50 Years

50
November 2016
Volume LXIII, Number 11
1966
2016
THE CHRONICLE
of Higher Education
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50
Volume LXIII, Number 11

November 2016
2 EDITORS NOTE
4 TIMELINE
50 Years
of Higher Education
1966
2016
42
64
86
106
THE CHRONICLE
OF HIGHER EDUCATION
12 An Era of Protests
By Jacqueline J. Adams, James W. Brann,
Malcolm G. Scully, Philip W. Semas, William
A. Sievert, and Edward R. Weidlein
16 We Must Find New Forms

for Higher Education
By Ernest L. Boyer
18 The New York Tragedy

By Larry Van Dyne
120
44 The Last Weeks of an AIDS
Women Under 40
By Carolyn G. Heilbrun
26 Wheeling and Dealing

on Capitol Hill
By Anne C. Roark
30 Black Professors
on White Campuses
By Lorenzo Middleton
37 For God, for Country,

and for Notre Dame
The End Is the Beginning
By Rich Monastersky
By Lawrence Biemiller
83 Sex and the Conference
46 Academe Must Give Black-
By Jessica Burstein
Studies Programs Their Due

By Henry Louis Gates Jr.
88 The Trials of Tony Judt

By Evan R. Goldstein
49 Camille Paglia Goes
93 The Shadow Scholar
to Harvard
By Ed Dante
98 An Era of Neglect
51 Berkeleys Judith Butler
By Karin Fischer and Jack Stripling
Revels in Role
of Troublemaker
103 The Day the Purpose

of College Changed
By Liz McMillen
54 The Lessons of a Lost Career

By Scott Heller
By Dan Berrett
108 Sexual Paranoia

By Laura Kipnis
66 So You Want to Go
114 The $10-Billion Sports Tab
to Grad School?
By Brad Wolverton, Ben Hallman,

Shane Shifflett, and Sandhya Kambhampati
By Thomas H. Benton
68 Psst. Wanna Buy a Ph.D?

By Thomas Bartlett and Scott Smallwood
73 The Education
Marginalia
78 Primed for Numbers
Sufferer at Berkeley
By Carolyn J. Mooney
23 Men Over 40,
By Zoe Ingalls
24
The Faculty
The World
Race on Campus
Technology
118 Holding On to What

Makes Us Human
By L.D. Burnett
of Lloyd Thacker
By Eric Hoover
This publication was made possible in part by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the authors.
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50 t h a n n i v ersa ry | nov em ber 2016
50
EDITORS NOTE
The Chronicle:
How We
Got Here
By LIZ McMILLEN
2 nov em ber 2016 | t h e ch ron icl e of h igh er e duc at ion
The Chronicle founder

Corbin Gwaltney
ifty years ago this month, The

Chronicle of Higher Education began
life with an unprecedented and audacious vision: to produce great
journalism about every facet of
American colleges and universities.
Unprecedented because no newspaper
had ever attempted to report exclusively
on higher education. (Before The Chronicle,
news and data about the sector made their
way to campuses slowly, sometimes weeks
or months after the fact.) And audacious because the thousands of disparate institutions
that made up the sector didnt have a national culture in common until The Chronicle helped to create it through its regular
presence, journalistic integrity, and uncompromising independence.
Corbin Gwaltney and John A. Crowl,
who founded The Chronicle, were well positioned to seize this opportunity. As an
alumni-magazine editor and a public-relations officer at the Johns Hopkins University, they brought an intense interest in news affecting colleges and universities (news often
neglected by the daily press) together with the metabolism of newspaper reporters. They wanted to create a national publication that reported honestly and fairly about colleges, not one that would serve as
a booster for higher education.
As the staff of 11 worked on The Chronicles first issue, they worried that higher education might not produce enough news to fill the
eight-page paper 22 times a year. As it turned out, there was no need
for concern. The Chronicle arrived at just the right moment, as the
sector was facing exceptional growth as well as rapid change.
The federal government was expanding its role in higher education. In coming years, the draft and the escalation of the Vietnam
War would stir protests around the country. Radical movements divided faculties and student groups as never before, while civil-rights
demonstrations were met by police force. A depressing recitation of
campuses experienced riots, bombings, shootings, and other forms of
violence: Kent State, Jackson State, Southern, Columbia, Madison,
Berkeley.
s youll read in this anniversary issue, representing

some of the best and most representative journalism of
The Chronicles first 50 years, we covered it all from the
turbulence of the 60s to the present moment of financial
constraint and accountability.
Over time, we expanded our reporting staff to include coverage of
every corner of campus life: technology, the business of college athletics, scholarly research, intellectual currents. We provided continuing coverage about threats to academic freedom and about sexual and
racial discrimination. In the face of outright hostility, we reported
the salaries of college presidents.
We sent reporters to South Africa to report on universities and

apartheid, to Lebanon during its civil war to cover the American
University of Beirut, to Beijing to report on the student uprising at
Tiananmen Square. With the advent of the internet, we began a daily news operation, expanded our presence online, and introduced sophisticated interactive data features and multimedia.
Along the way, our reporters have sat down with thousands of college presidents, attended hundreds of scholarly meetings, and tagged
along on the occasional spring break. One was carjacked doing a
story on hitchhikers; another sustained broken ribs riding a bronco
while reporting on collegiate rodeo.
Over the years, our coverage has informed and influenced national conversations about higher education among academics and in the
broader society.
As The Chronicle helped to define the higher-education community,
it also became an enduring home for some of the finest reporting and
writing of the past half-century. In assembling this anthology, we
chose from an impressive variety of articles. And as we made those
choices, we kept seeing themes repeat themselves. Many headlines
that The Chronicle ran in the 60s and 70s about the professoriate,
the value of the humanities, the consumer orientation of students
would be just as apt today.
Here youll find portraits of scholars and presidents, explorations
of the lived experience of students and faculty members, investigative reporting, data-driven journalism, provocative opinion articles
and essays, and documentary photographs and original illustrations. They represent the range and depth of our reporting over the
years.
The Chronicles story has been about being in the right place at the
right time. Its our ambition to continue that narrative in the decades
n
to come. We hope you enjoy this issue.
196os 19
50 YEARS
OF HIGHER EDUCATION
February 1968
South Carolina police
shoot and kill three at
South Carolina State
College after a civil-rights
protest at a segregated
bowling alley.
May 1968
Activists take over five
buildings at Columbia U.
(left) in the largest protest of its kind, with 700
arrested sparking a
culture of student unrest.
August 1968
Students and other
protesters battle the
police at the Democratic
National Convention, in
Chicago.
February 1969
Notre Dames president, Father Theodore
Hesburgh, releases his
Tough 15-Minute Rule,
encouraging student
dissent against the war
but stipulating that it
must not interfere with
the civil rights of others.
Violators would get a
timeout.
April 1969
More than 100 students
at Cornell U., some later
carrying guns, occupy
Willard Straight Hall
to protest the campus
racial climate.
ARCHIVE PHOTOS, GETTY IMAGES
January 1967
Gov. Reagan fires Clark
Kerr (left) as U. of California president. The Carnegie Commission on Higher
Education is subsequently
established with Kerr at
the helm.
TED STRESHINSKY,
THE LIFE IMAGES
COLLECTION,
GETTY IMAGES
November 1968
Yale announces it will
admit women. Princeton
follows within months.
October 1969
Clifton R. Wharton Jr. is
named the next president
of Michigan State U., the
first black president of
a major, predominantly
white state university.
JOSEPH N. PISANO
October 1969
UCLA undergraduate Charley Kline
transmits the letter L to a computer
at Stanford, the first message sent on
the precursor to the internet.
UConn congratulates
The Chronicle of Higher Education
on its 50th Anniversary!
U.S. News & World Report ranks UConn among

the Top 25 Public Universities in the nation.
uconn.edu
6os 197os
June 1972
Title IX and the precursor
to the Pell Grant become
law.
November 1973
The first Carnegie
Classification of
Institutions of Higher
Education is released.
May 1970
National Guardsmen kill four students
at Kent State (below). Eleven days later,
police fire on protesting students at Jackson
State, in Mississippi, killing two more (bottom).
November 1974
The Family Educational
Rights and Privacy Act of
1974 becomes law.
July 1978
Hanna Gray becomes the
first woman to
lead a major
U.S. higher-education
institution,
the U. of
Chicago.
BETTMANN ARCHIVE,
GETTY IMAGES
April 1976
The Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence
reports that academics
in over 100 colleges,
universities and related
institutes have clandestine relationships with the
CIA.
JOHN FILO, GETTY IMAGES
October 1979
The U.S. Department
of Education is created
under President Jimmy
Carter.
September
1976
The U. of Phoenix
enrolls its first eight
students.
AP IMAGES
March 1977
Demonstrators at a
National Academy of
Sciences forum protest
the potential for alteration
of human genes in
recombinant-DNA
research.
June 1978
The Supreme Courts
affirmative-action decision
on the U. of California v.
Bakke bans quotas but
approves advantages
to minorities in college
admissions.
198os 199
January 1987
The Rev. Jesse
Jackson leads some
500 Stanford U. students
on a march chanting,
Hey hey, ho ho, Western
cultures got to go! Stanford eventually replaces its Western-culture
requirement with a new
one including courses on
non-European cultures.
May 1982
The U.S.
Supreme
Court rules
that Title
IX bars sex
discrimination
against employees and
students in
any education program
or activity
receiving federal money.
CORNELL U.
April 1983
In a report, A Nation at
Risk, a federal commission warns that a rising
tide of mediocrity threatens the nations schools
and colleges.
BETTMANN ARCHIVE, GETTY IMAGES
May 1983
Rejecting a plea from Bob
Jones U., the Supreme
Court rules against tax
exemptions for educational institutions that practice
racial discrimination, even
on religious grounds.
May 1987
Allan Blooms The
Closing of the American Mind causes a
sensation by asserting that students
are dispirited and
universities are in
disarray.
February 1985
William J. Bennett, the
controversial head of the
NEH, becomes secretary of education. In his
first news conference,
he endorses a plan to
cut federal spending on
student aid and suggests
that some students
may have to consider a
stereo divestiture, an automobile divestiture, or a
three-weeks-at-the-beach
divestiture.
KOICHI IMAEDA, MAGNUM PHOTOS
December 1986
Michigan approves the
first statewide prepaid-tuition plan, allowing parents
to start saving for college
when their children are
still in diapers.
June 1989
Hundreds of students and other protesters are slain
in Chinas Tiananmen Square massacre.
8os 199os
July 1990
George H.W. Bush signs
the Americans With
Disabilities Act, expanding
protections for college
applicants and students
with disabilities.
July 1993
The Chronicle reports that authorities are confounded by separate mail-bombing
attacks against professors at Yale University and the University of San Francisco. The FBI says the attacks are believed to be the latest in a string of 14
that began in 1978, and theyre calling
the case UNABOM, for university and
airline bomber.
April 1996
FBI agents find and arrest the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, a mathematical
prodigy and former UC-Berkeley professor
with degrees from Harvard and the University of Michigan, at his primitive
cabin in Montana. Kaczynski,
who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, killed three
people and injured 23 others,
many with university ties, during
his 17-year terror campaign.
December 1993
Colleges exemption
to the Federal Age
Discrimination Act
expires, allowing professors to work past the
age of 70.
March 1996
A federal appeals court
rules in Hopwood v.
California that the 1978
Bakke decision no longer
justifies racial preferences, heralding a new era in
which affirmative action is put
on the defensive.
ALLAN TANNENBAUM, THE LIFE IMAGES

COLLECTION, GETTY IMAGES
LEWIS AND CLARK SHERRIFF DEPT., NEWSCOM
October 1997
A Chronicle article on the 10th anniversary of Black Monday says, one of the longest-running bull markets in modern history has enriched institutional investors,
boosting endowments by millions and,
in some cases, billions of dollars. The
market climbed for 13 years, from the
October 1987 crash until the burst of the
dot-com bubble in 2000.
September 1998
Two Stanford Ph.D. candidates, Larry Page
and Sergey Brin, start a new company called Google.
BEN MARGOT, AP IMAGES
2ooos 2o
June 2003
In a case involving the
U. of Michigan, Gratz
v. Bollinger, the U.S.
Supreme Court sets
strict new standards for
affirmative action in undergraduate admissions,
still allowing race to be
considered.
March 2006
Lacrosse players at Duke U. are accused of raping
a stripper at an off-campus party. The teams
season is canceled, but DNA evidence fails to corroborate the accusations, and the state attorney
general ultimately declares the players innocent.
February 2006
Lawrence H. Summers
resigns as president
of Harvard U. after
suggesting a year earlier
that women might lack
an aptitude for math and
science.
September 2006
A panel chaired by Margaret Spellings, U.S. secretary of education, issues
a controversial report that
criticizes colleges for not
preparing students for the
21st-century workplace.
August-September 2005
Hurricanes Katrina and
Rita cut a swath of
destruction across three
states, displacing thousands of students and
ultimately causing thousands of college employees to lose their jobs.
April 2007
JIM R. BOUNDS, BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
DAVID HOWELLS, CORBIS, GETTY IMAGES
A mass shooting at Virginia Tech leaves 33 dead,

including the gunman. It
was at the time the
worst such massacre in
modern American history.
NEWSCAST, EYEVINE
February 2004
Mark Zuckerberg, a 19-year-old Harvard
undergraduate, launches thefacebook.com, a
dating site for the universitys students.
September 2008
Some 2,200 people sign
up for the first massive
open online course, or
MOOC, taught at the U.
of Manitoba. Twenty-five
students pay tuition for
the course.
February 2008
The subprime mortgage
crisis, which had already
spun the U.S. economy
into recession, begins
to pummel colleges, The
Chronicle reports.
os 2o1os
April 2011
The Education
Departments Office for
Civil Rights issues new
guidance to colleges
on complying with Title
IX, heralding a wave
of investigations into
alleged incidents of sexual
violence on campuses.
October 2011
The Federal Reserve Bank
of New York reports that
total student-loan debt
will top $1 trillion by
years end.
March 2014
A package of articles in
The Chronicle describes
a gradual but steady
decrease in state
spending on public higher
education that will, if
trends continue, dry up
altogether as soon as
2022, in one state.
November 2014
Rolling Stone publishes
a horrific account of a
students gang rape at a
U. of Virginia fraternity.
The magazine retracts
the story five months
later after the womans
accusation unravels.
October 2015
Ten people, including the
gunman, die in a mass
shooting at Umpqua
Community College, in
Oregon.
KIM KARPELES, ALAMY
August 2016
Texas allows permit holders to carry concealed weapons on public college
campuses. The law takes effect on the 50th anniversary of the Texas tower
massacre, the first mass murder on an American college campus, which left
15 people dead.
DANIEL BRENNER, THE NEW YORK TIMES, REDUX
November 2015
Protests by black students at the U. of Missouri,
including a threatened boycott by the football team,
culminate in the resignations of the university system
president and the flagships chancellor.
July 2015
The Education
Department continues
its crackdown on forprofit colleges as its
gainful employment
rule goes into effect. At
least two for-profit chains
Corinthian and ITT
eventually go belly up, and
the department proceeds
to strip its recognition of
the Accrediting Council
for Independent Colleges
and Schools, a major
accreditor of for-profit
n
colleges.
Congratulations to The Chronicle of Higher
Education on 50 years of providing unprecedented

access into the world of higher education, fueling
the entrepreneurial spirit that powers institutions
to create incredible impact on the world.
ucf.edu
U N I V E R S I T Y O F C E N T R A L F LO R I DA
50 t h
a n n i v er sa ry
nov e mber
11, 2016
11
An Era of Protests
The depth and breadth of campus activism
are apparent in excerpts from our coverage
May 20, 1968
Campus Protest
Movements Take
New Tack at Columbia
By JAMES W. BRANN
1968-1973
For years after The Chronicle started, in 1966,
student protests, radical movements, and
campus violence dominated our headlines. As
support for the antiwar and civil-rights movements grew, and students began organizing,
our reporters filed reports from campuses
that became synonymous with unrest
Columbia, Madison, Berkeley, Kent State,
Jackson State, and Southern University.
new york
at Columbia University
this spring are signs that new factors are
being injected into campus protest movements.
These two aspects of the Columbia confrontation have special significance:
n The hard-core activist students who
launched the protest care little about resolving the announced issues halting construction of a new gymnasium and reconstructing the decision-making apparatus at
Columbia and the universitys relationships
with society. The leaders of Columbias chapter of Students for a Democratic Society view
the seizure of Columbia buildings, as well as
the resulting student strike, as a mechanism
to educate students and the public to what
they call the corrupt and exploitative nature of American society.
n Faculty members have been moved into
a position of attempting reluctantly to mediate and to serve as a buffer between opposing
forces.
Some accounts of the faculty involvement
describe the professors as nave do-gooders
who got in the way of a hard line confrontation and settlement between the students and
the university administration. Others picture
the faculty as a hard-driving group eager to
grasp the reins of power from an embattled
administration and board of trustees.
We were neither, explains Professor Walter P. Metzger, an authority on American intellectual history. Our aim was to generate
support for the moderate position among the
students, to create a center.
If the faculty is perceived as a bunch of
nincompoops or power-seekers, says Mr.
n the turmoil
Metzger, its role in power struggles at other

institutions will be greatly diminished.
James W. Brann, a Chronicle reporter, went on to
teach journalism at Boston University for 24 years.
September 2, 1968
War, Political
Frustration, Race Issues
Presage Deeper
Student Unrest
point to more and deeper student dissidence on many campuses in the coming academic year.
Events of the summer, agree most persons
close to the activist student movements, have
only served to intensify the students disenchantment with their lot not only in their colleges
and universities but in society generally.
Last weeks events in Chicago, both in the
Democrats choice of what many students
consider the organization candidate and in
the actions of police against young demonstrators in the city streets, were regarded by
many student activists as the final proof that
working with the system is no way to bring
about the forms they desperately desire.
ll indicators
May 5, 1969
Response to Armed
Negroes Divides
Cornell Community
By JAMES W. BRANN
ithaca, n.y.
of armed Negro students
leaving a campus building after a 36hour occupation has created an atmohe sight
sphere of tension and resulted in bitter debate and recrimination at Cornell University.
The Cornell crisis attracted national attention when about 100 Negro students occupied Willard Straight Hall, the student
center, at 6:20 a.m. Saturday, April 19. They
ousted sleeping parents (it was a parents
weekend) and seized the campus radio station in the building.
The Negro students left the building 36
hours later, after Robert D. Miller, dean of
the faculty, had promised he would recommend that the faculty nullify its reprimands
against three Negro students involved in earlier demonstrations against the universitys
slowness in creating a black studies program.
The faculty rejected the agreement the following day, but reversed itself two days later.
That turnabout was followed by the resignations of the chairman of the departments
of government and history, and of Professor
Walter F. Berns of the government department, this years winner of a Cornell distinguished teaching award.
September 15, 1969
Conservative Students
Lay Plan to Sock It
to the Left
By MALCOLM G. SCULLY
st. louis
Sock It to the
Left, the nations largest organization
of conservative students the Young
Americans for Freedom has mapped plans
to confront the student left legally and, if
necessary, physically during the coming academic year.
But even as such plans were being formulated at the YAF convention here, the organization faced challenges from dissidents of
its own a group of about 20 percent of the
730 delegates who argued that the state and
its growing influence, rather than student
radicals, should be the major target of YAF
activities.
In all, YAF claims about 51,000 members
in more than 500 chapters.
Among the dissidents, who called themselves libertarians, was a small group of anarchists one of whom brought uproar to
the convention when he burned what was allegedly a facsimile of his draft card during
the floor debate.
aking as its slogan,
Malcolm G. Scully arrived as a reporter in 1967

and served in a variety of editorial positions,
including editor at large, before retiring as editor
of The Chronicle Review in 2007.
February 24, 1970
At Berkeley, Where It All

Began, Activism Has
Become a Way of Life
By PHILIP W. SEMAS
berkeley. calif.
on Friday on the University
of California campus here, a girl stood
on the steps of Sproul Hall and talked
over a loudspeaker about womens liberation.
Only about a dozen of the thousands of
passing students stopped to listen.
Nor did the students pay much attention to
the card tables set up in front of the student
union across the plaza. There supporters of the
Students for a Democratic Society, the Young
Socialist Alliance, the boycott of California
table grapes, and the Radical Student Union
tried to give away or sell literature, solicit
funds, and occasionally argue with a passer-by.
A few feet away, at the corner of Bancroft
and Telegraph Avenues, Hubert Lindsay was
teaching. Holy Hubert, as he is known to
his fans, is a gap-toothed, freckle-faced fundamentalist preacher who debates daily with
students. The debates are mostly entertainment for the students, who scream questions and insults and then laugh as Hubert
tells them Youre all sinners or Youve got
a dirty heart. He had the largest crowd on
the plaza: about 50 people.
That Friday scene, a fairly typical one at
Berkeley these days, shows how many things
have changed since the Free Speech Movement here in 1964.
t noon
Philip W. Semas came to The Chronicle as a

reporter in 1969 and retired as editor in chief
in 2013. He started The Chronicle of Philanthropy in 1988.
May 25, 1970
Kent State Is Where It

Happened It Must
Never Happen Again
By PHILIP W. SEMAS
kent, ohio
on the Kent State campus
primarily faculty members and administrators seem less concerned with
fixing blame for the killings than with finding ways for the university to recover.
This is certainly not a time for finger-pointing or for decisions based on guilt,
which all of us share, says Robert E. Matson,
vice-president for student affairs. We need
a rational return to a commitment to reason,
hose now
which will necessitate an end to polarization.

Thats what we need if were going to turn
our efforts to reconstruction, which implies
change as well as a return to those values.
Kent State of all places cant let the
deaths of four young people be lost in the
rhetoric of finger-pointing, Mr. Matson
says. It ought to be able to contribute something to the best side of human values.
September 28, 1970
Faculty and Students

Fearful and Confused
After Fatal Bombing
at U. of Wisconsin
By PHILIP W. SEMAS
madison, wis.
last week at the University of Wisconsin, fear and confusion were the words most often
used by administrators, professors, and students to describe the state of their campus.
In August, after four years of protest accompanied by escalating violence on the
part of both students and police, a bomb that
was intended to destroy the Army Mathematics Research Center exploded in a parking lot, killing a graduate student and doing
$2.7-million in damage to the center and
nearby buildings.
The fear on the campus is of two kinds.
One, expressed mostly by administrators
and professors, is that radical violence may
make scholarship impossible.
The other fear, expressed mostly by students but also by some faculty members, is
that the university faces a wave of repression
and official violence from the university regents and state officials.
The confusion is over what the effect of
the bombing will be on the future course of
radical activity on the campus.
s classes began
December 6, 1971
Jackson State, Scene

of Killings, Tries to Shake
Haunts of Past
By WILLIAM A. SIEVERT
and JACQUELINE J. ADAMS
jackson, miss.
still loom large in the
memories of everyone who was on
the campus that May 15, and you have
to search to find anyone who is not con-
he killings
Continued on Following Page
13
Continued From Preceding Page

vinced the shootings were acts of outright
murder by city policemen and highway patrolmen who entered the campus to quell
rock-throwing by about 100 students.
Police fired more than 400 rounds of bullets and pellets into Alexander Hall, a womens dormitory, and the surrounding area,
killing James Earl Green, a high school senior, and Philip L. Gibbs, a senior at Jackson
State. Another dozen persons were wounded,
11 of them students.
Most of the people you meet at Jackson
State today are resigned to the fact that the
only reason their campus is on the map at
all is that their incident followed by only
11 days the killing of four white students by
National Guardsmen at Kent State University.
Students point out that a similar incident
on their campus in which another youth,
Benjamin Brown, was shot to death by police in 1967 stirred not a ripple of national
outrage.
But most of the people at Jackson State
this fall seem to feel it is useless to dwell on
the past.
Theyve forgotten all about it, says Mary
Gibbs, sister of the slain Phillip Gibbs, as
she gestures to the small groups of students
hurrying across the campus. And I dont
like to bring it up, either.
William A. Sievert was a reporter and editor
at The Chronicle from 1970-80. Jacqueline J.
Adams was an editorial intern in 1971. She became a broadcast journalist for CBS.
March 13, 1972
Who Are/Were Those

Kids And Why Do/Did
They Do Those
Awful/Wonderful
Things?
y the end of 1971, there had been

more than 100 empirical studies of
student activists. Out of that vast research has emerged a relatively consistent
picture of their numbers and their background. Beyond that, however, much of the
data can be and has been interpreted in a variety of ways.
And the apparently dwindling intensity of
the movement after the nationwide protests
against the U.S. incursions into Cambodia in
the spring of 1970 has posed new questions
for the theorists of student revolt.
What we do know is that the percentage
of students who called themselves radical

rose during the late 1960s, but has begun to
decline again since the Cambodian incursions.
November 27, 1972
Southern U. Tragedy
on a Tortured Campus
Slaying of 2 Youths in Louisiana
Deepens a Long-Festering Distrust
Between Students, Administrators
By EDWARD R. WEIDLEIN
baton rouge, la
almost impossible to pinpoint
who killed the two students. It is even
more difficult to offer any logical explanation of the events of Nov. 16, or how differences between administrators and students could get so out of control.
Many of Southerns faculty members and
some of its students live less than a mile
from the university, in an area of East Baton Rouge Parish with neatly laid-out houses,
some of them rather opulent, some lacking
any pretension. Their neighbors are Baton
Rouges black lawyers, black physicians, and
other black professionals.
In one of those houses, at 7340 Yorkshire,
Frederick J. Prejean was rousted out of bed
at 4 a.m. on Thursday, Nov. 6, by sheriffs
deputies armed with a warrant for his arrest.
The warrant had been requested by G. Leon
Netterville, Jr., president of Southern University.
Mr. Prejean, a 26-year-old senior in accounting, is a chief spokesman for Students
United, a group of Southern students who
brought a series of grievances before the university administration in mid-October. The
students asked for a role in university governance and curricular changes, among other things. They followed their statement of
grievances with boycotts of classes when the
administration did not respond as the students wished.
News of the arrest of Mr. Prejean and
three other students spread quickly. By the
time he got to his office that morning, Mr.
Netterville found several dozen students in
the administration building. They wanted to
know why the students had been arrested and
requested that they be released.
Mr. Netterville left his office, reportedly to go to a scheduled meeting with the
state board of education in downtown Baton
Rouge.
Sometime after he left, the head of Southerns security force acting in my behalf, according to Mr. Netterville, put in a call to
sheriffs deputies. For almost a month, off
and on, they had been alerted for duty at
t is still
Southern. The security officer asked that

they come onto the campus to remove the
students from the administration building.
Meanwhile, a crowd estimated at one-third
of the 9,000 students on the Baton Rouge
campus was gathering near the administration building.
Police massed outside the building. From
somewhere a canister, first thought to be a
smoke grenade and later said to be tear gas,
was thrown onto the ground. Police fired
more tear gas, some of it from shotguns.
When the gas cleared, Denver A. Smith
and Leonard D. Brown lay dead.
Edward R. Weidlein came to The Chronicle as
a reporter in 1971 and held a variety of editorial
positions until he retired in 2014. He edited our
first opinion pages and our books and arts coverage in the 1970s.
October 23, 1973
The New Scholars:

A Special Report
The ferment of the 1960s
has created a climate of profound
change in American scholarship
n the surface ,
at least, the heady

radicalism that prevailed among some
students and in some scholarly associations in the late 1960s has subsided, and
colleges and universities appear to be functioning normally again.
Yet the radical scholars of the 60s and the
questions they raised about their academic
disciplines have created a climate of profound
change in American scholarship.
In virtually every discipline, as a result of
internal evolution and external pressures, a
new scholarship has emerged a scholarship
that rejects many of the orthodoxies of the
past and offers new ideologies and methodologies to students who are beginning their
careers as scholars.
The radicals themselves, who took over
meetings of the American Sociological Association, who elected two of their own kind
to be presidents of the Modern Language
Association, and who turned stodgy business
meetings into bitter political confrontations,
are now less vocal, hence less visible, than
even two years ago.
Some radicals have left the academic
world to practice what they have preached.
Many of those who have remained are, as
one says, trying to be twice as good scholars as our colleagues so we can keep our
n
jobs.
We Must Find New Forms

for Higher Education
By ERNEST L. BOYER
educational institutions reflect the life styles and learning

patterns of the times in which
they were designed. One of the
urgent reasons for finding new
forms for American higher education is that
the 19th century model still in use mirrors a
society that no longer exists.
Consider the social conditions that influenced the university 70 or 80 years ago. At
that time, higher education was expected
to serve a small fraction of middle- and upper-class men and very few women who
monopolized the learned professions, the upper reaches of government, and the emerging
enterprises of industry and business.
The pool of potential students was small,
and the pool of persons qualified to teach
them was even smaller. As a badge of social
status, a college degree possessed a scarcity
value which would have been severely diminished had it become more widely available.
This was a society in which long-distance
travel remained a venture not to be undertaken lightly. When the small-town lad from
upstate New York went off to Columbia or
to Yale, he was expected to stay put, except
for a rigid holiday schedule when he dutifully
traveled home.
Also, most of todays colleges were founded
in a period when the prime teaching device
still was the human voice not even aided by
a public-address system, let alone tape recorders, films, television, or cassettes.
There were, of course, books expensively printed and bound, and severely limited in
supply. But all this was not so serious, because
the knowledge thought to be necessary for an
educated man was limited and fixed or at
least increasing at a slow and dignified rate.
Finally, it was an era which took the phrase
in loco parentis with deadly seriousness, because young teen-aged students were away
from home and confined for long periods.
Teachers devoted countless hours to the
ur
February 14, 1972

In 1971, The Chronicle published its first
opinion article, an argument by the former
Brandeis president Morris B. Abram against
student demands for curricular relevance. It
ran as a Point of View feature on what would
become a highly read spot, the back page.
In a POV article the following year, Ernest L.
Boyer lamented that the modern university was
still rooted in the 19th century, and he called
for new forms of education that reflected the
changing realities of our time. In particular,
Mr. Boyer advocated on behalf of external
degree programs, an approach that draws
on new teaching and learning not bound by
the confines of a single campus. Forty years
before MOOCs and the rhetoric of disruption,
a legendary university and foundation leader
made the case for why higher education
needed to adapt and evolve.
16 novem ber 2016 | the ch ron icle of h igher education
moral supervision of their charges, especially

in the hundreds of denominational colleges
where moral indoctrination took first place
and scholarship a feeble second.
Given all these circumstances, is it any surprise that the 19th century reflected a mentality both of scarcity and of siege? Knowledge
in the form of a curriculum, a faculty, and
a library had to be painstakingly accumulated, hoarded behind massive brick walls, and
sparingly parceled out to a chosen few admitted for a carefully prescribed exposure period.
While the student was undergoing this
four-year ritual, his behavior day and night
was carefully scrutinized and regulated, lest
he bring ruin to himself and disgrace upon
the fragile enterprise of higher education.
Inevitably, this fortress approach proved
enormously expensive and, in todays context
at least, equally wasteful. In an insular and
sometimes secretive way, schools competed
for faculty and students, duplicated library
holdings, and built up increasingly complex
physical plants with classroom and laboratory facilities not only for educating their students, but for housing them, feeding them,
doctoring them, and providing them with
amusement, religious services, recreation,
and at least since 1910 parking space for
their automobiles.
Each campus was to be somewhat insulated and totally self-contained. It was to make
available through its faculty, its library, its
housing arrangements, and its moral teachings, all of the elements needed to produce
the educated man. Then the campus was
viewed as an island, an intellectual and moral oasis, a place which both probed the student and protected him from the world outside.
All this would be merely an exercise in rather curdled nostalgia were it not for the fact
that so much of what took shape in that earlier time still survives today. This model of the
self-contained campus well-rooted in the
circumstance of the time has been locked

into an iron vise of custom and still forms our
image of the way things ought to be. And
while our world has been transformed around
us, we still cling to a mental picture of higher
education that would have been entirely familiar to our great-great-grandparents. We
are, in short, in one of those periods of lag, in
which an institution evolves more slowly than
the society it serves.
Millions of Americans are now looking for
new educational approaches that reflect the
changing realities of our time.
is one approach that recognizes that changes in communication have introduced new teaching and learning
not bound by the confines of a single campus.
n It is an approach that takes fuller advantage of our increased mobility and views the
campus as a base of operation, not a place of
confinement.
n The external approach recognizes the
validity of educational experiences outside the
traditional campus setting.
n It is an approach that enables adults in
mid-career to begin or resume their college
education, to pursue new scholarly or cultural interests, or to develop the skills that our
knowledge-oriented society requires for advancement.
n And, finally, the external degree makes
a serious effort to relate the cost to actual academic services rendered, not to a myriad of
extraneous and unwanted functions.
For more and more individuals in search
of an education, the trappings of college life
represent an irrelevance or a distraction. Our
multi-million-dollar physical plant may have
served a useful function when a culturally insecure young nation needed tangible reassurance that the scholarly pursuits were actually
going on. But for this generation, the process,
not the setting, is the thing.
From what Ive said, you may have concluded that I believe that the external degree
approach will completely replace the conventional four-year campus-based form of college education.
That is highly unlikely in the near future.
There will continue to be the majority of
he external degree
our students who, because of their interests

and inclinations, prefer and indeed must
have the experience of the traditional campus, with all its real virtues and all its fringe
benefits.
The point is simply that for increasing
numbers of college-age young people as
well as for countless thousands of adults
the external-degree approach offers the alternative they have been seeking, and that,
rather than proliferate endlessly the campus
model, we should create flexible alternatives
to match the need.
However, the campus, in some form, is absolutely essential both real and imagined
to provide a center for scholarly research
Quality is not
guaranteed by
forcing all students
to jump through
an identical set
of hoops.
about higher education here in America is undergoing some fundamental changes. The old model of a scattered
collection of isolated enclaves,
each jealously hoarding its resources and
minutely regulating its students, who must
remain in confinement for a four-year term,
is giving way to a far more complex and dynamic image a network of learning, resembling perhaps the human nervous system itself: intricate, continually pulsating, and totally interconnected.
The individual campus is coming to seem
less a fortress surrounded by its moat, and
more of a supermarket of ideas, a library with
easy access, or a base of operation to coordin
nate learning, not control it.
ur thinking
and study that is still, and must continue to

be, a central mission of any great university.
ent on campus, nor on the regularity of lectures he has sat through. It is not guaranteed
by forcing all students to jump through an
identical and well-worn set of hoops. And it is
certainly not guaranteed by pouring millions
of dollars into bigger and better buildings.
It seems to me that the quality of an individuals education depends upon four fundamental conditions:
n A student with a motivation to learn;
n Teachers to channel that motivation toward clear educational objectives;
n The availability of resources adequate to
achieve those objectives; and
n Rigorous evaluations of both the students
and the institution to determine how well
those objectives are being achieved.
Since I believe that each of these criteria
can be met outside the traditional four-year
residential framework of higher education, I
cannot accept the argument that external degree programs are a menace to the quality of
the educational enterprise.
Indeed, I would contend that in certain very
significant respect, such innovative approaches highlight the true process of education, remove some deceptive crutches, and thus actually enhance the quality of education.
general concern that advocates
of external degree programs

must confront squarely is the
fear that such efforts threaten the
quality of higher education. Although, perhaps, rooted in the days when the
field was dominated by fly-by-night operations,
fraudulent diploma mills, and the You-CanGet-Rich-in-Television-Repair syndrome, the
fear is a real one, and needs to be responded to
seriously. To do so, we must think most carefully about what we mean by quality in education, and how it is to be measured.
First of all, quality does not depend on the
number of credit hours that appear on a students transcript. It does not depend upon the
number of years he has been physically pres-
At the time of this writing, Ernest L. Boyer was

chancellor of the State University of New York.
He later became president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He died
in 1995.
QUOTABLE
May 20, 1968, Campus Protest Movements Take New Tack at Columbia
I wish the Red Chinese would send some money.

Were $1,100 in the hole right now and living
on peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.
Mark Rudd, a student activist at Columbia U., responding to administrators
suspicions that outside leftist groups were financing the protests
50th ann iversa ry | novem ber 2016
17
The New York Tragedy

By LARRY VAN DYNE
T
September 13, 1976
New York City was in deep financial trouble.
Stagnation in the national economy, a loss of
tax revenue, high crime rates, and crumbling
infrastructure had combined to create a
continuing downward spiral. Bankruptcy
approached, and President Gerald Ford at first
declined to bail the city out prompting the
New York Daily News headline Ford to City: Drop
Dead. Insolvency was averted, but only because
the city agreed to let a state financial-control
board take over its budget. The ensuing austerity
measures included steps to reduce spending
at the City University of New York, which was
forced to give up its 126-year-old policy of free
tuition for city residents. The result, as Larry Van
Dyne reported in the first of a three-part series,
was tumult and uncertainty for an institution
that had produced many of Americas greatest
scholars. This series exemplified The Chronicles
signature reporting on the continuing struggles
of public higher education.
he new yorkers,
new york
Abe Beame and

Hugh Carey, went down to Washington on a Tuesday a windy
morning in 1975 for their appointment with the Republicans at
the White House.
The mayor and governor, both Democrats
from Brooklyn, were having an usually troubled spring. They had come into office only
months before to find the city and state governments in worse financial shape than anyone had imagined.
New York Citys debt, built up during
more than a decade of overspending on city
services, had reached a staggering $12-billion, and the city was within weeks of default
because the banks refused to extend its credit any further. To coax the bankers back into
the market, Mr. Beame and Mr. Carey hoped
to get the federal government to provide a
guarantee on the citys notes.
So they went off to Washington to make
their case knowing that the Republicans
might not be too sympathetic, if they reacted
as Republicans normally do when Democrats
are in trouble.
They met in the Oval Office, with all the
key people: Gerald Ford smalltown, a Midwesterner, conservative heir to the Nixon
presidency; William Simon one-time Wall
Street broker, administration economic strategist, secretary of the treasury; and Nelson
Rockefeller millionaire, long-time governor of New York, now the vice-president.
The meeting, naturally, was private, but it
was apparent from what leaked out that Mr.
Beame and Mr. Carey did not get what they
came for. There was no federal help promised, no matter how much they argued that
New Yorks money problems were at least
partly tied to such national developments as
the recession and the northern migration of
thousands of poor blacks and Puerto Ricans.
Instead, they got from the President a stern
lecture about the fiscal waywardness of the

nations largest city a city that had been
controlled by generations of free-spending
liberals, something no Republican politician
would be likely to forget.
At one point the rambling conversation
in Mr. Fords office apparently came around
to the City University of New York and its
long-standing policy of not charging city residents any undergraduate tuition at least
that is how Mr. Rockefeller remembered the
meeting later in a published interview.
The President was said to have been surprised that free tuition, a policy now abandoned by virtually all other public universities and one that Mr. Rockefeller had tried to
end when he was governor, had lingered so
long in New York City.
Mr. Mayor, the President said, I understand you have free tuition in your city university, and youre asking us to provide money for the city. We dont have free tuition in
Lansing, Michigan. Why should the federal
government provide free tuition for the students in New York City and not in other cities of the nation?
Mr. Beame, the son of immigrant Jews
who traced his rise to the citys highest office
from the start provided by tuition-free classes at City College in the 1920s, reduced the
issue to a personal level, apparently unconscious of the double-meaning the citys critics would read into his response.
If we hadnt had free tuition, he said, I
wouldnt be here.
City University of New York,

the countrys third-largest university system, is opening classes
on its 19 campuses this month still
shaken and weary from months of
tumult and uncertainty. And it is beginning
the process of accommodating itself to major
changes in policy and scale forced on it by
the parent citys near-bankruptcy.
he
Reluctantly, under the enormous economic

and political pressure of that crisis, C.U.N.Y.
has:
n Ended its 126-year-old policy of free tuition for city residents and imposed charges
that are among the highest for public colleges and universities in the country ($775
for freshmen and sophomores, $925 for juniors and seniors) a change that is expected to drive several thousand students away.
n Altered its controversial and ambitious
promise of open admissions for even the
worst prepared of the citys high-school
graduates introduced in 1970 to aid the
social and economic rise of masses of New
Yorks new migrants (blacks and Puerto Ricans), much as the university had done for
earlier waves of dispossessed newcomers.
n Absorbed over a two-year period a whopping 17-per-cent cut in its half-billion-dollar
budget forcing it to cut its payroll by some
4,500 full-time employees, including 2,900
faculty members and administrators figures that make it by far the severest academic
retrenchment in anyones memory.
n Accepted a restructured governing board
that subsequently increases the power of the
state government and reduces the power of
the city in university affairs a change that
may foreshadow a state takeover or some
other major realignment of public higher education in New York.
These adjustments, however, do not fully
measure the turmoil that has engulfed an institution already drained by 15 years of fatiguing fights with the Rockefeller administration over money, tuition, and control, by
the tension of faculty unionization, by minority-student protests, and by the uneasy
transition to open admissions.
during these last few

months life at C.U.N.Y. seems to
have taken on a sad, absurd, crazy-Gotham quality that is difficult for outsiders to grasp.
An English professor caught this quality in
a letter to the editor of the Times. Noting the
proximity of C.U.N.Y.s remodeled, high-rise
graduate center on 42nd Street to the Times
Square pornography district, he poured out
his frustration and disgust at the choice society
seemed to be making between the mind and
the flesh. In the strange power equations that
pass for representative government in New
York these days, he said, it is easier to close
an entire university than one massage parlor.
Indeed, last spring, while most of the
countrys universities were quietly going
through commencement, C.U.N.Y. ran out
of money and shut down, sending its unpaid
faculty and staff into unemployment lines
and its students into a pre-exam limbo. All
this while waiting for Governor Carey, the
citys Democratic legislators, and upstate Republicans to reach the agreement that ended
t times
free tuition and mandated a much-reduced

budget level for the current year.
Only weeks before, a proposal from the
C.U.N.Y. administration to scale down and
restructure the university set off sit-ins and
demonstrations against the threatened merger or closing of five of its newest and smallest
campuses.
Two senior colleges, Medgar Evers in
Brooklyn and York in Queens, faced demotion to community-college status. Eugenio
Maria de Hostos Community College, a bilingual institution in the Bronx, was to be
merged into another two-year college. John
Jay College, a special institution in Manhattan for educating policemen and other criminal-justice personnel, was to be merged into
Bernard Baruch College. And Staten Islands
Richmond College, an institution with upper-division students only, was to be closed.
(Many of these changes have since been rescinded by the state legislature.)
The budget cuts the severest of which
came over the past summer and included 30day layoff notices to large numbers of faculty
members in the junior ranks created personal hardship and widespread anxiety.
Its been tough, laments Robert Kibbee,
the systems chancellor. We have a form of
institutional cannibalism under way. The
presidents fight each other. The departments
In New York these

days, one professor
wrote, it is easier
to close an entire
university than one
massage parlor.
battle each other. And the scraps keep getting smaller.
Moving from campus to campus now, one
finds signs everywhere of how the crisis has
altered C.U.N.Y. a university that has always been one of the countrys most urban in
mission and style.
Even its physical appearance has always
had that extraordinarily cramped quality
typical of New York City. Hunter College,
its Park Avenue branch, has a high-rise campus that occupies only a single city block.
And last year the university enrolled 270,000
students without a single dormitory.
In the citys subway trains, alongside the
lavish graffiti and the placards plugging
Broadway shows and Off-Track Betting, advertisements now urge C.U.N.Y. students to
apply for financial aid to help offset the new

tuition charges.
n the upper east side,
where
the universitys central administration is scattered in several old
office buildings, secretaries laid
off on various campuses meet to
see if they have the seniority to claim jobs
elsewhere in the system.
At City College, whose aging campus
overlooks Harlem, a badly-needed, $90-million academic complex stands half-finished,
abandoned by the hardhat crews, with surface rust spreading over its exposed steel
beams. It is halted, as is much other C.U.N.Y.
construction, because no one will touch the
bonds of the states college construction
agency.
At LaGuardia Community College in
Brooklyn, all incoming freshman are being
telephoned by faculty volunteers to reassure
them that the campus will open on schedule,
regardless of rumors or confusing newspaper
stories to the contrary.
At Queens College, a promising young
historian who has been let go in the retrenchment, solely because she lacked seniority in her department, is furious at the
injustice of it all: To be kicked out without
an academic judgment by a computer or
something tantamount to that is outrageous!
Many people on the campuses and
throughout the city are looking back on the
crisis to find explanations and villains
viewing the events, naturally, through their
own filters of political ideology, educational
philosophy, or self-interest.
To many political conservatives, the outcome of the crisis is not regarded, at least
in some respects, as any special tragedy for
C.U.N.Y.
The imposition of tuition is seen as a
long-overdue accommodation to fiscal realism that had been avoided for years by
bleeding-heart liberals with no respect for
the bottom-line and no stomach for political risk-taking. And the alteration in open
admissions is viewed as a move away from a
misguided and discredited policy that had
threatened to destroy academic standards
and turn the university into a welfare agency
for illiterates.
Many liberals, however, see a great urban
institution laid low and punished for creative
social innovation, exemplified by free tuition
and open admissions.
The City University and its working-class
clientele seem abandoned by turncoat Democrats who sold out to the big banks, which
were interested mainly in protecting profits
during the citys crisis, and to conservative,
anti-urban politicians who played to Peoria
rather than provide federal help.
19

The differences in interpretation are extremely sharp. It is possible for conservative columnist William F. Buckley, Jr., to argue that tuition is the kind of sacrifice that
was needed to improve the concentration of
shiftless open-admissions students, and for
the left-leaning Village Voice to regard the
same events as a counter-revolution.
City College, whose origins date from
a free academy established by citywide
referendum in 1847, is the oldest of the
C.U.N.Y. campuses and the source of much
of the mystique that surrounds free public
higher education here.
In a part of the country historically dominated by socially exclusive private colleges,
City College stood out as a kin of the more
democratic public universities in the Midwest, South, and West. It is still spoken of
with nostalgia, especially by its older alumni, as the Harvard of the proletariat.
City College joined later by Hunter,
Brooklyn, and Queens was the route into
the professions for the working-class, particularly the children of Eastern European
Jews who crowded into the Lower East Side
by the thousands at the turn of this century. To these families, the garment trades and
City College became the channels of upward
mobility that ward politics and the police
department were to the Irish.
A unique set of factors produced this situation. Not only were Jewish immigrants
heavily concentrated in New York, but they
were heir to a cultural tradition of extraordinary respect and hunger for learning. And
because nearly all were poor, the lack of tuition at City College made the difference
between getting a formal education and resigning oneself to a life in the manufacturers lofts.
to the New York legislature summarized by S. Willis Rudy in the colleges official
history presents a profile of
the colleges student body in the
report
late 1930s.
Four-fifths were Jewish, with parents born
in Russia, Poland, and elsewhere in Eastern
Europe. Some language other than English
usually was spoken in their homes, and typically their apartments were crowded and inadequate. Health problems were common,
and nearly half arrived needing eye glasses.
(Twenty-five years later, a problem noted
among some of C.U.N.Y.s black and Puerto
Rican students was malnutrition.)
They also were high-achievers in the public high schools, getting through an average
of about a year and a half faster than other students, and they arrived at City with a
ferocious drive to succeed and with strong
attachment to intellectual values. All this reflected in part the fact that lack of space at
the college had forced up admissions standards, so that those who got in were the
brightest students culled from a huge pool
of talent.
Going in bright, they came out bright,
and they established a remarkable record of
achievement.
Of the men who earned doctorates in this
country between 1920 and 1973, one study
has shown, more did their undergraduate
work at City College than anywhere else except the University of California at Berkeley
and the University of Wisconsin, both much
larger institutions. (Among women, Hunter
sent more on to doctorates than any other
college.)
Many of the most visible contemporary
American intellectuals started their careers
at City. Although many of them started out
Sidney Hook, Irving

Howe, Alfred Kazin,
Irving Kristol, Seymour
Martin Lipset, Bernard
Malamud, Lewis
Mumford, Ernest
Nagelall went
to City College.
as students on the political left in the 1930s,
some have since taken an interesting political journey to the right, particularly in the
1970s. Although a few are still associated
with the left-liberal ideas of such journals as
Dissent, others now provide the neo-conservative firepower arrayed in publications like
Commentary and The Public Interest.
Daniel Bell, Lewis Feuer, Nathan Glaser,
Paul Goodman, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe,
Alfred Kazin, Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset, Bernard Malamud, Lewis Mumford, Ernest Nagel all went to City College. And what they accomplished in intellectual life was matched in other professions
by Bernard Baruch, Felix Frankfurter,
George Goethals, Zero Mostel, Edward G
Robinson, Jonas Salk, Upton Sinclair, and
many others. Four graduates went on to win
Nobel Prizes Julius Axelrod and Arthur
Kronberg in medicine, Kenneth Arrow in
economics, and Robert Hofstadter in physics.
New York and its suburbs are today filled
with lesser-known, upwardly mobile City
College alumni in law, medicine, dentistry,
business, accounting, engineering, teaching, and other professions. And memories

of their education at a free but highly selective City College were strong enough
to play at least some role in the debate that
surrounded the crisis-provoked struggle
over free tuition and open admissions at
C.U.N.Y.
here was more involved in the

C.U.N.Y. struggle than the matter of free tuition, of course, but
that was the policy that was most
deeply engrained and whose demise attracted the most attention.
The City University stood out as President Ford noted as the last institution in
the country to declare itself for free tuition.
(There was some semantic confusion. In fact,
C.U.N.Y. charged a mandatory general fee
for resident undergraduates $110 a year
in senior colleges and $70 in community
colleges as well as relatively high fees for
graduate students and nonresidents.)
The fight to save free tuition was carried
on not only in the midst of a mind-boggling
financial crisis but in a national atmosphere
that had shifted subtly away from the old
American consensus about the social value
of low college tuition.
There was a time say, in the late 1960s,
when Ronald Reagan imposed tuition on a
resistant University of California when
low tuition in public universities was assumed to be the best (indeed, the only) device for opening higher education to the
masses. But the emergence of a new set of
circumstances in 1970s has gradually made
that assumption more vulnerable to attack.
One important change is the relatively recent introduction of major government programs providing low-income students with
money to help offset tuition. Although these
programs are not always adequate, they have
done a good deal to alter the interests of various social classes in low tuition. They also
have undercut the claim of low-tuition advocates that it is the only way to expand educational opportunity for the poor.
None of these aid programs was available for students who made it through City
College in its free and glorious days in the
1930s, although most surely would have
qualified under todays standards. The main
source of federal aid for undergraduate education today, the need-based Basic Educational Opportunity Grants, dates only from
1972. New York States Tuition Assistance
Program, which also bases awards on family
income, came along in 1974.
The availability of these funds for low-income students of which C.U.N.Y. has an
unusually large number was frequently
used in the debate here to argue that the imposition of tuition would not be a severely
Continued on Page 22
CHANGE THAT DOES

THE WORLD GOOD
In a global city teeming with energy and brimming with opportunity,
risks are taken, doors are opened and the future takes shape. UCLA
is dedicated to excellence and making a difference, with the size and
scope to allow for unimagined diversity, unmatched breadth and depth,
and impact that spans the globe.
We became one of the worlds greatest public research universities by
attracting the kind of faculty, students and alumni who see beyond the.
horizon. Who never give up. Who rise to any challenge.
We call these people Optimists. People who believe anything
is possible and frequently prove it.
ucla.edu
Continued From Page 20

regressive step. At one point, Ewald B. Nyquist, the state education commissioner, produced figures to show the cushioning effect
that these funds would have for the poorest
students if C.U.N.Y. installed tuition comparable to the State University.
Government money, he said, would completely cover tuition costs for all students
from families with annual incomes of $11,000
and below (about 55 percent of C.U.N.Y.s
full-time undergraduates). The universitys
own estimate was closer to 40 per cent, but
Mr. Nyquist had made his point.
A second development undercutting low
tuition is the end of major growth and the
amount of tax money that states are willing
to provide for higher education.
In New York, for instance, the State University now gets a smaller share of the state
budget than it did in 1970-71 a period in
which inflation has wildly increased its costs.
Faced with this situation, the university has
doubled tuition in that period to the point
where students are now the source of substantial revenue.
This gradual shift of the burden of higher education from state tax revenues to students was a trend C.U.N.Y. found it difficult
to buck.
Another new factor bearing on the fate of

low tuition is the aggressive entry of the financially beleaguered independent colleges
into state politics. State governments, especially New Yorks, have begun to assume
some financial responsibility for the future
of these colleges, in the belief the country
needs a mixed system of higher education.
The Tuition Assistance Program in New
York is structured to help the independent
colleges by providing extra money to those
students who elect to go there and pay the
higher tuition, which is now about $2,000
a year above those at S.U.N.Y. This year
about $73-million in state money will go
to students to offset tuition at independent
colleges, and the colleges themselves will
get another $87-million in other state subsidies.
In this context with the interests of
the independent colleges to worry about,
the state gradually shifting more costs to
students in S.U.N.Y., and the impact of a
tuition increase cushioned for the poorest students the policy of free tuition at
C.U.N.Y. was in a less secure position than
it once had been. All of this, it is well to remember, was occurring at a time of severe
financial constraint in both city and state.
Nonetheless, there were those in the city
who strongly defended free tuition as wise

social policy and well worth the cost to the
public.
They argued that imposing tuition would
mean real hardship for families that earn
$11,000 to $20,000 a year not that much
in a city as expensive as New York, but too
much to qualify their children for any substantial student aid. They reminisced about
the personal and social payoffs of free education at City College in the old days. They
argued that continuing public investment in
free training for the citys future work force
was critical to its economic revival. And they
argued that free tuition was as important a
symbol of the citys openness as the Statue
of Liberty.
But, for others, free tuition at C.U.N.Y.
stuck out as a symbol of another sort as
a symbol of well-meaning but misguided
spending that had helped bring the city to
fiscal crisis. Eventually, of course, events ran
n
their way.
Larry Van Dyne was a national correspondent
at The Chronicle from 1971 to 1980, when he
left to take a one-year fellowship for journalists at
Stanford University. He returned to Washington
as a reporter for The Washingtonian, where he
worked for 30 years.
VANDERBILT
UNIVERSIT Y
congratulates
The Chronicle of
Higher Education
ON ITS
GOLDEN
anniversary.
22 nov em ber 11, 2016 | t h e ch ron icl e of h igh er e duc at ion
Men Over 40,

