Ralph Luker has the latest, saving me the effort of having to sum it up myself.

However, there are some bits Luker overlooked: Thames is now going after the Mississippi chapter of ACLU for its decision to provide counsel to aid the appeals of Glamser and Stringer, and the USM faculty senate will consider a resolution calling on Thames to resign at its next meeting.

My two cents on using “they” as a singular pronoun: it’s acceptable in spoken English, but not in written English. In writing, one should use “he or she” unless one has to repeat it more than once in succession, or if one has to use the reflexive form, at which point it just gets too awkward. In that case, one should just use “he” or “she.” And for crying out loud, don’t ever write “he/she” or “(s)he.” Shudder.

I also note that Tim Sandefur shares my biggest grammatical peeve: signs at the checkout aisle that say “10 items or less.” It’s “10 items or fewer.” Use “less” with mass nouns (“Less than 10 inches of snow”) and “fewer” with count nouns (“Fewer than 10 cats”).

It’s interesting that “more” works with both mass nouns and count nouns.

Scott of I Know What I Know has an email that gives one perspective on the “big picture” of what’s going on at Southern Miss:

Word on the street is that the attempt to decimate liberal arts at USM is very calculated and is indeed one of the reasons Thames was given the job. IHL had a very tangible agenda for putting him in there against protests from the faculty. They were operating under pressure from “the business community,” or a handful of powerful people who have the goal of reducing education spending in the state by cutting duplicate programs from the various universities. They consider strong graduate programs in liberal arts at more than one university in the state to be wasteful duplication.

First, the obligatory disclaimer: I’m strongly in favor of rationalization and consolidation in Mississippi higher education. This state doesn’t need 8½* public universities, especially when you consider that half of them were created as a result of racial and gender segregation in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Nor does it really need half of its universities to be classified as doctoral institutions by the Carnegie Foundation.

That being said, while I favor better allocation of the limited resources the state can bring to bear on postsecondary education, I don’t think an overall cut in the IHL budget would be productive. And, were I to start cutting at individual institutions, it wouldn’t be at USM—rather, I’d focus on the four institutions (ASU, DSU, MUW, and MVSU) with a combined enrollment smaller than the individual enrollments of Mississippi State, USM, and Ole Miss. This state runs two sets of four-year institutions (DSU-MVSU and MUW-MSU) that are geographically closer than the two campuses of USM. While there are sound political reasons for this arrangement, there are no good pedagogical or financial justifications for this duplication of effort.

Turning back to the “conspiracy theory” explanation: in general, I am disinclined to believe grand, overarching explanations for human behavior. The more plausible explanation, from what I can piece together from this account, is that the professors involved engaged in some sort of (potentially illegal) misrepresentation† in their correspondence with the University of Kentucky to further their investigation of Angie Dvorak, and Thames decided—since he didn’t particularly like professors Glasmer and Stringer in the first place—to use evidence of that misrepresentation to force them out. This theory has the benefit of generally fitting the observed facts, although it is undoubtably wrong on some of the particulars, and is generally speculative in nature.

Will Baude has received a fair amount of feedback on his advocacy of “they” as a singular pronoun. I am overall, sympathetic, to Baude’s plight, and certainly prefer a singular “they” over such awkward PCisms as “he or she.” French, alas, has a decent third-preson genderless singular, on, and I am somewhat partial to “one” as a substitute for it—particularly as a substitute for the oft-colloquial “you” in hypotheticals and the like. Unfortunately, “one” is a bit pretentious for everyday speech. If we must move to gender-neutral language—a need that, frankly, is lost on me—“they” is infinitely preferable to “he or she,” although “one” is reasonable as well.

My general policy in academic writing is one I picked up from a book on voting behavior (I honestly don’t remember which; it may be Zaller’s The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion): I tend to use female pronouns for citizens and voters and male pronouns for politicians, reflecting the empirical preponderence of both.

My policy as a grader, however, is most agnostic. I do not insist on the use of gender-neutral language, as some of my own professors did when I was an undergraduate. In general, I prefer clarity of expression over form; the ultimate test of good writing is not whether or not it conforms to a particular style, but whether or not it communicates ideas successfully. “Standard written English” is a standard largely because of the latter, and, while I will correct awkward locutions, I do not insist on precise conformity with a stylebook, as such requirements can be counterproductive to the essayist’s central goal of clear, efficient communication.

