Drills, skulls, the DOE

●.....As you know, our new Accreditation difficulties stem, in part, from the DOE’s cracking down on our accrediting agency, WASC/ACCJC. With that in mind: From this morning’s Inside Higher Education: A Little Help From Its Friends?:

.....In the year and a half since the report of the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, the U.S. Education Department has invested significant time and energy on pressuring accrediting agencies to prod colleges to more effectively measure and more transparently report the academic outcomes of their students. In many ways, the accreditation war has been at the center of the department’s effort to carry out the commission’s work.
.....Which has made it all the more frustrating to Secretary Margaret Spellings and her aides that Congress is poised to shut them down. Bills that both the House and Senate have passed to renew the Higher Education Act would bar the Education Department from promulgating federal rules to guide accrediting agencies on what and how they should assess colleges’ efforts to measure student learning. The measures would also make clear that colleges, rather than accreditors, have primary responsibility for setting standards for student learning.
.....College leaders, who last spring fought tooth and nail against the department’s efforts to impose a set of new regulations governing accreditation, lobbied Congress hard to limit the department’s work on accreditation. But department officials strenuously oppose the approach lawmakers have taken in the Higher Education Act legislation and have expressed their objections in many venues: interviews with reporters, White House letters outlining their problems with the legislation, and, most recently, a harshly worded op-ed in a Washington political newspaper in which Spellings lambasted for having been “persuaded to block the U.S. Department of Education from overseeing the quality of institutions of higher education by special interest forces determined to keep the accreditation process insular, clubby and accountable to no one but themselves.”
.....“While business leaders embrace the future, Congress is vigorously defending old structures and outdated practices in higher education at the behest of entrenched stakeholders who advocate the status quo,” Spellings wrote in the Politico.
.....Department officials have tried, so far unsuccessfully, to persuade leading members of Congress to drop or soften their prohibition. As House and Senate lawmakers and staff begin work on a compromise version of the Higher Education Act legislation, they may get a little help from a friends — former members of the secretary’s higher education commission.
.....This month, Sara Martinez Tucker and Diane Auer Jones, respectively the department’s under secretary and assistant secretary for postsecondary education, held a conference call for former members of the Spellings Commission to, as a spokeswoman characterized it, update them on the department’s efforts to carry out the panel’s recommendations. The spokeswoman said that the department has done so occasionally, although she could not say when or how often.
.....By all accounts, department officials — who like all federal officials are barred contacting or encouraging others to lobby Congress — did not in any way encourage the participating members of the Spellings panel to urge lawmakers to reconsider their approach to the accreditation issue. According to several participants on the call, Tucker and Jones updated the members on a wide range of recent administration and Congressional initiatives, including the renewal of the Higher Education Act, and they did make clear that they were unhappy about the outcome of the accreditation issue.
.....“Sara said something like, ‘We’ve been beaten up on this accreditation issue,’ and she may have said that the department had been ‘emasculated’ or something to that effect,” said Richard K. Vedder, a commission member who is an economics professor at Ohio University.
.....Vedder and Charles Miller, who chaired the Spellings panel, insisted that department officials “did not in any form or fashion ask us” to advocate on the agency’s behalf, as Miller put it. But someone — Miller, Vedder and Arthur J. Rothkopf, another former commission member, all said it “may have been” them — asked Tucker whether there was anything the panel’s members might do.
.....“I may have initiated it,” said Rothkopf, a former Lafayette College president and now senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “Some of us wondered, If we don’t like what the Congress is doing, maybe those of us who are commissioners could say, ‘We think this is going in the wrong direction.’ “
.....Vedder, who like Rothkopf describes himself as generally sympathetic to the department’s position on accreditation, said that Tucker responded along the lines of: “We are constrained by the law, we cannot lobby Congress. but you people can do whatever you want.”
.....And they just may, says Rothkopf, who notes that he is speaking as an individual capacity and not for the Chamber of Commerce. “I think that most commission members felt that the accreditation process was a way to get more outcomes out there, to give students and parents and the public more information. Congress’s approach would seem to cut the accreditors loose and cut the department loose. What Congress has done here runs counter to our recommendations and will make it harder to achieve the results we would like to achieve. It’s a possibility that some members of the commission will express their views.”….

