Buckley, If Not God, Returns to Yale

From Neal Freeman, at Wall Street Journal (via Google).

Added: Peter Berkowitz, at RealClearPolitics, "God and Man at Yale Turns 60."

Who Wants to Be Evaluated by Students?

Well, interestingly, I'll be passing out my own student evaluation forms next week, as part of my post-tenure review cycle. This happens every three years after the fourth year of employment (and the final probationary evaluation, when one is granted tenure). I don't mind them at all. I get decent reviews, and it's my political science colleagues who'll be using them to do a brief write up for their post-tenure committee reports. I imagine the dean and higher ups in the administration might be interested in them, but I doubt they do anything more than accept the recommendations from the department committees. The buzz on campus, however, is the latest union negotiations with the college over "student learning outcomes," which if implemented college-wide, could be used in evaluating faculty. (These SLOs could be combined with student evaluations in way way or another.) Needless to say the union's not falling in line for this. So many factors (outside of the classroom) determine student success that using SLOs in evaluating faculty would be seriously flawed, and worse, prone to really awful abuse if faculty retention decisions are made with them. I mention all of this as background for this piece at Minding the Campus, "Who Wants to Be Evaluated by Students?" Read the whole thing at the link, and here's this from The Barrister, at Maggie's Farm:

The notion that students evaluate profs as if school were American Idol seems perverted to me. School is not infotainment. I can be an entertaining speaker and did some litigation in my distant past, but I would never teach where my career, even in part, depended on student evaluations. When teaching, I like to be a demanding SOB, intolerant of anything short of excellence and keeping people on their toes. In the end, people are thankful for my demanding attitude.

RELATED: One of my favorite articles on this, "Something Wrong in Our Schools? Let's Blame Teachers."

'There is overwhelming evidence that the University of Wisconsin in engaging in racial and ethnic discrimination, and it should stop'

Says Roger Clegg from the Center for Equal Opportunity, speaking yesterday at the University of Wisconsin. State Assemblyman Mark Pocan, a Democrat, attacked Clegg pretty agressively, according to Althouse:

Whether the University complies with the standard laid down in the Supreme Court case law is, of course, crucial, but the state legislature has the power to impose a stricter standard on the University (if it thinks that's a good idea). In addition, it's possible that the CEO plans to use this case to get affirmative action back into the Supreme Court with the hope of changing the legal doctrine.

RTWT for the context.

The Academic Roots of Occupy Wall Street

At Chronicle of Higher Education, "Intellectual Roots of Wall St. Protest Lie in Academe":

Famous scholars like Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek, and Frances Fox Piven have spoken to the crowd, with their remarks dispersed, word-for-word, from one cluster of people to the next through a "human megaphone." Many others, such as Lawrence Lessig, have lent their support from farther away, as the demonstrations have spread to cities and college campuses nationwide.

The movement has repeatedly been described as too diffuse and decentralized to accomplish real change, and some observers have seen the appearances by academic luminaries as an attempt to lend the protest intellectual heft and direction. Certainly, its intellectual underpinnings and signature method of operating are easier to identify than its goals.

Economists whose recent works have decried income inequality have informed the movement's critiques of capitalism. Critical theorists like Michael Hardt, professor of literature at Duke University, and Antonio Negri, former professor of political science at the University of Padua, have anticipated some of the central issues raised by the protests. Most recently, they linked the actions in New York and other American cities to previous demonstrations in Spain, Cairo's Tahrir Square, and in Athens, among other places.

But Occupy Wall Street's most defining characteristics—its decentralized nature and its intensive process of participatory, consensus-based decision-making—are rooted in other precincts of academe and activism: in the scholarship of anarchism and, specifically, in an ethnography of central Madagascar.

More at that top link.

RELATED: At Los Angeles Times, "UK Uncut fights for 'tax justice' in Britain."

Political Scientists Barbara Walter and Andrew Kydd Beclown Themselves with Theory of Palestinian Bargaining

Here's the authors' op-ed from yesterday's Los Angeles Times, "A win-win strategy for the Palestinians." And the key passage of beclownment:

The Palestinians are playing a long-term bargaining game, and any move toward the goal of statehood has to be considered a victory. Statehood will not come immediately, or when a vote is taken in the Security Council. What will happen is that support for it will slowly and surely increase among average citizens around the world. The extreme positions of Israel and the United States — their refusal to pursue real efforts to allow Palestinians to rule themselves and be free of military occupation — will be increasingly revealed, and tolerance for these positions, even among Israelis and Americans, will decline. Going to the Security Council knowing the bid will be publicly and persistently rejected, therefore, is an inspired strategy. Palestinians appear peaceful and reasonable. Israel and the United States do not.

Walter and Kydd are offering a strategic theory, and any theory like this is based on a number of assumptions, like the assumption of actor rationality. As highlighted above, the authors also assume Israeli and American intransigence. But a model is only as good as its assumptions, and the intransigence assumption here is fatally flawed, and hence their larger analysis falls apart. Case in point: Also out yesterday was Charles Krauthammer's column at Washington Post, "Land without peace: Why Abbas went to the U.N." Krauthammer explicitly challenges Walter and Kydd's assumption that Israel and the U.S. "refuse to pursue real efforts" free of military occupation:

While diplomatically inconvenient for the Western powers, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s attempt to get the United Nations to unilaterally declare a Palestinian state has elicited widespread sympathy. After all, what choice did he have? According to the accepted narrative, Middle East peace is made impossible by a hard-line Likud-led Israel that refuses to accept a Palestinian state and continues to build settlements.

