For-Profit Schools Donate to Lawmakers Opposing New Financial Aid Rules -- from ProPublica

For-Profit Schools Donate to Lawmakers Opposing New Financial Aid Rules

by Sharona Coutts ProPublica, Sep. 17, 10:20 a.m.

Between 2005 and the beginning of this year, Rep. Donald M. Payne, D-N.J., received $6,000 in campaign contributions from sources related to for-profit colleges. This year, he received more than $20,000 from the schools and their lobby groups, according to campaign finance records. What changed?

For one, the colleges have upped their lobbying efforts considerably in the face of proposed regulations that the industry says could shutter many of its schools.

For another, Payne co-signed three letters to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, in which as many as 18 members of Congress pleaded with the secretary to put the brakes on that proposed regulation.

Collectively, members who signed the letters received nearly $94,000 from the for-profit college sector between the beginning of 2010 and late July, according to the most recent available campaign finance data reviewed by ProPublica. Most of the donations flowed after March 22 -- the date the first letter was written to Duncan.

(Take a look at the campaign contributions here.)

Other co-signers who received campaign cash from the industry include Reps. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla.; and Jason Altmire, D-Pa. Payne and Altmire sit on the House committee that oversees education, as do several other members who signed the letters and received donations.

Payne did not reply to our requests for comment, but longtime campaign finance watchdog Fred Wertheimer, president of the group Democracy 21, which seeks to "eliminate the undue influence of big money in American politics," said the money given to Payne created a troubling impression.

"Whenever a member of Congress gets a large amount of contributions relatively close to the period where they take a specific action for an interest group, it raises appearance problems that undermine public confidence in the action that was taken, and also undermines the argument for the position on the merits," Wertheimer said.

A spokesman for Wasserman Schultz, who signed two of the letters and received nearly $7,400 from the for-profit industry this year, said the congresswoman signed the letters because the proposed Department of Education regulations are "overly broad and were written without Congressional hearings."

None of the other congressional offices we contacted responded to calls or e-mails.

The stakes are high for the for-profit schools because the proposed regulation tightens the conditions under which educational programs can participate in federal student aid programs. Many proprietary schools draw the majority of their revenue -- billions of dollars each year -- from those taxpayer-backed sources.

Called the "gainful employment" rule (PDF), the regulation would create a two-part test that Duncan has said is intended to stop some career schools from "saddling students with debt they cannot afford in exchange for degrees and certificates they cannot use."

The first part would measure how many former students are paying down the principal of their loans, while the second establishes ratios between the debt students take on to finance their education and their earnings after leaving the school, according to the Department of Education.

The test applies to individual programs of study rather than an entire school. Each program must satisfy at least one part of the test for its students to remain eligible for financial aid.

For example, if a school's nursing program failed to meet the lowest thresholds for principal repayment and debt ratios, future students could not pay for that program using federal financial aid. But if the same school's computer sciences program was in compliance, students in that field of study could continue accessing federal aid.

Schools could be required to warn students about high debt loads if a particular program falls into a danger zone, the Education Department says.

The regulation would apply to all schools -- including for-profit, public and private, nonprofit institutions. Based on current numbers, the department estimates that "5 percent of all programs would no longer be eligible to offer their students federal student aid and 55 percent of all programs would be required to warn their students about high debt-to-earnings ratios."

Mark Kantrowitz, a financial aid expert who publishes Fastweb.com and FinAid.org, predicted the rule will have a greater impact on for-profit schools than other institutions. "The difference is that every type of program at for-profits is impacted, whereas at traditional colleges, it's just the vocational programs," he said.

The department's move comes after government investigations found fraud (PDF) in the recruiting practices of several major for-profit colleges, and amid worsening data on loan default rates, especially for students at for-profit schools.

Harris Miller, president of the Career College Association, which represents for-profit colleges and trade schools, said the gainful employment rule poses a "fundamental threat to a lot of very high-quality programs that could be forced to close."

The industry's effort to build congressional pressure against the new rules has been carefully planned. ProPublica obtained a "whip list" that appears to divvy up responsibilities to lobby individual Democratic members among various schools and industry groups.

