About the Author

Stan Katz teaches public and international affairs and directs the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at the Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is a past president of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for Legal History. He comments frequently on policy issues relating to higher education, particularly liberal education, and on the humanities and social sciences, philanthropy, scholarly relations with Cuba, and the interplay of civil society, constitutionalism, and democracy. And on his beloved Cubs.

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Recent Posts

Can You Use Orphan Works? | Comment [9]

SNAAP Judgments | Comment [6]

Thanks, Karen | Comment [5]

Symphony Orchestra as a Team Sport | Comment [2]

Is the E-Book in Trouble? | Comment [2]

Featured Articles By the Author

Liberal Education on the Ropes

Philanthropy's New Math

The Liberal Arts in School and College

The Pathbreaking, Fractionalized, Uncertain World of Knowledge

What Has Happened to the Professoriate?

May 7, 2008

Can You Use Orphan Works?

Most of you have never heard of an “orphan work.” Short of a flurry of interest in child orphanages promoted by some neoconservative politicians as a response to abortion-rights advocacy, the word “orphan” has an antique (well, 19th-century) ring to it. But it is a significant concept in the world of intellectual property, a shadowy world to most in the academic community even after all the controversy over copyright (and copyleft) in the recent past.

An orphan work in this context means a copyrighted work (visual, text, sound) whose rightsholder (intellectual property owner) cannot be either identified or found. Most of us have in fact encountered the problem without knowing we were confronted with an “orphan.” The most usual context for a professor is when she wants to quote from a work for publication or copy a work for course assignment, but cannot identify (or locate) the person or company who owns the rights to the work. The question is who the parents of the orphan are, and/or where they are to be found?

Orphan works have long been an issue, but of course the introduction of digital information has intensified the problem. We now have access to vastly greater amounts of information, and, much better means of identifying the information we want to use either for scholarship or teaching. But assuming that not all usage is covered by the “fair use” doctrine (a very large question I will avoid here), a good deal of the newly accessible information is hard to attribute to a rightsholder. How do we get permission to use it? If you are a copyright hardliner, you will say that you simply cannot use such orphaned material. Tant pis. A freer spirit will say that so long as you have made a reasonable effort to identify the rightsholder, you are free to use the material without permission.

But the for the last decade or so there have been efforts to legislate a middle position, usually involving the establishment of a registry of orphan works and mechanisms for payment of reasonable fees for their use. Bills have recently been introduced in both the House and the Senate to provide such solutions, and they are being hotly contested. The rightsholder communities (for different sorts of rightsholders have very different attitudes) favor the imposition of tougher burdens on use and higher payments, while user communities (also diverse) favor a more relaxed mechanism that will result in greater and cheaper access to orphan works. Hearings have very recently been held in the House, and have generated intense concern in different communities. At a recent panel I chaired on newspaper op-ed art, a talented illustrator for The New York Times and other papers told the crowd that all visual artists were about to get ripped off, since the House bill would destroy all property rights in illustrations.

Well, not in my view. But on the other hand one of the most prominent library commentators on IP issues has warned her readers that the provisions the visual artists have introduced into the House bill are a “poison pill” that should make the bill unacceptable to the library community. My own guess is that we will not get any legislation before the Congress descends into election year paralysis, but the issue will not go away. And it is one that any academic who cares both about fairness in copyright and the capacity to use literary and artistic creations ought to inform himself about. This issue is too important to leave solely either to visual artists or library lawyers.

May 5, 2008

SNAAP Judgments

Former Mayor Ed Koch of New York City used to be fond of asking anyone who would listen, “How am I doing?” There is a growing debate in higher education about how we are doing, but the debate is multifocused and poorly distributed.

The code name for the debate is, of course, “accountability,” and the point of reference is all too often the late and sometimes-lamented Spellings Commission. I am convinced that the debate is as consequential for individual institutions as it is for the field of higher education as a whole.

The problem is that if it is higher ed as a whole that is being assessed, nobody’s institutional ox is gored. Of course some institutions, especially those that answer closely to legislative oversight, are laser-focused on institution-specific assessment. But private institutions are not immediately answerable to government agencies, even though they are theoretically under the purview of regional accrediting agencies. And many private institutions, especially the most selective and elite, apparently feel that they are so self-evidently successful at promoting student learning that they do not have to institute specialized assessment instruments.

