This was just posted on UO Matters under the headline “Every now and then”:

8/11/2010: there is a sign that UO is moving towards being a real institution for the public good, with decisions made in the open, on the basis of joint goals and a shared mission. We are still a long way off, but I think the direction is good.

Of what is this a propos? I certainly don’t have the answers. If you do, let us know.

Some things have been going on during the last couple of months.

1. University of Oregon President Richard Lariviere released a white paper outlining his idea for a restructure of University funding and management. The proposal includes a $1.6 billion endowment for the university, a portion of which would be financed by state bonds. The legislature is not pleased, but it certainly has folks talking.

2. The UO got grilled hard by the Oregon Senate Business and Transportation Committee about the $227 million arena project, the process for which did not involve an open bidding process, as would most large scale university projects. The committee also tapped into the Bellotti Buyout. The essence of the Willamette Week article linked to above:

“The university does not inspire confidence,” says committee chairman Sen. Rick Metsger (D-Welches). “What you get from this project is either they don’t know what they’re doing or they don’t want the public to know. Neither is good.”

The process for building the arena is actually pretty convoluted and complicated, and many people are displeased with the progress.

3. The State of Oregon has a pretty unsustainable budget, to the tune of $563 million that will come in across the board cuts to all state entities. Including a $4.7 million cut to the University of Oregon.

4. The University Senate confirmed large-scale campus speech policy changes, with the addition of a Freedom of Inquiry Policy and Facilities Use Policy. This is a real victory for administrators, who wanted to deal with the Pacifica Forum issue but not be seen as only promoting certain kinds of speech or, y’know, violating the First Amendment. The new facilities use policy dictates that only university recognized groups — not individuals — can access space for free. “Non-university entities” can still have space, but they have to pay for it. You can read the Register-Guard’s opinion here.

5. The UO created an Office of Public Records to deal with public records requests as Lariviere tries to deal with the aftermath of the Mike Bellotti deal and an athletic program on the fringes of his reach. They’re hiring a public records officer, if you’re looking for a job.

6. Tuition is going up again. No, seriously.

7. Phil Knight’s private company, Phit LLC, wants to construct additional football facilities to the Len Casanova Athletic Center. But they want to do it in a way that sidesteps the public bidding process by having this private company lease the land from the university, construct on it, and then donate the finished project back to the University of Oregon. The state approves.

8. Jeremiah Masoli got kicked off the UO football team for getting pulled over with a suspended license and marijuana in his car after rolling a stop sign. Masoli was a good quarterback. He just keeps getting himself into trouble.

9. Colorado joined the Pac-10. Texas said no. People are concerned with the implications of where the university’s priorities lay. I just like the math and the excitement of it all. GO DUCKS!

And that brings us to today. Those were some things that happened.

Central Falls School Superintendent Frances Gallo fired a total of 94 teachers, administrators and assistants on Feb. 22 because of poor student performance.

With a graduation rate of less than 50 percent and abysmal standardized testing scores, Gallo implemented the “turnaround” model of reform or, the removal of all staff.

The firings come after the teachers’ union rejected six conditions Gallo presented to improve the school.  Those conditions were: extending the school day by 25 minutes, requiring teachers to tutor students weekly for one hour before or after school, eating lunch with students once a week, undergoing more rigorous evaluations, meeting once a week for 90 minutes to discuss education and planning, and attending two weeks of paid professional development in the summer.

Other than the professional development, extra compensation did not accompany the proposed conditions.

(more…)

As though the issue of hate speech on campus hasn’t been covered enough.

ASUCSD president Utsav Gupta pulled funding to 33 campus media outlets on February 20, following coinciding with perfectly with the dying Pacifica Forum outrage.

Apparently, “Jigaboo Jones,” a local radio shock-jock, organized a party he called the “Compton Cookout” with the help of several fraternity members. Jones, in his own off-color way of celebrating Black History Month, used the ghetto for the party’s theme. The facebook ad encouraged attendees to dress ghetto style, telling men to roll with their “Jersey’s, stuntin’ up in ya White T” and  women to “have short, nappy hair.” No fraternity houses hosted the party, although several members of the UCSD Greek community helped organize it.

Days after the party, outrage of the offensive stereotypes swept UCSD. And in politics, you cry to state litigators instead of mom and dad. Legislative pressure prompted UCSD authorities to launch an “aggressive investigation” (Why hello, Joe McCarthy) of the students involved in promoting the party.

