Summer Readings

Our Universities: The Outrageous Reality, Andrew Delbanco

Public Research Universities: Why They Matter, AAAS

The Pope and the Planet, Bill McKibben

What Is Wrong with the West’s Economies?, Edmund S. Phelps

The Mystery of ISIS, NYRB

China: The Superpower of Mr. Xi, NYRB

Dual Enrollment: Is High School the Future of Higher Education?, AHA Forum 

What Does It Mean to Think Historically?, Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke

How Long to the PhD?, Robert B. Townsend

How Do We Learn from History?, James J. Sheehan

After Waterloo, Marco D`eramo

The Failure of the EU’s Technocrats, AI

Escaping the Civil War Trap in the Middle East, K. M. Pollack and B. F. Walter

'50 Ways to Live the Good Life'

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Pub. Date: December 2006

With her 25th book, lifestyle philosopher Alexandra Stoddard offers simple steps for taking charge of your life--your way. In brief essays filled with useful examples and optimism, she reveals 50 choices you can make to live joyfully in pursuit of what is true, good, and beautiful. Her essays help us trust ourselves ("Intuition is your guiding light"), stay steady in a storm ("Your choices count most in a crisis"), embrace the new ("Accept opportunity"), address unfinished business ("Have as few regrets as possible"), surround ourselves with delights ("Redefine what is beautiful"), and remember to have fun ("Cheap thrills are thrilling").

As a pioneering writer and lecturer on personal happiness for the past twenty years, Alexandra has inspired millions to break the "rules" and pursue fulfillment. Now, as scientists have begun to discover the benefits of living a happy life, Alexandra provides practical ways to live happily every day. She puts us in charge of our choices, reminding us that we always have a choice about what we think, feel, and do. When we are true to ourselves, we can fly above stress and conflict, contented and confident that we are the right path.

Every choice you make is an opportunity to delight in life. You Are Your Choices offers insight and companionship each step of the way.

Deborah Bigelow - Library Journal

Stoddard's (Living a Beautiful Life) guide, which invites readers to live a good, beautiful, and true life, fits right in with people's desire to live life differently in the new year. In 50 short essays, Stoddard incorporates the thoughts of great philosophers and leaders into commonsense ideas for daily application. She invites readers to embrace variety, e.g., by tasting a new flavor of ice cream or learning to identify constellations. Similarly, she encourages the celebration of simple rituals by using a special bar of soap or a beautiful towel for hand washing. Everyone will undoubtedly find something of value in this gem of a book for most public libraries.

Biography

Alexandra Stoddard is the author of more than twenty-five books and is a sought-after speaker on the art of living well. Through her lectures, articles, media appearances, and books such as Choosing Happiness, Things I Want My Daughters to Know, You Are Your Choices, and many more, she has inspired people around the world to pursue more fulfilling lives. She and her husband, Peter Megargee Brown, live in Stonington Village, Connecticut.

Table of Contents

An Invitation 1
Every Day, Commit Yourself to Experiencing the Good Life 4
Be True to All Your Choices 9
Be Responsible-Say No 12
Stand On Your Own Two Feet 15
Information Is Not Inspiration 19
Take Satisfaction in Doing the Right Thing 22
Go After What You Love 25
Have Realistic Expectations 29
Live from the Inside Out 33
Celebrate Simple Ceremonies 36
Reevaluate Your Priorities Regularly 43
Have as Few Regrets as Possible 48
Leave the Safe Harbor 52
Who Knows, It Might Be Good 57
Redefine What Is Beautiful 61
The Power of Flowers 67
Share the Beauty 72
Live with the Objects You Love 75
Why Not Be Comfortable? 80
Maintain Balance Through Your Choices 84
Cultivate Good Energy 87
Cheap Thrills Are Thrilling 91
You Own Your Self 95
Stop Complaining 98
Accept Responsibility 101
Be Aware 104
Your Choices Count Most in a Crisis 107
Faster Isn't Better 109
Reach Out-Literally 113
Privacy Please 116
A Free Day for You 119
Good Design Matters 122
Enough Is Enough 125
Give Yourself Time 130
Get Going 134
Embrace Variety 138
Move On 143
Walk Away 147
See the Big in the Little 150
Surround Yourself with People You Trust 154
Intuition Is Your Guiding Light 157
Never Say Never 160
Understand the Law of Cause and Effect 162
Choose Love for Yourself and Others 165
Do More Things That Make You Happy 168
Trust Your Subjective Well-Being 171
Avoid Perfection in Pursuit of Excellence 176
Get Organized 181
Why Not Now? 186
Wise Choices, Yes, and Good Luck 190
.
Source: Barnes and Noble

.

The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking

Princeton University Press, 2012

Winner of the 2013 Silver Medal in Self-Help, Independent Publisher Book Awards

Also available as an audiobook

Reviews | Table of Contents

Introduction[PDF] 

The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking presents practical, lively, and inspiring ways for you to become more successful through better thinking. The idea is simple: You can learn how to think far better by adopting specific strategies. Brilliant people aren't a special breed--they just use their minds differently. By using the straightforward and thought-provoking techniques in The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking, you will regularly find imaginative solutions to difficult challenges, and you will discover new ways of looking at your world and yourself--revealing previously hidden opportunities.