The whip list is in an Excel spreadsheet (.xls) written by Chris Collins, according to the document's "properties" data. The Career College Association lists a Chris Collins as its "Grass Roots Coordinator," but Miller said he would not comment on "specific internal documents."

The for-profit industry has not been shy about using its financial weight to lobby for what it wants. The founder of one for-profit chain, Arthur Keiser, has become a major national donor, according to campaign finance records. Keiser is also the current chairman of the Career College Association.

Campaign finance records show that Keiser, his wife, Belinda, and mother, Evelyn, contributed a collective $31,600 to members of Congress who signed the letters since the beginning of this year, when the fight over the regulations had begun to heat up.

Key figures in the industry have also paid numerous personal visits to the Education Department, according to public documents. They include visits by John McKernan, chairman of Education Management Corp., a company that owns several major for-profit schools. McKernan is the former governor of Maine and the husband of Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe.

Records also show visits to the department by officials from DeVry Inc. and Kaplan Inc., two of the biggest players in the industry, and their lobbyists.

Schools have also elicited tens of thousands of comments about the proposed regulation from their students, resulting in what the Department of Education said is by far the largest ever response to a public comment period.

In one instance, the president of the University of Phoenix, William Pepicello, sent out what appeared to be a blast e-mail to students that the Department of Education called misleading.

The e-mail claimed the gainful employment regulation would "block hundreds of thousands of Americans from getting the college education they need and deserve to get ahead in their jobs or find even better jobs."

An Education Department official told ProPublica that the e-mail inaccurately implied that the rule would prevent students from getting loans, when in fact it would affect only particular degree programs at specific schools.

"Students do not lose loan eligibility," said James Kvaal, deputy undersecretary of education. "They can and many will choose from the tens of thousands of programs that remain eligible," he said.

The University of Phoenix would not say to whom the e-mail was sent. The school's most recent financial filings say it has 476,500 students.

Education Department officials would not comment on the industry's lobbying campaign. The agency expects the rule to be finalized by November, and schools that fail the gainful employment test could be cut from the federal aid programs beginning in 2012.

Koching up a Tea Party

When public opinion is for sale:

"The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to “educate,” fund, and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement. Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist and a historian, who once worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas-based think tank that the Kochs fund, said, “The problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it’s been all chiefs and no Indians. There haven’t been any actual people, like voters, who give a crap about it. So the problem for the Kochs has been trying to create a movement.” With the emergence of the Tea Party, he said, “everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out there—people who can provide real ideological power.” The Kochs, he said, are “trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies. . . .”"

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=2#ixzz10ATIkmm1

Jane Meyer, "Covert Operations: The Billionaire Koch Brothers Who are Waging a War against Obama," The New Yorker, 30 August 2010.

Elections for Sale

"Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies would certainly seem to the casual observer to be a political organization: Karl Rove, a political adviser to President George W. Bush, helped raise money for it; the group is run by a cadre of experienced political hands; it has spent millions of dollars on television commercials attacking Democrats in key Senate races across the country. . . ."

Michael Luo and Stephanie Strom, "Donors Names Kept Secret As They Influence Midterms," New York Times, 21 September 2010.

Public Address Conference 2010

this note from Gordon Mitchell about the Public Address Conference later this month was published on h-rhetor today:

From: "Mitchell, Gordon Roger" gordonm@pitt.edu>
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2010 11:29:23 -0400

Want to attend the 12th Biennial Public Address Conference upcoming September 30 - October 2, 2010, but can't make it to Pittsburgh? Let us bring some of the featured content to you live!

You are just a few clicks away from setting up your virtual ticket to what promises to be stellar criticism and commentary on the conference theme of "Human Rights Rhetoric: Controversies, Conundrums and Community Actions."

We have arranged for high-quality audio and video recordings of the following panels to be streamed live via the University of Pittsburgh's MediaSite platform, which also enables remote viewers to contribute written questions that we will be compiling and considering for inclusion during the audience Q&A session for each panel:

Friday, October 1, 2010, 12:40 - 1:45 p.m. EDT
http://xrl.us/amnestydebate
Public debate on the motion: "This House Believes Amnesty is a Necessary Tool to Address Gross Human Rights Violations in Deeply Divided Societies."
Marie-Odile Hobeika, University of Pittsburgh and Amber Kelsie, University of Pittsburgh; vs. touring British national debate champions Mary Nugent, University of Cambridge, and Lewis Iwu, BPP School of Law, London.

