Universities are highly responsive to very rich people

>More and more, they are not.

Are you really arguing that universities are more the playgrounds of the rich and powerful than they were, say, 60 years ago, before the GI bill? or than 100 years ago when the college graduation rate was 3% and universities didn’t even pretend to be anything other than finishing schools for the elite?

cassander – I assume there’s some sort of implicit comparison to the period from about 1975 to 2000 or so. Perhaps there was a reprieve from direct intervention by the rich during the “great moderation” in the stock market?

But I think you’re right, it doesn’t appear that things now are any worse than they had been through most of the history of the university system in the United States.

I made a flip remark about this in a previous thread, but my point was an entirely serious one. A university, taking the long view (as who else should?), gets the rich people it deserves.

This is most obvious at institutions whose overseers are solely and directly elected by the alumni. There was a small flap a few years ago about one of the Harvard houses putting protective rails in front of some of its library’s rare books, to prevent undergraduates from stealing or mishandling them. As an adversarial stewardship and disciplinary issue between administrators and students, this would have been a routine matter, but the intergenerational attitude leads to a more nuanced view: the alumni-donated books in the alumni-built house, managed by a hired administration under its alumni overseers, are ultimately there for the benefit of the future alumni who live there, and who will ultimately have to bear the cost of their replacement. The housemaster, herself an alumna, leapt intuitively to this view of the case, told the hired library admins to get stuffed, and opened a round table with the current students about how they could best preserve the house’s treasures for classmates unborn. Some creative but dignified solution, involving keys entrusted to a work-study student, was found and affirmed by consensus of the current class, and applauded by letters in the alumni magazine.

I will never have the personal resources to influence the companies I invest in, the politicians I elect, the clients I work for, or the organizations I volunteer for as profoundly as I can influence my alma mater by bending the ear of a billionaire classmate at a reunion. It may be partially for that reason that I have been politely listened to over decades, starting in my freshman year, by many administrators who had no information about my (negligible) present or future financial clout.

Breaking the link between money and power, or between a privileged few and money, are big jobs for our civilization as a whole. Sustaining the link between the previous generation’s money and power, and the present generation’s vision of opportunity, diversity and civic virtue, is a more realistic but still worthy job for which our universities have been organically designed by their own sons and daughters.

More and more I find myself hearing academic radicalism through a manager’s ears, with a kind of reflexive sneer – good luck getting that into $BIG JOURNAL, the Research Councils are going to lap that up, you can talk like that if you’ve already got a Chair* and so on. Of course it’s not really the voice of management, just the voice of a junior & rather insecure academic who’s internalised the need to damp down the rhetoric and triangulate**. But then, that is the voice of management. O governmentality.

*Although, increasingly, you can’t.
**Old-fashioned, gratuitously oppositional research question: “Has police brutality increased under the Coalition?”. Friendly, constructive research question: “How can the police build confidence in their work?” Clever, split-the-difference research question: “What factors determine positive or negative perceptions among people in contact with the police?”

I wish I was a very rich person….

/Hey! Here is a crazy idea. Why don’t we fund public education so that they don’t have to suck up to rich donors? Also stop paying University president’s crazy high wages that just attract the wrong sort of people.
//Yeah, yeah I am just a dirty hippy….

Ironically, the more prestigious universities, particularly the Ivies, have less problems with a grubby and politically motivated board. Columbia University, where I worked for 21 years, has a consistent record of beating back attempts to victimize pro-Palestinian professors. This is a function of board members having a better grasp of the need for academic freedom in an elite institution as part of their own elite education at Columbia and other such institutions. The lower you are on the academic totem pole, the more likely you are to end up with a board of very wealthy mediocrities.

I think it would be stranger if major bourgeois institutions were organized, directed, and influenced differently from the prevailing social order they are embedded in.

And yet, universities in other bourgeois countries do not operate like this at all. They might reflect their social order anyway, but through different channels.

In most places, both universities and rich people are amazed by the amount of money American rich people give to universities, with all the good and bad effects of it.

From their perspective, the risks of angering rich people will usually outweigh the risks of angering faculty.

From the perspective of our politicians, the risks of angering rich people will usually outweigh the risks of angering citizens.
~

I think this phenomenon is pretty common, and generally lauded.

For a key example–most histories I’ve read credit the Ford Foundation’s “hire who we say and admit who we say, or we won’t give you money and will encourage others not to” as a key factor in desegregating the private universities int he South.

@SamChevre

So it’s good that a handful of really rich people control the universities because they know best?

Indeed, who pays the piper calls the tune. The only way out of this (aside from publicly funding higher ed) would be if some of the right Board members are persuaded that a governance structure designed to ensure maximal faculty independence is a good idea. Of course, since any firewall or policy derives its authority from the contingent will of the Board, all it takes for everything to go south is a new crop of less enlightened plutocrats.

Henry and @22

If you look at the UVA affair, it was started by a conservative Board member who was hooked up w/the Hoover institution and, sort of, some hedge fund alumni. At the end of the day, however, the faculty (with a delay) and most of the alumni weighed in for Sullivan. The governor keep his head down. The attempted coup was considered an embarrassment and debacle by almost all the stake holders.

@22
Why do you think even a fully state funded university would cede control to the tenured faculty? The taxpayers would want oversight which is exactly what you get with an executive-appointed board confirmed by the legislature.

T: “taxpayer oversight”- that’s true. Given the varieties of higher education in this country, we might have a good natural experiment testing the relative merits of democracy (voter control), plutocracy (donor/Board control), and aristocracy (faculty control).

Let’s see. The U is funded by the state, alumni, and student/families. But all control should be with the tenured faculty because they know best?

That’s an utterly absurd statement. Professors don’t exercise anything close to “all control”. They have, by general agreement between the administration, the state and the faculty, been given (some) control over pedagogical matters, and a great deal more control over the evaluation of the quality of the scholarship of their colleagues (for the purposes of promotion) and job candidates (for the purposes of hiring). They have virtually no control over the budget or budgetary priorities.

