United Faculty of Florida, Fall 2006

As graduate students complained and faculty groused, various wires got pulled, and before long there appeared a Frequently Asked Question page on the proposal. Now the Graduate School was requesting that colleges and programs adopt the rule. The acceleration of academic progress was still the primary rationale given, although the last paragraph did say, somewhat mysteriously, that "There are certain requisite responsibilities that come with being a Carnegie Research 1 University, and it would be detrimental to our students and our academic endeavors if we did not accomodate these." The FAQ also promised that "The Graduate School will continue to seek the advice of the Graduate Council and the Graduate Assistant Union as we move towards implementing ..." Evidently, the Graduate School still did not acknowledge the administration's legal obligation to actually bargain terms and conditions of employment with the GAU. And evidently, the Faculty Senate was still chopped liver.

Then a memo was circulated this week (but apparently not posted) saying that the 12-hour rule would not be implemented now or "for the immediate future." It is not clear what the status of the proposal is right now.

During all this time, the GAU was -- and is -- working on getting the rule withdrawn, or at least forcing the Administration to put it on the bargaining table. Unions strongly dislike speed-ups, for they are often used (at least in the short term) to squeeze employees, and they often wind up with abuses, if not litigation.

The USF (Faculty & University Professionals) chapter supported our fellow UFF chapter: as Ben Franklin once noted, either we hang together or we hang separately. We regard the unlawful promulgation of a rule affecting the terms and conditions of employment as a dangerous precedent. The chapter voted to publish a letter (now under construction) expressing our support for the GAU in this matter.

What the other stakeholders will do is unclear, especially since the rule seems to be morphing or disappearing. Presumably, since the rule does not apply to doctoral candidates, it will interfere only with faculty research that relies on students in masters programs. In fact, the confusion and uncertainty about what (if anything) this rule does is in itself a powerful argument for why such rules should be debated in public, using the shared governance system -- and collective bargaining, when it affects terms and conditions of employment -- during a period of time when faculty are in town. As the Graduate School FAQ itself says, we are a Carnegie I institution. We should act like one.

In Tuesday's primaries for nominations to the gubernatorial races, U.S. Represenative Jim Davis won the Democratic primary while Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist won the Republican primary. For the Democratic primary, the Florida Education Association had endorsed both Davis and his primary opponent, state Senator Rod Smith. Davis won with 47% of the vote in a four-person race. The FEA is thinking about fall now, and may be making some announcements soon. Meanwhile, the FEA talked to some of the candidates for state office, and you can hear what they had to say at the FEA's website .

As mentioned in the July 13 Biweekly, we were suddenly faced with a bill that passed and a governor who was clearly going to sign it. The legal effect was clear, even if Rivera himself was less than coherent on the point: faculty may not use funds processed by state agencies -- such as public universities -- to visit officially designated "terrorist states." The point of the bill was that Cuba is an officially designated terrorist state.

So the question was what to do about a law passed and signed? While the American Civil Liberties Union acted at once (see their press release, unions are deliberative organizations and we began with appeals for information for our national affiliates.

As UFF President Tom Auxter reported in the latest UFF Update, the union found evidence of a great deal of disruption. For example:

• The law shuts down much work on the coral reefs, even though their current decline poses a serious threat to the Gulf's ecosystems and economy.
• On June 6, Science magazine reported that similar work on climate change, oil spills, and agricultural productivity had to be shut down.
• Longstanding longitudinal studies of Cuban migrations, conducted by Floridian research centers, were abruptly shut down. Faculty at such centers no longer have access to the source of the migrations.
• There are several "terrorist states," with valuable archeological sites which are now being abandoned. The abrupt departure leaves some of them more vulnerable to looting.

The travel ban was a major topic at the UFF Senate meeting last weekend, where Auxter announced that UFF had distilled the results of its information-gathering into a resolution, which was presented at the annual convention of the National Education Association. The convention overwhelmingly approved our resolution against the travel ban, and with that mandate, we are now exploring legal and political options. Meanwhile, the UFF Senate unanimously passed a similar resolution which will be forwarded to our other national affiliate, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

Of course, such resolutions are but mandates for action, and now comes the harder parts. Going through the courts could take years, especially in the current legal climate. The political process might be faster: it would involve persuading the Legislature to revisit the issue, possibly on the grounds that passing legislation that hasn't been properly vetted is an invitation to unintended consequences. Quite possibly we will be proceeding on both fronts in parallel.

So we are back to collecting information: if you know of any consequences of this legislation, please let us know: send details to .

