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Faculty members complain constantly about plagiarism and trade stories about strategies to combat it. Loye Young thought he had a solution. On his syllabus at Texas A&M International University this fall, he wrote: “No form of dishonesty is acceptable. I will promptly and publicly fail and humiliate anyone caught lying, cheating, or stealing. That includes academic dishonesty, copyright violations, software piracy, or any other form of dishonesty.”

Many professors use the syllabus to warn students about enforcing plagiarism rules, but few promise public humiliation. Young, who owns a computer business in Laredo and doesn’t depend on a teaching job for his livelihood, thinks humiliation is part of the justice system. He noted in an interview Wednesday that “there’s a reason that trials are in public.”

When he caught six students in his management information systems course cheating, he wrote about it on his course blog (which he maintained on his business’s Web site), naming the students and telling the world that he had caught them and that they would receive an F for the course and be reported to university officials.

“Plagiarism is manifestly unfair and disrespectful to your classmates,” Young wrote on his blog. “There are students taking the course who are working very, very hard to learn a subject that in many cases is foreign to them. A plagiarizer is implicitly treating the honest, hard-working student as a dupe. Of course, the plagiarizer is the dupe or else would not need to plagiarize.”

When university administrators realized that Young had followed through on his threat to fail and publicly humiliate the students, they put the failing grades on hold — the cases are now being referred to an honors council for consideration and the F’s may or may not stand. But action against Young was quick: He was fired. The university says he violated the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a federal law known widely as the Buc

Groseclose also questions whether the pressure being put on UCLA and admissions officers in particular was so great that they felt they had no choice but to find a way to get more black applicants admitted. He cites an article on admissions in the UCLA faculty and staff newsletter that said: “A number of regents feel so strongly about issues of access that they ‘are threatening to fire chancellors if we don’t increase diversity,’ [then] UC Provost Wyatt (Rory) Hume told faculty leaders at the teleconference.”

To examine his hypothesis, Groseclose asked the admissions office for 1,000 applications files — 500 randomly selected from the first year of holistic admissions and 500 from the prior year, with names redacted. UCLA officials cited a number of reasons for denying this request, raising privacy concerns, and questioning whether it was too early to do a study. Several other members of the admissions committee released letters (included in Groseclose’s report) calling his requests for information appropriate and saying that he was unfairly rebuffed by the university. Other committee members, however, opposed his request and backed a plan — now going forward — for an “independent” review of applications.

Groseclose says that these actions played a major role in his decision to quit the committee. He writes that the faculty role in admissions isn’t real when those charged with oversight of admissions can’t check out evidence of possible problems. “There is considerable evidence that high-ranking administrators and a controlling block of my committee are engaged in a cover-up — they are preventing me and others from obtaining these data so that the above malfeasances will not be discovered,” he writes.

"Our belief is that the APSA should choose its sites carefully, with particular regard for questions of freedom of speech and conscience," Mr. Watson told the National Post by e-mail. "We therefore believe Canada to be a problematic destination."
Mr. Watson said that professors signing the petition are concerned that recent human rights commission investigations into Maclean's and Western Standard magazines over articles concerning Islam, and the conviction of pastor Stephen Boisson, who was ordered by Alberta's human rights tribunal in May to cease publicizing criticisms of homosexuality, suggest that professors risk being chilled from discussing important academic subjects, or ending up in legal trouble. Mr. Watson said he plans to distribute hundreds of buttons to attendees at the Boston conference reading "Toronto 2009, Non!"
Several professors in the working group behind the protest "have written in areas that seem particularly disfavoured by the Canadian legal establishment," Mr. Watson said. "We are uncertain of the extent of the legal jeopardy that APSA members might place themselves in should they make public arguments in Canada, or post those arguments online, concerning hot-button issues like homosexuality, same-sex marriage, or the nature of the Islamist threat to Western civilization."

The aversion to long-term and deeply committed study of science among American students also stems from other cultural imperatives. We rank the manufacture of "self-esteem" above hard-won achievement, but we also have immersed a generation in wall-to-wall promotion of diversity and multiculturalism as being the worthiest form of educational endeavor; we have foregrounded the redistributional dreams of "social justice" over heroic aspirations to discover, invent, and thereby create new wealth; and we have endlessly extolled the virtue of "sustainability" against the ravages of "progress." Do all that, and you create an educational system that is essentially hostile to advanced achievement in the sciences and technology. Moreover, those threads have a certainty and unity that make them not just a collection of educational conceits but also part of a compelling worldview.

