Steven Douglas Maloney

The American University is not dead, and it may not be dying – but it is definitely heading into a dark and unknown future.  The Chronicle of Higher Education has declared tenure dead.  The Delta Project’s studies on trends in college spending provide some bleak data (unless you are a college athlete).

The numbers seem to suggest something like the following model is playing out in higher education:

1. Public funding per student has decreased dramatically for higher education
2. The fundraising of elite private research institutions has been dramatically improved over the past ten years
3. The difficulty for other higher ed. institutions to provide comparable educations to scale of the higher institutions has been damaged by their inability to raise funds the way the elite private universities have, making it harder to justify the current level of public subsidy of the public, much less seek ore money to maintain their relative place in the academic universe.
4. To cut costs, universities have had to reduce the number of tenure offers and cut public service expenses out of their budget, making their product even less attractive to public investment.
5. Students have been asked to subsidize more and more of their own education, requiring higher education institutions to focus on competing for student money through improved exercise, entertainment, dining and residential facilities in order to secure more students.
6. The maintenance of all of these campus life elements requires a much larger core of administrators, who are tasked with attracting student money to the school and keeping students connected to giving to the school as alumni.
7. The increased spending on facilities, administration, admissions, alumni support, has forced instruction into a holding pattern.  Research that funds itself is encouraged because ti pays for itself and then some, but academic work in sector that do not attract funds is supported only insofar as it is needed as a means of attracting students the way that having an olympic-sized swimming pool attracts students.
8. The glut of students who have self-paid for their advanced degrees creates a glut of teaching talent that is heavily invested in not giving up in making a career out of what took half a decade and a home mortgage worth of debt to accomplish.

In short, I endorse the hypothesis that while yes, the higher education system is in a very bad way, I do believe that Universities are generally structured to maximize the objectives that Universities ought to be pursuing.  Yes, building fancy facilities for entertainment, exercise, and whatnot for students is distasteful when you have faculty who make less than a greeter does at Wal-Mart.  But without the student, parent, and alumni money that comes in off such investments, it is not at all clear to me that the University could afford to purchase more of its more nobler aims.

Given the tumult and the tight budgetary situation nationally, there is not a lot of room for entrepreneurship, because there are not a lot of public or private investors in this climate who could afford to absorb the cost of an intriguing risk that does not pan out.  I think the picture is going to have to change by a number of small entrepreneurial moves in  higher ed. until either they add up to something that changes the momentum in some way, or until an idea catches fire enough that investing in it no longer seems risky.

Another dynamic at play here is that the patrons are actually unhappy.  Peter Levine notes that millennials have a historically low amount of trust in other people.  I have noticed over the past few years that students are getting more and more libertarian in their politics.  When I ask about it, I hear a common theme of frustration that they have been thrust into roles of carrying political institutions for older generations without many of the tangible benefits older generations received from participating in those systems.  Most of my students believe there will be no social security for them when they retire, believe that health care costs will be generally worse fro them than their parents, believe that they have to carry a higher debt load in order to run a profitable household than past generations and have a general sense that most of society is more than happy to stick them with living through the difficult times of covering programs to control the “skyrocketing” costs of prescription drugs while no one lifts a finger for the increased cost of attending college, which has increased in cost at a rate that puts prescription drugs to shame and has gone from guaranteeing a respectable job in the workforce to being a ticket in a national employment lottery – you have to have one to play, but there is no guarantee you will win anything at the end of the day.

We appear to have a situation where the public will not invest in education because it is more concerned in distributing the state’s patronage to older citizens, which has created an education system which has had to cut spending on public service, and saddled students with costs, and is raising a generation of young people who have had less opportunity for public engagement and what experience they have had has been watching older generations use political institutions to shift costs unfairly onto their backs.

You get what you pay for, I guess.

Sigh… major crash happened.  Recovered what I could… missing about a year.  Found a nice template generator, can’t afford the money to register it.  For now, suck it up and deal with the stuff that says “Trial” on the borders.  Bear with me on this stuff.

