The great desecration

DISRESPECTFUL FELLOW.
.    Biologist P.Z. Myers of the University of Minnesota seems to love getting in the face of creationists—and of theists generally. (See Crusade Against a Crusader in this morning's Inside Higher Ed.)
.    Recently, on his blog, Pharyngula, he’s defended a U of Central Florida student who “protested the presence of religious groups on his campus by taking a Eucharist — the small wafer blessed in Roman Catholic services and then seen as the body of Christ — and removing it from the service rather than consuming it. Myers, in an entry entitled ‘It’s a Frackin’ Cracker’ — questioned why this was such a big deal.”
.    Naturally, the usual suspects have begun attacking him and calling for disciplinary action.
.    Myers, being Myers, responded by staging a “great desecration,” which entailed taking a genuine communion wafer (sent to him by a supporter) and driving a rusty nail through it. He threw it in the trash, along with a banana peel, coffee grounds, some pages from the Koran, and—in a display of self-desecration—some pages from The God Delusion. I guess he photographed this mess and put that on his blog.
.    Now, people are really pissed. He’s even received threats, references to his children, etc. So far, the U of M, while distancing itself from his views, stands behind him. That’s great, but I do wish Myers would lay off of the “bring it on” routine.

CHIMP TRUSTEES.
.    Inside Higher Ed also reports on a community College board in Michigan. According to the local accreditor, “The board of Oakland Community College…‘dabbles in micromanagement,’ and doesn’t know how to have constructive discussions.”
.    Gosh, that sounds awfully familiar.
.    IHE says that, according to a Detroit paper, the accreditor “linked poor governance to controversies over management, saying that the board must ‘learn how to argue, debate and disagree intellectually.’ The board chairwoman told the newspaper that when the accrediting team was visiting, some board members were ‘very disgraceful’ and ‘didn’t act professionally.’”
.    Gosh, maybe some of those trustees are chimps.
.    Well, there’s your problem.
.    We live in such a special country. Over much of this great land, judges are elected by the people. (This means, of course, that they’re elected by a horde of legal ignoramuses. That’s the way it is around here.) Only stupid people would come up with a system like that.
.    We really love “local control” of things such as education, and so school boards and college boards are elected, too. Yeah, I get it, but one problem with that system is that you can have fools running school districts and colleges. Consider the state of Kansas.
.    And consider the South Orange County Community College District. Ten years ago, the board president was a Holocaust denier.
.    Nowadays, the dominant trustees on the SOCCCD board are right-wingers with open contempt for educators—this is especially true of Mr. Tom Fuentes, who embraces a conspiracy theory re accreditation according to which faculty pretty much orchestrate things.
.    This group (a descendent of the board of a decade ago) has brought our two colleges to the brink of non-accreditation, owing to their endless micromanagement (and the micromanagement of their agent and puppet, Chancellor Raghu Mathur) and their arrogant and disrespectful meddling with accreditation reports.
.    Pace chimps.

SERIOUS ACCOUNTABILITY—IN THE OLD WORLD.
.    Also in this morning’s Inside higher Ed, there’s a fascinating story about the system of “accountability” for institutions of higher learning that exists in Europe (On Accountability, Consider Bologna):

Impressed by American higher education’s embrace of accountability? You shouldn’t be, according to a new policy brief on the Bologna Process from the Institute for Higher Education Policy. Written by Clifford Adelman, a senior associate at the institute, the document “contends that none of the major pronouncements on accountability in U.S. higher education that we have heard in the recent past – from Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings’ Commission on the Future of Higher Education to platitude pronouncements and wish lists for student learning from the higher education community — even begin to understand what accountability means.”

OK, so who does understand?

Adelman contends that across the Atlantic, the nearly decade-old, 46-country higher education reform initiative known as the Bologna Process offers lessons for what real accountability – not “accountability light” – looks like. And out of Europe’s efforts to make colleges, continent-wide, “more compatible and comparable,” Adelman identifies a series of “reconstructive recommendations” for American higher education.

Have a look.