justice

Here we have the frightening subtext of all the recent hand-wringing about higher education: the widening inequality among institutions of various types and the prospects of the students who attend them. While the financial crisis has demoted Ivy League institutions from super-rich to merely rich, public universities are being gutted. It is not news that America is a land of haves and have-nots. It is news that colleges are themselves dividing into haves and have-nots; they are becoming engines of inequality. And that — not whether some professors can afford to wear Marc Jacobs — is the real scandal.

via Essay – The End of Tenure? – NYTimes.com.

The key to the Alzheimer’s project was an agreement as ambitious as its goal: not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world.

No one would own the data. No one could submit patent applications, though private companies would ultimately profit from any drugs or imaging tests developed as a result of the effort.

“It was unbelievable,” said Dr. John Q. Trojanowski, an Alzheimer’s researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s not science the way most of us have practiced it in our careers. But we all realized that we would never get biomarkers unless all of us parked our egos and intellectual-property noses outside the door and agreed that all of our data would be public immediately.”

via Rare Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer’s – NYTimes.com.

We’ve written a few times about the ongoing fight over whether or not federally funded research should be somewhat accessible to the public. This kicked off a few years back when the NIH, which funds a tremendous amount of research, required that any research that was funded by them had to be published in PubMed, its free and open database of such research one year after it was published in a journal. Scientific journals, as you probably know, are basically a huge scam. Unlike most publications, the journals don’t pay the people who provide all the material in those journals. Instead, the researchers pay the journals to publish their research. Not only that, but in exchange for paying the journal, the researchers also have to hand over their copyright on the research. This gets really ridiculous at times, as professors I’ve spoken with have needed to totally redo their own experiments because some journal “owned” their research, and they couldn’t reuse any of the data.

On top of that, these journals don’t pay people to do peer review. Other researchers in the field are expected to do the peer review for free. Oh, and then did we mention that these journals charge ridiculous sums (thousands upon thousands of dollars) for subscriptions, which many university libraries feel compelled to pay? And that much of the research is paid for by your tax dollars anyway?

via The Intellectually Dishonest Claims Of Those Fighting Against Open Access To Federally Funded Research | Techdirt.

Everybody agrees that scientific research is indispensable to the nation’s health, prosperity, and security. In the many discussions of the value of research, however, one rarely hears any mention of how much publication of the results is best. Indeed, for all the regrets one hears in these hard times of research suffering from financing problems, we shouldn’t forget the fact that the last few decades have seen astounding growth in the sheer output of research findings and conclusions. Just consider the raw increase in the number of journals. Using Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory, Michael Mabe shows that the number of “refereed academic/scholarly” publications grows at a rate of 3.26 percent per year (i.e., doubles about every 20 years). The main cause: the growth in the number of researchers.

Many people regard this upsurge as a sign of health. They emphasize the remarkable discoveries and breakthroughs of scientific research over the years; they note that in the Times Higher Education’s ranking of research universities around the world, campuses in the United States fill six of the top 10 spots. More published output means more discovery, more knowledge, ever-improving enterprise.

If only that were true.

While brilliant and progressive research continues apace here and there, the amount of redundant, inconsequential, and outright poor research has swelled in recent decades, filling countless pages in journals and monographs. Consider this tally from Science two decades ago: Only 45 percent of the articles published in the 4,500 top scientific journals were cited within the first five years after publication. In recent years, the figure seems to have dropped further. In a 2009 article in Online Information Review, Péter Jacsó found that 40.6 percent of the articles published in the top science and social-science journals (the figures do not include the humanities) were cited in the period 2002 to 2006.

via We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

via Nieman Watchdog > Ask This > The BP disaster underscores government as the problem, not the solution.

AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Republicans on the board voting for it.

The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest buyers of textbooks. In the digital age, however, that influence has diminished as technological advances have made it possible for publishers to tailor books to individual states.

In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwin’s theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles, and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state.

