Dear Commons Community,

After a week of electronic balloting, the faculty at New York University’s College of Arts and Sciences voted no-confidence in President John Sexton.  This was anticipated and as reported in the New York Times:

“The vote, 298 to 224 (with 47 abstaining), took place via electronic balloting from Monday through Friday. Full-time tenured and tenure-track professors were asked to respond to the statement: “The faculty of Arts and Science has no confidence in John Sexton’s leadership.” Voter participation was 83 percent.

A statement by that college’s Faculty Senators Council Caucus said, “In the coming days and weeks, we anticipate that the N.Y.U. community, along with the F.A.S. Senators, will be discussing the ramifications of this vote, the circumstances that gave rise to it, and the next appropriate course of decisions and actions.”

Dr. Sexton issued his own statement, which concluded: “In the university setting, we believe in debate and criticism; it helps us improve. That will be particularly important in the months and years ahead, because we are at a moment that compels meaningful change in higher education. It is also the case that faculty must be at the center of the academic endeavor and involved in the decision-making. We have taken some important steps in that direction and, particularly with this vote in mind, that effort will continue. I look forward to working with the faculty to maintain N.Y.U.’s academic trajectory and prepare for the challenges ahead.”

The vote, a nonbinding resolution, does not have any immediate effect. Such actions, like the 2005 vote against Lawrence H. Summers, then the president of Harvard, have led to the removal or eventual resignation of leaders at some universities. But N.Y.U.’s board of trustees has always stood behind Dr. Sexton, over the years raising his salary to nearly $1.5 million from $773,000 and scheduling a $2.5 million “length of service” bonus, to be paid in 2015.

After the vote, Martin Lipton, the board’s chairman, released a lengthy statement that began, “The board of trustees unanimously and strongly supports President John Sexton, and believes in his strategic direction for the university.”

Mr. Lipton went on to detail Dr. Sexton’s accomplishments. He said that the board was “attentive” to the vote, and that while the board was still the university’s ultimate authority, “the time has come to consider ways in which” the voice of the faculty “may be made even more meaningful.”

The results quantified, for the first time and in a public way, the dissatisfaction inside the university. Since taking office in 2001, Dr. Sexton has greatly raised the university’s profile, attracting a vast array of celebrated thinkers, raising more than $3 billion, winning approval for a huge expansion in Greenwich Village and assembling a Global Network University of campuses and study centers around the world.

But during the same period tuition rose and faculty salaries stagnated. His opponents said his emphasis on growth, along with the salaries and perks for a few top employees, were more appropriate to a corporation than a nonprofit institution.

They also found his top-down management style to be at odds with an academic tradition of allowing faculty members to help steer a university. In particular, they have criticized the Global Network University as motivated by financial goals, not academic ones, and resisted N.Y.U. 2031, a controversial plan to add two million square feet of facilities in Greenwich Village and six million overall in New York.”

Without a doubt these are difficult times for college and university presidents but in the case of Sexton, it appears that one cannot overly concentrate on real estate transactions, buildings and global enterprises.  There are still people – students, faculty and staff – that deserve attention.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article reporting on the results of a new study of students who take a double-major as undergraduates.  The article states:

“An undergraduate education is traditionally supposed to provide students with both breadth and depth of knowledge, which derive from their general-education requirements and major, respectively.

Increasingly, education experts also want students to develop a third skill, integrative thinking. It entails learning the deeper, underlying meaning of a discipline, making connections across courses and subjects, and applying different intellectual perspectives. Even better, some researchers say, is creative thinking, in which students master multiple disciplinary approaches to generate fresh and original ideas.

Students who major in two fields are more apt than their single-majoring peers to think both integratively and creatively, according to a new study. But they achieve those goals largely on their own, often despite the obstacles put in their way by academe.

“Double majors give students the opportunity to build bridges between domains of knowledge, and many students travel those bridges regularly,” said Steven J. Tepper, an associate professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University and a co-author of “Double Majors: Influences, Identities, and Impacts,” a report describing the study. The report was published on Friday by the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt, and was supported by the Teagle Foundation.”

This report supports the views and observations of many of us involved with interdisciplinary work.

Tony

Note:  The link to The Chronicle article requires a subscription but the full report is available as a free download at the Curb Center website.

Dear Commons Community,

Reuters and The Huffington Post are reporting that the U.S. war in Iraq has cost $1.7 trillion and that it could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest, a study released on Thursday said.

The war has killed at least 134,000 Iraqi civilians and may have contributed to the deaths of as many as four times that number, according to the Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

When security forces, insurgents, journalists and humanitarian workers were included, the war’s death toll rose to an estimated 176,000 to 189,000, the study said.

The report, the work of about 30 academics and experts, was published in advance of the 10th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003.

