The Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education Is, Unsurprisingly, the Exact Opposite of What It Pretends to Be

Baker Library at Dartmouth College

This one is long, even by Curmie’s standards, Gentle Reader.  Buckle up.

A few months ago, Curmie wrote a blog post criticizing the president of his alma mater, Dartmouth College, for declining to sign on to the “Call for Constructive Engagement” from the American Association of Colleges and Universities. 

Here’s a snippet of Curmie’s commentary: 

At the moment, Dartmouth is one of only two Ivy League schools not to have substantial cuts in federal funding based on little but the caprice of the most anti-intellectual administration in history.  Dartmouth’s time will come, no doubt.  Surely we’re not under the impression that craven silence is any kind of reasonable solution.

Sometimes Curmie hates being right.  When you’re dealing with an authoritarian bully like Donald Trump, the slightest capitulation, even if it’s manifested as inaction, will be seen as weakness, and further demands are both inevitable and imminent.  And so… here we are.  Dartmouth is one of nine colleges and universities currently being extorted into agreeing to asked for commentary about the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, which, of course, has literally nothing to do with academic excellence, but is instead an authoritarian wet dream of governmental control over some of the nation’s most reputable, I dare say prestigious, bastions of higher education.  Dartmouth’s response, alas, couldn’t be more wishy-washy.  Curmie detects just a little too much Susan Collins in President Sian Leah Beilock’s statement.

Side note: The other schools on this particular hit list are Arizona, Brown, MIT, Penn, USC, Texas, Vanderbilt, and Virginia.  Gentle Reader, if you are an alum of any of the nine institutions listed here, Curmie urges you to head to a webpage created by a group called Stand for Academic Freedom and sign on to a petition to your alma mater’s president and trustees urging them to refuse to submit to the Compact.  By the way, apparently these schools were chosen because the White House believes they “are, or could be, ‘good actors.’”  Curmie, a theatre director for a half century or so, hereby hopes for more bad actors.  The Compact is essentially a threat masquerading as an opportunity: about as close as a government can come to a protection racket.

We start with the threat at the end of the first paragraph of the document: “Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits.”  (Curmie can’t suppress a giggle here: the word the idiots who wrote and distributed this missive meant is “forgo.”  “Forego” means precede.  Oh, and they make the same mistake in the other direction in Section 9.  <Snort.>)  The “federal benefits” which might be jeopardized by failure to adhere to edicts from the Mad King of Trumpistan include access to federally-affiliated student financial aid, research grants, and student visas. 

OK, on to Section 1: “Equality in Admissions.”  There’s the predictable anti-DEI blather, but the really problematic paragraphs, to Curmie’s mind, come later: 

University admissions decisions shall be based upon and evaluated against objective criteria published on the University’s website and available to all prospective applicants and members of the public.

Institutions shall have all undergraduate applicants take a widely-used standardized test (i.e. SAT, ACT, or CLT) or program-specific measures of accomplishment in the case of music, art, and other specialized programs of study. Universities shall publicly report anonymized data for admitted and rejected students, including GPA, standardized test score, or other program-specific measures of accomplishments, by race, national origin, and sex.

What.  Utter.  Crap.  “Objective criteria”?  That would eliminate any thought process by admissions offices.  How do you reconcile, for example, excellent grades and a poor SAT score?  Could be the school has no standards; could be the student had test anxiety, or was ill or dealing with some other form of life issue the day of the test.  Curmie has been on both ends of alumni interviews: does this student have what it takes to succeed in this specific environment?  Recommendations from high school teachers really do matter; Curmie has read a few hundred of them, and not infrequently made recommendations about scholarships accordingly.

That student over there doesn’t have a very good grade point average overall, but look at how much better he did when he quit the football team and joined the marching band (or vice versa).  That other student went in the opposite direction.  Knowing why would be a good thing.  Yet another applicant is brilliant in one area but barely passable in another (Curmie saw a lot of that in theatre majors, a fair number of whom were not necessarily noted for their mathematical prowess.)  Do we celebrate the specialized excellence or go for the applicant who is very good (as opposed to outstanding) across the board?  Curmie once again reveals his inner Confucian: there is simply no way to factor all of the potential variables into an “objective” model… and if there were, it would be so complex that it could be parsed only by someone with an advanced degree in statistics and probability, not by high schooler looking at a website.

More importantly, the past matters, but it isn’t the sole determinant of future success.  Standardized tests measure test-taking ability more than knowledge.  Curmie has made this point more times than it’s practicable to link to all the examples here, but this one, with reference to his own experience as a test-taker, may be taken as illustrative.

Oh, one more thing: this administration sure does care about “objectivity” when it means rich white folks benefit (students really do perform better on the SAT if they’ve taken one of those often expensive prep courses).  And their quest for transparency inevitably means lawsuits, and that, too, benefits families that can afford lawyers.  The desire to break down the data by race, national origin, and sex—but not the economic status of the student—is sort of a tell, isn’t it?  But, more significantly, where was that reverence for objectivity when the nation was saddled with cabinet appointees like Kennedy, Hegseth, and McMahon, all of whom are objectively unqualified to be hired by their agency, let alone lead it?

The Compact, in other words, should be rejected based on its first section alone.  But (insert late-night infomercial voice here) wait!  That’s not all!  Moving on to Section 2: Marketplace of Ideas & Civil Discourse.  Here’s the money quote: 

A vibrant marketplace of ideas requires an intellectually open campus environment, with a broad spectrum of ideological viewpoints present and no single ideology dominant, both along political and other relevant lines. Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as necessary to create such an environment, including but not limited to transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.  

