward Churchill case demonstrates
  
• The apparent inability by institutions to set reasonable budgetary priorities focusing on a core instructional mission, combined with frequent scandals resulting from financial mismanagement
  
• The Eurocentrism prevalent in many disciplines, especially in the humanities. By this I mean less a focus on "dead white men" than I do on the idea, prevalent in Europe since the eighteenth century, that the Western Hemisphere is a degenerate place, and European thought and institutions are inherently superior.
  

Tenure is the least of it. I think it's worth pointing out, too, that most blogs that identify themselves as academic or educational blogs don't have much to say on these matters. Tenure will go away by itself. In many of these other areas, the academy doesn't even know it's sick.

Monday's Other Termination

It's hard to say which termination made more news Monday, Elizabeth Hoffman's resignation as President of the University of Colorado, or Harry Stonecipher's firing from Boeing due to an extramarital affair. The Forbes piece here has an interesting take: it's skeptical that Stonecipher's firing marks any new epoch in corporate ethical enforcement, suggesting that many companies have policies against consensual affairs between employees where there is a manager-subordinate relationship, but such policies are often unenforced. Forbes suggests we don't have all the information -- likely not. Nevertheless, the bottom line is that Stonecipher, who by all accounts had been doing well, was fired, with Boeing giving the affair as its public reason.

Forbes, though, has to go back to 1980 and the William Agee-Mary Cunningham affair at Bendix to find a flagrant example where such rules were ignored.

"One case is not a trend," said Ellen Bravo, former executive director of 9to5 National Association of Working Women. "In most cases, the CEO gets away with murder."

Bravo and others pointed to the situation at Bendix in 1980, when CEO Bill Agee came under scrutiny. Agee denied that his relationship with a subordinate, Mary Cunningham, was responsible for the 29-year-old Cunningham's quick elevation to a job as vice president of corporate strategy.

In the Boeing case, of course, the CEO was the one fired (the executive with whom he had the affair hasn't been identifed, so it's hard to say if there was a penalty there). It's worth pointing out that it was the Board that fired Stonecipher, but the Forbes story nevertheless doesn't mention the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a major development since the Agee-Cunningham romance. As Barbara Hackman Franklin recently editorialized on PBS's National Business Report,

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act – known as SOX – came into being two and a half years ago in response to a spate of corporate scandals. It caused a sea change in boardroom expectations. One measure of success: Has director performance improved?

The answer is yes. In the boardrooms where I serve, there have been strong efforts to comply with the new regulatory regime and do even more. Board work now takes more time and more energy.

But two weeks ago there was another bombshell. The outside directors of WorldCom agreed to pay $18 million out of their own pockets to settle a class action lawsuit brought by investors. Enron directors made a similar settlement.

The trial of the Disney Company directors is proceeding before the Delaware Court. If they are found to have breached their fiduciary duty in hiring former president Michael Ovitz and awarding him a large severance package, this could have implications for directors.

Fear of personal liability for enabling breaches of ethical conduct, Franklin suggests, is a powerful motivating factor. I would say that the apparent efficiency and confidentiality of the Boeing investigation -- we knew nothing about it until Stonecipher was fired -- and the fact that the CEO went this time, are major differences between this incident and Agee-Cunningham, which was in the news well before Cunningham left the company.

But I'm also interested in how this episode reflects on the discussion I've had here about academic culture. Corporations frequently have policies, which are at least sometimes enforced, against consensual affairs where there is a conflict of interest. Universities only sometimes have policies against professor-student affairs, even though the conflict here is flagrant. They almost never, I believe, have policies equivalent to corporations on such relationships among administrators, even though the conflicts can involve as much misfeasance as that in a corporation. Department chairs and deans can be married in a university, in spite of the potential for favoritism. It goes without saying that budgetary dollars don't get used as well if a husband-wife team is splitting things up between them, yet this happens with some frequency on campus.

This is another area where the mainstream culture is adjusting to workplace realities, while academic culture appears to be in continued denial.

John Bruce Gets Still More Results

Elizabeth Hoffman resigns as President of the University of Colorado. I said more than a week ago that her vacillating public statements made her look to me like a short-timer. As I've been saying here, the only thing outsiders can really do is press to have the coach fired, rather than try to micromanage, and however this came about, it was the right thing to do. As I've also said, the question is going to be how many others go down with Churchill; the count is now at one.

We Make Tenure Decisions In Part Because of "Fit", Right?

Free Dartmouth takes some exception to my paraphrase of the Dartmouth Government Department chairwonan's explanation for losing faculty in recent years. Timothy Waligore says,

From what I understand, one real problem the government department has had over the past few years is that it has not been able to keep professors who also have partners who are also in academia. Junior hiring is difficult because these partners need to find jobs in Hanover. Academics often fall in love with other academics. I wonder whether Dartmouth departments have tried to pay institutional attention to this problem (rather than deal with on an ad-hoc and neglectful basis).

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been discussing how faculty hiring is done with several academic bloggers, and Michael Drout at Wheaton has been especially helpful. In explaining the lengthy and subjective process by which junior faculty is hired and awarded tenure, Michael says,

The problem is that each institution and department wants to have colleagues that "fit" and that the definition of "fit" changes from place to place. At Wheaton it means a dedication to teaching. At Yale a focus on research and a desire to avoid undergraduate teaching at all costs. At Berkeley it may mean a particular political background, etc. One would like colleges to be intellectually adventurous, but in this end it's a committee decision and thus likely to cater to the lowest common denominator in the committee.

The British system -- in which outside "electors" determine who will get certain professorships -- breaks through that logjam by selecting the "best" person for the job without having to live in the same department as that person. At the high levels in which this system is used, departments are filled with scholars of surpassing excellence (think the Anglo-Saxonists who have recently been at Cambridge).

So from what Michael tells me, I would expect Dartmouth's Government Department hiring committee, which no doubt received some hundreds of applications for its latest junior opening, to winnow these down, based not only on scholarship and dossier, but on subjective qualities like "fit", to a dozen or so whom they interview at the APSA, and then perhaps bring a few finalists to campus. The hiring committee, faced with what must be an embarrassment of riches in its final candidates, naturally is able to apply questions of "fit" throughout the process, and thus, we must assume, eliminate candidates whose preferences or family situations might make living near Hanover a difficult adjustment.

