Biddy Martin to Leave Wisconsin Flagship for Amherst College

“A significant portion of the professoriate sees engagement in politics as part of the job description. And, unfortunately, they are right. It is becoming harder and harder to find professors devoted to teaching traditional academic subjects for their own sake, to undergraduates who lack the basics in the humanities and the social and natural sciences.”

First, everyone comes from a political place. The issue is whether or not that these politics are transparent and made known. It is very easy to teach traditional subjects from a status quo position and not claim to be political. The issue to make sure that students fully understand what product they are buying, politics or not….

Also, I disagree with your analysis that the professoriate is overly involved in politics. If this was the case, there would be a bigger uproar on many issues facing middle class families. It may even be department specific (you do not really see business school profs) selling against their interests in the system. Theses educators have been institutionalized. They ignore the political sentiment and hide in creases of their personal benefits in a system that is more about job training and credential accumulation….

In terms of: “for undergraduates who lack the basics” in these areas, one of the last places you will see groups of de-skilled 18-22 year old students get a foundational education is in an American university. It is not designed to work that way. What should be at the bottom of university priorities should be the political make up of the professoriate.

TIND wrote:

“First, everyone comes from a political place. The issue is whether or not that these politics are transparent and made known. ”

No. The issue is whether researchers and their peer reviewers attempt to distance themselves from that political place and produce material that is as unbiased as possible.

But I have to agree with Bill that having the professoriate disengaged from politics is not necessarily positive. In instances where we have professors striving for objectivity, their research results will occasionally point to political action. For instance, the professor who wants to know whether there is wage discrimination in the federal sector will reach conclusions, whether they point to discrimination or not, that will be socially significant. I, personally, would want someone knowledgeable like that in the public debate. Professors who engage themselves (especially in the classroom) on political matters that are outside their expertise (or on matters on which they are informed only by theory that was written with predetermined political conclusions) fall outside of this desired group.

And really, the political makeup of the professoriate would not matter if we were dealing with professors who strove for objectivity (even if imperfectly) instead of ones who declare that all knowledge is inherently political, thereby giving themselves carte blanche opportunities for political propagandizing.

And NSR wrote:

“Rather, entire departments and university administrations see the goal of higher education as political.”

Been there, seen that, and I think this is really the problem. It’s a question of priorities. Look at your MLA discipline profs and find the enthusiasm they show for improving their students’ writing (for instance) compared to the enthusiasm they show for their pet political issues. Aside from a certain Brainstorm blogger named Bauerlein (and probably many others, though a definite minority), you see a much lesser personal engagement with the skill building than with the politics. And I know that college is about much more than skill building, but if the skills aren’t developed, students can’t express (or perhaps even comprehend) the deeper thoughts they might develop or be exposed to.

And that brings me back to the Michigan case where the email fishing expedition seems outright dopey to me. In Michigan, they’re targeting the Labor Studies folks. If I’m not mistaken, Labor Studies starts from politically programmatic premises. It might just be easier to tell the public “Hey! Look at the Labor Studies website. The entire subject is about political goals and they say so themselves.” No dubious investigations necessary…

Okay, I’m done now.

Yes, ssaulvolk, exactly. “At a time when the percentage of students needing remedial education is at an all-time high, when the need for job training beyond high school is pressing, and when we worry about how even our top students will compete with their peers around the world, political activism should be at the bottom of any university’s list of priorities.”

All of these issues are direct results of, you guessed it, “politics.”

“Hy Poc”

* “No. The issue is whether researchers and their peer reviewers attempt to distance themselves from that political place and produce material that is as unbiased as possible.”

Actually, No. We all come from a place of bias. Attempting to distance does little to alleviate the issue except to make for a cloak or mask of neutrality. Also, your standard is “unbiased as possible”? C’mon, this is whitewash and revisionism…

It appears you are blind to the construct of power (studying indigenous third world cultures en masse but rarely do you see a study of CEO’s in their natural habitat). Can you be honest here Poc? There are good ole boy clubs that sell themselves on their objectivity all the time. This isn’t to mean that individuals cannot be objective, but groups largely have some ingrained institutional bias to protect the system….

Establishing greater distance means that you believe you are removed from the system (above it), but we know in human ecology and system theory that all that does is make your view less valid to the real lived experiences of participants that you are supposedly trying to study (unless you are there to get in and out so you can make your publishing deadline)….

No, addressing your biases up front (assuming that people are capable of this) provides the opportunity for all readers of the research to ethically understand applied research and why it was undertaken.