It is remarkable how this gross inversion of the truth has become conventional wisdom. In fact, Benjamin Netanyahu brought his Likud-led coalition to open recognition of a Palestinian state, thereby creating Israel’s first national consensus for a two-state solution. He is also the only prime minister to agree to a settlement freeze — 10 months — something no Labor or Kadima government has ever done.

To which Abbas responded by boycotting the talks for nine months, showing up in the 10th, then walking out when the freeze expired. Last week he reiterated that he will continue to boycott peace talks unless Israel gives up — in advance — claim to any territory beyond the 1967 lines. Meaning, for example, that the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem is Palestinian territory. This is not just absurd. It violates every prior peace agreement. They all stipulate that such demands are to be the subject of negotiations, not their precondition.

Abbas unwaveringly insists on the so-called “right of return,” which would demographically destroy Israel by swamping it with millions of Arabs, thereby turning the world’s only Jewish state into the world’s 23rd Arab state. And he has repeatedly declared, as recently as last week in New York: “We shall not recognize a Jewish state.”

Nor is this new. It is perfectly consistent with the long history of Palestinian rejectionism. Consider...

Keep reading for Krauthammer's examples, from Camp David in 2000 to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert peace deal of 2008.

So think about it: Who's intransigent? It's the Palestinians who are refusing "to pursue real efforts" at self-rule, which would allow themselves to "be free of military occupation." And it's for this reason that the Palestinians have gone to the United Nations. They don't want to negotiate. They've never wanted a final negotiated settlement, because it would mean leaving the Israeli state at the center of the territory to which they claim historical rights.

So notice what we really have: Two fairly prominent political scientists, writing in one of the nation's national newspapers, offering a fancy theory of Middle East bargaining and diplomacy that's based on a theoretical assumption that's a pure lie. And notice further: This example illustrates the power of the global left's campaign of delegitimation against Israel. Statements alleged as fact are shown to be complete fabrications after an elementary review of the historical record. But it goes on and on like this. Modern "progressive" societies buy into a historicism of deceit the exists for the sole purpose of exterminating the Jewish state. And notice one more thing: Walter and Kydd, who I've never met, again show us how often tragically useless is contemporary political science in explaining the world. At a basic level, rigid ideology is a poor foundation for problem solving, since to sustain an ideology requires the erection and perpetuation of myths such as, in this case, Israel's strategic intransigence. By contrast, some basic historical pragmatism shows that in fact the Palestinians have repeatedly rejected peace, having instead opted for violence --- indiscriminate violence, at that --- and war. And when Israel responds it's the one who's rebuked for employing force. I have hard time taking a lot of modern political science seriously precisely because scholars have poisoned their minds with really dishonest ideological presumptions. The idea that Israel is the reason for the failure of peace in the Middle East is false. It's an enormously malicious falsehood. And it's one more tragedy of the political science discipline that scholars rest serious substantive arguments on it.

RELATED: "The Tragedy of John Mearsheimer."

The Tragedy of John Mearsheimer

There's been a recent and very significant development involving Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. A few days ago, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote an entry pointing out that Professor Mearsheimer had written a book blurb for Gilad Atzmon's, The Wandering Who. The title at Goldberg's entry is not subtle: "John Mearsheimer Endorses a Hitler Apologist and Holocaust Revisionist." I hoped to blog something about it, but being the big birthday weekend, I put it off for a bit. In the meantime, a number of other writers have picked up on the story, and the implications for Mearsheimer are nothing short of devastating. In addition to The Israel Lobby, Professor Mearsheimer is the author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, a work of neorealist international relations theory that received general acclaim in the discipline. The book argues that great power politics is tragic, especially for the leading states in the system, since the structure of the realm impels them to seek greater power and act more aggressively, with revisionist aims for international mastery. Since opposing great powers share the same incentives to offense and expansion, states are fated to perpetual conflict. And thus the prospects are dim for international peace.

I think the prospects for internal peace are dim for Professor Mearsheimer. By that I mean that while both Mearsheimer and his co-author Stephen Walt have received withering criticism since the publication of "The Israel Lobby" in 2006 (and the full-length book in 2007), this latest controversy is a definitive confirmation of the attacks on Mearsheimer by his critics. As will be seen below, amid these developments, I can't imagine how Mearsheimer will ever live down the allegations of anti-Semitism that have followed him for years -- he will be fated to unsuccessfully fighting these battles for the remainder of his career. Personally, I've always held back on making such allegations. I was late to the debate in the first place, and the full weight of all the writings and responses took me a while to absorb. And frankly, there's hardly any more ugly attacks than to call someone anti-Semitic, especially a scholar whose work could be evaluated on scientific grounds. But I can't any longer make those arguments in good faith. After reading all the commentary on this, it's undeniable that Gilad Atzmon, whose book Mearsheimer blurbed, is a despicable and ugly Hitler apologist and Holocaust denier. What's also particularly disturbing is that Professor Stephen Walt joined the debate to explicitly defend Mearsheimer against the allegations of anti-Semitism. The two together are fighting a rearguard action with virtually no prospects for success. Readers will recall that I've hammered Walt on occasion, for example, when he spoke at the Code Pink convention earlier this year, where the roster of sponsoring organizations was a veritable "one-stop shop for the global left's international solidarity movement." It would be one thing to offer up a controversial theory of Israel as the primary focus of American foreign policy. It's quite another thing to actively join forces with the global left's Israel extermination industry, but that's what Stephen Walt has done. I find that tragic too, since Walt was someone who I studied a great deal in graduate school, and I wrote my dissertation with some of his theories as the starting point. Now the both of them have dug down deep to defend against this backlash, and it's just pathetic. These two eminent scholars have destroyed their reputations by peddling the most base anti-Israel stereotypes that simply can longer be defended on academic grounds. When you traffic with Holocaust deniers --- no, when you champion them --- you've pretty much given up the game.

