"Why was a prosecutor terminated for a simple, legitimate inquiry?"

     The Voice of OC has a pdf file of the CCLEA letter requesting an investigation of John Williams' Public Administrator/Public Guardian Office. I've converted it for display below (click on these images to enlarge them).
     It's well worth reading.

Did Spitzer bump into something hinky at Williams’ office?

     Here’s a way curious development. The Voice of OC reports (Police Group Wants Probe of Public Guardian Role in Spitzer Firing) that

     A statewide law enforcement group is calling on state Attorney General Jerry Brown to investigate the role Orange County Public Administrator/Guardian John Williams' office in the firing of Todd Spitzer from the district attorney's office.
     …[M]any are questioning William's unusually public role in the firing, which [sic] him sending out a Saturday press release announcing his concerns about Spitzer.
. . .
     The California Coalition of Law Enforcement Associations today wrote to Chief Deputy James Humes at the attorney general's office, asking him to launch a probe that focuses on Williams' office.
     The group is openly questioning whether Spitzer essentially bumped into a major issue and got fired for checking it out.
     "What has transpired in the last week has the real potential of sending a chilling effect to concerned citizens who rely on the public guardian to look out for their rights," said Wayne Quint, who is president of the statewide group representing 80,000 law enforcement officers as well as the local deputy's union, the Association of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs.
     "Our members are deeply concerned that the health, welfare and financial interests of present conservatees and those presently under investigation are in jeopardy," Quint wrote.
. . .

     The coalition is worried about more than a confidentiality agreement, it is worried about a possible conflict of interest because Rackauckas' fiancé is the second-in-command at the public administrator/guardian's office.
     "We cannot refer this case to the District Attorney who clearly has a conflict of interest because of his personal relationship with a high ranking administrator in the public guardian's office and because the District Attorney cannot investigate the propriety of this own conduct in this matter."

     Oh my. I wonder if the CCLEA would risk the embarrassment of causing the AG to look into hinkyness where no hinkyness exists? Perhaps they know something. D'you suppose?
     Oh my!

• Melissa [Fox] on the Community College Crisis (Orange Juice Blog)

Start your week with pain

     If you’d like to start your week with a little pain, check out ORANGE COUNTY’S “MR. REPUBLICAN”, TOM FUENTES, SHARES LEADERSHIP SECRETS AND REVEALS HIS LONG-TIME TIES TO SAN DIEGO.
     It’s mostly about Fuentes’ family history.
     It’s pretty ridiculous, sporting such fawning verbiage as this:

     The guy who has done everying [sic] in politics made each person gathered around him that day feel they were important and worthy of his respect.
     Watching and listening, I saw why Tom Fuentes was/is so successful, and why he still draws a crowd to this day wherever he goes in Republican circles.

Here's more:

The Fuentes Family in early California

     In an interview this week, Mr. Fuentes kindly shared some family history, which helps explains why he is so motivated to build a stronger, freer California. It is a family tradition, and his ties to San Diego go back to 1834. It [?] comes from a journal kept by his great-great-great grandfather:
     “My great great great grandfather Victorian [?] Vega arrived in San Diego on August 14th, 1834, aboard the brigantine Natalia. He was billeted upon arrival and had occasion to make some candy for Pio Pico (the future Governor of California).
     “One dance [?] was presented in the barracks of the Spanish merchant Don Jose Antonie Aguirre, who was married to the daughter of Captain Jose Maria Estudillo. The other dance was at the presidio, in the house of Don Juan Rocha, courtesy of Don Pio Pico.
     “A few days after the festivities, Victoriano left for Mission San Luis Rey to join his family [?]. From there, he traveled north to San Gabriel, and further north to Santa Barbara; eventually all the way to Monterrey by 1835. He worked as a carpenter in the house of the commissioner at the presidio. With the passage of time, he eventually returned south to make a home at Mission San Gabriel in his last years.
     “Our family has the good fortune of having Victoriano’s oral narrative of his life in early California, that all began in San Diego.
     “Every time I visit the place of my ancestors’ first arrival in California, I think how San Diego must have been in those days gone by, and of those early pioneers who each contributed to its development and growth.
     “As he disembarked from the ship Natalia in San Diego, Victoriano Vega was given some printed verses:

“‘Companions, our heavenly blessings, our congratulations
To a peaceful alliance, a lasting wish for peace
‘Companions, brothers and friends; to our victorious wives
Here in this beautiful land and to this fertile soil
We dedicate our lives.’”

     This was the mystical spell California cast on newcomers so long ago, and to those who are perceptive, it still does today. We can be greatful [sic] to Don Victoriano for his dedication and for founding a truly great California family.
     Victoriano Vega must be smiling today as he watches the continuing adventures of his distinguished descendant, Thomas A. Fuentes!

