My April 14 post, “Science Rattles the Tin Cup in Washington,” argued that wealthy universities should spend more of their own money on academic research in these hard times; that industry, too, should increase its academic spending. The post also noted that claims of inadequate reimbursement of indirect costs in universities have evoked some skepticism.

A mixed bag of comments ensued. Particularly strong disagreement was expressed by officers of two major academic outposts in Washington: Anthony DeCrappeo, president of the Council on Government Relations, which focuses on federal financial and administrative regulations for research universities, and David Korn, chief scientific officer at the Association of American Medical Colleges, the medical school...

[Contributed by Norman Stevens, Devoted Reader and Librarian Extraordinaire]

“Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”

— Saul Bellow, in “Him With His Foot in His Mouth”

Since his appointment as head librarian at Hillborne slightly more than 10 years ago, Timothy Peason, a wiry Englishman with a small mustache and the tenacity of a bulldog, had survived three presidents in his quest to move what had been a languid backwater locked in the late 19th-century into the electronic era of the early 21st century.

Noted for his role, as assistant librarian of the Molesworth Institute, in helping plan for the first non-book academic library (“The Fully Electronic Academic Library” College & Research Libraries 67: 8-14, January 2006), Peason had used his velvet glove to...

I am back from two weeks in France and the Netherlands, where I spent part of the time bicycling into the wind — a 20-mile-per-hour headwind whose constancy loomed ever larger in my imagination. My survival solution was to spend as much energy as I could afford working through what I have come to see as a wondrous puzzle: Why should an enterprise devoted to rationality, clear thinking, and precise exposition spend so much of its time arguing about a set of words that have literally lost their meanings?

The words I have in mind belong to a set I have come to call the four horsemen of higher-education reform: access, accountability, affordability, and quality. In her charge to her Commission on the Future of Higher Education, Margaret Spellings asked us to provide guidance on how to ensure that our American higher-education system celebrated those four qualities. I...

You have to understand the place of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in American science and science politics to grasp the sexist effrontery of the venerable institution.

With a Congressional charter signed by Abe Lincoln in 1863, the NAS is both a prestigious hall of fame and a scientific think tank, all rolled into one snooty organization, headquartered in a marble palace near the Washington Mall. In a profession that doles out honors like a nursery-school graduation, membership in the Academy is the greatest honor for an American scientist, second only to the Nobel Prize.

Each year, the current membership votes in a new crop of members. Universities boast of the number of academicians on their faculties. Scientists scheme and plot to get elected and to elect their allies. Conspiracy rumors are plentiful. Many aspirants are hopeful, but few make it. The...

John H. Marburger III, President Bush’s science adviser, invited me to come by his office for a conversation, which we held on April 23. Marburger, who heads the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, is one of the administration’s longest-serving officials, having arrived in October 2001. A physicist, and nominally a Democrat, he formerly was president of SUNY Stony Brook and came to Washington from the directorship of the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Following is Part Two of edited excerpts of the conversation. Part I is here.

Q. Do you feel the media distorted the significance of the various controversies between scientists and the administration?

A. Of course. All that most people know...

The killer had spent an hour looking through the book Mann wrote in 1952 on Melville and systematically tearing out pages that dealt with the sexual overtones in Moby Dick. The killer remembered how in grade school, when they first even heard of the title, kids would make fun of it, making the “Dick” part sound smutty, wagging their hands between their legs. Turns out they were right. Mann made it his business to point out every filthy part of the book in his typical, blunt way, condescending and fascinated both at once. Page after page was ripped from the binding. Mann’s reign had gone on long enough. The job was finished. Time to start on Mann’s book on Whitman because that one was even worse.

Vera Campbell, Washington Jefferies, and Ahmed Farouk decided to give the scholarship to Mark Johnson over beers at the Bull’s Tail bar. They...

The College Board has decided to drop AP Programs in four subjects, reports Education Week. No more Italian, Latin lit, French lit, and Computer Science AB. A distinguished French professor in the Ivies says that a group of French professors are drafting a letter of protest, but the College Board has a ready reply. The enrollments aren’t there, and costs are rising. The Italian class claims only 1,642 students served, with 352 of them taking it as their only AP class. French literature isn’t much higher at, respectively, 2,068 and 86.

Trevor Packer, vice president at College Board, “said the decision was made principally...

John H. Marburger III (Image from APS Physics site)

John H. Marburger III, President Bush’s science adviser, invited me to come by his office for a conversation, which we held on April 23. Marburger, who heads the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, is one of the administration’s longest-serving officials, having arrived in October 2001. A physicist, and nominally a Democrat, he formerly was president of SUNY Stony Brook and came to Washington from the directorship of the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Following is Part One of edited excerpts of the conversation.

Q. There’s more hostility between the scientific community and this administration than...

We seem to have accepted the locution “student-athlete” in the academy, though all too often I think we really mean “athlete-student.” all too often. In selective institutions we make special provisions to ensure that a requisite number and variety of student-athletes are admitted — quarterbacks, point guards, pole vaulters, strokes, mid-fielders, and the like. The sports teams cannot do without them, and for a variety of reasons (in my view, some better than others) we find ways to admit them that seem consistent with our academic standards and dignity.

We usually justify this affirmative action policy with reference to the values of commitment, hard work, sportsmanship and teamwork that will stand our students well in life after graduation. And I agree that these are important values.

But what about our other teams? Surely sports...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com ADMINISTRATOR: Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste. I go by many names. Doctor, Boss, Sir, Chairman, Gentleman, Scholar, Dean, Pillar of the Community, Cheap Bastard, but you can call me the Administrator. —Joe Camhi, “Screw U, a play in one act” performed at Portland Community College

One of the things that many folks don’t grasp about the shift to administrative domination of the university is that it has been intentionally accomplished, by a culture war from above. If you read the truly appalling discourse of university administration, you find that it long ago moved to an emphasis upon transforming organizational culture — targeting faculty culture for change and aggressive re-engineering. This...