May 15, 2008
Academic Capital Flows: U. of Chicago Plans $200-Million Milton Friedman Institute
A decade ago, officials in Mongolia reportedly considered building a statue in honor of Milton Friedman, who was one of the 20th century’s most influential proponents of laissez-faire economics.
Today the University of Chicago announced its own monument to Mr. Friedman, who died in 2006 at the age of 94. The university plans to invest $200-million in a research center to be known as the Milton Friedman Institute.
In a proposal completed in January, a faculty committee at Chicago said that the new institute would “ensure that the singular position of Chicago economics over the last century would serve as a foundation for continued leadership in shaping fields of thought as well as economic and social policies throughout the world.”
The institute will be housed in a building now occupied by the Chicago Theological Seminary. The department of economics might also move to the building. The university will pay for a new structure for the seminary, which will remain in the Hyde Park neighborhood.
Mr. Friedman did much of his graduate course work at Chicago, though he finally earned his doctorate from Columbia University. He taught at Chicago from 1946 to 1976 and maintained ties there until his death. —David Glenn
(Photo by the Flickr user Gabriel M. Used under a Creative Commons license.)
Posted on Thursday May 15, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [8]May 13, 2008
U. of Colorado at Boulder Wants to Hire 'Professor of Conservative Thought'
The chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder hopes to raise $9-million to endow a faculty chair for a professor of conservative thought and policy.
According to an article in today’s Wall Street Journal, the chancellor, G.P. (Bud) Peterson, believes the new chair would help create “intellectual diversity” on the campus.
Activists like David Horowitz have been pushing that concept for years, amid complaints that the professoriate is full of liberals. But, in the article, Mr. Horowitz is quoted as saying that creating such an endowed chair might simply establish a place on the campus for a token right-winger. And as Mr. Peterson notes, the professor might not even be a genuine conservative, just a scholar of the movement.
Boulder has long had a reputation as a hotbed of liberal activism. Last year the university’s regents voted to fire Ward Churchill, an ethnic-studies professor who six years earlier said that businessmen killed in the September 11 terrorist attacks were legitimate targets because they were “little Eichmanns.” —Robin Wilson
Posted on Tuesday May 13, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [57]May 12, 2008
State Governments Pony Up a Half-Billion Dollars for Specific Research
State-government agencies commissioned just over $500-million in 2006 for specific research and development projects at universities, the National Science Foundation reported in its first such survey in more than a decade.
The NSF contacted 423 state agencies nationwide, of which 209 reported any such expenditures for academic research. The result is a finer-grain analysis than the NSF’s annual survey of universities about their research spending from various financing sources, including state governments. The annual survey covers a broad range of state support, including nonspecific appropriations for the operations of university laboratories and agricultural research stations. The spending totaled $3-billion in the 2006 fiscal year, the most recent reported by the NSF.
The specifically commissioned research described in the new report is a subset of that total, and so the new survey offers “a more complete and consistent accounting of states’ role in supporting R&D” than the annual survey alone, said John E. Jankowski, director of the NSF’s program on R&D statistics and the author of the new report.
Of the 209 agencies reporting any commissioned expenditures for academic R&D, the most common were responsible for natural resources (52 agencies), transportation (48), agriculture (37), health (22), and the environment (19). The leading states were Pennsylvania ($68.7-million), New York ($57.4-million), California ($57.2-million), Michigan ($37.9-million), and Ohio ($34-million). Spending by those states accounted for about half the total.
At the bottom of the list were New Mexico ($65,000), Rhode Island ($150,000), Mississippi ($454,000), Vermont ($610,000), and Alaska ($621,000). The NSF plans to repeat the survey for the 2007 fiscal year, Mr. Jankowski said. —Jeffrey Brainard
Posted on Monday May 12, 2008 | Permalink | CommentU.S. Labels MIT Students as 'Security Threats' and Denies Clearance at Ports
Eight graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been denied a security clearance by the Department of Homeland Security, which has labeled two of the students “security threats.”
The Tech, the student newspaper at MIT, reports that the eight students, who are affiliated with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, were denied the new Transportation Worker Identification Credential, a clearance that allows people to more easily board and leave ships at American ports. When Woods Hole appealed the decision on their behalf, at least two of the students — from Britain and from Germany — were declared a threat, the newspaper reports.
James A. Yoder, dean at Woods Hole, said the lack of a credential could make it more difficult for the students working on its three research ships.
It is unclear, however, why the students, who were required to submit their fingerprints and copies of their passports, were declared threats. According to the legal code governing the program, a person can be deemed a threat if he or she does not have the right kind of visa. Student visas are not explicitly listed as one of the kinds the government may accept for the program, although the rules allow the Department of Homeland Security some leeway, The Tech reports. Other oceanographic institutions have not tried to get credentials for all staff members and students, and so have not encountered the same problem.
