Who is our evil twin here in academia? The media?

They too are in the business of putting together and distributing information, so they are our twin. They lack our analytical standards and put out all sorts of nonsense, plus are rich and drive out real knowledge with their fake kind, so they are evil.

Or so it often seems when a member of the university community watches ten minutes of silly cable news or Bill O'Reilly saying the most absurd, falsifiable things without fear of challenge. The media seems to specialize in ad hominem argument - Bill can prove the falsehood of any statement in the New York Times by saying "the VERY LIBERAL New York Times" six times a minute. They are also pathetic copy-cats, recycling the same stuff from one source that wasn't correct in the first place. I saw this when three articles in major papers covered the Mark Yudof nomination to be UC's president with identical paragraphs on how his high Texass salary might be a problem. It's really pre-medieval, or plagaristic, or subcivilized, or well, just not very academic.

But I digress. My point here is that we should love our evil twin better and try to help it. Not Fox News, exactly, but print journalism, which is getting shafted by ad revenue declines and the unoriginal revenue thinking of its new owners. David Carr had a piece on the problem yesterday. He stirs the usual stuff around into a big ambiguity pie so we can conclude there is no solution to the end of the independent information train that is essential to democracy. So don't read the piece for that.

There was this interesting passage, based on a good quotation:

John Morton, a longtime newspaper analyst, is more pessimistic. “The industry is meeting these challenges by cutting, by reducing the news hole and the people who fill it,” he said.

“Newspapers have lived through recessions before and come back strong,” he added. “My worry is that when things do turn around, they will be coming back in an environment that is more competitive than ever because of the Internet, and that after all these cuts, they will have less stature, less product quality and less talent — all of the things that they need to compete.”

While I was on the line with Mr. Morton, I mentioned that we had been talking about newspapers on and off for over a decade. That makes us almost friends, I said. But we are fast becoming the kind of friends who see each other only at funerals and wakes.

Ha ha ha. My point here is that the same thing is happening to public higher ed. Capacity has been hollowed out for twenty years. Quality is still OK in core areas. But we regularly "start and starve" new initiatives, and can't throw whole teams at any research problems, and can't rapidly upgrade when we need to. This chronic underfunding needs to be seen for what it is, a recipe for stagnation and decline.

How can we describe it so that folks will see college funding as the social crisis it really is?

The New York Times had a good piece about states cooking their graduation books. See the sample stats at left. California, self-described world headquarters of the knowledge society, had an actual high school graduation rate of 67%.

When UC President Clark Kerr defined the university at the heart of a new knowledge society nearly fifty years ago, he no doubt thought 67% would by now be the percentage of college grads in California. One scholar cited in the piece pointed out that at this rate California will reach its graduate rate target in 500 years.

"In California, we're patient," an official replied.

Actually, no we're not.

One of my colleagues on the nano and society project who teaches at Berkeley's business school said the signs of the Brazilianization of California are everywhere. I mentioned this to another guest who has been working abroad for years. She said no, the theory of California leaders is now closer to that of Ghana's.

OK we're getting far from home. But still, how many more decades are these crappy, falsified, HS grad rates going to be allowed to contradict what we say we stand for?

Mark Yudof has been nominated to move from being the head of the University of Texas system to the presidency of the University of California system. I'm completely relieved that we found someone who has been running a big public university system and who has a record of fighting state governments for more public funding. Basic arithmetic shows that public universities are great only when they receive serious public funding: here's my Planning and Budget committee report on the UC case.

Here are two pieces by Yudof, both originally published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The first is on the decline of public funding for public higher ed, and the second on the value of university systems to their states.

There are things to debate, but I'm also relieved that we may get a president who's given public funding this much lucid thought, and started writing about it in the early 1990s.

Inside Higher Ed has a good overview of the Bush II Presidential Library controversy. The facility at Southern Methodist will have three parts, including a policy center that aims to "celebrate" the president and his record.

The obvious problems include:

• knowledge being produced on a university campus without the normal safeguards of peer review
• knowledge that will be received by the media and the public as valid because it comes from a university campus.

