Sens. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) are working together to create a national identification card with biometric technology. The purpose of the card will be to curb illegal immigration. Because all citizens will be required to carry one, employers will have no excuse to hire illegal immigrants.
Predictably, privacy advocates are already up in arms over the proposal. According to the article (see link above), one of the major objections is that the government will be able to track citizens. However, this concern makes little sense in today’s digitized world. If you use a credit card, debit card, or cell phone, the government can already track you wherever you go.
The biometric data, undoubtedly, will also cause a stir. Early indications about the bill (which is still being developed in the Senate) seem to show that the biometric data will either be a fingerprint or a scan of the veins on the back of one’s hand. I assume that if DNA was the biometric of choice, this issue would go from controversial to downright explosive. Fortunately, that probably won’t be the case.
In an age of globalization and terrorism, it may be time for the United States to implement a national ID card. At the very least, it’s time to have this discussion. Hopefully it goes better than the health care discussion.
In an insightful commentary at In Character (subtitled “a journal of everyday virtues”), Naomi Schaefer Riley examines how academe evolved from Socrates’s dictum, “All I know is that I know nothing,” to Skip Gates’s “You don’t know who you are messing with.”
I was just looking over Kant’s On Education. He died in 1804 when Germany was but on the cusp of industrialization (it considerably lagged Great Britain). Kant emphasizes home schooling and tutoring. He believed in education research and experimental education. He had high hopes for a theory of education. He prefers public education to home schooling and tutors to parental instruction (although had he seen America’s public schools today I suspect he would have thought differently). The home schooling/public education question was alive to Kant as it has recently become again.
I wonder how he would have reacted to the crackpot diversity-speak of today’s education schools and the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education.
Household tutors probably fell out of fashion as their relative cost increased, much like household servants. But today increasing numbers of jobs are of this kind. Many New Yorkers have dog walkers and full time nannies. Why not tutors?
I wonder if tutoring as a profession might make a comeback, especially in light of the increasing interest in home schooling. Perhaps an enterprising academic might start a chain business “Home Tutors R Us” that offers tutoring services, much like the firms that provide nannies.
This would have the advantage of being offered in suburban and rural as well as urban locations, where affluent parents send their children to private schools. Perhaps home tutoring could be combined with distance learning. Perhaps small groups of parents could combine to hire a tutor for several children.
I think the bottom line is that a market driven system of tutors would be far preferable to the dismal public schools of 21st century America.
University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole has long taken radical, public positions on the ongoing struggle in the Middle East.
As Winfield Myers writes, he has tried to vilify Middle East scholar Martin Kramer, because of his devastating critiques of Cole:
He has a relationship with the so-called “Middle East Forum,” which runs the McCarthyite “Campus Watch,” and which was part of a scheme to have me cyber-stalked and massively spammed.
Nothing new here:
Cole’s accusations against Campus Watch fit his pattern of responding to criticism by engaging in conspiracy-theory-mongering and ad hominem attacks. To explain his failure in 2006 to land a chair at Yale University, he blamed a “concerted press campaign by neoconservatives,” who used Cole’s frequently intemperate writings on his blog, Informed Comment, to paint him as a radical.
As for the clinker, as shown by David White in his article “Juan Cole and Yale“: The university’s verdict was “based on an assessment of Cole’s scholarly work … deemed insufficient.”
Would there were more such honest and responsible calls.
Today’s Inside Higher Education has a lead article about an unfolding crisis at Wellesley College, where members of the freshman class are “seething” with indignation. No, the school hasn’t announced a big spike in tuition or suggested that there are too many A grades being awarded, and no hate crimes have been reported thus far this week, either. Instead, the affronted first year students are OUTRAGED that their school was, until this week, being represented by three men in the Mr. Campus Freshman Contest, sponsored by HerCampus, a web page devoted to the college lives and experiences of female undergraduates. The idea is to select as a winner the “coolest, silliest, sexiest” guy to represent your school. Wait a minute, you say, isn’t Wellesley all female? Don’t try to pull that one! We don’t want to be represented by men in a “hottest guy” competition, say the affronted Wellesleyites. This is discriminatory! Now, now, replied the owners of HerCampus: we certainly don’t mean to offend anyone:
It was never our intention to offend anyone with this contest, or to make any kind of anti-feminist, hetero-normative statement.
