Category Archives: The Corporate University

One would think that the public should have access to information about the financial dealings of public universities. But B.C.’s three leading public universities say otherwise and are arguing that access to such records fall outside democratic interests and that the transparency principle of government does not apply when universities are acting as “service providers to a private company.”

The Georgia Straight reports that the province’s three largest universities have argued that the public should not have access to financial dealings of their spinoff companies. According to documents filed with the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner in a case involving Simon Fraser University, both UBC and the University of Victoria have justified this position, in part, with the claim that universities act as “service providers” to private-sector organizations.

The dispute centres around a freedom-of-information request to SFU, which was filed by David Noble, a professor at York University. Noble, a critic of the corporate influence on universities, sought information in February 2004 from SFU’s University/Industry Liaison Office on companies spun off from SFU research.

The Canadian Association of University Teachers has intervened on Noble’s side, claiming that SFU should not be allowed to use it’s wholly owned company to deny public access to documents involving licensing deals.

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David Horowitz and his gaggle of right-wing emenies of academic freedom (like the so-called “Bruin Alumni Association” at UCLA) have been a on rampage in recent months. Horowitz has humped his “Academic Bill of Rights”as the solution to a phantom problem: liberal professors who ideologically abuse conservative students and give them lower or even failing grades because of their political views.

Hororwitz has never provided any systematic evidence to support his claims about classroom bias (nor does he supply evidence that liberal professors are murders, a claim made in his recent book-length rant about liberal/left professors).

Well, as it turns out there is empirical research on the issue in question and the evidence suggests that there is no relationship between students political views and their grades, with one interesting exception: in some disciplines favored by conservative students (e.g., business and economics), students with liberal politics are the ones receiving lower grades. Hmmm…

Inside Higher Ed reports: “Markus Kemmelmeier, a sociologist at the University of Nevada at Reno, has been watching the Academic Bill of Rights debate with growing frustration, because he thinks there is proof about the question about classroom bias that has been ignored. “I just don’t see evidence” of bias, says Kemmelmeier, one of three authors of an in-depth study on the topic that was published last year in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.”

Kemmelmeier’s research shows conservative and liberal students do equally well in courses with politically charged content (e.g., sociology, women’s studies, African American studies, education, cultural anthropology) and the results casts doubt on conservative activists’ claims that liberal faculty members routinely discriminate against their conservative students.

These results are from a four-year longitudinal study that began in the late 1990s, Kemmelmeier surveyed 3,890 students at a major public university in the Midwest. Asked to describe their political orientation, 2.7 percent identified themselves as far left, 34.6 percent as liberal, 42 percent as middle of the road, 20 percent as conservative, and 1.2 percent as far right.

Mr. Kemmelmeier then compared the transcripts of a variety of students taking the same courses, specifically courses taught in the economics department and the business school (which Mr. Kemmelmeier considered “hierarchy-enhancing,” or conservative) and those taught in American culture, African-American studies, cultural anthropology, education, nursing, sociology, and women’s studies (which he considered “hierarchy-attenuating,” or liberal).

He found that in the latter courses, students’ political orientations had no effect on their grades — which, the study says, suggests that disciplines such as sociology and anthropology “might be more accepting of a broad range of student perspectives,” while economics and business classes “appear to be more sensitive to whether student perspectives are compatible with those of the academic discipline.”

In economics and business classes, the study found, conservative students earned better grades. It also found that conservative students were likely to gaduate with higher GPA’s in those courses than liberal students who entered college with similar SAT scores.

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Well, it’s we’re in the thick of March Madness (or if you’re a Vancouver Canucks fan “March Badness,” but that’s another story), and the folks at Inside Higher Ed have come up with a rather unique take on “The Big Dance,” asking “What if the tidal wave of frenzied ethnusiasm” for college hoops was directed at applauding the graduation rates of basketball players, rather than their tourney prowess?

The Inside Higher Ed brackets show how 65 teams in the NCAA tournament advance from the first round through the “Sweet Sixteen,” “Elite Eight,” and “Final Four,” down to a National Championship for hoops player graduation rates. Teams advance based on their NCAA Graduation Success Rate, as compiled by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, at the University of Central Florida, which released its annual report on the academic performance of college sports teams on Sunday.

In this alternative universe the mighty Bucknell Bison prevail.

The institute found that 64 percent of the teams in the tournament graduated at least 50 percent of their basketball players according to the Graduation Success Rate, the NCAA’s newly conceived accounting measure, and 36 percent of the teams graduated at least 70 percent of their players. Only 25 percent of the teams graduated fewer than 40 percent of their players. (The Graduation Success Rate differs from the widely used federal rate by excluding from the calculation athletes who leave the institution in good academic standing before graduating, and including those who transfer into the institution and graduate. As a result, the rates tend to be about 10 percent higher than the federal rate on average.)