This arrangement is another sign of the difficulty universities have staying independent in the midst of desperate struggles for either adequate funding or big-league competitiveness (SMU's issue). But we shouldn't pick on SMU. The Hoover Institute at Stanford has for decades openly pushed conservative positions and systematically built conservative networks of scholars and top officials without feedback from Stanford's overall faculty. UC Berkeley recently signed a deal with BP that will allow BP scientists to conduct proprietary work in facilities built with public money and housed on campus.

The appointment of Donald Rumsfeld to a Hoover Institute position raised the issue at Stanford. An on-line petition against the hire raised over 4300 signatures. Some faculty proposed a motion last fall to investigate the process that led to the Rumsfeld hire. The Stanford Daily reported Philosophy Prof and motion advocate Debra Satz explaining, “I find it hard to understand the reasoning in appointing Rumsfeldnot because of his views, but because of his competence.”

The SMU Bush connection is a little more fawning towards a figure who is, like Rumsfeld, a little more disgraced than the normal donor or beneficiary. It's easy to assume that university resources would go into the partisan defense of weak records rather than into history and policy analysis. It's hard to image Chalmers Johnson being invited to Hoover or SMU to speak. The SMU case may help raise awareness of the fragility of academic freedom when it comes up against powerful interests, especially ones that haven't done too well and feel that they have something to prove.

Meanwhile, Stanford faculty are using Hoover's hiring of Donald Rumsfeld as a visiting fellow to try to established a new review process for affiliated institutes that trade on Stanford's name.

The Council for Aid to Education has released its figures for higher education philanthropy in 2007. Overall donations were up 6.3 percent, which is close to the annual average for the last ten years. The Chronicle of Higher Education story also offered what have become standard comments about the skew in private giving towards the very top.

Large donations to the nation's wealthiest colleges accounted for much of the increase. The top 20 recipients (see table), which represent just 2 percent of the survey's respondents, raised more than a quarter of all the contributions.

"The top 20 historically have controlled a lot, and they're controlling a bigger and bigger share of private donations," said Ann E. Kaplan, the survey's director. "It's large gifts to large institutions that drive national trends."

The top 2 percent of institutions also accounted for 30 percent of the year-over-year growth in these donations. And "megagifts" remain a major factor in the shaping of higher ed.

Everyone is worried about the impact of the economic downturn that has already started. Ironically, it may only increase the influence of the megagifts. As one CHE consultant noted, "If the market falls and people's wealth shrinks, then you start seeing a slowdown, or people postponing capital contributions. . . . But the big donors, who drive these numbers anyway, tend to be stable."

There's another issue that is never mentioned. Little of this giving is unrestricted, so at public universities it cannot be applied to general operating costs to make up for public funding cuts. When our UC Planning and Budget committee heard officials from the Treasurer's Office talk about this, they estimated that unrestricted gifts are 2 percent of the total. Even in scholarship giving, only 20 percent are unrestricted. Over a period of years, the effect is not a happy substitution of public with private funding, but a campus divided by an iron curtain. The stem-cell research facility may be state-of-the-art, while the math department, dependent on public money, can't pay for phones in faculty offices or for TAs to give actual feedback on homework in calculus lectures with 500 students.

There is no evidence at all that private money is willing to pay for mass quality higher education - broad access at a top level. It pays for special projects for the best and the most famous. We are getting plenty of that, but losing the mass quality that underwrote both post-war prosperity and general quality of intellectual life.

Student loans produced a lot of stories about conflicts of interest last year, and some mild clean-up activity. One pattern there was kickbacks - gifts from private loan companies in exchange for favors from university counsellors. Another was a revolving door between universities and private loan companies that increased collusion between the two. Sallie Mae sought a buy-out that would have given its CEO over $225 million personally (the sale did not go through; I don't know CEO Albert L. Lord's final cut, but he continued to seek a $900 million breakup fee after the deal collapsed). The Department of Education admitted to having overpaid private student loan companies.

The obvious theme here is that the activities of these private agencies increased the cost of obtaining a college degree. There were good stories about just how broke students are in part because of high-tuition coupled with high-priced loans. The most famous response was that some of the country's wealthiest private universities - led by Harvard - switced from loans to grants for lower-income students.

