Dear Commons Community,

Greg Johnson, a colleague at Hunter College passed along that David H. Petraeus, who resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency last November, will serve as a visiting professor at the City University of New York next academic year.

Mr. Petraeus, who will be the next visiting professor of public policy at the university’s Macaulay Honors College, had been approached by many universities, but settled on CUNY because he admires its diversity of students, locations and offerings, his lawyer, Robert Barnett, said in an interview.

In a statement, Mr. Petraeus said he looked forward to leading a seminar “that examines the developments that could position the United States — and our North American partners — to lead the world out of the current global economic slowdown.”

The idea, Ann Kirschner, dean of Macaulay, said in an interview, “is an interdisciplinary seminar in keeping with his research interest in energy, advanced manufacturing, life sciences and information technology.”

In addition, she said, he will give talks and meet with students about their research projects. “We’re still figuring out how much time he’ll be available to us and how to get him as involved as possible in the life of the college,” she said. His compensation for the one-year position, which begins in August, is “still in discussion,” she said.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The CUNY Board of Trustees announced yesterday that William P. Kelly, President of The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, will serve as Interim Chancellor of the University starting July 1, following Chancellor Matthew Goldstein’s announcement that he would step down after nearly 14 years in the post.

Dr. Kelly, a distinguished scholar of American literature, vice chairman of the CUNY Research Foundation and trustee of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, was unanimously appointed to the interim position at a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees. He has served as a University educator for nearly four decades.

“Dr. Kelly brings an extensive scholarly record, superb administrative experience, and a deep commitment to the University’s educational mission to the position of interim Chancellor,” said Board Chairperson Benno Schmidt. “He will provide continuity of purpose and policy during this important transition period.

We wish President Kelly well and hope for his speedy return to the Graduate Center!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, which is one of the last tuition-free colleges in the country but has been under severe financial strain, announced on Tuesday that for the first time in more than a century it will charge undergraduates to attend.  The New York Times reported:

“The decision ends almost two years of roiling debate about an education that was long revered for being “free as air and water,” and stood as the school’s most distinguishing feature, insulating it until now from concerns about the rising cost of a college degree.

Under the plan adopted by Cooper Union’s trustees, the prestigious college, based in the East Village, will continue need-blind admissions. But beginning in fall 2014, it will charge students based on what the college described as a steeply sliding scale, with those deemed able paying around $20,000, and many others, including those “with the greatest needs,” paying nothing. The change would not apply to undergraduates enrolled as of this fall.

“The time has come to set our institution on a path that will enable it to survive and thrive well into the future,” the board chairman, Mark Epstein, said in an announcement to students and faculty members in the college’s Great Hall. “Under the new policy, the Cooper Union will continue to adhere to the vision of Peter Cooper, who founded the institution specifically to provide a quality education to those who might not otherwise be able to afford it.”

Some students wept during the announcement; others left, declaring there was nothing more to hear. “I can’t even process this,” said Ashley Katz, 20, a second-year architecture student from California. “One of my professors came out and said, ‘Drape the whole school in black.’ ”

After the speech, opponents of the decision gathered outside the Great Hall, where Abraham Lincoln gave one of his most famous speeches, in opposition to the westward expansion of slavery, and staged what they called a walkout.

Cooper Union opened in 1859, endowed by the industrialist Peter Cooper with valuable real estate and a mission of educating working-class New Yorkers, at no cost to them. Early on, some students who could afford to pay did so, but no undergraduates have paid for more than 100 years. Along with the nation’s military academies, Cooper Union was among the only remaining schools in the United States that did not charge tuition.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article that asks the question:  What a college degree is worth?   Interviewing  a number of individuals including educators,  most respondents indicated it was more than just earning power.  Here is a sample:

John C. Hitt, President of the University of Central Florida. “… the true power and gift of higher education—it transforms lives.”

Carolyn A. (Biddy) Martin, President of Amherst College, “College is for finding a calling, or many callings, including the calls of friendship and love.”

Phyllis M. Wise, Chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,  “Good universities find a balance where students are free to form their long view of the world while at the same time acquiring the knowledge and skills to pursue a rewarding profession. “

The response I particularly liked came from Frances Bronet, dean of the school of architecture at the University of Oregon.