The institute highlighted racial disparity as the most glaring problem. Sixty-six percent of the teams graduated at least 70 percent of their white players, while only 33 percent did the same with black players. Twenty-five tournament teams have at least a 30 percentage point gap between the graduation rates of white and black basketball players.

The Final Four in the NCAA Graduation Success Rate Tournament includes:

Bucknell U Bison
Villanova U Wildcats
U of North Carolina at Wilmington Seahawks
U of Illinois Fighting Illini

Dowload your brackets here.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education: Canada’s Provincial Leaders Unite in Appeal for More Federal Support of Higher Education

By KAREN BIRCHARD

Ottawa

The leaders of Canada’s provinces and territories emerged from an unprecedented summit on higher education here on Friday saying the country needs a vision that will create a culture of higher learning if Canadians want to maintain their standard of living and compete internationally.

They also called on the country’s new government to spend billions of additional dollars on higher education. The premiers stressed, however, that developing a national strategy on higher education and skills training was just as critical as obtaining additional money.

“Failure is just not an option,” said Dalton McGuinty, the premier of Ontario and a co-chairman of the meeting. “Why do we Canadians insist that our hockey players are the best in the world but we settle for less with our postsecondary system?” he asked. “… We’re after nothing less than the best.”

Canadians are deluding themselves if they think the current situation can continue, said Bernard Lord, the premier of New Brunswick. “We need to realize that in the next decade and beyond, 80 percent of all new jobs created in this country will require some postsecondary training or education.”

The summit was organized as a result of a meeting last summer of the Council of the Federation — the group that represents the premiers of the 10 provinces and three territories. Education is a provincial matter, but the provinces depend on some money from the federal government for higher education.

The premiers agreed to put aside their regional differences and take a united approach with university leaders and others in asking the federal government to join them in improving higher education. They invited hundreds of people from across the country — university executives, faculty representatives, students, and business leaders — to a one-day meeting on Friday to gather their ideas on a number of issues that should be included in a pan-Canadian higher-education strategy.

“There’s a lot of intellectual firepower in this room,” Mr. McGuinty said before the delegates broke up into working groups to come up with recommendations for the premiers to help formulate that strategy.

A Quest to Recover Lost Funds and More

Everyone agreed that the premiers had to ask the federal government to restore the $2-billion dollars (U.S.) designated for higher education that it cut in 1995 from federal transfer funds to the provinces. That $2-billion figure is only a starting point, according to Mr. McGuinty, if Canada is serious about competing globally. “India and China are not focused on the 1995 standard; neither are Brazil and Russia,” he said.

“People recognize that cut caused problems in a number of different ways,” said George Soule, national chairman of the Canadian Federation of Students. “You can talk about access, you can talk about quality … but the bottom line is the federal government’s cut had drastic results.”

While Canada’s new Conservative-led government, elected in January, has promised to restore designated funds for higher education, it has not said how much money that will entail.

Getting education, business, and political leaders together for the summit was a good idea, several delegates said. “It’s about time,” said Peter J. George, president of McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario. “It’s really important in this country to get a handle on what the federal role in higher education ought to be, apart from the traditional areas of supporting research and supporting student assistance.”

There was a sense of urgency in the working groups, participants said, with senior administrators and executives stressing the need to be able to compete with other countries for faculty members, graduate students, skilled workers, and leading-edge researchers. “We’re in a global talent race,” said H. Wade MacLauchlan, the president of the University of Prince Edward Island, one of the participants.

More Than Money Is Needed, Delegates Say

Some delegates noted that it would take more than money to become the best. “If you don’t have a clear vision and benchmarks, throwing money at the problem isn’t going to do it,” said David L. Lindsay, president of the Association of Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology of Ontario.

“In our group discussing research, people said it’s going to take courage from our politicians, who naturally work within a short time cycle, to invest now in something that’s going to bear fruit 10 or 15 years from now,” said Bonnie M. Patterson, president of Trent University, in Peterborough, Ontario, and chairwoman of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada.

At the end of the day, there was optimism that perhaps a new way had been found to deal with the federal government. “The very fact of this national conversation will raise the issue on the national political landscape,” said Tom Traves, president of Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

“In the past, it used to be like Oliver Twist,” said Ken Webb, vice president for academics at Red River College, in Winnipeg, Manitoba. “The provinces would go to Ottawa and say ‘Give us some more, please,’ or that’s how Ottawa would characterize it.” With the summit’s united approach, “saying that it’s just the provinces coming for a handout is something the federal government may not be able to do now,” he said.

He added that the premiers can say, “Look, we had hundreds of people — academic leaders, student leaders, industry leaders — from across the country come together and this is what they said is important, and we are here as 13 premiers to tell you it’s important to us.”

