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    • Canonical report on financialization of higher education

      AlfredENeuBernankeVery nice report from the folks at Debt and Society here about higher ed's tango with Wall Street. Lot's of distressing stuff, including the change from old fashioned bonds to newer, more risky types of debt:

      Private and public colleges in the past more commonly issued municipal bonds that would be repaid using only tax revenue or revenue from a particular project like a dormitory. Investment banking houses like JP Morgan and Barclays today have helped some higher education institutions to issue general revenue bonds that collateralize all college revenue in exchange for lower interest rates. Such bonds pledge state appropriations, project revenue, and even future tuition increases if necessary to repay bonds. Other institutions have gone a step further, adding variable rate bonds to their debt mix. Other institutions still, from Harvard to the Peralta Community College district have securitized these variable rate bond offerings with derivatives known as interest rate swaps. For-profit institutions, on the other hand can turn to corporate bonds, stock offerings, and private equity capital.

      There is also a nice history of higher education financing, describing how and why student and institutional indebtedness has exploded recently. In one decade alone the amount of institutional debt has tripled, much of it spent on new buildings and things related to athletics programs. It's a vicious circle. Colleges take out loans to expand amenities to attract students who will pay higher tuition, which requires raising tuition to pay off the debt, which requires expanding amenities, which requires taking out loans to expand amenities. . .*

      It's a very weird thing to have happened right after the financial crisis that caused the current recession.** Maybe not that weird though. . . If history teaches anything it's that very smart people can collectively do very stupid things.

      [*Also remember that, as recounted here, universities with the highest paid administrators and coaches also are the worst at larding their students up with debt and adjunctifying the faculty.

      **Also, check out Ed's piece from March here, which has a nice discussion of how the expanded institutional indebtedness ends up dictating administrative policy.]

    • How Wall Street Skims Higher Education

    • Goldfish-Pool Immortality

      Must an infinitely continued life inevitably become boring? Bernard William famously answers yes; John Fischer no. Fischer’s case is perhaps even more easily made than he suggests — but its very ease opens up new issues.

      Consider Neil Gaiman’s story “The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories” (yes, that’s the name of one story):

      He nodded and grinned. “Ornamental carp. Brought here all the way from China.”

      We watched them swim around the little pool.”I wonder if they get bored.”

      He shook his head. “My grandson, he’s an ichthyologist, you know what that is?”

      “Studies fishes.”

      “Uh-huh. He says they only got a memory that’s like thirty seconds long. So they swim around the pool, it’s always a surprise to them, going ‘I’ve never been here before.’ They meet another fish they known for a hundred years, they say, ‘Who are you, stranger?’”

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    • Harvard releases its internal report on Mark Hauser (h/t Eric S.)

      here.

      Its pretty damning.  The most appalling behavior, in my opinion, is the manner in which he threw the people below him under the bus to protect his fraudulent findings.

    • NYU Abu Dhabi Faculty letter to CHE (hat-tip Mathew Silverstein)

      Letter HERE, containing an explanation of what they are trying to accomplish, a discussion of labor issues in the gulf region, and what the university is doing about the recent scandals. It takes a lot of guts to be this forthright, and I think overall the letter's a good advertisement for the virtues of the kind of education they are delivering.

    • Brazilian music on Fridays: ‘Fio Maravilha’

      Continuing the football-themed series I started last week, today I’m posting ‘Fio Maravilha’ by Jorge Ben(Jor). In January 1972, the iconic team Flamengo was playing a friendly game against the Portuguese team Benfica in the Maracanã, and Jorge Ben, a fanatic Flamengo supporter, was among the spectators. Less than 15 minutes before the end of the game, the score was a frustrating 0 x 0, and so the spectators started to demand that João Batista de Sales, a much beloved player who was benched for that match, be let in the game. Coach Mário Zagallo finally decided to comply, and Sales was brought in as a substitute. In no time he scored an astonishing goal, sadly not immortalized on video. The goal is however immortalized in the song ‘Fio Maravilha’, which was the nickname given to Sales after this match; it was an angel’s goal, according to Jorge Ben. The song became very popular and won a national song festival in 1972, in the voice of singer Maria Alcina.

