HÁ QUEM AINDA SE ILUDA

Esta forma de pensar faz parte do problema, não da solução (simplesmente, porque não há solução):

End the University as We Know It

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”

Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.

In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings. The other obstacle to change is that colleges and universities are self-regulating or, in academic parlance, governed by peer review. While trustees and administrations theoretically have some oversight responsibility, in practice, departments operate independently. To complicate matters further, once a faculty member has been granted tenure he is functionally autonomous. Many academics who cry out for the regulation of financial markets vehemently oppose it in their own departments.

If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin with six major steps:

1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.

Just a few weeks ago, I attended a meeting of political scientists who had gathered to discuss why international relations theory had never considered the role of religion in society. Given the state of the world today, this is a significant oversight. There can be no adequate understanding of the most important issues we face when disciplines are cloistered from one another and operate on their own premises.

It would be far more effective to bring together people working on questions of religion, politics, history, economics, anthropology, sociology, literature, art, religion and philosophy to engage in comparative analysis of common problems. As the curriculum is restructured, fields of inquiry and methods of investigation will be transformed.

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as practices shape beliefs.

A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.

3. Increase collaboration among institutions. All institutions do not need to do all things and technology makes it possible for schools to form partnerships to share students and faculty. Institutions will be able to expand while contracting. Let one college have a strong department in French, for example, and the other a strong department in German; through teleconferencing and the Internet both subjects can be taught at both places with half the staff. With these tools, I have already team-taught semester-long seminars in real time at the Universities of Helsinki and Melbourne.

4. Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.

5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained. It is, therefore, necessary to help them prepare for work in fields other than higher education. The exposure to new approaches and different cultures and the consideration of real-life issues will prepare students for jobs at businesses and nonprofit organizations. Moreover, the knowledge and skills they will cultivate in the new universities will enable them to adapt to a constantly changing world.

6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Initially intended to protect academic freedom, tenure has resulted in institutions with little turnover and professors impervious to change. After all, once tenure has been granted, there is no leverage to encourage a professor to continue to develop professionally or to require him or her to assume responsibilities like administration and student advising. Tenure should be replaced with seven-year contracts, which, like the programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed. This policy would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers, scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.

For many years, I have told students, “Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.” My hope is that colleges and universities will be shaken out of their complacency and will open academia to a future we cannot conceive.

Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia, is the author of the forthcoming Field Notes From Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 27, 2009, on page A23 of the New York edition.

À atenção de todos os tristes que andam neste momento a fazer candidaturas a projectos FCT

O American Way of Science

Luís Fernandes

O apelo à internacionalização dos cientistas equivale, na prática, à submissão ao sistema científico anglo-americano É comum ver hoje designadas as nossas sociedades como “sociedades do conhecimento”.

A produção e a difusão de saber científico são aspectos-chave do funcionamento deste tipo de sociedades, o que confere às suas comunidades científicas um papel estratégico. É por isso que, com regularidade, os governos reafirmam ritualmente o seu investimento na sociedade do conhecimento em geral – veja-se o caso recente do já famoso computador Magalhães – e no sector científico em particular.

Ora, a Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia tornou públicas, no final do ano passado, as classificações dos centros de investigação que financia.

Não pretendemos pôr em causa a necessidade de avaliar as estruturas da investigação científica ou, sequer, colocar em causa a idoneidade e a isenção do processo que foi levado a cabo. Visa-se, apenas, reflectir sobre o modo como tende a ajuizar-se hoje o trabalho de quem se dedica profissionalmente à ciência, procurando mostrar como este juízo responde a um sistema de regras, nem sempre claramente explicitadas, que relevam de factores extracientíficos.

O nosso ângulo de análise é elaborado a partir das ciências sociais e humanas, admitindo por isso que, para outros sectores da divisão das ciências, as questões possam não ser colocadas, em relação a alguns aspectos, do mesmo modo.

As investigações norte-americana e inglesa têm vindo a adquirir progressiva influência no sistema científico internacional, convertendo-se numa verdadeira dominação. É próprio dos sistemas de dominação um traço etnocentrista: são melhores do que os outros, como o demonstra o facto de dominarem, e, portanto, consideram-se, por uma espécie de direito natural, investidos da incumbência de ditarem aos outros um conjunto de regras. E é próprio dos dominados acabarem por incorporar essas regras, de tal modo que passam a achar que são naturalmente suas.

No caso vertente, elas ditam aquilo que deve ser investigado, o formato em que devem decorrer os certames de especialistas, em que órgãos da comunicação da ciência devem ser publicados os resultados e em que língua os investigadores devem expressar-se – o que decorre naturalmente do idioma dos países desses órgãos. As línguas inglesa e, em menor grau, francesa são os instrumentos de afirmação da hegemonia.

Sabemos como os sistemas de controlo apostam na vigilância das linguagens e das línguas – a hegemonia exprime-se numa linguagem positivista e na língua inglesa. Todo o sistema de dominação que não se impõe pela força, mas pela subtileza, tende progressivamente a ser incorporado como natural.

É por isso que as gerações de investigadores mais jovens, aculturadas no circuito de congressos internacionais e nos circuitos virtuais da net, onde o inglês é o veículo, não sentem isto como dominação, mas como proficiência – é-se tanto mais competitivo e, portanto, num sistema marcado por uma competição desenfreada, tanto melhor cientista quanto mais e melhor se falar e escrever em linguagem positivista e em língua inglesa.

Note-se que ainda há poucas décadas esta ditadura da língua pendia para o francês. E sabemos dos esforços que a França faz para se manter como língua internacional da ciência, numa consciência clara da perda de influência que a sua desvalorização acarreta – porque uma língua não é só um veículo, é um sistema de pensamento, é constitutiva de uma cultura. Enfim, o sistema internacional são meia dúzia de países, uma linguagem e duas línguas.

