THE CULTURAL COMPETENCE FOLLIES. University Diaries found a point-counterpoint in the Salem (Oregon) Statesman-Journal in which a state legislator makes a pertinent observation about the University of Oregon's cultural competency initiative.

Before we require teachers to be culturally competent, we need to know what it is, how you measure it, if it is just another educational trend that will be discredited in the future, and how much it will cost.

In the meantime, we need to use proven methods to close the achievement gap. High expectations of all students, high standards for students and teachers, and rewards for the many, many excellent teachers we now have -- and respect for each and every person.

In private correspondence, an Oregon faculty member asked me for suggestions in bringing the reservations some faculty members raised to the attention of the legislature. It appears as if the author of this essay, Rep. Linda Flores of Oregon City, who chairs the state House Education Committee, is someone who is sympathetic to the objections. A professor of education suggests that cultural competence is simply part of effective teaching (but differences in learning style exist among sub-populations as well as within them, nicht wahr?) and worthy of further consideration.

Let the battle be over how we define cultural competency, not the need for it.

OK. Cultural competence means being able to show up on time, finish your tasks on time, and look like you know what you're doing. Let's continue from there.

So what's up at Oregon? The six-year graduation rates at Oregon flirt with 60%, which is not that impressive, although it is above the national average, and the disparities among populations are not as pronounced as they are elsewhere, for example at Northern Illinois. Some of the arguments being offered for the initiative don't appear to make much sense given the comparable defect rates among sub-populations. Wouldn't it make more sense for the Oregon administrators to deal honestly with their 40% defect rate, or push for a higher four-year completion rate? Consider this. That just might work. The reservations Betsy's Page picks up from Joanne Jacobs suggest that what Oregon is considering will not work. The points do call for a bit of fisking.

Exhibits capacity to promote equity of student access and outcomes.

This is a classic canard. Will a faculty member be called on the carpet for suggesting that admitting unprepared students and calling it "access" does not make much academic sense? Will the Office of Harrison Bergeron be evaluating grades to make sure that there are no under- or over-represented populations on the "A" list or on probation?

Advocates for social justice.

That's not as easy as it looks. Consider Wikipedia's observations.

The concept of Social justice has been politicised and it is sometimes stated proactively as being the promotion of equality through comprehensive government action. In practice, such interventions have not often produced equitable results, resulting in favouritism towards classes of people, restrictions of personal liberty and excessive regulatory burdens. Many critics regard the guarantee of equal outcomes, which is implicit in many social justice movements, as antithetical to the notion of equal opportunity because it frequently requires special, favoured treatment to arbitrary classes of people. Actual justice, they argue, does not penalize success nor reward failure, but holds all persons to the same standards regardless of their race, ethnic origin, financial condition, religion or beliefs.

Where is the justice in requiring the faculty to be sensitive to differences in learning styles that correlate with ascriptive characteristics, or in requiring students to learn queer theory, if 1 + rt/1! + (rt)²/2! + (rt)³/3! + (rt)⁴/4! + ... has no meaning to finance majors?

Ability to identify, discuss, and challenge institutional racism and bias.

Oceania grapples with Eastasia, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. One would think that after 30 or 40 years of making "commitment to affirmative action principles" and all that came after preconditions for administrative positions and implicit in "fit" there would be no institutional racism remaining. Biases, on the other hand ... can you say "self-referential?" Are these Silent Generation relics so unsure of their own commitment to their version of "social justice" that everybody else must be alert to their remaining failings?

Ability to receive and integrate critiques of cultural competence.

"Plays well with others" dressed up as a salary review? And so it goes on.

Betsy's Page gets to the plain meaning of the plan.

This is scary. These are all non-objective standards that can be twisted to mean that anyone could be described as "incompetent" in their devotion to cultural diversity. No wonder the professors were very upset about this plan. This newspeak in the plan sounds like a way to punish professors who don't pass all their students with grades distributed equally among racial groups. And if any little darling complains that their professor didn't measure up on one of these criteria, kiss good-bye to tenure.