Meanwhile, last week, the UFF Senate had a visitor who reminded us that a quite different battle is being waged outside of Florida. Larry Gold, Director of Higher Education for the American Federation of Teachers, was one of UFF's strongest supporters during our struggle for survival. He visited this Senate meeting, where he told us that David Horowitz's well-funded campaign inspired twenty bills in twenty states, including (as readers will remember) our own Dennis Baxley's bill for Florida, and the more spectacular traveling show in Pennsylvania. The AFT met money with shoe leather, building alliances and making its first use of the blogosphere (see their page on academic freedom. But Horowitz's campaign is likely to continue as long as the cash and media coverage continues; indeed, Larry Gold told us that Horowitz is talking about going after the K-12 teachers next.

The point that Gold was in Orlando to make was one we've heard before: we need to deal more with the Legislature.

Bill Heller is a Professor at USF-St. Petersburg, working in special education. He is running for District # 52, and on his web-page, Betty Castor is quoted saying, "There is no one who will serve you better in Tallahassee than Bill Heller."

Keith Fitzgerald is an Associate Professor of political science at New College. He is running for District # 69, and on his web-page, he says of the current statehouse that "after eight years of focus on education, we are worse off than we were before."

This reception was only one way in which the UFF is focusing more on the legislature. For example -- as Auxter reminded us -- the state had been appropriating us the same raises that state employees get, but as a transitional measure. The governor and the legislature had planned to cut us off this year, but after an intense campaign by UFF, the legislature changed its mind. Part of the mind change was a result of argument (Florida universities have a high turnover), but part of it was sheer decibel level: as Aesop observed, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

But we have a ways to go. Auxter said that during the past twenty years, education's share of the state budget has declined, and higher education's share of the education budget has declined. Here is an area where UFF and the university administrations can help each other. Indeed, Auxter said that the university presidents had wanted the base raise for faculty (the university presidents don't like high turnover, either), but that the union was in a better position to go from door to door in Tallahassee. The salary campaign this year is a sign that we can be successful going directly to the statehouse.

As AFT's Director of Higher Education, Larry Gold has a wider perspective, and he proposed a program of model legislation to package for statehouses across the country. There is, he told us, a national crisis in academic staffing. Fully 70 % of all higher education faculty are "contingent" (non-tenure-track) faculty. While some tenured faculty may not see this as a problem (as long as the best and the brightest get tenure), the political reality is that this will reduce tenured faculty to a politically marginal group.

Editorial comment: tenure in the United States was popularized during the 1920s and 1930s as a mechanism for protecting teachers who spoke indiscretely about economic distribution and biological evolution. As such, it applied to a large population which, organized, wielded considerable clout. If tenure whithers into a perk for star researchers, then the clout of the tenured faculty will whither, too.

Returning to Larry Gold's remarks, he said that the AFT is proceeding on the traditional front of organizing contingent faculty. But the problem appears to be amenable to a legislative solution at the state level. So the AFT is developing a model law, a Faculty & College Excellence Act, which will limit the use of contingent faculty and provide pay and benefits for contingent faculty.

In general, the union is planning to be more visible in the future, including this fall: the Florida Education Association (FEA) -- our statewide affiliate -- has endorsed Jim Davis for governor (FEA President Andy Ford said that Jim Davis has a "common sense approach to public education [that] would be a breath of fresh air"), as well as several candidates for the legislature ... including our two colleagues, Bill Heller of St. Petersburg and Keith Fitzgerald of Sarasota.

On Tuesday, September 26, the Department of Education released a report, A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education. In her prepared remarks, U. S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said of higher education in America, "a lot of people will tell you things are going just fine," but continued, "Is it 'fine' that college tuition has outpaced inflation, family income, even doubling the cost of health care? Is it 'fine' that only half of our students graduate on-time? Is it 'fine' that students often graduate so saddled with debt they can't buy a home or start a family? None of this seems 'fine' to me."

So last fall, she launched a commission consisting of four business executives (three in high-technology firms and one in for-profit education), five academic administrators, six education activists (some from Non-Government Organizations), and two faculty members. There were also ten ex officio members, including four cabinet officers (including a "designee" for U. S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield). It would be fair to say that the committee consisted more of stakeholders and players than of experts, scholars, and teachers. And the Chronicle of Higher Education reported there were problems in composing the report, the two biggest squabbles concerning:

• The sequence of preliminary "Commission Reports" composed by the commission chair, Charles Miller, former chairman of the University of Texas Board of Regents and now a "private investor" (often in for-profit education) (see the April 20 Biweekly article, and
• Complaints that the staff was usurping the role of the commission and composing the report. (It should be noted that said staff were employees of the U.S. Department of Education and thus ultimately answerable to Spellings.)

