| When the inmates run the asylum; how responsible were the trustess? | |
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| Topic Started: Feb 20 2009, 08:36 AM (528 Views) | |
| Quasimodo | Feb 20 2009, 08:36 AM Post #1 |
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How much of what happened at Duke can be traced to the fault of the Trustees? Charles Sykes' book The Hollow Men is a short history of Dartmouth College during the period running from 1971-1990. http://www.articlearchives.com/education-training/education-systems-institutions/678132-1.html The great movement toward "general education," which originated at Columbia in the 1920s and involved a reading of the books generally deemed essential, had influence across the country. Educational leaders recognized that there were certain books an educated person simply had to be familiar with, and all such programs were intended to bridge the gap between specialization and shared culture. This wave did not much affect Dartmouth. President Kemeny, Mr. Sykes shows, did try to introduce a serious core" curriculum, but the faculty wasn't interested. This brings us to the second of Mr. Sykes's major points: the shift of institutional power from the administration and the trustees to the faculty, which led inexorably to the politicization of the academy. As Mr. Sykes documents, the Dartmouth faculty wrecked the McLaughlin administration, chiefly over the issue of ROTC. Actually, the substance of that issue was not the training of a few officers. It was Vietnam, in retrospect, and Nicaragua and El Salvador in the present tense, with the faculty solidly on the side of Third World Communist insurgencies. Behind it all was a negative view of American power, and, implicitly, of America itself Intimidated by what Roger Kimball has called "tenured radicals," President McLaughlin dithered, tried to appease the faculty with perks, got nowhere, and ended up with no constituency. The result of these developments can be put succinctly. Dartmouth no longer knows who or what it is. |
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| Quasimodo | Feb 20 2009, 08:37 AM Post #2 |
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http://www.articlearchives.com/education-training/education-systems-institutions/678132-1.html (cont.) The loss of an overall rationale for the bachelor-of-arts program, plus the advance of specialization, plus the gain of tenured-radical power at the expense of the college president and the trustees, has issued in a permeable and exploitable curriculum. Courses get proposed and instituted because of pressure from loud interest groups. Leftist ideology has flowed into the educational vacuum. By examining course reading lists and interviewing professors and administrators, Mr. Sykes has uncovered courses the content of which is, to put it mildly, indefensible-courses that amount to pure indoctrination, and cannot stand up to professional scrutiny. There are, for example, courses offered for degree credit in which the entire list of assigned readings is Marxist. Worse, the Marxist readings are not in the original texts by Marx and Engels, but in what might be called Paperback Marxism. Throughout American higher education foolish and unexamined ideas are taken as canonical, and are promulgated by a parade of symbols, as in the appearance of Angela Davis as the keynote speaker at an anniversary of coeducation. During the controversy about the deployment of Pershing II missiles, which had much to do with the deliquescence of the Soviet empire, Dartmouth's "senior symposium" presented thirty speakers: 28 opposed the missile, one favored it, and one sat on the fence. |
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| Quasimodo | Feb 20 2009, 08:38 AM Post #3 |
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http://www.ourcivilisation.com/dumb/dumb75.htm Sykes explains the politicization of the college courses. He tells how race, gender and class have been enshrined as the looking glasses through which all subject matter must be seen if one is to survive in academia. Colleges have gone overboard with institutionalized affirmative action, sensitivity training, and anti-free speech codes. The second half of the book is devoted to a case study of Dartmouth College, which became a prime example of the intolerance of those who preach "diversity." |
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| Quasimodo | Feb 20 2009, 08:39 AM Post #4 |
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What books 'have to be read' now at Duke for a graduate to be considered educated, and to experience a shared culture with the rest of educated Americans? "American Psycho"? (What happened to Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens, Shakespeare, and co.?) |
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| Quasimodo | Feb 20 2009, 08:44 AM Post #5 |
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[lost the URL ] Why trustees function as vacuous booster boards and have allowed academic institutions to degenerate into faculty sandboxes is a question for students of social psychology. Boards are generally formally constituted by self-replication and are too large for effective deliberations: unweildy secret societies, in effect. One might suggest three sets amendments to state laws that might have a meliorative effect. 1. Amendments to state corporation law that would annul the charters of those extant tertiary institutions which are not subsidaries of other corporate bodies, and replace them with standard charters with the following provisions: a. The Board of Trustees is to consist of between five and 21 members; b. It is to be elected by a postal ballot of the alumni; c. Candidates for positions on the board are to be nominated by petition or by payment of a deposit. There shall be no 'nominating committee'; (snip) f. There shall be standard language in all charters, and mailed to every candidate for a position on a board, that it is the responsibility of the trustees to determine the educational mission of the school; that the exercise of such discrection includes deciding which disciplines the institution will and will not teach and what the institution's investment in each discipline will be; that the departmental faculties are no more competant than the trustees to superintend any matter outside the realm of the speciality of each department; and that neither the trustees nor their agents should delegate authority to elected committees of the faculty; 2. Amendments to state labor law which render any contract of employment enforceable for periods of no more than six years. After six years, a faculty member would have to be issued a new contract or would be terminable-at-will; Edited by Quasimodo, Feb 20 2009, 08:45 AM.