UCSD publication “The Koala,” known for patently racist and provocative content, aired a public statement on SRTV objecting to the investigations. The statement used the words the words “ungrateful n—-rs” among other racial slurs, according to Adam Kissel of FIRE.

(more…)

Tonight there was a Pacifica protest meeting at Cafe Roma. The Commentator was a seemingly unwelcome addition to the meeting when it was stated by one of the Black Tea Society affiliates wrapped in a particularly douchey bandana that, “Contributors to the Oregon Commentator have voiced their support of free speech by ANY means necessary.” This seemed a bit absurd to me. I believe the blog comment (not a staffer’s post) was:

“OC editors, I respect you: Call me on it if I’m wrong to be frustrated with the funding side. I support free speech, and would, indeed, fight to the death to protect the PF’s right to it. (Well, maybe not Marr. But the others? Sure.)”

The protesters on Friday were disorganized to say the least. They could not agree on what it was that they were protesting, let alone whether they were to be silent or disruptive. Fortunately, this was first thing on the agenda.

Cimmeron Gillespie wanted to emphasize that protesters against the forum should not associate their cause with the question of free speech. Gillespie made it very clear that the reason for the meeting was to plan an effective protest against what they believe to be a narrow-minded group with ties to one or more groups, such as Volksfront and Stormfront, who have an alleged history of violent bigotry.

“Again, this is a campus and student safety issue,” Gillespie continued. He then ran us all through the plan of attack for their protesting of the next Forum topic: Neo-Communism and the Anti-Hate Task Force (which, supposedly, targets one of Eugene’s own Lane County Board members. Pictures of him and other protesters from last Friday appear on the fliers). The plan consists of three parts:

1. Framing – Emphasize safety, not free speech.

2. Administration – Gillespie described the UO administration as, “A giant tractor with no engine. We have to pull and push and move it how we want.”

3. Forum – Develop a reasonable argument with constructive questions that will lead Billy Rojas and his followers to either “hang themselves up,” or realize the error of their ways.

Emma Kallaway put in her two cents, using her experience with the administration to her advantage. She thought that this whole fiasco is even more complicated than it seems. The fact that the University of Oregon is a public institution funded by the state and part of OUS (Oregon University System), iterates that the buck doesn’t stop with Dick Lariviere. Furthermore, to change policy regarding alumni, old professors and rights to the usage of OUS property is asking quite a bit.

As for the Pacifica Forum, hopefully they will have a chance to exercise their right to free speech this Friday. Personally, I can’t speak to the extent of their connections with violent groups and whether or not they are using Pacifica as a front for their “socialist recruiting machine.”

There will also be a Senate meeting in the Walnut Room on Friday at 7pm. The first ten minutes will consist of four people recalling their individual altercations with Pacifica attendees. The rest of the time is reserved for questions.

Those wishing to learn more about the issue are encouraged to attend and not ignorantly yell and scream like a fucking idiot.

Read this. Just do.

Via Reason, The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a great article about one of the Commentator’s favorite topics — intellectual diversity on campus. It starts by discussing the (somewhat eyebrow-raising) opening of a “Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements” at Berkeley, and eventually moves into a broader discussion of the intellectual monoculture that’s evolved on college campuses over the last forty years:

Though we are no longer in the politically correct sauna of the 1980s and 1990s, and experiences vary from college to college, the picture [David Horowitz] paints of the faculty and curriculum in American universities remains embarrassingly accurate, and it is foolish to deny what we all see before us.

Over the past decade, our universities have made serious efforts to increase racial and ethnic diversity on the campus (economic diversity worries them less, for some reason). Well-paid deans work exclusively on the problem. But universities show not the slightest interest in intellectual diversity among faculty members. That wouldn’t matter if teachers could be counted on to introduce students to their adversaries’ books and views, but we know how rarely that happens.