The book offers real-life stories, explicit action items, and concrete methods that allow you to attain a deeper understanding of any issue, exploit the power of failure as a step toward success, develop a habit of creating probing questions, see the world of ideas as an ever-flowing stream of thought, and embrace the uplifting reality that we are all capable of change. No matter who you are, the practical mind-sets introduced in the book will empower you to realize any goal in a more creative, intelligent, and effective manner. Filled with engaging examples that unlock truths about thinking in every walk of life, The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking is written for all who want to reach their fullest potential--including students, parents, teachers, businesspeople, professionals, athletes, artists, leaders, and lifelong learners.

Whenever you are stuck, need a new idea, or want to learn and grow, The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking will inspire and guide you on your way.

To share thinking stories, go to: http://5elementsofthinking.wordpress.com

Edward B. Burger is the president of Southwestern University, and an educational and business consultant. Formerly he was a professor at Williams College and a vice provost at Baylor University. He has authored or coauthored more than sixty-five articles, books, and video series; delivered over five hundred addresses and workshops throughout the world; and made more than fifty radio and television appearances. His teaching and scholarly writing have earned him many national honors and the largest teaching award given in the English-speaking world. Michael Starbird is University Distinguished Teaching Professor at The University of Texas at Austin and an educational and business consultant. His numerous books, lectures, workshops, and video courses have reached large national audiences of students, teachers, businesspeople, and lifelong learners. His success at teaching people to think has been recognized by more than fifteen awards, including the highest national teaching award in his field as well as statewide and university-wide honors selected from all disciplines.

Reviews:

"What do earth, fire, air, and water have to do with effective thinking? Everything, according to mathematics professors Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird. In The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking, the authors draw on these metaphor-laden elements from the natural world to demonstrate how to ask better questions, take calculated risks, learn from mistakes, and, ultimately, transform ourselves into more engaged and thoughtful citizens of the world. . . . The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking is a useful guide for anyone interested in tackling difficult subject matter, particularly in the classroom. The book also could serve as a solid supplementary text in courses on critical thinking."--Jennifer Moore, ForeWord Reviews

"If you remember being told by your teachers to think harder and having no idea how, The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking should help. . . . This is a snappy, illuminating read that should appeal to anyone who has ever dreamed of being a genius and is willing to strive, step by step, to become one."--David Wilson, South China Morning Post

"Thinking is good, enthuses this book by two distinguished teachers of mathematics. You might think you're being creative or having intuitions or conducting a romance or whatever, but it's all thinking, right? And you can learn to think better! So you can, and the advice herein, which includes many practical tenets of 'critical thinking', will surely be useful to many a schoolchild or business leader."--Steven Poole, Guardian (U.K.)

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9810.html 

European Universities’ Identity Crisis

VÍCTOR PÉREZ-DÍAZDEC 10, 2013www.project-syndicate.org/

Víctor Pérez-Díaz, President of the ASP Research Center in Madrid and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the European Academy, is the author of Markets and Civil Society and Europe and the Global Crisis: Economy, Geostrategy, Civil Society, and Values.

MADRID – Higher education in Europe today finds itself in a state of profound uncertainty. What should universities’ primary focus be – research, professional training, or social inclusion? Should governments invest more in higher education to underpin long-term economic growth? Should universities be left alone to compete and survive (or not) in a global education marketplace?

Amid the debates about their future role, Europe’s universities must not lose sight of their individual identity, their traditions, and their sense of social purpose. This will not be easy. University administrators face pressures from above – European institutions and national governments – and from their own researchers, teachers, and students.

Moreover, the parameters of the debate are becoming hazy. On one hand, universities are abiding by long-standing agreements with government; on the other, they face zealous reformers who seek market-based solutions that stress competition among institutions, encourage staff and student mobility, and emphasize student-centered learning.

Obviously, these outlooks generate very different implications for universities’ future. Traditionally, universities undertook research, provided a professional education, and offered a country’s young people a cultural foundation as they entered society. Today, none of these aims appears secure. Indeed, the gravest danger to Europe’s universities is a prolonged period of confusion about their ultimate aims.

Seeking truth through observation, experimentation, rational argument, and mutual criticism has always been a raison d’être of universities. Reflecting this, some European institutions are encouraged by government to try to match the research excellence attained by top universities in the United States.

But not all of Europe’s universities regard themselves primarily as research institutions. Many prefer to focus on preparing their students for the world of work. However, the skills that are now required outside academia are changing so rapidly that universities may struggle to marry the generic cognitive skills taught in the classroom – such as critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving, and writing – with the professional expertise that is increasingly acquired in the workplace. And if years of schooling do not translate into greater cognitive skills, then much of the economic justification for investing in higher education falls apart.

Universities have also had a public-service mission: to provide students with a cultural foundation for life. This purpose may seem increasingly controversial in pluralistic Western societies, but universities should at least provide their students with an understanding of the models, history, and philosophical fundamentals with which to debate these issues. Without a reasonable awareness of their socio-cultural environment, students may view universities merely as a place to pursue private goals, make useful connections, enjoy student life, and perhaps pick up a superficial sense of diversity.

