… links to my post about the nature and purpose of a serious university education.

University Diaries welcomes readers from MPR.

The best universities, writes Paul Johnson

help to instill certain intellectual virtues in young minds, including respect for the indispensable foundation of democracy, the rule of law; the need to back up opinions with clear arguments, empirical evidence and hard work; the varying importance of resolute conviction and friendly compromise, when appropriate; open-mindedness at all times; and the perpetual need for courage in the pursuit of truth.

These are essentially moral qualities, which must form the basis of any university education.

He’s trying, in a short essay in Forbes, to justify the time and expense of a university education, and what I’ve just quoted is his conclusion, his answer to the question of justification.

I think he muddies things a bit when he talks about moral qualities, since what his list of intellectual virtues really has at its heart is dispassion, not any particular form of goodness. “Disinterested intellectual curiosity,” writes Trevelyan, “is the life-blood of real civilisation.”

Indeed I’ve long argued that the weakest universities, the weakest departments at universities, tend to be those that feature the most explicit moral stance, the most overt and self-aggrandizing ethical self-definition. Women’s Studies, that sort of thing. Some Ed schools subject their students to “disposition assessments” — a close personal examination, with an eye toward your having certain correct values. Instead of wanting free autonomous inquiry in their students – Johnson thinks this form of inquiry takes courage, but unless the only schools in your country are fundamentalist religious institutions, it doesn’t really take that much – they want sheep-like conformity. They test for it.

Johnson’s list stresses the cultivation of a very conscious distance from the convictions and opinions you bring with you to campus, an open-minded willingness to hold everything that seems to you obviously true and beautiful in a kind of abeyance.

It’s quite unnatural, this stance. Most people grow up in particular moral communities, internalize the beliefs of those communities, and go on living out their lives from there, without challenging those moral foundations very much, if at all. Truly university-educated people, Johnson suggests, are just the opposite – they have the guts or the obstinacy or whatever to pursue the truth as it gradually, contingently reveals itself through high-level argumentation and well-grounded evidence. (Today is the centennial of William James, and in an appreciation of him in The Daily Beast, his biographer writes that James is “our great prophet of the truth that there can be no one great permanent truth, but only the process of trueing, as a carpenter trues a board with a plane, or as a builder trues an upright with a plumb line.”)

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Note, above all, that Johnson’s description of the instilling of intellectual virtue among university students presumes a flesh and blood professor actively modeling this virtue — a dispassionate figure at the front of the room embodying and articulating and organizing the class as democratic procedure. Discussion is argumentation based on evidence; it features the willingness to take on the hard task of making yourself understood, as well as the willingness to grant views very distant from your own some legitimacy.

So, as Johnson remarks, you need a certain lively verbal dialectic to be put in play in the classroom between what he calls conviction and compromise. The implicit conversation goes something like this:

This point of view seems to me true or persuasive or likely; something very much at odds with this seems to you true or persuasive or likely. I ask you why you believe as you do; you respond by asking me the same question; we go back and forth.

Back and forth, week after week, under the subtle guidance of a professor who has gathered all of us here precisely to put into play these debates, a professor who keeps us from falling into sloppy attitudinizing, who, via her own efforts in the direction of intellectual virtue, keeps us honest and disciplined.

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Almost all of my classes, at the beginning of the term, have some students in them who are emotional and doctrinaire in what they say. “Anything can be art!” “Everything’s subjective!”

I find these students exciting, because — although I’m perfectly okay with their holding these views at the end of their time with me — I know that, with their impatient certainty about things, they will be my inspiration for the semester. They will start my engines every day. I will be directing immense pedagogical energy toward loosening their hold on those emotions, those doctrines.

Yet if they do accomplish this broadening, this loosening, it won’t primarily be because of me. It will be because of the complex and subtle drama of dispassion, conviction, and compromise that I will hope, from the front of the room, to direct. There’s something I want to make happen among my students, and Paul Johnson gets at what it is well enough.

University education takes place in the theater of the classroom. It can’t be put online.

… law school, established by a man being sued by his neglected children.

And when does Bill Lerach join the faculty?

… eloquently defends the fundamental principles of universities against forces of reaction.

Background on Menachem Mautner.

… a nicely written but somewhat bland and evasive review of a new book about American universities. It’s in the New York Times book review section. Here.

UD wrote about the same book here.