Para os avaliadores da FCT, não conta publicar um artigo numa revista brasileira ou espanhola? E polaca ou grega? Os polacos ou os gregos não conseguem fazer uma revista científica que valha pontos?

Quando fazemos investigação solicitada e financiada por instituições portuguesas, devemos escrever os relatórios em inglês? E, se a problemática for pouco interessante para os norte-americanos, por razões da nossa especificidade sociocultural, não podendo publicá-la nesses países, esta investigação não vale pontos? Publicá-la aqui não serve para nada? Então a produção de saber não deve ser utilizada pela comunidade a que diz respeito? Não visa agir na nossa realidade próxima? E, se publicar aqui não vale nada, como pode algum dia chegar-se a ter uma boa revista científica?

Portanto, o justo apelo que é feito aos cientistas para se internacionalizarem – o que, nas regras do jogo científico, é não só sensato como indispensável – equivale, na prática, à submissão ao sistema científico anglo-americano.

Publicando nas revistas que, neste sistema, são consideradas de qualidade, estamos internacionalizados. E são estas que lemos, são estas que pomos os nossos alunos a ler e é nestas que alguns deles algum dia publicarão – fechando-se assim o círculo da dominação, que a reforça e, no limite, a hegemoniza, tornando-a indiscutida e indiscutível.

Foi este o mecanismo pelo qual uma série de países alimentou o sistema financeiro liderado pelos EUA convertido em tentativa de hegemonia neoliberal e cujo círculo acaba de romper-se. Se esta dominação se verificasse a outros níveis, desqualificando tudo o que se passasse noutras latitudes que não a do eixo anglo-americano e, em menor escala, francófono, esses países seriam acusados de imperialistas e de praticarem a discriminação.

Como podem pessoas que pertencem à nossa cúpula intelectual, como são os membros da comunidade científica, não se darem conta de que estão a ser alinhados por uma mão adestradora que é, em particular no caso das ciências sociais e humanas, exterior à sua lógica de produção e difusão do conhecimento?

Como não se dão conta de que estão a ser infantilizados em interrogatórios de senhores que vêm, por meia dúzia de dias, ao nosso país constituir um júri desfasado da nossa realidade e incapaz de ler, sequer, o melhor da nossa produção porque este não está, as mais das vezes, nas línguas deles? Que fazemos do pensamento crítico, que devíamos ter tão treinado? Como somos tão complexos e críticos para umas coisas e tão simplórios e amorfos para outras?

Fiquemo-nos, para já, com estas questões, enquanto não chega o próximo júri internacional convidado pela FCT e não nos ajoelhamos de novo, prontos para o exame de consciência científica…

Investigador

in Público – Opinião 27.01.2009

ÚLTIMA LIÇÃO

I’m Leaving

By John Smith

Inside Higher Ed, 31 de Outubro de 2008

The withdrawal of the last Russian regiment in Afghanistan

I distinctly recall the first day of graduate school. Some of my classmates knew the field’s top-tier journals, the term “anonymous peer reviewing,” and each professor’s research area of expertise. I was a neophyte with raw, analytical skills, no publications, a healthy ego and a desire to teach at a small, liberal arts college, much like my alma mater. I soon learned my discipline – the jargon, the journals and the gossip.

I honed my writing skills, and, more important, my thinking skills. Yet for all the merits of graduate school, even the premier one from which I was graduated, I left disappointed and ambivalent about the process. I took some classes with engaged, brilliant and dedicated professors, but I also attended more than a few seminars with detached scholars who thought of students as distractions from their labs and research. They were famous, but they could not teach, even their own research.

Like many other graduate students, I slogged through the bad, and made the most of the good. I got the job at the liberal arts college, where I received tenure, and even served as a department chair (a burden, not an honor, I tell you). I now want out.

Why? Because I fear that I have become the archetypical professor whom I did not want to become.

Don’t get me wrong. I still prepare my lectures and judging from the teacher evaluations, I know that I make students better thinkers. The classroom give-and-take produces a high that cannot be easily described or imitated. Even more, I love doing research. Sitting with pen and book in hand, or typing after months of textual analysis, is a rare joy. You mean I get paid to think? About ideas that inspire me? And I can read other research it, and dissect its merits? This gig is too good to be true.

Bingo.

After too many years at this job (I am in my mid-40s), I have grown to question higher education in ways that cannot be rectified by a new syllabus, or a sabbatical, or, heaven forbid, a conference roundtable. No, my troubles with this treasured profession are both broad and deep, and they begin with a fervent belief that most of today’s college students, especially those that come to college straight from high school, are unnecessarily coddled. Professors and administrators seek to “nurture” and “engage” and they are doing so at the expense of teaching. The result: a discernable and precipitous decline in the quality of college students. More of them come to campus with dreadful study habits. Too few of them read for pleasure. Too many drink and smoke excessively. They are terribly ill-prepared for four years of hard work, and most dangerously, they do not think that college should be arduous. Instead they perceive college as an overnight recreation center in which they exercise, eat, and in between playing extracurricular sports, they carry books around. If a professor is lucky, the books are being skimmed hours before class.

How do I know that my concerns are not unique to my employer, or my classroom? My students are brutally honest – they tell me with candor and without shame that their peers think of college as a four year cruise without a destination.