That all sounds pretty innocuous: well, except for the paranoia about sparking violence (!) against conservative ideas.  (Curmie, who has spent considerable time on college campuses over a period of more than half a century, has literally never seen anything approaching violence against conservatives.)  Tellingly, the proposal is sufficiently vague that virtually any actual examination of an ideology could be seen as attacking it.  Racism is conservative.  Sexism is conservative.  Homophobia is conservative.  True, most 21st-century conservatives reject, or at least purport to reject, these ideologies, but all have been standard conservative doctrine in Curmie’s lifetime.  (Curmie is old, but not that old.)  And transphobia and Islamophobia are still central to the right’s playbook.

Curmie belittled more than a few arguments from the right at some point in his career: not because they were from the right, but because they didn’t stand up to scrutiny.  He also got in trouble for saying that not all feminist arguments are good arguments, and that a proposal to enforce “anti-racism” (not being racist was insufficient) on all students in a program was “Stalinistic.”  That kind of criticism would no doubt be applauded by the Regime, not because it was well-reasoned, but because it furthered their point of view in an “enemy of my enemy” sort of way.

There’s a fair amount of argumentation in Section 2 that’s actually good policy, but rather ironic coming from this administration.  It’s fine to assert the importance of civility and to note that “Civility includes protections against institutional punishment or individual harassment for one’s views.”  But this administration was strangely quiet when tenured faculty were fired for being insufficiently obsequious in mourning the death of Charlie Kirk.  Free speech for me, but not for thee.

Plus, of course, the kinds of policies proposed in this section about safeguarding free expression have already been adopted, generally long ago, by virtually every college or university in the country.  There may not have been universal enforcement, but these matters are often more complicated than the Trumpsters would have us believe.  Curmie is especially fond, though, of this sentence: “The university shall impartially and vigorously enforce all rights and restrictions it adopts with respect to free speech and expression.”  It follows shortly after the prohibition of “support for entities designated by the U.S. government as terrorist organizations.”  (“Support” is, of course, undefined.)  Oh, and there’s a prohibition against countenancing genocide (except when perpetrated by Israel, bien sûr).  We’ll just antiphrastically avoid noting that even supporting violence is protected speech unless there is a specific and imminent incitement.

By the way, Antifa, which is not an organization at all, but simply an anti-fascist (notice the first six letters) ideology, is now characterized by Dear Leader and his merry band of sycophants as a terrorist threat.  So much for free speech, a ”broad spectrum of viewpoints,” and similar sentiments. 

Section 3: Nondiscrimination in Faculty and Administrative Hiring.  Boy, that would be great.  Having, say, a university president not be selected by the politically appointed trustees here in Texas would be a big step in the right direction.  Oh.  Wait.  That’s probably not what this section means, even if that’s what it says.  There’s also the same bullshit about objectivity as for admissions.  I mean, hire the professor who has the best (perhaps padded) résumé, not the one students respond to, right?  These people neither know nor care about actual education.

Section 4: Institutional Neutrality.  This is actually reasonable, except, of course, that it is intended in this document (see above re Charlie Kirk aftermath) to extend past insisting on neutrality from employees in their “capacity as university representatives.”  It’s also interesting and ironic that President Beilock of Dartmouth is quoted approvingly in this section of a document that is being used to extort her college.

Section 5:  Student Learning.  This is a screed against grade inflation.  Curmie wishes them luck.  Really.  No irony intended here.

Section 6: Student Equality.  Mostly an attack on trans athletes, with some argument against, say, scholarships designated specifically for students of a particular sex, race, national origin, etc.  The section is simplistic and predictable.  (Curmie would be interested in seeing a discussion of donor’s rights in this regard.  So, he suspects, would Beloved Spouse, who works in Financial Aid.) 

Section 7: Financial Responsibility.  The GOP, which has been largely responsible for under-funding public universities (including some of the nine schools affected by the Compact), is suddenly concerned with students being “saddled with life-altering debt.”  It’s certainly true that there are a lot more administrative staff than necessary, especially in Student Affairs; it’s also true that upper-level administrators are almost universally overpaid relative to other staff and faculty.  (That part doesn’t get mentioned, of course.)

But the level of reporting demanded in this section (and others) actually increases administrative costs.  Curmie is so old that he remembers when it was the liberals who were all about administrivia.  Not so much, now…

There’s also a demand to freezing “effective tuition rates” (does that mean inflation-adjusted?) for five years.  Yawn.  More grandstanding than policy.  Next.  Oh, and universities should “refund tuition to students who drop out during the first academic term of their undergraduate studies.”  This has got to be a contender for stupidest fucking idea in the history of stupid fucking ideas.

And… there would be no tuition charges for students in the hard sciences at schools with more that a $2 million endowment per student.  This one, apart from being profoundly stupid by de facto punishing universities for having good science programs (and de facto penalizing students in other fields: that tuition money has to come from somewhere), seems aimed at specific schools.  Curmie’s alma mater, for example, is certainly in good financial shape, but it comes in at $1.8 million or thereabouts in this metric.

This entire section, like Section 1, is enough to make any competent administrator reject the entire Compact, even if other parts of it make a fair amount of sense… which it sort of does in a couple places.

Section 8: Foreign Entanglements.  There’s a lot of nonsense about money laundering and such-like before we get to the real stuff about limiting enrollment by foreign students.  This is supported by predictable jingoistic argumentation about requiring “foreign students [to] exhibit extraordinary talent that promises to make America stronger and more economically productive, and the selected students are introduced to, and supportive of, American and Western values, ultimately increasing global understanding and appreciation for the United States and our way of life.”

Curmie speaks here from years of experience with an exchange program with a British conservatory.  The rationale wasn’t about making America more economically productive (the only thing this administration cares about); it was about enhancing American students’ education by exposing them to peers who had grown up in a different society and a different political system, and had been educated in a different manner.  It was about establishing relationships that would be beneficial to students from both sides of the Atlantic.  (For the record, there are at least a few of those British students who now live and work in this country.  This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing; it is simply a thing.)

