August 18th, 2010
Education News
Roundup
Articles posted by five reliably interesting sources of
news about higher education.
Obama to Ease Cuba Travel
Rules
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/18/qt/
obama_to_ease_cuba_travel_rules
August 18th, 2010
The Obama administration is planning to ease travel
restrictions to Cuba -- and specifically to make it easier for
academic and research programs to take place, The New
York Times reported. Many American education groups have
argued for years that the limits are so severe that they inhibit
programs that could benefit both countries.
Test Takers Increase, Scores
Don't
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/18/act
August 18th, 2010
More and more students are taking the ACT in high school, but
their scores are not increasing, finds the new ACT Condition
of College and Career Readiness report, released today.
The average composite ACT score in 2010 was a 21.0 out of a
maximum 36 -- the lowest average score in the last five years.
Average subject scores for mathematics and science stayed
constant from 2009, while English and reading declined by 0.1
percentage points, as seen in the table below.
ACT officials say they are nonetheless encouraged by this
year's results, because while overall scores are not rising,
more students are taking the test and therefore more are
moving in the direction of being academically prepared for
college. The number of students taking the ACT in 2010 rose
to 1,569,000 students, up by 30 percent since 2006, when
1,206,000 students took it. The number has grown steadily, by
roughly 100,000 students a year, in the intervening years.
Average ACT scores for 2009 and 2010
2009 2010
Composite 21.1 21.0
Reading 21.4 21.3
Math 21.0 21.0
Published by: philosophyandrew
Science 20.9 20.9
English 20.6 20.5
“If you look at the average score over the last five years,
it’s been basically stable,” said Cynthia Schmeiser, ACT’s
education division president and chief operating officer. “But
what we believe is really important to focus on is the College
Readiness Benchmarks, because they represent the levels of
skills that students need in order to go into any kind of
postsecondary education without needing any remediation.”
Based on their scores, 24 percent of students met or surpassed
all four ACT College Readiness Benchmarks, which are
empirically identified scores for each of the subjects that
indicate what a student needs to know to succeed in a first-year
college course. The data show a slight increase from 21 percent
in 2006, but Schmeiser says that the number of students
who are completely prepared to go to college is far too small.
Twenty-eight percent of students met none of the benchmarks,
and 15 percent met only one. Last year, 28 percent of students
met no benchmarks, and 16 percent met one.
“Admittedly, it’s slow progress, but the trend is a positive one,”
Schmeiser said. “All in all, even though the progress is headed
in the right direction, we still have a lot of work to do.”
Nearly half of all 2010 high-school graduates took the ACT,
and in seven states -- Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan,
North Dakota, Tennessee and Wyoming -- all high school
graduates are required to have taken the test as part of a
statewide assessment. More states hope to implement such a
policy in coming years.
But of those seven states, only North Dakota had more than 40
percent of its test-takers meet at least three of the benchmarks.
Of all states, only Minnesota exceeded 50 percent, with 70
percent of 2010 high school graduates there having taken the
ACT. Schmeiser said that having everyone take the test opens
more doors for students and offers greater access to higher
education.
In addition to an overall increase in the number of test-takers,
there has also been a significant increase in minority students,
and particularly Hispanic students, taking the test. Of all the
students taking the test this year, 454,000, or 29 percent, were
of ethnic or racial minorities. This is up from 27 percent in
2009, and 23 percent in 2006, when 279,000 were minority
students. This year, 10 percent of test-takers were Hispanic,
compared to 7 percent last year. African-American test-takers
increased from 13 to 14 percent.
But even though their numbers are growing and more minority
students may be expressing interest in going to college, their
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August 18th, 2010
scores are staying flat or decreasing. Only Asian students have
shown a marked increase in scores since 2006. Black students’
scores have decreased.
Racial breakdown of average ACT scores
2006 2009 2010 5-year
change
Asian 22.3 23.2 23.4 1.1
White 22.0 22.2 22.3 0.3
American 18.8 18.9 19.0 0.2
Indian
Hispanic 18.6 18.7 18.6 0.0
Black 17.1 16.9 16.9 -0.2
Schmeiser said that in addition to racial and ethnic diversity,
the ACT is also seeing more diversity among family incomes
and achievement levels
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Stop Admitting Ph.D. Students
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2010/08/18/harris
August 18th, 2010
They walk into my office every spring, dressed in new suits (the
men) or dressy pantsuits (the women). They are prospective
graduate students, and they're nervous. We engage in a few
pleasantries, and then I ask them what they want to do with
their Ph.D.s. They all reply that they want a tenure-track job
at a research university. I then ask them what they know of
the academic job market in my discipline (social psychology).
Smiles faltering a bit, some say they've heard it was rather bad
at the moment; others say they don't know much about it. I
explain to them that calling the job market "rather bad" was
akin to calling Katrina "a bad storm" and that the market is
as bad as I've seen in my 23 years as a professor. They gulp
hard and then reply gamely that they are prepared to work
hard to achieve their goals. I smile back at them and applaud
their initiative. Inwardly I wonder if they truly know what they
are getting into, that even if they work hard and amass an
impressive vita, it still might not be enough to enable them to
earn that coveted tenure-track job.
After a few years of watching the academic job market collapse
into a seeming death spiral, I also started to wonder whether
my "full disclosure" strategy of trying to scare off prospective
graduate students was adequate. I started to entertain the
possibility that if the problem was too many qualified
applicants for too few jobs, then perhaps the responsible
Published by: philosophyandrew
– even ethical – course of action would be for me to stop
contributing to the oversupply of applicants.
So, a few weeks ago I revised my departmental web page
to include the following statement: "Notice to prospective
graduate students: I will not be accepting new students in my
lab for the indefinite future."
Some of my colleagues voiced private support; others
vigorously disputed the idea that there was an oversupply
of psychology Ph.D.s. As one friend told me over coffee at
Starbucks, "Sure, the market is bad, but our students always
find jobs." While that was true, it was also true that their
searches had grown increasingly desperate over the past
couple of years and that our success was driven in part
because graduate training in psychology opens up a large
number of applied options – options that are also drying up
disconcertingly in the current recession.
In our own recent faculty searches, the number of applications
received and the strength of the candidates were staggering.
Our latest hire had over 25 publications when he interviewed,
many of them in the top journals in our field. We clearly
benefited from the job market glut, but what would come
of the countless others in the pool who had decent, even
impressive, vitas but simply couldn’t vault to the top of a short
list? And would the students I train be able to compete at
such a level? At this stage of my career, I’m publishing steadily
but not spectacularly. I feel I can offer students excellent
training in research methodology and theory, but I am no
longer confident that will be enough to propel them to the top
of a short list for the kinds of jobs they came into graduate
school wanting.
In short, I think academia shares many of the classic
elements of a social trap: It is in most faculty members’
and departments’ best interests to recruit a lot of graduate
students. Churning out Ph.D.s is one of the major metrics of
departmental “success.” Departments need graduate students
to teach their classes, and faculty members need them to run
their labs. Yet, as in any social trap, when everybody acts in
their self-interest, a negative collective outcome ensues. I have
served as chair or co-chair of 13 Ph.D. students in my career,
a number I’m guessing is typical of most research faculty.
Population growth of that magnitude is a Malthusian melt-
down in the making and simply isn’t sustainable. We’re not
creating enough academic jobs to absorb all those Ph.D.s, and
in today’s economy, applied jobs are disappearing as well.
Of course, it is possible, as my coffee buddy assures me, that
the market will start improving in a couple of years and we will
need all the Ph.D.s we’re churning out. Maybe so, and if it does,
I can always start accepting students again. But I’m no longer
willing to pin my students’ prospects for their futures on an
ephemeral job market that shines in the distance like a mirage.