I recall King Banaian discussing just this during a hiring process at St. Cloud State University's Economics department last year. I believe he said that a major consideration in making a hire was that the individual would be coming to live in a small, rural community, and the various factors that emanated from that circumstance would certainly need to be called into play. So naturally, I must expect that Dartmouth's Government Department, a group at the top of its profession, would take all such conditions of "fit" into consideration in making a hire. Naturally, a candidate who appeared to be less limited by having an academic spouse might be a better candidate if no concurrent faculty offer to a spouse seemed possible. Some people, after all, aren't called to marriage. Another might have a spouse whose career interests could better tolerate a move to the Upper Valley. Could such a person be a better "fit" under such circumstances?

I mean, as Michael Drout suggests, we're not in the British system, where a department is told whom to hire without the ability to figure out whether or not they might be a good "fit" for the particular job. Except, of course (and I can only go on what I'm told here), the Dartmouth Government Department hired one or more candidates who, as far as I can see, might have been imposed on them from some government board in the UK, for all the good their "fit" did them in retaining that hire.

I'm back to the question I've been posing, with the tenure system we have, with a committee of wise heads, experienced in the profession, expeerienced in academic life, why do we have such a high error rate?

Timothy Waligore asks, in the context of the Dartmouth alumni trustee petition candidates,

If this is an institutional problem, I don't see the petitioner candidates addressing this issue and trying to solve it.

As I've said, I agree, we have a pair of indistinguishable second-stringers running here, and I've already complained that Zywicki, in particular, as a tenured professor himself, is unlikely to sympathize with measures that might dismantle the system under which he's been successful (insofar as that can be measured). I like them better, of course, than folks who hobnob with the Rockefellers, as some of the "approved" candidates seem to do -- those rich folks know from tenure about as well as Mrs. Heinz Kerry knew from chili, I'll betcha. (Why, by the way, to we find the Left in recent years siding so consistently with Old Money in this way?)

However, the issue is not whether anyone on the Board of Trustees can fix tenure. The issue is whether it's time to fire the leadership when everyone seems to be floundering around this way, over tenure and many other things. If the Government Department has been wasting tenure-track hires with poor choices like this, when the claim for the hiring system is that new hires should be a good "fit", then I would guess this is a symptom of something bigger. Based on my experience in life, I'm predisposed to think this way, and I think even a couple of second-rate knuckleheads are a better bet to do something about the overall problem than people whose connection to the status quo seems to limit their perspectives.

UPDATE: Michael posts in the comment, "We are forbidden from asking about marital status, children, partners, etc.". But then he goes on to explain the very high stakes connected with how the trailing spouse will be affected by the appointment, to the extent that he says candidates might do something like remove a wedding ring prior to the interview in order to influence the outcome. This suggests to me that, while the standard forbidden question, "Does your husband mind if you work?" is clearly a bad idea, the consequences of a bad hire are such that it's incumbent on the committee to find out all it can on a hire to determine "fit". Obviously, the error rate in tenure-track hires depends on far more than what a spouse, if one exists, does for a living -- and my concern is that the error rate is so high from all causes, not just this one.

The results, as we see above and as Michael describes, are too important not to pay careful attention to "fit". It's not against the law to Google finalist candidates (as I understand is frequently done). It's not against the law to take a finalist to the faculty club for a few glasses of sherry and a chat about life. As King Banaian says, you're going to be spending a lot of time with this person in a small town. Is it the case that you'll seriously make a hire without a clue as to marital status, spouse's occupation, and the like? I find this hard to believe. If the senior faculty serving on a new hire committee has the experience some ought to have, then they, along with the human resources department, ought to have a smaller error rate than what we're seeing. This is my point over and over. Whatever individual difficulties may arise, I've got to answer that a tenured faculty member is there partly for the professional experience that will help overcome those difficulties -- and I've got to continue to say that if the hiring process is simply as good as its supporters say it is, it should have an error rate lower than it appears to.

After all, the points supporters of the current system seem to raise are these: (1) the system is good, but it won't change. (2) The apparent high error rate in the system can't be helped. In other words, it's a real good process, because we get to judge a candidate's "fit", except we often can't (either because we're unable, or we aren't allowed to) judge a candidate's "fit". But if that's the case, then why on earth can't we move to a system that's cheaper, if the error rate would be just as high?

Where Do We Go From Here?

Yesterday, via Pirateballerina.com, I found a Denver Post op-ed piece, "What if there were no CU?" by John Andrews. He floats this idea:

What if there were no publicly owned and operated University of Colorado? No state higher-education system at all?

What if CU and the others could go forward as precisely what the University of Denver is now: independent institutions of learning, unencumbered with grumpy taxpayers, a meddlesome legislature, politically elected regents, and layer upon layer of government officials?

Why should diploma factories, any more than car plants, be government-run? If they weren't, everyone concerned might be better off - except for those living large off the present system.

Andrews calls the idea a "modest proposal", so we know he's got his tongue in his cheek here. But he goes on,

Making college possible is a valid public purpose. Owning and running a bunch of colleges may not be. Why not let nonprofit boards of trustees do that - and devote our whole budget to helping needy students pay tuition? If the GI Bill was good enough for the Greatest Generation, isn't it good enough for 21st-century Colorado?

Andrews sees this problem in having the government run universities:

The winnowing of truth from falsehood and the discernment of right from wrong are gravely hindered when Caesar controls the game. Higher education will never be free to be its best until it is free from self-interested political authority.

I don't see this problem at all. As I've said, the product, and the culture, of the US university system is homogeneous. There's no difference between the content of a Political Science class at Berkeley and one at Harvard. I don't think Caesar is doing a thing to control the content of higher education -- it's possible that Caesar isn't doing enough, in the sense that nobody, least of all Caesar, who's footing the bill whether schools are public or private, is asking whether there's an intellectual there there, especially in the humanities and social sciences. (On balance, of ouurse, it's better if Caesar stays out of this question, though someone needs to ask it.)

