Friday, October 09, 2020


Tracking the growing challenges surrounding campus discussions of China

In response to China, universities around the world are making adjustments to classes and programming. As the pandemic continues to force much learning online, and as China maintains its tight control over even mild criticism, it’s important to track whether universities are balancing competing interests, or succumbing to censorship. Today, FIRE released a resource tracking the adjustments made at universities in the United States, as well as Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, in response to concerns about faculty members’ and students’ ability to freely discuss China.

Two major developments this year have posed challenges to the way campus communities around the world discuss issues sensitive to China, like the Tiananmen Square massacre, the plight of Uighurs, or Hong Kong protests: 1) the difficulties of online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, as it requires students in China to take courses at non-Chinese institutions amid severe internet restrictions and repressive censorship laws, and 2) the imposition of the national security law in Hong Kong, which puts forth vague bans on “separatism and subversion.” The law applies even to non-residents, threatening anyone who violates the law and later enters Hong Kong or mainland China. As Oxford professor Patricia Thornton told The Guardian, “How does one protect academic freedom when China claims the right to intervene everywhere?”

FIRE’s resource will be updated regularly to reflect the changes made at universities in response to these developments. These changes have primarily come in two forms: faculty-led course adjustments intended to protect international students from legal repercussions, and administrative-side changes to online programs.

Faculty at institutions including Princeton University, Yale University, and Amherst College have made the decision to offer anonymity in class discussions or use their syllabi to warn students that class material could be considered problematic in other countries. These measures are preferable to alternatives like removing material or limiting class discussion to abide by foreign censorship laws. Reports of these troubling measures are beginning to emerge. For example, a TA at the University of Toronto recently alleged that “he was advised to steer discussions away from controversial topics,” for example.

University administrations have offered a range of responses, some of them troubling. George Washington University, for example, temporarily posted a troubling data privacy notice warning Chinese students that the university may hand over their classroom data to China’s authorities. And a number of universities in Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand are using Chinese internet firm Alibaba Cloud to allow students in China to access specific approved resources offered by their universities, raising questions about whether these institutions will give China final say over class material.

It is vitally important to understand the way that repression overseas can make its way to countries like the United States and, in this case, campuses, and how it can impact free expression and academic freedom. In a comment to the Chronicle of Higher Education last week, I explained that “[t]he worst thing we could do is to make Chinese laws applicable around the world.” This would be the worst case scenario: allowing China’s censorship to set the standard not just for its own citizens, but in global academic institutions.

As a Dartmouth College student from Hong Kong told student newspaper The Dartmouth, “The fact that college faculties are worried that they might put students in trouble, it’s akin to the Chinese government holding overseas students hostage … They’re using those overseas students for putting pressure on U.S. campuses to silence them or to tone them down.”

SOURCE

Working-class educational practices are changing

Like many children around the age of two, Madison has decided not to do what her mother wants. She will not speak above a whisper. She does not want to read “Big Red Barn”. She will not identify her colours or her shapes, even though she knows them. So, for half an hour, her mother patiently cajoles, persuades, distracts and redirects. “You want me to read to you? What kind of sound does the cow make? Are you going to sing? What’s this?”

It would be a familiar scene in a pushy, upper-middle-class home. But this is a working-class black family in a poor district of Long Island, east of New York City. The careful cultivation of Madison reflects a change in her household. Her mother, Joy, says that she did little to prepare her two older children for school, assuming that they would be taught everything they needed to know. She is determined not to make the same mistake again.

Across the rich world, working-class parents have reached the same conclusion. They expect more of their children than in the past, and treat them differently. Gradually, they have adopted child-raising habits normally associated with middle-class parents. That largely unheralded change has probably mitigated the harm done to poorer children by covid-19 and the school closures it prompted. Unfortunately, some damage has been done anyway.

In 2003 Annette Lareau, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, published an astonishing book about child-raising. “Unequal Childhoods” showed that work-ing-class parents—whether they were white or black, poor and welfare-dependent or with steady jobs—thought and behaved differently from middle-class ones. Most assumed that their children would develop naturally, and that their job was to keep them happy and safe. Middle-class parents, by contrast, engaged in what Ms Lareau called “concerted cultivation”, stimulating, stretching and scheduling their progeny to within an inch of their lives.