The summit’s other co-chairman, Premier Jean Charest of Quebec, said the timing “was perfect” because the premiers could discuss their conclusions at an informal dinner that evening with Canada’s new prime minister, Stephen Harper, telling him that higher education was now a priority item.

But none of the premiers expected an immediate answer. The prime minister had joked when they arrived that the evening would put dinner, not dollars, on the table.

Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Charles Miller is the business executive at the helm of George W. Bush’s commission on higher education. The U.S. Department of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education is currently exploring a “No Child Left Behind” type higher education policy, which would impose standardized tests on colleges and universities.

On her website, teacher and education activist, Susan Ohanian has two “backgrounders” on Miller.

Outrages: “Panel explores standard tests for colleges

Outrages: “Charles Miller invests [sic] himself

A recent Fort Worth Weekly article titled “School for Profit” had this to say about Miller:

By 1994, Dallas entrepreneur Randy Best had made a fortune in investment banking. That year he decided to branch out. He rounded up investors and, with $3.5 million in hand, founded a for-profit company called Voyager Expanded Learning. One of those investors was Charles Miller, a millionaire friend of George Bush. The Texas governor tapped Miller to lead the statewide task force on school reform. Miller was also a friend of Margaret Spellings, another education advisor who would become secretary of education when Bush became president.

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L. A. Times: UCLA Alumni Group Is Tracking ‘Radical’ Faculty

A fledgling alumni group headed by a former campus Republican leader is offering students payments of up to $100 per class to provide information on instructors who are “abusive, one-sided or off-topic” in advocating political ideologies.

The year-old Bruin Alumni Assn. says its “Exposing UCLA’s Radical Professors” initiative takes aim at faculty “actively proselytizing their extreme views in the classroom, whether or not the commentary is relevant to the class topic.” Although the group says it is concerned about radical professors of any political stripe, it has named an initial “Dirty 30” of teachers it identifies with left-wing or liberal causes.

Some of the instructors mentioned accuse the association of conducting a witch hunt that threatens to harm the teaching atmosphere, and at least one of the group’s advisory board members has resigned because he considers the bounty offers inappropriate. The university said it will warn the association that selling copies of professors’ lectures would violate campus rules and raise copyright issues.

The Bruin Alumni Assn. is headed by Andrew Jones, a 24-year-old who graduated in June 2003 and was chairman of UCLA’s Bruin Republicans student group. He said his organization, which is registered with the state as a nonprofit, does not charge dues and has no official members, but has raised a total of $22,000 from 100 donors. Jones said the biggest contribution to the group, $5,000, came from a foundation endowed by Arthur N. Rupe, 88, a Santa Barbara resident and former Los Angeles record producer.

The Daily Bruin: Alumni group pushes right: New association hopes to air conservative voice in guiding UCLA’s direction

Andrew Jones didn’t want to be part of the official UCLA Alumni Association. So the recent UCLA graduate started his own.

Enter the Bruin Alumni Association.

The local non-profit organization, founded and run by Jones, wants to tackle what Jones alleges is a strong liberal bias ñ he calls it a “cancer of political radicalism” ñ at UCLA by soliciting donations from alumni, then using the money to campaign against activist professors, the UCLA Alumni Association and administrators in Murphy Hall.

Allegations of political bias are nothing new at UCLA, or even in higher education in general. But many prior attempts at addressing it have focused on what can or cannot be said in the classroom.

Jones is taking aim at two areas UCLA is considered strongest: outside fundraising and alumni.

Also check out The Daily Kos on the Bruin Alumni Association’s offer to pay students for monitoring “radical” professors, an act that would be in violation of the UCLA Student Conduct Code, which prohibits “selling, preparing, or distributing for any commercial purpose course lecture notes or video or audio recordings of any course unless authorized by the University in advance and explicitly permitted by the course instructor in writing.”

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In the “Politics of Professional Advancement Among College Faculty” Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter and Neil Nevitte argue that there is ideological discrimination in higher education that relegates Republican, women, and praciticing Christian professors to “lower quality schools than their professional accomplishments would predict.” Their conclusions are based upon a national survey of over 1,500 faculty members from 183 four-year colleges and univerities.

The Forum: The Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics has just published a paper by University of Pittsburgh researchers that shows Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte’s work is “plagued by theoretical and methodological problems that render their conclusions unsustainable by the available evidence.” In Hide the Republicans, the Christians, and the Women: A Response to “Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty” authors Barry Ames, David C. Barker, Chris W. Bonneau, and Christopher J. Carman offer an alternative hypothesis theoretically consistent with Rothman et al.’s findings. Unfortunately, the authors were unable to subject their alternative hypothesis to empirical assessment (or even to replicate the initial results of Rothman et al.) since they have refused to make their data available to the scientific community.

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