I have written elsewhere about the need for longitudinal assessment, but I was again reminded of the problem last week when I received a release on the new SNAAP (sounds like a Dutch beverage, doesn’t it?) instrument. The Strategic National Arts Alumni Project has been developed by the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research (George Kuh and the folks who brought us NSSE) in partnership with the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University. SNAAP will be a long-term longitudinal survey of arts alumni to show, among other things, “how students in different majors use their arts training in their careers and other aspects of their lives.”

My own university, like many others, is investing heavily in both facilities and faculty for undergraduate art-making in the visual and plastic arts, and in performance (dance, music, theater). Many of us feel intuitively that such an investment will pay off in the enrichment of liberal education, just as advocates for arts education in the schools have long claimed (in supposed response to the work of Howard Gardner) that precollegiate student learning capacity will be enhanced by engagement with the arts.

But social science research has yet to prove the intuition definitively correct in the schools, and we frankly don’t have a clue how useful an analogous arts approach will prove in colleges. The information garnered from SNAAP will be helpful, but it will not be available for a long time, and it does not appear to address questions about the impact of the arts on undergraduate education.

But shouldn’t we care whether arts education, freshman seminars, service learning or any of the other “enhancements” to undergraduate education actually improve student cognition and capacity to achieve? I think so, and I think we need to worry about such new forms of assessment sooner rather than later if we are to be taken seriously with regard to our “product.” It is probably not going to happen, however, if faculty do not wake up to the need. If we care about educational innovation, we should care whether it is consequential. This may be too important a matter to be left to university presidents, at least in the private sector of higher ed.

May 1, 2008

Thanks, Karen

This morning The Chronicle reports a really important story — the departure of Karen Arenson from The New York Times.

Anyone who is reading this blog is likely to be a higher-education news junkie (bless all of you!), but for many Americans Karen was one of the few mainstream reporters who provided coverage of higher ed. She was the best the Times had, and I will always be grateful to her for turning her Metro Desk beat into a perch from which to comment knowledgeably and intelligently on what was going on in our colleges and universities. Karen took a buyout, in part to deal with pressing family issues, but also, I think, because of the increasing difficulty of doing her job well on a paper that is having a hard time deciding what it wants to be in an era of declining print readership and killing electronic competition.

I first met Karen about a decade ago when she came to Princeton to write a story on Jewish admissions to our University. Typically, she had picked up on the story by reading a brilliant investigative series in The Daily Princetonian by a freshman reporter (Richard Just, now with The New Republic). I was the “president” (= board chair) of the Center for Jewish Life, and Karen interviewed me at length. She wrote a long and acute piece which featured a large photo of me, and produced a series of quizzical responses from old friends who wondered when I had become a rabbi. My first encounter with Warhol-fame. My more important encounter, however, was with a reporter who has become a very good friend, someone with whom I have discussed higher-ed policy on a regular basis. I think I have occasionally been helpful to her in providing a sounding board for her story research, and even, much more infrequently, in giving her information. But, as a very well-informed and highly skeptical insider, she has been more important to me as I have tried to understand the larger higher-education picture.

I have learned a lot about how a good reporter operates from observing Karen. To be sure, she has had (thanks to the Times) the sort of job that permitted her to take the time to develop a story properly, and she has worked with fine editors — even if their news sense about higher ed was not always hers, or mine. She has worked hard to get the story right, and she has evinced the skepticism required to uncover the truth. She has frequently challenged my confident assertions about what was going on in the field, and she has more often than not been correct. Her knowledge of economics and her comfort with statistics has been a big part of her professional competence, as we saw recently in her reporting on university endowments. And of course she writes beautifully.

Reporters like Karen Arenson cannot be replaced. And it does not seem likely that the Times will even try to fill her position, since they are clearly downsizing their education beat. This will be a great loss to all of us in the field of higher education, since a well-informed public is essential both to legislative policy formulation and to popular support for what we do. We will miss you, Karen, but I thank you publicly for what you have done for us. But please keep calling me!