In any case, Jeffrey Goldberg has been updating his responses to the controversy. See, "Mearsheimer's Endorsement of a Holocaust Revisionist (Cont'd)"; "Giving John Mearsheimer a Chance to Climb Down"; and "A Mearsheimer Falsehood, and Other Reactions to Atzmon."

And from David Bernstein, at Volokh, "A Challenge to John Mearsheimer":

Mearsheimer accuses his critics of suggesting that he must be an anti-Semite, given that he is intellectually in bed, so to speak, with the likes of Gilad Atzmon. Certainly, it’s reasonable to suspect Mearsheimer of anti-Semitism as this point, given that the main alternative explanation, that he is simply a fool who endorses highly polemical books attacking Jews and Israel without reading them closely or knowing anything about the author, has now been rebutted by Mearsheimer himself. But one could also posit Mearsheimer has decided to adopt a “Popular Front Strategy”, willing to accept any anti-Israel allies even from the blatantly anti-Semitic fringe. Regardless, it’s a pathetic fall from grace for Mearsheimer, and it’s disappointing to see that his co-author Walt is enabling him rather than pulling him back from the brink.

Bernstein links to Pejman Yousefzadeh, and here's another from Pejman that's vital: "John Mearsheimer Further Beclowns Self. Film at Eleven."

And here's this from David Rothkopf, "Mearsheimer picks a winner: Finally, a revealing book jacket blurb":

Mearsheimer was given a chance by Walt on this website to "defend" himself against the "smears" of Goldberg. Walt thus associated himself with Mearsheimer's choice to back Atzmon. He also asserted Goldberg was more inclined to make ad hominem attacks than to address the substance of U.S.-Israel relations. This is of course, absurd as, agree with him or not, no one can deny that Goldberg has written extensively on the subject and, to his credit, comparatively little about the two professors.

Mearsheimer's defense is stunningly lame. He begins with an attack on Goldberg. He then quotes the blurb and edges slightly away from the book by saying he doesn't agree with everything in it. He then repeats his admonition that Jews and non-Jews should read the book ... although I can hardly imagine how many Jews will be moved to buy a book on the recommendation of John Mearsheimer.

That said, he goes on to say that he has taught courses about the Holocaust and is therefore not a Holocaust denier. That said, Goldberg never said he was a Holocaust denier. He said he had endorsed one. Goldberg's assertion, based on Atzmon's writings, is that Atzmon has sought to both minimize the event and to explain away its origins as something at least in large part provoked by the Jews. What is this if not revisionism and there is no disputing that by blaming the Jews in part for their fate, Atzmon is, in fact, as accused a full-fledged apologist for Hitler.

Rothkopf's reference is the the post by Mearsheimer at Stephen Walt's blog at Foreign Policy, "Mearsheimer responds to Goldberg's latest smear."

I may be missing a couple of the responses I saw while researching this post, and I'll update if I find anything with added value. That said, this Harry's Place entry is probably the most precise examination of Gilad Atzmon's anti-Semitism: "Mearsheimer and Walt defend antisemite who thinks Hitler will be proved right." (And note that Harry's Place includes examples of Atzmon's anti-Semitism found in The Wandering Who, the very book that Mearsheimer reviewed.)

Check back for updates. Goldberg and Rothkopf are left-of-center, so Mearsheimer's taking a hit from those closer ideologically than myself. It's fascinating, and sad too, the way the authors of The Israel Lobby have kept digging when the long ago should have just stopped.

The Harvard College Freshman Pledge

This is a fascinating report, from Virginia Postrel, "Harvard Now Values ‘Kindness’ Not Learning." For example:

Kindness isn’t a public or intellectual virtue, but a personal one. It is a form of love. Kindness seeks, above all, to avoid hurt. Criticism -- even objective, impersonal, well- intended, constructive criticism -- isn’t kind. Criticism hurts people’s feelings, and it hurts most when the recipient realizes it’s accurate. Treating “kindness” as the way to civil discourse doesn’t show students how to argue with accuracy and respect. It teaches them instead to neither give criticism nor tolerate it.

And at Bits and Pieces (the blog of Harvard Professor Harry Lewis, "The Freshman Pledge":

Its purpose is to make people think and to induce conversation on the important matter of civility and generosity. I am assured that the intention is not to make anyone feel compelled to sign the pledge.

In this case, alas, the line between an invitation and a compulsion is exceedingly narrow, and I doubt those who explain it to students can consistently do so with the required nuance. The pledge is delivered to students for signing by their proctors, the officers of the College who monitor their compliance with Harvard rules and report their malfeasances to the College's disciplinary board. Nonconformists would have good reason to fear that they will be singled out for extra scrutiny. And their unsigned signature lines are hung for all to see, in an act of public shaming. Few students, in their first week at Harvard, would have the courage to refuse this invitation. I am not sure I would advise any student to do so.

