I've had my skirmishes on this blog with readers who don't see why I have a problem with the government's takeover of health care--or, more broadly, why I have a problem with big and bigger government. It's not that I don't want reform--I do. It's that I don't think this albatross of a bill is going to give us what we need--and that it's a Trojan horse (mixed metaphors courtesy of pre-caffeinated state) for a style of government that should have us all worried. Now, as the health care takeover becomes--almost as an afterthought--a means of securing quite a federal hold over higher ed as well, I wonder what those readers are thinking about.

Here's Peter Wood on why academics--and anyone who cares about free inquiry, quality education, knowledge creation, and all the good stuff that is supposed to happen at our colleges and universities--should be more than worried:

Congressional Democrats have added President Obama’s takeover of the student loan industry to the health care reconciliation bill. It is a troubling development, but not because of the finances. The trouble comes from the specter of federal control of American higher education. “Obama loans” may seem benign but they threaten academic freedom and may compromise the quality of academic programs.

The move by the Democrats forestalls a debate we need to have over who controls this key institution. Since 1965, the federal government has subsidized colleges and universities by guaranteeing loans that students take from private lenders. Obama’s idea is to cut the banks out of the picture as loan-originators and have the Department of Education lend directly to students.

On the surface this so-called “Direct Lending” sounds thrifty. Over ten years the government would “save” billions of taxpayer dollars that would otherwise be spent in fees and subsidies to private lenders. The Congressional Budget Office has slashed the projected savings from $87 billion to $67 billion over eleven years. But that’s still a lot. What’s not to like? And Direct Lending has been in place on a smaller scale for about fifteen years. Lots of colleges already do it and like it. We know it works.

[...]

The federally subsidized student loan system surely stands in need of reform. But “Direct Lending” may well be a cure that is worse than the disease. The main problem is not financial but political. It will make American higher education extraordinarily vulnerable to political interference. Will Congress, presidential administrations, and the Department of Education resist the temptation to misuse their new power? Direct Lending will give the federal government decisive if not quite total control of higher education finance.

t is not as if the federal government has taken a hands-off approach in the past. Consider what happened to men’s teams in sports such as swimming and wrestling. They have been eliminated in most colleges because Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 has been read as requiring equal numbers of men and women in college athletics. The law itself was anodyne: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance..." But one faction read that qualifying phrase, “receiving Federal financial assistance..." and saw an opportunity. They succeeded in transforming Title IX from a law against discrimination into a system of quotas. Too many boys playing college sports? The Department of Education will knock your college off the list of institutions eligible to receive federally-guaranteed student loans. That would be a death sentence for most colleges. In the name of “gender equity,” the government used its financial aid muscle to impose its own agenda on one dimension of college life.

Or consider the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights which has more than once used the government’s financial leverage to foster racial preferences in college admissions and hiring.

But it is not just the Left that has attempted to tell colleges what to do. Under President Bush, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings attempted to change the nation’s college curricula to produce college graduates whose skills mesh better with the needs of business and industry. Discovering that she had no direct say over what colleges teach, Secretary Spellings tried to get the nation’s accreditors to implement her plan for her. She didn’t succeed—but then again, she didn’t have the advantage of having total control over student loans. Direct Lending will change that, and future Secretaries of Education, whether moved by Obama-style progressivism or Bush-style utilitarianism, will have a great deal more power to get their way.

[...]

My biggest worry is that American higher education already tends towards stale conformity. The Climategate scandal provides a dramatic example of how genuine debate was for a period of years shut down in favor of an enforced “consensus” based on social pressure rather than scientific evidence.

We have a system of higher education that is highly vulnerable to such groupthink. If we add to that an arrangement of institutional funding that has no practical firewalls against being turned to ideological purposes, we face the likelihood of serious damage to the quality of American higher education.

Are these well-founded worries? Am I taking alarm at a measure that is really just a common sense step toward better government stewardship of an expensive program? I am not an especially humble critic, but sure, I could be wrong. I have been painting the picture in primary colors. But here’s the thing. I am raising questions that really ought to be examined thoughtfully by our legislators and not just brushed aside in a slapdash effort to get the bill on the President’s desk by the end of this week. I don’t think anyone in Congress intends the sort of consequences I have been describing. They just haven’t thought much about how higher education actually works. My point is that Direct Lending creates a huge opportunity for mischief, and the mischief-makers will figure that out soon enough.

