United Faculty of Florida, Summer 2007

All this took time, and in the midst of all this, Collins blurted out that at the Weingarten's outlet she had worked at before, she had often gotten lunch...for free. Her boss promptly asked her to sign a paper saying that she would pay for those lunches, but she refused. A quick investigation showed that (a) at that other outlet, many employees (including the manager!) got free lunches and (b) there didn’t seem to be any policy against this. (Oh, well.) Meanwhile, Collins went to her shop steward for help, and the Retail Clerks' Union filed an Unfair Labor Practice complaint which ultimately became a Supreme Court case, the National Labor Relations Board v. J. Weingarten, decided in 1975 and posted on-line.

As noted a previous account of the Weingarten decision (in the July 22, 2004 article), if an employee (represented by a union) is summoned to an investigatory meeting (or if a meeting turns interrogatory) with a potential for disciplinary action, the employee has the right to ask that the meeting be stopped until a union representative can attend. This is not like a Miranda right: the employer doesn’t have to tell the employee about this right, and the employee has to ask for a union representative. (And the employee has to be represented by a union to have this right! However, the employee does not have to be a member of that union.)

So, for example, if a chair says that a student has a complaint about a faculty member's conduct, or if the Office of Audit & Compliance has a few questions, or if the Division of Research Integrity & Compliance wishes to discuss possible research misconduct, a faculty member has the right to have a representative of the union present: you may need to answer the questions, but you have the right to a union representative with you in the meeting. For more information, contact our Grievance Chair, Mark Klisch, at mklisch@verizon.net.

And notice the interview led to the Supreme Court decision. It began over a $ 2 misunderstanding – which quickly metastasized into a muddle because of unclear policy (did employees at the old Weingarten’s have to pay for their lunch?) which a boss tried to fix extemporaneously at the employee's expense. Human frailty at work. All sorts of things can go wrong in these interviews, and it is often wise to go prepared. And presence of mind helps: if in a moment of great tension a piece of paper appears with a demand that you sign, ask to take it with you so you can think about it.

Last Tuesday, May 29, just over a year since an investigative committee voted 3-2 to recommend that Churchill be dismissed for academic misconduct, University of Colorado President Hank Brown announced that he will recommend Churchill's dismissal to the Board of Regents. His recommendation cites another report, this one by the Faculty Senate's Privilege and Tenure Committee and not released to the public, but which Brown quoted (according to the Chronicle of Higher Education): the Committee "found ... three instances of evidentiary fabrication by ghost writing and self citation, two instances of fabrication of material, one instance of falsification, two instances of plagiarism, and one instance of failure to comply with established standards on the use of author names on publications." Such a report by the Faculty and Senate Privilege and Tenure Committee is part of the procedure for dismissing faculty from the University of Colorado "for cause" ( Article 5, Section C of the Laws of the Regents).

Academic misconduct was not what interested South Park or the rest of the media, much less the Colorado House nor Colorado's governor, both of whom had a lot to say on a different subject.

In September, 2001, Pockets of Resistance # 11 published an essay by Churchill, Some People Push Back. At about 5,500 words, Churchill began with Malcolm X's remark upon the assassination of President Kennedy: "Malcolm X famously – and quite charitably, all things considered – replied that it was merely a case of 'chickens coming home to roost.'" Churchill then turned to the main point of his essay: "On the morning of September 11, 2001, a few more chickens – along with some half-million dead Iraqi children – came home to roost in a very big way at the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center."

In fact, the essay was primarily about Iraq, and Churchill claimed that U.S. sanctions against Iraq inspired, motivated, or were at least morally entangled in the attacks of 9/11. The essay contained many ferocious statements, including the now notorious "... the Pentagon ... and those inside comprised military target ... As to those in the World Trade Center ... they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire ... If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it."