No doubt these students deserve some blame for their lethargy, but some culpability lies with their professors, and the administrators who ostensibly but unsuccessfully provide vision and direction. Today’s faculty and administrators capitulate to students’ demands in innumerable ways. They hold classes outside on sunny days, not really caring if there is no blackboard, or if the students are admiring each other instead of the texts to be dissected. They encourage students to think of college as a “comfortable” and “supportive” community, not as a means to acquire necessary skills. Far too many of my colleagues are dialing in – showing up late, popping in videos during class, assigning group projects, or sitting in a circle and asking students how they feel. Why they have abandoned classroom rigor is something that only they can answer. But one answer is simple – students flock to these popular classes, probably because they cater to the students’ worst sensibilities. Homework is minimal, or sometimes optional. Surprise quizzes are considered unfair. Late assignments are not failed. Some grades are even negotiable.

Such a pedagogy runs counter to the school, undergraduate and graduate training that I received, but it is openly embraced by nervous administrators who encourage faculty members to be innovative, experimental and experiential. They speak openly about pandering to student demands, but opt not to use the word “pander,” employing instead the curious and the trendy phrase “student empowerment.” I prefer to empower them with reading skills. But such a mission is considered old-fashioned. Maybe I should attend a seminar (don’t worry, the college will pay for it) titled “Technology in the classroom” or “Innovative pedagogies in the 21st century.” I pass.

Grade inflation is rampant. Students think of a “B minus” as an F. I constantly get criticized for grading too harshly, even though I find my mean grade point average has risen over the past decade. A “C” to today’s student is unfathomable. “Professor, I am on scholarship. How can you give me a C?” I remind them that I do not “give’” grades, but such semantics are lost on the student who yearns for an A at any cost. I tell them that I got Bs and Cs and I never complained, because I knew I deserved them. They do not believe me. (Maybe I should post my undergraduate and graduate transcripts on my office door?)

Grades did not matter to me because I believed in the superiority of my professor’s judgment. I recall questioning a professor’s grade – once and only once, only after I showed the assignment and his comments to a senior who lived down the hall. She advised me to speak to the professor. I did. The professor had made a simple calculating mistake, and apologized for his error. We remain friends to this day.

Today’s students are not questioning the logic behind the grades; They are questioning why their grades in my class are lower than in their other classes. Down the hall, those same students can get an A- by putting in three hours of work a week. How do I know? The students tell me, candidly, and without shame or the slightest pangs of guilt. To them, this disparity just doesn’t seem fair, and is the fault of the tougher grader.

Higher education for too many undergraduates at too many liberal arts colleges has become a puffy sofa nestled with down pillows. For a few bucks and in a few hours, students can take a test and learn that they are language disabled, or mathematically disabled, or for a few bucks more, both. Students increasingly ask me during advising sessions if a class is tough or hard, or if the professor assigns a lot of reading, because they need to “lighten their load.” “I want to take a class with Professor So-And-So. I have a lot on my mind, and I don’t want to stress out.” “Don’t worry,” I say, “you won’t.”

This comfy zone of mediocrity extends beyond the classroom. “Student life” largely serves to debilitate the notion of a genuine, deliberative, academic community. Rather than fuel cerebral discussions with activities for the mind, resident advisors and their adult supervisors plan activities that redefine anti-intellectualism. There is Sensitivity Day, Tolerance Day, and Wear [insert color here] Day, and a host of other events that are aimed at “inspiring.” Dorm life is supposed to be cool, fun and engaging. For me, it was simply a place to sleep.

My faculty colleagues rarely complain about their daily lives, or about the state of higher education. To the contrary, they feed the mindset that all students are exceptional by awarding high grades, honors and special prizes to the intellectually inferior. These faculty also yearn to be comfortable. How? By immersing themselves in trivial pursuits, like how many members should serve in the faculty senate, or whether serving on the Education Policy Committee should be determined by a simple majority, or a run-off election.

Intellectual sparring (dare I use the term) about ideas – among students and faculty – has been replaced by one-sided, partisan drivel (for example, Obama = admirable. McCain = terrible and, for the record, I will be voting for Obama). While it would be easy to blame a liberal bias among faculty for this groupthink, it should be noted that this simple world of good and bad pervades the world around us. On radio, television and the Internet, ideological pundits scream at one another with vitriol and fervor. My partisan colleagues are universally National Public Radio listeners. They do not hear the other side, so it is easy to demonize the other side. Their students are listening, and sadly think of conservatism in its many forms as horrific. Worse still, they now conflate liberal passion and advocacy with justice, and by default, analytic rigor and reason. They do not weigh evidence, or take note of pro, cons, costs or benefits. Doing so would be to admit that there are merits to positions they do not hold. To acknowledge that their ideology is imperfect is the first step towards compromise, or in their overused, precious phrase, “selling out.”

Their idealism, of course, is a work in progress. Nonprofit employment is admirable, but doing the same work for a for-profit corporation (with health care and retirement benefits) is deemed suspicious. Yet when college is completed, too many graduates have trouble finding work. The economy is rough, and even rougher for math-disabled, language-disabled, ideologically-driven, emotive students who do not read for pleasure. Should they take, say, an accounting course, or Shakespeare, either of which would test or push their comfort zones? Their hearts say yes, but the problem is that these classes meet early in the morning (Shakespeare at 8:30 am? C’mon!), when hangovers are to be nursed and sleepy minds are not to be awakened. Besides, rumor is that the Shakespeare professor is a tough grader.

Working at a small college is no easy task. We professors oftentimes work without research assistants. We have heavy teaching loads, and we grade our own assignments. Endowments are low, and so too are salaries and research funding. But hard work need not be depressing, and rather than become depressed, I have learned after almost 20 years that I am woefully ill-suited for today’s classroom.

Will I miss some of my colleagues? Sure. They have a remarkable ability to enjoy their craft, but I have great difficulty believing that I am making a significant difference in the lives of my students. Are my peers aware students are skimming the reading? Yes. They have figured out that getting emotionally invested in the student body is both taxing and fruitless. Instead they enjoy their autonomy and the bucolic campus life without a second thought, or with a deeply imbued cognitive dissonance that I have not yet embraced.

