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Politics of Liberty
Do Bagram detainees have the right to habeas corpus? So far – no. However, one federal judge explored the case during a hearing Monday, searching all possibilities. [SCOTUSblog] The brutal beating of a Chilean homosexual finally led to progress in the country’s criminal justice system. [NY Times] Security Council members stumbled on negotiations as Damascus transitions into an all-out war zone. [Washington Post]
On one hand, Kilgore’s line of attack already seems slightly outdated: as he concedes, the state is actually in the process of developing metrics for evaluating which private schools are eligible for participation in the program, and the more pressing debate in Baton Rouge has not been over performance standards, but over which faith-based institutions are suitable for inclusion. Kilgore still persists in assuming that Louisiana’s voucher program will let in too many bottom-dwellers. But while lamenting the fact that an unidentified number (he unhelpfully describes it as a “lot”) of the schools applying for the voucher program suffer from curriculum flaws or other professional deficiencies, Kilgore offers no evidence beyond a reflexive suspicion of Louisiana’s competence that the weakest applicants will survive vetting. Of course, the larger inference, that too few of the state’s private schools provide a high quality alternative worthy of public support, requires a much rigorous assessment of comparative data like graduation rates, college enrollment, achievement based testing, etc.
Nor does Kilgore grapple with a fact that even a private school skeptic must concede. At least some Louisiana private schools are high performers, but remain well out of financial reach for children whose median family income is one of the lowest in the country. Is it troubling to Kilgore that without vouchers, there is no consistently effective path for low-income Louisiana children to gain access to schools like New Orleans’ well regarded but 8% African American Isidore Newman, or the nationally recognized girls school at Mount Carmel Academy, with its 2% black population? Read the rest of… Check out how Toure expertly breaks down the relationship between the War on Drugs and the nihilism and anger of hip-hop. [Washington Post] The Politics of Hoops
A ‘Linsane’ contract offer from the Rockets is challenging Jeremy Lin’s once-certain future in the New York. [Yahoo] New NCAA recruiting rules are putting top prospects under a magnifying glass. But how far can it go before one of these kids gets burned? [ESPN] Young gun Irving managed to corral the Black Mamba into a very expensive game of 1-on-1, but the two will be hard-pressed to make the match more entertaining than their conversation leading up to it. [Grantland] The correct way to leave a city. [Boston.com] ESPN’s legendary columnist wrote an important column on Joe Paterno, the man he profiled for the Sports Illustrated‘s Sportsman of the Year issue in 1986. SPOILER ALERT: It’s devastating. [ESPN] This weekend, the RP appeared on WKYT’s Kentucky Newsmakers, the oldest and most respected TV news interview program in the Commonwealth, hosted by The RP’s friend, local broadcasting legend Bill Bryant. Enjoy their discussion (in two segments below) about poker, politics and a whole lot more: PART ONE: PART TWO:
Crashing or coasting? Depends on if you are on the outside looking in or the inside looking out. Unfortunately, you see it a lot in business. It’s almost a predictable arc–rising, leveling and, like a star, eventually imploding. It starts with breaking through initial barriers and onto the scene. Followed by rapid and dynamic growth for a sustained period until it becomes an institution of sorts. Then there is a plateauing. An uneasy period where management becomes more concerned about maintaining market share than growing it…because, frankly, it already has about all the market share it can ever get. And then there is a disconnect. Slow at first and only noticeable to those looking for it. But then noticeable to a growing number of others. But not to management. Until the decline has begun. Sometimes management notices and faces the problem then and tries to reverse course. Other times a new management team is brought on because the current team is unable to see the problem clearly or navigate out of the crisis they inadvertently created. And if neither of these take place, there is the crash. Sometimes its soft; sometimes hard. Sometimes swift; sometimes slow. But the crash is inevitable. In the final stage the company is no longer nimble. No longer responsive to customers. It takes them for granted. Instead of trying to see ahead and anticipate market demands and adjust early to them the company instead rests on its laurels and tries to prevent the natural changes from happening within the industry—ironically, the same changes this once great company used to break into a leadership position by being more responsive than their former complacent competitors. The former agent of change has become the agent for the status quo. They resist change during this phase not because change will hurt better delivery of their products or services to customers but because change has become an inconvenience for management. The company is no longer “client centered” but “self centered.” And they have long forgotten the day when they counted on their once larger competitors to believe that self-importance was a successful long-term growth strategy in business. It never is. They will eventually remember this truth. That is inevitable too. But sadly that is almost always “after” the inevitable crash–not before. And now from the other side of The New York Times, here’s CAMERA:
Click here to read the full, disturbing article. Excellent piece in the weekend’s New York Times on No Labels’ latest initiative to Make the Presidency Work:
Click here to read the full article, “Unshackling the Presidency to Fix the Government”
What makes academic life seem so exotic is that being a professor is more like practicing a medieval craft than pursuing a modern profession. As befits a world of robes, elaborate ceremonies, and gothic quadrangles, universities maintain a system of unique rewards and demands that harkens back to pre-modern times. Practically, this means that the work habits of academics are hard to reconcile with the patterns of most normal professions. Academics are supposed to do two things—produce knowledge and share that knowledge with the larger community. They are also, according to tradition, supposed to govern and police themselves. Although that does not mean what it used to, when universities had special laws and even their own jails (some of which are preserved as tourist sites in European university towns such as Heidelberg in Germany) it still means that universities pride themselves on being governed by their own—deans, directors, chairs, and presidents drawn from the faculty.[1] In present parlance, that means university faculty members are evaluated according to the classic trilogy of research, teaching, and service to the academic community.[2] Here we get at the root of the contrast between what people think professors do and what they actually do. For the things that are most visible to the outside world—teaching in the classroom, meeting with students in office hours, grading assignments—is also only a part of what academics are expected to do. When junior faculty sigh and say they “really need to find time to do my own work,” they are rarely referring to teaching. Indeed, even the most dedicated teacher who devotes time to developing and preparing new courses is going to need a lot of time alone to gather and develop new knowledge. That means everything from reading and reviewing the newest literature in their field to working on their own projects. None of these tasks lend themselves to punching a clock. Academics are paid to think and read and write, which means a lot of their time is unstructured, and they have freedom to organize it according to their own priorities. That is the positive view. The less positive view is to note that unstructured work means that it is never really over. There is always more to read, and those books and articles don’t write themselves.
If those outside academe have a hard time understanding what goes on there, that is also because the practical details of academic life can vary greatly depending on both the type of university or college and the field in which an academic operates (and of course upon whether one is on the tenure track). Schools can range from teaching-heavy colleges (which would include both small private institutions and satellite campuses of state universities, as well as community colleges) where the average professor is expected to offer four or five courses a semester (and do all of her own grading) to the elite research universities where the load is usually two courses a semester—perhaps less, if the faculty member has special administrative responsibilities such as chairing a department or directing an institute—and where most of the grading is done by graduate students, as part of their apprenticeship before beginning their own academic careers.[3] Teaching and research exist in tight, inverse proportions: the lower the teaching load, the higher the research expectations.[4] What those research expectations may be depends on the field. In the natural sciences, successful academics are expected to manage a laboratory and conduct a range of experiments. That means hiring and supervising a small army of student assistants, and applying for and managing the large outside grants necessary to fund the operations. Natural scientists also publish several research reports and articles a year. Most of those publications will be multi-authored, which (to put it most charitably) allows scientists to leverage their work into more publications than they could have produced on their own. Humanities and social science professors publish fewer and longer pieces—journal articles and books, usually single-authored—and are less dependent on labs and grants, except when they need to travel to archives. Critics ranging from undergraduates unable to get an appointment to complain about midterm grades to Wall Street Journal op-ed writers have attacked the attention faculty pay to what can appear to be unnecessarily esoteric research.[5] Imust admit to having mixed emotions about these criticisms. There is nothing wrong with demanding that faculty remember their responsibility to share their knowledge with non-specialists, and I am a firm believer in the importance of teaching. What such critics tend to miss, however, is the responsibility of professors not only to repeat old knowledge but to create new knowledge as well. At their best, such criticisms can serve to puncture the pomposity of over-specialized academics. At their worst, they sink to the level of the know-nothings who want to eliminate the library budget because no one has read all the books that are already in it. Read the rest of… |
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