Oregon State University Center of Political Corruption Scandal

More 8March2011: Jerry Pournelle looks at this issue and concludes that something is very rotten in the state of Oregon. (h/t Instapundit)

Specific members of the Oregon State University administration and fraculty have apparently joined with US Congressman Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) in what appears to be an act of blatant political payback against DeFazio's opponent in the November 2010 election for US Congress in Oregon's 4th District, Dr. Art Robinson.

Inconceivably -- in an unprecedented act of vindictiveness -- the DeFazio loyalists at OSU appear to have targeted the children of Dr. Robinson -- students in the OSU graduate school -- for prejudicial treatment, including dismissal without cause from their programs, and appropriation of their work without credit or attribution.

Political corruption and ideological bias within state-run educational systems may be widespread, but this level of blatant vindictiveness against children of a political opponent is almost certainly unprecedented. Here is more from Dr. Robinson:

OSU administrators think they can violate ethical academic standards of professional conduct, break formal OSU rules and regulations, and even violate U.S. laws with impunity because, in any resulting litigation, they would be defended by lawyers from the Oregon Department of Justice, assuring that only students with huge sums of money and many years to invest in litigation can oppose them. The Robinsons do not have those huge sums of money, and, moreover, they want to complete their education – not receive money in exchange for the destruction of their education and opportunities.

...As things stand today, Jack Higginbotham and his students and staff, along with Joshua Robinson are in immediate danger. Bethany Robinson is slated for dismissal soon after and without the Ph.D. that she has nearly completed. The dismissal of Matthew Robinson may not be far behind. And the danger to Professor Higginbotham's other students is likewise very high.

Please don't let this happen!

Please notify OSU of your interest in this matter and urge the university to stop its destructive actions against Joshua, Bethany and Matthew Robinson and against Professor Jack Higginbotham, the remarkable president of the OSU faculty senate who has risked his career to help them!

Contact information for the OSU nuclear engineering department is:

Phone: 541-737-2343
Fax: 541-737-4678
mailto:joan.stueve@oregonstate.edu

Mailing address:
116 Radiation Center,
Corvallis, OR 97331-5902

Please also contact the president of OSU, Edward Ray:

Phone: 541-737-4133
Fax: 541-737-3033
mailto:pres.office@oregonstate.edu

Mailing address:
600 Kerr Administration Building
Corvallis, OR 97331-2128

Here is the e-mail address of the OSU vice president for university relations and marketing, Todd Simmons mailto:todd.simmons@oregonstate.edu.

For more information or to take further action, please visit OregonStateOutrage.com. _ArtRobinson_via_GreenHell

When members of a particular ideology occupy faculty and administrative offices in such overwhelming proportions, the temptation to go beyond the academic mandate -- to exercise greater power than has been authorised by their position -- can become overwhelming. At first glance, this is what seems to have happened to the over-zealous OSU faculty and staff, in their efforts to please Congressman DeFazio -- who helps to determine their budgets and remuneration -- by punishing the children of DeFazio's opponent.

Stay tuned for more details as they become available.

An Overpriced Educational Establishment Becomes Public Enemy 1

More: If you want to know how the educational establishment could drift so far out of touch with reality, the words of Alexis de Toqueville may provide a clue:

"Should members of the lettered class," wrote the Frenchman, "fall into the habit of frequenting only themselves and writing only for one another, they may lose sight of the rest of the world entirely and thereby lapse into affectation and falsity, gradually alienating themselves from common sense...." _DeToqueville_quoted by Fred Siegel

Educational expenses in the US have been rising exponentially, while educational attainment has not even pretended to keep pace. Public sector educators are on the verge of rioting in US state capitols, and universities are cutting vital departments to balance budgets -- while continuing a costly and counter-productive administrative bloat.

In a budgetary situation being played out in other cash-strapped states and municipalities, the legislation requires workers to cover more of their health care premiums and pension contributions, although supporters say local governments will ultimately decide on health care contributions for their employees.

The Wisconsin legislation also requires collective bargaining units to conduct annual votes to maintain certification. Unions would lose the right to have dues deducted from worker paychecks and collective bargaining can only cover wages. _CNN

This type of reform is under-stated in the extreme, and long past due. If public sector unions are prepared to riot in the face of such desperately needed budgetary and policy reforms, imagine what they will do in the face of a genuine collapse -- which they seem to be working so hard to bring about?

At the higher education level, many forces are working together to bring about significant -- perhaps revolutionary change.

Nationally the price of college tuition increased more than 274 percent from 1990 to 2009 -- roughly four times the rate of inflation. That's even more than the brutal rise in health costs that has touched off a near-crisis in that field.

...Technology will change, perhaps cataclysmically, almost all colleges. That's according to Clayton Christensen, a BYU grad turned Harvard professor who is now an acclaimed expert on innovation. He is the lead author of a new paper, "Disrupting College," on what lies ahead, and soon, for higher education.

He has studied how new technologies have disrupted and transformed industry after industry. And often established companies were upended or destroyed in the process.

The same fate could happen to established universities, as technology brings the biggest changes in information dispersal since the invention of the printing press.

Christensen and his co-authors write: "Roughly 10 percent of students in 2003 took at least one online course. That fraction grew to 25 percent in 2008, was nearly 30 percent in the fall of 2009, and we project it will be 50 percent in 2014."