Sensible remarks by Ms Riley and pocvecem suggesting the pedagogical futility of partisan politicking by faculty as a classroom substitute for disinterested scholarship and teaching. Of course some departments at colleges and universities quite easily encourage social and political advocacy cum activism and even owe their creation to it, e.g., women’s and ethnic studies, social work, “peace studies,” “labor studies,” and the like.

Sure, I’ve read Friere’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” but, apparently unlike ssaulvolk, found it pretty oppressive Marxist stuff. And ssaulvolk’s caricature of the views of scientific and other skeptics about global warming alarmism being based “literally [on] 1-2 emails” ignores the contributions of skeptics (they’re not “deniers”) like Lindzen and Michaels and cautious warmists like Curry to the House hearings. “Literally” here, often like “virtually” elsewhere, means “not really.”

* “Sure, I’ve read Friere’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” but, apparently unlike ssaulvolk, found it pretty oppressive Marxist stuff.”

Sounds like someone needs to refresher course or an ability to read for comprehension.

Friere helped the impoverished to read and write (basic literacy) in Brazil. Also, literacy in Brazil was a requirement for a citizen to vote. He has been imprisoned, in positions of authority within the education system and a global scholar for decades. When we deal with large disparities between the haves and have nots, Freire reminds us that we all have a role to play:

*** “There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”
—Richard Shaull, on Paulo Freire

Freire advocates that education allows the oppressed to regain their humanity and overcome their condition; however, he acknowledges that in order for this to take effect, the oppressed have to play a role in their own liberation (something that also touches on our current discussions with apathetic and “over-privileged or pampered students” — see NSG) This is not some “American Dream corporatized bullshit, but real lived experiences of people who came from nothing who learned to how to be dialectical thinkers through action…..

Other attaining the maxist tag, mavprof, is there anything related to Freire’s life work that makes him less worthy than yourself?

tind’s touts for Friere’s mixing of pedagogy with Marxist politics notwithstanding, I can read well as he; I simply disagree with some of Friere’s views, e.g., his “banking concept of education,” which seems to me a simplistic model used to indict the traditional curriculum as unwarrantedly “oppressive.” A critique of the influence of Friereian “critical pedagogy” and pedagogical “social justice” orientation on K-12 education by an academic educator, Sandra Stotsky, may be found here:

http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?doc_id=229

Mav, you might be better served to pick someone who hasn’t built their career on reforming the system through changing pedagogy… I read the article you list as well as a few others. While Stotsky is impressively credentialed (Michigan & Harvard), she is far from persuasive and one wonders what her impact on the children of Arkansas has been during her tenure…

As we know with Freire, he would have gotten people to read and write where ever he lived… At some point, yelling reform and selling teaching assessment is a cover for those who rely upon the certainty of a permanent working class in a corporately owned for-profit industry….

I think if you contemplate long enough that you will find the cookie cutter simplistic solutions to reform resemble more of Stotsky than of Freire’s Banking Concept of Education, but since he is marxist (you already know the answers of where he is going). Peter McLaren does an excellent job of talking about the Freirian influences in his book Life in Schools for those who would like a little more marxist critique of the commodification of the western education. Something you will definitely not get from Stotsky….

Markt, there is a difference between political work (not okay) and work with political implications (to be expected sometimes).

To use one of your examples, the biology professor who works on evolution is doing biology. The existence of an political group that promotes intelligent design does not make that biologist’s work inherently political, although it does add a few political implications to the biologist’s conclusions. By the same token, business schools provide career training. The existence of an outside group that promotes Marxism does not make the business school’s work inherently political, although some might argue that political implications are added.

So to answer your question, no the religious studies department is not a political act. I’m also quite surprised to see you state that it “works to undermine our Christian nation.” Learning about other cultures’ religious practices would help our country understand the rest of the world, but the results you identify just aren’t there. (One can also learn about world religions to find ways to develop more effective evangelism among selected populations, for example.) I’m pretty sure that no one accuses the Pope of being less Christian just because he studied up on Islam. I think most of us can recognize the difference between a religion course that seeks to impartially introduce a set of unfamiliar ideas and one that seeks to proselytize. To offer a parallel: most of us can recognize the difference between a Marxism course that asks students to understand a philosophy that helped shape history and cultures and a Marxism course that teaches students to use that philosophy as a lens to understand the world around them.

In Academically Adrift it is noted that the most learning on college campuses goes on in humanities courses and majors – i.e., those courses taught by the “overly politicized” faculty. The fact of the matter is that human knowledge does not fit into neat little silos, nor is it mutually exclusive. Yes, you can simultaneously teach students to read and write even as you expose them to the political realities that surround them.