Andrews's distinction between public and private universities is artificial. The difference between a state school and a private one is the source of the government subsidy. In that sense, privatizing a state school like the University of Colorado might reduce some out-of-pocket state expense on bureaucrats, but the students would continue to get a tuition subsidy from some source, which means that the university faculty, staff, and administration would probably be unaffected by such a move. Athletic recruiting scandals, keg policies, and the like would continue unabated.

The problem isn't a particular state subsidy, and I agree with Andrews that educational subsidies of some sort are a valid public purpose. The problem at this point is the amount of the subsidies and the use to which they're put. The first order of business for improving higher education almost certainly has to be reducing the overall amount of subsidies, since as I've argued here, the subsidies have crossed a threshold where their purpose no longer supports instruction. Instead, both state and federal money, direct grants, tuition support, and student loans, now constitute a pool of unspent resources that simply tempt administrators to dream up new uses for them in adventitious programs like diversity awareness or keg policies. The biggest single step toward education reform will be to find a politically palatable way to reduce the subsidies and make sure that the reduction forces a choice between frivolous programs and core instruction.

In part, we probably won't be able to avoid this kind of a reduction, since economic predictions suggest that the need to fund Medicare and Social Security in coming decades will leave little discretionary income for education. It should also be possible to argue that the current educational infrastructure was built to serve the baby boom generation, and in the decades since that generation left college, the same number of institutions serves, and competes for, a much smaller pool of students. One effect of subsidies has been to avert the lowering of prices that we should have seen in such a situation -- instead, subsidies have driven a remarkable price inflation over the same period. Retrenchment is overdue. It should almost certainly result in the closure of a non-trivial number of schools and graduate programs.

I think this is a necessary public goal, and if constraints on government spending in coming decades are as predicted, it will probably be accomplished simply by the choice that's forced on legislators, who will need to pay for the baby boomers' retirement and medical costs. But I think an important part of the debate will come from students and other interested observers who can make it clear that the government money that's now going into "education" is often not being well spent.

Food Fight!

It appears that a food fight has broken out over the Dartmouth alumni trustee petition candidates, a subject on which I've posted here. Some of the controversy stems from the fact that official and semi-official Dartmouth entities are actively campaigning against the petition candidates, in violation of Dartmouth's own rules against "electioneering" during the campaign. The Daily Dartmouth has editorialized against the candidates, for instance, though I can't entirely disagree with the substance of the editorial:

In last year's election, alumni voted outspoken administration critic and write-in candidate T.J. Rodgers '70 on to the board. Hoping to follow the path Rodgers blazed, Peter Robinson '79 and Todd Zywicki '88 will run as petition candidates for the open seats. While we appreciate the passion for Dartmouth the two have shown, they have done little to distinguish themselves from Rodgers or each other. Instead, it seems both have simply chosen to push the same hot buttons Rodgers pushed last year, but without Rodgers' credentials or overarching vision.

I've said pretty much the same thing here (and don't like the fact that they seem to have rewritten their platform statements from some single source of talknig points that someone else gave them), though I'd rather see them on the Board of Trustees than the other candidates, who seem to be people of very wealthy backgrounds who are more typical of those who serve on non-profit boards.

However, as part of the food fight, we also get to hear from Government department chairwoman Anne Sa'adah. In a long and rambling "guest editorial" in The Daily Dartmouth, she responds in part to allegations that key Government classes at Dartmouth are over-enrolled, discouraging students from the Government major. I've cited this case as a disadvantage of the tenure system here. This is Prof. Sa'adah's response to complaints about the problem from students, and apparently alumni as well:

Senior hiring is always difficult; even junior hiring is increasingly complicated, in part for reasons that people watching children in two-career couples can well imagine. Sometimes the pieces do not fall into place; sometimes we are the ones who get poached. On this question as on others, Asch [a disgruntled alumnus] latches on to an exceptional case and portrays it as the rule. Chairs (of whom I am one) are not being told there is "no money" for world-class hires any more than students are lining up to buy their way into closed courses.

Several of the courses in my department are oversubscribed; many other courses are actually enrolled below their caps. We are working with the Registrar to improve the queuing system; we are also revising our major requirements and improving our system of advising so that students will be better positioned to put together intellectually coherent programs. We would like to see our course count increased; we expect to have to make an argument, we respect the needs of others, and we recognize the complexities involved.

Quick paraphrase: it's very complicated. It's almost as complicated as watching children, ha ha. We've lost out on several offers, and we've lost some of our own faculty to offers from outside. [gee-why?] It's just not fair to complain about oversubscribed classes. And anyhow, even if you can't sign up for a class, we're working with the Registrar to make inconsequential changes to the system. And the problem is not that there's no money. The people who are complaining are completely wrong. And we even have some [unpopular?] classes that still have openings. We're going to change the major requirements so you can use those classes for your major. We do still expect to hire new faculty someday, but we have to share with the other children and play nicely, and it's very complicated.

This woman has a PhD from a major university, and is charged with running one of the most popular departments at an Ivy League school? After reading this, I can't help wondering if the Government Department's staffing problems may stem from problems with the Department's leadership.

If I were foolhardy enough to book long-distance travel on Amtrak, and in consequence found myself asking the conductor, "Wait a minute -- I paid four or five times to ride on Amtrak what I'd pay to fly to Chicago on Southwest, and here I'm riding in a car that smells like s--t. Why does this car smell like s--t?" I could expect an answer not much dfferent from Prof. Sa'adah's reply to disgruntled students and alumni: "Sir, it's very complicated. And it's just not fair to complain that this particular car smells like s--t. We have several other cars on the train that do not smell like s--t. Any report on the web that all the cars smell like s--t is just inaccurate. The baggage car, in fact, smells very clean right now. And we're doing everything we can to try to clean all the cars when we get to Chicago, but frankly, if you've ever had to get three kids in the car and make it to Sunday school on time with them, you can understand our problem. We're trying to get budget to hire more car cleaners. It's all very complicated. Have a nice day, sir."

