Teaching Mathematics for Social Justice

This introductory course explores principles of social justice in education as a lens in rethinking school mathematics. The course will provide participants with a) an opportunity to expand their knowledge and awareness of issues of social justice in the context of mathematics education; b) an opportunity to develop a pedagogical model for teaching for social change; c) a process to critically examine the content of school mathematics curriculum and instructional practices from the perspective of social justice; d) an opportunity to contemplate on the role of the teacher as an agent of change and “transformative intellectual”. Throughout the course we will emphasize the relationship between theory and practice in an attempt to understand some of the complexities and challenges in addressing issues of social justice in mathematics teaching and learning.

' The Young Conservatives [at Texas A&M] ranked Bonilla-Silva as the top perpetrator of academic abuse in the classroom in their Professor Watch List Hall of Dishonor.

[A spokesperson] said the ranking was partially based on written comments. In Bonilla-Silva’s syllabus for his “Sociology of Minorities” class, he called the U.S. “The United States of Amerikkka” and said he would “remove the three K’s from this word when the USA removes racial oppression from this country!”

The Young Conservatives’ list claimed “Bonilla-Silva also routinely refers to conservative students as ‘Nazis’ or ‘klan-like’” and does not allow them to dissent in class.

Though not completely surprised by the attacks, Bonilla-Silva … said students gave him positive teacher evaluations, a fact he considered impressive for a professor with liberal views on a generally conservative campus.

Bonilla-Silva said the statements the group criticized were “tongue-in-cheek.” '

UVA PROFESSOR FALLS DOWN SHAFT


Crews with the Charlottesville Albemarle Rescue Squad, and City Fire Department responded to a tactical rescue at Campbell Hall on the grounds of the University of Virginia. When they arrived they found a man inside a shaft.

It happened just before 3 o'clock in the afternoon inside Campbell Hall at the University of Virginia. Inside the hall, which serves as part of UVA's architectural school, was a professor and group of people involved in a tour of the facility.

At some point during the tour, the man went into a 200 foot tunnel, believed to be a utilities maintenance area, when he fell.

Responders from the Charlottesville Fire Department, and Charlottesville Albemarle Rescue Squad used six pieces of equipment to rescue the professor whose injuries are consistent with a fall such as this.

The professor was taken to the hospital at the University of Virginia.

The problem for Democrats is that an important part of their base -- upscale white liberals -- seems torn about the meaning of patriotism… The right answer to GOP jingoism, …cannot be left-wing anti-Americanism. Of course, progressives can criticize their country and still be patriotic. Indeed, one of the highest forms of patriotism is being honest about your country's flaws and taking responsibility for fixing them. But it is what's in your heart that counts. Are your objections rooted in a warm and generous affection for your country, or in a curdled contempt for it? Too many Americans aren't sure if the left is emotionally on America's side. And that's a big problem for Democrats.

The left's unease with patriotism is rooted in a 1960s narrative of American arrogance and abuse of power. For many liberals who came of age during the protests against the Vietnam War, writes leftish commentator Todd Gitlin, "the most powerful public emotion of our lives was rejecting patriotism." As he and other honest liberals have acknowledged, the excesses of protest politics still haunt liberalism today and complicate Democratic efforts to develop a coherent stance toward American power and the use of force.

…[Americans’] …frame of reference is not the Vietnam War, but Sept. 11, 2001. The terrorist attacks evoked the most powerful upsurge in patriotic feeling since Pearl Harbor, and thrust national security back into the center of American politics. Democrats have yet to come to grips with this new reality. More than anything else, they need to show the country a party unified behind a new patriotism -- a progressive patriotism determined to succeed in Iraq and win the war on terror, to close a yawning cultural gap between Democrats and the military, and to summon a new spirit of national service and shared sacrifice to counter the politics of polarization. …

Patriotism is the ultimate values issue. Democrats need not be embarrassed by it. And they ought not to let Republicans monopolize the emblems of national pride and honor. Democrats need to be choosier about the political company they keep, distancing themselves from the pacifist and anti-American fringe. And they need to have faith in their fellow citizens: Americans will accept constructive criticism of their country if they know the critic's heart is in the right place.

The range of American political discourse is pathetically limited to often-superficial differences and trivial debates between two equally corrupt parties that are captive to corporate America and the military-industrial complex. …Why are conservatives so terrified at the notion of socialist views being expressed in these realms that they have poured hundreds of millions of dollars in the past thirty years into overwhelming them? Why do they hysterically depict corporate-servant Democrats like Clinton and Kerry as radical socialists? And why do they smear democratic socialists by distorting their beliefs and equating them with their deadly enemy, Communism — when such red-baiting would be recognized as nonsensical anywhere else in the world?

[T]he aesthetic response should be [our] initial response [to a novel]. Otherwise why bother with the "art" at all? Why fool around with the formal manipulations and the fancy writing in the first place when we can just leap headlong into the "content"? If the aesthetic is a "peculiar mode of appreciation," why not demand that the artist stop tempting us with it? By all means discuss the content. Just don't do so as if the artist had made it available to us in the same way as the essayist or the polemicist.

The aesthetic: A peculiar mode of appreciation that wishes to place in brackets or disavow the obvious content of a work and stress instead form and symbolism.

The bourgeoisie has an...interest in preserving a certain myth of the aesthetic consciousness, one where a transcendental ego is given something appropriate to contemplate in a situation essentially detached from the pressures and deformities of history. The interest is considerable because the class in question has few other areas (since the decline of the sacred) in which its account of consciousness and freedom can be at all compellingly phrased.

Why should we have aesthetics OR the moral? (The moral, of course, meant in its largest sense, to mean something like 'meaningful human conduct and the discourse about that'.) Why not both? The aesthetic is a human product, and so it will always have a moral dimension.

