Heidi Bond quotes from a rather petulant email received by Kevin Jon Haller taking issue with the latter’s use of “state time” to post to his weblog. Haller writes, in partial response:

… I think the author has a very narrow understanding of what my academic duties are. Blogging is an extension of my research and teaching, not a digression from them.

Stephen Karlson reports on another misconception of the role of the professor, while Mike Munger is highly annoyed with mid-level university functionaries telling professors what to do.

It seems to me that the job (nay, responsibility) of the professor is the dissemination and expansion of human knowledge, for the good of society at large; in other words, both teaching and research. Further, being a professor (as opposed to a teacher, instructor, or lecturer) necessarily transcends the status of “jobhood” into a (dare-I-say?) existential realm; the occupation defines one’s existence, in a way that being a secretary, janitor, lawyer, or medical doctor doesn’t.

As such, professors are never truly “off the clock,” nor are they ever truly “on the clock”—professors have professional responsibilities to teach, to counsel and advise students, and to participate in shared governance of the university or college, but the scheduling of classes and meetings are concessions to the temporal nature of the world at large rather than exercises in “clock punching.” Thus, contra the AAUP, I’m not sure there is a point at which the professor truly speaks as a “private citizen,” although there are certainly points at which the professor should make clear that he is speaking outside his field of expertise, and unless the professor is an administrator of the college or university his remarks should not be construed as to carry their endorsement.

To return to Haller’s point, the professor’s primary teaching responsibility is to his or her enrolled students, but—unlike the teacher’s responsibility—the job also entails the wider dissemination and expansion of human knowledge. Blogging—like earlier forms of professorial participation in public discourse—is thus not a “distraction,” or even an “extension,” of one’s teaching and research; it is, in fact, an essential part of it.

I can’t say I have a huge amount of sympathy for the political views of Ward Churchill, the UC-Boulder professor who now won’t be speaking at Hamilton College. That said, he’s a tenured faculty member at Colorado—however ill-judged the decision to tenure him was—and even if he weren’t tenured, the facts that he’s an insensitive jackass with repellant views and a walking testimonial for the validity of Godwin’s Law wouldn’t rise to the level so as to justify his firing.

More at Protein Wisdom and Cold Spring Shops; another account of Churchill’s travails appears in today’s Chronicle of Higher Ed daily update ($).

Orin Kerr discusses law school grading practices, including the notorious (and universal) use of strict curves, without as much overthinking as I engaged in earlier this week.

Since before Robert’s post on this topic, I’ve been pondering grades in general, prompted by this post by Will Baude relating his experience at Yale, where he hasn’t yet “taken any classes that attempt to draw actual distinctions among the students.” Indeed, the very purpose of grading (as opposed to marking, as my Canadian colleague refers to it) is to discriminate among students on the basis of their academic performance. Thus all of the participants in the debate are right in their own ways, but I think they (individually, at least) miss the big picture.

Leopold Stotch and Steven Taylor both bemoan the administrative meddling in grade assignment inherent in Princeton’s decision, a sentiment with which (as a fellow political science professor) I must concur, lest we become like those emasculated law profs who not only no longer control their grades but also lack control over their own exam conditions. On the other hand, Nathan Novak thinks it’s a non-issue, due to the widespread use of class rank to compare students from different institutions; Andrew Samwick makes a similar point, although he acknowledges that grade inflation does lead to compression of the grade range. At the extreme end of the scale, the Grouch thinks grades don’t matter at all; I wouldn’t go that far, due to reasons of path dependence, but I can see his point—few people today care what grades I got in high school or as an undergraduate, but I wouldn’t be a professor today if I hadn’t gotten mostly A’s and B’s.

I think what Princeton is trying to do (rightly or wrongly) is address the “compression” problem that Andrew talks about—if 50% of the class are getting A’s, ny meaningful discrimination among those students has been eliminated; in other words, there’s been a loss of information in the process. If the purpose of grading is simply to drop passing students in buckets based on their absolute performance, giving 50% of students A’s might be appropriate; on the other hand, if the purpose of grading is to determine the relative merit of students, putting 50% of them in a single category isn’t very helpful.

The trouble is, we expect grades to do both of these things. The Millsaps college catalog, for example, requires all political science majors and minors to earn C’s in all of their coursework for the major (which leads to its own sort of compression effect, since effectively the minimum passing grade is raised from a 60 to a 73), and students must maintain a 2.0 GPA to participate in various and sundry extracurricular activities—the C and 2.0 represent absolute standards. But we also use grades to evaluate relative achievement, for election to honorary societies such as Phi Beta Kappa and for awarding other honors.