And I’ll be OK without new Ph.D. students, even after my
current student finishes. I have access to bright honors
students who can collect data for me, albeit with a lot
more supervision and input on my part. I can collaborate
with colleagues who have students of their own. Maybe I’ll
explore other forms of scholarship that don’t require graduate
students, such as working with archival data sets or writing
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August 18th, 2010
that trade book that’s been rattling around in my head for a
while.
I’m not arguing that graduate programs should stop admitting
students entirely. There are, after all, some jobs out there, and
graduate students play too important of a role in the modern
research enterprise to phase out graduate training completely.
But I think we need to reduce, and in some disciplines sharply,
the number of Ph.D.s that are produced.
Knowing that prospective students apply to graduate school
of their own free will, with hope in their hearts and stardust
in their eyes, doesn’t absolve faculty of some portion of
responsibility for the current crisis. As the bumper sticker
says, if I’m not part of the solution, I’m part of the problem.
I don’t want to be part of the problem any more, and I think
I will sleep better knowing that I am no longer contributing
to an academic job market that bears an uncomfortable
resemblance to a Ponzi scheme on the verge of falling apart.
Cornell University, located in Ithaca, New York, is an inclusive,
dynamic, and innovative Ivy League university and New York's
land-grant institution. ...
Up, Up and Away
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/18/ncaa
August 18th, 2010
Yet again, nearly every Division I athletics program spent
more than it made last year. And at a time when many are
feeling pressure to achieve self-sufficiency, these programs are
relying more than ever on institutional subsidies to balance
their budgets.
Those were among the key findings of the National Collegiate
Athletic Association's annual report of athletics revenue and
expenses at its Division I institutions. The report, released
Tuesday, painted a bleak financial picture for intercollegiate
sports and reinforcing critics’ charge that the current pattern
of sports spending is unsustainable. The data for the 2008-9
report were compiled by Daniel L. Fulks, accounting program
director at Transylvania University.
Most emblematic of the slumping economy’s effect on
college athletics, only 14 programs from the Football Bowl
Subdivision (formerly Division I-A) generated more revenues
than expenses. This is down from 2006-07 and 2007-08, when
25 programs turned a profit.
No programs in the Football Championship Subdivision
(formerly Division I-AA) generated net revenues in 2009.
Similarly, no Division I program without a football team
(formerly Division I-AAA) has generated net revenues since
2005.
In a similar vein, the median institutional subsidy for athletics
in the FBS rose from around $8 million in 2007-8 to more than
$10 million in 2008-9. This reliance on institutional funds has
increased as the growth in median revenue generated directly
by athletics programs in the FBS -- via sources such as ticket
sales and media contracts -- slowed to nearly 6 percent from
2008 to 2009. This is down significantly from the 17 percent
growth in revenue from 2007 to 2008. By comparison, total
athletics expenses sped in the other direction, ballooning by
Published by: philosophyandrew
nearly 11 percent. This is double the growth in expenses from
2007 to 2008.
The net losses for institutions in FCS and those Division I
institutions without football teams also increased notably.
“It continues to be all about an institution’s determination of
the value athletics adds to overall operation,” Jim Isch, the
NCAA's interim president, said in an association news story.
“It appears more institutions are having to face these difficult
decisions about where to invest their money. The top end --
while it is not as populated as it was a year ago -- still does not
have to rely on institutional subsidies. But those that do are
falling further behind.”
The gap between the “haves” and “have-nots” grew
considerably within the FBS. The sports program generating
the most revenue in the subdivision -- which the report does
not identify -- produced $138.5 million, whereas the median
generated revenue was $32.3 million. Also, the largest total
expense by a single program was $127.7 million, in comparison
to the median of $45.9 million. The gaps for FCS institutions
and those Division I institutions without a football team are
significant but not nearly as large.
Remaining consistent, however, was the size of athletics
expenditures as a percentage of total institutional budgets.
This has hovered at around 5 percent since 2004 for Division I
institutions. Isch noted that sports spending is growing at the
same rate as overall spending.
“Early on in this period, athletics expenses were growing
at rates that were up to 5 percent faster than the rates
for institutional expenses,” said Isch in an association news
story. “However, in the last year, the median institutional
gap has closed to zero. What we don’t know is whether that
phenomenon is the result of the economy or some type of
behavior modification. The only way to find out is to see what
happens in subsequent years.”
Looking at individual sports, only football and men’s
basketball generated surpluses in the FBS subdivision as a
whole. Still, on the ground, only 60 percent of teams have
generated such surpluses in each of the past six years. These
“revenue-generating sports,” then, do not always have the
3
August 18th, 2010
funds to support themselves and cannot always support other
teams, as some football and basketball supporters argue.
This year’s latest report is chock-full of even more data. Some
of the other findings:
• Ticket sales and donations from alumni and other
supporters make up more than half of the revenue
generated by FBS programs.
• Salaries and benefits for coaches and athletic
scholarships for players make up nearly half of the total
expenses of FBS programs.
• The highest median head coaching salaries in the FBS
are, in order, football ($1.2 million), men’s basketball
($911,000), women’s basketball ($308,000) and men’s
ice hockey ($313,000).
• Only 2 percent of football programs, 6 percent of
men’s basketball programs and 2 percent of women’s
basketball programs in the FCS generated surpluses.
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Science and Subpoenas
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/08/18/levine
August 18th, 2010
On Friday, Inside Higher Ed sadly reported on an effort
underway by the state superintendent of Arizona to use the
subpoena powers of a federal court to obtain data from
education research scholars at the University of Arizona and
Arizona State University. The research in question examines
the state’s approach to educating children who are not native
speakers of English. If the pending cross-motion of the state
superintendent to compel production of experts’ source data
prevails, the outcome of that determination could compromise
the privacy protection promised to research participants and
the confidentiality of the data.
Published by: philosophyandrew
Today, a federal judge has an opportunity to issue an order
that prohibits the release of any information that would
directly or indirectly disclose the identities of teachers who
participated in important education research studies. Or
the court could strike a blow to science serving the public
interest by ordering identifiable information to be disclosed
and thereby making teachers who voluntarily participated in
these studies vulnerable to harm (e.g., loss of jobs, public
criticism). In addition, the court ruling may result in a
broader and longer-term impact by chilling the willingness of
others to participate in research or stifling researchers from
undertaking some of the studies most necessary to policy and
public decision making.
In the human sciences — whether in biomedical or social and
behavioral science — advancements to knowledge depend on
individuals’ willingness to participate in research. In science,
we have long recognized that responsible conduct of research
and quality science require the ethical treatment of those
willing to be studied. Across ethics codes in the human
sciences, including the Ethical Standards of the American
Educational Research Association, informed consent and
protecting the confidentiality of identifiable information are
bedrock to the conduct of research.
In 1979, the National Commission for the Protection of
Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research
set forth Ethical Principles and Guidelines (widely known
as the Belmont Report) that emphasized the centrality of
informed consent and protection of research participants
from increased risk of harm due to their participation in
research. The Belmont Report led to passage in 1981 of the
Code of Federal Regulations for the Protection of Human
Subjects (45CFR46), which delegates review of research and
implementation of the regulations to institutional review
boards (IRBs) at universities and other institutions.
Under 45CFR46, institutions and their IRBs are provided
with some degree of discretion in specifying human research
protection plans, but have the affirmative responsibility
of ensuring that the research procedures set forth by the
research scientists protect the privacy of subjects and the
confidentiality of data. Discharging their responsibilities, the
IRBs at the University of Arizona and Arizona State University
approved the research procedures set forth for these studies
to protect the identities of participating teachers and any
information that could disclose their identities. Following
these protocols, faculty members made commitments to the
teachers participating in their research, and teachers gave
their consent to participate with the understanding that the
data in these studies would not be used in any way that could
reveal their identities. These protocols reflect a commitment
of researchers to their research participants; by virtue of their
review and approval, the institutions’ IRBs also affirmed their
commitment to the specified plans.