The substance of the pledge is critically important. This is not a pledge to refrain from cheating, or to take out the garbage. It is not a pledge to act in a certain way. It is a pledge to think about the world a certain way, to hold precious the exercise of kindness. It is a promise to control one's thoughts. Though it refers to sound institutional values affirmed at Commencement, the pledge pretends to affirm them not through the educational process to which the Dean testifies, but through a prior restraint on students' freedom of thought. A student would be breaking the pledge if she woke up one morning and decided it was more important to achieve intellectually than to be kind.

Chilling. Our very highest institution of learning, once again seen as among the most totalitarian.

Via Maggie's Farm.

The Myth of the Digital Native

An interesting piece from Josh Sternberg, at The Atlantic, "Social Media's Slow Slog Into the Ivory Towers of Academia." The "myth" of the digital native holds that students don't actually know as much about digital technology as some professors claim, and the myth holds because professors are afraid of being shown up by savvy students. At community college there's something of a digital divide ---- so there really is a myth of the digital native --- but there's still a core of students on the cutting edge of technology. So, we can learn from our students, but it takes professors to give up some control over learning so that it's a conversation in the classroom rather than a disquisition. That doesn't work all the time, since I believe students need frequent chalk and talk lectures to impart the important stuff that they simply don't know. But soliciting feedback on an area of learning where students have a homefield advantage creates win-win situations. Besides, it's a lot more fun to talk about the cool stuff.

'ScamProf' Law Professor Paul Campos Interviewed at Wall Street Journal

Ann Althouse pretty much nailed it the other day, in an update to her post on epic law prof loser and Lawyers, Gun and Money blogger Paul Campos:

I'd say Paul Campos is doing just fine. He should keep up the graphomania, hook Oxford University Press again, and grasp the fame and money that comes from writing a pithy polemic that hits right in the zone as people question the value of a legal education.

Yep, see WSJ, "A Q&A With the Creator of ‘Inside the Law School Scam’."



I have a neat little related story on this, but that'll have to wait for another post.

Jennifer Perez and Nadege Tandoh

Those are the names of the two Widener University law students who made egregious allegations against Professor Lawrence Connell. They are identified at the Delaware Law Weekly, "Controversy Continues at Widener After Connell Suspension" (via William Jacobson).



Also at Newsworks, "Delaware law professor sues two students and Widener Law."



PREVIOUSLY: "The Claims of Grievance-Bearing Identity Groups Will Always Prevail Over Fairness," and "Charlotte Allen: 'The Mess at Widener Law School'."

Professor Lawrence Connell's Hypotheticals

ICYMI, be sure to read my earlier entry, "Charlotte Allen: 'The Mess at Widener Law School."



I've been thinking about the case and will have more later. Mostly, I'm trying to figure out Deans Ammons' animosity toward Professor Connell. Charlotte Allen notes:

Connell’s most egregious offense ... and probably the offense that brought down the full-bore wrath of Ammons upon him, was a series of classroom hypotheticals. The scenarios involved Ammons herself and Connell’s efforts to kill her (hypothetically) after she threatened to fire him (hypothetically) for parking his car in her parking space. In one of the hypotheticals Connell rushed into Ammons’ office with his .357 magnum and shot her in the head—except that the “head” turned out to a pumpkin artfully painted to look just like the dean. The idea was to ask the class whether under prevailing legal rules he should be tried for attempted murder—or not, since no harm actually befell her. Imaginative and macabrely humorous hypotheticals, often pitting professors against deans and other campus authority figures, are a standard feature of Old Law School pedagogy. The idea is that the students will absorb and remember the underlying legal principles better in a context of humorous narrative. Hypotheticals show up not just in law school classrooms but in exam questions and moot-court competitions. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan was repeatedly murdered in classroom hypotheticals when she was dean of Harvard Law School.

Indeed, as Professor Jonathan Turley indicates, "Widener Law Professor Suspended For Using Dean In Hypotheticals":

I must confess that I routinely incorporate the Dean at our school in the same type of hypotheticals as well as any contract professors. Indeed, my final every year involves some struggle between myself and the Dean and contracts professors. Absent something more, I fail to see the basis for such disciplinary action. Other professors have raises objections to the case on sites like Volokh.



In his letter, [Widener Vice Dean J. Patrick] Kelly accuses Connell of an “outgoing pattern” of misconduct, and cites his use of such hypotheticals, including “cursing and coarse behavior, “racist and sexist statements” and “violent, personal scenarios that demean and threaten your colleagues.” Without more, the allegations raise serious concerns over academic freedom and privilege.



I am most disturbed by the statement of Gregory F. Scholtz, associate secretary and director of the American Association of University Professors. AAUP is organization that is expected to defend academic freedom. Yet, Scholtz is quoted as saying “Education is all about pushing the boundaries, and it’s all about controversial ideas, but the question always is when does it cross the line. Given our modern culture and the violence that exists, you’re really asking for trouble when you talk about killing people.” Really? That is news to those of us who teach torts and criminal law. It is common for faculty to incorporate colleagues into hypotheticals as good-humored jokes. At my school, contracts professors respond by incorporating me into their own hypotheticals. I have never found it even remotely bothersome or insulting. It keeps the attention of students and adds a needed element of levity in lectures.

It's routine. And Turley has more on how chilling the Lawrence case is for academic freedom.