The essay garnered very little reaction, but in 2003 Churchill expanded it into a book, "On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality". Richard Delgado, University Distinguished Professor of Law & Derrick Bell Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh wrote a review of the book in the American Indian Law Review (30 Am. Indian L. Rev. 477, 2005/2006: "Shooting the Messenger"): "Ward Churchill's book stands alone, the only sustained treatment of America's wars and breaches of international law. ... it is a piece of serious scholarship. On the whole well written (if sometimes prone to florid prose), the book features an extended, but forceful, argument, good use of examples, and copious [490] footnotes and lists of sources, ... The author is a well known Indian law scholar and historian ... and has been cited in a standard legal database - a field not even his own - 135 times."

Meanwhile, copies of the essay appeared at various websites. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education ("Inside a Free Speech Firestorm", 2/18/2005), a tipping point occurred when Churchill was invited to speak at Hamilton College; after a few suspicious Hamiltonians tracked down and complained about the essay, there was a storm of controversy ultimately leading to the withdrawal of the invitation. The rest was history.

That history went back decades – possibly back to his army years in the mid-1960s, but certainly back to the 1980s, when he was an affirmative action officer at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He wrote many articles and books, much of them on White America's treatment of Native Americans. He played a role in the fragmentation of the American Indian Movement (AIM) into what was called "autonomous chapters", including Churchill's American Indian Movement of Colorado. Memories are long, and the Grand Governing Council's AIM web-page has, at the top of its left-hand column, a link to its anti-Churchill blog; the Colorado AIM's web-page says that Churchill is on-leave from its Leadership Council.

The Colorado AIM site lists Churchill as a Ketoowah Cherokee. Churchill has (apparently) made a number of claims about his Vietnam experience, his subsequent radicalization, his Indian ancestry, and other matters, and that has made him a target for veteran's groups, right-wing bloggers, left-wing bloggers, and fellow Indian activists, who have accused him of everything from slacking in Vietnam to being some kind of police agent. I wrote "(apparently)" for the reality – even about what he has actually claimed – is more difficult to determine, as can be seen from exchanges between Wikipedia's authors on the (now-locked) article on Churchill: see the talk page. Churchill's own views are not difficult to find: see his spartan campus website, his ZNET homepage, and the Ward Churchill Solidarity Network site.

Meanwhile, with a B.A. and an M.A. in Communication from what is now the University of Illinois at Springfield, he was tenured as an associate professor in 1991 and later became a full professor and chair of the Ethnic Studies department (he resigned as chair in 2005 as the temperature rose). Critics have been using him as target practice for years, and when Boulder's Board of Regents decided to launch an investigation on February 3, 2006, the investigators found that they had no shortage of material.

The report came out on May 16, 2006, and was 125 pages long. There were eight allegations, largely misrepresentation, fabrication, and plagiarism. For example, the first allegation (brought forward by one of Churchill's dedicated critics) concerned at least eleven assertions about the General Allotment Act of 1887: the report concludes that while Churchill got the gist of the history, "Professor Churchill nevertheless has virtually all of the details of that history wrong." In its conclusion on the first allegation, the committee perceived a pattern of sloppiness that the authors ultimately took to be manipulation rather than wishful thinking. At this point, the report on the first allegation grew surreal, for the committee investigated whether Churchill had plagiarized from apparently independent sources he cited, only to hear Churchill claim to have ghostwritten those sources "from the ground up." In conclusion on the first allegation, "...the Committee finds by a preponderance of the evidence that: (a) Professor Churchill has engaged in research misconduct with respect to Allegation A regarding the General Allotment Act of 1887; and (b) that such research misconduct was not and could not have been inadvertent and therefore was deliberate."

There were seven more allegations. In the abstract of the report, the conclusion was: regarding the 9/11 essay, "As repugnant as his statements are to many in the University community...they are protected by the First Amendment." Regarding the charges of academic misconduct, "These allegations have sufficient merit to warrant referral to the University of Colorado at Boulder Standing Committee on Research Misconduct for further inquiry in accordance with prescribed procedures."