The little darlings, on the other hand, might be left professionally incompetent in the service of an untested theory.

EVERYTHING HAS AN OPPORTUNITY COST. University Diaries has located a number of useful posts on mission creep in the higher learning, this time focusing on the misnamed cultural competency. First up: Wendy McElroy.

'Cultural competence' "entails actively challenging the status quo…one table noted the need to incorporate institutionalized notions of power, privilege, and oppression into the definition….Thus, for many, cultural competence is transformative and political."

There is something of the Cretan Paradox in this definition. Suppose the status quo at a university is a 'cultural competence' mission. Is it thus culturally competent to actively challenge the mission? Suppose further that the university has a Director of Cultural Competence. Does that person embody an institutionalized notion of power, privilege, and oppression? But let us suppose that the Director is destooled and the mission statement rewritten? Is not there a new status quo to challenge, ad infinitum, ad nauseam?

Next up: Butterflies and Wheels.

So at the University of Oregon. There was this committee, see, and it came up with ever such a good idea to transform the university - the entire university, every bit of it, not just the studies departments, but all of it, math, physics, biology, all of it - from a pesky old educational and research institution into a wonderful caring hand-holding Make Everything Better device. Into a branch of mental health and/or social work. Super idea, no? Only...one wonders why not leave that to mental health and social work and similar organizations, in order to leave time and space for the university to go on doing what the university is (generally) supposed to do? On account of how it's all tooled up to do that, and knows how, and has the equipment in place, and has the rules written down, and the staff hired, and the beds fitted up with sheets. That's not to say it couldn't do it better, that there's no possible room for improvement, but it is to say that it seems a little wasteful to make it do a completely different job after it's already gone to all that trouble. Unless of course we think teaching and research are just completely valueless, in which case it does make sense to recycle all those books and microscopes and libraries and lecture rooms into something else as best as people can. But do we think that? Have we decided that? Have we quite, entirely made up our minds that teaching and research are just boring effete pointless elitist preoccupations that should now make way for therapy and massage and bedwetting? Have we? I on't think we have, quite. We may be stumbling and creeping in that direction, but I don't think we're quite there yet.

Go read the whole thing. Reflect on whether there might be comparative advantages in researchers being researchers, therapists being therapists, and higher education higher.

Finally, a lengthy and rather gloomy essay by Professor Norman Levitt. Too much stuff to highlight here. Let me offer this.

Therefore, if I tell you that a university is, above all, an institution for the preservation and extension of learning and for its dissemination to the emerging generation, for the winnowing of truth from falsehood and imposture, for the conservation of the highest values our civilisation can conceive, for the emulation, insofar as we are capable, of the finest and deepest minds our civilisation has produced, for the hoarding and protection of what must survive of our civilisation even after all the dross has fallen away; if I tell you all this without satiric intent, and with the purpose of describing an ideal that is at least approximable if not perfectly realisable, then I will have committed an enormous gaffe, by the standards that our culture inflicts on us all. I will have tried to sell you a bill of goods, swamp real-estate, pump-and-dump stock, the Brooklyn Bridge.

Read the rest, and ask, where is the Fortune 500 employer who will tell the job-fair sales representative "Enough?" Read it, and ask, where is the stressed parent who will tell the campus recruiter, "Enough?"

REVIEWING THE INTERCHANGE REPORT. Doxagora finds my roller coaster story, also catches the brass at the New York Times crying with their mouths full. Samantha at The Torch has a spot-on observation on Oregon's cultural competency initiative.

[Oregon's] President Frohnmayer said that “to me [cultural competency] means that we are able to effectively reach all of the students who have demonstrated their competence to be in the university but for whom, because of cultural background, traditional techniques of teaching may not be as effective as others” (emphasis added). If you cut through the politically correct newspeak in that quote and think about what Frohnmayer seems actually to be saying, his comment is ridiculous and patronizing. It is bad enough that this patronizing attitude prevails at American colleges and universities; the fact that the University of Oregon now wants to coerce its professors into sharing this attitude is unconscionable.