April 28, 2008

Symphony Orchestra as a Team Sport

We seem to have accepted the locution “student-athlete” in the academy, though all too often I think we really mean “athlete-student.” all too often. In selective institutions we make special provisions to ensure that a requisite number and variety of student-athletes are admitted — quarterbacks, point guards, pole vaulters, strokes, mid-fielders, and the like. The sports teams cannot do without them, and for a variety of reasons (in my view, some better than others) we find ways to admit them that seem consistent with our academic standards and dignity.

We usually justify this affirmative action policy with reference to the values of commitment, hard work, sportsmanship and teamwork that will stand our students well in life after graduation. And I agree that these are important values.

But what about our other teams? Surely sports are not the only activity in which these values can be learned. The other teams, however, are taken for granted, possibly because they do not seem to require rhetorical overkill to justify them. Still, we should remember that they exist, and that they serve our students in equally important ways. I am thinking of the debate team, the modern dance team, the community-service team — and my personal favorite, the university orchestra.

Think about it for a moment. The orchestra conductor recruits special-teams players just as intensely as the football coach, but instead of seeking punters and wide receivers, he is on the lookout for piccolos and contrabassoons (scarcer than long snappers, for sure). The orchestra engages in team practices throughout the year (like crew, not football), and the individual players practice daily (their counterpart to the weight room?).

They need to play skillfully and together, and to perform under the pressure of public scrutiny, though to be sure they get two performances of each program to get it right. And quite a few fans come to cheer for them (and frequently pay for the privilege). Shouldn’t we give varsity letters for orchestra (and the other non-sports teams)? Well, I haven’t seen a letter sweater on a campus in a long time, but you know what I mean.

My wife and I attended a championship performance by our team, the Princeton University Orchestra, brilliantly coached and conducted by Maestro Michael Pratt, last weekend. The musical among you will understand the ambition of their performance if I tell you that they played Mahler’s Ninth symphony, one of the longest and most difficult in the repertoire. The first-desk players were all students (there were four or five adult ringers, mostly double bass players), who played their exposed parts with skill and confidence. And the string playing at the end of the fourth movement (some of you will know what I mean) was to die for.

Maestro Pratt introduced the 17 seniors who had played for the orchestra for all four years at Princeton. Of them, only one had majored in music. The other majors ranged from chemistry, molecular biology and mathematics to operations research, religion and psychology. My senior advisee, Sarah Vander Ploeg, a Marshall Scholarship winner, is principally a lyric soprano but plays viola in the orchestra and majors in public policy. I wonder how many other teams can boast such academic and intellectual range, not to mention consistent excellence?

Go team!

April 25, 2008

Is the E-Book in Trouble?

The Chronicle reported a couple of weeks ago (4/12/08) that there were rumors that the Columbia University might eliminate its electronic publishing program, and that the admirable Kate Wittenberg, who has been the editor most prominently associated with Columbia’s electronic-publication program, would leave the University in June. Jim Neal, Columbia’s able librarian and chief information officer (Columbia was one of the first universities to combine the two positions) refused the Chronicle’s request for comment on the matter. I gather from friends in publishing that no one knows exactly what is happening, but if Columbia is abandoning the field of electronic publishing, those of us who have promoted digital publications should be concerned.

One of Columbia’s first forays into the field was via a Mellon-funded partnership with the American Historical Association, to publish Gutenberg-e. This was an initiative spearheaded by then AHA president Bob Darnton (my former Princeton history colleague and currently the Harvard Librarian) to award prize fellowships for the best history dissertations in fields that seemed to have limited publishing opportunities. I was the vice president for research at the AHA at the time, and worked with Bob to launch the project.

Simultaneously, the Mellon Foundation was funding an ACLS digital history project, intended to provide retrospective digital conversions of important history monographs, as well as to publish born-digital monographs in the field. The initial idea was to distribute e-publication across several academic publishers, but Columbia pretty quickly emerged as the leading publisher, in part because of the skill and commitment of Kate Wittenberg, and in part because of Columbia’s commitment to e-publishing.