With these education research studies now completed and
reports from them independently peer-reviewed and made
accessible by the Civil Rights Project at the University of
California at Los Angeles, two of the investigators have agreed
to appear as expert witnesses before the U.S. District Court
of Arizona. As with any scientific expert appearing before the
courts, these education researchers can be cross-examined
4
August 18th, 2010
with respect to their own expertise or about the studies that
they seek to present. Serving as expert witnesses, however,
does not waive in any sense the agreements that researchers
made to research participants or the responsibility of the
universities and their IRBs to ensure that these commitments
are honored.
In an open society, we should engender a commitment
among scientists to disseminate their findings on important
matters of societal dialogue and debate. Scientific discoveries
that are relevant to high profile or controversial issues —
whether global warming, disease transmission, efficacy of
first responders in disasters, recovery from traumatic events
— need to be part of the public discourse where sound
science can contribute to policy and practice. There is no
more important an arena where science can matter than
education, where schools and communities are struggling with
limited information and equally limited resources to help
guide effective interventions and outcomes, including in this
case those related to instruction for English language learners.
There is every reason to support and encourage scholars who
undertake quality research to publicly present it without fear
of undermining how ethically responsible research is done in
all of human science or putting their research subjects at direct
risk.
Looking ahead, there are steps that institutions and their
faculty members or researchers can take to reduce the
likelihood of disclosure — including forced disclosure through
legal proceedings. These steps range from how and where
identifiable data are retained to strengthened data protection
plans through obtaining Certificates of Confidentiality from
federal agencies, in particular from the National Institutes of
Health. These certificates are intended to protect the privacy of
research subjects by protecting institutions and investigators
from being forced to release sensitive information that could
be used to identify participants, including education research
addressing sensitive topics (e.g., truancy). Certificates of
Confidentiality are intended to encourage recruitment of
subjects on sensitive issues by enhancing privacy protections
and reducing concerns about participation. Although these
certificates are more visible to researchers working in areas
where criminal or civil legal proceedings are more likely
(e.g., medical malpractice research, studies of drug treatment
programs), little is known about the strengths or durability
of these protections. On less sensitive topics — as with many
studies in education — the research may not qualify at all for
Certificates of Confidentiality, even if sought.
Parties in a dispute, as in the Flores v. State of Arizona et
al., the suit that has led to the demands for information about
the education research conducted in Arizona, certainly have
a right to present and scrutinize the research and findings
presented before the court. To review the methodology, the
data analyses, and the findings — much of which seems to
be provided in the reports on the UCLA website — does
not, however, require knowing the identity of the research
participants. In one of the studies, a survey of some 800
teachers, the investigators themselves do not know who
the anonymous respondents are. By forcing disclosure of
information about specific schools or school districts, the
Published by: philosophyandrew
identities of now anonymous participants could be deductively
disclosed.
In the social sciences and very much evident in education
research, there is a history of data access under restricted
licensing agreements that allow other bona fide scientists to
reanalyze data or undertake additional analyses adhering to
the original confidentiality agreements made with research
participants. As a condition of these licenses, there are very
stiff penalties for violation. It would seem that such steps
would not be necessary in the pending case because the court
could satisfy itself that the expert testimony is reliable based
on the factors established by the Supreme Court in Daubert
v. Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. without needing to
know the names of the participants. If there are questions
unaddressed that are important to the Court, it would be
far better to ask the researchers to provide further analyses
or to have other qualified scholars undertake analyses under
restricted conditions than run the risk of compromising
teachers or intimidating researchers by compelling disclosure
of the identities of human subjects.
We are at a time in our history when science is sorely needed
to advance the public good in education and elsewhere. These
universities should stand firm in protecting the integrity
of science and backing their IRBs that approved of the
research protocols guaranteeing that subject identities would
not be revealed. Were the universities to do otherwise, they
would need to scrutinize whether breaches of confidentiality
constitute adverse events according to their own guidelines.
For academic researchers or their universities to face this
challenge when researchers and their studies could be
scrutinized without revealing participants’ identities is a sad
moment indeed. In an era when good evidence in education
can help to make wise decisions, we can only hope that the
U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona will defend the
interests of these researchers and those who serve science and
society through their participation in research.
Cornell University, located in Ithaca, New York, is an inclusive,
dynamic, and innovative Ivy League university and New York's
land-grant institution. ...
Take Me Away, Country Roads
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/18/wv
August 18th, 2010
Bluefield, West Virginia is a city of about 11,000 people in
the southern Appalachians, in the southernmost corner of
the state – coal mining country. “It’s a small community;
I’m proud of this community,” said Sudhakar R. Jamkhandi,
the coordinator of the Office of International Initiatives at
Bluefield State College, in West Virginia. “I’ve been here since
’86 myself and I wouldn’t trade it for anywhere else in the
world.”
But Jamkhandi would like to see Bluefield become more
worldly. In West Virginia, where 94.5 percent of the
population is white and only 1.1 percent is foreign-born –
compared to 11.1 percent nationally – international education
is arguably all the more critical. Yet the reality is that, leaving
aside the two largest universities, West Virginia and Marshall,
5
August 18th, 2010
the state’s smaller, rural institutions have been behind when it
comes to efforts to internationalize their campuses.
This is for any number of reasons: financial, cultural,
demographic, and geographic. Only 17.3 percent of West
Virginia’s population has a bachelor’s degree or beyond, the
lowest proportion in the nation. In the city of Bluefield,
the median household income is $27,672. Bluefield State
estimates that between 68 and 70 percent of its students are
first-generation college students, and their average age is 26.
In this context, study abroad can be a hard sell.
A very hard sell: When Bluefield State offered its very first
study abroad program, in 2009, just two students enrolled.
This past academic year, study abroad participation increased
to seven, across two programs (focused on the correctional
system in Bermuda and the culture and ecology of Costa Rica,
respectively). “I look at it warts and all,” said Jamkhandi. “It’s
a modest beginning.”
But it is a beginning. The obstacles to internationalization
remain, but this is a story not only about challenges, but
also about progress, of how rural colleges become more
cosmopolitan places largely from scratch and how West
Virginia’s institutions of higher education have collaborated in
this effort.
“We’re just trying to build the capacity of our institutions to do
internationalization,” said Clark Egnor, executive director of
the Center for International Programs at Marshall University
and chair of the Consortium for Internationalizing Higher
Education in West Virginia, which was established in 2006.
“A lot of our institutions don’t really have the tools to
recruit international students and to do study abroad. We’re a
poor state, we’re under-resourced. We’ve been in a recession
forever.”
All that said, “We want our students to have these
international opportunities just like in any other state.”
Capacity Building
Marshall and West Virginia Universities have played
leadership roles in the consortium on internationalization,
which receives $120,000 per year in funding from the state’s
Higher Education Policy Commission. The consortium is more
broad-based than other such statewide consortiums, which
typically focus on promoting their states as destinations for
international students.
The West Virginia consortium does that, but it’s also
focused on increasing study abroad participation and
internationalizing the undergraduate curriculum at the state’s
public universities (Bluefield State and Glenville State
Colleges; Concord, Fairmont State, Marshall, Shepherd, West
Liberty, West Virginia State, and West Virginia Universities,
including WVU at Parkersburg; and the West Virginia
Institute of Technology).
Among its various initiatives, the consortium has signed up
with the International Student Exchange Programs, through
which West Virginia students can pay in-state tuition and
study at foreign universities in the ISEP network. Marshall and
WVU are the institutions of record in the ISEP arrangement,
and while all of the universities in the consortium can send
Published by: philosophyandrew
students abroad (through the auspices of the universities of
record), only Marshall and WVU are approved to receive the
incoming exchange students. This is for reasons of capacity.