Whatever the response, a core principle remains: increasing the number of steps between the buyer and the seller - the student and the university - increases the costs to the buyer. We used to know that "middlemen" like railroads were bad for people like farmers. We seem to need to learn this all over again with higher ed.

The Times of London - of all papers - had a good piece by Alexi Mostrous on Martin Amis's 80,000 pounds a year from the U of Manchester, in exchange for which he performs a "distinctly achievable" 28 hours of work - per year. What was good was that Mostrous did not make Amis's featherbedding into a metaphor for all UK professors. "His salary is more than 240 times that of an average full-time academic, who earns £38,933 a year for 59 hours a week." There it is - the real story for college teachers everywhere in the known world - paid not much for doing a lot.

The piece also explains why they'd pay this big salary for almost no effort: Amis isn't getting paid to work, but paid to endorse the Manchester university brand. His celebrity endorsement sends the brand value up, which sends applications up, which improves fee revenues, while also raising the university's status, which increases its power to hire high-powered professors, who will in turn contribute more publications to the university's list for the Research Assessment Exercise that apportions future funding - just as Amis's many publications will too. Their world rank might eventually go up. Then will then be able to hire more lecturers for 38k pounds (or 2500 pounds per course) to do the actual work.

In buying the Amis name, Manchester's administrators were behaving like completely rational businesspeople running a market-oriented business. Unfortunately, they're actually running a university. Once you go down this path, it's almost impossible to get off it. It's not obvious that anyone thinks there's a reason to have a university that isn't divided between stars and labor.

Inside Higher Ed has a report on university endowment growth last year. If you follow this topic the data won't surprise you. The rich got richer faster - Harvard and Yale, the two biggest, grew 23 percent and 28 percent respectively. The report includes a table showing that the smaller you are, the slower you grow, which of course is a familiar rule to those of us living in eagerly Darwinist America. It's worth noting that the lowest average growth figure is 13.6 percent, which is very high.

The report does not note three other important things.

First, endowment growth has been decoupled from the growth of the overall economy, of state budgets, and of general educational support for public universities. 13.6 percent is 2-4 times higher than average state increases, faculty salary increases, and the like. As I've noted before, the universities that educate 90 percent of higher ed students have little or no endowment income and are barely keeping ahead of inflation - and only in the last couple of years. Endowments index higher ed health about as well as Brad Pitt's income indexes the health of yours and mine.

Secondly, coverage of "creativity" in finding "alternative" investment strategies for university endowments lags behind coverage of the financial sector in general. There, creativity has become a facetious proxy word for blind faith in structured investment vehicles whose risk "beta" is obscure and which have been starting to blow up. Universities will not be getting these kinds of endowment returns this year or the next or the next. Some may lose money just like the pros at Merrill Lynch and Citigroup have managed to do.

Third, this is a good time to think about restoring stable, broad-based funding for majoritarian higher ed. This means taxes seen as a public investment, and not the transient miracles of the financial loaves and fishes that in any case are lavished not on the general followers but on the few.

Everybody hates the incessantly rising costs of medical care. Commenting on the latest inflation numbers, the economist Dean Baker puts the cost of higher education in the same category.

The major forces pushing the rate of inflation higher continue to be medical care and education. Medical care costs rose by 0.3 percent in December. They have risen at a 5.1 percent annual rate over the last quarter and 5.2 percent for the last year. Education costs rose 0.5 percent in December, bringing the rate of increase over the last quarter to 7.7 percent, up from the 5.6 percent rate over the last year.

The fact that higher ed costs constantly rise faster than the rest of the consumer price index never gets a decent public explanation. It has hurt higher ed with the public even more than have the culture wars and TV coverage of the everyday beer binges and drug orgies on campuses everywhere. It also helps explain the fact that when states cut public higher ed, most people really don't care.

Business Week has published a piece with an excellent array of accessible statistics on the inequality boom in higher ed. It has a good first line too: "It's only fitting that Whitman College, Princeton's new student residence, is named for eBay (EBAY) CEO Meg Whitman, because it's a billionaire's mansion in the form of a dorm."