I will not miss all of them. Simply put, too many are intellectually lazy. Many of my colleagues think of the day they receive tenure as the last official day they have to produce research. They consider research as a burden, not as a labor of love that complements teaching.

As for the students, I know that I’ll miss the good ones. Any good professor treasures the joy of seeing in a student’s eyes the “ah-ha – now I get it” moment. It cannot be replicated, nor can it be easily described. It is sadly ever increasingly rare. In fact I think I am doing a genuine service to the better students by leaving. I cannot in good conscience dumb down a lecture, knowing full well that the gifted and talented have read four chapters beyond the syllabus, and that they are not being sufficiently challenged.

I am ready to move on – perhaps for a career where deadlines are honored, ideas are exchanged and gimmicks and fads are routinely avoided because they distract from advancing the mission of gaining and sharing knowledge. Yes, it is time to find another line of work, where I can enjoy the fruits of my labor, even if I realize that the grass is grayer, if not greener, elsewhere.

John Smith is the pseudonym of a professor at a liberal arts college. He asked to remain anonymous because he is continuing to teach while he is job-hunting and doesn’t want his comments to reflect on his institution.

[via Que Universidade?]

O MERCADO ÚNICO DA BANALIDADE

No MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE:

O Processo de Bolonha e o futuro da universidade

João P. Almeida Fernandes, Alexandre Bettencourt, Christopher Bochmann

A recente e controversa aprovação pela Assembleia da República do Regime Jurídico das Instituições do Ensino Superior (RJIES) é apenas o primeiro passo de um processo que pretende instituir em Portugal um novo modelo de universidade, que também se generaliza na Europa. Ao RJIES deverão seguir-se disposições relativas à avaliação e um novo Estatuto da Carreira Docente.

Estas disposições convergem na adopção ou imposição à universidade europeia de um modelo organizacional que, pesa embora a aceitação acrítica que tem tido, corresponde a uma visão particular da instituição universitária, do seu passado e o do seu papel no futuro, que é altamente discutível – e tem sido, sobretudo, insuficientemente discutida antes de adoptada.

Clicar para continuar a ler

EXEMPLOS A SEGUIR

Repress U: How to Build a Homeland Security Campus in Seven Steps
by Michael Gould-Wartofsky

Free speech zones. Taser guns. Hidden cameras. Data mining. A new security curriculum. Private security contractors… Welcome to the new homeland security campus

From Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned their attention to “violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism” – as it was recently dubbed in a House of Representatives bill of the same name – have set out to reconquer that traditional hotbed of radicalization, the university.
Building a homeland-security campus and bringing the university to heel is a seven-step mission:

1. Target dissidents: As the warfare state has triggered dissent, the campus has increasingly become a target gallery – with student protesters in the crosshairs. The government’s number one target? Peace and justice organizations.

From 2003 to 2007, an unknown number of them made it into the Pentagon’s “Threat and Local Observation Notice” system (TALON), a secretive domestic spying program ostensibly designed to track direct “potential terrorist threats” to the Department of Defense itself. Last year, via Freedom of Information Act requests, the ACLU uncovered at least 186 specific TALON reports on “anti-military protests” in the U.S. – some listed as “credible threats” – from student groups at the University of California-Santa Cruz, State University of New York, Georgia State University, and New Mexico State University, among other campuses.

At more than a dozen universities and colleges, police officers now double as full-time FBI agents and, according to the Campus Law Enforcement Journal, serve on many of the nation’s 100 Joint Terrorism Task Forces. These dual-purpose officer-agents have knocked on student activists’ doors from North Carolina State to the University of Colorado and, in one case, interrogated an Iraqi-born professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst about his antiwar views.

FBI agents, or their campus stand-ins, don’t have to do all the work themselves. Administrators often do it for them, setting up “free speech zones,” which actually constrain speech, and punishing those who step outside them. Last year, protests were typically forced into “free assembly areas” at the University of Central Florida and Clemson University; while students at Hampton and Pace Universities faced expulsion for handing out antiwar flyers, aka “unauthorized materials.”

2. Lock and load: Many campus police departments are morphing into heavily armed garrisons, equipped with a wide array of weaponry from Taser stun guns and pepper guns to shotguns and semiautomatic rifles. Lock-and-load policies that began in the 1990s under the rubric of “the war on crime” only escalated with the President’s Global War on Terror. Each school shooting – most recently the massacre at Virginia Tech – just adds fuel to the armament flames.
Two-thirds of universities now arm their police, according to the Justice Department. Many of the guns being purchased were previously in the province of military units and SWAT teams. For instance, AR-15 rifles (similar to M-16s) are now in the arsenal of the University of Texas campus police. Last April, City University of New York bought dozens of semiautomatic handguns. Now, states like Nevada are even considering plans to allow university staff to pack heat in a “special reserve officer corps.”

Most of the force used on campus these days, though, comes in “less lethal” form, such as the rubber bullets and pepper pellets increasingly used to contain student demonstrations. Then there is the ubiquitous Taser, the electroshock weapon recently ruled a “form of torture” by the UN. A Taser was used by UCLA police in November 2006 to deliver shock after shock to an Iranian-American student for failing to produce his ID at the Powell Library. Last September, a University of Florida student was Tased after asking pointed questions of Senator John Kerry at a public forum, his plea of “Don’t Tase me, bro” becoming the stuff of pop folklore.

3. Keep an eye (or hundreds of them) focused on campus: Surveillance has become a boom industry nationally – one that now reaches deep into the heart of the American campus. In fact, universities have witnessed explosive growth in the electronic surveillance of students, faculty, and campus workers. On ever more campuses, closed-circuit security cameras can track people’s every move, often from hidden or undisclosed locations, sometimes even into classrooms.