President Knapp’s response to the authors’ call for universities to drop their medical schools, for instance, is rather weak:

Consider, for instance, the proposal that universities divest themselves of medical schools: they are, the authors think, too distracting and costly, if not in dollars, then in their demands on a president’s attention. A tempting suggestion, many a president will agree!

But what an odd suggestion from the pen of authors who lament the self-enclosure of traditional academic disciplines. This is an era, after all, in which some of the most searching inquiry — and most exciting teaching, including the teaching of undergraduates — is taking place precisely at the intersection of medicine and other fields, not just engineering and physics but also fields like anthropology and history. It is a time when some of our most engaged undergraduates are fascinated by fields like global health, which brings medicine and the social and human sciences together in ways more rich and subtle than students of my generation could have imagined. And where are the humanities more alive, right here and now, than in seminars in bioethics that expose undergraduates to searing and quite possibly unanswerable questions about the beginning and end of life?

I mean, maybe — I’m not sure Knapp’s right that this is the hottest deal in the humanities at the moment. But what’s more important is his implicit characterization of medical schools as bursting with intellectuals who want to lead bioethics seminars. Aside from the fact that you typically draw such people not from medical schools but from philosophy and the social sciences (and maybe law), his comment overlooks the fact that med schools are mainly about practicing physicians and empirical research.

Anyway, Knapp doesn’t engage with the authors’ larger point – that major institutional distractions (athletics and professional schools, mainly) and an overvaluation of research over pedagogy, have combined to degrade the essential function of a university: high-level teaching.

A blogger at the Washington Post offers local examples of university presidents getting themselves and their universities in trouble by sitting – and doing nothing – on corporate boards.

… John Casteen III, who has just left the presidency of the University of Virginia, [was] a director of Wachovia Corp. for years, before the North Carolina bank racked up losses of $23.88 billion in 2008 and was forced into a shotgun merger with Wells Fargo National Bank, using taxpayer bailout money.

Wachovia stumbled because it got involved in subprime mortgages, notably by buying Golden West, a subprime mortgage lender. Casteen, who did not respond to questions, was on the board during that takeover and throughout all of the drama when the financial crisis hit in late 2007, spelling doom for Wachovia.

Today, Casteen is a defendant in a massive lawsuit brought on by pension fund managers who say they were cheated by Wachovia. If that weren’t enough, Wachovia has settled with the federal government by paying fines of $160 million for its involvement in the laundering of drug money through Mexican currency exchange houses, something that occurred when Casteen was on the board. In 2007, Casteen’s total compensation amounted to $243,500 from his service on Wachovia’s board and stock ownership…

The writer offers other examples.

Excerpts from Online Education: You Get What You Pay For, by Brian Fogarty in the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

… Academe, the established nonprofit colleges — public and private — are being forced into competition with the fast-degree industry. Their response has been to adopt a corporate-style business model: On the one hand, cut costs by increasing class sizes and hiring more part-time faculty; on the other, grow and diversify in order to weather ups and downs in the supply of new students.

The problem is that the first option reduces quality, while the second incurs new marketing and administrative costs.

… The rush to market cheap and easy education threatens to gut [the] upper-middle range of institutions and create a two-tiered system of higher education. Many of America’s quality, nonelite colleges and universities will be pressured by competition to offer more and more prepackaged curricula, “managed” by de-skilled and part-time faculty, to appease consumer demand for cheaper and faster diplomas.

A few students will still go to the elite schools — enjoying real interaction with real professors — while the rest are consigned to the discount bin.

… A student taking classes online is immersed in a whirl of distractions — the gong of arriving e-mail, instant messaging, Facebook updates, online games and all the rest. The problem with i-College is that it fails to provide the one thing that a genuine college experience offers: an environment completely dedicated, if only for short periods at a time, to the world of ideas and the process of learning…

Here Fogarty isolates the specific nature of the thing we call a college or a university: It is a world apart, an entire intellectual environment — a location Bartlett Giamatti called a free and ordered space.

The university is free in that it is committed to free inquiry, free social engagement, free personal exploration; it wants to give young people scope to be reflective and daring and changed. But it is also ordered in that the campus is a physically constrained, historically established, and rule-bound place. You enter its gates — real or metaphorical (Even urban campuses like UD‘s GW, or like NYU, have a university presence of their own that sets them apart from the city around them.) — and you enter an institution with rituals, traditions, established moral and intellectual commitments…

Above all, the university stages, every day, the life of the mind. In the classroom, it offers difficult and rewarding and disciplined inquiry as a possible model for one’s life. The university wants to seduce you into its world, wants to appeal to your seriousness.

