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Showing posts with label Academia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Academia. Show all posts
Amazing statement from Professor Gerald Early defending Obama lying in his autobiography

Amazing statement from Professor Gerald Early defending Obama lying in his autobiography


See the discussion at 1:52 into the video. The written article that goes along with the video is at Fox News.

The Story presents more than three-dozen instances of material discrepancy where Dreams fails to align with the facts as Maraniss reports them. Case in point: Maraniss confirmed that Mr. Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, left his father, Barack Obama, Sr., a volatile bigamist, and not the other way around, as related in Dreams.
Dreams also related the tale of Obama's paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango, who was said to have been detained and tortured in a prison outside Nairobi for six months because of his brave defiance of British colonialists. But after a half-dozen interviews and other research, Maraniss deemed the tale "unlikely." . . .
Gerald Early, a noted professor of English literature and African-American studies at Washington University in St. Louis, agreed. "It really doesn't matter if he made up stuff," Early told Fox News. "I mean, after all, it's like you going to a psychiatrist and you make up stuff, and the psychiatrist can still psychoanalyze you because they're your lies." . . .
told Maraniss that Obama had "greatly exaggerated" inDreams the details of another encounter between them. . . .
Surprise: Journal editors ask scholars to cite relevant articles from their journals in their research

Surprise: Journal editors ask scholars to cite relevant articles from their journals in their research

This is a surprise? The fact that it is primarily younger authors who get the most suggestions slightly helps to differentiate it from the fact that editors might simply know the articles in their own journal best. The alternative might be the editors want to suggest articles that they know to everyone, but that they refrain from doing so to senior researchers who might react negatively. From USA Today:

Business, economics and related scholarly journal editors are coercing scholars into unnecessarily citing their own journals, a survey suggests, perverting the research record.

A system of "impact factors", tied to references listed in studies, pervades the scholarly enterprise, notes survey author Allen Wilhite and Eric Fong of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who reports the survey of 6,672 researchers in economics, sociology, psychology, and business research in the current Science journal. The survey covered journal editor behavior from 832 publications.

Overall, about 20% of survey respondents say that a journal editor had coerced extra citations to their own journal from them. Broadly, journals with higher impact factors attract more prestige, advertising and power in hiring and firing decisions in scholarly circles, the authors note, giving journal editors an incentive to extort added citations to their publications in the studies they consider for publication. "(T)he message is clear: Add citations or risk rejection," write the authors.

In particular, younger professors with few co-authors who need publications to keep their jobs reported the most pressure. Business journal editors coerced the most often, followed by economics, and then psychology and other social sciences. . . .
Sachs' amazing claims don't seem to hold water

Sachs' amazing claims don't seem to hold water

The Economist Magazine points out that there might be a few problems with Jeffrey Sachs phenomenal claims.

Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University argues that if public investment and foreign aid are big enough, they will boost household incomes, spurring savings and boosting local investment. They should also “crowd in” external investment by improving infrastructure.

Unlike most economists, Mr Sachs can put other people’s money where his mouth is. He set up the “millennium village project”, taking 14 places in rural Africa with about 500,000 people and, since 2006, making them the subjects of a $150m project run by his university and African governments.

The project—motto: “no single intervention is enough…we must improve them all”—carries huge hopes. Touring a village in Malawi, the UN’s secretary-general says he saw the potential of technologies such as smartphones and drip irrigation “to advance human well-being in ways that simply were not feasible even a few years ago”. George Soros, a financier, gave the project $47m and predicted that it would transform entire regions. . . .

The projects’ backers claim extraordinary results: a 700% increase in the use of antimalarial bednets; a 350% increase in access to safer water; a 368% increase in primary-school meal programmes. On closer inspection, though, these numbers turn out to be less dramatic. . . .

Michael Clemens of the Centre for Global Development, a think-tank, and Gabriel Demombynes of the World Bank says that a randomised trial is needed to disentangle what the millennium programme is doing from what is happening anyway. In such a trial, each village would be paired with a similar one not getting the same help—and the results compared. . . .

Now a Kenyan economist, Bernadette Wanjala of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, has raised further doubts about the project. She interviewed 236 randomly selected households in Sauri who had been offered the benefits and 175 randomly selected ones who had not. In a study with Roldan Muradian of Radboud University, she concluded the first group had raised their agricultural productivity by an impressive 70%. Yet she found that the impact on household income was “insignificant”, and that there had been little extra saving or investment. The villagers had grown more food—and eaten it. They became better nourished, but this did not affect the wider economy. . . .
"What Passes for Debate Among the Left in Academia"

"What Passes for Debate Among the Left in Academia"

It would be nice if there was some real condemnation for these types of personal attacks in academia.