The report (big PDF document), has two major groups of findings and recommendations, one having to do with pedagogy, and one with access and finances. The preamble hints at the direction the report will go, with its blithe presumption that students can be treated as consumers while concentrating on the need for greater "accountability."

Lets look at the pedagogy first. The report begins its findings section with a conclusion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress that only 17 % of high school seniors are "proficient" in mathematics, while 36 % are "proficient" in reading. According to the report, the problem is a disarticulation between high school graduation requirements and college expectations. The result is that 40 % of college students take remedial courses, at a cost of a billion dollars a year, and only 66 % of all students graduate within six years. (And incidentally, the report says employers are complaining about how ill-prepared their new employees are.) In addition, there are too few students going into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) subjects, and that America is falling behind other nations.

The difficulty, suggests the report, is that higher education is too conservative, too unwilling to employ the latest technology, much less new teaching techniques derived from recent discoveries in cognitive science. In addition, colleges are not held accountable for their performance. New teaching techniques are mentioned in a perfunctory fashion, but the report goes into accountability with enthusiasm. It is proposed that a database or some databases containing academic information about all individual students be constructed and used for evaluating performance of academic institutions. To persuade states to have their universities institute such systems (and to similarly persuade private institutions to participate), government funding will be made at least partially contingent on participation.

As with other information-collection schemes being proposed by the current Washington administration, there will be suitable privacy protections for the students whose information is gathered and maintained. (It is not clear who will have full access to this information.) At any rate, the public will be able to access processed data to get assessments of institutions, particularly of "value-added" performance measures (how does student performance improve at different institutions over time?), and thus be able to make consumer decisions based on institutional performance. The report implies that colleges and universities should and will respond in entrepreneurial fashion, competing to develop pedagogical techniques that maximize their performance measures. Apparently, new pedagogical techniques grow on trees, and all academia has to do is pick them.

Having solved all the pedagogical problems, the report then proceeds to solve access and financial problems. The report identifies access problems -- lack of preparation, lack of information about college requirements and opportunities, and lack of financial aid (or disorganization of financial aid). There are also many complaints about obstacles faced by transfer students. The report recommends fixing high schools (to deal with the lack of preparation), consolidating the current panoply of financial aid programs (which the report says contribute to the confusion) while increasing the amount of need-based aid. It is not clear how the authors of the report would deal with the lack of information about college requirements and opportunities (there is no mention of high school counselors): perhaps students could visit the proposed database to track institutional performance.

Money is a major issue in the report. States are reducing their support to the universities, and according to the report, will probably continue to do so. (There is little mention of how the federal government supports universities, directly or indirectly.) So universities will have to more rigorously control costs. Indeed, there is much discussion of profligant spending, especially in student services and administration ... and salaries. Institutions can also save money with new technology. There are several complaints about opaque, incoherent, or irrational accounting practices, and comments that colleges and universities are (inappropriately?) insulated from the effects of their excessive spending.

In accepting the report on Sept. 26, after enumerating the problems that are not "fine" with her, Spellings announced her "immediate plans to address the issues of: accessibility, affordability and accountability raised by the Commission," relying on the principles of the No Child Left Behind legislation, "And let me assure you—-NCLB is going strong." She listed four "action" steps:

• "ACTION ONE under my plan is to build on this by expanding the effective principles of No Child Left Behind and holding high schools accountable for results."
• "ACTION TWO under my plan is for my Department to streamline the process, cut the application time in half, and notify students of their aid eligibility earlier than Spring of their senior year to help families plan."
• "ACTION THREE under my plan will work to pull together the same kind of privacy-protected student-level data we already have for K through 12 students. And use that data to create a higher education information system."
• "ACTION FOUR under my plan will provide matching funds to colleges, universities, and states that collect and publicly report student learning outcomes."

The Chronicle of Higher Education said, "Secretary of Education Will Propose More U.S. Aid for Students and a Database to Track Their Progress in College," while James B. Hunt, former governor of North Carolina and a member of the commission, said the report was "one of the most important reports in the educational and economic history of our country, if we act on it." Not all members of the commission were as enthusiastic. Robert M. Zemsky, another education activist, said, "There are a lot of people out there who no longer believe in us," and David Ward used his office as president of the American Council of Education as an excuse not to sign, and complained, among other things, about the "false sense of crisis" in the report, along with the report's tendency to blame academia for problems extending beyond academia, as well as the report's fondness for simple and Procrustean solutions.