No doubt contributing to the ruckus was Churchill's personality. Consider his appearance on Hannity & Colmes on April 6, 2006 (see a partial transcript) with David Horowitz, which largely featured Hannity and Churchill. For example, at one point, Hannity said, "You obviously don't like this country, and you insult the families of dead people and try and justify it because of your twisted, distorted political view. That's hatred in my view, sir. You have hatred for your own country," and at another, Churchill said, "That I think is a lesson that needs to be learned. Other people are not so much toilet paper or expendable commodities to be used up for the benefit, amusement, whim, edification, whatever of Americans." And then there were exchanges like Churchill saying, "I don't really care what you think, Alan," and Hannity retorting, "I don't care what you think either." ("Alan" is in fact Alan Colmes, who Churchill largely ignored.) At one point, the normally forceful David Horowitz complained about feeling like a potted plant. One of the Wikipedia authors wrote on the talk page that if Churchill "...does get canned, he should be hired by Fox News to replace the wimpy Alan Colmes on Hannity and Colmes. That should be a ratings boost. They could conduct the show 'live', maybe sell tickets, hold it at Madison Square Garden..."

Churchill is a public intellectual with many available forums: it is not clear to what extent he needs the University of Colorado. There appear to be few allegations of criminal behavior floating about, except those that Churchill himself has leveled rather broadly, which means that legally the university administration may be on its own if it proceeds against him. The university president has now recommended dismissal, apparently based in part on a faculty senate report that the faculty senate has not published. This problematic ball is now in the Board of Regents' court.

USF's Policy on Investigating Allegations of Research Misconduct

For more information, read Article 16 in the Collective Bargaining Agreement and the Misconduct in Research Policy – and look at USF's Research Misconduct Program webpage.

DePaul University is a Catholic teaching institution with about 23,000 students, "Founded on the Vincentian principle of access for everyone, we remain committed to providing a quality education through personal attention to students from a wide range of backgrounds." (According to my Dictionary of Saints, St. Vincent de Paul is especially remembered for ministering to peasants, galley slaves, war refugees, and the poor.) According to their mission statement web-page, DePaul University "respects the religiously pluralistic composition of its members and endorses the interplay of diverse value systems beneficial to intellectual inquiry. Academic freedom is guaranteed both as an integral part of the university's scholarly and religious heritage, and as an essential condition of effective inquiry and instruction." Their political science department offers baccalaureate degrees.

Finkelstein received a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1988, and held eight temporary positions at five institutions until his appointment at DePaul in 2001. In the mid-1990s, he started a series of books roughly on what DePaul lists as his areas: "theory of Zionism, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the Nazi holocaust". In 2000, he published 'The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering'. He later wrote that in 'The Holocaust Industry', "I examined how the Nazi holocaust has been fashioned into an ideological weapon to immunize Israel from legitimate criticism." The book was controversial – Amazon.com's page on the 2003 second edition has 130 reviews with a four star average (out of five stars), but thirteen reviewers gave it one star while eleven gave it two or three, and Amazon.com's description says, "Finkelstein indicts with both vigor and honesty those who exploit the tragedy of the Holocaust for their own personal political and financial gain" and quotes The Guardian writing, "The most controversial book of the year." Writing in Historical Materialism (11:2, 2003, pp. 215 – 225, available on-line via the USF Tampa Library), Enzo Traverso wrote, "... the argumentation developed in 'The Holocaust Industry' is so simplistic, sectarian, polemical and provocative that its conclusions are not convincing, even when its author is right."

Finkelstein then presented a small publisher, New Press, a book entitled 'Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History'. The book (available on-line via the USF Tampa library) is presented in its Introduction as an extension of 'The Holocaust Industry', this time being an examination of a "new anti-Semitism". The Introduction is blunt: "Looking back after two decades of study and reflection, I am struck most by how uncomplicated the Israel-Palestine conflict is", whereupon he begins a deconstruction of what he called "the Exodus version" of Israel's past (along with his own account – both sides being historical accounts of Nineteenth and Twentieth century events).