I don’t know that there’s a simple answer to these problems, although perhaps including measures of central tendency and dispersion along with assigned grades (as is at least partially the case at Dartmouth, according to Andrew) might be a good start.

Leopold Stotch at OTB is indignant over Princeton’s new policy of capping the number of A’s at 35% of the class. I’m a little new to academia, but I’m not sure the policy is as objectionable as he seems to think.

Administrators are limited in their ability to judge the performance of professors. The problem—and the reason many administrators will default to grade distributions as a measure of grade inflation—is that educational outputs aren’t easily observable, whereas grades are easily observable. To make educational outputs observable, administrators have to overcome a great deal of uncertainty and cost. The attempts include taking student surveys—which, not surprisingly, are strongly correlated (positively) with grades—and observing professors in class. This last item is quite expensive and may just result in the professor being on his best behavior when the auditors are present.

One of the reasons that research universities use publication to make tenure decisions is that publication is easily observable, as is the quality of the publication (an ‘A’ journal, ‘B’ journal, and so forth). In any case, this is a topic that will be with us a while, if not forever.

Heidi Bond and Amber Taylor are looking around some of their law classes and finding them to be male-dominated. This got me to thinking of my classes this semester, for which I just received final rosters earlier today.

• Intro to American Government: about 50–50 (I think I counted 17 male students out of 36).
• Con Law II (catalog name: Civil Liberties): about 60–40 female (16 students).
• Public Opinion: 75–25 male (8 students).
• Directed Readings and Honors Thesis: 100–0 female (two students, one in each).

The college population is about 55–45 female, and the political science major seems to be around 60–40 female. Not really sure why public opinion is less popular than con law with female students; if anything, I’d have expected the opposite, since con law really only makes sense for the pre-law types, who tend to be male here. Then again, it could be a scheduling thing; the MW 2:45–4 timeslot is pretty empty at Millsaps, while more classes are offered during the 1–2:15/40 slot (so there are more conflicts).

One other oddity: before looking at the roster, I would have guessed that intro was a bit more skewed female. I think part of that is the middle of the lecture hall seems more female, and it’s difficult to have the full class in my field of vision, particularly with glasses (49 seats are crammed in a room that probably was originally designed for 30, so lecturing in there is almost like performing in the “round”).

Everyone’s favorite Moonie-owned newspaper, the Washington Times, attempts to make a cause celebré out of a student who got a bad grade on an American government exam at Foothill College, a community college in the Bay Area. (þ: Wizbang)

Steven Taylor and James Joyner have offered their grades of the purported essay in question, and—like them—I’d be hard pressed to give a non-failing grade to the essay, even leaving aside the weak grammar; it fails to meaningfully respond to the question as written, instead going off on a tangent to discuss the contemporary constitution and its effects. That the essay may be a heartwarming account by a hard-working immigrant doesn’t redeem that failing; indeed, if the question had asked for such an essay, I’d be inclined to give the essay a significantly better grade, though probably not an A. As it stands, I’d probably give it something on the order of 12–13 points out of 20.

All that said, if the professor did indeed tell the student he needed “psychological treatment” (as the Times account alleges), the prof ought to be disciplined. There’s more from the student’s side here (þ: PoliBlog).

Well, yeah, especially if they have PhD’s, like Chris. However, excommunication seems like an astonishingly authoritarian move and inappropriate to a field such as political science. The same goes for economics. That’s why I tend to refer to economics and political science as disciplines, or fields, rather than professions, like law, medicine and accounting where you are afforded state-supported credentials that bar others from entry. Removing a person from an association for an ethical breech—plagiarism comes to mind—is one thing; preventing them from working is another.

Alexandra Samuel seems to be proposing exactly that. It appears that receiving her degree has gone to her head.

Eugene Volokh and Jim Lindgren have more.

Update (from CNL): Dr. Samuel has a response to the conspirators.

After a doctor’s appointment and some last-minute rearrangements of my public opinion syllabus, I think I’m ready for classes. But we’ll see about that for certain in about 40 minutes.

I apparently have a love-hate relationship with my students; in my mailbox at work today were a Christmas card from a student and my abysmal (at least by Millsaps standards) course evaluations. Four students in my intro class apparently thought it would be amusing to give me the lowest possible ranking on all 19 questions, even such procedural items as “gives clear directions” and “presents [material] in a clear sequence.” Ah well, at least I “demonstrate knowledge” of what I’m teaching…

My response to all this, of course, was to finish my SPSA paper on voting in recent presidential elections and continue getting organized for my trip to Florida tomorrow.

