Links for 12/15/10

DANIEL HAMERMESH

what a pathetically lazy bunch of faculty!...

Arthur Levine

More often tenure provides a lifetime of job security not to professors whose work requires protection, but to a significant minority of "deadwood" — individuals who are unproductive, out of date, or poor in their research, teaching or institutional commitment…

it is better that the majority who may not need the protections of tenure receive them than that the minority who do need protections be denied them…

Since mandatory retirement is not possible, the length of tenure could be limited to a significant but finite number of years. A term of 30 years, for example, would ensure essential academic freedom and at the same time allow for the turnover that universities require to remain intellectually strong…

Megan McArdle

So the Supreme Court will not hear the eminent domain case involving Columbia University, which finagled the state into seizing local land and transferring it to the school…

I am not against eminent domain for public uses like hospitals or railroads. But by no stretch of the imagination could Columbia University be called a public accommodation. One's gut and one's social conscience rebel at the seizure of private property which is taken precisely because it serves, or is owned by, poorer people. One's gut and one's social conscience positively riot at the thought of taking this seized land and handing it over to wealthy private institution that almost exclusively serves the affluent class…

Kevin Carey

the prevailing attitude toward information about learning still ranges from infinite caution to outright hostility… "The perfect is the enemy of the good" has become a rhetorical strategy to be deployed, rather than a problem to be avoided, when outsiders ask uncomfortable questions about teaching and learning…

there are upward of 170,000 people working in colleges today who have been rigorously trained to find meaning in chaos. They explore the furthest theoretical reaches of time and space; ponder the nature of justice, beauty, and truth; develop new ways of understanding the human condition; and contribute countless innovations that make the world a more vibrant, humane place to be. Are we to understand that it is beyond their intellectual means to produce a reasonably accurate estimate of how much chemistry majors learn at Institution A compared with Institution B? That a student's relative capacity to think analytically and write clearly is a mystery that no mortal can hope to reveal?

Nonsense. Comparable learning information doesn't exist because many groups have a strong interest in its not existing. Institutions that thrive on centuries-old reputations, despite their present-day failure to challenge students in the classroom. Companies looking to exploit the federal financial-aid system. Faculty who hate teaching and love research…

we need a measuring stick for higher education… If higher education has the courage to take responsibility for honestly assessing student learning and for publishing the results, the measuring stick will be a tool. If it doesn't, the stick could easily become a weapon. The time for making that choice is drawing to a close.