Although your professors wish you well, they are not thinking, as they engage you in their classrooms, about what job you’re going to get when you graduate. They are thinking about lighting a fire under your ass about a certain subject matter. They scan your faces, they ask you leading questions, in order to see whether there’s any smoke coming out of you.

Did you read any of Tony Judt’s obits? If a student of his missed one class — just one class — Judt sent the student a hectoring email. Get back in here! I want to see you every day! I’m giving you my all. You give me your all.

Sure, the university is a free space. You’re free to do many things, and the university wants you to have that freedom, because ideally your four years will turn out to have been a lasting synthesis of free thought and free social engagement. But under that experimental looseness lies the deadly serious ethos of real education, an ethos embodied by Judt’s insistence on your full presence in the world of the mind, your simple, committed being there. Those love notes from Judt meant that he needed you — needed your physical presence to share a space with his, needed the dialectic of his mind and yours, the clash of your ages, temperaments, cynicisms, personal histories, suspicions, hostilities, passions, all of it, you’ve got to bring it. It doesn’t work without you.

… is the ninth most expensive institution of higher learning in America. UD has visited its beautiful verdant campus, full of smart preppy students and excellent teacher/scholars.

Trinity gave Steven Pearlstein, a Pulitzer Prize winning writer for the Washington Post, the sophisticated literacy, the social polish, the cultural knowledge, and the personal contacts to launch a successful, high-profile, and lucrative career. UD‘s guessing that this sort of future is what Pearlstein, and his family, wanted for him when, as an eighteen-year-old, he began to consider what college to attend. They rightly figured that the expense of Trinity was worth it for the quality of understanding and the depth of experience it could give him.

But that was Steven Pearlstein. For the rest of America, as Pearlstein writes in his defense of for-profit universities, the for-profit approach is good enough.

There is no reason that these cost-effective new ways of teaching and learning [the almost-exclusive use of online technology by the for-profits, that is] couldn’t be used effectively at traditional universities other than that they would disrupt just about everything — routines, hierarchies, to say nothing of the incomes and job security of the tenured faculty. That pretty much explains why the higher education establishment has been reluctant to embrace new technology and methods. The usual explanation is that education is not a commodity, that the process of learning and teaching is too nuanced, that the quality will suffer.

Put aside the fact that the for-profits are not at all cost-effective — they cost a fortune, much more than community colleges offering similar courses — and focus rather on the curious and specific high-handedness of Pearlstein’s approach to the for-profit problem.

He begins his defense by noting that Kaplan, a big shady for-profit educational outfit, is part of the Washington Post Co., but that “we in the Post newsroom have nothing to do with it.” It’s just back there somewhere, generating way-impressive profits for the newspaper (Pearlstein, a business writer, might ask himself how Kaplan can do that if its tuition is so low), but we don’t dirty our hands with it… He spends no time in his opinion piece doing what you’d expect him to do — to reckon, at least initially, with his own in-house for-profit scandal.

Indeed the Post newsroom has everything to do with Kaplan, since it is part of their corporation, and its ethical lapses are tarnishing the Post by association. Not only that, but Pearlstein’s salary and job at the sinking Post depend, presumably, on Kaplan staying afloat. There is a conflict of interest here that should have been addressed. You wouldn’t want to look as though you’re rushing to the defense of for-profits because your newspaper’s already shaky value is now much shakier in the wake of the congressional investigations of for-profits. (Kaplan was one of the fifteen big offenders in the GAO’s investigation.)

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The for-profit university industry in general is one Pearlstein has chosen to have nothing with which to do, although it was certainly up and running when he went to college. (I don’t know if he has children, or how old they are. If they’re college age, are they at Phoenix?) He and his family went to enormous expense to put themselves among the hierarchies, tenured faculty, and nuanced learning of Trinity College.

Yet now Pearlstein condemns the world of the Trinities as “the establishment,” thick with tenured elitists grasping at privileges.

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Tenure, as Timothy Burke notes, is decidedly on its way out at American universities. And most universities, including Berkeley, are busy onlining themselves.