The antiscience agenda is visible as early as kindergarten, with its infantile versions of the diversity agenda and its early budding of self-esteem lessons. But it complicates and propagates all the way up through grade school and high school. In college it often drops the mask of diffuse benevolence and hardens into a fascination with "identity."

That could be a good thing if the introspections were enriched by professors who could show students where Plato or Shakespeare had touched such depths, or who could startle them by showing where Hobbes or Tocqueville had seen them coming. But in a curriculum dissolved in the sea of minutiae and professorial enthusiasms, the opportunity to pass through moody introspection and back into the sturdy world of real people grows rare.

The science "problems" we now ask students to think about aren't really science problems at all. Instead we have the National Science Foundation vexed about the need for more women and minorities in the sciences. President Lawrence H. Summers was pushed out of Harvard University for specu

Editor’s note: Higher education has two key missions: transferring existing knowledge to students, and discovering new knowledge. While the two functions are not mutually exclusive, there is a growing awareness that trade-offs exist between them. Does an emphasis on research detract from undergraduate education? Are too much time and money spent on research rather than teaching? Is career advancement (such as tenure) too dependent on research, a la “publish or perish?”

We asked four noted university-based economists to discuss those issues. This dialogue is an edited transcript of their commentary.

The participants are: James D. Gwartney, who holds the Gus A. Stavros Eminent Scholar Chair at Florida State University; Dirk Mateer, senior lecturer and co-director of undergraduate studies, Economics, Pennsylvania State University; Richard Vedder, Distinguished Professor of Economics at Ohio University; and Russell Sobel, who holds the James Clark Coffman Distinguished Chair in Entrepreneurial Studies, West Virginia University. (For more information about this stellar group, see links below.)

Editor: We asked the panel to address two questions: 1) Is it necessary to conduct research in order to teach well? 2) Can research harm teaching?

The study is based on data collected for a report released last year, “The Social and Political Views of American Professors,” which found that faculty members are more liberal than the public at large, but appear to be moderating compared to previous generations. That study — which was praised by many experts from varying perspectives for the breadth of its scope and depth of its data — asked professors many questions on social issues, but did not attempt to identify a politically correct cohort within academe.

The new study, which does so, was produced by Solon Simmons, co-author of last year’s report and an assistant professor of conflict analysis and resolution at George Mason. The study appears in The Forum, an online journal that has published numerous key studies on the issue of professors’ politics, including some that have been used to suggest that significant bias is present in the academy — a point of view the new study does not share.

For some university leaders, faculty poaching is something of a celebrated blood sport. Take Daniele Struppa, the chancellor of Chapman University, in Southern California. As a former dean at George Mason University, Struppa has used his contacts to raid his former employer of some of the very faculty he recruited during his days as dean there. On Struppa’s watch, nearly 15 George Mason faculty have moved from the outskirts of Washington, D.C., across the country to Chapman.
“I heard through the grapevine that they’re not happy this is happening,” Struppa says of his former colleagues. “But faculty vote with their feet.”
Struppa’s recruitment effort, which has happened over roughly the last two years, is less about exploiting economic conditions and more about tapping personal relationships. Struppa called up his old friends at George Mason, presenting Chapman as a land of opportunity that’s on the cusp of great things.
In pitching Chapman, Struppa acknowledges that it’s an institution quite different from George Mason. With more than 30,000 students, Mason has an undergraduate population about five times the size of Chapman’s. Mason also boasts a significantly more established research enterprise.
For Chapman, the spoils of the recruitment wars include Vernon Smith, a Nobel Laureate who came to Orange, Calif., with three other economists from George Mason. To pull in faculty like Smith, Struppa had to sweeten the pot. He offered the professors a chance to help design a brand new facility for experimental economics, starting his negotiations by asking for their “dream plan.”

Goldin and Katz, meanwhile, are continuing to develop their model and are scrutinizing the recent growth of wage inequality within the group of people who hold college degrees. "There has been much more growth of inequality among college graduates than among noncollege workers," Katz says. Only some people, he says, are coming out of college with the high-level abstract-reasoning skills that fully complement the new information technologies and command high salaries. Workers with "midlevel" skills, by contrast, are more likely to see their tasks simply replaced by computers.

Does that mean, then, that too many people are going to college, and that the rewards of a B.A. are overrated, as some commentators have recently suggested?