These events took place about a decade ago, and today almost all academic presses are doing some electronic publishing, though it is my impression that little of their digital activity is of born-digital scholarship. Google has of course made large-scale digital retrospective conversion of older academic monographs and source materials a startling reality, and most academic journals currently publish either simultaneously in analog and digital forms or exclusively electronically. But the economics of born-digital publishing (whether commercial or non-profit) are still very difficult, and therefore the news from Columbia may be discouraging. We do not yet (or I do not yet) know enough about the actual situation to be sure, but this is one more sign that our entry into digital publishing is still a work in progress.

Can academic presses continue their important work without philanthropic support? If not, what is the near-term future of the digital academic book?

April 20, 2008

The Real World of Higher Education

A good many of you have written to remind me that I write about the experience of the elite institutions, not about “higher education” generally. I know that, of course, but I teach in an elite institution and most of my career has been spent in comparable universities. It is the world I know from first-hand experience. But I am frequently reminded of the range of experiences even across the leading institutions simply by comparing notes with my two children — one teaching at New York University, and the other at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

But last week I attended the second session of a new seminar for scholars of higher education that meets monthly in New York City. I had made the presentation to lead off the first seminar in March, and was a little surprised (we were meeting in the Century Association, where the Gotham elite meet to eat) at how vigorously many in the group objected that the problems of Harvard, Princeton and Stanford were not indicative of the real problems of higher education. In response, the organizers asked Paul Attewell and David Lavin of the City University to talk about the findings in their important new Russell Sage volume, Passing the Torch: Does Higher Education for the Disadvantaged Pay Off Across the Generations?

To say the least I learned a lot, mostly by way of giving concrete reality to aspects of popular higher education that I have an intuitive feel for at best. I suppose the most important message is that we should stop talking about the “traditional” student, since what we used to think of as traditional students — those who go to college immediately after graduating from high school, reside on campus, attend school full time, and graduate in four or five years — constitute no more than one-fourth of all those in the four-year higher education systems. More than half of postsecondary students are of course in community colleges, and many of them will not proceed beyond the AA degree. But even those who do will be part-time students, working at least half-time, and frequently dropping out to earn enough money to continue their education. One-fourth of these students live on campus. They will attend several institutions before receiving a bachelor’s degree — 60 percent will earn a B.A. from a different institution than the one they started college in. And it will take them a long time to receive a degree. Over the long term, though, 60 to 70 percent of students will in fact earn a degree. Overwhelmingly, their problems are economic — no one is offering them the sort of aid that Harvard and Princeton provide to all their admits.

Moreover, these “new traditional” students are making very different sorts of curricular choices. Only about one-third will major in academic (arts and letters) subjects, for they are mostly (and for obvious reasons) opting for what Attewell and Lavin call “career” majors — those with the most obvious and immediate economic payoffs. Fewer than 10 percent are majoring in the arts and humanities and even fewer (3 percent) major in mathematics and the physical sciences. Further, given the explosive growth in college attendance, most (75 percent) of our postsecondary institutions are nonselective — despite the focus of the press on the pressures and importance of selectivity. The norm is closer to open enrollment than to Amherst College.

I learned a lot more, and I would encourage anyone who cares about the relationship between economic disadvantage and higher education to read Passing the Torch. But to say the least, those of us (whether or not we are in truly selective institutions) who care about the arts and sciences tradition and the viability of liberal education need to think more broadly than I have been doing.

April 18, 2008

Wie Gehts, USC?