Whew. I think that the crisis has been stayed for the time being, since a Wellesley freshman has now tossed her hat into the Hottest Freshman contest. Big story, as I said, and I’m grateful to Inside Higher Education for keeping on top of significant trends on campus. But check back: there may be an extra.
Madonna Constantine has lost her lawsuit against Columbia, reports the Washington Monthly. The University had investigated the Teachers College professor and found her guilty of plagiarism on multiple counts. During the investigation, a noose was found hanging on Constantine’s office door. She immediately launched a campaign against the University calling the plagiarism charges (coinciding with the noose appearance) “a conspiracy and witch-hunt,” and said she had “been specifically and systematically targeted” as a black woman.
Constantine sued the University after Columbia fired her for plagiarism.
NAS has written about Constantine in “The Copyist: The Plagiarist and the Noose,” “No Fire Escape for the Copyist,” and “Noose Professor Cites NAS in Lawsuit.”
On college campuses, the “student programmers” could use with a bit of anger management. On my campus there is the obligatory Vagina Monologues sticking to the script of the “angry vaginas” and other pleasant scenes.
My university is also part of the growing movement to “educate” through “Tunnels of Oppression.”
Alas, benighted Lithuania hasn’t caught up with U.S. “higher” education. They actually have a tunnel of oppression that deals with communism under Soviet rule. In the U.S. academy this is known as “historical communism” (to distinguish it from the Real Thing).
At any rate, those of us stuck in the “late stage of capitalism” are disadvantaged by our freedom, yet we may experience “historical communist oppression” through this Communist Theme Park (trip to Lithuania not included):
Check out the debate that took place this month between Education Sector’s Kevin Carey and NAS on the need for expanding higher education.
First, Carey proposed a “Race to the Top” equivalent for higher education in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (subscription required). NAS agreed with some of his points and disagreed with others in “To Infinity and Beyond! Kevin Carey’s Race to Over-the-Top.” Carey replied in “Debating RTT4HE,” where he asserted that NAS “just wants to hoard college credentials for the privileged few.” We responded at length in “Expanding Enrollments, Declining Standards: American Higher Ed Prepares to Take the Plunge.”
Do we really want to do to higher education what we have to K-12 education? We might achieve the hollow boast of the most college-credentialed citizenry in the world who also happen to be among the worst-educated.
A newly released Kaplan survey seems to support what many instructors have already sensed about the widely popular site, Ratemyprofessors: students actively shop around for faculty members – they’re often junior and untenured – who give out lots of A and B grades, don’t assign much reading, and have relaxed attitudes toward class attendance, punctuality, etc. These, in other words, are the “best” professors. Not surprisingly, the authors of the study suggest that this is a contributing factor to the rampant grade inflation which continues to expand in most of the contemporary academy. Full disclosure: yes, I’ve peeked at my own Ratemyprofessors evaluations a couple of times, and am generally regarded as a big meanie who takes attendance, expects assignments to be completed, and doesn’t grade on a curve. I’ve also viewed the comments directed at some of my colleagues. Overall, I’m struck – but not surprised – by the puerility of many of the student posts, which are little more than temper tantrums. They paid for the course, right? And aren’t they entitled to a good grade? This study suggests that many professors think so, and assign grades accordingly. No doubt, many of them stand in fear of failing to win tenure or promotion, in view of the undue weight already given by faculty committees and administrators to student evalutions. Most unfortunately, as my own experience confirms, some of these folks also give RatemyProfessors comments more than a little consideration as well. I guess if we can’t be exactly sure what students might be learning, we can at least hope that they’re satisfied customers.
Now here’s a novel insight: Greg Forster, a senior fellow at the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, in making the case that school vouchers deliver substantially more educational improvement than charters, argues:
An educational revolution in the making? Perhaps too soon to be optimistic. But Forster marshalls impressive evidence to suggest that the winds of change are indeed blowing.
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