Women Rising. What's next?

According to a recent article in the Monitor, of the 130 students admitted to Makerere University's faculty of law this year, 106 are women. Of the 100 law graduates admitted to Uganda's Law Development Centre, through which all lawyers must pass before practicing, 58 are women. Reflective of a recent trend in Ugandan legal education, these numbers are becoming increasingly typical in many countries. In South Africa, nearly 56% of all university students are women. In the U.S., women have comprised the bulk of college entrants for years.

A story on NPR's Morning Edition yesterday called attention to a new, and illegal, counter trend in U.S. higher education: A new admissions advantage for men.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is investigating whether some colleges and universities, concerned about becoming predominately female, are admitting lesser qualified men in the place of well-qualified women in order to create gender balance. Such a policy would run counter to Title IX, which bans gender discrimination at institutions that receive federal aid and continues the zero-sum philosophy that has governed U.S. higher education from the beginning. Why must it be the case that when women win, men lose?

What's next for higher education now that women are making inroads? Action to encourage women to pursue studies in fields where they remain underrepresented and attention to the issues that are preventing men--particularly traditionally underserved men--from enrolling at all.

The Incredibly Precarious Status of University Professors

Concerned about what it perceives as new threats to academic freedom of speech, the Association of American University Professors (AAUP) has launched an action campaign called Speak Up, Speak Out: Protect the Faculty Voice on Campus. Complete with a website, action toolkit and comprehensive report just released, the AAUP has mounted a major defensive against the application in higher education settings of the 2006 Supreme Court ruling in Garcetti v. Ceballos.

Without exploring the fact that this is a great strategy on the part of AAUP for reasserting its relevance--the organization has been in the doldrums of late, and academic freedom, an issue that practically made the AAUP--this is a really interesting case.

In Garcetti v. Ceballos, the Supreme Court found that the first amendment does not necessarily protect speech made by public employees in their official capacity. In this case, an assistant district attorney was demoted for criticizing a local sheriff. The feared higher education corollary would be the withholding first amendment protection for faculty members (or staff, presumably) who speak out about or otherwise criticize their institution. Though, at the time of the ruling, Justice Anthony Kennedy, stated that Garcetti v. Ceballos was not intended to apply to speech made by faculty members at public colleges and universities, it is being applied in just that way.

As reported by Inside HigherEd in 2008, a lower court dismissed a lawsuit brought by University of California at Irvine Professor Juan Hong who claimed that he was wrongfully denied a merit raise because he spoke out about what he considered to be the excessive use of part-time faculty. Citing Garcetti v. Ceballos, the court found that Hong's comments were made within the scope of his "official duties" as a faculty member and were not protected under the first amendment.

Garcetti v. Ceballos is the point of departure for the AAUP's new report. According to the AAUP, a faculty member's criticism of her home institution and its practices should be treated no differently than her professional critique of, say, post-modernism in Germany. Criticism of a professor's institution, the AAUP argues, is a part of his job, his service to humanity.

What a fascinating case. It gets at the very heart of the professoriate and begs many questions: What are academic faculty members if they cannot criticize their institutions--public or not? Are they simply employees, managers or partners in governance? According to the landmark 1980 Yeshiva case, faculty members are managers, exempting them from the right to bargain collectively. As managers, should not they be allowed to engage in some discussion about their public institutions? And, under the concept of shared governance, should not they be allowed to criticize their institutions within the same broad range allowed other governing directors? Or are they first members of academic disciplines that best serve the public by transcending, and perhaps, superseding institutions?

This is a debate worth following.

Can Someone Say Anachronism?

I know I am not the only person shocked by the recent row at Hampton University, a historically black university in the U.S., over the crowning of the first white Miss Hampton. I could not care less that Miss Hampton is white (or even that she appealed to President Obama to school her classmates on racial tolerance!), but I am appalled that Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) still hold beauty pageants.

In her article titled "Miss Who?" Elizabeth Reed, a student writer for the North Carolina State University Spartan Echo, does not even come close to questioning the tradition of pageants on HBCU campuses. Instead, she questions the legitimacy of HBCUs in a white-miss-U paradigm and states emphatically: "It is inappropriate for a white female to represent an African American school. If Hampton University wants this person to be the image of their school, then maybe they should reconsider whether they want to be categorized as an HBCU."

In response to the controversy, the director of Hampton's pageant had only this to say: "We have all kinds of people on our campus; we are not in a cocoon. As far as I'm concerned, we need to get her ready to serve HU and to move on and represent us at Miss Virginia."

Come on, folks. Get with the program. Some traditions deserve the boot. Beauty pageants have no place in higher education.

Adding Value: Higher Education and New Technologies

Yesterday, I attended a luncheon discussion headlined by Gwen Ifill, moderator and managing editor of Washington Week, a popular show on U.S. public television. The event honored woman leaders and Ifill's remarks were both insightful and inspiring. When asked by a member of the audience what issues she thought most deserved to be covered in the media, but were not, she said that there were many, but had recently heard President Barack Obama state that he wished more attention would be paid to his efforts to promote and improve education. Indeed, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been unusually engaged, challenging educators to rethink their approaches and tools. This is largely because the world is changing rapidly, and there is a sense among many that the U.S. education sector is lagging far behind.

This fact was underscored at a reception and panel discussion I attended last night. Also geared towards woman leaders--in this case, those in the higher education sector--the reception brought together woman administrators for discussion about new information and communication technologies, social networking and higher education. The discussion was moderated by the president of the state public radio corporation who had also attended the Gwen Ifill luncheon earlier in the day and opened the panel with this quotation from her: "Transformation happens when you are looking the other way."