Donohue wasn’t willing to let Wilson’s dissent go unanswered, and the attacks became quite personal. In a debate carried nationally on National Public Radio, Donohue attacked Wilson as letting his alleged employment by the NRA bias his academic findings:

The lone dissenter [Wilson] was someone who was not an econometrician, who admitted in his dissent that he wished he knew more econometrics, and who had previously testified as an expert witness on behalf of the execrable NRA.


When later called on this claim after the debate, Mr. Donohue did not offer proof, but instead called on Wilson to prove that he had never gotten paid by the NRA. When asked for evidence, . . . .
David Protess founder of "Innocence Project" removed from teaching and forced to retire because of ethical problems

David Protess founder of "Innocence Project" removed from teaching and forced to retire because of ethical problems

This is a pretty surprising event for academia: “You have the most lionized member of the faculty suddenly becoming somebody who is summarily removed from teaching with no notice and subjected to a kind of banishment." From the NY Times has this story about David Protess, a renowned journalist and professor:

But in a search of Innocence Project computers, the university turned up an e-mail from Mr. Protess to his assistant in 2006 that indicated the students’ reporting memos had been shared with the defense.

“My position about memos, as you know, is that we share everything with the legal team, and don’t keep copies,” he wrote, referring to Mr. McKinney’s lawyers.

But the copy of the e-mail he provided to university lawyers was altered to read, “My position about memos, as you know, is that we don’t keep copies.”

Mr. Protess said that he altered the e-mail to reflect the actual practice of the Innocence Project as he remembered it.

“Everybody assigns sinister motives to what I did, but my intent was not to mislead; it was precisely the opposite,” he said. “My part was due to memory failure about the extent to which I had shared student memos with the defense, and then I stubbornly stuck to that position when I felt ganged up on by everybody else.”

With the discovery of the e-mail, what had been a publicly united front broke down behind the scenes. At a hastily called faculty meeting at Medill on April 6, Mr. Lavine presented his colleagues with a PowerPoint presentation of statements and actions by Mr. Protess that the dean considered misleading, and asked for opinions. But by the time the faculty members got back to their desks, a press release had already been issued announcing Mr. Protess would not be teaching spring semester and making it clear he would not be welcomed back after that. . . .
Bias in academia

Bias in academia

As the article says, these types of numbers don't come about by randomness. I have a discussion of this bias in my book Freedomnomics.

It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three. . . .
“I consider myself very middle-of-the-road politically: a social liberal but fiscal conservative. Nonetheless, I avoid the topic of politics around work,” one student wrote. “Given what I’ve read of the literature, I am certain any research I conducted in political psychology would provide contrary findings and, therefore, go unpublished. Although I think I could make a substantial contribution to the knowledge base, and would be excited to do so, I will not.” . . .
Rampant cheating in academia

Rampant cheating in academia

Given how poor the English is of these students, it seems that these essays will only temporarily benefit these students. But presumably there are many students who do get long term advantage from this cheating. The discussion is available here.
New Piece at National Review: "Medical Journal Bias on Guns"

New Piece at National Review: "Medical Journal Bias on Guns"

My new piece at National Review starts this way:

Medical journals are not always the objective, purely scientific publications we might think that they are. Their editors have increasingly strayed into politics at the expense of scientific accuracy. For example, the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine has over the last few months published a number of extremely biased and poorly done studies on gun control.

One of the articles, written by Garen Wintemute, Anthony Braga, and David Kennedy, makes the case for extending background checks to the private transfers of guns, arguing that “perhaps the principal reason for the well-documented failure of the Brady Act to lower rates of firearm-related homicide is that its requirements do not apply to private-party gun sales.” But they do so without providing any evidence that these or any other background checks reduce crime. Further, they conveniently overlook the only research that has been done on what they are proposing. For instance, the updated More Guns, Less Crime specifically studied this very issue and found no evidence that either type of law helped reduced crime.