Whichever path Europe’s universities take, maintaining a distinct identity in the face of global change and education reform will become increasingly difficult. Researchers are no longer confined within their ivory towers, but work as part of complex global networks alongside private-sector participants. Tenured professors, once central to the life and image of a college, are being replaced by part-time teachers who lack a strong connection to their institution.

Likewise, in the emerging conception of universities – one that draws heavily from the corporate world – educational “managers,” applying “best practices” (and always ready to move on to the next posting) – retain the most cursory regard for the institution’s life and traditions. And students, seen as mere consumers of a service, are invited to exercise choice regarding teachers, curricula, and location.

Some may find these changes exciting. But their purpose will be lost if pursuing them weakens the very identity of Europe’s universities, many of which are used to functioning in a world of state patronage and strict regulation. Policymakers must be aware of the educational and cultural damage that continuous reforms – all justified in the future-oriented jargon of the day – can wreak.

Universities must protect their institutional memories, local traditions, and commitment to each new generation of students. A loyal and grateful alumni network can help to ensure this. The alternative is a formulaic educational experience that not only lacks individual character, but that is also devoid of moral purpose.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/v-ctor-p-rez-d-az-on-the-corporate-makeover-of-higher-education-in-europe

The Value of the Humanities

The Value of the Humanities

By James Grossman

"The higher education system needs to evolve with the economy. . . . People pay taxes expecting that the public good will be served to the greatest degree possible. We call that a return on investment."
—Dale A. Brill, chairman of the Florida governor's task force on higher education

A"blue-ribbon" task force has recommended to Florida Governor Rick Scott that the state's public universities adopt a "strategic" tuition structure. "Strategic" in this case does not imply the kind of thoughtful planning that considers all aspects of an institution's mission and future. These recommendations instead offer a very narrow idea of strategy, designed, in the words of the president of the state senate, "to lash higher education to the realities and opportunities of the economy."

Perhaps more a leash than a lash. And a short leash, because even in the narrowest financial sense this is short-term thinking that ties the public university system to a single aspect of what should be a broad mission.

There are two issues here: whether the state's interest in public higher education is so purely financial that "return on investment" can be measured only in dollars, cents, and employment rates; and even within this narrow (and narrow-minded) frame whether this is smart strategy indeed.

The answer is no, on both counts, and I am proud that a group of historians at the University of Florida is spearheading the opposition with an online petition challenging the recommendations.

Both issues involve the concept of value. What is the value to the people of the state of Florida not only of the very presence of public higher education institutions, but also of each individual's graduation from those institutions? What is in it for the taxpayer to pay for some part of someone else's enhanced opportunities? What is the public "return on investment" for expenditures on postsecondary education?

These are big questions. Arguably, one has only to accept their importance to recognize why this task force's recommendations are so wrong-headed. The bull's-eye on the task force's target is the humanities. Governor Scott has made this clear in other contexts ("Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don't think so," he quipped in an interview) and suggested that humanities degrees are luxuries that are not affordable in a world of fiscal stringency and global competitiveness. But these are the very issues that humanities scholars discuss. Humanists teach students to inquire about the nature of value, why it matters to consider the particular time and place in which one is attributing value, and (yes), how to identify and evaluate the different ways of measuring that value.

It seems particularly striking that the governor of the state of Florida would find it difficult to appreciate the value of education beyond the narrow (if essential) arena of job creation and training. This is a state that would benefit from informed and thoughtful conversations about the nature of democracy, the basis of participation in a democratic polity, and the history of limitations on that participation. I don't know whether the state of Florida in particular needs more anthropologists; but I stand with National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman Jim Leach, who has suggested that having policymakers with more knowledge about the history and culture of certain countries in the Middle East and central Asia might have saved us a few wars, billions of dollars, and a lot of lives. Policymakers who majored in those "less strategic" disciplines in college like history and anthropology.

For the moment, however, let's concede the principle of the centrality of fiscal practicality to higher education policy. I agree that college education—at least in part—ought to serve individual career interests and even the state's interest in economic development. Most college students (and their parents who often foot the bill) do not have the luxury of excluding financial considerations from their educational choices. Indeed, the AHA's "Tuning" project is in part oriented toward enhancing the ability of first-year college students and their parents to appreciate the earning potential of a history major; and toward helping potential employers comprehend the "value" that a college graduate trained in historical thinking brings to the workplace.

I am guessing, however, that neither Brill nor Scott nor the Florida task force members have the foggiest notion of what that "value" is. Nor does Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who seems to think that these are good ideas that ought to travel north. It is possible that a history major (or a major in philosophy, English, or even Governor Scott's academic bête noir, anthropology), might not prepare a student for their first job in the private sector (which is Governor Scott's terrain, and that of Brill, who directs the research and policy development arm of the Florida Chamber of Commerce). It is the second job—and the third and fourth jobs—where humanities education comes into play. Ask most CEOs of large corporations, or thoughtful recruiters. I have. They will tell you that the company can teach a well-educated graduate whatever they need to know to do various kinds of entry-level work. They are looking for applicants who want to learn and know how to learn, educated men and women who can find and filter information, make sense out of it, and communicate what they have learned. In other words, history majors are as valuable to the state of Florida as mechanical engineers. And we won't even begin to discuss how mechanical engineers can benefit from sharing dorm space with history majors (and vice versa, of course).