A new gym with a climbing wall or a new wing for the library? More money for the football program or more money for academic scholarships? These are questions over which the faculty have very little control.

In short, the faculty have been given significant control over those aspects of the university’s mission (scholarship and teaching) in which there are presumed to have special competence because that’s actually what they do all day. This is no different in principle from navigators in the navy being given discretion in how best to pilot ships. Hey, I’m a tax payer! How come I’m not allowed to have a vote over what speed aircraft carries should cruise at?

You’re constant refrain about “why should professors have all the power?!” make you sound like a conspiracy theorist.

Reading other comments now. I guess mine is out of bounds. Like criticizing Israel.

@Academiclurker

>2, 4: I’m not sure that “Let’s be complacent about losing the gains that were made during the 20th century” is a winning strategy for the middle class, when it comes to university governance or anything else.

My claim isn’t that we’re losing ground, my claim is that the universities have gotten to be less and less the playthings of rich donors over the course of the century.

>Hey, I’m a tax payer! How come I’m not allowed to have a vote over what speed aircraft carries should cruise at?

Well first, the navigator on a ship doesn’t decide how fast it goes, the captain does. the captain might ask for advice, but the boat goes as fast as he says it does regardless what the navigator thinks is wise. Second, you can’t simultaneously have democracy and expert control. any decision you take out of the hands of voters and put into the hands of anyone else ceases to be made democratically.

@MPAVictoria

>Hey! Here is a crazy idea. Why don’t we fund public education so that they don’t have to suck up to rich donors?

Why is sucking up to congress any better (or any different than) than sucking up to congress and state legislators?

@Joshua W. Burton
There’s no particular reason to think that alumni, as a class or category of people, should have the decisive say in how a university runs; they should have a role, but so should faculty and students, the people who are actually there. And there’s especially no reason to think alumni should have much of a say in who gets hired and who doesn’t. [Even wealthy alums who endow a chair don’t usually, I think, get to pick the particular person who holds it, though there are no doubt exceptions to this, and the title of a chair (e.g. “the xyz professorship of the virtues of free markets” or whatever) can skew the incumbents in one direction.]

On a related pt, I question your implicit assumption that anyone who has been a student at a university that tries to instill certain values in its students (accepting, for the sake of argument, that some universities in fact do try to do so) necessarily internalizes those values. Universities can try to (gently) indoctrinate their students in the ‘liberal’ values of openness to differing views, diversity etc, but that’s no guarantee these values will ‘take’ in any given case. In short, your saying “a univ gets the rich people it deserves” seems to assume too much about the effects of the ‘educational experience’ at any particular univ. (Btw you didn’t mention that the smaller, unelected Harvard Corporation has more power than the larger, elected Board of Overseers. My guess is that the Univ. of Illinois Board of Trustees is probably more comparable to the Corporation in terms of its powers, though I’m not sure.)

ISTM that Henry’s basic point in the OP about wealthy donors having considerable influence is right, regardless of whether particular boards of trustees are mainly composed of wealthy people or not. If a particular board of trustees is not composed mainly of wealthy donors, then the latter will exercise their influence through more informal channels, but I suspect they will exercise it one way or another.

The state of Illinois is in an economic disarray right now. Significant debt. A woefully underfunded state pension plan (woe to all UofI profs – they may never get to retire.) It is the place that most people want to leave (according to a survey I saw not long ago.)

States (including IL) have – for years – shaved significant dollars from higher ed support. I know in NC, the state sheds more and more support for higher ed with each year – I am not sure it will ever go back to where it was. All state employees get a raise this year in NC – except for university faculty. Tuition grows, access to higher ed becomes problematic for students without a trust fund.

Funding matters. When the state divests itself from supporting higher ed, funders matter. Not the way it should be at all. But a terrible reality for public universities today in the US.

(To be clear, I am not defending UofI in this issue.)

@28
Please read in context of the previous posts. My point is that in addition to the tenured faculty there are taxpayers, alumni and students/family. They are all stakeholders, the later three which actually fund the place. There is a natural tension among these groups because they view the institution differently. The idea that is faculty should be able to make lifetime hiring decisions without oversight, decisions costing millions of dollars paid for by others, is hubris.

The relationship among these four stakeholders has changed significantly in the last 35 to 40 years. The old norms are under stress. The idea that certain norms that primarily benefit one set of stakeholders are sacrosanct while those benefiting the other stakeholder fall by the way is an idea being questioned.

One of the least appreciated problems of economic inequality is that it tends to filter out ideas that are uncongenial to rich people, and to heavily overweight ideas that they like

This has been noted by some…

LFC, @37. I agree. My FIL was the son of a postman who sent his 4 children to private colleges during the depression. My g-grandfather had a dirt farm in Blanco, Texas (they raised goats), and sent 8 of his 9 children to the U of Texas and other colleges. (The eldest son had to stay home and manage the farm.)

In a decade when one in three people did not have a job, son of a postman is not poor.

It would be possible for a university to be governed by its faculty, if the faculty owned the university. They could own one by starting one. The reasons why this will not work — I feel sure I will be told that in a minute — the reasons might be interesting.

LFC @34: Btw you didn’t mention that the smaller, unelected Harvard Corporation has more power than the larger, elected Board of Overseers.

The Corporation is elected by the Board, at one remove. And I believe every current member of the Corporation (except one former US Treasury secretary) is a professor with a distinguished research record, a former elected Overseer, or both. To the larger point, I’m not holding up Harvard governance as a Platonic ideal, but neither do I share your broad cynicism about undergraduate affiliation as a defining and transformative moral passage. At any rate, that’s why they write songs about it, and come back at their own expense for reunions. I would emphatically not trust Harvard alumni to run UIUC, nor vice versa.

#39 – I like your pictures of butterflies very much. But I don’t have a clue, not a smidgen of a hint, of what you’re trying to say.