Trump’s purported America First ideology in fact diminishes opportunities for American students to experience… wait for it… a “broad spectrum of ideas.”  It also wants to deny access to anyone who might not be willing to swear allegiance to “American and Western values.”  How would they know without being exposed to them except in the abstract?  And if those values are indeed superior, wouldn’t even a skeptical student smart enough to get into one of those universities end up being converted?

By the way, apparently those “objective” standards for admission apply only to American students.  Curmie speaks only for himself, but he’d rather have a better student who happens to be Chinese or Saudi than a lesser student who’s American.  If you’re an American student who can’t compete: get better.

Anyway… Section 9: Exceptions.  Nothing of substance here.

Section 10: Enforcement.  More busy-work; more threats.  Nothing to see here.  Move along.

The Compact, as expected, does exactly the opposite of what it purports to do.  It places the government as the de facto decision-maker for both public and private universities.  It restricts freedom of speech even as it pretends to support it.  It reveals a profound ignorance about the way higher education works and a contempt for scholarship, teaching, and learning.  Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln…

Orwell was an optimist.

Cheque Cards, Negative Connections, and Sian Leah Beilock’s Error

Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock

Curmie had a conversation a couple of days ago with a student who is preparing to spend a year at a British conservatory with which our university has a long-standing exchange program.  She wanted to know about things like student visas, health care, and the like.  Curmie, as regular readers of this blog know, did his MA at the University of Birmingham in England, and he was the faculty point-person on our end of his university’s exchange with that conservatory for about a decade.  He hopes he was able to help, despite the fact that some of his information may be out of date.

Anyway, that conversation conjured memories of Curmie’s own attempts to navigate the experience.  It was the first time to truly be on his own, without knowing literally anyone in a new location; having that happen in a foreign country added to both the excitement level and the stress. 

At the time, Curmie didn’t have a credit card in his own name.  He did have a one or two cards linked to his father’s account for use in emergencies, but really wanted to be as independent as possible… and didn’t necessarily want to explain purchases to the ‘rents.  Importantly, this was long ago: a lot of smaller businesses, like the convenience store across the street from Curmie’s bed-sit, didn’t accept credit cards, anyway.  Oh, and debit cards hadn’t been invented yet. 

Curmie established a checking account with the local branch of Lloyd’s Bank, and made lots of trips there to get cash.  ATMs existed, but few were located outside bank property.  So if you needed to, say, go buy a new shirt or something, you’d have to make a trip to the bank to get cash.  Or… and Curmie finally gets to his point… you’d write a check (or a cheque, to use the British spelling).

A number of banks, including Curmie’s, introduced what they called a “cheque card” as a service to their customers.  Curmie was able to get one.  Essentially, this card guaranteed that merchants would get their money on cheques up to £50 (Curmie may be misremembering the exact amount): even if there were insufficient funds in the account, the bank would make it good, and they’d be the ones to deal with their customer. 

Alas, what started out as a service that benefitted customers and merchants alike soon took a turn.  Within months if not weeks, cheque cards become a sine qua non: it was no longer a good thing to have such a card, but a bad thing not to have one.  For customers who didn’t have the account balance or sufficient reliable income to get a card, it meant that even businesses that had accepted your cheques for years would no longer do so.

Curmie was thinking about that phenomenon when reading that his undergrad alma mater, Dartmouth College, was the only Ivy League school whose president had not signed on to a “Call for Constructive Engagement” from the American Association of Colleges and Universities.  As of this writing, that open letter, dated April 22, has 509 signatories. 

Dartmouth spokesperson Kathryn Kennedy says that President Sian Leah Beilock “does not believe that signing open form letters like this one is an effective way to defend Dartmouth’s mission and values.”  With all due respect, Dr. Beilock: bullshit.  Just as the absence of a cheque card quickly became more important than the presence of one, we’re at the stage where not joining in solidarity with the leaders of hundreds of other institutions of higher learning across the country makes more of a statement than signing would.

Back in the days when Curmie taught courses in Persuasion and Public Speaking, he talked a lot about the difference between positive and negative connections.  A positive connection is when if you do X, then a good thing, Y, will be more likely to happen.  A negative connection occurs when failure to do X will make a bad thing, Y, more likely to happen.  Stop pretending that only positive connections exist.  Signing on to that manifesto almost certainly won’t make things better, but not signing will almost certainly make things worse: for Dartmouth, for higher education in general, and for the nation.

At the moment, Dartmouth is one of only two Ivy League schools not to have substantial cuts in federal funding based on little but the caprice of the most anti-intellectual administration in history.  Dartmouth’s time will come, no doubt.  Surely we’re not under the impression that craven silence is any kind of reasonable solution.  Just ask the Republican leadership in Arkansas how their embarrassing obeisance has worked out when they’re no longer a particular asset.  “No, you don’t get FEMA assistance after tornadoes.  Don’t be silly.  Bootstraps, and all that…”

By contrast, China, Canada, and the European Union refused to buckle under tariff threats and left Trump behaving as the blustering xenophobic buffoon that he is.  Or check out the international students who sued the government rather than cravenly getting on the next plane home.  Friday’s New York Times headline: “Trump Administration Reverses Course on Student Visa Cancellations.” Or look at the difference between Columbia’s cowardly capitulation which led only to more demands, as opposed to Harvard’s suggestion that 47 perform an action best suited to particularly limber hermaphrodites, which led to a declaration that the letter to Harvard was “unauthorized.”  Bullies are always cowards.

More to the point, that statement from the AAC&U is pretty inoffensive.  First off, it’s not the monodigital salute to the Trump administration that Curmie would have written.  (Curmie had most of the skills of a successful administrator… except, crucially, the ability to suck up to powerful idiots.)  The presidents seek not confrontation but “constructive engagement.”  “Let’s talk this out,” in other words.