Prof Sa'adah goes on,

These phenomena are not the product of "Dartmouth's drift" or of Jim Wright's allegedly nefarious leadership. They are the result of profound societal change, driven in part by technological change, which has in turn deeply affected K-12 education. Institutions across the country have been struggling for years to devise solutions that work pedagogically and that are financially feasible.

Whew! We can't handle the enrollment for Government 101 because K-12 education has let us down, or something. This lady, like our hypothetical Amtrak conductor, is a person who is not accountable. This is a major problem. Issues like this, or Ward Churchill, surface at major universities, and it appears to informed observers that they've grown out of all ability for the administrations to handle them. But I also fully recognize Stephen Karlson's point: "Many faculty members take faculty governance seriously and view attempts by department chairmen, deans, presidents and trustees to expand their powers as actions to be viewed with the most serious, and with the most skeptical attentions."

I can visualize my friend Prof. Throckmorton holding forth in the faculty lounge after his eighth sherry: on balance, he's normally against Western Civilization, but if the petition candidates for the Board of Trustees are voted in, this will most certainly be the end of Western Civilization as we know it.

The difficulty I see with trying to put petition candidates on a Board of Trustees is that micromanaging issues like class enrollment or keg policy or faculty hiring is not normally a Board's job. The problem is that the people who are supposed to be doing these jobs aren't doing them. The only thing a Board of Trustees ought to do is fire the President. If that's the objective in putting the two otherwise undistinguished and indistinguishable petition candidates on the Board, then I'm all for it. But nothing in their platform statements suggests that's what they are there for. I can't imagine that they can be very effective at doing anything else.

On matters like this, the Denver Post has the right solution: as it applies to the University of Colorado, it's time to fire the President. There's no sense having the governor, the regents, or the legislature micromanage the situation. (In the case of Dartmouth, by the way, if the Trustees fire James Wright and see Lawrence Summers on the job market at the same time, they should resist the temptation to pick him up at a bargain.) But there are other things interested bystanders can try to accomplish.

The Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility and the Law of Substitution

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), recognized as ". . . the profession's principal strategist for articulating and attempting to enforce the standards of academic freedom and of tenure", is, of course, aware that the rise in tuition isn't going to the faculty. It says,

According to U.S. Department of Education data as well as to data gathered by the national AAUP, the idea that escalating tuition costs are primarily traceable to faculty compensation is without merit. More money is being funneled into the expansion of administrative bureaucracies on the nation's campuses than into improving the economic condition of those who do the teaching and research on those campuses. Since 1980 administrative costs have grown by 60%, whereas instructional costs have increased by only 39%.

Why would a university spend proportionally less money on tenured professors, its most visible and prestigious means of educational production, as its income increases? We might imagine that an individual dean might squander these funds on self-aggrandizing projects like keg policies, but various authorities like Boards of Regents or Boards of Trustees or state legislatures or concerned alumni would discipline such individual cases. What we're seeing, though, is a national trend. Everyone's doing the same thing. Why?

Part of the explanation, it seems to me, is the economic Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility:

A law of economics stating that as a person increases consumption of a product--while keeping consumption of other products constant--there is a decline in the marginal utility that person derives from consuming each additional unit of that product.

In other words, as a university hires (or consumes) additional tenured professors, the utility to the university of each additional tenured hire decreases, and in fact, as I've discussed, a disutility begins to arise, since the professors constitute a long-term obligation to the university, with an increasing likelihood that in out years they won't be efficiently used. This law may operate in combination with the Law of Substitution. Casting about the web for a good explanation of this law, I found this passage from Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics (1890):

Let us begin by recalling the action of the principle of substitution. In the modern world nearly all the means of production pass through the hands of employers and other business men, who specialize themselves in organizing the economic forces of the population. Each of them chooses in every case those factors of production which seem best for his purpose. And the sum of the prices which he pays for those factors which he uses is, as a rule, less than the sum of the prices which he would have to pay for any other set of factors which could be substituted for them: for, whenever it appears that this is not the case, he will, as a rule, set to work to substitute the less expensive arrangement or process..

This statement is in close harmony with such common sayings of every-day life, as that "everything tends to find its own level," that "most men earn just about what they are worth," that "if one man can earn twice as much as another, that shows that his work is worth twice as much," that "machinery will displace manual labour whenever it can do the work cheaper." The principle does not indeed act without hindrance. It may be restricted by custom or law, by professional etiquette or trade-union regulation: it may be weakened by want of enterprise, or it may be softened by a generous unwillingness to part with old associates. But it never ceases to act, and it permeates all the economic adjustments of the modern world.

The substitution factor here is contingent faculty. There is no single, undisputed definition for contingent faculty. Some say it is "non tenured" faculty, though this would imply assistant professors. Some say it is part-time faculty, though it's not clear if this includes graduate assistants, and it's possible to be full-time and contingent. However, it's plain that there is a growing segment of academic personnel that is not tenured, not eligible for tenure, and teaching a larger proportion of all university classes. They are without question lower-cost producers, both in amount paid per credit unit taught and in long-term liability to the institution. Many discussions suggest that contingent faculty teach mostly remedial, introductory, lower-level, or non-credit classes, but a recent blog post by an anonymous adjunct indicates he will be teaching a graduate seminar in the next semester, and this isn't the only account I've heard of this happening.

The AAUP naturally opposes the use of contingency faculty by universities. In 2003, the AAUP reaffirmed its

long-standing policy that . . . part-time and non-tenure-track appointments should be limited to no more than 15 percent of total instruction within an institution and no more than 25 percent within a department.

In contrast, as just a single example, a 2001 report by the University of Tennessee's Faculty Senate said, "For Fall Semester, 2000, instruction of sections by Contingent Faculty and Graduate Assistants constituted slightly more than 40% of all sections taught." (Hard information like this appears to be very difficult to find, for reasons that should be easy to deduce.) An essay on the historical trend concludes,

national surveys of faculty members in the 1960s and 1970s indicate that the numbers of such appointments were negligible. Full-time status essentially was tantamount either to having tenure or a probationary appointment leading to a tenure decision. That has all changed. In fact, my colleagues and I have found that during the 1990s, slightly over one half of all new full-time academic appointments have been tenure-ineligible term appointments.