Then the Introduction continues on to...Alan Dershowitz. "The most recent addition to this genre and the subject of the second part of this book is the best seller The Case for Israel by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz." The Introduction had begun with an attack on a book by Joan Peters, and "It can fairly be said that [Dershowitz's] The Case for Israel surpasses [Peters'] From Time Immemorial in deceitfulness and is among the most spectacular academic frauds ever published on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Indeed, Dershowitz appropriates large swaths from the Peters hoax. Whereas Peters falsified real sources, Dershowitz goes one better and cites absurd sources or stitches evidence out of whole cloth." While "... it’s difficult to find a single claim in ... any ... chapter of The Case for Israel that, among other things, doesn’t distort a reputable source or reference a preposterous one," Finkelstein's goal "is not [to show] that Dershowitz is a charlatan." The book delivers on Dershowitz: in the 2-column pages of the index, references to Dershowitz occupy more than a column of space, including "The Case for Israel, 89 – 314".

"Poor Alan Dershowitz," sympathized Mark LeVine in his Contemporary Sociology review (see pp. 356 – 358), "one of the most humbling experiences an academic – aspiring or established – can go through is to have Norman Finkelstein take a pen to one's work. I know from first-hand experience..." LeVine sees the primary thesis of the book being the breaking down of that what Finkelstein called the "mechanisms for quality control". LeVine concludes by agreeing with Finkelstein that Dershowitz was functioning more as an advocate than as a scholar. LeVine never explicitly remarked on the relative amount of space Finkelstein had devoted to Dershowitz and 'The Case for Israel', although he occasionally complained about issues Finkelstein glided past.

Under what the Chronicle of Higher Education called "pressure from Mr. Dershowitz and his lawyers," New Press delayed publication of 'Beyond Chutzpah' and Finkelstein took the manuscript to the University of California – Berkeley press. Berkeley's review was, as the Chronicle quoted press director Lynne Withey, "a very arduous process because of Dershowitz's threats": instead of the usual two referees, there were six, as well as a number of lawyers. Niels Hooper, the book's editor said that "Every comma, every full stop" was checked. Among other things, the word "plagiarism" ended on the cutting room floor. (As a comparison, when Inventiones Mathematicae published Andrew Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem – certainly the most high-profile mathematical paper in recent memory – the journal relied on six referees, rather than the usual one to three.)

Battle was joined. Both Dershowitz and Finkelstein have impressive websites with links to their broadsides. There were accusations of conspiracy, complaints about the media, and even a debate over Finkelstein's mother, a Holocaust survivor (Dershowitz claimed that Finkelstein admitted that his mother was a collaborator, and Finkelstein said that he had not, etc., etc.); for an extreme example, see their joint appearance on Democracy Now on Sept. 24, 2007. And others joined in, producing what appears on the www as a web of vitriol, but some observers were just disgusted: on April 12, Alexander Burns posted on the American Heritage blog the observation that "The striking thing about this feud is just how little it has to do with real scholarship, and the extent to which it must distract these professors from more serious academic work. Each of these men has apparently poured hours of energy into producing personal attacks on the other ("The 10 Stupidest Things Finkelstein Has Said," for example, or "Should Alan Dershowitz Target Himself for Assassination?")...."

Meanwhile, Finkelstein was coming up for tenure. According to the Chronicle, last fall Dershowitz sent to DePaul law and political science faculty what Dershowitz described as a "dossier of Norman Finkelstein's most egregious academic sins, and especially his outright lies, misquotations, and distortions." The DePaul's Liberal Arts and Sciences' Faculty Governance Council sent a letter to DePaul President Father Dennis Holtschneider and DePaul Provost Helmut Epp complaining that "that the sanctity of the tenure and promotion process is violated by Professor Dershowitz's emails." The Chronicle quoted Finkelstein saying, "DePaul is in a growth mode, and they see me as an albatross because they’re getting all this negative publicity because of me."

