Worst School Board In The Nation

I’m Surprised It’s NOT In Wash.  D.C.

Don Surber blogs from the Daily Mail:

Most of Buffalo’s kids don’t graduate from high school, yet its school board members traveled first class on $90,000 worth of trips and dined on catered meals before each school board meeting — at a cost of $33,000.

And then the members of the worst school board in the nation don’t appreciate a typical menu of “egg rolls, shrimp lo mein, General Tso’s chicken, pepper steak, sesame chicken, cheesecake, cookies and flan, among other goodies.”

That was last week’s menu.

Sheesh.  The D.C. area schools are known for union members that stole $5 million from the teacher’s pension fund.  That was simple theft.  This, this is simple stupidity.

“It’s not a high-end buffet, and it’s not a lot of it, either. It serves like 20, 30 people maybe,” board member Ralph Hernandez told the Buffalo News. “The administrators eat there, too, the superintendent and associate superintendents. Most of us don’t even eat it. We’re sick of it, and it’s the same stuff all the time.”

Uh-huh.  The Buffalo school system spends over $16,000 per student.  I see how that’s possible.

Obama’s Embryo Destruction

Who’s Afraid of Post-Modernism?

We were hearing last week about the freeing up of science from the yoke of politics.  No more would government prevent scientific research that would otherwise find cures for a host of diseases that plague us by using dubious ethics as a bludgeon to hold academics at bay.  Yuval Levin, who’s associated with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, cuts through the verbiage written about the new Human Embryonic Stem Cell research policies put in place by the Obama administration.  It is, as he says, important to know what the new policy does and does not do.

The federal government has in fact never before-even under President Clinton-used taxpayer dollars to encourage the destruction of human embryos, as it will now begin to do. Obama’s decision is an unprecedented break with the longstanding federal policy of neutrality toward embryo research. Before 2001, not one dollar had ever been spent to support embryonic stem cell research, and when George W. Bush provided funds for the first time, he did so in a way that made sure tax dollars did not create an incentive for the ongoing destruction of human embryos. President Obama’s new policy will do precisely that: it will tell researchers that if they destroy a human embryo, they will become eligible for federal dollars to use in studying its cells; establishing an obvious and unprecedented incentive.

Well, that’s change, I guess.  No more politics over science, right?

Over at Hot Air, Ed Morressey puts his finger on what really happened.

The advocates of this policy cheer the supposed triumph of science over politics, but in truth, it’s the reverse. Over a year ago, researchers found a way to unlock adult stem cells to have the same flexibility as hEsc lines, ie, the ability to transform into any kind of tissue. Bush’s policy in effect pushed the government-funded research in that direction, which prompted the breakthrough. With that process available, we have no need to grind up our offspring to cure diseases, especially since grinding up our offspring has yet to result in even one therapeutic result, despite billions of dollars of research into hEsc. A scientific approach would dictate that we follow success instead of failure.

In fact, the market has done just that.

But the Bush administration was anti-science, wasn’t it?  I mean, everyone was saying so.  It was the meme.

Melissa Clouthier at Pajamas Media questions that idea.

The press, the left and even some on the right have purposefully misrepresented President Bush’s position about stem cells, making it seem like the President hated stem cell research in particular and science generally. This was a simplistic view meant to reinforce the image of Bush as a bible-beating anti-science zealot rather than a man sensitive to the ethical concerns of using the citizenry’s money to fund research which many voters view as morally ambiguous.

President Obama reinforced this inaccurate view by taking jabs at President Bush saying, “Promoting science isn’t just about providing resources, it is also about protecting free and open inquiry. It is about letting scientists like those here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it’s inconvenient especially when it’s inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.”

President Obama made it sound as if scientists themselves are devoid of ideology and politics. One only has to examine the overwhelming amount of breast cancer research compared to every other kind of cancer research, to know that this is simply not true:

As for breast cancer, the second most lethal malignancy in females, investigation in that field has long received more funding from the National Cancer Institute than any other tumor research, though lung cancer heads the list of fatal tumors for both sexes.

When government funds are used, politics necessarily plays a part in what does and does not get funded. Scientists know this, politicians know this and citizens should know this. [Latest example: nuclear power. Want politics to drive scientific inquiry? Look at anything related to global warming.]

I see often from even conservative writers that the humanities are PC bastions of post-modernism at the heart of universities, and along with it, the notion that the sciences are (at least relatively) unaffected by such things. They are “rational”, “devoid of ideology and politics”.  I don’t think so, and I come to believe it’s a naive idea.

