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]Southern Cal Names Hindu as New Dean of Religious Life
The University of Southern California has chosen Varun Soni as its new dean of religious life — an appointment that makes him, according to the university, the first Hindu to hold such a position in the United States. —Thomas Bartlett
Posted on Thursday May 15, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [9]May 14, 2008
Key Higher-Education Official Is Leaving Education Department
Washington — Diane Auer Jones announced her resignation today as the U.S. Education Department’s assistant secretary for postsecondary education, one year after taking the job.
“She did let her senior staff know today that she will be leaving,” said Samara Yudof, a department spokeswoman. Ms. Yudof said she had no immediate details on the reasons for Ms. Jones’s departure.
Ms. Jones was nominated by President Bush in May 2007. She had served as a science-policy adviser in the White House, and as director for government affairs at Princeton University. She also served as a program director at the National Science Foundation and as an associate professor at the Community College of Baltimore County.
That combination of experiences made her valued in the college community, said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education.
“Diane brought enormous skill and knowledge to the assistant-secretary position,” Mr. Hartle said, citing her efforts to draft regulations governing loan and grant programs for students, and to oversee their implementation. Her departure “is disappointing but not totally surprising,” given that appointed government officials often seek new career opportunities toward the end of an administration, he said. —Paul Basken
Posted on Wednesday May 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [5]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
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
Budget Crisis Prompts Berkeley to Halve Its Offerings in East Asian Studies
The California budget crisis has taken a toll on the University of California at Berkeley’s department of East Asian languages and cultures, which has announced that this fall it will eliminate classes for 1,500 students to make up for an unexpected financial shortfall.
The cuts are a response to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed state budget, which would reduce spending on Berkeley by $30-million to $40-million, the Daily Californian reported. The university has asked several academic departments to make cuts to courses and faculty members to close the gap, but hardest hit will be departments that employ many adjunct lecturers and graduate-student instructors.
As a result, the East Asian department, which expects to lose $300,000 in support, will cut 40 percent of its courses in Japanese, 54 percent of those in Chinese, and 66 percent of those in Korean. It will also not renew contracts for 13 lecturers. According to a notice on its Web site, the department will restrict enrollment in its courses to students in the College of Letters & Science.
The English department, which faces a $400,000 cut, has appealed to faculty members with endowed chairs to donate a portion of their private research grants to the department.
Berkeley students have organized an afternoon rally today to protest cuts in the East Asian language programs. An online petition asking university administrators to reconsider the cuts and to provide emergency funds for East Asian languages has collected 900 signatures so far. —Paula Wasley
Posted on Thursday May 8, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [2]Congressional Panel Considers Call for More Female Science Professors
Washington — For women contemplating careers as science professors, the numbers are daunting. More than half of the bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering these days go to women, but they run into a high hurdle when it comes to securing academic jobs. Fewer than one in three science and engineering professors are female, and the numbers for full professors drop to one in five. So Congress held a hearing today to consider how to raise those odds.
A draft bill introduced by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, a Texas Democrat, would promote the use of workshops “to increase awareness of implicit gender bias in grant review, hiring, tenure, promotion, and selection for other honors based on merit,” according to a news release issued by the House Science Committee’s Subcommittee on Research and Science Education. The committee has not yet released the proposed legislation, and the details of such workshops remain unclear. The workshops would be based, at least partly, on ones organized by academic chemists and by the American Physical Society, which have in the past two years convened gatherings of federal officials and the chairs of top university departments.
The legislation, titled “Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering Act of 2008,” would also seek to gather better demographic data from federal grant-making agencies. But that may be a difficult endeavor. Lynda T. Carlson, director of the division of science-resource statistics at the National Science Foundation, told committee members that scientists who receive grants “are not, nor can they be, required to provide demographic information because of the Privacy Act.” Many scientists who win grants do not indicate the race and gender of the people working under their grants, she said. “NSF cannot support the proposed legislation as its requirements will be excessive as they exceed current data-collection capabilities,” according to a statement submitted by Ms. Carlson.
Although the hearing was devoted to the issue of female academic scientists, the witness list contained no practicing scientists, male or female. The lone academic was Donna K. Ginther, an associate professor of economics at the University of Kansas, who has studied gender differences in academic science. In her statement, she endorsed the idea of gender-bias workshops for academics and grant reviewers, but she cautioned that the sessions should be tested for effectiveness. While past workshops have focused on department chairs, Ms. Ginther said that it would be important to reach principal investigators who oversee postdoctoral fellows. Her data indicate that most women leave academic science during the postdoctoral years.
The best way Congress could help women in academic science, she said, would be to improve their access to child care. She proposed allowing universities to support child-care facilities with the indirect costs that they take from research grants made to faculty members.
At today’s hearing, Congress itself inadvertently showed how far the nation has to go in promoting the success of women in academe. Rep. Vernon J. Ehlers of Michigan, the top Republican on the subcommittee, said in a statement that “effective institutional change must be systemic since bias may hide behind even the simplest language used in recommendation letters.”
His Republican colleague Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett of Maryland demonstrated the power of language while smiling at the trio of female Ph.D.’s who were testifying. Mr. Bartlett hailed them as “effective representatives,” but then proceeded to call them “three very attractive women.” —Richard Monastersky
Posted on Thursday May 8, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [11]Michigan Supreme Court Upholds Ban on Same-Sex Benefits
The Michigan Supreme Court has upheld a lower-court ruling that Michigan’s public universities and other government agencies may not extend employee benefits to a worker’s same-sex partner.
The Supreme Court, in a 5-to-2 decision released on Wednesday, ruled that Michigan’s constitutional ban on gay marriage also covers employee benefits. Recognition of domestic partnerships is considered no different than marriage, the court said.
It’s unclear what effect the ruling may have on Michigan’s state employees because many public agencies have changed their benefits policies to include unmarried individuals living together but not legally related, the Detroit Free Press reported today. —Hurley Goodall
Posted on Thursday May 8, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [21]
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