The shocks don't end with technology. "Disrupting College" suggests that "the business model of many traditional colleges and universities is broken." Moreover, this model's collapse is "so fundamental that it cannot be stanched by improving the financial performance of endowment investments, tapping wealthy alumni donors more effectively, or collecting more tax dollars from the public. There needs to be a new model." _DailyHerald

From "Disrupting College:"

America is in crisis. Employers say paradoxically they cannot find the right people to fill jobs even though the country is facing its highest unemployment rates in a generation. Competition with a rising China and India and their vast populations lend urgency to the need for the country as a whole to do a better job of educating its citizens. _DisruptingCollege

As science better understands how students learn, and as educational technologies offer revolutionary possibilities for new teaching paradigns, the mass production assembly line factory-style methods of education will find themselves squeezed from all directions. Those which are unable to change due to fossilised unions or other forms of paralysing groupthinks of entitlement, will ultimately be crushed.

Educators and establishment insiders from K-12 to University are demanding that a recession-plagued US society mortgage its future, in order to provide them tenure and generous benefits. The halo over the head of the educational establishment is slipping badly, as teachers and professors are starting to be seen more as extorting thugs than as wise, honest, and impartial learning coaches and advisors. At the state and local levels, the problem is clearly the public sector unions and a climate of entitlement among public educational workers. At the higher education levels, it is more a problem of administrative bloat and an insane groupthink crisis of a badly decayed leftism which dominates the humanities and administration on most campuses.

U Cinci Don't Do No Computer Science, Man!

But U Cinci does do Africana, Queers y Women, Political Correctness, and all the really cool stuff!

U. Cincinnati Ohio
As university budgets grow ever tighter, institutions of higher learning must make very difficult choices about what to cut, and what to keep. It is unthinkable for a university to cut its administrative staff -- no matter how bloated and unsightly. But academics is another matter, since teaching has always been secondary for politically correct universities. So, what is the University of Cincinnati in Ohio cutting out? Computer Science, man!

The University of Cincinnati will stop accepting undergraduate majors in computer science starting in fall 2012.

About 125 current students in the program will be able to complete their programs.

The move by the College of Engineering and Applied Science is one step toward reducing the college's academic programs to 11 from the current 17, Dean Carlo Montemagno said.

It's driven by impending budget cuts that could slice $4.9 million off this year's $24 million budget, he said. _news.cincinnati.com

Dwindling resources must be focused upon what is central to the currents' flow. Science and engineering are not nearly so important in the age of Obama as are queer ethnic women's studies, and the crucial indoctrination of students by administrative staffing. Consequently, the money must be spent on administration and departments which provide the type of student considered desirable in this age.

H/T Instapundit.com

Social Sciences in US a Hotbed of Politically Correct Bias?

“If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community,” he said. “They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.” _NYT

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt spoke at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference last month. Professor Haidt mad a lot of waves when he came right out and called the US social sciences bigoted and quasi-religious in its biases and dogmatisms. Will Haidt become the next target of hate for having spoken his mind honestly? More about Haidt's talk:

He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

Dr. Haidt (pronounced height) told the audience that he had been corresponding with a couple of non-liberal graduate students in social psychology whose experiences reminded him of closeted gay students in the 1980s. He quoted — anonymously — from their e-mails describing how they hid their feelings when colleagues made political small talk and jokes predicated on the assumption that everyone was a liberal.

“I consider myself very middle-of-the-road politically: a social liberal but fiscal conservative. Nonetheless, I avoid the topic of politics around work,” one student wrote. “Given what I’ve read of the literature, I am certain any research I conducted in political psychology would provide contrary findings and, therefore, go unpublished. Although I think I could make a substantial contribution to the knowledge base, and would be excited to do so, I will not.”

The politics of the professoriate has been studied by the economists Christopher Cardiff and Daniel Klein and the sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons. They’ve independently found that Democrats typically outnumber Republicans at elite universities by at least six to one among the general faculty, and by higher ratios in the humanities and social sciences. In a 2007 study of both elite and non-elite universities, Dr. Gross and Dr. Simmons reported that nearly 80 percent of psychology professors are Democrats, outnumbering Republicans by nearly 12 to 1.

The fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology have long attracted liberals, but they became more exclusive after the 1960s, according to Dr. Haidt. “The fight for civil rights and against racism became the sacred cause unifying the left throughout American society, and within the academy,” he said, arguing that this shared morality both “binds and blinds.” _NYT

Unfortunately this is a widespread phenomenon in the humanities and social sciences faculties, and in administrative staffing at universities. To the victor go the spoils. In this case what is being spoiled are the futures of students and entire societies.

Higher education in the US is overpriced and of decreasing quality. As faulty assumptions get incorporated into mainstream academic thought -- and into the thinking of research funding institutions -- the outcome of multi-billions of dollars worth of scholarship and research comes into question.

Affirmative action for libertarians, conservatives, and white males is not the answer. The answer is a complete housecleaning in higher education staffing and research funding to get rid of the ideologues and riff-raff who have managed to clog the system. Such a housecleaning of personnel is necessary at all levels, from K-12 to the highest levels of education. The stink of bigotry, indoctrination, and dogma throughout the educational system is too great to ignore any longer.

Jonathan Haidt's TED Talks page

More: The same phenomenon has been observed among economics professors as well
H/T Powerline