Mother Of All Conspiracy Theories

And It’s Got Nothing To Do With Kennedy

I had a friend a long time ago in college, who became convinced that she and all her friends were the reincarnation of the conspirators involved with the Lincoln assassination in 1865. Made for some interesting late-night discussions (and laughs) of a kind for which college students are known. I forget which of the conspirators I was supposed to have been.

This came to mind just last week when I happened across a show on The History Channel; The Hunt for John Wilkes Booth, an episode that both I and the AstroWife found particularly entertaining and informative.

That’s nothing to blog about, of course. But today I traipsed upon this item from InstaPundit, wherein Glenn Reynolds led me to this interesting tidbit:

Dismissed for 175 years as a fake, a letter threatening the assassination of President Andrew Jackson has been found to be authentic. And, says the director of the Andrew Jackson Papers Project at the University of Tennessee, the writer was none other than Junius Brutus Booth, father of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth.

Now that’s history!

To Catch a Thief

Or Not…

Many years ago, but in a galaxy not that far distant, I taught physics and astronomy to undergraduates at a decently large university (perhaps you remember my name in the course catalog – I was Prof. Staff…).  Mostly it was a great job, with no heavy lifting.  My memories of those days are pleasant.

But (you knew a “but” was coming, right?) there was one incident.  I caught a student cheating, red handed (he scored near perfectly on a multiple choice test, if I used the wrong key).  And it was not the first time (the first time involved the use of a symbol for a capacator that I had never seen before, except two minutes earlier on the sheet handed in by an A student.  Funny how a good number of other answers were the same, too).  My department chairman was made aware of the situation.

I flunked the student on that test (it was one of five grades I gave, outside of the final exam, and I gave him a 0 on this one).  I watched the student.  For the final exam the person came in, holding a handkerchief and coughing.  “I’m not well.” came the claim.  “May I be excused?”

“Sure.” I answered.  Just don’t expect to pass the class.  The student left.

Grades were turned into the registrar, and sure enough, I was called into a meeting the next week with the department chairman and the school’s ombudsman, who was there to plead the student’s case. You’d think it would be open and shut.  Even without the proofs (plural) of cheating, which I had in hand, the history of warnings (records existed), and the fact that the course was not completed (no final exam), I was essentially told to give the student the lowest possible non-failing grade (in this case, a D).  There was a reason given.  The student faced deportation if I did not.  Pretty serious stuff.

Ugly situation.  In one sense, I had no say in the matter.  I was not on a tenure track, so my career was not on the line.  But if I flunked the student it was made clear to me that the chairman would change the grade (and that if he did not, the school would, and he would no longer be chair).  A lowly adjunct prof. one year out of grad. school has no standing to even know the outcome of these things, much less have a say.  “There are bigger issues to be considered here.” you’re told.

The attititude about cheating has changed since, thanks to the internet. But not for the better.

The universal lament that the Internet makes it a huge challenge to catch cheaters is the opposite of the truth. Any college, department, or individual teacher who takes cheating seriously can easily obtain the means to catch cheaters.

And that’s the rub. Catching cheaters is easy — if you want to catch them.

But colleges nationwide have made a decision that cheaters aren’t their problem.

As it now stands, the schools (universities and colleges) have insulated themselves by saying that detecting and punishing cheating is the sole responcibility of the instructor.  They’re not involved.

The abdication of dealing with cheaters from the administrative to the individual teacher level is just another defensive measure. When a student flunked for cheating sues, the college isn’t responsible.

And the fear of lawsuits only compounds the difficulty of what is already a difficult decision. Even with the strongest possible intellectual conviction that it’s the right thing to do, actually imposing a punishment on a fellow human being takes a certain amount of moral courage. It takes some guts.

The isolation of the teacher as the lone defender of honesty in the classroom only makes it much more difficult to do the difficult but necessary thing when the time comes.

It sort of looks to me that some students consider a passing grade to be their right (it’s somewhere in the constitution, right?)  And why not?  “They paid for that damn grade.” (They paraphrase Reagan alot).

Greg Forster, who wrote the article I’m quoting, says that in the face of lawsuits and academic pressure, many in academia are chickening out.  He did.  I did.

[D]oes anyone think that this is the optimal way to determine the punishment for cheating? Cutting teachers loose from all support and then seeing how far their individual moral courage holds up under pressure?