Also, at Volokh, "Interview With Lawrence Connell, the Criminal Law Professor Suspended for His Hypotheticals":

Q: Can you give me an example of a hypothetical you might have used in class, to which the students who complained might have been referring? Can you describe the context in which you would have used it?



A: Yes, here is one: The Dean has threatened to fire me if she comes to school one more time and finds that I have parked in her designated parking space. Upset about the possibility of losing both my job and the parking space, I bring my .357 to school, get out of my car, put the .357 into my waistband, walk to the top floor where her office is located, open the door to her office, see her seated at her desk, draw my weapon, aim my weapon, and fire my weapon directly into what I believe to be her head. To my surprise, it’s not the Dean at all, but an ingeniously painted pumpkin — a pumpkin that has been intricately painted to look like the Dean. Dick Tracy rushes in and immediately wrestles me to the ground. I am charged with the attempted murder of the Dean.



The hypothetical raises various issues about attempted crimes that might entail discussion that spans more than one class. Some of the classroom discussion in the first, for example, will address the two basic philosophical problems of why we punish attempts, which are failed efforts at crime, and why we punish attempts less than successfully completed crimes.



A retributive argument, on the one hand, is that the attemptor has demonstrated his moral culpability by his bad conduct, and the degree of his punishment should not depend on a fortuitous turn of luck. On the other hand, a retributivist might argue that punishment in the absence of harm is unjust. For retributive purposes, has Connell demonstrated his moral culpability by shooting what he believes to be the Dean? Or does the fact that he merely destroyed a pumpkin suggest that his punishment would be unjust?

It's obviously a powerful heuristic.



More on this tonight. I'm checking around for more on Deans Ammons' motivations to persecute Professor Connell.

Kate Weaver on the State of International Political Economy (IPE)

At Duck of Minerva, "State of the Field, Redux: What's Wrong with IPE?"



What caught my attention about Weaver's post is that she cites Dr. Benjamin J. Cohen's book, International Political Economy: An Intellectual History. Professor Cohen is on faculty at UC Santa Barbara's Department of Political Science. He was a key mentor to me during my years there in graduate school, and we still communicate by e-mail. I posted an essay from Professor Cohen last year, "'Are IPE Journals Becoming Boring?'"



In any case, check over at Duck of Minerva for the post.



I'm starting my Fall 2011 World Politics course on Monday.

Charlotte Allen: 'The Mess at Widener Law School'

At Minding the Campus (via Glenn Reynolds):

Old Law School culture revolves around a traditional curriculum—those torts and contracts courses—and the Socratic method of instruction, with its pointed and rigorous give-and-take between professors and students. Old Law School assumes that the process of training lawyers is training them to a centuries-old Anglo-American tradition of lawyerly thought, which rests on the careful crafting of legal arguments and the relentless challenging of those arguments, often by the professor in the classroom. Old precedent-setting cases may be supplanted by newer cases, and legal principles may shift, but the underlying methodology of close analysis of written court opinions and the arguments on which they rest, along with certain assumptions underlying the American legal systems—that human beings are generally capable of exercising reason and free will and thus should be held responsible for their actions—are Old Law School constants.



New Law School culture, growing out of the Critical Legal Studies movement that first surfaced in law schools during the 1980s, is quite different. In New Law School thinking, the law does not embody a rational system of justice—or even strivings toward such a system—but is essentially a political construct that has historically operated to keep the rich and powerful in their places of wealth and power and other groups—women, racial minorities, the disabled, and the poor—in their socially subordinate places. If this characterization sounds Marxist, that is because Critical Legal Studies—and its intellectual progeny, Critical Race Theory and Feminist Legal Theory—grew out of the New Left radicalism of the 1960s, which viewed American governmental and social structures as systems of oppression. It has also been influenced by postmodernist literary theory, with its assumptions that there is no objective truth or reality. In New Law School thinking, reason, free will, and personal responsibility are illusions, for all legal battles are actually struggles of race, class, and gender, in which power, not justice, is the ultimate goal. In New Law School scholarly writing, rigorous analysis of court opinions and the drawing of fine distinctions underlying legal arguments have been supplanted by “story telling": personal narratives typically involving the law professors’ own experiences as members of an oppressed group with the race-gender-class matrix that is the source of their oppression. Since a shift in the power structure, not justice, is the goal, any tactic that coerces the recalcitrant into conforming to the new power regime is permissible in New Law School thinking.

Continue reading. Especially good is Allen's discussion of Linda Ammons. I wrote briefly along the same lines here, "Widener's Dean Linda Ammons Goes After Law School Professor Lawrence Connell."



And from Allen's conclusion, she notes that Professor Lawrence Connell was exonerated of the allegations against him, yet Ammons still prevailed on her preposterous charge that Connell "retaliated":

What is appalling is that, despite both exonerations, Ammons appears to have gotten her way in the end after all, exacting sanctions against a tenured professor that are not only costly but humiliating (he is supposed to apologize to the complaining students. The charge of retaliation, based on a vague prohibition in the faculty handbook, seem especially flimsy. Connell’s e-mail to his students in December neither named his accusers nor referred to them in any way. As for the lawsuit, Connell never waived his right to seek redress in court against individuals whose false accusations have already cost him quite a bit of money and promise to cost much more. But that is the way of New Law School. It is perhaps only Old Law School, with its emphasis on fairness, reasonableness, and color-and gender-blind justice, that would find something totalitarian in Widener’s treatment of Connell and accordingly demand Linda Ammons’ resignation. In New Law School thinking, where power is everything, and the claims of grievance-bearing identity groups will always prevail over fairness, it is perfectly fine to strip your perceived opponent of his livelihood and to consign him to the ministrations of your own Nurse Ratched—and there is no such thing as abuse of power.