● Also in IHE: Drill Terrifies Students:

.....Elizabeth City State University, in North Carolina, is offering counseling to students and faculty members after a mock safety drill in which someone pretended to be a killer and entered a classroom with a fake gun, The News & Observer reported. An e-mail and text message had alerted the campus to the drill, but there were not full details and many at Elizabeth City State apparently didn’t read the message. The unknowing professor whose class was the target of the fake drill said he was “prepared to die” as the events took place.

● From yesterday’s OC Reg: Saddleback College's Rapid Tech program makes industry partners:

.....Two days before last Thanksgiving, a young woman in the Sacramento area was in a horrific car accident that crushed the right side of her face. The next day, engineers at Saddleback College were building a large-scale model of her skull to send to surgeons at UC Davis Medical Center.
.....The skull was built by the college's National Center for Rapid Technologies, part of its Advanced Technology Center. The center has existed since 2005, but only last October did it receive a $4 million grant from the National Science Foundation. It then assumed the name "RapidTech" and became the only center in the country that specializes in rapid prototyping and additive manufacturing, said Ed Tackett, the program's director.
.....Instead of starting with a large block of material and shaping it down, machines at the center build parts or prototypes from scratch − a much more efficient process, Tackett said.
.....The technology has existed since the late 1980s, but newer processes and materials have made the technology more economically viable. That means companies need engineers who know how to use it.
....."From an educational aspect, what (RapidTech) lets see is where the technology's going in the future, and it lets us develop coursework that will train the new generation of technicians and engineers," Tackett said.
.....Saddleback offers a certificate program in using the technology. It keeps the class size to about 10 – mostly because of the building's lack of physical space, which Tackett and his colleagues are hoping to change by finding a generous donor.
.....In addition to education, the center has also partnered with several companies, including Pixar, Ford, Honda and Boeing, by developing prototypes and specialty parts for new projects.
.....Tackett said as the technology progresses, Saddleback will lead the industry in the creation of new ways to utilize it. New jobs come from new technology, he said, and the manufacturing industry should focus on America's strengths – creativity and the ability to specialize – instead of trying to bring back mass-manufacturing jobs lost to outsourcing.
....."Let's be realistic about U.S. manufacturing: a lot of it has been moved offshore," he said. "We need to be progressive, not regressive about our manufacturing and our capabilities."

● From this morning’s New York Times: School Board to Pay in Jesus Prayer Suit

.....A Delaware school district has agreed to revise its policies on religion as part of a settlement with two Jewish families who had sued over the pervasiveness of Christian prayer and other religious activities in the schools.
.....One family said it was forced to leave its home in Georgetown because of an anti-Semitic backlash.
.....The settlement, which was approved Tuesday, includes payments to the families that both sides would not disclose. Although the settlement resolves many complaints in the suit, against the Indian River School District, the parties are proceeding with litigation over the school board practice of beginning its sessions with prayer....

The little Vietnamese flag story is out there

From Inside Higher Ed: 

“Irvine Valley College has removed the Vietnamese flag from an atrium display of flags from all over the world, in response to threats by Vietnamese immigrants in the area to hold a protest of what they view as an inappropriate honor for the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, The Orange County Register reported. A spokeswoman said that the college was trying to be ‘considerate.’” 

See also: LA Times. The story’s on the AP wire. Saw it on MSNBC website, etc., yesterday. A brief video of IVC's SSC flag issue:

Communist flag vs. Republic flag

Some background on the Vietnamese Flag issue: From Wikipedia: the flag of the Republic of Vietnam (i.e., the flag of South Vietnam, pre-1975) and its importance to Vietnamese Americans:

• When a Vietnamese American video tape store owner displayed the communist [i.e., the current] flag in front of his store in Westminster, California in 1999, a month-long protest against it climaxed when 15,000 people held a candlelight vigil one night, sparking the Hi Tek Incident (Hi Tek was the name of the store).
• A faux pas by the United States Postal Service in using the current Vietnamese flag in a brochure to represent the Vietnamese American community that it serves cause some outrage among Vietnamese Americans and resulted in an apology.
• In 2004, some Vietnamese American students at the California State University, Fullerton threatened to walk out on their graduation ceremony to demand that the university use the former flag of South Vietnam as well as the current flag of Vietnam to represent its Vietnamese students. This resulted in the university scrapping all foreign flags for the ceremony.