The report concluded the United States gained little from the war while Iraq was traumatized by it. The war reinvigorated radical Islamist militants in the region, set back women’s rights, and weakened an already precarious healthcare system, the report said. Meanwhile, the $212 billion reconstruction effort was largely a failure with most of that money spent on security or lost to waste and fraud, it said.

Former President George W. Bush’s administration cited its belief that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s government held weapons of mass destruction to justify the decision to go to war. U.S. and allied forces later found that such stockpiles did not exist.

God forgive us for this wastage of lives and resources.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The world media has been waiting this week for the College of Cardinals to elect  a new pope.  Yesterday, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected and will be called Pope Francis. He is the first non-European pope in more than 1,200 years and the first member of the Jesuit order to lead the church.  In choosing Francis, who had been the archbishop of Buenos Aires, the cardinals sent a message that the future of the church lies in the global south, home to the bulk of the world’s Catholics. He was born to Italian immigrant parents and was raised in the Argentine capital.

The good news is that Pope Francis appears to be a man of the people who is genuinely interested in the poor of the world.  The New York Times reports that: 

“Francis is known as a humble man who spoke out for the poor and led an austere life in Buenos Aires. President Barack Obama said “As a champion of the poor and the most vulnerable among us, he carries forth the message of love and compassion that has inspired the world for more than 2,000 years — that in each other we see the face of God,”

The bad news is that he is a staunch conservative on religious doctrine and opposes abortion, gay rights, and expanding the role of women in the church.  As archbishop of Buenos Aires beginning in 1998 and a cardinal since 2001, he frequently tangled with Argentina’s governments over social issues. In 2010, for example, he castigated a government-supported law to legalize marriage and adoption by same-sex couples as “a war against God.”

In sum, Catholics will take the good with the bad and support their new leader.  He will have great appeal in South America, Africa and Asia but will be seen as a representative of traditional conservatism in the United States and Europe.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The California Senate is getting ready to debate legislation that could reshape higher education by requiring the state’s public colleges and universities to give credit for faculty-approved online courses taken by students unable to register for oversubscribed classes on campus.

If it passes, as seems likely, it would be the first time that state legislators have instructed public universities to grant credit for courses that were not their own — including those taught by a private vendor, not by a college or university. The New York Times is reporting:

“We want to be the first state in the nation to make this promise: No college student in California will be denied the right to move through their education because they couldn’t get a seat in the course they needed,” said Darrell Steinberg, the president pro tem of the [California] Senate, who will introduce the bill. “That’s the motivation for this.”

The legislation is directed specifically at students who are shut out of courses in California’s public higher education systems.  The article goes on to describe:

“In part because of budget cuts, hundreds of thousands of students in California’s three public higher-education systems are shut out of the gateway courses they must pass to fulfill their general education requirements or proceed with their major. Many are forced to spend extra semesters, or years, to get degrees.

Under the legislation, some of the eligible courses would likely be free “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, like those offered by providers like Coursera, Udacity and edX; others might come from companies like Straighterline, which offers low-price online courses, or Pearson, the educational publishing and testing company.

“This would be a big change, acknowledging that colleges aren’t the only ones who can offer college courses,” said Burck Smith, the founder of Straighterline. “It means rethinking what a college is.”

According to Senator Steinberg, a Democrat from Sacramento, the state’s 112 community colleges each had an average of 7,000 enrolled students who were on waiting lists, and at the 420,000-student, 23-campus California State University, only 16 percent of students graduate within four years, in part because of the difficulty in getting the courses they need.

“It’s almost unthinkable that so many students seeking to attend the public colleges and universities are shut out,” said Molly Corbett Broad, the president of the American Council on Education. “I definitely expect it to spawn serious deliberations within the faculty, but these would be the basic courses that perhaps faculty gets the least psychic reward from teaching.”

In a way, the legislation has a head start: Last year, in an effort to bring down textbook costs, Mr. Steinberg won passage of a law requiring free online textbooks for the 50 most popular introductory college courses, and in the process created a faculty panel — three members each from the University of California, California State University and the community college system — to choose materials.

The new legislation would use that panel to determine which 50 introductory courses were most oversubscribed and which online versions of those courses should be eligible for credit. Those decisions would be based on factors like whether the courses included proctored tests, used open-source texts — those available free online — and had been recommended by the American Council on Education. A student could get credit from a third-party course only if the course was full at the student’s home institution, and if that institution did not offer it online. “

Important precedence is being set with this legislation.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, has a lesson in economics for those in Washington who are fixated on the deficit.  In his column yesterday, he proposed that:

“Smart fiscal policy involves having the government spend when the private sector won’t, supporting the economy when it is weak and reducing debt only when it is strong. Yet the cyclically adjusted deficit as a share of G.D.P. is currently about what it was in 2006, at the height of the housing boom — and it is headed down.

