justice

Another major study has arrived—this time from the Department of Education confirming that online courses can be at least as effective in achieving measurable learning outcomes as traditional, face-to-face courses.

At the same time, a study from the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities shows that 70 percent of the 10,000 faculty members surveyed believe that online courses are either “inferior” or “somewhat inferior” to traditional ones. Professors who have taught online are more positive about the approach, but 48 percent of them are likewise convinced that online courses are not as good as face-to-face teaching.

That antagonism might alarm anyone who attempts online teaching in response to administrative encouragements; some of your colleagues will regard you with suspicion, and they may even tell students to avoid your courses. Just like online publication, teaching online entails some amount of risk to one’s reputation.

via Online Learning: Reaching Out to the Skeptics – Advice – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

September 14, 2009—Five of the nation’s premier institutions of higher learning—Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Berkeley—today announced their joint commitment to a compact for open-access publication.

Open-access scholarly journals have arisen as an alternative to traditional publications that are founded on subscription and/or licensing fees. Open-access journals make their articles available freely to anyone, while providing the same services common to all scholarly journals, such as management of the peer-review process, filtering, production, and distribution.

According to Thomas C. Leonard, university librarian at UC Berkeley, “Publishers and researchers know that it has never been easier to share the best work they produce with the world. But they also know that their traditional business model is creating new walls around discoveries. Universities can really help take down these walls and the open-access compact is a highly significant tool for the job.”

The economic downturn underscores the significance of open-access publications. With library resources strained by budget cuts, subscription and licensing fees for journals have come under increasing scrutiny, and alternative means for providing access to vital intellectual content are identified. Open-access journals provide a natural alternative.

As Dartmouth Provost Barry P. Scherr sees it, “Supporting open-access publishing is an important step in increasing readership of Dartmouth research and, ultimately, the impact of our research on the world.”

Since open-access journals do not charge subscription or other access fees, they must cover their operating expenses through other sources, including subventions, in-kind support, or, in a sizable minority of cases, processing fees paid by or on behalf of authors for submission to or publication in the journal. While academic research institutions support traditional journals by paying their subscription fees, no analogous means of support has existed to underwrite the growing roster of fee-based open-access journals.

via Harvard University Library : Publications : News : 9/14/09.

We the undersigned universities recognize the crucial value of the services provided by scholarly publishers, the desirability of open access to the scholarly literature, and the need for a stable source of funding for publishers who choose to provide open access to their journals’ contents. Those universities and funding agencies receiving the benefits of publisher services should recognize their collective and individual responsibility for that funding, and this recognition should be ongoing and public so that publishers can rely on it as a condition for their continuing operation.

Therefore, each of the undersigned universities commits to the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds. We encourage other universities and research funding agencies to join us in this commitment, to provide a sufficient and sustainable funding basis for open-access publication of the scholarly literature.

via Compact for OA Publishing Equity – The Compact.

EVERETT — Jody Sands was off his medication and suffering from hallucinations when he killed his grandfather by clobbering him with an ax.

In another case, authorities warned that it was only a matter of time before Ryan Miller, homeless and mentally disabled, hurt someone. He confessed this summer to helping beat a Marysville grandmother to death with a hammer.

Both men had documented histories of mental illness that required professional care. Over the years, they were hospitalized and medicated.

Now, Miller and Sands are off to prison for murder.

Both are extreme examples of a system failing people living with serious mental illnesses, according to some in the criminal justice system and mental health professionals.

via HeraldNet: Mentally ill often adrift in the criminal justice system.

Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which “going to college” means packing up, getting a dorm room and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges cannot survive.

The real force for change is the market: Online classes are just cheaper to produce. Community colleges and for-profit education entrepreneurs are already experimenting with dorm-free, commute-free options. Distance-learning technology will keep improving. Innovators have yet to tap the potential of the aggregator to change the way students earn a degree, making the education business today look like the news biz circa 1999. And as major universities offer some core courses online, we’ll see a cultural shift toward acceptance of what is still, in some circles, a “University of Phoenix” joke.

This doesn’t just mean a different way of learning: The funding of academic research, the culture of the academy and the institution of tenure are all threatened.

via A Virtual Revolution Is Brewing for Colleges – washingtonpost.com.

On September 12, 2001, Human Rights Watch issued a statement condemning the 9/11 attacks, calling on the Bush administration to “uphold the principles that came under attack yesterday, respecting innocent life and international law.” Eight years later, we repost our original statement, because it still stands for the principles we believe should have been, but were not, followed in responding to those brutal events.

Human Rights Watch Response to Attacks on the U.S.Civilian

Life Must Be Respected

September 12, 2001

We profoundly condemn yesterday’s cruel attacks in the United States and express our condolences to the victims and their loved ones. This was an assault not merely on one nation or one people, but on principles of respect for civilian life cherished by all people.

Last night, President Bush said that the United States “will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbored them.” Yet distinctions must be made: between the guilty and the innocent; between the perpetrators and the civilians who may surround them; between those who commit atrocities and those who may simply share their religious beliefs, ethnicity or national origin. People committed to justice and law and human rights must never descend to the level of the perpetrators of such acts. That is the most important distinction of all.

There are people and governments in the world who believe that in the struggle against terrorism, ends always justify means. But that is also the logic of terrorism. Whatever the response to this outrage, it must not validate that logic. Rather, it must uphold the principles that came under attack yesterday, respecting innocent life and international law. That is the way to deny the perpetrators of this crime their ultimate victory.

via Remembering 9/11 | Human Rights Watch.

States across the United States are facing the worst fiscal crisis in years. All but two states are dealing with budget deficits, and spending is being cut across the board. Second only to Medicaid, corrections has become the fastest growing general fund expenditure in the United States. Considered off limits for many years, corrections budgets are now subject to these same cuts. Based on a survey of enacted FY2010 state budgets and other recent sentencing and corrections legislation, this new report from Vera’s Center on Sentencing and Corrections found that at least 26 states have reversed the trend of recent decades and cut funding for corrections. This report examines the form of these cuts, including reductions in operational costs, reforms in release policy, and strategies for reducing recidivism, and it highlights some of the innovations that states are pursuing for long-term savings while also maintaining public safety.

via The fiscal crisis in corrections: rethinking policies and practices | Vera Institute of Justice.

We all have a longing to be cared for, a longing that unfortunately comes to feel inherently in conflict with autonomy and freedom. The conflicts that we all have about being deserving of such care thus get distorted and appear as anti-government paranoia.

Our own internal sense of being undeserving of care becomes, then, a rejection of the need for care, which becomes an external distrust of the care that is actually being offered. Government-as-caretaker becomes a threat rather than a gratification. If you see government as providing help, you are forced to accept that you need help, and that position is what ultimately is intolerable. Try telling a town-haller some time that he or she is on the government dole via Medicare and see how far you get!

This dynamic process in which need becomes fear becomes anger is well known to clinicians who treat paranoid patients. The threat feels external to these patients, but the source of it is really internal, a fear of their own dependency needs being manipulated and used as a means to control them.

The only way that they can feel safe and innocent is if they locate the problem outside themselves in some larger malevolent power and then aggressively defend themselves against that power. If they join with others in the process, all the better, since such imaginary communities provide a further sense of safety and connection.In the end, though, the paranoid system has to be continually replenished with new enemies, new threats, and, therefore, new dangers to battle. For the hard-core right, egged on by their media and political patrons, the government provides an endless source of new enemies.

via The Psychology of the Right-Wings Anti-Government Death-Panel Delusions | | AlterNet.