I’m glad to hear that some business schools examine the fundamental assumptions of the economic systems with which we live.

Mavprof writes “I doubt whether most academic business schools are promoters of a “mindless reproduction” of some caricatured view that “virtually any action by any government is ‘socialism.’” I am sure that most readers of this column know that I did not make that claim. I pointed out that “a substantial percentage of Americans” seems to hold this belief. It’s not exactly a caricature. Read online sources such as Big Journalism, where you will see very aggressive examples of just this kind of thinking.

As for Medicare, we each have our own statistics and data, I guess. Critics of Medicare argue that it contributes to rising health care costs; supporters of Medicare point out that there are no data to demonstrate that, and that, on the contrary, because Medicare recipients have the option of using their Medicare benefits to enroll in private health insurance plans, it is more likely the increases in prices of those private, for-profit plans that drive up overall costs. See, for example, Oberlander’s book The Political Life of Medicare. Where did I just read Clarke’s Second Law of Egodynamics?: For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.

I consider Paul Ryan’s proposal unreflective for the simple reason that his proposal digs the cost hole deeper, and does precisely the opposite of what many health care economists such as Oberlander and Reinhardt argue is needed to bring costs down: in essence, it strips the specifically Medicare option from Medicare, and leaves only the for-profit private sector insurance options; he has announced that this is to allow the power of the marketplace to drive down the price that Medicare recipients will have to pay. But that hasn’t worked for private sector health insurance clients in the past, and Ryan offers no reason to believe that it will work in the future, apart from his vigorously expressed belief in the power of the marketplace.

It may also be worth pointing out that the debate over Medicare Part D made it perfectly clear that proposals to use the collective power of millions of Medicare recipients to negotiate lower drug prices were simply not going to be allowed by Republicans in congress, and so was dropped as a tool to control costs. Even when a free market strategy was considered, business-friendly politicians killed it as a form of “socialism” akin to letting those pesky collective bargainers get their hands on costs.

Mavprof raises a key point about rational choice, but I am not sure that that the historical evidence supports any clear conclusions about the rationality of the market, especially the rationality of the health care market. Here again economists differ over what is rational and how much choice is involved.

As we know, Rep. Ryan’s plans for Medicare are projected to cover only a portion of the cost of health insurance premiums, and estimates suggest that the percentage covered by Medicare could drop to 33% within a decade. Paul Krugman’s column yesterday suggested that the most likely rational response of seniors will be to demand legislative relief, through a return to higher levels of subsidy, wiping out any cost savings to the government. Whether or not Krugman is himself reliable, I assume that this legislative strategy is a rational one in terms of self-interest, if not national interest. I’m just glad I’m over 55…

I am generally in favor of rational choice in the market, and Mavprof and I are, I think, in agreement on that. But I took an online survey a couple of months ago about what kind of health insurance I’d prefer, and even though my level of reading and comprehension is at least at the 8th grade level, I found the complicated mosaic of options bewildering. Would I prefer a plan with $1000 annual deductible and coverage for X, Y, and Z, or a plan with a $500 deductible and partial coverage for X and Y, and full coverage for Z, or a plan with no deductible and 25% higher premiums and full coverage for X, Y, and Z, or… I think there were 10 options per page, with about 6 pages of choices. It’s impossible for most consumers to gauge with any accuracy what their health care needs will be in 5 or 10 years, especially as seniors, and making decisions on the basis of how I feel today is not a good idea. Will I have a heart attack in 6 months? Will my insurance cover this or that range of organ transplants? Should I care? What’s the risk of cancer in my family history? I can easily decide which can of corn is the better choice, and the consequences of the wrong decision are minimal. No one wants to be bankrupted because they chose affordable medical insurance and later needed a complicated procedure their insurance doesn’t cover.

I’ve wandered far from the issue of whether Rep Ryan’s Medicare proposal is unreflective (let alone Cronon!), and while you might persuade me that it is or is not – I’m open to persuasion on these complex matters – I am concerned that relying on the market to be rational where, as in health care, it has not been rational in the past, is probably a bad idea.

I am not surprised.  Once she sided with Walker, her time was up and she knew it. Actually, I think we should pay Donna whatever she want’s and get her back on our campus.

Smart move Chancellor Martin! Who wants to die of heart attack at a flagship campus when you can enjoy longenvity at an endowed college? I hope all smart administrators know when it is time to move on to more peaceful jobs. Did you see Senator B. and Former Governor P from MINNESOTA trying to become the US President after messing up MN just like WI? Our politicians need professional development and continued education. 

