NAS Blog

In a bold move, Superintendent Frances Gallo fired every single teacher from Central Falls High School, one of the worst-performing schools in the state.  Gallo had offered the teachers a plan to improve school performance, which included a 25-minute longer school day, increased tutoring, eating lunch with the students, and a summer training course.  The school offered the teachers an additional $30 per hour for the additional work.

The teachers’ union rejected the plan because they wanted $90 per hour.  So Gallo fired all of them.  (It should also be pointed out that R.I. teachers’ average salary is already higher than the national average.)   US Education Secretary Arne Duncan applauded the superintendent.

So do I.  This story represents yet more evidence that teachers’ unions are destroying education in America.  It’s about time somebody stood up to them.

“Sustainability” is certainly one of them, but in this week’s Clarion Call, I focus on the way “globalization” is being used as an excuse for creating new courses such as “global diversity.”

If you haven’t had a chance to read this column by William Pannapacker (writing as Thomas H. Benton), you owe yourself the pleasure. (Unless you are considering graduate school in the humanities, in which case, you owe yourself the warning.) Benton explains, as only someone who has experienced the misery of the search for a job as a humanities professor can, why the odds of finding a job are so infinitesimal that no one who cares for their students can, except in rare cases, advise them to pursue a Ph.D. in the humanities.

While Benton rightly points the finger at universities that admit students to doctoral programs without informing them of the reality of the job market, there is one part of of the problem he doesn’t address. I remember when, over 20 years ago, I couldn’t decide between graduate school in political science and law school, one of my political science professors advised me that if I couldn’t get into a top 10 or 15 program that it was not worth going to graduate school at all. The underlying assumption of his advice was that any school with an opening would fill it with an applicant from a top program. If he was right–and economic theory would predict any rational school would act as he assumed–then, as students wised up to the reality of the market, the numbers of students attending graduate programs at lower ranked institutions would fall.

If my university is any indication, however, the problem is that schools don’t–even if they can–hire only from the top graduate programs. They hire people from the schools they know best–their own and others like them. The problem with these hires, aside from the disputed issue of whether you are hiring the best person, is that it is difficult to tell prospective students that you have no chance of landing a job with a Ph.D. from a less well known program when there are real life examples of recent graduates who landed decent jobs. The irrational bias of hiring committees, then, enables these programs, at least some of which either shouldn’t be in business or should take fewer students, to continue to tempt students into probable vocational suicide.

A former University of Buffalo scientific researcher, William Fals-Stewart, has been accused of using actors — yes, hired, scripted actors — as part of a painstaking plan to win acquittal in a misconduct hearing led by State University of New York officials.

And, by golly, he nearly got away with it! Read on about the saga of Fals-Stewart, who has now been arrested and charged with felony crimes, including the fraudulent use of thespians whose lines are said to have been filled with inaccuracies about his research.

As an undergrad, I spent one year at Berkeley, 1968, a year full of death, riots, tear gas, and bayonets under Peder Sather’s gate.  I dressed in Levis, love beads from a head shop on Telegraph Avenue, and an Army field jacket pilfered from Fort Ord.  I wore OD and flashed the peace sign in “solidarity” with my contemporaries who were fighting and dying in Vietnam while I skated by with an educational deferment.

Ironically, three years later I was at Fort Ord teaching classes full of `Nam vets, some rotating back to the rice paddies and the jungle.  I learned the shorthand:  TDY, MOS, HALO jumping, “boo-coo” (beaucoup), “bookin’,” and I discovered the joy of teaching military students who were prompt, eager, did the reading, and called me “sir.”  For the next 20 years, outside our barracks classroom was Vietnam, Panama, Desert Storm; inside was Moby Dick and Dylan Thomas.  Then the Soviet Union’s collapse brought base closure, and I was transferred to main campus.

I furnish this prologue because recently I listened to a colleague expound passionately on the futility of war, and I wondered how a veteran would feel hearing that indictment of his sacrifice, however well-intentioned.  Professors with pacifistic sentiments are commonplace, of course, but one also finds naked hostility towards the military in academia, such as Dr. June Terpstra’s fever-dream, “Killers in the Classroom.”

That’s why I now include a “thank you for your service” in my syllabus and request that veterans identify themselves privately in case I need to adjust class material for them.  When studying film, I often show Apocalypse Now. Thirty years ago, a sergeant asked to be excused from the viewing because he, like Colonel Kurtz, had “gone native in Vietnam.”  Just last year, a quiet, Iraq War veteran also asked for an alternative assignment.  He ended up writing a stunning account of a chaotic, bloody firefight he was in on “IED Alley” outside Al-Qaiim.  He said it helped him to write about it and thanked me.  I could only reply, “No, Corpsman Chan, thank you.”