Women Under 40
These two seemingly unlikely groups hold the power
to give women a larger role on college faculties
By CAROLYN G. HEILBRUN
the frightful imbalance of the sexes in the

faculties of our institutions of
higher education rests, I believe,
with the two groups least likely,
at first blush, to offer hope for that change:
men over and women under 40. Inspiring
these two groups to action is certainly uphill
work. I am reminded of the Vermont farmer
who, asked for directions, replied: If I wanted to get where youre going, I wouldnt start
here. Here, nonetheless, we are.
Why these two groups? Why not, for example, the group to which I belong: academic women, mostly tenured, 40 and over?
I can only state bluntly that this group of
older women of achievement must be counted out. While there are marked exceptions,
as in every characterization of groups, older
academic women appear to exist in an irreversible state of fear in the presence of their
male colleagues.
Women now under 40, however complacent about enjoying what has been won
for them, did not grow up as slaves. Doris
Lessing has told us that slaves set free, are
marked by the habits of submission; and
slaves imagining freedom see it through the
eyes of slaves. There are many explanations
for older womens failure of courage, and I
hope one day to identify and describe them,
but this much is clear: Established academic
women will not offend the male club which
has initiated them.
As to men under 40, if they can discover
ways to survive in the shrinking academic
world, and to live with women without dehumanizing themselves, that is all that can
be asked of them, and it is enough.
Men over 40, in whose hands all power
lies, are the conservatives of the academic world. A conservative is one who, in defense of principles he considered imperative,
can bear with equanimity the suffering of
others. We are all in some ways conservahe power to change
tive, but complete conservatism and absolute

power are a dangerous combination. I suspect that, for many reasons, older academic
men are now subtly aware of this, and that
awareness can be encouraged. (I remind myself that the harshest penalty for navet is to
look a fool.)
There is another characteristic of this
group, little noticed and less commented
upon, which they share with the other successful men of their age: They are at that
point in life when the self grows restless and
asks, is this all there is? Freud had his work
cut out for him exploring the unconscious
of infancy, and his followers have paid little attention to the crises (or, as Gail Sheehy calls them, the passages) of middle age.
Colleges and universities are being run by
men as unconsciously sick of power as women are of powerlessness. It is, moreover, being continually affirmed that the feminine
selves in males (like the masculine selves in
women) become, in middle age, adamant and
persistent in their demand for expression.
Of course, the average head of a department
(think of one!) would sooner admit to plagiarism than to a feminine self. Nonetheless, that powerful male in crisis, although
he appears as arrogant as ever, may, given a
face-saving way to change, be tempted toward uncharacteristic actions if these can be
shown to be sternly practical.
these practical
actions be?
First, those prestigious
institutions that set the
style for the profession
might stop trading back and forth the few
acceptable women professors and administrators. There is one woman professor who
must have had more offers of alliance in the
last decade than Elizabeth I had in her whole
lifetime. Male professors and administrators
hat might
November 15, 1976

In the mid 70s colleges were still mens
clubs: Women made up less than a quarter of
full-time faculty. Female scholars seeking to
be taken seriously, increase their numbers,
or earn equal pay risked being written off
as womens libbers. Here, the scholar
and prolific writer Carolyn Heilbrun (the
first woman to earn tenure in Columbia
Universitys English department) put the lie to
standard explanations of the dearth of female
academics, and offered some provocative
strategies for change.
23
Marginalia
December 13, 1976
In 1975, Corbin Gwaltney, founder and,
at the time, editor of The Chronicle,
introduced a humor column called
Marginalia, which ran in each issue
on Page 2. Signed with the initials
C.G., Marginalia poked fun at typos,
malapropisms, and other bloopers in
college publications. It grew to be a
favorite of readers, who submitted many
of the items he used. The column that Mr.
Gwaltney most enjoyed writing was the
one that he composed every year for the
Christmas and Hanukkah season, with
puns on college names, and his favorite
among those was the one from 1976.
Deck the halls of higher knowledge,

Hail the university or college
Dear to you and yours this season:
Ivy, redbrick; healthy, wheezin.
Sing out Carrolls, every one:
Wisconsins, Mont.s, Ohios (John)
Hail to Santas, Christmas day:
Barbara, Clara, Rosa, Fe.
Dance round Wash.s Evergreen
Hail New Jerseys college, Kean,
And may the day be specially merry
At St. John Vianney Minor Seminary.
Pluck the strings and toot the tuba
For all whose school is dear old Yuba.
And let us take this opportunity
To toast the folk at Polk Community.
Sing out the fabled Mater, Alma
For George Corley Wallace C.C. at Selma.
Sing yet another lilting stanza
For Foothill Colleges kin, De Anza.
And may the merriment be total
At Deganwidah-Quetzalcoatl.
Its name has changed to D-Q U.
(Thats Iroquois-Aztec, please, not Sioux.)
Dance a holiday fandango
For Clarion State Coll at Venango,
And while were dancing, try a waltz
For SUNYs College at New Paltz.
Up, Ohio State, and at em;
Tis the season. Sweetbriar, Chatham;
Raise your brimming eggnog glasses
To Alice Lloyd at Pippa Passes.
Cheers to those at U. of M.,

To Lehigh U. and Bethlehem.
To Newport, Swarthmore, Brown, Pomona,
Simmons, Stanford, Cal Sonoma.
To Whitman C in Walla Walla,
To U. Missouris branch at Rolla,
To M.I.T. and then Biola:
To all, a Case of Coker cola.
Tingle spines (a Christmas tactic
At Logan College of Chiropractic).
Were sure that you, whateer your sex,ll
Find much Christmas cheer at Drexel.
For Hawaii-Manoa,
A Christmas aloha;
And we all surely owe a
Wassail to Samoa.
Turn north and drop in on the U. of Alaska,
Then east to the U. of Regina in SaskaTchewan; then south to Iowa Lakes;
Greet the Coes and the Dordts
and the Clarks and the Drakes.
(While in that vicinity, join
The festive events in Des Moines.)
At Harcum, herald angels sing;
At Angelina, caroling
Fills the air with sounds of Bliss;
Now move on south; dont miss Ole Miss.
While thereabouts, pile high the plate
With festive fare for Delta State.
Thats near the home of Uncle Judd
(His feet in Miss., not Harvey, Mudd).
Doane we now our sleigh apparel,
Soar to snowy roofs at MarylHurst, then off to fete Don Bosco;
Thence to Idaho at Moscow.
Down the chimney, fill the sock
With Toys for all at Bay de Noc.
Trim the Lone Pine; colored Ball
And Shining Starr will say to all:
From Brandeis U. to Santa Monica,
Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukkah!
c.g.

appear to have one criterion of achievement:
Would Harvard hire him/her?
By the time those in search for tenured
women have eliminated women who will not
move, and those who are suspected of feminism (such a woman is often called a womens libber), they are ready to declare that,
of course they havent enough tenured women, but suitable candidates (sad to admit) just
arent available. Every study tells us where
these women are: in the less prestigious institutions, where they are usually being marvelously competent and gaining valuable experience. Since the less prestigious the institution, the more women it has, the source
of trained women is obvious. Think of farm
clubs, think of the minor leagues. As to the
feminism of these women, is it really that
dangerous? In fact, the few frankly feminist
women with tenure, in or out of prestigious
intuitions, are so endangered a species as to
interest a zoo.
Second, so-called womens or gender studies are the fastest, perhaps the only, growing academic pursuit in a dreary world. Even
some men are teaching these courses, or trying to. Instead of treating this whole subject
as a duchess would treat a dog who not only
got into the drawing room but made a mess
on the hearth rug, why not recognize it for
it sheer money-making, scholarly, growth
possibilities? No academic field, outside of
those sciences whose chief characteristic is
their purity, cannot be seen in a new way if
every aspect of femininity, or what has hitherto been defined or ignored as femininity, is
explored. The whole question of human cognition is now being challenged; Piaget, for
example, considered only logical rationality
in his pioneering work. Was this too limited?
Male administrators, scrounging for funds,
must not ignore his source simply because
they find it not quite nice.
Third, the largest group of potential students is no longer the 18- to 22-year-olds.
Many of the snootiest universities have more
non-matriculated than matriculated students, although they are careful not to tell
their alumni. This group consists of women
and men wearied of stereotyped male pursuits. Courses must be geared to their needs:
not made simpler, but less rigid and less authoritarian. Women are those most likely to
possess the skills for devising centers and
programs for people who wish to study after
adolescence or even middle age.
Fourth, chairmen might stop telling every man who is not hired that affirmative action forced the hiring of a woman instead.
It is a lie, and if it soothes the disappointed
male applicant, it is no less evil or harmful
for that. Even with all the unemployment
around, one rarely meets, these days, a man
turned down for any other reason.
Finally, male administrators must allow
themselves to recognize that large numbers

of their students, graduate and undergraduate, are women. Can men in power be absolutely confident that women students will
continue to pay high fees to be taught exclusively (with only a few token exceptions)
by men?
to my second group, women under

40 often way under,
since I include students as
well as faculty members.
The Chronicle reported in April that a woman
student at Brown had said: Activism is considered a male thing. Most women dont run
for office. A lot of women are afraid to be labeled feminist.
How does one counter the fear of being labeled feminist? I have recently thrown out
a collection of clippings from The New York
Times (it had grown so large that either it
or I had to go) of accounts of women who
had made the greatest advances in centuries.
They had entered the military academics,
taken jobs down mines and up mountains,
joined Papa in father-daughter firms, started businesses, deserted tired marriages, and
joined formerly all-male boards. One and all,
they announced that, of course, they were
not feminist. They just wanted to live their
own lives.
Everything in a females life encourages
her to believe that any struggle for self-assertion will result in her abandonment, her isolation from male approval. This fear has been
avoided by only a few exceptional women,
most of them now assistant professors, little
more than a decade older than the students
they must now encourage. Often teaching
womens or gender studies, they risk losing
hich brings us
possible promotion in being frankly feminist.

My faith in these assistant professors is great,
for they were formed in the 60s, that decade
which, to be sure, promised more than it
gave, but which did teach us that powerful
conservatism can be overturned by the persistent efforts of the apparently powerless.
Yet this generation of women assistant
professors will find itself an isolated event in
history, like their suffragette forbears, if they
cannot cultivate their natural constituency:
Colleges and
universities are
being run by men as
unconsciously sick
of power as women
are of powerlessness.
the women students in coed or formerly male
institutions. They must remind the women
students in institutions formerly all male that
no special privilege has been conferred upon
them in giving them admittance to these hallowed halls. They were taken in because the
pools of academically qualified applicants
could not be enlarged without them and because they were needed to attract the best
male applicants.
These students need not be humbly grateful. On the contrary, they should demand
that, if the institutions cannot survive with-
out women students, neither can those students survive without the role models provided by numerous women faculty members.
The same is now true at the graduate level, particularly in the humanities and social
sciences. Enrollments in those departments
would be disastrously low were it not for the
large numbers of women students. These
brilliant women are at least half and, in
many departments, the better half of
graduate students, yet there are few women
professors in their departments, and those
few are underpaid. Women students must
learn their own political and economic power, and stop acting like charity children at a
Christmas party.
I like to imagine the male chairman and
the woman student in dialogue. He, his feet
on the desk, cigar in mouth, patronizes her,
eager for her money and brains so long as she
will let him pontificate and not ask to be his
equal, his colleague; she, afraid someone will
tell her she is not feminine if she expresses
what Virginia Woolf called the manliness of
her girlish heart. I like to imagine that suddenly, to him, she is the self he never developed, that self that might have talked without
its feet on the desk. And to her, he is the possibility of real selfhood, without, of course,
the pomposity.
Can I really be fool enough to hope for
change from these two? Remember Matthew Arnold, who spoke of two worlds one
dead, the other powerless to be born? I think
he was wrong then, and I think hes wrong
n
now.
Carolyn G. Heilbrun was a professor of English
at Columbia University when she wrote this essay. She retired from Columbia in 1992 and died
in 2003, at age 77.
QUOTABLE
January 31, 1972, Six New Doctrines That Send My Blood Pressure Up
I can remember when persuading the able and often reluctant to

undertake the difficult and sometimes impossible was one of the
main jobs of educational administration. Now the average I.Q.
of a committee, commission, or other group chosen for what may
be primarily a task for experts is deemed less pertinent than its
E.Q., or ethnic quotient. To update this observation we must now
add the S.Q. factor, or sex quotient, a mandate which is further
complicated on some campuses by the problem of what to do with
gay lib elements.
Logan Wilson, based on an address he gave as he stepped down
after 10 years as president of the American Council on Education
25
Wheeling and Dealing

on Capitol Hill
How Dapper Dan and Maggie handled funding for colleges
By ANNE C. ROARK
washington
a stage-villains mustache,
white patent-leather shoes, and rings
on nearly every finger, Rep. Daniel J.
Flood, the 74-year-old chairman of
one the most powerful subcommittees on Capitol Hill, swooped into a Congressional hearing room last March and began his
oration to the crowd of onlookers:
Act II, Scene 1. This is the second act of
a bad play. I feel I have already seen it. Indeed, the former Shakespearean actor from
Wilkes-Barre, Pa., not only had watched
but had been a star in the same performance
many times before in his 10 years as subcommittee chairman.
It was the Flood subcommittees opening
day of hearing on a massive money bill for
the Departments of Labor and Health, Education, and Welfare for fiscal 1978.
A few days later, a similar scene would take
place on the other side of the Capitol with
an actor of a different style.
Puffing on a fat, black cigar and leaning on
a cane, Sen. Warren G. Magnuson, a 72-yearold Democrat from Seattle, quietly entered his
subcommittees ornate hearing room.
He paused just inside the door to see that
the press was comfortably seated. Shuffling
to his own seat, the Congressional veteran of
over 40 years stopped at least once along the
way to whisper something perhaps a reminder of some forgotten favor in a colleagues ear.
porting
November 28, 1977

Covering developments in Washington was
a hallmark of The Chronicles early years,
especially as the scope of the federal
governments involvement in higher education
expanded. In 1977, Anne C. Roark decided
to monitor the long and complex process
that led to production of the 1978 spending
bill for the Departments of Labor and of
Health, Education, and Welfare. That year,
two powerful lawmakers were in charge of the
appropriations subcommittees Rep. Daniel
J. Flood and Sen. Warren G. Magnuson
and they lent an almost theatrical air to the
smoke-filled proceedings. One might expect
high drama and important debates during such
weighty decisions. Instead, Ms. Roark writes,
the process was more often like a circus,
sometimes featuring personal buffoonery and
comical disputes.
apper dan
and Maggie,
as these colorful characters
are known on Capitol Hill,
are two of Congresss most
powerful lawmakers.
As chairmen of the House and Senate
Appropriations Subcommittees on Labor,
Health, Education, and Welfare, they have
the job of leading their colleagues through
the long and complex process of recommend-
ing to Congress how it should divide approximately $60 billion among the nations social
endeavors, scientific-research projects, and
educational programs.
The production of the Labor-H.E.W. appropriations bill for fiscal 1978 began pretty
much on schedule last spring, when dozens
of high Administration officials paraded from
their executive offices to the Hill. There, before the appropriations subcommittees, they
defended the Presidents budget requests.
Mindful that the President has the power
to veto whatever they do, Mr. Floods and Mr.
Magnusons panels used the Presidents proposals as a starting point and cautiously calculated where they could make additions. After Mr. Flood and the 10 other Congressmen
on his subcommittee drafted their version of
the spending bill, the House Committee on
Appropriations and the full House of Representatives approved their decisions, with
few changes. Then, having completed their
hearings, Senator Magnuson and his 11 colleagues began to draft the Senate version of
the money bill. It, too, had to be approved by
that bodys full appropriations committee and
then by the Senate itself.
Any differences between the two chambers would have to be hammered out in a
House-Senate conference by Oct. 1, when the
new fiscal year would begin. At least, that was
the way the process was supposed to work.
An innocent who came to The Hill for the
first time to see how such weighty decisions
were made might have expected high drama.
He might have assumed that there would be
important debates on why higher education
should be allotted only 5 percent of the Labor-H.E.W. funds, while public-assistance
programs would receive nearly 33 percent.
Despite the serious business going on and
the impressive cast of characters, the process
was often more like a circus, sometimes featuring personal buffoonery and comical disputes.
Take, for example, the day that officials

from the National Institute of Education testified before Mr. Floods subcommittee.
Education research has never been particularly popular with Congress. Harold L.
Hodgkinson, then director of the research institute, knew this well and carefully tried to
defend his $109 million request. The figure
the budget suggested was $39 million more
than N.I.E. had received the year before, but
$91 million less than Congress had authorized in a 1976 law extending the life of the
agency and setting its spending ceilings.
Bored Congressmen squirmed in their
seats or dozed as Mr. Hodgkinson explained
the efforts his agency had made to upgrade
education research, improve teaching, and
eliminate crime in the public schools.
Suddenly an enormous, befuddled looking
Congressman with a wild mop of white hair
stood up. With a loud harrumph, Rep. Edward James Patten, Democrat of New Jersey,
interrupted Mr. Hodgkinsons testimony.
heres no end
to what I hear
about the public schools,
snorted the 72-year-old
Congressman, who is known
to add comic relief to formal
hearings by wandering in late, peering over
witnesses shoulders, and even tugging from
their hands the written testimony that they
were presenting to the subcommittee.
I went out to Linden High School to talk.
They have something to be proud of there,
he said, pounding his fist on the table. I tried
to make those kids proud that the largest oil
company in the country is there. Jesus! They
blew me out.
I tried to make them proud that Cadillac,
the best automobile company in the world,
was right there in their town. I laid a fried
egg. I was shocked. I was hurt. I dont mind
telling you that.
Mr. Patten paused, peering through thick
glasses at Mr. Hodgkinson. The Congressman grinned. Youre not the guy who started this Hodgkins disease, are you?
You know the point Im making. There is
no respect for this country. I dont feel like
some great hero I cant Im exhausted.
He plopped down in his chair.
But then something else occurred to him
and he leaned forward. [President] Carter
told us no one knew anything about the history of my country. Congressmen dont
get any respect. Im depressed.
With that Mr. Patten folded his arms and
leaned back in his chair. It was a hard act to
follow, but Mr. Hodgkinson nodded sympathetically and tried to explain what N.I.E.
had done to solve such problems.
Within weeks, however, the appropriations
panel would cut the National Institute of Educations request for funds by more than $20
million.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Capitol, Mr. Magnusons subcommittee grilled
Marie D. Eldridge, Administrator of the National Center for Education Statistics, on why
her $13 million agency should get an additional $3 million.
Ms. Eldridge methodically explained the
importance of education statistics. But she,
too, was interrupted when Senator Magnuson
came in a half an hour or so late for his panels 2 oclock hearing on the Labor-H.E.W.
bill.
As you know, Ive been an opponent of
N.I.E. for years, Senator Magnuson said as
he sat down. I dont know what they do with
all this data when we get it.
Actually, sir, Ms. Eldridge timidly interjected, this is the National Center for Education Statistics.
The Senator showed no embarrassment.
Yeah, well, he said, all you data-gathers
look the same.
By the time the appropriations bill had
worked its way through Senator Magnusons
subcommittee, the full Committee on Appropriations, and onto the Senate floor, the
Administrations budget requests which
some educators contended were inadequate
to begin with for the National Institute of
Education, the Fund for the Improvement of
We all have our notes

and our dramatic
speeches on how we
need to spend more
money on this or that.
It sounds like the
second scene of a bad
first act.
Post-secondary Education, and the National
Center for Education Statistics had been cut
by millions of dollars.
Although the Labor-H.E.W. appropriations panels routinely, and often casually,
agreed to spend billions of dollars for some
programs, the same Congressmen and Senators found themselves caught in long and
heated debates over the wisdom of allocating
a million or even a few thousand dollars to
others.
Not infrequently, some of the smallest programs were ones that affected colleges and
universities the most.
The problem, said one education lobby-
ist is that their minds are so boggled at the

thought of how much money they are dealing with over $60 billion that they cant
begin to deal with the big issues. As a result,
they have to talk about the little one.
One of the little issues in which the lawmakers became embroiled during the hearings turned into one of the hottest political
debates on many college campuses this year.
When the celebrated reverse discrimination case between Allan Bakke and the University of Californias medical school at Davis
was heading toward the Supreme Court this
past summer, Rep. Louis Stokes, Democrat of
Ohio, was urging the House appropriations
subcommittee to do something about the
chronic shortage of black doctors.
ne way alleviate the problem,

argued the black Congressman,
was to help a predominantly
black medical college in Georgia build a basic medical-science
building. The cost to the government would
be $5 million.
Mr. Stokess colleagues on the appropriations panel were skeptical apparently not
about the legality of supporting such programs, but about the value of it. They spent
many hours saying so even though the
cost of the program that Mr. Stokes proposed
would amount to less than one-hundredth of
1 percent of the total bill.
Rep. Robert H. Michel, Republican of Illinois, said he didnt buy the theory that white
doctors treat whites and blacks treat blacks.
The dispute was finally settled in a favor
of the Georgia school.
However, there were other serious conflicts over spending for health. Some Congressmen, who might have been bored with
the medical-school debate, proposed large increases in the multi-billion-dollar health-research programs of the National Institutes of
Health.
Dont overplay a scene, Mr. Flood advised the health-research advocates on his
panel.
Mr. Flood knew as well as anyone that
the more money that went to scientific research, the less there would be for other programs. For years, he has been one of The
Hills staunchest supporters of education
programs.
On the other hand, even Congressmen and
Senators have to think about their health.
Just bringing up the subject caused the
small, ornate committee rooms on both sides
of the Capitol to fill with denser-than-usual
clouds of cigar and cigarette smoke. Disease
had hit close to home for many lawmakers.
One Congressman argued that, because
his mother had died of cancer and his wife
had suffered from it, the government should
spend more money to find a cure for the
27

disease. Another argued that more money
should be channeled to the National Eye Institute: His father had died blind and he, the
Congressman, didnt want to do the same.
We all have our notes and our dramatic speeches on how we ought to spend more
money for this or that, said Mr. Flood, reminding his colleagues that he had been operated on not many years before for cancer of
the stomach.
It sounds like the second scene of a bad
first act, he said of the debate over increasing allocations for the National Institutes of
Health.
Mr. Flood later pointed out to his colleagues on the House floor that the Congressional actors were not quite so loquacious in
the really tough scenes the ones where decisions had to be made about how to finance
their favorite programs and still keep the Labor-H.E.W. bill within the spending ceilings
set by Congress and close enough to the Administrations requests to avoid a Presidential
veto.
Indeed, Mr. Michel, the appropriations
subcommittees ranking minority member,
introduced an amendment to cut $563 million from the final House version of the bill.
The effort made by the education lobbyists to stop that amendment was one of the
best-executed scenes in the whole production
of the 1978 Labor-H.E.W. bill.
The Washington lobbyists entrance onto
the Congressional stage was impressive.
They divided up lists of members; they deluged Senators and Representatives with letters; they organized state universities to exert
pressure from home districts.
Said Mr. Michel, as his proposed spending
cuts were being rejected: If we would take
all the money they are spending lobbying
against my amendment, I would not be surprised but that we would have all the money
we need for some of these programs they are
interested in.
The $61.3 billion measure that was approved by the House of Representatives in
June would have cost nearly $700 million
more than the version the Senate approved
a few days later. Higher-education programs
were to receive $3.38 billion $201 million
more than the Senate approved.
How the complicated tradeoffs would resolve themselves had to be worked out in
perhaps the most colorful scene of all the

House-Senate conference.
into a Senate hearing

room with a mural depicting
the Roman goddess of war over
the door 13 House members
and 14 Senators began to settle
their differences in July. By November, they
still had not concluded the final act.
One of the most frustrating experiences in
the world is sitting down in an H.E.W. conference, Sen. Magnuson told his colleagues.
Its enough to give you cardiovascular disease.
However, most of the process of deciding
how much money should be spent particularly on education went as smoothly as
an auction:
Senator Magnuson: Take $35 million?
Mr. Flood: Make that 20 and well take it.
Senator Magnuson: Make it 30 and well
split the difference on the next item.
All told, the Labor-H.E.W. bill that the
rowded
Take $35 million?

Make that 20
and well take it.
Make it 30 and well
split the difference
on the next item.
conferees settled on was a healthy $425 million less than the figure set by the Carter Administration. Yet both health and education
programs came out considerably ahead of the
Presidents requests. Higher-education programs alone were to receive nearly $3.6 million $311 million above the Administrations budget and $385 million more than the
year before.
To come up with such figures, Mr. Michel
of Illinois told his colleagues when they voted
on the compromise version of the bill, took
some fancy bookkeeping manipulation.
The final bill, he charged, contained phony
reductions for welfare programs, and was a

substantial $2.3 billion over the Presidents
budget.
Despite Mr. Michels opposition, by August the conferees had but one task left: to
hammer out the final language of another
controversial amendment attached to the
bill. The provision would deny, totally or
partially, H.E.W. funds to poor women for
abortions.
undreds of anti-abortion lobbyists who could not find seats in

the tiny conference room lined
the halls of the Capitol, as the
conference continued nearly every day throughout the fall.
Women and children stood impatiently in
line, holding up artificial red roses to those
who passed as a sign of their support for the
unborn youngs right to life.
In the corner stood a priest, quietly praying. Yea, though I walk through the valley of
the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil.
In October, other protesters marched outside the Capitol mourning the death of a
woman who had resorted to an illegal abortion.
Inside, the House-Senate conferees were
deadlocked over how far the restrictions on
such controversial operations should go. Senator Magnuson, speaking for his chamber, insisted that the language should not be as restrictive as that adamantly supported by Mr.
Flood and his colleagues in the House.
After weeks of stalemate on the Labor-H.E.W. bill, Congress recessed early this
month. The final words that stood between
the two sides the number in a cheap telegram, said Senator Magnuson still remained to be settled.
Thus, months after decisions had been
made on the real purpose of the bill to determine what Congress wanted to spend on
the hundreds of programs operated by the
Labor and H.E.W. departments the final
act of the annual appropriations process had
n
yet to be played.
After Anne C. Roark left The Chronicle, she

became a freelance writer in Los Angeles and
covered health care and higher education for the
Los Angeles Times. Recently she was a contributor to The New Old Age, a New York Times
blog.
QUOTABLE
March 12, 1979, Recruitment of Foreign Students Said to be Causing Chaos
Accepting foreign students simply to fill emptying classrooms is an

exercise in inexcusable cynicism. The desperation tactics of a few
desperate colleges dishonors the whole notion of international education.
Harold I. Enarson, president of Ohio State University
FOREVER
WILLING TO
RAISE
OUR
VOICES
Born into an era of the greatest generation of free thinkers and speakers, The Chronicle
gave voice to higher education during one of the most challenging times in its history.
With an enduring commitment, Kent State University guides students in the development
of a meaningful voice; calling the world to have conversations that raise both solutions
and hope; changing the altitude of our worldview.
FROM ONE HIGHER EDUCATION ICON TO ANOTHER,
HAPPY BIRTHDAY,
CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION.
Black Professors
on White Campuses
Despite progress, many still feel isolated and uncertain of their future in academe
By LORENZO MIDDLETON
October 2, 1978
Campus race relations have long been fraught
with tension, and for decades The Chronicle
has sought to explore and reflect on-the-ground
perspectives. This article from 1978 found
animosity and bias, but little open discussion.
Before terms like microaggressions were in
common use, black faculty members on predominantly white campuses described feeling
excluded and misunderstood. In some ways,
little has changed: 40 years ago, about four
in 100 full-time faculty members were black;
the figure now is five in 100. Still, colleges and
universities pledge to pursue diversity in hiring,
and still a less-than-supportive climate results
in significant turnover. One professor in this
article related the constant need to prove himself to white colleagues; a dean wrote in The
Chronicle last year that he smiled all the time
to put people at ease. The extra obligations
of mentorship and service explained here by
minority professors have more recently been
called cultural taxation, or invisible labor.
in a high position
at a place like Dartmouth
College, you tend to forget
about racism. You try to
do your job. You earn the
respect of the campus establishment and become a leader in the community. You include
a number of whites among your close friends,
skiing buddies, and tennis partners.
You get to feel quite comfortable, says
Samuel W. Smith, a member of the class of
1949 who returned to Dartmouth 10 years
ago as assistant director of admissions. But
every so often, he says, something happens
to remind him that blacks are still aliens on
white campuses.
Like when his children come home from
school and complain of being called nigger
by the children of his colleagues.
Or when, as happened as recently as a
month ago, he is working in his garden and
two maintenance men from the college drive
by and suggest loudly that he might be happier in Africa.
We will always be called nigger, Mr.
Smith says. We will until the day we die. You
can expect that. But its most shocking in a setting like this, where you really dont expect it.
Among faculty members and administrators, of course, such name-calling is taboo.
Any hint of racial animosity in the cordial
atmosphere of the academic community is
rarely discussed nowadays, and certainly not
between blacks and whites. Unlike students,
who told The Chronicle last spring that racial
tension (the kind that surfaces in fights on the
football field and in dormitory graffiti) is still
a fact of life on many of the nations campuses, most academics say that they themselves
have no problems.
Faculty members and administrators at
large and small colleges around the country said in interviews over the past several
months that they had not been aware of any
burning race-related issues among their colorking
leagues for several years. Some said it was not

considered gentlemanly to bring up the
subject of race relations among scholars.
Such relations have come a long way from
the direct action faculty confrontations of
the late 1960s a time when black instructors at least one large California college dramatized the need for a black-studies program
by setting fire to a trash can during a faculty
senate meeting.
Today, however, blacks and other minority-group members at all levels from college presidents to part-time instructions
insist that their presence on the campuses has
less of an impact than it did in the early days
of the civil-rights movement.
Now, they say, their white colleagues listen patiently to their concerns and then
ignore them. It is a situation that has led to a
fear some would say a paranoia among
the members of minority groups about their
status and future in the university.
Weve come a long way, says Mr. Smith
of Dartmouth, but its a constant battle to
prevent a dropping-back to the status quo
which for some people would mean the fewer
of us, the better.
The common complaint among minority-group academics is that the old war against
overt racism is spreading along new fronts,
reflecting a growing trend across the country
toward fiscal and racial conservatism. Now,
they talk about struggling against such barriers as unconscious racism, subtle patterns
of discrimination, entrenched tokenism,
the erosion of support for minority concerns, and just plain apathy.
The barriers, they say, are still keeping significant numbers of minority-group members out of the mainstream of academe, and
are making it difficult for those who do get in
to do their jobs.
Black educators, particularly, seem to be resigned to an atmosphere of professional and
social isolation on white campuses.
They tend to stay away from me, and I

dont bother them, says a black professor
about white professors at the University of
Chicago. Im doing my own thing here, and
Im happy doing it. In that sense, Im enjoying the isolation.
At the same time, many say they feel pressured to prove themselves to the white faculty to overcome, in the words of one, an
affirmative-action image.
y far the major concern among

young black and other minority-group faculty members on
white campuses today is whether
they can hold onto their jobs. The
central issue is tenure.
Some have become discouraged by the
pressures of working in white institutions and
voluntarily have gone to black colleges, or left
higher education altogether. But many are
part of what James E. Blackwell, a sociologist
at the University of Massachusetts in Boston,
calls a whole generation of young minority
faculty members who are moving from institution to institution because they did not
get tenure at the institution where they were
originally hired.
Some argue that it is not a racial issue, basically, but a matter of economics. Many blacks
were hired when universities were expanding
and anticipating more students, the argument
goes, and its an unfortunate happenstance
that now, when many of those same people
are becoming eligible for tenure, students
are disappearing, the job market is getting
tighter, and tenure slots are not opening as
fast as they used to. Therefore lots of young
professors, black and white, are not getting
promoted.
Jordan E. Kurland, who monitors tenure
complaints at the American Association of
University Professors, says minority groups
are not overrepresented among some 1,000
complaints of unfair tenure decisions his organization handles each year. Only about 40
of the complaints are based on discrimination
charges, he said, and the overwhelming majority of those are from women.
But many blacks who have been denied tenure argue that they are victims of a complex
set of racial biases that are nearly impossible
to prove in a discrimination hearing.
Occasionally, someone like Harry Edwards
at the University of California at Berkeley
will fight a negative tenure decision and win.
Berkeleys sociology department declared
that Mr. Edwards was not qualified for
promotion last year. However, the outspoken Mr. Edwards, who organized a protest
by black athletes at the summer Olympics of
1968, challenged the decision on the basis of
his record as one of Berkeleys most popular
teachers and a long list of publications on the
sociology of sport, a field of study which he
has pioneered.
Mr. Edwards was eventually granted tenure by Chancellor Albert H. Bowker, after
the professor had taken his fight to the public and enlisted the support of fellow faculty
members.
More often, the attitude of black faculty
members will be like that of Jomills H. Braddock, who quietly began looking for another
job after he was denied tenure last winter by
the sociology department at the University of
Maryland at College Park.
It just isnt worth fighting, says Mr. Braddock. When you try to fight an institution
like this, you almost always lose more than
you gain.
Nonetheless, Mr. Braddock and six other black instructions and staff members at
Maryland who were denied tenure, fired,
or demoted during the 1977-78 school year
claimed in a letter to Acting Gov. Blair Lee
that their problems were very much race-related.
has built-in barriers for

blacks who follow the rules of survival in the predominantly white
university and devote most of their
time to research and publishing,
Mr. Braddock says.
Most black scholars are concentrated in the
social sciences and humanities, he says, and
their research traditionally, either directly
or indirectly, involves matters of race. But
race relations by itself is generally not considered a legitimate field of research among
he system
Weve come
a long way, but
its a constant battle
to prevent a
dropping-back
to the status quo.
white scholars, he says, and so the black researchers generally find themselves ranked
low, professionally.
Julius Debro, a black criminologist who
was also denied tenure at Maryland, adds:
Its very difficult for black scholars to
publish as much as white scholars because of
the different kinds of expectations placed on
blacks in the academic system. Black scholars
are expected to handle all black problems in
the department. There is seldom more than
one black in the department. That means if
there are any problems related to blacks, you
become the instant expert.
If there are [black] students in your department, they tend to gravitate toward you.
You become the counselor for all black students in your department, in addition to your
regular load.
Youre expected to attend all black events
on campus. You are also expected to serve on
more than your share of committees. And
you are also expected to give service to civic
organizations in the community outside the
campus.
To succeed, you have to be what I call a
supernigger. You wind up constantly trying
to prove yourself and constantly trying to sell
yourself to white folk.
At the same time, its very difficult to
say no to black students who ask for help,
Mr. Debro says. Most black scholars are
first-generation scholars, and they are not
too far removed from poverty themselves.
And they understand what the struggle is all
about.
Adds Mr. Braddock: Most black faculty
are cognizant on some level at least of the fact
that in predominantly white institutions of
higher education, black students are, in large
measure, their raison dtre.
Recognizing this, we often find many
black faculty becoming most immersed in
[the affairs of black students], which ultimately, of course, will contribute very little to their professional recognition and advancement.
The dilemma for black faculty members is
that, if they try to think of themselves as just
another professor who happens to be black,
they are likely to come under criticism from
black students and lose the basis of support
that brought many of them to the campus
in the first place, Mr. Braddock says. On the
other hand, if they identify themselves primarily with black concerns, they tend to be
isolated form the mainstream of the academic
community.
Some institutions have acknowledged that
minority-group faculty members do have extra responsibilities and have introduced compensatory programs, such as Berkeleys Faculty Development Awards. Michael I. Heyman,
the Berkeley vice-chancellor who oversees
the universitys affirmative-action efforts,
says the program, which amounts to a yearlong research grant, is aimed at helping minority-group members and women who are
in terribly vulnerable positions in terms of
being put upon by all sorts of special-interest
demands.
At the same time, some minority-group educators argue that they may be devoting too
much time to minority students.
Albert H. Berrian, president of the Institute for Services to Education and former
associate commissioner for higher education
in New York, argues that black professors
know when they come in that, if they dont
31

publish and they dont meet the criteria, they
will not be promoted. Some of them elect to
set up a different reward system for themselves, but it doesnt work.
One black math professor adds that he feels
he has been bearing other peoples responsibility over the years by giving help to black
students who are not in his classes.
Because Im willing to work with the black
students, he says, many other faculty members dont feel the necessity to make any special effort on behalf of those students.
to the tenure issue

is the feeling of professional isolation among minority educators
on predominantly white campuses, especially among young black
faculty members.
Part of that feeling, some say, is due to the
fact that many of them are ghetto-ized in
ethnic-studies departments. Even in other
departments, some say they feel isolated because their ranks are so thin.
They feel that loneliness most acutely when
they try to convince other faculty members of
the need to recruit more minority-group students into disciplines where such students are
not normally found, says Ray Collins, chairman of the botany department at Berkeley
and the other black professor in the biological sciences there.
Four years ago, when he tried to persuade
his department to set aside a special admit
slot for minority students, Mr. Collins says he
felt more tension and frustration, perhaps,
than I have felt at any other time in my life.
His colleagues rejected the idea, he says, because he was the only person arguing in favor of it.
Its no longer a question of discrimination, he says. The argument is always based
on the need to protect academic standards.
Now that he is chairman of the department, Mr. Collins says, I can get them to
cooperate if I press the issue, but its not like
having the position of support from shared
convictions.
William J. Wilson, chairman of the sociology department at the University of Chicago, suggests that some of the isolation felt by
young black professors is due to their own
feelings of insecurity.
Its largely a matter of self-esteem and
confidence, he says. If you think that youre
marginal, whether youre willing to admit it
or not, and if you feel that youre not measuring up or you feel that your colleagues dont
have a great deal of respect for you, then its
bound to wear on you and create that problem of isolation.
Mr. Wilson adds:
A lot of it probably has to do with the
changing image of blacks in institutions of
higher learning. Whereas in the past you
losely tied
were viewed as outstanding to really be there

that in spite of discrimination you were
making it.
Now there is the feeling that if youre a
student or on the faculty, youre here because
of affirmative action; youre here because they
lowered their standards.
Many minority educators fall victim to
some subtle patterns of racism to which you
have to be attuned in order to understand,
says Mr. Blackwell of the University of Massachusetts.
Im not comfortable with this individual
or where he has published is a phrase that
is often used by white committee members
when turning down minority-group candidates for tenure or hiring, Mr. Blackwell
says. What that phrase really means, he says,
is eliminating those who are not like us.
It wont be stated as forthrightly as that, but
thats generally the underlying meaning.
Another explanation of why blacks are being denied tenure is the affirmative-action
backlash theory, described by one black administrator as a question of whites reclaiming their jobs that went over to blacks a few
years ago.
In a tight job market, the administrator adds, there is a tendency among ethnic
groups in power to take care of the members
of their own group.
At least one white educator agrees in part
with that theory. He is Lawrence Salomon,
who lost his job in the African-studies de-
It just isnt worth

fighting. When you try
to fight an institution
like this, you almost
always lose more
than you gain.
partment at the New Paltz campus of the
State University of New York when the department was dissolved during the retrenchments of 1976. Although he had tenure and an
impressive record of research in his field, Mr.
Salomon says, he was not rehired in the newly formed black-studies department, which to
date has been staffed only by blacks.
It was clearly a case of racism, Mr. Salomon says. I dont believe that any black professor [with a similar background] would be
retrenched from any university in this country.
The A.A.U.P. has seen significant upsurge
in the number of so-called reverse discrim-
ination cases involving tenure and hiring,

according to Jordan Kurland. Now, he says,
for every minority who complains, someone
from the majority group complains that he
lost out because of affirmative action.
Occasionally, say the members of minority
groups, they are confronted directly by colleagues who show a distaste for affirmative
action. A black professor at Harvard, for example, recalls how he was stunned at a cocktail reception at that university when, in the
middle of a conversation about the need for
more blacks in academe, a white professor
shouted from across the room:
One more word out of you on blacks, and
Ill come over there and kick your black ass.
is a consensus among minority-group educators on campuses across the country that

those in ethnic-studies programs
are now the most unwelcomed.
After watching their programs slowly decline
in popularity among students since the late
1960s, the professors especially those in
black studies, where the programs are most
numerous are finding that the rest of the
university does not want them.
While a handful of black-studies programs
have managed to hold on to student support
and win some measure of academic respect,
most are still struggling to prove their worth.
Even faculty members in solidly supported
programs say they are usually regarded with
skepticism by the members of other departments.
No one has challenged the validity of our
courses, says a poet who teaches Afro-American literature at a New England university,
but the feeling that black studies is less than
a legitimate part of the university is often expressed by a remark here, a remark there
a raised eyebrow or even a silence.
As an example of their stepchild status,
many faculty members in black and ethnic
studies point to the fact that their jobs are
often dependent on joint appointments with
legitimate departments.
The problem, now that interest in black
studies is declining and the programs are losing their financing, according to Mr. Kurland
of the A.A.U.P., is that the survival of black
professors in joint-appointment positions is
becoming more dependent upon their contributions to other departments.
Most members of other departments have
looked at blacks as courtesy appointments,
Mr. Kurland says, and for the most part they
have not been very interested in the blacks
contributions to those departments.
Other departments were eager to cooperate before, he says. But now they are saying,
He just doesnt fit into a slot as a full-time
member of our department.
Under the threat of impending cutbacks
in funds, many black-studies programs are
here
breaking old ties with other fringe programs and are turning to already established
departments for support. That often causes a
rift between old allies.
At Berkeley, for example, one of the countrys first coalition of Third World studies
programs fell apart when the Afro-American-studies program withdrew from the department of ethnic studies. The Afro-American-studies faculty saw the switch to the social-science division of the College of Letters
and Sciences as a move toward academic legitimacy.
However, it ended all hope of forming a
proposed Third World college at the university and left a lot of tension and hostility, one faculty member said, towards Afro-American, Native Americans, and Chicano studies.
Some educators are advocating changes in
black-studies courses that will make the more
acceptable.
Nathan Hare, who helped pioneer blackstudies programs in 1968, has suggested:
Black studies could become less bold and
more conventional in a desperate effort to
trim off the divergent and to gain acceptance
just as the diet of a dying or otherwise unhealthy person is likely to become more restricted and less saturated with the spice and
variety of more succulent gourmet fare in a
last-ditch effort to live.
that the problems of

black studies, the failure to get tenure, and the lack of commitment
on predominantly white campuses
has resulted in a slippage in the
number of black faculty members at those
institutions. The statistics contradict those
claims, however, showing that the number of
blacks and other minority-group educators
increased between 1973 and 1976.
An estimated 15,000 blacks held full-time
faculty position in 1973, with about a third
believed to be working on historically black
campuses. By the end of 1976, according to
the National Center for Education Statistics,
the number of black full-time faculty members had risen to 19,500, about 4 percent of
the total.
Still, many blacks on white campuses insist
that their ranks are shrinking. A close look
at most university affirmative-action figures,
they charge, might show increases in the
over-all number of minority-group members
and women, but not in the number of blacks.
Some examples:
n A drive to recruit black professors to
the University of Massachusetts in Boston,
launched in 1970, substantially increased
their numbers over a five-year period, according to Mr. Blackwell, one of seven tenured
black professors at the university. But then
the commitment seemed to have stopped,
he says. The commitment to get them here
was not the same commitment to keep them

here, and so weve experienced a tremendous
amount of slippage of our black faculty.
n At Dartmouth, the number of minority-group professors in the arts and sciences
between 1971 and 1975 grew by 400 percent
(from 4 to 20). Since then, the number has
grown to 24. However, says C. Dwight Lahr,
chairman of the facultys black caucus, only
one black faculty member, an assistant football coach, has been hired during the past
two years.
n Berkeleys affirmative-action figures show
that the number of minority-group faculty
members rose from 74 to 110 between 1973
and 1977. But William A. Shack, an anthropology professor who serves as the faculty assistant to the vice-chancellor for affirmative
action, notes that it has been three years since
The commitment
to get them
here was not the
same commitment
to keep them
here.
ome argue
a black person was hired in any department

other than Afro-American studies.
Administrators often claim that because of
low availability pools in many fields, qualified blacks are hard to find.
The black professor or administrator is
still in great demand, said one affirmative-action officer, but now he is expected
to compete on even terms with his competitors. Blacks are in such demand, says Robert
L. Gluckstern, chancellor of the University
of Maryland at College Park, that as soon as
we hire one who is any good, they try to steal
him away from us.
As an example of the frustrations of trying to hire qualified black professors, Mr.
Gluckstern said he had recently offered a
high-ranking administrative job to a black
person at a yearly salary that was several thousand dollars higher than he would
have offered to a white for the same position.
However, the black applicant went to another
institution that offered him even more money.
Some institutions, however, are making no
effort to attract either black students or educators, according to some reports. Samuel
Allen, who teaches Afro-American literature
at Boston University, complains that there is
a little evidence of a vigorous affirmative-ac-
tion program on his campus, citing as an example the absence of black professors in the
music department, in which there are areas
where the only real competence would come
from a black professor.
The departments failure to put an emphasis on traditionally black music has caused at
least on one black music major to leave the
university, Mr. Allen says.
what they are paid

or what their position is, some
black educators say they feel
they will never be accepted as
members of the club.
Frequently, members of minority groups
talk about being excluded from the mainstream of academic life, and often, even when
holding high administrative positions, feel
they are denied a chance to become a central
part of the university structure.
But many admit that at least part of the isolation is self-imposed.
I look to a different set of colleagues for
approval or disapproval, says Edgar G. Epps,
a professor of urban education and the only
black in his department at the University of
Chicago. Mr. Epps says his real peers are other black professors in related fields, who have
formed a network and are in constant communication.
Many formal organizations of black professors in the same field have sprung up either
as black caucuses within larger professional
organizations or as separate groups, some of
them carryovers from the days of segregation, when black scholars were not permitted
to joint white colleges or their professional
groups.
Black professors say they gain comfort
from such groups. They liken it to the feeling of camaraderie that black students feel in
black student unions. Usually it is in those
groups, rather than within their department,
that black scholars exchange information on
research and embark on collaborative projects. Often, says Mr. Braddock, young black
professors will hesitate to go to white colleagues for help in solving scholarly problems, because it is too much in keeping with
the old stereotypes for black to go meekly
with their hands out to the whites, asking for
aid and assistance.
Because of their low numbers and broadening interests, some black faculty members
say they seldom meet professionally on their
campuses. Most black faculty caucuses, like
black student unions, were organized around
a cause in the late 1960s and are now described as ineffectual.
In some areas, however, the perceived
mood of conservatism around the country
has persuaded black faculty members to reorganize in an attempt to bring group pressure
on their campuses to prevent the erosion of
o matter
33
previous gains for black students and faculty

members.
The black caucus at Dartmouth, after several years of dormancy, is now engaged in
a lively campaign, so far without success,
to convince the New Hampshire Commission on Postsecondary Education to adopt
an affirmative-action plan that penalizes departments that fail to prove that they have
searched for minority-group candidates in
the hiring process.
A group of black faculty members at the
University of Chicago met recently with
Hanna H. Gray, the new president, to outline a number of concerns, including, according to one participant, the need for a
stronger affirmative-action program for students and faculty members.
frequently talk of being in the loneliest

and most frustrating position on
white campuses because, they say,
they are often given high-sounding titles with little or no power. Clifford D.
Harper, now dean of the predominantly black
Fisk University, said he had left his position
as dean of academic programs at Southern Illinois University last year partly because I
simply got tired of making decisions about
black students with white folks looking over
my shoulder.
Those who reach prestigious positions in
the university structure often find, as Kenneth S. Washington, president of the City
College of San Francisco, put it, grave resistance to turning over the decision-making
process to minorities.
Mr. Washington is among several black
leaders of major colleges who have encountered efforts by their faculties to have them
removed. The academic senate at the college
cast what was, in effect, a vote of no confidence in Mr. Washington last March, recommending by a 2-to-1 margin that his contract not be renewed. The board of goverlack administrators
nors sided with Mr. Washington, however,

voting in June to renew his contract for two
years and concurring in several of his decisions that were unpopular with faculty members.
At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Paul L. Puryear, in a move he called
blatantly racist, was forced to step down
by Chancellor Randolph W. Bromery, who
is also black, following a battle between Mr.
Puryear and nine of the universitys 10 academic deans. The fight came to a head last
January, when the deans formally asked Mr.
Puryear for his resignation. Mr. Puryear responded the next day by asking for the resignation of six of the nine deans.
Chancellor Bromery sided with the deans,
saying he had complete confidence in their
administrative performance and academic leadership, and demoted Mr. Puryear
from the provost to full professor in the
black-studies department.
While white faculty members and deans
said the conflict was a result of Mr. Puryears
heavy-handed administrative style and policies, he charged that it had been caused by
an element of racists who just didnt want to
yield to the authority of a black person who
was sitting in what was generally regarded as
the white chair.
O. Clayton Johnson, assistant chancellor
for educational services at the University of
Wisconsin at Parkside, is another black administrator who says he feels powerless.
I dont think people want blacks to do
these jobs when they give them to them, Mr.
Johnson says. They want you to come in and
be nice and shuffle along and get your little
money and keep quiet.
They have a lot of different kinds of relationships which you are not a part of, he
said. A group of them belong to the Congregational Church. Some of them went to high
school together. They have these cliques that
you wont get into. The cliques are constantly
communicating what you are attempting to
do to each other. They can put up barriers,

and they can go around you.
A black man appointed to a position just
to serve black students would occupy a more
powerful position than I do. The black students could be politicized and could become a
rallying group, which they are always careful
of dealing with.
But what can a black administrator do who
has eight or ten white directors working for
him? Nothing. Youre like a man out there by
yourself. And youre always walking a balance
between what the administration wants and
what you think is right.
More than the professional barriers, Mr.
Johnson adds, very often it is the small
things that go on in faculty life that build up
so much that you just become hostile.
An example he says, is knowing that a
group of faculty wives are throwing a reception for a new vice-chancellor and remembering that your wife was snubbed by the same
group when you arrived on campus.
One couple at another Midwestern university a Navajo woman and a black man
got invited out to dinner practically every
weekend because the liberal element of the
university community thought this was really groovy, having a Navajo Indian married to
a black man, both of them working professionally in the university, but, a friend says,
thats just another form of racial bias that
minorities are trying to overcome on white
campuses:
If they stare at you like some kind of an
oddity, or invite you to cocktail parties because they want something interesting to disn
play either way, youre still different.
Lorenzo (Renny) Middleton Jr., a veteran of the
U.S. Air Force, served as assistant editor of The
Chronicle for four years before becoming public-relations director at the Tuskegee Institute.
Old-timers here remember his remarkable talent
and potential. He died following a car accident in
1982, when he was 35.
QUOTABLE
July 21, 1980, So You Want to Be a College President?
According to my bestiary of presidential qualities,

he will need: the aloofness of a cat; the cunning of
a fox; the eye of an eagle; the hide of an elephant;
the slipperiness of an eel; the courage of a lion;
the stubbornness of a mule; the tenaciousness of a
terrier; and the wisdom of an owl.
Lee Hall, president, Rhode Island School of Design
Congratulations to
On Your 50th Anniversary
the Gold Standard of News
IMAGES
April 26, 1971
Campuses Calm
as Students Join
2 War Protests
A Washington statue
shouldered one protesters
message as hundreds of
thousands of his colleagues
marched in Washington
against the Vietnam War. The
national effort, one student
leader said, was draining the
best organizers from many
campuses. (Dennis Brack,
Black Star, for The Chronicle)
For God, for Country,

and for Notre Dame
By ZOE INGALLS
south bend, ind.
the whole time I

was at Notre Dame, says a young
alumnus named Kevin OReilly.
One night, I would climb the fire
escape and talk to Father Ted.
Every student at the University of Notre
Dame has heard the story. It is chapter 1, verse
1 of a collection of tales a kind of folklore
that has grown up around the Rev. Theodore
M. Hesburgh, who has been Notre Dames
president for 30 years, longer than anyone now
in office has been head of a major university.
He routinely works until 2 or 3 or 4 a.m.,
warding off the early morning chill with a
charcoal-grey cardigan over his priests garb.
His drafty office is cheered by the strains of
classical music from a Magnavox stereo, the
gift of an admirer. He interrupts himself only
to change the record or to eat canned soup
warmed on a hot plate in a small room next
door.
Anyone, even a freshman, can meet him
face to face, so the story goes. Look for the
light in the window of the gold-domed building in the wee hours. Climb the fire escape.
Rap on the window. Hell let you in.
Few students do it. Not because of the physical exertion required the office is only on
the third floor. The problem for most is that
meeting Father Hesburgh means coming face
to face with the stuff of legend. Some people
here have Hesburgh almost canonized, says
one faculty member.
had this fantasy
heodore hesburgh set out 30 years
ago to transform Notre Dame into

a great Catholic University, and,
in the attempt, transformed himself
into a national figure who is influential far beyond his roles of Catholic priest
and university president.
Father Hesburgh has been tapped for advice or service by every American President
since Eisenhower. He has headed or served on
the boards of organizations as diverse as the

Rockefeller Foundation, the U.S. Commission
on Civil Rights, the Chase Manhattan Bank,
the Select Commission on Immigration and
Refugee Policy, and the Presidential Clemency Board, which decided the fate of young
men who dodged the draft during the Vietnam War. Most recently, he served at President Reagans request among those monitoring the election in El Salvador.
For every thing I take on, I turn down 10,
Father Hesburgh says. He turned down Lyndon Johnsons request that he head the space
effort, and he declined when Richard Nixon
asked him to take over the poverty program.
(Father Hesburgh recalls that he said to
Nixon, Well, the poverty program is a mess
and I think I can clean it up and make it work,
but it would make you the most unpopular guy
in the country, because its turned into a patronage program for all the big-city mayors
whove got all their buddies making $30,000
a year. The first thing Id do is fire the whole
kit and caboodle, and every mayor in the U.S.
would be unhappy, beginning in Chicago and
going to Atlanta. The farther south you go the
more unpopular youd be because Im a priest.
(So [Nixon] thought a minute, Father
Hesburgh continued, and said he hadnt
thought of that. And I said, Ill forget you ever
mentioned it. )
He has received numerous awards, including
the Medal of Freedom, this countrys highest
civilian honor, and the Meiklejohn Award for
academic freedom of the American Association
of University Professors. He holds honorary degrees from 90 colleges and universities, replacing Herbert Hoover (had 89) in the Guinness
Book of World Records. His most recent honor, the
Jefferson Medal, was awarded last Saturday in
Washington by the Council for Advancement
and Support of Education at a ceremony attended by among others the representatives of
those 90 colleges and universities.
October 13, 1982

Few college presidents make their mark like
the University of Notre Dames Rev. Theodore
M. Hesburgh. President for 30 years when
this article was written, Hesburgh turned
what was known as a Catholic institution
and football powerhouse into a well-endowed
university with an academic profile that
drew faculty and students from all faiths.
He was also a national figure: an outspoken
champion of civil and human rights who
traveled the world and had the ear of U.S.
presidents. Father Ted was hugely popular
on campus but, as our reporter found, not
without his critics. He led the university until
1987 and died in 2015, at 97.
37