…Chekhov is a great writer because he is a great stylist, and because of certain qualities of his style he is also a great humanist. Flaubert gives rise to moral doubts, at times, on the part of readers, because his style seems to incarnate a kind of hatred of his subjects; he longed, famously, to write a book about 'nothing, with no external attachment', and there are times when his aestheticism seems to want to do away with matter altogether, to pulverize the human subject.

To call something, in a derogatory way, 'mere aestheticism' is to make a moral judgment about certain kinds of aesthetic decisions. (This isn't being only a moral critic; it is being a moral and an aesthetic critic: what other kind could there be?) Chekhov, for me, is so miraculous because an absolute perfection of form -- he instructed the journal editor of 'The Bishop' not to change a single word -- co-exists with the opposite of Flaubert's misanthropy. Style, for Chekhov, seems not to have been in any necessary conflict with the humane. He is the great stylist and the great humanist.

Henry James … exactly showed, in his critical comments on Flaubert and others, that a great interest in the moral and a great interest in the formal can and should co-exist. Truth and beauty together, not separated. I thought all this was pretty obvious.

…Surely when ideas take fictive form, as they do as soon as a narrative of any seriousness is essayed, they become indistinguishable from aesthetics? This is what an idea or an argument IS in fiction: it has taken a form which it could not exactly have taken outside this particular fiction; it has an aesthetic shape; it has been irrevocably modified by aesthetics.

It was Eliot … who best said this in his famous words about how Henry James's mind was so fine that no idea could violate it. He didn't mean that James wasn't thinking; he meant that James thought fictively.

"Molly Ivins, a Texan who's described herself as 'a left-wing, aging Bohemian journalist,' delivers her hard-Left views in prose distinguished by mean-spirited potshots marinated in a somewhat labored cornpone populism."

[It] seems to mark an incompatibility between a musical idea and its realization. In the Tempest, the differences between exposition and recapitulation alert us to the conflict. In the deformed seventh-chords of the recapitulation, we can actually hear the musical idea (an abstract, mental thing) being compromised by the exigencies of actual physical performance. In the Fifth, there is a similar incompatibility between what is conceived (two very different chords, with different functional meanings) and what is played (a single sound).

[We] can have tremendous, Beethovenian passions without losing all sense of our own limitation. (As one can have powerful political convictions while still recognizing that reasonable people may disagree.) Beethoven himself may not have achieved the perfect synthesis of these two, complementary qualities. But the evidence of both his music and his life suggests that he tried. Passionate maturity, neither resignation nor moderation nor fanaticism: that, perhaps, is what is truly sublime.

The argument that competition increases polarization assumes that liberals want to read liberal newspapers and conservatives conservative ones. Natural as that assumption is, it conflicts with one of the points on which left and right agree - that people consume news and opinion in order to become well informed about public issues. Were this true, liberals would read conservative newspapers, and conservatives liberal newspapers, just as scientists test their hypotheses by confronting them with data that may refute them.

But that is not how ordinary people (or, for that matter, scientists) approach political and social issues. The issues are too numerous, uncertain and complex, and the benefit to an individual of becoming well informed about them too slight, to invite sustained, disinterested attention. Moreover, people don't like being in a state of doubt, so they look for information that will support rather than undermine their existing beliefs. They're also uncomfortable seeing their beliefs challenged on issues that are bound up with their economic welfare, physical safety or religious and moral views.

[However], for that sliver of a sliver that invites challenges to its biases by reading The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, that watches CNN and Fox, that reads Brent Bozell and Eric Alterman and everything in between, the increased polarization of the media provides a richer fare than ever before.

A University of Georgia instructor says linebacker Tavares Kearney twisted her wrist after she confiscated his camera cell phone because she suspected him of using the device to cheat on a nutrition exam.

A battery charge instructor Dawn Penn filed against Kearney was dropped Wednesday, but the freshman player could still face school discipline for the incident, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Friday.

Penn said she took the phone from Kearney after he apparently took a photo image of an answer key to a version of a test he was taking July 15, according to a police incident report. The answer key had been accidentally distributed to the class earlier and the instructor had asked for them to be passed back to her.

After the teacher took the phone, Kearney asked for it back. When Penn refused, the 6-foot-1, 210-pound Kearney allegedly grabbed the woman's left hand, which was holding the phone, squeezed it and twisted her wrist.

Penn, a 27-year-old graduate student overseeing the exam, said she did not want to pursue criminal charges against Kearney, but she is pursuing an academic honesty investigation of the player.

Kearney has since withdrawn from the course and has returned to his home in Atlanta, a school spokesman said.

His football eligibility is uncertain pending the outcome of the university inquiry.
"It's my intent to withhold comment until that process has been exercised," coach Mark Richt said.

If Kearney is unable to compete for Georgia this fall, he'll become the seventh member of the 19-player incoming class to miss the season. Five others did not meet academic requirements and a sixth, Antavious Coates, suffered a season-ending knee injury this summer.

Three returning players have been suspended for the season opener against Boise State following offseason arrests. A fourth, Derrick White, was kicked off the team after being arrested on a DUI charge. And junior fullback Des Williams is out for the season after tearing a chest muscle.

Jeez, you’d think their first freedom-enshrining Constitution would be getting more press (did they have this problem in 1776?) Why is it we have to go to a non-media source for news that should be trumpeted across the front pages of every freedom-loving newspaper in the world? …Ho-hum, democracy and freedom being codified for 25 million people. Yawn.

Roman Polanski, the film director, was today awarded £50,000 libel damages over a Vanity Fair article which stated that he made sexual advances to a Scandinavian woman soon after his wife’s brutal murder in 1969.