• In 2006, Vietnamese American students at the College of Engineering, UTA [University of Texas, Arlington] requested that the university add this flag in addition to the communist flag as a part of its student diversity in the Hall of Flags, Nedderman Hall. After several weeks of protests from the Vietnamese-American community in the area, the president removed all the flags from display in its Hall of Flags.
• Prior to President George W. Bush's visit to Vietnam in 2006, the White House website briefly displayed this [i.e., the old Republic of Vietnam] flag before replacing it with the current flag of Vietnam.
• The lobbying efforts of Vietnamese Americans resulted in the state governments of California and Ohio to adopt it to symbolize Vietnamese Americans in 2006.


The infamous Hi Tek incident, 1999

“They are our enemies,” said the trustee

From this morning’s Inside Higher Ed: How Offensive Can a Trustee Be?:

.....Nationwide, colleges have been bolstering their programs in Arabic and the study of the Middle East, responding to growing student interest and awareness that Americans benefit from better understanding the region. At the College of the Siskiyous, in California, such a plan prompted a tirade of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim comments from a trustee, disturbing many on the campus. The trustee is refusing to apologize or resign.
.....The community college is planning to offer its first credit courses ever in both Arabic and Middle Eastern history. At a board meeting last month, the additional courses were included among the “consent” items for the board — non-controversial items that are typically approved collectively at the start of a board meeting, unless a board member objects.
.....Dorris Wood, the board member, objected last month, with the following comments: “When I look at this proposed class, my one thought is that we know all we need to know about the Arabs and Islam. They are our enemies: pure and simple.... They have declared war on the United States and are committed to our destruction.... When our schools fail the citizens of this great country by undermining the basic principles of democracy and support the sworn enemies we will fail completely.... Study history and understand how the Muslims have over the centuries invaded other countries and forced their religion by killing, plundering, and ravaging... Now they are invading Christian countries of the world from inside, one method being through our schools and universities.... If you want to give yourselves to Islam, you have the right and freedom to do that. But don’t give my country to them.”
.....The statement didn’t sway the board and the courses were approved, but the fact that a trustee would describe Arabs and Muslims in this way (without any distinctions among Arabs and Muslims, who are not monolithic in their views) stunned those at the meeting, and many who heard of the comments later.
.....Concern over the statements prompted the college president, Dave Pelham, to meet with Wood and then to apologize to everyone associated with the college for her statements. In an e-mail he sent to students and professors, Pelham said that after talking with Wood, he had a better understanding of her perspective. “She raises the concern that the impact of religion in the development of our country is not dealt with in the same manner as it is when we teach courses about other cultures. In other words, her argument is that the impact of Christianity in the formation of the United States does not receive the same focus in our American history classes as the impact that Islam had in the development of the Middle East will receive in the proposed course on Middle Eastern history. Regardless of your opinion on this issue, it is a valid concern for discussion/debate.”
.....However, Pelham continued in language that is unusually harsh for a president (even one who happens to soon be leaving for another position) to use about one of his board members. He said that her comments on Arabs and Islam as “enemies” demonstrated a “logical fallacy has been used many times throughout history to marginalize, isolate, and in extreme cases, eliminate large groups of people.”
.....He continued: “As logically flawed as I find these remarks in the abstract, I am incensed by the fact that they classify members of our own staff, faculty, student body and community with the terrorists that attacked this country on 9/11. These people love and support our country AND are of Arab descent and/or follow Islam. It is to these members of our campus and community that I offer my most sincere apology. They deserve better treatment, especially at an institution of higher education.”
.....Wood did not respond to messages seeking her comment. But at this month’s board meeting, local press accounts said, she rebuked Pelham for having sent out his apology, saying that she is “an elected official, elected by the voters of Siskiyou County and not by the staff of the college.” She added, according to the Mount Shasta Record, that “when I speak about an item or an issue I am speaking on behalf of the public based on my judgment of that issue.”
.....Further, she told Pelham that he should not apologize on her behalf, saying “this is way beyond your authority.”
.....A coalition of student and faculty groups, including the Academic Senate and the Associated Student Body, presented a joint resolution asking Wood to resign immediately, saying that her comments violated the anti-bias rules of the college, and that her seeking to block new courses based on those views amounted to an infringement of academic freedom. Wood ignored the request.
.....Pelham said that Wood has indicated that she plans to run for re-election to the board this fall.
.....A spokeswoman for the Association of Community College Trustees said officials there could not comment on the situation because they have a policy of never commenting on anything said by a board member during a meeting.

