DO IVIES SUCH AS HARVARD MATTER?

Principally a review of two books: "UNIVERSITY, INC: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education" by Jennifer Washburn and "PRIVILEGE: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" by Ross Gregory Douthat. The reviewer is Alan Ryan, Warden of New College, Oxford. He was professor of politics at Princeton University from 1988-96.

We take large, modern research universities so much for granted that it requires an effort to realise how easily we could do without them - even Berkeley, Harvard, and Oxford, to take the three that members of the academy themselves recently rated as the best in the world. Consider the higher education of the young. One of university's main functions in the field of tertiary education - pre-professional education - could be performed in schools of law, accountancy, medicine, teacher-training and the like where professional education itself is given. As for liberal education - introducing students to a wide range of disciplines to develop their minds while they are young - it is best provided in small colleges by people who take it seriously. It is not assisted, but threatened, by diversions of time, money, and managerial effort into the research activities of the modern university.

"Blue skies" research could easily be done in publicly funded research institutes by professional researchers unencumbered by the pretence that they are engaged in teaching the young. And the function that increasingly dominates the life of the modern university - doing research and development for the benefit, and often under the control, of multinational pharmaceutical and telecommunications companies - could and perhaps should be done in commercial research parks. The new California Institutes for Science and Innovation described in Jennifer Washburn's University Inc. are to all intents and purposes just that, even though they are one-third funded by the State of California and two-thirds by private corporations, physically housed on the campuses of the University of California system, and staffed in part by academics.

What would be lost, if we disaggregated Berkeley, Harvard and Oxford? One slightly surprising fact is that there would be no problem recruiting the next generation of high-grade research workers; in the US, the best liberal arts colleges, such as Williams, Amherst or Swarthmore, where the focus is on undergraduate education, send a higher proportion of their graduates into research training than do Ivy League universities such as Harvard and Yale. It is less surprising on second thoughts. The idea that a student gets a deeper insight into Shakespeare by attending a university whose hospital is especially good at transplants is not very plausible; but one has to believe it to suppose that, say, Stanford's excellence in advanced surgical procedures automatically enhances the education in the humanities that it provides.

Since we can imagine a world without research universities, where the disparate things they do are spread among professional schools, community colleges, liberal arts colleges, research institutes and research parks, we might wonder whether there is any function that only a research university can perform - and whether it is one that is threatened by co-operation with industry. Those are the questions asked and answered in University Inc.

The book is somewhat sensationally sub-titled, "the corporate corruption of higher education". But it is actually a calm, balanced and careful look at a topic that has exercised many commentators, among them Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard. Bok's exploration of the damage that corporate ties can do was published last year. Universities in the Marketplace was no more reassuring than Washburn's book, but she has more to say than he did about the wider legal and political context in which universities work.

John Dewey provided the received view of the university's unique place in society 90 years ago. A century ago, it was common for trustees to demand the dismissal of professors whose political views they disliked - and to get their own way. Security of tenure was needed, said Dewey, because the university's unique role was to perform "the truth function" - to discover and disseminate the truth so far as it could be known, for its own sake and for no ulterior purpose. That is why "blue skies" research belongs inside a university rather than in a government-funded institute: only inside the university is there the necessary pressure to publish the truth, unvarnished, unadjusted, awkward and embarrassing as that truth may be.

At least, that's the theory. Performing the "truth function" is not easy. Nor is it threatened by only one danger. Ross Gregory Douthat's acerbic Privilege gives so many reasons for disliking Harvard that anyone who reads him alongside Jennifer Washburn may conclude that the damage done to universities by commercialisation is icing on the cake of their self-inflicted intellectual and social corruption. Still, we must not exaggerate; at the end of Privilege, readers will find Douthat succumbing, as everyone does, to the hope that higher education's better self can triumph over all. Nobody ever hoped to see Enron's better self.

University Inc. is built around three ideas that should animate thinking about university relations with commerce and industry. The first is that there is no gainsaying that where research can benefit everyone, it should - whether by making industry more efficient, finding more effective drugs, miniaturising electronic circuits or whatever. The idea that pure research is too pure to be sullied by exploitation is plain foolish.