The jury of nine men and three women took four-and-a-half hours to reach their unanimous verdict at London’s High Court. Publisher Conde Naste also faces a legal bill estimated at £1.5 million.

His lawyer, John Kelsey-Fry, argued that Mr Polanski had been "monstrously libelled for the sake of a lurid anecdote" in the 2002 article which accused him of propositioning the woman in a New York restaurant while on the way to Sharon Tate's funeral.

It alleged that Polanski, director of Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown and The Pianist, put his hand on the woman’s thigh and promised her: "I will make another Sharon Tate out of you."

During the high profile trial, Conde Nast accepted that the incident did not happen before Miss Tate’s funeral, but about two weeks later. It maintained the article was substantially true and argued that Mr Polanski's reputation had already been ruined by his 1978 conviction and promiscuous past.

The publisher's case was dealt a devastating blow when it emerged that Beatte Telle, the Norwegian woman allegedly at the receiving end of his unwanted attentions, had not been called to give evidence.

In a statement, Mr Polanski said: "It goes without saying that, whilst the whole episode is a sad one, I am obviously pleased with the jury’s verdict today. …Three years of my life have been interrupted. Three years within which I have had no choice but to relive the horrible events of August 1969, the murders of my wife, my unborn child and my friends… Many untruths have been published about me, most of which I have ignored, but the allegations printed in the July 2002 edition of Vanity Fair could not go unchallenged."

Outside court, Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, said: “I find it amazing that a man who lives in France can sue a magazine that is published in America in a British courtroom. Nevertheless it was interesting to see the wheels of British justice move, and I wish Mr Polanski well. We have a magazine to put out..."

JOHN ROBERTS, THE ANTI-BUSH? I don't know heads or tails about constitutional law, so I'll have to focus on the politics of John Roberts' nomination. And what I know so far is that 'liberal' journalists are falling all over themselves to see who can praise Roberts more.

Why? Because Roberts is the opposite of everything they hate about Bush. Consider this mash note from the NYT:

[Roberts] was always conservative, but not doctrinaire. He was raised and remains a practicing Roman Catholic who declines, friends say, to wear his faith on his sleeve...

John G. Roberts is an erudite, Harvard-trained, Republican corporate-lawyer-turned-judge, with a punctilious, pragmatic view of the law.

Mind you, that's a straight news article I'm quoting, not an editorial or even a "news analysis" column. Liberal activists must be fuming -- positive coverage from the NYT, WaPo, etc. is turning Roberts' confirmation into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Technically, the editorial boards at the Times and the Post are insisting that we must all reserve judgment until the Senate has conducted a thorough and substantive examination of Roberts' merit as a judge. But who're they kidding?

When the WaPo is running headlines such as "Democrats Say Nominee Will Be Hard to Defeat" , there is simply no way to portray Roberts as the sort of "extreme ideologue with an agenda of stripping away important rights" that the NYT says is unacceptable on the nation's highest court.

Now why has the media decided to give John Roberts the kid glove treatment? It's not because he went to Harvard College and Harvard Law. After all, Bush has degrees from Harvard and Yale. What matters a lot more is that Roberts graduated summa cum laude and was the managing editor of law review. He's not just an Ivy Leaguer -- he's the kind of Ivy Leaguer that journalists and pundits wish their children could be.

In other words, Roberts is supposedly the kind of Ivy Leaguer who thinks in a way that fellow Ivy Leaguers readily understand and heartily praise -- whereas Bush doesn't.

Consider how the NYT's Elisabeth Bumiller describes Bush's decision to nominate Roberts rather than Harvie Wilkinson:

"Well, I told him I ran three and a half miles a day," Judge Wilkinson recalled in a telephone interview on Wednesday. "And I said my doctor recommends a lot of cross-training, but I said I didn't want to do the elliptical and the bike and the treadmill." The president, Judge Wilkinson said, "took umbrage at that," and told his potential nominee that he should do the cross-training his doctor suggested.

"He thought I was well on my way to busting my knees," said Judge Wilkinson, 60. "He warned me of impending doom."

Judge Wilkinson's conversation with the president about exercise and other personal matters in an interview for a job on the highest court in the land was typical of how Mr. Bush went about picking his eventual nominee, Judge John G. Roberts, White House officials and Republicans said. Mr. Bush, they said, looked extensively into the backgrounds of the five finalists he interviewed, but in the end relied as much on chemistry and intuition as on policy and legal intellect.

I would say that the often-condescending Ms. Bumiller has thoroughly misunderestimated the president. While I'm sure that Bush asked Wilkinson about his exercise habits, we have every reason to believe that Bush carefully chose himself a candidate with both strong conservative beliefs and an incomparable ability to persuade Democratic senators to support his nomination.

In fact, it is precisely because Bumiller and others perpetuate such hackneyed stereotypes about Bush's intellect that John "summa cum laude and law review" Roberts has established himself so rapidly as an unborkable candidate.

' Speaking at the AlwaysOn conference at Stanford University, futurist George Gilder predicted a harrowing future for humanity. TV will die, he said, and be replaced by blogs.

"TV is dying fast. ...There are only a few channels available. TV was [a] technology of tyrants. It fed this advertising model that has collapsed," Gilder told an audience at the conference. "The thirty-second spot is just going to die. Nobody is going to watch any ads they don't want to see.” '

As a University of Oregon alumnus, I read with some disquiet about the University’s Five Year Diversity Plan.

The most disturbing aspect of this plan is the purposefully undefined notion of “cultural competency.” John Shuford asserts that this vague concept was left so because it “would not be appropriate for the drafters of the blueprint to impose a definition because that might have led to adverse responses by some” (ODE, June 30, “Diversity plan sparks controversy with faculty”).

