Those Crazy Texas Freaks
by AndrewMc | 3/17/2010 06:00:00 AM
As many of you have no doubt seen, the Texas State Board of "Education" has re-worked the state standards to bring them more in line with a far-right agenda that seeks to re-write history, subsuming it to the political expediency of programming a generation of school children.

From the New York Times:

After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Republicans on the board voting for it.


A great deal of alarm has been raised over these developments, but I think there may be hope for a positive outcome.




First, some of the issues. It has been clear for a number of years that in Texas education takes a back seat to neo-conservative evangelical political indoctrination. The state Board of Education has for years been re-writing the standards a little bit at a time in an effort to weed out what conservatives on the board see as the pernicious influence of liberalism.

Over time this has resulted in the removal or devaluing of the contributions of such figures as Cesar Chavez and others in the labor movement. Civil Rights has taken a back seat to cheerleading the United States' role in the Cold War. And Joseph McCarthy has reemerged as an American hero.

From the Washington Post:

A far-right faction of the Texas State Board of Education succeeded Friday in injecting conservative ideals into social studies, history and economics lessons that will be taught to millions of students for the next decade.

Teachers in Texas will be required to cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation's Founding Fathers, but not highlight the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state. Curriculum standards also will describe the U.S. government as a "constitutional republic," rather than "democratic," and students will be required to study the decline in value of the U.S. dollar, including the abandonment of the gold standard.



More interesting, from my own perspective, Thomas Jefferson will be removed as one of the people studied in order to understand the Enlightenment. Now I know we tend to study Jefferson in a rather bland way, as the person who wrote the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Resolutions, the 3rd president, etc. But he is a key Enlightenment thinker, and the Declaration of Independence is important as a summation of a number of key Enlightenment principles.

Not the least of these is "we hold these truths to be self-evident." It would be hard to find a more concise summation of Enlightenment principles in a widely distributed public document. It almost perfectly captures the spirit of the Enlightenment.

According to the New York Times article, "Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term 'separation between church and state'.” He was also a Deist, which is problematic if you're trying to make the case that the Founders intended to establish a Christian nation. Sure, many of the Founders were Deists, but TJ was certainly one of the more vocal Deists.


So, what to make of all this ignorance? Bloggers have gone 'round and 'round, with much sputtering. And I agree with news and bloggers at HNN weighing in with resounding criticism.

But let me offer a positive spin. It's not news that the current economy has hit states quite hard, and that education budgets in all states are taking a hit. If anything good is to come from the Texas Board of Education's revision to the standards, it's that now may be the time for states to jettison traditional textbooks in favor of online sources, DIY texts, and other electronic materials. Some are much cheaper, some are free, and some electronic materials could certainly be linked to district-level grant initiatives that might bring both technology and educational materials into the classroom.

So, now is the time. Are you outraged by what's going on in Texas? Do you see that this is going to have a broad effect on how school districts in your states purchase textbooks? Then start helping out. Help your district or state assemble an online textbook that speaks to your state standards and/or the national standards and can be had cheaper than a traditional textbook. Don't let Texas dictate what your schools teach.

In many ways, this is a teachable moment. Seize it.


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It Is Us
by AndrewMc | 9/21/2009 07:00:00 AM
Last week I had the “opportunity” to attend the Kentucky “Governor’s Conference on Postsecondary Education Trusteeship.”

I love the word “opportunity.” It has so many divergent meanings, and as with many words, context is everything. A business opportunity can bring profit, and the phrase “opportunity knocks” is generally seen as positive. But when my department head says “I have an opportunity for you,” I usually turn and run in the other direction. When the dean or the provost says it, I’m not yet sure what to think.




So there I found myself at the Governor’s Conference—a yearly event that lays out the “state of the union” for education. The conference features sessions on a variety of topics. This year’s offerings included something on enrollment, a session on trustee/regent responsibilities, one on the “post-recession” challenges, a session on the upcoming legislative agenda in Kentucky, and a few others.

At the opening talk, the speaker flew through a series of PowerPoint slides, sometimes three or four of them in a matter of a second or two. But I did learn that nationwide, more money is being spent on wealthier students, and less on low-income students in the form of grants, federal aid, and institutional aid. So, the speaker concluded, more money is going to students who don’t need it. In the past year, there’s been about 17% more money for low-income and about 35% more for high-income students. 60% in aid dollars go to students with no financial need.