“As rising college costs have loaded more and more debt onto the backs of Americans, the return-on-investment conversation seems inevitable—­and perhaps prudent. But a single-minded focus on money pays little heed to one of the best aspects of the American higher-education system: its skill at developing curious, critical-thinking, culturally aware people. Those qualities may have greater financial rewards than critics realize.

Frances Bronet…knows that defending this  mission sounds elitist. She grew up intensely poor in Montreal. “There was no way I could go to school and not have an immediate return,” she says. “My parents already thought that my going to school was an opportunity lost.” She went to McGill University and majored in architecture and engineering—technical fields she knew would pay.

Now one of her great regrets in life is not having gotten a broader liberal-arts education. “We talk about people being entrepreneurial, but it’s really about being creative, thoughtful, and critical,” she says.

When she taught at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, her department surveyed engineering alumni, asking what they felt they had missed in their education. Graduates who were a year out of college wished they had gotten more technical skills. Those who were five years out wanted more management skills. But alumni who were 10 to 20 years into their careers wanted more cultural literacy, “because they were traveling all over the world, working with cultures they never experienced before,” she says.

Now if we get more of our legislators thinking this way, American higher education may continue to be the envy of the rest of the world.

Tony  

Dear Commons Community,

Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Carola Suárez-Orozco at the U.C.L.A. Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and the authors, with Irina Todorova, of Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society, have an op-ed piece today reporting the results of an extensive study they conducted on immigrant children.  Their research began in 1997, and involved a large-scale study of newly arrived immigrants, ages 9 to 14, in 20 public middle and high schools in Boston, Cambridge, Mass., and the San Francisco Bay Area. Participants came from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean; many fled not only poverty but also strife, in countries like Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Haiti. Over five years, they interviewed more than 400 students, as well as their siblings, parents and teachers.  They also gathered academic records, test scores and measures of psychological well-being.

In the op-ed piece, they make the point that the two brothers accused in the Boston bombings — Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who was killed on Friday, and his brother, Dzhokhar, 19, who was captured later that day — were around 15 and 8, respectively, when they immigrated.  They were not part of our study, but they fit the demographic profile of the subjects of our research: birth to families displaced by war or strife, multiple-stage (including back-and-forth) migration, language difficulties and entry into harsh urban environments where gangs and crime are temptations.

Among their findings:

“Many newcomer students attend tough urban schools that lack solidarity and cohesion. In too many we found no sense of shared purpose, but rather a student body divided by race and ethnicity, between immigrants and the native born, between newcomers and more acculturated immigrants. Only 6 percent of the participants could name a teacher as someone they would go to with a problem; just 3 percent could identify a teacher who was proud of them.

When asked what Americans thought about immigrants of their national origin, 65 percent of the students provided negative adjectives. “Most Americans think we are lazy, gangsters, drug addicts, that only come to take their jobs away,” a 14-year-old boy in the Bay Area told us. We also found that many educators, already overwhelmed by the challenges of inner-city teaching, considered immigrant parents uninformed and uninvolved.

Having just one friend who spoke English fluently was a strong predictor of positive academic outcomes. Yet more than a third of the students in our study reported that they had little or no opportunity even to interact with native-born students, much less make close friends.

Our research also confirmed that kids who arrive during their high school years, as Tamerlan Tsarnaev did, face bad odds, especially if they experienced interrupted schooling, family instability and traumatic dislocations back home.”

Their conclusion:

“Whatever motivated the Tsarnaev brothers surely … may never be known. Among some of the distinctive features of their case are family estrangement, multiple relocations across countries and, possibly, religious radicalization.

But the broad lesson — assimilating immigrant students into the fabric of society through academic, psychological and other supports — should inform educators and policy makers in the decades ahead, when immigrants and their children will account for most of the nation’s population growth.”