DePaul University had a political scientist with strong support from his department and a full-scale feud with a Harvard superstar. The administration was not in the humor to see this in a positive light. The Chronicle reported that while the Political Science department voted 9 – 3 in favor of recommending tenure, and the College Personnel Committee voted 5 – 0 in favor of tenure, the dean wrote that "I find the personal attacks in many of Dr. Finkelstein's published books to border on character assassination and, in my opinion, they embody a strategy clearly aimed at destroying the reputation of many who oppose his views." On June 8, Finkelstein was told he was denied tenure; Finkelstein posted President Holtschneider's letter, where Holtschneider quoted the University Board on Promotion and Tenure writing "Criticism has been expressed for his inflammatory style and personal attacks in his writings and intellectual debates." Holtschneider maintained that the denial had been made independently of any "lobbying" by external parties. Finkelstein told the Chronicle that "This decision is not going to deter me from making statements...," while Dershowitz said, "It was the right decision, proving that DePaul University is indeed a first-rate university..."

Then one of Finkelstein's supporters, assistant professor of International Studies Mehrene Larudee, was also denied tenure. Professor Larudee had been recommended by the dean to be the next Director of International Studies, and reportedly had strong faculty support, but President Holtschneider wrote to Larudee that she was denied tenure because of "mixed teaching evaluations, at times below the departmental mean, a thin record of scholarship." The chairman of the Liberal Arts and Sciences' Faculty Governance Council was quoted by the Chronicle saying that the tenure decision was "devastating to international studies", while the administration assured the Chronicle that Larudee's case was independent of Finkelstein's. The two denials have caused DePaul serious problems, for the Chicago Sun-Times reported that DePaul chief may face vote of no confidence.

Students have descended on officials (a sit-in was recently organized), and the story has hit the national media. Despite DePaul's insistence that no appeal is possible, the Chronicle reported that both Finkelstein and Larudee are seeking independent reviews while the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences’ Faculty Governance Council is planning its own investigation. DePaul's own rationale was that Finkelstein was not...collegial...in the sense that many administrators tend to abuse that word. (DePaul had another collegiality incident recently, resulting in the dismissal of an adjunct professor for getting in a loud argument with some students during an "Involvement Fair": see a brief account.) Indeed, on June 11, Inside Higher Ed's Scott Jaschik suggested that "the Finkelstein case is emerging as a test of whether a range of qualities grouped together as 'collegiality' belong in tenure cases". Larudee's tenure denial, however coincidental, suggests that what the DePaul administration is trying to do is get rid of people who make waves. And there are few more effective programs for mediocrity than systematically weeding out wave-makers. Just ask Harvard's School of Law.

The big issue during June was a proposal to let permit UF and FSU to raise their tuition by 40 % and to let USF raise its tuition by 30 %, all by increments of at most 15 % per year. See the May 17 Biweekly article for details. This legislation was pushed publicly by the university presidents, and not just of UF, FSU, and USF: UCF vice president (of university relations) Dan Holsenbeck told the Tampa Tribune, "We feel very confident that out of this will come a fair tuition policy for all the institutions." However, Holsenbeck did say that he would have preferred that UCF be explicitly mentioned in the bill, and the Tribune concluded its June 28 report with a discussion of tiered state university systems and their associated tiers of tuition. However, there was very little discussion of the possibility that the legislature might finally be letting a tiered system through the door.

Business groups and some of the media also supported the bill, and despite initial skepticism, Crist announced on Wednesday, June 27, that he wouldn't veto it. Still, Crist hopes that the universities will get money from elsewhere rather than from raised tuition, and the Miami Herald reported that Crist asked university presidents to "give us a shot to work it out through the budget process, rather than the tuition process and they agreed to do that" despite murmurs by legislators that additional appropriations during an election year featuring tax cuts might not be forthcoming. Perhaps more realistically, the Orlando Sentinel interpreted some of Crist’s remarks to mean that Crist expects universities to cut budgets. At any rate, the tuition increases will be put off for a year, which means that UF, FSU, and USF face the same budget crunch this coming year that other institutions do. UCF president John Hitt spoke to the Sentinel of the veto of the general 5 % hike: "It's dozens of faculty members, it's hundreds of courses that we won't be able to offer." Meanwhile, The Oracle reported that "[USF Vice Provost Ralph] Wilcox said that administrators are looking to trim back services that would not impact educational delivery or campus safety and security."