The "Ivy League plus" educates 1 percent of university students and now lives on a different financial planet from the rest of us. The implication is that higher ed no longer spreads prosperity, but simply reflects the widening class gaps in the United States, with Ivy-league college being just another luxury good solidifying and symbolizing elite status.

In the three decades after World War II, higher ed spread prosperity because it massively increased college enrollments at a fairly decent level of quality. Academic ambitions soared as enrollments did, and quality steadily improved for the broad middle classes. The BW piece points out that in contrast, the Ivies Plus have actually reduced their undergrad enrollments by about six percent over the last ten years.

At one point, the article asks, will the "benefits to society outweigh the damage to the public universities [the Ivies] are stripping of star professors, who tend to take their outside research money with them when they go?" The obvious answer is no: public benefits are mass benefits, not benefits to the top 1 percent.

The heads of some huge public research universities replied with a good description of their lives with continuous public funding cuts, and an eloquent appeal for proper public funding.

Let's hope this kind of letter starts to work better now than it has over the last twenty-five yers. If the public research universities don't get the public funding they need, most will become regional schools for students tracked into 2nd, 3rd, and 4th-rung salaries, while both economic and research productivity decline for the country as a whole.

The American Association of Medical Colleges has published a study on "Diversity of U.S. Medical Students by Family Income" which shows that the majority of med students come from the top fifth of the population by family income. In addition, this number is actually growing, in spite of much official concern. The report concludes this way:

A real concern is a possible increase in
the systemic skewing toward children
of upper-income families. From 2000,
when 50.8 percent of matriculants
came from the top quintile, to 2005,
when 55.2 percent came from that
quintile, there may be the beginning
of an undesirable trend. As reported
elsewhere,6 the debt incurred by
medical students continues to increase
with every passing year; 2007 graduates
reported a median educational
debt of $140,000. With debt
increasing much more rapidly than
physician incomes, a continued
increase in the fifth quintile
percentage would be a warning that
medical education is becoming
increasingly out of reach for applicants
of modest means.

This is not good. But medical schools are in fact doing better than very selective colleges, which is not good either.

No group helps itself by always favoring its fortunate few - or by using them as the index of its condition.

College language and literature departments are a case in point. The Modern Languages Association devoted some discussion at its convention this year to the plight of the adjunct faculty member. When the plight of adjuncts initially surfaced ten or fifteen years ago, they were considered an unfortunately minority - "freeway flyers" on their way to something better later on. By the middle of this decade, faculty began to realize that adjuncts had become a majority. Inside Higher Ed covers some of the statistics the MLA panel presented. Overall, well over half, and perhaps as many as two-third of higher education instructors are temporary and/or untenurable.

Education hasn't abolished tenure: it's just downsized it and hollowed it out. This degrades tenure into a minority privilege. It makes it easier for society to ignore the knowledge that comes from those who have it, and to discredit their ideas as the fruit of a pampered elite.

In fact, there is a direct correlation between reducing faculty security and reducing quality of instruction. One measure is graduation rates: According to a Chronicle of Higher Education summary (October 27, 2006) of a study by Daniel Jacoby, "colleges where nearly 80 percent of the instructors worked part time had graduation rates of only about 20 percent. As the proportion of instructors who worked part time declined, graduate rates rose."

There are two crises here. The first is that literary and cultural study is being slowly and steadily unravelled. It can no longer reproduce itself. It is losing the working conditions that allow the research that would help a world riven by cultural crises of every possible kind.

The second is the quality of the education received by the vast majority of the public. We are reducing it in the period when higher ed is supposed to be the foundation of prosperity and even survival. Why?

The MLA should declare a professional emergency and start creating concrete programs for reversing this 35-year-old decline.

It's a question of numbers. All sorts of great people are part of the Duke community - no disrespect to them - but Duke's annual enrollment is a bit under 13,000 total, about half of whom are undergraduates.

If you are interested in putting those numbers in perspective, this article about selective college admissions is a good place to start. The authors looked at the country's "top" 146 schools, defined as those that are "most" or "highly" competitive in their admissions. There core finding was this:

74 percent of the students at the top 146 highly selective colleges came from families in the top quarter of the SES scale (as measured by combining family income and the education and occupations of the parents), just 3 percent came from the bottom SES quartile, and roughly 10 percent came from the bottom half of the SES scale.