The signatories claim write that 

We are open to constructive reform and do not oppose legitimate government oversight. However, we must oppose undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses. We will always seek effective and fair financial practices, but we must reject the coercive use of public research funding.

That’s clear and focused, but it’s not antagonistic.  The most important two sentences are these:

American institutions of higher learning have in common the essential freedom to determine, on academic grounds, whom to admit and what is taught, how, and by whom. Our colleges and universities share a commitment to serve as centers of open inquiry where, in their pursuit of truth, faculty, students, and staff are free to exchange ideas and opinions across a full range of viewpoints without fear of retribution, censorship, or deportation.

In other words, our colleges and universities take seriously both the First Amendment and their responsibilities to pursue truth, as opposed to claiming to have found it.  That seems a pretty straightforward articulation of both the goals and the realities of high education.  Are there sometimes breakdowns in the system that lead to unjust results?  Of course.  Educators are human. 

But does virtually every college or university care more about free inquiry than the Trump administration does?  Is that even a serious question?  Which one seeks to thwart research into contagious diseases, cancer, or climate change, and which one wants to bring together our best and brightest academics to perform that research?  And, regardless of the academic discipline, no one gets anywhere by just repeating what they’ve been told.  That’s the job of lazy undergrads… or AI (a.k.a, A-1, according to the hopelessly unqualified Secretary of Education).

Of course, not all research is conducted in scientific disciplines, but if that made research in the humanities and social sciences unworthy of pursuit, Curmie would have done a lot less of it.  All research at the level at which university faculty engage in it is about an attempt to understand the world in which we live or the way we live in it.  Importantly, studies in languages and literature, the arts, history, philosophy, sociology, and the like tend not to be those that receive big government grants (there are some, of course, from sources like the NEH and NEA), so restricting federal funding has its most serious impact on precisely the STEM fields the right seems to think are the only ones that matter... or, in Harvard’s case, on support for area hospitals.

President Beilock’s passivity is disappointing for two fundamentally different reasons.  First, Curmie was impressed by her handling of the pro-Palestinian rallies last spring: guaranteeing the protesters’ right to free expression, but placing appropriate boundaries: no interfering with others’ rights, no taking over buildings, no true threats or intimidation, etc.  Curmie is saddened by the idea that someone who could exercise such appropriate leadership then could be such a milquetoast now.

Secondly, Curmie understands why not all college and university presidents feel safe in supporting even such a moderate document as this.  Of the five schools where Curmie either received a degree or held a full-time teaching position, four are in red states, and two are state universities; we’ve certainly seen enough evidence of the vindictiveness of GOP pols to warrant a bit of extra discretion.  The two private schools are small colleges; their endowments are less than $100,000 per current student.  They aren’t necessarily in a position to take even moderate risks.  They should, but their reluctance is understandable.

By contrast, Dartmouth is a prestigious private college in a purple state.  Its endowment is about a million and a half dollars per student.  Few institutions are in as strong a position, have as loyal an alumni body, or are as well insulated from any potential downside to signing on to the AAC&U statement.  Yet President Beilock remains passive, as if that’s a safe position.

Deliberate inaction is action.  Curmie was never a great fan of the Canadian rock band Rush, but they had their moments, like this line: “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”  The name of the song?  “Freewill.”

Dartmouth's Basketball Team Embarrasses This Alum, But Not as Much as the NLRB Does

The men’s basketball team at Curmie’s undergrad alma mater, Dartmouth College, is an embarrassment.  No, not because they’re terrible, although they are: they have secured last place, alone, in the not-exactly-elite (in basketball terms) Ivy League.  They didn’t win a road game all year.  As of this writing, they’re 337^th (of 362) in the NET and 339^th on KenPom.  They haven’t had a winning record in 15 years, and currently sport the longest active streak (dating back to 1959) of not participating in the NCAA tournament.  They weren’t very good back when Curmie was a student there; they’re worse now.

But “disappointing” isn’t the same as “embarrassing.”  Not being very good basketball players is one thing; being narcissistic little assholes is something else again.  The reason the Big Green’s hoopsters are in the news, alas, falls into the latter category.  The players voted today (as I write this on March 5) to unionize (!), thanks to a heightened sense of self-importance by some rather mediocre athletes and a remarkably inane decision by the NLRB’s Regional Director, declaring them “employees.”  All 15 players signed the initial petition to join Local 560 of the Service Employees International Union, and 13 of them voted to unionize.

The Regional Director in question is Laura A. Sacks of the Boston office.  (Curmie believes people who do remarkably stupid things in their professional capacities shouldn’t be able to hide behind an important-sounding title.  Walking lawyer jokes like Jake Krupski ought to be similarly disgraced.)  The decision itself is inane on its face, but the rationale is even worse.

Here’s the decision; let’s look at a couple of key points.  First off, there is no argument with the college’s position that financial aid is offered exclusively on the basis of financial need; indeed, four players on the team receive none, whereas one gets a full ride.  Athletes don’t get special housing or other such perks.  Again, no one claims otherwise.  A fall term message to players “encouraged” them not to schedule courses during potential practice times, particularly between 2:00 and 5:00 in the afternoon. 

Conversely, that message told players they should “[F]eel free to register for courses in the following time slots: 8S/8L, 9S/9L, 10, 10A, 11, 12.”  Here’s where Curmie’s experience becomes relevant, because he knows what that means.  About 90% of all the courses I took as an undergrad were in one of those time slots.  Afternoons, certainly after 2:00, were almost always free.  One doubts that much has changed, even given the considerable interim.