[…]

Lyons was an American historian who wrote about the 60s and made no secret of his liberal politics or his loathing of Reagan and post-Reagan conservatism. But he was also disturbed by how few colleges offer courses on conservatism, treating it as a “pathology” rather than a serious political tradition…

The author, Mark Lilla, offers some anecdotal evidence of what happens when students are allowed the opportunity to take courses in conservative thought that are taught actively and honestly:

Lyons’s class was split almost evenly between liberal and conservative students, who had no trouble arguing with each other. They seemed to understand what thin-skinned professors wish to forget: that intellectual engagement is not for crybabies. The students had loud debates over Reagan’s legacy, Bush’s foreign policy, religious freedom, abortion, even the “war on Christmas”—and nobody broke into tears or ran to the dean to complain. And the more the students argued, the more they came to respect one another. According to Lyons, students learned that that conservative guy was no longer just the predictable gun nut or religious fanatic. And the conservative students learned that they had to make real arguments, not rely on clichés and sound bites recycled from Fox News. [emphasis added]

[…]

We should be grateful for his modest book, which has lessons for everyone. It reminds liberal academics of just how narrow-minded and conservative (in the nonpolitical sense) they are in their hiring and teaching, and how much they have to learn if they want to understand the political world we live in.

There are lessons for conservatives, too. Anti-intellectualism has always dogged conservative tradition (you betcha!), and figures like David Horowitz, who stoke the hysteria, only contribute to the dumbing down. Hopped up on Fox News, too many young conservatives have become ignorant of the conservative intellectual tradition and incapable of engaging civilly with their adversaries. [emphasis added]

Or maybe it’s just more convenient for some to promulgate the “racist, gun-toting, religious nut” stereotype and continue to churn out the thoughtless, pliable Nate Gulley’s and Diego Hernandez’s of the world.

First against the wall.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared in the Guardian UK. Its Author, Simon Singh, was sued by the British Chiropractic Association and ruled against due to the UK’s stunningly illiberal libel laws. This has been making the rounds today, it’s presented here so that you might read and enjoy. Also, the BCA is kindly invited to fuck right off.

Some practitioners claim it is a cure-all, but the research suggests chiropractic therapy has mixed results – and can even be lethal, says Simon Singh.

You might be surprised to know that the founder of chiropractic therapy, Daniel David Palmer, wrote that “99% of all diseases are caused by displaced vertebrae”. In the 1860s, Palmer began to develop his theory that the spine was involved in almost every illness because the spinal cord connects the brain to the rest of the body. Therefore any misalignment could cause a problem in distant parts of the body.

In fact, Palmer’s first chiropractic intervention supposedly cured a man who had been profoundly deaf for 17 years. His second treatment was equally strange, because he claimed that he treated a patient with heart trouble by correcting a displaced vertebra.

You might think that modern chiropractors restrict themselves to treating back problems, but in fact some still possess quite wacky ideas. The fundamentalists argue that they can cure anything, including helping treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying – even though there is not a jot of evidence.

I can confidently label these assertions as utter nonsense because I have co-authored a book about alternative medicine with the world’s first professor of complementary medicine, Edzard Ernst. He learned chiropractic techniques himself and used them as a doctor. This is when he began to see the need for some critical evaluation. Among other projects, he examined the evidence from 70 trials exploring the benefits of chiropractic therapy in conditions unrelated to the back. He found no evidence to suggest that chiropractors could treat any such conditions.

But what about chiropractic in the context of treating back problems? Manipulating the spine can cure some problems, but results are mixed. To be fair, conventional approaches, such as physiotherapy, also struggle to treat back problems with any consistency. Nevertheless, conventional therapy is still preferable because of the serious dangers associated with chiropractic.

In 2001, a systematic review of five studies revealed that roughly half of all chiropractic patients experience temporary adverse effects, such as pain, numbness, stiffness, dizziness and headaches. These are relatively minor effects, but the frequency is very high, and this has to be weighed against the limited benefit offered by chiropractors.

More worryingly, the hallmark technique of the chiropractor, known as high-velocity, low-amplitude thrust, carries much more significant risks. This involves pushing joints beyond their natural range of motion by applying a short, sharp force. Although this is a safe procedure for most patients, others can suffer dislocations and fractures.

Worse still, manipulation of the neck can damage the vertebral arteries, which supply blood to the brain. So-called vertebral dissection can ultimately cut off the blood supply, which in turn can lead to a stroke and even death. Because there is usually a delay between the vertebral dissection and the blockage of blood to the brain, the link between chiropractic and strokes went unnoticed for many years. Recently, however, it has been possible to identify cases where spinal manipulation has certainly been the cause of vertebral dissection.

