Author Archive for homer

Stanley Fish on Teaching Law

Published on December 17, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From the New York Times Opinionator blog:

This week marks the last sessions of my Yale law school class on law, liberalism and religion. In the course of the semester my students have learned how to read religion clause cases against the background of long-standing debates in philosophy and theology about the relationship between religious imperatives and the obligations of democratic citizenship. They have become adept at recognizing the arguments behind the arguments the justices are making explicitly. They can see how a case ostensibly about vouchers or school prayer or Christmas trees on courthouse steps is really about whether principle or history should inform a court’s decisions. They can see how a case about head coverings or beards in the military (a topic that has surfaced once again) turns on the distinctions set down in John Locke’s “Letter Concerning Toleration” (1689), a tract the justices may never have read. They can see how the majority and dissenting opinions in a free exercise case often reflect a tension between negative and positive liberty as these terms are defined by Isaiah Berlin, an author the justices will likely not have referenced. They can see how the entire history of religion-clause jurisprudence at once illustrates and is an extended critique of John Rawls’s attempt in “Political Liberalism” to devise a form of government that will be fair to religion while at the same time keeping it at arm’s length.

Fish goes on to say that skills and tricks of the trade should not be the point of advanced study but rather deep understanding of the nature of the game being played. In cultures dominated by cheerleading for entrepreneurial capitalism that commitment to depth of study must struggle hard to maintain itself against the tide favoring tricks for short-term success.

For the article…

Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age

Published on August 2, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

Sarah Brookover, left, a senior at Rutgers University in New Jersey, with Vibiana Bowman Cvetkovic, a reference librarian.

From Trip Gabriel in the New York Times:

At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.

At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.

And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying fromWikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.

Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.

But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.

For more…

Vanguard, laggard, or relic? The possible futures of higher education after the Epistemic Revolution

Published on March 16, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

2629-26516-1-pb From the journal First Monday:

The early twenty–first century networked information economy has generated new communicative fields and literacies, and new forms of knowledge production, sociality and creative expression. The emergence of decentralized techno–fields, such as Facebook, Twitter, Second Life and virtual gaming communities, on teaching, learning, institutional hierarchies and sources of authority, presents both problems and opportunities. This article claims that the current moment represents an Epistemic Break in the Academy, and this piece traces some of how this is so. In doing so, we argue that as educational products and experiences contend with other multi–mediated forms of communication, significantly more attention must be paid to the aesthetic, functional and emotional elements of multimedia design creation and modification of course materials, as these materials vie for the attention of Digital Natives. The conclusion suggests both practices and policies needed for higher education to successfully compete for student attention in the current media intensive environment.

…

For colleges and universities, a sustained commitment to flexible and expert design, testing and implementation of online formats, informed by the successes of the open source movement, and consistent with Sterling’s notion of producing communication formats with low cognitive loads and low opportunity costs, is the critical task, once infrastructure is in place. Flexible communicative vehicles may well be known by their fruits. They facilitate collaborative efforts that allow participants to be both active consumers and producers. As might be inferred from the success of South Africa’s Ubuntu Linux, ambitious design projects may well require a strong and responsive executive, one that exercises power in such a way as to create opportunities for collaboration and creative and productive action from the edges of an organization (Whitworth and Friedman, 2009).

For the article…

University rankings smarten up

Published on March 7, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

464016a-i10 From Declan Butler in Nature:

Every autumn, politicians, university administrators, funding offices and countless students wait impatiently for the World University Rankings produced by Britain’s Times Higher Education(THE) magazine. A position in the upper echelons of the THEranking can influence policy-makers’ higher-education investments, determine which institutions attract the best researchers or students, and prompt universities to try to boost their ratings.

But academics and universities have long criticized what they describe as the outsized influence of the THE and other university rankings, saying that their methodology and data are problematic (see Nature447, 514–515; 2007). Many universities see wild swings in their rankings from year to year, for example, which cannot reflect real changes in quality; and many French universities’ ratings suffer because their researchers’ publications often list affiliations with national research agencies as well as the university itself, diluting the benefit for the university. Now, universities and other stakeholders are developing their own rankings to tackle these shortcomings.

