Their Band Could Be Your Book

I, too, applaud Lumina on it’s moves towards transparency – including their very public goal of 60% by 2025, and holding themselves accountable for reaching that goal. But I’d add that the final proof (for me at least) is how these findings will be used to inform future funding strategies. My read is that Lumina is moving more into the realm of policy and advocacy, and moving away from supporting program. Which is problematic for me – especially since Lumina is the largest funder focusing exclusively on college access and success. Also, it would help if their support moved down from higher ed into K-12 reform – which is a key component of the “access” part of the equation.

nathanielcampbell

Yes, I have met, and worked alongside, conservatives in academe and have throughout my career. Thanks for elaborating your own understanding of how you accept (and live) the label. Part of my point was that Wood uses the term conservative here in such a vague way to gain rhetorical high ground while ignoring a finer degree of analysis and differentiation about how we define “conservative.” (Also, he has in recent blogs dismissed gay civil rights issues and stood in support of Glenn Beck’s attacks on Frances Fox Piven while ignoring that those attacks have lead to death threats to Piven.)
Chuck Kleinhans

I have no doubt that both “right” and “left” in and out of academe have aspects of the “tribal-moral community.”

Which one has a greater tendency not to question sacred tenets? (Heck, which one freely admits to hewing to sacred, unquestionable tenets?) Which one is more rigid, more ideological, less likely to skepticism?

These are not difficult questions to answer, although the answers may be uncomfortable for the NAS.

Don’t worry, Dr. Smith. The National Association of Scholars would be comfortable with the answer either way, although I rather doubt that the matter is as open and shut as you seem to think. There are plenty of ways to be rigid, ideological, un-skeptical, and attached to tenets beyond the reach of self-questioning, and some of them oddly enough seem characteristic of people who pride themselves on their skepticism.

Peter Wood (Sorry, I omitted my name on the initial post)

The “culture of evidence” in the project closely resembles in nearly all aspects and perhaps even comes from the prior idea in Total Quality Management called “managing by fact not boss opinion”.

This was, in Japan where, as an effective business practice, it originated, a direct counter to normal Japanese management culture, where highly emotional dependent-emotionally-on-sempai (boss) behavior ruined work quality. The founders of TQM in Japan, designed a COUNTER to their own natural culture, a CORRECTIVE to it. I personally experienced this TQM induced CULTURE FIGHT at both Matsushita Electric Ind. Co. Ltd., an early Deming Prize winner and Sekisui Chemical, a winner while I was working on TQM there, and Taiyo Kogyo, a later winner I also contributed to—all in Japan. It was heartening to see Japanese in tens of thousands fight to change their own culture.

TQM, due to Japanese export power in global markets, drew the serious attention of business communities in the USA and Europe. Painful loss of domestic markets drew respect for Japan’s quality and systems for attaining quality levels higher than American and European competitors. DUE to that economic threat, TQM was paid attention to (I suggest without billions lost in market share, TQM would have been a typical fluff fad).

When TQM entered the USA, which I observed at Baldrige Winner Xerox, it came, stupidly as direct copying of practices inside TQM that were effective counters to JAPAN’s culture. So the US from the beginning stupidly copied counters to weaknesses in Japan’s culture inherent in TQM practices. The US did not develop analogous counters to weaknesses in US management culture. So, a few years later of installing counters to a culture not in US business, TQM produced less quality in the US than the same practices produced in Japan. Surprise surprise.

I was at the U of Chicago B school when professors there took the team out of TQM then made it more mathematic, so ordinary workers would no longer do it, then made it theoretical so no one would benefit from it practically—within three years—-an MIT-approved completely neurotic intellectual individual elitist form of TQM had been born in journals (that FORTUNATELY no one in the history of the world will ever read—for good reason).

I review all this boring history because:
1) installing a change in one’s own culture requires a courage lacking in the USA in general but found in this Limina project—give the guys and gals there a break—the USA is terrible at admitting its cultures are flawed and more terrible at doing culture change work.
2) installing a change in one’s own culture is a PROVEN route to global power—Japan and TQM—but ONLY because Japan changed her normal business culture via TQM practices invented and installed for that purpose.

I admire the intellectual courage and publicity smarts and moral power of everyone involved in the Lumina project—keep on doing what you are doing and just do more of it and get more doing it.

However, the IMPLEMENTATION WAY THAT WORKS is always as follows:
1) tackle an immense impossibility—only that motivates people to do their best work
2) shave off, from time to time, partial early superficial but understandable results to sell to the public and moronic politicians proving by their low standards that your ultimate project is “helping”.

In other words you split EVERY project into BIG results that address root problems/causes and A SERIES OF SMALL VISIBLE results that sell the public with its poorly educated media and leaders of the worth of your project (they may never hear about or understand and support your ultimate goal and direction). I believe this is taught to every manager on the planet as one of their first rules of operation—valid work can never get support, you have to clothe it with superficial popular clothes goals to make valid work viable.

Here are some possible rock band names taken from Penn State art history titles:
Angels of Art (http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-01557-8.html)
Beyond Pleasure (http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-02971-9.html)
Chains (http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-02963-4.html)
Dark Side of Nature (http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-02467-4.html)
Fixed Ecstasy (http://psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-02972-6.html)
Rainbow Bridge (http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-01977-8.html)
Sacred Shock (http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-02470-4.html)
Wos up Man? (http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-911209-62-X.html)

 What a great idea!

 Is there anything to prevent the Duke administration from simply reducing the library’s budget (from the main univ budget) by the same amount that it gets from the tickets?

We were wondering about that too.  Seems like that happens all too often.