Death of Keynesianism? Not for Paul Krugman

Some have been speculating on the death of Keynesian economics, but folks need look no further than Paul Krugman to see how strong a grip discredited academic theories still hold on the establishment class. See Krugman's essay this morning, "Macroeconomic Folly":

All of a sudden, people seem to have noticed that policy is moving in exactly the wrong direction. We’re getting headlines like this: Debt Deal Puts U.S. on Austerity Path as Economy Falters.

I’ll need to write up my thoughts here at greater length, but let’s just say for now that what we’ve witnessed pretty much throughout the western world is a kind of inverse miracle of intellectual failure. Given a crisis that should have been relatively easy to solve — and, more than that, a crisis that anyone who knew macroeconomics 101 should have been well-prepared to deal with — what we actually got was an obsession with problems we didn’t have. We’ve obsessed over the deficit in the face of near-record low interest rates, obsessed over inflation in the face of stagnant wages, and counted on the confidence fairy to make job-destroying policies somehow job-creating.

It’s a disaster – and maybe not only an economic disaster.

Fears of far-right rise in crisis-hit Greece...

Well, that's fear alright ... fear-mongering.

Social Media Consumer Report

If I was on the job market I wouldn't do what I do online. And I know certain progressive academic bloggers who ought to be more careful, and they know it, although I can't name names at the moment.

See: "I Flunked My Social Media Background Check. Will You?" (via Kathy Shaidle).

FLASHBACK: "Academic Tenure and the 'Damascus Conversion to Unpopular Views'."

Lessons in Handling Plagiarism From Professor Panagiotis Ipeirotis

I had a nightmare class at UCSB in 1999, the second lecture class I taught as in independent instructor. It was a Black Politics class. I had a running battle with radical students throughout the quarter. I even had one dude pull me aside to say, "Hey, man, this is how you teach the class." I wasn't down hard enough on the Man, apparently. This dude, and some of his allies, wanted a course in victimology and racial recrimination. And I was doing straight civil rights developments and the political science of voting rights and redistricting. It started to be a nightmare. Students complained to the department that I graded their midterms "too hard." It was a big learning experience. And the final exam was the kicker. I caught a couple of black women cheating. They were passing their exam sheets back and forth with notes they'd written while writing their essays. They had arrows and diagrams tracing arguments. It was involved. When one of them turned in the exam I asked for the question sheet and she wasn't about to give it to me. I was like hello? This is what you do. So she reluctantly gave to me and later I turned the students over to the vice chair of the department. Within a couple of days I was called into the chair's office, Professor Lorraine McDonnell, who no one liked, and who had a reputation, basically, of piggy-backing off her husband, Professor M. Stephen Weatherford, a nice guy and sought-after research "quant" (a numbers and methods guy who sharpened research knives, which is hip in political science, a field that remains envious of the economics discipline for its much more formal and recognized academic rigor). Professor McDonnell threw me under the bus. (I ended up assigning grades to all students and being done with that class, and I moved on after that semester to teach at Fresno State.)

Anyway, check this piece at Inside Higher Ed, "Who Is Punished for Plagiarism?" (via Glenn Reynolds):

Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis has taken down the controversial blog post, but the debate is raging on without the original material.

Ipeirotis, a computer scientist who teaches at New York University's Stern School of Business, wrote a post on his blog last week called "Why I will never pursue cheating again." In it, he told the story of how he found that about 20 percent of a 100-person class had plagiarized -- and described the fallout from his accusations. While Turnitin led to his initial suspicions, and gave clear evidence for some of the students, it only cast doubts on other students. Many of them confessed only when Ipeirotis told the class that if he didn't hear from those who had cheated, he would report the incident immediately -- whereas in the end he included in his report the information that students had admitted what they had done.

So why does Ipeirotis consider the experience a failure? His students became antagonistic, he wrote on the blog post, and gave him lower teaching evaluations than he had ever received before. And those poor teaching evaluations were cited in a review that resulted in the smallest raise he had ever received.

Keep reading.

Ipeirotis' post is taken down temporarily. But Ruan YiFeng's Blog has excerpts. I like this:

“The process of discussing all the detected cases was not only painful, it was extremely time consuming as well.

Students would come to my office and deny everything. Then I would present them the evidence. They would soften but continue to deny it. Only when I was saying “enough, I will just give the case to the honorary council who will decide” most students were admitting wrongdoing. But every case was at least 2 hours of wasted time.

With 22 cases, that was a lot of time devoted to cheating: More than 45 hours in completely unproductive discussions, when the total lecture time for the course was just 32 hours. This is simply too much time.”

Students, in general, are inveterate liars when it comes to grades and classroom performance. I'd need more information, but this sounds like Ipeirotis' crucible from the trenches. You can't be an excellent teacher without failing a few times. And in this case there was something wrong, very wrong, with the course design. Exams and paper assignments have to be designed to prevent cheating. If he's doing research papers, there's got to be a way to create a project that students can't easily off load from the web. I still catch about one student plagiarizing a paper every year in World Politics, and usually a couple in American Government. And technically, you can't just fail them without due process. And to provide due process requires a formal administrative review and possibly hearing, and most professors don't even grasp the legal significance of the process. Since I've been a "traditional" professor on the issues, I had some experience dealing with problems at my college and soon I ended up leading a couple of workshops on academic discipline. It's the same stories over and over again. A lot of things you hear are just like what Professor Ipeirotis recounts. And that's why each professor has to develop an assignment regime that makes cheating hard, but they've also got to be ready to uphold standards. For the most part, my college today backs professors. Maybe students at community college aren't as powerful --- or their parents have less resources --- as students at competitive universities, but it pays to lay the administrative groundwork for upholding policies inside the classroom. Without that backing, teaching, inevitably, will be no fun.