And the situation may be getting worse. According to the state, revenues are falling below previous estimates, as much as $1 billion short of estimates that the legislature built the budget on. The Governor wants all state agencies to plan for cuts over the summer, and universities have been included in that request. The University of Florida has already announced a hiring freeze, and the USF provost's office has distributed a draft list of possibilities to the university community, which has been described in the media. The Chapter will be discussing the university budget situation at the meeting tomorrow, and we would appreciate input.

Crist's position is similar to the old-fashioned populist view that higher education should be accessible to all: "Times are tight, and I just didn't want to hit the students and families..." Crist is not unique: Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards has made access to higher education part of his campaign while the Chronicle of Higher Education has run an occasional series on students not being able to afford to go to college (see, e.g., a summary in the July 27, 2006 Biweekly). Indeed, the ideal of free higher education is an American tradition: in 1847, Townsend Harris founded a "Free Academy" to "open doors" to rich and poor alike. This institution became part of the City College of New York, which charged no tuition until 1975, when a combination of decades of political pressure and a passing financial crisis moved the Board to impose tuition. That trend continues, and on Nov. 23, 2006, the New York Times grumped, "The public universities were founded on the premise that they would provide broad access in exchange for taxpayer subsidies. That compact has been pretty much discarded in the state flagship campuses..." who "...compete for high-income, high-achieving students ... while overlooking low-income students who are perfectly able to succeed at college but whose options are far more narrow."

But it is telling that the New York Times made this complaint in an editorial about Pell grants. A flagship university is expensive. If a state wants major research universities, it will need money. Ever since 1980 or so, federal money has been drying up, and that leaves state appropriations, tuition and fees, and fund drives. A state that is miserly in its appropriations will face stark choices. And that, most likely, is the fiscal reality that moved Crist to grudgingly accept differential tuition.

Hence much of the content of the periodicals is education, including the feature article of the April 2007 issue of the NEA Higher Education Advocate. This was one feature in its occasional series on Thriving in Academe, entitled "Understanding Learning Styles," by Laura L. B. Border, Director of the Colorado Preparing Future Faculty (COPFF) Network at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The feature is on-line.

"It is commonly believed that most people favor some particular method of interacting with, taking in, and processing stimuli or information," says Wikipedia. "Based on this concept, the idea of individualized 'learning styles' originated in the 1970s, and has gained popularity in recent years," although, "Learning-styles theories have been criticized by many." Probably the best-known is the Representational System of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, which associates a different learning style with a different sense, and includes the proposal that many people are primarily oriented towards learning via that particular sense: thus most people are predominantly visual, of the remainder, most are auditory, and of those left over, there are minorities associated with various other senses (kinesthesis, smell, taste, etc.) or who are "multi-modal." This system has generated proposals for teaching students using methods that engage them through their various styles, as opposed to just through the style of the teacher.

Border presents a different system, David Kolb's Learning Style Inventory (LSI), which is essentially cognitive. It is based on a cycle suggestive of Sir Francis Bacon's model of the scientific method. Concrete experience (CE) is considered in reflective observation (RO) and distilled in abstract conceptualization (AC) which generates active experimentation (AE), which no doubt produces further concrete experience, etc. The point isn't that students learn by going through this cycle, but that in some sense they do not. Many students do not proceed in this cyclic order, and many tend to hover in on of the four primary styles, or alternatively, in one of the four intermediate positions on the cycle: thus, for example, "divergent" thinkers hover between concrete experience (CE) and reflective observation (RO); Barber does not define "divergence" but presents as an example an apparently divergent thinker, Oliver Wendell Holmes, whom she quotes saying, "A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions." The other three intermediate styles of thinking are "assimilation" (between RO & AC), "convergence" (between AC & AE), and "accommodation" (between AE & CE).