Since January, Republicans on the board have passed more than 100 amendments to the 120-page curriculum standards affecting history, sociology and economics courses from elementary to high school.

via Texas Conservatives Win Vote on Textbook Standards – NYTimes.com.

The average law school increased its faculty size by 40 percent over the past 10 years, according to a study by The National Jurist to be released in late March.

This increase in staffing accounts for 48 percent of the tuition increase from 1998 to 2008, the study shows. Tuition increased by 74 percent at private schools and a 102 percent at public institutions from 1998 to 2008.

The increase in staffing does not take into account the increase in support staff, which most law school administrators acknowledge has also increased. But no reliable data is available for that.

Law school observers say the dramatic increases are related to two things — an increased need for specialization and the U.S. News & World Report rankings of law schools.

“Law schools tend to believe that their faculty reputation is driven by scholarship and they are very interested in U.S. News,” said William Henderson, a law professor at Indiana University Mauer School of Law. “Lowering your faculty-to-student ratio improves your [U.S. News] ranking and increases time for scholarship.”

Henderson said the typical teaching load has dropped from five courses a few generations ago to three courses today.

“Professors are spending less time in the classroom,” he said. “Now whether that is a smart use of a social resource is another question. It is very expensive to pay for faculty research.”

via Law school faculties 40% larger than 10 years ago | the National Jurist.

I had an absolutely brilliant time at TEDxNYED over the weekend, reconnecting with old friends like Larry Lessig, George Siemens, Neeru Khosla, and Dan Cohen, and making new friends like Michael Wesch, Gina Bianchini, Amy Bruckman, Chris Lehmann, and Dan Meyer. The videos of our talks will be online in a few weeks.

In the mean time, I’m posting the final version of the notes I wrote before creating slides for the talk. This is the fifth or sixth version of the notes, and due to time constraints not even all of this version got in – but much of it did. My words on stage didn’t mirror these rough notes directly, but the notes capture the spirit of the talk. You can view the slides for the talk on Slideshare.

Open Education and the Future

What is meant by “openness” in education?

Let’s begin by defining terms.

For over a decade, openness in education has been an adjective describing educational artifacts.

Open content, open educational resources, open courseware, and open textbooks all mean teaching materials that are shared with everyone, for free, with permission to engage in the 4R activities.

The 4Rs are reuse, redistribute, revise, remix.

Open access to research means that articles describing the results of research are shared with everyone for free, generally with permission to engage in the first 2R activities (but sometimes all 4).

While the nouns being modified (content, resources, courseware, textbooks, and research articles) differ from each other, the activities that we associate with operationalizing openness is the same – acts of generosity, sharing, and giving.

Openness is about overcoming your inner two-year-old who constantly screams, “Mine!”

via My TEDxNYED Talk « iterating toward openness.

Diane Ravitch, the education historian who built her intellectual reputation battling progressive educators and served in the first Bush administration’s Education Department, is in the final stages of an astonishing, slow-motion about-face on almost every stand she once took on American schooling.

Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically critical. She underwent an intellectual crisis, she says, discovering that these strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were undermining public education. She resigned last year from the boards of two conservative research groups.

“School reform today is like a freight train, and I’m out on the tracks saying, ‘You’re going the wrong way!’ ” Dr. Ravitch said in an interview.

via Leading Scholar’s U-Turn on School Reform Shakes Up Debate – NYTimes.com.

Right now, universities around the world are embracing level one — course content exchange — of the Global Network for Higher Learning. But they need to move further in the next four levels.

As part of this, the academic journal should be disintermediated and the textbook industry eliminated. In fact, the word textbook is an oxymoron today. Content should be multimedia — not just text. Content should be networked and hyperlinked bits — not atoms. Moreover, interactive courseware — not separate “books” — should be used to present this content to students, constituting a platform for every subject, across disciplines, among institutions, and around the world. The textbook industry will never reinvent itself, however, since legacy cultures and business models die hard. It will be up to scholars and students to do this collectively.

via Innovating the 21st-Century University: It’s Time! (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE.