Father Hesburgh has become known as a
champion of human rights and moral causes at
home and abroad. After United States forces
invaded Cambodia in May, 1970, and students
were killed at Kent State and Jackson State
Universities, Father Hesburgh was the main
speaker at a protest rally at Notre Dame. In
a sermon at mass a week later, he said that an
Administration that would continue the Vietnam War was composed of mental midgets.
In 1972, President Nixon fired Father Hesburgh from the chairmanship of the Civil
Rights Commission after he publicly criticized
the Administration for its antibusing policies
and for dragging its feet on enforcing integration.
Every kid in the country stands up and say,
One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, Father Hesburgh said.
But for the Negro, theres neither liberty nor
justice.
He has been a leader in trying to deal with
world hunger. In 1979, when reports surfaced
of mass starvation in war-torn Cambodia, he
headed a relief effort that raised $70-million
in five months.
Most recently, Father Hesburgh has played a
key role in organizing an international movement against nuclear weapons among educators, scientists, and church leaders.
Last month, he helped organize a meeting
on the nuclear-arms race that was attended by
some of the worlds top scientists including
several from the Soviet Union. Convening in
Rome under the auspices of the Vaticans Pontifical Academy of Scientists, the scientists presented Pope John Paul II with a statement denouncing nuclear weapons and calling upon all
nations to take steps to curb the development,
testing, production and deployment of nuclear
weapons systems.
Father Hesburghs activities have required
that he spend much of his time away from the
Notre Dame campus, eliciting criticism from
some here mainly students. Theres an old
joke they like to tell that goes:
QUESTION: Whats the difference between God and Father Hesburgh?
ANSWER: God is everywhere. Father Hesburgh is everywhere but Notre Dame.
The butt of the joke does not take it too seriously, Im away from campus at most 40 percent of the time, he says. And when Im here,
I work double shifts, so they are getting more
than 100 percent of me here.
in the office around noon, taking phone

calls, holding conferences, and
receiving visitors during the rest
of the afternoon. After a meal
with his fellow priests, he returns to the office
and settles in for the famous long night.
Hes blessed with great good health and
needs less sleep than most people, says the
e usually appears
Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, executive vice-president of the university and a friend and colleague of Father Hesburghs for 30 years.
In addition to doing an awful lot while other people are sleeping, Father Hesburgh says
he has developed the facility to do one thing
at a time and give full attention to that while
Im doing it.
Its a question of concentration, of being
able to read fairly quickly, and of being able to
make decisions without worrying about them.
Theyre not all going to be right, but if the majority are, youll get through the night.
When he finally quits for the night and flops
down on a cot in his cubicle in the priests residence, he falls asleep immediately. I dont lose
Im away from campus

at most 40 percent of
the time. And when
Im here, I work double
shifts, so they are
getting more than 100
percent of me here.
sleep, he says.
Those who work most closely with him say
they find themselves adapting to his schedule.
In addition, they say, he is a superb delegator
who, in the words of the Rev. John J. Egan, his
special assistant, never interferes with your
job.
You cant do outside things if youre a busy
administrator, says Father Hesburgh. When
I get out of here, Im out of here. Theres no
calling back or having mail delivered in the
field. When I come back, they bring me up to
speed right away.
You learn to have good people associated on tasks and give them their heads and
let them do the job without second-guessing
them.
If thats true, you can multiply yourself 100
times.
Nevertheless, Father Hesburgh makes many
of the decisions affecting Notre Dame and
all of the major ones, according to Timothy
OMeara, Notre Dames provost. Those decisions made without his signature are infrequent, Mr. OMeara says.
Even the decisions made by others bear his
input. The fact that Im in this job indicates
a certain compatibility of point of view, Mr.
OMeara says.
Although Father Hesburgh is, according
to those who work most closely with him, a
strong, decisive administrator who knows what
he wants, that does not mean he is closed to
argument or new ideas. He encourages you

[to disagree with him], says Father Egan. He
doesnt like soft people who say yes to him on
everything, who will break apart just because
he says this or that or disagrees. He likes good
discussion, people with strong opinions.
But he and the rest of us know whos boss.
Father Hesburghs management style annoys some at Notre Dame who feel they occupy the lower echelon in the hierarchy primarily faculty members. They call his style
paternalistic and say they would prefer a
more collegial approach.
The whole structure of the university is
designed to keep other sources of power from
emerging, says Vaughn R. McKim, professor of philosophy and chairman of the faculty
senate. There is no direct access to decision
making.
Faculty members made an abortive attempt
to unionize in 1977. Today, although there is
an A.A.U.P. chapter on campus, it has very
low visibility. This faculty has relatively little experience in governance, says Thomas R.
Swartz, professor of economics. It would take
something pretty drastic to get them agitated.
Although many faculty members may be
unaware of it, and none would like to admit
it, that may have to do partly, he says, with
the Catholic mentality regarding authority.
Perhaps its a willingness to accept authority
in the old Catholic sense of do what the good
Father says.
In the case of Notre Dame, a lot of it has
to do with who the good Father is. Father
Hesburgh rules through persuasion and the
sheer power of his force of personality, says
Mr. McKim.
People have respect for him and can see
what he has accomplished, says Mr. OMeara.
became president
of Notre Dame in 1952, when he was
a 35-year-old priest in the Congregation of the Holy Cross and it was
a small, somewhat parochial institution better known for its Fighting Irish
football teams than for academic excellence.
Before World War II, this was basically an
undergraduate school that carried the name
university, says Mr. OMeara, the provost.
Father Hesburghs conviction that Notre
Dame had to overcome its football factory
image jelled at one of his first press conferences as president.
He came prepared to talk about academic programs. Only sportswriters attended. At
one point, a photographer tossed him a football and asked him to pretend to hike it.
The drive toward academic excellence became the overriding passion of his life, says
Father Joyce. Money was a key. If you take
10 universities in the country with the largest
endowments, you will likely have the 10 best
universities, Father Hesburgh says.
With Father Joyce, a fiscal conservative
ather hesburgh
who trained as an accountant before joining

the priesthood, carefully shepherding the universitys tiny endowment about $9-million
in 1952 Father Hesburgh set about hiring
new faculty members, appointing new deans,
building new buildings, and placing more emphasis on graduate studies and research.
It was a traumatic change, says Mr.
OMeara. Notre Dame, at the beginning of
what many like to call the Hesburgh era, was
rigid and anachronistic. Legally, the university was run by the Congregation of the Holy
Cross, and the orders priests dominated the
administration and faculty. (In 1967, Notre
Dame because the first Catholic university to
transfer power to a lay board of trustees.)
Although strong in the physical sciences
most notably chemistry and mathematics,
Notre Dame was weak in the humanities and
social sciences. There was no psychology department, and the religion department confined itself to teaching accepted church dogma.
Through a long, often painful, but never
slackening process, Father Hesburgh gradually
succeeded in bringing Notre Dame into the
mainstream of American life, the late George
N. Shuster, a Hesburgh adviser and former
president of Hunter College, said in 1969.
It was a very exciting time. We had a sense
of a new world to create, says Mr. McKim,
the faculty-senate chairman. He arrived at
Notre Dame in the mid-1960s, fresh from a
doctoral program at Yale University, one of
many promising young scholars lured by the
universitys goal of becoming the best it could
be academically.
to attracting new talent, the

Hesburgh era saw a rise in endowment
from $9-million to $215-million, putting Notre Dame in the top 20 of all universities in the country. We had more
endowment than Harvard had at the end of
World War II and theyre a lot older than we
are, says Father Hesburgh proudly. A recent
five-year fund-raising campaign brought in
$180-million, $50-million more than the goal.
In its efforts to attract top-rank faculty
members, Notre Dame has added 61 endowed
chairs, of $1-million each. They helped the average faculty salaries reach respectable levels,
ranging in 1981-82 from $21,400 for instructors to $36,200 for full professors.
Enrollment, now 9,000 including undergraduate and graduate students, is nearly double what it was in 1952. Research grants have
increased sixteenfold to $12-million. Forty
new building have been constructed, including
an $8-million library and a $9.3-million chemistry-research facility, dedicated just last week.
Construction is under way on a new $6.2-million office building for the faculty of arts and
letters. And although the library is still small
in comparison with other major research universities the Association of Research Lin addition
braries ranks it 96 out of 101 it contains

four times the number of volumes it did when
Father Hesburgh took over.
Exactly how good Notre Dame has become
is, of course, difficulty to judge. Father Hesburgh says he feels happy about the place,
but Im not going to tell you its as good as it
should be in every way. The graduate school
needs upgrading, he says, and so does the library. And he would like every professor in
the place to have an endowed chair.
The main thing is to keep moving forward, he says. The day you stop, youre
dead.
Officials at Notre Dame used to take pride
in calling it a Catholic Princeton, or the
Harvard of the Midwest. Now, says Richard W. Conklin, director of information services, with increasing self-confidence, we say
were not modeled on any place else; were just
unique.
All along, Father Hesburgh has been determined to refute George Bernard Shaws observation that a Catholic University is a contradiction in terms. That has meant emphasizing the quality of scholarly endeavor, without
abandoning a commitment to moral leadership
and to infusing a sense of values into the educational process.
In recent years, though, the drive toward excellence has resulted in a curious side effect.
Father Hesburgh
has been determined
to refute Shaws
observation that
a Catholic University
is a contradiction
in terms.
Although the undergraduate student body has
remained solidly Catholic at present about
92 percent that is not the case with the faculty. Several years ago, Notre Dame administrators reached the conclusion that in 15 or
20 years, given current hiring trends, many
departments would have few Catholic faculty
members and some departments would have
none.
Top officials began to put renewed emphasis on maintaining the universitys Catholic
character. That meant, in addition to stressing the importance of values, hiring more
Catholic faculty members.
The issue has become a bucket of worms
I dont think anyone can get untangled, says
Mr. Swartz, echoing the comments of many
other faculty members. Its clear that if you
have no Catholics on your faculty, youll no

longer be a Catholic university.
But like many of his colleagues, he says that
it is difficult to measure such things reliably, to
know what a Catholic is and what number
is enough.
Its an unresolvable kind of tension, says
Robert A. Vacca, professor of classics and former chairman of the faculty senate. There is a
small pool of people. We have to bid for them
with the Harvards and the Berkeleys. [The administration] wants two different values: they
want impeccable scholarship and religious,
moral commitment. You dont get the two of
them in one package.
While some criticize the universitys top
administrators for pressuring departments to
hire Catholic faculty members, other contend
that those officials are not making enough of
an effort when it comes to recruiting and hiring women and members of minority groups.
A few years ago, about half of the universitys female faculty members sued the university. The suit, which sought to prove that Notre Dame had discriminated against women in
hiring, promotion and tenure, was settled out
of court last year.
Today, how female faculty members feel
about the way they are treated appears to vary
from department to department. My department has been lovely to me, says Wendy A.
Carlton, an assistant professor of sociology.
There is no intentional or unintentional sexism. Nevertheless, Ms. Carlton and other says
they do not see a sufficiently strong commitment to hiring and promoting female faculty
members.
The number of minority-group faculty
members 59 total, 16 black, according to
1981-82 figures has remained fairly constant over the last few years, according to Joseph W. Scott, professor of sociology, who is
black.
In addition to citing the statistical evidence,
some critics say the university has a poorly
organized and ineffectual affirmative-action plan and offers limited upward mobility, in the words of James B. Stewart, formerly the director of the universitys black-studies
program and now an assistant professor of economics at Pennsylvania State University.
Nicholas F. Fiore, a white former professor,
says that when he was chairman of the department of metallurgical engineering and materials science, we worked hard on affirmative
action, and Father Hesburgh strongly encouraged those efforts. He at one point said,
There wont be another engineering faculty
member hired unless hes black.
The universitys record on minority-group
enrollment at the undergraduate level has been
the subject of much criticism over the years.
Only 10.1 percent of this years freshman class
are from a minority group; only 4.2 percent
are black and that is the highest proportion
39

in the last 10 years. Some view the situation as
an embarrassment to Father Hesburgh, given
his outspokenness on civil-rights issues.
He has repeatedly said that increasing the
proportion of minority-group students is a
top priority and purely a question of money. He has set up a $4.6-million endowment
to finance scholarships for minority-group
students, a fund that he would like to see increase to $12-million over the next five to ten
years.
Ive said frankly we ought to have twice as
many minority students as we have, and well
have them as soon as we have the resources to
do it, he says. Once weve got [the additional
endowment], were home free.
says he never wanted to be president of any university. That was the last thing on my
mind, he says. He would have preferred to be a parish priest or a misather hesburgh
sionary.
But when I joined the order, I had to take
three vows poverty, chastity, and obedience, he says. Every year for the first three
years of his presidency, he asked to be assigned
to missionary duty, always with the same result: They told him to stay put. After a while,
he says, he stopped asking.
Father Hesburgh made the decision to become a priest quite early in his life. He has
been one for 39 of his 65 years. Of Irish and
German descent, he was born Theodore Martin Hesburgh on May 25, 1917, in Syracuse,
N.Y. His parents were Anne Marie Murphy
and Theodore Bernard Hesburgh, an executive with the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company.
He has a brother and two sisters living. A third
sister died in 1957.
He attended Catholic elementary and secondary schools, then entered the Holy Cross
seminary at Notre Dame. Three years later he
left to attend Gregorian University in Rome,
where he received a bachelor-of-philosophy
degree in 1940.
Father Hesburgh studied theology at Holy
Cross College in Washington, D.C., from
1940 to 1943, when he was ordained a priest.
He received his doctorate in theology from the

Catholic University of America in 1945.
He asked to be assigned to missionary duty
abroad, but his superiors sent him to Notre
Dame to teach religion and serve as chaplain
to the World War II veterans enrolled there.
Father Hesburgh was appointed chairman of
the department of religion in 1948, and executive vice-president of the university in 1949.
Even today, Father Hesburgh says he views
himself first and foremost as a priest. If you
said to me, What are you? I wouldnt say
university president. I wouldnt say educator.
I wouldnt say world traveler. I wouldnt say,
Father Hesburgh says

he views himself first
and foremost as
a priest. I have no
recollection of ever
seriously wanting to
be anything else.
Im involved in government or foundations or
things of that sort. Id say, Im a priest.
I have no recollection of ever seriously
wanting to be anything else.
He never misses offering his daily mass,
although he says hes had to do it in some
strange places in a tent in the Antarctic, for
example, or in an airport lounge.
As St. Thomas Aquinas said very well, being a priest means being a mediator standing
between God and man, Father Hesburgh
says. It means being a visible sign or a kind of
walking sacrament in the world.
If youre doing your job, people should look
to you for things godly, the Good News, the
grace of God.
Those who know Father Hesburgh well
and only a handful get behind the public
mask, says Mr. OMeara says his priestli-
ness translates into thoughtfulness on a dayto-day basis. But Father Hesburgh maintains
a strict reserve, a kind of untouchable quality
that keeps people from getting too close. You
rarely see him with the full extent of his humanness showing, says an observer. Its that
priest training guard emotions, keep confidences.
Two years ago, Father Hesburgh announced
that he would retire from the presidency in
June, 1982. Last year, the board of trustees announced that he had agreed to stay on for five
more years.
Edmund A. Stephan, a Chicago lawyer
who was chairman of the board at the time,
said publicly, The conviction finally came to
us that we should not change the leadership
when we have such a winning situation. However, he recently acknowledged to The Chronicle that there simply was no successor groomed
and ready to take over.
According to university bylaws, the president of Notre Dame must be a Holy Cross
priest from the orders Indiana Province,
which consists of about 366 priests.
The search committee formed when Father Hesburgh announced his retirement
found several very talented younger priests
who had the potential but not the experience
to take over, according to Mr. Stephan and
others. Four of those priests were recently
appointed to high-level positions in the Hesburgh administration to give them a chance to
gain that experience.
Why, with Father Hesburgh approaching 65
and the end of this third decade in office, had
the trustees apparently left the grooming of a
successor to the last minute?
I suppose we could be faulted for not
having more people ready to go, says Mr.
Stephan, although we continually surveyed
people we thought showed promise.
Then he adds, a bit sheepishly, But I guess
that down deep in our hearts, we really didnt
n
want Father Ted to quit.
Zoe Ingalls, a longtime reporter at The Chronicle, went on to become managing editor of Duke
Magazine and, currently, special assistant to the
president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
QUOTABLE
November 28, 1984, To Reclaim a Legacy, a report on the state of the humanities
The college curriculum must take the non-Western world into account, not out
of political expediency or to appease interest groups, but out of respect for its
importance in human history. But the core of the American college curriculum
its heart and soul should be the civilization of the West, source of the
most powerful and pervasive influences on America and all of its people.
William J. Bennett, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities
4 0 nov em ber 2016 | t h e ch ron icl e of h igh er e duc at ion
WHEN YOU
WERE BORN IN
THE 60s,
YOU WERE DESTINED
TO MAKE
A DIFFERENCE
NSU congratulates The Chronicle of Higher Education
on 50 years of success.
REALIZING POTENTIAL
Founded in 1964
The Campaign for Nova Southeastern University
50 YEARS
OF HEADLINES
The Faculty
Ripple Effects
of the Shrinking Job Market
Too many Ph.D.s, not enough jobs. Contrary to predictions in the 1980s of mass
retirements, full-time, tenure-track positions have become the exception. The
result: a transformation in the role, influence, and lifestyle of the college professor. As part-time and contingent instructors cobbled together livings at more than
one institution, and as administrators with eyes on the bottom line adopted a
customer first mindset, faculty governance weakened, collegiality and marriages
were strained, and as one article featured here describes academic politics
sometimes reached absurd levels. Recently adjuncts have banded together to
fight back. What hasnt changed? A story about the pipeline problem for black
faculty members could be written just as easily today as in 1986.
Adjunct professors joined fast-food

employees and other low-paid
workers at a rally in Boston in 2015
as part of a national campaign
calling for a minimum wage of $15
an hour.
MARILYN HUMPHRIES, NEWSCOM
42
nov e mber
2016 |
t h e c h ro n ic l e o f h ig h e r e duc a t io n
January 4, 1971
Shortage of Academic
Positions for Ph.D.s
Seen Worsening
in Next 20 Years
We have created a graduate education
and research establishment in American universities that is about 30 to 50 percent larger
than we shall effectively use in the 1970s
and early 1980s, and the growth process
continues in many sectors, Allan M. Cartter,
chancellor and executive vice-president of
New York University, said. Mr. Cartter
also saw little hope that Ph.D. production
would decline.
November 19, 1979
The Sad State

of Faculty Governance
The facultys role in institutional governance today is declining, and may be in
jeopardy.
Consumerism has entered the picture,
with the rising awareness that those an institution serves students, alumni, the public
in general have a role in its management,
if for no other reason than that they pay the
bills. For better or worse, the result has been
a diluting of authority under the concept of
shared institutional government, with the
facultys voice as only one among several.
September 10, 1986
Women Flock
to Graduate School
in Record Numbers,
but Fewer Blacks
Are Entering the
Academic Pipeline
[W]hen higher-education institutions
look for replacements for the large number
of senior professors who will retire within
the next 15 years, plenty of female faculty
members will be available. However, lingering sexual bias in hiring and promotion
decisions, as well as a shortage of women
with doctorates in scientific fields, may
cloud the promise that women may achieve
parity.
If there ever were a time for colleges

and universities to increase the number of
minority-group members on their faculties
especially blacks this is it.
Chances are it wont happen.
Instead, the new generation of professors
that will oversee Americas college classrooms by the year 2000 could be as homogeneous as previous generations, even though,
in some states, the majority of students they
teach will come from minority groups.
November 1, 1989
April 21, 2000
A Couples Struggle
to Find Good Jobs
in the Same City
The influx of women into Ph.D. programs
has made graduate schools a perfect mating
ground. As a result, faculty recruiters are
spending more and more time on the twobody problem job candidates who have
academic spouses in tow.
August 4, 2000
Feeling Disillusioned?
Unappreciated?
Professors obsessed with being perfect,
eager to criticize, disillusioned after years
of sacrifice in graduate school may be
making themselves emotionally ill.
One psychologist believes that such a
pattern has given rise to what he sees as an
emotional disorder unique to the professoriate. He has given it a name professorial
melancholia.
June 13, 1997
Empty Tables at the

Faculty Club Worry
Some Academics
Alleged Death Threats,

a Hunger Strike,
and a Department at Risk
Over a Tenure Decision
Sure, there were the internecine backstabbings and poison-pen missives weve come to
expect of this process. And the usual personality
conflicts, professional jealousy, and generational
divides again held sway as this contentious rite
of passage played itself out in Bloomington.
But then things got weird.
November 5, 2012
baltimore
The faculty table at the Johns Hopkins
Club is all but deserted on a recent spring
day. A lone professor, graying and spectacled,
sits surrounded by seven empty chairs. The
big table, as its known, has turned into a
table for one.
August 8, 1997
An Aging Faculty Poses

a Challenge for Colleges
For professors and their institutions, the
question of when to retire has become more
complicated since 1994, when a federal rule
that exempted higher education from the
Age Discrimination in Employment Act
expired, ending a widespread tradition of
forced retirement at age 70.
Mandatory retirement pushed some scholars off campus before they were ready to go,
but it gave administrators the ability to predict faculty openings. Even if Professor Doe
didnt want to retire at 65 or 68, his college
knew he would have to leave at 70.
50 t h
Adjuncts
Build Strength
in Numbers
When professors in positions that offer
no chance of earning tenure begin to stack
the faculty, campus dynamics start to change.
Growing numbers of adjuncts make themselves more visible. They push for roles in
governance, better pay and working conditions, and recognition for work well done.
And they do so at institutions where tenured
faculty, although now in the minority, are
still the power brokers.
March 20, 2015
Tenure Is on Life Support

Earlier this month, the University of Tennessee system coined the term de-tenure, apparently by accident. The systems president immediately got an earful (on Twitter of all places)
that the ability to de-tenure someone would
defeat the very purpose of tenure. Whether or
not university officials actually believed that
argument, they at least backed off their initial
n
effort to make de-tenuring a possibility.
a n n i v er sa ry
nov e mber
2016
43
The Last Weeks

of an AIDS Sufferer
at Berkeley
A friend remembers
By LAWRENCE BIEMILLER
I
December 4, 1985
HIV/AIDS, which had begun its spread in
recent years, received early major coverage
in The Chronicle, notably in two articles by
Lawrence Biemiller. The first one was reported
from the University of California at Berkeley,
where three people had died after contracting
AIDS, others were being treated, and the
university was working to develop policies
for dealing with complex logistical and
philosophical questions about the disease.
Mr. Biemiller followed up with the story here,
an account of the lengthy relationship of two
lovers on the campus as one of them was
dying of AIDS. Both of them had dropped
out, Paul because of his declining health
and Terry so that Paul could spend his last
days at home. Months later, Terry returned
to class and volunteered to participate in the
universitys AIDS-education efforts. In 1994,
Mr. Biemiller wrote about Terry again, after his
death from AIDS.
berkeley, cal.
before Pauls death,
he insisted to Terry Weisser that horses
were running loose in the bathroom of
their home.
Terry remembers the hallucinatory
horses with some fondness they brought a
touch of lightheartedness to his lovers days
and to his own. Bedridden and in diapers, Paul
was suffering progressive brain damage during
the final stage of his 15-month-long bout with
AIDS. He was 27.
By then, he had fought off a variety of
AIDS-related ailments, including three attacks of pneumonia, and both he and Terry
had dropped out of classes at the University of
Californias campus here Paul because his
declining health prevented him for attending
class, Terry because he had decided that Paul
should spend his last days at home, rather than
in a hospital, and at that point Paul needed
round-the-clock care.
Now, eight months after Pauls death, Terry
has returned to class, seeking to complete undergraduate work that was interrupted first by
a career as a restaurant manager and then by
Pauls illness. He has also volunteered to serve
as a public speaker in the universitys AIDS-education campaign, answering questions from
students, faculty members, and others on the
campus who are worried about the disease and
telling against the wishes of Pauls family
both Pauls story and his own.
His father said to me after the funeral, now,
dont go talking to the press, says Terry, who
has himself experienced some minor symptoms
that his doctor says may be AIDS-related. But
theres an enormous amount of negativity and
fear. That needs to be balanced. I want to talk
to as many people as I can.
Terry is 31. He was raised on a farm in Minnesota, but was attracted to Northern California by its reputation as a mecca for homosexuals
he has lived with male lovers, he says, since
he was 18. At the university, where he is now a
n the last weeks
senior, he is studying the economics of natural

resources. He supports himself by working in a
local restaurant, and relaxes by playing bridge
with friends and working out at a gym.
Paul, on the other hand, was of Mexican-American Roman Catholic descent, and
was raised in Redwood City, one of the towns
strung out along Highway 101 between San
Francisco and San Jose. At the university, he
studied architecture. He had, Terry adds, an
enormous number of friends.
Terry and Paul met about three years ago,
at a time when Terry was unsure of what he
wanted to do with his future. I had enrolled in
the Peace Corps, but they were really dragging
their heels. When Paul came along, and we
became lovers, he was a retail-clothing manager, and I was a restaurant manager, but we
were both college dropouts. He had decided to
go back to school, and hed been accepted at
Berkeley. So he suggested I apply, and I was accepted, too. We moved to Berkeley at Christmas in 1982.
f,
as homosexual lovers returning to college together, they were in some ways

atypical Berkeley undergraduates, in
other ways they were not they attended classes, studied for tests, and worried
over assignments. In the crowds of students
crossing Sproul Plaza at noon, neither would
have seemed at all out of place not in that
first year, at least.
The whole thing happened so fast, Terry
says. To this day the rapidity of it all amazes
me. The next December, around Christmas,
Paul started really freaking out. He wasnt a
moody person at all, but we started fighting
a lot, and he started staying out all night, and
getting drunk and being really abusive. I knew
something was wrong, but it wasnt until later
that I learned that violent changes in mood can
precede an AIDS condition.
One Sunday night he went to the free venereal-disease clinic at Berkeleys gay-mens
center, and came back totally distressed. He

had a yeast infection that a lot of people with
AIDS get white patches in the back of your
mouth. The doctor gave him a prescription
for vaginal suppositories. Thats how you treat
it you suck on vaginal suppositories. We
thought it was pretty funny.
In February, though, Paul couldnt get out
of bed for something like six weeks. He lost his
appetite, and he was sweating all the time. He
hadnt been diagnosed as having AIDS yet, but
I knew he did. I dont know what he thought.
He didnt want to talk about it.
Paul consulted a doctor at the universitys
Cowell Hospital, Terry recalls, but it wasnt
until he contracted first cytomegalovirus
which can produce symptoms similar to those
of mononucleosis and then a type of pneumonia called pneumocystis carinii that Pauls
doctors at Cowell and at nearby Highland Hospital were certain that he had AIDS.
In April, he was in the hospital for two
weeks with the pneumonia, says Terry.
Thats when his father found out. Then he recovered, and he was perfectly healthy for five
or six months. We went to Minnesota during
the summer, and he met my family. We more
or less forgot about it.
Late in 1984, however, Pauls health began to
worsen, and his outlook worsened, too. I never let him go to the doctors alone, says Terry,
and I wouldnt let them do anything to him
that I didnt approve of.
But he started to rebel against my advice.
The problem for Paul was not how to fight the
disease, but how to accept the notion of dying,
the sense that it was inevitable. Thats the way
he perceived it, although I dont think thats the
case at all. But we both believed that our lives
had been tragedies, and he thought that getting
AIDS was the final scene in his tragedy. The
only question was how to die with grace and
some sense of style and with a peace of mind.
Paul never wanted to tell anyone that he had
AIDS. None of his classmates knew. He was
ashamed he had a horrible time accepting
the fact that he was gay. If it had been me, I
would have told more people, but I told very
few. I felt that if this was going to be the final
scene of his life, I was there to make it happen
the way he wanted it to.
Ultimately the church gave him his greatest
comfort. A priest came once a week, and when
he left Paul always had this glowing smile on
his face.
QUOTABLE
We had heard all the horror stories, but we

only had one bad experience, when a nurse at
the hospital wouldnt come to his room when
he had a fever. He had to call me in the middle
of the night, and I went over. I complained to
the director the next day.
But Pauls friends didnt desert him, and our
landlady didnt know until after he died that he
had AIDS.
After his third bout of pneumonia, I decided
to keep him home, and eventually I went into
the medicine cabinet and threw all his drugs
away. He had wonderful doctors, but they
couldnt really do anything. His doctor from
Highland Hospital came out once a week or so,
and she was on call anytime and would come
over, basically on her own time. The visiting-nurses association sent someone over once
a week, and his doctor from the universitys
health service, even though he was technically
off the case after Paul went to Highland, came
by to help.
School became a very separate thing for
me, Terry continues. People encouraged me
to stay in class because of the distraction it provided, but finally it became too much.
A sympathetic professor helped him extricate himself from his classes for the semester,
he recalls.
Pauls last months were very content, Terry says. The only thing that bothered him at
all at the end was when he started to get confused. And I had an enormous amount of help
Pauls illness had a powerful impact on dozens of people. They were incredibly helpful,
and were more than willing to offer their services. The amount of care and love he got from
total strangers amazed me. He was at home at
the end for several months, and the house was
filled with friends. You knew there was death
happening, but there was also this incredible
vitality.
He died of dementia. I had seen that happen
to old people over a couple of years, but in six
weeks he went from a lucid, intelligent person
to this vegetable lying in bed.
My father and my sisters and brothers came
out from Minnesota for the funeral, Terry
says. They gave me a tremendous amount of
support. His relations with Pauls family remained good, says Terry. They think of me as
a kind of second son.
Certainly it was tragic that a 27-year-old
had to die of this. There was a lot of grief and a
lot of pain, but the good things that have come
out of it have been remarkable. Death doesnt

have to be a horrible thing, not if you dont let
it.
For the sake of Pauls family, Terry wants to
avoid publicizing Pauls last name, but otherwise he is looking forward to making whatever
public appearance the universitys AIDS-education program schedules for him in the coming months.
Already he has been asked to appear on a
panel at a university-sponsored AIDS forum,
to speak to a group of counselors, and to speak
at a seminar on death and dying. He is not worried about the possible consequences of having
a high profile, he says the managers of the
restaurant at which he works are aware of his
situation, and AIDS-related hysteria doesnt
seem to be as much of a problem.
Obviously, Im a prime candidate for the
disease, Terry says. I take care of myself and
Im perfectly healthy, but Ive tested positive
for antibodies, and the doctors tell me, because
of some minor things that have happened, that
I have ARC the acronym for AIDS-related complex.
The test for antibodies verifies whether an
individual has ever been exposed to the AIDS
virus, but cannot predict whether an individual
will develop the disease. Over all, researchers
at the Federal Centers for Disease Control in
Atlanta say that between 5 and 25 percent of
those exposed to the AIDS virus will contract
the disease eventually.
ARC, on the other hand, indicates that the
person has developed symptoms associated
with the first stages of AIDS. The doctors say
that an as yet-unknown proportion of those
with the preliminary symptoms that lead to an
ARC diagnosis can expect to develop AIDS.
Terry, however, does not expect to develop
anything of the sort. The past two years have
changed some of his attitudes, he says for
the better. He now intends, he says to be the
first person ever to test positive and then negative.
My own self-hatred about the fact that Im
gay has had a negative effect on my health,
Terry says. And Im just now working that out.
Im trying to get away from the notion of tragn
edy. Ive had enough of that.
Lawrence Biemiller came to work at The Chronicle in 1980. He is now a senior writer whose favorite topics include campus architecture, the arts, and
small colleges.
June 26, 1985, Questioning the Science in Social Science, Scholars Signal a Turn to Interpretation
None of the social sciences can predict worth a damn. Its not just
in economics but in political science, in sociology, we tried to make
predictions, and they didnt work out. That has created a kind of failure
of nerve.
Seymour Martin Lipset, a professor of political science and sociology
at Stanford U.s Hoover Institution.
45
Academe Must Give

Black-Studies Programs
Their Due
By HENRY LOUIS GATES JR.
his month,
September 20, 1989

Twenty years after student protests led to
the creation of black-studies programs at
many universities, the field was still suspect
in the minds of many academics. The very
interdisciplinarity that made it intellectually
rich was an institutional handicap, allowing
traditional departments to write off the fields
scholars for their unorthodox approaches.
Meanwhile, the numbers of African-American
students and faculty were falling. Henry Louis
Gates Jr., at the time already one of black
studies key figures, wrote this essay tracing
the fields development and importance not
just for academe but also for all Americans
understanding of their history.
scores of black-studies programs around the country

are celebrating their 20th anniversary and, in many ways, their
academic maturity. Who can forget the stormy origins of the field and the
dire predictions of the skeptical that this fad
would not survive the decade of the 70s? But
while many ill-considered programs seemed
designed to failand didblack studies, as
a central feature of the college curriculum,
is here to stay.
Now it is time for the academic community to give these programs their due. For
all their successes, too many scholars continue to view black-studies programs, and the
people who work in them, with disdain. Too
little effort is made to recognize the fields
intellectual maturity and to integrate its insights into other scholarship. Financial resources for innovative research and academic
programs in black studies are still painfully
scarce.
Yet in the face of this, the role of black
studies in the academy has never been more
crucial. For its interdisciplinary perspectives
have not just added information; they also
have helped bridge a serious intellectual gap
among academic specialities and disciplines.
No less important, black studies has also
demonstrated particular strength in both attracting minority students into the academy
and in increasing the numbers of minority
students who enter Ph.D. programs in other
subjects.
Recognizing the importance of black studies, and perhaps attempting to redress the
imbalance in resources, the Ford Foundation announced a major initiative last year
to support the growth and expansion of such
programs. As a Ford Program officer, Sheila Biddle, remarked: It is the foundations
view that the current generation of scholars is anxious to secure the position of Afro-American studies, to confirm its legitima-
cy as a discipline in the academy, and is quite

capable of doing so.
Houston A. Baker Jr., director of the Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania, has
aptly charted the development of the field as
a progression of four phases. The first phase
was a sort of quick corrective, a concession to
the political clamor in the late 1960s. In the
second phase, black academics (such as St.
Clair Drake, Charles Davis, Eileen Southern, Darwin Turner) joined white faculties
and became instrumental in administering
black-studies programs.
By the third phase, academics largely
trained by phase two scholars began to
make theoretical innovations within their
double-disciplinesthe doubleness coming
from the overlay of a black-studies perspective on traditional disciplines (English, history, economics). As Professor Baker notes,
this phase inevitably was in part theoretical,
for once Afro-Americanists gained a hearing, they needed to begin the task of developing paradigms from which to speak. In
this phase, black and white scholars made
major scholarly contributions. Thus, one is
careful to speak of Afro-Americanists today,
whereas two decades ago the phrase Afro-Americanfor political reasonswas
used to describe the scholar and the scholarship.
The fourth phase of development has witnessed bold initiatives in black studies at several institutions (notably Princeton) and the
formation of the black research institute, allowing for what Mr. Baker describes as the
consolidation, expansion, and innovation
in Afro-American scholarly pursuits. In addition to Professor Bakers Center for the
Study of Black Literature and Culture, the
W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard, the
Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, and the Frederick Douglass
Institute at the University of Rochester are
playing primary roles in the development

of new approaches to the field. At the same
time, such research institutes are also places
where the teaching of Afro-American scholarship can itself be taught. Summer seminars
for high-school teachers have helped distribute the harvests of scholarship well beyond
the professors granary. (The need for such
outreach projects is documented by a recent report showing that only two black authorsLorraine Hansberry and Richard
Wrightappear among the 50 books most
widely assigned by high-school English
teachers.)
e also are seeing an

increasing number of
black-studies programs
becoming departments,
complete with the right
to award tenure. Over the past 20 years, research methods in black studies have become
increasingly innovative and cross-cultural,
responding to the particular nature of the
materials and data under analysis by fashioning new tools. Scholarship in black studies
tends to bring together insights from several disciplines precisely because black studies
started as a multidisciplinary field. And insofar as our particular content was excluded
from traditional disciplines, it was incumbent
upon us to draw upon innovative approaches
to what was essentially a new subject matter within the academy.
Consequently, many of the signal texts
in black studies in the last two decades
John Blassingames The Slave Community, St.
Clair Drakes Black Folk Here and There, Eugene Genoveses Roll, Jordan, Roll, Lawrence
Levines Black Culture and Black Consciousness, Nell Painters Standing at Armageddon,
Eileen Nathan Huggins Harlem Renaissance,
and Claudia Mitchell-Kernans work in linguistics and anthropologyare characterized by a truly interdisciplinary approach.
Historians of the Afro-American experience
have long been noted for their historiographical innovations, pioneering techniques of
historical reconstruction from oral testimony, folklore, and other non-archival sources.
A broader, richer conception of expressive
culture has been key in the study of African-American art and music, while insights
from the study of oral and non-verbal performance have proven invaluable to literary
criticism and theory.
Unfortunately, an Afro-Americanist using
an interdisciplinary approach can be defined
by a traditional department as having moved
outside the discipline precisely because of
her or his distinctive concerns and resultant
adaptation or innovation in methodology.
Nor is this problem peculiar to black studies. Newly developed programs in cognitive
science, for instance, have arisen for similar
reasons: New areas of inquiry generate new
methodologies, new research interests. It is,

after all, just this development in methodology that makes a discipline a discipline.
But black studies, born in the social strife
of a turbulent era, has a role to play in the
university beyond considerations of pure
research. Its proponents can hardly ignore
the alarming reversals on todays campusesthe diminishing presence of black undergraduates and graduate students; the fact
that blacks make up about 2 percent of the
college faculty nationwide. According to the
American Council on Education, between
1977 and 1983 the number of black faculty members dropped by 4 percent, while
the number of white faculty members increased by 5 percent. Nor are the immediate
prospects hopeful: Of the Ph.D.s awarded
in 1986, for example, 0.03 percent went to
blacks.
at Yale,
the University of California at Los
Angeles, and Cornell offer useful
models for addressing these problems. The Yale program, to take
just one, in which a student takes half of her
or his masters courses in a traditional department (thereby enabling the student to
he graduate programs
Far from being an

artifact of ghettoized
knowledge, then, the
best black-studies
programs can help
acquaint our students
and each other with
our multicultural
inheritance.
demonstrate ability independent of Graduate Record Examination scores), channeled
31 of 40 M.A. recipients into Ph.D. programs
between 1978 and 1988. Many of those students were initially rejected by Ph.D. programs and referred to black studies, where
they served a sort of apprenticeship, gaining
in academic skills and preparedness. The remarkable success of this approach should encourage others to support such programs.
As administrators have also learned, the
recruitment of black faculty members is
vastly easier on those campuses that have
well-established black-studies programs
and a critical mass of black faculty members. Why do so many black scholars take
an interest in black studies? For James Baldwin, writing about being a Negro was the
gate I had to unlock before I could hope to
write about anything else. Since each of us
must come to an intellectual understanding of what it means to be black in a white
societythe individuals complex engagement with (and concomitant estrangement
from) an ethnic cultural traditionone inevitably turns to others who have confronted this very complexity and recorded their
own, often painful, details of this encounter. It is for this reason that literary works
by black authors fall into a tradition; writers ground their representations of blackness
in other written representations. One must
learn how to be black in America, from ones
parents, relatives, and friends in childhood
and through books in late adolescence and
adulthood.
Few of usvery fewwish to be the only
black on the block. And the cultural isolation and estrangement that still prevail on
college campuses that have been seen historically as bastions of white middle-class values
and norms often prove discomfiting for black
professors.
One thing is clear. Black studies, in its
third decade, has an important role to play
in educating a nation that remains woefully ignorant of the historical achievements
of African-Americans. I recently was taken
aback by the discovery that only one member of a college audience I was about to address had even the vaguest idea who W. E. B.
Du Bois was. What I had planned to use as a
rhetorical device to introduce my lecture became the subject of my lecture itself, as I put
down my speech and addressed the relevance
of black studies to the students lives and educations, whether they wished to be academics or investment bankers. It is not only white
students who need this education; my audience was entirely black.
Far from being an artifact of ghettoized
knowledge, then, the best black-studies programs can help acquaint our students and
each other with our multicultural inheritance. They can help de-ghettoize the university as a whole. For the study of the humanitieswhich is the study of the possibilities of human life in culturehas always
thrived on diversity. And if we have taken
black studies for granted as a tool for integrating higher education, we may have only
begun to glimpse its potential for integrating
n
the American mind.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. was a senior fellow at the
National Humanities Center when he wrote this
essay. In 1991 he joined Harvard as chairman of
its Afro-American-studies department, and today he leads the universitys Hutchins Center for
African and African American Research.
47
IMAGES
March 1974
Just Hangin Out

Streakers, perhaps celebrating the arrival of
spring, drew a crowd at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where, chill or no, the fad made
itself apparent that season. On dozens of campuses, The Chronicle reported, there were single
streaks, mixed-double streaks, and numerous attempts to set records for mass streaking.
Camille Paglia
Goes to Harvard
By CAROLYN J. MOONEY
cambridge, mass.
amille paglia seizes the podium at
Harvard Universitys Sanders Theater and ignites. Her topic this evening: Whats wrong with Harvard.
Thats with a period, not a question
mark. For the next two hours, the frenetic and
fearless author, who teaches humanities at the
University of the Arts in Philadelphia, unleashes the attacks that have made her an enemy of
feminists and literary theorists and a cause celebre on the interview circuit. She trashes prominent scholars, tenure, academic conferences,
the department system, and, again and again,
the French literary theorists Jacques Derrida,
Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan.
Shes an academic guerrilla, a firestorm of
energy, and above all a performer. Her voice is
like an automatic weapon spitting out bullets:
She sneers. She taunts. She mimics. She hurls
insults. She tells critics to shut up.
And she names names, starting with professors at Harvard Marjorie Garber, Barbara
Johnson, Susan R. Suleiman, and Helen Vendler. But why stop at Harvard? She names more
names Stanley Fish and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick of Duke University, and more.
Charlatans, she calls them. Toadies. Conference groupies. Pseudo-feminists. Hustlers.
Sleazebags. Ass kissers.
The whole time, here in the polished-wood
splendor of the Victorian-Gothic theater,
standing beneath three crimson plaques that
bear the Harvard motto Veritas, Miss Paglia
she prefers Miss to Ms. is pounding
away at her message. Which is this: Academe
is being corrupted by trendy feminists and literary theorists who have abandoned scholarly
standards and who dont care about beauty or
truth or history or nature. While liberals stand
around doing nothing, conservatives are taking
control of academic reform.
Today its like, get a gimmick, get a critic,
she tells the crowd of about 800.
What are we doing wasting our time with
these stupid and vulgar theorists? ...

Its such crap.
She recites her mantra: Hate dogma. Love
art. Love learning.
A woman in the audience tells Miss Paglia
that some of her remarks sounded like something Joseph Stalin might have said. Miss
Paglia brushes her off like a mosquito. Absurd, she retorts.
Catching the show from the front row is
Christina Hoff Sommers, a Clark University
philosopher who also has something of a reputation for skewering her fellow feminists. Im
such a nice girl compared to Camille, she says
later, with a sigh of admiration.
Like many others, Ms. Sommers never
heard of Camille Paglia before 1990, when
Miss Paglias first and so far only book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to
Emily Dickinson, was published by Yale University Press. (Vintage Books later published it in
paperback.)
Thats because Miss Paglia had spent the last
20 years in the wilderness, researching her
book and being rejected, as she tells it, by mainstream academics and feminists who couldnt
handle her dissident views on feminism. The
recipient of a doctorate from Yale (her mentor
there was Harold Bloom), she taught at Bennington College, then held a string of appointments in the early 1980s while searching for a
permanent job and a publisher.
Her book has given her the fame she feels is
due her. But she says elite universities would
never hire her now, either shes too vicious.
The book is a 718-page treatise that attempts
to present a unified theory of Western culture
from ancient Egypt through the late 19th century. A second volume and essay collection are
in the works.
Chief among the ideas expressed in her book
and elsewhere is this: That innate sexual differences mean men and women will always be
different so different that If civilization
April 1, 1992
Every once in a while, a scholar comes along
who is so provocative, funny, and media-savvy
that shes impossible to ignore. In the early
90s, that was Camille Paglia, a professor
at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
Her first appearance in The Chronicle was a
short excerpt from her breakout 1990 book,
Sexual Personae. By 1992, she was a fullblown celebrity, posing for People magazine
dressed like a character from West Side Story,
switchblade in hand, under the headline:
Street Fighting Woman. That spring the
Paglia roadshow arrived in Cambridge, Mass.
Introduced by Harvey Mansfield as an enemy
of the namby-pamby, the hoity-toity, and the
artsy-fartsy, Paglia took the stage to indict
Harvard for intellectual shoddiness. She
named names. She kept it up into the wee
hours. It was pure performance. And Paglia
ever attuned to her public profile was up
early the next morning to read the reviews.
49

had been left in female hands, we would still
be living in grass huts. Similarly, her views on
date rape she calls it the leading soap opera among middle-class white women who fail
to recognize that women are always in sexual danger, and says the police, not universities,
should deal with genuine rape charges have
incensed those pushing for campuswide education on the issue.
Madonna is her ideal feminist.
only recently began

taking her ideas to campuses.
She goes next to Smith and
Williams Colleges.
Last month she spoke at
Brown University a place so politically correct, she says, that of course the feminists
boycotted me, okay, right? I loved it.
If academic feminists have ignored her, as
Miss Paglia contends, conservatives have not.
It was Harvey C. Mansfield, a Harvard government professor who says his reputation as a
neo-conservative is fair, who invited her here
tonight. He was the only Harvard professor to
vote against the creation of the womens-studies program because, he explains, it wasnt really womens studies, it was feminist studies.
The crowd at Sanders Theater smells of
wet wool. It is a polite crowd, a mix of older, tweedy academics and students wearing
fringed Russian-peasant scarves and carrying
huge bookbags.
Mr. Mansfield introduces Miss Paglia as an
enemy of the namby-pamby, the hoity-toity,
and the artsy-fartsy. In fact, she has numerous
enemies and appears intent on making new
ones tonight. After she establishes her credentials she believes prostitution, pornography,
abortion, and drug use should be legal, and is
a bisexual who believes in full political and legal rights for women she opens fire on the
feminists.
The idea that there is any open debate in
academic feminism today is a lot of crock, she
sneers.
Unlike many feminists, Miss Paglia says, I
respect the past, okay? I dont see history as an
endless series of victimizations.
She also accuses certain feminists of keeping their lesbianism secret until they became
prominent. When it would have cost them
something, did they do it? The crowd applauds loudly.
By now it is apparent that Miss Paglias style
is not exactly one of collegial criticism.
Her first target is Helen Vendler, a Harvard
English professor who, she says, has given in
to trendy scholarship (and who has criticized
Miss Paglias book). Everything from Chaucer to Wallace Stevens, I respect, Miss Paglia
says. But after Wallace Stevens, she has been
a disaster.
Next comes Barbara Johnson, head of Harvards womens-studies program, who is aciss paglia
cused of toadying to male professors, including the late Yale deconstructionist, Paul de
Man.
As for Marjorie Garber, a Harvard English
professor whose book on cross-dressing Miss
Paglia has slammed, she could have written a
major book, Miss Paglia contends. But you
have to put in the effort. You have to go to the
library.
Next comes Susan R. Suleiman, a comparative-literature professor here whom she calls
one of the great conference groupies of all
time. One of Miss Paglias arguments is that
the deal making at academic conferences has
led to tenure for trendy scholars who will be
around long after their work is outdated.
Now, lets see, who havent I maligned yet?
She calls Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a Duke
gay-studies scholar, a charlatan and opportunist who latched onto Foucault because she
had no talent. Stanley Fish, a prominent literary theorist, is a sleazebag and a phony.
And there are others.
Miss Paglias targets apparently werent at
the lecture. But when contacted later, Ms. Suleiman, the conference groupie, is eager to
fight back. The difference between a confer-
What are we
doing wasting
our time with
these stupid
and vulgar
theorists?
Its such crap.
ence and a one-woman show, she says, is that
at conferences people engage in discussion.
Miss Paglia engages only in totalitarian discourse, she says, adding that feminists would
be happy to listen to her ideas if she had any.
Ms. Garber calls Miss Paglias version of
feminism a caricature that ignores all new
scholarship. She also questions whether Miss
Paglia is worthy of more publicity, and suggests Mr. Mansfield was uncollegial to invite such an attack on his colleagues.
Mr. Fish and Ms. Sedgwick did not want to
comment; Ms. Johnson and Ms. Vendler could
not be reached.
Miss Paglia concludes her lecture by proposing that literary conferences be abolished and
that shoddy scholarship be exposed. And she
suggests that she is the perfect role model for
women since I have no self-esteem problems.
She ends with her mantra: Hate dogma.
Love learning. Love art.
The performance has left some here stimulated but mentally exhausted, and others outraged.
Make sure you put this in shes a demagogue, says Jane Margolis, who teaches education in the extension school here. Shes
missing an important aspect of power realities.
Miss Paglia, meanwhile, continues holding
court on the stage. Its 11 p.m. She has been
talking non-stop since dinner, and will continue until 1 a.m. at a post-lecture reception at
Mr. Mansfields home.
She could go on forever.
The next morning finds Miss Paglia in her
hotel suite, already in her frenzied-performance state. (My normal state is a cocaine
state. I dont need drugs.)
Shes wearing the same outfit knee-length
black dress, well-cut red jacket, black patent-leather, high-heeled pumps. Should anyone
question whether her clothing is relevant, its
very relevant to her. Appearance, projection
its all part of her argument that women must
take control of the image and sexuality they
project. She calls her outfit my performance
drag. Normally, Im totally dowdy.
Shes talking about her sudden fame, the importance of teaching freshmen, the need for
lust, her admiration of nuns, the vindictive
pleasure she gets from torturing Harvard,
and, once again, those feminist toadies.
The phone rings just as she is reopening her
attack on Ms. Johnson, the womens-studies
head. Mr. Mansfield is on his way? Okay, good,
all right. She slams down the phone without
missing a syllable.
Mr. Mansfield enters bearing several of the
lecture posters, a copy of her book, and that
mornings Boston Globe. Everybodys buzzing, he says with a grin.
Miss Paglia grabs the newspaper and
shrieks. Oh, The Globe covered it? Great!
Shes calling her publicist now and simultaneously scanning The Globe and The Harvard
Crimson, squealing, waving her hands, stamping her feet, snorting, and rolling her eyes
when her call wont go through. Oh my God!
I dont believe they reported it! All right, yes,
Brown University mentioned great! Yes,
this is a collect call. Oh, I love this: She singled out Susan Suleiman, Barbara Johnson ...
Aaaaah! This is not a flattering picture. Oh,
my legs came out well, though ... Slams Harvard. Okay, all right! Trendy people in cultural
studies ... Hello, what is the problem? ... We
need to liberate the young from this French theory
crap ... All right! Aaaaah! Hello? Hello!! This
is Camille ...
n
She could go on forever.
Carolyn Mooney has served as an editor and reporter at The Chronicle for more than 20 years.
She is presently senior editor for special sections, coordinating coverage for Digital Campus, Diversity,
and other issues.
Berkeleys Judith Butler

Revels in Role of Troublemaker
She challenged ideas of gender and helped create queer theory;
now she moves to defend free speech
By LIZ McMILLEN
berkeley, calif.
Gender Trouble caused
a stir, and before she became a
prominent theorist with a devoted graduate-student following, Judith Butler was a kid in a Cleveland synagogue who frequently got herself
in trouble.
She disrupted classes. She made faces
during assemblies. Finally, she was kicked
out and told that she wouldnt be allowed to
return to the school until she had completed a tutorial with the head rabbi. The rabbi
sized the 14-year-old up and decided that it
was time for her to get serious.
So what do you want to study? he wanted to know. Holocaust historiography was
her quick reply. Martin Buber and existential
theology. Whether German idealism was responsible in any way for the rise of fascism.
This after-school punishment laid the
groundwork for a scholarly career marked by
extreme diligence and a knack for making
trouble. I was always talking back, she says.
I guess Ive elevated it into an art form.
Once a disciplinary problem, always a disciplinary problem. In 1990, as a 34-yearold professor of humanities at the Johns
Hopkins University, Ms. Butler published
Gender Trouble (Routledge), a dense and
ground-breaking book that challenged the
conventional feminist wisdom and gave intellectual shape to the emerging movement
of queer theory.
Gender Trouble was that rare academic
commodity: an instant classic. Brilliant,
innovative, and subversive are a few of
the adjectives scholars have used to describe
Gender Trouble. At meetings in the early 90s
on gay-and-lesbian studies, the book and its
author were cited in practically every session,
with acolytes talking about working in the
Butler paradigm of performativity. It is
perhaps an understatement to say that Butlers Gender Trouble rocked the foundations of
ong before
feminist theory, writes Sara Heinamaa, in a

recent article in Hypatia, a journal of feminist
philosophy.
Although she is trained in philosophy
she received her doctorate in 1984 from Yale
University Ms. Butlers work has been
influential in literary and cultural studies,
feminist and queer theory, law, politics, and
psychoanalytic theory. In the Arts and Humanities data base, which tracks scholarly
articles and books, her work is the subject of
more than 1,000 citations since 1990. Next
year, she will deliver the Rene Wellek Lecture in Literary Theory and Criticism at the
University of California at Irvine, an honor
that has gone to Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, J. Hillis Miller, and Edward Said.
Now she is a professor of rhetoric and
comparative literature at the University of
California at Berkeley, and the author of two
more books, published this spring. Excitable
Speech: A Politics of the Performative (Routledge) is her analysis of contemporary controversies over hate speech. The Psychic Life
of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford University Press) considers the relationship between the psyche and the social operation of
power.
Drucilla Cornell, a professor of womens
studies, politics, and law at Rutgers University, calls Ms. Butler one of the major thinkers of the late 20th century and says Excitable Speech is essential reading for anyone
concerned with the politics of free speech.
Shes contributed a new theory for grappling with a very difficult topic.
Even though Ms. Butlers work is highly theoretical one reviewer groused that
her prose was so convoluted and opaque as
to render her arguments nearly inaccessible
she has achieved something approaching
cult status outside the academy. In the book
alt.culture (HarperPerennial, 1996), she gets
a separate entry for her work in queer theory
May 23, 1997