The second is that whatever legal framework ensures that research can be exploited should not create conflicts of interest dangerous to the functioning of higher education. Many of these conflicts are familiar: too many professors draw a salary for teaching students while they have what amounts to a full-time job running a spinoff company or consulting on the side. Universities have rules limiting the amount of such work their faculty can do; but where someone brings in large sums of money to the university, rigorous enforcement of the rules too often goes by the board.

The third thought is that since the public spends a great deal of money on the research done in universities, the public ought to get a fair share of the benefit. Otherwise, the public pays for the research twice over, first through its taxes and then through the profits made by the companies that exploit the research. The question is what a fair return to the public actually is.

Might the public get a better bargain if the results of research remain available to anyone who wishes to use them, as part of the intellectual "commons"? And might the public have grounds for thinking that, if private sponsors fund research, the quality of what is produced should be more carefully policed than at present? When more than 90 per cent of papers reporting sponsored research into the effectiveness of drugs report positive findings, and only 60 per cent of non-sponsored research do so, anxiety about the corruption of the researcher's judgment - even inadvertent - is not misplaced.

The temptation is to denounce the wickedness of corporate capitalism, university administrators and the other "usual suspects". Washburn is too intelligent to succumb to that temptation. Universities have been starved of public funding over the past two decades and can hardly be expected to pass up the offer of private funds; and the pace of innovation in fields such as bio-technology is such that no company can pass up the chance to be involved in research. What is needed is not a retreat into an ivory tower but better regulation.

Universities Inc. induces two reactions in a British reader. The first is to envy the US its investigative reporters. The other is to wonder what a British version of Washburn might uncover. British universities have lately been encouraged to engage in aggressive patenting and licensing and it is hard to believe that they do not run the dangers she describes. If they do not, it is perhaps less because British universities are full of high-minded, strong-willed academics immune to the attractions of the dollar than because neither government nor business has been signing cheques as large as their American counterparts.

Ross Douthat's entertaining account of undergraduate alienation, on the other hand, induces the usual envy of the young for their fluency and vigour, and a little gratitude not to have been among the Harvard faculty and Douthat's undergraduate contemporaries who get their comeuppance in these pages. He does, however, make a serious argument worth chewing on. The whole point of Harvard, he thinks - and Harvard here stands for the Ivy League, its competitors such as Stanford or Duke, and its liberal arts cousins such as Amherst and Williams - is to reproduce the American ruling class. One might guess that he would have thought the argument over "social engineering" provoked by Steven Schwartz's report into university admissions in England and Wales last year was pretty naive. What else do elite universities engage in if not social engineering?

How indignant Douthat is about this fact is unclear. What he is certainly angry about is the basis on which the elite is selected. Forced to choose between an arbitrarily recruited elite whose rank is a matter of birth and accident - and whose arbitrariness might induce in the fortunate a certain sense of noblesse oblige - and the meritocracy that Harvard has put together on the basis of PSATs, SAT Is, SAT IIs, APs and the assorted extra-curriculars that American high school students engage in, he prefers the former.

This is not entirely irrational. Gordon Brown and Sir Peter Lampl are tremendous fans of the Harvard Admissions Office, but Douthat has done his homework. One hundred out of the 31,700 high schools in America provide more than a fifth of the students at Harvard, Yale and Princeton. These high schools are overwhelmingly private and heavily concentrated in the so-called "blue" states - those that vote Democrat. So Harvard is politically and geographically unrepresentative in the extreme. The university's attempt to create a "diverse" student body, meanwhile, amounts to recruiting a small number of black and Asian students who often take the first opportunity to self-segregate and frustrate the university's hope that their presence will do their white contemporaries some rather ill-defined educational good.

Although Harvard gives generous scholarship aid, the campus is no more economically diverse than it is politically diverse. The less well-off half of the American population provides less than 10 per cent of Ivy League students; 75 percent of students come from the top quarter of American families. The elite polished by Harvard is a narrowly recruited group; it may be cosmetically diverse - with enough black, Asian and ethnic minority students to match the American population in skin colour - but economically, ideologically, socially and culturally, it is nothing of the sort.....

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The Jihadist Prof at UC-Santa Barbara

The usual high standards of scholarship one expects from the UC

Lisa Hajjar has made an entire academic career out of bashing the United States and Israel for their supposed use of "torture" against Arabs. She spouts off these baseless accusations from her academic home at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), where she teaches in its "Law and Society" program. In fact she has no credentials at all in law. (She also teaches "Middle East Studies" at UCSB, with even fewer qualifications in that field.) Instead she holds a PhD in sociology from American University. The one in Washington, not Cairo.