     I don’t get it. If this whole California-Fuentean saga begins with Vega’s arrival in San Diego in 1834, then how can it be that he leaves, a few days after his arrival, to meet his family in Mission San Luis Rey? I guess they arrived, too, but not in San Diego. But that didn’t count as the start of anything, evidently.
     Obviously, Fuentes is proud of his family’s contributions to this thing, the state of California, and its ruthless sproutage amongst the native Americans, most of whom were killed off or pushed into the weeds by various means. “Peaceful alliance” my ass. (I won’t even mention Californians’ conduct re Mexico.)
     That’s some “mystical spell,” ain’t it?

Walking around with "all sorts of unexamined beliefs...that are mistaken"

     It’s an old pattern in education: we embrace unverified (and sometimes debunked) theories, insisting all the while that we are being scientific. Recall the California K-12 community’s disastrous embrace of the “whole language” reading teaching method or its embrace of the goofy notion that student “self-esteem” is the key to success in life and study. That latter idea probably helped mess some of those kids up. They act like lazy assholes and then they expect to get a prize.
     Well, here we go again.

Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits (New York Times)

     Every September, millions of parents try a kind of psychological witchcraft, to transform their summer-glazed campers into fall students, their video-bugs into bookworms. Advice is cheap and all too familiar: Clear a quiet work space. Stick to a homework schedule. Set goals. Set boundaries. Do not bribe (except in emergencies).
     And check out the classroom. Does Junior’s learning style match the new teacher’s approach? Or the school’s philosophy? Maybe the child isn’t “a good fit” for the school.
     Such theories have developed in part because of sketchy education research that doesn’t offer clear guidance. Student traits and teaching styles surely interact; so do personalities and at-home rules. The trouble is, no one can predict how.
     Yet there are effective approaches to learning, at least for those who are motivated. In recent years, cognitive scientists have shown that a few simple techniques can reliably improve what matters most: how much a student learns from studying.
     The findings can help anyone, from a fourth grader doing long division to a retiree taking on a new language. But they directly contradict much of the common wisdom about good study habits, and they have not caught on.
     For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing.
     “We have known these principles for some time, and it’s intriguing that schools don’t pick them up, or that people don’t learn them by trial and error,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.”
     Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded.
. . .

My niece Natalie visited on Sunday

     But individual learning is another matter, and psychologists have discovered that some of the most hallowed advice on study habits is flat wrong. For instance, many study skills courses insist that students find a specific place, a study room or a quiet corner of the library, to take their work. The research finds just the opposite. In one classic 1978 experiment, psychologists found that college students who studied a list of 40 vocabulary words in two different rooms — one windowless and cluttered, the other modern, with a view on a courtyard — did far better on a test than students who studied the words twice, in the same room. Later studies have confirmed the finding, for a variety of topics.
     The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time, the authors say, regardless of whether those perceptions are conscious. It colors the terms of the Versailles Treaty with the wasted fluorescent glow of the dorm study room, say; or the elements of the Marshall Plan with the jade-curtain shade of the willow tree in the backyard. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.
. . .
     Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting — alternating, for example, among vocabulary, reading and speaking in a new language — seems to leave a deeper impression on the brain than does concentrating on just one skill at a time. Musicians have known this for years, and their practice sessions often include a mix of scales, musical pieces and rhythmic work. Many athletes, too, routinely mix their workouts with strength, speed and skill drills.
. . .
     Cognitive scientists do not deny that honest-to-goodness cramming can lead to a better grade on a given exam. But hurriedly jam-packing a brain is akin to speed-packing a cheap suitcase, as most students quickly learn — it holds its new load for a while, then most everything falls out.
     “With many students, it’s not like they can’t remember the material” when they move to a more advanced class, said Henry L. Roediger III, a psychologist at Washington Universityin St. Louis. “It’s like they’ve never seen it before.”
     When the neural suitcase is packed carefully and gradually, it holds its contents for far, far longer. An hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now: such so-called spacing improves later recall, without requiring students to put in more overall study effort or pay more attention, dozens of studies have found.

Her twin sister, Catherine, visited too

     No one knows for sure why. It may be that the brain, when it revisits material at a later time, has to relearn some of what it has absorbed before adding new stuff — and that that process is itself self-reinforcing.
     “The idea is that forgetting is the friend of learning,” said [Williams College’s] Dr. [Nate] Kornell. “When you forget something, it allows you to relearn, and do so effectively, the next time you see it.”
     That’s one reason cognitive scientists see testing itself — or practice tests and quizzes — as a powerful tool of learning, rather than merely assessment. The process of retrieving an idea is not like pulling a book from a shelf; it seems to fundamentally alter the way the information is subsequently stored, making it far more accessible in the future.
. . .
     “Testing has such bad connotation; people think of standardized testing or teaching to the test,” Dr. Roediger said. “Maybe we need to call it something else, but this is one of the most powerful learning tools we have.”
     Of course, one reason the thought of testing tightens people’s stomachs is that tests are so often hard. Paradoxically, it is just this difficulty that makes them such effective study tools, research suggests. The harder it is to remember something, the harder it is to later forget….