In mid-December, two calls for a national day of action to defend education were issued, building on a state-wide call for action to defend public education issued in California. On December 14th, the California Coordinating Committee released a National Call for a March 4 Strike and Day of Action To Defend Public Education. Two days later, on December 16th, an ad-hoc body comprised of students, workers, and other activists from many states, including California, released a call of their own for a March 4 National Day of Action to Defend Education. This body consisted of students who participated in the New School occupations, students and workers from across the country, student activists from ongoing campaigns in North Carolina, Chicago, Milwaukee, and various other locations.

The website you are reading is hosted by the ad hoc committee that produced the December 16th call. We do not see the two calls as being in competition or opposition with one another in any way. The dual calls were produced not out of any political, strategic or tactical disagreement, but because the two groups were not in contact with one another when they were drafting the calls. We encourage all students, teachers, workers and parents to forward the text of both calls to their friends, peers and allies, and to organize actions in their schools and communities to defend education for all. The text of both calls is reprinted below, along with a list of endorsers for the December 16th call. A form that can be used to submit endorsements for the December 16th call is located at the bottom of the page.

via Defend Education Take a Stand March 4th: National March 4th Calls for Action and Endorsements.

FBI agents for years sought sensitive records from telephone companies through e-mails, sticky notes, sneak peeks and other “startling” methods that violated electronic privacy law and federal policy, according to a Justice Department inspector general report released Wednesday.

The study details how the FBI between 2002 and 2006 sent more than 700 demands for telephone toll information by citing often nonexistent emergencies and using sometimes misleading language. The practice of sending faulty “exigent” letters to three telecommunications providers became so commonplace that one FBI agent described it to investigators as “like having an ATM in your living room.”

Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said the findings were “troubling” and urged the FBI and the Justice Department to “take additional corrective action” in response to the 289-page report. Information on more than 3,500 phone numbers may have been gathered improperly, but investigators said they could not glean a full understanding because of sketchy record-keeping by the FBI.

via Inspector general cites ‘egregious breakdown’ in FBI oversight – washingtonpost.com.

It’s an outrage that the United States locks up citizens for so long with such uncertain effect; but it’s also self-defeating, because long sentences give rise to a crisis of legitimacy that can lead to more crime, not less.

via Prisoners of Parole – NYTimes.com.

Mark Tushnet

This morning’s Washington Post has a story on proposed legal challenges to the individual mandate in the pending health care legislation. (In brief, conservatives are arguing that Congress lacks the power to require people to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty, under either the commerce clause and the power to tax and spend for the general welfare.) The story observes that liberal-leaning constitutional scholars think that, as Erwin Chemerinsky puts it, “There are many close constitutional questions. But this is not among them,” or, as Jack Balkin says, “All of these arguments don’t work, but they’re interesting to debate.”

I’m afraid that these reactions demonstrate that liberal-leaning constitutional law types haven’t absorbed the lessons of critical legal studies — or, indeed, the lesson Justice William Brennan taught his law clerks by holding up one hand with his fingers splayed: “With five votes you can do anything.” The CLS lesson was — and is — that where the stakes are high enough and the political energy is available (to lawyers and judges), at any time the body of legal materials contains enough stuff to support a professionally respectable argument for any legal proposition. So too with the constitutional arguments against the individual mandate.

I lack both the interest and the energy to work out the arguments in detail, but I’ve thought enough about the constitutional issues to be able to sketch out an argument, compatible with existing law, that the individual mandate (a) doesn’t fall within Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce, (b) doesn’t fall within Congress’s power to tax and spend for the general welfare, and (c) is (in its penalty aspect) a direct tax prohibited by the Constitution. I myself don’t find these arguments particularly strong, but that — on the CLS view — doesn’t mean anything about what constitutional law on this matter “really” is. If, as Holmes said and as CLS reiterated, what the law “is” is what the courts will do in fact, the thing to do is to figure out which side of the argument can count to five first.

Or, put another way, remember Bush v. Gore?

via Balkinization.

Move Your Money.