The reason that Direct Loans are being bundled into the reconciliation bill is that the Democratic leaders of Congress reckon that they do not otherwise have the votes to get it passed. When it comes to health care, the Democrats defend this parliamentary maneuver by saying that, over the last year all the arguments have been heard and weighed, and that it is at last time to act. I don’t find that a very compelling argument for health care, but be that as it may, the same cannot possibly be said about Direct Loans. This is a dramatic restructuring of higher education finance with implications far beyond the dollar amounts, and yet it has received barely any public notice at all.

Note to students: Don't take on tremendous debt to pay for college. Go to a school you can afford and work your butt off to make sure you don't fall between the cracks and you get the courses and the guidance you need. Be focussed and purposeful. Make it work--and shed any latent fixation you may have that if it's not private and costing $50K a year, then it's not a good school.

Beekeeping has long been banned in New York City. Deemed too dangerous for city life, the gentle, sweet honeybee has been lumped in with hyenas, tarantulas, cobras, dingoes(!), and other animals the city doesn't think people living in close proximity to one another should be allowed to keep. It's been a bad rap for the honeybee, and has been tough on urban beekeepers, who have stuck to their hives despite the risk of a $2000 fine if they are caught.

Now, though, New York City is rethinking the ban on honeybees, and may even be about to do the right thing:

On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s board will take up the issue of amending the health code to allow residents to keep hives of Apis mellifera, the common, nonaggressive honeybee. Health department officials said the change was being considered after research showed that the reports of bee stings in the city were minimal and that honeybees did not pose a public health threat.

The officials were also prodded by beekeepers who, in a petition and at a public hearing last month, argued that their hives promoted sustainable agriculture in the city.

A ban, of course, has not deterred many New Yorkers from setting up hives on rooftops and in yards and community gardens, doing it as a hobby, to pollinate their plants or to earn extra income from honey. Although the exact number of beekeepers in the city is unknown, many openly flout the law. They have their own association, hold beekeeping workshops, sell their honey at farmers' markets and tend to their hives as unapologetically as others might jaywalk, blaming their legal predicament on people’s ignorance of bees.

"People fear that if there's a beehive on their rooftop, they'll be stung," said Andrew Cote, president of the New York City Beekeepers Association, which was formed two years ago and has 220 members.

"Honeybees are interested in water, pollen and nectar," he said. "The real danger is the skewed public perception of the danger of honeybees."

I started a hive last year, and it was an amazing experience. Unfortunately, a curious raccoon knocked the hive over very early in the season, killing lots of bees and harming the queen's health so badly that she never became the top-speed egg layer that queen bees have to be if hives are to survive.

A honeybee lives about six weeks. She dies having worked herself to death. The queen is responsible for laying at a rate that ensures that the hive population will grow into the tens of thousands throughout the season--thus producing enough honey for the winter, and, if you are lucky, for you to harvest and eat. A damaged queen, if not recognized early and replaced, guarantees a failed hive. We learned that the hard way last year, replacing the struggling queen too late, and watching our hive dwindle and die out entirely by mid-summer. I can't tell you how sad it was--and I am not someone who likes insects. But I fell in love with those bees, and I was never stung.

This spring, we are trying again. Instead of beginning with package bees (a starter kit of several thousand workers plus queen, delivered through the mail in a buzzing, sticky box that makes for fun conversation with the UPS man), we are going to start with a "nuc colony" from an apiary nearby. A nuc colony amounts to five frames of drawn comb filled with brood, honey, pollen, etc., plus the workers, plus their queen. You place them in your hive deep alongside five more empty frames, and let them go. If all is well, they'll fill up those five frames, and fill up ten more in another deep, and then start making honey especially for you by the end of the summer.

All in all, it's a more secure way to establish a hive, because you aren't asking a very few tired, mailed bees to start from scratch with an unproven queen. You get a small but already successful colony, and all they have to do is adjust to their new surroundings and take off.

