Photo by Inside Higher Ed

Inside Higher Ed reports that the University of Florida is conducting an experiment worthy of a marketplace of ideas. With a $3 million grant from the Knight Foundation, the University recently put up a “Civil Debate Wall”: five wall-mounted touch screens with questions about controversial topics, such as “Is wealth distributed fairly in the United States?” Student passers-by have the opportunity to respond in short opinion statements. A camera overhead snaps a headshot, and the person’s response, picture, and first name go up on a screen.

It seems like a good idea for getting students accustomed to an attitude of respectful debate on a college campus. Ann Henderson, the university staff member who established the wall, told Inside Higher Ed she hopes it will help students learn to take a stand on hot-button issues but to do it with courtesy:

“We’re trying to say you can disagree with somebody, you can do it civilly, you can do it with respect,” she said.

That’s especially important, she said, at a time when political issues are polarizing and debate can be bitter. “At the end of the day, it’s not just about being polite,” Henderson said, “it’s about how to function in a democracy when you believe that and I believe this.”

Inside Higher Ed today has a story about a new book by a professor on hip-hop culture in college. In the interview, the author says, ”Hip-hop collegians are college students who create hip-hop and apply its sensibilities and worldview to their educational lives….They dance, rhyme, make beats, DJ, paint and draw visual arts such as graffiti, curate events, and more… A hip-hop collegian is not someone who simply listens to rap music. Anyone who turns on the radio can listen to rap music today because it is a mainstream part of American society. But a student who is deeply invested in the fuller culture of hip-hop, often by creating a part of it, and applies its sensibilities to education, is a hip-hop collegian.”

Sounds like a satire from “The Onion,” as one commenter wrote, but apparently not.

I wonder just what hip-hop “sensibilities” are and how they differ from the sensibilities affiliated with any other form of music. Other than perhaps creating more graffiti,how are these “hip-hop” collegians different from others?

None of the infamous “faculty/student non-aggression pact” for him.

It is unlikely that Ms. Ali has ever sat at desk like mine, on the phone with a parent who cannot believe I allowed his daughter to drink, much less allowed (or not allowed — always a difficult point to discuss) a “boy” to do the things her account reports. Or a parent who wants to know why I have sent her son home without so much as a hearing, an action we call “interim removal,” while we investigate these claims.

“Because the alleged victim is afraid of seeing him, and the Office for Civil Rights has made it clear that our process must support the alleged victim in this way” is not an answer that satisfies an angry mother who believes that her son (1) has been unjustly accused, (2) has not been given a chance to defend himself (yet), and 3) may find his ability to succeed academically compromised by his absence from classes during this investigation.  Has Ms. Ali ever had a parent, in a rageful voice, point out the inequity of all of this? Because I’ve experienced that on several occasions as I have tried to do what OCR expects from a “victim-friendly” policy.

The author writes that experienced human judgment is a better approach to getting to the bottom of sexual assault charges than this “victim-friendly” rule: “I do not appreciate having my hands tied by the presumption of guilt the Dear Colleague Letter portrays.”

The OCR regulations thus harm not only students and their families but also the campus administrators trying to sort out these painful situations.

What really happened during the student protest against the findings of the Center for Equal Opportunity? W. Lee Hansen, professor emeritus of economics at UW-Madison, documents what he observed on September 13 and offers a new assessment of the controversy. He poses a number of “unanswered questions” pertaining to the episode. Here’s one:

Were the actions of the Vice Provost and the Dean of Students consistent with the guiding purpose of a university, and this one in particular, which is to use reason and argument rather than physical protest in addressing controversial issues? Did these two officials violate the spirit of the famous “sifting and winnowing” statement?

“Whatever May Be the Limitations Which Trammel Inquiry Elsewhere, We Believe That the Great State University of Wisconsin Should Ever Encourage That Continual and Fearless Sifting and Winnowing by Which Alone the Truth Can Be Found.” [See policy]

The Center for Equal Opportunity published two reports on the use of racial preferences at UW-Madison last month.  The reports generated an angry protest against the findings (see the article by Peter Wood, “Mobbing for Preferences”). Dr. Hansen, who was present for the events of September 13, will soon publish a complete eyewitness account of the day along with a new assessment of the DoubleTree Hotel protest on the NAS website.

Single-sex schooling is not for everyone. But it can help some students to become more focused and well-rounded. Girls cannot leave it to boys to dissect the frog, and boys cannot leave it to girls to edit the school newspaper. When a 2007 British study compared life outcomes for thousands of middle-aged graduates of single-sex and coed schools, it found that “gender stereotypes” were “exacerbated” in coed schools and “moderated” in single-sex schools. In single-sex schools, males were more likely to focus on language and literature, and females on math and science. And for girls, “single-sex schooling was linked to higher wages.”

All that “critical thinking” stuff they’re learning at UW put to use!

Stotsky answered:

What a strange question: Does our society devote too much time and money to education? We spend much more on K-12 schools now than ever before but get so much less in return mainly because our high schools have long failed to address the real range of adolescents’ interests. We have oversold the worth of a college degree to compensate for a high school diploma with little academic or career meaning.

Finland offers all students leaving ninth grade the option of a three-year general studies high school or a three-year vocational high school.

Possibly half of the students now enrolled in our public universities and four-year colleges would be more motivated to study and develop better work habits in programs of their choice that could have been available to them in high school. As for many of the dropouts in ninth and 10th grades, their long-term costs to society could have been avoided if they had been offered programs in high school that appealed to young adolescents more interested in practical activities than the reading and writing required in authentic college-level courses.

If Race to the Top and Common Core’s high school standards had aimed at strengthening the high school curriculum so that a high school diploma meant more than it now does — and the percentages of remedial math and reading courses at public colleges were drastically reduced — that would have been a major step forward. Instead, the U.S. Department of Education seduced most states into adopting reading and mathematics standards that in effect mean most high school students declared “college ready” will be even less prepared for authentic college-level work than those now going into nonselective post-secondary institutions.

Other developed countries offer adolescents a choice of curricula. Finland, for example, offers all students leaving ninth grade — the end of compulsory schooling — the option of attending a three-year general studies high school or a three-year vocational high school, with about 50 percent of each age cohort enrolling in each type of high school. The “comprehensive” American high school has outlived its usefulness, but our policy makers have chosen to weaken its academic goals and ignore its career-forming capacity rather than serve the diversity of adolescent interests, talents and needs in grades 9 through 12 — at a much greater cost to the students, their families and society.