Harvard has this great page with all sorts of fascinating videos and lectures and stuff.  I had started watching the lectures on Beethoven’s 9th in the summer of 2007, but never finished.  We’ll put this one back on my to-do list.

Link.  (anyone know how to use flowplayer on a wordpress.com blog??)

One of the nice discoveries of being in a Derek Parfit reading group – aside from encountering Parfit – is that I am going to stumble upon some other interesting and thoughtful blogs as others host the chapters.  As such, I have very belatedly run into an Arendt question that apparently has people talking, both here and here.  

Is Hannah Arendt a philosopher?

I believe that the answer is yes, but with a qualification.  She is one “with a hammer,” as Nietzsche would say.  I think Arendt would agree with Hubert Dreyfus’ reading of Nietzsche’s aphorism about God having been killed by man in The Gay Science, as indiciating that God is not the Christian God, but God is the idea (going back to Plato) that there is a perspective on the universe that will completely explain all things, and that the judgment of our lives and their meaning is in accordance to this standard.  

In following Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc. down this road, Arendt is in some sense an “anti-philosopher.”  She takes multiple cuts at perceiving the same thing over and over again, the way an artist makes multiple sketches, and sometimes multiple versions (like Monet, for example) in order to work out her relationship with the world.  

Many commenters on the two above cited blogs have stressed that Arendt says she is not a philosopher as a way that sets her up as an anti-philosopher like Nietzsche or Kierkegaard.  Where I think we can take Arendt at her own word about what she is doing is when she said in an interview with Gunther Gaus, “I want only to understand.” and that if her work helped others understand, that would feel like, “being home.”  For me, that is the Arendt comment on Arendt that is worth thinking through in order to understand what she has done.

Here again, is the Sotomayor quote that has some rankled:

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life

Here’s the context of where and why she said it, via the WSJ.  

The idea of legal realism came back in the now-famous 2001 lecture Judge Sotomayor delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, titled “A Latina Judge’s Voice.” There she disputed the argument by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor that a “wise man” and a “wise woman” should necessarily reach the same verdict.

Let’s play a game:  Objective:  PROVE JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR’S STATEMENT INCORRECT

HYPOTHESIS:  It would be good if all justices should rule the same regardless of race in all cases

CASE:  Korematsu v. United States

WISE WHITE JUDGES: “Korematsu was not excluded from the Military Area because of hostility to him or his race. He was excluded because we are at war with the Japanese Empire, because the properly constituted military authorities feared an invasion of our West Coast and felt constrained to take proper security measures, because they decided that the military urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast temporarily, and, finally, because Congress, reposing its confidence in this time of war in our military leaders — as inevitably it must — determined that they should have the power to do just this. There was evidence of disloyalty on the part of some, the military authorities considered that the need for.”

CONCLUSION:  A Wise Japanese-American judge would agree with the “Wise White Judge Opinion.”

Ummm… Q.E.D. ?????

It’s funny.  I watched the HBO movie Recount last night, where both sides of the Bush-Gore election are portrayed in a fairly positive manner, but the Supreme Court is not.  It was an interesting thing to watch in the context of the nomination of Justice Sonia Sotamayor to the United States Supreme Court.  

I’m not sure how anyone can look at Bush v. Gore and not say, at the very least, that the court always makes decisions as an exercise of political power that awards some as winners and others as losers.  This is what President’s do when they set particular administrative policy, and it is what Congress does when they pass legislation.  In the olden days (see: Montesquieu, Madison), these three facts were called judicial power, executive power, and legislative power.   Somewhere along the way, America has become bedazzled by this idea that judges somehow do not use power, and that their decisions on law are simply like “calling balls and strikes,” to quote our now Chief Justice of the Court.  

What is funny, actually, is that Justice Roberts’ famed comparison not only misstates the duty of the court, it misstates the purpose of umpires.  Yes, umpires are supposed to call balls and strikes as accurately as possible.  But they are supposed to do so in order that no one feels as though the game’s integrity is compromised.  We use umpires because they are disinterested, not objective.  Even with television exposing the shocking performances of officials in sports night after night, we need them in order to contain the impact that certain types of cheating and intimidation have on deciding winners and losers.  