Like many models of learning styles, LSI comes with the proposal that many problems in teaching arise from a teacher having one style and many students having another. Indeed, most of the feature is devoted to the problem of having students of a wide variety of different preferred styles – many of whom are uncomfortable or dysfunctional when moving out of their preferred style. And all these students are in a single class. Barber proposes that lectures, assignments, etc., be constructed to engage students at all positions on the cycle: such materials will present almost all students with a toehold, and also present almost all students with components outside of their comfort zone to encourage growth. She then goes to her stated goal in the feature, which is how to encourage "deep learning," which she characterizes as "mastery and a high degree of confidence that they have made the information their own." However, she does not address the standard criterion for measuring the success of deep learning (at least in mathematics): the ability to take what one knows to deal with a problem that is relatively novel to the student, but still soluble by means the student has been provided with.

All models of learning styles are controversial – indeed, the very proposal of an identifiable "learning style" is controversial. But Barber does not discuss any controversies, and instead concentrates on applications of the system. Readers can get more on the subject from one of David Kolb's original papers, Learning Styles and Disciplinary Differences.

As mentioned in the last UFF Biweekly, Governor Crist vetoed legislation to raise university undergraduate tuition by 5 % throughout the Florida State University System (SUS), but decided not to veto legislation permitting Florida State University, the University of Florida, and the University of South Florida to raise their tuition incrementally, starting in the 2008 – 2009 academic year. Governor Crist would rather that FSU, UF, and USF not raise their tuition and give the "political process" (presumably the legislature) time to come up with more money. But legislators seemed skeptical that more money would be forthcoming. Meanwhile, a possible deficit of over a billion dollars (out of a budget of about seventy billion) looms. This happened just after the legislature muddled Florida's finances further with some ad hoc tax cuts and a proposal for more muddlement to appear in a state constitutional referendum next year.

Two interesting developments have developed since then, both pertaining to the constitutional status of the SUS and its board of governors.

Former Governor Bob Graham sued the state legislature, claiming that the constitutional amendment creating the board of governors as a constitutional body denies the legislature the power to set tuition: the only reason why the board failed to exercise its power to set tuition, said Graham, was its "timidity". "This lawsuit is nothing more than an attempt to get unbridled tuition increases," growled State Senate President Ken Pruitt, R-Port St. Lucie. "God help our students if they win." State Senate Higher-Education Appropriations Committee Chair, Evelyn J. Lynn, R-Clay/ Marion/ Putnam/ Volusia, appealed to the board not to join the suit: "We'd lose our partnership, the wonderful -- I think -- camaraderie we have built up." But camaraderie doesn't pay the bills, and the board joined the suit; as SUS Chancellor Mark Rosenberg told the Chronicle of Higher Education, "We are drawing the line to say that quality counts."

But the money still comes from the state (see the 2006 – 2007 budget for details). Provost & Senior Vice President Renu Khator announced on July 12 that USF's Educational & General (E & G) funds will be cut by 4 %; E & G makes up a quarter of the budget, this year being about $ 400 million, so that's perhaps $ 16 million, of which ten million is to come from the Tampa campus E & G budget. (E & G funds come from state sales tax and other miscellaneous taxes, the lottery, and student tuition and fees; historically, about two thirds of E & G funds go into salaries & benefits.) The governor's office has asked for a budget assuming a total 10 % cut in E & G funds. This sort of exercise serves several purposes. It provides the governor with information about his available choices. It gives agencies advance notice so they can prepare for possible cuts. And it sets people thinking in terms of deep cuts so that they would be relieved by – and perhaps less cranky about – smaller cuts. After all, at the moment, the state anticipates only a two percent deficit...

In many ways, this is a political problem in which the administration and the faculty (and the community) have very similar interests. Tuition is at best part of the long-term solution to the historical funding problem, especially with access becoming an increasingly pressing issue. Chancellor Rosenberg was quoted in the St. Petersburg Times saying that up to now, "Yo-yo financial management has characterized our system." It's time it was fixed.