Annie with all the kids: Catherine, Sarah, Natalie, and Adam

Accessorizing the Deckchairs on the Titanic

AAUP to Universities: Tenure Is Not Just for Researchers (Chronicle of Higher Education)

In a new report, the Association of American University Professors continues to push for a tenure system that includes contingent faculty members—both full-time and part-time—who are the backbone of the professoriate. ¶ The report, "Tenure and Teaching-Intensive Appointments," released by the association's Committee on Contingency and the Profession, says that tenure "was not designed as a merit badge for research-intensive faculty or as a fence to exclude those with teaching-intensive commitments." Instead, the report calls for bringing non-tenure-track faculty members into the tenure stream as a way to "stabilize the faculty" and outlines various ways to do so that have found success at institutions nationwide.
Marc Bousquet, an associate professor of English at Santa Clara University, and Mayra Besosa, a full-time lecturer in Spanish at California State University at San Marcos, are co-chairs of the committee. Mr. Bousquet, in a written statement, warned that students will ultimately pay for higher education's reliance on contingent faculty. ¶ "In 1970, most undergraduates took nearly all of their class from tenure-eligible faculty, most with terminal degrees in their fields," Mr. Bousquet said. "This fall, however, at many institutions, a first-year student is more likely to drop out than ever to meet a tenure-track professor." ¶ The report is the final form of a draft report published last October.

For-Profits Spend Heavily to Fend Off New Rule (Chronicle of Higher Education)

For-profit colleges, under attack in Congress and faced with regulation that could ravage their revenues, are staging an aggressive, but increasingly hopeless, campaign to ward off legislation and defeat a proposed stricture. ¶ In recent weeks, their representatives have filed thousands of comments criticizing the Education Department's "gainful employment" rule, which would cut off federal student aid to programs whose graduates have high debt-to-income ratios and low loan-repayment….

Thinking simple thoughts, drifting toward academic disaster

     Think of the Professorate as comprising a vast spectrum. With regard to teaching load (i.e., how much a professor teaches per semester), community colleges are on the high end. For instance, my load (at Irvine Valley College) is five courses. (I could teach more but choose not to.) Each of my courses has 45 students. That’s a lot. (And, no, I do not make $100,000 a year, despite teaching at this college for 24 years.) (I'm ignoring for today the plight of part-time teachers, the slave labor of academia.)
     But the picture isn't a simple one, even at community colleges. Some of my colleagues—e.g., writing instructors, who typically teach four courses—work very long hours at their teaching, if only because they are buried in papers to grade. It amazes me the hours these people put in. They seem to be the work hours champs.
     But others manage to teach their classes without giving much or any written homework. That's not so good.
     Some—our math department is notorious for this—have managed enduring scams in which tenured instructors are paid extra for large-lecture courses that typically dwindle to regular size. For years, the math faculty at IVC (some of whom are also richly encumbered with scandals of a less pecuniary nature) blocked new hires to protect their gravy train. Some of these jokers make well over $200,000/yr. plus rich benefits.
     They’ve been protected by their friends in administration. Not sure why. It’s demoralizing.
     They’re scum. If our college leadership had a clue, and if they cared at all about teacher morale, they'd deal with this sort of thing. But no.
     Boy am I sick of it.
     But let's get back to the bigger picture. The differences and details between college instructors won’t matter as our society stumbles forward with its disastrous and unguided “destruction of higher education” project. Caricatures and Straw Men will be the only kinds of professors on most Americans’ minds. As usual. We're incredibly stupid.
     Caricaturing comes up in a book review article by Christopher Shea that appeared a couple of days ago in the New York Times. I'll leave to you the judgment whether it's fair.

The End of Tenure?