Yes, we’ll want to reduce deficits once the economy recovers, and there are gratifying signs that a solid recovery is finally under way. But unemployment, especially long-term unemployment, is still unacceptably high. “The boom, not the slump, is the time for austerity,” John Maynard Keynes declared many years ago. He was right — all you have to do is look at Europe to see the disastrous effects of austerity on weak economies. And this is still nothing like a boom.

Now, I’m aware that the facts about our dwindling deficit are unwelcome in many quarters. Fiscal fearmongering is a major industry inside the Beltway, especially among those looking for excuses to do what they really want, namely dismantle Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. People whose careers are heavily invested in the deficit-scold industry don’t want to let evidence undermine their scare tactics; as the deficit dwindles, we’re sure to encounter a blizzard of bogus numbers purporting to show that we’re still in some kind of fiscal crisis.”

Deficit-scold industry:  Who can Krugman be talking about?

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Over the past several weeks, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has had two columns praising MOOCs and what they might do to democratize higher education.  There have been several rebuttals but I particularly like one by Rebecca Schuman, a visiting assistant professor of German at Ohio State University, that appears in today’s online version of The Chronicle of Higher Education. To set the stage, she reviews Friedman’s positions and recent rebukes:

“Thomas L. Friedman’s breathless New York Times column on the potential of massive open online courses envisioned remote villages in Egypt enthralled with lectures on Plato and nuclear physics, and thereby a large-scale democratization of what used to be the purview of the privileged few: higher education. Friedman did mention the online revolution’s potential disadvantages—“Yes,” he conceded, “only a small percentage complete all the work, and even they still tend to be from the middle and upper classes of their societies.” But the general tone of the piece betrayed giddy anticipation for the gleaming new delivery model of education that will arise from the rubble of the old Ivory Tower.

The blowback to Friedman’s piece in the professorsphere was considerable (and Richard Wolff’s rejoinder one of the best reads). And this has prompted Friedman to publish a second column in praise of the MOOC, one that doubles down on his earlier assertions with the added bonus of ad hominem insults to the professoriate.

The response to this newer column is even more heated (with John Warner at Inside Higher Ed quipping that “Thomas Friedman has as much credibility on education as I do on dunking a basketball”). And for good reason—the column is based on false premises, sure, but the worst thing about it is that it advocates for an academia that is even more oligarchic and stratified than it already is!”

Shulman then stakes out her own critique and does not hold back at all.  For example:

“Somehow, in the service of making higher education free and available for everyone, we must whittle the professoriate down to the likes of superstars such as the Harvard professor Michael Sandel, who is now so big in South Korea that he is apparently forced to wear special shoes all the time. Everyone who does not have triple-tenure and the stage presence of a mid-1990s Garth Brooks will be the deserved victim of outsourcing to a more deserving “online competitor.”

I am not even going to address Friedman’s premise that my colleagues and I are not trained. After all, it is true that the five years most of us spend in teaching assistantships or with our own courses—and, in my case, the graduate seminars on second-language acquisition and the pedagogy conferences—do not result in an Official Certificate of Professoring. I had been under the impression that was called a “Ph.D.,” but what do I know? I have never appeared on Chinese television, and thus am currently wearing an unimpressive pair of beat-up galoshes that cost $21.

No, my main issue with Friedman is that the brave new world of democratized education (never mind that most remote villages in Egypt do not have high-speed Internet) is anything but. What Friedman proposes is nothing less than the creation of an über-oligarchy that is even more exclusive than the current state of academe—which is already elitist enough, thank you very much.

Shulman is on target and it is amazing to see that the current MOOC movement is being led by faculty at elitist universities most of whom have had very little experience in mounting online programs or courses.  To the contrary, it has been the community colleges, the large public university systems, the more mainstream private colleges and the for-profit colleges that have the experience and expertise  and have been teaching online in many cases for fifteen or more years.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Faculty members at Harvard criticized the university yesterday  after revelations that administrators secretly searched the e-mail accounts of 16 resident deans in an effort to learn who leaked information about a student cheating scandal to the news media. Some predicted that it would lead to a confrontation between the faculty and the administration.

The New York Times reported:

“I was shocked and dismayed,” said the law professor Charles J. Ogletree. “I hope that it means the faculty will now have something to say about the fact that these things like this can happen.”

News of the e-mail searches prolonged the fallout from the cheating scandal, in which about 70 students were forced to take a leave from school for collaborating or plagiarizing on a take-home final exam in a government class last year.

Harry R. Lewis, a professor and former dean of Harvard College, said, “People are just bewildered at this point, because it was so out of keeping with the way we’ve done things at Harvard.”