(The author here seems to be talking about "full time tenure-ineligible" appointments, which would not include part-time adjuncts or graduate assistants. If this information is correct, the proportion of "contingent" faculty may be even larger than other estimates suggest.) The AAUP's President has also acknowledged in 2003 that "the majority of faculty" is now contingent.

The AAUP is doing little other than trying to sweep out the tide, of course. Contingent faculty has become much like the commercial where one woman paid $75 for designer-label jeans at one store, and another paid $35 for the same jeans at another, just without the fancy label. It would be hard to ask for a better comparison to illustrate the economic Law of Substitution: a tenured faculty member has a PhD from a top-20 school and earns $70,000 per year and must be paid a comparable salary for life. A contingent faculty member has a PhD from a top-20 school and earns $2000 per class; she can be laid off at the end of the term.

What's the difference? Well, according to the detailed accounts I linked a week ago by Michael Drout and Jim Hu, the tenured top-20 PhD weathered a lengthy and arduous weeding-out process, which culminated in a six-year probationary period, whereupon his colleagues at length rendered a final favorable verdict on his qualifications and his "fit". The contingent top-20 PhD simply wasn't that lucky in a horrible job market, but as a result, she may be less likely than the tenured PhD to be a snob or a bully. Sound like the commercial?

The reason a top-20 PhD will work for $2000 a course and no benefits is that the system produces thousands more PhDs each year than it needs. I discussed this problem at some length here a year ago. The tenured professors at research universities are heavily complicit in the problem, because they justify both their enrollment and their prestige by teaching graduate students, which is another way of saying they feed lots of PhDs into the assembly line. The problem of contingent faculty and the resulting devaluing of tenure-track appointments won't go away as long as there are so many fully qualified people on the job market willing to work at contingent jobs.

The AAUP's response is that it would like institutions to increase " . . . the proportion of faculty appointments that are on the tenure line, and improv[e] job security and due process protections for those with contingent appointments." And I'd like a Cadillac. It just isn't going to happen. Not only is moral suasion feckless against the Law of Substitution, AAUP members themselves are actively creating the oversupply of PhDs that forces high-quality candidates to work for subsistence pay as adjuncts. In this regard, the AAUP's statements work only to salve the consciences of those among its members who are causing the problem, but by implying that the AAUP doesn't have a stake in the status quo, they are also simply disingenuous.

In the face of steadily increasing income from tuition and fee hikes, but the ability to hold down teaching costs via the Law of Substitution, university administrations are in effect like families that suddenly have too much cash. There's only so many cars you can drive, there's only so many vacation houses you can live in, so eventually those with too much money find more exotic ways to spend it. Thus we see yachts, race horses, private railroad cars. This, it seems to me, is the explanation for keg policies, condom festivals, and sensitivity training: administrators who see excess money waiting to be spent and who go looking for a way to spend it. There's only so many tenured professors you can hire, after all; past a certain point, they're as useless as your sixth and seventh car.

And if the job market makes it possible to find top-20 PhDs who'll work for $2000 a course, nobody has to do a single thing to end the tenure system. It's withering away as we speak. Ward Churchill may make a few people angry, and his example may even hasten the process slightly, but it's economic reality that will kill tenure. What we're seeing is a very slow, very late application of the Law of Substitution, slowed, in Alfred Marshall's words, ". . . by custom or law, by professional etiquette or trade-union regulation: it may be weakened by want of enterprise, or it may be softened by a generous unwillingness to part with old associates. But it never ceases to act, and it permeates all the economic adjustments of the modern world."

We know what's happening, and we know what will happen, whether we lift a finger over it one way or another. But it seems to me that there are counterproductive things we're doing now, and things we're not doing that could take better advantage of what's happening. I'll have more to say on this.

Tenure and Amtrak

US Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta recently made more headlines over "killing Amtrak" than he has at any time while he's held that job, which is remarkable, since he had little memorable to say even after 9/11. But on the matter of Amtrak and the Bush Administration's proposal to zero out its subsidy, he "rejected critics' claims that he is just trying to kill the railroad, saying if that were the case he 'wouldn't have to lift a finger.' "

Amtrak "is dying and everyone knows it," [he] said during a news conference at Chicago's Union Station. . . . "Everyone agrees that Amtrak is on financial life support. But the answer to the problem is not throwing more money into a system that is fundamentally flawed. The answer is top-to-bottom reform."

The idea that Amtrak is dying isn't a surprise to those who follow railroads: the chronic lateness of its long-distance trains is such that resulting problems include toilet tanks filling up en route, making them not only unusable, but creating a stench. And there may not be time to clean the cars before the train has to leave on its return trip, with the result that, according to accounts on the web, some coaches have begun to acquire a permanent odor of excrement mixed with sweaty socks. In recent months, there have been instances of trains running nearly 24 hours late, creating an interesting theoretical puzzle for amateurs of rail operation: what happens when the following day's train actually passes the train from the previous day? Paradoxes akin to time travel begin to develop. Trying to kill Amtrak indeed.

In trying to get a handle on tenure in these posts, I'm not really "against tenure", any more than Secretary Mineta is trying to "kill Amtrak". Like the Secretary, I don't need to lift a finger, which is just as well, since unlike the Secretary, whether I lift a finger or not will be of no consequence. What I'm trying to do here is describe as best I can, with the evidence that comes to me via the web, what's happening to the academic institution of tenure. Ideally, I'd like my description to be good enough that it will be able to predict what happens in the future. My intentions have nothing to do with that. I'm doing it as an amateur because the pros, as one pro has pointed out, don't seem to be interested, a worthwhile point of data in itself.

One of the observations about higher education costs that's interested me has been that the continuing runup in price -- ten percent or more per year, according to the Jacoby column I cited a few days ago -- briefly went to faculty salaries, but past a certain point, faculty salaries leveled off. In more recent years, that money has been going to hire more administrative staff, and as the opinions we've seen from Dartmouth students indicate, those projects often appear to be frivolous. The types of programs that have arisen concurrently with the heavy increases in fees include condom festivals, various kinds of sensitivity training, diversity awareness (supported by additional "diversity deans"), and the like. As I've pointed out, since administrators now have career paths across several universities, these programs are fairly homogeneous across US academic culture. An associate dean at Bucknell, say, can point to experience running a diversity program in order to qualify for a more responsible job in the same field at Oberlin.