     In tough economic times, it’s easy to gin up anger against elites. The bashing of bankers is already so robust that the economist William Easterly has compared it, with perhaps a touch of hyperbole, to genocidal racism. But in recent months, a more unlikely privileged group has found itself in the cross hairs: tenured professors.
     At a time when nearly one in 10 American workers is unemployed, here’s a crew (the complaint goes) who are guaranteed jobs for life, teach only a few hours a week, routinely get entire years off, dump grading duties onto graduate students and produce “research” on subjects like “Rednecks, Queers and Country Music” or “The Whatness of Books.” Or maybe they stop doing research altogether (who’s going to stop them?), dropping their workweek to a manageable dozen hours or so, all while making $100,000 or more a year. Ready to grab that pitchfork yet?
     That sketch — relayed on numerous blogs and op-ed pages — is exaggerated, but no one who has observed the academic world could call it entirely false. And it’s a vision that has caught on with an American public worried about how to foot the bill for it all. The cost of a college education has risen, in real dollars, by 250 to 300 percent over the past three decades, far above the rate of inflation. Elite private colleges can cost more than $200,000 over four years. Total student-loan debt, at nearly $830 billion, recently surpassed total national credit card debt. Meanwhile, university presidents, who can make upward of $1 million annually, gravely intone that the $50,000 price tag doesn’t even cover the full cost of a year’s education. (Consider the balance a gift!) Then your daughter reports that her history prof is a part-time adjunct, who might be making $1,500 for a semester’s work. There’s something wrong with this picture.
     The debate over American higher education has been reignited recently, thanks to two feisty new books. Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — And What We Can Do About It (Times Books, $26), by Andrew Hacker, a professor emeritus of political science at Queens College, and Claudia C. Dreifus, a journalist (and contributor to the science section of The New York Times), is if anything even harsher and broader than the cartoonish sketch above. It is full of sarcastic asides like “Say goodbye to Mr. Chips with his tattered tweed jacket; today’s senior professors can afford Marc Jacobs.” But its arguments have been praised in The Wall Street Journal and given a respectful airing on The Atlantic’s Web site. They are also echoed in Mark C. Taylor’s Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (Knopf, $24), which is more measured in tone but no less devastating in its assessment of our unsustainable “education bubble.”
     The higher-ed jeremiads of the last generation came mainly from the right. But this time, it’s the tenured radicals — or at least the tenured liberals — who are leading the charge. Hacker is a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books and the author of the acclaimed study “Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal,” while Taylor, a religion scholar who recently moved to Columbia from Williams College, has taught courses that Allan Bloom would have gagged on (“Imagologies: Media Philosophy”). And these two books arrive at a time, unlike the early 1990s, when universities are, like many students, backed into a fiscal corner. Taylor writes of walking into a meeting one day and learning that Columbia’s endowment had dropped by “at least” 30 percent. Simply brushing off calls for reform, however strident and scattershot, may no longer be an option.
     The labor system, for one thing, is clearly unjust. Tenured and tenure-track professors earn most of the money and benefits, but they’re a minority at the top of a pyramid. Nearly two-thirds of all college teachers are non-tenure-track adjuncts like Matt Williams, who told Hacker and Dreifus he had taught a dozen courses at two colleges in the Akron area the previous year, earning the equivalent of about $8.50 an hour by his reckoning. It is foolish that graduate programs are pumping new Ph.D.’s into a world without decent jobs for them. If some programs were phased out, teaching loads might be raised for some on the tenure track, to the benefit of undergraduate education.
     And if colleges are ever going to bend the cost curve, to borrow jargon from the health care debate, it might well be time to think about vetoing Olympic-quality athletic facilities and trimming the ranks of administrators. At Williams, a small liberal arts college renowned for teaching, 70 percent of employees do something other than teach.
     But Hacker and Dreifus go much further, all but calling for an end to the role of universities in the production of knowledge. Spin off the med schools and research institutes, they say. University presidents “should be musing about education, not angling for another center on antiterrorist technologies.” As for the humanities, let professors do research after-hours, on top of much heavier teaching schedules. “In other occupations, when people feel there is something they want to write, they do it on their own time and at their own expense,” the authors declare. But it seems doubtful that, say, “Battle Cry of Freedom,” the acclaimed Civil War history by Princeton’s James McPherson, could have been written on the weekends, or without the advance spadework of countless obscure monographs. If it is false that research invariably leads to better teaching, it is equally false to say that it never does.
     Hacker and Dreifus’s ideal bears more than a faint resemblance to Hacker’s home institution, the public Queens College, which has a spartan budget, commuter students and a three-or-four-course teaching load per semester. Taylor, by contrast, has spent his career on the elite end of higher education, but he is no less disillusioned. He shares Hacker and Dreifus’s concerns about overspecialized research and the unintended effects of tenure, which he believes blocks the way to fresh ideas. Taylor has backed away from some of the most incendiary proposals he made last year in a New York Times Op-Ed article, cheekily headlined “End the University as We Know It” — an article, he reports, that drew near-universal condemnation from academics and near-universal praise from everyone else. Back then, he called for the flat-out abolition of traditional departments, to be replaced by temporary, “problem-centered” programs focusing on issues like Mind, Space, Time, Life and Water. Now, he more realistically suggests the creation of cross-¬disciplinary “Emerging Zones.” He thinks professors need to get over their fear of corporate partnerships and embrace efficiency-enhancing technologies.
     Taylor’s eyes also seem to have been opened to the world beyond Williams and Columbia. After his Op-Ed article appeared, a colleague from a cash-short California State University campus wrote to say that the “mind-pulping” teaching load left no room for research of any kind, even if it fell short of the five-courses-a-semester load at some community colleges. “This is an extremely unfortunate situation,” Taylor writes, “because the escalating cost of higher education is driving more students to these institutions.”
     Here we have the frightening subtext of all the recent hand-wringing about higher education: the widening inequality among institutions of various types and the prospects of the students who attend them. While the financial crisis has demoted Ivy League institutions from super-rich to merely rich, public universities are being gutted. It is not news that America is a land of haves and have-nots. It is news that colleges are themselves dividing into haves and have-nots; they are becoming engines of inequality. And that — not whether some professors can afford to wear Marc Jacobs — is the real scandal.

James Corbett has a message for the high-IQ club

"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." 