#31 – Midwest law partners and anesthesiologists with 6-figure incomes are not the kinds of people who can sway university decisions by threatening not to buy a new building. Rich people as I understand the original post means people with tens or hundreds of millions in wealth.

I suspect that Thornton Hall is vinteuil (see Belle and Chris Bertram posts of late). Or Indecipherable @39 may be. (Or they are all the same person?) They/he (maybe she — why do I have trouble imagining she here?) = You all haven’t suffered as much as I have (the vast suffering of the virtuous, anonymous objector is somehow to be assumed), so you don’t deserve any voice at all! ( I kept thinking about feeding my niece with MS her lobster at vinteuil’s posts over on Belle — my niece’s Medicaid-supported healthcare greatly limited by LePage…. Glad I could treat her to some lobster: real lobster! not the mere roll! My brother and his wife can’t afford either — and they actually live near the coast in Maine.)

Public universities are under particular stress due to underfunding, making them vulnerable to the demands or expectations (the latter can be insidious) of donors. (Donors are also, often, wonderful.) Is this news? But whatever the history of public/private partnership with land-grant and other public schools (a thoughtful post above on this), the balance has been way off for some years now.

Most of all, reading these comments, I am struck: this is why we have LAWS and such. To protect us from our own short-term, hunger-at-the-moment inclinations. “Our” being all the stakeholders, who, in the case of a university or college, public or private (the latter must be chartered by state governments, btw), tend to cede a great deal to the, you know, professors. At least, they once did.

And to change the direction of whining or rah-rahing that I may seem to have gone in: I wonder how many of the assistant and recently tenured profs at my college will show up for faculty meetings this year? Fewer and fewer every year. Most are too busy “elsewhere,” at a conference or something.

Eternal vigilance, and all that. Sorry to be so all over the place — maybe, but I think somewhere in here I am not.

@52 also, I can’t quite tell, but I think you think I feel I have suffered a great deal???

In fact, I have suffered very, very little in my life that wasn’t self-inflicted. The fact that I have escaped suffering thanks to the fact that I was born to the right parents is what fuels my energy in attacking those who imagine that it was the skill or value or wisdom of their ancestors that put them in the catbird seat. When you have screwed up as much as I have and still find yourself rich, then you truly know the pernicious power of the myth of meritocracy.

> hy do I have trouble imagining she here

Autism is sex-linked.

Just sayin’, is all.

J.W. Burton @48
neither do I share your broad cynicism about undergraduate affiliation as a defining and transformative moral passage. At any rate, that’s why they write songs about it, and come back at their own expense for reunions

I think there’s a range of individual variation. Some are v. positive about their undergraduate ‘experience’, others have more mixed feelings about it. Some go back for reunions, some don’t (either never or not regularly). Re the Corporation: there have been some changes in membership lately, plus the # of members has been increased. I’m fairly sure that if you examine its composition over the years, you’ll find there has been a considerable albeit not exclusive representation of (very) wealthy people/alumni, esp. in certain positions such as senior member of the Corp., treasurer etc. (Which doesn’t necessarily mean the Harvard governance system is bad or obvs. defective: it prob. more or less does what it’s intended to do, given the social-economic system in which univs. are embedded.) Anyway, this is somewhat off the main topic of the thread, so I think this will be my last comment on this.

A biography of Ed Meese, concentrating on what he did after the Reagan Administration, would be enlightening, concerning how academic institutions are shaped from above.

Through a collection of circumstance I found myself in an argument with the head of Princeton Career Services during reunions a few years back (not my alma mater). When I found out that the investment banking firms were given access to Sophomores I was astounded. What was really shocking was the justification and how infused it was with the religion of free markets:

If our graduates end up as investment bankers it is because they choose that path. Our job is to give them a range of choices.

This is a school that pre-dates the word “capitalism” by a century. That history has taught valuable lessons as to what a true education requires and so while Harvard is content to handout sheepskins upon the collection of 30 gentleman’s A minuses, Princeton requires a thesis of every single student.

Why would you let a sophomore wander down the road to Gomorrah when you know he or she is incompetent to make such a choice before completing a senior thesis?

Our job is simply to facilitate their choices.

In this model, universities are run by 18 year olds. No wonder Princeton also has a brand new gym full of fancy exercise equipment after the old one worked just fine for a century.

@62-63
When you ask student and their families to pay, borrow or otherwise procure +$200k for the privledge of an undergraduate education, is it not perhaps understandable that the payors would expect a bit more than clean gym mats and a 50-year old set of free weights?

Your comment seems to overlook that most purchasers of a university degree are only tangentially concerned with the pursuit of knowledge and deep learning. What most want is the credentials necessary to land work for which they are at least reasonably qualified and an avenue from which to recoup their $200k.

As it happens investment banking is one such profession which provides that possibility. While you might would rather that not be so, why should Sophmores or anyone else be denied the opportunity to seek a path that allows them to repay the cost of their education as expeditiously as possible.

Golden handcuffs, more like.

“So it’s good that a handful of really rich people control the universities
because they know best?”

Absolutely not. We should have poor college professors control the universities because they have some much more experience dealing with ‘the real world’.

You guys are a hoot. You live and work in protected bubbles and Ivory towers. And you don’t understand why those who do not think you are all a bunch of idiots*.

* for the benefit of the highly “educated” clowns who host the blog and do most of the posting I would suggest a class in the Greek language. Then you might begin to bea able to actually understand the derivation of that word. Of course, that would require effort on you part. Instead of taking classes in ‘racism’ or ‘imperialism’ or ‘gender studies’. So very, very, challenging. But I guess you did get to play a lot of beer pong when you were undergrads.

Ä“dÅ«cere — my bad!

“Until WWII only the richest 5% of Americans were granted bachelor degrees.”
Both of my parents were poor but University students at Ohio State. Education was interrupted by WW2, so they didn’t get the degrees until after. But, clearly at least some states made it possible for nontrivial numbers of non wealthy to do it.