Remember, too, that since Dartmouth is on a quarter system, students take only three courses at a time, so there’s less likelihood of scheduling conflicts at all; unless a particular course necessary for a player’s degree plan was offered only in the afternoon and only during basketball season, problems are rare if not altogether absent.  It’s also unclear why the team couldn’t practice in the evening, as there are multiple places on campus with basketball courts, and much of “practice” is film study or time in the weight room.

Also worthy of notice is the fact that NCAA and Ivy League regulations prohibit teams from requiring too much practice time: “In-season, student-athletes may participate in a maximum of four hours of CARA [countable athletically related activity] daily and a maximum of twenty hours of CARA weekly….  When a sport is not in-season, student-athletes may participate in a maximum of six hours of CARA each week.”

Yet, curiously, Sacks and her minions based part of the decision on the bizarre belief that athletes should be treated differently because the demands on their time exceed those required of participants in, for example, music, theatre, or journalism.  In a word, BULLSHIT.  First off, those activities are year-round; there’s no “off season,” and certainly no time cap.  Curmie was required to spend more than four hours a day and more than 20 hours a week not infrequently (especially but not exclusively during tech weeks) when he was in school, and he's certainly expected that kind of commitment from students throughout his career as a director and technical director in college and university settings. 

The other variation on this theme was that Curmie realized early on that if he was going to be an active member of the debate team, he was going to have to spend a lot more than 20 hours a week.  He opted instead for doing research to help the team when he could, administering one of the divisions of the high school invitational tournament hosted by the Forensic Union, and occasionally brainstorming with more active team members.  But those active debaters spent dozens of hours a week working for the team.  Same with the editors (at least) of the college newspaper, the directorate of the radio station… the list goes on and on. 

It’s also frankly nuts to claim that the Ivy League is taking students out of classes willy-nilly.  Virtually all league games are played on Friday night or Saturday.  Wanna guess, Gentle Reader, how many road games Dartmouth will play this year on a Monday through Thursday while classes are in session?  The answer is… wait for it… one.  Yes, one.  Another came between the end of classes and the end of finals.  Yet somehow, we get an official NLRB ruling with nonsense like “if, for example, the team is traveling on a Monday…”  Is Sacks incapable of looking at a schedule?  Furthermore, there was no rebuttal to the coach’s testimony that players sometimes missed road trips, with his blessing, because of class responsibilities.  In the Ivy League, education matters more than sports.  It really does.

So the whole “taking them out of classes” business is nonsense.  Moving on.  OK, get this: Cade Haskins, one of the students who keeps getting quoted, says that although the college makes it clear that “it is understood by both the faculty and coaching staff that class attendance takes precedence over participation in athletics,” he often prioritized basketball.  The fact that he can’t abide by the rules is an argument in his favor?

The precedent for this action is a decision a few years back when the Northwestern football team successfully convinced the NLRB that they were employees, but because they compete in a league that includes state universities (Dartmouth doesn’t), federal law apparently makes it impossible for the NLRB to make a ruling against the university in this instance.  Of course, unlike Dartmouth or indeed any other Ivy League school, Northwestern does give athletic scholarships, so, arguably, players are indeed employees, doing a job in exchange for financial considerations.  Still, it’s ironic that it would be Northwestern, a school far more noted for its academics than its athletics, that would be the target for such a unionization effort.

There are more ironies at play, too.  It would be impossible to name an athletic conference that cares more about the importance of education relative to sports than the Ivy League does, and there are few teams in any sport in the Ivy League more inept than Dartmouth men’s basketball… well, with the possible exception of Dartmouth women’s basketball.  If these folks are “employees,” Curmie would hate to see the amateurs.

Oh, but alumni contribute to the college because of the basketball team!  (Seriously, that’s an argument!)  Luckily, Curmie had put down his mug before reading that part, or coffee would’ve come out his nose.  There’s an alumni group, you see, Gentle Reader, that contributed over $300,000 to improve the basketball facilities!  Curmie got a missive from the alumni fund the other day.  That $300k for basketball would amount to about 7/10 of 1% of the unrestricted giving to the college last year (that doesn’t count the tens of millions of dollars designated for other specific uses.) 

It goes without saying that the basketball team at Dartmouth loses a lot more money than it brings in.  Don’t expect to see games televised except on ESPN+, and whereas Curmie’s other American school (his MA is from a British university), the University of Kansas, has sold out 16,300 seat Allen Field House every game for the last 22 years, Dartmouth can’t fill 2100 seat Edward Leede Arena even half full for Senior Night. 

The fact that according to the NLRB decision, “[N]o current members of Dartmouth’s men’s basketball team participate in NIL activities” sort of tells it all.  They’re eligible to do so, but local businesses don’t care enough to pay them as spokesmen.  Why?  Because they aren’t going to attract positive attention.  Curiously enough, the “whiny loser” image isn’t one that advertisers choose to foreground.  They’ll do their own ads or hire actors who know how to read a line. 

But if NIL threatens merely the idea of collegiate sports as we know them (see Curmie’s commentary here, here, and here, for example), the prospect of having to remunerate student-athletes will—nay, should—spell the end of intercollegiate sports altogether.  Many colleges are considering cutbacks to athletic programs as it is.  Curmie wrote last year that another Ivy League school, Brown, “had to cut some varsity sports a couple of years ago: losing money on athletics was one thing; losing that much money was untenable.”  

Whereas part of Curmie says “Good!”, the fact is that cheering on the home team is, or should be, very much a part of student life.  Curmie saw dozens of athletic events—football, baseball, basketball, hockey, lacrosse, ski jumping—as a student and doesn’t want future generations of students to be denied that opportunity. 

