Category: Academia
The Professor-Student ‘Non-Aggression Pact’
William J. Bennett and David Wilezol, Is College Worth It? (Thomas Nelson 2013), p. 134:
Knowing that students prefer to spend more time having fun than studying, professors are more comfortable awarding good grades while requiring a minimum amount of work. In return, students give favorable personal evaluations to professors who desire to be well received by students as a condition of preserving their employment status. Indeed, the popularity of the student evaluation, which began in the 1970s, has had a pernicious effect.
I would say so. Here is an anecdote to illustrate the Bennett thesis. In early 1984 I was 'up for tenure.' And so in the '83 fall semester I was more than usually concerned about the quality of my student evaluations. One of my classes that semester was an upper-level seminar conducted in the library over a beautiful oak table. One day one of the students began carving into the beautiful table with his pen.
In an abdication of authority that part of me regrets and a part excuses, I said nothing. The student liked me and I knew it. I expected a glowing recommendation from him and feared losing it. So I held my tongue while the kid defaced university property.
Jeff H. and I had entered into a tacit 'non-aggression pact.' (And I got tenure.)
The problem is not that students are given an opportunity to comment upon and complain about their teachers. The problem is the use to which student evaluations are put for tenure, promotion, and salary 'merit-increase' decisions. My chairman at the time was an officious organization man who would calculate student evaluation averages to one or two decimal places, and then rank department members as to their teaching effectiveness. Without getting into this too deeply for a blog post, there is something highly dubious about equating teaching effectiveness with whatever the student evaluations measure, and something absurd about the false precision of calculating averages out to one or two decimal places.
Is Jones a better teacher than Smith because her average is 3.2 while his is only 3.1? Well, no, but if the chairman is asked to justify his decision, he can point to the numbers. This is mindless quantification, but it takes someone more thoughtful than an administrator to see it.
I strongly recommend the Bennett-Wilezol book to anyone thinking of attending college or thinking of bankrolling someone's attendance. Here is a review.
Warning to University Admins: Abdication of Authority Carries a Cost
The cardinal virtues are four: temperance, prudence, justice, and courage. Of the four, courage is the most difficult to exercise. So it is no surprise that cowardice is so widespread among university administrators. There is no coward like a university administrator, to cop a line from Dennis Prager.
But the cowardice that issues in abdication of authority and the refusal to stand up for the classical values of the university in the face of barbarians and know-nothings comes with a cost, literally.
The University of Missouri is one of many universities where the administrative pussy-wussies are feeling the pinch:
Donors, parents, alumni, sports fans and prospective students raged against the administration’s caving in. “At breakfast this morning, my wife and I agreed that MU is NOT a school we would even consider for our three children,” wrote Victor Wirtz, a 1978 alum, adding that the university “has devolved into the Berkeley of the Midwest.”
As classes begin this week, freshmen enrollment is down 35% since the protests, according to the latest numbers the university has publicly released. Mizzou is beginning the year with the smallest incoming class since 1999. Overall enrollment is down by more than 2,000 students, to 33,200. The campus has taken seven dormitories out of service.
The plummeting support has also cost jobs. In May, Mizzou announced it would lay off as many as 100 people and eliminate 300 more positions through retirement and attrition. Last year the university reduced its library staff and cut 50 cleaning and maintenance jobs.
Mizzou’s 2016 football season drew almost 13,000 fewer attendees than in 2015, local media reported. During basketball games, one-third of the seats in the Mizzou Arena sat empty.
[. . .]
This phenomenon isn’t limited to Mizzou. Private institutions like Yale and Middlebury aren’t covered by public-records laws, so they can conceal the backlash. But when public universities have released emails after giving in to campus radicals, they have consistently shown administrators face the same public outrage.
Virginia Tech received numerous phone calls and more than 100 angry emails last year after it disinvited Jason Riley, a columnist for this newspaper, from speaking on campus. “While we can respond to the people who write to us, we cannot dispel the negative impression created by the media against the president, the university, the dean and the college and the department,” one administrator woefully told his colleagues.
Virginia Tech administrators also noted that news of the debacle reached millions on Twitter, where the reactions were “overwhelmingly negative toward the university and higher education in general.” Once again, a frustrated public vowed to yank support.
Universities have consistently underestimated the power of a furious public. At the same time, they’ve overestimated the power of student activists, who have only as much influence as administrators give them. Far from avoiding controversy, administrators who respond to campus radicals with cowardice and capitulation should expect to pay a steep price for years.
WSJ's Jason Riley, mentioned above, is one seriously black dude. But he wasn't prevented from speaking because of his race but because he refuses to toe the Party Line: he is a conservative black and therefore, to a leftist shithead, 'a traitor to his race.'
This shows that the overpaid administrative assholes at Mizzou and elsewhere have no clue as to the purposes of a university. You can't reach them with reasons, but they are very sensitive to emolument.