That’s the subject of a debate scheduled for March 16 at New York University. Rod Paige, Terry Moe, and Larry Sand are the team arguing that we should. Teachers union president Randi Weingarten and others are on the opposing side. Details about the debate are available here.

If you’re in the NYC area, this should be worthwhile.

Cross-posted from www.nas.org

Yesterday I spoke in an online radio interview on the American Freedom Alliance’s broadcast, the Western Word. The program was on “The Green Movement and Its Discontents,” with myself, Holly Swanson of Operation Green Out! and author of Set Up and Sold Out: Find Out What Green Really Means, and Michael Shaw, president of Freedom Advocates. We three—with the addition of Steve Milloy, author of Green Hell and founder of JunkScience.com, and Claudia Rosett, journalist-in-residence at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies—will speak this Sunday in Los Angeles at aseminar on the sustainability movement.

The radio program is an hour in length. To listen or download the broadcast (download if you’d like the capability to skip through), click here. My main segment is from 26:18-33:30, with additional subsequent comments. I speak about how the sustainability movement is on the rise in higher education, beginning with organizations such as Second Nature and evident in the curricula of institutions such as Florida Gulf Coast University.

The Associated Press reports that University of Alabama – Huntsville students had banded together to let university administrators know something “wasn’t quite right” about Professor Amy Bishop. “She taught by reading straight out of the textbook, never made eye contact and liked to remind people constantly that she went to Harvard.”  Here’s the link.

Of course this kind of incompetent, obnoxious behavior characterizes many professors — and to Alabama’s credit, it may help to explain why Bishop was denied tenure.  What is sad is that she lasted long enough to be eligible for tenure — why wasn’t she weeded out during her first year, if her teaching was as pathological as these students have claimed?

Of course it’s now widely known that Bishop had killed her teenage brother in Massachusetts, and had been a suspect in a pipe-bombing attempted murder at Harvard.  I’ve come to think that background checks are appropriate for every tenure-track hire.  I can see tort cases arising from “negligent hiring” of dangerous faculty.

It appears as if the deepening skepticism about the once-invincible global warming “consensus” has shaken loose from what was until very recently strictly taboo. This piece by an undergraduate writer in the Stanford student paper is useful simply for the fact that it’s been written, but also for its description of the “consensus” on campus prior to “climategate” and subsequent revelations. It’s good to see, but also another ominous ilustration of the extent to which ideology had completely overpowered genuine science. Write on, students.

Cross-posted from www.nas.org

I just read an article in the Huffington Post, “Educating the Next Generation of Sustainability Professionals,” by Steven Cohen. Cohen tells how the demand for business courses insustainability has grown exponentially since he first began teaching at Columbia University in 1981. He scoffs at “The scare tactics being used to de-legitimize climate science and environmental policy” and then says:

Before long the definition of high quality management will be sustainability management. The students I teach know this and no amount of propaganda is going to change their minds.

This is rich. One out of three children fears that the earth won’t be around when he grows up, because that’s what they’ve been taught in school. The entire environmental movement is built on scare tactics. But Cohen says that’s just what global warming skepticism is.

He also calls it propaganda. He writes, “The students I teach know this.” Right, because you taught them that, using propaganda.

The sustainability movement is deceptive. Its proponents like to make it sound as if it’s only about environmental stewardship, thrift, and prudence. But in reality it’s a political ideology intent on establishing big government, economic redistribution, and loss of personal freedoms. How convenient for Cohen to call resistance to such a radical, anti-Western, anti-liberal movement “propaganda,” when he’s the one disseminating biased and fallacious hype.

We are at a moment when the entire edifice of “global warming” theory is tottering. Jones, the former head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia admits to the BBC that there has been no global warming for the last fifteen years, and that the medieval warming period (with no human contributions) may well have been warmer than the 20^th century temperature highs. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s grand report turns out to be riddled with misstatements, poorly sourced claims, and outright fictions. This isn’t an especially good moment for Professor Cohen to be inveighing against skeptics as mythmongers. Mythologist behold thyself.

N.B. Cohen is the executive director of Columbia’s Earth Institute, whose goal is to “help achieve sustainable development primarily by expanding the world’s understanding of Earth as one integrated system.” On the Institute’s board of advisors is Bono, the lead singer of U2; and George Soros, the billionaire who bankrolls multiple projects of the Left, called removing President George W. Bush from office “a matter of life and death,” and was convicted of insider trading in 2002.