This news shocked a lot of people when it was announced in 2003. It means that the great majority of the college-age population never goes near a highly selective college. It means that the country's "good schools" don't serve American society so much as they serve the top slice of it. It means that the people who could benefit the most from college - who don't have a parent who went to college (or finished high school), or who have low family incomes - are the least likely to get the most intensive college instruction (small classes with senior faculty as happens most often in the wealthy privates).

I have some experience on this last point. I went to Reed College in the late 1970s, where my largest class, a required organic chemistry course, had 40 students. My first job was at Rice University, where the largest course I taught was a British lit survey that had, again, 40 students. My second job was and is at UC Santa Barbara, where every year I teach 200-300 students in Detective Fiction and/or Global California - each. A UCSB English major has a senior seminar with 15 students - once in his or her college career. Many UC departments - at Santa Barbara and elsewhere - offer no courses that small, especially after the latest round of state funding cuts in the early 2000s. I regularly write letters of recommendation from students whom I have never met personally because they took one of my lecture courses, but who feel somehow like they know me better than any other of their professors. And UCSB is a very good public university with a faculty and administration that is trying very hard, day and day out, to deliver a high-quality undergraduate education.

The vast majority of American college students attend what we can call "factory schools" - the staff and students care a lot, and yet they all work under the conditions of mass production. Under the past 20-30 years of quasi-austerity for public higher education, everyone has shifted when they can towards factory-style savings, including standardized material, mechanized grading, and temporary faculty that teach more for less. 70 percent of college courses are taught by non-permanent instructors, which saves money and reduces quality at the same time.

But let's get clearer about the size of this "vast majority." The 2003 study notes that fewer than 10 percent of college students attend one of the most selective 146 schools. 90 percent go somewhere else. And only a handful of the 146 are actually "elite" schools like Duke: the 146 are those that accept fewer than half of their applicants, and includes students who were in the top 35 percent of their high school classes. For some perspective, remember that UC campuses limit their intake to the top 15 percent or so of high school classes. Cal State takes around the top 35%, so on this count (though not on others), Cal State resembles the very good colleges in the 146. In 2006, it enrolled 417,000 students. Since 1961, it has produced 2 million graduates. The top 146 may be selective, but they are not elite.

Each year, 1.2 million students are enrolled in 4 year colleges of all types nationwide. About 900,000 of those are in colleges that are essentially non-selective. That means that 3/4 of all college students exist outside the selection system. 3/4 of all college students study and graduate with no contact with schools like Duke and Stanford or, equally, with UC and Cal State Dominguez Hills. (Three UC campuses are in one selectivity list's top-20; two are above Duke, which comes in at 14. This whole ranking business, as an index of educational experience and output, is a crock.) Each year, Duke teaches 0.5 percent of all 4-year college students. It teaches about 3.5% of each year's students at the 146 most selective (about 170,000).

If your educational world consists entirely of highly selective colleges, or top-50 or top-25 schools, Duke matters - somewhat. If you think about the college population as a whole, Duke is a speck on the horizon, one tree in the forest. It hardly matters at all.

Things have only gotten worse since 2003: see a new study of Pell Grants that shows the same pattern of selective schools serving the already-affluent. Meanwhile, we distract ourselves with Harvard's tuition forgiveness program, Stanford's latest billion-dollar fundraising drive, or Duke's previously free iPods for new students.

In this context, the fixation on three falsely-indicted student athletes at one elite college is a case of terminal narcissism that illustrates why this country is having so much trouble addressing its basic problems.

I finally commented on my forthcoming book about the troubles of the public university, but it's on my other blog. What the hell - the university book is about the undeclared cold war on the mass middle-class (the whole bottom 80% or so), so this won't be the last cross-blog collision.

This is the story that wouldn't die. If you've completely missed this one, don't start now, so I won't fill you in. But notable events of the last 12 months include:

• rape charges against the Duke Lacrosse team players were dropped almost exactly a year ago, at the end of December 2006. North Carolina's attorney general threw out all remaining charges in April 2007.
  
