Memorial Day news you can use

From the New York Times:

• British U.F.O. Shocker! Government Officials Were Telling the Truth

“The government has been telling us the truth,” declared David Clarke, a senior lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University, who has a side interest in U.F.O.’s. “There are a lot of weird things in the sky, and some of them we can’t explain, but there’s not a shred of evidence for a single alien visitation.”

• More Colorado Follies (Stanley Fish on the U of C’s “Chair in Conservative Thought and Policy”):

.....I’ve just returned from New Zealand and find that in my absence the University of Colorado – the same one that earlier this year appointed as its president a Republican fund-raiser with a B.A. in mining and no academic experience – has gifted me again, this time with the announcement of plans to raise money for a Chair in Conservative Thought and Policy.
.....Why? The answer is apparently given in the first sentence of a story that appeared in the May 13th edition of the Rocky Mountain News: “The University of Colorado is considering a $9 million program to bring high-profile conservatives to teach on the left-leaning Boulder campus.”
.....Embedded in this sentence is the following chain of reasoning: The University of Colorado, Boulder, is left-leaning and therefore it is appropriate to spend university funds (technically state funds) in an effort to redress a political imbalance.
…..
.....If the reason for funding a chair in conservative thought and policy is to correct a political imbalance, it is not a reason any university should take seriously until there is more than anecdotal evidence that ballot-box performance tracks classroom performance. And even if it were to turn out that ballot-box performance did in fact track classroom performance, the proper remedy would be not to even out the partisan numbers, but to remind faculty members of whatever political stripe of the distinction (on which the whole rationale for higher educations rests) between political questions and academic questions.
…..
.....G.P. Peterson, the chancellor of the Boulder campus, who has been prattling on about “intellectual diversity” (always and only a stalking horse for political diversity), did have a moment when he seemed to be an academic administrator rather than a political operative. He acknowledged that the professor of conservative thought didn’t have to be an actual conservative, and pointed out that many teachers of French “aren’t necessarily French.” ….

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

• Colleges Must Prepare for New Wave of Federal Oversight, Speaker Warns:

.....Colleges must steel themselves for a new era of intensive federal oversight, an accreditation advocate said Sunday evening during a plenary address at the annual meeting of the Association for Institutional Research.
.....The speaker, Judith S. Eaton, who is president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, predicted that the Higher Education Act — the final terms of which are still being negotiated — will require colleges to report to the federal government on at least 300 new topics, including tuition increases, transfer-of-credit policies, file sharing, meningitis outbreaks, fire safety, voter registration, and technology disposal. Ms. Eaton had an attentive audience: The institutional researchers gathered here will often be responsible for crunching the numbers and shipping their colleges’ reports to Washington.
.....Ms. Eaton expressed regret that the traditional relationships among colleges, accreditors, and federal regulators were being transformed. (One of her slides showed a representation of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, with the caption “The Government Drives Accountability.”) But she said that she understood the public anxieties that have given rise to the new federal role. “We ought to be accountable when we’re spending a hundred billion dollars or so in federal money,” she said. “We do have obligations here.”
.....Ms. Eaton urged college leaders to take their own steps to improve their institutions’ responsiveness and accountability. If she were a college president, she said, she would make clear to the world what her institution was trying to achieve and how it would measure its success. “I would do transparency audits,” she said. “I would have a Web site, for example, that tells anybody who goes there immediately some very salient things about the performance of my institution vis-à-vis its students. With all due respect to all of the wonderful college Web sites out there, that kind of information isn’t easy to find on many of them.” —David Glenn