The International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators reports that surveillance cameras have now found their way onto at least half of all colleges, their numbers on any given campus doubling, tripling, and in a few cases, rising tenfold since September 11, 2001. Such cameras have proliferated by the hundreds on private campuses, in particular. The University of Pennsylvania, for instance, has more than 400 watching over it, while Harvard and Brown have about 200 each.

Elsewhere, it can be tricky just to find out where the cameras are and what they’re meant to be viewing. The University of Texas, for example, battled student journalists over disclosure and ultimately kept its cameras hidden. Sometimes, though, a camera’s purpose seems obvious. Take the case of Hussein Hussein, a professor in the Department of Animal Biotechnology at the University of Nevada, Reno. In January 2005, the widely respected professor found a hidden camera redirected to monitor his office.

4. Mine student records: Student records have, in recent years, been opened up to all manner of data mining for purposes of investigation, recruitment, or just all-purpose tracking. From 2001 to 2006, in an operation code-named “Project Strike Back,” the Department of Education teamed up with the FBI to scour the records of the 14 million students who applied for federal financial aid each year. The objective? “To identify potential people of interest,” explained an FBI spokesperson cryptically, especially those linked to “potential terrorist activity.”

Strike Back was quietly discontinued in June 2006, days after students at Northwestern University blew its cover. But just one month later, the Education Department’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, in a much-criticized preliminary report, recommended the creation of a federal “unit record” database that would track the activities and studies of college students nationwide. The Department’s Institute of Education Sciences has developed a prototype for such a national database.

It’s not a secret that the Pentagon, for its part, hopes to turn campuses into recruitment centers for its overstretched, overstressed forces. In fact, the Department of Defense (DoD) has built its own database for just this purpose. Known as Joint Advertising Market Research and Studies, this program now tracks 30 million young people, ages 16 to 25. According to a Pentagon spokesperson, the DoD has partnered with private marketing and data mining firms, which, in turn, sell the government reams of information on students and other potential recruits.

5. Track foreign-born students, keep the undocumented out: Under the auspices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been keeping close tabs on foreign students and their dependents through the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). As of October 2007, ICE reported that it was actively following 713,000 internationals on campuses, while keeping more than 4.7 million names in its database.

The database aims to amass and record information on foreign students throughout their stay inside the United States. SEVIS requires thick files on the students from the sponsoring schools, constantly updated with all academic, biographical, and employment records – all of which will be shared with other government agencies. If students fall out of “status” at school – or if the database thinks they have – the Compliance Enforcement Unit of ICE goes into action.

ICE has also done its part to keep the homeland security campus purified of those not born in the homeland. The American Immigration Law Foundation estimates that only one in 20 undocumented immigrants who graduate high school goes on to enroll in a college. Many don’t go because they cannot afford the tuition, but also because they have good reason to be afraid: ICE has deported a number of those who did make it to college, some before they could graduate.

6. Take over the curriculum, the classroom, and the laboratory: Needless to say, not every student is considered a homeland security threat. Quite the opposite. Many students and faculty members are seen as potential assets. To exploit these assets, the Department of Homeland Security has launched its own curriculum under its Office of University Programs (OUP), intended, it says, to “foster a homeland security culture within the academic community.”

The record so far is impressive: DHS has doled out 439 federal fellowships and scholarships since 2003, providing full tuition to students who fit “within the homeland security research enterprise.” Two hundred twenty-seven schools now offer degree or certificate programs in “homeland security,” a curriculum that encompasses over 1,800 courses. Along with OUP, some of the key players in creating the homeland security classroom are the U.S. Northern Command (Northcom) and the Aerospace Defense Command, co-founders of the Homeland Security and Defense Education Consortium.

OUP has also partnered with researchers and laboratories to “align scientific results with homeland security priorities.” In Fiscal Year 2008 alone, $4.9 billion in federal funding will go to homeland security-related research. Grants correspond with 16 research topics selected by DHS, based on presidential directives, legislation, and a smattering of scientific advice.

But wait, there’s more: DHS has founded and funded six of its very own “Centers of Excellence,” research facilities that span dozens of universities from coast to coast. The latest is a Center of Excellence for the Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism, the funding for which cleared the House in October. The Center is mandated to assist a National Commission in combating those “adopting or promoting an extremist belief system… to advance political, religious or social change.”

7. Privatize, privatize, privatize: Of course, homeland security is not just a department, nor is it simply a new network of surveillance and data mining – it’s big business. (According to USA Today, global homeland-security-style spending had already reached $59 billion a year in 2006, a six-fold increase over 2000.)

Not surprisingly, then, universities have, in recent years, established unprecedented private-sector partnerships with the corporations that have the most to gain from their research. The Department of Homeland Security’s on-campus National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), for instance, features Lockheed Martin on its advisory board. The Center for Food Protection and Defense relies on an industry working group that includes Wal-Mart and McDonald’s offering “guidance and direction,” according to its chair.

While vast sums of money are flowing in from these corporate sponsors, huge payments are also flowing out into “strategic supplier contracts” with private contractors, as universities permanently outsource security operations to big corporations like Securitas and AlliedBarton. Little of this money actually goes to those guarding the properties, who are often among the most underpaid workers at universities. Instead, it fills the corporate coffers of those with little accountability for conditions on campus.

Meanwhile, some universities have developed intimate relationships with private-security outfits like the notorious Blackwater. Last May, for example, the University of Illinois and its police training institute cut a deal with the firm to share their facilities and training programs with Blackwater operatives. Local journalists later revealed that the director of the campus program at the time was on the Blackwater payroll. In the age of hired education, such collaboration is apparently par for the course.