–Ralph Waldo Emmerson*

     Yesterday, I noticed the Register piece on James Corbett, the hapless Capistrano Valley High School history teacher, who was sued by a student a couple of years ago for trashing Christianity in class. (Intellectuals must 'push back,' urges teacher sued by student.)
     I was in no mood to write about Corbett, who strikes me as the wrong guy to be a poster child for K-12 academic freedom. I do wish he’d go away.
     As near as I can tell, he continues to be the wrong guy.
     He’s got a message. It’s about “intellectuals.”
     Where does he promulgate his message?
     At a Mensa convention.
     You probably know that Mensa is that silly society that exists to satisfy the alleged needs of the high IQed. (Poor lonely devils.) My late brother Ray was a member (in the San Diego chapter, I believe). Ray was smart, and I loved him, but he was disturbed and profoundly unwise. His membership in Mensa and his activities there didn't leave a good impression of that organization. (Corrupt former OC Sheriff Mike Carona and Holocaust denier James von Brunn appear to be members.)
     Really, Dr. Corbett? Your message is about intellectuals and you want to spread it at Mensa meetings?
     That’s stupid. It plays right into the right-wingers’ hands, what with their endless yammering about “elites.” I’m not sure what to make of Mensa, but I don’t think anybody denies that “intellectuals” refers to a kind of well-educated, scholarly elite.
     One of the Mensa “intellectuals” who heard Corbett speak had this to say:
     "I enjoy hearing an educated person talking … He is very articulate and makes me wish I was a lawyer and can go pro bono and help him out."
     Well, IQ isn’t everything, I guess.
     Part of Corbett’s message is on target, I think. He refers to conservative “anti-intellectualism.” (The term “anti-intellectualism” owes whatever currency it has to the classic "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” by historian Richard Hofstadter, published in 1963.)
     Clearly, the phenomenon of conservative anti-intellectualism exists and thrives. Does it ever. But Corbett evidently hasn’t noticed that it thrives, too, among liberal and progressive elites (and non-elites).
     In my classes, I sometimes explain the reasons for skepticism of various popular philosophies, including the embrace of so-called “alternative medicines” and organic farming and the fear of genetically modified foods. The latter are more or less a part of the progressive (and pro-diversity) world view.
     It never fails. No matter how carefully I talk about the best evidence regarding these ideas and the fallacies and sophisms that make them popular, students—often some of my best students—declare that I am mistaken, for so-and-so says so. “You should see this video,” they often say, referring to something they viewed in another class. Or: "You should listen to Professor So-and-So."
     They simply ignore the evidence I have presented. Evidence schmevidence.
     I get the feeling that my "truth" is, um, incorrect. (Admittedly, I get more flak about my other, allegedly "conservative," incorrectnesses.)

* * *

     If you’ve got anything on the ball upstairs, teaching isn’t easy. (If you’re a dolt, it’s amazingly easy; but you’re likely a lousy teacher.) You want to encourage skepticism, but not too much skepticism. You want students to know the things that are known, but you also want them to maintain the appropriate doubts about the mechanisms of knowledge-production and pseudo-knowledge production. A kind of moderation is important, I think. If possible, I say, take things slowly and easily. (Once again, uselessly, I declare, "See? I am a conservative.")
     That’s why I lay so much emphasis on, not knowledge, but the methods of attaining it (deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, scientific method, avoidance of fallacies, etc.). I often tell my students, “I don’t care what you believe, I really don’t.” And that’s true, more or less. “I do care how you believe and how you arrive at your beliefs. If you reason well, I will be impressed, no matter what you believe. I will pay attention to what you say.”
     One problem with this approach is that you undercut yourself when you refuse to reveal the products of your own careful efforts to arrive at the truth. So, to varying degrees, I allow myself to disclose them. When students ask me if I believe in God, I will answer them (I am some manner of agnostic), but, first, I typically explain that my opinion isn’t relevant. What’s relevant are the arguments, the evidence. And when we cover a topic such as the existence of God, I never bring the class to some big declaration of the truth. Whatever truth there is anyway tends to be “nuanced,” as they say.
     Here are the sorts of things I tend to say during, and at the end of, the “existence of God” unit in my Introduction to Philosophy course:

“Yes, the traditional arguments for God’s existence turn out to be pretty shaky, but, remember: that in itself is not evidence for the non-existence of God. Possibly, there are good arguments that have not yet been discovered or formulated.”

“Theists are obliged to present a coherent picture of the world, and, thus far, their efforts seem satisfying only to believers. Their account needs to succeed with those who do not already believe that God exists." 

“Often, atheists’ point about the problem of ‘evil’ is simplistic, but there are non-simplistic versions of the point, and we need to consider those.”

“David Hume noted that, since we have no experience with the creation of universes, it is difficult or impossible to speculate about the cause of our own. Perhaps that is correct. It’s hard to say.”

"Please remember that the history of humanity is a history of arrogance--of assuming that we are far less prone to error than the generations who came before us. But, thus far, that has never been the case. It is important to maintain some humility, especially with such important questions."

     Yeah, that's what I actually say. I refer to my own views no less than to students' views when I make that point about arrogance and humility. The point is important to me. Nevertheless, unsophisticated (and intermittently present) students hear only, “belief in God is stupid and illogical” repeated over and over. "Only stupid people believe in God," says that rat bastard Bauer.
     Listening to some of these bizarre-of-hearing students, you’d swear I show up to class telling students to take off their goddam “Jesus glasses” and urging them to combat the right-wing, religious, capitalist cabal!
     Gosh, I hardly ever do that.

