--- February 10, 2008:
A Perfect Storm Is Building in Higher Education
By
James Castagnera
When it comes to college, I wear two hats. As a parent I’m probably a lot like you other moms and dads out there. I want my kid’s college to be an affordable, safe path to a prosperous and meaningful life. That’s a tall order for any institution of higher ed. But I feel entitled to demand it. And I feel anxious, and even a bit betrayed, by the ever-increasing tuition costs, not to mention the guns that keep going off in college classrooms. Last week Louisiana Tech in Baton Rouge joined the list of universities, headed by Virginia Tech, where crazy students shot their classmates and then themselves. Our kids’ college years aren’t supposed to be anything like that; their high school friends who joined the armed forces --- like my friends who went to Vietnam --- are supposed to suck that up for the rest of us.
When I switch chapeau and don my university attorney’s fedora, I see what may be in store for American higher education in the decades ahead. What I see is a perfect storm. You’ll recall that Sebastian Junger’s book by that name told the maritime tale of three weather fronts that came crashing together in the North Atlantic. The three weather fronts facing higher ed are global competition, government regulation, and consumer demands.
American universities continue to be the gold standard of higher education. However, other world regions are giving us a run for our money. The European Union’s so-called Bologna Accords are aimed at creating uniformity across its many member nations, so that EU students can study almost anywhere on Continent, confident their credits will be counted at their home institutions. This will be a big incentive toward doing their study-abroad experiences in Europe, rather than coming to the U.S. For their part, Asian students are increasingly electing to study in Australia or New Zealand, where travel and tuition costs are significantly less on average than in the States. Add to these competitive initiatives the barriers --- albeit trending lower --- erected against international students in the wake of the Nine-Eleven terrorist attacks. You may recall that some of the killers who hijacked and piloted the planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon studied at American flight schools under the auspices of student visas.
George Bush may claim to favor a smaller government and fewer regulations. His Secretary of Education does not seem to agree. Earlier this month Secretary Spellings told a Texas audience, “Today, we're using data to drive decision-making and to empower consumer advocates. After decades of doling out federal dollars and hoping for the best we're now expecting - and beginning to get – results.” What she would like is a system of accountability similar to what the Bush Administration has imposed in the K-12 environment. Last week, too, the House passed its version of a renewal of the Higher Education Act. The lower house of Congress must have disappointed the DOE Secretary in that a surviving amendment would keep her agency out of the accreditation business… at least for now.
Meanwhile, a fellow named Andrew Cuomo, son of the one-time governor of New York, shook higher ed to its financial foundations last year when he went after financial aid directors --- some serving at America’s most prestigious universities --- for accepting perks and kick-backs for preferential treatment of selected student-loan organizations. Cuomo continues his crusade this year, aiming the power his office --- Attorney General of New York --- at the enormous study-abroad business. As with accreditation of colleges, Cuomo’s crusade is requiring higher ed institutions and umbrella organizations to retreat rapidly into stricter self-regulation or risk additional federal and state intrusion.
Furthermore, if we don’t succeed in making our campuses safer, federal and state law enforcement will. A current “hot button” among the feds is a perceived rise in Islamic extremism on some campuses,
Bringing this column full circle, last but not least are we parents and our children… the consumers. The 35th annual freshman survey, coincidentally released last week by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, found that 63% of respondents said they chose their schools for academic quality while 52% mentioned the good jobs that alumni are getting. A sizable number also pinpointed financial aid as a significant factor.
These numbers tell me that we have become savvy consumers. A college education is an investment and we expect a reasonable return. The day can’t be far off when the courts will experience a surge of suits by parents and students claiming that the college or university of their choosing failed to deliver on its promises.
And that, fellow parents, is the perfect storm that I, as an academic administrator, am bracing to weather.
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--- May 28, 2008:
Remembering VTU and Other Campus Killings (Part One)
By James Castagnera
Attorney at Large
The April 16. 2007, Virginia Tech massacre sent editors and writers scurrying to their microfiche and video vaults. The very day of the tragedy, CBS News recalled the mother of all campus mass-murders… the August 1, 1966, slaughter of 16 by a sniper from the top deck of U.T.-Austin’s landmark tower.
Journalists need not even resort to their vaults for material on America’s most notorious campus killings. The May 4, 1970, shooting of 13 students in about as many seconds on Kent State’s campus has retained the public eye into the new millennium, thanks chiefly to a 2001 Emmy-winning documentary and Reporter-Novelist Philip Caputo’s 2005 book.
In the lingo of American tort (aka personal injury) law, Virginia Tech more closely resembles the University of Texas. Both campuses were victimized by an unexpected and entirely unwanted intruder. If either institution, its officials and safety forces are legally liable, then the basis must be negligence, i.e., some common-law sin of omission.