Herein lies the fundamental challenge of capacity building:
If you build it, students will come (and go), but you have
to build it first. Without an existing international program,
universities may lack the infrastructure they need to properly
support students as they are incoming and outgoing; some
of the smaller institutions have struggled with the process of
approving transfer credits from study abroad, for instance.
“This is a very sensitive thing,” Egnor said. “We’re trying to
help the other institutions develop that capacity.”
The consortium has promoted West Virginia as a study
destination for international students. “We’re not what most
prospective students are going to think of when they think,
‘Where am I going to study in the United States?’ ” said Egnor.
"They’re going to think of New York or California, so we have to
work really hard to get West Virginia in there, to make it one of
the options.” The consortium has opted to focus its recruiting
efforts on Turkey, which is one of the top 10 source countries
for international students in the U.S., but which West Virginia
universities weren’t already targeting on their own.
“We looked at where West Virginia as a state has been
receiving international students, and we found out that most
of our institutions were already invested in recruiting students
from China, India, South Korea and Japan, so it didn't make
sense to duplicate efforts that individual institutions were
already making,” Egnor said. “Turkey appealed to us because
it is the top European country of origin for international
students who study in the U.S., but unlike other European
students whose countries are members of the European Union
and tend to study abroad within Europe through Erasmus
exchanges, Turkish students more often choose to study in the
United States.” Egnor noted, too, that there are developing
trade links between West Virginia and Turkey. .
The consortium has held training workshops on topics
like faculty-led study abroad, awarded $15,000 grants to
institutions to support various international initiatives, and
funded scholarships for study abroad for foreign language
teachers in training. And it sponsors – and subsidizes -- a bus
trip abroad.
For two years now, each spring, freshmen from across the state
have climbed on board for a one-week, one-credit, faculty-
led study abroad program at Laval University, in Quebec. The
price for students has been about $300 (not including the
tuition cost for the credit hour). “We want to give them a
quick international experience, to whet their appetite to do it
again,” Egnor said. “What we’ve found is when students do this
program, these freshmen come back and they want to study
French, they want to go back abroad for a longer period of time.
So it’s like an intervention.”
This fall, the consortium will hold a workshop
on internationalization and the curriculum. “If these
international experiences are disconnected from the
curriculum, it means nothing,” Egnor said. “It’s not
sustainable.”
“To me, the greatest contribution of this whole thing has been
increasing awareness levels at the institutions of the kinds of
6
August 18th, 2010
things they can do to become more internationally focused,”
said Bruce C. Flack, the director of academic affairs for the
state’s Higher Education Policy Commission. As the interim
chancellor in 2006, Flack convened a conference that jump-
started the statewide internationalization efforts.
“It’s not that some of these things weren’t going on anyway,
but it wasn’t systematic and I think what we’ve done is help to
systematize things a bit.”
An International Niche
“West Virginia has not been a very international place and it
still isn’t, but certainly these initiatives of the last five years
have been very important, and have made an impact,” said
James J. Natsis, the director of the office of international
affairs at West Virginia State University, in the state capital
of Charleston. West Virginia State and Bluefield State are
both historically black colleges but have predominantly white
enrollments.
West Virginia and Marshall Universities, Natsis said, have
all the various components of an international agenda –
study abroad, English as a second language programs, and
significant international student enrollments. As for the other
smaller public institutions in the state, “None of them have the
complete package,” but each can carve out a niche, Natsis said.
West Virginia State’s chosen niche is curriculum, and the
university is offering a new bachelor’s degree in international
studies this fall. “This degree creates a backbone for
internationalization,” Natsis said. “It consolidates what we’ve
been doing.”
At Bluefield State, Jamkhandi has become an expert in
utilizing federal grant programs to bring international
students and scholars to campus. “All the programs I’ve been
doing are either nominal or low-cost items. In fact, some of
them are revenue-generating,” said Jamkhandi.
Among Bluefield State’s initiatives: An undergraduate from
Burkina Faso is coming to Bluefield on a Fulbright and
two German students will spend the year on campus
through the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange Program.
Fulbright Language Teaching Assistants from Iraq, Kenya
and Senegal will teach elementary and intermediate Arabic,
and elementary Kiswahili and Wolof, on the campus this
fall. Bluefield State’s first Fulbright Scholar in Residence,
a professor of psychology at Kostroma State University,
in Russia, will teach courses in elementary Russian, 20th
century Russian history, and the psyche of Communist Russia.
Jamkhandi hopes to leverage this to launch an institutional
partnership between Bluefield and Kostroma, and Bluefield
State’s president plans to travel to Kostroma State this winter.
Meanwhile, Concord University, in the southern section of the
state, just 20 miles from Bluefield, has emerged as something
of a magnet for international students. “I hope we’re not being
too prideful in saying that Concord is a hot spot in West
Virginia if you want to really get exposure to international
programming,” said Stephen Rowe, a professor of English
and director of the library, who formerly served as Concord’s
liaison on the statewide internationalization consortium.
Concord has about 100 international students and, with grant
money from the consortium, has funded recruiting trips to
Published by: philosophyandrew
Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Puerto Rico, South Korea, and
Turkey. The university has an articulation agreement with
the Japan College for Foreign Languages, whose students
can transfer into Concord to complete their undergraduate
degrees, and is in the process of developing linkages with
Turkish universities. “Students either come here to see us or
we go there to see them,” said Rowe. “That works so much
better than using agents or e-mails or whatever.”
And once international students decide to come to campus,
Rowe said, the university takes good care of them. “We go to
Charleston or we go to Roanoke with university vehicles to pick
the kids up when they come here, and we don’t charge them
a fee for that, because one of the things we understand is it’s
a rather daunting thing to pack up your bags and go 12,000
miles away for school in a different culture and a different
language where you know no one.”
And in the middle of nowhere. “One student asked me, when
I was recruiting in Osaka, ‘Is your college in the middle of the
woods?’ ” Rowe related. “I said, ‘You better believe it.’ ”
The International Affairs Office processes and provides
paperwork for those foreign students and scholars/faculty and
staff who are accepted as ...
RESPOND is the largest of five USAID-coordinated projects
designed to identify and minimize the impact of newly
emergent diseases of animal origin ...
The Student Services Specialist is required to plan, organize,
implement and evaluate social and cultural activities for
Temple's international ...
Medical Statistician University of Bristol Bristol, United
Kingdom £29,853 - £37,839 Permanent or Fixed term
contract for 9 months Ref: ...
The Mild Torture Economy
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee303
August 18th, 2010
In his mock documentary Take the Money and Run (1969),
Woody Allen plays the ambitious but remarkably unlucky
bank robber Virgil Starkwell. He never makes the FBI’s Ten
Most Wanted because, after all, it all depends on who you
know. But he does manage to shave some time off one of
his prison sentences by volunteering for medical research. He
survives the experiment. There is one side effect, however, as
the narrator explains in a solemn voiceover: He is temporarily
transformed into a rabbi.
This sequence came to mind while reading The Professional
Guinea Pig, by Roberto Abadie, just published by Duke
University Press. “An estimated 90 percent of drugs licensed
before the 1970s were first tested on prisoners,” writes
Abadie. “Prisoners were in many ways a perfect population
for a controlled experiment. Because they had similar living
conditions they provided good control groups for clinical
trials, while the financial and material benefits ensured a large
supply of willing and compliant volunteers.”
Only in 1980 did the Food and Drug Administration ban the
use of prisoners for medical research. Their circumstances
made a mockery of informed consent. (Especially in Virgil’s
7
August 18th, 2010
case.) “Prisoners received one hot meal per day,” the narrator
explains: “a bowl of steam.”) But the demand for experimental
subjects for biomedical research had to be met somehow. And
so there has emerged the new regime of power and knowledge
analyzed by Abadie, a visiting scholar with the health sciences
doctoral program at the City University of New York Graduate
Center.
