Shots in the Dark

I’ll be speaking tonight at 7:00 at the Hue-Man Bookstore in Harlem. (For more information, see the link.)

Special guests will include Cornel West and C-SPAN….

Hue-Man is at 125th Street and 8th Avenue, easily accessible by the A/C/D/B subway….

U-Colorado professor Ward Churchill may not get fired for his controversial remarks about 9/11…but he might get the boot for being a plagiarist, according to an article in InsiderHigherEd.com.

It also turns out that Churchill may not be of Native American descent, as he has claimed.

Key quote: “The report also examined an unusual allegation that has been raised: That Churchill is not an American Indian…. Churchill has always identified himself to the university as an American Indian, and the university received complaints from Indian leaders 10 years ago that Churchill was being untruthful. At the time, the university concluded that self-identification was an appropriate way for Churchill to declare himself an Indian, so the matter was dropped.”

The NBER transcript has been re-posted on President Summers’ website….

Remember how, in a spirit of openness, Larry Summers posted the transcript of his NBER remarks on his website? Well, glasnost didn’t last long. Now, if you click on the site, you get a message saying that if you want a transcript, call the president’s office.

Where I’m sure they’ll take your name down very carefully…..

A fascinating piece in the Times looks at how New York governor George Pataki has privatized and politicized the state university system. Harvard afficionados will note the byline on the story belongs to Pat Healy, who used to cover Harvard for the Boston Globe. This is a thorough and nuanced piece of reporting. Not to mention a good read.

The ubiquitous David Horowitz promotes his “Academic Bill of Rights” here. Horowitz worries that lefty professors have taken over the academy, and so his bill aims to promote “intellectual diversity.”

Key quote: <Why do we need legislation? There are too many people like Ward Churchill—the University of Colorado professor who compared 9/11 victims with Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann—on faculties across the nation. They confuse their classroosm with a political soap box.>

Horowitz then gives a whopping two examples, both at small schools in Colorado. (What is with Colorado professors, anyway? It’s not exactly a blue state.) At least one of those examples—a professor who asked students taking a criminology exam to argue that the invasion of Iraq was a criminal act—sounds defensible to me.

(Although better if the professor had said: “The invasion of Iraq was illegal. Agree or disagree.” But who knows? Maybe he did.)

Legislators need to get involved, Horowitz concludes, to ensure that schools are “educating our kids, not brainwashing them.”

Mmmm. Because there’s so much intellectual diversity in our legislatures these days, right?

(Sorry. That was a cheap shot.)

The point is, the kind of political sermonizing Horowitz is up in arms about just isn’t widespread. And when it does occur, universities can address it on their own, without any help from politicians.

What Horowitz really wants is affirmative action for conservative professors…

According to a survey by the Princeton Review, more American students consider New York University their “dream college” than any other.

Harvard was ranked second, followed by Stanford, Yale and Princeton.

The Review interprets this as evidence that students are choosing an “urban” college experience, largely because of the internship and employment opportunities New York provides.

Let’s hope that this is indeed the case, and it’s not just that the Olsen twins go there….

Lee Bollinger, who lost the Harvard presidency to Larry Summers, talks about free speech at universities here.

Bollinger was specifically addressing the allegation that the department of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia is a hotbed of anti-Semitism.

The Columbia president, a First Amendment scholar, strikes a reasonable balance. Just because they have tenure and the right to free speech, he said, professors can’t say anything they want, and shouldn’t use their classrooms to promote their own political agendas.

Then Bollinger adds this very important caveat: “When there are lines to be drawn,” he said, “we must and will be the ones to do it. Not outside actors. Not politicians, not pressure groups, not the media. Ours is and must remain a system of self-government.”

People at Columbia tell me that Bollinger’s agenda is very similar to Larry Summers’ at Harvard: centralizing the president’s authority, expanding the campus, building up the sciences, etc.

And yet, for some reason, the Harvard president is embroiled in controversy while Bollinger looks like the public intellectual Summers was supposed to be….suggesting that it’s not necessarily Summers’ agenda that has gotten him into trouble, but his personality.

And then some.

The College has announced that tuition will rise 4.5% next year, going up to $41, 675, once again outpacing the rate of inflation. Simultaneously, Harvard says that it will increase its college scholarships to $84.6 million. As much as that sounds, it’s still less than a third of total revenue from tuition. My rough estimate: assuming that Harvard has 6, 400 undergraduates, they pay $266, 604, 800 in tuition every year.

I know that many students who want to go to the nation’s finest colleges think that such exorbitant amounts of money are well-spent. The reward is economic success in later life.

I can’t help but wonder, though, if the very purpose of college isn’t being warped by such prices. The higher the price of tuition, the less likely students can afford to do anything but go into high-paying fields like law and finance after they graduate….

Dormaid’s “general counsel,” a sophomore economics concentrator named Joseph T.M. Cianflone, makes the case for Dormaid in this Crimson op-ed.

Key quote: <<The most important issue at hand is economic freedom. The principles of free enterprise and the right of every citizen in a just and fair society to decide how and when to purchase what they will are the cornerstones of any democratic meritocracy. Dorm life is not a mandatory egalitarian process imposed upon us by the College to distort our view of how societies run best. Nor is it a system designed to paternalistically decide what is fair and unfair consumption based upon income brackets.>>

Well, there you have it: For today’s students, the most important right is the right to purchase whatever they want. That’s the “cornerstone” of meritocracy.

Kudos to Cianflone for stating the case so forthrightly. But I couldn’t disagree more. Harvard College should not simply be a luxury mall at which shoppers purchase the services they want-courses, maids, a diploma, whatever-and then depart, prepped for success in the outside world. Any college that means something should aspire to educate its students outside the classroom as well as inside. Who really wants to attend a college which teaches that money is everything?

Wait a second—don’t answer that question.

It’s not fashionable to say that a college should teach values, I know. But Harvard should—and Dormaid doesn’t.