What? In other words, they didn’t define the governing idea of their plan because someone might not like their definition? This, at a large university, is the actual response of a salaried member of the administration? They didn't do something that needed to be done because somebody might not like them for doing it? Good God.

The authors of the diversity plan are going to govern a large part of University life based on an undefined concept, which they will get around to defining — if ever they do — at some equally undefined time down the road, if and when everyone promises not to get mad at them? No wonder the faculty is rebelling.

...If the people behind this plan — which for all I know may be a fine plan if done properly — cannot find sufficient steel in their spines to go out on a limb and define “cultural competency,” they have no business writing the plan in the first place.

Less and less, in society as well as in the University, are there people willing to take principled but intelligent stands on issues of importance. To do so requires careful thought, a mind willing to keep alive a little doubt in every certainty and, above all, the willingness to be wrong. If you don’t define “cultural competency,” you don’t ever have to risk being wrong about it. But if you are not willing to take such a risk, you need either to excise the concept from the plan, or turn it over to someone who is willing to take the risk.

Curt Hopkins
1991 Honors College graduate

"Among other charges in [her] suit [against Southeastern Louisiana University], [former Dean] Landesberg-Boyle said her Jewish identity was often met with scorn at Southeastern. She said that when a Jewish candidate was interviewed for an SLU position in 1998, one campus employee told an administrator in a memo that 'we don't need another neurotic coffee-drinking Jew.'"

That there are so many more Arabs (and Turks) than Kurds has determined attitudes toward the Kurdish people. The issue is, obviously, not only numbers. It is also a matter of the power of Arab — and Muslim — states. It entails concern for oil and Turkey’s strategic location. And finally, it concerns the fact that the Kurds are not only a small people, they also do not have powerful friends. They are a nation without many cousins abroad or fraternal allies.

One can understand why governments and chancellors respond to these dilemmas with realpolitik, but it is a scandal that liberal, left-wing opinion, supposedly motivated by humanistic and universal values, has traditionally ignored the case of the Kurds. How often have left-wing intellectuals and protesters who condemn Israeli policies — sometimes rightly, sometimes less so — mobilized on behalf of the Kurds and against their oppressors — Saddam’s Iraq, but also Turkey?

This is a stain on the record of the European and American left. The only consolation may be that the present geopolitical situation, brought about by the toppling of Saddam, may perhaps give the Kurds in Iraq, for the first time in history, a place in the sun, either in a federal, democratic Iraq or, ultimately, in a state of their own.

Should this happen, Kurdish self-determination would not be due to the support of the left, but to the questionable politics of the Bush administration. Perhaps some people on the left ought to examine their consciences. Those of us who share a belief in Hegel’s “cunning of reason” — that is, the idea that great historical consequences don’t always come from the intentions of historical actors — may, once again, and against our moral preference, be vindicated.

This is the flag of Kurdistan in my lapel; but my Kurdish comrades say that …their main responsibility is for the new Iraq now. And they who would have every right to say we want to get out of this prison house of the state are willing to still cooperate to help to emancipate the rest of it. I think that's an extraordinary sacrifice on their part. Deserves more recognition than it's had.

A voice,
crying in the wilderness,
and then just crying

By Tom Smith

Do you sometimes feel, Professor, that no one is listening to you, that your articles are ignored? IS ANYBODY LISTENING?!! Well, the bad news is, you are probably right. That is, you probably are being ignored. I will try to make this point in forthcoming article(s), but probably no one will pay any attention to me, so this is your chance . . .

I just got some new data back from Lexis, with whom I am engaged in a massive citation study, but that's another story. This data concerns law review articles that are in their Shepard's database and how much they get cited. This data covers about 385,000 law review articles, notes, comments, etc. etc. that appear in 726 law reviews and journals, and looks at how often they are cited. Cited by other law reviews, or cases.

First of all, 43 percent of the articles are not cited . . . at all. Zero, nada, zilch. Almost 80 percent (i.e. 79 percent) of law review articles get ten or fewer citations. So where are all the citations going? Well, let's look at articles that get more than 100 citations. These are the elite. They make up less than 1 percent of all articles, .898 percent to be precise. They get, is anybody listening out there? 96 percent of all citations to law review articles. That's all. Only 96 percent. Talk about concentration of wealth.

Why, you ask, is it like this? You should read my paper here, into which this new lawrev data will be incorporated, though I think it may justify a little article on its own. Similar dynamics are probably at work. Possible titles: Why this article (and yours) is a waste of time. Or, Stop that law professor before he writes again. This distributions of cites to law review articles and to cases look the same. Your basic stretched exponential with a long tail, or some would say a power law distribution. On a log-log chart, close to a 45 degree line.

So stop that blogging, professors, and get back to writing those law review articles!

Hypocognition results when a term is used to conjure up all-positive images to prevent us from understanding what is really going on. For example, hypocognition makes it hard for the public to believe there can be anything wrong with “globalism” or “free trade,” which sound like the apple pie and motherhood of the 21st century.

have been wrong to assume that people are rational actors who make their decisions based on facts; in reality, he says, cognitive science has proved that all of us are programmed to respond to the frames that have been embedded deep in our unconscious minds, and if the facts don't fit the frame, our brains simply reject them. Lakoff explained to me that the frames in our brains can be "activated" by the right combination of words and imagery, and only then, once the brain has been unlocked, can we process the facts being thrown at us.