Academia's Crisis of Irrelevance

From Naomi Schaefer Riley, at Wall Street Journal, "As more students question rising college costs, professors defend useless research and their lack of teaching."

Read it at the link. The key is academe's divorce from the real world, and I'd pile on about how this is killing the education of waves of students.

Professor Daniel Drezner Five Years After University of Chicago Tenure Denial

I first started reading blogs seriously around 2002 or so, when Professor Daniel Drezner published an essay on academic blogging at Foreign Policy. He's now a blogger at Foreign Policy, and there's no way I can find that old article through search. I have the hard copy in my office somewhere, so I'll go find it and search by exact title later. Anyway, he's got a new essay at the Chronicle of Higher Education, published with his wife, to commemorate his denial of tenure at the University of Chicago in 2005: "A Professor and His Wife on Absorbing the Shock of Tenure Denial."

In 2005, Drezner wrote a blog post on the news that he'd been turned down, "So Friday was a pretty bad day...." This was a pretty big sensation at the time, especially the hypothesis that he was denied tenure because he was a blogger (and hence not a serious scholar, etc.). I knew Drezner wouldn't have a hard time landing a new post, and in fact he was hired right away at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. I started my own blog shortly after this time (my first blog was Burkean Reflections, which I retired after I figured out I wasn't Burkean). I was tenured by then, but I was hesitant and tentative in my blogging, primarily because I hadn't figured out my own identity as a political scientist. Once I'd started American Power I'd figured out what I was doing in both blogging and life. And I don't worry about any backlash from blogging because blogging's my identity now, and teaching and activism. I couldn't have gotten to this point in my writing and commentary without being tenured, so if young untenured scholars come across this post my advice is don't do it --- especially if you're conservative (the academic neo-communist intelligentsia will seek to destroy you for deviating from the accepted narrative).

Anyway, read the essay from Drezner's wife Erika, "My Confident Husband, Suddenly Full of Self-Doubt." I like this part:

Things turned out well for us. We were lucky—my husband found a job, with tenure, and we moved to Boston, which just happens to be my favorite city. Our kids were young enough to move without much difficulty. I know that other people have had it a lot harder. They've struggled to find work, relocated to less desirable places, and have painfully disrupted family life. This is particularly difficult for couples in which both are academics. Those of us in more "portable" careers should be grateful to have avoided the two-body problem.

Exactly. Things have turned out better for them having Daniel been denied. (But of course it's gotta be an extremely painful experience, and academic tenure review is one of the most stressful experiences in anyone's career.)

Side Note: I stopped reading Daniel Drezner's blog years ago, when I noticed that he refused to stand up for Israel in his writing. He'd post the news but wouldn't offer any opinion, obviously worried about alienating powerful colleagues and fellow political scientists across the academy. He also co-authors academic papers with communist political scientist Henry Farrell, and thus Drezner's revealed he'll put professional mobility above moral clarity. I don't do that. It's costly, but I don't have to worry about peer recognition from inbred academic committees who hate America and disdain the real world.

Budget Cuts Hammer University of California Star Faculty Retention

I thought about this recently, having traveled to UCLA for both the Noam Chomsky and David Horowitz events, not to mention my coverage of Students for Justice in Palestine.

The Westwood campus is awesome. Too much construction, but it's a great feeling being on a research campus again. It feels so promising. And I was a little surprised at the vitality, since there's been so much talk of decline at the UC system. Anyway, certainly things aren't going as well as state leaders would like, and that's keeping in mind that UC is more insulated from budget crises than both Cal State and the community colleges. But this report at Los Angeles Times shows a real drag on maintaining quality and prestige. See: "UC fears talent loss to deeper pockets: The departure of three star scientists from UC San Diego has officials worried about a possible brain drain tied to budget cuts."

Read the whole thing at the link. I found fascinating the salaries of the three UCSD scholars lured away to Rice Univerity:

[Jose] Onuchic, who is co-director of UC San Diego's Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, said he was drawn to Rice mainly for the research funds and new building, along with the chance to work with cancer experts in Houston. "The opportunities were spectacular," said Onuchic, whose research focuses on protein movement and chemical reactions in gene networks. His UC salary, including summer grants, is $265,000; he and his colleagues said Rice would give them 40% increases.

The three scientists are expected to take with them much of their National Science Foundation grant, which has paid $6.6 million since 2008 and is expected to provide several million more over the next two years. At Rice, their funding will also include a $10-million grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, created with a $3-billion state bond issue approved by voters in 2007.

[Herbert] Levine, 55, who has been at UC San Diego for 25 years and earns $187,000 a year, said Rice's new and larger lab space and extra administrative support was too good to turn down. Another factor is that Rice, which has a fifth of UC San Diego's 27,417 students, is much less bureaucratic, he added.