Perhaps the best institutional design would be one that meliorated the worst tendencies of a tenured faculty in complete control of tenure and a Board of Trustees in complete control of tenure? One in which the Board shows deference, but occasionally says “no.” One in which the faculty sometimes acquiesces, but occasionally throws a fit (and says no)?

If the donor’s message had been limited by the facts to simply “Professor Salaita does not agree with my political views of Israel, and therefore I demand you reject him for tenure”, is it likely that the Board or Chancellor would have acquiesced? But here, like it or not, the nature of the tweets would give any reasonable person pause before hiring the tweeter as a tenured professor.

The correspondence indicates that the donor was able to be heard, but I do not see where the donor was able to purchase a decision. I haven’t read all of it though. Is there an exchange in particular that persuades anyone that donor-influence is the cause of the University’s decision?

“the worst tendencies of a tenured faculty in complete control of tenure”

Namely?

“I suppose things may have changed in the last 35 years, but certainly not for the better.”

Nope, pretty much the same. At least in Canada…

I’m happy to learn the real history of the university. Fascinating. Seriously.

As for who was poor, etc. I have never ever met anyone who had ever alluded to being related to a rich person in the Depression. As far as the anecdotal evidence is concerned, poverty was universal. And yet in all these anecdotes I have never heard a single person mention their grandfather the sharecropper. Do you think that was better or worse than a skilled government employee?

In my own family I hear tales of the desperately poor attorney. But I wasn’t there, so who knows, right?

And a public university should teach exactly what the tax payers decide they want through whatever executive bureaucracy gets set up to manage the place. If high tuition means 17 year olds decide what happens at a public university then that is yet another reason to go back to the days when college was free.

(Not just California, either. UMass was $250 a year in 1948).

@AcademicLurker

http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/p20-566.pdf

Another way to paraphrase the data would be that neither the rich nor the poor got BAs before WWII.

One thing that gets lost here as well is that you don’t have to be rich to be elite and that before the 1980s many were rich but not allowed into the elite. Professors have always taken most of their compensation in the form of status, not cash. The rich are frequently low class strivers who were desperate for the kind of status a university connection could bring. Carnegie and Rockefeller got as much as they gave.

“One of the least appreciated problems of economic inequality is that it tends to filter out ideas that are uncongenial to rich people, and to heavily overweight ideas that they like.”

Which pretty much explains why the planet is hurtling towards environmental disaster.

Thank you.

@68 You have no idea how much beer pong I played as an undergraduate. No idea.

Well I got Thornton’s point anyway.

Oh, sorry, my misreading.

harry b: “Personally, I don’t think tenure has anything to do with academic freedom (I’ll argue that elsewhere), and agree with T that associating AF closely with the idea that the faculty should make all the important hiring decisions brings AF into disrepute. I don’t think tenure is a great idea, and certainly academics should not have a right to a job for life (unless everybody does!): the point is that tenure was introduced as a move away from jobs for life (and, I believe, for most of its history it did have the function of reducing de facto job security relative to the real alternatives — not now, though, which is one reason it is under fire [maybe under fire is an exaggeration — perhaps “enduring mild criticism” is a better way of putting it]).”

Considering the effect of tenure, your argument is strange.

@79: Yes, I think it is unfortunate when the university is financially dependent on people who think it’s their right to have a say in the hiring process.

You haven’t made a substantive argument on the merits here, only predictions of what will happen, but I didn’t make much of a substantive argument either, so let me expand. Should every stakeholder get a say in the grading process? It is, after all, very very important for the people involved; why do we give nearly total control of it to the faculty? (And it would not be at all difficult for the upper administration and trustees to exercise as much control over this as they do over tenure and hiring; they could hold a nominal batch vote over it every semester, except when a particular case comes up that someone has a special interest in, and then they could change it.)

Well, we recognize surely that a grading system under which the trustees get to sign off on the grades and where they actually intervened in the rare cases in which it makes a difference would be a bad system. It wouldn’t really be a grading system at all, in fact. If the son of a donor gets to have his grade raised when he kicks up a stink about it to the fundraisers, the university has abdicated its role as an evaluator of students’ academic work. (This has already happened, or always been the case, in admissions; that’s a problem too.)

Now let’s think of the tenure process. What’s wrong with a system where trustees play a real substantive role in the tenure process? Well, ideally the purpose of research in a university is to follow inquiry wherever it may lead and to allow ideas to be judged on their merits. The tenure process is supposed to be part of that; professors are judged for tenure on the merits of their work rather than on whether some vested interests don’t like it. (Ideally.) But your idea, where “stakeholders” get a voice in the process, would allow professors to be turned down for tenured positions or fired because some rich donor didn’t like the conclusion of their work. It doesn’t let ideas win out on their merits as experts judge them, but on whether the rich donors approve of them.

So in both case, once we let donors start throwing their weight around, they’re not getting what they’re ostensibly paying for. They aren’t getting a university that honestly evaluates students or that honestly evaluates ideas. If donors decide that universities need to be turned into think tanks where anyone who strays too far from the party line gets thrown out, that would be unfortunate indeed.

(By the way I don’t really think that faculty should have complete control of tenure; we don’t have complete control of grading either. In both cases there are ways for the central administration to intervene. But it needs to happen the right way and for the right reasons, according to established procedures. Having the chancellor decide to interfere on orders from the money people after an organized pressure campaign is obviously not it.)

In light of harry b’s 87, I don’t think that tenure is particularly essential to this argument. What’s essential is that academic decisions, whatever they are, need to be made by academic people for academic reasons. “Who pays the piper calls the tune,” which is what T is proposing, is completely inimical to academic freedom–and to the running of any decent organization funded by donations, pretty much. If the funders of the symphony orchestra demand to decide on auditions themselves, you won’t have a great orchestra either.

People think of wages as an exchange. You work so much, and you get so much money. But it isn’t.

Employees work because they expect to be rewarded, and employers pay for work done because they expect to see more excellent work done. It would be rational for employers to stiff employees for their last paycheck, except that it’s illegal. The point of paying people is to get them to come back and work again — if you don’t need them any more why do things to get them to come back?