Middle-class child-raising habits such as endlessly pointing out new things and answering children’s questions with other questions are easily mocked. They are also highly effective. Jill Gilkerson is the chief researcher at LENA, an organisation that measures children’s and adult’s speech using small digital recorders. By controlling for social class, she finds that 14% of the variance in adolescents’ IQ scores can be explained by the frequency of “conversational turns” in their speech at 18-24 months—a measure of their interactions with adults. The effect of toddler talk on adolescents’ verbal comprehension was stronger: it explained 27% of the variance.

Fortunately, the ideal of concerted cultivation seems to have spread. In 2018 Patrick Ishizuka of Cornell University presented American parents with domestic vignettes and asked what they thought of them. In one vignette, a girl who complains about being bored after school is told to go outside and play with her friends; in another, the bored girl is pushed into music lessons and sport. Mr Ishizuka found that highly educated and thinly educated parents differed hardly at all in their responses to these scenarios. Almost all thought the pushy parent was better.

Poorer parents are putting in more time, too. Sociologists Giulia Maria Dotti Sani and Judith Treas have data for 11 Western countries. In all but one (France) mothers without university educations are spending more time caring for their children than in the past. The Centre for Time Use Research has found a concertina pattern in Britain. In the mid-1970s highly educated and thinly educated mothers alike spent little time interacting with their children. Over the following decade the highly educated changed their behaviour, opening a large lead over everyone else. The less-educated then closed the gap (see chart).

Tomás Cano, a sociologist at the University of Frankfurt, suggests that child-raising norms are trickling down the social scale, much as liberal attitudes to divorce did in the second half of the 20th century. He has found that working-class Spanish parents are putting in more time on “developmental” child-care activities (such as reading and playing). Fathers in particular began to do more following the financial crisis, which hit Spain especially hard. They may have had more time for playing because so many had lost their jobs.

All this attention may be helping children at school. Two scholars, Sean Reardon and Ximena Portilla, have shown that in America the gap between the test scores of the most privileged and least privileged children upon entry to nursery closed slightly between 1998 and 2010. In Britain all children in year one of school—aged five or six—are doing better in phonics tests than they were a decade ago. Those who are entitled to free school meals because of their parents’ poverty have advanced more.

All they wanna do is go the distance

Working-class parents might have changed their behaviour in response to market forces. In America the wage premium for completing a college degree has risen from 29% to 45% since 1979. Not surprisingly, poorer parents have become more ambitious for their children. The proportion of parents in the poorest quintile of America’s population who expect their children to get no further than high school fell from 24% in 1998-99 to just 11% in 2010-11.

Another possibility is that training has changed attitudes and behaviour. Joy is being assisted by an organisation called Parentchild+, which has been sending books and toys to poor families, and guiding parents to play in more stimulating ways, since the 1960s. It now caters to 8,500 households in America each year and is expanding elsewhere. Evaluations of Parent- Child+ and similar programmes have mostly shown that they work. They are too small to have much of an impact nationally. But they may have helped change norms by spreading the idea that reading and playing with children are important.

Day care, which usually happens outside children’s homes, is common enough to make a difference. It is becoming more so as governments promote it. In the OECD the proportion of three-year-olds enrolled in pre-primary education rose from 62% in 2005 to 70% in 2014. As well as affecting children directly, these programmes could be changing their parents’ behaviour. A large evaluation of Head Start, America’s programme for poor children, found that enrolling three-year-olds raised the proportion who were read to at home.

Another possible explanation for the change is that the working class is different. Sarah Walzer, the chief executive of Parentchild+, says that her outfit encounters many more immigrant families than it used to. Immigrant parents are often ambitious for their offspring, enduring hardship and loneliness to give them better lives. Dina, the mother of a three-year-old boy, moved to America from El Salvador. She does not have a job, and her husband works in a pizza parlour, making the family squarely working class. But Dina, who went to college in El Salvador, has the aspirations of a middle-class parent.

Just as working-class children were catching up, covid-19 hit. School-age children were sent home to households where parents were already juggling pre-school children and their own work. This has been hardest on the poor. Academics at Harvard University discovered that American children did less work on a popular maths website in March and April, with the biggest decline in poor areas. The National Foundation for Educational Research surveyed British teachers in May, two months after the lockdown began. More than half reported that poor children were less engaged with their homework than others.