Friday, October 1, 2010, 4:00 - 6:00 p.m. EDT
http://xrl.us/boortonn
Mari Boor Tonn, University of Richmond, "'From the Eye to the Soul': Industrial Labor's Mary Harris 'Mother' Jones and the Rhetorics of Display."
Respondents will include Lawrence Prelli, University of New Hampshire and Cara Finnegan, University of Southern Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

Saturday, October 2, 2010, 4:00 - 6:00 p.m. EDT
http://xrl.us/hartnett
Stephen John Hartnett, University of Colorado at Denver, ³Speaking with the Damned: or, Prison Education, Social Justice, and Communication as a Human Right." Respondents will include Gerard Hauser, University of Colorado at Boulder and Marcus Rediker, University of Pittsburgh

Finally, Kirt Wilson, Pennsylvania State University, will deliver a keynote address during the conference's opening session: "More than Civil Rights: The Fight for Black Freedom as a Human Rights Struggle." Respondents will include Robert Terrill, Indiana University and Raymie McKerrow, Ohio University. We wish we could bring this panel to you live, but university firewall restrictions require us to tape the event and make it available for web streaming late on September 30 or early the next day on October 1: http://xrl.us/wilsonkeynote

Want more conference information? Visit our conference website at:
http://www.pitt.edu/~comm/

Technical questions? Contact the conference AV coordinator Gordon Mitchell
at gordonm at pitt dot edu.

* * *

Gordon R. Mitchell
Associate Professor of Communication
Director of Graduate Studies
Director, William Pitt Debating Union
University of Pittsburgh
CL 1117, 4200 Fifth Ave.
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Phone: (412) 624-8531
Fax: (412) 624-1878
http://www.pitt.edu/~gordonm/

Baseball and the War on Terror

Michael L. Butterworth, Baseball and Rhetorics of Purity: The National Pastime and American Identity During the War on Terror (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010).

Shepherd with His Horse and Dog

Russell Lee, "Shepherd with his horse and dog on Gravelly Range, Madison County, Montana," August 1942." LC-USW36-847 B - Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Collection -- Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

Invasion of the Mind Snatchers

Eric Burns, Invasion of the Mind Snatchers: Television's Conquest of America in the Fifties (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010).

from the press:

When the first television was demonstrated in 1927, a headline in The New York Times read, "Like a Photo Come to Life." It was a momentous occasion. But the power of television wasn't fully harnessed until the 1950s, when the medium was, as Eric Burns writes, "At its most preoccupying, its most life-altering."

In Invasion of the Mind Snatchers, Emmy-award winning broadcaster Eric Burns chronicles the influence of television on the baby boomer generation. Spellbound by Howdy Doody and The Ed Sullivan Show, those children often acted out their favorite programs, purchased the merchandise promoted by performers, and were fascinated by the personalities they saw on screen, often emulating their behavior. It was the first generation raised by TV, and Burns looks at both the promise of broadcasting as espoused by the inventors and how that promise was both redefined and lost by the corporations who helped spread this revolutionary technology.

Hendrik Hertzberg on "The Mosque"

Hendrik Hertzberg, "Move the Mosque," The New Yorker online, 11 September 2010.

Feisal Abdul Rauf, back from his State Department-sponsored trip overseas in time for the 9/11 anniversary, said his piece this week on the Op-Ed page of the Times. If you haven’t yet read his Op-Ed, please hasten to do so. What he writes is so generous, so unself-pitying, so utterly reasonable, and, in Andrew Sullivan’s words, “so transparently constructive, so evidently in the interests not only of domestic peace but of strategic victory against Jihadist terror” that one is “at a loss to understand why so many have reacted so ferociously to this project.” (I’m pleased to note that the imam is again calling the project Cordoba House—a much better name than Park51, which sounds like a Korean teenager’s internet handle). . . .

Hendrik Hertzberg recommends moving the mosque -- to Ground Zero, where it would be a beacon of freedom and reconciliation. Hertzberg points out that there has been a mosque at the Pentagon, since October 2002.