This should be probed a bit. I suspect that the speaker was casting a pretty wide net with her figures. For example, I suspect she’s counting the increased money that’s going into honors programs, which tend to serve students from middling and upper-class backgrounds.

At the talk on the legislative session we had a chance to ask questions of two of our legislators who are on Kentucky’s Senate Ed. Committee. Both are very nice guys, but I harangued them for calling for greater oversight of universities by Trustees/Boards while at the same time not exercising their own oversight over those boards. For example, I went into the issue of tenure at KCTCS and the astoundingly bad decision made by the Trustees. Where is the oversight when these boards fail?

By far the most startling thing I saw came at a session on higher education in the “post recession.” Friends, this is a sign of the times, and it wasn’t pretty. In fact, I’d call it a downright nightmare.

Essentially this speaker based his talk on three main premises:


  • The current recession requires decisive action: cutbacks, and long term innovations
  • A new generation of emerging analytic capabilities [web 2.0], means more accountability and performance improvement
  • To lift out of recession and more forward, and become more efficient and have better solutions, based on operational efficiency


OK, so far a bit of this makes sense. There’s fat in any university, and the recession certainly requires us to re-think how a university operates, what we need to prioritize, and how we can move forward. And certainly “operational efficiency” is something that any university should strive towards. The number of non-teaching administrators is growing by leaps and bounds.

And by and large he made some sense in the things he said when he discussed how we need to make sure students complete college without having to deal with too many institutional obstacles. But a lot of it made me uneasy, to be honest. The fact that he was hammering the “efficiency theme” got me a bit worried. It clearly was slanted toward the idea that students needed to get in, get out, and get a job. There was very little sense of a broader educational mission, or of any kind of understanding that a university exists for more things than to award degrees to get people jobs.

Whatever. I’d heard these things before.

But then he said that we need to “Improve academic productivity” and my head snapped up. I raised my hand. “Could you possibly explain what you mean by that?” I asked. His initial answer didn’t say anything, so I asked him to again explain how one would measure efficiency among faculty. At that point someone in the back, who I believe was with the speaker, shouted that it was “entirely possible to measure efficiency among faculty, it’s done in factories all the time!” I laughed, turned to the speaker, and asked him to readdress the question. He started to talk about how courses are taught, how many students one has, about hiring more adjuncts, and holding professors accountable for getting students through. I started to get chills.

I realized that I could meet all of his efficiency requirements by teaching a few 500-person sections, assigning crap work, and giving everyone an “A.” And that would be perfectly acceptable under his model.

Then I looked through the brochure for his biography. The speaker was a consultant for several factories (including Black and Decker) and for the University of Phoenix and Capella University. So, essentially his experience has been in trying to help a company produce a product for as little money as possible, all while charging as much as possible for that product. He has no teaching experience.

This is the future, folks. As state funding decreases and universities come to rely on tuition for more of their operating budgets, there will be increased pressure to make certain that students graduate, regardless of the education they receive. The idea of a “liberal arts” education will fall by the wayside as universities seek to maximize their bottom lines by hiring more adjuncts and having them teach larger sections of students.

Keep in mind that when KCTCS decided to abolish tenure for new hires, it started itself down the road towards greater efficiency. And this isn’t just a “Kentucky thing.” Other states are looking into changing the tenure rules as well.

In the meantime, the Board of Regents offered the president of the University of Kentucky a $168,000 “performance bonus.” Lee Todd, who earns $304,000 per year, wisely turned it down, saying that it would be inappropriate in this economic climate, when faculty and staff didn’t get raises this year.

The response? The Board voted to give it to him anyway, with one member saying “"He is CEO of a $2.4 billion entity. I think anything under $1 million is paltry, personally."

Welcome to the future of education.


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Teach Your Children Well
by AndrewMc | 9/07/2009 07:00:00 AM
This week, the President of the United States plans to speak to the nation’s school children in order to urge them to stay in school, work hard to succeed, and don’t do drugs. According to an e-mail sent by Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, the president’s message is that kids should “work hard, set goals for their education and take responsibility for their learning.” Uh oh.

The message of working hard to better oneself is apparently one that is both dangerous, and anathema, to large swaths of the Republican Party.



Naturally, there is a Republican backlash against the president’s attempt to indoctrinate our children with the crazy message that they should work hard in school, that they should use their education to get ahead in life, and that staying off drugs will, in the long run, lead to a life in which they can become prosperous citizens who can contribute to the greatness that is the United States of America. The very idea of this speech has made Republicans irate.