[Peter] Wolynes, 58, is a 10-year veteran of UC San Diego and earns $330,000 a year. Moving together keeps the team intact — it's a "Three Musketeers situation," he said — and the Texas cancer money will mean less hustling for grants. He still greatly admires UC, he said, but believes its "period of expansion" may be over.

These are accomplished scholars, and well-compensated. And it's no surprise that they'd be able to make much more money elsewhere. There's a market for top academics. And public universities struggle to stay competitive in tough economic times.

'What Third World Women Want'

"According to First World Feminists," by Charlotte Allen, at Weekly Standard.

It's about an academic conference, "Driving Change, Shaping Lives: Gender in the Developing World." I love this part, especially the "Battle of the Filipina Hostesses":

The first speaker was Valerie M. Hudson, a political science professor at Brigham Young University, leading off a panel titled “Shifting Populations.” Hudson delivered a genuine population-shift shocker: In China and India, which between them account for about 40 percent of the world’s 7 billion people, women, who in the West slightly outnumber men because they tend to live longer, are outnumbered by the male sex to the tune of 33 million in China and 28 million in India. The reason? As Hudson explained, it was the female-lethal combination of sex-selection abortion following the advent of fetal ultrasound during the 1980s and China’s longtime one-child policy, which has resulted in widespread female infanticide along with many forced abortions. As she rattled off disturbing statistics​—​120 boy babies for every 100 girl babies in China in 2005, and 121 for every 100 in India​—​Hudson pointed out that sex-selection abortion and female infanticide are illegal in both countries, but the laws on the books have failed to dent the cultural phenomenon of “son preference” in Asia, in which sons are valued because they’re expected to support elderly parents, whereas daughters often cost dowry money. “That’s 90 million missing women,” Hudson said.

In 2004 she and Andrea den Boer, a lecturer in politics and international affairs at the University of Kent, had published a book, Bare Branches, about the negative repercussions for a society, such as in China, that produces large numbers of surplus young men who cannot find wives and form families. “Those who don’t marry tend to have no skills and no education,” Hudson explained. “They are already at risk for violent behavior, since young men without stable social bonds tend to commit most violent crimes. They tend to be targets for military recruitment, and societies with surplus males tend to be marked by an aggressive foreign policy and ethnic groups pitted against each other.”

Maybe it was because abortion makes women’s studies people skittish, but Hudson’s ominous statistics​—​and indeed her entire presentation​—​were promptly forgotten, submerged in what might be called the Battle of the Filipina Hostesses. The combatants were Hudson’s two fellow panelists, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California and self-described former Filipina hostess, and Amy O’Neill Richard, a senior adviser in the State Department’s Office of Trafficking in Persons, a priority project of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. During the 1980s and 1990s tens of thousands of young women were imported into Japan by labor contractors from the chronically impoverished Philippines to sing, dance, flirt with, and coax drink purchases from stressed-out salarymen in bars and nightclubs​—​until a 2005 crackdown by the Japanese government reduced the hostesses’ numbers by 90 percent, from 80,000 in 2004 to 8,000 in 2006. Few of the Filipinas, it seemed, had any training as the professional entertainers that their visas said they were. The Japanese government maintained that most of them were actually prostitutes or near-prostitutes, pushed into long hours of dubious servitude by the contractors and the clubs, many of which had ties to yakuza mobsters. A spate of brutal murders of hostesses​—​along with some murders committed by hostesses of their pimps​—​fueled the drive to clamp down on the hostess business and send most of the women back to the Philippines.

Taking the podium after Hudson, Parreñas went on the warpath. She announced that she had no intention of abiding by the 10-minute presentation limit for panelists and then proceeded to read a fiery 20-minute paper that she titled “Migration as Indentured Mobility: The Moral Regulation of Migrant Women.” The paper blasted the hostess crackdown as part of “a U.S.-backed war” against “sex work” fueled by “moral imperialism and conservative values” (the U.S. government funds anti-trafficking programs in about 70 countries). In the crackdown the hostesses were “stripped of their livelihood,” Parreñas lamented. “They go to Japan of their own volition​—​they’re not drugged or forced to go. They find it empowering to be a hostess.” Parreñas’s theory was that “there are multiple moralities in society,” and that some Filipinas’ moral codes happened to permit “paid sex with the men they call their boyfriends.” The problem, as Parreñas saw it, was that many Japanese clubs tended to have a different “moral culture” from that of the hostesses who worked there, but the hostesses couldn’t quit until their indentures were up. Nonetheless, Parreñas insisted, “most of them resent the United States, and they resent being rescued” from the hostess life by being kicked out of Japan. Her solution to the hostess problem: open immigration in the West for developing-world sex workers so they could get jobs in, say, the Netherlands, where prostitution is legal.

Parreñas proved to be a tough act to follow. Richard, the human-trafficking expert from the State Department, seemed dumbfounded. “I think America is a wonderful country,” she said. She rattled off some information about the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 2000, along with some alarming-sounding numbers: 70 percent of the estimated 12 to 27 million human-trafficking victims in the world these days are women and girls, most of whom end up in bondage, often sexual bondage, in East Asia and the Middle East. Parreñas was having none of that. “It’s quite tricky to lump all trafficked people together,” she sniffed. “Most migrant workers are domestic workers, and many countries, including the United States, don’t even count domestic work as an occupation.” Nor did Parreñas have any positive words for Hudson and her bare-branches research. “Did you interview any of those single men you describe as psychopathic and poor?” Parreñas demanded of Hudson. “Did they see themselves as unmarriageable?”