One of the newer areas providing career paths for administrators is the effort to micromanage student alcohol consumption, especially at fraternities. The student article I referred to the other day raises key questions in this context: "Why is it that there is money available for a full-time position (and surely underlings galore) dedicated to the pursuit of keg policy? What gives the administration the idea that keg policy is something to be regulated at all?" Actually, keg policy has become a nearly theological issue at Dartmouth. The following excerpt from a recent article in The Dartmouth Review is necessarily long, because the bureaucratic ramifications of fraternity parties have grown so extensive:

To those who are unfamiliar with these regulations-mainly, alumni, because the S.E.M.P. is a relatively new set of regulations, and unaffiliated students, because they apply mainly to Greek undergraduates-the rules probably seem arcane. A `social event' is defined as "any activity that is sponsored by a student or organization and at which alcohol is present." A `social event' must be `registered' in specific cases, and most of these cases pertain to the College's Co-ed, Fraternity, and Sorority (C.F.S.) houses or other undergraduate societies. In this case, a social event must be registered if alcohol is to be served and the guests present will exceed either the number of members of that organization or forty people, whichever is fewer. In other instances, a social event involving alcohol must be registered if it occurs in a common area of a residential facility and the attendance is greater than ten students, or if it occurs in a private residence and might "affect the immediate environs." All social events on campus are encouraged to be registered, though registration is only required in the aforementioned circumstances.

Registration is a two-part process. The `hosts' of the social event file a `Social Event Registration form' with the Office of Student Life; later, they meet with a staff member of Student Activities (a sub-department of O.S.L.) to "discuss event management plans and procedures." The focus of these meetings is broadly on the S.E.M.P. guidelines and particularly on "safety." Assuming that the precautions planned are deemed sound, Student Activities gives the organization a go-ahead and alerts Safety and Security, the campus police.

Once an event is registered, the way alcohol is served throughout is strictly regulated. An organization must designate (in addition to the hosts) monitors, who work entrances and exits to "ensure the safety of guests, secure the facility, and compliance with [the S.E.M.P.];" and servers, who dispense alcohol "responsibly." All students who fill any of these rules are required to have participated in a "training course" on the fine points of the S.E.M.P.

The amount of alcohol served is also strictly regulated, which is whatever Student Activities determines is appropriate, based on a sliding algorithm (more on this to come). Serving more alcohol than allotted is of course prohibited; kegs are tagged with metal code bands that are periodically checked during the course of the social event by S&S to guard against deceitfulness.

Alcohol that is registered to be served at a party may arrive no earlier than the day of the event and any leftover alcohol must be removed from quarters no later than 3:00 p.m. the following afternoon. Guests must be served from a single central location; they are not allowed to serve themselves. Only one serving of alcohol is to be dispensed to an individual at a time, and no more than one drink per hour. Alcohol is not to be served to those who are underage or even mildly intoxicated. Non-salty snacks and non-alcohol beverages must be on hand for non-tipplers. S&S usually checks a registered social event twice-usually at the very beginning and at the very end-to ensure compliance with these regulations. "Alcohol," according to the guidelines, "may not be the primary focus of the social event."

As the student complaining about keg policy indicated, this level of surveillance requires money, not just for deans and assorted clerks, but even for the level of campus police personnel needed to check each event twice. But the need to micromanage fraternities and alcohol isn't unique to Dartmouth (and my effort to make my observations predictive here is rewarded). Via Stephen Karlson, we find the administration at Northern Illinois University pursuing a similar course:

University officials left Greeks out in the cold this weekend by suspending all alcohol-related events indefinitely; they also left the Northern Star and students out in the cold Monday night by refusing to allow the Star access to a meeting where the past weekend’s events were being discussed.

Administrators refused to let the Star cover the meeting headed by Brian Hemphill, vice president of Student Affairs, and hear what both Greek leaders and NIU officials had to say about the recent stabbing, suspensions and safety on Greek Row.

While administrators didn’t refuse to comment on the matter after the meeting held in the Holmes Student Center’s Capitol South Room, there is no reason why members of the NIU community should be kept in the dark and fed bits and pieces of information that concern more than those sitting around the table at Monday’s meeting.

And although NIU’s intention to remedy a "problem" on Greek Row is good at heart, it is unfair and unjustified to punish the entire Greek system because of an incident that happened in the middle of the street outside a row of fraternity houses.

If a fight broke out in the vicinity of a DeKalb bar (a situation not that uncommon), the city of DeKalb wouldn’t revoke all of the city’s liquor licenses and punish every bar it has jurisdiction over.

I think I can gaze into my crystal ball and foresee what will happen once NIU's administrators lift the ban on alcohol on Greek Row: there will henceforth be a keg policy. And with the keg policy will go a keg policy dean, and keg policy clerks, and a keg policy board, and an expansion of campus police due to the need to cover evening and weekend shifts monitoring keg policy. My ouija board also suggests that if I were to look beyond Dartmouth and NIU, I might find keg policies being implemented nationwide, with an accompanying increase in staff and rent-a-cops. I would guess that in the back of every self-respecting administrator's mind is the need to watch for triggering events of one kind or another to start this process rolling on any campus. A DUI, a tragic accident, a loud party, a hazing, whatever: the era of the keg policy is at hand.

What do smelly Amtrak coaches and keg policy have to do with tenure? Stay tuned.

John Bruce Gets More Results

Via PirateBallerina.com, a post by David Kopel on The Volokh Conspiracy (though not Volokh himself) belatedly cites the Jeffries case, in which a

Supreme Court case Waters v. Churchill, reversed a previous decision of the Second Circuit. On remand, the Second Circuit upheld the decision of the Regents of the City College of New York to strip Jeffries of his chairmanship of the Black Studies Department, because of the Regents' reasonable concerns that Jeffries' off-campus racist speech would disrupt the operation of CCNY. . . . Jeffries is an important case suggesting that the University of Colorado Regents' investigation of Churchill, based on the disruptive effects of Churchill's own hate speech, is perfectly lawful.

