Two interesting stories in the Chronicle. First, another state legislature bill that sought (in its original form) to control how academics teach in the classroom; this time addressing their English language abilities.

Late in January, Ms. Grande proposed a bill in the North Dakota legislature to prod public institutions of higher education in precisely that direction. Under her bill, if a student complained in writing that his or her instructor did not “speak English clearly and with good pronunciation,” that student would then be entitled to withdraw from the class with no academic or financial penalty — and would even get a refund. Further, if 10 percent of the students in a class came forward with such complaints, the university would be obliged to move the instructor into a “nonteaching position,” thus losing that instructor’s classroom labor.

As a differently-accented professor myself, I don’t feel in a position to make substantial comments. The article does seem to cover both sides of the argument fairly. It notes research suggesting that students in sections taught by foreign born T.A.s do worse than students in sections taught by native Americans. Equally, however, there’s evidence suggesting that this is in part the result of bad training (many schools don’t offer proper training to incoming T.A.s from different countries), as well as expectations (experiments suggest that students ‘expect’ foreign-appearing lecturers to have worse English, and have difficulty in understanding them even when they are perfectly fluent).

The Chronicle also has a follow-up story (sub-required) on the fallout from its plagiarism investigation of last year. Two plagiarists lost their jobs; one had (unspecified) disciplinary action taken against him by his university, another had no action taken against him, after an internal university investigation, which determined that the evidence supported a charge of plagiarism, but that the issue had arisen during a previous collaborative relationship.

Brad DeLong once wrote “Marty Weitzman is smarter than I am”. And he probably is; his paper on the equity risk premium was a gem, and in the couple of email exchanges I had with him he seemed like a hell of a nice bloke too. But it just goes to show that there are all sorts of different kinds of intelligence; I’d struggle horribly in any one of Weitzman’s economics seminars, but having grown up in the country, I’m pretty sure that if I wanted to nick a trailer load of horse manure I’d have been over the hills and far away with it, no trouble, before you could say “what a way to earn a living”. Nicking agricultural waste seems to me like one of those Hayekian “tacit knowledge” fields, where street-smarts and experience are probably a bigger driver of success than book-larnin’.

You wouldn’t have thought that someone who spent most of his working days in the Harvard Economics Faculty would be short of horseshit[1] but apparently so. On a more serious note, if there are any disciplinary consequences for Weitzman, at all, then I for one will be kicking up a hell of a fuss and encouraging him to sue. I mean, talk about a bloody double standard. Best of luck, Marty. Btw, what a pity it wasn’t Bullshit[2], or the rhetorical irony would have been complete.

[1]I plagiarised this from Doug Henwood
[2]Yes yes, fellow bumpkins, I know; nobody would bother to collect cow manure or steal it because cow manure isn’t all that good a fertiliser. Since I moved to the city I discovered these things called “jokes” and that was one of them.

Via “Pandagon”:http://www.pandagon.net/mtarchives/004936.html, the “Rev. Terry Fox”:http://www.ljworld.com/section/gaymarriage/story/201237 of Wichita, KS:

bq. Fox helped turn defeat of the amendment in the Legislature in 2004 to victory for his side at the polls Tuesday night. The amendment passed by 70 percent to 30 percent. “We never dreamed we would have this margin of victory,” he said. Next in his sights, he said, is “keeping an eye on evolution and abortion clinics.”

Evolution clinics? Hey, that’s not such a bad idea. We could get “P.Z. Myers”:http://pharyngula.org/ to run them as a franchise:

Walk-in: Well _I_ think that evolution is just a _theory_.
PZ: Step in to this room, please.

Meanwhile, Tad Brennan finds the Washington Post describing the “unusual educational careers”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32379-2005Apr6.html of Howard Dean supporters:

bq. More than half (54 percent) hold post-graduate degrees and a quarter have graduated from college.

Tad says that if he’d known you could get a post-graduate degree without graduating college, he’d have saved years of his life.

Which could be inconvenient as I fancy the knickers off him. Who are you? Via the younger Farrell siblings who are thinking of setting up a blog just to discuss the books, the George R.R.R.R. Martin Ice and Fire personality test.

After months of delay and dispute, the BBC reports that the Iraqi Parliament has finally mustered the two-thirds majority needed to nominate a president and two vice-presidents. These positions are largely ceremonial, but the deal presumably implies an agreement to select a Prime Minister, after which an interim government can finally take office, with the task of drawing up a permanent constitution. Some good news is that the Allawi group has been kept to the marginal position its weak electoral support implies.

There are still plenty of big problems ahead – the delays reflect fundamental divisions between Kurds and Shias about the future of Iraq and, except for some token appointments, the Sunnis have been excluded altogether. And the insurgency continues with little letup, having no doubt found many recruits among the refugees from Fallujah, almost completely destroyed in the November campaign there. Still, it seems reasonable to hope that a reasonably democratic, and only moderately Islamist government will eventually emerge.