Many people -- including us (see the July 13 Biweekly article) had been watching the situation very carefully, and now that the final report is out, there is some sound and fury from the various parties in the ongoing controversy over higher education in America. And what might that signify?

The most striking thing about the document is that its content could have been predicted -- and indeed, was predicted -- practically upon the appointment of the commission. All the relief expressed was about the "tone" (earlier drafts were somewhat sharper); this draft said roughly what people expected it to say. And it said nothing new, or surprising. It did say some silly things, like this gem from the summary: "Higher education institutions should improve institutional cost management through the development of new performance benchmarks, while also lowering per-student educational costs by reducing barriers for transfer students." (These are the two most significant steps institutions can take in cost management?) But this is merely symptomatic of the real difficulty suggested by David Ward: the commission's unwillingness to come to grips with the really deep problems. Let's look at two examples.

First, the report blithely enumerates the desiderata of students, employers (and presumably they also thought about parents, the government, and the community at large) without noting that all these groups are pulling academia ... in different directions. For example, employers want students with the ability to concentrate on a task, which is an important study skill. Many students (and most producers of standardized exams) want students to be taught how to plug correct answers into little questions, a quite different skill of little interest to high-tech employers. Meanwhile, parents would like their children to get individual attention, while governments would like to save money by having huge classes. The failure to recognize that different stakeholders have different desires is a major deficiency of the report. This omission is especially serious when treating students as consumers, for in many cases, student needs and student desires are very different things. This is a situation that higher education has to navigate, and is part of the problem (e.g., the report complains about fancy new student centers universities build, without noting that the universities are not building these centers out of sheer stupidity, but to market themselves to consumer-students -- and thus the report glides past the awkward question of what the success of such marketing schemes says about the student-as-consumer model). All academia hears from the Spellings report is ... the demands of yet another interest group.

For the other example, let's begin with the statement that it is highly unlikely that this report will have as great an impact on the skills of American students as J. K. Rowling has had. Suppose that it is "true" that 36 % of high school graduates are "proficient" in reading. Surveys show that most Americans are willing to tell complete strangers that (a) they haven't read a book in over a year and (b) they don't read newspapers. Learning, in the view of most students, is something one does in school. So the high school students don't read much, they come to college, and professors complain that the students don't read the texts. But some faculty observe that the literacy skills of many students are not up to the textbooks we've assigned. How are high schools supposed to fix this if students will not read on their own? Only, it seems, with the help of books that students WANT to read. And yet, on this point -- what happens OUTSIDE of the classroom -- the report is deafeningly, negligently, and suspiciously silent.

So if the content of this report was largely predictable, and if it avoided the big problems while swatting at those gnats that were high on certain political agendas, what is this report other than a move in a political game of chess? Perhaps not much, but the stakes in this particular chess game are high. First of all, this report really does represent a serious move to force colleges and universities to supply vast amounts of confidential information to government agencies. Since much information extracted will be used for marketing and appropriation purposes, it will turn out that in higher education, what is examined will be what is rewarded; and the choices about what to examine will not be made in academia. Inevitably, despite the report's complaints about micromanagement of academia, the result of implementing its recommendations would be the decline the independence of higher education in America.

(More on the NCLB in a later issue of the UFF Biweekly. In the meantime, see the NEA site, and the UFF Biweekly's prior article on the NCLB Act.)

Then FEA President Andy Ford said that in Tallahassee, there was sincere belief that the rich need to be richer, and that employees should be interchangeable commodities. He enumerated some of the union's legislative victories, and said that electoral victory is within reach, but only if we fight for it.

As an example, Ford described the primary battle over the Republican nomination for Florida Senate District 38 (essentially Miami-Dade). J. Alex Villalobos had served since 2000, and became the Republican Majority Leader in 2004. But he opposed an initiative to weaken the class-size amendment and another initiative to protect vouchers. He was forced out of the leadership in the midst of the session, and then Frank Bolanos, chairman of the Miami-Dade school board, ran against Villalobos in the primary with the support of Jeb Bush.

While a few brave Republicans supported Villalobos -- Nancy Argenziano, R-Leon County, complained about "an unusually public gubernatorial tantrum occasioned because he couldn't intimidate a member of the Senate," most kept a safe distance or joined Bush's posse. According to the Miami Herald (a source for this account), "third party" groups spent $ 6 million attacking Villalobos, a million in the last week before the primary. As many old friends abandoned him, the United Teachers of Dade (backed by the FEA) supported him during the primary, and Villalobos won 10,637 votes against 10,059.