"That's absolutely wrong," Katz says. "The reason we know that is the following: It's true that there's growing inequality among college graduates. But there's shrinking inequality among noncollege workers. The market is very bad for people with only a high-school diploma — they're not doing much better than people who dropped out in the eighth grade. So the return [on investment] to college is still very high. Even if you wind up in the bottom half of the college group, you're still much better off than in the top half of the high-school group."

The Internet gives scientists and researchers instant access to an astonishing number of academic journals. So what is the impact of having such a wealth of information at their fingertips? The answer, according to new research released July 18 in the journal Science, is surprising--scholars are actually citing fewer papers in their own work, and the papers they do cite tend to be more recent publications. This trend may be limiting the creation of new ideas and theories.

Revelations the government sought costings on a universal tertiary student allowance has re-ignited debate on whether it is a good idea.

Student groups have long called for all tertiary students to get an allowance, as is NZ First and Green Party policy.

Students argue they are being over-burdened by student loans and the cost of living is high.

Tertiary Education Minister Pete Hodgson today confirmed, following a story in the Press newspaper, that he asked officials to look at how much the proposal would cost.

The Education Ministry came back with $728 million a year.

The Press said the $728m net extra cost of such a plan was based on removing existing costs of the scheme and factoring in an expected reduction in student loans.

During the 2005 election campaign Labour scored significant points with students and their parents by offering interest-free student loans.

Russel Ogden is a university instructor whose interest lies in death. Assisted suicide and euthanasia. Consensual and not. Murder, it is sometimes called inside Canadian criminal courts.

He studies certain "deathing" methods - including a virtually undetectable application called New Technology for Self Deliverance, or NuTech.

Mr. Ogden also observes, in person, suicides. His supporters insist this is a valuable and legitimate method of academic inquiry. But the Vancouver-area school where Mr. Ogden works wants him to stop.

Kwantlen University College in Surrey, B.C., acknowledged Thursday that it has withdrawn its approval for a research proposal submitted three years ago by Mr. Ogden.

"Our due diligence included obtaining two opinions from one of Canada's foremost criminal lawyers about the legal implications," read a statement issued by the school's director of marketing and communications, Peter Chevrier.

The study also explored gaps according to race. To assure pools that were large enough, the researchers combined black and Latino professors and sectors of four-year higher education. The result — again controlling for other factors that could explain wage differentials — is that black and Latino professors who were recently hired earned 10 percent more, on average, than their white counterparts. For all faculty members, not just those recently hired, there was not any statistically significant difference between minority and white pay.

Porter said he would view these results “cautiously.” As with the gender gap, he said that the study didn’t claim to identify motivations, only to find wage differentials that couldn’t be explained by other factors.

The researchers examined data from four different surveys — in 1988, 1993, 1999, and 2004. Porter noted that the data on the female gap was relatively consistent. While the data show an apparent salary advantage for new black and Latino professors in all four years, the gap isn’t large enough to be statistically significant in the middle two years (6.7 and 2.8 percent, respectively). It was only in the 1988 survey (11.5 percent) and the most recent one (10.0 percent) that the gap was large enough to be statistically significant.

The witch hunt against the corporate funding of research ignores the fact that virtually every modern medical innovation was created with industry involvement

“Research isn’t a Google search,” she said.

That sentiment was echoed by several others involved with the Cornell Undergraduate Information Competency Initiative, a program that kicked off on Monday with a week-long summer institute aimed at understanding how students perceive university research, how to guide their habits and how to merge existing course goals with instruction in research methods. Those practices, of course, can apply whether inside a brick-and-mortar research facility or logged on from home. The goal is to “really learn how to use a library whether they’re in it or not,” Berggren said.

Among my saddest moments as a career counselor is when I hear a story like this: "I wasn't a good student in high school, but I wanted to prove that I can get a college diploma. I'd be the first one in my family to do it. But it's been five years and $80,000, and I still have 45 credits to go."

I have a hard time telling such people the killer statistic: Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later. That figure is from a study cited by Clifford Adelman, a former research analyst at the U.S. Department of Education and now a senior research associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy. Yet four-year colleges admit and take money from hundreds of thousands of such students each year!

Even worse, most of those college dropouts leave the campus having learned little of value, and with a mountain of debt and devastated self-esteem from their unsuccessful struggles. Perhaps worst of all, even those who do manage to graduate too rarely end up in careers that require a college education. So it's not surprising that when you hop into a cab or walk into a restaurant, you're likely to meet workers who spent years and their family's life savings on college, only to end up with a job they could have done as a high-school dropout.