Events are now on an inevitable collision course down in Hattiesburg. Today’s developments:

• The Hattiesburg American interviews University of Southern Mississippi president Shelby Thames. Thames did not back off his assertions that the AAUP was a union or his criticism of history professor Doug Chambers for allegedly cancelling class in response to Thames’ actions.
• Thames also went after the president of the USM faculty senate today, accusing him of hypocrisy.
• Thames suggests that criminal charges may be in the offing against fired professors Glasmer and Stringer. The professors deny they engaged in any illegal or unethical conduct.
• 69% of USM faculty voted on the no confidence motion; 64% of the entire faculty (including those who didn’t vote) voted in favor of the no confidence motion.
• USM provost Tim Hudson says he’s not stepping down, despite disagreeing with Thames’ actions in the case.
• Thames will not resign in the face of the overwhelming no confidence vote.

I Know What I Know and the Hattiesburg American are both reporting that the faculty of the University of South Mississippi voted overwhelmingly in favor of a no confidence motion against USM president Shelby Thames, and voted overwhelmingly in favor of reinstating ousted professors Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer.

Lily Malcolm asks why ambitious go-getter John Kerry ended up going to law school at decidedly middle-of-the-road Boston College rather than a more prestigious institution. Lily has some theories:

Maybe he was sick of the Ivy League. Or he decided BC would be better for his political career. Or he had terrible grades (how bad would they have to be to outweigh a Silver Star?). Were there financial complications? Geographical constraints?

Obviously I can’t read Kerry’s mind. My gut level feeling is that geography, alone, wouldn’t explain it—assuming his resume was as impressive as Lily indicates it should have been, Kerry could have gone to Harvard—historical Yale–Harvard grudges notwithstanding. And, generally, the “political career” explanation only works when you’re talking about leaving the state or region for law school; no rationally ambitious Mississippian would dare try to come back home and run for office after going to Princeton or Yale, what with the perfectly good (at least for such political purposes or for in-state practice, if not for one’s future reputation on the national scene) law school sitting right here in Oxford.

Indeed, it’s possible that Kerry’s high-profile antics after returning from Vietnam had a negative impact on his stature; law school admissions committees in the early 1970s, I suspect, were rather conservative bodies filled with men who served in World War II or Korea before their academic careers. Hanging out with the Hanoi Jane crowd and publicly accusing your comrades-in-arms of being war criminals don’t seem like the sorts of activities that would have endeared Kerry to an Ivy League admissions committee circa 1971.

That being said, people end up at particular schools for the most idiosyncratic reasons. Someone familiar with my academic record and standardized test scores probably wouldn’t guess I’d have degrees from the University of Memphis and Ole Miss. The place where one got a particular degree is only a very rough indicator of one’s talents—something I’m hoping (though skeptical) that hiring committees bear in mind.

Update: Lily has an update with a number of different perspectives.

Jane Galt, freshly rested (but not tanned), has a post of Den Bestean proportions on academe’s political diversity problem. Jane ponders these questions, in turn:

1. Are conservatives underrepresented in academia?
2. If they are, is this underrepresentation due to action on the part of the faculty, or is there some other reason that we can’t (or shouldn’t) correct?
3. If conservatives are underrepresented, and the cause of this underrepresentation is due, in whole or in part, to the actions of the faculty or administration, should we try to do anything about this?

You should definitely RTWT™.

Update: Both Jane and James Joyner don’t think the remedy is to be found in the political process; James writes:

I also share her libertarian instincts on the matter; there’s not much to be done about this phenomenon that wouldn’t be worse than the problem.

Eugene Volokh notes yet another blackface incident at a college fraternity. This time it’s Pi Kappa Alpha at Georgia State University. Prof. Volokh notes that the university is considering punishing the students involved, and that the wearing of blackface is protected under the first amendment. He then asks:

Do the university officials not know the law? Or do they just not care?

Good question. But here’s the question I really want answered:

When are these idiots going to figure out that blackface costumes are deeply offensive?

USM president Shelby Thames is now blaming the whole mess on the American Association of University Professors, a group whose combined national membership isn’t that much bigger than his campus’ student enrollment.

Ah, well, it could have been worse; he could have blamed outside agitators and sicced the Sovereignty Commission on them.

Forgive me for saying it, but the latest news from Hattiesburg seems just a wee bit odd:

University of Southern Mississippi President Shelby Thames said Tuesday he is considering whether or not to allow two dismissed professors back into the classroom to serve out the semester.

If he makes the decision, the reprieve would only be temporary. Thames said he would initiate termination proceedings at the end of the semester against Gary Stringer and Frank Glamser, two outspoken critics of his administration and leadership.