His book is an ethnographic account of the subculture of “paid
volunteers” recruited to serve as subjects for pharmaceutical
testing -- with a particular focus on what he calls the
“professionalized” guinea pigs who derive most (or all) of their
income from this work. Volunteers receive “from $1200 for
three or four days in less intensive trials,” according to Abadie,
“to $5000 for three or four weeks in more extensive ones.”
Actually the term “work” is somewhat problematic here. The
labor is almost entirely passive. Half of it, as Woody Allen
once said about life itself, is just showing up. You are weighed
and your blood taken, and there might be a few other tests,
along with quite a lot of boredom. (One of Abadie’s informants
describes it as participation in “the mild torture economy.”)
Some of the guinea pigs fall back on it as a supplement to “low-
paying jobs as cooks, construction workers, house painters, or
bike messengers.” For others, it is their sole source of income.
They enlist for up to eight rounds of testing per year, earning “a
total estimated income of $15,000 to $20,000 in exceptionally
good years.”
Higher rates of pay are available to those willing to endure
unpleasant procedures. Likewise, there is a premium for
testing psychiatric drugs -- though the considered opinion of
old-time guinea pigs is that you just don’t earn enough to make
it worth letting someone mess with your brain chemistry.
Abadie’s description of the guinea-pig milieu -- based
largely on interviews with a number of them living in a
bohemian neighborhood in Philadelphia -- focuses on how
they understand the risks involved in making a living this
way, including their preferred means of recovering between
rounds of exposure to “phase I” testing. (That is the term for
clinical trials in which pharmaceuticals shown to have low
toxicity when given to animals are tried on human subjects.)
Various dietary regimens are thought to have a purifying
effect. An informal network keeps participants updated on new
opportunities in the human-subject market, and there used to
be a zine called Guinea Pig Zero that still has a web presence.
Most of Abadie’s informants are also members of an
anarchist counterculture that prides itself on remaining
outside corporate capitalism. And making your living as a
guinea pig is certainly different from joining the rat race. But
the “mild torture economy” is well integrated into the larger
and more literal economy. Testing is a necessary stage of
pharmaceutical development, with some 80,000 phase I trials
-- each involving 30 to 100 human subjects -- being run each
year. The development of a pool of reliable but poorly paid
“volunteers” (consisting mostly of young men who, as Abadie
puts it, “use their bodies as ATMs to fund their lifestyles”)
is one sign of the effect of deindustrialization on the labor
market.
And the effect of becoming dependent on guinea-piggery as
a source of income is that it creates an incentive to ignore
Published by: philosophyandrew
the question of how exposure to experimental pharmaceuticals
might affect you over the long run. “Beginners are more
worried about risks than professionals,” notes Abadie.
“Maybe this reflects the general population’s anxieties
about biomedical research and its well-publicized abuses.
Volunteers’ initial uneasiness focuses on the unknown
effects of the drugs, but it also reflects a discomfort with
a procedure they do not yet fully understand…. Some
volunteers mentioned that they were somewhat concerned
about developing cancer in the future.”
Not so, evidently, with those who had been through the process
a few times: “Dependency on trial income, trial experiences
that have not exposed them to side effects, and interactions
with more experienced volunteers convinces newcomers that
risks are not to be feared.” Just drink a couple of gallons of
unsweetened cranberry juice and it’ll just wash the corporate
technoscience right out of your system….
Meanwhile, the FDA “inspects less than 1 percent of all clinical
trials in this country,” writes Abadie, and paid volunteers lack
the resources to challenge any abuses they may suffer.
Trials in phases II and III -- when a drug is tested on patients
suffering from the condition it may help treat -- draw on a
different pool of human subjects, with motivations beyond
that of payment. But when the subjects are economically
vulnerable, as with some of the poor AIDS patients discussed
in later chapters of Abadie's study, it compounds the ethical
problems facing an institutional review board trying to assess
whether the research has scientific merit or is driven instead
by business interests.
The IRB in this case oversees the work of a small, community-
based organization, not a university (where many clinical trials
are conducted), but Abadie suggests that its ambivalence is
commonplace. Its members "recognize the benefits that can
derive from a relationship with the industry, but at the same
time they fear that prospective financial gains can influence
the research. These anxieties are reflected particularly in
their views of the informed-consent process ... in which
volunteers are supposed to be able to evaluate risks and
benefits independently of other considerations."
The major weakness of this otherwise intriguing and worrying
book is that it provides no clear sense of how typical the
“professionalized” guinea pigs in Philadelphia may be -- and
how central such repeat-performing volunteers are to the
industry employing them.
Abadie maintains that a cohort of full-time human subjects
emerged after the pool of prisoners dried up 30 years ago.
The needs of the pharmaceutical industry led to the formation
of “a group of reliable, knowledgeable, and willing subjects
who depend on participation in trials for income to support
themselves.” Okay, but just how dependent is the industry
on them? What portion of the population of human research
subjects for pharmaceutical research consists of such full-
timers?
Invocations of “the new subjectivity required by neoliberal
governmentality” may have their place in defining the
situation. But hard numbers would be good, too. The fact that
we don’t have them is part of the problem. But then there aren’t
8
August 18th, 2010
too many dimensions of the health care industry that don’t
look like problems, right now.
DUTIES:The incumbent will report to the Section Supervisor
of Cytology. Duties will include: Performs clerical and
Cytopreparatory processing and ...
Tufts University School of Dental Medicine (TUSDM) offers
one of the most forward-looking educational environments in
dental medicine in the country. ...
Politics or Civility?
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/18/conservative
August 18th, 2010
ATLANTA -- The oppressed conservative student is a regular
theme in the right's critique of higher education. You know the
stories -- mocked for displaying the American flag or a Ronald
Reagan bust, shouted down for suggesting that that Iraq war
is just, always in fear of earning a low grade for criticizing
affirmative action or some other widely held belief among the
left-leaning campus majority.
Research presented here Tuesday at the annual meeting of
the American Sociological Association affirmed that many
conservative students feel that way, but also that many do not
-- and that the latter group in fact thrive on the very campuses
that tend to be portrayed as hostile to them.
The difference, the research suggests, isn't the relative size
of the conservative minority or the commitment level of the
more liberal majority. Rather, campus characteristics -- many
of them most commonly associated with small liberal arts
colleges, and harder to pull off at large universities -- may
be the determining factor. In fact, one suggestion from the
research that might distress fiscal conservatives is that low
student-faculty ratios may contribute far more to the comfort
of conservative students than would efforts to promote
ideological "balance" on a syllabus or in a department.
The study presented here was conducted by Amy J. Binder, an
associate professor of sociology at the University of California
at San Diego, and Kate Wood, a graduate student there. They
did in-depth interviews with conservative students at two
colleges that they named only in general terms -- "Eastern
elite," a small private institution, and "Western public," a large
university. Both are institutions that have been identified by
conservative critics as being particularly left-leaning. At both
institutions, they sought out as interview subjects the students
who are members of conservative groups or who are visibly
conservative, and also "in the closet" conservatives -- by asking
the conservative student leaders for the names of those who
had indicated their agreement but who were not involved in
public campus discourse.
The conservative students at Eastern elite were under no
illusions that they were anything but an extreme minority
-- and the institution's reputation is such that some were
discouraged by friends back home from even enrolling. But
almost uniformly, they were happy. They identified their
professors as being liberal, but admired them nonetheless.
In fact, as Wood noted here, "they viewed the experience of
being in the minority as a positive one" in teaching them to
Published by: philosophyandrew
examine and defend their beliefs, and "almost every single
one said that they received a better education" by being in the
extreme minority, a finding "in contrast to the conservative
critique." Further, she said, "not a single one of them said that
they regretted not going to a more conservative school."