Not many scholars have had a fanzine devoted
to them. Then again, not many theorists have
had such influence on as many disciplines as
Judith Butler, philosopher and professor of
comparative literature and critical theory at
the University of California at Berkeley. Ms.
Butlers ideas about gender helped shape
the emerging discipline of queer theory, and
her notions about gender performativity as
something one does, first articulated more
than 25 years ago when she was in her early
30s, have since gained wide circulation. The
subject of hundreds of thousands of scholarly
citations, Ms. Butlers work is dense, and
sometimes attacked for its difficulty. But
there is no denying its staying power. One of
her key books, Gender Trouble, has sold more
than 100,000 copies, spreading well beyond
academe. You can even see Ms. Butlers
gender-performativity theory explained online
with cats. At the time this profile was written
in the 1990s, the academic star system was
at its height, and Ms. Butler was an uneasy
celebrity.
51

and is called one of the superstars in 90s academia. In the trendy British magazine The
Face, she was cited as one of 50 people who
have had the biggest influence on culture in
the 1990s.
This conflation of intellectualism and
stardom reached a zenith or perhaps a
nadir in 1993, with the appearance of a
fanzine devoted to Ms. Butler. Judy! was eagerly passed around among starstruck graduate students hungry for gossip, even imaginary gossip. The 17-page love letter to Ms.
Butler and other theoretical divas, put together by an author who called herself Miss
Spentyouth, raised professor worship to a
new, if not absurd, level. At one point in her
reverie, Miss Spentyouth actually Andrea Lawlor-Mariano, an undergraduate at
the University of Iowa fantasized about
a mud-wrestling match between Catharine
MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, wearing
shiny bikinis, with Ms. Butler as the referee.
The subject of the exercise, however, found
it demeaning and offensive.
n fact,
Ms. Butler is a very reluctant

academic celebrity, turning down a recent interview request from The New
York Times Magazine and actively discouraging the whole academic-star
routine. My response to all this, for the
most part, is that Im just trying to learn how
to sleep at night, she explains. I make decisions in life based on whether it will help me
sleep or whether it will ruin that sleep. And
publicity always risks loss of sleep.
She agrees to this interview on two conditions. The first a hard and firm request
is that she not be asked about her personal
life. You can say that I have a partner and a
kid, but thats about it, she says. The second
has to do with that zine, which shed prefer
not to talk about but eventually does.
For now, shed rather talk about speech as
a performative act. Excitable Speech represents a continuation of her earlier work
and an attempt to intervene in debates about
hate speech and pornography, and about declarations of homosexuality by military personnel. Taking issue with Ms. MacKinnon,
the legal scholar at the University of Michigan, she argues that speech is not necessarily
a form of injury, and that state efforts to restrict it are misguided.
Speech, she says, is always in some ways
out of our control. Existing within speech is
the possibility of new meanings in new contexts. Name-calling, in fact, may be the initiating moment of a counter-mobilization,
she writes.
If you say that certain words wound because they have a history of injury encoded in them, and no matter who says them or
how they say them or where they say them
those words are injurious ... I find that really
problematic, she says. Because many people

repeat them as satire, they repeat them in jest
or to defuse their power.
Take the word queer, appropriated by
gays and lesbians as a term of pride. When
she was growing up, she dreaded the word.
If you were called it, you entered into a sort
of social death, she says. I lived in fear of it
my entire adolescent life, and when it did get
attached to me, I thought it was the end of
my life, really.
When queer studies emerged a few years
ago, she says she felt a moment of conservatism. Then I got used to it, and it became
quite thrilling. This doesnt happen in every
case, but injurious words can be owned and
recirculated, she maintains.
Ms. Butler views Excitable Speech as a response to a prevailing strain in feminism that
views pornography as equivalent to injurious
conduct against women. It is important, she
believes, to separate feminism from the anti-pornography movement. I think its really
crucial to rethink the importance of a feminist tradition of sexual freedom and the importance of a protected public sphere for the
representation of sexuality, she says.
As in Ms. Butlers earlier work, Excitable
I make decisions
in life based on
whether it will
help me sleep.
And publicity always
risks loss of sleep.
Speech brings philosophical concepts to bear
on troubling political issues, says Joan Scott,
a professor of social science at the Institute
for Advanced Study. One of the astonishing
things about her is that while shes grounded
in philosophy, she knows how to read literary
texts, psychoanalysis, legal cases. Shes done
the hard work.
On the day of her interview, Ms. Butler leads a three-hour graduate seminar at
Berkeley on Hegel, working paragraph by
paragraph through a chapter from Phenomenology of Spirit. A small, compact figure in
wide-legged gray pants and a cobalt-blue
blouse, she laughs easily and projects a sense
of warmth and ease. She offers to leave some
of her books on reserve at the library for the
students, but warns them, in high dudgeon,
that if anything happens to the books, Ill
never teach this class or work with you on
your dissertations.
Several of Ms. Butlers students cite her as

an intellectual role model. She is a responsible, caring teacher, they say and it doesnt
hurt that she is a dazzling performer. She
is the most ethical person Ive encountered
in how she handles departmental politics,
in the kinds of work she encourages, says
David Eng, a former student of Ms. Butlers,
who is now an assistant professor of English
and comparative literature at Columbia University. Shes exemplary in that sense.
In the seminar, Ms. Butler explains that
historically, there have been problems in
translating Hegel, with some trying to make
him clearer than is perhaps appropriate. I
want to suggest that the ponderousness is
part of the phenomenological challenge of
his text, she says.
Little-known fact: Judith Butlers first
book was not Gender Trouble but Subjects of
Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987).
In The Psychic Life of Power, she uses Hegel as
a point of departure to analyze human subjectivity and its inseparability from the operation of social power.
Its an interesting starting point, because
Hegel is a bte noire to so many people, says
Harry Brod, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Delaware, who
draws on her work in The Masculine Masquerade (MIT Press, 1995). He tried to explain
it all in one grand narrative. Ms. Brod argues that the roots of Ms. Butlers notions
about performativity lie in Hegelian philosophy.
In Gender Trouble, Ms. Butlers approach
was to question the very categories of gender, sex, and sexuality, using philosophical
thinking to show that there is no easy or natural relationship among them. In effect, she
troubled these categories, raising questions
about the nature and limits of identity.
She argued that gender is a set of behaviors
that are constantly performed and repeated;
hence the idea of performativity. All gender roles are an imitation for which there is
no original, she writes, pointing to drag as
an example of the artificiality of gender categories.
of performativity had
enormous theoretical and political
impact though, to her dismay,
it was often simplified and misunderstood. Performativity, she has
said over and over again, was not the same
as performance. In many quarters, though,
it seemed as if she were saying that gender
was a role that one casually chose that
one woke in the morning, perused the closet
or some open space for the gender of choice,
donned that gender for the day, and then
restored the garment to its place at night,
she writes in Bodies That Matter (Routledge,
1990).
he notion
She assumes readers have more knowledge of texts than they often do, observes
Ms. Scott, the social-science professor,
who was co-editor with Ms. Butler of Feminists Theorize the Political (Routledge, 1992).
One impact of Gender Trouble was its wonderful way of rethinking sexuality. But for
more-simple-minded readers, it became a
political tract about performativity.
George Chauncey, a historian at the University of Chicago and author of Gay New
York (BasicBooks, 1994), says, Many people
had realized that the theoretical tools to explore questions of gender and sexuality were
inadequate, but very few of us had the deep
knowledge of these traditions or the insights
that her work manifests.
Precisely because she is so serious about
her work, and about keeping herself out of
that work, the fanzine came as a shock to
Ms. Butler. She complained that the zine,
and a subsequent write-up in Lingua Franca, had reduced her work to sexual spectacle
and undermined her scholarly aims especially damaging for a field as vulnerable as
gay-and-lesbian studies. In a letter to the editor, she called the Lingua Franca story an
appalling and tasteless piece of journalism.
Routledge, her publisher, withdrew a fullpage advertisement.
Today she says she is sorry that she didnt

know how to orchestrate her response better, to handle the matter with bravado. But,
you know, a girl doesnt have that all the
time, she says with a laugh. I was so theo-
She is the most

ethical person Ive
encountered in
how she handles
departmental politics,
in the kinds of work
she encourages.
retical in my presentation in Gender Trouble
and Bodies That Matter that you barely got a
glimpse of who I was, which then produced
this desire to expose this hyperintellectual,
you know, hidden person.
Dont hold your breath for her memoir,
though. The confessional mode common in

cultural studies and in gay-and-lesbian studies, although she admires those who do it
well, is not for her. Im out of the closet and
have been out of the closet since I was 16,
so it wasnt a big deal for me. It wasnt like I
had a fabulous story to tell. You know, coming out is not a matter of saying you are gay;
coming out is a matter of displaying your
personal life to public view and doing it in a
way that others could identify with.
She claims that to some, her notoriety is a
liability. Was she trying to become a popular
icon? Did she have serious intellectual interests? She cant remember how many philosophers have asked whether shes still interested in philosophy. You know, whats happened to philosophy, Judy? she says, using
the diminutive, which, to her mind, carries a
patronizing quality.
Its only been in the last couple of years
that Ive allayed some of those fears, she
says. And no, that doesnt mean that I
didnt mean Gender Trouble. I meant every
n
word.
Liz McMillen joined The Chronicle in 1984
and became editor in 2011. Along the way, she
also served as a reporter, a section editor, and editor of The Chronicle Review.
Queens College President Flix V. Matos Rodrguez

and the entire Queens College community join
The Chronicle of
Higher Education
in celebrating its fiftieth anniversary.
We take this opportunity to recognize your long-standing
dedication to excellence in academic reporting, as well as your
support for learning and institutions of higher education.
The Lessons
of a Lost Career
How one unsung professor played by the rules, worked hard
at the same university for 27 years, and died worrying
that he couldnt pay his bills
By SCOTT HELLER
charleston, s.c.
its dead, Charleston
Southern University puts together a slide show. But the colleagues
and friends who gathered in Lightsey Chapel last October to remember Harold J. Overton, a linguist who died
suddenly of cancer after teaching there for
27 years, had to squint to see the handful of
images thrown up on a screen in a corner of
the stage. There werent enough photos in the
universitys P.R. files to fill the time, so they
ran in a repeating loop.
Somehow this was appropriate, for even after
so many years, Mr. Overton remained a blurry presence on this Baptist campus. Shy, courtly, and eager to please, he was appreciated for
his steady loyalty. Many in the audience didnt
know that he was an ordained minister and a
one-time missionary, that he was an antiques
dealer and had a passion for Norse sagas.
The various speakers praised Mr. Overton
for his courtesy and kindness, the endearing
way he would make a friends excitements into
his own. Each time during the years when
the university was able to provide an increase
in salary, said President Jairy C. Hunter Jr.,
Harold would always send me a little note expressing thanks.
And who else, asked Lisette Luton, an assistant professor of French, could or would
speak so passionately about obscure distinctions in Old French? Only Harold, who
wryly described himself as the tall, skinny,
bald guy when arranging their first meeting
at the Charleston airport.
Then, as the event wound down, Robert
Rhodes Crout, an associate professor of history, strode to the podium. A fellow Southerner, he had been Mr. Overtons closest friend
on campus. If the assembled expected another
run-of-the-mill tribute, they were to be sorely
disappointed. Harold Overton was a shy and
private man who lived a shy and private life,
and wanted his dying days to have that same
o
May 26, 2000

The scholars at the top of the heap the ones
making the big salaries at elite universities
get their share of plaudits and attention. What
about the unsung professors who labor quietly
for years, never rewarded for their loyalty? In
2000, Chronicle reporter Scott Heller took a
deep and moving look at one such professor.
With a doctorate in linguistics from Louisiana
State University, Harold Overton landed a job
in 1972 in the English department at Baptist
College at Charleston (what is now Charleston
Southern University), teaching four courses a
semester. He had dreams of a better career
that drew on his expertise. Instead, Overton
ended up teaching at the same college for 27
years, unsung and underpaid. He died at 62,
making substantially less than $40,000 a year.
As Mr. Heller writes, Overtons story is one of
a bargain broken between colleges and generations of scholars. The professors knew they
would not get rich. But they expected to feel
that the life of the mind was indeed valued,
that their compensations financial and otherwise would sustain them.
honor
quiet and private dignity, Mr. Crout began.

I honored that wish.
Now that he is dead, he continued, I can
speak. And so he did, stunning the audience
with a 20-minute recitation of Mr. Overtons
money worries and fears about the future.
Harolds sense of propriety never wavered,
Mr. Crout said. Yet privately, the late professor was wounded by a university that paid
him miserably and wouldnt offer the other
rewards, like promotion to full professor, that
come with long service.
The mood inside the room stiffened. After so many similar appraisals of a courteous
Southern gentleman, this speaker had breathed
life into Harold Overton, conjuring up a man
betrayed: a 62-year-old tenured professor who
did all that was asked of him, who taught more
than his course load, who played by the book,
both the official policies and the unwritten
rules of how to stay in favor, only to find himself, after 27 years, humiliated and trapped.
It was a shocking and perhaps ill-timed
message. All of Professor Overtons long-time
colleagues, and even some of his other close
friends, think he would have shuddered at
Mr. Crouts outburst. Yet both Mr. Crout and
President Hunter touched on the same onerous fact of life for Harold Overton, and for
many professors like him: money. In nearly
three decades at Charleston Southern, despite
a promotion and a department chairmanship,
Harold was still making substantially under
$40,000 a year at the time of his death, Mr.
Crout announced.
Mr. Overton took on plenty of overtime
work. He sold antiques for extra money. Still,
he feared he wouldnt be able to meet the payments on his house, and worried about his retirement.
What would be a fitting memorial for
Harold Overton? Mr. Crout asked at the
service. This is what I think Harold would
say if he could speak from the grave to this
assembly today: Just show the simple loyalty
to these folks that they have been showing to

this institution for years. ... Just do these folks
right, and Ill be content. In fact, if my death
led to those changes, it would give me a world
of satisfaction.
Two weeks later, the university dismissed
Mr. Crout. You have irrevocably broken the
collegial bond that joins us and have separated
yourself from our fellowship, the presidents
letter read. The American Association of University Professors is investigating the case as a
potential violation of academic freedom.
In death, as he never had in life, Harold
Overton had made news.
Every campus has its familiar types. The
inveterate complainers, like Mr. Crout, get
noticed, for better or worse. The loyal citizens, like Mr. Overton, toil largely in silence.
Whether they like or loathe their jobs, the
Overtons, unsung and underpaid, are legion
in academe. They often arrive with strong
credentials Mr. Overton studied 10 languages, from classical Latin to Swahili yet
may end up on a campus where no one really speaks their language. They teach so much
that research becomes difficult to imagine,
and a better job impossible to obtain.
They dont blow up, or snap. But one day,
they come to realize that a job that once held
such promise now feels like doing time.
Institutions like Charleston Southern prove
especially harsh. Because of their religious
vocation, they can tend to think their faculty
are the equivalent of clergy, and can be paid
accordingly, says Mary Burgan, the general
secretary of the A.A.U.P. At the same time,
faculty are expected to be more humble,
more modest, and thereby have less freedom
to express themselves.
Mr. Crout had no such humility. Yet in
shaming Charleston Southern, he inevitably
overlooked the nuances of Harold Overtons
life, his career, and his strategies for coping.
While Mr. Overton did grow increasingly
frustrated, looking for a job elsewhere as recently as 1995, the university was still home.
Colleagues became a surrogate family; other
professors Mr. Crout; Ms. Luton; George
Niketas, his former department chairman
were there for him at the end. On them, his
life and death left a profound mark.
Someone else will teach the history of the
English language, and phonetics, and world
literature in translation, just a few of the
courses Mr. Overton handled as an associate
professor of English. Someone else will oversee the language and visual arts department,
which he ran and protected for the last
10 years. Someone else already has his faculty office. Were it not for the eulogy, Harold
Overton might have been forgotten by now at
Charleston Southern.
His is the story of a bargain broken: the disintegration of an informal pact between colleges and generations of academics. The professors knew they would not get rich. But they
expected to feel that the life of the mind was

indeed valued, that their compensations financial and otherwise would sustain them.
bachelor professor dies and

whats left are books.
Scores of boxes, the science-fiction paperbacks Harold Overton
devoured, dictionaries of the ancient languages he studied, books on linguistics, the fat fantasy sagas hed lend to friends
and receive back, untouched.
Whats left are collectibles. The statue of
St. Augustine that greeted visitors to his suburban home; the carved wooden walking stick
hed brought back from Kenya; the page of a
medieval manuscript hed found at a local flea
market, cleaned up and framed, and tried to
sell for a profit at his own antiques stall in
Myrtle Beach.
Whats left are pets three dogs and four
cats, the constant companions he loved so
dearly and would talk about too much. A job
candidate would come to Charleston Southern, and Mr. Overton would break the ice:
So, hed ask, do you have dogs?
In time, the things get sorted and dispersed,
sent back to Greenville, Miss., to his mother,
Myrtis, and aunt, Kat, packed in shoeboxes
Mr. Overton was thrilled

to hire Lisette Luton
to revive Charleston
Southerns French
program, doting on her
like a favorite niece:
What little world he
had, she says, he kind
of pulled me into it.
or thrown away. Nearly 900 books were donated to the university library. The ornately
tooled piece of leather from Thailand went
to Lisette Luton. He never told her he was
dying though she knew, of course but
quietly tried to discern which of his treasures
she might want after he was gone. Friends of
friends adopted the Lhasa apso and the Pekingese. And the big dog, Charlemagne, who
lived outside in a fenced-in doghouse worthy
of canine royalty hes being looked after by
George Niketas, Mr. Overtons oldest friend
and the former English department chairman
at Charleston Southern.
In 1994, after 25 years there, Mr. Niketas

took early retirement, weary, he says, of the
politics and hypocrisy. His days are spent on
gardening and home improvements, or monitoring the stock market on television. Sunshine pours through the gazebo behind his
home, but a cloud crosses Mr. Niketass face
when the subject of the university and its administrators comes up. His thick hands press
against his temples. The place is a breeding
ground for the worst kind of self-centeredness, he says. For all that Christian baloney
they hand you, the real question is Whats in
it for me?
Over the years, Mr. Niketas fought for his
fellow professors. Yet he cant help feeling that
the battle has been lost. Their salaries have
inched up, while President Hunters annual
pay has climbed to $143,000, plus $30,000 in
benefits.
For Mr. Overton and other unattached professors at Charleston Southern, George and
Elaine Niketass house became a home away
from home. Holidays were a given, and once
or twice a week Mr. Overton would invite
himself over to gab. The phone would ring at
9 on Sunday night, and Harold, who always
stayed up late, would be on the other end.
You up for an Overton visit? hed ask Elaine.
Put the coffee on.
The Niketases were with Harold Overton right to the end, witnessing the will he
scratched out days before he died. Plenty of
the late professors belongings are stacked up
in a corner of their garage. Seven months have
passed. Yet Mr. Niketas is still struggling to
recall a younger, more hopeful Harold Overton. The recent memories are closer by: Mr.
Overton forwarding an e-mail message from a
student who liked his lecture that day. A telephone call to share the nice note another student included on a term paper. There was a
hunger there, Mr. Niketas says, a grasping
for straws.
When Lisette Luton remembers Harold
Overton, its at the Continental Corner, the
Greek restaurant 10 minutes from campus,
where she, Mr. Crout, and Mr. Overton made
up a regular Friday-night dinner club. She can
still smell the smoke. Of the group, only Harold smoked, but if you were going out with
Harold, you were sitting in the smoking section.
And you were sitting more than 10 feet
from the bar. He still had the Baptist in him.
Though she looks young enough to be mistaken for an undergraduate, Ms. Luton hardly
seems so carefree. She doesnt part easily with
a smile. Mr. Overtons influence, his death,
and its aftermath have shaped an already
rocky time at Charleston Southern.
In 1997, after 10 years in graduate school at
the University of Virginia, Ms. Luton, then
31, was glad to get a permanent job. If anything, Harold Overton was even happier. By
55

then a department chairman, he had landed
a promising young scholar who could help to
revive a French program that had been on life
support. Like an uncle protecting a favorite
niece, he did his best to make his new charge
comfortable.
Ive always wondered, he said earnestly, driving her to campus for a job interview,
how that vowel sound eu entered the
French language?
Even after she accepted the post, he worried
she wouldnt show up. On the August day she
arrived, his was the first friendly face she saw
on campus.
He had the biggest grin, Ms. Luton says.
Harold Overton must have seen a little of
himself, as he had been two decades earlier,
in Lisette Luton. Both from research universities, both with humanities Ph.D.s marginal to Charleston Southerns pre-professional
bent.
His cause became helping her to survive, if
not thrive, at this Baptist teaching college. He
explained to her the ways of a small school,
how important it was to attract students to her
classes, how the administration measured effectiveness by the numbers.
And he gave her a social life, inviting her
out with other faculty members for their regular dinners. Friday night was a sure thing.
But then thered be Sunday night, too, and
sometimes Tuesday as well.
What little world he had, she says, he
kind of pulled me into it.
Theyd argue over what time to meet, who
had to drive the farthest, whether to try a new
restaurant or to stick with an old favorite. The
Greek place, owned and run by Mr. Niketass
brother-in-law, was a good compromise.
The three professors, all unmarried, had a
nice little routine. We need separate checks
please, Mr. Overton, always formal, would
remind the waitress.
After that, hed sit back and let Mr. Crout
dominate the table. As a chairman out with
a professor in his department, Mr. Overton
tried to keep the mood cheerful. Still, like
workers everywhere, they gossiped about their
jobs. Once someone said, Lets talk about
something that isnt C.S.U. Ms. Luton recalls. And we looked at each other and said,
What else is there, but work?
Today, Ms. Luton cant stop talking about
Charleston Southern, but its really Mr.
Overton she wont let go. Once, she says, she
stepped into the Continental Corner, peered
into the smoking section, and began to cry. In
her minds eye, there he was, poring over the
newspaper, a curl of cigarette smoke drifting
up from the table, waiting for the other professors to arrive.
Then she remembered Harold was gone
and headed back to the clear air in the other part of the restaurant.
He so quickly disappeared, she says.
about Harold Overton, his

big dreams and staunch modesty,
was already evident in a little article in the Greenville High School
student newspaper celebrating the
Class of 1955 graduation. He says nothing
has ever happened to him, it reads. Not
much it hasnt.
The article painted in his accomplishments: Latin club, debate team, homecoming
escort. Photos from the time show a young
man with a full head of dark hair and a sweet,
somewhat nervous smile. After high school,
he told the newspaper, hed be going to Mississippi College, to major in foreign languages or political science.
He always was a bookworm, says his
favorite aunt, Katherine Kilby, flipping
through old snapshots in the living room of
the Overton family home. He worked in a
o much
Robert Crout surprised

mourners by revealing
Mr. Overtons money
worries, fears about
the future, and
unhappiness with
Two weeks later,
Mr. Crout was fired.
library when he was coming up. He was always studying.
The only child of a gas-truck driver and
a carpet mill worker, Harold realized that
books could take him places. Yet one book
the Good Book loomed largest of all. He
had to decide between teaching or the ministry.
For years, he kept both options open. At
Mississippi College, he majored in classical
(Greek and Latin) and modern (Spanish and
German) languages. In 1956, the pastor of
Greenvilles Second Baptist Church licensed
him to begin studies for the ministry. Later, he would tell friends that family pressure
led him into the religious life. But his college roommate, Bill Stewart, saw no sign of
that. He was very committed, very rooted in
Scripture, very stable and strong in his faith,
says Reverend Stewart, now a pastor in Eupora, Mississippi.
Mr. Overtons family remembers those
years as the time when he had his heart broken. He had met and gotten engaged to a
Chilean girl also studying for her degree. After graduation, both planned to do missionary work and the young woman returned to
Chile. While there, she wrote and asked Mr.
Overton for $1,000 so she could return to the
United States. He wired the money, and went
to the airport in Jackson to meet her flight.
She never showed up. Several years later, recalls his aunt, a foreign-looking man
approached Mr. Overton at the pulpit of a
church where he was preaching. I was the
man she ended up marrying back in Chile,
he said, and handed over the $1,000 in repayment. He never did go with another girl after that, his aunt says.
After college, Mr. Overton taught for several years in a nearby high school for boys
with discipline problems. Then, the ministry
firmly in sight, he entered the New Orleans
Baptist Theological Seminary, from which he
received a bachelor of divinity in 1964.
He was fascinated by texts in ancient Greek
and Hebrew. But his time as a pastor didnt
go well. Southern Baptist preachers have to
pound the pulpit every now and then, says
his aunt. Harold didnt have a showy streak,
nor the taste for congregation politics. He
found that he was called more to teach than
to preach, she adds.
Graduate school beckoned, and Mr. Overton entered the linguistics program at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, specializing in the history of language. He did
his masters thesis in 1966 on the evolution
of two verbs in Old Spanish. This love of
language dovetailed with his desire to serve.
While at Louisiana State, Mr. Overton taught
in summer programs for Baptist missionaries
who needed to get up to speed quickly on new
languages. He did his own missionary work
in Kenya. The experience made its way into
his Ph.D. dissertation, a grammar of the Kikuyu dialect, which he completed in 1972.
At 35, he was older than many aspiring professors. Yet his learning was wide-ranging
and impressive. He had studied three Bantu
languages, classical and late Latin, classical
Hebrew, Old Provencal, Old Icelandic, and
Koine Greek, not to mention Old, Middle,
and Modern English and German.
Mr. Overton kept various versions of his
c.v. on his computer. The languages he had
studied used to appear on the first page. This
was something to be proud of, to tell the
world. By the close of his teaching career,
they were left off completely expertise, he
came to realize, that had very little use at a
place like Charleston Southern University.
the Baptist College

at Charleston in 1972, when Harold Overton reluctantly accepted a
job there. He figured hed stay a year
or two, then move on. He had too
much education, he told his family, and that
t was called
Congratulations
on 50 years of
excellence.
Montclair State University applauds The Chronicle of
Higher Education for 50 years of educating educators.
In the Chronicles tradition of keeping readers informed,
Montclair State is proud to share some exciting updates
from our community:
Designation as a Research Doctoral University

by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of
Higher Education
The largest philanthropic gift in University history,

$20 million to support the Feliciano School of Business,
with its newly constructed $66 million building, complete
with financial trading floor, Bloomberg terminals, Center
for Entrepreneurship and 3D printing lab
The new, $55 million Center for Environmental and Life

Sciences, with state-of-the-art research laboratories for
the environmental and pharmaceutical life sciences
A strategic alliance with Sony Electronics to create one

of the most extensive 4K studio and production facilities
located on a university campus in a new $55.8 million
facility for the School for Communication and Media
Sustained enrollment growth to 21,000 students, with

achievement of Hispanic-Serving Institution status and
continued success in graduation rates
Learn more at montclair.edu/forward

scared away some of the colleges where hed
applied for jobs. With a mission to promote academic excellence in a Christian
environment, Baptist College was proud
to add an ordained minister to its faculty
roster. But Mr. Overton didnt exactly plant
deep roots. Though the college expected
every faculty member to be active in a local church, he never joined a nearby Baptist
congregation.
For some reason, he didnt step foot inside a church the whole time I knew him,
unless it was for a wedding or a funeral,
says George Niketas. Dying in the hospital, Mr. Overton was asked by a colleague
whether there was a clergyman he wanted
to ask in for comfort. He smiled weakly and
confessed that he wasnt an active churchgoer.
Now you know my secret, he said.
Like many religious institutions that
sprang up in the late 1960s, Baptist College was built more on devotion than on a
solid financial footing. Parishioners at the
First Baptist Church in downtown Charleston banded together to realize the dream of
their minister, the Rev. John A. Hamrick,
who called on the faithful to build a religious college in the lowcountry. The dream
became reality, but slowly. Officially chartered in 1964, with Mr. Hamrick as its president, the college held its first classes in a
church, with more than a hundred students
housed in the St. John Hotel downtown.
By 1972, the college was growing into its
campus, a brightly scrubbed oasis of pale
yellow buildings built low to the ground,
perched at the intersection of two highways
17 miles north of the city. Almost 2,000 students were enrolled, and more professors
were needed to teach them.
Mr. Overton was hired by the English
department, which wanted a professor to
teach the history of the language and other basic linguistics courses. Housed in the
basement of the library, the department
was young and sociable. Professors ate together almost every day, sometimes bringing a favorite poem to share and discuss. It
seemed that Harold was the perfect faculty
member, says Josephine Humphreys, who
taught in the department in the 1970s, before leaving to write novels. He was credentialed, he was highly articulate, and he
was Baptist.
Colleagues describe him, then and now,
as unfailingly polite and considerate. He
was careful about everything, says Ms.
Humphreys. He never left an empty cup in
the faculty room.
He was there, but not there; in 1973, his
first appearance in the college yearbook,
hes misnamed as Dr. Howard Overton. He
was always in the background at events,
says Margaret T. Gilmore, one of the col-
leges founders and its former public-relations director.

His close friends say the professor was
looking to leave from the start. For a while,
at least, he might have had a chance. Linguistics was a thriving field when Mr. Overton got his doctorate in 1972, and his dissertation touched on exciting new work. Noam
Chomsky and his Massachusetts Institute of
Technology acolytes were shaking up one
department after another.
But Mr. Overton got his Ph.D. from
L.S.U., not M.I.T., and his research interests
were scattered. He talked about continuing his dissertation work, but never quite
got started. Then, in 1975, the job market
crashed. Leading departments wrote letters
of warning to aspiring doctoral students,
urging them to think twice before entering
graduate school.
Harold Overton was never on the fast
Professors often
stay on indefinitely,
frozen in titles
instructor, assistant
professor that fit
more comfortably
on colleagues
half their age.
track. But the Baptist College was an especially tough place for a linguist to have landed. Knee deep in teaching four courses a semester, not to mention 12 office hours per
week, his work on faculty committees, and
the colleges insistence that professors attend
religious convocations, he missed the moment. Its a familiar story to Walt Wolfram,
the president-elect of the Linguistic Society
of America, who never met Mr. Overton but
knows many professors in similar straits. It
sounds like he got caught in a conspiracy of
all the wrong things at all the wrong times
where he went to school, what he did his
research on, where he got his first job, says
Mr. Wolfram.
At the end of his life, Mr. Overton would
still talk about a job offer from Montclair
State College that he had turned down in
those early years. By then, with retirement
looming, he had become obsessed by his low
salary. Today, the average annual salary of a
full-time linguistics professor at Montclair
State is $59,000; a professor of Mr. Overtons
seniority could pull down as much as $80,000.
staying in Charleston, Mr.

Overton stepped aboard the Baptist Colleges fiscal roller coaster.
He became subject to the whims
of an academic culture where personal loyalty is all-important, and popularity
with students counts. Instead of an up-or-out
tenure-and-promotion system, the college
advances some people quickly, while others languish for years, turned down but not
turned out.
Its the worst of both worlds, says Tunis
Romein, a veteran professor of English. You
have the insecurity that comes without tenure, he explains. Yet professors often stay on
indefinitely, frozen in titles instructor, assistant professor that fit more comfortably
on colleagues half their age.
As a humanities professor with an obscure
specialty, Mr. Overton was already hamstrung.
He was required to teach literature and
composition courses out of his field. The
courses he wanted to teach didnt draw many
students. And a professors status with the
administration depended heavily on student
evaluations. Evaluations were used as a club,
to keep someone from advancing, says Mr.
Niketas.
Over the years, Mr. Overton taught composition, literature, and public speaking, as
well as subjects closer to his field: phonetics,
semantics, history of the English language.
Between semesters, he taught short courses
that interested him, including science-fiction
writing and the Norse saga.
Still, many students found him an indifferent teacher, a fact that Mr. Overton had a
hard time accepting. In the classroom, his
love for language transported him into another realm, says Pamela Peek, an associate professor of Spanish. He could get all caught up
and not notice that it wasnt reaching the students. When students did show interest, and
talent, Mr. Overton would pounce, buttonholing them for chats in the hallway, or bringing
in brochures to encourage graduate school.
But most undergraduates had little interest in the fields he cared about. The last time
he taught a class in early-English literature,
only three students signed up. Meanwhile,
faculty colleagues who reviewed his courses didnt like what they saw. Every course
turned out to be a linguistics course, says
Carol J. Drowota, who succeeded Mr. Niketas as chairman of the English department.
Mr. Overton would bristle when other professors questioned his course content. But he
was not a complainer. He did his work and
tried, it seems vainly, to get noticed. And every once in a while, Mr. Overtons skills and
the schools needs meshed nicely, creating
a meaningful new opportunity for him on
campus.
In 1979, Mr. Overton was asked to head up
an English Language Institute, allowing the
y
college to recruit foreign students whose English skills were weak. It was a good deal for
everybody. The college enrolled tuition-paying students, and Mr. Overton applied his
expertise in second-language acquisition,
skills that werent being utilized in freshman composition courses. He was excited to
work again with international students, after his time in Africa. Many of the students
were Iranian, and he took them sightseeing
to downtown Charleston. Over time, though,
the fundamentalist revolution put a crimp in
things. Thousands of miles from home, Iranian students sympathetic to the Shah were
battling Khomeini supporters in the middle of South Carolina, in Harold Overtons
program.
The professor tried to play mediator,
scheduling classes at different times so the
factions met as little as possible. But administrators say the effort was for naught. My
recollection, says A. Kennerley Bonnette,
the provost, is he probably thought it was
time to do a flush he signals a toilet flushing and start again. The program was
discontinued in 1986. Friends say Mr. Over-
ton quietly pressed for another go, to no avail.

Meanwhile, he wasnt getting rich. According to the records he meticulously kept on his
computer, the professor earned $11,500 in his
first year.
His salary went up $460 a year after that,
and raises teetered between 4 and 5 percent
a year for much of the high-inflation 1970s.
Then, in 1977, he got no raise. The college
made up for it the next year, boosting his base
salary 9 percent, then 7 percent, to $16,165.
Then, in 1980, no raise. In 1982 and 1983,
no raise. In 1985, the year Mr. Overton got
tenure, professors had to take a 10-percent
pay cut when the college declared a financial crisis. (Salaries were restored later in the
year.)
The 1980s were a bleak time at the Baptist College. Whispers of mismanagement
mingled with rumors of the colleges demise.
We were all looking for jobs, says Mr. Romein, the English professor. Mr. Overton was
among them, and he applied wherever there
were openings. In 1986, he asked Mr. Niketas to write him recommendations for jobs at
Swarthmore College and at the Spartanburg
campus of the University of South Carolina.

About this time, Mr. Overton tried to establish a sideline as an antiques dealer. A regular at Charlestons monthly flea markets,
he always took special pleasure in spotting a
valuable piece amid the cheap doodads. Hoping to make money off a good eye and diligent research, he began ambitiously, with a
booth in a shop downtown, on King Street.
That proved too competitive. He shifted his
stock to an antiques mall in Myrtle Beach,
which he looked after, but visited infrequently, for the next 13 years.
Meanwhile, the college retrenched, paring
away programs that did not put students into
seats. As a linguist, Mr. Overton might have
feared for his own job. Yet when several small
departments were eliminated, the professor
came to the rescue, agreeing in 1989 to head
the new language and visual arts department.
It was less a power base than an orphanage,
composed of stray assistant professors and
instructors in art, drama, foreign languages,
and speech.
By 1990, when Baptist College evolved into
IMAGES
June 14, 1989
Defiance and
Death in Beijing
When the Chinese governments bloody suppression of protesters began
at Tiananmen Square,
a Chronicle reporter,
Robert F. Jacobson, was
interviewing students at
nearby Beijing University.
Word of the massacre
soon reached the campus. Something very bad
has happened, said a
physics instructor who
arrived by bicycle. Soon
after, an activist who had
escaped the armys assault said, Before, everything was so complicated.
Now it is so simple.
(Stuart Franklin, Magnum
Photos)
59

Charleston Southern University, the professor was earning $29,760 a year. Being chairman got him no more pay, but his four-classa-term teaching load was lightened by one per
semester. Still, if enough students wanted to
take a class and there was no faculty member
available, it fell on Mr. Overton as chairman
to take on the overload.
It didnt matter how large the classes got,
especially in the summer, when the university
scrambled for instructors. Today, teaching an
extra course earns a professor between $1,650
and $2,500.
The bigger picture was even more depressing for Mr. Overton and his humanities colleagues. The university was adding professional and graduate programs. New business
professors, fresh out of school, were earning
as much or more than long-serving English
professors.
In 1995, the last recorded year in Mr. Overtons computer files, and 23 years after he began teaching at the Baptist College, Harold
Overton was earning $34,154. The university
wont disclose further salary details. But no
one has denied Mr. Crouts assertion that at
his death Mr. Overton was earning less than
$40,000 a year.
He was still only an associate professor.
He believed that if he did a good job, eventually he would be told by superiors that it
was the time to apply for the promotion he
hoped for, Mr. Crout said at the memorial service, the president and provost sitting
nearby. But the word never came down.
In spring 1999, his last full semester, Mr.
Overton taught five courses, including a twocourse overload. Then he taught each of the
two summer sessions. He was slated to teach
four classes last fall one more than was required of him, as chairman but fell ill before the semester began.
Administrators say that Charleston Southern is now doing as much as possible to raise
professors salaries. This includes using a new
group of peer institutions as the benchmarks
for comparison. Weve been intentional at
this school about raising faculty salaries over
the last 15 years, says President Hunter.
Our records will show that.
Indeed, A.A.U.P. statistics show that salaries are going up. Yet many professors say
theyre not at Charleston Southern for the
money. This isnt just a paycheck were
concerned with changing our students lives,
says Charles Smedley, an associate professor
of sociology. Our faculty tend to be very
active in their churches. They do volunteer
work. They tend to think about their jobs as
an extension of that.
Mr. Romein, the veteran English professor, says hes pressed the administration to
deal with salary compression, and that lately
progress has been made on that front. While
he calls Mr. Overtons salary unconscionably
low, he insists the professor rarely expressed

frustration over his pay.
Instead of complaining about what was
going on in school, says Mr. Romein, Harold would talk about issues. He was very interested in the world around him. He was not
locked up in himself.
The rare time that Harold Overton made
his anger known, everyone noticed.
He was still a professor then, called with
his English-department colleagues into
the Gold Room, on the second floor of the
Strom Thurmond Student Center, to meet
with a former business professor turned administrator. The purpose was to encourage
Charleston Southern
President Jairy Hunter
Jr. says Mr. Overton
appreciated the raises
he got: All the stuff
youre getting blown
in your ear does not
represent Dr. Overton.
departments to recruit and retain more students. When words like deadwood and
faculty freeloader began creeping into the
administrators remarks, Professor Overton
had had enough. He stood straight up he
was among the tallest people there and
marched out of the room. When he left, the
door sprang back and slammed shut with a
bang. Heads turned.
Mr. Overton later confessed he had been
mortified by the disturbance his unintentionally noisy exit caused. He wanted to make a
point, he said, but not that loudly.
obert crout,
by contrast, was
never shy about making his opinions known. Charleston Southern doesnt take to such personalities, and Mr. Crout has fought
an uphill battle for acceptance all along. He
came to the university in 1989 after research
stints at Cornell, Princeton, and the University of Virginia, as well as teaching posts at
Oregon State and the University of South
Carolina at Aiken. He has won several notable research fellowships for a long-in-theworks biography of the Marquis de Lafayette.
At Charleston Southern, it hasnt counted for
enough. Turned down twice for promotion to
full professor, he says hes been tagged, mis-
takenly, as a troublemaking Ivy League elitist, when in fact he wholeheartedly believes in

this colleges mission.
If you brought in a president who had a
genuine religious interest and a scholarly background, then this place can be what
the founders intended, he says. Hes not the
only one who faults the current administration for putting dollar signs first. Its an academic strip-mining operation, says A.J. Conyers III, the former chairman of the religion
department, who now teaches at Baylor University. Administrators are making quite a
good living. And the faculty are not benefiting from it.
There were other professors to take up
such causes. Mr. Overton tried instead to
protect and expand his tiny department. Publicly, he remained polite and optimistic. But
he told friends he was protesting silently. He
stopped wearing a tie, then a sport jacket, to
campus. He attended convocation only intermittently.
In 1995, after 23 years at Charleston Southern, he applied for the chairmanship of the
English department at Trident Technical
College, a two-year school nearby. His salary
could have climbed as high as $58,000 a year,
but he didnt even get an interview. According
to Mr. Crout, Professor Overton finally realized he wasnt going to teach anywhere else.
By then, the burgeoning Internet had become a ticket to a wider world. He was among
the first Charleston Southern professors to
have a home computer, and he became wellknown for staying up deep into the night,
roaming across Web sites on medieval literature and linguistics, listening in on the kinds
of conversations he couldnt have on campus.
Mostly, he lurked. In the quiet of his living
room, hed download images and maps that
he could use in class. But as often as he could,
hed try to find something, a tidbit or a lead,
that someone else would find interesting.
Lisette, this is a really great site! he wrote
to Ms. Luton, the French professor. You can
hear the lines from The Song of Roland read in
Old French.
He began to plan for his retirement,
talking with Mr. Crout about an Internet
business that could bring him extra income.
Still, there were indignities to surmount. After missing an important faculty meeting,
Mr. Overton got a note from an administrator that questioned his dedication, according
to Mr. Crout. This was a shock to his very fiber, and an insult to everything he stood for,
he said at the memorial service.
On campus, Mr. Overton pressed, in small
ways, for professors to be treated more equitably. He asked the head of the Faculty Senate to push for salary increases for professors
who teach large classes. In regular meetings
of department chairmen, he spoke up about
the salary inequities between new and senior
CRICOS 00233E J000998
Celebrate the
RE MARK AB LE
Griffith University congratulates The Chronicle

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weve grown to be recognised as performing among the top
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Griffith was created to be a different kind of university, and
we know success often comes from being an exception to
the normchallenging convention, adapting and innovating,
creating bold new trends and pioneering solutions ahead
of their time. Weve never lost sight of our progressive
beginnings, and today, were known for our high impact
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student experience, our commitment to social justice
and our welcoming environment.
We believe in the potential for all people to be remarkable

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Visit remarkablegriffith.com.au to meet some of our
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Materialise, to bring the concept to life.

professors. Without raising his voice, the polite Southern gentleman had begun to make
himself heard. This, Mr. Crout says, was
not the Harold Overton I knew when I first
came to Charleston Southern.
Hiring Ms. Luton to teach French was
his last accomplishment. From the start, he
looked after her like a mother hen, encouraging her every move to revive a badly withered
program, fighting to keep offering French
courses that didnt draw many students. In
his 1998-99 year-end chairmans report, Mr.
Overton noted her successes. As for his own
achievements, there just wasnt much to say.
He had organized a luncheon for recent graduates from the department, at which he surprised another long-term professor with a
tribute and a corsage. Under special honors
or recognition, he wrote: Dr. Overton redirected the course, General Semantics, this
year to emphasize critical thinking. He introduced the practice of writing in e-prime as a
helpful method to make one think more originally as he writes.
What was he thinking as he ground out
the required report, yet another chronicle of
the everyday and the banal? That he kept to
himself.
But when good fortune smiled on his
friends, Mr. Overton smiled along. He was
there at the Continental Corner in 1998, saying farewell to Rose Bigler, a criminal-justice
professor who was leaving for a job in Illinois
after four years in Charleston. He whispered
in my ear to be happy, Ms. Bigler recalls.
He told me Id fallen into the honey pot.
Harold said, This would never happen to
me, she adds. He was resigned to that.
to twice their
size, his skin jaundiced an otherworldly yellow, Harold Overton spent his final weeks in and
out of Roper Hospital in downtown Charleston.
Early that September, the drained professor missed the second day of a faculty retreat
that preceded the fall semester. He dragged
himself in for a checkup, the first time he had
been to a doctor in 17 years. Soon afterward,
he sent a message to his dean and told her he
couldnt teach his classes that semester. He
had liver cancer.
Way back when, Mr. Overton would host
an occasional party at his home, but that had
stopped years before. For the first time in a
long time, visitors from the campus came by
to see how he was doing; they were shocked
by what they found. Years of cats and dogs
and cigarette smoke and closed windows had
left an overpowering smell. Somehow, in the
last few months or was it longer? Harold Overton had begun to live like a shut-in.
He led most people on the campus to believe the cancer was treatable. For his close
is feet swollen
friends, he put on a brave face, or changed the

subject. Two days before he died, Ms. Luton says, he told me he had decided to retire
from teaching.
The day after that conversation, a package
arrived in her mailbox. After a moment, she
realized what was inside: The first copy of her
first book, a study of a French childrens author, adapted from her dissertation.
In her short time at Charleston Southern,
Mr. Overton had always made sure to ask
about its progress to publication. Here it
was, she says. I was so excited to be able to
show it to him.
She met Mr. Crout at the campus and they
drove together to the hospital. Inside Mr.
Today, the market

calls the tune, and
everybody dances to it.
The distance between
the haves and the havenots is widening across
higher ed, not just at
Overtons room, Elaine Niketas sat with his
grief-stricken aunt, who had been called in
from Mississippi.
Ms. Luton showed off the book to Harold.
Long before, he had confided to Mr. Crout
that he, too, once hoped to turn his dissertation into a book, only to discover that another
scholar had published on the same topic.
When it was time to leave, Mr. Overton
wanly reminded Ms. Luton not to leave her
book behind.
When does summer school end? he asked
as the two professors prepared to go. They
looked at each other, confused. Harold, one
said, its October. Early the next morning,
October 5, 1999, he died.
does not apologize

for speaking out on behalf of his
close friend Harold Overton.
For as long as hes been there,
Charleston Southerns leaders have pretty much buried their ghosts,
he says today. And they were ready to bury
Overton and hope this episode, too, would go
away.
As he fights for his job, Mr. Crout has collected letters from former colleagues who
corroborate his version of Mr. Overtons last
years. But Mr. Bonnette, the provost, says he
obert crout
never heard Mr. Overton express these complaints. Neither the professors salary nor his
working conditions were out of line for a religious college, like Charleston Southern, that
grew into a university, the provost adds. I
found him to be well suited for the environment here, comfortable with his life here, he
says.
I hope you do Dr. Overton justice, says
President Hunter, because all the stuff
youre getting blown in your ear does not represent Dr. Overton.
No one, not even his friends, can fully
answer certain questions. Why did Harold
Overton leave the church? Why didnt he ask
to be promoted to full professor?
Then there is the question that can only be
answered with another question.
Why did he stay?
Did he have a choice?
The academic world seemed more expansive when Harold Overton began teaching,
in 1972. Today, the market calls the tune,
and everybody dances to it. The distance
between the haves and the have-nots is widening throughout higher education, not
just at Charleston Southern University. Accounting professors at private institutions
average $67,000 a year, their colleagues in
communications about $20,000 less. Assistant professors of English start at $37,000,
on average; in classical languages, $39,000.
Meanwhile, a new assistant professor of
management earns $61,000, his colleague
in finance $77,000.
This big economic picture is cold comfort to professors like Harold Overton, who
spend year after year in their own classrooms, teaching the young. For them, money is a flawed but convenient way to measure the value of their work to the world at
large. Respect, after all, is much harder to
tabulate.
The Rev. Al Zadig Jr., the assistant to the
rector at St. Michaels Episcopal Church, visited and prayed with Mr. Overton several
times as he lay dying in Roper Hospital. Mr.
Crout, a member of the church, had asked the
minister to look in on his friend. You talk
to some people, Mr. Zadig remembers, and
theyll have a kind of vigor: Let me tell you a
story. This is what Ive done.
Harold Overton never described his accomplishments that way. He talked about
his career somewhat mournfully, Mr. Zadig
says. It was, Well, this is the way it was. Or,
This is how it happened. He was grieving
n
over what could have been.
Scott Heller joined The Chronicle in 1984, editing the faculty section and writing about scholarly issues in the humanities until his departure in
2001. He was arts editor of The Boston Globe
before joining the The New York Times, where
today he is deputy editor of Arts and Leisure and
theater editor.
IMAGES
February 19, 1992
Talking Heads From Academe

Jerrold M. Post, a political psychologist at George Washington University who submitted to repeated
interviews during the Persian Gulf war about his study of Saddam Hussein, wrote about the scholarly
risks of letting journalists dictate the agenda. One cannot provide a complex analysis in a series of
28-second sound bites, he wrote. The essays illustrator, James Yang, proceeded accordingly.
63
50 YEARS
OF HEADLINES
The World
A Passion for Learning: in Africa,

Latin America, and Around the Globe
The Chronicle began publication aiming to write about American colleges and universities, but it quickly turned its eye overseas. In addition to a network of correspondents
we recruited around the world, we sent our reporters to international campuses to
report first hand on developments, often in regions of conflict. We sent a reporter to
the American University of Beirut during the 1982 Lebanon war, and to El Salvador in
1983 after the Salvadoran army ransacked the National University of El Salvador. We
also had a reporter at Tiananmen Square in Beijing during the 1989 student uprising.
A signature event in The Chronicles international reporting was a special report it
published in 1986 on higher education under apartheid. Two editors, Malcolm G. Scully
and Paul Desruisseaux, in collaboration with the papers Cape Town correspondent,
Helen Zille, traveled throughout South Africa, visiting 10 university campuses and interviewing more than 150 people. Their report ran over 20 pages in the June 11, 1986,
issue.
In recent years, The Chronicle has focused its reporting on the large influx of foreign
students to U.S. campuses and the international spread of American higher education.
Dali Mpofu and Thandi Gqubule

were students at the U. of the
Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg,
in 1986, as South Africas
apartheid regime began to unravel.
CHRONICLE PHOTOGRAPH BY MALCOLM SCULLY
October 14, 1968
British Style of Student

Activism More Ideological
Than U.S. Brand
london
The Oxford Union, breeding-ground of
prime ministers, has produced one of the
worlds best known youthful radicals
Tariq Ali Englands Mark Rudd. Mr. Ali,
a 24-year-old Pakistani, is, like many British
student radicals, a socialist.
He draws large audiences for his frequent
speeches at universities. But he is more
interested in reforming society than in
changing universities now.
British radicals are much more ideology-oriented than their American counterparts. They know what kind of world they
want to build on the ashes of the existing
social and economic order. Mr. Rudd, and
most other American leaders of Students for
a Democratic Society, readily admit they are
uncertain in their vision of an ideal world.
October 28, 1968
Student Radicals in Berlin

Find Professors Power
Impregnable
berlin
In the United States, England, and Canada, many students believe that the education
they are receiving is valuable and that they
are being taught in a viable and coherent
manner. Such students are not easy to find in
Germany at least in West Berlin. Several
dozen German students, of a wide range of
political persuasions, who were interviewed
here felt the German university required
substantial change beginning with breaking the power of professors.
We have a Middle Ages monarchy here in
the universities, a 26-year-old student said.
Professors are like absolute monarchs. They
are not and cannot be forced to cooperate
with any sort of academic pattern. They just
work as they want.
September 15, 1982
American University
of Beirut Caught Up
in War in Lebanon
beirut, lebanon
I dont feel unsafe, but the danger is always present. Malcolm H. Kerr, president of
the American University of Beirut, 16 months

before his assassination in January 1984.
June 11, 1986
the flames slowly consumed the cloth.

A student told an American visitor:
Please, tell your country: The Chinese
government is very cruel.
South Africa: The Crisis,

the Campuses, and Some
Messages for Americans
March 2, 2007
johannesburg
These two black students at the white
university here find little to be happy about.
Dali Mpofu and Thandi Gqubule are studying at one of their countrys most prestigious
institutions. But the daily, dominant fact of
their lives is apartheid. The South African
governments policy of white supremacy is
evident to them everywhere even here at
the University of the Witwatersrand.
The university is working valiantly to find
new ways of serving blacks. It is raising money
for scholarships bursaries, it calls them
that would enable more blacks to enroll. In defiance of South African law, it is housing black
students in dormitories on its campus so they
will not have to commute long distances from
black townships every day. And it is trying to
recruit more black professors.
But Dali Mpofu and Thandi Gqubule often
feel isolated at the university sometimes,
indeed, invisible. No matter how well-intentioned, this is still a white dominated institution in a white-dominated society in which
80 percent of the people are black.
mumbai, india
A whirlwind tour of India highlights U.S.
institutions haste to find global partners
India is increasingly showing up on the
travel schedules of college presidents nationwide. Like American corporations that
began coming to India more than a decade
ago to tap the brain power of its millions
of inexpensive, well-educated engineers,
software writers, and medical technicians,
American higher-education institutions are
flocking here to recruit Indian students,
set up academic and research ventures, and
raise money, largely through their rapidly
expanding alumni bases. The most ambitious
among them are considering joint-degree
programs or full-fledged campuses.
June 14, 1989
Beijing University,
Before and After
The bloody crackdown
by the government stuns students
and faculty members
beijing
Shortly before dawn on the morning of
June 4, students at Beijing University began
to gather outside their dormitories. They
stood in a tight little circle, not far from the
campus store, in a meeting area known as
sanjiao di.
The first, fragmentary reports of the carnage that would leave hundreds perhaps
thousands of students and other people
dead were beginning to reach the campus
from Tiananmen Square, about 10 miles away.
Someone produced a stack of black armbands, and one by one the students reached out
for them and put them on. A soldiers uniform,
neatly folded, was placed on the pavement and
set on fire. About a dozen students encircled
it and stood motionless, their heads bowed, as
Cornell Courts
a Subcontinent
July 6, 2015
The Chinese Mothers

American Dream
beijing
This fall more than 275,000 Chinese students will start classes on American campuses,
nearly triple the number from any other country. But even as American colleges have come
to rely ever more on these students tuition
dollars, they may know very little about the
people writing the checks. Back in China, some
half-million parents are holding their breath.
The decision they made to send a child
across the globe in search of a better education and a better life is one fused with hope
and fear, spurred by motivations that are
complicated and sometimes contradictory. It
may be about the draw of the United States
or dissatisfaction with China, aspirations for
the future or pragmatism about the present,
a childs desire or a parents resolve. It may
be about all of that.
In many ways, mothers and fathers in
Beijing and Shanghai face the same concerns
as their counterparts in Minneapolis and
Dallas, fretting about whether their kid is
choosing the right college or an impractical
major. But for Chinese parents, the choice of
an American education for their child and
almost always their only child is not just a
financial investment. Its a political maneuver, a personal sacrifice, a bet on greater
n
opportunity abroad.
65
So You Want to Go
to Grad School?
The best piece of advice you can give an undergraduate
who wants to pursue a Ph.D. in the humanities is, dont
By THOMAS H. BENTON
ont go to graduate school.
June 6, 2003
The outlook for jobs in the humanities has
long been an obsessing concern in academe.
After rosy predictions in the late 1980s failed
to materialize, by 2003 it was hard to pretend
that the job market would ever bounce back.
Even so, many graduate-school deans, department chairs, and disciplinary-association
leaders encouraged potential grad students
to take their chances. Our columnist Thomas
H. Benton called those optimists out. In So
You Want to Go to Grad School? Benton
an assistant professor protecting himself with
a pseudonym explored the psychology of
the desire to get an English Ph.D. in a down
market and accused program leaders of intellectual provincialism, at best, and cynicism,
at worst. The essay went viral, angering many
leaders in the field. But along with a series
of follow-up essays, it helped change the
conversation about graduate education, as
humanities leaders began to explore limits on
enrollment and training students for alternative careers.
But ... I burn with an

intense, gemlike flame for
Victorian poetry.
Dont go.
But ... Im sure Id love teaching.
Why are you really considering graduate
school?
Well, to be perfectly honest, I majored in
English, and I cant find a job. At least not one
that pays anything or has health benefits. Im
thinking I can hide out in grad school until
the economy gets better, and, hey, if I really
like it, I can just become a professor, right?
Hmm. Should I repress a long, low, bitter
laugh? Or do I give this misguided youth the
facts I wish I had when I was in the same predicament in 1990?
When should we stop coddling our undergraduates? Puffing up their self-esteem? Making utterly unrealistic promises about their future prospects?
Many undergraduates have never known
academic failure; most have never faced a serious intellectual challenge. They have received
a steady stream of praise from teachers their
entire conscious lives. There are few ways for
students to know whether they are really competitive, given that so many of them receive
such high grades for such mediocre work.
How do you finally say to your advisee,
Even though you have a 3.9 GPA and everyone here thinks you are wonderful, I dont
think you should go to graduate school if your
aim is to become a professor. Its just not that
easy.
Last year, the total number of advertised
jobs in English dropped from 983 to 792, and
only about half of those jobs are on the tenure track. Remember that the 977 doctorates produced in 2000-1 will have to compete
with hundreds of job-seekers from previous
years, to say nothing of all the adjunct faculty
members who are looking for full-time, tenure-track work.
The Modern Language Associations own

data very conservative and upbeat in my
opinion indicate that only about one in five
newly admitted graduate students in English
will eventually become tenure-track professors.
Are you the one in five? Really? Well,
thats what the other four think too. Take my
advice (I secretly care about you as a person):
Dont go.
If you speak this way, four out of five students will think youre a crank and find a
more flattering adviser: Of course, my little
genius, you can be anything you want to be.
For a few years toward the end of the 1990s
it seemed like undergraduates had finally gotten the message about grad school in the humanities. Some of the grumbling by unemployed Ph.D.s was breaking into the national media. More importantly, undergraduates
had better options for employment during
the boom economy. Even creative-writing
majors were becoming content developers.
But graduate-school enrollments soar
during recessions. They seem like a haven
from low-paying jobs that feel degrading to
students with egos inflated by a lifetime of
empty praise. And, inevitably, many universities use recessions to expand their corps of
low-paid, grad-student teachers and research
assistants who are mostly unemployable after
they complete their degrees.
But Im not sure I want to be a professor anyway, says the student. I just think
it would be fun to spend a few years in grad
school.
Remember, I advise, that if you go to
graduate school, you are contributing to the
problem by making it less necessary for universities to hire full-time faculty members at
decent wages. If you have a burning passion
for Victorian poetry, you can probably satisfy this passion by yourself. Force yourself to
read a few dozen academic books before deciding to dedicate your life to a subject. That
is what one does in graduate school anyway.