Naw.  But someone has got to make a stand.  I was thinking just yesterday about the tragedy in Mumbai, and how it’s so necessary for someone to find the courage to make a stand.  I could have made a stand but didn’t, thirty years ago.  It would have taken much less courage than in India last week, and it probably would have not changed the outcome one wit.  But maybe one school would have been changed, a school that has graduated a few thousand cheaters since.

School Gives Fake S.S. Nos. To Illegal Aliens

But Hey, They Can Use The Teachers!

I’m the grandson of immigrants. My father did not learn to speak English until he went to school. I am all for immigration, and want to see the number of immigrants admitted to the country increased. Drastically. Yesterday.

Illegal immigration is not the same thing, and it’s not the same issue.

It’s been reported almost everywhere today, starting with this, given to us by Drudge.

Years after being advised by a state agency to stop, the Dallas Independent School District continued to provide foreign citizens with fake Social Security numbers to get them on the payroll quickly.

Some of the numbers were not fake.

Some of the numbers were real Social Security numbers already assigned to people elsewhere. And in some cases, the state’s educator certification office unknowingly used the bogus numbers to run criminal background checks on the new hires, most of whom were brought in to teach bilingual classes.

If the report from the Dallas News is to be believed (caveat emptor), the practice went on for years and came to a halt this summer. The school district has an investigative unit, called the Office of Professional Responsibility, which discovered in 2004 that the school district was issuing fake numbers.

We note that the newspaper first reporting this story, the Dallas News, uses in it’s headline the word “faulted”, as if the school had made an administrative error. What the school did was illegal. Michelle Malkin and Ed Morrissey make the point that the press won’t.

The Dallas News won’t come out and say it, but it’s blindingly obvious this school district was cooking up fake Social Security numbers for illegal alien teachers (referred to in the report as “foreign educators”). Which means they committed at least three crimes: ID fraud, hiring illegal aliens, and felonious aiding/abetting illegal aliens.

And then they tried to cover it up.

Particularly telling:

This isn’t the first fraud involving DISD, either. And this should have been apparent two years ago, when the local CBS affiliate discovered that some of DISD’s “bilingual” educators didn’t speak English.

So what part of illegal don’t they understand?

Holiday!

For Pres.-Elect Obama?

Mark Wittington sees that yes, there is a serious attempt to create a National Holiday for the man who is embarrassed that you do not speak Spanish, Pres. Elect Barack Obama.

According to the Topeka Capital-Journal:
“Plans are being made to promote a national holiday for Barack Obama, who will become the nation’s 44th president when he takes the oath of office Jan. 20.

” ‘Yes We Can’ planning rallies will be at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. every Tuesday at the downtown McDonald’s restaurant, 1100 Kansas Ave., until Jan. 13. The goals are to secure a national holiday in Obama’s honor, to organize celebrations around his inauguration and to celebrate the 200th birthday of President Abraham Lincoln, who was born on Feb. 12 1809.

At 7:30 a.m. on Inauguration Day, Obama Cake will be served at the downtown McDonald’s, and a celebration is scheduled for 8 p.m. to midnight Jan. 20 at the Ramada Hotel and Convention Center, 420 S.E. 6th.”

Presumably, Obama Day would take place on August 4th, the day that the late Ann Dunham gave birth to him in Honolulu.

He goes on to say: No other person in American history has even been proposed to have a special, federal holiday. The public school teachers in Montgomery County, MD want a day off for the inauguration, too.

The Montgomery County Education Association, the teachers’ union, has asked about the possibility of closing schools so students and teachers can attend the history making event. The Board of Education is discussing the idea, but closing means a day of instruction lost and a day of pay for employees.

Considering the curriculum, the tenor and financial position of these schools, perhaps closing them more often would be warrented.

HST Is Back

And Doing Science

Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer [and worse political pundit. – ed] reports that as of Oct. 28, the Hubble Space Telescope has been up and running, using its Wide Field/Planetary Camera (WF/PC II) to do observations as intended.

It went offline when engineers were trying to restore Hubble back to speed after a major piece of hardware failed. They were able to get a backup piece working, but other problems delayed the operation. Now, however, things are looking good, and it looks like we have a working telescope.

This is known technically as a good thing^TM.

Take a look at the picture freshly retrieved from the restored system. Of course, like many – most! – of the photos taken by HST, it’s gorgeous! WF/PC has been (lovingly) called the Wide-Field/Publicity Camera for a reason, you know!

A Damning Review of Higher Education

Still Think It’s For Everyone?