Following these seven steps over the past six years, the homeland security state and its constituents have come a long way in their drive to remake the American campus in the image of a compound on lockdown. Somewhere, inside the growing homeland security state that is our country, the next seven steps in the process are undoubtedly already being planned out.

Still, the rise of Repress U is not inevitable. The new homeland security campus has proven itself unable to shut out public scrutiny or stamp out resistance to its latest Orwellian advances. Sometimes, such opposition even yields a free-speech zone dismantled, or the Pentagon’s TALON de-clawed, or a Project Strike Back struck down. A rising tide of student protest, led by groups like the new Students for a Democratic Society, has won free-speech victories and reined in repression from Pace and Hampton, where the University dropped its threats of expulsion, to UCLA, where Tasers will no longer be wielded against passive resisters.

Yet, if the tightening grip of the homeland security complex isn’t loosened, the latest towers of higher education will be built not of ivory, but of Kevlar for the over-armored, over-armed campuses of America.

Michael Gould-Wartofsky is a writer from New York City and a recent graduate of the new homeland security campus. He has written for the Nation Online, Z Magazine, Common Dreams, and the Harvard Crimson, where he was a columnist and editor, and his work has also appeared in Poets Against the War (Nation Books). He was a recipient of the New York Times James B. Reston Award for young journalists and Harvard’s James Gordon Bennett Prize for his writing on collective memory.

Published on Thursday, January 10, 2008 by TomDispatch.com
This piece is also appearing in the latest issue of the Nation Magazine.

PARA QUANDO, OS BORDÉIS DE BOLONHA?

BRAINWASHING 101

Indoctrination and sexual corruption in America’s college campuses. LER

HAVERÁ SEMPRE EMPREGO PARA ANTROPÓLOGOS

Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones

SHABAK VALLEY, Afghanistan — In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy. Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her team’s ability to understand subtle points of tribal relations — in one case spotting a land dispute that allowed the Taliban to bully parts of a major tribe —has won the praise of officers who say they are seeing concrete results. Col. Martin Schweitzer, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division unit working with the anthropologists here, said that the unit’s combat operations had been reduced by 60 percent since the scientists arrived in February, and that the soldiers were now able to focus more on improving security, health care and education for the population.“We’re looking at this from a human perspective, from a social scientist’s perspective,” he said. “We’re not focused on the enemy. We’re focused on bringing governance down to the people.”

In September, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates authorized a $40 million expansion of the program, which will assign teams of anthropologists and social scientists to each of the 26 American combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since early September, five new teams have been deployed in the Baghdad area, bringing the total to six.Yet criticism is emerging in academia. Citing the past misuse of social sciences in counterinsurgency campaigns, including in Vietnam and Latin America, some denounce the program as “mercenary anthropology” that exploits social science for political gain. Opponents fear that, whatever their intention, the scholars who work with the military could inadvertently cause all anthropologists to be viewed as intelligence gatherers for the American military.

Hugh Gusterson, an anthropology professor at George Mason University, and 10 other anthropologists are circulating an online pledge calling for anthropologists to boycott the teams, particularly in Iraq. “While often presented by its proponents as work that builds a more secure world,” the pledge says, “at base, it contributes instead to a brutal war of occupation which has entailed massive casualties. ”In Afghanistan, the anthropologists arrived along with 6,000 troops, which doubled the American military’s strength in the area it patrols, the country’s east. A smaller version of the Bush administration’s troop increase in Iraq, the buildup in Afghanistan has allowed American units to carry out the counterinsurgency strategy here, where American forces generally face less resistance and are better able to take risks.

Since Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the overall American commander in Iraq, oversaw the drafting of the Army’s new counterinsurgency manual last year, the strategy has become the new mantra of the military. A recent American military operation here offered a window into how efforts to apply the new approach are playing out on the ground in counterintuitive ways.In interviews, American officers lavishly praised the anthropology program, saying that the scientists’ advice has proved to be “brilliant,”helping them see the situation from an Afghan perspective and allowing them to cut back on combat operations. The aim, they say, is to improve the performance of local government officials, persuade tribesmen to join the police, ease poverty and protect villagers from the Taliban and criminals.Afghans and Western civilian officials, too, praised the anthropologists and the new American military approach but were cautious about predicting long-term success.

Many of the economic and political problems fueling instability can be solved only by large numbers of Afghan and American civilian experts. “My feeling is that the military are going through an enormous change right now where they recognize they won’t succeed militarily,” said Tom Gregg, the chief United Nations official in southeastern Afghanistan. “But they don’t yet have the skill sets to implement”a coherent nonmilitary strategy, he added.Deploying small groups of soldiers into remote areas, Colonel Schweitzer’s paratroopers organized jirgas, or local councils, to resolve tribal disputes that have simmered for decades. Officers shrugged off questions about whether the military was comfortable with what David Kilcullen, an Australian anthropologist and an architect of the new strategy, calls “armed social work.”

“Who else is going to do it?“ asked Lt. Col. David Woods, commander of the Fourth Squadron, 73rd Cavalry. “You have to evolve. Otherwise you’re useless. ”The anthropology team here also played a major role in what the military called Operation Khyber. That was a 15-day drive late this summer in which 500 Afghan and 500 American soldiers tried to clear an estimated 200 to 250 Taliban insurgents out of much of Paktia Province, secure southeastern Afghanistan’s most important road and halt a string of suicide attacks on American troops and local governors. In one of the first districts the team entered, Tracy identified an unusually high concentration of widows in one village, Colonel Woods said. Their lack of income created financial pressure on their sons to provide for their families, she determined, a burden that could drive the young men to join well-paid insurgents. Citing Tracy’s advice, American officers developed a job training program for the widows.In another district, the anthropologist interpreted the beheading of a local tribal elder as more than a random act of intimidation: the Taliban’s goal, she said, was to divide and weaken the Zadran, one of southeastern Afghanistan’s most powerful tribes. If Afghan and American officials could unite the Zadran, she said, the tribe could block the Taliban from operating in the area.“Call it what you want, it works,” said Colonel Woods, a native of Denbo, Pa. “It works in helping you define the problems, not just the symptoms.”