When an employer wants employees to work hard and think hard about what they’re doing and maybe be creative to get excellent results, he holds out the possibility of bonuses and raises. The successful workers get bonuses not so much because that was the deal, more that it’s important to convince people that they actually have a chance to get them. When employees get the idea they will not be rewarded for their outstanding efforts then it’s time to fire them or put them to work doing drudgery that doesn’t need any sort of excellence.

Tenure is only an extreme version of this. Young people finish college and work on an advanced degree. Likely they get some sort of stipend that lets them live modestly for 4+ years while they put their souls into their work, and also assist in teaching and/or research. Then if they are research-oriented they get to do two or three low-paid post-doc gigs, working hard while they write grant applications in their spare time. Or if they get into a tenure-track position, they get to work very hard for low pay, typically for seven years. Then they either get tenure or they get kicked out.

Say there are three people in tenure-track positions and one of them makes it. That’s 21 years of very hard work in exchange for 1 lifetime sinecure. Not such a bad deal for the school. The tenure has almost paid for itself before it starts, and it’s also possible to get some work out of people after they get tenure too.

Part of the reason the tenure-track system has withered is that schools don’t care so much about the difference between the desperate work they get out of tenure-track faculty versus the laid-back results from adjunct faculty who are paid so little they hardly care whether they keep the job. (Or desperate ones who need their pittance to survive.)

Another part is that it’s likely that the number of students will drop in coming years, and it’s bad to have an overload of tenured faculty when admissions are down.

But underneath the arguments about fairness and academic freedom etc, it isn’t that different from a law firm that *might* invite a brilliant young employee to become a full partner. The point is to get a whole lot of high-quality work based on the possibility, and then you have to give somebody the award so the next batch will think it’s possible.

A whole lot like a lottery, except instead of buying lottery tickets workers instead put in years of low-pay hard work. For their hope.

And that’s part of the problem with the Salaita thing. Everybody who has tenure or is working for tenure gets the idea that even after they have made their sacrifices and won their lottery, it could all get taken away if the administration doesn’t like some of their tweets.

It subverts the system. Why work hard for seven years hoping for tenure, if you in fact don’t even get tenure out of it?

If a lottery winner gets enough money to be set for life, and then the lottery administration says “We’ve decided you’re not a good enough person to deserve this lottery so we’re keeping the money”, a whole lot of people will stop buying lottery tickets. Why buy a ticket if you don’t win even after you win?

The arguments about tenure, and about who’s a stakeholder and who isn’t in hiring decisions haven’t been resolved here, and probably couldn’t be, given the complex history of the university as a cultural artifact. With respect to U.S. public universities, if the faculty, considered as a whole, wanted a greater influence in the governance of its institutions, the evidence suggests that early on in the post-war period it was there for the taking, donors notwithstanding.

It’s much too late now to puzzle over how it came to be that the rich have decided to wield the power conceded to them, and it may well be too early to mount a counterattack with any hope of support outside the campus. Make no mistake, though. This is about power, not about rules — a danse apache, not a minuet. You snooze, you lose.

matt w & J Thomas:

I suspect that arguing based on outcomes in this thread is a waste of time. For the authoritarian, “reinforce the hierarchy” takes precedence over all other considerations. What matters here is that there be a public display of the fact that a rich donor can crush a mere faculty member regardless of what the established procedures are. If that leads to a lesser quality university, that’s a fair price to pay in the eyes of someone who craves hierarchy above all else.

Also, I didn’t ever really read the volokh Conspiracy with any consistency, but wasn’t the consensus around there in favour of torture during the WOT ?

Rich Puchalsky @99: So much of the tone scolding implicitly depends on pseudonymity holding up. So much of it is, itself, pseudonymous.

Oh, dear. On the one hand, I entirely agree with the point of principle: treating anonymoids as if they were actual people inevitably leads to a general lowering of the tone of discourse. On the other hand, what a feeble defense of Salaita this is — attacking the reporter, when the reviews are (or were, before 6079 Smith W clocked in) verifiable with a click?

So . . . a general offer. “T”, or any letter, Unicode symbol or string who is so inclined, has unrestricted license to cite any independently verifiable fact in my name, subject to my ability to verify it and repudiate if I can’t. If the name that Google and the TSA know me by is insufficient, I’m known in better places as יהושע בן מתיתיהו ומרים (Joshua son of Matthew and Miriam if the back end isn’t Unicode clean), and I’ll stake that reputation as well on the existence of citations that exist. I’ve been online since 1982; there should be plenty of mud to dig up if Mr. Puchalsky thinks he can throw it without losing ground.

@105

I think your examples kinda prove my point. In the case of UVA, a very conservative Board member hooked up w/Hoover Institute types and some hedge fund alum tried a coup on UVA President Sullivan. It was other alum, parents of students who were footing the bill, and eventually the faculty that stopped the coup. In the case of Texas, the board stood up to the governor to protect the faculty. In the Salaita case, the board, alums and the student senate were not supportive.

And let’s not even get into the politics of faculty hiring. Do you think it was a coincidence that Robert Warrior’s former graduate student got the offer at U of I? Are you in the market for a bridge to buy?

Barry
Tenure. Salaita would be home free if he had tenure. Personally, I wish there was a more active Board regarding Mr. Yoo. Don’t you?

Harold @111
It’s pretty difficult to get canned once tenure is granted. Those instances are very rare indeed. Not so for the non-tenured. You’ll note that most of the support from Salaita came from the tenured crowd.

As I’ve noted earlier, I think one of the old norms that was broken by tenured faculty was honesty with graduate students and applicants. Humanities departments in particular have recruited graduate students into programs where there is little or no chance for future academic employment. Tenured faculty gain in higher prestige (always better to to in a PhD granting program) and lower workload by having grad students around. Maybe they should tell folks before they enter what is turning into a nine year commitment that they have a 10% chance of getting a tenure-track position.