There's more on my mind about developments at Oregon and elsewhere around the academy, but that's for the weekend.

DID POTEMKIN HOUSES HAVE PRETTY FRONT PORCHES? I have long taken issue with our director of athletics describing his operation as the "front porch" for a university. What goes on in the reading room and the kitchen also matters. At Northern Illinois, the students seem to understand this.

Elsewhere, evidence of deferred maintenance in the reading rooms and kitchens accumulates. University Diaries has been following developments at several campuses.

At Oregon, a number of professors have gone public with their objections to the administration's revealed preferences.

As professors at the university, we find it increasingly hard to tell whether the University of Oregon is an academic research and teaching institution devoted to the education of our state's students, or a minor league training ground for elite athletes. Academic departments struggle to make ends meet because of repeated budget cuts, but the president allows lavish spending by the athletic department. These actions have consequences for our students and faculty, and the university's academic stature.

This is the same Oregon administration that a few years ago decided the faculty needed more reeducation in cultural competence. But while the front porch gets a new rocking chair and the administrators establish their multi-cult bona fides, what goes on in the classroom sounds familiar.

Students are affected by poor resource allocation in other ways. Class sizes have grown since 2000 because of a 20 percent increase in undergraduate enrollment, without an equivalent increase in full-time faculty. Students are closed out of classes because there are not enough faculty to teach them. Graduate students, the life-blood of a research university, have dropped by 10 percent since 1970. Instead of hiring new faculty and attracting new graduate students, the university has devoted scarce resources to boosting the number of athletic coaches and staff by 25 percent since 1994. What's more important at the university, better education or better games?

(We continue to manage with half the faculty we had in the late 1980s, and I have now counted 10 or 11 requests to get into my closed classes, which sold out during November early registration. If there were some way I could run my classes as an independent contractor ...)

In Minnesota, Star-Tribune columnist Jay Weiner thinks about the previously unthinkable.

Chicago is ranked ninth among all universities in the nation, according to U.S. News and World Report; Minnesota is ranked 67th. Chicago, a private school, has an endowment of more than $4 billion, 13th largest in the nation. Alums still seem to be giving.

Long term, [Robert Maynard] Hutchins' university has thrived without big-time football. Can [Minnesota president Robert] Bruininks learn from that?

There might be some Nobel-class economists on the Minnesota faculty.

There's also discontent at traditional football school Alabama.

Such a very big payout also sends a very wrong signal regarding the priorities of the university. It now becomes very apparent that education is no longer the No. 1 priority in the campus. It is also now clear that boosters run the university, instead of academic minds.

It is also perplexing that the university is pleading for more money from the state educational trust funds, but at the same time has the audacity to squander annually $4 million of university funds to gain football prestige. UA is an educational institution, not an NFL franchise.

Tougher question: suppose Alabama allocated $4 million to attract world-class professors (perhaps to strengthen one or two already strong departments.) Would that be money well spent?

SECOND SECTION: Oregon's president (via University Diaries) demonstrates his staggering ignorance of opportunity costs.

In my 12 years as president of the University of Oregon, I have watched debates that pit the various elements of higher education against one another.

These debates assume that the success of one comes at the expense of the other - research or teaching, undergraduate education or graduate, in-state students or out of state.

Ask a professor to meet more classes or larger classes, see if he hits the top journals as frequently. Hire adjuncts to meet multiple sections of introductory classes: the remaining tenured faculty who were hired to direct dissertations will get the message. Devote some of your capacity to chasing the excess demand for prestige degrees, listen to the discontent from in-state parents and students.


Seventh graders grasp this concept. What is David Frohnmayer's excuse?