Michael Scheuer on "the enemy":

More on the Vietnames flag protest

A brief video of IVC's SSC flag issue:

.....It turns out, OC Reg reporters read Dissent. Marlo Jo Fisher has been working on the “flag” story today, and, well, here it is:

Vietnamese flag removed at Irvine Valley College:

.....Irvine Valley College officials have removed a colorful flag display in the atrium of the student center here, after threats of a large-scale protest from the local expatriate Vietnamese community over the flag depicting the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
.....The 144 miniature flags have hung from the second floor atrium for many years without controversy, in a gesture designed to symbolize the diversity of its student body.
.....On Thursday, college officials removed the display that has hung for a decade, in the wake of threats that busloads of protesters could arrive to disrupt the campus, if the Vietnamese flag were not removed.
....."We wanted to be considerate and represent the diverse population at IVC," campus spokeswoman Diane Oaks said Monday. "We are developing an alternate method of expression."
.....Westminster Councilman Andy Quash and Garden Grove Councilwoman Dina Nguyen said they met with college officials on Wednesday, after receiving calls from numerous constituents about the flag display.
....."We reminded them that in 1999, in the city of Westminster, that flag hung in a video store led to a 49-day protest peaking at 50,000 people," Quash said. "I'm sure the college hung the flag without realizing it is very provocative to certain students."
.....Nearly two months of protests in early 1999 were ignited after a video store owner put up a Socialist Republic of Vietnam flag and a poster of Ho Chi Minh in his window.
.....Thousands of protesters demonstrated between January and March over the issue, which led to court battles over the owner's right to display the symbols even though they were causing a public disturbance.
.....Nearly 5 percent of IVC's students are Vietnamese-American, Oaks said.
.....Nguyen said she had been contacted by several constituents, and she agreed with them that the flag should come down.
....."It's offensive because this flag represents a regime that is very dictatorial and does not respect human rights," Nguyen said. "It is not democratic, and that is why a lot of Vietnamese Americans are here as refugees. To see that being honored, well, millions of people lost their lives over that flag."
.....College officials decided to remove all the flags, instead of merely the Vietnamese one, because of safety concerns. Occasionally, she said, students will swipe the flags, and the college was concerned about the safety of students leaning over a second-floor atrium wall to filch them.
.....The flags, initially purchased a decade ago by the student government, are in storage, Oaks said.
.....Student government vice president Matthew Contorelli, 23, said no one had notified him that the flags were being removed, but he supported the decision in retrospect.
....."It's the best way to keep a peaceful environment," Contorelli said.
.....Downstairs, in the college cafeteria, biology student Robert Fuller said he hadn't noticed the flags missing, but he would have left them up.
....."It's sort of bland out there now, when it was so colorful before," Fuller said about the two-story gray atrium.

Campus crime rates have fallen—for violent crime too

Listening to some of our trustees—especially former cop John Williams—one might get the idea that violent crime is on the rise at American colleges and universities. (See Williams' remarks last week: trustee report; 1:44 into the video.)

Not so.

From this morning’s Inside Higher Ed: “Campus Crime Rates Fell From ‘94 to ‘04”:

The tragic killings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University have focused unprecedented attention on campus crime. But a special report issued by the Bureau of Justice Statistics last week — updating data more than a decade old — found long-term declines in campus crime rates at four-year institutions, and also substantial evidence for the professionalization of campus security forces.

Campus crime rates at four-year college and universities fell 9 percent for violent crimes and 30 percent for property crimes, between 1994 and 2004, the report found. The total in 2004, the bureau said, was 62 reports of serious violent crime and 1,625 reports of serious property crime per 100,000 students. Crime rates were significantly higher at private colleges than at public institutions, the report found….