Of course. Because what could be more insidious that the president of the United States trying to get children to do the very thing that the vast majority of us agree that they should do? Is it the message that they should work hard? That they should take responsibility for their learning? Both of those ideas strike at the very foundation of Republican ideals of laziness and reliance on the government to tell you what to do.

We can posit a number of reasons for Republicans’ reaction. Robin Gibbs dismissed it as an indication of the “silly season.” I dunno. If that’s the cause, it’s been “silly season” since November 5th. Others have attributed it to the August doldrums. But what with the health care debate raging across the country, the war in Afghanistan, and the steady trickle of mostly-depressing economic data, there’s been a distinct lack of fodder for the papers this August.

A new term seems to have entered the American lexicon—Baracknophobia—which describes the irrational fear of all things related to Barack Obama. Except I’m not sure it’s that, either.

I think there are a couple of intertwined explanations. On the one hand, the Republican party is essentially bereft of any single elected national leader with a coherent intellectual agenda who can reach people in a systemic fashion. They have nobody who can speak for them from the steps of the Capitol who commands the respect of the rank-and-file. Perhaps the only elected official who comes close for them in terms of national prominence, unfortunately for Republicans, is Michelle Bachman. Most people, however, would recognize that she’s nuttier than a fruitcake. Seriously.

Instead of intellectual rhetoric, what the Republicans have is an array of people from the talk-circuit-media [Hannity, Limbaugh, Beck] who throw out red meat to their listeners in order to boost ratings. A vicious cycle ensues as the more traditional media outlets—television and print news—pick up on the rantings and elevate those “ideas” to national prominence.

It makes for great entertainment, bad politics, and, I believe, a dangerous cultural and intellectual environment.

A republic is at its healthiest when it has political parties that can stand in opposition to each other on policy matters, but cooperate when necessary. Within that, though, it is imperative that both parties have clearly defined agendas with intellectual foundations that speak to the core principles of their respective followers. In cases where a country has only a two-party system, it is especially important for the opposition party to have a clear set of policies with which it can challenge the majority group.

Right now the United States doesn’t have that. We have one party in power that is attempting to forward the set of policies on which it was elected. This party has not done the best job of framing the debate, to be sure. However, while it may not be clear what the Democrats will eventually settle for in negotiations, it is pretty clear what the Democrats stand for—health care reform, environmental policies, greater regulations, great power to labor instead of management, and a whole array of other reforms.

Republicans used to have a clear ideology, framed by people like Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley. These were people who actually attacked the founders of the John Birch society for being too wingnutty. Such a thing would be unimaginable in today’s so-called conservative environment.

And so we find ourselves in a setting where asking schoolchildren to write letters to the president to suggest solutions for the president [something that my own university would call “student engagement” and for which they would dish three credit hours] is labeled “Marxist” by the Michele Malkins of the world. If that weren’t loopy enough, Democratic strategist Patricia O’Neill writes this off to “diversity,” as if one of the Democrats’ main party platforms [the push to include more minorities in all areas of American life] is equivalent to the ranting of a fringe group of whackjobs.

It’s not news that something is seriously wrong with civic discourse in American pubic life. It’s probably not even news that there is something so fundamentally flawed inside the Republican party that it cannot challenge and control, or at least ignore, the crazy in its base. And, I have to say, it’s not really even news that the Republican party cannot form, much less act on, any kind of coherent set of policies that reflect either its party platform or its core principles.

This latest round of “Say no at all costs” might be different. The vocal group of Republicans who scream about Obama asking children to be responsible, stay in school, and not do drugs may not represent the core of the party. But they do represent the most vocal group. They are the same group of people who just got home from Teabagging and disrupting town halls. And they are the face of the party, whether mainstream Republicans like it or not.

For a while I had thought “good, then they can go on and lose a few more elections.” I’m no longer convinced that this is a good thing for the American Republic.

[An update: The White House has released President Obama's subversive speech.]

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Where Has America Been?
by Ralph Brauer | 1/19/2009 06:13:00 PM



There may be no more perplexing nation than our own, but then maybe everyone thinks that about their home country. America can inspire and infuriate. It can move you to tears and fits of anger and then, when you least expect it, it can produce a moment that makes shivers run up and down your spine.



Even the sight of our flag can induce contrary emotions. Some people have wanted to burn it or fly it upside down. Others have turned it into a tacky trinket, a public relations figleaf or an advertising gimmick whose disrespect may be as despicable as spitting on the flag. Perhaps it is fitting our national anthem should be about the flag and that that very flag should be enshrined in a special case at the Museum of American History as if it were the holiest of icons.