Most learning is unsupervised, independent,
and onerous. Why pay or work according to
an institutional timetable unless one needs an
academic credential?
Also, remember that most grad students
start out as dilettantes, thinking theyll just
hang out for a few years on a stipend. But
eventually they become completely invested in
the profession, unable to envision themselves
doing anything else. A few years can become
a decade or more. Meanwhile, everyone else is
beginning their adult lives while you remain
trapped in permanent adolescence.
I want to say more (but usually refrain): Be
wary of people who claim, unambiguously,
that grad school is a wonderful experience,
a means of acquiring the polish of culture
a kind of grand tour before entering the
real world. Professionalism obligates people
to speak positively about their alma mater in
public.
rad school is not all fun and per-
sonal enrichment for many people. It can involve poverty-level wages, uncertain employment
conditions, contradictory demands
by supervisors, irrelevant research projects,
and disrespectful treatment by both the tenured faculty members and the undergraduates (both of whom behave, all too often, as
management and customers). Grad school is a
confidence-killing daily assault of petty degradations. All of this is compounded by the
fear that it is all for nothing; that you are a
useful fool.
I wish graduate school in the humanities
could be about loving a subject and learning
to teach it. I wish it could consummate the
values we preach to our undergraduates. It
pains me to tell some of my best students that
the structure of employment in the academy
has been hidden from them that many faculty members make less than fast-food workers and have no health benefits.
In darker moments I am quite sure that
higher education in the humanities as we
know it is not even likely to last out the careers
of the younger tenure-track faculty members.
Doesnt that impose some kind of obligation
on us? Shouldnt we turn out the lights?
Go home, find any kind of job, and wait.
The economy will change in a few years. New
opportunities will emerge, and youll be free
to seize them, possibly with only a few months
of training. Do not plan on a lifetime career
in a single field. Youll change careers at least
once every decade. And, heres the good news:

Your undergraduate degree in the humanities
has prepared you for that kind of flexibility.
Use your education to help yourself, your future family, and the larger society. Do not use
it to sustain unethical labor practices in the
new corporate universities.
Dont be in such a hurry to re-institutionalize yourself. Throw your mortarboard in
the air. Consider yourself free for the first
time in your life. If you really love knowledge and teaching, theres a whole world of
both outside the academy. Find it or create it!
Go! And if your advisees have listened and
still want to talk with you about grad school,
then maybe they are right for it.
To them, one owes a different kind of advice. And Ill try to offer it in my next two columns, first on how to select a graduate school
in the humanities and then on how to maximize your chances for academic employment
n
(and other alternatives) afterward.
Thomas H. Benton was the pseudonym of an assistant professor of English at a Midwestern liberal-arts college. Once tenured, he revealed himself to be William Pannapacker, now a professor
at Hope College who continues to write frequently
for The Chronicle.
IMAGES
June 1, 2007
Secularism
in the Elimination
Round
To illustrate a review
of Christopher Hitchenss
book God Is Not Great:
How Religion Poisons
Everything, Steve Brodner
offers up the author as
an atheist crusader. In
Hitchenss book, writes
Jacques Berlinerblau,
all religions are seen
as equally depraved.
67
Psst. Wanna Buy a Ph.D?

Some professors have dubious doctorates, other professors sell them,
and colleges often look the other way
By THOMAS BARTLETT and SCOTT SMALLWOOD
I
June 25, 2004
Its no secret that alongside the 3,500-some
American colleges that require students to
earn their degrees lurks a smaller world where
people can simply pay for them. But what if
the two worlds intersect more than people realize? Armed with a list of suspected diploma
mills, a pair of Chronicle reporters began
searching for mentions of them on the web
pages of college faculty and staff. They found
plenty. In a four-month investigation, they
talked to professors with fake degrees and
the administrators who hired them and touted
their credentials. They found faculty members
who ran lucrative diploma mills on the side.
They uncovered cozy connections among operators. And they witnessed one diploma-mill
doyenne who created the agency that accredited her own business and many others
coach a friend in how the system works.
The resulting package of a half-dozen articles
was a finalist for a National Magazine Award.
Here is the lead story.
rich in irony: A
member of a college accreditation board
holds a Ph.D. from a university that
sells doctorates to anyone with $1,500.
This year The Chronicle reported that
Michael Davis, a member of the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and
Schools, received his doctorate from Saint
Regis University, which claims recognition
from the government of war-torn Liberia and
requires little, if any, academic work. He has
since been booted from the board.
Most people in higher education probably
dismissed the news as a laughable aberration.
Regrettable and embarrassing, but nothing
more.
It turns out there are plenty of others like
Mr. Davis, at all levels of higher education:
A wrestling coach in Wisconsin. A librarian
in Texas. An assistant dean at a Baptist university. Not to mention dozens of professors
who hold degrees from unaccredited colleges,
some of which require nothing more than a
credit-card number and a mailing address.
And those are just the ones who can be
found in the nooks and crannies of the Internet. Their true numbers are anybodys guess,
although considering that unaccredited institutions rake in hundreds of millions of dollars each year, its safe to say the problem isnt
small.
Perhaps even more worrisome than the professors who earn degrees from such institutions are the professors who run them. For
example, two professors at accredited colleges
in New York State each operate an offshore
university that awards an array of degrees, including doctorates. Neither operation comes
close to meeting the standards of its accredited counterparts in the United States.
Academe has become home to a flourishing
underground market in degreesand judging by the reaction of some administrators,
legitimate colleges often dont seem to care,
or at least not enough to thoroughly check the
t was a revelation
backgrounds of their professors. That the

people who hold these degrees make excuses
doesnt surprise me, says David Linkletter, a
program specialist with the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. That institutions defend them does.
While experts on diploma mills broadly
defined as unaccredited institutions that require students to do little or no work to earn
degrees warn of the damage they do to the
integrity of higher education, many satisfied
customers say they get their moneys worth.
Just the ability to put Ph.D. behind my name
is what I was looking for, says Wayne J. del
Corral, who teaches finance part time at Tulane University. Itll make things a lot easier
with respect to submitting papers to journals
and so forth.
He also appreciates that his diploma from
Lacrosse University looks so real. The seal is
very nice, he says.
aldosta state universitys Web
site lists an assistant professor of

management as Dr. Jack Malehorn.
What the Web site doesnt say,
and what students and colleagues probably
dont know, is that Mr. Malehorns Ph.D. is
from Shelbourne University.
Shelbourne does not exist. It never existed.
It claimed to be based in Ireland, but actually was one of more than a dozen names
used by an international diploma-mill company that sold degrees, beginning in the mid1990s, for $500 to $2,500, according to an
investigation last year by the Federal Trade
Commission. The company, based in Romania, sent millions of unsolicited e-mail messages around the world, promising recipients
that they could receive degrees without doing
any academic work. Along with the diplomas,
the company also provided fake transcripts
and phony letters of recommendation.
When contacted by The Chronicle, Mr.
Malehorn at first denies that his Ph.D. is from

Shelbourne, even though his rsum says it is.
No, no, Im sorry, he says. I wish I could
help you.
After further inquiries, Mr. Malehorn acknowledges that his doctorate is, in fact, from
Shelbourne. He also contends that he did actual academic work to obtain it. It was all
through an Internet connection, he says. My
dissertation certainly seemed legitimate.
His boss doesnt think so. Kenneth L. Stanley, dean of the College of Business Administration, says he knew before hiring Mr. Malehorn that he had a fake Ph.D. Hell, we knew
it was worthless, says Mr. Stanley. Give us
a break!
But he hired Mr. Malehorn anyway because, according to the dean, its not uncommon for professors, or even top administrators, to have bogus credentials. Ive dealt
with provosts with degrees from mail-order
institutions here in the United States, Mr.
Stanley says. (He declines to name any of
those provosts or their institutions.)
Whats important, he argues, is that Valdosta State does not recognize the degree,
nor was it a factor in the decision to hire Mr.
Malehorn. If Jack had come here and we had
hired him thinking, Oh, well, hes doctorally
qualified, and were claiming that qualification, then were idiots and hes wrong, says
Mr. Stanley.
Contrary to the deans insistence, however, it appears that Valdosta State does consider the degree valid. Why else would the professor be referred to as Dr. in the bulletin
that announced his hiring in 2002? Why else
would he be listed as Dr. in the universitys
telephone directory and on the management
departments Web site? And why else would
he be allowed to call himself Dr. Jack Malehorn, Ph.D. when he contributes articles to
the Journal of Business Forecasting?
When all that is brought to Mr. Stanleys
attention, he is quiet for several seconds. Its
a little embarrassing, he admits. He recalls
referring to Mr. Malehorn as Dr. on several occasions, including in front of students. I
guess, you know, were guilty of institutionalizing a fraud, says Mr. Stanley.
The dean pledges that references to Mr.
Malehorns Ph.D. will be deleted from official
university material. Six weeks later, the management departments Web page still calls
him Dr.
of Mercy College, in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., Benjamin B. Weisman, a professor of

business, lists an honorary doctorate from the International
University for Graduate Studies. The degree
is there alongside his masters and Ph.D. from
New York University.
Founded in 1979, International University is located in the Caribbean nation of Saint
n the web site
Kitts and Nevis. The university has four administrators and no faculty members, according to its Web site. It awards 11 graduate degrees, including doctorates in psychology,
nursing science, and education. Students must
complete a five-day residency on the island
before receiving their diplomas.
When first questioned about his honorary
degree from International University, Mr.
Weisman says he cant remember much about
the institution, other than that he is pretty sure it is accredited. I think its in Saint
Kitts, he says. What Mr. Weisman, 68, fails
to mention is that he, in fact, owns International University. In a later conversation, after
acknowledging that he started and runs the
university, he offers a spirited defense of the
institution, which he says has been unfairly
maligned by some state regulators.
Mr. Weisman says he and a partner started
International to help graduate students who
have trouble transferring credits from one
university to another. International will accept those credits and allow students to complete their degrees. We act as an umbrella,
That the people who

hold these degrees
make excuses doesnt
surprise me. That
institutions defend
them does.
he says.
No one is admitted to the Ph.D. program
who has not completed at least 70 graduate
credit hours, according to Mr. Weisman. Nor
does the university offer credit for so-called
life experience, he says. There is no way I
would prostitute the degree that I give under
any circumstances, says Mr. Weisman. We
give no credit for life experience. Zero.
An admissions counselor at International, however, tells a different story. Life experience does count toward a degree, she says.
When a caller explains that he has done no
doctoral-level work, she assures him that that
doesnt have to be a problem. Youd be surprised what would constitute credit, she says,
adding that the caller could receive his Ph.D.
in a few months.
When asked about those statements, Mr.
Weisman says his employee was new and
made a mistake. However, Edward Jackowski,
who received a Ph.D. in behavioral management from International University, says his
credits were based entirely on life experience.
Mr. Jackowski, owner of a fitness company in
Manhattan, took no courses and wrote a dissertation on what motivates people to exercise. He liked the program, he says, because
it didnt take up much time.
Michael Hannigan saw an advertisement
for International University in a magazine. An
associate professor of social work at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, he had never
finished the Ph.D. program in family therapy at Florida State University and was looking
for a way to get his degree.
The professor calls International lightweight and says he is used to a bit more rigor in academic things. Still, he believes that
his degree from the university is legitimate.
They have the same accreditation as Oxford
has, says Mr. Hannigan.
Not quite. According to Dale Gough, director of International Education Services at
the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, the University
of Oxford is recognized by the government of
Britain, as are several colleges in the Caribbean. International University is not among
them.
Mr. Weisman says his institution is accredited by the government of Saint Kitts and
Nevis, a recognition that experts like Mr.
Gough and Alan Contreras, director of the
Oregon Office of Degree Authorization, a
state agency, consider meaningless. After all,
the Caribbean nation once accredited a university that doled out degrees for watching I
Love Lucy and other sitcoms.
Mr. Weisman says he didnt start International University to make money. But this
year he expects it to graduate between 50 and
100 students, each of whom must pay $10,500
in tuition plus $1,500 for food, travel, and
lodging. On the basis of those figures, International University should pull in between
$500,000 and $1-million this year.
What do Mercy College officials think of
Mr. Weismans Caribbean operation? A college spokesman says the professor, who has
tenure, can do whatever he likes as long as
it does not interfere with his duties at Mercy. The spokesman notes, however, that the
college would not accept transfer credits from
International University, because we do not
recognize its accreditation.
r. weismans former boss at

Mercy wouldnt be bothered
in the least by his extracurricular activities. Thats because
Donald Grunewald, a onetime president of Mercy who is now a business professor at Iona College, runs his own
unaccredited institution, called Adam Smith
University.
Adam Smiths degrees are a bargain compared with International Universitys. Mr.
Grunewald charges $2,500 for a bachelors
and $3,000 for a Ph.D. He declines to say how
69
IMAGES
December 4, 2009
The Images Dancing

in David Gelernters Head
Sixteen years earlier, a package from the
Unabomber blew apart the Yale computerscience professors world. Thats when he
found his polymathic, political, artistic self.
(Photograph by Steve Pyke for The Chronicle)

many students Adam Smith enrolls, only that
the number is very small. The university has
no full-time professors, although some faculty
members from other institutions sometimes
read papers and help students, he says.
Mr. Contreras, the Oregon official, calls
Adam Smith a diploma mill with a long and
unattractive history. Over the years it has
been based in Hawaii, Louisiana, and South
Dakota. Now its home is the ground floor of
the girls hostel at the Methodist Compound
in Monrovia, Liberia. The American address
is a mailbox in Saipan, a U.S. commonwealth
in the Pacific.
All the while, Mr. Grunewald, now 70, has
run the university from his home in Connecticut. He calls it a labor of love and bristles at the suggestion that it is disreputable.
My idea of a diploma mill is that you send
in the money and they send you back a degree, he says. Thats not what were doing at
all. We like to feel that we have integrity. We
have been accredited in Liberia.
What that particular accreditation means
is unclear. A visit to the Liberian Embassy in Washington sheds little light on the
matter. An embassy official, Abdullah Dunbar, doesnt know much about Adam Smith.
When asked who can verify the Liberian accreditation, he searches among the papers on
his desk and, after a few minutes, produces
the name Isaac B. Roland, who Mr. Dunbar
says is in charge of the Ministry of Education,
and a telephone number, which turns out to
be disconnected. Mr. Dunbar says he has never spoken with Mr. Roland and doesnt know
how to contact him.
Founded in 1991, Adam Smith was at one
time accredited by the World Association of
Universities and Colleges, a private group,
unrecognized by the U.S. Department of Education, that has accredited colleges that the
State of Oregon lists as diploma mills. Mr.
Grunewald later helped found another unrecognized accreditor, the International Association of University and Schools. He says
he now considers both of those to have been
mistakes that may have sullied Adam Smiths
reputation.
In the early 1990s, Adam Smith catered
mostly to U.S. military personnel. Today it
focuses on students who live in Africa and
Asia. Courses generally involve reading a
textbook and completing a simple exam, composed mostly of multiple-choice and truefalse questions. A Chronicle reporter finished
a years course in English in about an hour. A
semester of economics took 15 minutes.
An Iona spokesman says Mr. Grunewald is
not violating any college policy by running
Adam Smith. But the spokesman emphasizes
that Iona does not want to associate itself with
Mr. Grunewalds business: Anything that
would link us even in perception would be a
From its inception, Webster University has been an institution

meeting unmet needs and opening worlds previously closed to
students. Our student body is diverse in every way. Across the
Webster worldwide campus network, we are a microcosm of
the world itself.
Websters strategic plan focuses on innovation through
inclusive leadership, to assure global mobility, action-oriented
learning, and world-changing graduates.
Webster has received consistent recognition for the diversity of

its student body. Websters graduate programs award degrees to
the most diverse degree-seeking student population in the
United States among all non-profit private and public colleges
and universities. This past year, nearly fifty-one percent of all
Webster students completing a graduate degree self-identified
as an ethnic minority.
When we resist disrespect, devaluing and disunity; when we
affirm we are all in this together, we open worlds for all.
Congratulations to The Chronicle of Higher Education on its 50th Anniversary.

As a top source of news and information for college and university faculty and administrators,
The Chronicle is valued greatly by Webster University.
WEBSTER.EDU

problem, the spokesman says. Clearly there
is no tie to Iona, and we wouldnt tolerate it if
there were.
Both Mr. Grunewald and Mr. Weisman
take pains to separate their day jobs as professors from their moonlighting as operators
of offshore universities. Mr. Grunewald does
not mention his affiliation with Adam Smith
when he writes letters to The Chronicle and
other publications. When a caller to International University asks if Mr. Weisman is a
professor at any other college, the admissions
counselor says he isnt. Oh, no, she says.
This is his baby.
on the receiving end of

unaccredited degrees cite many
reasons for not attending one of the
3,500 legitimately accredited colleges in the United States.
Mr. del Corral, the Tulane instructor, had
completed much of his doctoral work at Louisiana State University but wanted to avoid
the hassle of facing a dissertation committee.
So he called Lacrosse University, which was
based in Louisiana until 2002, when state authorities declined to renew its license. (It is
now based in Mississippi.) Lacrosse charges
$2,200 for a Ph.D. An admissions counselor
told a caller that he could receive a bachelors,
masters, and doctoral degrees, all in less than
a year.
When informed that Mr. del Corrals doctorate is from Lacrosse, his supervisor, Paul
A. Spindt, a professor of banking and finance,
says he plans to discuss the issue with higher-ups at Tulane. As a matter of policy, I
wouldnt be very happy with people with degrees that are not fully accredited, he says.
Mr. del Corral never met the person at
Lacrosse who reviewed his dissertation. He
never talked to the person on the telephone.
He never sent him an e-mail message. And
he never took a single course. When asked if
he thinks Lacrosse is a diploma mill, Mr. del
Corral says it probably is. On the other hand,
he explains, it gave me what I needed.
Martin S. Roden got what he needed, too,
when he attended the now-defunct Kensington University. Primarily, I was just tired of
having to correct students who would call me
rofessors
doctor, says Mr. Roden, associate dean of

engineering at California State University at
Los Angeles. He had joined the faculty there
in 1968 and had already become a tenured full
professor before he got his Kensington degree, in 1982.
Kensington moved from California to Hawaii after a statewide crackdown on unaccredited institutions in the early 1990s. Last year
authorities in Hawaii forced Kensington to
close and fined its owners $300,000. Mr. Roden calls Kensington a second-rate, unrecognized place that basically is doing portfolio
analysis.
Florida Community College at Jacksonvilles Web site lists David Kiers masters
degree from Cambridge State University, a
spinoff of Columbia State University, which
was shut down in 1998 by the FBI. Mr. Kier,
Ive dealt with

provosts with
degrees from
mail-order institutions
here in the
United States.
an instructor at the community college, says
he liked Cambridge State because it was possible to get a degree quickly, without busting
your hump doing course work. It was minimal effort, he says.
A spokeswoman says Florida Community
College does not recognize his degree, but
has no policy on how professors list their academic credentials on the colleges Web site.
Ren A. Drouin, a student-loan official in
New Hampshire, came under scrutiny last
month when it was revealed that he earned
his bachelors from Kensington and his law
degree from LaSalle University (a name that
is easily confused with the venerable La Salle
University in Philadelphia).
The Louisiana institution made $36-mil-
lion in seven years by offering degrees

through the mail. Its owner was later sentenced to five years in prison after pleading
guilty to fraud and tax-evasion charges.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Drouin, who is a
member of an advisory committee to the U.S.
Department of Education, says he had no way
to know that the universities he attended were
not legitimate. Besides, his spokeswoman says,
his degrees didnt help him get hired or promoted. He would have achieved just as much
with only a high-school diploma, she says.
The argument that academic credentials
dont matter is heard often from administrators and professors who defend unaccredited
degrees.
In February it was revealed that Alan Williams, an associate professor of computer science at Southwestern Adventist University,
in Keene, Tex., has a Ph.D. from Glencullen
University, which is part of the same diploma-mill ring as Shelbourne. A spokeswoman for Southwestern Adventist says a doctorate is not required for the professors position. Southwestern Adventist took no action
against Mr. Williams, other than requiring
that he stop saying he holds a Ph.D.
Other institutions seem not to care if faculty members claim unaccredited degrees.
Tom Isbill, an adjunct professor of journalism
at the University of Central Oklahoma, has
two degrees, including a Ph.D., from Pacific Southern University, which is on Oregons
diploma-mill list. He says Central Oklahoma doesnt officially recognize the degrees.
But the university still allows him to be called
Dr. on the journalism departments Web
page.
While some colleges appear indifferent to
the academic backgrounds of their professors,
even Mr. Grunewald thinks the fuzzy line between diploma mills and real higher education
has become a serious problem. How do you
separate the people who want to do this legitimately from the crooks? wonders the owner
of unaccredited Adam Smith University. Ben
cause there are crooks out there.
Tom Bartlett, now a senior writer, joined The
Chronicle in 2002. Scott Smallwood was hired
as a reporter in 2000 and now serves as managing
editor and director of digital products.
QUOTABLE
April 20, 2001, Rescue Tenure From the Tyranny of the Monograph
University presses are publishing books that they should be turning down.
It is not that the books are unworthy; just that they do not justify the
expenditure of time and money that goes into them. So my question to
administrators and humanists is the same: Why do any of you want this
system to go on?
Lindsay Waters, executive editor for the humanities at Harvard U. Press
The Education
of Lloyd Thacker
A former high-school counselor has set out to undo the commercialization
of higher education. But first he must learn to sell himself.
By ERIC HOOVER
to hear Lloyd
Thacker, the prophet in the tweed
jacket. The room bulges with college admissions deans and highschool guidance counselors, who
sit in the aisles and squeeze against the walls.
Todays talk is called College Unranked
as if Education Matters. Right now, nothing
else does.
Mr. Thacker begins: May I quickly see the
hands of those people who had enjoyable and
rewarding college experiences? Its unanimous. Now, may I see the hands of those
who realize they could have had similarly rewarding experiences attending a different college? When the arms go up again, he asks,
What does that say?
He could end the lesson there, letting the
question hover like a blimp, and make his
point: There is no such thing as the one perfect college. But he is just warming up, and
for that his audience here in September at the
annual conference of the National Association
for College Admission Counseling, known as
Nacac, is grateful. After all, they believe that
Lloyd Thacker is the man who can save their
world.
Mr. Thacker, who had been a guidance
counselor since 1987, quit his job in February to found the Education Conservancy, a
nonprofit group based in Portland, Ore. Its
mission: to help students, colleges, and high
schools overcome commercial interference
in higher education and to promote ethical
admissions practices.
He argues that colleges have perpetuated
the myth of the perfect-fit campus through
self-serving marketing strategies, including
early decision, that compel high-school students to search for a glass slipper instead of
thinking about what they want from a college. He believes that the popular U.S. News
& World Report college rankings have warped
academes mission. He is not the first to make
such arguments, but he is the first to start an
hey have come
organization designed, as he says, to give

conscience to a market dominated by fear and
hype.
His first project was to commission, edit,
and publish College Unranked: Affirming Educational Values in College Admissions (Education Conservancy, 2004), a collection of essays
by counselors, deans, and college presidents
about what ails the admissions system. The
book assails the status quo, combining critiques of the College Board, a vivid portrait
of nausea-inducing hysteria among students
at a college-recruitment session, and recommendations for easing pressures on applicants.
Mr. Thacker does not envision a return to
some golden age of admissions. He has no secret blueprint for reform. Instead, he hopes
to build a stage for what he calls the voices of discontent, a vehicle for a collective
conscience that would catalyze more student-friendly admissions policies.
In his speeches he romanticizes learning
and accentuates its immeasurable qualities.
He deflates higher-education hype with wit.
When he describes the anxiety hes seen in
the eyes of students, his own eyes water.
His supporters have called him a Jeremiah, a hero, a savior. They have embraced his
recommendations for putting students first in
admissions. They have even lined up to embrace him.
After Mr. Thackers session at the admissions conference, spectators rush the podium.
Later a guidance counselor from Boulder,
Colo., shakes his hand and says, You gave me
my life back.
While his ears ring with praise, however,
doubts stalk him. At age 50, when many men
start to eye the green fairway of retirement,
he has flung himself into the professional unknown. Over the past year he lost 20 pounds,
weeks of sleep, and much of his confidence.
He has also lost his routine. Mr. Thacker
used to come to work at 7:30 and leave at 3:30.
November 19, 2004

In 1983, U.S. News & World Report ranked colleges for the first time, and higher education
hasnt been the same since. The initial rankings were based on a simple reputation survey of college presidents. But over the years,
statistics were added, other rankings cropped
up, and college admissions was transformed.
Brian Kelly, U.S. Newss editor, told The Chronicle decades later: We didnt ask to be the
arbiter of higher education. The job has fallen
to us. Little in American higher education
has been so simultaneously reviled and worshiped as the rankings. Like prophets in the
wilderness, a few voices have stood out in
the din. This is the story of one of the them.
Lloyd Thacker, a longtime guidance counselor,
wanted to spread a different message. In
2004, spurred on by dozens of people he
knew at selective colleges, he was inspiring
admissions officers and promoting a new
book, one that publishers wanted nothing
to do with because it didnt sell fear, didnt
promise tricks to win the admissions game.
Instead the title said it all: College Unranked.
73

He spent his weekends building furniture,
strumming his Martin D18 guitar, and camping in Oregons Wallowa Mountains with his
wife and two sons. Now there are no school
bells to mark his hours, and he has given up
his hobbies. A one-man force, he works out
of a borrowed office in downtown Portland,
never quite sure what hell be doing from one
hour to the next.
As strongly as he believes in his message,
Mr. Thacker sometimes wonders about his
ability to deliver it. Even as he rails against the
market influences in academe, he must learn,
like any salesman, to hone his pitch.
How does an idealist with no business background sell his ideas without selling out? How
does he turn his fledgling organization, for
which there is no model, into a self-sustaining venture?
Those are the questions Lloyd Thacker lugs
around. He has no choice but to find the answers, and fast. Even prophets have to pay the
bills.
his doubts, Mr.

Thacker has faith in his
imagination. Long before
he dreamed up his midlife
mission, he was inventing
hatever
things to do.
As a boy in Canoga Park, Calif., he and his
three sisters made up their own words. They
read their way through shelves of books. They
built kites out of bamboo and newspaper.
When he was about 8, his parents finally got
their first television; when it broke, though,
nobody bothered to call a repairman.
In 1972 he enrolled in Revelle College, at
the University of California at San Diego,
where he studied ocean samples in a laboratory and surfed the Pacific. Later he switched
his major from biology to political science. He
was caught up, blissfully, in a four-year whirl
of learning.
After graduating, in 1976, he was admitted
to the University of San Diegos law school
but skipped registration day. That fall he
picked up his guitar and started practicing.
For three years he played regular gigs in San
Diego nightclubs, cranking out covers of Paul
Simon and Cat Stevens, and songs of his own.
Then academe tugged at him once more. In
1979 he enrolled in a masters-degree program
at Davis, where he was a teaching assistant in
the political-science department. After earning his M.A., in 1982, he became an assistant
director of admissions at the University of
Southern California.
At the time, projected drops in enrollments,
increasing costs, and decreasing federal support were alarming college officials. One of
Mr. Thackers tasks was to develop a strategic-marketing plan that would help USC keep
its classes full.
Marketing to prospective students had once
seemed out of place, even inappropriate. But

packaging and selling a liberal education was
becoming the norm. Admissions staffers were
becoming recruiters. In one of his first staff
meetings at Southern California, the admissions director handed Mr. Thacker a copy
of John T. Molloys Dress for Success (P.H.
Wyden, 1975), the seminal how-to-impress
manual.
I could smell something wasnt quite
right, he says. People were starting to think
about students as consumers. It was, What is
it you want? Well give it to you, rather than,
This is what we have, and heres why you
need it.
Mr. Thacker left after a year, seeking a
change of scenery.
For three years he worked as associate director of admissions at the much-smaller Pacific University, in Oregon. Then, in 1987, he
took a job at Jesuit High School, in Portland,
where he became college-counseling coordinator. He sat side by side with the students he
counseled. Nearly all of them were motivated,
talented. Each year a vast majority reported
acceptances at their first-choice colleges.
But there were things that worried Mr.
Thacker. As colleges came to resemble businesses, more students and parents were treating admissions as if it were a contest. He saw
party invitations that listed the colleges to
which a student had been accepted. He listened to a worried junior who said she would
More students and

parents were treating
admissions as if it
were a contest. He saw
party invitations that
listed the colleges
to which a student
had been accepted.
end up stupid if she had to attend a public
university. He stammered when two parents
asked him what sport their 9-year-old daughter should play to improve her chances of getting into an Ivy League college.
He recalls trying to calm the frenzy
among students who fretted about their firstchoice colleges. He wrote students many
glowing letters of recommendation but generally declined to lobby admissions offices
on their behalf. He believed that his job was
to prepare kids for college not sell them.
Some parents did not like that, and their expectations weighed like lead on his shoulders.
Talking about those expectations, and the

forces behind them, earned him a reputation
as a dynamic speaker. At Nacacs 1998 conference he moderated a session called College
Admission: Profession or Industry that dazzled admissions deans and counselors.
Four years later, flying home from Nacacs
conference in Salt Lake City, he found himself sitting across from Jennifer Delahunty
Britz, editor of the Lawlor Review, an education-marketing journal, who had heard him
speak. Thacker, you need to write a book,
she told him. Then she pulled out a legal pad
and took notes as he spoke. Miles above the
Western landscape, his book was born.
The following year Ms. Britz would became
dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon
College. She would tell Mr. Thacker that he
had, in part, inspired her career change. She
would also tell him something else: Admissions is a Corvair, and youre Ralph Nader.
r. thackers
crusade began
with an e-mail message. In
the fall of 2002 he asked 12
college officials to write essays for a book on how colleges could change their admissions practices
to better serve students. Within three days he
had received a yes from 10 of the officials,
among them Karl M. Furstenberg, dean of admissions and financial aid at Dartmouth College, and Theodore ONeill, dean of admissions at the University of Chicago.
In the fall of 2002 he told The New York
Times about his plan for the book. Literary
agents started calling. He told them he did
not want to create a how-to guide on getting
into college, but rather a how-not-to book,
a straight-talk antidote to number-heavy college guides.
Mr. Thacker spent months drafting a proposal, which eventually grew to 90 pages. At
first, there were no takers. Then, last fall he
and his literary agent, Kim Goldstein, met
with representatives of HarperCollins in
New York. Editors at the publishing company raved about his idea, but the marketing
staff concluded that the book would not make
cash registers ring. Mr. Thacker and his agent
shopped it elsewhere, to no avail.
Its a complete uphill battle because the
books that sell are the ones that promise to
get you into the best colleges, says Ms. Goldstein, of the Susan Golomb Literary Agency,
in New York. Readers want to know what to
expect when they plop down their $15.
She told him that to get a contract, he
would have to write a book on how beat the
admissions system, trimming the essays down
to bullet-point bits of advice. He considered a
compromise. But as he tinkered with his proposal, his message lost its purity. How could
he tell his contributors, I have to chop up all
your essays?
His colleagues were clamoring for the
book. When, they asked, was it coming out?

The question tolled even in his sleep. The
project had become his passion and his albatross.
Mr. Thacker decided that he would have to
publish the book himself. He asked his supervisor at Jesuit High if he could work a reduced
schedule for the rest of the school year; she
said no. By then his mind had veered to a new
possibility: What if he left his job and founded
his own nonprofit group?
One day the name Education Conservancy just sprang into Mr. Thackers head. He
discussed his idea with an acquaintance, James
H. Wolfston Jr., president of Collegenet.com,
a Portland-based company that provides online services for colleges and their applicants.
Mr. Wolfston told Mr. Thacker he was a visionary and agreed to lend the group an undisclosed sum, to be paid back once it was solvent.
The money would allow Mr. Thacker to
draw an income that was slightly less than
what he made at Jesuit but for only a year,
at most. The book would have to sell.
Mr. Thacker worried that he was pinning
not only his professional future but also his
familys financial security on a daydream. Yet
his wife, Lori, encouraged him. The couple sat
down to discuss how they would handle mortgage payments and college expenses for their
sons, 22 and 12. They nixed their plans for remodeling their kitchen and visiting Costa Rica.
A low point came one night last winter. After dinner with two of Mr. Thackers admissions colleagues, Ms. Thacker asked them
about her husbands plan. It sounds like a
good idea, she said, but is there a job in it?
For a long moment, there was silence.
obody who knew him doubted

Mr. Thackers convictions. But
they worried about his stepping
into what one friend calls a solo
life.
After his last day at Jesuit High, in February, he spent his days and nights typing his
own essays for the book and editing the submissions. He skipped meals and stopped jogging. He woke up at 3 a.m. and paced. He was
moody. His son Sam told him, I want my old
dad back.
Mr. Thacker invited the eight members of
the Education Conservancys advisory board,
all college deans, to Portland in July for their
first planning session. The all-day meeting
was also a pep talk for Mr. Thacker, who was
reluctant to ask colleges for donations.
In making this practical, he was somewhat
embarrassed, or shy, that this also had to be
a financial reality, says one board member,
Philip Ballinger, director of admissions at the
University of Washington. We said, Lloyd,

you have to learn how to ask.
They made him stand up and rehearse his
pitch. They also made him promise to send
each of them letters asking for contributions.
Mr. Thacker had found a local printer for
the book and invested $16,000 in it. After delays, 5,000 copies of College Unranked arrived
in late September, just in time for Nacacs annual conference.
The book tapped into a vein. Mr. Thacker filled about 300 orders in Milwaukee, and
nearly 600 more by early November, at $19.95.
Earlham College alone purchased 100 copies
for students and counselors.
High-school counselors snatched up Mr.
Thackers posters, which list advice for students (College selectivity is no guarantee of
quality; Education is a process, not a commodity). Alice Kleeman, a counselor from
Atherton, Calif., sent e-mail messages to parents of high-school students, urging them to
read College Unranked. Some counselors say
the book has already helped them reduce application-season stress among parents.
At the conference, Robert J. Massa, vice
president for enrollment, student life, and
college relations at Dickinson College, raved
about Mr. Thacker. Later he called to ask
how much money he should send as a donaContinued on Following Page
IMAGES
June 21, 2013
Each Called
By Name
Earle Briggs Wilson III
graduates from Prince
Georges Community
College. I kind of thought
this didnt happen for
people like me, he told The
Chronicles Eric Hoover and
Sara Lipka in their moving
account of the ceremony
and the lives of some of
the people who were there.
(Photo by Greg Kahn for The
Chronicle)
75

tion. When Mr. Thacker named a figure, Mr.
Massa said, I was thinking double that. So
far, Dickinson and eight other colleges have
joined the Education Conservancy, each paying a $500 membership fee.
Mr. Thacker has lined up speeches at four
regional admissions conferences and at five
high schools. He plans to hold a national conference next year to formally introduce his organization.
As described by its creator, the Education
Conservancy is to become part consumer advocate, part think tank. Mr. Thacker hopes
to provide admissions information and advice
to parents, students, and high schools, to ease
pre-application anxiety. His Web site is one
tool in that effort.
There is also a plan to generate research:
Mr. Thacker would like his group to conduct
studies on how admissions practices, like early
decision, affect students behaviors and opinions. Colleges want to do a better job, he
says, but they dont have the data.
Like any guru, Mr. Thacker has developed
his own catch words. He rails against ranksters and preaches the importance of studenthood, which he defines as immeasurable
qualities, like curiosity and imagination, that
allow young people to learn.
Some of his supporters concede that the
term does not translate easily into a sound bite,
and that it is easier to criticize than to create
alternatives.
Daniel M. Lundquist, vice president for admissions, financial aid, and communications at
Union College, in New York, says Mr. Thackers success will depend on his ability to translate abstract ideas into concrete plans. As the
initial ideas get out there, a lot of people will
salute it, Mr. Lundquist says. Its very righteous, but it will plateau.
He believes, though, that it can move the
admissions debate and inspire college officials
to discuss ways of improving their practices.
We want to get away from running our worry beads through our fingers and wishing all
by our lonesome that things are going to get
better, says Mr. Lundquist, whose college is
a member of the group. This is a new approach.
David A. Hawkins, director of public policy
for Nacac, believes that the Education Conservancy can complement his association, which,
with its many constituents, must take all members views into account. Hes very passionate that students dont have a voice, Mr. Hawkins says. His challenge is coming up with
some other way to evaluate colleges from the
students perspective.
Mr. Thacker wins praise even from the man
behind his favorite target, the U.S. News rankings. Robert J. Morse, director of data research
for magazine, calls Mr. Thackers message inspiring. He, too, ordered a copy of the book.
Mr. Morse doubts, though, whether one
man, or one book, can sway college administrators to drop early-decision policies or stop
requiring the SAT. Some of the books essayists, after all, work for colleges that have pioneered some of the practices Mr. Thacker criticizes. And, naturally, Mr. Morse denies that
college rankings are the root of all competition among colleges, and that rankings themselves harm students. People want this kind
of information to help them make a choice, he
says, because everybody doesnt have a Lloyd
Thacker helping them.
Mr. Thacker has responded that just because rankings are big sellers does not mean
He believed that his

job was to prepare kids
for college not sell
them. Some parents
did not like that,
and their expectations
weighed like lead
on his shoulders.
they are educationally sound. And his wariness of profitability extends to his own organization. By design, proceeds from College Unranked go to the Education Conservancy, not
into his pockets.
Some agents have told him that once
the books momentum peaks, it will need
high-powered promotion and distribution. But
he worries about becoming a part of the marketing machinery that he despises. For now,
he will sell the book himself. I hope theres
enough momentum by word of mouth, he
says. I want conscience to deliver the message.
n a Wednesday morning in October, conscience and a little

self-promotion have delivered
nine more book orders to Mr.
Thackers Web site. They await
him when he arrives at his temporary office,
in Collegenet.coms airy suite in Portland.
At his desk he fills the orders, signs some of
the books, and returns several e-mail messages. Later its off to lunch with his friend and
adviser Michael B. Sexton, dean of admissions
at nearby Lewis & Clark College. Over burritos, Mr. Sexton, a member of the Education Conservancys advisory board, tells Mr.
Thacker that he must strengthen his Web
sites presence on the Internet his Google
weight by getting more colleges to link to
it. Mr. Thacker writes down the suggestion.
Mr. Sexton has also urged Mr. Thacker to

raise his speaking fees, which range from $500
to $1,500. The dean daydreams about getting
Mr. Thacker on television talk shows, about
prompting a national discussion of admissions
reform. Schmoozing the right people, thats
his learning curve, Mr. Sexton says.
To that end, he walks Mr. Thacker across
the campus to meet Peter W. Cookson Jr.,
dean of the Graduate School of Education,
who had inquired about College Unranked.
When a secretary informs them that the dean
is at lunch, they wait for him in the parking
lot.
After 10 minutes Mr. Cookson pulls up in
a silver BMW. Mr. Thacker introduces himself and hands him a book and a business card.
Maybe one day students in Mr. Cooksons
program might seek internships with the Education Conservancy, he says, hopefully. The
dean agrees, shakes Mr. Thackers hand, and
darts off to a meeting.
Later that night, as Mr. Thacker sits watching a baseball game in his living room, his gaze
goes right through the television. He is thinking about his work. His groups funds are running low. The responses to his efforts encourage him, but sometimes he wonders whether
his mission is selfish, a campaign to validate his
own beliefs. Im proving myself to myself, he
says. I want to believe its more than that.
Slowly, his self-doubt is fading, though.
Close to midnight, with his family asleep
down the hall, Mr. Thacker sits at his dining-room table, beaming. Before him are
stacks of folders, each containing hundreds of
pages of scrawled notes, letters to college officials, and news clippings about admissions. He
thumbs through them from time to time, for
inspiration.
Before an audience of one, he rolls through
an improvised sermon on studenthood, quoting from the looseleaf pages as if they contained poems. Riffing on the SAT, early decision, and the misuse of merit aid, he paraphrases a line from a recent speech by Andrew
Delbanco, a humanities professor at Columbia
University: How far can we go in protecting
the bottom line before the institution we are
protecting loses its soul?
In the morning Mr. Thacker will drive to
work, proofread his pitch letter, and work on
a grant proposal. He will worry that a draft of
his brag sheet is too boastful. He will wonder if he can ever convince enough people to
buy into his vision.
But as he goes through another day, he will
know at least one thing. He has already made
n
his toughest sell of all.
Eric Hoover is a senior writer who has been with
The Chronicle since 2001. He writes about college admissions and enrollment issues and has reported on debates over standardized testing, the challenges of student recruitment, and the growing demands on admissions officers.
The Chronicle of
Higher Education
Is Golden.
Over five decades, The Chronicle has documented the evolution
of higher education in the United States and beyond.
Whether reporting on the student demonstrations of the 1960s,
assessing the potential and promise of massive open online classes early in the new
century, or analyzing the causes and effects of todays ever-rising tuition,
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has influenced generations of educational leaders. We at Texas Christian University
salute you for excellence and wish you another 50 years of success.
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77
Primed for Numbers

Are boys born better at math?
Experts try to divide the influences of nature and nurture
By RICH MONASTERSKY
T
March 4, 2005
When Lawrence H. Summers said in 2005
that the underrepresentation of women in
tenured positions in science and engineering
at top universities and research institutions
may be due to intrinsic differences in aptitude,
the then-president of Harvard set off protests
on his own campus as well a broader debate
about the role of biology in mathematical and
scientific ability. What to make of it? As Rich
Monastersky reports here, despite discomfort
about the idea, there is some truth to Mr. Summerss remarks. A growing body of research
points to biological differences and hormones
as factors affecting performance in men and
women and in their career choices; other researchers argue that whatever differences do
exist are small compared to the social barriers
that block women from careers in math and
science. For years, Chronicle reporters have
brought insight to major scientific debates, and
here Mr. Monastersky takes on a fundamental
question about nature and nurture that affects
the academy itself.
he countrys stock of No. 2

pencils dipped on January 22,
as 380,000 high-school students
across the country opened up their
SAT tests and proceeded to indent
lasting grooves in their fingers.
For all positive integers w and y, where w
> y, let the operation be defined by w y = 2w+y
/ 2w-y. For how many positive integers w is w
1 equal to 4?
Questions like that no doubt caused some
test takers, in between palpitations, to wonder
whether they were any good at math. Girls,
especially, might have found their thoughts
wandering to the news that just a week earlier,
Lawrence H. Summers, president of Harvard
University, had said that intrinsic differences in aptitude between the sexes might be an
important reason that men dominate the science-and-engineering work force.
The remarks sparked widespread protests,
and Mr. Summers quickly apologized. But a
growing body of research suggests that there
is some truth in his comments: That something in the brains of boys may predispose
them to perform better on certain standardized tests of mathematical abilities. Hormones
in women and in men apparently alter
how well they can do particular cognitive
tasks. And there may be biological differences that lead mathematically gifted men toward careers in science and engineering while
pointing mathematically gifted women in
other directions.
Some academics just dont want to hear
such conclusions, says Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard who wrote
about innate traits in The Blank Slate: The
Modern Denial of Human Nature (Penguin
Putnam, 2002). Human nature in the eyes of
many academics is morally tainted, he says,
and that gets in the way of figuring out what
makes us tick.
At the same time, however, researchers who
study gender differences say Mr. Summerss
emphasis on innate aptitude simply doesnt

add up. Whatever biological factors do exist,
they pale next to the pervasive social forces
that push young women away from advanced
math courses, and later, from careers in mathematics and in related disciplines like physics and engineering. Women make up only 26
percent of the work force with doctorates in
science or engineering. In doctorate-granting
mathematics departments, women hold just 8
percent of the tenured faculty positions.
There may be some innate differences, but
were so far from hitting that barrier that its
silly to talk about it, says Jacquelynne S. Eccles, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who has followed several groups of students over two decades, tracking how they chose high-school
courses, college majors, and then careers.
Alice Silverberg, a professor of mathematics
and computer science at the University of California at Irvine who graduated summa cum
laude in mathematics from Harvard, says in an
e-mail message: I no longer ask why there are
so few women in mathematics; I ask why there
are so many. I can think of few male mathematicians who would have stayed in the field
if they had faced the prejudice and discrimination female mathematicians deal with.
If any good comes of the current controversy, observers say, it will pressure math and science educators to make those disciplines more
attractive to young women in high school and
college. It will also point to new ways of instructing both girls and boys, with the aim of
improving American students mediocre math
performance compared with those in many
other countries.
have been doing complex mathematics for only a few

thousand years, far too short a
time to have evolved any specialized brain regions devoted
to, say, understanding cosines or calculus. So
umans
the brain has taken advantage of more-basic

abilities and put them to use in tallying bowling scores or doing linear algebra. Over the
past decade, researchers have started to map
how various components in the brain language centers, spatial sectors, memory units
work in concert to create our mathematical abilities.
Cognitive research is also showing that
boys and girls perform differently on some
types of mathematical tests. Although the
two sexes score the same on broad measures
of mathematical ability, girls demonstrate
an advantage in arithmetic, while boys score
better in spatial tests that involve mentally
rotating three-dimensional objects.
On their own, those findings say little
about innate gender differences. By the time
kids can take tests, they have already spent
years immersed in the sea of cultural stimuli that can influence their performance. So
some researchers have gone back to the beginning.
In one study, scientists at the University
of Cambridge, in England, measured how
long 1-day-old infants looked at different objects. They found that boys tended to gaze at
three-dimensional mobiles longer than girls
did, while girls looked at human faces longer
than boys did. In tests of 1-year-old babies,
boys liked to watch videos of cars with moving wiper blades more than videos of faces,
while girls preferred the opposite.
To Simon Baron-Cohen, a professor of
psychopathology and director of the autism
research center at Cambridge, such data point
to clear biological differences in the sexes. In
general, boys are born with an interest in figuring out how systems work, while girls naturally focus more on understanding the mental state of others, he says. A fair percentage
of each sex shows an equal interest in people
and systems, and some small fraction of males
and females display the reverse pattern. But
broadly speaking, boys tend to exhibit preferences that coincide, later in life, with careers
in mathematics, science, and engineering.
The Cambridge team has extended its
work by measuring fetal testosterone levels
and examining how they correlate with childrens behavior after birth. Some boys and
girls produce more testosterone in the womb
than others. And children of either sex who
are exposed to higher levels of testosterone
are less likely to establish eye contact with
their mothers. They also develop language
later and have smaller vocabularies at 2 years
of age.
These studies are telling us that some of
these factors are established prenatally, possibly genetically, says Mr. Baron-Cohen, who
also cautions that genes are not the entire story.
Other studies establish a clear link between hormones and mathematical abilities,
says David C. Geary, a professor of psychol-
ogy at the University of Missouri at Columbia and author of Male, Female: The Evolution
of Human Sex Differences (American Psychological Association, 1998). In transsexuals,
when you suppress male hormones, their spatial abilities go down, he says. When you
give male hormones to women, their spatial
abilities go up.
A similar effect happens with female hormones, like estradiol and progesterone.
During menstruation, when those substances are less concentrated in the bloodstream,
women perform better on tests of spatial
ability than they do closer to ovulation, Mr.
Geary says. (Verbal abilities follow the opposite pattern during the menstrual cycle.)
The three-dimensional advantage helps
males not only on spatial tests but also more
broadly, in word problems and other types of
math questions, he says.
Some evidence for that comes from studies by M. Beth Casey, a professor of applied
developmental and educational psychology
at Boston College. In one experiment, she
There may be some

innate differences,
but were so far from
hitting that barrier
that its silly to talk
about it.
and her colleagues looked at students performance on the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, which compares
eighth graders around the world. Ms. Casey
pulled out questions on the test that boys
tended to answer better than girls did, like:
A straight line on a graph passes through the
points (3,2) and (4,4). Which of these points
also lies on the line? A. (1,1) B. (2,4) C. (5,6)
D. (6,3) E. (6,5). (The answer is C.)
Ms. Casey wanted to explore the reasons
that more boys than girls answered such
questions correctly. So she measured students self-confidence about math and how
well they could use spatial and mechanical
reasoning. While confidence levels did play a
role in determining how students performed
on the international test questions, she found,
spatial skills were three times as important as
confidence in predicting who would do well
on those questions.
point out a problem in the way students learn math

in the United States, she says: In
school, we dont teach spatial math
thinking. We teach logical deductive reasoning.
hose results
Boys have a natural advantage, Ms. Casey

says, because early in life they tend to play
more often than girls do in ways that develop
spatial abilities. Boys are attracted to those
kinds of spatial activities where theyre running cars along the ground or block building, she says. So when the time comes to
solve math problems, they can draw on their
spatial abilities as well as the more verbally
based algorithms that they learned in school.
Girls, on the other hand, with less experience
developing spatial skills, have to rely more on
the learned algorithms to solve math problems.
With support from the National Science
Foundation, Ms. Casey has taken those theories into the classroom by designing a curriculum to enhance spatial-problem-solving skills in young children. Information
about the curriculum is available on the Web
(http://www2.bc.edu/~caseyb/oview.html). In
preliminary tests, both boys and girls benefited from the new type of instruction, but
girls showed more of an improvement than
did boys, she says.
Those findings match other experimental
data showing that gender differences, whatever the source, are not immutable. In some cases, Mr. Geary says, boys perform better than
girls on word problems, but if you provide
girls with the basic diagramming skills, then
some of the gap disappears in the solving of
multistep word problems.
Other research points to the role that behavior or misbehavior may play in
helping boys learn math. In one study, Martha Carr, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Georgia, looked at
first graders who were learning to add and
subtract using manipulatives, like counting with their fingers or with beads. Midway
through the year, she noticed that most boys
were abandoning the manipulatives and were
doing the problems in their heads by recalling
the answers from memory. Most girls, meanwhile, continued to use the manipulatives.
At first glance, such a result might suggest
that boys have a natural advantage in arithmetic. But the difference had nothing to do
with ability, Ms. Carr says. Basically, she explains, a lot of the boys were guessing.
The boys had stopped using the manipulatives because it took too much time, and the
boys were vying to answer first. Theres this
competitive one-upmanship, and that supports the move toward retrieval, she says. By
the end of the year, boys and girls were doing
the problems equally well, but boys could answer the problems from memory, while girls
were still using the technique they had been
taught.
In general, girls tend to follow instructions
better than boys do, which made the girls
less likely to change strategies on their own,
says Ms. Carr. So it was the boys competitive
79

nature whether learned or innate that
caused them to make leaps in learning.
n a similar way,
other factors unrelated

to mathematical ability apparently play
important roles in determining whether girls will pursue math in school or in
careers. One clear demonstration comes
from studies of gifted students who scored at
least 390 on the math portion of the SAT test
when they were 13 years old, which put them
at the top 1 percent of their age class.
Those students are part of a cohort of more
than 100,000 teenagers who have participated in a talent search run by the Johns Hopkins University since the early 1970s. Camilla Persson Benbow and David Lubinski, both
professors at Vanderbilt University, have
tracked some of those talent-search students
for 20 years to see what factors influenced
their choices in education and careers.
The researchers found that, in general,
mathematically gifted females had broader abilities than did mathematically talented males. Girls tended to show more balance
between their math and verbal SAT scores,
while boys had more of a tilt, scoring higher
on the math section and lower on the verbal.
That quantitative tilt turned out to be an
important factor, the researchers said. Students with exceptional math abilities were less
likely to major in math or science if they also
had high verbal skills.
Indeed, among those mathematically talented students, 64 percent of the boys said
their favorite high-school class was in math
or science, while only 39 percent of the girls
said so. When it came time to choose majors
and careers, the mathematically gifted young
women followed their broader abilities and
interests into the life sciences and humanities
at much higher rates than did the mathematically gifted boys.
Susan C. Athey is a case in point. She was a
standout in math at an early age and qualified
for the Johns Hopkins program. But she also
had exceptional verbal abilities. That made it
less obvious that math was where I needed to
be focusing. It makes the career choice harder, she says. Although she started studying
computer science in college, she switched to
economics because she saw it as more relevant
to society. She is now a professor of economics at Stanford University.
For Mr. Lubinski and Ms. Persson Benbow,
the data from their studies suggest that efforts to gain gender parity in all academic disciplines may be wrongheaded. If the United
States is to remain true to the ideals that all
students be given access to opportunities for
developing their potential and that people be
allowed to choose their life paths freely, this
might require questioning whether males and
females should be equally represented across
the full educational-vocational spectrum,
they concluded in a paper published in the

journal Psychological Science in 2001.
There are some extremists out there who
say that there ought to be as many female
electrical engineers as males, says Julian C.
Stanley, a professor emeritus of psychology
at Johns Hopkins who started the Study of
Mathematically Precocious Youth there in
1971. That doesnt make any sense to me,
he argues, given the different interests that
women and men consistently express.
In studies of the students who went
through the talent search, he says, women
are more oriented toward social services and
aesthetics, while boys are much more oriented
These studies are

telling us that some
of these factors are
established prenatally,
possibly genetically.
toward theoretical concerns, factual concerns,
economics, and power.
That may explain why mathematically gifted women tend to go into medicine, psychology, and biology rather than physics or electrical engineering, Mr. Stanley says. The
question is, Do we want to work hard on a
woman who would rather be a doctor than a
physicist and make a physicist out of her?
ther researchers deride the

very idea of such a question.
This kind of logic assumes that
these differences in interest are
coming straight out of the genes,
that theyre not affected by the environment,
says Elizabeth S. Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard who studies how children
develop math skills. If we know anything
about the social forces that affect both genders, its that people of either gender, if they
look toward a field that is populated almost
entirely by the opposite gender, theyre not
going to be drawn to it.
Then there is the reality of discrimination,
both in its overt form and in the subtler, perhaps unconscious ways that it seeps into our
culture.
At the university level, those biases often
creep into the closed rooms where committees make hiring decisions, according to Ms.
Silverberg of UC Irvine. In my 20-plus years
as a mathematician, Ive seen a variety of excuses used to justify not choosing a woman,
which Ive never seen used against a man, she
says in an e-mail message.
Academics (even female ones) often view

women as part of their personal lives, not
their professional lives, she says. Men in academia often relate to their female colleagues
the way they relate to their wives, mothers,
ex-wives, and daughters, rather than the way
they relate to their male colleagues. As a result, women often are not taken seriously or
treated professionally.
Making matters worse, women are more
susceptible to cultural influences because
they are raised to focus on relationships, says
Martha Putallaz, a professor of psychology at
Duke University who runs the Duke Talent
Identification Program, which tests 80,000
middle-school students each year and invites
the gifted ones to participate in advanced academic programs. We socialize females to be
very good monitors of interactions and interpersonal feelings, she says, while males are
taught to focus on achievement.
Data from Mr. Stanleys program, at Johns
Hopkins, shows just how strong the cultural factors are in determining math achievement. In the early 1980s, he and Ms. Persson Benbow reported a whopping disparity
in the numbers of mathematically gifted boys
and girls who scored 700 on the math section of the SAT at the age of 13, a distinction
achieved by one in 10,000 students. A quarter-century ago, there were 13 boys for every
girl at that level. Now the ratio is only 2.8 to
1, a precipitous drop that has not been reported in the news media. Its gone way down as
women have had an opportunity to take their
math earlier, says Mr. Stanley.
that remarkable shift,

women are still vastly underrepresented in physics, engineering, computer science, and other math-heavy disciplines. Ms.
Eccles thinks she knows why. The Michigan
researcher has tracked 3,000 students from
elementary school through their postcollege
years. Unlike those in the talent-search studies, the students in Ms. Eccless sample included people of all different abilities.
When she examined why students elected
to take advanced math and physics courses in
high school, she found that they did not base
their selections on the obvious factors, such as
what courses they liked. Instead, utility mattered most. How important was the course
to their long-term goals? she says. Already
in high school, theyve made decisions about
what they want to do later.
And mathematically talented girls took
themselves out of the physics-engineering
pipeline for much the same reasons that Mr.
Stanley enumerated. The females are more
likely than the males to say they want a job
where they can help other people, Ms. Eccles says. Males are more likely to say they
want a job where they can be their own boss
espite
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and make lots of money. As a result, many
young women with high math skills in her
study ended up studying biology instead of
physics or engineering.
But unlike Mr. Stanley, Ms. Eccles sees
room to change the interest gap, by educating students better about career choices.
You have to change their views of these professions, she says. Engineers do help people. Physical scientists do help people. Weve
got to get a lot more information to highschool kids about what the physical sciences
are like.
Another way to draw in women would
be to change the way some disciplines are
taught. Females want to be good at lots of
things. They want to try lots of things. They
want to follow their interests, she says. But
typical engineering programs dont allow
Do we want to work
hard on a woman
who would rather
be a doctor than a
physicist and make a
physicist out of her?
February 27, 2011
In the Land of Tests, the Exam Dream Comes in Many Guises

