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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (22401)	9/3/2007 3:24:58 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

The Illiberal College Elite academia doesn't like oversight. Sunday, September 2, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT One of the more momentous cases in Supreme Court history, Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), involved an attempt by the state of New Hampshire to wrest control of the privately chartered school from its board of trustees. But a corporate charter like Dartmouth's, the Marshall Court ruled, is the same as a private contract; the state could not simply annex the school. The sanctity of contract has preserved the independence of not a few colleges and universities. But institutions of higher learning now shy from the same oversight their faculties have demanded of the corporate world, and some of the lessons learned in that 1819 case are being unlearned. Consider the Dartmouth of today, still serenely humming on the banks of the Connecticut River, but home to what appears to be a power play against its own alumni. In 1891, Dartmouth agreed to a pact that instituted a novel scheme of democratic governance. Alumni--the school's financial underwriters--won the right to elect half of its non-administrative or ex officio trustees, who oversee the school and hire and fire its president. (The remaining seats are filled by appointment and typically go to big donors.) The candidates for elected trusteeships have traditionally been vetted by a small committee, ensuring quiescence. Over the last four years, however, no fewer than four reform-minded candidates won seats on the board using a provision allowing nomination by petition. They include Silicon Valley CEO T.J. Rodgers and Virginia law professor Stephen Smith, who have raised the profile of such issues as academic standards, bureaucratic bloat and free speech. Their presence has proven to be a tremendous offense to Dartmouth's inner circles. Like administrators at most universities, these academic elites expect only money--not opinion and oversight--from their alumni donors. A year ago, the administration worked with a small committee of alumni to alter the petition process to make it less likely that outsiders could win. They lost in a rout in an alumni referendum. But rather than accept that rebuke and seek some common ground, the school's president, James Wright, and his trustee allies now seem prepared to overhaul the school's governance more or less by fiat. The scheme the board's governance committee is most likely to adopt this week has been dubbed "The Harvard Plan" because it would preserve the faint form of democracy while arrogating most power to an unelected internal committee. At Harvard, this is called the "Corporation"; a larger elected body, the Overseers, has little power. Former Harvard Dean Harry Lewis recently recounted the disposition of the Corporation during the Larry Summers debacle: "[It] was a leadership vacuum. . . . If Harvard were a public corporation . . . the shareholders would have been up in arms about the failure of the directors to care responsibly for the institution." It is not surprising that the "best practice" Dartmouth seeks to emulate is precisely the practice that enabled Harvard's expulsion of Mr. Summers. Should the board decide to vitiate Dartmouth's own experiment in democracy, it will be a departure from standards of good governance now required in the marketplace, as T.J. Rodgers explains nearby. Worse, it will be one more sign of a widening crevice between the real world and life on the nation's campuses. The endowments of the 25 wealthiest institutions of higher learning total $178 billion, and a college education is one of the largest investments a person will ever make (in tuition and donations as an alumnus). It isn't a surprise that alumni stakeholders have begun to show interest and exert influence. The only surprise is the lengths to which academic elites will go in order to keep out the light of day. opinionjournal.com

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (22401)	9/3/2007 3:52:41 PM
From: Geoff Altman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71588

Thanks to Snuffle on old FADG.... Peter, does this modus operandi sound familiar to you? It's the blue print for 99.9% of liberal progressive arguments (the G. Soros handbook?). Well, not quite, it is a scathing critic by Ayn Rand of B.F. Skinner: These conditions will bring the reader to miss the main ingredients of the book's epistemological method, which are: 1. Equivocation. 2. Substituting metaphors for proof, and examples for definitions. 3. Setting up and knocking down straw men. 4. Mentioning a given notion as controversial, following it up with two or three pages of irrelevant small talk, then mentioning it again and treating it as if it had been proved. 5. Raising valid questions (to indicate that the author is aware of them) and, by the same technique, leaving them unanswered. 6. Overtalking and overloading the reader's consciousness with overelaborate discussions of trivia, then smuggling in enormous essentials without discussion, as if they were incontrovertible. 7. Assuming an authoritarian tone to enunciate dogmatic absolutes-and the more dubious the absolute, the more authoritarian the tone. 8. Providing a brief summary at the end of each chapter, which summary includes, as if they had been proved, notions not included or barely mentioned in the chapter's text. sntp.net