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Showing posts from February, 2011

Five Myths about Liberal Academia (Washington Post, February 2011

By Matthew Woessner, April Kelly-Woessner and Stanley Rothman Friday, February 25, 2011; 12:00 PM Do red-blooded, hard-working Americans pay thousands of dollars each year to send their children to college, only to have those kids turned into pot-smoking Obamacare-lovers by a pack of communist hippies? This stereotype -- professors as brainwashing left-wing ideologues -- has dogged academia at least since the Vietnam War era. But our nation's vilified professoriate isn't composed of just Marxists and Whole Foods shoppers. Let's upend five popular misconceptions about the people educating the next generation. [the rest of the article here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/25/AR2011022503169.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Tenure Plays an Important Role in the Academic Mission

Representative Curtis Oda’s bill allowing me to club or shoot cats I deem feral is a good idea, unless you think about it. Similarly, Representative Christopher Herrod’s bill that would end academic tenure at public universities in Utah in the service of accountability and competition is a no brainer, unless you think about it. The words Mr. Herrod features -- accountability, competition, and taxpayer -- are potent. So are the words I would highlight: accountability, competition, and citizen. If we’re nothing but taxpayers, the only relevant questions about education are whether our money is being spent in ways we want it spent. If we are citizens, however, we’re engaged in the common exercise of figuring out how best to meet the needs of commerce, science, law, education, and so on. For the most part, we leave educational accountability to disciplinary experts, just as philosophers and linguists leave lawmaking to the lawyers and politicians and the business investments to those