My cousin Melvin Ely’s most recent book, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War continues to draw rave reviews; the latest is from James A. Miller in Sunday’s Boston Globe.

Update: Joe Gandelman uncovered the article on his own and has some interesting thoughts (and discussion) on the matter. Comments of my own below the fold.

The next time a student complains about a con law exam, I think I’ll assign them this question. Then again, I did give them this one on my second exam (open book, take-home, and optional):

In United States v. Lopez, while the Supreme Court did not overturn Wickard v. Filburn outright, the Court clearly staked out some limitations to Congress’s use of its power to regulate interstate commerce. With that precedent in mind, consider the upcoming Supreme Court case Ashcroft v. Raich, in which the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals argued that federal regulation of the noncommercial cultivation and distribution of marijuana exceeded Congress’s commerce clause powers. You should consider the following questions: Does Raich meet the standard for interstate commerce outlined in the Lopez test? How does Raich differ from Wickard—or, aside from the crops at issue, does it not differ at all?

I also gave this one on my first exam:

In 2007, the Supreme Court will hear the case Lewis v. Boulder County School District, in which perennial Pledge of Allegiance challenger Michael Newdow represents Sally Lewis, a 16-year-old atheist and high school student in Boulder who objects to the use of the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, added to the pledge by Congress in 1954 (codified at 4 USC 4). Lewis advances essentially the same argument on the merits advanced by Newdow in Newdow v. Elk Grove Unified School District (2004); however, Lewis’ parents, English professors at the University of Colorado at Boulder, fully support her challenge to the law and have permitted Newdow to represent her in her case against the school district.

In the meantime, Congress has passed the Pledge Protection Act of 2005, which was signed into law by President Lieberman.* The Pledge Protection Act provides that no court created by Congress shall have original jurisdiction in any challenge to the Pledge of Allegiance, nor shall the Supreme Court have appellate jurisdiction.

How should the Supreme Court decide the case at hand? Consider the issues of jurisdiction and standing, as well as the decision on “the merits.” In particular:

• Does Lewis have standing to sue?
• Is the Pledge Protection Act of 2005 constitutional?
• Is the inclusion of “under God” in the pledge an unconstitutional establishment of religion?

Consider the court’s precedents on standing and jurisdiction, as well as the political circumstances that gave rise to the Court’s decision in Ex parte McCardle. Your response will be fortified by reference to the legal and attitudinal approaches to judicial interpretation outlined in Chapter 1 of the [Epstein and Walker].

Ok, maybe I am an evil con law prof after all.

Stephen Bainbridge is outraged (yes, outraged) to discover bias in an exam question on the presidency:

In a five-page, double spaced paper in a 12-point font, write a memo to President Bush on how to assure that in his second term he become known as a persident who unites rather than divides the American people. In your memo you should concentrate particularly on the models past presidents provide for success as uniters. You might also point out the mistakes made by past presidents that President Bush ought to avoid.

OR

Write a memo on the actions President George W. Bush ought to take in the first one hundred days of his second term to deliver on the promises he made during the election AND to build a strong legacy for his presidency overall.

In your essay you should be mindful of the following observations made by seasoned pundits David Gergen and William Schneider:

”[The Bush Administration] has already shown ominous signs of ‘group-think’ in its handling of Iraq and tha nation’s finances. By closing down dissent and centralizing power in a few hands, he is acting as if he truly believes that he and his team have a perfect track record, that they know best, and that they don’t need any infusion of new heavyweights. He has every right to take this course, but as he knows from his Bible, pride goeth before…” (David Gergen, “The Power of One,” The New York Times, Nov. 19, 2004).

“Rallying his conservative base paid off for Bush. But he did it by running on divisive social issues, such as same-sex marriage, embryonic stem-cell research, and a ban on late-term abortions. His strategy will make it harder to heal the painful divisions created by the 2004 campaign. Just wait for Bush’s first Supreme Court nomination.” (William Schneider, “Exploiting the Rifts, ” National Journal, Nov. 6, 2004).

“The post-election Times/CBS News poll asked whether, in the next four years, Bush’s presidency will bring Americans together or divide them. The results were closely divided but tilted toward pessimism: 48 percent said Bush will divide the country, while 40 percent predicted that he will bring America together. In other words, the country remains divided-even over whether Bush will continue to divide the country.” (William Schneider, “Divided We Stand,” National Journal, Dec. 4, 2004.)