"Much more than an offering of serious political strategy, [Lakoff’s book,] Don't Think of an Elephant! is a feel-good, self-help book for a stratum of despairing liberals who just can't believe how their common-sense message has been misunderstood by eternally deceived masses," Cooper wrote. In Lakoff's view, he continued, American voters are "redneck, chain-smoking, baby-slapping Christers desperately in need of some gender-free nurturing and political counseling by organic-gardening enthusiasts from Berkeley."

Public Relations Campaign
for Research Office at E.P.A.
Includes Ghostwriting Articles

The Office of Research and Development at the Environmental Protection Agency is seeking outside public relations consultants, to be paid up to $5 million over five years, to polish its Web site, organize focus groups on how to buff the office's image and ghostwrite articles "for publication in scholarly journals and magazines."

The strategy, laid out in a May 26 exploratory proposal notice and further defined in two recently awarded public relations contracts totaling $150,000, includes writing and placing "good stories" about the E.P.A.'s research office in consumer and trade publications.

The contracts were awarded just months after the Bush administration came under scrutiny for its public relations policies. In some cases payments were made to columnists, including Armstrong Williams, who promoted the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind and received an undisclosed $240,000. In January, President Bush publicly abandoned this practice.

...

Donald Kennedy, the editor of Science magazine and a former head of the Food and Drug Administration, said in a telephone interview on Saturday that he found the idea of public relations firms ghostwriting for government scientists "appalling."

"If we knew that it had been written by someone who was not a scientist and submitted as though it were the work of a scientist, we wouldn't take it," Mr. Kennedy said. "But it's conceivable that we wouldn't know, if it was carefully constructed."

He added that the practice of putting public relations polish on scientific work has already been practiced by industry. "We had seen it coming in the pharmaceutical industry and were sort of wary about it," he said. "The idea that a government agency would feel the necessity to do this is doubly troubling."

"Why the hell didn't anyone mention that I could have hired PR people to pimp up my material before I handed in my friggin' tenure file???!!!"

Assignment 1 Doing Deviance

Do a deviant act or engage in some form of deviant behavior. The act or behavior must not violate the law (criminal or civil law, municipal ordinance, or vehicle code) and it must not violate University regulations. Failure to heed this warning will result in a F for the assignment and referral to the Deans Office and if warranted to the office of the prosecutor.

Week 8 Race and Higher Education

What should be done to level the racial playing field in higher education? There is an organization at UC Berkeley called BAMN (the Committee to Defend Affirmative Action By Any Means Necessary). A link to the BAMN website is here. On March 3 (Thursday) they are holding an all day teach in on affirmative action. Either go to this teach in, or read their website carefully to find out their position on affirmative action, what they think it means, why they believe it is important. (If you DO go to their teach-in, etc. for the day, you will get an extra 30 points of credit here.) After informing yourself on these issues, write a letter to the Governor explaining what YOU think should be done to deal with the issues of racial imbalance within the UC system.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
State Capitol Building
Sacramento, CA 95814
Phone: 916-445-2841

[O]ver the course of learning and using the emotionally-based tools taught in this class you may feel tempted to extend your relationship [with fellow students] into more intimate realms. This is because we are setting up a learning environment that can allow for closeness and trust that some of you may have not previously experienced in a school environment. While we encourage you to develop close and trusting friendships and working relationships, our experience has been that building "romantic" relationships with members of the class (where such relationships do not already exist) can be harmful to our primary goals of learning. Therefore we encourage you to be thoughtful about the nature of the relationships you establish. Explicitly, this means especially refraining from any unwelcome intimate advances. Should this occur to you or should you have questions about this policy, please contact the instructor immediately.

Custer and the Art of the Blog - Addendum

Friday, July 15, 2005, 01:27 PM - Building the Field

In light of a recent article in the online Chronicle of Higher Education, Bloggers Need Not Apply, I thought I would quote from my annual performance review::

Dear Mark,

[In the past year, you published this, taught that, and served on such and such a committee.] Finally, you maintained a very interesting and important academic military history blog, which you have used with skill to develop ideas about the field and also to advance your thinking on important scholarly issues, particularly on your Race and War project . . .

Sincerely yours,

Kenneth J. Andrien
Professor and Chair

Cc: John Roberts, Dean, College of Humanities

A Lesson for Law Reviews, and for Authors:

A friend of mine and I were e-mailing about various offers he had pending for a law review article he'd written, and in passing he mentioned this:

'[One of the journals] forbid[s] web publication of their articles, which is an absolute deal-breaker...'

I was pleased to hear him say that, and I think more authors should take this view. We want more readers, and these days Web publication is critical to getting more readers. And I think law journals should take the same view… Fortunately, he reported that the journal ultimately relented, 'and sent me an e-mail offering to allow web publication…'

A criminal justice assistant professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is under investigation on allegations of finagling a scholarship by forging an application for a female student with whom he sought a relationship.

Martin G. Urbina, 33, who this summer taught classes on the correctional and criminal court processes, according to the UWM Web site, was booked into the Milwaukee County Jail Friday as part of the investigation into possible charges of misconduct in office, forgery and misappropriation of personal identifying information, booking records show.

Authorities seized two computers and several documents from Urbina, according to a search warrant. They searched the assistant professor's home, office and Mercedes, the documents filed by an investigator from the state Department of Justice show.

The search warrant affidavit alleges that in June, Urbina sent a text message to a 22-year-old former student to say he was "working on a deal for" her, and on June 15, he told her on the phone that he had "pulled some strings" and had gotten her $6,000 from the Chancellor's Graduate Student Award fund.

She hadn't applied for the fund, she told investigators.

Authorities allege that Urbina told her that he had gotten her personal information from a school file, put it on an application on her behalf, and sent it in. The application included her name, cell phone number, Social Security number, former home address and e-mail address, the affidavit says.

The woman was one of three winners of the scholarship, for which Urbina was one of six evaluators.