We should get the call to come pick up our nuc in a month or so. I've been on the edge of my seat for weeks. This year's nectar is beginning to flow, and on sunny days wild honeybees are already going nuts in the rosemary and heather flowering around the house. I watch them up close, and they buzz around ignoring me, moving from flower to flower, drinking the nectar and filling their little leg pockets with pollen. Then they fly back to their hollow tree--precise location unknown--unload their pollen pockets, regurgitate the nectar, and hand it over to other workers who will make it into honey by doing lots more eating and regurgitating. Then the bees fly back out to keep working the same flowers, until the nectar is gone.

I'm guessing most people don't know honey is processed bee vomit. Does it matter?

For real.

Brevard College professor Robert Cabin takes up the topic of how pressed for time professors and students are--and along the way delivers an veiled indictment of both the peer review process and academic professionalism:

I do often wonder just how much of what is written these days is ever read in its entirety, and how often even those of us working in higher education ever manage to slowly and carefully think through and resolve our most important issues.

If my experiences are representative, the answers to those questions are not encouraging. For example, in my work as an associate editor of an academic journal, I have increasingly found: 1. fewer people willing to do peer reviews; 2. fewer people completing their reviews (let alone completing them on time); 3. more people turning in brief, superficial, poorly written reviews; and 4. more authors responding to their reviews in a manner that suggests they either didn't read the reviews carefully or didn't have time to focus on them thoroughly. Although I'd like to feel dismayed and outraged by those trends, the sad truth is that I too have found it increasingly difficult to complete my own editorial and peer-review work on time, and have felt forced to do more skipping and skimming than I care to admit.

My recent experiences as an author have done much to assuage my guilt for those sins. For instance, my last grant application didn't make the cut because one of its reviewers didn't have time to read more than its title and abstract page. Moreover, none of the four successive editors assigned to me by my former publisher ever managed more than a "quick skim" of my manuscript. (I appreciated their honesty but was left wondering what exactly such "editors" do these days.) While the editor at my prospective new publisher has been somewhat more responsive, the first thing she told me was that because nobody would buy (let alone read) a 400-page book anymore, if I wanted to work with her press I'd have to cut my manuscript by at least 50 percent.

Even within academe, I'm often struck by how many of us are willing to argue over documents we haven't actually read. I wish I had a dollar for every faculty round-table discussion and journal-club meeting I've attended in which at least half of the attendees had not read the papers we assigned ourselves. And just the other day, the chair of a committee I serve on interrupted a heated debate to ask whether we had all read the relevant sections of a document after our previous discussion of the topic at hand. "Yes," we all groaned irritably, eager to get back at it. "Well, that's quite interesting," she observed dryly, "because I still haven't managed to find the time to write up and send that document!"

"Given that so many of their lives are overflowing with a combination of "real world" commitments (taking six classes a semester, working part time, competing in collegiate sports, caring for ailing grandmothers) and seemingly involuntary virtual additions (texting, Facebooking, gaming, and God knows what else)," he asks, "is it really any wonder that so many are unable or unwilling to grapple with the plain old texts we assign?"

Cabin claims, at the end of the article, to have been employing "irony" -- but he also appears to argue, more or less with a straight face, that the solution does lie in dialing back:

I still dream that someday we will collectively slow down and start demanding less. For starters, how about less e-mail and fewer meetings for faculty members, and smaller course loads and fewer curricular requirements for our students? How about, say, once every other month we turn it all off on our campuses for (gulp!) an entire day—no computers, no Internet, no personal gadgets. Instead we might engage with one another and our surrounding communities the old-fashioned way—and even read and thoroughly discuss a book in its entirety.

Thus does pragmatism meet irresponsibility: Rather than discuss such matters as priorities, self-discipline, organizational skills, professionalism, dedication, and ethics, Cabin appears to read the widespread distraction, abdication, and deflection he sees at both the faculty and student levels as inevitable--and seemingly reasonable--reactions to a situational and sensory overload for which no one is personally responsible. It's almost a foregone conclusion, given this premise, that the answer is to lower standards for students and faculty alike. Failure to fulfill commitments and to do one's work ceases to be a problem when we define away the concepts of failure, commitment, and work, and when we allow inanimate entities such as technology to be blamed for our personal failures. The result: a lost opportunity to think creatively and constructively about how to address a very real problem.

I know I'm overloaded these days -- and you probably are, too. The electronic world I work in has a lot to do with that. But I labor under the impression that the answer is to become better at managing my time, more clear and disciplined about my priorities, more focussed and purposeful in everything I do, more able to say no when that's needed, and more firm than ever that when I make a promise--to myself or others--I keep it. I don't want to dial back and do less--I want to do more and I believe that if I am clever about managing myself I can. You?