Tony  

Dear Commons Community,

Columnist Paul Krugman examines the issue of long-term unemployment in the United States and posits that our policy decisions not to invest in the economy makes it more difficult for the long-term unemployed (out of work for six months or more) to find jobs.  He has written before about our overly cautious policies that focus on debt reduction rather than stimulus to move the economy and stimulate job growth.  Most disturbing was a study he cited that looked at the job  prospects of the long-term unemployed:

“One piece of evidence comes from the relationship between job openings and unemployment. Normally these two numbers move inversely: the more job openings, the fewer Americans out of work. And this traditional relationship remains true if we look at short-term unemployment. But as William Dickens and Rand Ghayad of Northeastern University recently showed, the relationship has broken down for the long-term unemployed: a rising number of job openings doesn’t seem to do much to reduce their numbers. It’s as if employers don’t even bother looking at anyone who has been out of work for a long time.

To test this hypothesis, Mr. Ghayad then did an experiment, sending out résumés describing the qualifications and employment history of 4,800 fictitious workers. Who got called back? The answer was that workers who reported having been unemployed for six months or more got very few callbacks, even when all their other qualifications were better than those of workers who did attract employer interest.”

Krugman’s conclusion:

“…we are indeed creating a permanent class of jobless Americans.

And let’s be clear: this is a policy decision. The main reason our economic recovery has been so weak is that, spooked by fear-mongering over debt, we’ve been doing exactly what basic macroeconomics says you shouldn’t do — cutting government spending in the face of a depressed economy.

It’s hard to overstate how self-destructive this policy is. Indeed, the shadow of long-term unemployment means that austerity policies are counterproductive even in purely fiscal terms. Workers, after all, are taxpayers too; if our debt obsession exiles millions of Americans from productive employment, it will cut into future revenues and raise future deficits.

Our exaggerated fear of debt is, in short, creating a slow-motion catastrophe. It’s ruining many lives, and at the same time making us poorer and weaker in every way. And the longer we persist in this folly, the greater the damage will be.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times reported that Dr. Gerald Lynch, the former president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice,  died at his home on Long Island.  His obituary mentions:

“Dr. Lynch, the college’s longest-serving president, was a psychology professor when he was named acting president of John Jay in 1975. Within weeks, the entire City University of New York system became embroiled in the fiscal crisis, and John Jay’s future was in doubt.

Mayor Abraham D. Beame had ordered the CUNY system to cut nearly $100 million from its budget. One solution proposed by the City University chancellor Robert J. Kibbee involved closing or merging multiple schools, one of them John Jay. The Board of Higher Education — now called the City University of New York Board of Trustees — was ready to go along, but Dr. Lynch opposed the plan.

He enthusiastically supported student protests, even scaling a wooden barricade with a megaphone to lead hundreds of students in chants. He also courted high-profile supporters in politics and law enforcement, including Police Commissioner Michael J. Codd and Nicholas Scoppetta, then the city’s commissioner of investigations and a teacher at John Jay. And he cut nearly $3 million with an austerity budget of his own.

“Even though this is radical surgery,” Dr. Lynch said, “it is better than death.”

For those of us at CUNY during the fiscal crisis, it was a most difficult time.  President Lynch defended his college well and fought the position of the CUNY Board of Higher Education.  John Jay went on to become one of the top schools of criminal justice in the country.

May he rest in peace!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Frank Bruni in his New York Times column today examines the issue of public higher education funding that is being debated in many of our state capitols.  He starts at the University of Texas by asking:

“Do we want our marquee state universities to behave more like job-training centers, judged by the number of students they speed toward degrees, the percentage of those students who quickly land good-paying jobs and the thrift with which all of this is accomplished? In the service of that, are we willing to jeopardize some of the trailblazing research these schools have routinely done and the standards they’ve maintained?

Those questions are being asked and fostering acrimony on campus after campus, the one here in Austin chief among them. In public remarks over the last few years, Hunter Rawlings, the president of the Association of American Universities, has called Texas both the “epicenter of public debate about the function” of higher education and “ground zero” in a welling crisis.