“Rankings have outgrown the expectations of those who started them,” says Kazimierz Bilanow, managing director of the IREG Observatory on Academic Rankings and Excellence, a Warsaw-based ranking quality-assurance body created in October 2009. “What were often exercises intended to boost newspaper circulation have come to have enormous influence on policy-making and funding of institutions and governments.”

For the article…

For a related Nature editorial…

Do scientists really need a PhD?

Published on March 6, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

w020090826388465563650 From an editorial in Nature:

Young scientists at a Chinese genomics institute are foregoing conventional postgraduate training for the chance to be part of major scientific initiatives. Is this the way of the future?

The approach to extended postgraduate training varies from country to country. The United States and Europe, for example, have long believed that students need to finish a multiyear programme of postgraduate work before they can fully participate in the front rank of research, whether in industry or academia.

In Asia, scientific communities instead tend to value directed, practical research. In Japan, for example, industry accounts for a much higher proportion of the scientific budget than in the West, and managers there often say that they prefer university graduates who they can train in-house. As a result, relatively little emphasis is given to academic postgraduate training.

Perhaps the most extreme example of this approach is at the BGI in Shenzen, China — the genomic-sequencing juggernaut formerly known as the Beijing Genomics Institute …. Some 500 Chinese university students have already signed up to join the BGI after they graduate this summer. There they will help to piece together DNA data from an expanding set of sequences for microbes, plants and animals.

For the editorial…

University of New Hampshire president says change or go under

Published on February 5, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

huddlestonindex From Associated Press writer Holly Ramer:

CONCORD, N.H.—The president of the University of New Hampshire outlined a 10-year strategic plan Tuesday he says is necessary to keep the state’s flagship public university from eventually sinking.

If the current trend continues, the typical New Hampshire family will be paying 75 percent of its disposable income to send a child to UNH by 2020, compared to 40 percent in 1978 and 60 percent today, Mark Huddleston said in a speech in Durham. That’s unsustainable, he said, and it’s time to move beyond asking families to work more to pay tuition and asking faculty and staff to simply make do with less.

Public colleges and universities around the country have been cutting costs, laying off staff and passing on much of their state budget shortfalls to students through higher tuition. But the current paradigm of higher education isn’t equipped to withstand the turbulence created by economic, political and demographic forces, Huddleston said.

“Either we change the paradigm or we go out of business,” he said. “This is not simply another year-ahead worry about UNH’s budget. It is about our ability to remain viable in the face of a gap between cost and ability to pay that grows into a true chasm when one looks ahead more than a year or two.”

For the article in the Boston Globe…

Should Accomplished Scholars Lead Research Universities?

Published on November 24, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

goodall A new book by Amanda H. Goodall says, “Yes.” Dr. Goodall is a Leverhulme Fellow at Warwick Business School at the University of Warwick in the UK. Her book is Socrates in the Boardroom: Why Research Universities Should Be Led by Top Scholars (Princeton University Press, 2009). To quote an article in Inside Higher Education,

Goodall … bases her work on analysis of the research records of those who have led top universities, and also on interviews with a number of presidents of top American and British universities.

Her book builds on research she has published previously in which she uses citation rankings (in which scholars are rated by the frequency with which their work is cited by others) as a proxy for academic quality of a scholar. While Goodall acknowledges that such measurements aren’t perfect, she said that they do give a sense of the impact of a given researcher. She has documented more movement to the top ranks (of national and international rankings, which she acknowledges as well are not perfect measures) — both of universities and business schools — at institutions that are led by presidents or deans with high citation rankings.

Ultimately, she says, research universities should be led by those who share a passion for what the institution is about — producing knowledge.

Proposal for a New Model University

Published on May 6, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: acdemic restructuring, adaptation, challenge, graduate study, opportunity.

Mark C. Taylor writes in the New York Times for 27 April 2009 about a sharply different organizational and procedural structure for the Academy in the present period of challenge and change. His op-ed piece is entitled End the University as We Know It.

After describing the current crisis, Taylor offers an alternative.

If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin with six major steps: 1. Restructure the curriculum … 2. Abolish permanent departments … 3. Increase collaboration among institutions … 4. Transform the traditional dissertation … 5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students … 6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure ….

For many years, I have told students, “Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.” My hope is that colleges and universities will be shaken out of their complacency and will open academia to a future we cannot conceive.