Such students are not aberrations. Today, amazingly, a majority of the students whom colleges admit are grossly underprepared. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million high-school graduates of 2007 who took the ACT examination were ready for college-level work in the core subjects of English, math, reading, and science.

At the University of Delaware, by contrast, Kathleen Kerr, the head the residence life program has seized on the idea of sustainability to advocate for a program that has no science at all but a great deal of ideology. Kerr and Keith Edwards from Macalester College made a presentation in November 2007 at a “Tools for Social Justice” conference in Kansas City, Missouri. Their PowerPoint presentation is posted online on the Sustainability Web page of the American College Personnel Association. There we learn quite a bit. Kerr and Edwards debunk the “myths” that sustainability is mostly about the environment” and that “sustainability is primarily a scientific and technical problem.” Rather, in their view, sustainability has over a dozen “social justice aspects”

Environmental Racism
Fair Trade
Living Wage
Domestic Partnerships
Corporate Responsibility
Rights of Indigenous Peoples
Gender Equity
Water Rights
Human Rights Child Labor Issues
Affirmative Action
Multicultural Competence
Pollution and Farming Practices
Worker’s Rights
Sweatshop Labor
Slavery

The list is almost whimsical. Why is “fair trade” a social justice issue bearing on sustainability, but not free trade, which has lifted billions of humans out of deep poverty? Why “domestic partnerships” but not stable heterosexual two-parent families? Why “multicultural competence” but not literacy and arithmetic that offer people a chance to wider their intellectual horizons? For that matter, why “water rights” and not mineral rights?

The answer to all these questions is pretty clear. Sustainability in Kerr’s and Edwards’ view is a campus on-ramp for the agenda of progressive left. The task of saving the planet appears too important to consider the views of capitalists, social conservatives, libertarians, nationalists, advocates of the trad

In the age of distance learning, downloaded lecture content, and Death by Powerpoint, it’s all the more important that humanities professors resist the ugly mechanization of the classroom, the new and primitive industrial age we’re in, and take more seriously than ever their function as living embodiments of the power of beauty. Raimond Gaita, a moral philosopher, puts the matter most strongly: “To be more than a high-flying dilettante you need more than intellectual skills. You must develop a certain kind of moral seriousness: you must try to overcome vanity, to have courage, to care more for truth than for status, and so on. That’s as obvious as the need to be kind and just if you are to be a good person and it’s just as hard. Critical thinking can be taught. How and why really to care for the truth can’t be, not, at any rate, in the same way. For that you need examples in your teachers and in the texts that you study. The examples won’t all come from the humanities, but only the humanities can give what you need to reflect on their significance.”

It is an interesting idea that the humanities might nurture “moral seriousness,” and that such seriousness is in fact required if one is to be more than merely clever, or well versed in one’s subject. The return of beauty to literary studies, which we think to be both underway and overdue, is one step toward the revitalization of the liberal arts. That will be its grand, social, public accomplishment.

Right then and there, it struck me: Some of us just aren’t made for university.

Now, a lot of you are ready to pounce on me right about now because you think I just implied that some Canadians are too dumb to handle higher learning. That’s a fair assessment — I do think that some of us are quite simply smarter than others. But I’m also arguing that four years at university might be less than optimally valuable for many of us. That, I think, is the obvious impression you get if you spend any time on the campus of a Canadian university.

Yet most Canadians refuse to accept this possibility because our system of publicly funding universities and colleges has ingrained in us the message that going to college is a right, not a privilege and responsibility. So we pretty much all go. And why not? It’s cheap (yes, even at $5,000 a year), it’s fun and there are virtually no expectations placed on you — just do what you please, study (or don’t) what you want and we’ll see you in four years. Maybe you’ll have gained a skill, maybe not, but either way at least you’ll have “experienced” university.

Umbach’s analysis finds a greater share of the salary gap in these general reward policies than in the unexplained category that could be blatant sexism. That’s why he said Monday that women face “a double hit” in what they earn — an average of $3,200 when he has controlled for all factors. Generally, controlling for all factors, he found a gap of 4 percent remained between the salaries of men and women. Controlling only for discipline and institution type, the gap is larger (14 percent) and part of Umbach’s concern is that the larger gap may be the one faced by most women.