UW MSN is so big that its needs are substantially different from the rest of the system. Separating it would have helped UW Madison and probably would have made operations more expensive for the rest of the schools but would have also allowed them greater flexibility. She deserves a lot of credit for trying.

Having worked with Dr. Martin at Cornell, I found her to be very bright, articulate, and passionate about higher education.  She listens, but also stands up for what she believes is in her institution’s best interests.  It is not surprising that she would become a strong advocate for the Madison campus; that’s her job. Given the state of politics in Wisconsin today, I’m also not surprised that she tried to spin off UW-Madison.  As a graduate, I was glad that she tried to protect the university’s position as a premier research institution. It’s clear that the governor doesn’t understand what a treasure the people of Wisconsin have in UW-Madison.

Agree or disagree with her strategy, at least Dr. Martin was willing to fight for what she believed was in her institution’s best interests.  Given what the legislature and governor are saying and doing, I don’t have any other better ideas. Her departure is a real loss for the university and the state. 

Who else is going to have the gusto and courage to envision such steps without saying how it will effect their golden handshake.  Much of corporate leadership is there less than 5 years.  How many chairs jst at HP in the last five years alone. -

Steve Jobs was under obligation to support his shareholders like any other CEO. And the textbook industry is ridiculous, and we know it! The fact that new textbooks come out with few modifications prove it, and forces the students to buy them. Each professor however, should make sure the newest ones (two or three copies) are in the library available to the students to read on site. This is one way to circumvent having to buy the ipad and the textbook! It is remarkably a common sense idea, dirt cheap, and an often overlooked form of goodwill from the professor to the student. Students don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care. Occupy the Library! 

The title of this article should be “Steve Jobs Had Hopes of Disrupting State Certification of Textbooks.” 

The point here really is not whether we agree or disagree what Steve Jobs had envisioned.  The point is a fact where the funding for education has become the last priority on the list at all local, state, regional and federal levels – not just K-12 but even at higher levels. 

Raza
________________________Raza Khan, Ph.D.Chemistry facultyDr.Raza.Khan@gmail.com

Our library does not have the resources to stock two or three of every textbook used on our campus.  I wish it did.  

Being a buyer for a K-12 district, I can see the positives and the negatives of this implimentation.  While free texts sound like a great idea, we have to stop and consider the children who come from homes that do not have the technology needed to load the texts.  I am currently involved in a mesh of technology integration versus paper form, and what I have found is that some schools do not have the funding to support the technology needed for this move.  While I am well versed in techology, there are others that I work with who have trouble opening and utilizing microsoft programs, what do we do then if these are the people educating our children? 

There is much more that goes into this transistion process than meets the eye. Until funding (at school and at home) is increased and training is provided, I fear that when we progress we will leave some students behind.

Far be it for me to defend Apple, as I find their litigious nature damaging to the ecosystem of innovation, but even with that, I am reminded by the saying “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.”  The game (patent system) is flawed, but that is a whole different conversation.

Anyway, on to your arguments.  First, I hear many people complain about how closed and proprietary Apple is, yet I don’t see this bearing itself out.  For sure, they are far better than Microsoft (ahem, PlaysForSure), Adobe, etc.:

- Their audio codec (AAC) is standard and they just opened their lossless format (ALAC).  They use MP4 for video–proprietary, but basically an industry standard.  And before you say anything, yes they used to wrap their music in DRM and still do so for movies, but only at the behest of the media industry (http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/06/a-letter-from-steve-jobs-on-drm-lets-get-rid-of-it/). 
- They push HTML5 (open) over proprietary things like Silverlight and Flash. 
- They are a major contributor back to open source:  http://www.apple.com/opensource/

With respect to planned obsolescence, while that may have been the case in the 1980s for the computer industry writ large–and something that flies in the face of the still functional Mac SE and LC I have–certainly Apple is less guilty of that than others.  They have a standard product release cycle, so in general, you always know when the next update is coming.  Also, Apple products have a higher resale value (http://www.salon.com/2007/11/07/mac_price/) than their competitors, and the best warranty and support service (http://www.macworld.com/article/160089/2011/05/apple_laptops_dominate_consumer_reports_rankings.html).

But, you know, don’t let the facts stand in the way of good hyperbole.

ipads are a wonderful device for reading. I love being able to read in low light and change the size of the text.  The DRM in apps should be enough for textbook publishers to be confident there work is secure while sales opportunities have the potential to be viral.  The current text book marketing model and lack of granularity of the information is in real need of innovation.  Hopefully someone like Jobs will pick up the classroom resource innovation torch.