Assuming this happens, was the invasion worth it? In my view, No.
[click to continue…]

“Mark Schmitt”:http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2005/04/david_brooks_is.html, “Jesse Taylor”:http://www.pandagon.net/mtarchives/004914.html#more and “Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/04/brooks_on_disag.html have some interesting (and, in Jesse’s case, annoyed) things to say about “this David Brooks column”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/05/opinion/05brooks.html?ex=1270353600&en=95b8e0d5b311e9b1&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland. All I have to say is that I hate this sort of thing:

bq. A year ago I called the head of a prominent liberal think tank to ask him who his favorite philosopher was. If I’d asked about health care, he could have given me four hours of brilliant conversation, but on this subject he stumbled and said he’d call me back. He never did.

This is supposed to be an indictment? I mean, I’m sorry the guy didn’t call Brooks back. But can you think of _any_ answer that Brooks would not have been able to turn into a head-shaking anecdote about the intellectual poverty and disarray of modern liberalism? Meanwhile, Brooks switches on his dichotomizer and, remarkably, always has himself come down on the right side — Red and Blue, Thinkers and Actors, Isolationists and Interventionists, “Fifties intellectuals and Contemporary intellectuals”:http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/media/columns/medialife/n_9749/index1.html , “Lucky-Charmers and Cheerioians”:http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2004/9/20warner.html. Occasionally he’ll divide people up in a way that makes sense in the light of your own analysis of things. This is what seems to have happened this time with “Mark Schmitt”:http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2005/04/david_brooks_is.html. But whereas Mark has a point of view and an argument to back it up, I don’t see much evidence that Brooks’ efforts are coming from anywhere other than the ur-distinction in his head between Us and Them.

This post should probably be called The Pope in Ireland II, following Kieran’s post of a couple of days ago. But I’m not quite ready to finally delete the shreds of a posting I keep re-writing that keeps getting overtaken by other posts and events in the meantime.

Anyway, this morning Slugger O’Toole points to the most beautiful antidote to the dolorous (and, frankly, condescending) blanket coverage of the pope’s death by CNN. Slugger kindly reproduces in full Fintan O’Toole’s superb essay placing JPII’s reign in the context of Hobbes’ description of the papacy as “nothing other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof”.

If, like me, you can’t bear another moment of mock-mourningful journalists raking out endless and unseemly titbits of human interest and pointless kremlinology-like speculations about the next pope, read this. It’s a cracker.

Blair has “called the UK general election for May the 5th”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4409935.stm . Though the polls seem to be indicating a Tory surge, the “current odds at bluesq”:http://www.bluesq.com/bet?action=go_events&type_id=850 are Labour 1/14, Tories 13/2, and LibDems 100/1.

I watched “Der Untergang”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0363163/ (Downfall) last night at Bristol’s Watershed cinema. An astonishing film. Bruno Ganz is fantastic as the increasingly stressed and incoherent Hitler and Corinna Harfouch is chilling as the the unremittingly evil Magda Goebbels. The film works partly through the contrast between above-ground where Berlin crumbles under Soviet bombardment and the bunker where reality impinges on fantasy intermittently and increasingly shockingly. There’s a great scene where Hitler addresses Albert Speer across the model of his planned Berlin-of-the-future whilst the real Berlin is flattened. Hitler is petty and selfish to the end, screaming of betrayal, his hatred of the Jews, and telling all that will hear that the German people deserve to die for letting him down — personally. The only slightly false note was when Traudl Junge (Hitler’s secretary) escapes at the end — one suspects some embellishment.

When the film ended the cinema was perfectly still for a moment or two. Everyone in the audience was, I think, psychologically winded by what they’d seen. Ganz, Harfouch and director Hirschbiegel deserve Oscars for this, no question.

“Josh”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_04_03.php#005332 is entirely right that Sen John Conryn’s statements in the Senate today about violence against judges are utterly unacceptable. Saying that judges are somehow to blame for violence against judges and courtworkers should be enough to get you kicked out of any ethically responsible caucus. This being the contemporary GOP, I’m not holding my breath.

“Brad DeLong”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/04/ben_bernanke_to.html gets a mild case of “pundit’s fallacy”:http://www.jargondatabase.com/Jargon.aspx?id=990 as he reacts to the news that “Ben Bernanke will head the CEA”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/0de25c40-a304-11d9-b4e8-00000e2511c8,_i_rssPage=9d5b9ebe-c8bc-11d7-81c6-0820abe49a01.html:

bq. … the first thing that Ben should do is to make a stand on a technical-but-vital issue where the CEA should have made its stand: get the Bush administration to reduce the clawback real interest rate on its proposed private accounts from 3% plus inflation to a floating rate equal to the U.S. Treasury’s borrowing rate (or the borrowing rate minus a small margin). That would keep Bush’s private accounts from being a bad deal for the non-rich who opt for them.