Laurie Mathiason was a 20-year-old Canadian waitress who visited a chiropractor 21 times between 1997 and 1998 to relieve her low-back pain. On her penultimate visit she complained of stiffness in her neck. That evening she began dropping plates at the restaurant, so she returned to the chiropractor. As the chiropractor manipulated her neck, Mathiason began to cry, her eyes started to roll, she foamed at the mouth and her body began to convulse. She was rushed to hospital, slipped into a coma and died three days later. At the inquest, the coroner declared: “Laurie died of a ruptured vertebral artery, which occurred in association with a chiropractic manipulation of the neck.”

This case is not unique. In Canada alone there have been several other women who have died after receiving chiropractic therapy, and Edzard Ernst has identified about 700 cases of serious complications among the medical literature. This should be a major concern for health officials, particularly as under-reporting will mean that the actual number of cases is much higher.

If spinal manipulation were a drug with such serious adverse effects and so little demonstrable benefit, then it would almost certainly have been taken off the market.

Simon Singh is a science writer in London and the co-author, with Edzard Ernst, of Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial. This is an edited version of an article published in The Guardian for which Singh is being personally sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association.

UO grad student Dan Lawton, who penned an opinion piece bemoaning the lack of ideological diversity at the UO, has a follow-up opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor. Lawton describes his further adventures in diversity-land, such as when he sat down to talk with one of the professors who disagreed with him:

He was eager to chat, and after five minutes our dialogue bloomed into a lively discussion. As we hammered away at the issue, one of his colleagues with whom he shared an office grew visibly agitated. Then, while I was in mid-sentence, she exploded.

“You think you’re so [expletive] cute with your little column,” she told me. “I read your piece and all you want is attention. You’re just like Bill O’Reilly. You just want to get up on your [expletive] soapbox and have people look at you.”

From the disgust with which she attacked me, you would have thought I had advocated Nazism. She quickly grew so emotional that she had to leave the room. But before she departed, she stood over me and screamed.

“You understand that my column was basically a prophesy,” I shot back. I had suggested right-leaning ideas weren’t welcome on campus and in response the faculty had tied my viewpoints to racism and addressed me with profanity-laced insults.

The Statesman Journal has a sloppy french-kiss of a goodbye to Frohnmayer:

Dave Frohnmayer wanted to be Oregon’s governor back in 1990. That didn’t happen.

But he has no regrets, and neither should Oregonians. Frohnmayer has charted the state’s direction through the thousands of lives he has influenced. For the past 15 years he has been president of the University of Oregon.

He leaves that job today, entering a well-deserved retirement, although he still will teach a bit at the UO.

Frohnmayer is the first native Oregonian to serve as president of one of the state’s large research universities.

He is a man of considerable personal grace and courage, someone for whom leadership and public service have been a lifelong calling.

Oh, brother. But wait, it goes on: (more…)

Rather than trying to append this to the smoking, charred remains of the last post that dealt with intellectual diversity, I thought I’d give this piece from Kenneth Anderson at The Volokh Conspiracy its own space.

Much has been made in the comments section of this blog about what the problem actually looks like and what can be done about it, and I think that Anderson does a reasonably good job of crystallizing a few of the major concerns regarding the lack of intellectual diversity in the academy.

He makes clear the results of a lack of intellectual diversity in the academy, and it’s not just that students run the risk of ending up in a classroom with biased instructors. Rather, courses that approach subject matter from a conservative or libertarian perspective simply are not taught. This is due in large part to the fact that many existing faculty are either uninterested or unable to teach such courses, with the outcome that classes in conservative political thought or historical interpretation, etc. have more or less disappeared from curricula. For support he cites Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, who writes:

To be sure, a political science department may feature a course on American political thought that includes a few papers from “The Federalist” and some chapters from Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.”

But most students will hear next to nothing about the conservative tradition in American politics that stretches from John Adams to Theodore Roosevelt to William F. Buckley Jr. to Milton Friedman to Ronald Reagan. This tradition emphasizes moral and intellectual excellence, worries that democratic practices and egalitarian norms will threaten individual liberty, attends to the claims of religion and the role it can play in educating citizens for liberty, and provides both a vigorous defense of free-market capitalism and a powerful critique of capitalism’s relentless overturning of established ways. It also recognized early that communism represented an implacable enemy of freedom.

[…]

While ignoring conservatism, the political theory subfield regularly offers specialized courses in liberal theory and democratic theory; African-American political thought and feminist political theory; the social theory of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and the neo-Marxist Frankfurt school; and numerous versions of postmodern political theory.