She told investigators that she had been getting "almost daily" text messages from Urbina, in which he called her "beautiful," said he missed her and asked, three times, about her underwear. One, she said, read that he was "not talking to (her) for sex" but for "more" - a long-term relationship, she believed.

He had also gone to the woman's apartment in May to give her and her roommate graduation gifts of flowers, chocolates and champagne, she told investigators.

Urbina has been teaching criminal justice courses at UWM since 2000, said Stan Stojkovic, dean of UWM's Helen Bader School of Social Welfare. Stojkovic said he could not comment on the allegations.

"The whole issue now is being assessed," Stojkovic said.

Urbina's attorney, Robin Shellow, called the allegations "a complete misunderstanding" of the assistant professor's relationship with the student.

"The ordinary and usual situation of a university professor encouraging and helping students . . . has been completely misunderstood here," Shellow said.

Assistant District Attorney David Feiss said he does not know when the issue of possible criminal charges against Urbina will be decided.

BECKY KARNES, a high school English teacher, recently completed a graduate-level writing course that she loved at Grand Valley State University.

"The course taught us better ways to teach writing to kids," said Ms. Karnes, a 16-year veteran who is finishing up her master's degree. "It showed you ways to stretch kids' minds. I learned so much, I had my eyes opened about how to teach writing."

Ms. Karnes learned all sorts of exercises to get children excited about writing, get them writing daily about what they care about and then show them how they can take one of those short, personal pieces and use it as the nucleus for a sophisticated, researched essay.

"We learned how to develop good writing from the inside, starting with calling the child's voice out," said Ms. Karnes, who got an A in the university course.

And so, when Ms. Karnes returns to Allendale High School to teach English this fall, she will use the new writing techniques she learned and abandon the standard five-paragraph essay formula. Right?

"Oh, no," said Ms. Karnes. "There's no time to do creative writing and develop authentic voice. That would take weeks and weeks. There are three essays on the state test and we start prepping right at the start of the year. We have to teach to the state test" (the Michigan Educational Assessment Program, known as MEAP).

"MEAP is not what writing is about, but it's what testing is about," Ms. Karnes said. "And we know if we teach them the five-paragraph essay formula, they'll pass that test. There's a lot of pressure to do well on MEAP. It makes the district seem good, helps real estate values."

In Michigan, there is added pressure. If students pass the state tests, they receive $2,500 college scholarships, and in Ms. Karnes's middle-class district, families need that money. "I can't see myself fighting against MEAP," she said. "It would hurt my students too much. It's a dilemma. It may not be the best writing, but it gets them the money."

In this fashion, the five-paragraph essay has become the law of the land: introductory paragraph; three supporting paragraphs, each with its own topic sentence as well as three supporting ideas; and summary paragraph.

Students lose points for writing a one-sentence paragraph.

Dr. Patterson has her teachers write in every class - something she did with her students during 29 years in the public schools. They draw maps of their neighborhoods, then write a story of something that happened there. They envision a character they'd like to create, make a paper doll of it, then pair up with another student and together write a story with the two characters interacting.

"You're teaching them narrative - how to tell stories that are dear to them," she said. She has them read good essays that start a hundred different ways - with a quote; a question; a simple declaration of a problem; a run-on sentence; a word or two. There are lessons on how a writer blows up an important moment and how to turn a personal piece of writing into a researched essay.

Armed Professor Arrested at Airport

Ohio State professor Frank Holtzhauer was arrested while carrying a fully loaded handgun through a Port Columbus Airport security checkpoint yesterday morning, said Scott Lorenzo, the Transportation Security Administration Manager at the airport.

Shortly after 7 a.m. yesterday, Holtzhauer approached Port Columbus' Concourse C checkpoint when a TSA screening machine noticed an unfamiliar image in his carry-on bag, Lorenzo said. Officers arrested Holtzhauer after verifying he was in possession of a loaded .32 caliber hand gun, Lorenzo said.

Holtzhauer said he did not intend to bring the firearm on his Delta flight and forgot it was in his bag, Lorenzo said.

Lorenzo said the firearm contained eight rounds of ammunition, one in the chamber and seven in the clip. He also had an additional clip of seven rounds, Lorenzo said.

OSU spokesman Elizabeth Conlisk said it was an innocent mistake and Holtzhauer is quite embarrassed.

"I would leave it at that," Conlisk said.

Holtzhauer's trip to Boston to teach a seminar on hospital security was quickly re-routed to the U.S. District Court, where he was held until his appearance before a judge at 1:30 p.m., Lorenzo said.

Holtzhauer was arrested because attempting to bring a firearm onto an aircraft is a violation of the federal law, Lorenzo said. The concourse was shut down for approximately five minutes, but neither Delta nor Southwest Airlines experienced any delays in operations at their concourse, according to the TSA manager.

Holtzhauer serves as an assistant to the dean and as director of the Office of Public Health Practice at the School of Public Health. He also serves as an assistant clinical professor at OSU and as the public health practice coordinator to the Association of Schools of Public Health, according to the School of Public Health's Web site.

According to the Pennsylvania and Ohio Public Health Training Center, Holtzhauer received his bachelor's degree at OSU in biological sciences in 1971. Ten years later, he earned his master's at OSU in preventative medicine. He obtained his doctorate in preventative medicine at OSU in 1989.

Lorenzo said he suggests all travelers visit the TSA Web site, www.tsa.gov, to obtain information on what can and cannot be brought aboard an aircraft at the Port Columbus Airport.

"The Web site is there for everyone's safety," Lorenzo said. "We just want to make sure our passengers are safe. We also want to reinforce the public to just be careful."