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| Quasimodo | Feb 20 2009, 09:01 AM Post #6 |
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A "core curriculum" as understood by Boston College: 1. The core curriculum should address perennial questions that have traditionally stood at the center of intellectual debate. These include questions about: * the origin and destiny of existence (e.g., naturalistic and transcendent accounts of human existence, the existence of God and whether and how we can know God); [Boston is a Jesuit college] * nature (e.g., the constitution of the physical world, scientific explanation, the environment); * human nature (e.g., cognition and affectivity, freedom, morality, art); * society (e.g., political community, law, rights and responsibilities, economics, justice, education, language); and * history (e.g., our attitudes toward the past and the future). The Core Curriculum should include the following elements: The Arts: one course History: two courses Literature: one course Writing: one course Mathematics: one course Philosophy: two courses Natural Science: two courses Social Science: two courses Theology: two courses Cultural Diversity: one course ------------ History should be included in the core to serve three general purposes: developing an understanding of the historical roots of contemporary societies, recognizing the influence of Europe on their emergence; establishing a framework in which students can organize ideas and locate and understand their own culture and era; and encouraging the sense of tolerance that results from an understanding and awareness of the histories of different cultures and parts of the world. Two three-credit history courses should be required. The content of these courses ought to focus on a manageable portion of human history, and, in particular, on the events, movements and personalities considered important to understanding European history and the impact of European institutions on the modern world. The courses should also promote an awareness of historical developments in other parts of the world. Methodological objectives include increased familiarity with the process of historical change, an understanding of the historical method of inquiry, and the habit of critical assessment of the values, ideas and practices of a historical era. -------------- The core requirement in philosophy should be two three-credit courses, satisfied by the Philosophy of the Person course or the Perspectives, PULSE and Western Cultural Tradition programs. The Philosophy of the Person courses and the Perspectives and Western Cultural Tradition programs present the seminal thought of the philosophical tradition. In the PULSE program, students are also encouraged to make academic inquiry interact with social reality. All core offerings in philosophy should prompt students to develop an intellectual and moral framework for considering questions of ultimate value and significance, and should challenge them to translate philosophical principles into guides for life. |
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| Quasimodo | Feb 20 2009, 09:07 AM Post #7 |
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(more from Boston college) In the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston hangs the painting that Paul Gauguin intended to sum up his life's work, one of the mysterious allegorical scenes he painted in Tahiti in the 1890s. Its title is: "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" Gauguin's questions are a version of a timeless theme: wonder about the origin and meaning and destiny of our lives. Art, politics, science, religion-human culture in all its variety-offer indirect answers to these questions. Since these questions were first asked, human beings have also thought that systematic study and reflection could yield answers to questions about the meaning of life, and that it was the central task of the community to educate its members to ask and answer these questions. From schools of biblical commentary and the Athenian academies, through the medieval universities, to our modern institutions of higher education, one conviction has been constant: that we can elucidate the central questions in our lives through study and investigation and that we can equip ourselves with the knowledge needed to live responsibly as human beings. [note that there is no 'diversity' here, with equivalence of all cultures; the study is focused on how western thought developed. ] |
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| Locomotive Breath | Feb 20 2009, 09:34 AM Post #8 |
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Dead white men. |
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| Sydney Carton | Feb 20 2009, 01:27 PM Post #9 |
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Quasi: (What happened to Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens, Shakespeare, and co.?) LB:Dead white men. Yeats:Since we died long ago, why do they dread us so? Edited by Sydney Carton, Feb 20 2009, 03:57 PM.