Without our support, Frank Bolanos would be the Republican nominee in a race with only token opposition, a point that should be remembered next year, for Ford went on to describe an initiative for the next session. This is the "I pledge" campaign, for "A Commitment to Public Schools." The pledge calls for:

• "Smaller class sizes for Florida's Children,"
• "Better funding for our public schools,"
• "Support for schools in need -- not private school vouchers," and
• "Competitive wages for teachers and support professionals."

On Friday morning, Senator Bill Nelson arrived to thank us, asserting that, "your profession should be the most respected profession in America." Saying that he had been inspired by John F Kennedy, and quoting Kennedy ("A child mis-educated is a child lost"), he outlined the history of the NCLB Act. It was originally worked out between the White House and Senator Edward Kennedy, and the White House had committed $ 18 billion a year for it; but Bush reneged, and the average appropriation was between $ 11 and $ 12 billion per year. Nevertheless, without providing the necessary funds, the White House still holds schools to the mandates. "Under these mandates," said Nelson, "nothing seems to matter as much as this one-time test score." He said that Congress would revisit the program next year and advised us, "Elections do change government policy; know what I mean?"

After lunch, Congressman Jim Davis came to give a forceful speech beginning with: "The heart and soul of our state are our schools, and you are the heart and soul of our schools." Davis is running for the office that matters most to Florida educators -- including us, for the governor appoints university governors and trustees. Perhaps to contrast himself with the current governor, Davis promised, "as the next governor of the state of Florida, I will always treat you with respect." NCLB being the hot topic, he turned to Florida's miniature version of NCLB, promising "we ... are going to end the FCAT as we know it," but warned, "this is not going to come without a big fight." With that, he turned on his opponent, Attorney General Charlie Crist, who, Davis suggested, was not up to speed on FCAT: according to Davis, Crist had not known when the FCAT was taking place (next year, February 26 - March 9 for most students), and when asked by a reporter what he thought of temporary workers grading FCAT worksheets, Crist responded with "What's the problem?" Then responding to a $ 30 million ad campaign featuring an empty chair, Davis said he had a 93 % attendance record in Congress. He concluded with: "This race boils down to how badly we want it."

After a lot of cheering, Bill McBride came up to give a low-key and somewhat homestyle talk thanking FEA for supporting him in 2002 ("I ... regret I was unable to win for you because you deserve it"), and asking us to support his wife, Alex Sink, for the second most powerful office in the state government. He described the new office of Chief Financial Officer as roughly the combined comptroller, insurance commissioner, and treasurer. McBride described Sink, a Phi Beta Kappa math major who worked her way up the banking industry to become Florida President of Bank of America, as a problem-solver. He noted a philosophical difference between Sink and her opponent, former President of the Senate Tom Lee (whose majority leader was ... Alex Villalobos): Lee regards the office of CFO as political, and thus does not regard his lack of financial experience as a handicap. Sink, on the other hand, regards the office as a public service, and McBride promised, "my wife will always be faithful to you."

It is widely anticipated that Nelson will defeat former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, but the races for governor and CFO are too volatile to call and considering early voting, will probably remain so until after polls close. The FEA has endorsed Nelson, Davis, and Sink, and strongly urges everyone to vote in the November 7 election.

The United Faculty of Florida is a "local" affiliated with the Florida Education Association (FEA), which represents educators and support personnel throughout Florida. It is jointly affiliated with both the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT, which in turn is affiliated with the AFL-CIO). The FEA's legislative body is the Delegate Assembly, which meets annually. Each union local is represented by a number of delegates; this year just under a thousand delegates (and about two hundred guests) met in a ballroom for a day and a half in late October. The big issue was the upcoming reauthorization of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The previous reauthorization, passed in 2002, was entitled "An Act To close the gap with accountability, flexibility, and choice, so that no child is left behind"; that law is posted on-line. This is the celebrated NCLB Act, and the next reauthorization is due in 2007.

At the FEA Assembly, after the initial introductions, technicalities, and announcements, American Federation of Teachers Executive Vice President Toni Cortese talked about the NCLB. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act was first passed in 1965 as part of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, and there is some concern that with NCLB, some of the original intent has been left behind.

Cortese noted that the AFT supports the principles officially underlying NCLB -- high standards, good teachers, helping weak students -- but she said that what teachers tell AFT is that the curriculum is narrowing as teachers are required to teach what is tested, that special education students are penalized, that vast amounts of time and effort is put into testing itself, and that many teachers do not believe that the tests adequately measure academic progress.