• the county prosecutor who brought the rape charges but who seems to have withheld evidence, exaggerated the evidence he did have, and lied to a judge, announced his resignation on June 15th.
• The three Lacrosse players who were charged received an undisclosed settlement from Duke around the same time.
• In October, these three players went to federal court to sue various Durham police officers, the city, the police chief, and the disgraced former DA.
• In December, three other players sued a total of 45 defendants for negligence, fraud, and conspiracy. Duke has apparently offered to pay their legal fees.
  
• the year saw the publication of at least three separate books on the subject, including one by KC Johnson, a faculty member at Brooklyn College.
  

The blogging and general debate have if anything intensified around a story that started close to two years ago, and whose serious criminal dimension ended one year ago.

I offer two thoughts.

1. The recent pattern shows that the Duke case is the Right's best current chance to continue its culture war on non-conservative faculty. This is sometimes a war on them personally, as in the hate mail, but more broadly on the social and intellectual change they represent. Other initiatives like David Horowitz's crusade against campus "Islamo-fascism" and other scapegoats like Ward Churchill are fading or fallen. All the more reason to try to keep the story alive.

In fact, Lacrosse story arc has ended several times, both when the charges were dropped and when the real villain for the Lacrosse students - the crooked DA - went down. KC Johnson - probably the leading crusader at the moment - is doing his best to make the main issue the faculty "Group of 88" that raised questions about campus climate in a statement of 20 months ago. I have to assume this is because he is obsessed with the Group of 88 itself, and with its infamous statement faculty challenges to the not-so-enlightened race and gender attitudes on the campus. Johnson has received enormous media attention and support - see the Amazon page list of publisher blurbs.

Let me draw an inference: many powerful people do not want to see attacks on the current "post-civil rights" detente around social movements. That detente says that fields like the critical humanities, race or genders studies, and cultural studies, and individuals like students or faculty of color shall be present in elite institutions, and yet at the same time they will not change or control the basic ground rules of those institutions. The detente remains Nixonian, for whom the genius of affirmative action was the very small numbers of people of color and women it would let in, Noak's ark style, two at a time. The detente says that "minority" fields - numerically and politically - will not demand power sharing (remember the public burning of Lani Guinier for advocating this), and that they will not organize. They will not form groups of 88 or even 8. Within the detente, the lives of affluent white students - whether drunken sports hooligans or great future economists or both - can go on very much as they always have. If "Duke Lacrosse" meant anything, it meant the right of a traditional Duke constituency to carry on as it always had even in the "new" and cosmopolitan Duke.

2. The whole episode reveals an obvious but forgotten fact about the elite private university in the US today. These are normally seen as liberal bastions, immune to crude outside influence and holding their own against the power of money and right-wing politics. In reality, elite private universities are run by and for . . . elites! Poor and middle-class kids are there if and only if they have elite potential - that is the entire point of admissions at "highly selective" universities. Since many great researchers and scholars are liberals or even leftists regardless of discipline - a Pew poll found that a higher percentage of engineers oppose Iraq war policies than did history professors - liberals must be tolerated at great universities. But they are best tolerated on a short leash. The leash is held by trustees, donors, and parents, who at places like Duke, Princeton, and Stanford are generally wealthy, powerful people who have done well with current arrangements and want to keep them as they are. But at Duke, the inviolability of their world was punctured by the accusation of one black stripper. Then they saw a proto-rebellion appear in the Group of 88, whose very existence implied deep problems with the campus status quo as such.

My core reactions:
I feel baldy for my friends there caught up in this. An already unstable climate has turned plain nasty for them.
The public university is more important than ever - it just is NOT subject to the same assertions of elite ownership that have been dogging Duke.

***
A very short list of sources:

-A reasonable, lengthy overview and update from an off-Dukeworld teacher and composer Robert Zimmerman.
-Anthropologist Charles Piot's piece "KC's World," which criticizes self-appointed watchdog KC Johnson's "Duke in Wonderland" blog and prints two of the racist hate mails black Duke faculty received.
-KC Johnson's Duke blog.
-An anti-KC Johnson blog, which has a lot of links and prints some of the hate mail Duke personnel received.