Notes and News

This weekend, C-SPAN had an hour with Phil Terzian, literary editor of the Weekly Standard and author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.  You can listen to it here, and enjoy in particular his reminiscence at the beginning of serving as speechwriter for Secretary of State Vance many years back.  He notes, too, that a monument to Eisenhower in DC is planned, and Frank Gehry will be the architect.  Terzian notes that Eisenhower would be uncomfortable with the project, for “he was a man of tremendous humility.”

Here’s another book that just came out, Generation iY: Our Last Chance to Save Their Future by Tim Elmore.  (I give the book an endorsement.) Among its many insights into the rising generation are the list of paradoxes Elmore lays out that identify some of the inscrutable aspects of the young (inscrutable, that is, to the elders).  They include “They are sheltered . . . yet pressured,” “They are self-absorbed . . . yet generous,” “They are social . . . yet isolated by technology,” and “They are high achievement . . . yet high maintenance.” Elmore has worked with college and high school students for years, and he’s worked with schools on such pressing matters as retention.  Whereas some commenters on the young provide only bilious, antagonizing, and dead-end renditions of teens, Elmore offers positive and concrete strategies for addressing, for instance, at-risk boys, workplace failings, and transforming education plans into deliveries that engage, not bore, the students.

Here is a biting report from the Goldwater Institute by Jay Greene that reveals and explains a telling statistic.  It is: “Between 1993 and 2007, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students at America’s leading universities grew by 39 percent, while the number of employees engaged in teaching, research or service only grew by 18 percent.”  Greene explains the trend as the result, in part, of government subsidies.  He writes:

“Growth in enrollments and higher rates of government subsidy have made universities flush with extra funds.  Being nonprofits, they do not return excess profits to shareholders; instead, they return excess profits to their de facto shareholders, the administrators who manage the institutions.”

Finally, Hamilton College history professor Robert Paquette has another essay at the National Association of Scholars Web site on the search committee confidentiality affair that we’ve discussed at length in previous posts.  It appears here under the title “Dictatorships and Double Standards, Part II.”  Paquette reviews the case and brings in ample information that commenters asked for in previous posts.  (My offer to others involved who wish to have their say in this space remains open.)  Aside from the circumstances of the case, Paquette also offers an explanation of the “King Numbers” reference that confused some readers:

“Read The Federalist cover to cover, all eighty-five essays. The word ‘democracy’ appears about ten times, and usually in pejorative contrast with republican government. ’Ambitious intriguers,’ as Madison, Hamilton, and others fully understood, could rather easily whip an unreflecting multitude into frenzy and turn democracy into majoritarian tyranny. Lest we forget (and who could deny the architected amnesia pervasive on the postmodern campus) the framers drafted the Constitution as a great experiment in republican government precisely because it had certain refining or protective features that mitigated the problem of King Numbers.”