When the AFT studied the NCLB, they found a mess. States have a jumble of assessment schemes, not necessarily based on the actual tests: eleven states match their tests with assessment. Sometimes the authors of the assessment schemes were asleep: one state uses the same standards for the second and eighth grades. [The previous Biweekly erroneously said that 70 % of the schools did not make Adequate Yearly Progress, when in fact it was 30 % that failed to do so.] When Paul Pederson of Harvard (he is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and Director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance -- and Cortese described him as "NOT a friend of ours") looked at the NCLB, he concluded that Adequate Yearly Progress was an inaccurate school measure -- and in fact, Florida's results were indistinguishable from random.

Cortese concluded with a discussion of accountability. Schools that "fail" have two years to recover or face sanctions. Cortese did not go into the problem that "failure" might be a random event [readers may recall that some Florida schools got quite different evaluations at the state and federal levels], but instead proposed that schools in trouble should get assistance. Then she turned on the government, saying that if politicians provide inadequate resources, they should be held accountable. As an example, she said many urban districts lack texts and try to hoard them in strange ways (largely by keeping them out of the hands of students).

NEA Executive Committee Member Becky Pringle also addressed the effects of the NCLB Act. At present, no state is in compliance, which may be understandable as the federal government isn't either: as mentioned in the last Biweekly, the federal government has not fully funded the NCLB. Even more alarming, the mean deficit is increasing:
For fiscal year 2002, $ 4.2 billion
For fiscal year 2003, $ 5.4 billion
For fiscal year 2004, $ 7.6 billion
For fiscal year 2005, $ 9.8 billion
For fiscal year 2006, $ 13.4 billion
Pringle then outlined outlined seven classes of criteria for accountability that the NEA would be pursuing:

1. Experience beyond the school, from Pre-K to after school, including counseling and health.
2. High expectations and standards in a rich and comprehensive curriculum that includes music, social studies, etc.
3. Physical and work conditions, from supplies and infrastructure to time for planning.
4. A qualified, stable, caring and dedicated workforce.
5. Shared responsibility and accountability for all participants -- including the politicians.
6. Parental, family, and community involvement and engagement.
7. The necessary funding to make all this work, equitably appropriated.

The issue affects higher education in at least two ways. First, freshmen are increasingly students who have been taught courses designed to prepare them for particular standardized tests -- not for the next course or any other such distant goal. Second, testing enthusiasts are touting standardized exams for higher education, which would result in pressure on us to teach to such exams.

That brings us to USF's plan. Like many institutions, USF has a Strategic Plan. This plan describes USF's goals for five years, at the end of which one would expect an assessment of progress made, and the development of a new plan. The period of the 2002 - 2007 plan is coming to an end, and the 2007 - 2012 plan is being formulated. The old plan is on-line, as is a UFF commentary on it.

We are now in the midst of a comment period: the Administration has posted a draft, and has requested comments by November 24. UFF does not have an official role here -- although we do retain the right to submit comments -- but we do have some unsolicited advice.

First of all, while some of the plan is actually carried out by the Administration and the Board (e.g., obtaining and allocating funds), much of it is either the direct (amount of research done) or indirect (number of external honors awarded) result of faculty activity. That means that the new plan needs more than faculty comments. It needs faculty involvement. There are two reasons for this.

First, there is a common bureaucratic delusion that confuses action and activity. Just because some body composes a plan doesn't mean that it will happen -- not even if (by some miracle) necessary funding appears. The planners need to know what faculty are doing and where they are going in order to build on success rather than on thin air.

Second, a plan presented from on high with much pomp and condescension has only the Powers That Be committed to it: if faculty had no part in actually developing it, why should we be committed to it? The same goes for the community, and the Board should not make the mistake that it is the community incarnate (any more than that the Administration is the university incarnate), and a plan produced behind closed doors does not have any community commitment.

But if faculty were to be involved in the plan (rather than just queried for comments), faculty would be getting information on how the previous plan worked. There is some information -- largely a stack of weakly prioritized numbers. Presumably we will have some kind of clear and public account of how USF did in meeting its goals -- and a discussion of where to go from here. Considering that it is the faculty that do the work, and that it is the community that pays the bills, such a public discussion should take place, and be more than just a formality.

And there are a number of issues that have appeared over the last few years that it might be a good idea for the plan to address. A number of these have to do with an entire subject ignored by the previous plan: leadership. A number of leadership issues have become pressing, from shared governance to the stresses of creating an administration capable of managing a Research I university. And the Board and the Administration have been largely reactive, leading to a collage of patchwork, promises, and rationalizations. After half a century of business experts telling us about the importance of proper organization -- and the problems with pyramid-type hierarchies -- it might be a good time for USF to, ahem, leave the 19th century. We could begin with a more open assessment of USF's past performance and development of the next plan.