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I mean, go ahead and defend the for-profits. Attack the non-profits. This blog attacks the non-profits all the time.

But better not to do it via hauteur and hypocrisy.

… comes out swinging on the Huffington Post, and then mixes it up with readers in his article’s comment thread. Very heady stuff.

His attack on for-profit universities is sharp and angry. He’s angry not only because these schools rip off students and taxpayers; he’s especially angry because their ethos has infected a lot of non-profit schools.

… Senator Harkin and the GAO’s work has exposed once and for all how utterly corrupt these for-profit “universities” and “colleges” really are.

At a time when the faculties of public colleges and universities are being told by their administrators how they should imitate the for-profits like the “University” of Phoenix because they represent some sort of idealized “private sector” efficiency model, Senator Harkin’s and the GAO’s revelations are all the more stunning. In California, the community college brass recently tried to ram through a transfer of credit deal with Kaplan as a way to stretch its budget. Luckily, the faculty senate refused to go along.

Sure, his sarcastic quotation marks should go; but his anger seems to UD justified. For years she’s chronicled the onlining and general cheapening of American university education, but there’s no stronger argument against the degradation of our degrees than a good look at the burgeoning, squalid for-profit sector. Aggressive recruitment of tons of students in order to make lots of money from them; overwhelmingly online offerings taught to people whose identity you cannot even verify; low standards of instruction and little expectation of serious work; not even an effort to offer face-to-face classroom instruction; the replacement of the higher thought implicit in the phrase higher education with information-bullets — we have seen the future, and it is us.

… continues. Tomorrow, Senate hearings on deceptive and illegal student recruiting practices in the industry resume. IHE provides, in this and other articles, a good deal of background, as well as links to important documents.

Undercover investigators posing as students found that employees at all 15 for-profit colleges visited for the [GAO] investigations made “deceptive or otherwise questionable statements” to students about accreditation, graduation rates, employment outcomes, program costs or financial aid.

At four institutions visited, admissions or financial aid officials encouraged students to submit fraudulent financial information in order to qualify for federal aid, the GAO says in its report.

UD’s been covering the scandal for years. In ’07, she wrote a fight song for the University of Phoenix.

Sing it out!

To the tune of Rawhide!!

Enrollin’ …rollin’ …rollin’ …

Keep movin’, movin’, movin’,
Though they’re disapprovin’,
Keep them students movin’, Phoenix!
Don’t try to educate ‘em,
Just rope and throw and bait ‘em,
Soon we’ll be living high and wide.

Boy, my head’s calculatin’
My paycheck will be waitin’,
Be waiting at the end of my pitch.

Move ‘em on, head ‘em up,
Head ‘em up, move ‘em out,
Move ‘em on, head ‘em out, Phoenix!
Set ‘em out, ride ‘em in
Ride ‘em in, let ‘em out,
Cut ‘em out, ride ‘em in, PHOENIX!

University Diaries long ago named it The Worst University in America.

Today it was named Top Party School in America.

The University of Georgia, in Athens, Georgia, beat out Ohio University, in Athens, Ohio, as the top party school — a ranking derived from questions about the use of alcohol and drugs, the amount of studying and the popularity of fraternities and sororities.

Reed College has the best teachers. And Reed was second in the nation for “study the most.” Interesting combination.

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UPDATE: Indeed let’s take a closer look at Reed College. Let’s look at three highly ranked (on Rate My Professors) teachers at the college ranked “best teachers.” Let’s see if we can discover traits they may share.

First, their names: Jerry Shurman, Mike Foat, Jamie Pommersheim. Shurman and Pommersheim teach math. Foat teaches religion.

Shurman’s RMP page.

Foat’s.

Pommersheim’s.

Read them, read them. Then get back to me….

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Okay. What did we discover? In no particular order, we discovered that

1.) Professors are weird. No surprise there. But it may be that really good professors are strikingly weird. Weird in the sense that they bring themselves into the classroom. Not that they talk endlessly about themselves, but that they are themselves. Not emotionally withdrawn. Not fake. Open. Vulnerable to being called weird. Human beings. Individuals. Students may like this in particular because at a young age, when students are tentatively working on becoming who they are, these professors — aside from teaching them — model a certain comfort in one’s own skin, an achieved identity. This can be quite inspirational.