Regular visitors know that I've been referring to this case for several weeks, specifically in opposition to (what are now clearly) uninformed opinions by Volokh himself, King Banaian, and Glenn Reynolds that Ward Churchill's free-speech rights are, or should be, absolute. Kopel goes on to examine the effect of the Second Circuit's unwillingness to carve out a special free-speech right for professors that goes beyond the First Amendment, and he stresses, as I have, the First-Amendment rights of news media, legislators, and citizens to discuss the case and call for a resolution.

Repeat: there is no special right of academic freedom that extends beyond the First Amendment rights of all citizens.

The Cash Nexus of Tenure

I continue to be puzzled at the way even Economics professors seem to hang back from talking about how economic principles apply to academic life. And I'm not alone: in an introduction to a symposium on "The Familiar but Curious Economics of Higher Education", an economist says, "Despite the involvement of two-thirds of economists in it, the higher education industry remains incompletely understood. Among the topics related to higher education that invite further research are the rapid increase in college costs, the interaction of tenure and the end of mandatory retirement. . ." Actually, a perusal of the usual economists' blogs suggests that (1) things are mostly just fine in the academic world, except that (2) if we could get rid of the pesky administrators, things would be a little better.

Who are these pesky administrators, anyhow? In the very enjoyable blog-interactions I've had with some interested faculty over tenure in the past couple of weeks, I've seen occasional references to problematic administrative behavior and preferences. Jim Hu .posted, "No matter how talented a non-tenure track person is, [u]niversities are usually reluctant and reactive about moving them to tenure-track." Steven Taylor, cited approvingly by Stephen Karlson, said, "I will say this: a lot of university administrators would love to get rid of tenure. It would allow them to cow the faculty, because any uppity professor who dared to challenge the administration would know that their job was on the line, meaning that there would be a whole lot fewer uppity professors to have to deal with."

I have a different take, following on yesterday's accounts from Dartmouth students of their difficulties enrolling in courses that would lead to a Government major. From their version of events, it appears that Government has become a very popular major. When I was there, English and History were the two most popular. The anecdotal evidence would suggest that Government has moved up on the scale -- how recently and quickly, it's hard to say, but I'm not sure it matters, given the economics of tenure.

A business -- let's say an airline -- finding a demand for more traffic out of St. Louis, could make numerous adjustments fairly quickly. It could add more flights, put larger planes on the run, and so forth. If it happened that the rise in traffic from St. Louis matched a decline out of Kansas City, it could move resources easily from one route to the other.

So, why doesn't the Dean of the Faculty at Dartmouth just sort of switch some resources from the English Department (if that's who's losing enrollment) to Government? If an airline can do it, why not a college? Well, the faculty isn't very interchangeable. Prof. Throckmorton has spent much of his career examining the transgressive rhetorical schema in the mythic structure of Coleridge's prose. To shift him from English to Government would be much more difficult than shifting a 737 to the St. Louis run, and its effect could even be to drive some students away from the Government major and back to English (now that Throckmorton's gone), to which the Government department would likely object.

So why can't a college just hire more professors, the way an airline could buy more planes? Can't all the PhDs at a college figure out that the Government department has had more majors over the past five or ten years, and so hire more Government profs? After all, airlines have to plan their purchases a couple of years in advance. Why can't a college? Here we have what I think is a real reason, not discussed by either Hu or Taylor, for why administrators would like to get rid of tenure.

A new PhD will be something like 30 years old when she goes on the academic job market. If she gets a tenure-track job, she'll be about 35 when the university grants her tenure. At that point, she can't be fired except, as we've discussed, if she stops showing up for work, if she has a felony conviction, or if the university can show gross incompetence or insubordination in some other way. These cases are extremely rare. Not only that, but the university can't lay her off the way an airline might lay off staff when the economy nosedives. Laying off tenured faculty, according to the AAUP agreement with institutions, is just about the last thing a college can do short of closing its doors.

In the days of mandatory retirement (something alluded to in the symposium cited at the start of this post), you could at least say that the professor who got tenure at age 35 couldn't stay any longer than age 65 or 70, though even then you'd be forced to pay 30 or 35 years of salary no matter what. But now, without mandatory retirement, and recognizing the light demands university teaching imposes, you've got something much more like an actuarial problem. Financially, you're paying an annuity to people starting at age 35, and you've got to start looking at death tables to estimate how long your obligation to pay them will last.

For a college, the tenured Prof. Throckmorton is a double whammy. They've got to keep paying him, and if, over the course of his projected 35, 40, or 45-year career tastes change, students get tired of Coleridge, and they'd rather study something else, the college gets less and less use from Throckmorton, and the money they pay him limits their ability to go out and find a new Government prof. Of course, there's absolutely no guarantee that the new hire in Government won't lose her value 25 or 30 years in the future, either.

So it seems to me that the administrators who are reluctant to hire new tenured faculty are in many ways rational economic actors. I also think that in the back of most administrators' minds there's the fear that a certain percentage of those who get tenure -- a low percentage, to be sure, but a steady and certain one -- will become a Nona Gerard, a Peter Kirstein, a Ward Churchill, an H. Bruce Franklin, a Leonard Jeffries, using the prestigious platform of the college or university and the extremely privileged position of tenure to go bananas, driving colleagues, alumni, and legislators up the wall and seriously damaging the college or university's finances. Given what's recently happened at Hamilton and Antioch, just the chance of something like that has got to weigh on administrators' calculations.

The end result for students, as we see at Dartmouth, is an extreme unwillingness, combined with what may also be a financial inability, of the institution to adjust its balance of tenured faculty to cope with changing preferences in major -- even over the medium or long term. How many tenured faculty in English are still in their 50s or younger? They won't die and free up budget for 20 or 30 years yet.

Follow the Money

In my post last week about the homogeneous university environment, I said I would start to address in a subsequent post the question of how this environment might change. Here it is. One subject that captures my interest now and then is how classical economic theory -- the stuff they teach in Economics 101, or should -- applies to what we know of the academic environment. In the end, money doesn't grow on trees, and institutions need money to survive.