A week ago (11 April), The Chronicle featured a story on the decision of the dean of the University of Southern California to close its German department. At one level, this was not surprising, since enrollments in European language and literature departments have been declining for some time. But at another level it is quite remarkable, since many of these departments have been reinventing themselves as cultural-studies programs, and in so doing have attracted considerable student interest.
Nowhere has this been more true than in the field of German, where the traditional Germanistik (language and literature) approach has been abandoned for German studies of one sort or another. In my own university, for instance, the German department offers brilliant instruction in media studies that has engaged some of our best undergraduates.
I am on the other coast, and I know little first-hand about USC, but there is something about the way that its German department was terminated that makes me uncomfortable. I note that Dean Howard Gillman (a scholar in my own field whose work I admire greatly) has spun the decision as one to close a “stand-alone” German department. In his 15 April memo to the faculty, he speaks of the need for a “global perspective,” and asks whether “we best serve this commitment by organizing every great literary and cultural tradition into separate stand-alone academic departments?” He mentions the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures as a model, and dismisses German as a stand-alone department “created before USC fully embraced its mission as a truly global university.” His conclusion is that it would be better to “integrate the field of study into a broader enterprise.”
Perhaps. And perhaps Dean Gillman has a clearer understanding of what it means to be academically “global” than I do. But his decision reminds me of the devastatingly successful attacks of the globalist-internationalists on the conception of area studies in the 1990s. Using the excuse that external funding was not available (true enough, I suppose), universities began to pull back on training students in area studies and even on hiring faculty. When was the last time your Economics department hired a Japanese or Middle Eastern specialist? Henry Rosovsky would have a hard time if he were seeking a first job in 2008. But everything that happens globally happens somewhere — and in a particular language.
It is quite possible, as I have heard, that the USC department was not up to the highest standard. If so, that is a genuine problem for any dean, and he is right to seek a solution. But the death penalty should not be the only option — even though I realize that “partial-life abortion” seems to be the solution offered at USC. Non-consultation (again, as reported) does not seem the best way to manage a university. But, to be fair, there is another more general problem embedded in this one. How many of our academic departments have adequate strategies for managing their life course? How many plan adequately for both retirements and changes in the direction of their fields? How many tools do deans have to help departments to help themselves?
There is a lot to ponder in what has happened at USC.

April 10, 2008

Can Small Be Beautiful?

Is “growing like Topsy” necessarily good for universities? Is it in any case inevitable? That is certainly the feeling I get when I travel from campus to campus. Each one seems more like a series of construction sites than a settled community, and there seems to be no end in sight to physical expansion.

I commented several months ago on the attempts of urban universities (Columbia, Harvard) to expand geographically. But I am in fact more interested in and concerned about the expanding built campus environment.

The Chronicle had an interesting piece on campus construction by Lawrence Biemiller yesterday: “Campus Construction Continues Despite Economy’s Woes.” Biemiller demonstrates that campus building has been surprisingly resistant to cutbacks due to the declining national economy. The building craze also continues despite the current inflationary pressures. Princeton’s vice president for facilities forecasts 7- to 8-percent price increases for construction annually, and expects the trend to continue. He says that Princeton “can afford to do less with the same resources,” but my untutored eye does not perceive any slowdown in new buildings on an already crowed central campus. Much of this building, at Princeton and elsewhere, is of course for new science and technology facilities — for which the universities doubtless expect return on investment. But of course the maintenance cost of additional structures steadily and vastly increases the fixed costs of doing university business.

I know that I sound like a broken record when I observe that the investment choices in expanding the built environment generally favor the sciences, technology, and athletics, and seldom do much to enhance the capacity of the humanities and social sciences. They also favor research over teaching. But I don’t think the point can be made too often.

I also wonder whether the educational functions of the university, especially the needs of undergraduate education, are not taking a back seat to what is considered to be “useful” science and technological research? Are we spending scarce resources on research that we ought to be spending on promoting student learning? Are we sending the wrong sorts of signals to undergraduate students? Are we maintaining the sort of proximity that is most conducive to community interaction?

Whatever happened to the notion that, in higher education, small might be beautiful?

April 7, 2008

The Emergence of the Digital Humanities

The world is slowly but surely recognizing that the revolution in computing and information technology has began to transform the humanities. Other fields in the liberal arts were more obviously changed by the digital revolution, mainly through the capacity of computing to deal with massive quantities of digital information. The humanist version of number crunching occurred early in the field of linguistics, producing an entirely new discipline of computational linguistics. But other approaches ranging from computer visualization to the creation of hugely complex databases have slowly changed the ways in which humanists think about significant problems, as well as the manner in which they analyze them.

Since universities, in which the bulk of humanistic scholarship takes place, devote a smaller and smaller proportion of research resources to the humanities, much of the promise of the digital humanities frontier has been underdeveloped. Humanists are last in line for new hardware and software, they have fewer technologists who specialize in their digital needs, the libraries they depend on are underfunded, and they have a less fully developed national digital infrastructure. As to this last point, I was encouraged by the appearance oc the ACLS cyberinfrastructure project a couple of years ago, but disappointed to find that nothing seems to have been done to implement the report after it appeared on the Web.