2.) Good teachers assign a lot of work and expect class participation and general engagement. But since the teacher has excited the student’s interest in the subject, the student does not seem to resent the work. Indeed, the student may wish to impress the professor with her work, her enthusiasm, because she admires the professor and wishes the professor to admire her.

3.) The professor is not condescending.

4.) The professor has a sense of humor.

5.) The professor is very smart.

6.) The professor somehow manages to anticipate your confusions, your questions. From Shurman’s reviews: “His ability to know exactly what you are thinking and stumbling over is uncanny.”

(Note to online instructors: Don’t try this at home.)

7.) The professor’s enthusiasm for his subject is contagious, sometimes dangerously so. (“He hypnotized me into taking Attic Greek my freshman year, one of the dumbest mistakes of my academic career…”) It also broadens and deepens his lecture content. (“Says fascinating things about the structure and meaning of math in class.”)

8.) Enfin, it’s a pleasure. “His class was a real pleasure.”

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Is this a scientific sample? No. Does everyone love these guys? No. Are they teaching under optimal, small-seminar, selective college conditions? Yes.

Still. Don’t we all already know that these are the attributes of really good teachers? Doesn’t this result simply confirm what we know?

TPM looks at Howard Zinn’s long FBI file. It notes that “[T]he anti-war activities of [left historian] Professor Zinn provoked a reaction in some members of the leadership of [Boston University]. What is perhaps more surprising is that at least some member of the university leadership was an informant to the FBI.”

TPM quotes from the file:

On 4/17/70, [Redacted] (former SA), [redacted] advised on instant date, that [Redacted for more than 2 lines] (an excellent source of the Boston Office) is highly disturbed with HOWARD ZINN, Assistant Professor, Department of Government, BU, Boston, (Bufile 100-360217, BSfile 100-35505, SI subject) because of ZINN’s persistent involvement in anti-war activities. [Redacted] was particularly incensed when ZINN, as featured speaker, spoke in front of Boston Police Headquarters on 4/14/70 in connection with a rally held for the release of BOBBY SEALE, BPP National Chairman. ZINN stated “it’s about time we had a demonstration at the Police Station. Police in every nation are a blight and the United States is no exception.”

ZINN further sated [sic] “America has been a police state for a long time. I believe that policemen should not have guns. I believe they should be disarmed. Policemen with guns are a danger to the community and themselves.”

[Redacted] indicated [Redacted] intends to call a meeting of the BU Board of Directors in an effort to have ZINN removed from BU.

Boston proposes under captioned program with Bureau permission to furnish [Redacted] with public source data regarding ZINN’s numerous anti-war activities, including his trip to Hanoi, 1/31/68, in an effort to back [Redacted’s] efforts for his removal.

TPM comments:

The Boston Office’s efforts to assist in the unnamed official’s supposed campaign against Zinn was denied — but only because the request was mislabeled as asking for help with Communist sympathizers, rather than anti-war sympathizers.

The Charter and Bylaws of Boston University indicate that there are only 2 people who could, alone, call a meeting of the Board of Trustees: the Chairman or the President. Otherwise, more than one-third of the members have to agree to such a meeting; there are currently 38 members of the Board of Trustees (though the number has fluctuated over time, it usually has around 40 members).

At the time, Arland Christ-Janer, now deceased, was the President — a job he’d held for less than 3 years. However, records reflect that, by April 1970, Crist-Janer had already given notice that he intended to leave in July 1970.

The Chairman of the Board of Trustees, who led the search committee for Crist-Janer’s replacement, was Hans Estin, the current Vice Chairman Emeritus of North American Management whose biography says that he served as an Air Force pilot during the Korean War.

… in Andrew Hacker’s remarks here. He’s being interviewed about his forthcoming book (August 3) attacking American universities. But UD would take issue with a few things too.

Yes, “there are just too many publications and too many people publishing… And many of the publications are too long. A book on Virginia Woolf could be a 30-page article.” (UD has written about the articles-on-steroids problem, and related over-publication issues, in these posts.) Hacker’s right to argue that undergraduate teaching is as important as publishing (actually, he argues it’s much more important).

His attack on tenure, though, isn’t as persuasive.

Academics typically don’t get tenured until the age of 40. This means that from their years as graduate students and then assistant professors, from age 25 through 38 or 39, they have to toe the line. They have to do things in the accepted way that their elders and superiors require. They can’t be controversial and all the rest. So tenure is, in fact, the enemy of spontaneity, the enemy of intellectual freedom. We’ve seen this again and again. And even people who get tenure really don’t change. They keep on following the disciplinary mode they’ve been trained to follow.