So one factor that few people have examined in the Ward Churchill affair is how some institutions have seen their economic well-being threatened by the controversy. Both Hamilton College and Antioch College have canceled Churchill speaking engagements. In the case of Antioch,

In a statement released Tuesday, [interim Antioch President Rick]Jurasek said, “I fear we will not be able to pay the internal price that we will impose upon ourselves. The presence of Mr. Churchill on our campus, it is clear to me, would destabilize our campus community, divide us, and draw down our energy. We would purchase whole-campus controversy when this particular controversial thinker was not even the choice of a whole-campus process.”

Adam Howard, the associate dean of faculty, said that bringing Churchill to Antioch could prove to be too difficult an event for the institution to cope with. “The controversies are worth it, but they take away money, and other things we need,” he said. “We aren’t strong now, we’re transitioning.”

Based on this op-ed piece by a Hamilton professor, Stephen Goldberg, that institution also saw a cash nexus in the Churchill controversy. Referring to the role of the Kirkland Project in inviting Churchill to the now-infamous Hamilton panel, he says,

To be very frank, the remnants of Kirkland have destroyed the reputation of Hamilton College, and crippled it financially for the foreseeable future. The Board of Trustees, as in the Enron Affair, sat on their hands, and worse, rationalized and ultimately supported the actions of the president, despite the damage that this was clearly bringing to the institution and its students. What they and the president seemed not to remember is that their primary "fiduciary" responsibilities are to the "shareholders" of Hamilton College: the students and the alumni

It shouldn't be surprising that some institutions -- especially private ones -- have been driven by the prospect of financial consequences to disinvite Churchill (public universities, the record suggests, are more inclined to go ahead with his engagements). What I find puzzling, though, is why these and other institutions find themselves in straitened circumstances in light of steady tuition increases.

A recent and unremarked Jeff Jacoby column points out both the extent of recent tuition increases at all institutions and the effect of federal subsidies on them:

Tuition and fees were up 10.5 percent at state colleges and universities last year. The year before that, they were up 14 percent. Every year for nearly a quarter-century -- since before most of today's college students were born -- higher education costs have raced ahead of inflation. And far from slowing this runaway train, government aid serves only to stoke the engine. . . . Higher Education Act funds "are seen by colleges and universities as money that is there for the taking," observes Peter Wood, an anthropology professor at Boston University. "Tuition is set high enough to capture those funds and whatever else we think can be extracted from parents. Perhaps there are college administrators who don't see federal student aid in quite this way, but I haven't met them." In 10 years of attending committee meetings on the university's annual tuition adjustment, says Wood, "the only real question was, 'How much can we get away with?'"

It's been observed, however, that faculty salaries haven't kept pace with these tuition increases (though I'm not arguing they should; in general, tenured professors' salaries now match those of middle-class professionals like computer consultants and journeyman attorneys, but the profs work only eight or nine months a year, and well under 40 hours a week). So this is an interesting case: institutions are swimming in federal aid; demand for college educations is relatively inelastic -- the middle class will keep paying more and more for that prized decal in the back window of their car -- but there's not enough money to go around.

Let's take an example from Dartmouth -- the cases I see are random and fragmentary, and I have to rely on what comes to my attention here. This is from an article in The Daily Dartmouth by Alex Tonelli, a student:

"College searches for new director of Judicial Affairs" (Jan. 28) and "Kennedy announces new SEMP proposal" (Jan. 25) were also intriguing as a contrast to the aforementioned articles. Why is it that there is money available for a full-time position (and surely underlings galore) dedicated to the pursuit of keg policy? What gives the administration the idea that keg policy is something to be regulated at all? Where did the phenomenon of Linda Kennedy come from? Why is there a need for a director of Judicial Affiars? Do regular courts even need a director of Judicial Affairs? Whose brilliant idea was it to have people actually spend their money on social event management procedures (SEMP)?

Taking a step forward, one may then ask, are these positions so integral to the College that we cannot hire enough professors? Professors! People who teach! There are two and only two integral parts to an educational situation -- students and teachers. Dartmouth students don't pay 160 grand to line the pockets of bureaucracy. They are paying for an education provided by professors. That's $120,000 more than tuition at an expensive state school (like Cal-Berkeley or Michigan or UVA). That's $100,000 more than an American student would pay to go to Oxford. "Students find promises of small class sizes unfilled" (Feb. 3) points out that one of the big draws to Dartmouth is the allure of having more personal access to professors. Sadly, based on personal experience and national reports, this is untrue.

Another student, Daniel Belkin, says on another day of the difficulty in signing up for classes in the popular Government major:

Something is not right when students have to consistently fight their way into both introductory and advanced classes. Something is not right when more names are on the waitlist for a class than can actually be enrolled in the class.

Underclassmen, especially freshmen, find themselves being locked out of even large introductory classes. As preached by faculty advisers and others, underclassmen are encouraged to explore new fields of study at the College to spur their intellectual curiosity. The liberal arts education is working when students originally interested in biology become government majors. However, such adventurous students must first be able to gain enrollment to government classes to be able to have their curiosity sparked. Prior to Dartmouth, it is unlikely that many students have had the opportunity to learn about comparative politics or international politics. You have to try it to see if you like it. The enrollment problem is preventing students from trying new things or further pursuing their interests.

Through talking with my peers, I have found that a significant source of the frustration is the uncertainty and lack of information about the future of the department. As underclassmen prepare to declare a major, they want and deserve a frank dialogue about the department and its capacity to handle droves of new majors. Simply put, the classes of today and beyond would like to be reassured. Will the status quo continue? What changes have and will be made to alleviate the enrollment issues?

In fact, I've seen reports of a derivative market, or possibly arbitrage, at Dartmouth in class enrollments: students will sign up for a class with the object of selling their enrollment slot to another student who wasn't lucky enough to get in. It sounds as though what we have is a shortage. That's something we can address if we've taken Economics 101 -- there's a market disequilibrium here. Maybe it's a shortage of classrooms, maybe a shortage of professors. With all the money coming in, it ought to be possible to spend a little more here or there and fix the problem. What's going on? I will keep talking about this.