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| Payback | Feb 20 2009, 03:34 PM Post #10 |
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In the 1994 NEW MELVILLE special issue of the Duke UP AMERICAN LITERATURE (an issue not refereed?) Cathy Davidson printed an article which recklessly accused Melville of the specific crime of wife beating. The effect was apparent the next year in a book by Nancy Fredricks: "The image of a drunken Melville beating and pushing his wife Elizabeth down a flight of stairs has imprinted itself on my mind's eye and caused me to hate him for abusing her. Whether it happened or not, I know it is possible." Davidson compounded her attempt to drive Melville from the canon by reprinting the offensive article with gleeful comment on how much publicity it had created. "WHETHER IT HAPPENED OR NOT, I KNOW IT IS POSSIBLE." This, of course, is the same mentality that surfaced when Brodhead said that whatever some of the lacrosse players had done, it was bad enough. Whether anything happened or not, he knew it was possible, and after all, as the poor man said to Ed Bradley, the facts kept changing. |
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| Quasimodo | Feb 27 2009, 11:38 PM Post #11 |
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(hat tip: Poster Debrah at DIW) http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2009/02/lose_a_president_to_a_coup_and.html Lose A President To A Coup And You Will Fail By John Silber February 26, 2009 (snip) The coup against Larry Summers had its origins in his intolerance of cant and his willingness to buck fashionable opinions. He had the audacity to demand that University Professor Cornel West produce scholarship rather than rap albums. (snip) Summers' enemies pounced. One faculty member attending the talk claimed that she was so distraught by Summers' comments that she nearly fainted. A small but enraged minority of Harvard's faculty declared open season on Summers before they had the opportunity to read what he actually said. . . The Harvard Board of Overseers might have responded to the controversy by defending Summers' right -- even obligation -- to address controversial subjects in the spirit of academic inquiry. . . Unfortunately for Harvard and for the academic community, Harvard's board showed no such courage. Instead at least one member of the board -- Nannerl Keohane -- undermined Summers by meeting independently with dissident faculty behind his back. Summers, under pressure from no more than a minority of faculty, felt compelled nevertheless to apologize for his remarks. Without the Board's public backing, Summers, bullied by attacks by university professors and university presidents and having options in New York and Washington, decided that he didn't need to put up with the abuse. (snip) In my own time as president of Boston University I was fortunate to enjoy the support of a board that was willing to withstand the controversy that inevitably accompanies any serious attempt at reform. This board was willing to discipline members who negotiated behind my and the board's backs. When I came to Boston University in 1971, I discovered four months into the fiscal year that the university faced a serious deficit of 13 percent of the operating budget ($8.8 million in a budget of $71 million). (snip) While these protests were going on, a member of the Board of Trustees came to the campus without my knowledge and met privately with students. He sympathized with the students, commenting on what he referred to as my autocratic style, and thus undermined my efforts to pacify the campus. At the next meeting of the board I informed them that they would have either my resignation or the resignation of the offending trustee. I said, "If the university doesn't need a president but relies on the Board of Trustees to administer the university, that is their option. But it is my option not to continue as president if trustees assume that responsibility. In short, either the offending trustee goes or I go." The Board backed me and the offending trustee resigned. [Imagine if Brodhead had similarly confronted the Duke BOT and told them that if they didn't support due process and a fair proceeding for Duke students, he would resign, very pubicly, and explain why in a nationally televised press conference...He would be remembered very differently today.] . . . But later, about 1,100 faculty met to demand my removal. About 800 called for my dismissal, their attacks laced with lies to the effect that I had built an Olympic swimming pool in my backyard and had spied on the faculty by examining the contents of their wastebaskets. The faculty members making these charges knew that they were false but cynically violated standards of scholarly responsibility and even decency. (snip) The cabal proposed to remove me. But I refused to resign and I refused to accept their offer of promotion to Chancellor, a position with no responsibilities. I told this small cabal that they had no right to speak for the Board of Trustees and that I would meet them at the next full meeting of the Board. There they presented their resolution to remove me. After extended discussion, the Board was galvanized by a statement from one trustee who pointed out that the star chamber proceedings by which I had been evaluated violated all principles of university governance and fairness. He pointed out that only three months earlier the trustees had honored me for my exceptional leadership and now were calling for my scalp. Denouncing the procedures of their investigation as a disgrace, he said, "If this board removes President Silber, Boston University will descend into the leperdom it shall richly deserve." When the votes were taken, I prevailed by a two-thirds majority. The chairman of the board resigned shortly thereafter, and the member of the board who had organized this revolt was voted off the board at its next meeting. (snip) A professor of political science at the New School in New York has asserted that the failure of Bob Kerrey to resign calls for action of the New School's board of trustees. He has claimed that faculty condemnation usually compels boards of trustees to change leadership or reform the structure of academic governance. But trustees have another choice: ignore irresponsible faculty who do not understand the necessity of fiscal responsibility and the dependence of academic progress on that solid economic foundation. (snip) The governance of universities involves nuanced fiduciary responsibilities. Boards must therefore insulate themselves from attempted pressure from students and faculty. Neither group understands the complex set of issues involved in maintaining the best interests of the institution. (snip) Often there is no easy or uncontroversial way to achieve genuine reform. The Trustees of the New School should ask themselves whether they want peace at any price. ---------------------------------------- John Silber is President Emeritus of Boston University Edited by Quasimodo, Feb 27 2009, 11:41 PM.
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| Payback | Feb 28 2009, 01:15 PM Post #12 |
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Edited by Payback, Feb 28 2009, 01:35 PM.
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