At tomorrow's membership meeting the UFF chapter will discuss and decide on the appropriate response to this situation. If you will not be there, but would like to send comments, please send them from a non-USF account to President Weatherford.

House Resolution 177 created the Select Committee, which investigated the University of Pittsburg (see our Dec. 1, 2005 report), Temple University (see our January 26, 2006 report), Millersville University (see our April 6, 2006 report), and finally at Harrisburg Area Community College (see our June 15 report). The hearings featured visitors from out of state deploring rampant academic bias in Pennsylvania colleges and universities, local administrators contending that there were no problems, local students complaining about other issues (e.g., college costs) not on the agenda, and local faculty in pro and con camps. The report was supposed to come out this fall. And indeed it finally is, piece by piece.

The overarching reality, 109 Republicans versus 94 Democrats, shifted on November 7, and is shifting still, now standing at 101 Republicans, 101 Democrats, and election officials, party observers, lawyers and reporters watching poor Chester County dither over what ballots to count a very close race. (In the latest count, the Democrats were ahead, but the snarling continues.) Meanwhile, Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, one of the major radical -- sorry, arch conservative -- figures in the Republican party, was fired by his constituents. Amidst all this, the Select Committee's report ... still wasn't finished.

A week after the election, the committee met and composed a report that was soon released to the media. (FrontPage.com has very kindly posted this report on their website). Much of the report consisted of a somewhat disorganized summary listing various complaints made against biassed academics. A careful reader may notice a certain bias in the material selected for inclusion in the summary. (Free Exchange On Campus, a coalition of the AAUP, the ACLU, the AFT and the NEA, etc., etc., posted an analysis of the testimony presented at the hearings, see , their analysis and compare with the Summary.) Nevertheless, despite the muddle, the primary theoretician for the Committee, FrontPage.com's David Horowitz, was delighted: "Pennsylvania Committee Finds Students Have No Rights," he wrote on Nov. 15 (see his column.) Noting that the Select Committee had "determined that a significant number of institutions had adopted faculty academic freedom policies, but not student academic freedom policies," Horowitz quoted himself saying, "We have been trying to draw attention to this deficiency in university policies for three years. Now our pleas have been heard." And he vowed to take his campaign to other states.

This view of the report was not universal, for the Associated Press reported on Nov. 15 that "Academic bill of rights flunked: Statewide rules for public colleges are unnecessary, because bias is rare, a legislative panel has found." The disagreement arose because while the Summary of the report was alarming, the Findings section found little to be alarmed about. Indeed, Pennsylvania State University's Michael Berube, one of the 101 most dangerous professors (according to David Horowitz), told Inside Higher Ed that he had no problem with the committee's recommendations (which were largely to encourage colleges and universities to institute their own reforms). More to the point, the Select Committee had met without a quorum (!), so the report that everyone was talking about wasn't the real report, anyway.

The Select Committee had a quorum a week after that, and there the Committee simply chopped out the Summary, tweaked a few other items, and plopped what Horowitz called "the eviscerated report" before the public, which FrontPage.com also posted. Horowitz blamed teachers' unions for the evisceration; he is clearly planning on continuing the fight. Meanwhile, Free Exchange on Campus announced that "Pennsylvania Purges Horowitz Taint From Report," and suggested that Horowitz had had a hand in drafting the deleted Summary. Free Exchange on Campus also said that "we hope that the legislature will turn to the real problems students face in Pennsylvania, such as paying for their education."

Amidst all this fog, it is not clear who won, if anyone. Much of the media is giving this round to Academia, but that may be precipitate; after all, the officially official report still isn't out yet (!). Still, the fizz started going out of the effort once the lead legislator, Gib Armstrong, lost his primary just before the fourth set of hearings. Facing uncertainty about the next year, the Select Committee may have decided to punt: certainly, the half-baked appearance of the report suggests a committee that wanted to get it out of their hair. But if Charles Fair is right, we will not see who won by examining the current noises emanating from the blogs, but by seeing what happens next, once Chester County's ballots are counted, and the House starts its new session.

Thanks to the electronic revolution, music has become ubiquitous. In a Zen-like fashion, we often do not notice it simply because it is everywhere. But many societies took music very seriously -- it is one of the original seven liberal arts -- and it may arise from deep in our minds. The journalist/ naturalist David Attenborough proposed that music is the source of much of what makes us "human." In his PBS production Song of the Earth, he describes troops of social primates that delimit their territories by getting together and vocalizing. The ... songs? ... are complex and seem to help bond the group as well as intimidate outsiders (two uses of music we see in ourselves today). Attenborough describes our ancestors singing in groups, and suggests that it is here that we see some of the origin of language. Certainly there is a connection between language on the one hand and rhythm and rhyme on the other, for oral historians have long known that humans can memorize vast amounts of material (the Iliad and the Odyssey, for example) if it is set to music.