Higher Ed

Marty Nemko writes at the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later. That figure is from a study cited by Clifford Adelman, a former research analyst at the U.S. Department of Education and now a senior research associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy. Yet four-year colleges admit and take money from hundreds of thousands of such students each year!

Even worse, most of those college dropouts leave the campus having learned little of value, and with a mountain of debt and devastated self-esteem from their unsuccessful struggles. Perhaps worst of all, even those who do manage to graduate too rarely end up in careers that require a college education.

That last paragraph startled me.  But this startled me even more:

Colleges trumpet the statistic that, over their lifetimes, college graduates earn more than nongraduates, but that’s terribly misleading. You could lock the collegebound in a closet for four years, and they’d still go on to earn more than the pool of non-collegebound – they’re brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections.

It startled me because, self-evident as it is, I hadn’t thought of it before.

Sometimes a hard-nosed realism is the most accurate take on a given situation. Here’s the one offered by Nemko, when he discusses what, and how, students actually learn.

Often there is a Grand Canyon of difference between the reality and what higher-education institutions, especially research ones, tout in their viewbooks and on their Web sites. Colleges and universities are businesses, and students are a cost item, while research is a profit center. As a result, many institutions tend to educate students in the cheapest way possible: large lecture classes, with necessary small classes staffed by rock-bottom-cost graduate students.

Emphasis mine.  That fits my experience.

H/T to Instapundit for the link.

Broader, Bolder, But Better?

This Seems To Be Education Week

AFT

Greg Forster at Pajamas Media reports:

[T]he teachers’ unions are using to try to lure you into giving them more money. It’s actually called “Broader, Bolder.” If you’ve ever seen a title that sounded more like a gimmick to sucker people out of their money, you’ve seen more marketing gimmicks than I have.

The argument runs like this: kids do better in school when they’re well fed, healthy, and so forth. Therefore schools should be transformed into social-service centers that will not only teach students, but also provide health care and lots of other services. Schools would be open all day and provide a wide variety of community programs.

This will, of course, cost a ton of money and entail a huge expansion of the government educational bureaucracy. Which has nothing to do with why the unions want it.

Emphasis mine. Forster soars to the heights of cynicism in his piece, but he makes a good point when he says:

The issue is, are schools the best institutions for providing these services? Even if schools could provide them, it still makes no sense to provide them through schools if other institutions could provide the same services better. Like, say, institutions whose core mission is to provide those services.

Without delving much further (like I probably should), my knee reflexively kicks when I see evidence of expanding government functions/power/spending. I keep hearing The First Law of Holes being sung as if in chorus.

Michelle Rhee

Making A Difference?

One of my “pet” topics has been education. Usually I’m absurdly negative and (for me, uncharacteristically) pessimistic about the prospects of anyone in this country, at any level, getting a decent education and that flies in the face of almost everyone’s experience.  Indeed, almost everyone has had more than one good teacher (or two, or ten) and there are many, many people who have gotten good educations right here.  I’ll admit my pessimism flies in the face of my own experience.

Perhaps my negative attitude comes about because I can’t think of one level of education – not primary, secondary, graduate or professional, that’s succeeding in their mission right now. They don’t even have, or they don’t know, their mission.

Right now, primary education is babysitting so that both parents can work full time. Weren’t grammar schools supposed to be teaching the basics, you know, reading, writing, ‘rithmetic and, um… helping parents turn those darling little creatures into little human beings?

The high schools are, of course, forced then to teach those basics, when they’re not simply warehousing teens and young adults (who will, in large numbers, be warehoused by the state shortly, it appears). Weren’t they to help prepare a workforce?

That’s what the colleges are doing now; trying, remedially, to prepare a workforce. Their goal at one time was to prepare the elite, I recall.

Those elite are now expected to become so in the graduate schools and professional schools. Instead, too many times, they become – competent, and I fear that it’s what we’ve come to expect.

But all that is just me spouting off meaninglessly in a dark moment. Michelle Rhee is not so empty.

Check out what Fast Company’s Jeff Chu has to say about Michelle Rhee, the newly appointed chancellor of D.C. public schools.

Paul Laurence Dunbar Senior High School in Washington, D.C., is one of the worst schools in one of the worst school districts in America.

“The mentality of excellence? We wish we could have that,” said principal Harriett Kargbo, as we toured the school one morning in May. “But this,” she said, pointing at the metal detector guarding the entrance, “is the reality.”