—James Grossman is executive director of the AHA.

The Humanities and the World

By Allen Mikaelian

My friends who are lobbyists (everyone in DC has at least a few) tell me that they have never had less influence. Not long ago, when Congress actually passed legislation, lobbyists’ seeds could find be planted, for better or worse, in the furrows opened up by compromise. But when everything seems dictated by ideology, and the ground for compromise narrows to the vanishing point, lobbyists and advocates can accomplish little.

And yet, there we were, on Humanities Advocacy Day in mid-March, paying visits to senators’ legislative aides to make the case for continued funding of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and other programs devoted to humanities research and education. This should not have been a hard case to make; the amount of money devoted to the humanities in the federal budget is miniscule, the benefits are clear, and we weren’t even asking for more money—just a vote to staunch the bleeding of the last several years.

Still, the default position on the Hill right now is to cut first and ask questions later, and only those programs with clear benefit have a chance. So what is the clear benefit of humanities programs? It is no longer feasible to rely solely on the idea of “enriching” society, or even the benefits to society of a citizenship informed by the study of humanity. (Perhaps it’s best to stay away from the word “society” altogether, at least with some congressional staffers.) Certain members of Congress have all but ruled out funding for study their own contexts through the lens of political science—see this month’s Coalition Column and the recent statement by the AHA Council for examples.

One argument for the humanities, which was offered during our preparations for the advocacy day, struck me as particularly compelling, and when I presented it during a meeting with a legislative aide, it seemed to spark something. (At least she started to write things down, and responded positively when I followed up with information relating the argument to her state.) In summary, the argument goes, we can’t have an effective workforce in the global economy without the humanities. You just can’t get to an understanding of the role of culture and history in shaping globalization through study of STEM alone.

An example at hand is the NEH’s Bridging Cultures initiative, and the program under this umbrella that has a home in the AHA (Perspectives on History, March 2013). Here, community college teachers are discovering how the United States is part of the Pacific world. The benefits to understanding this area as an interconnected region in the global era are obvious, and the fact that this understanding will be imparted to students in two-year universities, where so much job training and retraining is happening, is truly exciting.

An example in this issue of Perspectives is Hong-Ming Liang’s work on the Middle Ground Journal. Liang shows how an academic journal can do much more than publish scholarship, and that an editor is much more than a wordsmith. His journal is part of a global network of scholars, but also of teachers and students at several levels.

By bringing that network to his students and to students in other departments, the work his journal does connects those students to the world. It’s not surprising that he finds interested interns among the college’s marketing department as well as among history majors. As a defense of the humanities, the project goes beyond the well-worn and unspecific claims that the humanities deliver “enrichment” or “critical thinking.” Further, the project is encouraging because the content matters—it is no accident that a world history journal is at the center of this project.

All of this, however, puts some additional imperatives behind the issues raised by Luke Clossey and Nicholas Guyatt in this issue. If the wider world is truly in “historians’ peripheral vision,” as they suggest, the consequences are profound and the opportunities that could be missed are immense. The discipline has an interest in keeping itself diverse for more than the sake of diversity alone. Without a greater balance between the amount of research devoted to a region and its global relevance, the discipline as a whole becomes much easier to dismiss.

Other disciplines have significant external pressures to maintain a global vision: The scientific community has global interests, scope, and networks. Economic imperatives push engineering toward greater global activity, if not global awareness.

Historians, on the other hand, will have to further global awareness in the discipline by themselves. Their job will be made easier by the fact that the discipline is naturally curious and open, but resources for the infrastructures, additional training, and travel needed to even out some of the disparities Clossey and Guyatt point to will be hard to come by.

Such help won’t, we can be sure, be arriving from Congress any time soon.

—Allen Mikaelian is the editor of Perspectives on History.

© American Historical Association

http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2013/1301/Value-of-the-Humanities.cfm

http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/issues/2013/1305/Endnote-The-Humanities-and-the-World.cfm

Universities and the Urban Growth Machine

Andrew Ross,  New York University

Dissent Magazine, October 2012

Why has the price tag of an American college degree skyrocketed (500 percent in the public sector since 1985) in recent decades? Instructional cost is not one of the reasons. Salaries of full-time faculty have been stagnant for a long time, and the massive conversion of tenure track jobs into contingent positions (more than two-thirds of professors are now off the tenure track) has sliced the teaching payroll at almost all institutions. Aside from the obvious factor of shrinking state inputs, there is common agreement that the addition of many new layers of administrators, combined with rapidly rising salaries at the senior ranks, has played a leading role. Throw in the heavy investment in all kinds of extracurricular amenities, sports facilities above all. And then there is the less tangible factor of buoyant demand for places. Colleges raise their fees because they can—there is no shortage of applications—and also because a higher price connotes more prestige. Even if domestic demand falls off, the shortfall will be more than made up from overseas. Indeed, some analysts estimate that the global market for higher education will grow by 80 percent over the next decade, as the rising middle class in rapidly developing countries pursue a brand name degree for their offspring.