Willingham’s article in the Summer 2007 issue of the American Educator, provocatively described as Can Critical Thinking Be Taught? ... Not in the Way You Might Think, begins with "Virtually everyone would agree that a primary, yet insufficiently met, goal of schooling is to enable students to think critically." Willingham’s definition of “critical thinking” is broader and more detailed than Britannica's: "critical thinking consists of seeing both sides of an issue, being open to new evidence that disconfirms your ideas, reasoning dispassionately, demanding that claims be backed by evidence, deducing and inferring conclusions from available facts, solving problems, and so forth."

Calls for critical thinking are at least as old as Socrates, but Willingham concentrates on efforts since the 1983 publication of A Nation At Risk, which had complained: "Many 17-year-olds do not possess the 'higher order' intellectual skills we should expect of them. Nearly 40 percent cannot draw inferences from written material; only one-fifth can write a persuasive essay; and only one-third can solve a mathematics problem requiring several steps." Since 1983, there have been a proliferation of programs to teach such skills. These, argues Willingham, have not been particularly successful (readers can pause to reflect on their own students), and writes, "After more than 20 years of lamentation, exhortation, and little improvement, maybe it’s time to ask a fundamental question: Can critical thinking actually be taught? Decades of cognitive research point to a disappointing answer: not really." But he then modifies his position to say, "People who have sought to teach critical thinking have assumed that it is a skill, ...and that ... once you learn it, you can apply it in any situation. Research from cognitive science shows that thinking is not that sort of skill. The processes of thinking are intertwined with the content of thought ..."

Now for some critical thinking. Several things are going on in this article. There is a notion (critical thinking) that seems to be a good thing even if we don't agree on what it is. There are several extant programs designed to teach critical thinking, and these may not be particularly successful. Socrates might ask: are we likely to be successful at teaching skills when we cannot agree on what these skills are? And more generally, do the failures of these programs suggest that critical thinking (whatever it is) cannot be taught, or just that we are teaching them incorrectly?

Willingham briefly addresses Socrates' question with a working definition: "How Do Cognitive Scientists Define Critical Thinking?" "Critical reasoning, decision-making, and problem-solving ... have three key features: effectiveness, novelty, and self-direction," where "effectiveness" entails what old-fashioned rhetoricians used to regard as the construction and verification of valid argument. Notice that valid argument is only one of three features, the other two being "novelty" – which we'll look at below – and the ability to work on one's own. He devotes much of the feature to an indictment of current programs, and he implies that critical thinking might be taught, but only in context of particular subjects. In essence, Willingham does not believe that a class on "critical thinking" is likely to be very successful; instead he believes that critical thinking should be taught in content courses, where students should be taught to reason critically about the subject of the course.

Consider the "novelty" feature of critical thinking. Willingham looks at content courses, and describes a familiar phenomenon. A student learns to do problems similar to a group of examples, but when a slightly different problem based on the same principles appears, the student is helpless. Students tend to focus on the "surface structure" of a problem (e.g., a compound interest problem) and thus will not notice that a novel problem (e.g., a demographics problem) has the same "deep structure" and thus can be solved in the same way. Here, the goal is to teach students to find the deep structure. In practice, students succeed in finding this deep structure only if they have sufficient knowledge of the content of the problem: only after much practice with a wide variety of different examples do students start succeeding in the classic test of being able to solve problems of a novel surface structure but a familiar deep structure.

The most successful courses, he argues, are those that teach critical thinking in context of a content course, so that students develop the knowledge base that they need for critical reasoning on that content In essence, he is arguing against the classical view that Euclid can teach people how to think...about anything. His primary argument is empirical: programs designed to teach students how to think about...anything...do not appear particularly successful. As a reality check on Willingham's review of current efforts, consider the unhappy history of Euclid in European education: from its arrival in Europe in the High Middle Ages, professors have repeatedly tried to introduce it into their classes, and repeatedly failed. As early as the Renaissance, teachers were throwing in the towel and using Geometry for Dummies books in specialized courses on, say, how to be a surveyor.

So Willingham proposes that there really are no such things as "critical thinking skills." Instead, he suggests that students learn to think critically about a subject once they understand it very well. There are teaching techniques that can encourage students to think critically, but (and while he does not say this, it certainly follows from his argument) that entails getting students to do their homework.