      Jorge Ben recorded 'Fio Maravilha' a number of times: I'm posting here 'Fio Maravilha' on its own, and also a hugely popular medley of this song with two other Jorge Ben classics: 'Taj Mahal' and 'País Tropical'. (And let me say for the 1000th time that Jorge Ben is an effing genius.)

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    • Another open access journal – αnalytica

      With the successful launching of Ergo,  it seems worth highlighting a recent announcemnt of another open access journal that has arrived on the scene:  αnalytica. It is:

      …an open-access, English-language electronic journal dedicated to the philosophy of science. αnalytica is edited by a younger generation of Greek philosophers of science, with the aid and support of an international advisory board. It provides a platform for peer-reviewed original contributions in philosophy of science, and is hosted by the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

      Dare we hope that more open access philosophy journals are on the way?

    • In Memoriam: Maya Angelou (1928-2014)

      I just heard the news that Dr. Maya Angelou died today.  I had the enormous privilege to take a class with her as an undergraduate at Wake Forest, and it was a singular experience.  It was not just her elegant command of the classroom – though I’ve seen few others whose personal presence equaled hers – it was that she taught literature that I didn’t even know existed: Garcia Lorca, Soyinka, Baldwin and Fanon, among others.  She started the course by having us write down the line from Terence: “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto” (I am a human, I consider nothing human as alien to me – yes, she made us write it in Latin, though she always added the translation), and over a series of uncomfortable texts, kept returning to the Terence as a way to stop us from distancing ourselves from them. It left as deep an impression as any course I took before or after.  It was only after her class that I read her own work and learned of her extraordinary life.  As discussions and tributes to her literature appear, we should pause to note that the world has also lost a great teacher.

    • Kelly Oliver on “A Brief History of the Electric Chair”

      Tennessee Students and Educators for Social Justice has launched a blog series on issues raised by mass incarceration and the death penalty.  This week's post is by Kelly Oliver, W. Alton Jones Chair of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University.  Oliver describes the "war of currents" between Edison and Westinhouse that led to the invention of the electric chair and the domination of the electricity market by a company backed by Edison:

      Edison had invested himself in direct current electricity while Westinghouse had invested in alternating current, which could be more easily transmitted at higher voltages over cheaper wires. In a campaign to discredit alternating current, Edison tried to convince people that it wasn’t safe, first by using it to electrocute animals and eventually by endorsing it for use in executing humans. Edison reasoned that people would not want the same current flowing into their homes that was used in the electric chair.

      In public demonstrations to discredit Westinghouse, Edison reportedly executed so many stray cats and dogs, often in circuslike spectacles involving first shocking the animals with direct current and then killing them instantly with alternating current, that the area near his lab in Menlo Park New Jersey was almost devoid of strays. In 1887, he held a public demonstration in West Orange New Jersey, where he used a Westinghouse generator to kill a dozen animals at once, which spurred the media to use a new term to describe death by electricity, “electrocution.”

      Oliver's post, and her further work on the death penalty in The Southern Journal of Philosophy  and in her book, Technologies of Life and Death: From Cloning to Capital Punishment, offers a much-needed historical context for recent legislation allowing a return to electrocution in Tennessee, and for ongoing debates about capital punishment across the US.

      Read the full post here.

       

    • The Biopolitical Death Penalty at SCOTUS

      An important and somewhat neglected topic is what happens when biopolitics intersects with juridical power in courts of law.  Today, we got a good example of one way it can happen.  Several years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that states could not execute the “intellectually disabled.”  They also let the states decide what that meant.  Today, they specified (5-4, with the usual lineup for a “liberal” Kennedy opinion) that, although using an IQ score of 70 or below as evidence of such disability is ok, it’s not ok to draw a bright line cutoff at a score of 70 because one had to take into account the 5 point margin of error in the test itself.  In so doing, the SCOTUS spared the life of a Florida inmate with a measured IQ of 71.

      There is a lot to say here (and for me, quibbling about where the IQ cutoff should be distracts from the larger point, which is that we shouldn’t be executing people.  And, IQ testing is its own set of problems), but I do think it’s notable the extent to which the decision is expressly biopolitical, and not juridical.  Recall Foucault’s claim one symptom of the emergence of biopower is a decline in the death penalty (History of Sexuality 1, p. 138).  Here, we see how that decline can manifest itself even within the judicial system. 

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