*Stolen from a Susan Jacoby piece.
Photo from the OC Register.

Suspension upheld

UC-Irvine Upholds, but Shortens, Suspension of Muslim Student Group (Chronicle of Higher Education)

The University of California at Irvine plans to uphold the suspension of a Muslim Student Group, the Los Angeles Times reported on Saturday. The Muslim Student Union had appealed a suspension handed down in June after several students disrupted a February lecture by Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador. The university had originally recommended a yearlong ban, but the suspension was reduced to the fall academic quarter. The group must complete 100 hours of community service before it can apply for reinstatement. If that request is granted, the group will be on probation for two years.

From the archives

     I spoke recently with my mother and asked her about her real mother, who died in about 1934, when mom was a year old.
     Naturally, mom (Edith) has no memory of her mother, but she remembers a few things that were said about her. Her name was Gertrude Sternke and she hailed from Wolin, a town on the island by that name in the waters north of Stettin, on the Baltic Sea (Ost See).
     Her husband, Hermann Schultz, and Gertrude likely married in the late 20s; the couple had two children: Ilsa, who was born in 1930, and Edith (my mother), who was born in 1934. Both are still alive. Mom tells me that she just spoke with her sister two days ago (by phone).
     Hermann was from the small town of Bärwalde in Pomerania (Pommern). By the 30s, Hermann and the family lived in the big town of Stettin, to the West, near the Baltic Sea. Hermann was a trucker and, by the time of his death in 1939 (from a loading accident), he owned a trucking company in Stettin.
     Virtually nothing is known about Gertrude and her family. Mom is under the impression that no one from Gertrude’s family attended Gertrude and Hermann’s wedding (I’m guessing that occurred in 1929). At least one person in my mother’s family (a person given to parochialism and base prejudices) occasionally dismissed Gertrude’s family as “Gypsies,” but it is unlikely that they were actual Gypsies. There are stories (of unknown reliability; I’m trying to track them down) that she was Jewish, but that seems unlikely, though it is a possibility.
     I pressed my mom about how her mother died. She hesitated. With some difficulty, she told the story, as far as she knew it.
     When Hermann died (in ’39), Ilsa, mom’s sister, who had lived with Hermann, was sent to Bärwalde to join Edith and Tante Martha and Martha’s husband (who, by the way, was wealthy; a Marxist; a former master porcelain maker). It wasn’t until much later that mom realized that Ilsa was her sister (and that Martha was not her biological mother).
     But how did it come about that Ilsa and Edith were split up?
     When mom’s mother—Gertrude—died in 1934, the relatives gathered for the funeral (probably in Stettin) and the after-funeral “party.” When most of the guests had left to return home (some had flown in from Berlin), someone raised a question: What is to become of the children? According to the story, Edith, who was about a year old, was crying in the background. Hermann had already (or was it later?) declared that he would take Ilsa, who was four, but he could not also take the baby. Tante Martha, who loved children but could not have her own, declared that she would take the baby—if, that is, her husband was agreeable. Hubby was likely back in Bärwalde, ill from TB (he eventually died of the disease in 1941). When the notion was presented to him, he immediately agreed, and thus it was that mom (Edith) went to live in Bärwalde.
     The law at the time was such that Martha and her husband were not “fit” parents—owing to the TB, I believe—and so friends in town sat on the adoption paperwork for many years. (It was a running joke that the papers would be “coming through any day now.”) Because of the TB danger, Edith was compelled by the health authorities to undergo regular checkups, including X-rays and blood tests. (My mother tells of one occasion in which she ran away to avoid that awful needle. She sat on a bench across the street from the hospital, waiting for her Aunt to emerge. When she didn’t, mom trudged back to the hospital, apologizing to everyone there for inconveniencing them.)
     But then, of course, Hermann died too, in 1939, and so Ilsa, who was nine, came to live with Edith.

     It wasn’t until after the war—some time in the late forties—that Martha finally sat Edith down and revealed the nature of Gertrude’s death. It was quite simple, really. Gertrude was pregnant and she had died in the course of a botched abortion. Hermann came home from work and found her dead in a large pool of blood. The doctor cooperated in a minor cover-up, and so there was no record.
     Today, my mother showed me a picture of her mother. It is actually a scan of a picture that had been modified long ago. I looked at it. Was she a Gypsy? Was she Jewish? Was she simply from a family that had dwindled to the point that there was no one left to attend her wedding?
     When the Russians came, they burned mom’s home and much else. The family of four that lived next door to mom’s big house were all killed—after the two teenaged girls were raped. As near as I can tell, all of the town records were destroyed, and an “ethnic cleansing” eliminated all or virtually all Germans. Similar things occurred at Stettin and elsewhere.
     But I will make an effort to track down the records of Gertrude, of Hermann, and the others.

P.S.: I have been corresponding with a man I found on the internet who is building a database concerning the old Bärwalde (the "new" Bärwalde is Polish and is called "Barwice"). I will be sending him as much of a genealogy as I can scrape together. Evidently, next month, there will be some sort of Bärwalde reunion. Since the dispersion occurred more than sixty-five years ago, I doubt that many will be attending.