Dog Bites Back

Frank Rich, writing in the New York Times, calls (as so many have since January 2009) for President Obama to fight back, harder and in public rhetoric, against the conservative opposition and big business. This longing for presidential rhetoric seems to be a recurrent feature of our national life.

Rich even recommends FDR's 1936 Madison Square Garden speech excoriating his opposition -- a speech that my students always find a shocker. Here is a key passage from Franklin Roosevelt's speech, near the end of his first term:

For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.

I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.

Frank Rich, "Time for This Big Dog to Bite Back," New York Times, 12 September 2010.

Does big business try to run (or to stop) the government? Where to start? Have a look at Eric Lipton, "A G.O.P. Leader Tightly Bound to Lobbyists," New York Times, 11 September 2010. "As Democrats try to cast John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House minority leader, as the face of the Republican Party, his ties to lobbyists are under attack. . . ."

How Not to Give a Six-Minute Speech

Dairy Cat, 1939

Arthur Rothstein, "Milker gives pet cat some milk direct from cow, Brandtjen Dairy Farm, Dakota County, Minnesota." Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress. September 1939.

Academic Tenure for Whom?

A new report from the American Association of University Professors:

The AAUP's latest report discusses a growing consensus: Institutions that employ teaching-intensive faculty should hire them and evaluate their teaching through the rigorous system of peer review known as the tenure system. As E. Gordon Gee, the United States's highest-paid university president puts it, campus employers must preserve "multiple ways to salvation" inside the tenure system—even at research-intensive institutions.

As the report notes, tenure was designed as a “big tent” to unite faculty of diverse interests and workplace priorities. It was not designed as a merit badge for research-intensive faculty or as a fence to exclude those with teaching-intensive commitments. . . .

The complete report, "Tenure and Teaching-Intensive Appointments" is at the AAUP site.

Free Labor Will Win

Labor Day poster. Labor Day poster distributed to war plants and labor organizations. The original is twenty-eight and one-half inches by forty inches and is printed in full color. It was designed by the Office of War Information (OWI) from a photograph especially arranged by Anton Bruehl, well-known photographer. From the FSA-OWI collection at the Library of Congress. (1942)

1938 again?

Paul Krugman, "1938 in 2010," New York Times, 6 September 2010.

Now, we weren’t supposed to find ourselves replaying the late 1930s. President Obama’s economists promised not to repeat the mistakes of 1937, when F.D.R. pulled back fiscal stimulus too soon. But by making his program too small and too short-lived, Mr. Obama did just that: the stimulus raised growth while it lasted, but it made only a small dent in unemployment — and now it’s fading out. . . .

Paul Krugman has been warning about this possibility for two years, and he says it is now showing signs of happening.

Obama Wants Us To Forget The Lessons Of Iraq | The New Republic

Obama Wants Us To Forget The Lessons Of Iraq | The New Republic

On President Obama's Oval Office speech on the end of Iraq combat operations.

Andrew Bacevich, "Obama Wants Us to Forget the Lessons of Iraq," The New Republic, 31 August 2010.

See also Bacevich's new book, Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War.

The billionaire Koch brothers’ war against Obama: newyorker.com

Who is oiling your astroturf?

The billionaire Koch brothers’ war against Obama: newyorker.com

Jane Meyer, "Covert Operations," The New Yorker, 30 August 2010.

Jan Brewer - the pause

Democratic deliberation - we pause for this message

Level the Playing Field?

Robert Reich in the New York Times today -- "How to End the Great Recession":

THE Great Depression and its aftermath demonstrate that there is only one way back to full recovery: through more widely shared prosperity. In the 1930s, the American economy was completely restructured. New Deal measures — Social Security, a 40-hour work week with time-and-a-half overtime, unemployment insurance, the right to form unions and bargain collectively, the minimum wage — leveled the playing field.

Reich argues that we cannot recover from the long structural recession until the middle class is able to buy the goods in produces.

The Two-Body Problem

The AAUP has released a new report on recommended practices for academics seeking jobs for themselves and spouses/partners.