“treating anonymoids as if they were actual people inevitably leads to a general lowering of the tone of discourse”

Those of us without power and with something to lose choose not to let our full identities be know. I don’t think that makes our comments less valuable.

T: “You’ll note that most of the support from Salaita came from the tenured crowd.”

Proof please? The largest number of signatories on any one boycott statement (aside from the general one) is one organized entirely by and for graduate students. I know on several of the other statements — because their organizers told me — that the majority of signatures came from assistant professors.

So please provide me with actual evidence for your claim.

@106

A quick look at Google shows nothing that proves you’re a real person. Even if it did show “you” were a real person, it shows nothing that proves you are the person with that name. In fact, your vehemence about the subject, like your unwillingness to consider limitations on “sounds like a real name” as a criterion for being civil to people, suggests you’re not.

Odd–high-energy physics sites don’t show up on my page 1. What a surprise. So at best your argument is that if you use a name that sounds real, I should treat you better than someone who only uses their first name, because maybe your name will show up in a search engine, and maybe I’ll find that all the things you said about yourself are things I can find on the search engine. I’m really supposed to believe you take that seriously. I congratulate CT on finally getting a live one.

J Thomas
I find your comment @121 to be kind of absurd. Having read his comments here for some time and having also done a brief Google search out of curiosity (which proved a little bit more informative than bianca steele’s search apparently did), I have no doubt *at all* that Joshua W. Burton is who he says and that there is no “scheme” here of the sort you speculate about.

I also find this whole discussion of pseudonymity etc. to be quite unproductive. People have all kinds of reasons for using, or not using as the case may be, their full names on blog comment threads and/or elsewhere, and I think whether someone uses initials (or one initial), a pseudonym, a first name, or a full name should make, generally speaking, no difference in how their comments are viewed.

#122 LFC

I find your comment @121 to be kind of absurd.

You are welcome to.

The situation is absurd.

Public figures very often have multiple speech-writers who decide what they will say. Saddam went further, and let it be publicly known that he often sent around body doubles to deliver the speeches. Increasingly a public figure is a packaged product that needn’t be all that dependent on any individual human being.

And internet trolls? Some of them are committees. If you can write with the proper style and the proper tone and slant, and you have the right connections, you can be on the team.

It doesn’t take much to build a fake online background. Who’s going to check? Mostly, you’re you if you answer email sent to the email address you provided.

A snailmail address? A phone number? Easy, but there is somebody to find. Voice prints, fingerprints on letters, etc. Taking it to extremes, it would be hard to fake a dissertation at a prestigious university, but there are lots of people who get dissertations and then drift away to do something unrelated. Choose the name, look for their online habits, you can find one who is unlikely to notice if you use his name. Can and will the university find him if random bloggers ask them to?

A manufactured troll could work for a small business and the business itself can be fake. So long as government doesn’t ask questions, who would check?

He can have a job in a large business provided the right member of HR is on the team. They don’t have to make actual paychecks and tax records.

It takes some skills, and people who have too much of the opposite skills can catch them. But it is not at all implausible that a group who wanted to create a fake persona could fool a bunch of bloggers for decades. Provided the FBI etc did not get interested.

Why would they bother? I don’t know. I don’t know why they would bother to be trolls in the first place.

It’s an absurd world. And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.

#109

That might be the case for Volokh, but I fail to see how it applies to everybody else criticising Salaita – for all I care you can fire Too and Dershowitz tomorrow. And I don’t even have a strong opinion on Salaita’s dehiring, I just think that many of those defending his behaviour go to extraordinary lengths and seem to be unable to recognize differing viewpoints as valid. This is partly understandable since reasoned argument and political campaigning seldom go together well, but it makes the resulting discussion not very fruitful.

#126 Novakant

That might be the case for Volokh, but I fail to see how it applies to everybody else criticising Salaita – for all I care you can fire Too and Dershowitz tomorrow. And I don’t even have a strong opinion on Salaita’s dehiring, I just think that many of those defending his behaviour go to extraordinary lengths and seem to be unable to recognize differing viewpoints as valid.

I tend to agree with that.

On the one hand we have the general argument about academic freedom. That’s mixed in with what’s basicly a union/management dispute. People who aren’t in the union are often not that interested. Sure, academics are special and deserve special privileges, but are they *that* special? If we’re going to treat them special then we shouldn’t ever see them acting like normal human beings, right? And shouldn’t we get academic freedom for everybody? It would be easy to pass a rule about it for government employees, but it’s already hard to fire government employees for cause but easy to fire them for redundancy and it’s easy to decide the job is redundant.

Then there’s the specific case.

http://www.nea.org/home/33067.htm

Tenure is simply a right to due process; it means that a college or university cannot fire a tenured professor without presenting evidence that the professor is incompetent or behaves unprofessionally or that an academic department needs to be closed or the school is in serious financial difficulty. Nationally, about 2 percent of tenured faculty are dismissed in a typical year.

Two percent per year! And nobody argues about most of them.

But this is a special case. He lost his tenure because he opposes Israel. Zionists say it’s because he was uncivil, as if they would not have minded him opposing Israel if he was more polite. That’s because they don’t want to admit that they oppose him because he opposes Israel.

Nobody says those tweets are worth a firing except for some zionists.

People who are concerned that the Zionist lobby is too strong naturally tend to support Salaita, along with people who care about tenure. And people who pay attention, who think tweets during the latest atrocities in Gaza aren’t worth firing. He obviously did not get any hint of due process, but it was a special case where it could be argued that because he was transferring from one university to another he did not have tenure anywhere. Needless to say this alarms people with tenure who might want to transfer someday.

It’s entirely a judgement call. Are those tweets worth firing for? Of course people disagree. Even people who think that *some* tweets would be worth firing for are likely to disagree about these. (And it can go the other way, Zionists who have a long history of struggling for academic freedom can decide that *these* tweets are worth firing for.)