Reward yourself—with debt!

Cuomo Probes Credit Card Marketing to Students (Inside Higher Ed)

     Andrew Cuomo, New York State's attorney general (and the Democratic candidate for governor), announced Thursday that his office has started an investigation into "deceptive credit card marketing practices" that focus on college students. He said that his office has sent letters to every college and university in New York State, asking for information on agreements and marketing deals so he can look for "problematic" practices. Cuomo's statement said he was concerned about reports of colleges giving credit card companies students' personal contact information without the students' permission and of cases in which the credit card companies "have bombarded students with solicitations at student centers, athletic events, orientations, classroom buildings, and other campus locations."

     Back in the spring, we noted the many ads for for-profits on the Lariat’s website. Those seem to have largely disappeared.

     But the credit card ads remain. I just checked (here).

Reward yourself
With the Citi mtvU Platinum Select Visa Card
Apply now

When you click on the Lariat ad, you get this

     No such ads seem to appear in the online editions of the OCC “Coast Report,” but I found the same ad in the Fullerton “Weekly Hornet” (plus a DeVry ad) and the Santa Ana College “El Don.”

Dr. Rajen Vurdien set to take role as new president (Fullerton "Weekly Hornet")
The former VP of Instruction at Saddleback College brings with him a wealth of experience.

Public higher ed: "a narrower and more hollow mission"

Public Higher Education Is 'Eroding From All Sides,' Warn Political Scientists (Chronicle of Higher Education)

     The ideal of American public higher education may have entered a death spiral, several scholars said here Thursday during a panel discussion at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. That crisis might ultimately harm not only universities, but also democracy itself, they warned.
     "We've crossed a threshold," said Clyde W. Barrow, director of the Center for Policy Analysis at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. "Higher education is no longer viewed as a public good in this country. As tuition at public universities becomes more expensive, middle-class parents say, 'I'll bite the bullet and pay this for four years, but I don't want to pay for it a second time with taxes.' And families who are frozen out of the system see public universities as something for the affluent. They'd rather see the state spend money on health care."

     The mid-20th century suddenly appears to have been a golden age for higher education, said Wendy Brown, a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley.
     "That era offered not only literacy but liberal arts to a mass public," Ms. Brown said. "But today that idea is eroding from all sides. Cultural values don't support the liberal arts. Debt-burdened families aren't demanding it. The capitalist state isn't interested in it. Universities aren't funding it."
     The danger, Ms. Brown said, is that the public will give up on the idea of educating people for democratic citizenship. Instead, all of public higher education will be essentially vocational in nature, oriented entirely around the market logic of job preparation. Instead of educating whole persons, Ms. Brown warned, universities will be expected to "build human capital," a narrower and more hollow mission.
     And faculty members are unlikely to resist those changes at a time when two-thirds of them are on contingent appointments instead of the more secure tenure track, said Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors. They simply do not have enough power within the institution.
     During a plenary lecture earlier Thursday, Mr. Nelson, who is also a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said he believes that the era of "incremental state funding for public higher education is basically over." For the foreseeable future, he said, the traditional battles for higher state appropriations are bound to be losing ones….

Photos: tonight, Huntington Beach

Manifestering corruption

Streaming Video of the August 30 meeting of the SOCCCD board of trustees is now available at the district website (here). Scroll down to “archived videos”; click on “video” for August 30.

Then “jump to” item 6.3—“institutional memberships.”

Then: Enjoy the clash between social conservative/libertarian Don Wagner and the IVC (and Saddleback) faculty, who have the temerity to seek to maintain their membership in the Academic Senates for California Community Colleges, which, um, leaves headless bodies out in the Arizona desert. Or something.

Have you enjoyed our recent submersion in the MANIFESTERING corruption that is OC government? It’s fun—isn’t it?—connecting the dots between John and T-Rack and Mike and Chriss and Michael and Tom and John again and Phil and Raghu and Peggy and Susan and Tonya Harding.

As I was leaving campus today, I saw a kid walking and phone-talking whilst wearing his pants just below cheeks, revealing much square yardage of blue underwear. I quickly readied my camera, but, alas, he hiked up his pants several inches before I could take a shot. Here’s what I got.

Behold the future.

Life among devices

The weather's been good. Irvine Valley College looks pretty sharp. The place is buzzin'.

But absurdities abound.

Some absurdities concern the many gizmos that punctuate the environment. Old gizmos.

#1. There's a room in the library that is full of VCRs. You remember them. They play those big, stupid, boxy things called VHS tapes. Students occasionally wander into this room, puzzling over these dopey machines.

"What could they be?" they ask.

Even the staff doesn't know.

Sometimes they all stand in silence, contemplating these machines and their peculiar ugliness.

Recently, an inventory was taken of the IVC Library's VHS tapes. After considerable effort, it was determined that (1) there is precisely one huge shitload of them and they're taking up considerable space and (2) students almost never check them out or play them. Students wouldn't even know what to ask for. "Weird shit," maybe.