This, too: Dozens of kids wandering the halls during second period. Corridors littered with fliers, candy wrappers, potato-chip bags. One second-floor foyer reeking of marijuana. (“I smell pot smoke,” I said. “Really? I don’t,” Kargbo replied.) In the five-year history of No Child Left Behind, the school has never met the law’s benchmarks; in 2007, just 24% of its sophomores tested “proficient” in reading and only 20% made the grade in math.

As we walked from one teaching area to another — Dunbar is one of D.C.’s last open-plan schools, with dividers and old filing cabinets separating the “class-rooms” — it became clear why the students weren’t learning. Of the dozen classes we visited, only in one history session were all of the students doing something approximating work. “Why isn’t anyone teaching?” I asked Kargbo as I watched one student do a meticulous inventory of the contents of her wallet. “It’s the end of the period,” she said. Half an hour later, second period ended.

That afternoon, Kargbo was fired.

Ummm…. Yeah.

Rhee is fearless, determined, inventive, and utterly unique. Her approach combines tough-minded handling of resources, unwavering accountability for teachers and administrators, and sincere, personal investment in local urban communities, grounded in the area’s black churches.

Michelle Rhee has been on a tear, firing at will through the DC School District with the (strong) backing of DC’s new mayor, Adrian Fenty. Considering the years – decades – of corruption and incompetence we’ve seen both in the mayor’s office and in the (AFT affilliated) Washington Teacher’s Union, it’s more than surprising to see this happening. It’s welcomed.

The Housing Crisis

It’s Not What You Think

The price of housing is a two edged sword: When high, it’s good for the seller, when low it’s good for the buyer. Much has been made of the current lending crisis, which is actually not anywhere near so much about the cost of houses, but about the cost of the money used to buy the houses.

Punaro has a wonderful illustration of the cost of housing since 1890. It may be very contrary to your perceptions.

And gee – I never realized how bad the recession of the 1890s was. That was the recession blamed on the infamous “Robber Barrons”.

WordPress does not allow embedded videos (for security reasons), else I’d have presented the video directly.

Please note that the dates are shown intermittently in the lower right hand corner.

Randy Pausch – RIP

The Last Lecture

Apologies for not posting this sooner. I’ve been restoring my system.

Randy Pausch, made famous by his marvelous entry to the Last Lecture series, has died. We seem to be losing a large number of our best and brightest, lately. He will be missed.

Links to his lecture (from my earlier post) here.

Nature or Nurture? Science and Title IX

It’s Kind of a Drag

American Association of University Women

In April, I posted this about the imposition of gender quotas on Harvard’s infamous Math 55 course.

The imposition of gender quotas on collegiate science programs wouldn’t harm Harvard’s Math 55. At least, not at first. It would, however, immediately harm small and marginal programs, the analog to wrestling, hockey and even men’s track and field (remember that as you watch this summer’s Olympic Games).

Now, the NYTs John Tierney writes about the Federal Government doing “Title IX Compliance Reviews” at the physics and engineering departments of several universities.

The National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy have set up programs to look for sexual discrimination at universities receiving federal grants. Investigators have been taking inventories of lab space and interviewing faculty members and students in physics and engineering departments at schools like Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, M.I.T. and the University of Maryland.

So far, these Title IX compliance reviews haven’t had much visible impact on campuses beyond inspiring a few complaints from faculty members. (The journal Science quoted Amber Miller, a physicist at Columbia, as calling her interview “a complete waste of time.”) But some critics fear that the process could lead to a quota system that could seriously hurt scientific research and do more harm than good for women.

Isn’t that special!  It is, of course, Congress providing the pressure, for the budgets of the NSF, NASA and the DoE come from there.

The members of Congress and women’s groups who have pushed for science to be “Title Nined” say there is evidence that women face discrimination in certain sciences, but the quality of that evidence is disputed. Critics say there is far better research showing that on average, women’s interest in some fields isn’t the same as men’s.

Disputed?  Naw.  Couldn’t be.  There are those who say there should be no controversy about this at all.

When women are underrepresented in a desirable field the usual explanation is their personal preferences: women just don’t want to do physics or sell refrigerators, and who are we to question their choices? Maybe it’s genetic! With men, it’s almost the opposite: no one asks why men don’t become kindergarten teachers,[…]

[To which I say “What??? No one asks because the answer is too well known.” But that is besides the point at hand.]

Tierney goes a long way to support the thesis that there is something other than gender bias at work at the U. of MDs physics department.  He notes a study that tracked 5000 mathematically gifted girls to see where they landed in the universe of possibilities.