Thames, mind you, is the same guy who on Friday considered Stringer and Glamser such a threat to the university that he had the university’s custodial staff cart off stuff from their offices and change the locks while he was meeting with them. My bogosity meter is rapidly approaching 11 here, folks.

Thames’ meeting with USM students today didn’t exactly go well, either, according to the Jackson Clarion-Ledger.

More on this topic here; this is my entry in today’s OTB Traffic Jam.

Stephen Karlson and Eugene Volokh have followups on their posts from yesterday on the ongoing kerfuffle at Southern Miss. Quoth Volokh on the importance of the case:

[T]he faculty—as joint governors of the school—must have the right to criticize the administration, which must of course include the right to investigate alleged resume fraud by the University’s vice president of research. If the University is right that the faculty members whom it’s trying to fire engaged in defamation (i.e., were themselves lying) or real misuse of university facilities, then its actions might well be proper. But if the University is just trying to silence faculty members whose criticisms it sees as disruptive, that’s very dangerous indeed. Shared governance, whether in Washington, D.C. or in a university, necessarily involves some disruption and tension. Trying to eliminate that disruption and tension is impossible unless one abandons the shared governance project.

Meanwhile, I Know What I Know is still on the case; as Scott notes, The Student Printz is all over this, and it isn’t looking pretty for USM president Shelby F. Thames.

James Joyner has stirred up a bit of a hornet’s nest over his complaints about Patrick Henry College and, by extension, the homeschool movement it is associated with. James argues that PHC and homeschooling, by and large, foster closed-mindedness and a lack of exposure to diverse points of view. Since PHC, for example, only hires Christians—and, from a reading of their “statement of faith,” only Christians who believe in scriptural inerrency—a PHC student is not going to be exposed to people with varying religious viewpoints within the academy. And to the extent home-schooled students (generally Caucasian, Christian, and middle-to-upper class) are exposed to diversity by interaction with other homeschooled students, one suspects the ethnic, religious, and economic diversity of the children interacted with will be minimal.

On the other hand, we have the recent discussion of Duke University’s lack of political diversity in its faculty—not to mention the reaction of the American Association of University Professors to proposals for academic bills of rights, which is basically to say, “yes, we think there should be political diversity—but, unlike racial and gender diversity, we’ll have none of that government oversight stuff to ensure it actually happens.” Such attitudes suggest that the AAUP doesn’t take these legitimate concerns of many students and faculty seriously.

I don’t disagree with the AAUP’s Committee A when it says that being confronted with controversy in the classroom is an essential part of a postsecondary education. However, when only conservative students are being confronted with that controversy, as is often the case, it seems that universities are failing in their missions to challenge and educate their students.

But—that said—the antidote to the Dukes of the world is not to establish more Patrick Henrys and Oral Roberts. Rather it is for mainstream academe to take seriously its commitment to ensure a broad and challenging education for all of its students without marginalizing some for their political or religious beliefs.

There’s a big brou-ha-ha down in Hattiesburg at the University of Southern Mississippi: two tenured faculty members are being terminated by the university administration, apparently for speaking out against a university vice-president. More details at Critical Mass, I Know What I Know (just start at the top and keep scrolling down), The Volokh Conspiracy, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Clarion-Ledger.

Update: More at Crooked Timber and Opiniatrety, as well as Cliopatria (I take issue with the latter’s characterization of higher education in Mississippi in general, however) and Stephen Karlson.

I promised myself earlier this weekend that I wouldn’t blog about this, because I have a pending application at USM for a tenure-track faculty position, but there’s no way I will accept a job at a university that apparently has no respect for the tenure process.

Steven Taylor, prompted by the Invisible Adjunct, observes that the appropriateness of lecturing versus using a seminar format is largely determined by three factors:

1) the level of the course (e.g., intro, advanced undergrad, grad), 2) the subject matter, and 3) the size of the class.

I’d broadly agree with Steven. All three of these factors are highly correlated; relatively straightforward subject matter is generally taught at an introductory level in large classes, while more complex subject matter usually involves small classes taught at an advanced level. The exceptions—notably the “honors seminar” version of intro—work because there’s an underlying assumption that the students in the course are already familiar with most of the material that they would have learned in the non-honors course, thus the course is no longer a true “intro” course.

Steven Bainbridge, in the course of congratulating Steven Taylor on his promotion, makes the following observation:

When I was up for tenure (a nerve-wracking time, even worse than sweating out the bar exam), a senior colleague told me that getting tenure didn’t change anything in your life except that you stopped thinking about tenure. I didn’t believe him, but it turned out to be true. If you’re internalized the norms of teaching and scholarship, you don’t change what you do. You just keep teaching and writing.