Perhaps nothing inspires these contradictory emotions more than American history itself. As schoolchildren we are taught about our past as if it were a long march of names and dates always moving forward with a Biblical sense of purpose. But even before we graduate from high school we know there is more to it than that causing some of us to react like that storied kid who asked of a worshiped athlete who suddenly became enveloped in scandal, "Say it ain't so, Joe."

In recent years we cannot even agree on what should be in those history schoolbooks so a somewhat dutiful formula has set in that dictates various groups each receive their allotted pages. The formula is under constant readjustment as events cause yet another calibration which brings a formerly forgotten figure back from obscurity to be placed on the pedestal from which it fell. Sometimes the pieces are too shattered, too scattered for even horses and men to put them together again.

In yet another American irony many of those shattered pieces involve people who never even made it on to the pedestal. We will never really know even a tiny fragment about slavery from the perspective of the enslaved. Literally millions of stolen sacred Native American objects lie in obscure museum drawers severed from their context and traditions, treated by their keepers as curiosities or artifacts while those for whom they have the most meaning regard them as living not corpses to be dissected. For yet others who may have carefully written their inner thoughts during moments stolen from oppressive drudgery that weighed them down like the uncomfortable garments they were forced to wear, their past was often discarded as if it were little more than another piece of garbage which had the potential to make people feel uncomfortable.

To be a first generation American in such a nation only heightens all the contradictions precisely because your family came not because this country represented a city on a hill, but both more and less than that. My grandparents didn't even stay and my father always retained an accent my friends could detect but I could not.

To be the child of an immigrant--especially a political one--is to find yourself personally subjected to the best and worst of this country in ways only others in your position can truly understand. Your past is neither here nor there, but converges like two torrents into rapids that threaten to upset your equilibrium. But those torrents also pulse with creative energy that you find difficult to hold back even when you wish it would go away. In that creative energy is also a unique perspective for we know we would not be alive today were it not for America.

That is why for several decades now I have experienced considerable frustration at people, some of them friends, who have allowed their frustrations to occasionally slide into cynicism that becomes expressed as contempt for the American people. Yet to lose faith in the American people is to lose faith in our nation, for at the heart of this singular democratic experiment lies an extraordinary gamble where even all the machinations of the nation's founders could not cut the odds.

They feared what James Madison in one of the most extraordinary political documents ever written--Federalist #10--called the issue of faction. Yet in the end despite all the safeguards they put in place, safeguards any fifth-grader can recite, it is the people on which they wagered their lives, fortunes and sacred honor.

Perhaps that is why America senses how important tomorrow has become. First of all, it is testimony to the talents of one man, Barack Obama, who made that bet, but did so in a truly singular fashion against some pretty long odds. When I think of Obama and the moment he will place his hand on the Bible to become our first African American President, I can't help but think of buses.

It was a woman on a bus who symbolized the beginning of the path that pointed to this moment. She precipitated a bus boycott that brought forth a man whose holiday we celebrate today to the greatness that lay within him waiting to be awakened. It was buses that carried a delegation of Mississippi Freedom Democrats to Atlantic City in 1964 to remind America of what it stood for even as some sitting uncomfortably in their seats were not sure they would make it home alive.

It was from a bus that one of them, Fannie Lou Hamer, was pulled, placed in jail and beaten to near death. It was buses that carried the idealists of Freedom Summer and those participants of the march that ended in Lincoln's granite shadow where the man whose crusade had started with that bus boycott inspired this nation to its very soul.

Now again people are taking to the buses, only this time not in anger or protest but in celebration. I saw a picture of a woman climbing the steps to one of those buses and in her face was written the larger script of someone who had climbed on to one of those buses almost four score and seven years ago.

Buses are converging on Washington in a way they never have in America before for such an event. This is different than Coxey's Army or the Bonus March or any of dozens of other marches, for it is an expression of faith and hope. America has again confounded us. People like that woman perhaps understand perhaps best of all. The look on her face said that this is a moment to be there, to bear witness, to for once just be.

When those buses pull away from Washington in a few days carrying their loads of sated travelers they will again be enveloped in the fog that is America. No one can say where the visions they bear with them will travel, but all of us in America who are not on those buses should this time pledge to make sure they reach their destinations safely.