“I think what the administration did was creepy,” said Mary C. Waters, a sociology professor, adding that “this action violates the trust I once had that Harvard would never do such a thing.”

Last fall, the administrators searched the e-mails of 16 resident deans, trying to determine who had leaked an internal memo about how the deans should advise students who stood accused of cheating. But most of those deans were not told that their accounts had been searched until the past few days, after The Boston Globe, which first reported the searches, began to inquire about them.

Rather than the searches being kept secret from the resident deans, “they should’ve been asked openly,” said Richard Thomas, a professor of classics. “This is not a good outcome.”

The article went on to state:

“This is, I think, one of the lowest points in Harvard’s recent history — maybe Harvard’s history, period,” Richard Bradley, a Harvard alumnus and author of the book “Harvard Rules,” a look at the tenure of a former university president, Lawrence H. Summers, wrote on his blog. “It’s an invasion of privacy, a betrayal of trust, and a violation of the academic values for which the university should be advocating.”

Last August, Harvard revealed that “nearly half” the students in a large class were suspected of having cheated on a final exam. The university would not name the class, but it was quickly identified by students as Government 1310, Introduction to Congress, which had 279 students last spring.

Days later, news organizations reported on an e-mail sent to resident deans. Among other things, the e-mail said they might suggest to students accused of cheating who were varsity athletes that they withdraw voluntarily, rather than face being forced out and losing a year of athletic eligibility. It was the leak of that e-mail that prompted the searches of the e-mail accounts.”

This does not portray one of our esteemed institutions of higher education in a very good light.  Harvard we have a problem!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a featured article today on New York University’s President John Sexton that presents him as a hero to some especially the Board of Trustees but an autocrat to others including the faculty.  It is a timely article given the calls for strong presidential leadership that permeates the higher education reform discussions.  The article opens:

“Embarking on an ambitious expansion at home, constructing a network of new campuses around the globe, wooing intellectual superstars and raising vast amounts of money, John Sexton of New York University is the very model of a modern university president — the leader of a large corporation, pushing for growth on every front.

To some within N.Y.U., Dr. Sexton is a hero who has transformed the university. The trustees have thanked him by elevating his salary to nearly $1.5 million from $773,000 and guaranteeing him retirement benefits of $800,000 a year.

But to others, he is an autocrat who treats all but a few anointed professors as hired help, ignoring their concerns, informing them of policies after the fact and otherwise running roughshod over American academic tradition, in which faculty members are partners in charting a university’s course.

“He has a very evangelical sense of purpose,” said Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis, “that does not extend beyond the concept that the university should be an entity of his own making.”

“I think,” he added, “when other administrations see that they say, Well that’s what leadership should be. And when faculty see that they say, That is not what university leadership should be. It’s the style of a maverick C.E.O.”

The job description for university presidents has changed significantly in recent years. In a time of shrinking resources and rising costs, leaders must, of course, raise money; N.Y.U.’s recent $3 billion campaign set a national record. But they must also raise their institutions’ profiles, forge strategic and business alliances, and plot digital strategy. Dr. Sexton has charged ahead on all those fronts, both in New York City and around the world.

The article also provides a good analysis of NYU’s decisions to go global and on its  ambitious expansion plans in Lower Manhattan.  It concludes:

“The debate over Dr. Sexton’s presidency will come to a head this week. The faculty of the university’s largest school, Arts and Science, has scheduled a five-day vote of no confidence. Given Dr. Sexton’s international stature, the vote may serve as the most important referendum yet on the direction of American higher education…

“…[However]according to B. Robert Kreiser of the American Association of University Professors, no-confidence votes are often unsuccessful, and can even backfire “because boards rally around the president, often extending their contracts for years.”

If that happens at N.Y.U., said Andrew Delbanco, a professor at Columbia University and the author of “College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be,” it “will embolden other presidents to disregard, or at least discount, the faculty as a merely retrograde force.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Melissa Harris-Perry, an MSNBC host had harsh words for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Saturday. The MSNBC host took issue with a series of controversial ads, paid for by the city, that target teen pregnancy.

In the public health campaign, photos of young toddlers are paired with text that many have criticized as shaming young parents. In one ad, a toddler is shown with tears streaming down his face. “I’m twice as likely not to graduate high school because you had me as a teen,” the ad reads.

Another one says: “If you finish high school, get a job, and get married before having children, you have a 98% chance of not being in poverty.”

“That is the kind of misleading statistic that might lead some people to blame young mothers for America’s deepening poverty crisis rather than putting the blame where it belongs, on a financial system that concentrates wealth at the top and public policies that entrench it there,” Harris-Perry said.

Good for you, Melissa!

Tony