This seems like an odd analysis; the grant of tenure* doesn’t remove the incentive to publish, teach, and perform service at a high level (in the various department and college-prescribed ratios); while it is true you can no longer be fired for failing to do those things as proficiently, most associate-level professors at least aspire to promotion to full professor and the prestige and monetary rewards associated with that rank, which requires a similar level of effort (as between assistant and associate) to attain. Thus, we would rationally expect that professors would be more likely to slack off after promotion to full professor, rather than after achieving tenure.

Huzzah and kudos to Steven Taylor of PoliBlog, who will be granted tenure and promoted to the rank of associate professor on August 1.

Tyler Cowen notes that not every Ph.D. program is a gateway into eternal adjuncthood.*

* Nor, really, is political science, my complaints about enriching the U.S. postal service notwithstanding.

My daily routine now goes something like this:

1. Visit the Chronicle jobs web site.
2. Visit HigherEdJobs.com.
3. Fight with APSA’s eJobs system to get it to show me the last few days’ postings—bearing in mind that the “show jobs posted in the last two days” function doesn’t actually work because their website’s database isn’t synced with the actual jobs database, so jobs actually “posted” today may have been entered into the system several days ago. Also bear in mind that the “Full Professor” job at Rockford College (that I didn’t apply for, hence why I’m mentioning it by name) is actually a junior-level position, that jobs that don’t list your field on the main list may actually be looking in your field when you get to reading the actual text of the posting, that the same job at one college is in the database twice. Oh, the “print” version of the page actually takes up more paper than the non-print version. (Did I mention that eJobs sucks?)
4. Write cover letter(s) as needed.
5. Make pretty mailing label(s).
6. Stuff cover letter, vita, and other requested materials in big manila envelope(s).
7. Weigh and put stamps on envelope(s).
8. If before 1 pm, stick envelope(s) in mail box. If before 4:30 pm, get in car and go to post office to stick envelopes in mail box.

Writing cover letters at this point is a simultaneously easy and hard process. It’s easy in the sense that after you’ve written 50 of the damn things, one you’ve already written is pretty close to the one you “need” for the particular job. It’s hard in the sense that you have to remember which of those 50 letters is the right one to massage for the particular job in question.

It’s also hard in the sense that you have to show some enthusiasm for the job on paper—which for me entails doing some basic research about the college and putting in some thought as to I’d fit in there, something that makes me a bit more emotionally invested in a process that more closely resembles a meat market than anything a reasonable person would want to be emotionally attached to. It’s hard not to go from “I’d enjoy the opportunity to teach at X because I can contribute in ways A, B, and C” to actually feeling like you’d enjoy going to college X—and thus running the risk of being disappointed if you don’t get to go to college X for whatever reason, even if it’s not the “dream job” you expect to be doing when tenure time rolls around.

Brock Sides points out a public policy reason for states to subsidize universities (one that I thought about, but didn’t mention, in my prior post):

State support of higher education may be a rational investment by the state in its own tax base.

There is some merit in this argument, if the marginal increase in tax receipts due to residents’ higher education exceeds the amount of subsidy required—bearing in mind that, ceteris peribus, many of those residents would have gotten a collegiate education anyway. And it’s certainly an empirically-testable proposition, although one that’s difficult to examine in a single blog post.*

Anyway, as a graduate of two state universities and as someone with about a 70% chance of working for a state-supported institution next year (under the completely unreasonable assumption that I have an equal chance of being offered every single job I’ve applied for), self-interest—if nothing else—compels an end to this discussion.

Will Baude is the latest to jump into the public universities argument (roughly between Jack Balkin and the Volokh conspirators); Will writes:

I don’t particularly have a problem with government involvement in the private education market—either through direct subsidy (which is probably unnecessary) or through regulating the likely capital market failure. In other words, government-guaranteed student loans are great; a “graduate tax” could accomplish the same thing.

I used to generally agree with Will on this point; however, I’ve come to think that government subsidies—like guaranteed student loans, Pell grants, and student loan interest credits—make public and private universities insensitive to price as a rationing mechanism. This leads to much of the same problem we see in the health care market: most consumers don’t discriminate on the basis of price, because they have no personal stake in the price of service. In the case of higher education, the problem is more subtle, as at least there are direct costs to the consumer—they just aren’t felt until after college, due to in-school deferments of loan interest and principal payments. Regardless, this allows universities to increase tuition and fees at rates well in excess of inflation.