Do you have a “two-body” problem? Are you and your partner or spouse searching for academic positions in the same area, or even at the same institution? Or are you an administrator or department chair seeking guidance on sound policies and procedures for appointing an academic couple? Would you like to know what kinds of dual-career accommodation programs might be available to assist you, or what procedures an institution should follow to best accommodate your partner? If so, the AAUP’s newly released “Recommendations on Partner Accommodation and Dual Career Appointments” is a must read.

The new recommendations were formulated by the AAUP’s Committee on Women in the Academic Profession in view of the increasing likelihood that faculty, especially women faculty, will have domestic partners or spouses who are also academics. The recommendations provide critical guidance on developing sound, equitable policies. In addition, they provide a comprehensive review of the types of partner accommodation programs already available to dual-career academic couples at many colleges and universities.

The recommendations recognize the diversity of academic institutions and their needs, rather than endorse a particular partner accommodation program or policy as appropriate for all institutions. Research universities, for example, may have a particular interest in accommodating partners to remedy the consistent underrepresentation of women among their tenure-track and tenured faculty. Smaller institutions or those with collective bargaining agreements, because they may have more difficulty accommodating dual career couples, may be less inclined to do so. Whatever their needs, colleges and universities can benefit from well-developed policies that, according to the recommendations, “meet the strictest tests for transparency and good governance practices.”

Included among the recommendations:

• Accommodation policies should be developed by appropriate faculty bodies.
  
• The policies should take into account local conditions and institutional particularities, departmental hiring priorities, and programmatic and budgetary needs.
  
• Any faculty appointments made as a result of their implementation should be driven by considerations of merit, and, whenever possible, appointments should be made to tenure-track positions.
  
• Dual career appointments should not be the occasion for increasing the number of contingent faculty members at an institution.

Balancing the needs of departments and institutions with the needs of faculty members is of paramount importance to successful partner accommodation appointments.

We hope these recommendations will prove a useful tool to faculty and administrators seeking to harmonize sensitivity to the needs of academic couples with due attention to good governance and the protections of tenure long recommended by the AAUP.

Ann E. Green, Chair
Committee on Women in the Academic Profession

Ann Higginbotham, Chair

Public Forgetting

Bradford Vivian, Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2010).

from the press:

“In his sustained meditation on forgetting, Bradford Vivian makes a singular and extremely valuable contribution to the field of memory studies. He substantially advances the theoretical discussion of memory and forgetting with his extended critiques (rhetorical analyses, really) of both ancient and recent formulations of collective public memory and forgetting. The conclusion is almost poetic in its lightness of touch. It pulls all the strands of the book into a single compelling case for forgetting as part of memory.” —James E. Young, University of Massachusetts Amherst, author of The Texture of Memory and At Memory's Edge.

Forgetting is usually juxtaposed with memory as its opposite in a negative way: it is seen as the loss of the ability to remember, or, ironically, as the inevitable process of distortion or dissolution that accompanies attempts to commemorate the past. The civic emphasis on the crucial importance of preserving lessons from the past to prevent us from repeating mistakes that led to violence and injustice, invoked most poignantly in the call of “Never again” from Holocaust survivors, tends to promote a view of forgetting as verging on sin or irresponsibility. In this book, Bradford Vivian hopes to put a much more positive spin on forgetting by elucidating its constitutive role in the formation and transformation of public memory. Using examples ranging from classical rhetoric to contemporary crises like 9/11, Public Forgetting demonstrates, contrary to conventional wisdom, how communities may adopt idioms of forgetting in order to create new and beneficial standards of public judgment concerning the lessons and responsibilities of their shared past.

Facebook page for Public Forgetting

---

Dick Cavett on the Mosque

Dick Cavett, "Real Americans Please Stand Up" New York Times, 22 August 2010.

I remain amazed and really, sincerely, want to understand this. What can it be that is faulty in so many people’s thought processes, their ethics, their education, their experience of life, their understanding of their country, their what-have-you that blinds them to the fact that you can’t simultaneously maintain that you have nothing against members of any religion but are willing to penalize members of this one? Can you help me with this?

see also, Frank Rich, "How Fox Betrayed Petraeus," New York Times, 22 August 2010.

picnic time

Jack Delano, "Having a picnic lunch at the "World's Fair" in Tunbridge, Vermont," September 1941. Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress) . LC-USF33- 021181-M3.