Berkowitz argues that, far from actively seeking “conservative” scholars during faculty searches, departments should instead look for professors who, regardless of their political background, would be able to convincingly teach a courses about conservative interpretations of history, ideas, politics, etc. to complement the stable of scholars in virtually every humanities or social science department who are fluent in leftish ideas.

This approach would likely have the effect of attracting a more “diverse” group of applicants and nullifies the basis of the argument that only “liberal people apply to liberal schools” (or the even more absurd notion that conservatives are simply too thick to be academics) while at the same time avoiding any sort of political “litmus test” during the hiring process.

While approvingly quoting Berkowitz’s admonition against “affirmative action for conservatives,” Anderson also notes the stultifying results of the left-liberal coccoon in academia:

… within an academic institution, I find myself treated as “conservative” – either to recoil from in faint horror, with a certain advice to students, well, if you take him, you have to know what you’re getting, or with a certain faint institutional pride that we’re broad-minded enough to have someone like him, which is to say, there is nothing an academic institution cannot praise itself for if it tries hard enough. I’ve had conversations – earnest, well-intentioned – that amounted to saying, “We’re so glad you’re our token conservative.”

If a quality education that exposes students to a wide variety of ideas and perspectives is indeed the mission of this institution (and sometimes one wonders…), then it simply isn’t enough to retort “well, go take an economics class” whenever someone complains that conservative ideas are given short shrift in the academy. Students actually need to be able to expose themselves to a truly diverse set of ideas that are taught by people who’re interested in and qualified to teach them, regardless of their political background (I mean, can you imagine what a class at the UO campus on the ideas of Ronald Reagan or William F. Buckley might look like?).

As it stands, students are often presented with the illusion of choice and given the option of taking courses in any number of subjects, a large number of which approach the course material, whatever it may be, with much the same theoretical framework.

That’s not diversity, and telling conservative academics to get out of town and move to Texas doesn’t change that.

“First, they came for the smokers…”

“Next, they came for the Earth-killers…”

“Then, they came for the greedy, fat-cat kulaks…”

Right-wing rhetoric incites domestic terrorism!

Journalism grad student Dan Lawton has a new post over at his blog with responses to his recent ODE opinion piece on the lack of ideological diversity on campus. The  responses are all very predictable (“There are no Republican professors because you have to be smart to be a professor. Hurr hurr hurr!”). But then you get to the comment from UO journalism teacher Dan Morrison, who is on the record as saying (emphasis added):

You may be very upset that the University of Oregon, which, I may point out, is funded by people who live in a liberal state, and therefore, no surprise, tends to be liberal, attracts professor applying for a job who tend to be liberal. But as a student you have a choice. You do not have to come here. You most certainly can choose to spend your money to go to school in Alabama, or Texas, or Mississippi, or Georgia, or Louisiana or South Carolina.  And if you like conservatism, you can certainly attend the University of Texas, and you can walk past the statue of Jefferson Davis every day on your way to class.

Whoa, whoa, hold on. Full stop. Really? I don’t know where Morrison gets off, but the last time I checked, being conservative does not mean one is some sort of neo-Confederate. In fact, that’s a fairly disgusting and disingenuous statement to make. Way to really raise the level of discourse there, tiger. Of course, maybe Morrison has just been yukking it up with his UO colleagues so long that he doesn’t realize everyone’s not an effete, latte-sipping pinko. (Do you see how that works?)

Second, perhaps some of us can’t afford out-of-state tuition. Perhaps some of us simply want a decent education at the state’s supposed “flagship university.” And as a “flagship university” or a “hot brand” or whatever the UO’s touting itself as these days, maybe we’re upset because we’re paying to sit in class and listen to pious, liberal professors tell us how evil cars/Bush/guns are instead of trying to provide us with an actual education.

P.S. I forgot to mention: Lawton challenged Morrison to an open debate of the subject, which Morrison declined.

California set to abandon the use of textbooks in schools in favor of “internet aids”:

Gov Schwarzenegger believes internet activities such as Facebook, Twitter and downloading to iPods show that young people are the first to adopt new online technologies, and so the internet is also the best way to learn in classrooms.

I think there may be a logical fallacy skulking around in there somewhere.

How can the world’s fifth largest economy not have enough money to be able to outfit schools with textbooks? I’m sure it has nothing to do with out of control entitlements spending. Nope. Nothing to see here. It’s a revenue problem, you see.