Mr. Yoder said Woods Hole would continue to appeal the decision. “We’re a long way from giving up,” he said. —Karin Fischer
Posted on Monday May 12, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [20]NSF's Waterman Award Goes to Mathematics Researcher
Terence Tao, a professor of mathematics at the University of California at Los Angeles, is the 2008 recipient of the Alan T. Waterman Award, the National Science Foundation announced on Friday.
Mr. Tao was recognized for his mathematical research, which includes partial differential equations, number theory, and harmonic analysis, among other areas. The Waterman award recognizes a young researcher who is no more than 35 years old or seven years beyond receiving a doctorate, in any field of science or engineering supported by the foundation. In addition to a medal, Mr. Tao will receive a grant of $500,000, to be distributed over a three-year period, for further research.
Mr. Tao has also been recognized for his mathematical research both as a recipient of the prestigious Fields Medal and as a MacArthur Fellow in 2006. —Hurley Goodall
Posted on Monday May 12, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [2]New Details of 'Minerva' Project Emerge, as Social Scientists Weigh Pentagon Ties
The Department of Defense hopes to finance the earliest projects in the fledgling social-science program known as the Minerva Consortium by the end of 2008, a Pentagon official told a group of writers last week.
In a roundtable discussion with military-oriented bloggers, Thomas G. Mahnken, deputy assistant secretary for policy planning, offered only sketchy details about the program, which was announced last month in a speech by Robert M. Gates, the secretary of defense. The program will offer grants to groups of universities to investigate topics including “religious and ideological studies” and the Chinese military.
During last week’s roundtable, Mr. Mahnken said the program’s budget would be relatively modest: “millions of dollars,” but not tens of millions.
Asked why the Pentagon was turning to civilian universities for the projects, rather than working with its own research centers and think tanks, Mr. Mahnken said that the government ought to be able to draw on university expertise in the social sciences, just as it does in physics and engineering.
Mr. Mahnken acknowledged that some social scientists had greeted the program with skepticism, but said that the university presidents he had contacted were enthusiastic. “Many of these folks are people for whom this is uncontroversial,” he said. “I mean, they come from the physical sciences, they come from engineering, and government funding is part of the way they do business.”
Among the most visible skeptics are scholars in the informal group known as the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, which issued a statement last month criticizing the Minerva proposal. That statement is part of a broader debate about relations between anthropologists and the military, much of which has centered on the Pentagon’s Human Terrain System.
At last year’s annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, its members passed a resolution that supported a ban on secrecy in ethnographic research. The association’s president, Setha M. Low, said in an interview last week that the group’s ethics committee and executive board were crafting language for the ban. Depending on how it is worded, the new rule might effectively forbid the association’s members to take part in the Human Terrain program and certain other military projects. (In a separate controversy, the ban might also forbid much of the work that private-sector anthropologists do for corporate clients.)
Ms. Low, a professor of environmental psychology at the City University of New York, said that she hoped to release a draft rule by September 15 that would be debated at the association’s annual meeting two months later. The rule will be put before the group’s members in an e-mail ballot before it is made final. —David Glenn
Posted on Monday May 12, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [7]May 9, 2008
Social Scientist in Army's 'Human Terrain' Program Dies in Afghanistan
Michael V. Bhatia, a graduate student in political science who was serving as a civilian employee of the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain program, died on Wednesday in Afghanistan.
Mr. Bhatia graduated from Brown University in 1999 and was pursuing a doctorate in political science and international relations at the University of Oxford. Since late last year, he had been working with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division as part of the Human Terrain program, a controversial effort in which scholars advise military personnel about local social structures.
The program has prompted widespread criticism, but Mr. Bhatia strongly supported it, according to a memorial notice that was posted on Thursday by Brown’s Watson Institute for International Studies.
The institute quoted a November 2007 letter in which Mr. Bhatia wrote, “The program has a real chance of reducing both the Afghan and American lives lost, as well as ensuring that the US/NATO/ISAF strategy becomes better attuned to the population’s concerns, views, criticisms, and interests and better supports the Government of Afghanistan.”
The Watson Institute’s notice does not describe the circumstances of Mr. Bhatia’s death, but an e-mail message circulated on Thursday said that he had been killed by a roadside bomb near Khost, an eastern city near the Pakistan border, perhaps in an incident reported by the Voice of America. Two NATO soldiers died in that same attack.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Defense declined to comment on Thursday, citing a policy that forbids public discussion of casualties until at least 24 hours after the next of kin have been notified.
After graduating from Brown, Mr. Bhatia worked for several nongovernmental organizations and conducted research in East Timor and Kosovo. He was an author of two books, one of which was published just last month.