Other factors are less well understood. Expansionary growth is foremost among them, and there are few colleges that have not embarked on ambitious new building campaigns in the last two decades (students joke that UCD is the acronym for “Under Construction Daily”). Contrary to the truism so cherished by developers, growth does not pay for itself, and it is even more costly in cities where land is scarce. Yet many of our urban research universities have been expanding their footprints. This is not simply to meet their needs, but also because city managers are relying on them to do so, often permitting them to behave like quasi-sovereign planning entities in the neighborhoods that host them. Universities, in short, have become a vital part of the urban growth machine.

We tend to speak about urban renewal in the past tense, but the truth is it never really ended—we have just given it different names in the years since its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s. The first phase of urban renewal was accompanied by the building of urban freeways and mega-project construction, which involved the green-lighting of sports stadiums, convention centers, and eventually museums. All of these were super-block complexes, built with vast public subsidies, and often with limited public economic impact. Famously, a Chicago economist once estimated that if the public monies spent on a downtown football stadium were dropped in dollar notes out of a helicopter they would have much more economic benefit.

The “edifice complex” did not fade until the 1990s, and there have been at least two growth paradigms since then, both of them linked to the high-wage knowledge economy. One was the “creative city,” which Richard Florida popularized, and it revolved around recruitment of creative talent. This model was much cheaper than shelling out large subsidies for sports stadiums or to corporate investors—a few bike trails, some fair-trade coffee shops, and the semblance of an art scene (to attract the all-important gay population). But it did open up a new circuit of debt-financing for the urban growth machine–student loans. After all, student debt is what underpins the supply of the educated workforce in a “creative city.”

The other one is called “meds and eds,” and it is based on the premise that urban research universities and associated biomedical complexes can and do function as vital economic drivers. They are often among the largest employers in town; they bring in research monies, they train young creatives who tend to stick around, and most important, unlike corporations or major league franchises, they are not going to leave town any time soon. So urban managers have been reassessing these institutions, which they had hitherto taken for granted, and increasingly the Chambers of Commerce in many cities regard them as key assets for luring new business and retaining established ones. Some cities, like Pittsburgh, credit “meds and eds” with their turnaround economic success, and others are now depending on these complexes to generate jobs, wealth, population, and prestige.

Phoenix, the topic of my most recent book, faithfully adopted each of these successive turnaround strategies, and most recently persuaded Arizona State University to build a brand new campus in the downtown area. In addition, a pile of taxpayer subsidy has gone into a new biomedical complex on the vacant lots adjacent to it. Other cities in the metro area are also planning their future growth around colleges. Mesa put out a nationwide call for a college to relocate, or build a campus for its own downtown.

In a metropolis like New York City, the two large research universities, Columbia and NYU, have both embarked on ambitious expansion plans. Why are these institutions so committed to growth? Surely the business of spreading out and scaling up must run counter to their quest for prestige? Academic cachet, after all, is supposed to be a scarce commodity, available only to the select few, and not, in NYU’s case at least, an expanding student body, ever denser at its downtown Manhattan core and increasingly dispatched to campus locations all over the globe.

One of the answers is that these universities are responding in kind to the open invitation of urban managers to help diversify the economy of city that relies too heavily on its FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) industries. Not long after he came into office, John Sexton, NYU’s president, spoke publicly about how the intellectual, cultural, and educational industries now formed an ICE sector, large enough in its own right to stand alongside the city’s anchoring FIRE sector. Statistics were generated to show that ICE may be more resilient and profitable in the long run than FIRE. FIRE + ICE became the promotional banner under which the NYU administration pushed its interests through the city bureaucracy.

Of course, these are not altogether distinct sectors, and least of all in the case of NYU, which has a massive real estate presence in Manhattan (and now Brooklyn) and whose basic revenue depends on the student loan business—one of the most lucrative sectors of the finance industry. For evidence of the interlocking of FIRE and ICE interests, look no further than NYU’s own Board of Trustees (which includes Catherine Reynolds,who owns a company—Educap—that makes high-interest, predatory loans to studentswho have maxed out of the federal loan market). There you will find some of city’s biggest land developers, Wall Street’s wealthy financiers, and a bevy of corporate tycoons. Collectively speaking, they are members of the city’s “permanent government,” which calls the shots (especially on shaping land use), and no elected politician can afford to alienate a body with that kind of clout. Practically speaking, they are the governors of the city’s growth machine, and, as I have suggested, they now see urban universities as essential drivers of urban growth.

Growth does not pay for itself (taxpayers pick up the tab), though it is a relatively efficient way of transferring public monies to private pockets. Does NYU’s own growth fit the bill? Certainly there are many streams of public funds that flow into this private university. Government grants from multiple federal agencies are a basic source of funding for its research operations ($337 million in grants and contracts from federal, state and city sources). The New York State Dormitory Authority heavily subsidized the dormitory buildings NYU has erected as it made the transition from local commuter college to residential national university. NYU collects tens of million a year from New York State in grants.