Rawlings is referring to the tension between the nine regents who set policy for the University of Texas at Austin, all of them appointed by Gov. Rick Perry, and the university’s president, Bill Powers. The regents’ apparent animosity toward Powers, whose most recent request for a modest in-state tuition increase they denied, reached a point where state lawmakers passed several resolutions in February making their support for him clear. That was a slap at the regents — and, by extension, at Governor Perry. And while it reflected political factionalism, it also tapped into a philosophical divide. The regents, Perry and a conservative think tank with great sway over the governor have all called for, or mused publicly about, reforms at the university that many other Texans have deep and warranted reservations about.

The reformers want professors evaluated by how many students they teach and how many research dollars they attract, metrics that favor large classes and less speculative, visionary science.

They want the school to figure out a way, despite huge cutbacks in public funding, to offer students a four-year degree for a sum total of $10,000 in tuition, which is a small fraction of the current cost and seemingly impossible without a diminution in the quality of instruction.

They want expanded online classes. And they want programs tailored more precisely to the job market of the moment.

Powers says he’s open to much of this — to a point. “I and every other university president I know has made efficiency and affordability and using new teaching systems a high priority,” he told me when I met with him last week. The issue, he added, is how to do this while still “educating students at the highest level.”

Bruni provides other examples in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina.  He concludes that there is more to this than higher education efficiency:

“Scratch the surface of some of the efforts to reform state universities and you find more than just legitimate qualms about efficiency and demands for accountability. You find the kind of indiscriminate anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism popular among more than a few right-wing conservatives.

It’s worth noting that Governor Perry has dismissed global warming as “one contrived, phony mess” and that many of the voices calling most loudly for change at the University of Texas are from the Tea Party fringe.

In other words there’s some crude, petty politics in all of this. And as we tackle the very real, very important challenge of giving young Americans the best and most useful education possible in an era of dwindling resources, that’s the last thing we need.”

Politics indeed!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A.J. Jacobs, editor at large at Esquire magazine and author of four New York Times bestsellers, enrolled in eleven MOOC courses in the past year and provides his impressions in an op-ed piece.  He sets the stage by commenting:

“MOOC boosters tend to speak of these global online classes as if they are the greatest educational advancement since the Athenian agora, highlighting their potential to lift millions of people out of poverty. Skeptics — including the blogger and University of California, Berkeley, doctoral student Aaron Bady — worry that MOOCs will offer a watered-down education, give politicians an excuse to gut state school budgets, and harm less prestigious colleges and universities.

To see for myself, I signed up for 11 courses. The bulk were on Coursera, which was founded in 2011 by two computer science professors at Stanford and financed by John Doerr, the famed Silicon Valley venture capitalist, among others — but I also dabbled with courses sponsored by edX and Udacity. Here, my report card on the current state of MOOCs.”

His initial reactions were:

“I learned many fascinating things while taking a series of free online college courses over the last few months. In my history class, I learned there was a Japanese political plot to assassinate Charlie Chaplin in 1932. In my genetics class, I learned that the ability to wiggle our ears is a holdover from animal ancestors who could shift the direction of their hearing organs.

But the first thing I learned? When it comes to Massive Open Online Courses, like those offered by Coursera, Udacity and edX, you can forget about the Socratic method.

The professor is, in most cases, out of students’ reach, only slightly more accessible than the pope or Thomas Pynchon. Several of my Coursera courses begin by warning students not to e-mail the professor. We are told not to “friend” the professor on Facebook. If you happen to see the professor on the street, avoid all eye contact (well, that last one is more implied than stated). There are, after all, often tens of thousands of students and just one top instructor.

Perhaps my modern history professor, Philip D. Zelikow, of the University of Virginia, put it best in his course introduction, explaining that his class would be a series of “conversations in which we’re going to talk about this course one to one” — except that one side (the student’s) doesn’t “get to talk back directly.” I’m not sure this fits the traditional definition of a conversation.

On the other hand, how can I really complain? I’m getting Ivy League (or Ivy League equivalent) wisdom free. Anyone can, whether you live in South Dakota or Senegal, whether it’s noon or 5 a.m., whether you’re broke or a billionaire. Professors from Harvard, M.I.T. and dozens of other schools prerecord their lectures; you watch them online and take quizzes at your leisure.”

