Links for 5/7/10

C. Cryn Johannsen

how the best and brightest in the U.S. have been s$%*#ed by the student lending industry and been turned into indentured educated citizens. This industry, as a result, has turned college into a racket (they ain't no better than a bunch o' loan sharks…

[AG: Yikes, I wonder how long it will be before this anger is directed at our new loan sharks now that FFEL is gone?]

Pete Davis

CBO analyzed tax arbitrage by U.S. colleges and universities. The Internal Revenue Code bars recipients of tax-exempt bond proceeds from directly reinvesting at higher rates, but the Congressional Budget Office found that most colleges and universities will do so indirectly with the $5.5 billion of muni's to be issued for them in 2010. Tax arbitrage is a pipeline directly into the pockets of U.S. taxpayers.

whether certain large endowment universities are institutions of higher learning with large endowments or whether it's more accurate to describe them as hedge funds with some education on the side...

Peter Schmidt

the American Educational Research Association did not hesitate … to declare its opposition to Arizona's controversial new immigration law…

In doing so, they themselves crossed a frontier, between their commitment to promoting solid research and their urge to take public stands on issues…

That they felt torn between the group's legal obligation to be politically neutral and their own desire to be anything but became apparent as the conference quickly escalated from a briefing on the resolution into a forum for association leaders and members—and even visiting Arizona high-school students—to speak out against the immigration measure…
This was hardly the first time the education-research group has taken a public stand on a divisive issue. Most notably, when the U.S. Supreme Court weighed the legality of the University of Michigan's race-conscious admissions policies, in 2003, the association's leadership declared in a friend-of-the-court brief…

Sara Goldrick-Rab

Of course academia trains us to think, like Hess, that research is worthy only when fully divorced from politics. Our research questions should be derived from theory, stemming only from the reading of great books and dusty journals, and never from a desire to enter policy or social debates. Puhleese. Every research question is inherently political--we conceive and ask questions the way we do because we have a desire to know something. Knowledge is socially, and therefore politically, constructed.

I'm the first to admit that AERA is a deeply flawed organization, but aren't they all (Hess's included)? I think honesty and transparency are among the best qualities, and would much rather AERA's leaders and members take visible positions on issues they care about rather than pretend not to have opinions. Research lacks an agenda only in the most naïve of imaginations. But agendas lack research all-too-frequently. If AERA begins to use its members' work to create a research-backed agenda, that can only be a good thing.