I've admired John Ellis ever since I read his excellent and sad Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities. Ellis explained to me many of the patterns I was beginning to think I saw in the academic humanities--and put them into perspective in a way that helped me understand why the enterprise of the English department (scholarship and teaching) was coming to seem so bankrupt. It's not that there is no value or purpose in studying and teaching about literature and culture--I read and write and study like my life depends on it, because in some obscure but very real ways, it does--but that the way the academic humanities has come to do those things over the past several decades amounts to an airless, blinkered, and ultimately self-defeating enterprise.

There are all kinds of good reasons for this--and Louis Menand, for one, does a grand job of explaining some of them in his new book, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. That's another post for another time, though. Right now, I'm interested in John Ellis.

Ellis is an emeritus professor at UC Santa Cruz--and began teaching at the University of California in 1966. He's been watching the UC system for a long time--and has a special perspective on the campus unrest that is roiling the university right now as California goes broke and higher ed feels the pinch. Here he is at Minding the Campus, with a piece entitled "How the Campuses Helped Ruin California's Economy":

All across the country there were demonstrations on March 4 by students (and some faculty) against cuts in higher education funding, but inevitably attention focused on California, where the modern genre originated in 1964. I joined the University of California faculty in 1966 and so have watched a good many of them, but have never seen one less impressive that this year's. In 1964 there was focus and clarity. This one was brain-dead. The former idealism and sense of purpose had degenerated into a self-serving demand for more money at a time when both state and university are broke, and one in eight California workers is unemployed. The elite intellectuals of the university community might have been expected to offer us insight into how this problem arose, and realistic measures for dealing with it. But all that was on offer was this: get more money and give it to us. Californians witnessing this must have wondered whether the money they were already providing was well spent where there was so little evidence of productive thought.

The content vacuum with filled with the standby language of past demonstrations, and so there was much talk of "the struggle," and of "oppression," and---of course---of racism. "We are all students of color now" said Berkeley's Professor Ananya Roy, and a student proclaimed that this crisis represented "structural racism." (Why not global warming too?) Berkeley's Chancellor Birgeneau called the demonstrations "the best of our tradition of effective civil action." Neither Chancellors nor demonstrations are what they used to be. The nostalgia for the good old days surfaced again in efforts to shut the campus down by blocking the entrance of UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. It didn't seem to occur to anyone that the old "shut it down" cry was somewhat misplaced when keeping it fully open was what the present demonstration was about, but then this was not an occasion when anyone seemed to have any idea of what they were trying to achieve.

One group at UCLA stumbled into the truth, though it was a truth they did not understand. At Bruin Plaza a crowd chanted "Who's got the power? We've got the power." In its context this was just another slogan of a mindless day, but the reality is that those people do indeed have the power, and routinely use it in a way that makes them the author of their own troubles. Let me explain.

Ellis's conclusion focuses on the tragic irony of it all:

The irony here really cries out for attention: a large state university system needs a free market economy that hums along in top gear so that the revenue needed to support it can be generated. But California's two unusually well developed state university systems provide enormous local voting power in many Assembly districts for a bitterly anti-capitalist ideology that sabotages the California economy. The campuses are shooting themselves in the foot. The power that those students and faculty chanted about is indeed theirs, and if they used it to elect sensible assemblymen and state senators their problems would be solved by the healthy business climate that would result. The votes that they actually cast are the source of their troubles.

Only one idea for solving the funding crisis was floated on March 4. It was to repeal the state's requirement that taxes can only be raised by a two thirds vote, so that taxes can be raised yet again and more money made available to the campuses. In other words, let's make the funding crisis even worse, by driving out of California even more wealth and wealth creating capacity, and raising the unemployment level even more. "California is not a tax-heavy state," said Assemblyman Joe Coto, whose office is right next door to San Jose State University, which enrolls 31,000 students. And that raises the question: how much longer will the California citizenry want to support a system of higher education that keeps its legislature stuck on stupid? It's not a question for this state alone.

I'm still reading Atlas Shrugged, by the way. Rand has a word for people who think the way the campus protesters do. She calls them "looters."