Were university admins always cowards? No!
See Three Profiles in Civil Courage Among University Administrators
Neven Sesardić on Brian Leiter
My Sesardić posts:
Reading Now: When Reason Goes on Holiday
Omertà Among the Philosophers
Full text on Leiter below the fold:
Higher Remediation
My friends in the teaching trenches tell stories that lead me to believe that so-called 'higher education' is now little more than 'higher remediation.'
Andrew M. Bailey’s Analytic Philosophy Generator and the ‘Scholasticism Charge’
The AnalPhilGen is a bit of humor from occasional MavPhil commenter Andrew Bailey. I generated the following using Bailey's 'device':
It is a consequence of proper functionalism that polyadic predicates reduce to non-human consciousness.
On the standard Kripkean modal semantics, trope theories supervene on something like Rawls' famous Difference Principle.
Intuitively it seems obvious that both definite descriptions and proper names always lead to zombie arguments.
I came to Bailey's Analytic Philosophy Generator by way of a crappy article that complains about the 'scholasticism' of contemporary philosophy "talking about itself to itself in its own jargon." The article suggests that most of what analytic philosophers write is as meaningless as the above three sentences. The just-quoted phrase suggests that the problems of philosophy discussed by academic philosophers in their narrowly-focused, jargon-laden books and articles are not 'real,' but are merely artifacts of a highly ingrown way of talking.
This is simply not the case.
If you are a philosophy 'insider' you know this; if an 'outsider' then you probably cannot be 'reached.' Or maybe you can. Let someone else try.
Here is the crappy article.
The Bret Weinstein-Heather Heying Caper at Evergreen State
Having come to expect lunacy from lefties, I was not dismayed, but entertained, by the absurd bigotry that seeps out of the following passage from this Chronicle of Higher Education piece:
Now the couple weighed a new option. A producer for Tucker Carlson Tonight, a prime-time show on Fox News, had asked if Mr. Weinstein wanted to make his case to the conservative commentator and his millions of viewers.
It was a nauseating thought, says Ms. Heying. Theirs was an NPR family. Back in college, Mr. Weinstein had stood up to fraternities at the University of Pennsylvania over sexist and racist behavior at their parties. In an ideal world, says Ms. Heying, they would have talked to The New York Times or The Washington Post. But that’s not who had come calling.
"He was horrified, I was horrified," Ms. Heying told The Chronicle. "Tucker Carlson is someone he mocks in his classes."
Weinstein teaches biology and he wastes class time on political commentary and mockery of talk show hosts?
One thing I do like about lefties, though, is that they eat their own with a hunger and ferocity unlike anything on the Right. The 'progressive' Weinstein, who is now a 'racist,' is learning this the hard way. May he come to his senses. May he come to appreciate that conservatives are the new liberals, and liberals the new fascists.
I have written a number of articles critical of NPR and PBS. Here is an excerpt from National Public Radio and the Tit of the State:
"If the product is so superior, why does it have to live on the tit of the State?" (Charles Krauthammer)
One answer is that the booboisie of these United States is too backward and benighted to appreciate the high level of NPR programming. The rubes of fly-over country are too much enamored of wrestling, tractor pulls, and reality shows, and, to be blunt, too stupid and lazy to take in superior product.
Being something of an elitist myself, I am sympathetic to this answer. The problem for me is twofold. NPR is run by lefties for lefties. That in itself is not a problem. But it is a most serious problem when part of the funding comes from the taxpayer. But lefties, blind to their own bias, don't see the problem. Very simply, it is wrong to take money by force from people and then use it to promote causes that those people find offensive or worse when the causes have nothing to do with the legitimate functions of government. Planned Parenthood and abortion. NEA and "Piss Christ." Get it?
Another Liberal Witch Hunt
Jonathan Haidt is always worth reading: the blasphemy case against Brett Weinstein.
Why I Resigned from Duke
Paul J. Griffiths explains his resignation.
Back story here. The e-mail message that got him in trouble:
Sent: Monday, February 06, 2017 4:26 PM
To: Anathea Portier-Young
Cc: Divinity Regular Rank Faculty; Divinity Visiting Other Faculty
Subject: Re: Racial Equity Institute Phase I Training–March 4-5Dear Faculty Colleagues,
I’m responding to Thea’s exhortation that we should attend the Racial Equity Institute Phase 1 Training scheduled for 4-5 March. In her message she made her ideological commitments clear. I’ll do the same, in the interests of free exchange.
I exhort you not to attend this training. Don’t lay waste your time by doing so. It’ll be, I predict with confidence, intellectually flaccid: there’ll be bromides, clichés, and amen-corner rah-rahs in plenty. When (if) it gets beyond that, its illiberal roots and totalitarian tendencies will show. Events of this sort are definitively anti-intellectual. (Re)trainings of intellectuals by bureaucrats and apparatchiks have a long and ignoble history; I hope you’ll keep that history in mind as you think about this instance.