Except for the problem that both options essentially ask the same question (which, er, makes the inclusion of this option pretty stupid—pick one and stick with it), I’m a bit at a loss as to how these questions demonstrate bias, although I suppose the Gergen and Schneider quotes might stack the deck a little. I am curious what examples of “uniters” the question’s author has in mind, though; I can’t think of any post-Washington examples of presidents who managed to please most people, although I suppose there were presidents who managed to unite vast majorities of people in opposition to them (Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon spring to mind).

My first thought on reading the headline “NASA Chief Said to Be Top Contender for L.S.U. Job” was “What does NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe know about coaching college football?”

Exams are officially over!

If the new Left2Right blog’s contributors want to understand “Red America” (gag), it occurs to me an excellent place to start might be by asking their conservative colleagues how to better understand, and communicate with, the unwashed masses, rather than by starting a weblog. Readers are cordially invited to point out any flaws in my thinking.

One might also point the blog’s contributors to, say, any of the empirical research on the public opinion formation process, which suggests that by far the worst way to convince anyone to change their opinions is to wrap one’s self in ideological and partisan colors opposite of those of the people one is trying to convince. Try here and here for starters.

The fun in Hattiesburg never ends; the Hattiesburg American reports that Southern Miss was put on probation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, its accreditation body (and the accreditor for most of the colleges and universities in the southeastern United States, including Millsaps). The issues leading to the decision include problems with the “assessment of institutional effectiveness, assessment of distance-learning effectiveness and strategic planning in academic units..”

In other SACS news, Auburn’s probation was lifted ($) on Tuesday.

Brian Weatherson of Crooked Timber links to a new group blog, called Left2Right, which allegedly is designed for “blue state” professors to understand “Red America” (excuse me while I projectile-vomit). According to Weatherson:

The contributors so far include Elizabeth Anderson, Kwame Appiah, Josh Cohen, Stephen Darwall, Gerald Dworkin, David Estlund, Don Herzog, Jeff McMahan, Seana Shiffrin, and David Velleman. Wowsa. And many other names you may have heard of, from Peter Railton to Richard Rorty, are listed as being part of the team. This should be worth following.

Do I have to turn in my cap and gown if I declare that I haven’t actually heard of any of these people? (þ: Orin Kerr)

Amazon has a new "citations" feature for academic books. If the book is one for which "Search inside this book" is enabled, Amazon will tell you what other books are cited by the given book, and also what other books (with "Search inside" enabled) cite the given book.

For example, take the Amazon page for one of my favorite philosophy books, On the Plurality of Worlds, by David Lewis. In the citations section, we see that this book cites 29 other books in Amazon's catalog, including The Shape of Space, by Graham Nerlich, and Science without Numbers, by Hartry Field. There are 120 books in the Amazon catalog that cite Plurality, such as Supervenience and Mind, by Jaegwon Kim. There are even links to images of the pages where the citations occur.

It's trackback for books!

(þ Brad DeLong.)

Chris just commented on this extensively, but this topic seems to be all over the place (and I mentioned it earlier this week, however briefly). The Economist has an article as well by their “Lexington” on this issue of ideological bias in the universities. A quote:

This is profoundly unhealthy per se. Debating chambers are becoming echo chambers. Students hear only one side of the story on everything from abortion (good) to the rise of the West (bad). It is notable that the surveys show far more conservatives in the more rigorous disciplines such as economics than in the vaguer 1960s “ologies”. Yet, as George Will pointed out in the Washington Post this week, this monotheism is also limiting universities’ ability to influence the wider intellectual culture. In John Kennedy’s day, there were so many profs in Washington that it was said the waters of the Charles flowed into the Potomac. These days, academia is marginalised in the capital—unless, of course, you count all the Straussian conservative intellectuals in think-tanks who left academia because they thought it was rigged against them.

Bias in universities is hard to correct because it is usually not overt: it has to do with prejudice about which topics are worth studying and what values are worth holding. Stephen Balch, the president of the conservative National Association of Scholars, argues that university faculties suffer from the same political problems as the “small republics” described in Federalist 10: a motivated majority within the faculty finds it easy to monopolise decision-making and squeeze out minorities.

The more indeterminate the discipline, the more it tilts left.

There are some on the right that rather loudly oppose affirmative action in all its forms, except in academia, where they want some form of preferences for the right. This seems like a bad idea to me, and Chris said it better than I can below: “Replacing liberal ideologues who can’t keep their lectures and their leftism separate with right-wingers with similar faults is no solution.”