A much larger revenue stream comes from federal student loans—$108,641,000 in 2011. In 2010, NYU had $659 million in total student debt, a figure bigger than the gross domestic product of twelve countries, and it is a national leader in the debt carried by its graduates, at 40 percent more than the national average. According a recentNewsweek ranking, NYU is now the fourth “Least Affordable School” in the United States. And in the latest Princeton Review college rankings, its financial aid and administration ranked first—for being the worst. The projected $5 billion expansion plan is certain to increase the student debt burden. Most of current student loans are federal money, so we can add these on to the public inputs received by this private university at a time when public universities are being put to the sword.

But how does this public cash find its way into private pockets? Any analysis of payroll distribution would show a clear skewing of compensation toward two employee classes: senior administrators whose salaries have skyrocketed over the last fifteen years, and key faculty who are conduits for top grant funding or who generate lucrative intellectual property for the university (NYU also tops the list of universities that extract revenue from IP licensing—another way in which public monies in the form of research grants gets propertized as an excludable private good). But the most pervasive community rumor about NYU lies in its ties to real estate interests. Several graduates have described their alma mater to me as “a real estate company which also issues degrees.” As one of the city’s two or three largest landowners, the university has an extensive real estate portfolio, and it is perpetually buying, selling, and leasing buildings, or land-banking properties for future uses and returns. An administrator once remarked to me that he feels as if he is running a hotel and restaurant chain given how many beds and cafeteria seats NYU caters to on a daily basis. It is difficult to operate at that kind of that volume without favoring a tidy list of clients and contractors.

It’s fair to conclude then that NYU is a nonprofit institution that generates profits for others. Because its books are closed—and there is no pretense of fiscal transparency—not much can be said about the private profit structure, though there is little that would surprise long-serving employees. Nor is it a leap to observe that $5 billion worth of construction in the heart of downtown is a huge boost in general to the business climate of downtown development, and that it will enrich builders and contractors, amplify area rents, and add nothing to the city’s affordable housing stock. Yet the result is assumed to be in the public interest. Why? Because it is cloaked in the public goodness that is the stock-in-trade of any educational institution.

Perhaps the most important, and least understood, part of NYU’s expansion rests upon its debt financing. The absence of a business plan on the administration’s part has attracted a good deal of disbelief, and rightfully so. What kind of entity is able to raise $5 billion in the current economic landscape? More telling yet was the response of one administrator to queries about the proposed funding of the plan: “NYU is not afraid of debt,” she assured her audience, in a tone reminiscent of the freewheeling credit culture of 2004. But we miss the point if we don’t see how this kind of comment evokes an intimacy with debt and bond ratings that is essential to the capital funding of modern universities.

The ability of universities to raise tuition fees at will (without any fear of institutional default) is the basic collateral requirement for securing a good credit rating, which makes it much cheaper to borrow money to service existing debts and finance large-scale construction. In turn, this capital-intensive construction generates more space per capita, which is a key metric in the US News and World Report’s college rankings. Indeed, the need for NYU to improve on this metric is the only rationale offered by President Sexton for the 2031 expansion. NYU, according to him, falls too far behind Harvard on this rating. Invariably, however, universities need to increase enrollment, as NYU intends to do (an “overyield” this year alone brought 1,600 additional students) in order to secure the tuition-backed bond issues, and so the rationale behind the enterprise falls apart. But the outcome, for the bond financiers, hedge funds, and institutional investors, not to mention the construction industry in general, is an ongoing bonanza.

It is too crude to conclude that the 2031 plan is designed to generate profits for FIRE interests. There is no servant-master relationship at work here, because the main actors are members of an interlocking elite, serving each other’s executive class interests. Senior administrators revolve between high positions in government, Wall Street, and the academy, and the capacity to draw on executive influence in each of these sectors is key to the new patterns of wealth transfer. Jacob Lew is a notable example. Recruited from the Clinton Administration, where he was director of the Office of Management and Budget, he served as Executive Vice President at NYU during the period of the graduate assistant union strike, moved to Citigroup as COO of the bank’s Alternative Investments unit, and is now back in the White House as President Obama’s Chief of Staff. John Sexton himself served (from 2003 to 2007) as Chairman of the Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and as chair of the Federal Reserve System’s Council of Chairs.

With mortgage and other credit markets still in the doldrums, universities have become a very attractive option for investors looking for high returns on debt-financed growth. Money capital has poured into construction bonds, student loans, and other financial instruments spun out of the tuition bubble. When universities become the apple of the financier’s eye, they begin to generate debt in every direction, as I have shown here. NYU’s own long-term debt is a hefty $2.6 billion, far outpacing that of other comparable urban universities: Columbia ($1.3 billion), USC ($0.973 billion), and Penn ($1.7 billion).

To conclude, let me argue briefly that the developments I have been describing do not prove that universities are becoming more like corporations. I am not a fan of the label “corporate university,” though it is popular among colleagues around the academic water cooler. It is a lazy kind of shorthand for the changes coursing through higher education, and largely because it neglects how corporate organizations are being restructured at a pace that makes even the most entrepreneurial university look like a monastery by comparison. Modern research universities need to be seen as a new kind of organizational species evolving on their own power track, as they shake off older functions regarding public accountability, inclusion, and access. Their market orientation is not akin to corporations, not even corporations in the military sector who are just as dependent on federal contracts and guarantees.