Embedding ScholarsThe process that led to the creation of the teams began in late 2003, when American officers in Iraq complained that they had little to no information about the local population. Pentagon officials contacted Montgomery McFate, a Yale-educated cultural anthropologist working for the Navy who advocated using social science to improve military operations and strategy. Ms. McFate helped develop a database in 2005 that provided officers with detailed information on the local population. The next year, Steve Fondacaro, a retired Special Operations colonel, joined the program and advocated embedding social scientists with American combat units.

Ms. McFate, the program’s senior social science adviser and an author of the new counterinsurgency manual, dismissed criticism of scholars working with the military. “I’m frequently accused of militarizing anthropology,” she said. “But we’re really anthropologizing the military.” Roberto J. González, an anthropology professor at San Jose State University, called participants in the program naïve and unethical. He said that the military and the Central Intelligence Agency had consistently misused anthropology in counterinsurgency and propaganda campaigns and that military contractors were now hiring anthropologists for their local expertise as well. “Those serving the short-term interests of military and intelligence agencies and contractors,” he wrote in the June issue of Anthropology Today, an academic journal, “will end up harming the entire discipline in the long run.”

Arguing that her critics misunderstand the program and the military, Ms. McFate said other anthropologists were joining the teams. She said their goal was to help the military decrease conflict instead of provoking it, and she vehemently denied that the anthropologists collected intelligence for the military. In eastern Afghanistan, Tracy said wanted to reduce the use of heavy-handed military operations focused solely on killing insurgents, which she said alienated the population and created more insurgents. “I can go back and enhance the military’s understanding,” she said, “so that we don’t make the same mistakes we did in Iraq.” Along with offering advice to commanders, she said, the five-member team creates a database of local leaders and tribes, as well as social problems, economic issues and political disputes.

During the recent operation, as soldiers watched for suicide bombers, Tracy and Army medics held a free medical clinic. They said they hoped that providing medical care would show villagers that the Afghan government was improving their lives. Civil affairs soldiers then tried to mediate between factions of the Zadran tribe about where to build a school. The Americans said they hoped that the school, which would serve children from both groups, might end a 70-year dispute between the groups over control of a mountain covered with lucrative timber. Though they praised the new program, Afghan and Western officials said it remained to be seen whether the weak Afghan government could maintain the gains. “That’s going to be the challenge, to fill the vacuum,” said Mr. Gregg, the United Nations official. “There’s a question mark over whether the government has the ability to take advantage of the gains.”Others also question whether the overstretched American military and its NATO allies can keep up the pace of operations.

American officers expressed optimism. Many of those who had served in both Afghanistan and Iraq said they had more hope for Afghanistan. One officer said that the Iraqis had the tools to stabilize their country, like a potentially strong economy, but that they lacked the will. He said Afghans had the will, but lacked the tools. After six years of American promises, Afghans, too, appear to be waiting to see whether the Americans or the Taliban will win a protracted test of wills here. They said this summer was just one chapter in a potentially lengthy struggle. At a “super jirga”set up by Afghan and American commanders here, a member of the Afghan Parliament, Nader Khan Katawazai, laid out the challenge ahead to dozens of tribal elders.“Operation Khyber was just for a few days,” he said. “The Taliban will emerge again.”

David Rohde, New York Times.

Ver também ISTO.

REBENTANDO NO VENTO

The Unabomber Manifesto 

WISHFUL THINKING

A tendência anglo-saxónica para o politicamente correcto. Eliminamos uma palavra, esperamos que a realidade acuse a sua falta e que, concomitantemente, se transforme noutra coisa qualquer.

(Merci, Ines)

 

 The P Word

 Something has happened to the way we talk about what we do as historians. A decade or so ago, we spoke of “scholarship” or “research,” of “topics,” or even of “work.” Now everyone has “projects.” The change is in more than terminology. Behind the P word lurks a new, and in my view very unsatisfactory, understanding of the enterprise of history-writing.

 

“Scholarship,” “research,” “work” are open-ended activities; they are something one is, almost by definition, always in the middle of. When one does research or engages in scholarship, one meanders, following the sources where they lead, expecting that one will sometimes find oneself in strange byways, even blind alleys. One plunges ahead, open to new directions, expecting the questions one is asking to mutate as materials, their context, and the scholarship of others make new issues and points of view imperative. “Topics” are things that change as evidence emerges. Indeed when one “does scholarship,” or simply “works on a topic,” one can never really tell—it is a continuing problem we face as historians—when one has finished. A project, on the other hand, has a beginning and an end. It comes with its conclusions already drawn and its chapters outlined (sometimes before much research has yet been done). It has a time frame and an end point. A project has to be finished, the sooner the better.

 

I became aware of how our vocabulary and our assumptions have shifted when one of my students told me about a panel on professional ethics held at the College Art Association in 2006 at which someone asked whether it was ethical to apply for a second grant for “the same project.” The question makes stunningly clear how much the expectation that we do “projects” rather than “work” boxes us into constraining timetables and foregone conclusions. One could not ask such a question about scholarship, which can never—from year to year, month to month, or indeed text to text—

be “the same.”