But if the teachers were right about poorer children doing less work during lockdown (and they might not have been— few kept close tabs on their charges), it was probably not because parents lacked dedication or ambition. A British survey of almost 3,700 people, known as Understanding Society, found that 30% of parents with no more than GCSE qualifications spent at least two hours a day helping with home schooling during the lockdown. That proportion is a little higher than the 28% of parents with degrees who said the same. The parents might be exaggerating. But another survey, of children, found the same pattern. As in Spain after the financial crisis, they may have had more time because so many were furloughed or laid off.

SOURCE

We Need to Talk About Bruce

Nowhere is “cancel culture” more deeply entrenched than in academia; it was commonplace there long before the actual phrase was coined to describe the current social media phenomenon. The gears of academia keep grinding away dissenting opinions, despite occasional paeans offered in the name of academic freedom. Those who propose uniquely original ideas can face all manner of retribution, from subtle digs from colleagues and administrators to the loss of employment.

One such situation is occurring at Portland State University in Oregon. The political science department has rewritten its by-laws to distance itself from professor Bruce Gilley. Among the changes is the creation of a process for making statements of condemnation against department members whose work offends a consensus of the department.

Gilley, who is tenured, is no stranger to controversial research. In 2017, he published an article titled “The Case for Colonialism,” in which he suggested that European colonies in the Third World were both beneficial and legitimate, as they generally increased the local standard of living and were often supported by a significant portion of the local population.

Obviously, such a hypothesis goes against the academic zeitgeist; it was considered deeply offensive and decried throughout academia and elsewhere. The editor of the journal that published it, Third World Quarterly, even resigned his position out of fear for his physical safety.

However, Gilley was neither cowed nor chastened by the criticism and threats directed at him. He has continued to write articles questioning the accepted orthodoxy in his field—and has added activities such as defending free expression on campus, calling for the reform of university governance, and speaking out on matters of public policy. As can be expected, these pursuits are not ingratiating him on campus and off any more than his 2017 article did.

But the question of whether an author is deserving of academic freedom does not rest on whether people like the idea expressed; unpopular opinions are an important reason why free speech and academic freedom protections exist in the first place. Rather, academic freedom is afforded to scholars because their work meets standards of rationality and method. Or, in some cases, it may be denied because their claims are unnecessarily venal.

Gilley’s scholarship and policy critiques meet all of these criteria. His work on colonialism is empirical, rational, and serious; it presents a point of view that many have pondered without conducting the research to back it. He also writes without the sort of unhinged hostility seen from former Drexel University professor George Ciccarello-Maher, who tweeted “All I want for Christmas is white genocide,” or former Virginia Tech professor Steven Salaita, who praised the kidnapping and murder of Israeli teenagers. Gilley damns no one, but merely presents evidence and draws logical conclusions from it.

The PSU political science department correspondence acknowledges Gilley’s professionalism; it alleges neither academic misconduct nor personal misconduct on his part but affirms the opposite. In a report on him prepared by two faculty members at the request of the department chair and in other intradepartmental communications, there is some consideration to the possibility that taking action may violate the sense of fairness underlying academic freedom protections. For instance, the report states that no one “questioned the notion that Professor Gilley’s research agenda and extramural activities stemming from it are protected by academic freedom.”

Indeed, there is a certain passive-aggressiveness to the political science department’s discussion about Gilley. The report raises the possibility that “university administrators may be tempted to interpret” Gilley’s critique of university policy as unprotected speech subject to Garcetti v. Ceballos strictures. That 2006 Supreme Court decision narrowed the longstanding legal standard of Connick v. Myers, which said that public employees speaking out about workplace issues depended on whether their speech was a matter of public concern. Garcetti made Connick only binding if the speech was made with the employee acting as a private citizen and not acting as an employee. But the PSU political science department’s report on Gilley does not press for the use of Garcetti; instead, it declares that Gilley’s policy criticism is “surely a commentary on a matter of ‘public concern’ and therefore protected by the First Amendment” and that “we would encourage the faculty to oppose any such action by administrators.”