Kent State’s shootings implicated higher levels of legal liability… on both sides of the gun barrels. First, contrary to the clear innocence of the shooters’ victims at U.T. and V.T.U., an argument could be (and, in fact, was) made for student culpability in the tragedy of the KSU Commons. Likewise, state officials from the governor of Ohio down to the president’s office at the university shared in the decisions that led to four dead and nine wounded students.
On May 1, 1970, students demonstrated against Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia. On May 2nd a mob burned the Army ROTC barracks on campus. The following day the Ohio Riot Act was read and tear gas fired, before the students abandoned the campus Commons. A day later, the Ohio National Guard fired into the reconstituted campus crowd.
Immediately after the shootings, officials attempted to blame the protesters. On May 15th the Portage County Prosecutor displayed a shotgun, a pistol, machetes, cap pistols, slingshots and BB guns confiscated from dorm rooms. The ACLU labeled the search illegal and its fruits “meager.”
On June 6th the Ohio legislature enacted a campus riot law, which took effect in the fall.
The legal tide seemed to turn on June 10th when the parent of a dead student filed suit in federal court, asking $6 million against the governor and the guard commanders for “intentionally and maliciously disregarding” students’ safety. On June 23rd a U.S. Department of Justice report concluded the shootings “were not necessary and not in order.” Wrongful death suits followed from the other three decedents’ families.
Meanwhile, the pendulum took another swing, as a special grand jury indicted students and faculty for riot, assault and incitement. After unsuccessfully fighting the charges all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, a number of the defendants were eventually fined and imprisoned.
All four of the wrongful-death actions were dismissed on the ground of Ohio’s sovereign immunity from suit. But in 1974 the U.S. Supreme Court held in Scheuer v. Rhodes that the governor and other individual state actors, including KSU’s president, could be sued, since state immunity is “no shield for a state official confronted by the claim that he had deprived another of a federal right under color of law.” Meanwhile, eight guardsmen were indicted on civil rights charges by a federal grand jury; all were eventually acquitted.
In 1975’s Krause v. Rhodes, a federal jury found the defendants not liable by a 9-3 vote, but the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a new trial. As legal wrangling over campus construction that would obliterate the scene of the shootings dragged on, the parties settled for $675,000 --- the plaintiffs had sought $46 million --- in 1979.
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--- July 19, 2008:
Saudi Arabia’s Generosity: a Penance or a Purchase?
By Jim Castagnera
Special to the Greentree Gazette
Of the 18 identified Nine-Eleven terrorists, 11 are known to have been Saudi nationals. This fact did not go un-remarked in either Washington or Riyadh. The House of Saud wasted no time in cranking up its PR money-machine. Higher education was, and remains, one of the main beneficiaries of this largess.
In 2005, Saudi Arabia donated $20 million to Harvard. While that’s just a drop in the Cambridge-based university’s multi-billion-dollar endowment fund, it’s not peanuts in the PR world. According to the Boston Globe, “A Saudi Arabian prince who is one of the world’s richest people is giving $20 million to Harvard to establish a university-wide program in Islamic studies….” Focused as the gift is, it’s impact can be significant, even at a magaversity such as Harvard.
The newspaper story goes on to report, “Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, whose net worth was estimated by Forbes magazine this year as $23.7 billion, is also donating $20 million to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., to promote Muslim-Christian dialogue and understanding.”
This latter gift also has not gone un-remarked, although it seems to have maintained a low profile until this year. In February 2008, the Washington Post reported, “A Virginia congressman has asked Georgetown University to explain how it used a $20 million donation from a Saudi prince for its academic center on Muslim and Christian relations. Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R) sent a letter… to president John J. DeGioia expressing concern about the donation and asking whether the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding has ever produced any reports critical of Saudi Arabia.”
Representative Wolf’s press release on this inquiry can be accessed at http://wolf.house.gov/index.cfm?sectionid=34&parentid=6§iontree=6,34&itemid=1056.
Meanwhile, the Saudi cornucopia continues to spill over. The focus now seems to have turned toward individual faculty members. According to the Washington Advisory Group --- http:// www.theadvisorygroup.com/ --- a management consulting firm catering to R1 universities, in June 2008 a dozen lucky scientists were awarded a total of $120 million in Saudi grant money. Each researcher is involved in some aspect of alternative energy or energy conservation research. Each will receive $2-million per year for five years. The home universities of the 12 lucky faculty range geographically all the way from the University of Toronto to Penn State and Georgia Tech, and across the Atlantic to Cambridge University.