The disconnect between price and demand also allows universities to use price as a “prestige” factor; although virtually nobody actually pays $40,000 a year to go to Harvard, the price premium makes it appear as if you’re getting a better education than you would paying $15,000 to go to Americana State University. (You probably do get a better education at Harvard, but I suspect the premium is not worth $100,000.)

There are good reasons to criticize public subsidies of state universities—particularly in a poor state like Mississippi—but public subsidy of colleges and universities in general bears considerable scrutiny as well.

Update: Will Baude responds:

One thing to think about—

The reason, in general, that American[a] State U has a tuition of 15,000 to Harvard's 40,000 has a lot to do with the subsidies that American State provides to its U. To be sure, some private colleges are cheaper than others, but lots of kids I knew did indeed take price (and their financial aid packages) into account when choosing between them. And the diversity of price in private universities is pretty small—I don't know whether that's due to a universal-ness of costs (I doubt it) or more likely because demand is fairly price-inelastic. While it's true that subsidies (and to a lesser degree, loans) encourage that elasticity, it's not actually clear that's bad. On the one hand, some kids go to Harvard who really should have gone to Miss. But on the other hand, some kids go to Miss who otherwise wouldn't have gone at all.

Just a thought.

My experience as an undergrad (granted, 5+ years ago) was that there was more price differentiation among private universities; I know the tuition at Rose-Hulman was significantly lower than that of Georgetown, and the price differential was more than could be justified on the basis of cost of living differences between D.C. and Indiana (not to mention that Rose-Hulman is a superior academic institution to Georgetown). There may be less differentiation among elite-tier private institutions like Chicago, Stanford, and the Ivys, however (some of that used to be due to now-illegal agreements among the Ivys to limit financial aid awards to exceptional students).

Now it is true that price does matter to some people, even with government subsidies (both to universities and students). On the other hand, I find it difficult to justify subsidizing a flagship public university like Ole Miss on the backs of working class people; that being said, Ole Miss may be something of an aberration in this regard, although I suspect a number of other colleges, like the University of Alabama, Auburn, and LSU, are similar “blue blood” state universities (to say nothing of elite-level state universities like UC-Berkeley and Michigan, which are far more selective).

CalPundit and Steve Verdon are among those noting a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists over the Bush administration’s use and alleged abuse of science. Steve writes:

Personally I think the notion of impartiality is misleading. All scientists have their own views on the issues and particularly the area they are researching. ... Of course, the fact that scientists and researchers themselves have their own views and biases does not let the Bush Administration off the hook when it comes to possibly distorting science. However, it cannot be ignored that the Union of Concerned Scientists can also be said to have an agenda and that this agenda may be playing a role as well in this report when that agenda diverges from the agenda of the Bush Administration.

There’s not much to disagree with in either post, but something to bear in mind is that science is always politicized when it is used to make political decisions; there’s no way around it. For example, if a hypothetical study shows that tightening emissions standards will save 3000 lives a year, but cost consumers $100 billion per life saved, politics is going to decide which figure gets emphasized.

Update: More at the Dead Parrot Society.

Somehow I missed Eugene Volokh’s post on the whole “conservatives are stupid” kerfuffle. There are a few caveats in order with this use of ANES data:

1. Partisanship is not ideology. While the two concepts are correlated highly in the United States, a “strong Republican” is not necessarily a conservative. (The correlation has improved over time, however, as the South has dealigned.) The ANES does include an ideology item.
2. The partisanship scale used by the ANES has a weird inflection point noted by Larry Bartels several years ago: “weak identifiers” are generally more independent in their behavior than “independent leaners.”
3. Political knowledge is not general knowledge (as Volokh’s correspondent notes). Again, while general knowledge is correlated with political knowledge, the latter is only one component of the former.
4. There are numerous disputes over whether “quiz-type” political knowledge questions properly tap overall respondent knowledge about politics. Read chapter 2 of my dissertation if you need all the morbid details. Read the appendix of chapter 4 if you want to see how various types of questions performed in a 1998 Dutch election survey that uses a larger battery of questions than the contemporary ANES (I suppose the Dutch are more willing to subject themselves to quizzes than Americans, although Delli Carpini and Keeter disagree).

The GSS data cited in this InstaPundit post is more dispositive, although I am not as familiar with the GSS—and there may well be caveats that Prof. Lindgren does not mention or is unfamiliar with.

Steven Taylor has a followup tonight to my post on academic titles from a couple of days ago; James Joyner comments as well.