But I was encouraged by the recent National Endowment for the Humanities announcement that its “Digital Humanities Initiative” has now been institutionalized as the NEH Office of Digital Humanities. That sounds right, and if more significant resources emerge in forthcoming NEH budgets, this will be an important step in the right direction. Thanks to Chairman Bruce Cole for this. NEH is also considering the feasibility of a University of Virginia-based organization for digital scholarly editing, which is precisely the sort of infrastructural support the field needs.

But the primary inspiration for the digital humanities has, from the start, come from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Under the program officer Don Waters, Mellon has provided both leadership and significant funding for a host of worthy projects and initiatives, not least of which have been its own initiatives, JSTOR and ARTSTOR. The most recent of their funded projects is Bamboo, an attempt by humanities technologists at Berkeley and Chicago to develop shared technology services for humanities research. Without Mellon, we simply would not have a field to worry about.

Much remains to be done, and campus-based inattention to the humanities complicates the task. But the digital humanities are here to stay, and they bear close watching.

April 6, 2008

April Admissions Madness

April madness has occurred even as March madness continues. The selective colleges and universities have now sent out letters of admission. This will produce tears of joy for the chosen few, but salt tears for the large numbers of students who have failed — and failure is the construction most of them will place upon their thin letters of rejection (though most will of course have learned by going right to college admissions Web sites rather than waiting for snail mail).

The numbers are horrifying. I will use only my own institution, though I think that ours is only the third most selective process this year (following Harvard and Yale). Princeton has admitted only 9.25 percent of the 21,369 students who applied for admission to the class of 2012. This year was “the most selective in Princeton’s history,” according to our admirable dean of admissions, Jane Rapelye. Our applications increased by 12.8 percent this year, and their quality by the usual measure was staggering (to me, at least): More than 7,000 applicants had better than a 4.0 grade point average and more than 11,000 had a combined score of 2100 or higher on the three parts of the SAT examination. And they came from all over — from 7,436 U.S. high schools and 137 foreign countries. It is a strikingly diverse group along a number of parameters, including gender (50 percent each) and race/ethnicity (44.8 percent students of color). Students have been admitted from 61 different countries. If you are fortunate enough to teach in such an institution, these numbers are a boon. I happen to teach in the only selective major field (public policy) in a highly selective school, and my students are a joy to work with.

But of course the price of this selectivity is high. The elite colleges use alumni to interview high-school admissions applicants (Princeton “alumni volunteers had personal contact with an unprecedented 98.5 percent of applicants, or 21,052 students”), and those of us who participate have at least some sense of the pain out there. I have interviewed Harvard applicants for more than 35 years. I normally see four or five students each year, and speak to them for 30 to 45 minutes — enough for an experienced educator to form a superficial impression of quality — before writing an e-mail report for the admissions committee. But I cannot remember the last time one of the students I have interviewed has been admitted to Harvard.

This year I received a particularly painful e-mail message from one rejected applicant shortly after she had visited the Web site on Decision Day. She could not understand why her remarkable grades and test scores (and she was outstanding in other ways) had not qualified her for admission. The answer, of course, is that “many are called and few are chosen,” but only committed Calvinists will comprehend this response. Harvard, after all, admitted only a little over 7 percent of its applicants. My crude guess would be that, at a minimum, 20 percent of applicants to elite institutions are in fact fully qualified to do well in these colleges. Many of them, of course, will be admitted to other elite institutions, but not all, and many will harbor long-term feelings of rejection.

And the problem is exacerbated by the increasing asymmetry in the financial aid available to the best students — the more prestigious the institution, the greater the chance of the student (and her parents) emerging debt-free at the end of four years. So there is emotional pain and material consequence to the increasing selectivity of undergraduate education in these United States. I am grateful for the quality of students Janet Rapelye provides me with. But I worry a lot about those who did not have such fortunate lottery tickets — and I have absolutely no solution to propose.

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