More than a few nightmares originate in classrooms, as Eric Hoover described in an article
about academic anxiety. William G. Durden, president of Dickinson College, is among those
who acknowledges waking up from dreams in which hes a student who has forgotten to write
a paper. (Photo by Joey Pulone for The Chronicle)
students to choose many elective courses, so

they tend to repel students with broad interests. Some engineering schools are experimenting by making their programs more
relevant to students interests and more diverse in terms of coursework. Those kinds
of changes will attract more students of both
sexes, says Ms. Eccles.
Such a goal will find no dissenters, even
among those who see evidence for innate
gender differences. Although Mr. Geary, of
Missouri, wrote a book about male-female
differences, he says that the gap between
boys and girls is relatively trivial compared
to the gap between U.S. adolescents and adolescents in numerous other countries who
are receiving a much more solid education in
mathematics and science.
Still, he maintains that it is important to
study potential sexual differences, in part to
multiply the mathematical talent in America. It could be when we better understand
where exactly the differences are, he says,
we can provide additional interventions for
n
girls and boys.
Rich Monastersky was a senior writer at The
Chronicle who focused on science and academic
research. In 2008 he moved to Nature, where he
serves as a news features editor.
Sex and the Conference

Yes, there is such a thing as monogamy. Im not talking about that.
By JESSICA BURSTEIN
ex and the conference.
Oxymoronic, I know, and in all three senses

of the word. Yet there it is the reason the married people go, the reason
the single people go, the reason travel stipends were invented. Sex and the conference is proof positive that in the face of
all evidence to the contrary; despite what you
see when you look at your fellow panelists; regardless of the fact that it is, after all, Iowa
City hope springs eternal.
Yes, there is such a thing as monogamy. Im
not talking about you. While you and your
beautiful partner are headed for a summer
sublet in Wellfleet, the rest of us are going to
the conference. Following are some tips for
the unwashed.
When you get there, the first thing to do is
get a smoking room. Of course you gave it up
years ago. Good for you. The truth is, though,
that the best-looking people are smokers, and
if youre lucky youll end up with one of them,
or at least have a chance to experiment with
their lung capacity. Smokers are so desperate
to find a nicotine-friendly haven nowadays
that the feeding chain is entirely askew, and
you can often succeed outside your customary sexual tax bracket. Smokers have the added bonus of a relatively short life span, so you
run less risk of seeing them twice. Theres also
a much higher chance of getting bumped up
to an executive suite if you claim to have requested a smoking room. To rid yourself of
the osmotic cigarette smell, simply have your
clothes dry-cleaned on site before you leave.
If thats not possible, just say that you ran
into someone from NYU in the Denver airport and they dragged you to that unbelievable smoking bar on the second floor where a
Dixie cup of warm water is $6 and the, ahem,
waiters act like theyre at Le Cirque. Ten
minutes in there and you reek like an ashtray.
Honey, Im home. Oh that? Denver.
So youve got your smoking room, which
also smells like an ashtray, but its an execu-
tive suite with three minibars, each with

its own little key. Pocket the keys immediately and keep them with you at all times. It is a
little-known fact that minibar keys are themselves promiscuous and work in a trans-hotelian fashion. Should you find yourself wandering around some slumbering strangers room
at midnight, listlessly wondering what could
have made you think that someone working
on Trollope would become interesting when
he stopped talking, it is entirely possible that
one of those little keys will fit the lock of that
minibar. Face it: Youre never going to see him
again, and after what you just went through, a
few homuncular bourbons and an Almond Joy
is the least he can do.
Your job now is to find the registration area.
No matter how far the schlep, stay focused:
If the opportunity presents itself, you may be
able to score somebody elses name tag. Some
conferences do, alas, insist that you identify
yourself in advance to the bastard breed of Samaritan whose job it is to rub it in that you are
merely you. Following that humiliation, you
will be awarded a folder so brightly colored
that it clearly has just been ripped from the
arms of a weeping 6-year-old. Inside you will
find the map that helpfully shows you how
to get to where you already are, a name tag
with a phonetically rendered version of your
so-called name, a ticket to the lunch you will
never attend, and a Big Chief pad on which
to note the brilliant insights of every panelist
you will hear over the next three days. There
is something else, though, something else ...
ah, yes, the program. Throw that away. Youre
here on business.
However, at other and happy times, the
name tags are laid out on a table. I regard this
as a buffet and suggest you do the same. This
for multiple reasons. First, instant alibi. Like,
duh. Second, parading around with someone
elses name pinned to your chest can bring out
all sorts of characterological deficiencies that
June 22, 2007

Academic conferences are an annual ritual
maligned, yes, but also beloved (where else can
you reconnect with old friends?). For 50 years,
The Chronicle has dispatched reporters to these
confabs. Perhaps youve seen us, notebooks
in hand, pestering for interviews, pleading for
gossip. An axiom of our coverage has been
our belief that often the most interesting aspects of a conference arent on the program.
Its whats whispered in the hall, over coffee,
at the bar. But until 2007, wed never covered
conferences as hotbeds of assignations. Our
eyes were opened by Jessica Burstein, an associate professor of English at the University of
Washington, who offers this whimsical advice:
Get a smoking room (the best-looking people
are smokers), get to the bar by 10:30 a.m. (to
ingratiate yourself with the bartenders), keep
the minibar key with you at all times (theyre interchangeable and you never know where youll
wake up!), and beware: The mores of mating
differ from discipline to discipline. How many
professors have taken Bursteins advice out for
a spin? More reporting is needed.
83

in toto amount to an interesting new personality. After all, it is your job to make sure that
Lazlo Mancini of Little Dubuques Learning
Institute has a good time; look at what hes
going home to. Famous peoples name tags
are slightly more dangerous, but here, as elsewhere in life, reward comes with risk. For two
giddy days I was Judith Butler. I actually got
her that raise, not that she thanked me. This
leads me to suggest that you stay within your
own gender and height skew, but on the other hand, only on my third day of being Sander Gilman did someone ask me if I perhaps
should be attending to my calcium intake. All
in all, there is no reason why you should confine yourself to one alternative persona, given
identitys performative nature. If, for whatever
bizarre reason, you are content with your own
personality, more power to you.
It is often the case that name tags involve
the deployment of a safety pin through ones
lapel. That is an extremely annoying convention for those few of us who actually care
about our clothing. I did not pay an unmentionable sum of money for this Jil Sander
number so that I might shove a pointy metal
stick through its incredibly beautiful surface.
Nor did I don this shirt in order to conduct
a scientific experiment concerning the savage
powers of adhesive backing when exposed to
Armani. If I had wanted my clothing shredded, I would have gone to a faculty meeting.
But enough you stifle your sobs, because
you are Michael Fried, and he does not cry.
t some point,
find a bar. I suggest that you avoid the rush and

stake out your terrain no later
than 10:30 a.m. You may have
to elbow aside the medievalists,
but they tip over relatively easily, having been
there for several days running. By the time

5 oclock rolls around, you will know all the
wait staff by name, and they will know you
by yours, or in some cases yours. Having
tipped with increasing liberalism, you are
now the center of a hard-working family, of
which each member is delighted to assist in
perpetuating your fiduciary stupor. Should a
prospective partner present himself or herself,
you now have the luxury of asking Luke to ask
Damon to ask Franny to get this fine specimen beside you a double something on the
rocks with a twist. Academics are impressed
by people who know other peoples names
without the use of name tags. For this reason,
The mores of what

constitutes discretion
differ by discipline.
the best effects are achieved by avoiding bars
where the staff roam pre-tagged.
If you find yourself in a group, direct your
powers of concentration toward those who
seem to you the most attractive or, failing
that, the least frightening. You are free to ask
them about their work, but know that you risk
the danger of a reply. Substantive responses
often have the effect of killing any zest for life
you may have managed to work up in your
earlier prep time. More fruitful topics include
your proclivity for housing homeless kittens, the fact that you find your interlocutor
extremely engaging, and the quality of your
rooms minibar holdings.
While you are free to depart holding
hands, it is more likely that your new friend
will wish for some discretion on your part.
The mores of what constitutes discretion

differ from discipline to discipline, and it
is up to you to ascertain them, but here are
some pointers. Creative writers stand up, say
Im leaving now, and then stare fixedly at
you. Philosophers, a more intuitive lot, simply disappear into the mist, but you can find
them in the hallway in front of the vending
machine, slamming their palms against the
display window because the Doritos bag got
wedged halfway down and now they are out
of quarters. Sociologists loiter in the parking lot. Psychologists will follow you to your
room, so theres no need to say a word, although you may require a temporary restraining order by noon the next day. Ethnographers are fine with exiting while necking. Historians may require some cajoling,
but the promise of a side trip to the 7-Eleven
magazine stand will usually suffice. Literary
critics are already tapping their feet impatiently at your rooms doorway by the time
you get there, but will waste valuable time
explaining why their book was not positioned
in the very first row of their publishers table in the books exhibit. Scientists have already found their way into your room; get
there quickly or they may be done before you
arrive.
What you do next is up to you and your
lawyers interpretation of the Mann Act.
Above all, have fun, be safe, and dont stay in
n
touch.
Jessica Burstein was a recently tenured assistant
professor of English at the University of Washington when she contributed this essay in 2007. She
published Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art in 2012, and she has contributed the
Visual Arts chapter to the recent Cambridge
Companion to Modernist Culture. Her phone
number is now unlisted.
QUOTABLE
April 25, 2008, Hard-Boiled Eggheads, an article about mentions of The Chronicle in pulp fiction
In another hour, the members of the presidents party began drifting into
the robing room and the adjacent lounge. I mingled with them, making small
talk. Then my three charges arrived together.
Are you conspiring against me? I asked them.
We have decided on a joint presidency in alternate years, said one, to
general laughter from the others.
Get me The Chronicle of Higher Education fast, I replied, using one
hand as a mock phone to call the premier publication of the academic world.
They laughed and turned to mingle with the crowd.
Ronald P. Lovell, Searching for Murder (Penman Productions)
50 YEARS
OF HEADLINES
Race
on Campus
Progress Marked
by Turmoil and Skepticism
The question of racial diversity has riven higher education throughout The
Chronicles history. While the share of full-time, first-year students who were
not white rose to 42 percent in 2015 from just 10 percent in 1971, black
students gained only a few percentage points, and their share of enrollment
has been declining since 1985. Faculties have also failed to diversify significantly. Though the vocabulary of debates has changed from meritocracy
versus egalitarianism to excellence and inclusion our coverage shows
that campuses still struggle with a reluctance to talk about racist incidents,
the pressure on minority faculty and students to fit in, and questions about
what responsibility colleges have to foster broader social change.
Students at the U. of Missouri at Columbia,

who had held protests against the racial
climate on campus, celebrated in November
2015 upon learning that the university
systems president would resign.
GREG KENDALL-BALL FOR THE CHRONICLE
October 20, 1969
April 30, 1986
January 26, 2015
Change and Fear

of It Dominates
ACE Discussion
Black Students Who

Attend White Colleges
Face Contradictions
in Their Campus Life
What It Feels Like

to Be a Black Professor
Can the university make massive changes

to help resolve its and the nations racial
crisis? Or would such changes destroy the
university?
More than 2,100 college and university
administrators heard some stirring pleas and
some measured responses as those questions
were debated at the annual meeting of the
American Council on Education.
Even though predominantly white institutions often provide blacks with special
cultural, academic, and social programs, the
students still face situations and subtle
forms of discrimination that leave them
wondering whether they really belong.
April 26, 1989
May 15, 1978
The Uneasy
Undercurrent
In an informal survey of students and
student-affairs administrators at some two
dozen predominantly white institutions
public and private, large and small across
the country, The Chronicle found a considerable degree of alienation, avoidance, and
distrust between the races. Race relations
are seldom discussed by todays generation
of students except in the wake of an incident and the subject is carefully avoided
by many administrators who would like to
believe that a lack of open conflict signifies
improvement.
June 2, 1980
Hispanics
on the Campuses:
a Long Way to Go
It wasnt that white students were hostile, says Sylvia Robledo, a senior at UCLA.
It was just that I was the only one. The only
other Chicanas I saw were the maids cleaning the bathrooms.
May 16, 1984
Promise of the Landmark

Brown Decision
Is Unfulfilled After 30
Years, Scholars Say
The battle continues because there is still
a debate about the definition of integration
in higher education.
Behind Ugly Racist

Incidents, Student
Isolation and Insensitivity
While the number of overtly racist white
students who commit such acts may be
small, those who have studied them say, the
indifference of many other whites creates an
atmosphere in which racist acts are tolerated.
I want to think about my smiling as a

sign of empathy and generosity, but maybe
I am reading myself too kindly. At my most
cynical and self-critical, I call it a postmodern version of shucking and jiving: my
trying to do whatever I can to put people
at ease.
November 8, 2015
The Invisible Labor

of Minority Professors
The hands-on attention that many
minority professors willingly provide is an
unheralded linchpin in institutional efforts
to create an inclusive learning environment
and to keep students enrolled.
January 3, 2016
Black Students Describe

Racial Division, Isolation,
and Prejudice at
the U. of Missouri
March 16, 2001
In Brochures, What You

See Isnt Necessarily
What You Get
Institutions regularly stage photos by
gathering students from a rainbow of races
and seating them around a cafeteria table.
July 4, 2003
Affirmative Action
Survives, and So Does
the Debate
What happened here this past fall a

homecoming protest, a televised hunger
strike, a show of support by the football
team, the resignations of the system president and campus chancellor made
Missouri a stage on which black students
frustration, in all its dimensions, played out
for a national audience.
July 14, 2016
The U.S. Supreme Court hardly ended

the debate over race-conscious college
admissions policies in its two landmark
rulings last week involving the University
of Michigan at Ann Arbor. But the court did
answer the big question before it whether the Constitution permits such policies
with a resounding yes. Its decisions
may leave some colleges open to lawsuits
challenging the nuts and bolts of particular
admissions policies, but the general practice
of using affirmative action to enroll a diverse student body appears likely to remain
unassailable in the federal courts for many
years to come.
Talking Over
the Racial Divide
On seven Tuesdays this spring, The
Chronicle watched as 14 students met in a
course dedicated to discussing race, a perennial, at times explosive issue on campuses
and across the country. The University of
Maryland offers the course as part of an
effort to make students more proficient
with difference to help them have thorny
conversations on uncomfortable topics, see
the value of other peoples experiences, and
gain some perspective on their own. At least,
n
thats the hope.
87
The Trials of Tony Judt

Even as ALS tightens its grip, the historian remains outspoken
By EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN
O
January 15, 2010
For two decades, Tony Judt was a fixture in the
leading journals of opinion, an inescapable presence in Anglo-American intellectual life. But the
British historians October 2009 lecture at New
York University came as a shock. Judt rolled on
stage in a wheelchair, with a breathing device
strapped to his face. He explained that he had
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a fatal condition
that ultimately destroys a persons ability to
move and breathe. For the next few hours,
Judt spoke about the fate of social democracy,
the role of intellectuals in political life, and our
collective failure to learn from the past. It would
be Judts final lecture. A month later, when Judt
welcomed a Chronicle editor to his apartment,
his voice was so weak that he needed a microphone to be heard. He was in obvious discomfort throughout a nearly two-hour interview that
touched on his life, work, and imminent death.
In academe, ideas are currency, and The Chronicle has a rich history of profiling the people behind those ideas. This is a portrait of a scholar
confronting not only his body of work, but his
own demise. Tony Judt died in August 2010.
new york
in mid-October, the historian Tony Judt

appeared onstage at the Jack H.
Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, in Greenwich Village.
I hope you dont mind if I begin by shooting the elephant in the house, he said, speaking from an electric wheelchair, wrapped in
a black blanket, with a Bi-Pap breathing device attached to his nose. As you can see,
he continued, his voice gravelly and labored,
Im paralyzed from the neck down, and also
use this rather ridiculous-looking tube on my
face to breathe. A little more than a year ago,
Judt was diagnosed with a progressive variant
of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known
as Lou Gehrigs disease, a fatal condition that
gradually destroys a persons ability to move,
breathe, swallow, and talk.
In 2005, just four years earlier, the professor of European history at New York University had reached the pinnacle of his career
with the publication of Postwar: A History of
Europe Since 1945 (Penguin Press), his highly
acclaimed account of Europes rebirth after
World War II. The book was a finalist for the
Pulitzer Prize and was selected by The New
York Times as one of the top 10 books of the
year. Beyond academe, Judt had achieved renown as a political essayist and a formidable
combatant in the quarrels between the left
and right and within the left. He is perhaps
best known as a harsh critic of Israel and the
most prominent advocate of the creation of a
single, binational state the so-called onestate solution to the struggle between Palestinians and Israelis, a position that has earned
him both plaudits and scorn.
Judts appearance in October was part of an
annual lecture sponsored by the Remarque
Institute, a cross-disciplinary center he created in 1995 to foster greater understanding between America and Europe. Richard Sennett,
a professor of sociology at New York Univern a monday evening
sity and a friend of Judts, says the lecture was

a legacy speech, an opportunity for Judt to
reflect on a lifetime spent wrestling with
what it means to be on the left.
It would be Judts first time speaking to the
general public from a wheelchair. As he dryly puts it later, Im aware that I look like a
complete basket case. When he rolled out
onstage, a tense hush fell upon the more than
700 people in the theater. Judt had decided
that the logistics of working from a prepared
text would be too difficult to manage. Instead
he would speak completely from memory.
Would his concentration wander? Would he
be able to ignore his unquenchable thirst, unscratchable itches, unrelievable muscle aches?
He began by joking, referring to himself as
a quadriplegic wearing facial Tupperware
and promising not to use overdramatic hand
gestures. The tension abated, and Judt moved
into the substance of his talk, What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?
Judt called attention to Americas and Europes worship of efficiency, wealth, free
markets, and privatization. We live, he said,
in a world shaped by a generation of Austrian thinkers the business theorist Peter Drucker, the economists Friedrich A.
von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Joseph
Schumpeter, and the philosopher Karl Popper who witnessed liberalisms collapse
in the face of fascism and concluded that the
best way to defend liberalism was to keep
government out of economic life. If the
state was held at a safe distance, Judt said,
then extremists of right and left alike would
be kept at bay. Public responsibilities have
been drastically shifted to the private sector.
Americans and, to a lesser extent, Europeans
have forgotten how to think politically and
morally about economic choices, Judt warned,
his fragile, British-accented voice growing
louder. To abandon the gains made by social
democrats the New Deal, the Great Society, the European welfare state is to be-
tray those who came before us as well as generations yet to come.

The lecture, which lasted nearly two
hours, yoked together a few themes that have
long preoccupied Judt: the role of intellectuals and ideas in political life, and the failure
of both Americans and Europeans to understand and learn from the past century. (We
live, Judt has written, in an age of forgetting.) He concluded his remarks on a pragmatic note. It would be pleasing but misleading to report that social democracy,
or something like it, represents the future
that we would paint for ourselves in an ideal
world, he said, carefully pronouncing each
word. It does not even represent the ideal
past. But, among the options available to us
in the present, it is better than anything else
to hand.
The standing ovation was tremendous. I
was initially shocked by the disjunction between his intellectual capacity, which is completely undiminished and in many respects
unequaled, and the physical degradation,
says Richard Wolin, a professor of history at
the Graduate Center of the City University
of New York, who was in the audience. But
after five minutes, I lost sight of any physicality and focused on his words and their importance. He adds, It was one of the most
moving scenes I have ever witnessed.
About a month later, I meet Judt at his
apartment, on the upper floor of a tall brick
building near Washington Square Park,
where he lives with his wife, the dance critic
Jennifer Homans, and their two teenage children. A sign on the door asks visitors to wash
their hands. Judts nurse, a young man, silently leads me through the spacious, immaculate wood-floored apartment to a book-lined
study, where Judt is waiting in his wheelchair,
head against a tan pillow, hands on lap, feet
bare and swollen. At 61, he has close-cropped
hair and a graying beard. Dressed in a maroon T-shirt and flannel pants, he peers out
through circular glasses. A wireless microphone is affixed to his left ear. Though we
are sitting only a few feet apart, his nurse
flips the power switch, and Judts faint voice
suddenly booms out of a nearby speaker.
We have watched the decline of 80 years
of great investment in public services, he
says. We are throwing away the efforts,
ideas, and ambitions of the past. It is plainly
difficult for him to speak, but he is doggedly eloquent. His eyes, forced to do the work
of his entire body, are strikingly expressive;
when he gets excited, he arches his brows
high and opens them wide, which he does
when he says, Communism was a very defective answer to some very good questions.
In throwing out the bad answer, we have forgotten the good questions. I want to put the
good questions back on the table.
I ask how he felt after the lecture. Elated, Judt replies simply. Some friends and
colleagues had encouraged him to scrap his

planned remarks and speak instead about
ALS. I thought about it, Judt says, but
I have nothing new to say about ALS. I do
have something new to say about social democracy, and by saying it in my condition I
can maybe have some influence on peoples
understanding of sickness. He takes a deep
breath. There is something to be said for
simply doing the thing you would do anyway,
doing it as well as you can under the circumstances, and getting past the sympathy vote
as soon as possible.
was born into a lower-middle-class

Jewish family of Marxist anti-Communists. They lived in Londons East End,
a historically Jewish section of the city.
Anti-Semitism at a low, polite, cultural
level was still perfectly acceptable, Judt recalls. Fearing that their teenage son was too
socially withdrawn, his parents, in 1963, sent
him to a summer camp on a kibbutz in Israel.
Judt became a committed Zionist. I was the
ideal convert, he says. A leader in left-wing
Zionist youth movements, he even delivered
a keynote address at a large Zionist conference in Paris when he was only 16 years old.
(A smoker at the time, he seized the opportunity to denounce smoking by Jewish adolescents as a bourgeois deviation.) In 1967,
a few weeks after the Six-Day War, Judt volunteered as a translator for the Israel Defense
Forces on the Golan Heights. He was surudt
I have nothing new to

say about ALS. I do
have something new
to say about social
democracy.
prised to find that many of the young Israeli officers he worked with were right-wing
thugs with anti-Arab views; others, he says,
were just dumb idiots with guns. Israel, he
came to believe, had turned from a sort of
narrow-minded pioneer society into a rather
smug, superior, conquering society.
Disillusioned, Judt returned to England,
where he had already tested out of his final
year of high school, and gained early acceptance to the University of Cambridge. Later
he continued his studies at the cole Normale Suprieure, in Paris, where he met Annie Kriegel, a heroine of the Resistance and
an influential historian of Communism. She
had an intellectual methodology that combined abstract analysis with very close attention to circumstance. It was neither political
science nor history, but it combined the best

of both, Judt says. Around the same time,
he struck up a correspondence with George
Lichtheim, a German-born historian of socialist thought. A very brilliant, very depressive character, Judt recalls. His writings on
Marxism had a huge impact on me in terms
of subject matter, style, and approach. Judt
dedicated his recent collection of essays, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (Penguin Press, 2008), to Kriegel
and Lichtheim.
Judts first book, La Reconstruction du Parti
Socialiste: 1921-1926, a detailed analysis of the
French Socialist Partys break with Communism, was published in 1976 in France. Three
years later, Cambridge University Press released Socialism in Provence, 1871-1914: A
Study of the Origins of the Mod ern French Left,
a nuanced analysis of why the peasants of
lower Provence, battered by economic misfortune, had joined the ranks of the French
socialist movement. Such questions received
a more comprehensive treatment in Marxism and the French Left: Studies in Labour and
Politics in France, 1830-1981 (Oxford University Press, 1986). Those early books solidified Judts reputation as a bright young political historian. The following year, he left the
University of Oxford for the history department at NYU.
More and more, Judt became engaged in
an internal quarrel among leftists about their
failure to look honestly at Communism.
Tony was always attuned to a certain kind
of blindness on the extreme left toward the
Soviet Union, says Sennett. That concern
informed Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals,
1944-1956 (University of California Press,
1992), a merciless expos of several left-wing
luminaries Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de
Beauvoir, and the Roman Catholic philosopher Emmanuel Mounier (founder of the
magazine Esprit), among others for what
he saw as their reckless and nave fellow-traveling. Reviewed on the cover of The New York
Times Book Review, the work was praised as
a forthright and uncommonly damning
study. Numerous other commendations followed. (In The Burden of Responsibility: Blum,
Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century, a companion volume to Past Imperfect
published in 1998 by the University of Chicago Press, Judt traced an opposite tradition
anti-Communist and genuinely independent in French political life.)
Past Imperfect emerged at a moment, after
the revolutions of 1989, when a new generation of Anglo-American scholars, wary of the
excesses of postmodernism, took a fresh look
at the intellectual legacy of the French left,
says Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at
Columbia University. At the time, such a rethinking was already under way in France,
he says, but there was still a cargo cult in
50 t h a n n i v ersa ry
| nov em ber 2016
89

the American academy around Foucault and
Derrida.
Judt was traveling in France when he received word of the Times review. I got back
to New York, and I was a star of stage and
screen, he recalls, a few minutes after summoning his nurse to adjust the angle at which
he was sitting in his wheelchair. (In obvious discomfort, Judt nonetheless apologized
for having to briefly suspend the interview.)
Suddenly he continues, picking up the
conversation I was an expert on intellectuals. By years end, he had contributed several
essays to The New York Review of Books. Commissions poured in from other publications.
I wasnt looking to become a public intellectual, Judt insists, though he concedes that
people might have trouble believing that. As
a young man, he says, he was content with being a well-paid professor at elite universities:
I enjoyed teaching, and sitting in an armchair feet up, with a glass of wine and a
cigarette reading books.
Once coaxed into the public arena, Judt has
earned a reputation as a hard-hitting polemicist. Consider a 2006 essay for the London Review of Books Bushs Useful Idiots in
which he chided prominent liberal thinkers
Jean Bethke Elshtain, Michael Ignatieff,
and Michael Walzer, among others for
having acquiesced in President George W.
Bushs catastrophic foreign policy. Mincing no words, Judt wrote: Liberal intellectuals used to be distinguished precisely by their
efforts to think for themselves, rather than in
the service of others. Intellectuals should not
be smugly theorizing endless war, much less
confidently promoting and excusing it. They
should be engaged in disturbing the peace
their own above all. In response, Bruce Ackerman, a professor of law and political science
at Yale University, and Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia,
drafted a manifesto, signed by a number of
prominent academics, that dismissed Judts
claims as nonsense on stilts. Everyone who
signed, they pointed out, had opposed the
Iraq war as illegal, unwise, and destructive of
Americas moral standing.
Elsewhere, Judt has described the cold-war
historian John Lewis Gaddiss thumbnail
sketches of Communist doctrine as clunky
and a bit embarrassing, and has written that
The New York Times columnist Thomas L.
Friedmans portentous, Pulitzer-winning pieties are always carefully road tested for middle-brow political acceptability, and that the
eminent British historian Eric Hobsbawm, a
longtime Communist, refuses to stare evil
in the face and call it by its name. Last year
Judt won the Orwell Prize, awarded annually in recognition of journalism that has best
achieved George Orwells aim to make political writing into an art. The citation praises
him as a controversialist.
in 2002, when Judt was at

home recovering from radiation
and surgery to treat cancer in his
left arm, he became more and
more worried about the failure of
Israel to do the right thing. In May of that
year, The New York Review published his first
major statement on the Middle East conflict,
the solution to which, he contended, was obvious: two states, the dismantling of Jewish
settlements in the occupied territories, and
no right of return to Israel for Palestinian
refugees. Judt fingered Israel for the bloody
impasse, provocatively likening its actions
to those of France in its colonial war against
Algeria. By 1958, he noted, the damage that
French policy was inflicting on the Algerians
was surpassed by the harm France was inflicting upon itself. Israel, he wrote, was in a similarly dire predicament.
Judts historical analogy drew sharp rejoinders. If Israel resembles French Algeria, why exactly should Israel and its national
doctrine, Zionism, be regarded as any more
legitimate than Frances imperialism? asked
the political writer Paul Berman. That was a
arly
I hate publicity,
celebrity, fame, and
notoriety, all of which
are associated with
controversy in its
public form.
good question. A few months later, Judt revised his position. The time has come to
think the unthinkable, he proclaimed in a
widely disseminated essay in The New York
Review. The two-state solution a Jewish
state and an Arab state is probably already
doomed, and the least-bad option remaining
was for Israel to convert from a Jewish state
to a binational state. The depressing truth,
Judt wrote, is that Israel today is bad for the
Jews.
According to Benny Morris, a professor of
history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and author of One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict (Yale University Press, 2009), Judts essay placed the
one-state idea squarely and noisily on the
table of international agendas. The Forward
described it as the intellectual equivalent of
a nuclear bomb on Zionism. Within weeks,
The New York Review had received more than
1,000 letters to the editor. Suddenly, says
Robert Boyers, editor of the quarterly Salmagundi and an observer of the liberal intellectual scene, Judt was a major voice weighing
in on the Middle East. Indeed, if the death of

Judts friend the literary critic Edward Said,
in 2003, left a yawning void in the national
conversation about Israel, Palestine, and the
Palestinians, as Judt has suggested, then it is
Judt himself who has filled that void.
And like Said, who also advocated a onestate solution, Judt has become a very public target for criticism. An op-ed essay in The
Jerusalem Post accused him of pandering to
genocide. Omer Bartov, a professor of European history at Brown University, dismissed the binational idea as absurd; Walzer, co-editor of Dissent magazine, derided it
as an escapist fantasy that offers no practical
escape from the work of repressing the terrorist organizations and withdrawing from
the Occupied Territories. Steven J. Zipperstein, a professor of Jewish culture and history at Stanford University and a close friend
of Judts for a quarter of a century, blasted the
article as one more in a long series of calls
(perhaps the silliest yet) for Jewish self-immolation.
The most trenchant critique is that Judts
embrace of binationalism echoes the reckless,
unrealistic style of trafficking in ideas that he
condemned in Past Imperfect. I, too, wish everyone was a cosmopolitan Kantian, and we
had one huge democracy for the brotherhood
of all mankind, says Gadi Taub, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
and author of a forthcoming book, The Settlers and the Struggle Over the Meaning of Zionism (Yale University Press). But these are
two peoples (Jews and Palestinians) severely
traumatized by the lack of national independence. To argue that such a situation lends
itself to shared sovereignty in a binational
state is, says Taub, the strikingly irresponsible kind of thing that intellectuals sometimes
do for their own convenience vis--vis their
own conscience. In reality, a one-state solution will doom Israelis and Palestinians to a
permanent civil war.
Judt seems unconcerned that his public
image is now so tied to his views on Israel.
Google me, he says nonchalantly. You will
end up at the binationalism essay straightaway. He goes on to observe that to the
outside world, Im a crazed, self-hating Jewish
left-winger. Joking aside, Judt is not entirely
comfortable in his role as the public face of
the anti-Zionist crowd. I wouldnt call myself anti-Zionist, because there are openly anti-Semitic people who use anti-Zionism as a
cover, he explains. Some of them, like the
white nationalist David Duke, have reached
out to him, prompting accusations that he is
giving intellectual cover to bigots. Despite
such foul vilification, says the Columbia
historian Fritz Stern, Tony has, if anything,
only become more outspoken.
There have been efforts to silence Judt. In
October 2006, a lecture he was to give at the
Polish consulate in New York was abruptly
canceled following complaints by the Anti-Defamation League and the American

Jewish Committee. The ensuing crush of
media attention placed Judt at the center of a
free-speech fracas. The story was picked up
by the press in France, England, and Poland;
Judt at War, declared a headline in The New
York Observer, which quoted Judt denouncing
the ADLs national director, Abraham H.
Foxman, and some other leaders of American
Jewish organizations as illiberal lying bigots and fascists. More than 100 prominent
scholars and intellectuals, many of whom disagree with Judts views, signed a petition denouncing the climate of intimidation that
surrounded the cancellation of his lecture.
Tony is a man who thrives on controversy, says Richard Sennett. When I read that
quote to Judt, he balks. Richard is being a
bit mischievous, Judt replies without smiling. He concedes that he has always been
verbally provocative but that he doesnt
seek out controversy. A day after our meeting, Judt followed up in an e-mail message:
I hate publicity, celebrity, fame, and notoriety, all of which are associated with controversy in its public form. But, in fairness,
all my life Ive been rather upfront with my
opinions and never hidden them on grounds
of conformity or (I fear) politesse. However,
until the wretched Polish consulate affair, I
dont think I was ever controversial I was
certainly not known outside of the hermetic
little world of the academy, and my contrarian scholarly writings aroused no great fuss.
IMAGES
here was a fuss,
however, when
in 1979 the journal History Workshop published an attack by Judt,
then a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, on the
field of social history. A whole discipline is
being degraded and abused by the postmodern turn toward identity and feminist history, he wrote. (The essay, he tells me, placed
his bid for tenure in jeopardy.) By the early 1980s, his displeasure with the field had
evolved into a deep malaise. It was around
that time that he met the Czech dissident Jan
Kavan, living in exile in London, who in later years would serve as foreign minister and
deputy prime minister of the post-Communist Czech Republic. Through him and others, Judt, who had since moved to Oxford,
developed an interest in Czechoslovakia and,
more broadly, in Eastern Europe. He bought
a copy of Teach Yourself Czech, studied for two
hours every night, and enrolled in language
classes at the university. By the mid-80s, he
was competent in Czech, and in 1985 he traveled to Prague as part of a group organized
by the English philosopher Roger Scruton
and the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, an
Oxford-centered organization that supported samizdat publishing and other clandestine
MARCH 7, 2014
Deconstructing Paul De Man

Making words themselves crucial to his illustration, David Plunkert led off Carlin Romanos review of a biography of Paul De Man, philosopher
and scoundrel. How, Romano asked, should a
scholars ethics affect our reading of his work?
50 t h a n n i v ersa ry
| nov em ber 2016
91

cultural activities in Czechoslovakia. During
that visit, the first of many, Judt helped smuggle in banned books and lectured to crowded
rooms in private apartments. It was there that
he recovered his passion for the politics and
history of Europe.
When he first arrived at NYU, in 1987,
there was a sense that if you had good ideas,
they would let you act on them, Judt says.
So in 1995, when he was weighing a very
tempting offer to join the Committee on
Social Thought, at the University of Chicago, he proposed pursuing his interest in
European and American relations by setting
up the Remarque Institute. NYU, eager to
keep him, agreed. With typical self-assurance, Judt told the university, Give me 10
years, and I will give you a world-famous institute. According to Wolin, Judt has succeeded by nurturing a continuing conversation through conferences, workshops, and
fellowships among European and American academics. If youre a European scholar
of modern politics and history, and you want
to be known in America, Remarque is a rite
of passage, Wolin says. Fritz Stern, who is
on the institutes board, adds that Tony has
turned it into a major international center.
The institutes reputation is almost inextricably tied to that of Judt, for good and ill.
(Two board members resigned after he came
out in favor of a binational future for Israelis
and Palestinians.)
In Judts mind, however, his greatest
achievement is his book Postwar. In 1945,
Europe lay in ruins. Some 36.5 million of its
inhabitants died between 1939 and 1945. Most
of those who survived were starving or without shelter; Germany had lost 40 percent of
its homes, Britain 30 percent, France 20 percent. Yet in the next 60 years, Judt writes, Europe had improbably become a paragon of
the international virtues, and its social model free or nearly free medical care, early retirement, robust social and public services
stood as an exemplar for all to emulate.
Postwar tells the story of how that happened. The book is ambitiously organized
to combine the whole of the postwar history
of Europe Western and Eastern into
a single conceptual framework. The result
is not a work of dispassionate scholarship.
In the preface, Judt describes his approach
as an avowedly personal interpretation of
the recent European past. In a word that
has acquired undeservedly pejorative connotations, he writes, Postwar is opinionated.
Judts thesis, developed through 900 pages, is this: Europe remade itself by forgetting
its past. The first postwar Europe was built
upon deliberate mis-memory upon forgetting as a way of life. And there was much
to forget: collaboration, genocide, extreme
deprivation.
Translated into 19 languages, Postwar has
been received by critics as a masterpiece.

A remarkable book, declared the Harvard
University English professor Louis Menand
in The New Yorker. The writing is vivid; the
coverage of little countries as well as the
great ones is virtually superhuman; and,
above all, the book is smart. According to
the Oxford political theorist Alan Ryan, Postwar has the pace of a thriller and the scope
of an encyclopedia. Krzysztof Michalski, a
professor of philosophy at Boston University
and rector of the Institute for Human Sciences, in Vienna, where Judt is a permanent
fellow, says, Tony is one of the few first-rate
Western intellectuals with a nonideological
interest in Eastern Europe.
y last february,
Judt could no
longer move his hands. I thought
it would be catastrophic, he recalls matter-of-factly. How would
he write? He discovered that a lifetime of lecturing often without notes and
in complete sentences and full paragraphs
had trained him to think out loud. He can
now, with a bit of mental preparation, dictate an essay or an intellectually thoughtful
e-mail. Unable to jot down ideas on a yellow pad, Judt has taught himself elaborate
memorization schemes of the sort described
by the Yale historian Jonathan D. Spence in
This is an imprisoning
disease, and every
now and then there
is a desperate desire
to break out of the
prison and tell people
what it is like.
his 1984 book, The Memory Palace of Matteo
Ricci. Like Ricci, a 16th-century Jesuit missionary to China, Judt imagines structures in
his head where he can store his thoughts and
ideas. The basic principle: Picture entering
a large house; turn left and there is a room
with shelves and tables; leave a memory on
each surface until the rooms fills. Now head
down the hall into another room. To retrieve
your memories, to reconstruct a lecture or
recall the content and structure of an article, you re-enter the building and follow the
same path, which should trigger the ideas you
left behind.
It works, Judt says. In fact, he tells me,
his mental acuity has grown stronger over
the past year. He compares his situation to
that of a blind person with uniquely sensi-
tive ears, or of a deaf person with extraordinary eyesight. I knew it to be theoretically

true that when you are deprived of everything else, the thing you are not deprived
of gets better, he says. But it has been very
odd to experience that in practice. After a
moment, he goes on: Im a 61-year-old guy,
Im not as sharp as I was when I was 51. But
the things I could do last year I can do better this year.
He recently signed a contract to expand
his lecture on social democracy into a short
book, which he hopes will be published in the
late spring. Ive got a huge amount of mental energy, he says. Colleagues and friends
are understandably protective of Judt and are
wary of commenting on his physical decline.
(Youre not going to write about his illness
or the fact that hes dying, Sennett says at
the outset of our conversation, more as an
order than a question.) The life expectancy
of an ALS patient averages two to five years
from the time of diagnosis.
At bedtime, having been maneuvered from
his wheelchair to his cot and positioned upright, his glasses removed, Judt is left alone
with his thoughts. In recent months, they
have turned to his youth the charms of
a curmudgeonly grade-school German-language instructor, the shifting cultural mores
of Cambridge in the mid-60s, the comforting
solitude of a train ride. At the encouragement
of his friend Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European studies at Oxford, he has
crafted those little vignettes from my past
into a series of autobiographical sketches.
In one moving essay, recently published
in The New York Review, Judt addresses directly his life with ALS. Helplessness, he
writes, is humiliating even in a passing crisis imagine or recall some occasion when
you have fallen down or otherwise required
physical assistance from strangers. Imagine
the minds response to the knowledge that
the peculiarly humiliating helplessness of
ALS is a life sentence (we speak blithely of
death sentences in this connection, but actually the latter would be a relief).
Before I leave his apartment, as night falls,
I ask him why he decided to write such a personal account of his illness. He pauses, inhales deeply, and says, without drama or selfpity, This is an imprisoning disease, and
every now and then there is a desperate desire to break out of the prison and tell people what it is like. Judt takes another deep
breath. The disease is like being put in
prison for life, no parole, and the prison is
shrinking by six inches every week. I know
that at some point in the future its going to
crush me to death, but I dont know exactly
n
when.
Evan R. Goldstein was a staff editor at The
Chronicle Review when he interviewed Tony
Judt and wrote this profile. He is now the editor.
The Shadow Scholar

By ED DANTE
Editors note: Ed Dante is a pseudonym for
a writer who lives on the East Coast. Through
a literary agent, he approached The Chronicle
wanting to tell the story of how he makes a living
writing papers for a custom-essay company and
to describe the extent of student cheating he has
observed. In the course of editing his article, The
Chronicle reviewed correspondence Dante had
with clients and some of the papers he had been
paid to write. In the article published here, some
details of the assignment he describes have been
altered to protect the identity of the student.
came in by e-mail
around 2 in the afternoon. It was
from a previous customer, and she
had urgent business. I quote her
message here verbatim (if I had to
put up with it, so should you): You did me
business ethics propsal for me I need propsal
got approved pls can you will write me paper?
Ive gotten pretty good at interpreting this
kind of correspondence. The client had attached a document from her professor with
details about the paper. She needed the first
section in a week. Seventy-five pages.
I told her no problem.
It truly was no problem. In the past year,
Ive written roughly 5,000 pages of scholarly
literature, most on very tight deadlines. But
you wont find my name on a single paper.
Ive written toward a masters degree in
cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology,
and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. Ive worked on bachelors degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. Ive written
for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services,
sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion,
postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. Ive athe request
tended three dozen online universities. Ive

completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or
more. All for someone else.
Youve never heard of me, but theres a
good chance that youve read some of my
work. Im a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that.
Somebody in your classroom uses a service
that you cant detect, that you cant defend
against, that you may not even know exists.
I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by
creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students.
Ive worked there full time since 2004. On
any day of the academic year, I am working
on upward of 20 assignments.
In the midst of this great recession, business is booming. At busy times, during
midterms and finals, my companys staff of
roughly 50 writers is not large enough to satisfy the demands of students who will pay
for our work and claim it as their own.
You would be amazed by the incompetence
of your students writing. I have seen the
word desperate misspelled every way you
can imagine. And these students truly are
desperate. They couldnt write a convincing
grocery list, yet they are in graduate school.
They really need help. They need help learning and, separately, they need help passing
their courses. But they arent getting it.
For those of you who have ever mentored
a student through the writing of a dissertation, served on a thesis-review committee,
or guided a graduate student through a formal research process, I have a question: Do
you ever wonder how a student who struggles to formulate complete sentences in conversation manages to produce marginally
competent research? How does that student
get by you?
I live well on the desperation, misery, and
November 19, 2010

When Ed Dante published his pseudonymous
account of how he made a living writing student papers admissions essays, undergraduate reports, graduate theses, even doctoral dissertations it caused a sensation.
In the previous year, he had written more than
5,000 pages, usually for ill-prepared and lazy
students, earning more than $65,000 in the
process. Nurses and seminary students were
among his customers, and of all fields, educators were the biggest cheaters. Mr. Dantes
frank account, which became the most-viewed
article in Chronicle history, outraged and even
scandalized readers, who were shocked at
how deeply cheating penetrated the academic
system. Yet few people were talking about why
students cheat in the first place. It is my hope
that this essay will initiate such a conversation, Mr. Dante said. As for me, Im planning
to retire. Im tired of helping you make your
students look competent.
93
IMAGES

incompetence that your educational system
has created. Granted, as a writer, I could
earn more; certainly there are ways to earn
less. But I never struggle to find work. And
as my peers trudge through thankless office
jobs that seem more intolerable with every
passing month of our sustained recession, I
am on pace for my best year yet. I will make
roughly $66,000 this year. Not a kings ransom, but higher than what many actual educators are paid.
Of course, I know you are aware that
cheating occurs. But you have no idea how
deeply this kind of cheating penetrates the
academic system, much less how to stop it.
Last summer The New York Times reported that 61 percent of undergraduates have
admitted to some form of cheating on assignments and exams. Yet there is little discussion about custom papers and how they
differ from more-detectable forms of plagiarism, or about why students cheat in the
first place.
It is my hope that this essay will initiate
such a conversation. As for me, Im planning
to retire. Im tired of helping you make your
students look competent.
October 3, 2014
NYU Eats World:

An Alumna Laments the Rise
of an Imperial University
For Claudia Dreifuss critique of what she saw as
New York Universitys costly hubris the very
model of the modern, inflating mega-university,
she called it the illustrator Melinda Beck made
the most of violet, the school color.
in the semester when the

business student contacts me, a time
when I typically juggle deadlines and
push out 20 to 40 pages a day. I had
written a short research proposal for
her a few weeks before, suggesting a project
that connected a surge of unethical business
practices to the patterns of trade liberalization. The proposal was approved, and now
I had six days to complete the assignment.
This was not quite a rush order, which we
get top dollar to write. This assignment
would be priced at a standard $2,000, half of
which goes in my pocket.
A few hours after I had agreed to write
the paper, I received the following e-mail:
sending sorces for ur to use thanx.
I did not reply immediately. One hour later, I received another message:
did u get the sorce I send
please where you are now?
Desprit to pass spring projict
Not only was this student going to be a
constant thorn in my side, but she also communicated in haiku, each less decipherable
than the one before it. I let her know that
I was giving her work the utmost attention,
that I had received her sources, and that I
would be in touch if I had any questions.
Then I put it aside.
From my experience, three demographic groups seek out my services: the English-as-second-language student; the hopelessly deficient student; and the lazy rich
kid.
For the last, colleges are a perfect launching ground they are built to reward the
t is late
rich and to forgive them their laziness. Lets

be honest: The successful among us are not
always the best and the brightest, and certainly not the most ethical. My favorite customers are those with an unlimited supply
of money and no shortage of instructions on
how they would like to see their work executed. While the deficient student will generally
not know how to ask for what he wants until
he doesnt get it, the lazy rich student will
know exactly what he wants. He is poised for
a life of paying others and telling them what
to do. Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he
needs to stay on top.
As for the first two types of students
the ESL and the hopelessly deficient colleges are utterly failing them. Students who
come to American universities from other
countries find that their efforts to learn a
new language are confounded not only by
cultural difficulties but also by the pressures
of grading. The focus on evaluation rather
than education means that those who havent
mastered English must do so quickly or suf-
Youve never
heard of me, but
theres a good chance
that youve read
some of my work.
fer the consequences. My service provides a
particularly quick way to master English.
And those who are hopelessly deficient a
euphemism, I admit struggle with communication in general.
Two days had passed since I last heard
from the business student. Overnight I had
received 14 e-mails from her. She had additional instructions for the assignment, such
as but more again please make sure they are
a good link betwee the leticture review and
all the chapter and the benfet of my paper.
finally do you think the level of this work?
how match i can get it?
Ill admit, I didnt fully understand that
one.
It was followed by some clarification:
where u are can you get my messages?
Please I pay a lot and dont have ao to faile I
strated to get very worry.
Her messages had arrived between 2 a.m.
and 6 a.m. Again I assured her I had the
matter under control.
It was true. At this point, there are few academic challenges that I find intimidating.
You name it, Ive been paid to write about it.
Customers orders are endlessly differ-
ent yet strangely all the same. No matter

what the subject, clients want to be assured
that their assignment is in capable hands.
It would be terrible to think that your Ivy
League graduate thesis was riding on the
work ethic and perspicacity of a public-university slacker. So part of my job is to be
whatever my clients want me to be. I say yes
when I am asked if I have a Ph.D. in sociology. I say yes when I am asked if I have professional training in industrial/organizational psychology. I say yes when asked if I have
ever designed a perpetual-motion-powered
time machine and documented my efforts in
a peer-reviewed journal.
The subject matter, the grade level, the
college, the course these things are irrelevant to me. Prices are determined per page
and are based on how long I have to complete the assignment. As long as it doesnt
require me to do any math or video-documented animal husbandry, I will write anything.
I have completed countless online courses. Students provide me with passwords and
user names so I can access key documents
and online exams. In some instances, I have
even contributed to weekly online discussions with other students in the class.
I have become a master of the admissions
essay. I have written these for undergraduate, masters, and doctoral programs, some
at elite universities. I can explain exactly
why youre Brown material, why the Wharton M.B.A. program would benefit from
your presence, how certain life experiences
have prepared you for the rigors of your chosen course of study. I do not mean to be insensitive, but I cant tell you how many times
Ive been paid to write about somebody helping a loved one battle cancer. Ive written essays that could be adapted into Meryl Streep
movies.
I do a lot of work for seminary students. I
like seminary students. They seem so blissfully unaware of the inherent contradiction
in paying somebody to help them cheat in
courses that are largely about walking in
the light of God and providing an ethical
model for others to follow. I have been commissioned to write many a passionate condemnation of Americas moral decay as exemplified by abortion, gay marriage, or the
teaching of evolution. All in all, we may presume that clerical authorities see these as a
greater threat than the plagiarism committed by the future frocked.
With respect to Americas nurses, fear
not. Our lives are in capable hands just
hands that cant write a lick. Nursing students account for one of my companys biggest customer bases. Ive written case-management plans, reports on nursing ethics,
and essays on why nurse practitioners are
lighting the way to the future of medicine.
Ive even written pharmaceutical-treatment
courses, for patients who I hope were hypothetical.