Although it’s entirely a judgement call and not objective, we can’t expect people to just agree to disagree when an innocent man’s career is being destroyed.

Now zionists are saying his research is inadequate. They scrutinize his research looking for things that are not fully scientific. But there are plenty of women’s studies faculty whose research is emphatically worse, and they don’t go after them. They oppose him because he opposes Israel.

I can replicate LFC’s results, but just barely, even using all the information JWB’s dropped about himself in the past couple of months, and even using multiple search engines and turning on anonymous browsing. There are dozens of Joshua Burton’s in the US. Some of them probably even have overlapping opinions. If you’re going to go to the trouble of stalking them and finding out as much information online about them as you can, are you then going to confront them and ask them whether they’re the one you found?

My point isn’t that JWB might be trolling us, though, but that even if he isn’t, “I can find this one man in the white pages, therefore I believe the chances are about 100% that a fullname person is not a troll and a funny-named person is,” is not good reasoning.

Suppose I started using a full name here, and my initials just happened to be “LC,” or my name just happened to be “Meredith” or “Belle.” Would your first thought be that that was my name, or that I was trolling those people?

In fact, there are hundreds of people in the US with my real name (at least–there seems to be a max results of 100 for each search). If “John Smith” started posting here, would you assume he was a real person?

If half the commenters would react to my choice of name one way, and half would react a different way, whose opinion should I care about? What if the proportions were different?

If JWB is who he says he is, he’s been around long enough to know all that, and he should know that the fact that his online presentation gets respect is tied up with the fact that others’ perfectly presentable ones don’t, for various reasons.

R. Puchalsky:
If Salaita had made his tweets pseudonymously, no one would seriously say that this was an inherently morally flawed act that demonstrates his unfitness to teach.

I don’t understand this line of reasoning (or in the previous Puchalsky comments on this issue). My impression is that those who think Salaita’s tweets show his unfitness to teach are reacting primarily to the content of the tweets, not the fact that he tweeted under his real name. If he had tweeted the same things under a pseudonym and people had then discovered that the pseudonym was Salaita’s, those objecting and finding him unfit to teach would presumably have exactly the same objections they have now. To repeat, I believe it is the content of the tweets, not the name under which they were delivered, that the objectors find objectionable. If the real-name tweets allegedly indicate his bias etc. as a teacher, pseudonymous tweets would do so as well. (He doesn’t appear in the classroom as a pseudonym, after all.)

A message under a pseudonym is somewhat different than one under one’s ‘real’ name. In the latter case, one is invoking one persona, one’s personnage, one’s public image, which may change or emphasize the meaning of the message, since the author is saying not only ‘this is what I think’ but ‘this is who I am.’ Even on Twitter, which seems designed to attract triviality and random dumb hostility.

However, given the relative mildness of Salaita’s remarks in an Internet context, I think there must be more going on than the Twitter stuff.

Private to js. @125. Thanks for some kind words, but I do hope I never take myself that seriously. My actual belief is a bit subtler, and my analogy between “named person” in blogspace and “gentleman” in some more-or-less mythical past (probably the Rev. Endicott Peabody channeling the Duke of Wellington) is precise and narrowly limited. A gentleman takes it as a point of honor not to claim an extra dose of respect, or an extra anything not due to every citizen. He is held to an extra dose of accountability (“much has been given, much is expected”), and lives his life always knowing that “a halo need slip only a few inches to become a noose.”

I believe that people who speak under constraint of an indelible name (and who, by the way, shut up when that burden is too heavy, leading to modest paper trails) create self-policed safe spaces that are highly desirable as to tone. I believe they often improve the tone of others, by their example. I’ve believed that since relatively early Usenet days, and am comfortable with owning every word of my last thirty-odd years of nonsense, which is good because DejaGoogle kept an amazing amount of it. I recognize, pace MPAVictoria @114, that all privilege, including privilege never asserted but held as a private conceit, is exclusionary, and that inclusiveness is also a precious value in free discourse. I don’t have a full answer to this antinomy, but I think her (?) goal here is generally a higher one than mine, further inclining me to keep my conceits to myself.

So . . . almost the only thing that would actually provoke me to assert a privilege of non-anonymity is seeing someone else unfairly abused for not having it. The scrub who was bullying “T” @97, not for what he said but for being anonymous, deserved to be spanked by someone with a name who could make the same (objective, unrefuted) point. The chance to do so was personally gratifying, and having the scrub write his own ticket by doubling down on me was even better.

Whatever the larger merits of his case, I do admire Dr. Salaita for taking a similar view to mine of reputation capital: for better or worse, he has a name.

“I think what’s-his-name @121 is a stinker for making my phone number machine searchable”

I completely agree with you on that. I am sure that if you emailed management they would take it down.

” I don’t have a full answer to this antinomy, but I think her (?) goal here is generally a higher one than mine, further inclining me to keep my conceits to myself.”

Thank you? I think?

121 is unconscionable. Someone with the power to to do should obfuscate the phone number immediately and consider banning J Thomas for some reasonable period of time.

Thanks for some kind words

Classy!

A gentleman takes it as a point of honor not to claim an extra dose of respect, or an extra anything not due to every citizen.

Your concept of gentility differs from mine.

I believe that people who speak under constraint of an indelible name (and who, by the way, shut up when that burden is too heavy, leading to modest paper trails) create self-policed safe spaces that are highly desirable as to tone. I believe they often improve the tone of others, by their example.

Two perhaps seemingly contradictory responses: (1) I don’t give one solitary motherfucking shit about tone; (2) I find your tone repulsive.

I think that about covers it, don’t you?

Mr. Burton, are you implying. . . ?

No. I was making an analogy (between two situations, in different centuries, one of which involves names), but now I’m just letting my forehead fall repeatedly against the keyboard, and having spellcheck take it from there.

Oh, yes, and I think what’s-his-name @121 is a stinker for making my phone number machine searchable

I apologize. I did not notice how much anonymity you wanted.

I’m starting to think he doesn’t like me, if you want to know the truth.