It’s not as much of a threat in my discipline, economics, as it is in other fields. As my Thought professor has pointed out at great length, the economic discipline has created a “little box” which it defines as theory. The box is supposedly used as a means of keeping ideas that aren’t fully explainable out of the body of theory. There’s also a nearly complete positive correlation in favor of those ideas that can be expressed using math. Again leading to my theory about how indeterminate a discipline is sets its leftward tilt.

Greg Ransom and Glenn Reynolds are among those linking to Jeff Jacoby’s Boston Globe column on a survey conducted on behalf of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni that indicates that students perceive bias in the classroom environment at elite liberal arts colleges and universities; a similar perspective appears today at OpinionJournal.com.

Is political bias a problem in American college classrooms? If so, am I part of the problem?

Among the findings of the ACTA survey:

* 48% report campus presentations on political issues that “seem totally one-sided.”
* 46% say professors “use the classroom to present their personal political views.”
* 42% of students fault reading assignments for presenting only one side of a controversial issue.

The survey also indicates that political comments are consistently partisan. The survey, which was conducted just before and after the American presidential election, found that 68% of the students reported negative remarks in class about Pres. George Bush while 62% said professors praised Sen. John Kerry. ...

74% of students said professors made positive remarks about liberals while 47% reported negative comments about conservatives.

One wonders, somewhat, about issues of question wording (for example, if we invite a third-party presidential candidate to speak on campus, does that constitute a “totally one-sided” presentation?) and selection (what percentage of students said professors made negative remarks about Kerry or praise of Bush?). The lack of a straightforward report on the survey on the website is troublesome, to say the least, and I’m not sure you can infer much based on an average of 12 or 13 interviews per college, particularly without knowing the mode of interview or how interviewees were selected.

Nonetheless, there are a few noteworthy issues here worth discussing; first, course readers like the one I use for my introductory American government class rarely include articles supporting both sides of a particular issue, and I can’t assign a “conservative” reading on campaign finance reform if the only one in the book is from The Nation. Nor, for that matter, can I assign a “liberal” reading on homeland security, since the ones in the book are both from The Economist. Should I include a reading from David Duke to offset the pro-civil rights articles? At some point, balance becomes silly.

Second, the perception that the “job” of the liberal arts college professor is to indoctrinate students in political liberalism, rather than guiding students to knowledge through justified true belief and promoting the ability to think critically about conflicting ideas and values, is distressingly common on college and university campuses. A friend (and fellow Ph.D. student) and I once talked about the problem inherent when people who teach political science don’t even consider the political views of one of the two major parties to be legitimate.

All that said, I’m damned if I know what the solution is. Replacing liberal ideologues who can’t keep their lectures and their leftism separate with right-wingers with similar faults is no solution. Nor is a witch hunt against professors who, after all, are human and—over the course of 100+ hours of lecturing a semester—are probably going to say at least a couple of things that reflect something other than the objective material of the class. I like to think I do a good job balancing these things (one of the best compliments I’ve ever received teaching was from a bright student who “couldn’t figure out” what I was), but I also know I don’t always succeed.

U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) apparently added a rider ($) to the FY2005 appropriations bill requiring any educational institution receiving federal aid to have some sort of “instructional program on the U.S. Constitution” every September 17, according to today’s Chronicle of Higher Education daily update. (Here’s a link for people not blowing $85/year on the Chronicle.)

Perhaps we political scientists (who, doubtless, will be the individuals subject to this unfunded mandate) should also devote another day—say, December 3—to teaching about the practice of including non-germane provisions in conference reports, thus circumventing the committee system and the rest of the ordinary legislative process. I feel the need for a “teach-in” already.

Well, that was a fun semester. Let’s just hope that I get to do a few more of these before I have to move elsewhere.

George Will has a good piece on the leftward tilt of academia:

Academics such as the next secretary of state still decorate Washington, but academia is less listened to than it was. It has marginalized itself, partly by political shrillness and silliness that have something to do with the parochialism produced by what George Orwell called “smelly little orthodoxies.”

Many campuses are intellectual versions of one-party nations—except such nations usually have the merit, such as it is, of candor about their ideological monopolies. In contrast, American campuses have more insistently proclaimed their commitment to diversity as they have become more intellectually monochrome.

They do indeed cultivate diversity—in race, skin color, ethnicity, sexual preference. In everything but thought.

Congratulations to Dan Drezner on finishing the draft of his second book. Now I feel strangely unproductive…