Charles W. Nuckolls
It only amazes me how completely faculties have been bamboozled into adopting the administrative mindset: if it cannot be counted, it simply doesn't count.
At my institution, where I serve on the Tenure and Promotion Committee, the review committee members are only given the files a week or so before meeting. Suffice to say there is no time to read, let alone carefully consider, the contributions of someone to a field of study. So what do we do?
We pull up impact scores and assess the rating of different journals, issue by issue, to see if the contributions is"worth" anything. It takes a few minutes. Then we move on to the next file.
I am virtually alone on the committee in explicitly rejecting this approach, since, if numbers are allowed to do the talking, then the review process simply becomes an exercise in clerical number-crunching. Why not just have a secretary compile the statisticis?
The alternative, of course, would be to allow review committees an opportunity to read and assess their colleagues' work based on intellectual criteria. Heaven forbid!
I can only say how grateful I am that I received tenure and promotion to full professor before the business-school mindset completely corrupted the system and turned us all into shills for the administrative elite.
Jane S. Shaw
Three years ago, the John W. Pope Foundation pledged $90,000 to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for a series of lectures on"Renewing the Western Tradition." This followed a long period of discussion and debate over a much larger gift that would establish a curriculum in Western civilization--an idea proposed by the administration but ultimately rejected by the faculty. The lecture series was a remnant.
In the minds of distinguished and named professors at Chapel Hill, it turns out,"renewing" the Western tradition is more like"fixing" the Western tradition or" conducting a nuanced and multi-layered conversation about it and its relationship with other traditions, which may be better." See for yourself.
Aeon J. Skoble
Charles W. Nuckolls
A judgement body from whose decisions there is no appeal; secret regulations, unknown, typically, even to body members; an ever-widening scrutiny, even of mundane activites, for unconforming ideologies.
Don't know? You should, since you've probably got one at your institution. It is called the"Institutional Review Board." Such bodies, officially, are charged with"protecting human subjects," and they are supposed to be governed by federal statutes. In reality, they are autonomous entities within universities that sit in judgment on fundamental issues, such as"what is science." From their decisions, there is no appeal, and since their membership always includes"non-scientists" and"members of the community," one cannot assume the knowledge or background we take for granted within the disciplines. Ignorance, misinformation, and just plain silliness are commonplace.
To give one example: one of my students wanted to do fieldwork on widows in India -- a fairly routine sort of inquiry, especially within my discipline (cultural anthropology.) Her proposal was rejected, and I quote,"because you are a white woman, and a white woman is like a white man, and a white man represents implicit force." The person who wrote this" critique" was a non-faculty (but full-voting) member of the IRB, and her qualification is that she has an undergraduate degree.
There are plenty of horror stories like this. And if you think they are confined to anthropologists or medical researchers or drug-trial investigators, you're sadly mistaken: the IRB process is increasing taking under its purview projects in the humanities, including history. The people who do"oral history" have run into this problem plenty already.
Soviet-style justice, based on secret rules, and conducted without accountability are no stranger in American academic institutions. Administrations seem to specialize in creating star-chambers, don't they? But that does not mean we have to accept their proliferation, or the distortions they create, or the absurd beaurocratic over-reach they represent.
David T. Beito
David T. Beito
In the Democratic tradition of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, he is too often willing to sacrifice civil liberties on the altar of some broader goal such as"social justice.
Here is the latest example:
The Obama Administration has now actually co-sponsored an anti-free speech resolution at the United Nations. Approved by the U.N. Human Rights Council last Friday, the resolution, cosponsored by the U.S. and Egypt, calls on states to condemn and criminalize"any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence."
David T. Beito
Keith Halderman
In a very alarming article by Brian W. Walsh, a senior legal research fellow in the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation, the movement by the federal government to turn everyone into a criminal is discussed. The piece begins by describing a SWAT team raid by the Fish and Wildlife Service that trashed the home of George Norris. Walsh tells us that “Mr. Norris ended up spending almost two years in prison because he didn't have the proper paperwork for some of the many orchids he imported. The orchids were all legal - but Mr. Norris and the overseas shippers who had packaged the flowers had failed to properly navigate the many, often irrational, paperwork requirements the U.S. imposed when it implemented an arcane international treaty's new restrictions on trade in flowers and other flora.”
Mr. Norris is an elderly man with significant health problems and the two years in prison, along with the years fighting the charges, constitute a tremendous physical and financial burden on someone for what was essentially faulty paperwork. He represents a growing class of people, victims of overzealous federal prosecutors enforcing intrusive irrational laws. So many individuals and their families have had their lives ruined that the problem has warranted Congressional hearings. The question becomes who will be next person receiving this kind of injustice?