I, who have no name, no opinions, and no
style, have written so many papers at this
point, including legal briefs, military-strategy assessments, poems, lab reports, and, yes,
even papers on academic integrity, that its
hard to determine which course of study is
most infested with cheating. But Id say education is the worst. Ive written papers for
students in elementary-education programs,
special-education majors, and ESL-training
courses. Ive written lesson plans for aspiring high-school teachers, and Ive synthesized reports from notes that customers
have taken during classroom observations.
Ive written essays for those studying to become school administrators, and Ive completed theses for those on course to become
principals. In the enormous conspiracy that
is student cheating, the frontline intelligence
community is infiltrated by double agents.
(Future educators of America, I know who
you are.)
s the deadline for the business-ethics paper approaches,

I think about whats ahead of
me. Whenever I take on an
assignment this large, I get a
certain physical sensation. My body says:
Are you sure you want to do this again?
You know how much it hurt the last time.
You know this student will be with you for
a long time. You know you will become her
emergency contact, her guidance counselor and life raft. You know that for the 48
hours that you dedicate to writing this paper, you will cease all human functions but
typing, you will Google until the term has
lost all meaning, and you will drink enough
coffee to fuel a revolution in a small Central American country.
But then theres the money, the sense that
I must capitalize on opportunity, and even a
bit of a thrill in seeing whether I can do it.
And I can. Its not implausible to write a
75-page paper in two days. Its just miserable. I dont need much sleep, and when I get
cranking, I can churn out four or five pages an hour. First I lay out the sections of an
assignment introduction, problem statement, methodology, literature review, findings, conclusion whatever the instructions call for. Then I start Googling.
I havent been to a library once since I
started doing this job. Amazon is quite
generous about free samples. If I can find
a single page from a particular text, I can
cobble that into a report, deducing what
I dont know from customer reviews and
publisher blurbs. Google Scholar is a great
source for material, providing the abstract
of nearly any journal article. And of course,
theres Wikipedia, which is often my first
95

stop when dealing with unfamiliar subjects.
Naturally one must verify such material
elsewhere, but Ive taken hundreds of crash
courses this way.
After Ive gathered my sources, I pull
out usable quotes, cite them, and distribute
them among the sections of the assignment.
Over the years, Ive refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-word sentence
in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of
quotable text, and Ill produce two pages of
ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a
paragraph.
Ive also got a mental library of stock academic phrases: A close consideration of
the events which occurred in ____ during
the ____ demonstrate that ____ had entered into a phase of widespread cultural,
social, and economic change that would define ____ for decades to come. Fill in the
blanks using words provided by the professor in the assignments instructions.
How good is the product created by this
process? That depends on the day, my
mood, how many other assignments I am
working on. It also depends on the customer, his or her expectations, and the degree
to which the completed work exceeds his
or her abilities. I dont ever edit my assignments. That way I get fewer customer requests to dumb it down. So some of my
work is great. Some of it is not so great.
Most of my clients do not have the wherewithal to tell the difference, which probably means that in most cases the work is
better than what the student would have
produced on his or her own. Ive actually
had customers thank me for being clever enough to insert typos. Nice touch,
theyll say.
Ive read enough academic material to
know that Im not the only bullshit artist
out there. I think about how Dickens got
paid per word and how, as a result, Bleak
House is ... well, lets be diplomatic and say
exhaustive. Dickens is a role model for me.
So how does someone become a custom-paper writer? The story of how I got
into this job may be instructive. It is mostly
about the tremendous disappointment that
awaited me in college.
My distaste for the early hours and regimented nature of high school was tempered
by the promise of the educational community ahead, with its free exchange of ideas
and access to great minds. How dispiriting to find out that college was just another
place where grades were grubbed, competition overshadowed personal growth, and
the threat of failure was used to encourage
learning.
Although my university experience did
not live up to its vaunted reputation, it did
lead me to where I am today. I was raised in
an upper-middle-class family, but I went to

college in a poor neighborhood. I fit in really well: After paying my tuition, I didnt
have a cent to my name. I had nothing but
a meal plan and my roommates computer.
But I was determined to write for a living,
and, moreover, to spend these extremely expensive years learning how to do so. When
I completed my first novel, in the summer
between sophomore and junior years, I contacted the English department about creating an independent study around editing
and publishing it. I was received like a mental patient. I was told, Theres nothing like
that here. I was told that I could go back
to my classes, sit in my lectures, and fill out
Scantron tests until I graduated.
I didnt much care for my classes, though.
I slept late and spent the afternoons working on my own material. Then a funny
thing happened. Here I was, begging anybody in authority to take my work serious-
I work hard for

a living. Im nice
to people. But
I understand that
in simple terms,
Im the bad guy.
ly. But my classmates did. They saw my
abilities and my abundance of free time.
They saw a value that the university did
not.
It turned out that my lazy, Xanax-snorting, Miller-swilling classmates were
thrilled to pay me to write their papers.
And I was thrilled to take their money. Imagine you are crumbling under the
weight of university-issued parking tickets and self-doubt when a frat boy offers
you cash to write about Plato. Doing that
job was a no-brainer. Word of my services
spread quickly, especially through the fraternities. Soon I was receiving calls from
strangers who wanted to commission my
work. I was a writer!
a decade later, students,

not publishers, still come
from everywhere to find me.
I work hard for a living. Im
nice to people. But I understand that in simple terms, Im the bad guy.
I see where Im vulnerable to ethical scrutiny.
But pointing the finger at me is too easy.
early
Why does my business thrive? Why do so

many students prefer to cheat rather than
do their own work?
Say what you want about me, but I am
not the reason your students cheat.
You know whats never happened? Ive
never had a client complain that hed been
expelled from school, that the originality
of his work had been questioned, that some
disciplinary action had been taken. As far
as I know, not one of my customers has ever
been caught.
With just two days to go, I was finally ready to throw myself into the business
assignment. I turned off my phone, caged
myself in my office, and went through the
purgatory of cramming the summation of a
students alleged education into a weekend.
Try it sometime. After the 20th hour on a
single subject, you have an almost-out-ofbody experience.
My client was thrilled with my work. She
told me that she would present the chapter to her mentor and get back to me with
our next steps. Two weeks passed, by which
time the assignment was but a distant memory, obscured by the several hundred pages
I had written since. On a Wednesday evening, I received the following e-mail:
Thanx u so much for the chapter is going very good the porfesser likes it but
wants the folloing suggestions please what
do you thing?:
The hypothesis is interesting but Id
like to see it a bit more focused. Choose a
specific connection and try to prove it.
What shoudwe say?
This happens a lot. I get paid per assignment. But with longer papers, the student
starts to think of me as a personal educational counselor. She paid me to write a
one-page response to her professor, and
then she paid me to revise her paper. I completed each of these assignments, sustaining
the voice that the student had established
and maintaining the front of competence
from some invisible location far beneath the
ivory tower.
The 75-page paper on business ethics ultimately expanded into a 160-page graduate
thesis, every word of which was written by
me. I cant remember the name of my client,
but its her name on my work. We collaborated for months. As with so many other
topics I tackle, the connection between unethical business practices and trade liberalization became a subtext to my everyday
life.
So, of course, you can imagine my excitement when I received the good news:
thanx so much for uhelp ican going to
n
graduate to now.
Ed Dante eventually revealed himself to be Dave
Tomar, a freelance writer living in Philadelphia.
In 2012 he published a book based on this article.
Ranking 5th in the U.S. for innovative national universities Training IBMs Watson to detect
cybercrime Sending student Engineers Without Borders to help Kenyan villages Finishing
in the Final Four in mens soccer, game development, chess, and mini-Baja racing Contributing
$483 million annually to the States economy through alumni, 70% of whom live and work in
Maryland Examining images that challenge racial stereotypes Ranking in top 20 of U.S.
universities for NASA funding Competing in the Olympics four times Filming Academy
Award-winning documentaries Launching the careers of more African American M.D./
Ph.D.s than any university Housing 130 companies at Marylands first university research
park Exploring how Baltimore talks about our lives and our city Breaking boundaries in
HIV research Teaching entrepreneurship in more than 70 courses, from history and chemistry
to art and engineering Thrilling ears with the award-winning design of the Linehan Concert
Hall Raising student attendance and achievement at Lakeland Elementary/Middle School
Bringing the Civil War to life with gaming technology Creating revolutionary fish-farming
techniques to feed the world sustainably Becoming the first African American president of
the Maryland Bar Providing medicine-on-demand on the battlefield Performing in NYCs
Shakespeare in the Park Fighting mosquitos and other pests in the city Inventing the
next great portable coffee maker and mug-in-one Transforming seniors lives with health
care engineering innovations Winning Maryland Incubator Company of the Year Helping
prisoners turn vacant lots into vibrant landscapes Performing opera throughout Europe
Protecting our cyber networks
An Era of Neglect
How public colleges were crowded out, beaten up, and failed to fight back
By KARIN FISCHER and JACK STRIPLING
that no one really noticed at first. Thats the way erosion

works. It is a gradual decay.
But somewhere along the line, over the
past three decades or so, the deterioration
of support for public higher education became
hard to miss. Appropriations tanked. Tuition
soared. College leaders embraced gloomy rhetoric about broken partnerships with the very
people who had built these institutions from
the ground up.
Now we have come to a precipice. College
students and their families, who just a decade
ago paid for about one-third of the cost of
their education, are on track to pay for most of
it. In nearly half of the states, they already do.
Behind these changes is a fundamental shift.
Public colleges, once viewed as worthy of collective investment for the greater good, are increasingly treated as vehicles delivering a personal benefit to students, who ought to foot
the bill themselves.
The story of public higher educations transition from a key national priority to an increasingly neglected special interest is untidy.
It cannot be traced to any single moment in
time. It cannot be laid at the feet of any one
individual or ideology. Rather, it is the story
of dozens and dozens of consequential moves
made by individual actors across the country.
They are lobbyists and activists, antitax conservatives and big-government liberals, conflicted idealists and self-preservationists. Even
college leaders themselves.
They are the American public.
t happened so slowly
March 7, 2014
Journalism naturally seeks the new thing, the
big event, or the popular person. Were often
slow to catalog the thing happening right
in front of us. Back in 2013, David Boren,
president of the University of Oklahoma, gave
a campus speech in which he said, Without
any debate and without anyone in the country
realizing it, we are slowly but surely doing
away with public higher education in the
United States. It may have been hyperbole,
but that quote inspired us to tell a story that
had been staring us in the face. We set out
to explain how the decline of financial support
for public higher education had happened,
over three decades. The working idea was
Who killed public higher ed? There was no
one person, of course, but there have been
dozens and dozens of individuals whose
decisions to act, or not to act, have led the
nation to a precipice.
t first blush, Patrick E. Watson would seem to have little to

do with public higher education.
During his 36 years as South
Carolinas top lobbyist for car
dealers, Mr. Watsons sole focus was protecting the interests of his trade-association members. To the extent that he thought about public colleges at all, it was only to revel in memo-
ries of 1969, when he captained the University

of South Carolina football team.
But every victory that Mr. Watson won for
the states car dealers threatened to take money off the table for other interests. And every
dollar is significant in a state where colleges
are often told that there is no money left to
spare for them.
The story of Mr. Watsons greatest legislative coup begins one morning in 1984, when
the governors top man summoned him to
Cogburns Restaurant, in Columbia. Many a
deal had been struck at the popular hangout
in the state capital, where politicians and business leaders were known to trade horses over
$4 rib-eye steaks, fries, and toast.
As Mr. Watson ate that morning, a war was
brewing. Gov. Richard W. Riley, a Democrat,
had proposed a one-cent increase in the sales
tax to pay for improvements to elementary and
secondary schools. Auto dealers hated the idea,
fearing it would hamper car sales.
Hoping to placate Mr. Watson, the governors emissary made his first pitch: Call off
your dogs, he said, and we will insulate your
businesses from any tax hikes. At that moment, no one mentioned higher education.
It was a sweetheart deal for Mr. Watson,
who was executive vice president and chief
executive officer of the South Carolina Auto
Dealers Association. But he wasnt buying. Instead he stirred up his base, telling association
members to stick to their guns.
If one guy at Rotary Club says, Weve
got to raise taxes, he told them, you dont
be afraid to stand up and say, Youre crazy as
hell.
The strength of Mr. Watsons army of car
dealers, who populated every electoral district
in the state, had lawmakers in a panic. The
political winds were shifting in favor of the
governors penny tax, but legislators feared
getting on the wrong side of Mr. Watson. His
talking points were powerful in a tax-averse
state like South Carolina: Poor people here
need cars to get to work, and they cant afford

to pay more in sales tax. It was bad teachers,
not old buildings, the lobbyist argued, that
were holding back education.
If you can learn how to make love in the
backseat of a Volkswagen, you can learn to
read and write in a barn, Mr. Watson said
during a public debate with one of the governors supporters.
In their frantic efforts to satisfy Mr. Watson and his members, lawmakers soon rallied around a compromise not unlike what
had been floated at Cogburns. The sales tax
would increase by 1 percent, but taxes on the
sales of cars, boats, and even airplanes would
be capped at $300.
The cap, as it is known in South Carolina, is described by higher-education officials
there as a giveaway to special interests that
are less worthy than public colleges. Whether South Carolinians buy a Mercedes-Benz
for $200,000 or a Ford Fiesta for $14,000, they
pay the same sales tax.
The cap cost the state an estimated
$169-million last year, which would be sufficient to restore about half of the cuts made to
public colleges since 2008.
And the states budget pie just got even
smaller. In recent months, South Carolina
lawmakers decided that half of the revenue
generated by the states capped sales tax for vehicles should go to road improvements rather
than to a general fund that could finance other
interests, such as higher education and public
schools.
To Mr. Watson, 65, the capped tax was a
success. Dealers sold more cars as a result, he
says, and that is good for South Carolina. This
sort of argument, that the economic stimulus
of tax cuts offsets any losses in tax revenues, is
winning the day in many states where support
for public colleges has withered.
Behind this argument for more tax breaks,
there is always some version of Mr. Watson, a
self-assured power broker who has outmaneuvered his states public colleges.
Few tax-and-spend opponents, though, have
been as successful or well known as Douglas
Bruce.
there was a Tea Party, there

was Mr. Bruce.
An early adherent of the gospel
of limited government and low taxes, Douglas Bruce had ideas that
are now in the mainstream. But in the fall of
1992, when he asked voters to amend Colorados Constitution to control taxes and spending, such economic populism had only recently begun to take hold. It was time, he believed,
to put state agencies, colleges included, on a
fiscal diet. You, not free-spending politicians,
he told voters, should control the states purse
strings.
The voters agreed. They passed the amendment, the Taxpayer Bill of Rights.
efore
After its passage, Mr. Bruce did a victory

lap at the statehouse. He had a message for the
legislators: Ladies and gentlemen, you have no
idea what weve done to you.
What he and the voters had done was to tie
the hands of Colorados lawmakers, then and
ever since. The amendment, known as Tabor,
caps annual increases in government spending and requires that any revenue above that
threshold be returned to taxpayers, no matter
the need for the money. Any tax increase requires a public vote.
The state budget was squeezed, but back in
1992, its doubtful that many Coloradans were
thinking about how their votes would affect
spending on higher education and other government services a generation off.
Mr. Bruce got involved in Colorados antitax movement in 1986, months after moving
to the state from his native Los Angeles. California is home to the granddaddy of measures
to limit taxes, Proposition 13, and Mr. Bruce
studied it and others around the country. As
he crafted the Colorado amendment, he ad-
Why should some

truck driver or
waitress have to
pay for someone to
get their degree in
medieval literature?
opted the best, and often most stringent, components of other states measures.
Mr. Bruce, 64, can be both courtly and
combative. His observance of the rules of etiquette taking pains, for example, to ensure
that a female reporter visiting from Washington, District of Corruption never walked
on the curb side of the sidewalk would
make Emily Post proud. But he doesnt let
chivalry get in the way of making a political
point.
He offers up his late mother, a public-school teacher, as evidence of the problems with overgenerous public-employee
pensions. After a former governor decried his
terrorist political tactics, Mr. Bruce printed up business cards stamped with the words,
Douglas Bruce, terrorist, which he handed
out until the Oklahoma City bombing.
Mr. Bruce sold the Taxpayer Bill of Rights
on the basis of a simple message: You, the
taxpayer, will get to vote on every tax hike.
But the 1,703-word amendment was far more
complicated.
Shortly after its passage, a small group of
state-policy wonks was assigned to rewrite

the budget to comply with Tabors rules.
Hunkered down in a conference room for
more than two weeks before Christmas, they
combed, line by line, through the budget. Even
money collected from relatively inconsequential items, like drivers-license fees and towel
charges at university gyms, they found, could
add up and force the state to return money to
taxpayers. The amendment, it turned out, was
farther-reaching than many had imagined.
Still, in its first years, Tabors effect on the
state budget was muted, in part because of
Colorados strong economic growth throughout the 1990s. The measure was held up as
a national model, although no other state adopted as restrictive an approach.
All that changed in 2001, when the states
economy went into free fall. Because of the
way the law works, any drops in revenue trigger further spending restrictions restrictions that are slow to loosen even when the
economy rebounds. That meant lawmakers
couldnt make up the lost ground.
At the same time, just as in other states,
Colorados colleges faced growing competition from other government programs for a
share of the shrinking budget. The state increased spending on prisons, public schools,
and Medicaid, while putting less and less
money into higher education.
Today six of Colorados 12 public universities have been placed on a legislative watch list
because of shaky finances. And students and
families, who once paid less than a third of the
cost of college, now cover almost three-quarters of it.
To Mr. Bruces way of thinking, that responsibility is just as it should be. Why
should some truck driver or waitress have to
pay for someone to get their degree in medieval literature? he asks.
The amendment, says its architect, was always meant to rein in the growth of government, higher education included. Two decades
ago, Mr. Bruce was an outsider taking his case
to the public. Today he has set the terms of
the debate. In the battle over government
spending, Mr. Bruce won.
men like Mr. Bruce

were winning, Robert K.
Poch was learning what it
felt like to lose.
Mr. Poch was 28, fresh
out of the University of Virginias Ph.D. program in higher-education administration,
when he began his work as a staff member and
then a lobbyist for the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education. He had come
to the state in 1988, thinking he would help to
shape a sustainable financial model for public
colleges.
Instead he watched things get worse.
The all-consuming budget-setting process
hile
99

in the statehouse, Mr. Poch quickly discovered, bore little resemblance to the deliberative world of academe. Why bother developing a coherent strategy for higher education
when each year brings a new budget? And
anyway, who really had time to listen?
You were always in a state of chaos, says
Mr. Poch, who is now a senior fellow in the
University of Minnesotas College of Education and Human Development. Its like being in a washing machine. Its hard to get people to say, Lets stop. Lets look at the longer
range here.
Mr. Poch was lucky to get five minutes with
key lawmakers rushing between meetings or
sprinting into the bathroom. On any given day during a legislative session, he would
circle the Capitol with a throng of lobbyists.
They would scribble their names and issues
on little scraps of paper, stack them on a desk
outside the House or Senate chambers, and
wait for pages to run the messages down to
legislators on the floor.
B. Poch, he might write. Restructuring
of higher ed.
Then he would wait, sometimes minutes,
sometimes hours, for a lawmaker to emerge
for a brief chat. The conversations, such as
they were, often lent themselves to smallbore issues, such as changing the name of a
college or getting money for a one-time project. These were not times for deep discussions about the instability of the public-college business model.
When it came to fighting off budget cuts,
Mr. Pochs case was repeatedly undermined by
scandal: Ex-Leader of University Is Charged
With Misconduct in South Carolina, one
1991 New York Times headline declared.
Whats more, at a time when other state
agencies seemed very much on point with
their lobbying efforts, public colleges were
often at odds with one another, seeking special treatment from lawmakers and subverting
the commissions unified front, Mr. Poch says.
As a result, the colleges messages were muddled, and they were simply outmatched by the
competition.
The biggest win for South Carolinas colleges came in 2000, four years after Mr. Poch
left the state, when voters approved a lottery
to pay for merit-based scholarships. But even
that deal had its downside for both colleges
and students.
To hear it from higher-education officials,
lawmakers were emboldened to cut appropriations to colleges after the lotterys approval because they knew that the scholarships
would cover any tuition increases that came in
response to the cuts. But that is no longer the
case. Scholarship awards have remained largely stagnant, unable to keep pace with rapid tuition increases that college officials say were
necessary to offset budget cuts.
When the lottery-supported scholarships
were introduced, the maximum base award

of $5,000 covered the full cost of tuition at
the University of South Carolina. Today the
scholarships cover half of the $10,000 sticker
price.
The lottery is widely supported by college
officials, who celebrate its approval as a big
win for higher education in South Carolina.
But to extent that it gave lawmakers cover to
slash budgets, its hard not to see the victory
as Pyrrhic.
battles for public

colleges often happen largely out of
sight. They occur in the most mundane of places, like obscure legislative hearings that few reporters
would think to attend.
To see what it looks like when colleges get
bloodied up, witness one such hearing, held
on a hot and sticky morning not long ago in
Columbia, S.C. It was August 1, 2012, and
Rep. W. Brian White, a Republican, was fired
up.
A recent article in The State, the local newspaper, had reported that South Carolinas colleges, still reeling from years of state budget
cuts, were burdened by an estimated $1.1-billion in deferred-maintenance needs. Who was
to blame? Was it the colleges that had ignored
their upkeep obligations? Or the lawmakers
who had starved them of money?
Mr. White had reached his conclusion: The
colleges had plenty of money for repairs but
he most bruising
Where would
you spend your
first dollar?
Where would
you make the
first cut?
were spending it instead on lavish new buildings. The meeting of the Joint Bond Review
Committee was an opportunity to prove as
much.
Just as Mr. White knew they would, a train
of college officials came before the committee that morning and asked him to sign off on
proposals for new tennis courts, dormitories,
and libraries. They did not mention cracks in
ceilings or outdated chiller plants.
South Carolinas colleges are hardly exceptional in this regard. Even during the tightest of budget years, public colleges across the
nation put up plenty of brick and mortar. In
2012, when per-student appropriations were at
their lowest point in a quarter-century, public colleges spent $7-billion building more administrative and classroom space, according
to McGraw Hill Construction, a market-research company. That figure does not even
include gymnasiums, student centers, and
dormitories, where colleges are most often
accused of excess.
Mr. White, who is fond of bow ties and buffalo-nickel cufflinks, is regarded as one of the
states true conservatives. Known as a grinder who thrives on tedious committee work,
he rose to become chairman of the powerful
House Ways and Means Committee.
Mr. White is often critical of public colleges, but he has little personal experience
with postsecondary education. In the late
1980s, he enrolled for two semesters at Erskine College and left the private institution
before completing a degree. He works as an
insurance agent in Greenville.
As the bond-review hearing dragged on,
Mr. White and his fellow lawmakers grilled
college officials, one after another, for nearly
two hours. The chairman lectured a college
business officer about how private companies,
out in what I call the real world, judiciously
set aside money for upkeep of facilities.
At one point, Mr. White extracted a confession from a technical-college official: You
already have all the money you need, Mr.
White said, dont you? Ill say yes, the official told him. Hesitantly, Ill say yes.
None of the projects were approved that
day. The meeting laid bare the growing mistrust between some lawmakers and the public-college establishment.
It is difficult to see how college officials
and Mr. White will ever find much common
ground, because he is fundamentally skeptical
about one of the sectors core arguments. The
lawmaker says he simply does not believe that
cuts in appropriations justify tuition increases.
What distinguishes public colleges from all
other state agencies, he says, is the ability to
bring in more tuition revenue with the flick of
a switch. When other agencies are faced with
cuts, they tighten their belts, Mr. White says.
Public colleges just find someone else to pay
for it.
They kept raising tuition, he says, to
meet their needs.
ts no surprise
that lawmakers like Mr.

White arent in colleges corner. But political allies, too, dont always have higher educations back. True-blue liberal
states arent necessarily friendlier territory than those considered conservative, and
university budgets have taken a beating under
Democrats and Republicans alike.
More than a decade ago, the new governor of Michigan stood before a group of more
than 1,000 business leaders and posed a simple question: Where would you make the
first cut? The options were projected onto
large screens in the Detroit convention hall:

Health care. K-12. Prisons. Welfare. The
arts. Higher education.
A few weeks earlier, in January 2003, Jennifer M. Granholm, a 43-year-old Democrat,
had taken the oath of office on the frigid steps
of the state Capitol. Now she was bracing for
something more forbidding than Michigan in
winter a $1.7-billion budget shortfall, triple earlier estimates.
Tax revenues were down. Unemployment
had spiked. Few people were buying the cars
produced by Detroit automakers, whose executives were among those gathered in the hall.
The governor was going to the public to
help her decide where to trim the budget.
In the middle of each table was a device sort
of like a television remote. As a list of programs and government services flashed on
the screen, Ms. Granholm asked members of
the audience to press a button: Cut or keep?
Where would you spend your first dollar? she prompted. Where would you make
the first cut?
The vote wasnt even close. At the top of
the list of cuts: the states universities.
Over the next year, the governor would
conduct a dozen similar forums around the
state. Sometimes she asked participants to
rank their favored programs. Other times
she presented specific trade-offs: Eliminate
after-school programs or scholarships for students at private colleges? Cut money for cooperative extension or prescription-drug help
for senior citizens? No matter the size of the
group, no matter where in the state, the results were always the same: Higher education
should go on the chopping block.
That was the governors position, too.
It wasnt that Ms. Granholm was hostile to
higher education. Far from it. The first in her
family to go to college, at Berkeley and then
Harvard Law, she knew the power of a degree. Indeed, she would make doubling the
number of college graduates a priority and
promote community colleges as a way to retrain the states blue-collar workers.
But when it came down to it, as much as
she valued higher education, Ms. Granholm
considered other programs more crucial. She
sought to insulate public schools from deep
reductions. During her administration, she
is proud to say, not one person was dropped
from health-care rolls. But protecting those
programs meant that higher education took
a hit. In midyear cuts during her first year in
office, one dollar in every five came out of the
budgets of state universities and community
colleges.
In really tough times, Ms. Granholm
said in a recent interview, you have to cut
whats important to keep funding whats essential.
As it turned out, tough times got only
tougher. The auto industrys collapse deepened and prolonged Michigans recession.
The lost decade is how people around the

state talk about that period of economic hardship.
Eventually almost no program or service
was spared. Thirteen prisons were closed.
More than 10,000 jobs were cut from state
government. In inflation-adjusted terms, general-fund revenue today is below what it was
in 1969.
Even so, no major area of state government
In really tough
times, you have
to cut whats
important to keep
funding whats
essential.
absorbed financial blows as deep and as sustained as those to higher education.
We looked under every rock, we tightened every belt, Ms. Granholm said of the
cuts borne by Michigans colleges. We did
cut into muscle.
ruce d. benson
is a pragmatist, a
realist, a man who believes in picking his battles. And there is one
fight hes not confident he can win:
the one to restore the precipitous
cuts to the budget of the University of Colorado, where he is president.
Sure, Mr. Benson puts in his time at the
Capitol shaking the hands of legislators, some
of whom he helped get elected in his former
life as a Republican power broker. But state
funds now make up less than 6 percent of the
universitys $3.1-billion budget. Although the
governor, John W. Hickenlooper, a Democrat, has proposed an increase for colleges in
the coming year, Mr. Benson calls spending
on higher education the rounding error in
Colorados budget.
Instead of counting on a reversal of fortune
in state support, he goes about the business
of hunting for money elsewhere. Like college
presidents across the country, he has intensified fund raising and scoured the universitys
books to find efficiencies: $1-million here,
$1-million there. He has also increased tuition 48 percent in the six years he has led
Colorado.
Although Mr. Benson is outwardly upbeat,
implicit in his actions is a sense of resignation. The state is no longer will not likely again be a full partner with public colleges. These are the new rules of the game.
Of course I worry, he says, but you know

that old saying? You play with the hand youre
dealt and move forward.
He knows whats at stake. Mr. Benson
worked as a roughneck on oil rigs to put himself through the university, trading in his coveralls each semester for a college classroom.
Back then, in the early 1960s, a years tuition
at Boulder was $358, or roughly $2,700 in
current dollars. Today its $8,760.
And Mr. Benson, who went on to make
a fortune in the oil fields, fears that a public-college education could be slipping out
of the reach of low- and middle-income students, as he was once. Which tuition increase,
he wonders, will be the breaking point?
Mr. Benson isnt one to point fingers, but
hes been around Colorado politics and higher education for years, as a university trustee,
chairman of the Colorado Commission on
Higher Education, and member of countless
blue-ribbon panels on education. In 1994 he
ran for governor. So he knows the culprits: A
cap on residential property taxes. A constitutional mandate that guarantees spending for
public schools. The Taxpayer Bill of Rights.
All those Coloradoans who voted over time
to protect their pocketbooks and as a result
without really knowing it gutted higher
education.
When the amendment was approved, Mr.
Benson was chairman of the state Republican
Party. Hed backed the amendment, but only
half-heartedly, he says now. He liked the idea
of letting voters decide on taxes, but he didnt
fully understand the measures implications.
Its the fine print thats bad, he says. If wed
realized the headaches it created.
Mr. Benson has entertained the idea of going back to the voters, this time to ask for
special funds for higher education. But the
political mood isnt right, he said. It might
never be.
In Colorado and across the country, this
fraying of ties between states and their universities didnt happen overnight. To get
to this point, there was no one vote taken,
no single cut made, no lone backroom deal
struck. Rather, many, many individual choices together weakened the bonds between the
public and higher education. And one day
soon those bonds could finally snap.
Indeed, if Colorado continues on its current trajectory, some time in the next decade
public money for higher education will be
gone. Disappeared. Spent on other things.
And while Colorado may be first, projections suggest that other states could follow.
Soon Alaska. Then South Carolina. Arizona.
Rhode Island. Vermont.
n
A tradition of public support, lost.
Karin Fischer is a senior writer at The Chronicle who covers the globalization of higher education. Jack Stripling, a senior reporter, focuses on
college and university leadership.
101
IMAGES
May 8, 2015
The Lost, Secret History of Reading

Reversing the decline of the humanities, wrote Arthur
Melzer, may require something never contemplated
in debates on the subject: recovering the forgotten
art of esoteric interpretation, of reading between the
lines. (Illustration by Tim Cook for The Chronicle)
102
nov e mber
2016 |
The Day the Purpose

of College Changed
After February 28, 1967, the main reason to go was to get a job
By DAN BERRETT
had bad news: The

state budget was in crisis, and everyone needed to tighten their belts.
High taxes threatened economic ruin, said the newly
elected Ronald Reagan. Welfare stood to be
curbed, the highway patrol had fat to trim.
Everything would be pared down; hed start
with his own office.
California still boasted a system of public higher education that was the envy of the
world. And on February 28, 1967, a month into
his term, the Republican governor assured
people that he wouldnt do anything to harm
it. But, he added, we do believe that there
are certain intellectual luxuries that perhaps
we could do without, for a little while at least.
Governor, a reporter asked, what is an intellectual luxury?
Reagan described a four-credit course at the
University of California at Davis on organizing demonstrations. I figure that carrying a
picket sign is sort of like, oh, a lot of things you
pick up naturally, he said, like learning how
to swim by falling off the end of a dock.
Whole academic programs in California and
across the country he found similarly suspect.
Taxpayers, he said, shouldnt be subsidizing
intellectual curiosity.
That phrase quickly brought Reagan scorn.
The following week the Los Angeles Times editorial page warned that his budget cuts and
tampering with higher education threatened to create second-rate institutions.
If a university is not a place where intellectual curiosity is to be encouraged, and subsidized, the editors wrote, then it is nothing.
The Times was giving voice to the ideal of
liberal education, in which college is a vehicle
for intellectual development, for cultivating
a flexible mind, and, no matter the focus of
study, for fostering a broad set of knowledge
and skills whose value is not always immediately apparent.
Reagan was staking out a competing vision.
he governor
Learning for learnings sake might be nice,

but the rest of us shouldnt have to pay for it.
A higher education should prepare students for
jobs.
Those two theories had long existed in uneasy equilibrium. On that day in 1967, the balance started to tip toward utility in ways not
even Reagan may have anticipated.
Sometimes, sea changes in attitude start
small, gradually establishing assumptions
until no one remembers thinking differently. This is how that happened to liberal education. Its a story of events on campus and
beyond: the oil embargo, the canon wars,
federal fiscal policies, the fall of the Soviet
Union. On that day in 1967, Reagan crystalized what has since become conventional wisdom about college. In the early 1970s,
nearly three-quarters of freshmen said it
was essential to them to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. About a third felt the
same about being very well off financially.
Now those fractions have flipped.
The notion that a liberal education is of
dubious value has become entrenched in
the popular imagination, even as its defenders argue the opposite. The Association of
American Colleges and Universities, liberal educations chief advocate, celebrates its
100th anniversary this month. Its choices
have shaped the story of liberal education,
too. The group appears to be in fine shape,
with a $10-million budget, more than 1,300
member colleges, and high-profile projects
on educational quality, funded by the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation, and civic learning, commissioned by the U.S. Department
of Education. But such projects and respect
on many campuses havent stopped the public from largely dismissing the idea of liberal
education.
College is defined so narrowly and instrumentally now, AAC&Us president, Carol
Geary Schneider, has said, that its ultimately
January 30, 2015

The question, increasing in urgency, had become implicit in budget negotiations, political
campaigns, and meetings among faculty,
students, and their parents: What is college
for? For decades, the answer, too, had been
implicit: A liberal education is crucial to cultivate intellectual curiosity and a flexible mind.
Then, as the cost of living rose and the job
market tightened, attitudes began to change,
until the notion that a liberal education is
of dubious value has become entrenched in
the popular imagination, wrote Dan Berrett.
In establishing a timeline of that change, he
came upon a 1967 press conference held
by Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, who said, We do believe that there are
certain intellectual luxuries that perhaps we
could do without. The purpose of college, in
other words, was to prepare students for jobs.
Sea changes in attitude start small, Mr. Berrett writes, gradually establishing assumptions
until no one remembers thinking differently.
This is the story of how utility came to outweigh
intellectual luxury, at least in the popular
mind.
103

dangerous both to democracy and to economic
creativity.
Once prized as a worthy pursuit for all, liberal education that day in 1967 became pointless,
an indulgence, a joke.
t wasnt always
a punchline. Thomas
Jefferson argued for increased access to
liberal education among white males.
A broadly educated populace, he said,
would strengthen democracy. People
with genius and virtue should be rendered by
liberal education worthy to receive and able to
guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens, he wrote in 1779.
Such men wouldnt be easily swayed by tyrants.
Still, there were dissenters, Michael S. Roth
notes in Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters. Benjamin Franklin mocked
liberal education for focusing on the frivolous
accouterments of privilege. Harvard Colleges
students learn little more than how to carry
themselves handsomely and enter a room genteely, Franklin wrote. When they graduated,
they remained great blockheads as ever, only
more proud and self-conceited.
A century later, prominent thinkers were
still striking a balance. Booker T. Washington believed knowledge must be harnessed to
the things of real life so that newly emancipated black Americans could determine their
own economic fates. W.E.B. Du Bois sought to
broaden what counted as real life, so that the
pursuit of happiness wouldnt be reduced to the
pursuit of dollars, Mr. Roth writes.
Du Bois lent grandeur to that vision in The
Souls of Black Folk: The final product of our
training must be neither a psychologist nor a
brickmason, but a man.
Tensions between the two visions lingered
into the 20th century. In 1942, a consultant
to what was then the Association of American Colleges worried that institutions had
lost sight of the value of a liberal education
and that their curricula had deteriorated into
a hodge-podge of training in technical skills.
Still, the prevailing consensus endorsed
liberal education. A presidential commission
chartered by Harry S. Truman recommended
in 1947 that colleges strive to more fully realize
democracy in every phase of living, promote
international understanding, and deploy creative intelligence to solve social problems. College wasnt a way to get a job or make a buck.
For a long time, the pushback to that philosophy was productive. It forced higher education to be dynamic, to respond to conditions
beyond campus, says Mr. Roth, who is president of Wesleyan University and sits on the
AAC&U board. People understood that liberal
learning served individuals, regardless of their
jobs, as well as society at large. Thats no longer
true, he says.
A farmer reading the classics or an industrial
worker quoting Shakespeare was at one time
an honorable character. Todays news stories

lament bartenders with chemistry degrees.
Where once these incongruities might have
been hailed as signs of a healthy republic, Mr.
Roth writes, today they are more likely to be
cited as examples of a wasted nonmonetized education.
eagan rose to power by highlight-
ing how colleges had veered dangerously away from mainstream

values. He seized on campus unrest at Berkeley to connect with
voters who hadnt gone to college but wanted
their kids to. But the buildings their tax dollars
paid for were burning.
The new governor didnt spend time talking
about the tension between Jeffersons and
There are certain

intellectual luxuries
that perhaps we
could do without.
Taxpayers should
not be subsidizing
intellectual curiosity.
Gov. Ronald Reagan
Franklins visions. There was little political
payoff in nuance. Reagan, one of his campaign
aides told The New York Times in 1970, doesnt
operate in shades of gray: He lays it out there.
As his second term and the 1970s began, demographics, economic uncertainty, and world
events reinforced Reagans ideology. Two philosophical shifts, toward social egalitarianism
and free-market orthodoxy, took hold.
Higher education felt those shifts. Professorial authority diminished. The unraveling
consensus on the curriculum accelerated. Colleges increasingly viewed students as customers. Economic inequality and insecurity rose,
as did the wage premium of a college degree.
And that became one of higher educations
main selling points.
The long postwar boom, for both the economy and for higher education, was ending, and
the oil embargo, in 1973, further strained the
economy. Enrollment data showed students
fleeing from the liberal arts, disciplines commonly associated with a liberal education, and
flocking to professional and pre-professional
programs.
Higher education became more of a buyers
market. Overall enrollments dropped. As that
trend continued, colleges sought out new customers, especially adults and first-generation
students, many of whom wanted their investments to pay off in jobs.
Liberal education felt the squeeze. The Association of American Colleges went into the
red as several cash-strapped colleges withdrew
their membership. With money tight, all of
higher education looked for help from Washington. Although it may indeed be contrary to
academic tradition, as it is distasteful to many
of us personally, the hour is overdue for us all
to become more involved politically, Frederic
W. Ness wrote as the groups president in 1973.
Many of the sectors chief associations had
long refrained from lobbying because they
found it vulgar, according to the higher-education scholar Harland G. Bloland. College
leaders, he said, advocated not self-interest, but
the dispassionate pursuit of knowledge. They
spoke the language of liberal education.
But after some cajoling from lawmakers,
most of the higher-education associations
shifted tactics. The lone holdout was the AAC.
By 1976, it faced a crossroads. Five years
earlier, it had set up a subsidiary group to represent independent colleges. But trying to be
two things at once a lobbyist for a particular
type of institution and an advocate for liberal
education in general became untenable. So
it spun off the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, a lobbying
group for private institutions. Left behind was
an AAC that would look after the curriculum
and liberal education.
On one hand, that gave it freedom and
broad appeal. Schools of business and engineering joined the fold. And not lobbying on
behalf of liberal education meant not inviting
the federal government into curricular matters.
Weve been able to be more forthright and direct about needed change in higher education,
says Ms. Schneider, the groups president, because we never have to worry about what the
House of Representatives has to say about our
recommendations. Still, AAC&U has worked
closely with several states higher-education departments.
But not pressing for federal legislation has its
minuses, says John R. Thelin, a professor of the
history of higher education and public policy
at the University of Kentucky. AAC&U, like
most of the big higher-education associations,
is in Washington, where political power determines winners and losers. AAC&U doesnt see
itself as a lobbying group, he says. They see it
as a more subtle game.
But being too subtle risks leaving you on the
sidelines.
Reagan won the presidency, in 1980, practical degrees had

become the safe and popular choice.
That year students were most
likely to major in business. The disciplines rise seemed inexorable. In the 1930s,
y the time
around the time Reagan went to college,

about 8 percent of students studied in business and commerce. When he was elected
governor, that share was 12 percent. By the
time he moved into the White House, more
students majored in business than anything
else. Its held that top spot ever since. In the
early 80s, most freshmen said theyd chosen
their college because they thought it would
help them get a better job. The previous top
reason? Learning more about things that interested them.
It was a rational response to changing federal policy. Under the Reagan administration, the maximum Pell Grant decreased
by about a quarter. Student loans became a
more common way to pay for college, even
as the president made their interest payments
ineligible for tax deductions. As student debt
rose, so did the urgency of earning a living
after graduation.
Free-market ideas permeated higher education. The curriculum has given way to a
marketplace philosophy, wrote the authors
of Integrity in the College Curriculum: A
Report to the Academic Community, commissioned by the AAC in 1985. It is a supermarket where students are shoppers and
professors are merchants of learning.
Meanwhile, liberal learning floated from
its traditional moorings. After the associations split, the concept no longer resided
so clearly with liberal-arts colleges, and the
next logical home, academic departments in
the arts and sciences, didnt offer refuge for
long. The fierce canon wars of the 1980s revealed little consensus on what belonged in
the curriculum. How could anybody defend
a liberal education when no one could agree
on what it was?
The battles were especially passionate in the
humanities, reflecting anxieties about demographic change in the country and on campuses, says Andrew Hartman, an associate professor of history at Illinois State University.
Reagan showed little interest in the canon
wars, but he is often associated with a strain of
thought that grew out of the 1960s and gained
strength when he was president. It saw professors as idle elites antagonistic toward the values
of the white working class, says Mr. Hartman,
author of the forthcoming A War for the Soul
of America. Liberal education, he says, gets
wrapped up in that.
While the ideal of liberal education faded
during that period, it survived. The Sputnik
crisis had justified a huge investment in education that lifted all boats, says Catherine Liu,
a professor of film and media studies at the
University of California at Irvine. Responding
to the Soviet threat opened opportunities for
generations of middle-class Americans, argues
Ms. Liu, author of The American Idyll: Academic
Antielitism as Cultural Critique. Liberal education was the great dream of the postwar era,
she says.
But the conclusion of the Cold War ended

that dream, she says, and a more instrumentalist view of college has become a point of bipartisan agreement. President Obama, she says,
sees education as a redistributive process in
which community and state colleges will teach
vocational skills so people can get jobs.
Education once sought to develop peoples
potential, says Ms. Liu. Now its all about
training. Training, she says, is what you get
through mindless repetition.
Liberal learning is now a luxury good, she
says. Its become the education of the 1 percent.
f the definition and value of liberal education are in doubt, so is the question of
whom its for.
Even Jefferson and Du Bois thought
such a privilege should be limited to
those endowed with genius and virtue or
belonging to the talented tenth, respectively. The AAC&U pushes a more expansive vision: that a liberal education is for everyone
who seeks to make meaning in their lives and
to participate in democracy.
The purpose is broad knowledge that enables you to navigate the world you inherit, to
develop powers of the mind to make reasoned
judgments and cultivate a sense of ethical responsibility, and to connect those goals to the
We argued in 1915
and were arguing
today that we need
good citizens. A
welder is a citizen,
too.
world, says Ms. Schneider, the groups president.
Those objectives should not be restricted,
she says, to liberal-arts majors. They are useful for teachers and technicians. We argued
in 1915 and were arguing today that we need
good citizens, she says. A welder is a citizen,
too.
That message appears to get some traction, at least on campus. Some deans of colleges in practical fields tout their liberal-education approach. They want engineers who
can build a bridge and think about its effects
on the environment and surrounding community. Nurses should know how to draw
blood and consider the cultural influences
that might keep patients from taking their
medication.
And for students in traditional academic

disciplines, liberal learning cant be purely
theoretical. The AAC&U started the campaign Liberal Education and Americas
Promise a decade ago to encourage students
to learn by tackling societys big questions. More than 450 campuses have signed
on, and this month the association said it
would expand the campaign, pushing for every student to complete a project involving
field research, an internship, a practicum, or
community service.
Such projects, the AAC&U argues, draw
on the vital skills of critical thinking, writing,
quantitative reasoning, and teamwork that liberal education cultivates. Thats what employers have consistently told the group theyre
looking for in new hires, Ms. Schneider says.
They just didnt use the words liberal education.
Those words are often confused or conflated
with liberal arts, not necessarily a positive association. The word liberal, the association
acknowledges, has become a term of opprobrium. Recent research in economics found that
top students from low-income backgrounds reacted to the term liberal arts with comments
like I am not liberal and I dont like learning
useless things.
When politicians mock particular disciplines, it doesnt exactly bolster popular opinion of liberal education. If you want to take
gender studies, thats fine, go to a private
school, Pat McCrory, the Republican governor of North Carolina, said on a radio show a
couple of years ago. I dont want to subsidize
that if thats not going to get someone a job. In
other words, its an intellectual luxury.
To people like Mr. McCrory, such luxuries
are exclusively private goods. That said, plenty of governors through the years have understood that a liberal education also has a public
benefit.
One governor, dedicating a library at small
Eureka College in 1967, made the case.
Standing in front of the new building, the
speaker invoked the accumulated wisdom
behind him. The truth is, he said, the
answers to all the problems of mankind,
every one of them, even the most modern
and the most complex, can be found in this
building.
He grounded his remarks in sociological
theory and sprinkled in references to Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, and Maimonides, counseling students to read them critically. Past democracies had become mobs when they didnt
adequately protect minorities. Even the greats
made mistakes.
One of mankinds problems, the speaker
said, is we keep committing the same errors.
n
His name was Ronald Reagan.
Dan Berrett, a senior reporter, joined The Chronicle in 2011. He covers teaching, curriculum, and
research on higher education.
105
50 YEARS
OF HEADLINES
Technology
A Revolution
in Teaching and Research
In the era of smartphones, social media, and personal webcams its sometimes hard to remember that only 50 years ago colleges and universities
clattered with the sound of typewriters, and personalized learning meant
getting to know your students hobbies and interests. Computer companies and some educators in the vanguard predicted that the silicon chip
would bring about revolutions in higher education, but many in academe
hesitated to enter the computer age or didnt have the resources. Today
campuses continue to feel their way as they experiment with technology in
the classroom and the library, navigate the ethics of Facebook, and try to
assess digital projects for tenure and promotion cases.
Some 54,000 people around the world took

an early MOOC a massive open online
course in classical studies taught by Peter
Struck, of the U. of Pennsylvania, in 2012.
MATT SLOCUM, AP IMAGES
May 6, 1968
Computer Prints
Ph.D. Thesis
A 160-page doctoral dissertation, printed,
revised, edited, footnoted, page-numbered,
and printed again by computer, has been
accepted by the University of Michigan
graduate school. Stephen B. Spurr, dean
of the graduate school, noted that computer
printing could prevent some Ph.D. candidates from dropping out.
Too many students drop out because of
the rigorous demands of dissertation writing.
Weve been taking highly trained men and
tying them up as typists and desk clerks, Mr.
Spurr said.
October 30, 1978
Computer Teaching
Systems: Little Impact
on Achievement
Although the study found some shortcomings in the educational results of both
systems, it concluded that the demonstrations of PLATO and TICCIT had been successful and offered to commercial computer
companies renewed hope in the potential
of a computer market in education. ... Each
of the systems, in a distinct way, provides
individualized instruction through twoway communication between student and
computer.
February 1, 1984
Apples New Macintosh

Computer: A Mouse, Icons,
and Windows
... The mouse is a unit the size of a cigarette
packet that is attached by a cable to the computer. Moving the mouse on a desktop ... moves the
cursor, the blinking symbol on the screen.
September 9, 1991
Researchers Get Direct

Access to Huge Data Base
By early next year, users will be able to
obtain journal articles through the mail or

over facsimile machine.
February 23, 1994
High Network Costs

and Low Interest Keep
Many Off the Internet
There can be no doubt that the Internet
is hot. Most of the attention is driven
by the burgeoning interest in the Internet
among people in business, who constitute
the fastest-growing group of users. Many of
them have been drawn to the global web of
networks in hopes of preparing their companies for the futuristic data highway But
in higher education where the Internet
got its start as a research network 25 years
ago many are still wondering what all the
fuss is about.
While some institutions ... boast of
widespread access to the Internet through
computers in every dormitory room and
faculty office, hundreds of community colleges, small liberal-arts colleges, and urban
universities remain without connections.
August 1, 1997
UCLAs Requirement
of a Web Page for Every
Class Spurs Debate
... Not everyone thinks its a great idea.
Some students complain that the Web sites
arent worth the fees, which will amount to
more than $100 a year for most students.
Some professors fear that maintaining their
Web pages will take too much time, and that
students might find so much information online that they wont bother coming to class.
April 31, 2000
David Nobles Battle

to Defend the Sacred
Space of the Classroom
David F. Noble says distance education is
fools gold, and hes eager to point out who the
fools are. In his view, distance education is the
latest episode in a troubling saga of the corporatization of American higher education.
May 28, 2004
Have You
Facebooked Him?
The student-run service puts a digital spin
on the illustrated address books that many
colleges pass out to students early in the
academic year. Like those booklets, known
as facebooks, the Web site helps students
put names with faces. A lot of my friends
send messages to other people who they saw
on Thefacebook, he says. I mainly use it to
waste time.
August 29, 2010
Online, Bigger Classes

May Be Better Classes
... When a colleague suggested they
co-teach an online class in learning theory at the University of Manitoba, in 2008,
[Stephen] Downes welcomed the chance
to expand that privileged club. The idea:
Why not invite the rest of world to join the
25 students who were taking the course for
credit?
Over 2,300 people showed up.
They didnt get credit, but they didnt get
a bill, either. In an experiment that could
point to a more open future for e-learning,
Mr. Downes and George Siemens attracted
about 1,200 noncredit participants last year.
The classes have even spawned a new
name: Massive Open Online Course, or
MOOC.
February 26, 2012
A Digital Humanist Puts

New Tools in the Hands
of Scholars
When Daniel J. Cohen went to work at
George Mason University in 2001, its Center for History and New Media boasted a
name and little else. Today the center is a
well-oiled machine with more than 100 Web
projects, which reach 16 million people.
And Mr. Cohens specialty of digital humanities thinking about how technology can
advance scholarship in fields like history
is ascendant, with popular-press write-ups
and a growing presence at major academic
n
conferences.
107
Sexual Paranoia
How campus rules make students more vulnerable
By LAURA KIPNIS
THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
Section B
March 6, 2015
SEXUAL PARANOIA
HOW CAMPUS RULES
MAKE STUDENTS MORE VULNERABLE
By LAURA KIPNIS
March 6, 2015
Sex has long been a staple of campus life
and Chronicle coverage. One-Fourth of Women
Psychologists in Survey Report Sexual Contacts With Their Professors, declared a headline in 1979. Rigid Scholarship on Male Sexuality, offered another in 2007. But no article
on the topic has attracted more attention than
this 2015 essay by Laura Kipnis. Writing about
an uptick in activism and regulations to combat
sexual assault, Ms. Kipnis, a professor of film
at Northwestern University, argued that a moral
panic had taken hold on university campuses.
In response, two Northwestern students filed
Title IX charges against her, alleging that her
essay had a chilling effect on the willingness
of other students to report incidents of sexual
assault. Thus began a monthslong investigation (detailed in a second Chronicle essay) that
ultimately cleared Ms. Kipnis of any wrongdoing. In the meantime, Laura Kipnis became a
cause clbre, the public face of continuing
tensions between free speech and due process on college campuses.
ou have to feel a little sorry

these days for professors married
to their former students. They
used to be respectable citizens
leaders in their fields, department chairs, maybe even a dean or two and
now theyre abusers of power avant la lettre.
I suspect you can barely throw a stone on
most campuses around the country without
hitting a few of these neo-miscreants. Who
knows what coercions they deployed back in
the day to corral those students into submission; at least thats the fear evinced by todays
new campus dating policies. And think how
their kids must feel! A friend of mine is the
offspring of such a coupling does she look
at her father a little differently now, I wonder.
Its been barely a year since the Great Prohibition took effect in my own workplace. Before that, students and professors could date
whomever we wanted; the next day we were
off-limits to one another verboten, traife,
dangerous (and perhaps, therefore, all the
more alluring).
Of course, the residues of the wild old days
are everywhere. On my campus, several such
mixed couples leap to mind, including female professors wed to former students. Not
to mention the legions whove dated a graduate student or two in their day plenty of
female professors in that category, too in
fact, Im one of them. Dont ask for details. Its
one of those things it now behooves one to be
reticent about, lest you be branded a predator.
Forgive my slightly mocking tone. I suppose
Im out of step with the new realities because
I came of age in a different time, and under a
different version of feminism, minus the layers
of prohibition and sexual terror surrounding
the unequal-power dilemmas of today.
When I was in college, hooking up with
professors was more or less part of the curriculum. Admittedly, I went to an art school,
and mine was the lucky generation that came
of age in that too-brief interregnum after the
sexual revolution and before AIDS turned sex

into a crime scene replete with perpetrators
and victims back when sex, even when not
so great or when people got their feelings hurt,
fell under the category of life experience. Its
not that I didnt make my share of mistakes, or
act stupidly and inchoately, but it was embarrassing, not traumatizing.
As Jane Gallop recalls in Feminist Accused
of Sexual Harassment (1997), her own generational cri de coeur, sleeping with professors
made her feel cocky, not taken advantage of.
She admits to seducing more than one of them
as a grad student she wanted to see them
naked, she says, as like other men. Lots of
smart, ambitious women were doing the same
thing, according to her, because it was a way to
experience your own power.
But somehow power seemed a lot less powerful back then. The gulf between students
and faculty wasnt a shark-filled moat; a misstep wasnt fatal. We partied together, drank
and got high together, slept together. The
teachers may have been older and more accomplished, but you didnt feel they could take
advantage of you because of it. How would
they?
Which isnt to say that teacher-student relations were guaranteed to turn out well, but
then what percentage of romances do? No
doubt there were jealousies, sometimes things
didnt go the way you wanted which was
probably good training for the rest of life. It
was also an excellent education in not taking
power too seriously, and I suspect the less seriously you take it, the more strategies you have
for contending with it.
Its the fiction of the all-powerful professor
embedded in the new campus codes that appalls me. And the kowtowing to the fiction
kowtowing wrapped in a vaguely feminist air
of rectitude. If this is feminism, its feminism
hijacked by melodrama. The melodramatic
imaginations obsession with helpless victims
and powerful predators is whats shaping the
conversation of the moment, to the detriment

of those whose interests are supposedly being
protected, namely students. The result? Students sense of vulnerability is skyrocketing.
Ive done what I can to adapt myself to the
new paradigm. Around a decade ago, as colleges began instituting new offensive environment guidelines, I appointed myself the
task of actually reading my universitys sexual-harassment handbook, which Id thus far
avoided doing. I was pleased to learn that our
guidelines were less prohibitive than those
of the more draconian new codes. You were
permitted to date students; you just werent
supposed to harass them into it. I could live
with that.
However, we were warned in two separate
places that inappropriate humor violates university policy. Id always thought inappropriateness was pretty much the definition of
humor I believe Freud would agree. Why
all this delicacy? Students were being encouraged to regard themselves as such exquisitely
sensitive creatures that an errant classroom
remark could impede their education, as such
hothouse flowers that an unfunny joke was
likely to create lasting trauma.
Knowing my own propensity for unfunny
jokes, and given that telling one could now
land you, the unfunny prof, on the carpet or
even the national news, I decided to put my
name down for one of the voluntary harassment workshops on my campus, hoping that
my good citizenship might be noticed and applauded by the relevant university powers.
At the appointed hour, things kicked off
with a sexual-harassment pretest. This was
administered by an earnest mid-50s psychologist Ill call David, and an earnest young
woman with a masters in social work Ill call
Beth. The pretest consisted of a long list of
true-false questions such as: If I make sexual
comments to someone and that person doesnt
ask me to stop, then I guess that my behavior
is probably welcome.
the painful dumbness of

these questions and the fading of
afternoon into evening, a roomful of people with advanced degrees seemed grimly determined
to shut up and play along, probably aided by a
collective wish to be sprung by cocktail hour.
That is, until we were handed a printed list of
guidelines. No. 1 on the list was: Do not
make unwanted sexual advances.
Someone demanded querulously from the
back, But how do you know theyre unwanted
until you try? (OK, it was me.) David seemed
oddly flustered by the question and began
frantically jangling the change in his pants
pocket.
Do you really want me to answer that?
he finally responded, trying to make a joke
out of it. I did want him to answer, because
its something Id been wondering how are
espite
you supposed to know in advance? Do people

wear their desires emblazoned on their foreheads? but I didnt want to be seen by my
colleagues as a troublemaker. There was an
awkward pause while David stared me down.
Another person piped up helpfully, What
about smoldering glances?
Everyone laughed, but Davids coin-jangling
was becoming more pronounced. A theater
professor spoke up, guiltily admitting to having complimented a student on her hairstyle
that very afternoon (one of the Do Nots involved not commenting on students appearance) but, as a gay male, wondered whether
not to have complimented her would have been
grounds for offense. He mimicked the female
student, tossing her mane around in a Notice
my hair manner, and people began shouting
suggestions about other dumb pretest scenarios for him to perform, like sexual-harassment
charades. Rebellion was in the air. The man
sitting next to me, an ethnographer who studied street gangs, whispered, Theyve lost
control of the room. David was jangling his
change so frantically that it was hard to keep
your eyes off his groin.
I recalled a long-forgotten pop-psychology guide to body language that identified
change-jangling as an unconscious masturbation substitute. If the leader of our sexual-harassment workshop was engaging in public
The fiction of the

all-powerful professor
thats embedded in
the new campus codes
is what appalls me.
And the kowtowing
to the fiction, wrapped
in vaguely feminist
rectitude.
masturbatory-like behavior, seizing his private
pleasure in the midst of the very institutional
mechanism designed to clamp such delinquent
urges, what hope for the rest of us?
Lets face it: Other peoples sexuality is often
just weird and creepy. Sex is leaky and anxiety-ridden; intelligent people can be oblivious
about it. Of course the gulf between desire and
knowledge has long been a tragicomic staple.
Consider some notable treatments of the student-professor hookup theme J.M. Coetzees Disgrace; Francine Proses Blue Angel;
Jonathan Franzens The Corrections in which
learning has an inverse relation to self-knowledge, professors are emblems of sexual stupidity, and such disasters ensue that its hard
not to read them as cautionary tales about the
disastrous effects of intellect on practical intelligence.
The implementers of the new campus codes
seemed awfully optimistic about rectifying the
condition, I thought to myself.
he optimism continues, outpaced
only by all the new prohibitions

and behavior codes required to
sustain it. According to the latest version of our campus policy,
differences in institutional power and the inherent risk of coercion are so great between
teachers and students that no romance, dating,
or sexual relationships will be permitted, even
between students and professors from different departments. (Relations between graduate
students and professors arent outright banned,
but are problematic and must be reported if
youre in the same department.) Yale and other
places had already instituted similar policies;
Harvard jumped on board last month, though
its a sign of the incoherence surrounding
these issues that the second sentence of The
New York Times story on Harvard reads: The
move comes as the Obama administration investigates the handling of accusations of sexual
assault at dozens of colleges, including Harvard. As everyone knows, the accusations in
the news have been about students assaulting
other students, not students dating professors.
Of course, the codes themselves also shape
the narratives and emotional climate of professor-student interactions. An undergraduate
sued my own university, alleging that a philosophy professor had engaged in unwelcome
and inappropriate sexual advances and that
the university punished him insufficiently for
it. The details that emerged in news reports
and legal papers were murky and contested,
and the suit was eventually thrown out of
court.
In brief: The two had gone to an art exhibit
together an outing initiated by the student
and then to some other exhibits and bars.
She says he bought her alcohol and forced her
to drink, so much that by the end of the evening she was going in and out of consciousness. He says she drank of her own volition.
(She was under legal drinking age; he says he
thought she was 22.) She says he made various
sexual insinuations, and that she wanted him
to drive her home (theyd driven in his car); he
says she insisted on sleeping over at his place.
She says she woke up in his bed with his arms
around her, and that he groped her. He denies
making advances and says she made advances, which he deflected. He says they slept on
top of the covers, clothed. Neither says they
had sex. He says she sent friendly texts in the
days after and wanted to meet. She says she
109

attempted suicide two days later, now has
PTSD, and has had to take medical leave.
The aftermath has been a score of back-andforth lawsuits. After trying to get a financial
settlement from the professor, the student
filed a Title IX suit against the university: She
wants her tuition reimbursed, compensation
for emotional distress, and other damages.
Because the professor wasnt terminated, when
she runs into him it triggers her PTSD, she
says. (The university claims that it appropriately sanctioned the professor, denying him
a raise and a named chair.) Shes also suing
the professor for gender violence. He sued
the university for gender discrimination (he
says he wasnt allowed to present evidence disproving the students allegations) this suit
was thrown out; so was the students lawsuit
against the university. The professor sued for
defamation various colleagues, administrators,
and a former grad student whom, according
to his complaint, he had previously dated; a
judge dismissed those suits last month. He
sued local media outlets for using the word
rape as a synonym for sexual assault a
complaint thrown out by a different judge
who said rape was an accurate enough summary of the charges, even though the assault
was confined to fondling, which the professor
denies occurred. (This professor isnt someone
I know or have met, by the way.)
What a mess. And what a slippery slope,
from alleged fondler to rapist. But heres the
real problem with these charges: This is melodrama. Im quite sure that professors can be
sleazebags. Im less sure that any professor can
force an unwilling student to drink, especially
to the point of passing out. With what power?
What sorts of repercussions can there possibly
be if the student refuses?
Indeed, these are precisely the sorts of situations already covered by existing sexual-harassment codes, so if students think that professors have such unlimited powers that they
can compel someone to drink or retaliate if she
doesnt, then these students have been very
badly educated about the nature and limits of
institutional power.
In fact, its just as likely that a student can
derail a professors career these days as the
other way around, which is pretty much what
happened in the case of the accused philosophy professor.
To a cultural critic, the representation of
emotion in all these documents plays to the
gallery. The student charges that she suffered
and will continue to suffer humiliation, mental
and emotional anguish, anxiety, and distress.
As I read through the complaint, it struck me
that the lawsuit and our new consensual-relations code share a common set of tropes, and
a certain narrative inevitability. In both, students and professors are stock characters in a
predetermined story. According to the code,
students are putty in the hands of all-powerful
professors. According to the lawsuit, the student was virtually a rag doll, taken advantage
of by a skillful predator who scripted a drunken evening of galleries and bars, all for the opportunity of some groping.
Everywhere on campuses today you find
scholars whose work elaborates sophisticated
models of power and agency. It would be hard
to overstate the influence, across disciplines,
of Michel Foucault, whose signature idea was
that power has no permanent address or valence. Yet our workplaces themselves are promulgating the crudest version of top-down
The climate of
sanctimony about
student vulnerability
has grown
impenetrable. No
one dares question
it lest youre labeled
antifeminist, or worse,
a sex criminal.
power imaginable, recasting the professoriate
as Snidely Whiplashes twirling our mustaches
and students as helpless damsels tied to railroad tracks. Students lack volition and independent desires of their own; professors are
would-be coercers with dastardly plans to corrupt the innocent.
Even the language these policies come
packaged in seems designed for maximum
stupefaction, with students eager to add their
voices to the din. Shortly after the new policy
went into effect on my campus, we all received
a long email from the Title IX Coordinating
Committee. This was in the midst of student
protests about the continued employment of
the accused philosophy professor: 100 or so
students, mouths taped shut (by themselves),
had marched on the deans office (a planned
sit-in of the professors class went awry when
he pre-emptively canceled it). The committee
was responding to a student-government petition demanding that survivors be informed
about the outcomes of sexual-harassment
investigations. The petition also demanded
that the new policies be amended to include
possible termination of faculty members who
violate its provisions.
There was more, but my eye was struck by
the word survivor, which was repeated several times. Wouldnt the proper term be accuser? How can someone be referred to as
a survivor before a finding on the accusation

assuming we dont want to predetermine
the guilt of the accused, that is. At the risk of
sounding like some bow-tied neocon columnist, this is also a horrifying perversion of the
language by people who should know better.
Are you seriously telling me, I wanted to ask
the Title IX Committee, that the same term
now encompasses both someone allegedly
groped by a professor and my great-aunt, who
lived through the Nazi death camps? I emailed
an inquiry to this effect to the universitys
general counsel, one of the emails signatories,
but got no reply.
For the record, I strongly believe that bona
fide harassers should be chemically castrated, stripped of their property, and hung up
by their thumbs in the nearest public square.
Let no one think Im soft on harassment. But I
also believe that the myths and fantasies about
power perpetuated in these new codes are
leaving our students disabled when it comes to
the ordinary interpersonal tangles and erotic
confusions that pretty much everyone has to
deal with at some point in life, because thats
simply part of the human condition.
n the post-Title IX landscape, sexual panic rules. Slippery slopes abound.