He probably should. But one has to ask, how likely is it that _that’s_ going to happen? Bernanke certainly seems like a good guy, but the Bush Administration has a way of making sure that the good guys knuckle under. I see three ways this might happen. First, a pre-emptive effort to get him to publicly articulate the Apostolic Creed of the administration. (“I believe in one authority, the Executive almighty …”) Second, a straightforward smack on the wrist (or blow to the back of the head) as soon as Bernanke tries to assert a bit of intellectual independence. Third, a temptation on Bernanke’s part to make a Devil’s bargain: something like, “If I hold back for now, I’ll be in a _much_ stronger position to do the right thing when they appoint me Chairman of the Fed.” That way madness lies.

Diana Rhoten writes in Inside Higher Ed about the brain drain from academia.

With the rise of the knowledge economy and the spread of decentralizing technology, the academy is ceding authority and attention to businesses, nonprofits, foundations, media outlets, and Internet communities. Even more significant, in my mind, the academy may be losing something else: its hold over many of its most promising young academics, who appear more and more willing to take their services elsewhere — and who may comprise an embryonic cohort of new “postacademic intellectuals” in the making.

Rhoten argues that these can’t serve as substitutes for traditional public intellectuals, but they share some of the same motivations:

On many levels, the new generation I’m describing shares little with Trilling, Wilson, and other old-school public intellectuals. Yet by choosing to leave the academy, they demonstrate at least one thing in common: They need, want, perhaps even crave a larger public.

Rhoten identifies blogging as one of the possible paths that intellectuals can take out of the academy; I’m not sure that she’s right. More precisely, blogging offers academics a means of connecting with that wider public without having to leave the academy. My personal motivation for taking up blogging was to get into arguments about all of the things that I can’t really write about as a political scientist – science fiction, modern literature, curious historical facts – and to express strong and non-scientific opinions on politics. I used to joke that I wanted to be Susan Sontag when I grew up; someone who wrote fiercely argued and dense essays for the New York Review of Books. Blogging isn’t that, but it does give license to write in a freewheeling way, to speculate, to polemicize and to give a bit of free rein to your hobby-horses. All of which is to say that blogging isn’t ever going to be a substitute for academia, but it is a valuable ancillary activity. It allows you to write pieces that may or may not connect to your scholarship, but that never could see the light of day in an academic journal. At the same time, this can feed back in valuable and unexpected ways into your academic work. I suspect that over the longer term blogging will become increasingly attractive to scholars who want to connect with that wider audience, but who don’t want to give up their scholarship. You can become a low-rent public intellectual, without having to give up your day job. I don’t know if there are any people who’ve been lured away from academics by blogging, but I do see quite a number of academics who use blogging as a means of blowing off steam, and of writing about things that they couldn’t otherwise write about. Not substitute, complement.

An eye-rolling moment at “Instapundit”:http://instapundit.com/archives/022180.php:

From the comments at Tim Blair’s:
Final score for the 20th century:
Ordinary Poles, 2.
German intellectuals, 0.
Heh.

Right. Some scenes from a life:

1938. Moves to Kracow, enrolls in the Faculty of Philosophy at “Jagellonian University”:http://www.uj.edu.pl/index.en.html.

1939. Joins ‘Studio 38’ experimental theatre group. He would eventually write six plays.

1946. Ordained a priest. Studies at the “Angelicum University.”:http://www.pnac.org/Universities/PUSTAAngelicum.htm.

1947. Receives his doctorate in philosophy. Thesis on “The Problems of Faith in the Works of St John of the Cross.” Returns to Poland to lecture in Philosophy and Social Ethics at Jagellonian University.

1953. Defends second doctorate, titled “Evaluation of the possibility of founding a Catholic ethic on the ethical system of Max Scheler” at the “Catholic University of Lublin”:http://www.kul.lublin.pl/uk/. (Max Scheler was one of those German Intellectuals, by the way.) During this period, publishes poetry in various Polish journals under the pseudonym, “Andrzej Jawien.”

1954. Untenured Professor of Philosophy at Lublin.

1956. Appointed to a the Chair of Moral Theology and Ethics at Lublin.

And so on. Always nice to see Professor Reynolds standing up for the value of the life of the mind.

Since you can’t find this anywhere online and I think it’s worth a mention, I thought I’d do the honors. April 4, 1945 was the end of World War II in Hungary. When I was growing up, it was referred to as the day the country had been liberated and big celebrations ensued with one of my favorite Soviet-era songs (“Április négyrõl szóljon az ének..”). Not surprisingly that approach didn’t survive the political changes of the 1990s. Nonetheless, the fact that the significance of this day in the country’s history has been completely obliterated saddens me and leaves me frustrated. Talk about the social construction of holidays and historical dates. I would be much less bitter about all of this if the country had decided to commemorate the end of World War II on some other day, for example, the end of the war in Europe or across the world. But no such luck. Ignoring this issue is completely consistent with Hungary’s inability to face up to its horrific role in that war. Celebrating the war’s end would mean acknowledging that the country had anything to do with it and that’s clearly asking too much.