Economic report about Florida
Published via UF's Bureau of Economic and Business research:
Tough Choices: Shaping Florida's future is about Florida’s current tax policy in relation to future needs. Co-authored by David Denslow, University of Florida, and Carol Weissert, Florida State University.
It's 461 pages so don't print it all out...but on page 290 of the PDF (page 283 of the document) is the chapter about higher education in Florida.
Chancellor of state board of governors
This is an
editorial which appeared in the Gainesville Sun last week, calling for a strong chancellor. There is a bit more of an overview about the state system, sort of an expansion of what is going on politically with the state governance system.
October 20 class
Don't forget that class this week is going to attend the Faculty Senate meeting in the Reitz Union auditorium, the meeting is from 3 pm to 5 pm so you should go straight there. Here is the
agenda so you can see it beforehand. I think the General Education proposal will be lively (at least, I hope it will be lively).
Are conservative thoughts not welcome on campus?
Why Righties Can't Teach
By JOHN TIERNEY
I am in debt to liberal scholars across America. After I wrote about the leftward tilt on campus, they sent me treatises explaining that the shortage of conservatives on faculties is not a result of bias. Professors helpfully offered other theories why conservatives do not grace the halls of academe:
1. Conservatives do not value knowledge for its own sake.
2. Conservatives do not care about the social good.
3. Conservatives are too greedy to work for professors' wages.
4. Conservatives are too dumb to get tenure.
I'm studied these theories as best I could (for a conservative), but somehow I can't shake the notion that there just might be some bias on campus.
I can imagine reasons why liberals would be intrinsically more inclined than conservatives to pursue academic careers. But even if that's true, it doesn't explain why there are so many more liberal professors now than there used to be.
Surveys last year showed that Democratic professors outnumber Republican professors by at least seven to one, more than twice the ratio of three decades earlier. The trend seems likely to continue, because younger professors are far more likely than older professors to be Democrats.
You could argue that fewer conservatives today want to become professors, but that seems odd given the country's move to the right in recent decades. Conservative student groups and publications are flourishing. Plenty of smart conservatives have passed up Wall Street to work for right-wing think tanks that often don't pay more than universities do, and don't offer lifetime tenure and summers off.
At think tanks and other research institutions outside academia, there's a much higher percentage of Republicans than there is on university faculties. Apparently, despite their greed and other failings, many conservatives do want to become scholars, but they can't find work on campus.
One reason is the structure of academia, where decisions about hiring are made by small independent groups of scholars. They're subject to the law of group polarization, derived from studies of juries and other groups.
"If people are engaged in deliberation with like-minded others, they end up more confident, more homogenous and more extreme in their beliefs," said Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago. "If you have an English or history department that leans left, their interactions will push them further left."
Once liberals dominate a department, they can increase their majority by voting to award tenure to like-minded scholars. As liberals dominate a field, conservatives' work comes to be seen as fringe scholarship.
"The filtering out of conservatives in the job pipeline rarely works by outright blackballing," said Mark Bauerlein, a conservative who is an English professor at Emory. "It doesn't have to. The intellectual focus of the disciplines does that by itself."
Suppose, he said, you were a conservative who wanted to do a sociology dissertation on the debilitating effects of the European welfare state, or an English dissertation arguing that anticommunist literature from the mid-20th century was as valuable as the procommunist literature.
"You'd have a hard time finding a dissertation adviser, an interested publisher and a receptive hiring committee," Bauerlein said. "Your work just wouldn't look like relevant scholarship, and would be quietly set aside."
Social scientists call it the false consensus effect: a group's conviction that its opinions are the norm. Liberals on campus have become so used to hearing their opinions reinforced that they have a hard time imagining there are intelligent people with different views, either on campus or in politics. Last year professors at Harvard and the University of California system gave $19 to Democrats for every $1 they gave to Republicans.