The students at Eastern elite were clearly aware of the
conservative critique and many times answered questions
about possible bias by saying that they had heard about that
elsewhere but had never experienced it themselves.
At Western public, in contrast, many conservative students
did feel that they were the victims of bias in interactions
with students and faculty members. The research focuses on
student perceptions, not the reality of what went on in the
classrooms. So Wood said it wasn't clear whether the bias
actually took place, but she said that the researchers wanted
to see why it was that some students perceived fairness and
challenge, while others felt a bit abused.
So what were the qualities that made some conservatives feel
so contented, even in their minority status?
They were many of the same qualities that elite liberal
arts college advocates talk about. "They were proud of their
institution. They saw their peers -- liberals and conservatives
-- as future leaders of the country," and that made the
conservatives want to be part of the community and part of the
conversation.
They also felt that they had very close relationships with
faculty members with whom they disagreed on politics. "They
viewed their faculty members as professionals, as experts in
their fields, as people who would never be biased" based on a
student's politics, Wood said.
One key measure of the extent to which conservative students
felt comfortable at the college, she said, was that the most
popular majors for conservative students were identical to
those for liberal students (and all students). There were a small
number of courses that conservative students tended to avoid,
Wood said, citing "critical gender studies" as one.
She also noted that the college has policies that make it easy for
students to change schedules at the beginning of the semester,
and that this seemed to relieve any students who might be
worried about a professor's politics. It's not that they left
classes they signed up for, but the knowledge that they could
try something and change their minds was reassuring, she
said.
Much of this related to "very small class size" and to a
sense that all students and faculty members were part of a
common community, and wanted to disagree with one another
respectfully. As a result, Wood said, while the conservative
students generally said that they didn't hold back their views,
they didn't describe going to class looking for a fight -- and they
talked about wanting to disagree with professors in respectful
ways, since they felt treated with respect.
In contrast, she said, at Western public, with larger classes and
much less faculty-student interaction on an individual basis,
students were more likely to say that they were the victims
of bias -- but also that they didn't really know the faculty
members. And at Western, students talked about "trying to
9
August 18th, 2010
get in fights" with professors in class, of "trying to catch their
professors in the act of liberal indoctrination."
Another difference Wood noted relates to the role of faculty
members on both campuses who were in the conservative
minority. In the close-knit environment of Eastern elite, these
faculty members were visible on campus, taking part in the
debates, organizing lectures and so forth. At Western public,
she said, there was a similar cohort of right-leaning faculty
members, but they were far less active.
The implication of the findings, Wood said, was that colleges
of all sizes should focus on the elements of community and
civility that seem to make it possible for disagreement at
Eastern elite to be welcome in ways that don't belittle those
in the ideological minority. She noted that some elements
present at Eastern elite -- such as its prestige and traditions --
aren't things that colleges can up and create.
"But it's clear that access to faculty members makes a huge
difference, and that anything that creates smaller pools of
students" -- so that people know one another -- has a real
impact.
Sarah S. Willie-LeBreton, associate professor of sociology
at Swarthmore College, was the respondent to the paper,
which she praised. She noted that much of the public
discussion about conservative students focuses on incidents
that take place at certain campuses or claims made by various
groups. "It's nice that somebody is finally asking the students
themselves" in a comprehensive way, she said.
For faculty members, the research is an appropriate challenge,
Willie-LeBreton said, to "celebrate our conservative students'
sense of minority status and to think about what can be learned
from that."
Willie-LeBreton said that Eastern elite sounded like it shared
many values with Swarthmore, and that she thought that
"taking all students seriously" was a big part of a faculty
member's job. But she said that she worried that in much
of higher education today, "it's hard for professors" to
engage with students "when faculty members have been
marginalized" through larger class sizes that hinder close
student interaction.
Position Description: The Department of South Asia Studies
at the University of Pennsylvania seeks to appoint a standing
faculty member who is a ...
This is a time of unprecedented growth and opportunity
at UMass Lowell. Student enrollment and retention have
improved annually; research funding and ...
Colleges Cite Burden of U.S.
Conflict of Interest Rules
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/18/qt/
colleges_cite_burden_of_u_s_conflict_of_interest_rules
August 18th, 2010
New regulations proposed by the National Institutes of
Health in May to restrict conflicts of interest in biomedical
research sponsored by the agency would significantly
increase universities' administrative burden and their costs of
Published by: philosophyandrew
complying with federal research rules, four higher education
groups argued in jointly submitted comments Tuesday.
In their formal response to the proposed regulations, the
groups -- the Association of American Medical Colleges,
the Association of American Universities, the American
Council on Education, and the Association of Public and
Land-grant Universities -- recommended that the NIH
alter several provisions that they argued would require
excessive, unnecessary reporting. They also argued that to help
institutions meet the costs of the rules, which will require them
to "add personnel and expand their infrastructure to meet
[their] unfunded federal mandates," the government should
provide direct "implementation" grants and increase the rates
at which institutions are reimbursed for the indirect costs of
research awards.
Retired and Rehired
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/18/chapman
August 18th, 2010
In an unusual move, Dale Chapman, the president of Lewis
and Clark Community College, has been reappointed after
having retired in May to gain access to his pension funds,
which he said he needed to extricate himself from financial
difficulties.
Chapman used part of the pension to make delinquent
mortgage payments and resolve tax issues, and now the
college's Board of Trustees -- which had expressed an interest
in rehiring him -- has welcomed him back into the president’s
office and onto the payroll as of Aug. 16. He will be earning the
same salary as when he left.
Chapman's original intention had been to borrow against his
pension, but Illinois law prohibits it. In May, he opted to
withdraw his pension in a single lump sum instead of receiving
annuity payments.
“I had to access my retirement funds to pay my bill and make
things right, and fortunately I had the resources to do that,”
Chapman said.
According to the State Universities Retirement System of
Illinois, retirees may return to work at least 60 days after they
retire. “It’s very straightforward,” Chapman said. “You’re no
longer in the [SURS] system whatsoever, because you’ve taken
all your money out.... It’s not double dipping -- that doesn’t
apply to me at all because I’m treated as a new employee.”
“Double dipping” -- the process of retiring and becoming
reemployed, thus collecting both an annuity and a salary -- is
illegal in some states, but not uncommon. Earlier this year,
the Illinois legislature passed a major pension reform bill
that includes regulations outlawing the practice for new state
employees beginning in 2011. A similar situation led to the
resignation of the Louisiana commissioner of higher education
in July.
Even though Chapman is not receiving an annuity and
therefore not truly receiving two simultaneous salaries, his
situation is still slightly ambiguous.
"He's not getting a monthly annuity -- he cashed out his
retirement," said Ellen Andres, CFO and ethics officer for the
10
August 18th, 2010
Illinois Community College Board. "I'm assuming that the
amount that you get monthly versus the amount of your payout
would be the same, because it's all based on the amount of
money you have in your account.... This hasn't been asked
before. [In the lump sum] you get all the state's money at once,
so in a way I guess it could be considered double dipping."
She added that, nonetheless, double dipping is not illegal in
Illinois, and asking college presidents to come back to work is
not uncommon, especially if they are returning in an interim
capacity.
The board's decision to let Chapman return to the presidency
full time has raised some eyebrows among faculty.
"I don't know of any other circumstance where a college
president retires from his or her job and goes back to the same
job," said Tom Pulver, a member of the Illinois Community
College Board and a mathematics professor at Waubonsee
Community College. He added, however, that Chapman has
been a very successful president.
“The Board of Trustees at Lewis and Clark seems to be making
very questionable decisions,” said Kathy Westman, president
of the Illinois Community College Faculty Association. “It’s not
illegal what’s going on there at all, but problematic in regards
to a very strained time in our state, when we’re obliged to the
taxpayer…. Some colleges use past presidents for advisement
and they get some sort of stipend, [but] I’ve never heard of
this.”
