NAS Blog

Last fall the CUNY faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), settled Professor David Seidemann’s law suit by paying Seidemann’s pro bono attorney, Jones, Day, $250,000 in legal fees, roughly 1.5% of the PSC’s budget.  The suit concerned the PSC’s use of dues to pursue political activities unrelated to contract negotiation or administration.  There have been periods when the PSC has released e-mails concerning the Iraqi War virtually every day.

At issue was the agency fee arrangment whereby non-members are compelled through the threat of state violence to pay union fees.  Seidemann’s case went through several appeals, and was remanded to a magistrate sympathetic to the PSC at least twice. As the appellate court was mandating that more and more of the PSC’s budget be reviewed for being “non-chargeable” to dissenting non-members, the PSC settled.  The PSC had originally claimed that less than one percent of its budget is used for unrelated political purposes.   The settlement occurred at a point where the amount had increased to over 14 percent.  Seidemann suspects that the actual number is much higher.   A witness heard a PSC spokesperson say that the percentage is between 15  and 20%.

In a statement to its executive committee the PSC calls its payment to Jones, Day and the increase from 0% to over 14% “a victory”.  I wrote a two-page description of some of the details of the PSC’s loss and the leadership’s recidivist lying in Sharad Karkhanis’s Patriot Returns newsletter that is released to 13,000 CUNY employees.

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.

Sharad Karkhanis writes a satirical newsletter, Patriot Returns, that he e-mails to 13,000 faculty and staff of the City University of New York.  His sarcasm can be biting. Susan O’Malley, until her recent retirement one of CUNY’s left-wing faculty leaders, sued Karkhanis.  He referred to her with the appellation “Queen of Released Time” because of her non-existent teaching load due to exemptions for bureaucratic assignments.

In addition, O’Malley had publicly protested CUNY’s firing of Mohamed Yousry, who was convicted of abetting terrorism associated with the “Blind Sheik” trial in New York. Karkhanis wrote that O’Malley was planning on setting up an al Qaeda training camp.

O’Malley was a union officer and president of the faculty senate, roles which conflict. For instance, when Professor KC Johnson was engaged in a tenure battle with the departmental chairs of Brooklyn College, as a union officer O’Malley had a fiduciary duty to take Johnson’s side. But as president of the faculty senate she made public statements attacking Johnson and siding with the departmental chairs.  This was acceptable to New York State’s Public Employee Relations Board even though the state’s labor law, known as the Taylor Law, prohibits management-dominated unions.

Inside Higher Education covers the settlement of O’Malley v. Karkhanis here.   As well, I wrote a post about it on my blog here.

Communist countries like Russia have developed with extraordinary speed in the past decades entirely by means of public enterprise.  In fact, by our index of the rate of economic growth, i.e., electricity produced (or consumed), Russia is now developing at a considerably faster rate than the United States…The regression coefficient for the U.S.S.R. (.05) represents a considerably faster growth rate than for the U.S. (.03), which means that Russia should reach the present level of U.S. development by 1967 and surpass it by 1990.  Can it be that public enterprise is always as inefficient and lacking in drive and practical imagination as pictured?

—David C. McClelland, The Achieving Society, 1961, p. 293.

Academics’ doctrinaire acceptance of Oskar Lange’s defense of socialist marginalism and Clark Kerr’s claim that convergence was inevitable along with rejection of Ludwig von Mises’s and Friedrich von Hayek’s arguments for the impossibility of socialist planning are reflected in McClelland’s extrapolation.   The Soviet Union completely disintegrated in 1989, one year before McClelland’s prediction of  its surpassing the U.S.  Although von Mises and Hayek were right and Lange, Kerr and McClelland were wrong all along, von Mises could not find a paying job at an American university.   Several donors covered his salary while he taught at NYU.

So much for the claim that academic dogmatism began with the New Left and the 1960s.   The even more amazing footnote is that now that the Soviet Union has fallen, American academics argue for socialism as aggressively as ever.

In his book Moral Development: Advances in Research and Theory (NY: Praeger, 1986) James Rest of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues describe their work on “moral maturity” using the defining issues test (DIT).  Their assumption that ethics is based on universal ethical principles and their claim that similar levels of scores across several countries evidences universality are simplistic.  Kohlberg, Rest and their colleagues in effect claim that Kant and Mill are morally more mature than skeptics or particularists like Hume, Aristotle or Hegel. They seem to claim that there is a profession of “moral philosophers” who all agree as to what moral maturity might be.  As a member of the Academy of Common Sense, this strikes me as Mickey Mouse.

This emphasis on the general at the expense of the particular results in Rest et al.’s claiming that highly educated philosophers are more morally mature than fundamentalist ministers because the complexity of the philosophers’ thinking is greater.

Moreover, without defining their use of the terms “liberal” and “conservative”,  Thoma and Rest claim that liberals are more “morally mature” than conservatives.

Rest, et al.  do not indicate whether the study controlled for IQ, socioeconomic status, and “high educational and career orientation,” which they elsewhere state have robust correlations with their universalist moral maturity measure.  Might conservatives tend to have a particularistic orientation?