The only “evidence” that “screening works” comes from their claim that, in 2008, 1.5 percent of those having a Brady background check were denied from purchasing a gun. What the authors likely are aware of, though they do not tell the readers, is that virtually all these cases represent so-called “false-positives” . . .
"The Life of a Conservative Professor in Academia"

"The Life of a Conservative Professor in Academia"

The American Thinker has a conservative professor's interesting piece on his experience for 40 years at the University of Maryland (his school isn't mentioned in the piece, but people can find this out quickly by searching on the internet). I never met Ron at the university, but I can personally attest to the fact that he made some differences at the margin. Here is just a small part of his essay:

My epiphany came about 20 years ago at the inauguration of a new campus president. In his acceptance speech, he said many things that seemed bizarre to me, but the comment I recall most vividly was his insistence that he would create a world-class university by building "excellence through diversity." His point seemed to be that by substantially increasing the number of minority and female faculty, staff and students (and consequently decreasing the number of white males), this would of necessity make us a great university.

I always thought that the best way to build a great university was to attract the brightest, most innovative and productive faculty and students -- regardless of their hue -- but I realized at that moment, as the applause for his idea rained down, how out of step I was. . . .
More news coverage on academic freedom at our universities

More news coverage on academic freedom at our universities

The Hartford Courant has this:

Should college students be challenged by new and unfamiliar ideas, even if those ideas offend them or make them feel uncomfortable? An incident that occurred last fall at Central Connecticut State University suggests that the answer, as far as campus administrators are concerned, is no — that the comfort level of students matters more than their education.

In October 2008, students in a class in the department of communication at Central were asked to select a topic covered by the mainstream media and discuss it in class. Students were free to express their opinions on the topic they selected. At least that is what they thought they were allowed to do. . . . .
How to teach economics

How to teach economics

I think that most professors just find it much easier to teach technical material. It is pretty mindless and mechanical. The Chronicle has the story here:

The undergraduate major in economics is generally healthy, but it would be stronger if faculty members had better skills in presenting the discipline to the vast majority of their students who do not want to become academic economists. That is the verdict of a draft report to be discussed here Saturday during the annual meeting of the American Economic Association.

The report was drafted by David C. Colander, a professor of economics at Middlebury College, and KimMarie McGoldrick, a professor of economics at the University of Richmond. It is one of a series of reports supported by the Teagle Foundation in an effort to promote “fresh thinking” about various undergraduate majors.

The good news, according to Mr. Colander and Ms. McGoldrick, is that most undergraduate economics departments continue to offer a broad education that speaks to students who might pursue business, public policy, or academic careers. A new national survey has found that a large majority of economics majors are satisfied with their programs.

But the authors fear that as doctoral education in economics becomes more technical and abstract — a trend Mr. Colander has criticized elsewhere — new faculty members are badly prepared to teach economics to undergraduate students with diverse interests. . . .


Personally, I am not as optimistic as Colander and McGoldrick are about the current state of the field. I have had two sons studying economics in college and their intermediate economics classes are mindless mechanical minimization and maximization problems.
Should Students be encouraged to take brainpower boosting drugs?

Should Students be encouraged to take brainpower boosting drugs?

I have a lot of pieces on this issue here. It seems to me like a simple cost benefit analysis. There is no more a moral question than whether people should drink coffee to wake up or have surgery to repair joints. This article below is from the Times of London:

Students should be allowed to take “smart drugs”, such as Ritalin, to help boost their academic performance, a leading academic has suggested.

John Harris, professor of bioethics and director of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester, said the government and medical profession should “seriously consider” making cognition-enhancing drugs available to students without prescription, or allowing them to be prescribed for non-therapeutic purposes, such as studying.

Students have long used drugs to boost their study performance. Caffeine and ginseng are traditional favourites. But recently the use of more powerful, restricted drugs, particularly the anti-hyperactivity medicine Ritalin, has spread from campuses in the US.

Currently such drugs are available only on prescription. Although many students buy them on the internet, their use without a prescription is a criminal offence.

But Professor Harris, joint Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Medical Ethics, said that serious consideration should now be given to making some of them available on prescription for non-medical reasons, specifically for the purpose of enhancing cognitive performance.

There was now a sizeable body of evidence to show that stimulants such as Ritalin, Provigil and Adderall significantly improve concentration and performance and their side effects were proportional to their benefits, he said. . . . .
For a list of the World's Top 200 Universities

For a list of the World's Top 200 Universities

The Times Higher Education has a report on the top 200 universities in the world. The top ten are reportedly:

Harvard
Yale
University of Cambridge
University of Oxford
California Institute of Technology
Imperial College London
University College London
University of Chicago
MIT
Columbia

My own belief is that the Brits who put this survey together are a little bit biased towards their own country. For example, if a student were asking whether they should go to Princeton or the University College of London, I don't think that it would be a close call, but they say that for most degrees you should pick the later. I might be interesting to compare their ranking for US schools against other rankings for US schools because I would guess that they won't match up very well. For whatever it is worth, in my own small area of expertise, the best UK school regarding economics is the London School of Economics, and they do have some very good people there. But the LSE is ranked well down at 66th.
University of Chicago Professor Questions whether Palin is a Woman

University of Chicago Professor Questions whether Palin is a Woman

As someone who has been around academics, this is not particularly surprising.

Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman. The Republican party's cynical calculation that because she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!) she speaks for the women of America, and will capture their hearts and their votes, has driven thousands of real women to take to their computers in outrage. She does not speak for women; she has no sympathy for the problems of other women, particularly working class women.


Doesn't speak well for the state of sex education in Illinois, does it?

The thing to understand is that academia doesn't really value diversity per se. Groups that are perceived to be fairly liberal are viewed as underrepresented and helped to gain admittance, but once an individual in these groups is identified as a conservative they are no longer allowed to count as a black or Hispanic or a whatever other underrepresented group that they were being used to proxy for.

UPDATE: A friend of mine, Robert Hansen, reports that the local newspaper for Hanover, NH contains a similar story. The first line says: "Sarah Palin is No Woman."
The Craziness of Academia: the Association of American Law Schools boycott

The Craziness of Academia: the Association of American Law Schools boycott

The Chronicle of Higher Education notes this:

Law-Schools Meeting Finds a Way to Deal With Boycott Threat

The Association of American Law Schools may have found a way out of a sticky situation. The association had contracted with the Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel, in San Diego, several years ago to hold its annual meeting there next January. But The San Diego Union-Tribune reported in March that the hotel’s owner was a prominent contributor to an effort to amend the California Constitution to ban same-sex marriages, and several groups had threatened to boycott the meeting unless the association moved it to another hotel.

According to a statement adopted by its executive committee late last week, the association had also booked rooms at the San Diego Marriott, and the contracts left the choice of where to locate specific events — such as registration, an exhibit hall, and representatives’ meetings — up to the association. “We will honor our contracts with both hotels, and we have exercised our option to hold all AALS events at the Marriott to ensure the maximum participation by our members,” the statement reads. . . .


The Chronicle left out one little embarrassing fact. What makes this story particularly funny and newsworthy is that the Association of American Law Schools went through huge efforts to boycott a hotel because of the owner's support for banning same-sex marriage but failed to see that the Marriott and Hyatt are BOTH owned by people who support amending the California Constitution to ban same-sex marriages. Here are some sources on this here and here.

Pediatrics attack: This passes for academic discussions in medicine?


Simply saying that "We respectfully disagree with Dr. Lott's comments and stand by our editorial" is irksome. As one friend wrote me: "Their response is puzzling--they just ignore everything you say and say they stand by their original conclusions--bizarre."

UPDATE: SayUncle puts this in perspective here.
Robert VerBruggen mentions the exchange here at NRO's phi beta cons.
University of Colorado at Boulder setting aside money specifically to hire a conservative academic

University of Colorado at Boulder setting aside money specifically to hire a conservative academic

The Denver Post has the article here:

Mr. Peterson's quest has been greeted with protests from some faculty and students, who say the move is too — well, radical.

"Why set aside money specifically for a conservative?" asks Curtis Bell, a teaching assistant in political science. "I'd rather see a quality academic than someone paid to have a particular perspective." Even some conservatives who have long pushed for balance in academia voice qualms. Among them is David Horowitz, a conservative agitator whose book "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America" includes two Boulder faculty members: an associate professor of ethnic studies who writes about the intersection of Chicano and lesbian issues, and a philosophy professor focused on feminist politics and "global gender justice." While he approves of efforts to bolster a conservative presence on campus, Mr. Horowitz fears that setting up a token right-winger as The Conservative at Boulder will brand the person as a curiosity, like "an animal in the zoo." We "fully expect this person to be integrated into the fabric of life on campus," replies Todd Gleeson, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Boulder is far from the only campus to recognize a leftward tilt to the ivory tower. National surveys have repeatedly shown that liberals dominate faculties at most four-year colleges.


Anne Neal at NRO notes:

Universities should never hire faculty members on the basis of their beliefs. They should always make hiring decisions on the basis of candidates’ professional qualifications.


That is a fine thought, but that is in fact what universities do all the time. How do you get schools away from this bad equilibrium that they are in? I don't think that was is proposed for Colorado would do that because you need to hire people who are in a department, that is where other hiring will be occurring.
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