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The Bailout We Need
by AndrewMc | 1/11/2009 04:21:00 PM
There have been a few musings of late regarding what kinds of bailout higher education needs—or if indeed higher education needs anything more than a re-ordering of its fiscal priorities. Some have suggested that a massive infusion of cash into American universities would help revitalize the economy by providing an educational infrastructure that would transform American education, and by extension America itself. In early December the Carnegie Corporation took out a two-page advertisement in the New York Times in which 36 university CEOs begged President-elect Obama not to forget higher education when it came time to spread around the bailout largesse. Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich wonders why we're bailing out out Wall Street but not public education.

The Wall Street Journal, predictably, has suggested that a little belt-tightening might be just the thing. One blogger at The (Washington D.C.) Examiner reacted to Carnegie’s advertisement by saying “having the federal government borrow money so that pampered professors and university administrators at prestigious institutions like UVA can continue to indulge their surf-and-turf appetites is as ludicrous as it is offensive.”








Set aside, for the moment, the misconception that some may have about what goes into funding higher education. The fact is that many universities overspend, or spend on the wrong things, in an effort to appear modern or to attract more donors. A prime example is college athletics. Big-time college athletics serves no educational purpose that cannot be fulfilled by intramural sports. Study after study—some by the NCAA itself—detail the ways that universities pour millions of dollars into football programs that provide no concrete returns. Yet despite budgets that have increased massively in the past few decades, higher education is chronically underfunded. As Carnegie pointed out, universities and colleges are the places that produce the solutions that will help fix and ultimately strengthen our economy.

Does Higher Ed need a bailout? Well, not in the sense that the Big 3 does. It doesn’t produce a product that nobody wants. Nobody is suggesting that college graduates don’t have the skills to succeed in 21st century America. It also doesn’t need a bailout for the reasons that Wall Street does. Higher Ed produces something of value (an educated citizenry) that always increases in value, and does it well.


No, if American Higher Ed needs a bailout it is because American Higher Ed isn’t capable of delivering its product to enough people. Let me say that in a different way. If Higher Ed needs a bailout, it is because not enough people can afford what it produces. If Higher Ed needs a bailout, it needs a bailout that will help it make its product accessible to more people.


That is, not enough people have what Higher Ed is selling. Fewer than a quarter of all Americans over 21 have college degrees. And it’s not for lack of desire. People want what Higher Ed can provide—better education, better access to jobs. Its just that for a variety of reasons, a large segment of the American population can’t access the product. That’s what any bailout has to address.

Let’s imagine, then, that American higher education was going to get a bailout. What would it look like? What should it look like? Are those two things different?

In terms of what would happen, well, it depends on the model. If it’s a Big 3-style bailout, then there’s a great deal of debate, the faculty and staff (but not the administrators) at higher ed institutions are blamed for the problem, a pot of cash is dangled, a bunch of strings are attached to the money, and institutions gratefully take it and have to account for the ways in which it is spent. If it’s a Wall Street model then there’s very little debate, the students get blamed for the mess, American higher education gets handed a bunch of cash, few or no strings attached, and college presidents are trusted to Do The Right Thing.

But let’s imagine that a bailout really is in the offing. We won’t quibble about how many millions or tens billions it might take. Instead let’s turn our heads to what should happen. For university presidents a “Big-3”-style bailout with the attendant oversight would be a disaster. Far better to have a Wall Street-style “here, take some money and keep being irresponsible” infusion of lucre. I’ll operate on two premises here: The first is that I’ll take the Carnegie advertisement at its word. If the purpose of an educational bailout is, as the authors suggest, to produce educated people who will be the foundation for economic stability, then any bailout must not only be geared specifically toward that end, but must also rework American education in a way that ensures that the production of broadly educated people is the sole purpose. The second is that in order to ensure the first premise, the quality of education must not suffer. That is, the point isn’t to produce more people with college diplomas. The point of any bailout for American universities is to produce more and better-educated people who can make a better future for this country.

Any bailout of American higher education must therefore begin with a bailout of primary and secondary education in this country that has as its goal producing more college-ready kids. Although test scores have improved in recent years, American primary and secondary education is still a mess. Too many kids still graduate unable to read, do anything but the simplest math, and needing intensive remedial education. This is not the fault of teachers, but certainly better-trained teachers will help. Start the bailout by providing funds for every middle- and high school teacher to gain an MA in their field of teaching, and then providing enough money to ensure salary increases at double the cost of living for the next ten years. Following the findings of numerous studies (Krieger 2002, Project STAR, etc) funds would be provided to ensure that every school district has enough money to be able to limit their class sizes to no more than 15 kids, with 12 kids per classroom being the targeted ideal. Those are limits, not averages.