Congressman Wolf’s are not the only eyebrows raised by this Saudi generosity. President Clifford May of the Washington-based, pro-Israel think tank, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies --- http://www.defenddemocracy.org/ --- speculates, “There’s a possibility these campuses aren’t getting gifts, they’re getting investments… sometimes money is a bribe. Sometimes it’s a tip.”
As the price at the pump tops $4.00 per gallon and the war in the Middle East grinds on, Saudi Arabia arguably requires the goodwill of American academia more than it ever did, even in September 2001. Although May is hardly an unbiased observer, it’s difficult to disagree that such mega-gifts can purchase a lot of goodwill and positive press.
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--- December 6, 2008:
Why Reforming American Education Is Crucial
By James Castagnera
Attorney at Large
Last week in this space, talking about how to win the war on terror, I asserted, “The American workforce must be better prepared to compete in the global marketplace. When we are through congratulating ourselves on electing our first black president, let's recall that inner-city high school graduation rates still hover at or below 50 percent in most major metropolises. Colleges are over-priced and inefficiently labor-intensive. We are cranking out too many lawyers and too few engineers and scientists.”
Just as I am convinced that our national security against terrorists rests primarily on good police work, secure borders, and a sensible immigration policy, the proliferation of drug wars, inner-city gangs, and campus crazies persuades me that education --- like energy --- is a national security issue. I offer two reasons why.
First, no democracy can feel itself either fair or safe, when it allows an inner-city proletariat to persist and fester from generation to generation. According to the cover story in the December 8th TIME Magazine, “Young Americans are less likely than their parents were to finish high school.” Adds the article’s authors, “This is an issue that is warping the nation’s economy and security.” They are right.
A report issued in April by America’s Promise Alliance and reported on Fox News found high school graduation rates below 50% in America’s 50 largest cities. According to Fox, “The report found troubling data on the prospects of urban public high school students getting to college. In Detroit's public schools, 24.9 percent of the students graduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated in Indianapolis Public Schools and 34.1 percent received diplomas in the Cleveland Municipal City School District.”
Consider this: the odds that you or I will be the victim of one of these thousands of high school dropouts is astronomically higher than the chance that one of us will be killed by an international terrorist. Philadelphia annually averages about 400 homicides, for example. While many of these killings are drug dealers or gang members taking out their rivals in jungle-land turf battles, the collateral damage in innocent citizens, including kids, is heartbreaking.
We need only glance across our southern border to Juarez, Mexico, to see how much worse it could become. As early this year as February 28th, the Dallas News reported 72 drug-related murders in Juarez and worried that the violence could begin spilling over the porous border. In Mexico, the killings include public officials who try to oppose the warring factions. “Among the dead there: journalists, a city council member and a police chief on the job just seven hours before he was gunned down. Additionally, the cartels tried to assassinate a federal legislator. And efforts to clean up the force have stalled, as nobody wants the job of police chief. Local media self-censors to survive.” A popular way for cartel killers to communicate their message is to hang a beheaded corpse from a highway overpass.
How great is the distance between Philadelphia and Juarez? Thousands of miles as the crow flies, but perhaps only a few years away in terms of escalating violence, as our uneducated proletariats turn in increasing numbers to the only livelihood likely to pay them well.
For those who do graduate from high school and hope to come to college, the current financial crisis may pose an insurmountable barrier. College students already are regularly graduating with five-figure “mortgages” on their diplomas. Often, if mom and pop are footing the tuition bills, an actual second-mortgage on the family homestead is how the money is raised. Now, even that undesirable method may be slipping away, as home equity shrinks and major lenders like City Bank flounder. We’ll have to wait and see whether the college class of 2013, which will come to campus in September ’09, will be substantially smaller than this year’s crop of collegians. I predict it will be.
Those who can’t afford college probably won’t be working either. This morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer’s front page reports the highest unemployment rate in 34 years: 6.7% nationally. More than 500,000 jobs, adds the Inky, evaporated just last month.
More than 100 years ago, the famous defense attorney Clarence Darrow claimed, “There are more people go to jail in hard times than in good times — few people comparatively go to jail except when they are hard up. They go to jail because they have no other place to go. They may not know why, but it is true all the same. People are not more wicked in hard times. That is not the reason. The fact is true all over the world that in hard times more people go to jail than in good times, and in winter more people go to jail than in summer…. The people who go to jail are almost always poor people — people who have no other place to live first and last.”
The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, more than 700 people per 100,000. Only Russia, some of the other states of the former USSR, and a couple of Caribbean countries come close. Are we stronger on law and order than our sister democracies? Or are we failing to provide alternatives to crime?
And where lies the greater threat to our security, Afghanistan or the city nearest your home?
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