Dr. Holtzhauer's areas of interest include a range of issues from public health workforce development to violence as a public health issue, Reye's syndrome, toxic shock syndrome, and infectious diseases including Legionnaires disease. Frank began his public health career as a field epidemiologist with the Ohio Department of Health and then moved thru [gevalt] the ranks to become the Chief of the Division of Epidemiology.

But is this really such a victory [for the Academic Bill of Rights]? Certainly, it's several steps from being a win for the ABOR. Remember, when legislators can’t be bothered to legislate, they investigate. And in this case, the resolution's sponsor doesn't expect a report for almost a year and half.

Yes, the investigation will be a nuisance to Pennsylvania educators, and yes, the sound of [David] Horowitz braying “VICTORY!” is never welcome. But he brays a lot, and this inquiry may well do no more to advance his cause than similar hearings in Florida earlier this year, which proved a bust, and left the ABOR dead in the water there.

Value follows intention. There is no greater mark of the gap that separates writers and English departments than the question of value. The very thing that most matters to writers, the first question they ask of a work - is it any good? - is often largely irrelevant to university teachers. …Writers are intensely interested in what might be called aesthetic success: they have to be, because in order to create something successful one must learn about other people's successful creations.

[F]ormalist definitions of the “intrinsic” properties of literary language inevitably wind up in one of two places. Either they turn into simple tautologies (literature affords reading experiences of a distinct kind, and reading experiences of a distinct kind can only be induced by literature), or they involve their proponents in angels-dancing-on-pins exercises, like trying to determine how the sentence “Twenty minutes later we were in the car” can be nonliterary in a journal or diary, but literary when it appears on page 119 of DeLillo’s White Noise.

But recent corporate scandals in the United States and elsewhere have clearly shown that the plethora of laws and regulations of the past century have not eliminated the less-savory side of human behavior.

A generation from now, as you watch your children graduate, you will want to be able to say that whatever success you achieved was the result of honest and productive work, and that you dealt with people the way you would want them to deal with you. … I do not deny that many appear to have succeeded in a material way by cutting corners and manipulating associates, both in their professional and in their personal lives. But material success is possible in this world, and far more satisfying, when it comes without exploiting others. The true measure of a career is to be able to be content, even proud, that you succeeded through your own endeavors without leaving a trail of casualties in your wake.

[T]he efficient markets hypothesis is itself a reflection of a deeper and broader philosophical positivism that is now pandemic to the entire academy. …Over the past two centuries the assaults on the rational basis for morals have created an atmosphere that stymies interest in ethical education. In the 18th century, the philosopher David Hume wrote that one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is,” so that morals are emotional and cannot be proven true. Today’s academic luminaries have thoroughly imbibed this “emotivist” perspective. …[T]o learn to act ethically, human beings need to be exposed to living models of ethical emotion, intention and habit. Far removed from such living models, college students today are incessantly exposed to varying degrees of nihilism…

[T]he growing influence of nihilism within the academy is deeply, and causally, connected to increasing ethical breaches by academics (such as the cases of plagiarism and fraud that we cited earlier). Abstract theorizing about ethics has most assuredly affected academics’ professional behavior….It is time for the academy to heed the AAUP’s 1915 declaration, which warned that if the professoriate “should prove itself unwilling to purge its ranks of … the unworthy… it is certain that the task will be performed by others.”

"[T]he university must come to the aid of unprotected and timid reason. The university is the place where inquiry and philosophic openness come into their own. It is intended to encourage the noninstrumental use of reason for its own sake, to provide the atmosphere where the moral and physical superiority of the dominant will not intimidate philosophic doubt.

…[T]he university may be said to exist in a democracy not for the sake of establishing an aristocracy but for the sake of democracy and for the sake of preserving the freedom of the mind.

…Nothing prevents us from thinking too well of ourselves. It is necessary that there be an unpopular institution in our midst that sets clarity above well-being or compassion, that resists our powerful urges and temptations, that is free of all snobbism but has standards.

…[T]here is one simple rule for the university’s activity: it need not concern itself with providing its students with experiences that are available in democratic society. They will have them in any event. It must provide them with experiences they cannot have there.

[T]he university, of all institutions, is most dependent on the deepest beliefs of those who participate in its peculiar life. Our present educational problems cannot seriously be attributed to bad administrators, weakness of will, lack of discipline, lack of money, insufficient attention to the three R’s, or any of the other common explanations … All these things are the result of a deeper lack of belief in the university’s vocation. One cannot say that we must defend academic freedom when there are grave doubts about the principles underlying academic freedom. … In order to find out why we have fallen on such hard times, we must recognize that the foundations of the university have become extremely doubtful to the highest intelligences."

Vincent said the allusions to mind control and George Orwell's "1984" are unfounded.

"The reason why the plan became public is to give as many people as possible [the opportunity] to comment," Vincent said. "Orwellian would mean they didn't have an opportunity to weigh in. My only criticism of [faculty who sent the letter] is that they didn't give any alternatives."

He said the UO faculty's concern with the vagueness of cultural competency was legitimate and needed to be dealt with. He defined the term as the skill to work with people from different cultures and backgrounds.

There was this contented, poised, inquisitive, observant toad. We might call him, in fact, a pondering toad. He had perched himself on the brick threshold and was taking in the world scene from his unobtrusive vantage point. …I’m grateful to the pondering toad. I’m sure he makes my life quite a bit easier by reducing the pest insect population in my garden. He looked pretty plump, fattened, I’m sure, by a gullet of flies and ants and mosquitoes and aphids and other assorted bugs.

So much of life takes place right under our noses, and we know nothing about it.

