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Tuesday, September 11, 2007
SCATHING ONLINE SCHOOLMARM Borderline Depressed Writing UD now predicts that President Glenn Poshard of Southern Illinois University, who has led by negative example, and whose plagiarism case is only the latest among recent fallen SIU leaders, will resign. There are reasons the world envies America's public and private universities. The crucial reason is one of legitimacy: To an amazing degree, by global standards, we maintain a reality-based higher education establishment, in which the quality and substance of scholarship and teaching undergoes authentic and frequent scrutiny. This scrutiny is both external, in the form of things like the US News and World Report rankings and Rate My Professors, and internal, as in tenure review. Some of it's sort of internal/external, as in our remarkably free market of professors, a market whose operations make administrators aware of their best faculty, since they're the ones who can move somewhere else. Even in advanced European countries, and certainly in many other countries, as UD has chronicled at length on this blog, nepotism, abuse of power, meager admissions standards, illegitimate procedures in faculty hiring and retention, laziness or corruption in research activity, extensive government control, and restrictions on free speech are common. The core problem in many of these countries is the politicization of higher education, its primary use as a patronage machine, or as a place to stash unemployed young people for awhile. Many weak American universities look a bit like European universities. They're run by people like Poshard, political hacks without intellectuality -- without, really, a grasp of what a university is. UD understands why public systems in particular would find the prospect of political machers running them attractive. These people are powerful, well-connected, can make things happen in the legislature, etc. But without personal academic legitimacy, and without an understanding of the ethos of the university, such presidents and chancellors represent a real risk. Frank Brogan of Florida Atlantic University has a resume similar to Poshard's -- a life in politics, degrees in education (Brogan only went as far as a Master's) -- and he demonstrates, in the way he runs the school, the same embarrassing unawareness of the nature of a university. Observers of American higher education warn that the model of the intellectual president who can also run things (George Washington University's new leader, Steven Knapp, looks to be one of these) is being displaced by the CEO-type for whom the mega-university is a profit-driven business. But we have just as much to fear from hacks who don't know what they're doing. Poshard still doesn't know that he plagiarized. In his world, you eke out an ed degree because you need the credential, and everyone knows the work in it is shabby but no one cares. That's why he was able to say, when asked, that his committee didn't care whether he cited stuff, so why should he? When you can't defend a person intellectually, there's always a temptation to go the emotional route. This is almost always a mistake. SOS says lookee here:
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