In a 2004 paper, Mr. Bhatia and two colleagues criticized the management of the NATO-led intervention in Afghanistan, arguing that U.S. and NATO troops relied too heavily on local militias and warlords and had done too little to help ordinary citizens feel secure. —David Glenn
Posted on Friday May 9, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [13]May 8, 2008
New Study on College-Going Rates Gives Mom Something Else to Worry About
Here’s a novel line for a Mother’s Day card: “Thanks, Mom, for loving me so much I never earned a college degree.”
Implausible as it might seem, a new study suggests that there might be some truth to such a sentiment. Based on the survey responses of more than 13,800 young Texans polled during their senior year of high school and then again a year later, the study concludes that seniors who reported having good relationships with their mothers and fathers were actually less likely than others to enroll in a four-year college.
Yep, it’s true: Parents just can’t win.
One reason such findings are counterintuitive is that a large body of other research shows that children who have good relationships with their parents do better at school. The new study — by Ruth N. López Turley, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Matthew Desmond, a doctoral student in the department — reached the same conclusion, finding that students who reported getting along well with the folks generally reported having better grades and higher class rankings than their peers did.
How, then, does a strong parent-child relationship hurt college-going prospects? It makes a high-school senior substantially more likely to express a strong desire to live at home during college. And those seniors who said it was important to them to live at home after high school were more than 40 percent less likely to enroll in a four-year college than their peers were.
The study found that many other traits — including socioeconomic disadvantage, being foreign-born, or not having degree aspirations — increased the likelihood that a young person would not want to leave the nest right after high school. Above and beyond the effects of such factors, Hispanic students were more than twice as likely as white students to report that it was important for them to stay home, suggesting that culture also plays an important role.
But, after using regression analysis to separate out the other possible factors, the researchers found that the unwillingness to leave home that comes from having good relationships with the parents has a negative-enough influence on college-going to cancel out the positive influence derived from the higher academic performance associated with such family relations.
In a paper summarizing their findings and submitted to the American Sociological Review, Ms. Turley and Mr. Desmond say: “Through our research, a paradox has come to light: Strong family ties, considered vital to a child’s success in school, can serve as an impediment to a child’s educational attainment. Parents who strive to develop an encouraging and communicative relationship with their children might produce a high-school honors student but not a four-year college graduate.” —Peter Schmidt
Posted on Thursday May 8, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [30]May 7, 2008
House Spending Bill Leaves Out Money for Physical Sciences
Washington — Advocates for scientists have lost their bid to persuade Congress to raise spending on physical-sciences research during the remainder of the 2008 fiscal year. The money is not contained in a war-spending bill that the U.S. House of Representatives is to consider on Thursday.
Universities had lobbied to increase money specifically for the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. Congress provided both agencies with minimal increases for 2008, far less than the amounts authorized by the America Competes Act, a law enacted last year to bolster technology development and the economy. As a result, layoffs are planned at Energy Department laboratories that serve academic researchers.
Thirty-one House members in both parties signed a letter in April endorsing a spending increase for the two agencies. But House leaders have been under pressure to squeeze increased spending into the bill for a variety of other civilian programs, including veterans’ benefits.
“We’re very disappointed” about the lack of research money, said Barry Toiv, a spokesman for the Association of American Universities. He said he hoped the proposal might yet gain traction in the Senate, where eight members signed a letter in March calling for the spending bill to include $350-million for the two agencies. —Jeffrey Brainard
Posted on Wednesday May 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [4]A Major Anthropology Conference in China Faces Postponement
In what might be another sign of pre-Olympics tension in China, the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences has warned its members that a major conference planned for July is likely to be postponed.
The association, which was formed in Brussels in 1948, meets every five years. This year’s meeting is scheduled for mid-July at Yunnan University, in Kunming, a city in southwestern China not far from Tibet. Kunming was the site last month of large demonstrations against the Tibetan independence movement and perceived anti-Chinese bias in the West.
On Tuesday the association’s Chinese affiliate wrote to the group’s international executive committee, saying that it had “encountered complex difficulties hard to resolve in its preparation work recently, which makes it impossible for us to hold the congress at the time originally planned.”
The executive committee has rejected the idea of a postponement, but it has not yet received a reply from its Chinese colleagues. “We still have no concrete information about the results of our plea not to postpone the congress,” wrote the association’s president, Luis Alberto Vargas, a professor of physical anthropology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in an e-mail message to The Chronicle today.
Mr. Vargas and other members of the executive committee declined to comment further, citing the delicacy of the situation.
The conference’s program includes a number of panels on potentially sensitive topics, including dozens of papers on ethnic and linguistic diversity and four papers specifically on Tibet.
The association’s newsletter published last month a May 2007 memorandum that outlined 20 points of agreement between the association and its Chinese affiliate, including an understanding that Chinese scholars would organize a conference panel titled “The Achievement of China’s Policy Toward Ethnic Minority Groups and Ethnic Administration.” —David Glenn
Posted on Wednesday May 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [5]
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