Peter Kalkavage is a tutor at Saint John's College in Maryland, and Director of their Chorus. He wrote the cover article of the Fall 2006 AFT American Educator, on The Neglected Muse: Why Music is an Essential Liberal Art. Kalkavage begins by saying that "Music has a central place in the lives of young people. For many, music is their life." Therefore, "Teaching music to the young is ... more than conveying ... information and ... facts, or ... [to] develop their talent ... [or] make them ... refined." Instead, teaching music gives "them an opportunity to know themselves better by ... [showing them] the amazing power that music has over them."

Kalkavage says that students must learn to listen, and to play, but most of his article is about listening. First of all, there are the nuts and bolts of harmony, based on Pythagoras's observation that successful chords were composed of notes with special relationships to each other. For example, Kalkavage describes a stringed device called a sonometer, which consists of two taut strings over a soundboard, with a moveable bridge under one of them: the bridge allows the user to pluck the bridged string as if it were a string of any selected length. A student will discover that when the bridge is in the middle, the bridged string will produce a note an octave higher than the other; other chordal relationships can be worked out by experimenting with the bridge. Students soon discover a compelling motive for understanding fractions.

Kalkavage goes on to how we are influenced by music. He seems greatly influenced by Greek notions of beauty; contrasting beauty and pleasure, he writes that "We can take pleasure in something ugly and base." Beauty requires education to recognize, and that is one motive behind his article. Once students are taught to recognize and appreciate beauty, they can experiment intelligently with beauty; for example, they can learn how a melody holds together by seeing what happens if they change one of the notes. "In music, the question of beauty comes down largely to ... how musical forces combine to form a whole."

At this point, the gentle webmaster notes that Kalkavage's proposal is to start with "great music in the classical tradition" -- he lists Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven -- and the classical tradition remains at the center of his view. But when we speak of the POWER of music, we are often speaking not of beauty, but of what Eighteenth Century critics called the "sublime," which is often associated with the Romantics from Beethoven and Chopin to Wagner and Brahms. Classicists (who were fond of gentle fields and elegant fountains) complained from the start that the Romantics were abandoning beauty, to which the Romantics (who were fond of craggy mountains and stormy seas) replied that they had other priorities. Beauty may not be the only thing students should learn about.

But compared to Kalkavage's primary complaint -- that music is an orphan that schools are abandoning -- the focus on beauty is a quibble. Moving away from both the Classical and the Romantic, the American Educator also ran an interview with jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who said that "Music, in its purest form, encompasses the very ideals that we want to impart to our children." In the interview, he describes a jazz performance as a cooperative effort in which individual musicians must work together for the piece to succeed. Like Kalkavage, Marsalis regards much popular music as accoustical soda pop, saying that bands should play classical band music (he mentions Sousa, Joplin, Bernstein, and Ellington); when the interviewer suggested that high school bands tend to play the music students like, Marsalis said that students have not heard the great music, and had only heard "the latest commercial musical ventures."

Music education was sidelined in America long before the current fashion in standardized testing marginalized it by not testing it. Music education is regarded as a frill, often living off the crumbs of that most basic of necessities, the high school football team. And this raises the question that these articles did not address: how is it that music is a luxury and football a necessity? It is this riddle that we may have to answer if we are to bring something more than musical soda pop into our schools.

It is often denied that Newton got the idea for gravity by being bonked by an apple falling off a tree at Woolsthorpe manor: Cambridge was closed because of the plague in the mid-1660s, so Newton went home and thought about optics, calculus, and physics (he would compute logarithms to fifty places as recreation). Nevertheless, the tree is still there, so who knows.

Much as been made of Newton's genius, so here is what he said about it. First, "I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light." Second, "If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention, than to any other talent." Most famously, he wrote to Robert Hooke that "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants," a quote even more telling when one remembers that centuries before, St. Bernard of Clairvaux (allegedly) said that we are but dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants. Try these quotes on your students and see what happens.

So make some cider and have a Happy Isaac Newton's birthday! (And also Alban Arthuan, Chanukkah, Christmas / Epiphany, Dong Zhi, (and Eid al-Adha this year), Kwanzaa, New Year's, Winter Solstice, and all other holidays in between.) This is the last Biweekly of the year, but we will return in January.