Links for 4/2/10

Jack Stripling

It's been a politically popular move for lawmakers to bail out prepaid college tuition plans that are now going broke, but doing so raises some potentially troubling questions of equity. Indeed, these bailouts could have the net impact of forgiving investment losses for middle- and upper-income families at the expense of low-income people...

Justin Fox

why economists had gained so much influence over the past half century and historians had lost so much.

One answer I offered was that economists had managed a remarkable balancing act between making the guts of their work totally incomprehensible — and thus forbiddingly impressive — to the outside world while continuing to offer reasonably straightforward conclusions. The basic form of an academic economics paper is a couple of comprehensible paragraphs at the beginning and a couple of comprehensible paragraphs at the end, with a bunch of really-hard-to-follow math or statistical analysis in the middle. An academic history paper, on the other hand, is often an uninterrupted cascade of semi-comprehensible jargon that neither impresses a lay reader nor offers any clear conclusions…

I heard another explanation from the historians themselves. It's that, especially in the U.S., only the tiniest minority of academic historians concern themselves anymore with matters of economic policy (or diplomacy, or war, or politics in the big-picture sense). The discipline has moved mostly to the study of identity (gender, race, etc.) and culture, ceding territory to the economists and political scientists…

Edububble

When people get hurt on the job in Colorado, Pinnacol helps pay for their medical care and their disability. It’s probably fair to say that they help people with severed limbs, crushed bones and maybe even worse. If the universities take that $200m, they’re taking it from the pockets of the infirm. This is what it’s come to: snagging the cash from the folks in wheelchairs...

KC Johnson

Last week, CUNY's University Faculty Senate sent to all CUNY faculty a 13-page "statement on academic freedom." The document makes for an intriguing read.

In his cover note announcing the statement's availability, UFS chairman Manfred Phillips maintained, "Political pressures from organizations, university administrators or students [emphasis added] can threaten the academic freedom of individual faculty members." This statement was remarkable for both what it included and what it excluded. Not only does the faculty's "statement on academic freedom" contain no mention that students, as well as faculty, possess (more limited) academic freedom rights, but to CUNY's elected faculty, students are a threat to academic freedom. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, only "organizations, university administrators or students can threaten the academic freedom of individual faculty members"---not members of the faculty majority intent on driving out dissenters in their midst...