Despite their mathematical prowess, they were less likely than boys to go into physics or engineering.

But whether they grew up to be biologists or sociologists or lawyers, when they were surveyed in their 30s, these women were as content with their careers as their male counterparts. They also made as much money per hour of work. Dr. Lubinski and Dr. Benbow concluded that adolescents’ interests and balance of abilities — not their sex — were the best predictors of whether they would choose an “inorganic” career like physics.

Indeed, he quotes Susan Pinker (see “The Sexual Paradox,”), who finds the opposite problem.  Women who had abandoned careers in the sciences had done so, not because they felt discrimination, but because the felt that they had been pressured into careers that they disliked.

Finally, after about 40 column inches about the impact of the discussion and controversy on women, Tierney then hints that he understands the problem the way I do.

Whether or not quotas are ever imposed, some of the most productive science and engineering departments in America are busy filling out new federal paperwork. The agencies that have been cutting financing for Fermilab and the Spirit rover on Mars are paying for investigations of a problem that may not even exist. How is this good for scientists of either sex?

… which is the idea I was trying to get across in April.  I’m sure that if James Carville was writing that last paragraph, it would read “It’s the educational overhead, stupid.”  It drags everyone down.

Arrested For Cheering At Graduation

When Rudeness Is Criminal

It’s common for graduating students to have raucus cheering sections attend the ceremonies which have been accused of disrupting the awards for others. Sometimes the noise makers are arrested.

Six people at Fort Mill High School’s graduation were charged Saturday and a seventh at the graduation for York Comprehensive High School was charged Friday with disorderly conduct, authorities said. Police said the seven yelled after students’ names were called.

“I just thought they were going to escort me out,” Jonathan Orr told The Herald of Rock Hill. “I had no idea they were going to put handcuffs on me and take me to jail.”

Orr, 21, spent two hours in jail after he was arrested when he yelled for his cousin at York’s commencement at the Winthrop University Coliseum.

Even 10 years ago, my wife and family were annoyed at the ceremony at JHU when attendees (presumably family of graduating students) used shouts and noise makers to draw attention to themselves. No arrests were made, however.

Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy thinks the response is way over the top.

I think this is a classic slippery slope problem. Imagine you let people cheer at graduation. It seems innocuous at first. People get used to it; it feels good. But the next thing you know, they’ll start cheering at sporting events. Then they’ll add in concerts. Then they’ll cheer on their favorite contestants when watching American Idol. Before you know it, people will start expressing great joy all the time.

Prof. Kerr’s observation is aptly answered by commentator “Sk” in the responses.

1) When is decorum enforceable? Can I cheer after every sentence in Professor Kerr’s class (can I shout anti-gay slurs in college classes, the way I can outside of funerals? Can I should ‘fuck’ in a college class full of adults, given that I have the constitutional right to shout ‘fuck’ in a neighborhood full of children)? Anytime I want at a golf tournament? Tennis match? In a library? Can I scream outside of Professor Kerr’s family funerals, with no limits? If I disobey (say, instructions to stop interrupting Herr Professor), can I/will I be arrested?

2) If decorum is enforceable, but arrests are not allowed, how, exactly, is decorum to be enforced? (maybe simply removal will do).

Both unanswered questions. I have the sneaking suspicion, though, that first amendment rights extend only so far as they don’t discomfit law professors…

Yeah – there’s a time and a place for everything, and in this case there are real cultural differences about what’s allowable at graduation ceremonies.

But how to enforce decorum when shame is prohibited?

Or What’s A Harvard For?

Sean Carroll sets the record straight.

Harvard University’s endowment is $35 billion, and some people aren’t happy about it. Massachusetts legislators see money that could be theirs, and are contemplating new taxes. Social activists see money that could be going to charity, and want to divert it. Distinguished alumni who have landed at public universities wonder why, with all that cash, Harvard graduates such a tiny number of students.

These are all legitimate concerns, and I won’t be suggesting the ideal policy compromise. But there is one misimpression that people seem to have, that might as well be corrected before any hasty actions are taken: the purpose of Harvard is not to educate students. If anything, its primary purpose is to produce research and scholarly work.

I think Sean (Ph.D. Astronomy, Harvard) is correct, but then any student who goes there for the education is mistaken. Attending a “research facility” is not the way for a man’s reach to exceed his grasp, as Browning noted, and I would think that most students would be able to better spend their money elsewhere.