 

We all know why this shift in terminology has occurred. Scholarship is something a tenured professor (at least one who does not have to teach summer school in order to pay a child’s tuition bills) does in the months between June and August, then puts aside or picks up as time allows during the academic year. Scholarship is leisurely; it is generated—sometimes with fierce insistence—from within the scholar, shaped and re-shaped as current historiography and the classroom raise new questions. Projects are proposed in order to get grants or fellowships, to win tenure, to gain a job or a promotion. Projects are often generated from without, by pressure from deans, department heads, even mentors. Some young academics today struggle under the burden not just of “the project” but of “the second project,” constrained by the demands of senior colleagues and university administrators to race to a close-ended, tightly formulated statement of where they will be one or two years hence when they have had no chance to ruminate on what their first research (the doctoral dissertation) accomplished or left undone.

 

Those of us who are senior scholars need to speak out more than we do against these pressures. But we will probably not be able to reverse such trends significantly. We all live in a grant-grubbing world. Young people do have to learn to write proposals, and their mentors have to help them learn how to do it successfully. But I would like to make a modest proposal. I suggest that we abandon the P word. If we were to return to describing what we do as “work,” the assumptions—the correct and real assumptions—behind our enterprise would be more evident. If senior scholars who evaluate proposals and consider tenure dossiers were to think, deliberately and self-consciously, in terms of scholarship not projects, they would be more inclined to reward research that is honest about its uncertainties and flexible as it confronts its sources—research that admits how topics change, wandering afield and backtracking as often as they progress. And if all of us who apply for grants, come up for tenure, explore new areas, or describe our books to publishers, were to speak again of what we do as “scholarship” or just plain “work,” we might find it easier to do it. Because the events and cultures, art and literature, politics, victories and defeats of the past are, as we all know, only very arbitrarily divided into finite hunks. Real research always has loose ends. It does not come in year-long, project-size units. By reverting to how we once spoke, we might release ourselves from a little of the burden we all feel in an academic world where there is ever greater pressure for speed and results.

 

Caroline Walker Bynum

(Professor of medieval European history at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)

in historians.org, Outubro 2007  

 

THE MARKETIZATION OF UNIVERSITIES

The marketisation of universities and some cultural contradictions of academic capitalism 

Hermínio Martins

 

(To all the decent, upright academics I have known)

 

“Sorry: your soul has just died” (Tom Wolfe)

“News from the rat race: the rats have won!” (Car bumper sticker)

 

THE CURRENT COMMITEMENT OF THE BLAIR LABOUR CABINET to a substantial increase in university tuition fees in the UK does not spring solely from the need to address the financial crisis in higher education. It is driven also by the sense that British universities or at least some of them must move towards a US exemplar/myth/utopia of the “world-class research university”, or some version of it, though no clear specification of the goal-state or even of a spectrum of scenarios, appears to have been published as yet. I am not sure whether many, or indeed any, of the distinguished academic backers and co-instigators of this drive share the brutal judgment expressed recently by a former Labour Minister of Education, resident in recent years in Cambridge, Mass., that Britain does not currently possess a single “world-class” university or multiversity, Britain having presumably slipped down into this outer darkness at some oddlyundisclosed point in the recent or perhaps not-so-recent past In fact, the recently published ranking of 500 world universities and 100 European universities, prepared by a team at the Shiao Jong University of Shangai, shows that Britain, as of 2003, was doing very well indeed in the number of universities in fairly high places in the list, in having two universities in the top ten (so part of the la crème de la crème), and four in the top twenty. No matter the merits or demerits of the Higher Education Bill, no matter what happens to it, now or in the next Parliament, the questions I am addressing will remain, possibly in an even more acute form.

 

My concern here is not with the question of the comprehensiveness and equity of access to universities supposedly ensured by the new financial arrangements, important as it is, or with the “output” so unengagingly described by The Financial Times in commending editorially these proposals, as nothing more than improved “intellectual skills of the workforce”. For which purpose, surely, you dont really need universities at all, let alone “elite universities”, as it calls them, and it is worth noting that this proverbial “mouthpiece of capitalism” eschews any additional reference to such desiderata, if not sheer requisites, of a healthy democracy as a well-educated citizenry –indeed the FT does not at all refer to the “citizenry”, or to the “nation”, or to the “people” of Britain, but only to the “workforce” (it seems to imply that the sole matter of concern is the transformation of the studentry into suitable labour market material or the vector studentry→workforce). It altogether fails to invoke the word “education” at all. Indeed, this “world-class” paper failed utterly to mention even any cognate terms such as “culture”, “cultivation”, “civilisation”, “citizenship” (national, European or ecumenic), “formation”, “competences”, “qualities of mind”, “intellectual qualities”, “breadth of understanding”, or even, unbelievably, “knowledge”, all keywords belonging for the last two centuries to the discourse of and about the university, about the higher learning, everywhere in the West (how can we account for the omission of these terms in the FT or the UK government’s statements about the role or the “mission” of the universities or of the expectations they entertain about students?5). “The City’s house journal” did not mention, either, “democratic citizenship”, or some democracy-related facet of education, which would almost certainly have been mentioned, most likely even stressed, on a comparable occasion, by, say, The Wall Street Journal. But in any case, my focus is, rather, on the character of the institutions students are going to have access to, whatkind of “form of life”, what kind of form of academic life, they will be participating in, as well as their teachers.

 

Now the academic advocates of the course referred to are undoubtedly extraordinarily busy people at any time, and the exertion of political pressure, not least on our rulers, is, I am sure, particularly draining (though 10 Downing Street is surely both more accessible and more amenable than the George W. Bush White House in either its first or its second version). So it is not clear whether they have had the opportunity to read, or re-read, anything of an analytical rather than merely encomiastic kind on American universities (it is American universities –and largely a subset of these, in effect- they unceasingly refer to, choosing to ignore other forms of excellence in American higher education, for instance the liberal arts colleges or even the great state universities). I have in mind a couple of works in particular…

 

Continue reading…