We here at Duke Divinity have a mission. Such things as this training are at best a distraction from it and at worst inimical to it. Our mission is to think, read, write, and teach about the triune Lord of Christian confession. This is a hard thing. Each of us should be tense with the effort of it, thrumming like a tautly triple-woven steel thread with the work of it, consumed by the fire of it, ever eager for more of it. We have neither time nor resources to waste. This training is a waste. Please, ignore it. Keep your eyes on the prize.
Paul
——————–
Paul J. Griffiths
Warren Chair of Catholic Theology
Duke Divinity School
Potemkin Universities
The universities are dead. Victor Davis Hanson:
At most universities, if a scheduled campus lecturer expressed scholarly doubt about the severity of man-caused global warming and the efficacy of its government remedies, or questioned the strategies of the Black Lives Matter movement, or suggested that sex is biologically determined rather than socially constructed, she likely would either be disinvited or have her speech physically disrupted. Campuses often now mimic the political street violence of the late Roman Republic.
Campus radicals have achieved what nuclear strategists call deterrence: Faculty and students now know precisely which speech will endanger their careers and which will earn them rewards.
The terrified campus community makes the necessary adjustments. As with the German universities of the 1930s, faculty keep quiet or offer politically correct speech through euphemisms. Toadies thrive; mavericks are hounded.
The true maverick, I should think, abandons the leftist seminaries and strives to keep the noble ancient values alive in some other way.
The Self-Murder of Academic Philosophy?
Rod Dreher here exposes the latest lunacy in the precincts of mad-dog feminism. I have no objection to the main body of his post, but his opening sentence, written by a philosophy outsider, will give philosophy outsiders the wrong impression. Dreher asks, "Can somebody please tell me why anybody would choose to go into academic philosophy?"
Short answer: philosophy is a magnificent subject and one of the supports of high culture; it cannot be done well, however, without attention to the work of 'academic' philosophers from Plato on down.
Dreher seems to be assuming that the garbage he uncovers is representative of academic philosophy. Not so. Pee-Cee Unsinn is on the rise, and leftist termites have a lot to answer for in the undermining of the universities, but good work is being done in contemporary academic philosophy, not to mention the work done in decades past.
That being said, the short-term trends are not encouraging. But one cannot live without hope. One reason for hope is that "Philosophy always buries its undertakers" as Etienne Gilson famously wrote. That is the first of his "laws of philosophical experience." (The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Scribners, 1937, p. 306) The undertakers are winning at the moment, but they will taken under in their turn.
Were University Admins Always Cowards?
There is no coward like a university administrator, to cop a line from Dennis Prager. That is not to say that there have never been any who have demonstrated civil courage. But we have to go back a long way to the late '60s and early '70s.
With apologies to that unrepentant commie Pete Seeger who wrote it and to all who have sung it:
Where have all the Silbers gone, long time passing?
Where have all the Silbers gone, long time ago
Where have all the Silbers gone, gone into abdication every one
When will they ever learn, when will they e-v-e-r learn?
See here for three profiles in civil courage among university administrators.
The Cowards of Academia
Ann Coulter was scheduled to speak this week at the University of California, Berkeley. Last week, the university announced it was canceling her speech, providing the usual excuse that it couldn't guarantee her safety, or others'. This excuse is as phony as it is cowardly. Berkeley and other universities know well that there is a way to ensure safety. They can do so in precisely the same way every other institution in a civilized society ensures citizens' safety: by calling in sufficient police to protect the innocent and arrest the violent. But college presidents don't do that sort of thing — not at Berkeley, or Yale University, or Middlebury College, or just about anywhere else. They don't want to tick off their clients (students), their faculty, leftist activist groups or the liberal media.
That's right: arrest the violent. And if they resist arrest? Use the force necessary to subdue them. They will call you 'fascist.' But they will call you that anyway. The epithet is without meaning as they use it. Above all, no hand wringing. After all, the miscreants are destructive, hate-America leftist thugs.
Cal Berkeley
Just cut their federal funding. With Trump in the saddle this is a real possibility. Why should taxpayers be forced to support leftist seminaries? Separation of church and state doesn't go far enough. We need separation of Left and state. Just as the state has no right to impose religion on the populace, it has no right to impose that destructive ersatz religion, leftism.
A rollback in funding is probably the only way to get the attention of the corrupt administrators of once great universities and force them to cease their abdication of authority and defend the classical values of the university.
Abdication of Authority in Academe
Heather MacDonald recounts her experiences at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California and at UCLA:
The Rose Institute for State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna had invited me to meet with students to talk about my book, The War on Cops, on April 6. Several calls went out on Facebook to “shut down” this “notorious white supremacist fascist Heather Mac Donald.”
Time was, when university faculty and administrators stood in loco parentis. Now their posture is supine while the students go loco.