PORCINE COSMETOLOGY. University Diaries finds either a climbdown or an obfuscation by Oregon president David Frohnmayer, providing more material for Herrn. Schneider u. Schwarz.

Cultural competency, Frohnmayer said, is a straightforward concept.

"To me it means that we are able to effectively reach all of the students who have demonstrated their competence to be in the university but for whom, because of cultural background, traditional techniques of teaching may not be as effective as others," he said. "A good teacher is always open, I hope, to ways to increase teaching effectiveness."

Who says it has to be about cultural background? Are we talking about differences in learning styles? Is this the latest iteration of the role model argument? And if the objective is effective teaching, why the focus on queer theory and the entire universe of alternative lifestyles in the draft plan? Why not put some Turing and some Keynes on the reading lists? Strikes me as a lot of trouble to just find one more way of determining that a tenure-tracker's teaching is below average.

On the opposite coast, Harvard's president, Larry Summers, continues his climbdown, with results noted by Heather Mac Donald (via Power Line; see also Discriminations.)

Though the administration announced the outcome in advance—it wanted, at a minimum, a call for a new high-placed diversity bureaucrat and for more affirmative-action hiring efforts—the creation of task forces, complete with paid staff, is by now an ironclad ritual whereby colleges and universities demonstrate their deep concern for pressing issues.

The existing programs haven't worked. Let's have more of them. See why I call it the Diversity Boondoggle.

First, its purpose is to recommend the identical set of actions that the institution, whether academic or corporate, has already been doing. Every college in the country has been frantically pursing “diversity” in hiring and admissions for decades. The task force itself commends the diversity policies of 17 rival colleges—the mere tip of the iceberg—without drawing the obvious conclusion.

The second obstacle follows from the first: there is nothing more that can be done. If untapped pools of highly qualified female and minority candidates existed out there, schools would have snapped them up long ago—if not your college, then its dozens of competitors, just as desperate to placate the quota gods. (The one course of action that might, in the case of black and Hispanic faculty recruitment, bear long-term results is the one that elite college personnel are least likely to choose: intensive mentoring of young students and the jettisoning of all “progressive” pedagogy in the schools.)

Precisely. One has to develop the feedstocks at one end of the Ph.D. pipeline in order to take delivery of Ph.D.s at the other end. Harvard and similar institutions, by the way, did snap up many such colleagues at the beginning of the affirmative action era. Wayne State, a Detroit area public research university, was at one time a source of such faculty; the Wayne administration did everything it could except raise salaries and admission standards to obtain a comparably diverse faculty after those raids occurred.

The only new hires that diversity initiatives generate are in college administrations, already overloaded with sinecures. The Harvard task force demands the creation of a most remarkable new position, a Senior Vice Provost for Diversity and Faculty Development.

That sounds like the same sort of thing Oregon might currently be considering. I have some lurid samples of what the local office of Faculty Development does: although the people who run it are good people, their efforts do everything except the most logical way to develop a faculty, which is to provide the proper inducements for people to do their jobs well.

And just in case the lesser functionaries in the provost’s office still don’t appreciate the exalted status of the new Senior VP for D, the task force provides that “she” (the report’s choice of words) “be given priority in terms of office space.” So much for non-hierarchical, anti-patriarchal collaborative sharing of collective resources. Naturally, the Senior VP for D will “also be supported by a group of dedicated staff.”

But there won't be any paper for the diversified faculty members to produce class handouts, or any additional classes on the works of inter alia Turing and Keynes. There's a lot more in the article; I'm just hitting the low spots. Here's more porcine cosmetology, in this case renaming the diversity incentive fund. It doesn't matter what you call it, any institution of higher education has one.

In an unusual collision with the truth, the task force acknowledges that “there was a sense that candidates hired with support of the [existing] funds are somehow less qualified.” Someone slipped up big-time here, because admitting the poisonous stigma that affirmative action efforts impose on their “beneficiaries” is something that diversocrats must never ever do. But the task force’s encounter with reality is brief. It appears fully satisfied with the idea that renaming the Outreach Fund will eliminate the stigma of race and gender preferences.