But if pampering a cohort of mediocre narcissists will cost even more time and/or money than it already does, the tipping point draws nearer.  There are some outstanding colleges and universities that don’t have athletics teams at all, or who play only in Division III or the NAIA: Brandeis, CalTech, MIT, NYU, and the University of Chicago come to mind.  Brooklyn’s St. Francis College recently eliminated all its Division I athletics programs, citing finances.  Indeed, only a handful of athletic departments break even; most lose millions of dollars a year, the shortfall made up by increased tuition and fees borne by other students, a goodly number of whom couldn’t care less about whether the basketball team is any good.

It's also probably worth mentioning that the two players quoted in the Politico article linked above are, predictably, not among the best players of even the remarkably unsuccessful team on which they play.  They’ve totaled 153 points and 50 rebounds in 26 games (let me save you the math, Gentle Reader: that’s less than 6 PPG and 2 RPG between them); both have more turnovers than assists.  They… erm… have little hope of a career in professional basketball.  Yet they seem to be at the center of the self-glorification.  Figures.

To be fair, there will be appeals after appeals, and it’s unlikely that college officials will have to negotiate for the services of hoopsters in the near future.  That doesn’t make the initial Regional NLRB ruling any less ludicrous.  Ultimately, the argument comes down to this: are athletes are treated significantly differently from participants in other extra-curricular (or co-curricular) activities?  If the answer is no, then there’s no case.  If it’s yes, then the rationale is that because jocks have been coddled in the past, they should be even more coddled in the future.  Color me unimpressed.

Curmie is loath to quote Donald Trump with anything even bordering on approbation, but on this one, he’s got it right.  If these guys want to be considered employees, the correct response is “You’re fired.”  Laura Sacks ought to hear those words as well.

Robert Reich and “Real Charities”

You don't have to be a millionaire to love this painting.

There are still a few (and by “a few,” I mean a lot) of potential Curmie nominees to get to, but I’ve got to mix it up a little, here. So we turn to a recent piece on Salon.com by former Clinton administration Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. In it, Reich seems to bemoan the fact that rich people’s charitable contributions go to where the donors want them to go, and not to “the poor.”

I get it. Really, I do. It would be nice if more charity went to those who need it most. But it isn’t my call, or his. And the suggestion that the poor benefit not at all from contributions to cultural institutions is as ill-founded as it is pompous. Anyway, here’s Reich:

But a large portion of the charitable deductions now claimed by America’s wealthy are for donations to culture palaces – operas, art museums, symphonies, and theaters – where they spend their leisure time hobnobbing with other wealthy benefactors.

Another portion is for contributions to the elite prep schools and universities they once attended or want their children to attend…. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the rest of the Ivy League are worthy institutions, to be sure, but they’re not known for educating large numbers of poor young people. (The University of California at Berkeley, where I teach, has more poor students eligible for Pell Grants than the entire Ivy League put together.) And they’re less likely to graduate aspiring social workers and legal defense attorneys than aspiring investment bankers and corporate lawyers.

I’m all in favor of supporting fancy museums and elite schools, but face it: These aren’t really charities as most people understand the term. They’re often investments in the life-styles the wealthy already enjoy and want their children to have as well. Increasingly, being rich in America means not having to come across anyone who’s not.

Curmie is usually a big fan of Mr. Reich, but not when he’s spewing twaddle like this. Curmie is as cynical as the next guy, but might it not be, after all, that rich folks support museums and universities and the like not out of a desire to hoard the goodies, but to make them available? If that was true of the Andrew Carnegies, Leland Stanfords, and Cornelius Vanderbilts of the world (not exactly the nicest of folks in many ways), why might it not be true for the Warren Buffetts and Bill Gateses?

Berkeley has more Pell-eligible students than the Ivies? Might that be because it’s a state school with a specific mission to educate the greater population? Or that it’s bigger than the Ivies (Berkeley has about five times as many employees as my Ivy League alma mater has students)? And might not contributions to the Ivies be in part necessitated by the fact that they’re not getting a state subsidy, so private donations are all the more important? By the way, I don’t have the figures, but I’d be willing to bet that my current employer, a non-flagship state university, probably rivals Berkeley for Pell recipients, although we have only half the student population and a budget considerably smaller than that. Not to mention the sour taste created by Reich’s holier-than-thou attitude…

There, then, are three fundamental reasons to reject Reich’s argument. First is the “they can do what they want with their money, but I’d do something different, so they should, too” approach. There is no more telling liberal conceit (in both senses of that term) than this: the idea that, in this case, it’s only a “real charity” if Robert Reich thinks it is.

Second, there’s the cherry-picked data and false logic. I’ve already mentioned the Pell Grant business. We could add the bit about all the tax deductions going to the rich. Of course, they do: that’s a function of the tax code, specifically the standard deduction. A much higher percentage of Curmie’s contributions would go to reaching the tipping point whereby itemizing deductions pays off than would be true for Scrooge McDuck. But Curmie has often benefited from the standard deduction per se in a way that ol’ SMcD wouldn’t have.

The greatest weakness of Reich’s argument, however, is the sheer anti-intellectual, anti-aesthetic smugness of it all. He smirks that “Poor New Yorkers rarely attend concerts at Lincoln Center,” for example. Actually, they do, though not in person. Contributions to Lincoln Center by rich people allow that venue to survive. Contributions to NPR and PBS allow the concerts produced there to by accessed not merely by poor New Yorkers, but by poor Peorians and poor San Franciscans, as well.

Think of what it costs to produce an opera: just in terms of professional staff, there’s the cast, orchestra, artistic staff (designers, directors, choreographers, etc.), front-of-house staff, technicians… at least 100 people, most of them for the entire run of the production process, from first rehearsal (or before) until the show closes. These are professionals, remember, and they deserve to be paid accordingly. We’re talking well into five-figures in box office a night, just to make payroll. That doesn’t count the cost of the venue, the promotion, the equipment, the upkeep, the sets, the costumes… Guess what? Help has to come from somewhere. Those tax-deductible contributions matter. A lot. And it’s pretty clear that one of the strengths of the current tax structure is its encouragement of charitable giving.