This, too, is in effect what the use of judicial power is for.  It is designed so that it may allow politics to determine who wins and loses under the conditions that it finds most prudent for all.  Judges are as disinterested as possible, but are not wholly disinterested.  If one looks at the decisions of Justice Scalia, who is supposed to be one of the great examples of “judge as umpire,” one can find passages about the core of our culture in gay rights decisions, implied harm to political candidates and the nation in Presidential recounts, and proclamations that Supreme Court rulings on releasing detainees have made our country “less safe.”  Even Justice Scalia has an understanding that the judiciary rules on the structure of power in society and deems some ways valid and others invalid.  He has a particular view, that is colored by his particular notion of what’s at stake in who it would be wise to privilege in these power relations.    While I do not always agree with his sense of what is prudent in assigning these privileges, I do think he is, in fact, trying to make legal decisions with these concerns in mind, and is right to do so. 

In this context, the “umpire” view of justice actually hinges on preserving the existing privileges in the structure of power in American society as much as possible.  It is not, on the whole, a terrible impulse.  It is also, clearly, not always the best impulse either.  In fact, Sotomayor’s comment, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Is directed specifically at egregious decisions by famed early twentieth century legal realists who made egregious legal decisions because they had no understanding of how underprivileged non-whites fit into the current and future constellation of the American regime.  

As Brian Leiter points out in the link above, there is empirical evidence to show that race effects legal decisions.  However, to firmly believe that this implies something about the law, argues some in the opposition, makes a judge not sufficiently disinterested to be competent.  On this view, the only way to prove you are disinterested enough is apparently to lie about how disinterested you are.  

I do not know if Justice Sotomayor would make a competent Supreme Court justice or not.  What I think that I do know is that the idea that privileging the allocation of power to its default sources is what conservative justices do, and that this is not always either the best or the worst course of action.  Neither is having the position of Sotomayor as I understand her position.  In short, their is no implied holy covenant of jurisprudence that either a Scalia or a Sotomayor offends, so let’s stop pretending that there is and move on.

In talking to students about papers this semester, I’m wondering about their writing priorities.  They are so obsessed with PLANNING their papers before ever committing a word to the page.  They are in fact, unanimously convinced that the best way to write a paper is to write it once and then to edit it to make sure that their grammar and spelling is correct.  

I’m going to provoke a fight in saying this, but the best writing method is not massive planning, outline, paper, spell and grammar check.  I’m a big fan of the following:  just write.  And then realize that what you have written is actually terrible.  So write it again better.  Repeat terrible paper recognition.  Repeat improvement.  Repeat cycle until paper is due.  

Why is this better?  Because students, as of now, are not interested in revising their IDEAS because they have a phobia of ripping out parts of their papers and redoing them.  ”Rewrite” is taken as a sign of failure, rather than a matter of course.  

I wonder if part of the aversion to revision–and the writing method we teach students–is actually a throwback to typewriters.  Stay with me here.  Back when people typed papers on typewrites, mistakes in writing early drafts cost paper and ribbon.  A priority was placed on doing papers in a way where you maximize getting as much right the first time as possible.  

Now that we have computers, we may overvalue pressuring a quality first/only draft.  The computer makes typeface the only non-perishable resource a student has in their writing process.  My conjecture here is not that students shouldn’t make good outlines or do competent pre-planning.  Ideally, they’d do all phases with the greatest attention and care.  But given that students have papers on deadline, I wonder if we do not teach them to economize poorly because we convince them that revising is the most time-consuming part of the writing process when it is not.  Writing the first draft is the most time consuming process, and we actually appear to teach students to extend that portion of the process out as agonizingly long as possible.  

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Brian Leiter posted a poll for the best political and legal theory journals… I find this interesting both for future reference if I ever publish again with Sybil, and also because the poll ranks Condorcet Winners.

Have people made good use of the similarity in ridiculous formulation between Cap ‘n Trade and Cap’n Crunch?  Yes?  Oh good.