Cross posted on The Trebach Report
David T. Beito
C.J. Maloney
Mr. Reich fails to notice the other side of the coin – all the jobs destroyed and people thrown into poverty by the removal from their lives of the funds he wishes to dispense so freely to his favored groups. Mr. Reich should spend less time blogging and more time reading Bastiat, where he can learn exactly what the phrase “the seen and the unseen” is all about.
Robert Higgs
Whence cometh a good deal of talk about “more stimulus,” although administration spokespersons such as Larry Summers are quick to distance themselves from this phraseology, if not from the substance it denotes. So, what exactly do our glorious rulers have in mind? According to the Wall Street Journal, White House officials said they also are examining whether to extend a soon-to-expire tax credit for first-time homebuyers, but that provision faces a stiffer headwind.
If these ideas are the best ones that the administration’s economic geniuses can come up with, the economy is heading for even rougher waters.
To understand why, recall that lesson one in public-policy economics is this: if you want less of something, tax it; if you want more of something, subsidize it. Extending the term of unemployment-insurance benefits and offering tax credits to cover 65 percent of the cost of maintaining health-insurance coverage for the jobless in effect subsize unemployment: these measures lower the cost of remaining unemployed by reducing the employment benefits the unemployed forgo. Hence, unemployed people will search for new jobs less actively, and they will be more likely to turn down a job offer that does not provide the same compensation they received in their previous jobs.
Thus, these measures will keep the unemployment rate higher than it otherwise would have been, magnifying and prolonging the recession. Political realists might also note that the continuation of high unemployment will increase the demand for government rescues of various sorts. In this way, the government gets, as it were, just what it (which is to say, the taxpayers) pays for, namely, continued excuses for its bulked-up spending (i.e., vote buying). So, before you accuse administration officials of contemplating the adoption of crazy policies, consider that these politicians may actually be crazy like a fox.
Extension of the tax-credit for first-time homebuyers is a looney idea for somewhat different reasons. To understand this measure’s perniciousness, recall that our present economic difficulties spring in large part from the de facto subsidies that various public policies created during the earlier years of this decade for home purchases by people who, absent those subsidies, could not afford to repay the requisite mortgage loans. Now, while the economy is still deep in the quicksand of millions of mortgages in delinquency or default, with many others likely to be in such trouble soon, the government is considering the extension of a measure that – strange to say – again tempts people who cannot afford the mortgage payments on a home purchase to go ahead and purchase it nevertheless. By such “caring” policies, the government lures people who cannot swim into waters much too deep for them to stand in, with predictable results looming not far in the future.
Again, however, the government may simply be seeking to keep the economy in trouble as long as it can do so, because as long as the troubles continue, the demand for the government’s salvation will remain at its present elevated level. Think of the policies the administration is now contemplating as parts of a perpetual-motion machine for government spending and the willful distortion of market pricing and resource allocation. And who can possibly object, unless it be a taxpayer or someone with an interest in the creation of wealth in this country? In politics, of course, such old-fashioned naysayers count for practically nothing. Obama administration economists said they would like the enhanced unemployment-insurance program to extend beyond its Dec. 31 expiration date. They also want to maintain a program that offers tax credits to pay 65% of the cost of health insurance policies under the COBRA program, which allows laid-off workers to purchase the health plans they had through their previous employer.
David T. Beito
Sheldon Richman
Had I been a resident of Chicago, I would have said, Barack, Michelle, Oprah, mind your own business.
Rio, you have my condolences.
Keith Halderman
Trying to have it both ways, Dumanis claims to be a friend of medical marijuana, however, no clinic, despite great effort to do so, ever seems to be able to live up to her exacting legal standard. Dion Markgraff, San Diego coordinator for Americans for Safe Access, argues that “she can't follow the plain language of the law, but instead she holds some impossible standard that no one else knows about. We're on the front lines of the most terrorist county in the whole state. The DA is sending in cops who lied to doctors to get valid recommendations, and then busting dispensaries that are operating according to the law. At worst, maybe somebody didn't file this or that piece of paper or had a zoning issue, but there was certainly nothing criminal."
The Drug Policy Alliance is petitioning California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown asking them to help put a halt to Dumannis’ unjust harassment. You can sign it here. With all of the discrimination and maltreatment that gay women have had to endure over the years you would think that someone with the DA’s background would be little more hesitant to inflict such treatment on other people, especially the sick.
Cross posted on The Trebach Report
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