When Chapman resigned, Lewis and Clark did not begin
a search for a new president, instead waiting see if his
case would resolve itself before they did anything “more
formal,” Chapman said. He added that legally there was "no
connection" between his retirement and his return, and that
he knew he had to meet the appropriate standards before the
Board could rehire him.
He said he was very transparent with the board of trustees
about his situation, and when he was again financially stable,
he submitted a letter to the board asking to be reconsidered
for the president’s position.
Robert Watson, chair of the Lewis and Clark Board of Trustees,
said that at the time of Chapman's retirement, he hoped the
president "would consider being rehired at some later date,"
but that there was no agreement. "The fact that he chose to
take the lump sum and pay his bills rather than declaring
bankruptcy -- I think that was the right decision," Watson said.
In a statement, Watson praised Chapman's "track record of
success" and his work in leading the college through significant
growth. Chapman has served as president since 1992. Gary
Ayres, vice president for administration, was appointed as
acting president and will now return to his previous position.
“I know 100 people myself who are retiring and coming back
after the 60-day waiting period,” Chapman said, adding that
in his own case it seems like a bigger deal because he’s a public
figure. “Illinois is going through a very difficult financial time,
so there are people who are accessing their retirement funds.
This is not an unusual concept whatsoever, at any level.”
“[Chapman] is an excellent leader, and I’ve seen him over the
years make tremendous progress at Lewis and Clark,” said
Jerry Weber, president of the Illinois Council of Community
Published by: philosophyandrew
College Presidents. He declined to comment further on the
situation.
The American University of Rome (AUR) seeks a President
to succeed Dr. Robert Marino who retires in July 2011 after
nearly a decade of distinguished ...
Founded in 1871 as a comprehensive land-grant institution,
Alcorn was the nation's first state-supported institution for the
higher education of ...
College President Transforming Lives Through the Power of
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one of the Wisconsin ...
The District was founded in 1964, and serves six cities in
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Founded in 1877, JSU has a rich heritage as a historically black
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Court Says Davidson Police
Can't Enforce State Laws
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/18/qt/
court_says_davidson_police_can_t_enforce_state_laws
August 18th, 2010
A North Carolina appeals court ruled Tuesday that the state
incorrectly authorized Davidson College's police force to
enforce state laws, and shouldn't have done so because the
college has a religious affiliation. The Charlotte Observer
reported. Davidson is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church
of the USA, although the college does not impose religious
requirements on students. The college said that it is reviewing
the decision. The arrest by a Davidson police officer that led
to the court challenge involved driving while intoxicated, and
had no apparent connection to Davidson's religious ties.
The Girl Discovers
Anthropology
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/
confessions_of_a_community_college_dean/
the_girl_discovers_anthropology
August 18th, 2010
By Dean Dad August 17, 2010 9:13 pm
Last Sunday, when it was particularly hot outside and we were
mostly stuck inside, TG declared that she was going to pretend
to be an alien from another planet, observing human behavior.
(That’s my girl!) She followed us around for a while, writing
down her observations. I’ve transcribed them below; only the
spellings have been changed.
People play on computers.
People grill on a grill.
People read books.
People talk to people.
People write on paper.
People write and read papers.
People read magazines.
11
August 18th, 2010
People lay on couches.
People can talk and see.
People can be a boy or a girl.
People have flowers.
People have houses.
People love people.
People have lives.
Apparently, she inherited the social science gene from her
father...
Bullwinkle's mushrooms
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/getting_to_green/
bullwinkle_s_mushrooms
August 18th, 2010
By G. Rendell August 17, 2010 3:00 pm
OK, this one is going to take a little explaining.
Once upon a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth (starting
in 1962), there was an animated TV series called "Rocky &
His Friends". Rocky was a flying squirrel (you could tell by
the leather aviator helmet and goggles), and his #1 friend was
Bullwinkle J. Moose. (Indeed, reruns of the series were later
titled "Rocky & Bullwinkle" and later "The Bullwinkle Show".
One of the regular features was something called "Bullwinkle's
Corner", in which the moose of the same name would mangle
a well-known poem (imagine, this was so long ago that
there actually were well-known poems!). One of the episodes
that sticks in my mind was based on Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow's lyric "Excelsior". In the cartoon, the moose
charges randomly (as moose are prone to do), with pennant
in hand, crying "Excelsior" at regular intervals. When Rocky
asks him (in verse) why he goes to such effort "just to make
that silly cry" . . .
"Excelsior?" (that's the one)
"The answer came both bold and blunt
It's just an advertising stunt
I represent Smith, Jones and Jakes
A lumber company that makes
Excelsior!"
See, "excelsior" used to refer to a packaging material made of
shredded wood -- an alternative to shredded newspaper, but
with less dust. It quickly became obsolete with the advent of
"plastic peanuts", the extruded/expanded polystyrene space-
filler so familiar to all of us.
But now, plastic peanuts may themselves become obsolete.
A company called Ecovative Design has created EcoCradle,
a packaging material made from mushroom tissue and other
organic wastes. In addition to being biodegradable (which
polystyrene notoriously is not), this stuff is created at an
energy savings of over 97%. (And we all know what direction
energy prices are headed.)
Rocky and Bullwinkle, of course, left us no organic waste. (I
could compare the timeless nature of Jay Ward's humor to the
ecological half-life of plastic peanuts but that might be in bad
Published by: philosophyandrew
taste, so I won't). But if they did, I can think of no better use
for it than to grow mushrooms, which could then be used to
create packing material, which might be used to ship DVDs. As
in, of classic cartoons. Perhaps from the early 1960's. Or not.
Guest Review: Logic: The
Question of Truth
Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/
blogs/the_education_of_oronte_churm/
guest_review_logic_the_question_of_truth
August 18th, 2010
By Oronte August 17, 2010 7:00 am
***
Review by Okla Elliott
Logic: The Question of Truth. Translated by Thomas Sheehan.
Indiana University Press, 2010. Cloth, $44.95.
***
In the course of the Winter Semester 1925-26, as the
story goes, the dean of the philosophy faculty at Phillips-
Universität in Marburg walked into Martin Heidegger’s office
and said, “You must publish something now. Do you have an
appropriate manuscript?”
Stanford University professor and Heidegger scholar Thomas
Sheehan goes on to inform us in his introduction: “Within a
few months he would. As soon as the course ended, Heidegger
went off to his cottage in Todtauberg and started writing out
Being and Time by hand. By the end of March he had finished
much of Division One of the text, and by 20 April he and
Husserl were reading page-proofs of those sections.”
But from which thinking did this masterwork of philosophy
come? On which philosophical foundation did he build the
work without which it is hard to imagine the existence of
later work by such giants as Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida,
Michel Foucault, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Richard Rorty, and
Jean-Paul Sartre? It is true that Heidegger had a nascent
interest in the nature of Being (Sein) and beings (das Seiende)
before his widely lauded lectures on logic and the nature of
truth in the Winter Semester of 1925-26, but a careful reading
of these lectures shows how his conception of truth and logic
(in)formed his conception of Being.
The so-called “question of truth” and how/if the human mind
grasps truth—and attempts to represent it—has been the
subject of philosophical investigation since the ancient Greeks
(and likely antedates even them). Two subjects have come
to the fore in this discussion since the ancient Greeks as
well: logic and language; and these are the starting point in
Heidegger’s 1925-26 lectures. These lectures were published
in 1976 in German under the title Logik: die Frage nach
Wahrheit and have just appeared for the first time in English
in this translation by Thomas Sheehan.