He rated his overall MOOC experiences as a “B”:

“Am I glad I spent a semester attending MOOCs? Yes. Granted, my retention rate was low, and I can’t think of any huge practical applications for my newfound knowledge (the closest came when I included Erich Fromm’s notion of freedom in a piece for my day job at Esquire — before deleting it). Though one fellow “Introduction to Finance” student, an information technology consultant, told me he’s planning to include the course on his résumé, I probably won’t go that far.

But MOOCs provided me with the thrill of relatively painless self-improvement and an easy introduction to heady topics. And just as important, they gave me relief from the guilt of watching “Swamp People.”

As these online universities gain traction, and start counting for actual college course credit, they’ll most likely have enormous real-world impact. They’ll help in getting jobs and creating business ideas. They might just live up to their hype. For millions of people around the globe with few resources, MOOCs may even be life-changing.

As for whether MOOCs will ever totally replace colleges made of brick, mortar and ivy, however, count me as a skeptic. A campus still has advantages for those lucky enough to afford the tuition — networking being one. (Even dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg made key social connections at Harvard.) And an online college will never crack Playboy’s venerable annual list of top party schools.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday was a day that sent the news media in a frenzy as reporters tried to keep up with the latest developments in the confrontations  between police and suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings.    It was reminiscent of the O.J. Simpson chase in the 1990s with viewers glued to their television sets awaiting the outcome of the hunt for two brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the prime suspects in the bombings.  At the end of the day, the older brother Tamerlan (left photo above), aged 26,  was killed , and the young brother,  Dzhokhar (right photo above), age 19, was wounded and brought into custody.  Much will be written about these two young men in the coming months especially about their motives.  If there are profiles of people who commit heinous acts of destruction,  it will be debated whether these two fit any of them.

The New York Times describes them:

“One was a boxer, one a wrestler. One favored alligator shoes and fancy shirts, the other wore jeans, button-ups and T-shirts.

The younger one — the one their father described as “like an angel” — gathered around him a group of friends so loyal that more than one said they would testify for him, if it came to that.

The older one, who friends and family members said exerted a strong influence on his younger sibling — “He could manipulate him,” an uncle said — once told a photographer, “I don’t have a single American friend. I don’t understand them.”

A kaleidoscope of images, adjectives and anecdotes tumbled forth on Friday to describe Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, the two brothers suspected of carrying out the bombings at the Boston Marathon that killed three people and gravely wounded scores more.

What no one who knew them could say was why the young men, immigrants of Chechnyan heritage, would set off bombs among innocent people. The Tsarnaevs came with their family to the United States almost a decade ago from Kyrgyzstan, after living briefly in the Dagestan region of Russia. Tamerlan, who was killed early Friday morning in a shootout with law enforcement officers, was 15 at the time. Dzhokhar, who was in custody Friday evening, was only 8.

In America, they took up lives familiar to every new immigrant, gradually adapting to a new culture, a new language, new schools and new friends.

Dzhokhar, a handsome teenager with a wry yearbook smile, was liked and respected by his classmates at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, where celebrities like Ben Affleck and Matt Damon had walked the halls before him. A classmate remembered how elated he seemed on the night of the senior prom. Wearing a black tuxedo and a red bow tie, he was with a date among 40 students who met at a private home before the event to have their photos taken, recalled Sierra Schwartz, 20.

“He was happy to be there, and people were happy he was there,” Ms. Schwartz said. “He was accepted and very well liked.”

A talented wrestler, he was listed as a Greater Boston League Winter All-Star. “He was a smart kid,” said Peter Payack, 63, assistant wrestling coach at the school. In 2011, the year he graduated, was awarded a $2,500 scholarship by the City of Cambridge, an honor granted only 35 to 40 students a year.

For Tamerlan, life seemed more difficult.

A promising boxer, he fought in the Golden Gloves National Tournament in 2009, and he was noticed by a young photographer, Johannes Hirn, who took him as a subject for an essay assignment in a photojournalism class at Boston University. “There are no values anymore,” Tamerlan said in the essay, which was later published in Boston University’s magazine The Comment. “People can’t control themselves.”

We will see in the coming months what drove these two to kill and maim innocents.

Tony