I don’t understand you. I get ideas what you’re doing, and then each time you seem to be more complicated than that.

The phone number has been deleted. Please note, more generally, that using these comment threads in a way that may be perceived as trying to punish another commenter, even if you find him or her annoying, is liable to be treated seriously by the Management. Since the commenter had previously indirectly linked to his own phone number, I’m treating this as an ambiguous case. Please also note that civility is not just a topic of conversation, but something we try to maintain on this blog. The basic tone of argument – from several commenters with various stances – leaves a lot to be desired. While I obviously shall not be retaliating in ways that affect people’s livelihoods, I will close this thread, or alternatively disemvowel and use temporary or long term individual bans as needs be. You are all guests here. Guests are under an obligation to behave well if they want to stay at the party.

I think it’s a bad idea to post other people’s personal information without their permission, and for the hosts to take that down if they see it.

That said, I feel entitled to point out that the guy posted the link to his own phone number in an attempt to make me look stupid for not being able to find his phone number in a standard search engine.

bianca steele @150: in an attempt to make me look stupid

Not a bit — apologies!

Not a bit — apologies!

And mortified to be misunderstood that way. Please call me, bianca, if I need to say more offline to make it right.

#151 Mike Schilling

“Not all zionists see it this way. But enough do to create a reputation for the whole class.”

There’s a word for that kind of reasoning, and it isn’t a pretty one.

The word is “generalizing”.

So on this blog there are occasional comments about what conservatives are like, and the psychological syndrome that makes people be politically conservative.

Similarly, conservatives generalize about liberals, various people generalize about PETA members, people generalize about NRA members and gun owners, etc etc etc.

What makes it work is that the generalizations are born out by experience. While there may be many millions of responsible gun owners who do not fit the stereotypes, when a gun owner identifies himself as a gun owner and talks about his opinions, 95+% of the time he is a gun nut who matches everybody’s expectations of him.

There may be millions of libertarians that you would be glad to have as a next-door neighbor. But the ones that call themselves libertarians online usually act like — libertarians.

And zionists online tend to do whatever they can to make Israel look good, or at least fudge the evidence, They lie, they quote MEMRI, etc etc. I can’t blame them. In their position I would do the same.

I want to believe I’m on the side of the good guys. That in the long run, being a good guy is the path of survival. So I don’t like secrets. If the good guys I support are secretly acting like bad guys because they think that’s what works, I want to know. I want to look at their evidence that it’s necessary and see whether I’m convinced. If I disagree I want to persuade them to stop being bad guys. And if that fails, I will stop supporting them.

But what if I was in a war against intensely evil bad guys, and I had an alliance with some moderately bad guys. And our survival all depended on winning the war. You can’t have a big public argument about military tactics during a war, when the enemy can listen in. When it affects how neutrals respond to both sides. If there are evil people on your side you can’t just stop supporting them, when losing the war means people who are even more evil take over.

You don’t have to be evil to lie for Israel. You only have to be at war. Israel has been at war longer than most people have been alive. Longer than many grandparents have been alive.

I can’t blame the MEMRI guys. They’re at war. Of course they do whatever they can to make their enemies look bad.

Anybody who believes them, it’s their own fault. Decide about somebody from what their enemies say about them? That isn’t “fool me twice”. That’s fool me once, shame on me.

But there’s an important problem from this stuff, namely blowback. It takes a special sort of double-think to spread the propaganda without believing it yourself. The natural way for things to go is the people who’re spreading it believe it more than anybody else does. And when those people have a say in tactics and even strategy, their false beliefs start to warp the reality. The false beliefs can’t be ignored when making choices, and so important choices get distorted by them. That can hurt you more than the propaganda helps.

But I’m just a kibitzer when it’s a question of how to run somebody else’s war. It’s none of my business except as it affects my own nation, and of course I want to see it ended with good results for everybody.

J Thomas, if you set up the conditions so that you’re in eternal war, then you bear the responsibility for acting as if you’re in eternal war.

That’s true, but the decision-making on that can be pretty diffuse. It looked like Rabin made a serious attempt to make peace, and he was assassinated by a lone gunman, and there has been no serious attempt ever again. Peace activists suffer discrimination of various sorts, and may get beaten up on the sidewalk by unknown assailants. Peace demonstrations get attacked by war demonstrations and then the police are likely to take the war side. I think if I was facing all that and I could get out, I might likely leave and lose most of my chance to make a difference. But I still would not want my country destroyed, even though I felt their policies were wrong-headed.

I was impressed with JWB’s friends who were working for peace in Israel, and then one line he wrote gave me the impression that what they were doing was, they found palestinians who were safe to talk to, and they talked to them to tell them to accept whatever terms Israel wanted to dish out. A “peace” movement that would be utterly safe from Israeli opposition. I wasn’t sure whether that was right, and I saw that without a lot of honesty it would be hard to find out.

When people get into war mode it’s very hard to get them out. You can say it’s their own responsibility, but once their minds are locked and loaded, they are victims themselves.

And I wasn’t generalizing about Zionists[….]

No, I was, and Mike Schilling was on the verge of trying to smear me for it.

I was generalizing about Salaita’s detractors. [….] If I have to repeat the obvious: this is about criticism of Israel.

Yes. Not all zionists are going after Salaita, but pretty much all who go after Salaita are zionists, and doing it primarily because they’re zionists.

I am still old enough, 63, to have known Holocaust survivors and many other Jews tired of Judaism’s being reduced to the Holocaust and the modern state of Israel.

Would you prefer I say “the state of Israel”? It’s only a little more typing.

Just to say, “Israel” (like “Next year, in Jersualem!) is a very large idea. A very wonderful, inspiring, moving, enlarging idea, that might just take us all (including Muslims) nearer to g-, and thereby to one another. So long as we don’t confuse Israel with a specific geographic place (or people, the last added by me as a Christian gentile).

And yet that has nothing to do with the permanent war that is central to the existence and meaning of the modern state of Israel.