Conservatives complain about this imbalance in academia, but in some ways they've benefited from being outcasts. They've been toughened by confronting skeptics on campus and working at think tanks in Washington involved in the political fray. They've come up with ideas - welfare reform, school vouchers, all kinds of privatization schemes - that have been adopted around the country and the world.
But how many big ideas from liberal academics are on anyone's agenda? Democratic politicians are desperately trying to find something newer than the New Deal to run on next year. They're glad to take campaign contributions from professors, but they're leery of ideas from intellectuals who've have been talking to themselves for so long.
Teach for America
From the New York Times, an
article about Teach for America:
"All told, a record 17,350 recent college graduates applied to Teach for America this year. After a drop last year, applications were up nearly 30 percent. Teach for America accepted about a third of this year's Ivy League applicants, and about a sixth of all applications."
Why is there a lack of interest in becoming a teacher?
Is this the future of US education?
Other thoughts welcome.
October 2005
General posts, start conversations, etc. here.
UF plans for increasing diversity
There is an article in Sunday's Gainesville Sun which talks about plans for increasing diversity, specifically for black students, at UF. This article has a good bit of information about the background of minority admissions in the state of Florida for the past 5-6 years, since the implementation of One Florida:
UF acts to foil trend towards less diversityThis article,
Diversity study finds UF making some progress, also has some background info.
,
Declining by degrees DVD
comments? thoughts?
Academic learning compacts
Each major in Florida state universities, per resolution of the Florida Board of Governors, must set forth student learning outcomes for each bachelor's degree program. These are called
academic learning compacts.
So each department is working on these right now.
Here is a sample, from the IDS major (Interdisciplinary studies in biochemistry or neuroscience):
Student Learning Outcomes
Content Knowledge/Skills
1 Understanding of and competence in biochemistry, molecular biology, molecular cell biology, or neurobiological sciences, as specified in baccalaureate degree syllabus.
2 Understand and use the scientific approach to gathering and verifying knowledge.
3 Ability to draw appropriate conclusions and inferences from properly conducted laboratory research
Critical Thinking Skills
4 Ability to evaluate the significance, quality and veracity of information gathered experimentally and in the literature and to apply effectively
Communication Skills
5 Demonstrated ability to articulate research results clearly in accepted style of presentation
Individual Student Assessments
1 Completion of requirement for the baccalaureate degree, as determined by faculty.
2 Pass the CLAST examination before the beginning of Tracking Term 5.
3 Satisfactory completion of IDS 4906 thesis (capping 7-12 credits of thesis research) requiring demonstration of SLOs 1 through 5 above, graded according to department rubric.
Why would the FBOG want these?
What objections or issues would come from the faculty of the departments?
General education and learning
There is a renewed emphasis on general education and student learning nationally. Recently, the University of Georgia organized a task force on the quality of undergraduate education and made several recommendations. Here is the full
report.
Does UF care about student learning?
What initiatives make sense in this report?
Which ones are not so good?
What ideas would you like to see implemented at UF?
Grade inflation
It is commonly accepted information that grade inflation is something that has taken over the U.S. At Princeton, they are working hard to reduce the number of A grades given to students. Here is a link to their
results.
Does grade inflation exist in college? at UF? in your high schools?
Alligator cartoon
There have been several "official letters" from the University administration (Dr. Machen, Dr. Telles-Irvin) about the first editorial cartoon published in the Alligator on Sept. 13 and the "revised" editorial cartoon on Sept. 19. The editorial in the Sept. 19 Alligator by the editorial staff was also important.
Here are a few questions to think about:
1. What is the relationship and role of an independent student newspaper?
2. Is this an important issue for the president and vice-president of student affairs?
3. What was the intended meaning of the cartoon? What was the effect of the cartoon?
--Jeanna
September 2005
OK, this is where you should post for the month of September 2005. Feel free to post on any topics that interest you--I will separate them out into different postings if there is a good discussion going. We'll see if this works better.