Contributions by millionaires and billionaires (and by a lot of us who aren’t) allow my alma mater (which is also Reich’s, by the way) to have need-blind admissions and to be able to say this on their website: “Students coming from families with total incomes of less than $100,000 and typical assets receive free tuition and no loans at Dartmouth. Many of these students receive scholarship assistance to cover the other costs of the Dartmouth experience.” I think that’s fairly impressive, and frankly, I’m proud to have contributed in some small way to making that happen. The same argument could be employed, of course, for countless other colleges and universities, not to mention a vast panoply of other worthy ventures, including those elitist museums and arts companies.

Whenever I’m in Chicago, I make a point to find a little time to visit the Art Institute. It holds a special place in my heart for a variety of reasons, not least because it displays several of my favorite artworks, including the Gustave Caillebotte painting at the top of this post (my wife and I refer to this painting simply as “Gus”). It costs a fair amount of money to go to the Art Institute: $23 for someone like me. It’s worth it. But both the quality of the exhibitions and even that level of affordability (Illinois residents can get in free on Thursday evenings, by the way) are very much a function of charitable giving, often by (gasp!) rich people. If I can get a ticket to the Alley Theatre in Houston for $60 instead of $100, that is a direct result of someone underwriting the operation. It means that I can go more often, and that someone with a little less cash flow can go at all.

And do not EVEN begin to tell me about how art is the exclusive purview of the rich, Mr. Reich. I mean, haven’t you seen “The Shawshank Redemption”? Do the names Bertolt Brecht, Augusto Boal, Athol Fugard, Václav Havel, or Joan Littlewood mean nothing to you? Did you not know that the most famous revival of the quintessential absurdist play, Waiting for Godot, is not the current one with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart (although I’m sore depressed that I don’t get to see it), but the one at San Quentin Prison many years ago? Have you never heard the Blind Boys of Alabama or Leadbelly? Seriously, Mr. Reich, you don’t get out much, do you?

Over the years, Curmie has contributed to three colleges and universities; several theatre companies, museums, arts councils, and galleries; a wide range of animal rescue or welfare organizations; a few different churches; a handful of health and disaster relief agencies; a couple of charities with a specific mission to help the poor; three or four environmental causes; some free speech advocacy groups; at least a half dozen different PBS and NPR affiliates; and probably a few places I’m not remembering off the top of my head. I don’t know which of these Mr. Reich considers “real charities.” I also don’t f*cking care.

[I should note that Curmie’s netpal Jack Marshall has already written on this subject. We agree on this one.]

When Real Educators Honor the Fake Ones... and I don't mean actors

Haven’t written here in forever… where to begin…

How about this: today was the commencement ceremony for my undergrad alma mater, Dartmouth College. The commencement speaker for the second year in a row was a faux educator who has done far more harm than good to the American educational system while simultaneously playing to the adoring squeals of media whores, corporate busybodies (hey, Bill Gates: I admit I know nothing about software… why don’t you do the same with respect to education?), and—alas!—people who should know better.

Anyway, last year’s speaker was Wendy Kopp, founder and CEO of Teach for America, one of those good ideas in theory which, looked at objectively, has been a colossal failure. The idea is to recruit the best and brightest from the nation’s top universities, then to turn them loose on troubled school districts to bring about REFORM. No one is willing to define exactly what that means, but it sure does sound promising, dunnit?

For another viewpoint, one that closely resembles mine, here’s Salon’s Andrew Hartman a few months ago:

From its inception, the media anointed TFA the savior of American education. Prior to a single corps member stepping foot in a classroom, The New York Times and Newsweek lavished Kopp’s new organization with cover stories full of insipid praise. Adulation has remained the norm. Its recent twenty-year anniversary summit, held in Washington, D.C., featured fawning video remarks by President Obama and a glitzy “who’s who” roster of liberal cheerleaders, including John Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell, Gloria Steinem, and TFA board member John Legend. The organs of middlebrow centrist opinion—Time Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic—glorify TFA at every opportunity. The Washington Post heralds the nation’s education reform movement as the “TFA insurgency”—a perplexing linguistic choice given so-called “insurgency” methods have informed national education policies from Reagan to Obama. TFA is, at best, another chimerical attempt in a long history of chimerical attempts to sell educational reform as a solution to class inequality. At worst, it’s a Trojan horse for all that is unseemly about the contemporary education reform movement.

The original idea was to replace weak and often part-time or substitute teachers with bright and energetic—but, frankly, dilettante—recent college alums with good academic pedigrees but only five weeks of preparation. These alleged teachers would commit to two years in the classroom before moving on to “real” careers on Wall Street or wherever… you know, careers worthy of their skills. Veteran Fordham professor Mark Naison describes one promotional poster as urging college students to:

“Learn how joining TFA can help you gain admission to Stanford Business School.” The message of that flyer was: “use teaching in high-poverty areas as a stepping stone to a career in business.” It was not only disrespectful to every person who chooses to commit their life to the teaching profession, it effectively advocated using students in high-poverty areas as guinea pigs for an experiment in “resume-padding” for ambitious young people.

Supposedly, at least according to early recruitment strategies, TFA-ers would enhance the reputation of public school teachers, because, you see, with so many of the nation’s academic elite working for them, all those career educator boats would rise in the new high tide of excellence. It really takes someone from the media/education/corporate elite to miss the condescension dripping from the rhetoric. I am frankly mortified but hardly surprised that my alma mater bought into this tripe.

Gentle Reader, Curmie is aware of the irony that he graduated with honors from an Ivy League school and never took an education course in his life (the perfect TFA-er!) and yet took up a career as a teacher, albeit at the university rather than primary or secondary level. It must surely seem strange for one such as I to be so adamantly opposed to TFA’s operation. The answer is simple, though no less ironic. There is no question that my undergraduate experience was extremely beneficial to developing my critical thinking skills—the very skills my alma mater seems to have abandoned in its fawning over the smug and elitist TFA agenda.