Perhaps Mr. Williams should consider the possibility that he is exaggerating the threat of campus violence owing to its being more "available" in his thinking:

Essentially the [availability] heuristic operates on the notion that "if you can think of it, it must be important." Media coverage can help fuel a person's example bias with widespread and extensive coverage of unusual events, such as airline accidents, and less coverage of more routine, less sensational events, such as car accidents. For example, when asked to rate the probability of a variety of causes of death, people tend to rate more "newsworthy" events as more likely because they can more readily recall an example from memory. In fact, people often rate the chance of death by plane crash higher than the chance by car crash, and death by natural disaster as probable only because these unusual events are more often reported than more common causes of death. In actuality, death from car accidents is much more common than airline accidents. Additional rare forms of death are also seen as more common than they really are because of their inherent drama such as shark attacks, and lightning.... (Wikipedia: the availability heuristic)

It's frustrating, dealing with trustees (you know the ones) who are opposed to intellectualism and science. You can't reason with them. If you try, you'll be dismissed as being "pointy-headed" and unrealistic.

Trustees: take some logic. Hey, Mr. Probolsky took an "intro to phil" class, and he's much improved! Ain'cha noticed?

The Mathur watch

.....OCCASIONALLY, I Google “Raghu Mathur,” for the Chancellor is indeed a fascinating fellow. Here's what I came across this morning.

1. Teaming Mathurian women

.....Did you know that Raghu maintains an association with the California Women’s Leadership Association (CWLA)? It’s essentially a club for Republican women who seek power. (See its website.)
.....CWLA has a “statement of belief,” which comprises the usual conservative/libertarian stuff: smaller government, individual freedom, etc.
.....CWLA has goals, too:

The goals of this organization are to…demonstrate and develop the strengths women bring to the policy-making arena of problem solving skills, consensus building, and teaming; and [to] educate women to leverage power to attain specific goals, working within the system.

.....Teaming? Strengths women bring? Leveraging power? Sounds mighty retro-creepy, in an Ayn Rand sort of way.
.....Our man Raghu can be found—in photographs—at several points on the website: see him with OC District Attorney Tony Rackauckas; see him with OC Supervisor John Moorlach; see him with the OC Auditor-controller, Joe Shmo and County Corpse Boy John Williams.
.....Hey! How come there aren't any women in these pictures?

2. ARGOSY won't abide plagiarists

.....As you know, the Chancellor is proud of his association with Argosy University. I came across the fellow’s biography (on the district website) this morning. It explains that "Dr. Mathur serves as an Advisory Board Member for the School of Education at Argosy University where he also teaches courses in educational leadership to doctoral students.”
.....I decided to do a little research on Argosy. The for-profit university has 18 locations in 12 states. It seems to specialize in teaching Psychology, Business, and Education.
.....I came across this: according to Wikipedia, one or two years ago, one of Argosy’s faculty and its Director of Training (at its psychology campus in Chicago) screwed up bigtime. (The incident was fully reported by the Chicago Sun-Times. See also famous plagiarists.) Psychologist Bindu Ganga, who received her doctorate from Argosy, was accused of plagiarism by one of her students! According to the student, Ganga had quoted verbatim from Charles Ford's Lies! Lies!! Lies!!!—without attribution—in her Psych dissertation!
.....Says Wiki, “Initially, the school found ‘no merit’ in the accusations, and scolded the accuser, noting her accusation in her academic record.”
.....What happened next was very odd. Eventually, Argosy “recanted” and fired Professor Ganga. I guess they finally checked. Argosy also took back her doctorate.
.....According to Wiki, such actions are unprecedented in academia. Not so sure about that.
.....But get this: according to Wiki, “One year later, Argosy reinstated Ganga's Doctoral degree, but required the plagiarist to do a completely original Doctoral thesis.”
.....Boy, they sure do have high standards at Argosy.
.....No doubt that's why they hired our Raghu.

•• Just in case you haven't seen this slide show—concerning the early days of the MATHUR ERA—check it out. (Click on any image that interests you. It will enlarge. I especially like the Hugh Hewitt slide. Check it out.)