Recently, the Dean and the Vice President of Instruction moved to rid the Library of these cloddish and forlorn artifacts. Immediately, Luddites among the faculty commenced caterwauling.

"No! No! Our instruction depends on these things!"

Years ago, I recall attempting to get our old Art History instructor to give up his Carousel projector and his set of slide trays. He had, like, two or three of 'em. It was his whole Pedagogy. "Why doncha digitize this stuff?" I said. "Maybe get some new stuff!"

Nope. Not him. He retired.

#2. Faculty came back after summer break only to find a new duplicating machine in building A200.

I was told that it is vaguely sinister. It sends emails and faxes. It makes breakfast.

It is not to be trusted.

Today, I took some pics.

There was an eerie silence.

Naturally, it's broken.

A technology launched nearly 35 years ago.

(IVC Library and Antique Emporium)

DVDs are a fifteen-year-old technology.

Try 'em; you'll like 'em!

“Not before known, heard, or seen”

• Check out the Voice of OC’s John Williams' Strange (and Very Brief) Turn in the Media Spotlight. 

• The latest: Rackauckas Will Seek Re-election in 2014 (Voice of OC)

• Spitzer reveals that there's nothing in his personnel file: Spitzer opens up personnel file (OC Reg)

• Mickadeit offers an overview: Spitzer stops by Register to make case (OC Reg)

Durbin: a "federally subsidized rip-off”

• Key Senator Calls for More Federal Oversight of For-Profit Colleges (Chronicle of Higher Education)

     Continuing Congress's scrutiny of for-profit colleges, Sen. Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, argued at a forum he held in Chicago on Tuesday that "there are too many schools taking advantage of students and making money hand over fist."
     The forum, which featured testimony from two former students and the leaders of three major for-profit higher-education companies and two traditional colleges, covered much of the same ground as recent hearings held by the Senate education committee in Washington, according to Wall Street analysts who attended the event. The two students described being misled about their programs' accreditation status and their job prospects, while the corporate executives defended their institutions and warned against a rush to regulate the for-profit sector.
     A recording of the forum is available on Senator Durbin's Web site.
     Like Sen. Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, the chairman of the Senate education committee, Senator Durbin voiced concerns about the sector's aggressive recruiting tactics and heavy dependence on federal student aid. He dismissed the colleges' argument that the higher-than-average default rates for students of for-profit colleges are due to the sector's demographics and expressed outrage at the high costs of for-profit culinary programs.
     During the question-and-answer period, Senator Durbin grilled the chief executive of the Career Education Corporation about the morality of charging $40,000 for culinary programs that prepare students for $10-an-hour jobs, calling the programs a "federally subsidized rip-off." He also confronted the president of Kaplan University and the chief executive of DeVry Inc. about their students' low loan-repayment rates.
     "The loser is not only the student, but the taxpayer," Mr. Durbin said, according to an analyst with the investment-banking firm Signal Hill who attended the hearing. "You are enticing students into debt where they lose and you win," the senator said.
     Mr. Durbin proposed that for-profit colleges be required to bear some of the risk on government loans made to their students and called for an end to the practice of allowing for-profit colleges to acquire accreditation by purchasing nonprofit institutions. He also proposed an examination of how much federal aid the colleges spend on marketing campaigns.
     It's unclear how much influence Mr. Durbin will ultimately have in the debate over for-profit colleges, however. While the senator holds a key leadership post in the Senate, he does not serve on the committee that would consider any legislative changes for the sector.
     For-profit colleges got some moral support at the hearing from a group of students from the Illinois Institute of Art, who stood outside the forum carrying signs that read "'Gainful employment' rule discriminates against my school." The Education Department's proposed gainful-employment rule would cut off federal student aid to programs where students have high debt-to-income ratios and low loan-repayment rates.
     During the hearing, Mr. Durbin said he had approached one of the students and asked how much his program cost and what he thought he could make at his first job out of college. The student told him that his two-year culinary program would cost $54,000 and that if he was lucky, he could make $30,000 in his first job.

• The Williams-Spitzer episode. It only gets stranger:

The latest in the Todd Spitzer firing (OC Reg)

     …Unbeknown to Spitzer, the same public administrator case Spitzer had been looking into had been brought to the attention of Supervisor John Moorlach’s office more than a week earlier. And that Assistant Public Administrator Peggi Buff had been corresponding with Moorlach’s office.
     Buff also happens to be Rackauckas’ fiancé.
     Rick Francis, Moorlach’s chief of staff, confirmed that he sent an e-mail to Public Administrator/Guardian John S. Williams on Aug. 16 asking about the status of the case.
     Francis also confirmed that he received an email the following day, on Aug. 17, from Buff informing him that there was an investigation and that investigation was confidential.
     At that point, Moorlach’s office stopped looking into the case, Francis said.
     About a week later Spitzer began asking questions about the case after being told of a domestic-violence victim may have been targeted inappropriately for prosecution by the county’s bad check program. Once he was told there was an investigation underway, he said he called the citizen back and informed her of the ongoing investigation….