Nor do they define  “liberal” and “conservative.”   Henry David Thoreau’s radical libertarianism might be construed as “conservative.”  Was Thoreau morally immature in the opinions of Rest and Kohlberg?

I have attended two “Tea Party” meetings of the Kingston/Rhinebeck Tea Party.  About forty people attended the  first meeting and about 75 attended the second.   Given that the meetings were both held on cold winter days in a rural area with driving times averaging 25 minutes or more, the turnouts were encouraging.

A wide range of people attend, varying in socioeconomic status and education.  Mostly they are conservatives but not well read.  The Hudson Valley was the birthplace of Martin van Buren and many have Lockean instincts.  But they are construction workers, butchers, tailors and phone salesmen, and lack knowledge and, more importantly, the self confidence to educate themselves.  Bad education has disabled citizens’ abilities to participate.

Members of the group sense that things have gone amiss.  Several have started an education subcommittee that aims to reform the local schools. More than a few attendees told tales of political correctness, suppression of alternative views and left wing indoctrination in the Hudson Valley’s and Catskills’ public schools.

Few attendees have the knowledge to question what they hear on television or the radio.   As a whole, the group lacks a plan or vision. They have trouble accepting that there may be systemic problems behind the declines in living standards, the current high unemployment rate and creeping socialism.

Members of the NAS can make an important contribution to the Tea Party.  The mere attendance of a professor with a Ph.D. encourages them.  As well, guidance as to ideas, history and tactics would be productive.

I am in the middle of Reimer, Paolitto and Hersh’s Promoting Moral Growth from Piaget to Kohlberg as part of research on business ethics.

Kohlberg claims that as children mature they develop greater capacity for ethical deliberation in six stages.    The two highest levels are adapted from formal philosophical systems, John Rawls’s  contractual utilitarianism and Kantian duty-based ethics, that all action should be a universal law to (in Kohlberg’s version)  maximize social welfare.

Levels five and six make the claim that concern for society at large equals  moral maturity.  Kohlberg confounds complex thinking with moral maturity.  Some people consider social justice in their moral thinking, others may give weight to economic rationality.  This does not make strong utilitarianism (the agent’s thinking of society at large) more “mature”. It just makes it acceptable to Kohlberg and his followers.

In one of the case studies he uses to test moral maturity, Kohlberg excludes economic rationality from moral deliberation.  He views people who think that it is moral to steal a needed drug as more moral but those who understand that strong moral assumptions about stealing are necessary for economic rationality are less so.  In other words, the advocates of moral maturity see theft as morally acceptable if it maximizes economic illiteracy. Kohlberg’s theory is ideologically utilitarian.

Kohlberg claims that moral maturity causes social justice thinking when the relationship ought to be that cognitive eomplexity causes complex ethical deliberation. Numerous grants for ethics programs were awarded to Kohlberg and his followers.

The City University of New York still lacks a free institutions program, and Professor Thomas J. Main of Baruch College is aiming to close the gap. 15 months ago Main came within a hair’s breadth of finding funding, but the ’08 stock market collapse crushed the grant. Now, another foundation has offered Main some seed capital, and he has requested course proposals from about ten faculty around CUNY.  Among the courses being proposed are “Institutions and Economic Growth”, “Liberty and Equality in American Constitutionalism”, and “Federalism in American Government”.  Let us root for Professor Main’s success in this worthy undertaking.

News Busters, the blog of the Media Research Center, reports that the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) has stated that Michael Mann, a Penn State climatological researcher involved in the recent e-mail scandal, received “$541,184 in economic stimulus funds last June to conduct climate change research.”

NCPPR has issued a press release criticizing the Obama administration “for awarding a half million dollar grant from the economic stimulus package to Penn State professor Michael Mann, a key figure in the Climategate controversy.”  The release states that Professor Mann is currently under investigation by Penn State Univesity “because of activities related to a closed circle of climate scientists who appear to have been engaged in agenda-driven science.”

I always thought of utilitarianism as a somewhat capitalistic hence individualistic philosophy.  I seem to remember reading John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty in college and passages about the right of the British to sell opium to the Chinese, the right of free speech and freedom absent interference with others, which would suggest libertarianism.  But I am reading Mill’s Utilitarianism for a project on business ethics and am struck by this passage, which sounds to me like advocacy of social justice education (p. 28):

…education and opinion, which have so vast a power over human character, should so use that power as to establish in the mind of every individual an indissoluble association between his own happiness and the good of the whole; especially between his own happiness and the practice of such modes of conduct,  negative and positive, as regard for the universal happiness prescribes; so that not only he may be unable to conceive the possibility of happiness himself, consistently with conduct opposed to the general good, but also that a direct impulse to promote the general good may be in every individual one  of the habitual motives of action, and the sentiments connected therewith may fill a large and prominent place in every human being’s sentient existence.

That is social justice education in a nutshell.  One can see in Mill the close link between utilitarian capitalism and socialism; and the ease with which American capitalists in the past two years have wavered between them.