Each classroom would have one MA-level teacher, and one teacher’s aide with a Bachelor’s-level degree in a related field. For those grade levels and subjects that do not require Master’s-level knowledge (kindergarten, for example), teachers could choose to take an MA in any field that might help them in teaching. Each school in every district would have a fully-funded “resource room” that would serve as a place where kids could get remedial services. Teachers who do not want to get an MA would become teacher's aides in another school, and be replaced with MA-level teachers.

Every school would have one textbook for every student for every subject taught, and enough money to fund science labs, physical education, and enough computers with full Internet access so that no child would be without one. Every school district would also have, depending on its needs, enough money to fully fund “adult continuing education centers” where parents who are not able to meet minimum educational levels in reading, writing, and mathematics, could learn these basic skills. Legislation would have to be enacted to ensure, as the Carnegie letter points also argues, that state legislators do not use the federal bailout as an excuse for reducing their own fiscal commitment to primary and secondary education. Continued funding would depend not on test scores, but on improving the college admission rates of students, including admission to two-year, four-year, and trade colleges.

Will this solve the myriad problems with primary and secondary education in the United States? No, certainly not. A whole host of problems exist. But other problems require longer-term solutions and negotiations, and would more properly be solved on the state level. But, it’s a start.

What about the colleges and universities? My model would be closer to a Big-3 bailout than a Wall Street bailout. That is, any two- or four-year college or university wanting access to federal funds would have to submit to an outside audit of all its books, including funds in so-called “foundation” accounts that are traditionally used to pay college presidents, coaches, and others their off-books stipends. No open-accounting, no federal funds. Period. Likewise, states would have to continue to provide funding to higher ed, and would have to develop plans that lay out the ways that state-level funding of higher education would continue to grow in the same ways that it had in the past. Some kind of enforcement mechanism would have to be developed to show that the state weren’t substituting federal funding for their own, and that federal bailout money was “bailout money” and not a new source of continuing money.

Universities would have to develop budgets that justify educational spending, as opposed to athletics funding. Athletics must comprise no more than 1% of the university budget. University presidents would receive a salary equivalent to the average salary of a full Professor, plus whatever comes from foundation accounts. Then, every university desiring federal bailout money would have to develop a plan to prioritize spending federal bailout money along the following lines:

  1. Reducing class size to a ratio of not more than 20 students to each teacher. Not as an average, but as a limit.
  2. Funding scholarships for needs-based students and showing that the expansion in their enrollments is a function of the increased access to education by needs-based students.
  3. Creating a pool of funds to help students complete community-based learning projects that would benefit the community as a whole, while the students were still in school. Projects might include things like public history students funding the creation of museum displays, arts students funding community theater, engineering students coordinating Habitat-for-Humanity projects, etc. etc.
  4. Identifying “21st century skills” and preparing students, in whatever their given field, using those skills.
  5. Increase funding for research projects across the board.


Federal funds could not be used to replace already-existing funds, only to supplement, and could only be used for expenses directly related to education—not for buildings, maintenance, groundskeeping, or any other non-classroom expense. Those other expense are important, true. But if the purpose of a bailout is to create better-educated society then the bailout money ought to be spent on education.

This isn’t a perfect solution, to be sure. But I’d suggest that if higher education wants a bailout that they ought to be prepared to accept greater oversight and responsibility as part of it. And if the purpose of a bailout is to create a better-educated citizenry capable of solving America’s problems, then bringing that education to a much broader array of students must be part of any solution.



You thoughts, additions, modifications, or subtractions?






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Liberté pour l’Histoire
by Ahistoricality | 10/17/2008 02:39:00 PM
Via Ralph Luker, I note a new effort to clarify the liberating role of history, and the importance, conversely, of liberating history from legislated truths. The new appeal says, in part [emphasis added]:
History must not be a slave to contemporary politics nor can it be written on the command of competing memories. In a free state, no political authority has the right to define historical truth and to restrain the freedom of the historian with the threat of penal sanctions.
...
We ask government authorities to recognize that, while they are responsible for the maintenance of the collective memory, they must not establish, by law and for the past, an official truth whose legal application can carry serious consequences for the profession of history and for intellectual liberty in general.
In a democracy, liberty for history is liberty for all.

I would add, in the list of dangers to history from state attention, the creation of national curriculums of such detail and narrow conception as to force primary and secondary school history into memorization exercises, stripping them of the inquisitive and argumentative joy that real history offers.

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