Obviously it’s hard to be anything other than anecdotal about this sort of thing. How do we measure the useless wimpiness of a person? I would just suggest the following:

There are reasons American universities dominate all the world rankings, and these reasons have to do with much more than our country’s wealth. I don’t mean to discount our wealth, but anyone who tells you that American universities dominate the global quality tables merely because we’re filthy rich is simply wrong. Hacker’s right that there’s a lot wrong with our universities, and that trends are downward; but anyone writing about our schools has to reckon with the fact that many of them are spectacularly good. They didn’t get that way by being top-heavy with terrified little weenies. Tenure deadens some people, for sure; others (see Eva von Dassow) it seems to embolden.

Hacker’s right that students should get a liberal arts, not a vocational, degree. If they want a vocation from the word go, they should go to a vocational school (more and more universities are transforming themselves into vocational schools, to be sure; but if students protested this, it might stop). He’s certainly right that big time sports fuck everything up.

At a college like Ohio State … undergraduates pour into the stadium for the big Ohio-Michigan game. They paint their faces red and blue and all the rest. But what are they cheering for? Victory in a football game. Michigan is actually a much better university than Ohio State — its reputation, its medical school, its law school, and so on. It makes you wonder whether Ohio is putting so much into its sports teams because its academics really aren’t so great.

Got to make the best of a bad situation, as Gladys says.

Hacker’s too much of a hippie about grades (they’re evil; toss them), and he’s too random on the subject of admissions (drop applications into a hat…).

But I love his final comment about some students arguably not being ready for college.

Our view is that the primary obligation belongs to the teacher. Good teaching is not just imparting knowledge, like pouring milk into a jug. It’s the job of the teacher to get students interested and turned on no matter what the subject is. Every student can be turned on if teachers really engage in this way.

… I teach at a city college in New York, where we come very close to allowing virtually anybody who applies to walk in. I say, ‘This is the hand I was dealt this semester. This is my job.” Some people say to me, “Your students at Queens, are they any good?” I say, “I make them good.” Every student is capable of college. I know some people have had difficult high school educations. But if you have good teachers who really care, it’s remarkable how you can make up the difference.

I agree. Much of the curricular crap at universities finds its justification in the students-aren’t-ready thing… Students aren’t interested… So we make our professors clowns and have them teach the Harry Potter books… Or we give students laptops and let them play on Facebook while we do deadly PowerPoints in front of them…

Hacker’s right that the only thing that can change this scenario is a real teacher.

Even? Especially.

UD‘s already noted the increasingly criminalized nature of the University of Miami – perhaps our only university able to go head to head, jail-time-wise, with the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

Anyone surprised that an ethics honcho at the University of Miami is going out of his way to argue that a man caught stealing tens of millions of dollars from trusting clients shouldn’t really have to go to jail for very long doesn’t know this university.

Probably doesn’t even know that in an effort to hide his criminal career and give himself the look of a serious person, a philanthropist, Lew Freeman, like Bernard Madoff (a Yeshiva trustee) and like many others before them, gave lots of his dirty money to a university – the University of Miami, in fact. The University of Miami law school, in fact. An ethics seminar at the University of Miami law school, in fact.

The prosecutor said Freeman’s misconduct was particularly bad because he built a reputation as the “go-to” forensic accountant in South Florida who could be trusted by the community. He noted, for instance, it was “ironic” that Freeman sponsored an ethics lecture series at the UM School of Law.

Nothing ironic about it. Standard operating procedure for criminals hiding behind something legit.

But the University of Miami had better watch it. Eventually its rep will get so bad, the pool of criminals willing to underwrite its ethics seminars will dry up.

NYU has bought the Larry Rivers archive, which includes

films and videos of his two adolescent daughters, naked or topless, being interviewed by their father about their developing breasts.

One daughter, who said she was pressured to participate, beginning when she was 11, is demanding that the material be removed from the archive and returned to her and her sister.

… N.Y.U. has agreed to discuss the matter and has already, at the urging of the foundation, pledged to keep the material off limits during the daughters’ lifetimes. Two years ago [one of the daughters] asked the foundation to destroy the tapes, but it declined…