Heh.

Harvard’s millions will guarantee that it can rout all competitors for female nuclear physicists, but its competitors will undoubtedly up their own antes to stay in the game. There must be better ways to spend the millions of dollars that schools will dedicate to poaching “diversity” trophies from rival institutions—buying books for libraries, for example, or grooming scholars in neglected fields such as the American founding, or producing operas on campus, or capping tuition hikes.

All totally pointless, as the return on investment in a degree from a name college is lower than the return on investment in a degree for a comparable state-located or less well-known college.

Harvard has just dumped $50 million down a bureaucratic sinkhole tells you all you need to know about why attending Harvard for eight months costs more than most families earn in a year. Eventually, students and parents may start asking why anyone would want to.

It's called a market test, baby.

IS THIS MEETING NECESSARY? An anonymous dean at a community college somewhere in the northeast laments.

The tricky part of summer work is trying to put meetings together. Since academia is allergic to the concept of a single manager doing anything on his own intiative (that would be running the college like a business! Horrors! What’s next – tying pay to performance?), everything requires consultation and collaboration. In practice, everything requires meetings.

The logistics of assembling meetings are challenging enough during the academic year, when everyone’s calendar is full already. In the summer, simply finding days when everyone is in the state at the same time is tough.

Oh, come. Summer shut-down has been a fact of life for what, 100 years? And in that time nobody has figured out how to deal with most of the routine business by May 15? Legislative recisions have been reality for, oh, the past 15 years? And nobody has figured out the most logical contingency plans for this year yet?

Give. Me. A. Break.

And why might everyone's calendar be full during the school year? Might there be a connection between down-sizing the faculty, asking the remaining faculty to teach more sections with more students, subjecting that faculty to more inquisitions from various advisory offices keeping track of the progress of special-admissions students as well as requiring attendance at mandatory harassment or diversity training sessions or seeking participants for focus groups? (A conjecture: watch the final version of the Oregon Five Year Plan for Cultural Competence include the re-education mandatory training during the school year: resistance to that training during the summer being more likely to get people angry than the insulting nature of the training's content.)

What is the sound of Atlas, shrugging? In the academy, is it a growing reluctance of faculty to volunteer to do extra, unpaid work, during the summer session as the administrators become more intrusive and arbitrary in their demands on faculty during the nine months they are under contract? Does the absence of any rewards for greater productivity (couple those enlarged teaching loads with higher enrollments and minimal merit raises) make the faculty more protective of their own time than they otherwise would be?

USE THEIR OWN RULES AGAINST THEM. Nothing like a long weekend during the summer recess to bring out the craziness in academic administrators. University of Oregon president David Frohnmayer's lackeys have released more of their plans to build the culturally competent faculty. Their intent might have been to sneak it past everybody, but they've been spotted, and Herrn. Schneider u. Schwarz have added the relevant information to their file.

Joanne Jacobs has a link to a workshop intended to reinforce the propensity of some search committees to hire sycophants of color for cultural competence. A close reading of the text suggests that invented spelling is on the list of competences to be identified.

King at SCSU Scholars notes the effect of requiring faculty to attend mandatory summer (meaning unpaid labor; administrations are faculty unions' best friends these days) re-education as part of a five year diversity plan on the morale of faculty members from the Former Soviet Union.

It occurs to me that the nomenclature and implementation are contrary to the very civil rights laws the Diversity Boondogglers exist to enforce. Isn't the creation of five year plans and mandatory re-education creating a hostile work environment for immigrant faculty from the old Warsaw Pact? Many of the affected faculty members evidently are keeping their credentials up-to-date and contemplating new jobs. You mean the Diversity Boondoggle, stripped of all pretense, isn't "if you can find a better job, take it," all over again? All that's missing is the stationery from the human resources department watermarked with the broken-necked crane.