In the Cold War heyday, C. Wright Mills argued that the exercise of power in the United States was shaped by “interlocking directorates” drawn from the corporations, government, and the military. Now that research universities are becoming independent drivers of the knowledge economy as stimulants of growth and development rather than as mere providers of trained labor and research, they are forging their own path to power, adding to the tripartite model that Mills set forth inThe Power Elite in 1956. Universities, far from devolving into mere adjuncts of corporations, will more likely end up as players in their own right, throwing their weight around in their own backyard at the same time as they project their presence overseas in the worldwide establishment of offshore campuses.

Andrew Ross is a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University. His latest book is Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City(Oxford University Press, 2011). He is also a member of the OWS Strike Debt Assembly.

http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=633

On Leaving Academe

Terran Lane

The Chronicle of Higher Education

18 August 2012

The author, formerly an associate professor of computer science at the University of New Mexico, is now a software engineer at Google. This essay was first published on his blog Ars Experientia.

Earlier this year, I resigned from my position as an associate professor of computer science at the University of New Mexico; in July, I started as a software engineer at Google. Countless people, from my friends to my (former) dean, have asked, Why? Why give up an excellent—some say "cushy"—tenured faculty position for the grind of corporate life?

It's a good question. Tenure represents the ultimate in intellectual freedom; my colleagues in my department were talented, friendly, and incredibly innovative; and I was privileged to work with some excellent students, a number of whom would have fit in just fine at powerhouse institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Purdue University.

Honestly, the reasons are myriad and complex, and some of them are purely personal. But I wanted to lay out the ones that speak to larger trends at the university, in New Mexico, in academe, and in the United States in general. I haven't made this move lightly, and I think it's an important cautionary note to sound: The factors that have made academe less appealing to me will also affect other professors. I'm concerned that the United States—one of the innovation powerhouses of the world—will hurt its own future considerably if we continue to make educational professions unappealing.

Making a difference. Ultimately, I got into academic science to make a positive contribution in the world. My goal hasn't changed, but, for some of the reasons I outline below, it has become harder to achieve over time. Google is a strong example of an organization that actually is using advanced computer science to make a real, positive difference in the world. While it's also difficult to make an impact working at an immense company like Google, in the current climate it seems I have a better chance here than in academe.

Work-life imbalance. Immense amounts have been written about the imbalance issue, and I won't try to reprise the arguments here. Suffice it to say that the professorial life can be grueling, if you try to do the job well, and being posttenure doesn't make it easier. This is a widespread problem in academe, and my university was no different. As of my departure, the University of New Mexico had still not approved a unified parental or family-leave policy for faculty, let alone established consistent policies and support for work-life balance.

Centralization of authority and decrease of autonomy. In my time at the university, I served under four presidents, three provosts, and two deans. The consistent pattern of management changes was centralization of control and resources, and increased pressure on departments and faculty members. Those trends gradually, but quite noticeably, produced implicit and explicit attacks on faculty autonomy (less money under faculty control and more uncertainty). In turn, I (and many others) feel that those attacks subvert both teaching and research missions of the university.

Budget climate. A near-decade of two simultaneous foreign wars, topped off by the most brutal recession in two generations, has left federal and state budgets reeling. A poisonous political climate and a Congressional meltdown has destroyed any chance of coherent, reasoned budget planning.

In the face of such pressures, we have seen at least seven years of flat or declining support for federal science programs while state legislatures have slashed educational spending across the country. Together, those forces are crunching universities, which has led to additional pressure on faculty members. Professors are being pushed ever harder to win ever higher levels of federal research money precisely at a time when that money is ever tougher to come by.

Such trends hurt the university by putting the teaching mission at odds with the research mission and subjugating both to the quest for the elusive dollar. A recent policy change in my old university's engineering school, for example, uses teaching load as a punishment to goad professors into chasing grant money. (Indeed, the policy measures research success only as a function of dollars brought in. Strangely, research productivity doesn't enter the picture, let alone creativity.)

Hyperspecialization, insularity, and narrowness of vision. The economic pressures have also turned into intellectual pressures. When humans feel panicked, we tend to become more conservative and risk-averse—we go with the sure thing, rather than the gamble.

The problem is that creativity is all about exploratory risk. The goal is to find new things—to go beyond state-of-the-art and to discover or create things that the world has never seen. It's a contradiction to simultaneously forge into the unknown and to insist on a sure bet. Traditionally, U.S. universities have provided a safe home for that kind of exploration, and federal, state, and corporate dollars have supported it (incidentally, buying advanced research far cheaper than it would be cost in either industry or government, and insulating those entities from the risk). The combination has yielded amazing dividends, paying off at many, many times the level of investment.

In the current climate, however, all of those entities, as well as scientists themselves, are leaning away from exploratory research and insisting on sure bets. Most of the money goes to ideas and techniques (and researchers) that have proven profitable in the past, while it's harder and harder to get ideas outside of the mainstream to be accepted by peer review, supported by the university, or financed by grant agencies. The result is increasingly narrow vision in a variety of scientific fields and an intolerance of creative exploration. (My colleague Kiri Wagstaff, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has written an excellent analysis of one facet of this problem within our own field of machine learning.)