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August 18th, 2010
The book is in fact more than a translation, which would be
important enough, given the embarrassing gap in Heidegger
studies this thirty-year oversight has caused. It is also the
first synthesis of the three main text sources for Heidegger’s
lectures from this era—his own meticulously written out
lectures, the transcript of his son’s stenographic recording of
those lectures (whose additions allow us to know Heidegger’s
digressions and divergences and which were later corrected
in collaboration with Heidegger himself), and the notes taken
by one of his famous former students, Helene Weiss, who was
pursuing her doctorate at the time of the lectures and who
later became a professor and Heidegger scholar in Britain. This
tripartite synthesis of texts, along with meticulous use of other
published texts—both by Heidegger and others—makes this
not only the first compete appearance of Heidegger’s Logic in
English, but the first complete appearance in any language.
When Heidegger undertook the work on his Logic, he knew
what tradition he was entering into. Kant wrote his Logic and,
as Hartman and Schwarz tell us in their introduction to their
1974 translation of it, Kant reread it “often twice a year, for
over 40 years, from 1755 to 1796 in order to remind himself
of his own methodology (and for seminars he frequently gave
on the subject).” Hartman and Schwarz also tell us that “the
importance of Kant’s Logic has never been fully appreciated.
This is one of the reasons this work, published in 1800, is only
now appearing in a complete English translation.”
I believe Heidegger’s Logic has been similarly
underappreciated and that the first full version of it is only
now appearing for similar reasons. But Kant was not the
only German philosopher to write his logical methodology
into a book. Leibniz, Hegel, and Husserl all wrote their own
Logics as a springing-off point for their philosophical systems.
Heidegger was positioning himself in the great tradition
of German philosophy by writing his, and he knew what
importance such an undertaking possessed.
In these lectures on logic, Heidegger makes use of (and often
plays his ideas against) Kant, Husserl, and Aristotle to think
through the notion of truth and logic, working toward the
nature of ideal and empirical being (which sets the stage for
his move to a discussion of Dasein and Being in his magnum
opus Being and Time). He also puts before us the relationships
of psychology and logic, science and logic, and language and
logic. These lectures are interesting as a work unto themselves
and should be treated with the respect they deserve as a major
work, though they are doubly interesting to us because they
directly preceded (both temporally and conceptually) Being
and Time.
Published by: philosophyandrew
In the Bible, John 1:1 famously reads: “In the beginning,
there was the Word”—and there has been much discussion
over the translation of the word “logos” in this and other
works. It can mean “spoken language,” “word,” “logic,” or
“discourse,” depending on the context. According to the
Christian cosmology, therefore, in the beginning (before Being
came clearly into existence from chaos), there was the logos;
and it was likewise with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.
But how important is logic in Heidegger’s view? For him, it is
the sine qua non of all truth—scientific and otherwise.
The basic structure of that whole [of the sciences] is the
possible “truth” within which any research activity operates.
In other words, the constitutive parts themselves are only
necessary structural moments of theoretical truth. Thus they
can be understood and are to be appropriated from out of
the pre-understanding of theoretical truth and ultimately of
truth in general. This means that clarity in scientific research
is possible only by way of a philosophizing logic.
But it is not a static, “scholastic logic” he is after, but rather
an authentically “philosophizing logic.” It is no surprise,
therefore, that he would set out to redefine logic before he set
himself to revolutionizing philosophy with Being and Time.
It is necessary to trace, as Heidegger does, the pre-
Heidegerrian view of logic and truth before we move on to
enumerating how Heidegger finds it wanting. We will end
this portion of the essay with Heidegger’s notion of truth as
aletheia, the term used by Aristotle and Plato for “truth” which
means, according to Heidegger’s etymological interpretation,
“un-covering” or “being-uncovered.” (There is some debate
as to whether Heidegger’s etymology is correct, though most
agree it is at least a possible etymology, and it seems more
important that this is how Heidegger philosophizes truth.)
It would be simple enough to find quotes from Heidegger’s
Logic that sound like a sort of early draft of passages from
Being and Time, but the more important and productive
endeavor would be to understand the fundamental shifts
Heidegger made in logic and philosophy of language which
undergird his later radical and almost incalculably influential
shifts in ontology. Likely the most direct connection is
Heidegger’s discussion of time in his Logic, to which he
dedicates thirteen chapters, much of which feeds directly into
his thinking in Being and Time. But what is more interesting
here, I think, is how these chapters supplement Being and
Time, which was planned as a work in two Parts with three
Divisions per Part. What we have of that larger planned work
is only Division One and Division Two of Part One, that
is, only one third of the entire proposed project. Division
One of Part Two was, according to Heidegger himself in the
introduction to Being and Time, supposed to be on “Kant’s
doctrine of schematism and time, as a preliminary stage in
the problematic of temporality” and Division Three of Part
Two was to be on “Aristotle’s essay on time, as providing
a way of discriminating the phenomenal basis and limits
of ancient ontology.” In effect, I would argue, the thirteen
chapters Heidegger dedicates to time in his Logic can be seen
as a sort of completion of his project in Being and Time, albeit
an incomplete one.
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August 18th, 2010 Published by: philosophyandrew
By applying pressure to the meaning(s) of the Greek word and is the author of two poetry chapbooks and is co-editor, with
philosophical concept logos, Heidegger uncovered, as it were, Kyle Minor, of The Other Chekhov.
a new way of understanding truth—aletheia, which means
“uncovering”—and therefore a new way to conceive of the
structure of the world and human consciousness’s place in
it. This radical reorganizing of logic and truth made Being
and Time. While a brief review is insufficient to uncover the
ways Heidegger’s Logic influenced and laid the theoretical
foundation much of his later work, especially Being and Time,
I can say that with this new translation, such an investigation is
possible for English speakers for the first time (and given that
this is the most complete edition of the work in any language,
it is important for non-English speakers as well). Reading his
Logic as a supplement to Being and Time, even at times a
stand-in in for certain missing sections from the proposed
larger work, we might understand the real magnitude of the
Logic and, hopefully, more fully understand Being and Time.
While Sheehan has done an excellent translation overall, he
has perhaps failed readers in his lack of discursive footnotes.
The generally agreed-upon standard English translation of
Being and Time, by John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson,
has hundreds of footnotes which include original German
quotes and explanations along with connections to other
works by Heidegger and others whose works influenced him.
Sheehan could have created a stronger book had he followed
their model. That said, the glossary of German and English
terms specific to Heidegger that Sheehan includes in the book
is thorough and should prove very helpful to first-time readers
of Heidegger, and it serves some of the same functions I am
suggesting for the footnotes.
The other flaw is his translating “Dasein” as “human
existence.” Dasein is a very specific term for Heidegger,
which literally means “there-being” (sometimes rendered
in English as “being-there”), but which actually
means, in the Heideggerian usage, something like
“the being-there-of-human-existence-as-opposed-to-human-
consciousness/subjecthood.” The term is well-known among
readers of Heidegger, so not only is Sheehan’s translation
flawed, it is unnecessary, since I doubt there will be a large
public readership of this book. Those who will read the book
either already know the term or would be willing to look it up or
would have it explained in the class for which they are reading
the book. To his credit, Sheehan admits in his preface that his
choice here will not please many people; and if I were forced
at gunpoint to translate the term succinctly, I would go with
“human existence” as well. My complaint is merely that there
was no such gun and the term should have been left in German,
perhaps, here again, with a footnote explaining it.
These ultimately minor complaints aside, this is an excellent
book, a wonderful addition to Heidegger studies and 20th
century philosophy. I recommend it highly for graduate
courses in these and related fields and for all university library
collections. It is readable, accurate, and I predict destined to
become the definitive translation.
***
Okla Elliott's non-fiction, poetry, short fiction, and
translations have appeared in A Public Space, Indiana
Review, International Poetry Review, The Literary Review,
The Los Angeles Review, and New Letters, among others. He
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