From there, she offered a synopsis of what she considered to be the big ideas driving the technological revolution. One of them was simply what she called "free." That is, information and other materials are now free thanks to today's technologies. She spent some time expounding on this idea, as she found it particularly problematic. She pointed to an ascendant culture that no longer pays for information because, in her words, "if it is free, why pay?" This culture, she said, is responsible for numerous newspaper reporters losing their jobs because, while print media organizations such as the New York Times plow big money into investigative and other stories, search engines like Google comb the internet, aggregating these stories and giving them away at no cost whatsoever. And, in the case of higher education, she noted, free online courseware is equally hazardous for professors who will soon find themselves without work as students opt for free online courses over classroom time. Free, a defining characteristic, of the method by which information and ideas are transmitted today was certainly the most threatening of the big ideas she discussed.

And, to conclude her marks, the moderator showed a rather ominous YouTube video with a scary soundtrack called Did You Know?. Against a background of flying question marks--think the opening credits of Star Wars, but with question marks rather than stars--the video posed questions, answers and facts about the new technological era. They included things like: "India has more honors kids than America has kids" and "China will soon become the largest English-speaking country in the world." Scary stuff, eh? What was clear from these opening remarks, overblown as they were, is that the times are certainly changing.

What was not so clear from the remarks or the ensuing panel discussion was how public radio, newspapers and higher education institutions plan on adapting to this changing environment. Just this week at the 2009 Educause Conference, higher education technologists gathered to discuss the future of libraries. According to an interesting piece in Inside HigherEd, for many at the conference, new information and communication technologies spell the demise of libraries. After centuries of existence, a mere couple of decades with Google Books and YouTube have just about wrapped it up for enduring institutions. Others, however, see in the history of libraries a tradition of and capacity for adaptation. The question is not how do libraries persist despite a changing environment, but how do they add value to it?

As someone who is absolutely thrilled about MIT's Open Courseware, TED lectures, iTunes U and the abundance of free information on the Web, I must admit that I find information gathering and analysis these days to be a bit daunting. In fact, I blog in order to process what I read, and colleagues tell me that they do the same, whether blogging, tweeting or using other tools. Isn't this the critical purpose of the new library and university? To help us process all of this free information rather than to sell it to us?

Perhaps one of the reasons why we do not see much media coverage of President Obama's education initiatives is because the education sector is not yet onboard with his, or any, change agenda. Indeed, Secretary Duncan recently called for major reform of teacher education programs prompting many program leaders to nod in agreement as they pointed fingers at each other.

The technology driven transformation we are witnessing is real. I hope higher education institutions do not turn their heads from this one.

Social Media and the University

I mindlessly made the following remark a couple of months ago to a colleague--an avid blogger, tweeter and iPhone user-- as he prepared to deliver remarks before an undergraduate convocation:

"Now look, you cannot use your iPhone to tweet while you are on stage sitting next to the president."

After closing my mouth, I paused and thought to myself: why ever not? Because it would be a rude distraction? Or because tweeting was inappropriate in sacred academic spaces, amid the gowns, gonfalons and other regalia? Or because I'd never seen it done before? Well, it would certainly have been a bit of a distraction, and to some, a downright affront. I could just hear the gasps of visiting dignitaries at the unsheathing of an iPhone and the pitter-patter of fingertips during the perfect tweetable moment. But, would it have been a game-ender? Would the gods of higher education rained down fire and brimstone for an innocent tweet posted from a dais during opening ceremonies?

This silent rumination gave way to more thoughts about the implications of new information and communication technologies, particularly social media, for higher education. Within higher education, there seems to be both a zeal around these new technologies and a silent loathing. Just as more and more presidents turn to tweeting and colleges and universities join Facebook, there is also brooding fear about these new tools. I have heard concerns about blogs allowing any and everyone to elevate themselves as an expert when true mastery comes only with the dedication and focus of a doctorate. I have heard complaints about the inevitable dumbing down of young people who Twitter and text and the demise of literature at the hands of email. I have heard online courses trashed and seen eyebrows rise at mention of MIT's open courseware. And, we have all heard that social media and video game culture have ruined students' abilities to focus and sit through lectures. Though it is hardly the dominant sentiment, there is a sense among some on college and university campuses that these new technologies are threatening.

While I certainly do not think these technologies pose a threat to higher education , I do believe that they are completely upending the traditional process of knowledge generation and dissemination, dominated by colleges and universities. They also interrupt a legacy of arcane ceremony, staid hierarchy, and exclusivity by elevating the voices of students, community members, and independent scholars and bringing them into previously closed spaces.

A couple of months ago, I read about a session at a higher education conference where participants were allowed to tweet to a feed prominently displayed on a screen at the front of the meeting room. The result was a simultaneous feedback loop: from speaker to audience and from audience to speaker/audience. On display at this conference was what many today are calling the social media backchannel, or in this case, the Twitter-enabled backchannel. The backchannel consists of all of the side conversations that take place outside of an official space. It is in these side conversations where candid thoughts, raw ideas and partnerships are hatched.

By leveling playing fields, these backchannels create an opportunity for democratic dialog between established authorities and those traditionally spoken to, taught or otherwise acted upon. Both those in authority--as in my colleague who might have tweeted from the convocation dais--and those not can use the technologies to subvert structures of power by speaking directly, candidly and as equals to each other. This may sound benign, but this redirection of the flow of discussion and knowledge is a major development within the halls of academe where the power dynamic is, more than anything else, like that of the other institutional relic of the old world, the church.