Other measures were discussed—including the implementation of “shadow classes” for students who were so offended by Gilley’s research that attending his class was unthinkable. Legal precedent and American Association of University Professors disapproval, however, block the use of shadow classes, and the idea was dropped.

Yet, the departmental communications still recommend some manner of action to deal with Gilley—just because? The unspoken reasons can only be ideology and fear of opinion—and the possibility that he may be an effective voice against the progressive monopoly of intellectual life in Oregon.

What is really at issue is that Gilley’s scholarship is controversial and outside the narrow ideological lines permissible in much of academia and in the general Portland community. The same goes for his criticism of the academy and public policy analysis. A “confidential” email by department chair Melody Valdini to other department members (but not Gilley) called for urgency in taking department action against him due to his March 2020 article asking whether the hidden costs of shutting down the Oregon economy could be worse than the costs of the disease. (That is a question that should have been asked by everybody from the state governor to the “man on the street.”) “We need to talk about steps regarding Bruce,” she implored her colleagues. “It is time to make some decisions.”

In the end, three resolutions were added to the political science department’s governing by-laws:

Faculty whose scholarship or community engagement generates controversy should make a good faith effort to explicitly state that their views are not those of the Department or PSU when they write or speak in extramural settings.
When faculty are aware that particular extramural speeches or writing are likely to generate negative reactions, they should inform the Department Chair.
If a faculty member feels that the PS Department should produce and publicize an official department statement in response to another faculty member’s work, the following procedure should be followed…
The first two are relatively benign and reasonable. The first was already expected of faculty members for all their scholarship; the new resolution merely emphasizes that faculty members are independent scholars and speak only for themselves. The second is a courtesy to the department chair, who may be faced with additional work communicating with people outside the department when a department member’s writing or speech garners public attention.

It is the third of the three resolutions that is disturbing. It offers a path for politicized faculty members to “police” colleagues whose research or speech does not pass ideological tests. The actual process approved by the political science department is chilling: a single faculty member with an axe to grind against another can propose a statement of condemnation against the other’s extramural statements. The statement is secretly sent to, first, the department head, and then to all other faculty except the one who is under attack. The decision to proceed is made according to a consensus of the department, without the controversial member’s knowledge.

What is really at issue is that Gilley’s scholarship is controversial and outside the narrow ideological lines permissible in much of academia and in the general Portland community.
Next, the controversial faculty member is informed and has a chance to respond. After revisions, 2/3 of the department must approve the statement for it to become official. That is no high hurdle in today’s monolithic academy; the political imbalance in the social sciences and humanities is roughly 12 Democrats for every Republican nationwide. Furthermore, the middle ground is disappearing; in many departments, there are more open communists than there are Republicans. Given this political climate, the new process is a blueprint for condemnation of legitimate scholarship based on ideological reasons.

And although the statement is not an official “censure,” it can be used to isolate the dissident professor. Isolation is no small matter, more than an aggravation. The secretive process and subsequent statement suggest that Gilley is no longer a member of the department with unique perspectives, but that he is no longer one of “us.” If one is excluded from the group, it can be deduced that the group no longer needs to respect his or her possession of the special right accorded to the group: academic freedom.

SOURCE

Australia: Humanities degrees set to double in price as federal Parliament passes higher education bill

Parliament has passed contentious laws that will dramatically increase the cost of some university degrees, while cutting the cost of others.

Under the changes, the cost of a social sciences degree will more than double, while nursing, mathematics and teaching degrees will become cheaper.

The laws also remove government support for students who fail too many courses.

The cost of degrees will change due to a major shake-up of how much the Commonwealth will pay for students’ degrees.

Education Minister Dan Tehan says the changes will give students cost incentives to study subjects that will prepare them for fields where jobs are needed.

“The … legislation will provide more university places for Australian students, make it cheaper to study in areas of expected job growth and provide more funding and support to regional students and universities,” he said earlier in the week.

The changes were passed in the Senate with the support of One Nation and Centre Alliance senator Stirling Griff, whose crucial vote the Government secured earlier this week.

In securing his support, the Government made concessions to give South Australia more Commonwealth-supported places, and offer some protections to students who failed courses.

Opponents of the laws say the changes saddle university students with substantially higher debt if they pursue their preferred study paths.

SOURCE

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