But the fact is that anyone with a functioning bullshitometer will be immediately skeptical of TFA’s grandiose claims. The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss, who actually covers education issues instead of merely opining about them, points out a host of problems with TFA’s hype: that the studies cited are unlikely to be peer-reviewed, that standardized testing just might not be the panacea that TFA and others claim it to be, that the single best predictor of a teacher’s effectiveness is experience (and, by definition, the TFA folks will have only one or two years on the job)… you get the idea.

Indeed, TFA has allowed school administrators and politicians more interested in slashing budgets than in educating students—and that’s a good many of the former and the vast majority of the latter—to save money at the expense of quality by laying off good and experienced teachers in favor of TFA drive-bys.

There are lots of other reasons to distrust TFA: the fact that few of the university students accepted into the program come from anything like the communities in which they will serve, for example. Obviously, people from higher socio-economic classes ought not to be precluded from participating in TFA or similar programs, but there does seem to be a systematic attempt to prioritize prestige over product in the selection of TFA “associates”: an apt metaphor, I fear, for the entire operation.

As Naison writes:

…the most objectionable aspect of Teach For America — other than its contempt for lifetime educators — is its willingness to create another pathway to wealth and power for those already privileged in the rapidly expanding educational-industrial complex, which already offers numerous careers for the ambitious and well-connected. An organization which began by promoting idealism and educational equity has become, to all too many of its recruits, a vehicle for profiting from the misery of America’s poor.

Still, if Kopp represents much of what we ought not to be celebrating in the American educational system, she’s not even in the same league of charlatanism as this year’s Dartmouth honoree, Geoffrey Canada, hero of “Waiting for Superman” and the executive poobah of the Harlem Children’s Zone, another ostensibly high-minded program designed to exploit public school teachers and students for the benefit of… well, Mr. Canada.

Whereas Kopp’s operation is at least forthright in its elitism and demonization of teachers’ unions (and teachers), for example, Canada is a full-out fraud. He’s the guy who insists that class size doesn’t matter, while keeping his classes to 15 (he sucks up gazillions of dollars in corporate largesse to be able to afford that). He’s the guy who claims that a good education doesn’t necessarily cost a lot of money while spending $16K a year per student. By the way, that’s just the in-class costs, not counting “the costs of a 4 p.m.-to-6 p.m. after-school program, rewards for student performance, a chef who prepares healthy meals, central administration and most building costs, and the students’ free health and dental care, which comes out of the zone’s overall budget.” So tack on another few thousand per student. The national average per student in 2011: $10,694.

Canada also bellows full-throatedly about his successes at raising test scores. Let’s leave aside the obvious points that test scores are not the sole determinant of educational value, or that non-school factors (family life, economic class, etc.) are generally conceded to play a greater role in predicting educational success than any changes in personnel or curriculum. For the sake of argument, let’s treat test scores as worth the paper they’re printed on, and we’ll even ignore Canada’s significantly better facilities and pretend that the playing field is even.

Let’s just look at the numbers. Canada crows that 100% of his students graduate. Well, yeah… if you add enough qualifiers. Of course, if you add enough qualifiers, you can make anything “true.” George W. Bush was, in fact, the greatest (Republican) President in (21st century) American history. What goes unspoken in Canada’s self-aggrandizing is the fact that his statistics are based on students who make it to senior year. He casually neglects to mention that he dismissed an entire class… twice! Even if we ignore those purges, Canada’s claims of 100% completion rate are at best misleading and more accurately described as utterly fabricated. There were 97 6th graders in HCZ in 2005-06; 62 graduated in 2012. That’s a little short of 100%: about 36% less, to be precise. The others? Some may have moved, although one suspects that this was relatively infrequent. The rest either dropped out or were removed.

I am not suggesting here that such figures are problematic in and of themselves. A school in a high-poverty area that graduates close to 2/3 of its students and places all or nearly all of those graduates in colleges and universities is doing something right. Indeed, I am always skeptical of extremely high retention rates. As a university professor, I am always interested in keeping our attrition rates low, but not necessarily “as low as possible.” We wouldn’t be doing our jobs if we gave passing grades for work that doesn’t meet reasonable standards, and—for as many different reasons as there are students who fail—some of our charges just don’t make it. That’s not the problem with Canada. It’s the misrepresentation that is so egregious that nothing he says should ever again be taken at face value. If he’s willing to lie about something that can be readily checked, what’s he going to say if he suspects there’s no way for the rest of us to find out the truth?

Moreover, even as the “Waiting for Superman” director David Guggenheim orgasms over the wonderfulness of Canada’s “reforms,” actual achievement is somewhat more down-to-earth. Diane Ravitch points out that “even Geoffrey Canada’s schools have many students who are not proficient. On the 2010 state tests, 60 percent of the fourth-grade students in one of his charter schools were not proficient in reading, nor were 50 percent in the other.”

In other words, by spending more money in better facilities, Canada was able to achieve some positive but hardly amazing results. Somehow I suspect that traditional schools could have achieved similar results without the hype and without paying $400K to the administrator in charge.

Which brings us back to Dartmouth. Two years in a row they’ve not only given an honorary degree to an educationist hack, but have chosen said anti-teacher, anti-student self-promoter as the commencement speaker. There were certainly other options—one of my personal heroes, Johnny Clegg, received an honorary degree last year, for example. What’s to be done? Well, I could cut my Alumni Fund contribution in half… that would send shock waves through the budgetary process, amounting to about .0000005% of the annual operating expenses. Or I could squawk ineffectually in a blog post. Yeah, I think I’ll do that.