Jesus said, But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. (Matthew 13:16 NRSV) …

“Cultural sensitivity and knowledge are necessary but not sufficient for individuals to behave in a culturally competent way. What gets rewarded, gets done.”

"Fifty percent of Americans mentally impaired -- are you kidding me?" said Dr. Paul McHugh, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University. While the new survey was carefully done, Dr. McHugh said, "the problem is that the diagnostic manual we are using in psychiatry is like a field guide and it just keeps expanding and expanding. Pretty soon," he said, "we'll have a syndrome for short, fat Irish guys with a Boston accent, and I'll be mentally ill."

Jim Windolf, editor of the New York Observer, tallied the number of Americans allegedly suffering from some kind of emotional disorder. He sent away for the literature of dozens of advocacy agencies and mental health organizations. Then he did the math. Windolf reported, 'If you believe the statistics, 77 per cent of America's adult population is a mess.... And we haven't even thrown in alien abductees, road-ragers, and internet addicts.' If we factor in the drowning girls, diminished boys, despondent women, agonised men, and the all-around emotionally challenged, the country is, in Windolf's words, 'officially nuts.'

As someone with a painful first-hand experience with the criterion, I oppose the use of collegiality in personnel matters. In theory, of course, it's better to have a department peopled with professors who work well together. But in practice, I don't see any way to structure a system that can ensure that the criterion won't be abused.

A couple of recent articles in Inside Higher Ed illustrate the point. The first, by Mary McKinney, a clinical psychologist who advises academics, proposes 15 pro-collegiality "rules" an untenured person should follow. McKinney's piece, it should be noted, doesn't take a position one way or the other on whether collegiality should be used; rather, it's a "how-to guide" for untenured faculty working within an institution that uses the collegiality criterion, either formally or informally.

A lot of McKinney's rules (i.e.--don't whine, look for a mentor, be a good listener) are common sense. Others strike me as more off-putting: "the rules of collegiality are similar to the rules of dating"; "sometimes, make your concrete, focused compliments in front of a third party (such as right before a faculty meeting begins)"; "if there are 10 people at the meeting, make sure that you speak less than 10 percent of the time"; "avoid campus when you’ve got to write and reserve tasks that require less focus for your office."

McKinney sounds like she's quite good at what she does, and I have no doubt that someone who followed all 15 of her rules would be likely to get tenure. That said, McKinney's rules also offer insight on why the use of collegiality is such a dangerous criterion.

First, several of her rules amount to advice to suck up to figures in power and show deference, whether appropriate or not, to those in authority. Obviously, no one, junior or senior, should go out of their way to attack people. But the principle of academic freedom depends on the argument that faculty self-governance is the best way for the academy to function. Will someone who has spent six or seven years of his or her life as an untenured professor following McKinney's collegiality rules suddenly be likely, upon receiving tenure, to function as an autonomous unit within a self-governing structure? …

[T]he personnel difficulties of William Bradford offer further insight on the anti-research bias inherent in the "collegiality" criterion. Bradford is the IU law professor who received only a 10-5 vote for his third-year reappointment--a sign of long-term trouble--even though his performance was rated as "excellent" in teaching, scholarship, and service. His problem? Several senior members deemed him "uncollegial," on grounds that seem transparently political.

But Bradford seems to have done something else very uncollegial--he's outperformed some of his senior colleagues in publishing. One of Bradford's leading critics is a law professor named Mary Harter Mitchell, whose website discretely declines to provide a link to her publications. This 1978 graduate of Cornell Law School, who has been on the IU faculty since 1980, has published one book, Legal Reference for Older Hoosiers, put out by a press called "The Foundation" in 1982; a search of Lexis-Nexis reveals no law review articles published by Mitchell in the last decade. Bradford, on the other hand, has a forthcoming book, The Laws of Conflict in the Age of Armed Terror, and has published four book chapters and 20 law review articles in the last six years.

Is there any way to ensure that Prof. Mitchell's judgment of Prof. Bradford's "uncollegiality" doesn't consistitute anything but professional jealousy? And shouldn't that fact alone suggest that universities might want to dispense with the criterion?

You might think I’d be enthusiastic about the proposal. All the Africanists in the region could certainly contribute a lot of pro bono assistance in the development and implementation of the program, and if they go ahead with the plan, I’d certainly be willing to pitch in.

But I have some real misgivings. Anthony Appiah made an important observation yesterday in the Inquirer: the relationship between any history requirement and actual learning outcomes is pretty hazy at best. It’s not very clear that the courses which are commonly required in high schools produce a great deal of historical literacy or understanding of the uses and importance of historical knowledge. Just stacking another requirement on as if it will produce useful consequences, whatever those might be, seems to skip some major necessary steps in reform.

You could argue that such literacy will best be achieved with courses that are more focused than the generic survey of US history, and more relevant or sharply drawn. That’s possible. But I already sense that this course is so freighted down with competing and contradictory missions from consciousness-raising to self-esteem improvement, to being a subject aimed at producing critical thought in all students to being a subject intended to do identity work for only the African-American students, that I suspect this justification won’t play out in practice.

…You could say it’s got nothing to do with Philadelphia per se, that this is a topic that every educated American should know something about. I agree, but the overly casual or less thoughtful kinds of celebrations of the proposal leave themselves little room for saying why African-American history ought to occupy a year of high school but Latino or Native American history doesn’t qualify. There’s only two clear ways to make that cut: privileging the history of the local or arguing that African-American history is just plain more important to understanding what it means to be American and to be a modern person. I might venture a ways out onto that plank and at least contemplate diving off it, but I doubt Maya Angelou and Jesse Jackson and the other familiar figures to celebrate the decision would.

Good intentions, definitely. A subject I think is important, no doubt. But I wonder if this is the wisest way to deal with it.