Links for 1/28/10

Mark Bauerlein on campus speech codes

The problem with these policies is that they lower the bar of disturbance to "offense" or "disrespect" or "objectionable" actions. They don't recognize that Federal definitions of harassment require a level of severity far higher than these definitions assume. They open the door for administrators and bureaucrats who push an identity-politics agenda, or who harbor certain resentments, or who are just plain controlling personalities, and they also encourage individuals to lower their own tolerance and raise their sensitivities. It's a recipe for thin-skinned reflexes, and poor training for adulthood.

DAVID BROOKS

the Democratic ruling class has been driven by one fantasy: that voters will get so furious at people with M.B.A.’s that they will hand power to people with Ph.D.’s. The Republican ruling class has been driven by the fantasy that voters will get so furious at people with Ph.D.’s that they will hand power to people with M.B.A.’s. Members of the ruling class love populism because they think it will help their section of the elite gain power…

Eric Kelderman

Martha J. Kanter, the No. 2 official in the U.S. Education Department, took higher-education accrediting organizations to task on Tuesday for being too secretive about how they assess colleges and for using outmoded standards that don't give enough weight to measuring student learning.

Doug Lederman

very different impressions of the state of student learning assessment in higher education…

If you sat in on the many presentations by campus officials talking about their efforts to engage students, improve retention and measure their results, you’d have been left with the unmistakable impression that there are lots of individual faculty members, departments and colleges very much dedicated to measuring how successfully their students are learning and using that information to improve the quality of the education they provide…

Do the multitude of individual campus efforts amount to a comprehensive effort to change practices within higher education? And is the progress -- without something that ties it together nationally -- likely to satisfy external pressure from politicians and others on colleges to prove that they are giving students the skills that they (and their eventual employers) want and need?...