Gropers become rapists and accusers become survivors, opening the door for another panicky conflation: teacher-student
sex and incest. Recall that it was incest victims
who earlier popularized the use of the term
survivor, previously reserved for those whod
survived the Holocaust. The migration of the
term itself is telling, exposing the core anxiety
about teacher-student romances: that theres
a whiff of perversity about such couples, notwithstanding all the venerable married ones.
These are anxious times for officialdom,
and students, too, are increasingly afflicted
with the condition after all, anxiety is contagious. Around the time the survivor email
arrived, something happened that Id never experienced in many decades of teaching, which
was that two students one male, one female
in two classes informed me, separately, that
they were unable to watch assigned films because they triggered something for them.
I was baffled by the congruence until the
following week, when the Times ran a story
titled Trauma Warnings Move From the Internet to the Ivory Tower, and the word trigger was suddenly all over the news.
I didnt press the two students on the nature of these triggers. I knew them both pretty
well from previous classes, and theyd always
seemed well-adjusted enough, so I couldnt
help wondering. One of the films dealt with
fascism and bigotry: The triggeree was a minority student, though not the minority targeted in the film. Still, I could see what might
be upsetting. In the other case, the connection
between the student and the film was obscure:
no overlapping identity categories, and though
there was some sexual content in the film, it

wasnt particularly explicit. We exchanged
emails about whether she should sit out the
discussion, too; I proposed that she attend and
leave if it got uncomfortable. I was trying to
be empathetic, though I was also convinced
that I was impeding her education rather than
contributing to it.
I teach in a film program. Were supposed
to be instilling critical skills in our students
(at least thats how I see it), even those who
aspire to churn out formulaic dreck for Hollywood. Which is how I framed it to my student: If she hoped for a career in the industry,
getting more critical distance on material she
found upsetting would seem advisable, given
the nature of even mainstream media. I had
an image of her in a meeting with a bunch of
execs, telling them that she couldnt watch one
of the companys films because it was a trigger
for her. She agreed this could be a problem,
and sat in on the discussion with no discernable ill effects.
do we expect will become of students, successfully cocooned from uncomfortable feelings, once they leave the sanctuary
of academe for the boorish badlands of real life? What becomes of students
so committed to their own vulnerability, conditioned to imagine they have no agency, and
protected from unequal power arrangements
in romantic life? I cant help asking, because
theres a distressing little fact about the discomfort of vulnerability, which is that its pretty much a daily experience in the world, and
every sentient being has to learn how to somehow negotiate the consequences and fallout, or
go through life flummoxed at every turn.
Heres a story that brought the point home
for me. I was talking to a woman whod just
published her first book. She was around 30,
a friend of a friend. The book had started at
a major trade press, then ended up published
by a different press, and I was curious why.
She alluded to problems with her first editor. I
pressed for details, and out they came in a rush.
Her editor had developed a sort of obsession
with her, constantly calling, taking her out for
fancy meals, and eventually confessing his
love. Meanwhile, he wasnt reading the chapters she gave him; in fact, he was doing barely
any work on the manuscript at all. She wasnt
really into him, though she admitted that if
shed been more attracted to him, it might
have been another story. But for him, it was
escalating. He wanted to leave his wife for her!
There were kids, too, a bunch of them. Still no
feedback on the chapters.
Meanwhile he was Skyping her in his underwear from hotel rooms and complaining about his marriage, and she was letting
it go on because she felt that her fate was in
his hands. Nothing really happened between
them well, maybe a bit of fumbling, but she
UT WHAT
kept him at a distance. The thing was that she

didnt want to rebuff him too bluntly because
she was worried about the fate of her book
worried hed reject the manuscript, shed have
to pay back the advance, and shed never get it
published anywhere else.
Id actually once met this guy hed edited a friends book (badly). He was sort of a
nebbish, hard to see as threatening. Did you
talk to your agent? I asked the woman. I was
playing the situation out in my mind, wondering what Id do. No, she hadnt talked to her
agent, for various reasons, including fears that
shed led the would-be paramour on and that
her book wasnt any good.
Suddenly the editor left for a job at another
press, and the publisher called the contract,
demanding a final manuscript, which was
overdue and nowhere near finished. In despair,
the author finally confessed the situation to
our mutual friend, another writer, who employed the backbone-stiffening phrase sexual
harassment and insisted that the woman get
her agent involved. Which she did, and the
agent negotiated an exit deal with the publisher by explaining what had taken place. The
author was let out of the contract and got to
take the book to another press.
What struck me most, hearing the story,
was how incapacitated this woman had felt,
despite her advanced degree and accomplishments. The reason, I think, was that she imagined she was the only vulnerable one in the
situation. But look at the editor: He was married, with a midlevel job in the scandal-averse
world of corporate publishing. It simply wasnt
the case that he had all the power in the situation or nothing to lose. He may have been
Sex is leaky
and anxiety-ridden;
intelligent people
can be oblivious
about it.
an occluded jerk, but he was also a fairly human-sized one.
So thats an example of a real-world situation, postgraduation. Somehow I dont see the
publishing industry instituting codes banning
unhappily married editors from going goopy
over authors, though even with such a ban,
will any set of regulations ever prevent affective misunderstandings and erotic crossed
signals, compounded by power differentials,
compounded further by subjective levels of
vulnerability?
The question, then, is what kind of education prepares people to deal with the inevitably messy gray areas of life? Personally Id
start by promoting a less vulnerable sense of

self than the one our new campus codes are
peddling. Maybe I see it this way because I
wasnt educated to think that holders of institutional power were quite so fearsome, nor did
the institutions themselves seem so mighty.
Of course they didnt aspire to reach quite as
deeply into our lives back then. What no ones
much saying about the efflorescence of these
new policies is the degree to which they expand the power of the institutions themselves.
As for those of us employed by them, what
power we have is fairly contingent, especially lately. Get real: Whats more powerful a
professor who crosses the line, or the shaming
capabilities of social media?
I dont much want to

date students these days, but its not
like I dont understand the appeal.
Recently I was at a book party, and a
much younger man, an assistant professor, started a conversation. He reminded
me that wed met a decade or so ago, when he
was a grad student wed been at some sort
of event and sat next to each other. He said he
thought wed been flirting. In fact, he was sure
wed been flirting. I searched my memory. He
wasnt in it, though I didnt doubt his recollection; Ive been known to flirt. He couldnt
believe I didnt remember him. I apologized.
He pretended to be miffed. I pretended to be
regretful. I asked him about his work. He told
me about it, in a charming way. Wait a second,
I thought, was he flirting with me now? As an
aging biological female, and all too aware of
what that means in our culture, I was skeptical. On the heels of doubt came a surge of
joy: Still got it, crowed some perverse inner
imp in silent congratulation, jackbooting the
reality principle into assent. My psyche broke
out the champagne, and all of us were in a far
better mood for the rest of the evening.
Intergenerational desire has always been a
dilemma as well as an occasion for mutual fascination. Whether or not its a brilliant move,
plenty of professors I know, male and female,
have hooked up with students, though informal evidence suggests that female pro fessors
do it less, and rarely with undergraduates.
(The gender asymmetries here would require
a dozen more articles to explicate.) Some of
these professors act well, some are jerks, and
it would benefit students to learn the identifying marks of the latter breed early on, because
postcollegiate life is full of them. I propose a
round of mandatory workshops on this useful
topic for all students, beginning immediately.
But heres another way to look at it: the
longue dure. Societies keep reformulating the
kinds of cautionary stories they tell about intergenerational erotics and the catastrophes
that result, starting with Oedipus. The details
vary; so do the kinds of catastrophes prophesied once it was plagues and crop failure,
OR MYSELF,
111

these days its psychological trauma. Even over
the past half-century, the story keeps getting
reconfigured. In the preceding era, the Freudian version reigned: Children universally desire their parents, such desires meet up with
social prohibitions the incest taboo and
become repressed. Neurosis ensues.
These days the desire persists, but whats
shifted is the direction of the arrows. Now its
parents or their surrogates, teachers who
do all the desiring; children are conveniently
returned to innocence. So long to childhood
sexuality, the most irksome part of the Freudian story. So too with the new campus dating
codes, which also excise student desire from the
story, extending the presumption of the innocent child well into his or her collegiate career.
Except that students arent children.
Among the problems with treating students
like children is that they become increasingly childlike in response. The New York Times
Magazine recently reported on the tangled
story of a 21-year-old former Stanford undergraduate suing a 29-year-old tech entrepreneur shed dated for a year. Hed been a mentor
in a business class she was enrolled in, though
theyd met long before. They traveled together and spent time with each others families.
Marriage was discussed. After they broke up,
she charged that their consensual relationship
had actually been psychological kidnapping,
and that shed been raped every time theyd
had sex. She seems to regard herself as a helpless child in a womans body. She demanded
that Stanford investigate and is bringing a civil
suit against the guy this despite the fact that
her own mother had introduced the couple,
approved the relationship every step of the
way, and been in more or less constant contact
with the suitor.
No doubt some 21-year-olds are fragile and
emotionally immature (helicopter parenting
probably plays a role), but is this now to be
our normative conception of personhood? A
21-year-old incapable of consent? A certain
brand of radical feminist the late Andrea
Dworkin, for one held that womens consent was meaningless in the context of patriarchy, but Dworkin was generally considered
an extremist. Shed have been gratified to hear
that her convictions had finally gone mainstream, not merely driving campus policy but
also shaping the basic social narratives of love
and romance in our time.
of many enclaves in
academe that they were old-boys clubs
and testosterone-fueled, no doubt still
true of certain disciplines. Thanks to
institutional feminisms successes, some
tides have turned, meaning that menopausal
women now occupy more positions of administrative power, edging out at least some of the
old boys and bringing a different hormonal
T USED TO BE SAID
The implementers
of the new campus
codes seemed
awfully optimistic
about rectifying
the condition.
style a more delibidinalized one, perhaps
to bear on policy decisions. And so the pendulum swings, overshooting the middle ground
by a hundred miles or so.
The feminism I identified with as a student
stressed independence and resilience. In the
intervening years, the climate of sanctimony
about student vulnerability has grown too
thick to penetrate; no one dares question it
lest youre labeled antifeminist. Or worse, a
sex criminal. I asked someone on our Faculty
Senate if thered been any pushback when the
administration presented the new consensual-relations policy (though by then it was a fait
accompli the senates role was advisory).
I dont quite know how to characterize
the willingness of my supposed feminist colleagues to hand over the rights of faculty
women as well as men to administrators
and attorneys in the name of protection from
unwanted sexual advances, he said. I suppose the word would be zeal. His own view
was that the existing sexual-harassment policy already protected students from coercion
and a hostile environment; the new rules infantilized students and presumed the guilt of
professors. When I asked if I could quote him,
he begged for anonymity, fearing vilification
from his colleagues.
These are things youre not supposed to say
on campuses now. But lets be frank. To begin
with, if colleges and universities around the
country were in any way serious about policies
to prevent sexual assaults, the path is obvious:
Dont ban teacher-student romance, ban fraternities. And if we want to limit the potential
for sexual favoritism another rationale often
proffered for the new policies then lets include the institutionalized sexual favoritism of
spousal hiring, with trailing spouses getting
ranks and perks based on whom theyre sleeping with rather than CVs alone, and brought in
at salaries often dwarfing those of senior and
more accomplished colleagues who didnt have
the foresight to couple more advantageously.
Lastly: The new codes sweeping American
campuses arent just a striking abridgment of
everyones freedom, theyre also intellectually embarrassing. Sexual paranoia reigns; students are trauma cases waiting to happen. If
you wanted to produce a pacified, cowering
citizenry, this would be the method. And in
n
that sense, were all the victims.
Laura Kipnis is a professor in the department of
radio, television, and film at Northwestern University and the author, most recently, of Men:
Notes From an Ongoing Investigation (Metropolitan Books).
QUOTABLE
May 6, 2012, The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps
The media gives us this image that people who are on

public assistance are dropouts, on drugs or alcohol,
and are irresponsible, she says. Im not irresponsible.
Im highly educated. I have a whole lot of skills besides
knowing about medieval history, and Ive had other jobs.
Ive never made a lot of money, but Ive been able to
make enough to live on. Until now.
Melissa Bruninga-Matteau, an adjunct professor
IMAGES
November 9, 2015
Shake-Up
at U. of Missouri
The fervor of antiracism
protests at the University of Missouri, gaining
national attention, led to
the resignations of the
systems president and
the flagships chancellor.
(Brian Davidson, Getty
Images)
113
The $10-Billion Sports Tab

How college students are funding the athletics arms race
By BRAD WOLVERTON, BEN HALLMAN, SHANE SHIFFLETT and SANDHYA KAMBHAMPATI
D
November 20, 2015
For many Americans, their chief connection
to college is a football game on a crisp autumn Saturday. College sports have been a
mainstay of the campus experience for generations. The Chronicle has never covered the
games; instead, our approach has been to investigate the system of college athletics. And
weve often found it to be a troubled one. In
this case, we looked at the massive amounts
of money that most colleges use from student fees to pay for their athletic programs.
All those big television contracts might make
you believe that college sports pour money
back into campus, or are at least self-sufficient. Nothing could be further from the truth.
This investigation also highlights a classic
Chronicle form deep analysis of nationwide
data paired with up-close reporting at a single campus, in this case Georgia State.
atlanta
the stadium, the

team gathered for a college
football ritual. The marching
band gave its cue, and the players bounded through a long
tunnel, a blue-and-white blur, pumping fists
and high-fiving students who had gathered
to cheer.
For a few moments, it was possible to believe that the teams enthusiasm would be
met by the roar of spectators and the full
pageantry of game day in the Deep South.
But then the tunnel ended and the team, the
Georgia State Panthers, emerged into the
largely empty 70,000-seat Georgia Dome,
home of the NFLs Atlanta Falcons.
An announced crowd of 10,252, clustered
at midfield, clapped politely. But a few minutes after kickoff of this season-opening
game, after the home team had fumbled the
ball on its opening possession, all the energy had left the building.
The Panthers, now in their sixth season, havent given fans much reason to
celebrate. In the 2013 and 2014 seasons,
competing at the highest level of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the
team recorded just a single victory. Average attendance last year was among the 10
worst in the NCAAs top level. Yet Georgia
States 32,000 students are still required to
cover much of the cost. Over the past five
years, students have paid nearly $90 million in mandatory athletic fees to support
football and other intercollegiate athletics
one of the highest contributions in the
country.
A river of cash is flowing into college
sports, financing a spending spree among
elite universities that has sent coaches salaries soaring and spurred new discussions
about whether athletes should be paid. But
most of that revenue is going to a handful of
elite sports programs, leaving colleges like
eep within
Georgia State to rely heavily on students to

finance their athletic ambitions.
In the past five years, public universities
pumped more than $10.3 billion in mandatory student fees and other subsidies into
their sports programs, according to an examination by The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Huffington Post. The review
included an inflation-adjusted analysis of
financial reports provided to the NCAA
by 201 public universities competing in
Division I, information that was obtained
through public-records requests.
The average athletic subsidy that these
colleges and their students have paid to
their athletic departments increased 16 percent during that time. Student fees, which
This story was a collaboration between

The Chronicle and The Huffington Post.
accounted for nearly half of all subsidies,

increased by 10 percent.
Student-fee increases have sparked campus protests at some institutions, including
the University of New Mexico, and have
drawn criticism from lawmakers in some
states. A few elite athletic programs bring
in so much revenue that they do not require
student fees or other subsidies, and some
even return cash to their universities. At
the other end of the spectrum are five institutions in Virginia, including the College
of William & Mary, that charged students
an athletics fee that exceeded $1,500 a year
during 2014-15, more than most students
spend on their annual cell-phone bill.
The Chronicle/HuffPost analysis found
that subsidy rates tend to be highest at colleges where ticket sales and other revenue
are the lowest meaning that students
who have the least interest in their colleges
sports teams are often required to pay the

most to support them.
Many colleges that heavily subsidize
their athletic departments also serve poorer
populations than colleges that can depend
more on outside revenue for sports. The 50
institutions with the highest athletic subsidies averaged 44 percent more Pell Grant
recipients than the 50 institutions with the
lowest subsidies during 2012-13, the most
recent year for which statistics are available.
At Georgia State, athletic fees totaled
$17.6 million in 2014, from a student population in which nearly 60 percent qualify
for Pell Grants, the federal aid program for
low-income students. The university contributed an additional $3 million in direct
support to its sports programs. All told,
those subsidies represented about threefourths of the athletics budget.
Georgia State is far from an outlier. Last
year, sports programs at 47 other public colleges reviewed by The Chronicle and HuffPost were even more dependent on fees and
other institutional support as a percentage
of their athletic budget.
The growing schism between have and
have-not colleges, and the reluctance of
universities that rely heavily on subsidies to
scale back their spending, has alarmed professors, presidents, and even college coaches, who are raising new questions about the
long-term viability of major college athletics.
Georgia State, an urban commuter college located in a largely vacant stretch of
downtown Atlanta, had long resisted a
move into big-time athletics. Carl Patton,
a former president of the university, says
students began asking him to add football soon after he took the job, in the early
1990s. For years he told them: Not in my
lifetime.
At the time, the university had a set of
aging classroom buildings and no on-campus housing. Mr. Patton, who retired from
the presidency in 2008, oversaw the addition of a student recreation center, a library
renovation, and the construction of the first
dormitories.
As the university evolved into a more
traditional campus, Mr. Patton reconsidered his earlier opposition to football and
commissioned a feasibility study from outside consultants. The study found that the
addition of a football program could yield
many intangible benefits, such as building
a sense of community for students.
But the report also cautioned that adding football was a gamble, requiring a near
doubling of the student athletic fee and
straining the universitys finances. Budget
issues raise serious concerns about the feasibility of a successful, self-sustaining program, the report concluded.
One big problem: Georgia State had almost no history of philanthropy, with donations accounting for just 1 percent of its
athletics budget.
Before greenlighting football, the university secured a $1-million commitment
from donors to help start a program. The
team started playing in 2010 in the Colonial
Athletic Association, which competes in the
Football Championship Subdivision, the
lower of the two Division I football tiers.
Soon after, during a wave of conference realignments, Georgia State got an invitation
to move into the big leagues.
ill curry is a former head football coach at the University of

Alabama and Georgia Tech.
He led Georgia States football
team in its first three seasons.
Mr. Curry says that his fledgling team
was not ready to move, but that he eventually agreed to the change and generally supports the universitys investment in
the sport. In 2013, Georgia State joined
the NCAAs Football Bowl Subdivision, a
group that includes elite powers like Ohio
State University, which won the national
championship last season.
Since joining the NCAAs top level, the
Panthers have gone 3-29. Mr. Curry says he
feels bad for the players, but he understands
the universitys motivation: Colleges like
Georgia State feel tremendous pressure to
High fees and

subsidized athletics
mean students
are paying more
for a lower-quality
education.
seize opportunities to enhance their status.
As much as anything, he says, it was a play
for prestige.
In America, and especially in sports,
youre not allowed an intelligent timeline, he says. Youve got to take one
that launches you so youre on [ESPNs]
GameDay sooner.
Mr. Curry says his experience at Georgia
State led him to believe that some colleges
are making fundamentally flawed business decisions in a desire to compete at the
highest level.
At many midtier and smaller institutions,
these decisions are fueled by a pressure to
keep up with better-financed peers, even
though the colleges are unable to tap into

the same television and licensing money.
Just two dozen universities collect nearly half of the $26 billion in revenue that
has flowed into the athletic departments of
Division I public colleges in the past five
years, according to the Chronicle/HuffPost
analysis.
Hundreds of colleges are vying to join
this rarified group. In the past two decades,
32 universities have made the leap to Division I. Like Georgia State, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the
University of Texas at San Antonio, among
others, have added football the sport
with the most potential to lead to big paydays. College leaders say such investments
help attract prospective students and build
connections with donors and other supporters.
More recently, efforts by the wealthiest
universities to take better care of their athletes have put new financial pressures on
other colleges. In January the NCAA approved a change allowing Division I programs to offer athletes aid up to the full
cost of attendance, which can amount to
thousands of dollars a year to help them pay
for living expenses.
Many programs in the five most powerful conferences the Atlantic Coast, Big
Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, and Southeastern
have agreed to pay out $1 million or more
in additional aid each year to finance scholarships.
Colleges have rarely dropped sports or
moved to a lower, less-expensive, NCAA
level in response to added financial pressures. Those few that have considered reducing their athletic commitment have
faced a backlash.
Late last year, the president of the University of Alabama at Birmingham announced that his institution planned to
drop football, citing the escalating costs of
big-time sports and a $20-million budget
shortfall.
Six months later, following a public outcry, the university reversed its decision.
UAB plans to bring back its team in 2017,
with renewed support from donors. But
the athletic department is still projected
to have operating deficits through at least
2020, according to a consultants report.
And its reliance on subsidies is only growing. This year, the university is expected to
subsidize more than two-thirds of the athletics budget.
Theres this illusion that you can wave
a magic wand, build all these fabulous stadiums and facilities, and the moneys going
to roll in, Mr. Curry says. But the reality is
that without consistent success on the field,
donors will not write the big checks that
colleges need to sustain their programs.
115

Youve got this problem all over the
country, he says. It really is an epidemic.
he driving force behind Georgia State football is Mark Becker, who took over as president in
2009. A self-described adrenaline
junkie whose hobbies include
ice climbing, he was a graduate student at
Penn State in the 1980s when it won a national championship in football, and he later worked at the University of Michigan
during a Final Four run in basketball. He
has seen how sports success can unite alumni and spark interest in a university.
He has big plans for Georgia State, and
football is only part of them. During his
seven years there, the university has helped
revitalize a dormant part of downtown,
buying up abandoned buildings and converting them into high-end spaces to sup-
port its growing academic programs, including a law school ranked among the best
values in the country.
Georgia State has nearly doubled its research spending in the past few years, to
$100 million. Its hands-on approach to student retention has made it a leader in graduating low-income and underrepresented
minorities. And its in-state tuition and fees,
totaling around $10,000 a year, are about
average among public universities.
Its student body, though, is especially
sensitive to any extra costs. The proportion
of Pell-eligible students has nearly doubled
since 2007, from 32 percent to 59 percent.
And in 2012, more than 14,000 Georgia
State students had unmet financial need,
in some cases more than $15,000 a year.
Despite efforts to create a more traditional college atmosphere, about three-fourths
of Georgia State students still commute to
campus, including many who attend part
IMAGES
April 17, 2015
Lasting Furor
Over Rape
Two students got tattoos
as reminders of their use
of Title IX to file a federal
complaint against the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill over its response to allegations of
rape. Students were beginning to wield the federal anti-gender-bias law as
a weapon to demand that
colleges strengthen their
policies against sexual assault. (Photo by Thomas
Patterson, The New York
Times, Redux)
time at night. (All fees, including those for

athletics, are prorated for students who take
less than six credit hours.)
While athletic fees have gone up during
Mr. Beckers tenure, the overall fee burden
for the typical student has not increased.
That is partly because the university has retired some other charges that students formerly paid. However, because of a sharp increase in enrollment, overall fee revenue has
continued to climb.
Mr. Becker says the subsidies are crucial
to building a vibrant athletics department
and turning Georgia State into a destination campus.
Great research universities tend to have
great athletic programs, says Mr. Becker.
With the additions, he says, the university
is now complete.
The argument that elite universities need
elite sports programs is bogus, says Nathan Tublitz, a University of Oregon pro-
fessor and former head of the Coalition

on Intercollegiate Athletics, a faculty-led
sports watchdog group. Schools without
teams dont have any problem getting applications.
The Chronicle/HuffPost analysis of Division I finances suggests that Mr. Beckers dream will be hard to realize. Very few
strivers ever reach the upper echelon.
In 2010, 127 universities subsidized more
than half of all costs incurred by their athletic departments. By 2014, only five of
those institutions had managed to increase
outside revenue beyond 50 percent.
n campus, views are mixed

about what constitutes a reasonable subsidy and whether
students should foot the bill.
Subsidies make possible thousands of athletic scholarships, which often
go to low-income students who might otherwise not attend college. Without subsidies, many nonrevenue sports like track and
field and swimming would probably be cut.
Of the more than 100 faculty leaders at
public colleges who responded to an online
survey conducted by The Chronicle/HuffPost,
a majority said they believe college sports
benefit all university students. But they were
divided about whether students should pay
fees to support their college teams.
Students are our biggest donors, says
Matthew J. Streb, a political-science professor and the faculty athletics representative at Northern Illinois University,
where subsidies account for more than twothirds of the athletic departments revenue.
(About one-third of the departments revenue comes from student fees specifically.)
Without that money, he says, universities
couldnt offer as many sports or scholarships
as they do.
David Hughes is a Rutgers anthropology professor who has sparred with his administration over ballooning subsidies. His
university has spent $172 million in the
past five years to underwrite intercollegiate
sports, more than any other college in the
country during that time.
The two major forms of subsidies, he says,
undermine universities in separate ways. Increases in student fees make college more
expensive, while rising institutional support
of athletics threatens the academic mission.
Add these things together, he says, and
you have students paying more for a lower-quality education.
Research published in January in the
Journal of Sport found that students themselves are often unaware of athletic fees or
what they are used to support. A study of
3,500 students in the Mid-American Conference found that more than 40 percent
of respondents either didnt know, or were
highly uncertain about, whether they paid
athletics fees. Many said they were willing to pay fees for student centers or health
care, but in general did not support fees for
athletics.
Brea Woods, a 20-year-old junior at
Georgia State, said she didnt know she paid
an athletics fee, which costs full-time students $554 a year. That makes me mad because Im not an athlete, says Ms. Woods,
who has taken out $19,000 to finance her
education.
The Drake Group, a faculty-led reform
organization, has encouraged colleges to
adopt restraints on the use of student fees
and other institutional subsidies, proposing
that colleges establish a dollar limit on what
students must pay.
Some states have also waded into the debate. In July the state auditors office in
Utah released a report detailing subsidies
at the states eight public universities. The
report, which found subsidies of 50 percent
or greater at all but one institution, stopped
short of recommending regulations but
raised questions about the extent to which
NCAA athletics should be subsidized and
how responsible students should be for covering those costs.
Earlier this year, responding to concerns
that many of the states public universi-
Great research
universities tend
to have great
athletic programs.
ties were putting too much of a financial
strain on students, the governor of Virginia
signed into law a bill that sets limits on the
percentage of athletics budgets that can be
funded through student fees. The changes,
which dont go into effect until July 2016,
vary by NCAA level.
at the Georgia Dome, in

September, Georgia States season began on a sour note. The
team turned the ball over three
times in the first half. In a box
high above the field, the universitys president watched with growing discomfort.
Mr. Becker faces the same dilemma as
administrators of other striving programs.
He says he wants to reduce the universitys
financial support for athletics to less than
half of its budget. But doing so requires a
big boost in outside revenue, and there is no
easy path to get there.
Mr. Becker has had some modest success
at fund raising: Two years before he startack
ed, the athletic department was raising just

$100,000 a year in private donations. Last
year it brought in more than $1.5 million.
But less than $70,000 was earmarked for
football. And the team still spends $4.2 million more than it brings in.
The mens basketball team had a brief
moment in the spotlight in the spring, after
it knocked off heavily favored Baylor University in the NCAA tournament, and a clip
of its coach falling out of his chair in excitement went viral. But converting such an
achievement into sustained success and
more revenue remains a tall hurdle.
Hank M. Huckaby, chancellor of the
University System of Georgia, was seated
near the president in his suite. He said he
remains skeptical about the viability of the
football program.
He has two degrees from Georgia State
and was not a proponent of adding football.
His biggest concern is the financial burden
on students. He says he fields as many complaints about overall student fees as about
any other issue.
Mr. Beckers bold idea to reduce the subsidy: Spend even more on athletics. He
wants to build a football stadium for his
team about a mile from the campus. He envisions a modern, 25,000- to 30,000-seat
facility that offers a lively game-day environment. He also wants a baseball field
and a soccer field, retail shops, and student
housing. He believes he can secure investments from local real-estate developers and
finance more through bonds, a strategy that
wouldnt require a student-fee increase.
It might sound crazy pumping more
money into what has been a losing venture
but Mr. Becker says students and faculty
members will get behind him. As a striving
institution, he says, taking risk is something people embrace.
But selling students on the idea of risk is
problematic, says William Serrano-Franklin, a masters student in public administration, because many students wont be
around to see a return on that plan.
Its like throwing your chips down on a
roulette game, he says, and leaving before
the ball stops rolling.
Down on the field, Georgia State mounted a comeback, but ultimately lost 23-20.
Mr. Becker shook it off.
At least, he said, we won the second
half.
Brad Wolverton, a senior writer, has covered athletics for The Chronicle since 2005. Sandhya
Kambhampati, a former Chronicle database reporter, is now a Knight-Mozilla fellow at Correctiv, in Berlin. Ben Hallman and Shane Shifflett
were editors at HuffPost when they worked on
this collaboration. Additional reporting was done
by Isaac Stein, then a Chronicle intern, and
Nicholas Forster, a HuffPost fellow.
117
Holding On to What
Makes Us Human
Defending the humanities in a skills-obsessed university
By L.D. BURNETT
September 2, 2016
Dire pronouncements about the future of the
humanities have been with us since the invention of the humanities, it seems. But the jeremiads have been growing in urgency and intensity
these last few years and how could they not
given the shifts unsettling higher education?
L.D. Burnetts essay captures the mood of the
moment, even as it resists it. It opens with a
reverie about selling her old textbooks, a found
metaphor for the humanists worry about looming obsolescence. It then blooms into a scholars polemic, at once diffident and defiant. Her
essay ends up being a defense of the humanities thats not defensive at all. Forget transferrable skills, she urges the humanities
matter for their own sake. Burnett is the model
of an engaged academic, a scholar who seeks
to bring her ideas about humanism and history
to a wider audience. Shes the kind of writer we
at The Chronicle have long prided ourselves on
championing and the values she espouses
here are the same ones that have animated our
pages these 50 years.
few years after I graduated from
college, short on cash, short on

space, and short on hope that I
might ever again spend at least
part of my days reading and writing and thinking, I made a decision that I have
wished many times I could take back: I sold almost all of my textbooks.
The overpriced and understudied behemoth
from Intro to Econ was easy to part with.
And my well-used grammar and exercise books
from French I and II? How useful could they
be in our tiny apartment, on our tiny budget,
with me staying home to take care of our tiny
baby? In such straitened circumstances, I didnt
need those books taking up room in my life; I
needed whatever money they might bring.
But those were not the only books I culled
from my little library. I gathered up Robert
Lowell and Alice Walker, Edmund Spenser
and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lucretius and Virginia Woolf, Lorraine Hansberry and Aristotle, Montaigne and Nietzsche, Flaubert, Boethius and Baudelaire, and many others besides
most of them authors I had never so much
as heard of before I set foot on the Stanford
campus.
For many reasons, college was a revelation.
I had never bought books of my own before
I went. Nor did I know that people wrote in
the margins of any books other than their
well-studied Bibles. In college, I proudly
bought Norton critical editions and anthologies of fiction and poetry, Penguin Classics and
mass-market paperbacks, and I wrote in them
all. When pressed to choose between buying
my books and, say, eating more than one meal
a day for a few weeks, I chose the books.
It had cost me dearly to acquire those volumes and make them my own; it cost me even
more to let them go. Oh, I got a few dollars
for my eclectic collection, and those few dollars made a difference at the time. But when I
sold those books, I lost the record of my own
history as a reader, as a learner all the notes
and exclamations and questions I had scrawled

in the margins, the asterisks, the dog-ears, the
passages underlined sometimes two or three
times.
But all was not lost: I didnt sell all my
books. Among the texts I kept were Augustine and Shakespeare, Dickens and Faulkner,
Spoon River, Thomas Wyatt, Jane Austen and
George Eliot and Thackeray so deft and droll,
Zuni poetry and an anthology of Coyote tales
from the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest, Dante and Cervantes and a few other
stragglers besides.
One of those stragglers was the Spanish existentialist philosopher Miguel de Unamuno.
Before I was an English major, I was a Spanish
major, and I had been introduced to Unamuno in the Spanish lit survey at the end of my
freshman year. Alas, the two-volume anthology we used in class, with its excerpt from Unamunos beautiful Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho
(Life of Don Quijote and Sancho), was among the
books I sold. But the stand-alone volume of Del
sentimiento trgico de la vida (The Tragic Sense of
Life) that book I kept.
Unamuno came to believe that dogmatic
confidence in rationalism and airtight logical
systems were a paltry philosophical response to
the great crisis of human existence: the problem of death. Unamunos existential anguish
and his quest to find or fashion some hope in
the face of the miserable fact of our mortality
struck a chord with me. I might not have understood everything he was arguing or arguing against on my first read, but I understood the desperation of his inquiry. In the face
of our inevitable annihilation, what do we do?
hat question, that problem, has

been much on my mind lately, particularly as it relates to the fate and
future of the university as an institution or even as an idea. Policy
makers and the public view the purpose of college as purely vocational, and see humanistic
inquiry the study of literature, the arts, history, anthropology, philosophy as a waste of
time and money.
In these circumstances, what do we do?
Does it even matter?
Thinking of those questions, I was reminded of a passage in Unamuno where he quotes
the French writer Etienne Pivert de Senancour
somewhat disapprovingly, as it turns out, a
fact lost on me the first time I read the chapter. Here is the quote, and my best attempt at a
translation of it:
Lhomme est prissable. Il se peut; mais,
prissons en resistant, et, si le neant nous est
rserv, ne faisons pas que ce soit une justice.
Man is perishable. That may be. But let us
perish resisting, and, if Nonexistence is what
awaits us, let us not act in a way that would
make our fate seem just.
Unamuno rejected Senancours resignation
that le neant Nonexistence was our
collective fate. He would not surrender to nihilism. Still, Unamunos own argument for
faith faith not as the opposite of doubt but
rooted in doubt and flowing from doubt
was a means of doing precisely what Senancour
urged: that is, to perish resisting. Reason, the
pitiless actuary, assures us that we are destined
to perish. Unamuno thought that even as we
perish, humankinds sustained, spirited refusal to accept that fate is our collective testimony that some day yet to come would see reason
proven wrong. Let us resist despair together, Unamunos philosophy urged, and so perish not.
I sold my old books in a time of great financial distress and profound personal despair (the
two were connected, as they often are). The
paltry sum I received for them only deepened
my sorrow and sense of loss. But at the time I
didnt know what else to do. I did know, however, that no matter how much of my little library
I had to give up for practical reasons, there remained a portion that under no circumstance
would I willingly surrender. Somehow I knew
that if I had let those last few books go, I would
have gone right with them.
Instead, those books, the enduring foundation stones of my humanistic education, sustained me through some very lean years. But
they were lovely years as well. And part of what

turned those years challenges into memories I
now cherish was the enduring value of the books
I kept not the price they could command
with a used book dealer, but the priceless wisdom they offered me each time I turned to them
to catch a glimpse of the world beyond my own
immediate circumstances and limited horizons.
perishing. But if we
must perish, let us perish resisting.
This should be our credo as humanists in the 21st century. We must not
concede to the actuarial ethos of the
corporatized university that reduces all discussions of value to questions of profit and loss.
Economic arguments for the value of a humanistic education will not save the humanities,
et us resist
A few years after I

graduated from college,
I made a decision that
I have wished many
times I could take
back: I sold almost all
of my textbooks.
and we should stop making them. The value
of the humanities as the heart of a university
education does not lie primarily in transferrable skills nor in the critical thinking that
employers presumably want. Instead, a core
education in the humanities gives students the
intellectual space to grapple with questions of
enduring importance. The value of knowing
how humankind has tackled those questions
and taking part in that endeavor can never be
measured in dollars and cents alone.
Some might say that such an argument is elitist because it ignores current economic conditions: the skyrocketing costs of college, shouldered more and more by students and their
families as policy makers slash public support

for higher education. Students are under enormous pressure to get through college as quickly
as they can and land a job. How elitist to insist
that students spend time studying subjects that
dont easily translate into financial gains.
But what could be more elitist than turning
these subjects into luxury goods? What could
be more elitist than deciding that first-generation or working-class students going to community colleges and state colleges dont need
or deserve the same opportunities for intellectual growth and exploration available to privileged students at elite private universities? The
assault on humanistic study as frivolous and
impractical, the scorn heaped upon students
who want to learn something more meaningful
than the mastery of a vocational skill set that
might be obsolete by the time they graduate
college these are the legacies of a profiteering corporatist ethos that is replacing possibility and creativity with conformity and austerity, turning hopeful young people into dutiful
drones, compliant worker bees in the neoliberal
economy.
But the value of what we study, of what we
teach and what we learn, is that such learning
can help keep the human spirit alive alive
and alert to possibilities that lie beyond our
present horizons. That may not be what employers or state budget committees want to
hear and that is precisely why we need to
deliver such a message. We must insist on the
importance of sustaining other values besides
the purely pecuniary. That is the ground upon
which we must stand to defend the place of
the humanities in higher education, to defend
the opportunity for our students to grapple
with ideas and questions of enduring value. If
that ground at the very heart of the university is lost, whatever still remains will hardly be
worth keeping, whether or not we ourselves are
n
by some miracle still standing.
L.D. Burnett is an adjunct professor of history at
Collin College. Her book, Canon Wars: The 1980s
Western Civ Debates at Stanford and the Triumph of Neoliberalism in Higher Education, is
forthcoming from the University of North Carolina
Press. An earlier version of this piece appeared on the
blog of the Society of U.S. Intellectual History.
QUOTABLE
March 4, 2005, Aloha, Ward Churchill
I never set out to be a poster boy of academic freedom. ... They selected
me. And Im going to stand on the principle. Im going to stand on the issue
because to give an inch is to give away something that we cannot afford
to lose, and when I say we I mean all of us in the academy. Whatever your
interest is in the academy, if you let this one go down youve lost it all.
Ward Churchill, speaking at the U. of Hawaii-Manoa on the dispute over his calling the victims of 9/11 little Eichmanns
119
Is The End Is the Beginni

In 50 years of weekly and then daily publishing, The Chronicle has produced thousands of headlines for its news articles and opinion essays.
Editors and reporters prize originality, but sometimes we fall back on, shall we say, formula. Over the past 50 years, weve started more than a
few headlines with The Education of (a Provost, Young Donors, a Scholar Who Chose to Become a Black Man) or Who (Should Pay for
Public Higher Education? Wrote the Serenity Prayer? Killed the Bugs at Kansas State?). Weve gone down Route 101 as well (Academic Relationships 101, Smooching 101, Successful Plagiarism 101, to name a few). In looking back at our headlines, though, were most amused
at the variety of those announcing, or questioning, the end of things. Heres a sampling.
The End of the Journey

The End of Race as We Know It
The End of Solitude
The End of Snow Days
The End of Gnosticism?
The End of American
Hegemony?
The End of a Lobbying Group
The End of Easy Oil
The End of Racism
in American Politics?
The End of NATO
The End of the Line
The End of Innocence
The End of the Academic
Affair
The End of Winter
The End of Serenity
and Certitude
The End of a 50-Year

Love Affair With Foreign Films
The End of Interest Subsidies?
The End of Serendipity
The End of Enlightenment
The End of the Academic
Library
The End of Human Specialness
The End of MLAlienation

The End of Affirmative Action
The End of Summer Blues
The End of Twapperkeeper?
The End of the International
Office?
The End of Countdown
The End of Education Schools?
The End of the Textbook

as We Know It
The End of the Beginning
The End of the American

Century
The End of the Affair
The End of Free Space

The End of Feminism?
The End of Male Supremacy
The End of College?
Not So Fast
The End of Nature, Again
The End of War?

An End to Microsoft Word
Attachments
The End of Admissions
as We Know It?
The End of Memory,
the Beginning of History
The End of Theology
The End of the World:

Next Week?
The End of Mandatory

Retirement
The End of Leadership
The End of Black Literature?
The End of the Divestment Era
and
The End of the Novel of Love
The End of Irony. Or Not.
A Fitting End
The End Is the Beginning Is

50
Congratulations
on Your
50th Anniversary.
Were proud to help The Chronicle of Higher Education celebrate
50 years, and look forward to working together to support the dedicated
professionals who work in the higher-education community.
nov e mber
15, 2016 |
Who We Are and When We Started

1966 Corbin Gwaltney . 1975 Steve Smith . 1979 Lisa A. Birchard . 1980 Lawrence Biemiller
1982 Nina C. Ayoub, Stacy Palmer . 1983 Sue Lalumia, Peter Monaghan, Rose Engelland
1984 Betsy Barefoot, Liz McMillen . 1985 Jasmine Stewart, Robin Wilson, Cynthia J. Kennedy
1986 Carolyn Mooney, Holly Horner . 1988 Goldie Blumenstyk, Joyce Phinisee, Denise K.
Magner . 1989 Brenda Stewart, Anne St. Vil . 1990 Samuel Eziemefe, Bonnie Gaskins . 1992
Scott Seymour . 1993 Gwen Gaiser, Jacques A. Benovil . 1994 Gabriela Montell, Matthew
Bassow, Andrew C. Mytelka, Mitchell Londres . 1995 Mitchell Gerber, Rene Baldonado
1996 Peter Schmidt, Nicole Wallace, Jennifer Ruark . 1998 Carmen Mendoza, Alice Chang,
Don Troop, Chris Leighton, Heidi Landecker, Alexander C. Kafka . 1999 Sara Hebel, Beth
McMurtrie, Scott Carlson . 2000 William J. Peyser, Brock Read, Robert McGrath, John
Ready, Scott Smallwood, Erica Bergin . 2001 Eugene McCormack, Eric Hoover, Ian Wilhelm,
Charles Huckabee, Audrey Williams June, Brian OLeary, Tom Bartlett, Jojo Mendoza, Heather
Joslyn . 2002 Ralph Gioseffi, Brad Wolverton . 2003 Sara Lipka, Sarah H. Henderson . 2004
Kelly Field, Kenneth Moir, Karin Fischer, Maria Di Mento . 2005 Evan R. Goldstein, Ruth
Hammond . 2006 Gerry Kiernan . 2007 Paul Basken, Richard Felder . 2008 Beckie Supiano,
Erica E. Lusk, Eric Kelderman, Adrian Padilla, Kristopher Doyen . 2009 Marc Parry, Mireille
Grangenois, Don Sargent, Richard Lewis . 2010 Greg Channel, Ron Coddington, Murali
Thota, Robert Watson, Rachel Sylvester, Jennifer Williams, Mathew Good, Dianne Donovan,
Margie Fleming Glennon, Joe Avison . 2011 Jack Stripling, Cody Switzer, Dan Berrett, Wendy
Min, Marilyn Dickey, Gwen Vargo, Hubert Telesford . 2012 Anais Strickland, Niki Turner,
Harry Kang, Marcy Walker, Lee Gardner, Allyson Shriner, David Wescott, Nick DeSantis,
Tim Froemling, Stacy Ward, Lena Yue, Nickole Cotton, Erin Gajarsa, Janeen Jones, Joshua
Hatch . 2013 Steve Kolowich, Shawn Fegley, Nick Findlay, Brian Hartman, Michael G. Riley,
Gary Stallings, Andrew Bowen, Carl Cox, Ken Sands, Andy Thomason, Alex Daniels, Charda
Stallings, Amaya Beltran, Leighann Ransom, Julia Schmalz, Lisa Sherr . 2014 Katie Mangan,
Jeff Bruns, Vimal Patel, Don Liggett, Dan Parks, Dan Bauman, Megan ONeil, Mike Fernandez,
Samson Ondiek, Kerry Mitchell, Ginnie Titterton, Drew Lindsay, Nadia Dawood, Katherine
Tubridy, Angela Washington, Rebecca Koenig, Jon Davenport . 2015 Kate Malone, Patryk
Kruk, Mina Ayazi, Valerie Katircioglu, Ben Pilkerton, Eden Stiffman, Elizabeth Kennedy, Sara
Davis, Jen Diorio, Charles Rodgers, Katherine Jackson, Benjamin Myers, Greg Hawkins, Cierra
Cox, Christopher Braman, Nidhi Singh, Matt Lyndaker, Maria Hilario, Paul Orejimi, Jummy
Sanni, Peter Olsen-Phillips, Toks Oriola, Kristine Afroilan, Grace Maliska, Brandon Hayes,
Matt Finn, Caroline Friou, Khan Salauddin, Katelyn Caillouet, Sarah Brown, Brenda Bonds
2016 Eric Martin, Andrew Markowitz, Timothy Sandoval, Jess Forrester, Freddie Pagani,
Arni Mapili, Alyssa Rosenthal, Fernanda Zamudio-Suarz, Elbert Ventura, Sarah Taurchini,
Maura Mahoney, James Hester, Paul Ruderman, Jessica McDonald, Jerome Burnett, Cory
Brown, Luis Mirantes, Hope VanDross, Nadia Dreid, Katherine Knott, Shannon Najmabadi
THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

50 Years

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50

Ill take higher learning

Talk with Fidelity today about retirement,

Volume LXIII, Number 11

16 We Must Find New Forms

18 The New York Tragedy

44 The Last Weeks of an AIDS

26 Wheeling and Dealing

37 For God, for Country,

The End Is the Beginning

83 Sex and the Conference

46 Academe Must Give Black-

Studies Programs Their Due

88 The Trials of Tony Judt

49 Camille Paglia Goes

93 The Shadow Scholar

51 Berkeleys Judith Butler

By Karin Fischer and Jack Stripling

103 The Day the Purpose

54 The Lessons of a Lost Career

108 Sexual Paranoia

114 The $10-Billion Sports Tab

By Brad Wolverton, Ben Hallman,

68 Psst. Wanna Buy a Ph.D?

78 Primed for Numbers

23 Men Over 40,

118 Holding On to What

50 t h a n n i v ersa ry | nov em ber 2016

2 nov em ber 2016 | t h e ch ron icl e of h igh er e duc at ion

The Chronicle founder

ifty years ago this month, The

s youll read in this anniversary issue, representing

We sent reporters to South Africa to report on universities and

50 t h a n n i v ersa ry | nov em ber 2016

ARCHIVE PHOTOS, GETTY IMAGES

4 nov em ber 2016 | t h e ch ron icl e of h igh er e duc at ion

U.S. News & World Report ranks UConn among

JOHN FILO, GETTY IMAGES

6 nov em ber 2016 | t h e ch ron icl e of h igh er e duc at ion

BETTMANN ARCHIVE, GETTY IMAGES

50 t h a n n i v ersa ry | nov em ber 2016

ALLAN TANNENBAUM, THE LIFE IMAGES

8 nov em ber 2016 | t h e ch ron icl e of h igh er e duc at ion

BEN MARGOT, AP IMAGES

JIM R. BOUNDS, BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

DAVID HOWELLS, CORBIS, GETTY IMAGES

A mass shooting at Virginia Tech leaves 33 dead,

50 t h a n n i v ersa ry | nov em ber 2016

KIM KARPELES, ALAMY

DANIEL BRENNER, THE NEW YORK TIMES, REDUX

10 nov em ber 2016 | t h e ch ron icl e of h igh er e duc at ion

Congratulations to The Chronicle of Higher

Education on 50 years of providing unprecedented

12 nov em ber 2016 | t h e ch ron icl e of h igh er e duc at ion

Metzger, its role in power struggles at other

aking as its slogan,

Malcolm G. Scully arrived as a reporter in 1967

February 24, 1970

At Berkeley, Where It All

Philip W. Semas came to The Chronicle as a

Kent State Is Where It

which will necessitate an end to polarization.

Faculty and Students

Jackson State, Scene