Hajjar is among the shrillest voices in the United States trying to chant the accusations over American "abuses of the human rights" of the al-Qaeda terrorists in Guantanamo Bay. She served on the pretentious "world tribunal," the one that found Saddam's Iraq innocent and the US guilty of war crimes and human rights abuses. Among the "tribunal's" objective findings were that "the occupation of Palestine, Afghanistan and all other colonized areas is illegal and should be brought to an end immediately."

Lisa Hajjar has written:

"There is no reason to doubt that torture has been systemic and pervasive, or that authorization can be traced up the chain of command, or that this has seriously damaged not only the immediate victims but also our national institutions and America's image abroad. Yet top officials in the Bush Administration are still doing what torturing regimes do: denying the facts and blaming "rogue" officers. Despite the abundant evidence of torture, Congress refuses to challenge these denial tactics in any meaningful way, for example by refusing to confirm for high office those responsible. What we desperately need is public acknowledgment that torture is always and everywhere a crime, and an official policy that reflects this conviction."

Hajjar has tried to define herself academically as a scholar having some expertise on the use of torture. She defines her aim as the debunking the false "popular belief that Western history constitutes a progressive move from more to less torture." The fact that she publishes her "findings" on web sites of the communist party raises questions about her credibility and objectivity. Hajjar gets her kicks out of issuing "warnings" about human rights abuses. She has spent her energies bemoaning the "torture" of the Iraqi Ba'athists being held in the Abu Ghraib prison.

Lisa Hajjar is apparently the daughter of a Finnish mother and a father of Syrian descent. She teaches in the "Law and Society Program" at the University of California at Santa Barbara, but she is in fact nothing more than a third-rate leftist sociologist. She has no training in law or legal studies, is not qualified as a Middle East scholar or researcher, and his extraordinarily few bona fide publications even in sociology. None of this prevented UCSB from granting her tenure as well as its "Pious Award" for her "research". She was among the UCSB faculty members opposing the war against Iraq and defending Saddam as part of "Not in Our Name".

Before coming to Santa Barbara, Hajjar taught "military law" at Swarthmore. There she engaged in partisan one-sided indoctrination in her classroom, as is revealed by the syllabi of her courses there. Her required reading list was a who's who of far leftists, communists, and haters of American and Israel. Among her proclamations at Swarthmore, was: "While the United States voices outrage about Saddam Hussein, it goes on tolerating human rights violations and other misdeeds by regional allies." Her "research" at Swarthmore consisted of little more than serving as a cheerleader for politicized "cause lawyers."

Hajjar does not hide her support for Palestinian violence. She writes: "Because Palestinians are stateless and dispersed, their struggle for national rights has taken 'unconventional' forms, including guerilla warfare. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which emerged in the 1960s to lead this struggle, has been castigated by Israel, and to a lesser extent the US, as nothing but a terrorist organization. This typifies the use of the terrorist label to non-states in their struggles against states.. Since most Palestinians have identified politically with the PLO, it was easy for the Israeli state to relate the repression of Palestinians to the imperatives of Jewish/Israeli national security. Generally speaking, everything connected to Palestinian nationalist activities and especially to the PLO was considered a security threat which (sic) could justify limitations and restrictions of rights."

Those "unconventional" Palestinian forms of protest happen to include blowing up buses full of school children and pregnant mothers.

Hajjar is a radical feminist, but one with little real interest in the position of women in the Arab world and with no concern at all over Israeli women being murdered by her beloved Palestinian terrorists. She has mentioned that in Morocco things are less equitable than at Vassar. She seems to believe that the main cause for Arab feminists should be destroying Israel. She is highly praised by Neve Gordon, a fanatic anti-Israel lecturer in political science at Ben Gurion University in Israel, someone who was arrested for serving as a "human shield" for Palestinian murderers, and someone who wrote a sycophantic piece about Holocaust Denier Norman Finkelstein, comparing Finkelstein ethically to the Prophets in the Bible. Gordon and Hajjar like to cite one another as authoritative sources for the claim that Israel uses torture against Arab prisoners. This is a bit like Ward Churchill and Noam Chomsky citing one another's works to prove how that America is more oppressive than Nazi Germany.....

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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