Poor incentives. The "publish or perish" and "procure funding or perish" pressures discourage exploration outside one's own specialty. It's hard to do exploratory or interdisciplinary research when it is unlikely to yield either novel publications or new grant money (let alone, say, help students complete their degrees) in your own field.

But many things that are socially important to do don't necessarily require novel research in all of the participating fields, so there's a strong disincentive to work on those projects. As just one example from my own experience: My research team was asked to help on a medical-school project that would actually help save babies' lives. But the statistical techniques needed for the project were already established, so there was nothing precisely publishable for my graduate students working on it and no good basis for new grant proposals from the work. Any time spent on it would delay students' progress toward their Ph.D. with nothing to show for it on their CV's. When you can't get credit for helping to save babies' lives, then you know there's something seriously wrong in the incentive system.

Mass production of education. There's been a lot of excitement in the media about Stanford University's 100,000-student courses in computer science, MIT's open-sourced classes, and other efforts at mass distance education. In some ways, those efforts really are thrilling—they offer the first truly deep structural change in how we do education in perhaps a thousand years. They offer democratization—opening up access to world-class education to people from all over the globe of diverse economic and social backgrounds. How many Srinivasa Ramanujans might we enable, if only we could get high-quality education to more people? But I have to sound three notes of caution.

First, I worry that mass production in this case will have the same effect that it has had on manufacturing for over two centuries: Administrators and regents, eager to save money, will push for ever larger remote classes and fewer faculty members to teach them. Are we approaching a day in which there is only one professor of computer science for the whole country?

Second, I suspect that the "winners win" cycle will distort academe the same way that it has industry and society. When freed of constraints of distance and tuition, why wouldn't every student choose a Stanford or MIT education over, say, the University of New Mexico? How long before we see the AT&T, Microsoft, or Google of academe? How long before 1 percent of the universities and professors garner 99 percent of the students and money?

Third, and finally, this trend threatens to kill some of what is most valuable about the academic experience—to both students and teachers. At the most fundamental level, education happens between individuals—a personal connection, however long or short, between mentor and student.

Whether it's answering a question raised in class, taking 20 minutes to work through a tricky idea during office hours, or spending years of close collaboration in a Ph.D.-mentorship relationship, the human connection matters to both sides. It resonates at levels far deeper than the mere conveyance of information—it teaches us how to be social together and sets role models of what it is to perform in a field, to think rigorously, to be professional, and to be intellectually mature. I am terribly afraid that our efforts to democratize the process will kill the human connection and sterilize one of the most joyful facets of this thousand-year-old institution.

Salaries. It has always been the case that academics are paid less—substantially so—than their comparable colleagues in industry. (That is especially true in highly competitive fields, such as science, technology, engineering, and math as well as various health fields, law, and certain other disciplines.)

Traditionally, universities compensate for the disparity with broad intellectual freedom, a flexible schedule, and the joy of mentoring new generations of students. But all of the trends I have outlined above have cut into those compensations, leaving faculty members underpaid, but with little to show for it. As one of my colleagues remarked when I announced my departure, "We're being paid partly in cool. If you take away the cool parts of the job, you might as well go make more money elsewhere."

Anti-intellectualism, anti-education, and attacks on science and academe. There is a terrifying trend in this country right now of attacking academe, specifically, and free thought and intellectualism, generally. Free thought is painted as subversive, dangerous, elitist, and (strangely) conspiratorial. ("That word. I do not think it means what you think it means.")

Universities are accused of inefficiency and professors of becoming deadwood after tenure or of somehow "subverting the youth." (Socrates's accusers made a similar claim before they poisoned one of the great thinkers of the human race.) Politicians attack science to score points with angry voters, religious fundamentalists, and corporate sponsors. Some elements of those feelings have always floated through the United States psyche, but in recent years they have risen to the level of a festering wound in the zeitgeist of the country.

Perhaps those who sling accusations at education have forgotten that the United States helped reshape millennia of social and economic inequity by spreading public education in the 19th century? Or that education has underlaid the majority of the things that have made this country great—fields in which we have led the world? Art, music, literature, political philosophy, architecture, engineering, science, mathematics, medicine, and many others? That the largest economy in the world rests on (educated) innovation, and that the most powerful military in human history is enabled by technological and engineering fruits of the educational system? That the very bones of the United States—the Constitution we claim to hold so dear—were crafted by highly educated political idealists of the Enlightenment, who firmly believed that freedom and a more just society are possible only through the actions of an enlightened and educated population of voters?

Frankly, it's sickening, not to mention dangerous. If the haters, fearers, and political opportunists have their way, they will gut one of the greatest institutions in human history and, in the process, will cut the throat of this country, draining its lifeblood of future creativity. Other countries will be happy to fill the gap, I'm sure.

There are other factors behind my decision, of course. Any life change is too complex to express in a short essay. Those are the major ones, though.

Nor am I necessarily done with academe forever. I'm going to give the industry track a try for a while, but I could well find myself back in higher education in the future. There are certainly many things I still find beautiful and joyful about faculty work. In the interim, I will look for other ways to contribute to society, other ways to help educate the future, and other ways to change the world.

http://chronicle.com/article/On-Leaving-Academe/133717/