Dorothea Lange

Jan Goggans, California on the Breadlines: Dorothea Lange, Paul Taylor, and the Making of a New Deal Narrative (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

from the press:

California on the Breadlines is the compelling account of how Dorothea Lange, the Great Depression’s most famous photographer, and Paul Taylor, her labor economist husband, forged a relationship that was private—they both divorced spouses to be together—collaborative, and richly productive. Lange and Taylor poured their considerable energies into the decade-long project of documenting the plight of California’s dispossessed, which in 1939 culminated in the publication of their landmark book, American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion. Jan Goggans blends biography, literature, and history to retrace the paths that brought Lange and Taylor together. She shows how American Exodus set forth a new way of understanding those in crisis during the economic disaster in California and ultimately informed the way we think about the Great Depression itself.

Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).

from the press:

Winner of the 2010 Bancroft Prize and the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography: Dorothea Lange’s photographs define how we remember the Depression generation; now an evocative biography defines her creative struggles and enduring legacy.

We all know Dorothea Lange’s iconic photos—the “Migrant Mother” holding her child, the gaunt men forlornly waiting in breadlines—but few know the arc of her extraordinary life. In this sweeping account, renowned historian Linda Gordon charts Lange’s journey from polio-ridden child to wife and mother, to San Francisco portrait photographer, to chronicler of the Great Depression and World War II. Gordon uses Lange’s life to anchor a moving social history of twentieth-century America, re-creating the bohemian world of San Francisco, the Dust Bowl, and the Japanese American internment camps. She explores Lange’s growing radicalization as she embraced the democratic power of the camera, and she examines Lange’s entire body of work, reproducing more than one hundred images, many of them previously unseen and some of them formerly suppressed. Lange reminds us that beauty can be found in unlikely places, and that to respond to injustice, we must first simply learn how to see it.

.

Wired Says Web Is Dead. Already?

Wired magazine

Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching and more about the getting. Chris Anderson explains how this new paradigm reflects the inevitable course of capitalism. And Michael Wolff explains why the new breed of media titan is forsaking the Web for more promising (and profitable) pastures.

From the September issue, 17 August 2010. The rest of the issue is here.

Eavesdropping

John L. Locke, Eavesdropping: An Intimate History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).



from the publisher:

Who among us hasn't eavesdropped on a stranger's conversation in a theater or restaurant? Indeed, scientists have found that even animals eavesdrop on the calls and cries of others. In Eavesdropping , John L. Locke provides the first serious look at this virtually universal phenomenon. Locke's entertaining and disturbing account explores everything from sixteenth-century voyeurism to Hitchcock's "Rear Window"; from chimpanzee behavior to Parisian cafe society; from private eyes to Facebook and Twitter. He uncovers the biological drive behind the behavior and highlights its consequences across history and cultures. Eavesdropping can be a good thing--an attempt to understand what goes on in the lives of others so as to know better how to live one's own. Even birds who listen in on the calls of distant animals tend to survive longer. But Locke also concedes that eavesdropping has a bad name. It can encompass cheating to get unfair advantage, espionage to uncover secrets, and secretly monitoring emails to maintain power over employees. In the age of CCTV, phone tapping, and computer hacking, this is eye-opening reading.

Friendship Fictions

Michael A. Kaplan, Friendship Fictions: The Rhetoric of Citizenship in the Liberal Imaginary (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010).

from the publisher:

A criticism often leveled at liberal democratic culture is its emphasis on the individual over community and private life over civic participation. However, liberal democratic culture has a more complicated relationship to notions of citizenship. As Michael Kaplan shows, citizenship comprises a major theme of popular entertainment, especially Hollywood film, and often takes the form of friendship narratives; and this is no accident. Examining the representations of citizenship-as-friendship in four Hollywood films (The Big Chill, Thelma & Louise, Lost in Translation, and Smoke), Kaplan argues that critics have misunderstood some of liberal democracy’s most significant features: its resilience, its capacity for self-revision, and the cultural resonance of its model of citizenship.

For Kaplan, friendship—with its dynamic pacts, fluid alliances, and contingent communities—is one arena in which preconceptions about individual participation in civic life are contested and complicated. Friendship serves as a metaphor for citizenship and mirrors the individual’s participation in civic life. Friendship Fictions unravels key implications of this metaphor and demonstrates how it can transform liberal culture into a more just and democratic way of life.

Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism

Arnold A. Schmidt, Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

from the publisher:

Making extensive use of untranslated texts, Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism analyzes the incorporation of Byron’s life and works into Italian political discourse during the risorgimento, unification, and the two world wars. Italian authors appreciated his celebration of liberty and nationalism so much that between 1818 and 1948, they referred to Byron more than to any other non-Italian poet. Arnold Anthony Schmidt explores the intellectual milieu of Byron’s Italian years, his participation in Grand Tour and salon culture, his influence on Italian Classicists and Romantics, and his importance in constructing Italy’s national identity.

How to Make a Citizen

Anna McCarthy, The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America (New York: The New Press, 2010).

from the press:

The Citizen Machine is the untold political history of television’s formative era. Historian Anna McCarthy goes behind the scenes of early television programming, revealing that producers, sponsors, and scriptwriters had far more in mind than simply entertaining (and selling products). Long before the age of PBS, leaders from business, philanthropy, and social reform movements as well as public intellectuals were all obsessively concerned with TV’s potential to mold the right kind of citizen.

After World War II, inspired by the perceived threats of Soviet communism, class war, and racial violence, members of what was then known as “the Establishment” were drawn together by a shared conviction that television broadcasting could be a useful tool for governing. The men of Du Pont, the AFL-CIO, the Advertising Council, the Ford Foundation, the Fund for the Republic, and other organizations interested in shaping (according to American philosopher Mortimer Adler) “the ideas that should be in every citizen’s mind,” turned to TV as a tool for reaching those people they thought of as the masses.

Based on years of path-breaking archival work, The Citizen Machine sheds new light on the place of television in the postwar American political landscape. At a time when TV broadcasting is in a state of crisis, and when a new political movement for media reform has ascended the political stage, here is a vital new history of the ideas and assumptions that have profoundly shaped not only television, but our political culture itself.

Anna McCarthy is an associate professor in the department of Cinema Studies at New York University. She is the co-editor of the noted journal Social Text, as well as the author of Ambient Television.

Now we know better, of course. It's the Internet that's going to save democracy.

Rhetoric, Politics, and Trust in Breast Cancer Research

Lisa Keranen, Scientific Characters: Rhetoric, Politics, and Trust in Breast Cancer Research (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010).

from the press:

Scientific Characters chronicles the contests over character, knowledge, trust, and truth in a politically charged scientific controversy that erupted after a 1994 Chicago Tribune headline: “Fraud in Breast Cancer Research: Doctor Lied on Data for Decade.” In the aftermath of this dramatic news, Dr. Bernard Fisher, the eminent oncologist and celebrated pioneer of breast cancer research, came under intense scrutiny following allegations that one of his investigators falsified data in landmark breast cancer research. Although he was eventually cleared of all wrongdoing, the controversy called into question the treatment decisions of tens of thousands of women, because Fisher’s research had demonstrated that lumpectomy and radiation were as effective as breast removal for early stage cancers—a finding that was hailed as revolutionary in women’s health care.

Moving back and forth between news coverage, medical journals, letters to the editor, and oncology pamphlets, Lisa Keränen draws insights from rhetoric, literary studies, sociology, and science studies to analyze the roles of character in shaping the outcomes of the “Datagate” controversy. Throughout the scandal, debates about the character of Fisher and other key players endured, showing how scientific knowledge is shaped by perceptions of the personal temperament, trustworthiness, integrity, and transparency of those who produce it. As administrators, politicians, scientists, patients, journalists, and citizens attempted to make sense of what had happened, and to assess the integrity of the research, they raised questions, assigned blame, attributed responsibility, and reshaped the norms of scientific practice. Scientific Characters thusaddresses what happens when scientists, patients, and advocates are called to defend themselves in public concerning complex technical matters with direct implications for human life. In assessing the rhetoric that animated Datagate, Scientific Characters sheds light on the challenges faced by scientists and citizens as science becomes more bureaucratized, dispersed, and accountable to varied publics.

BP and Academic Freedom

Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, on "BP and Academic Freedom" Inside Higher Ed, 22 July 2010:

"On Friday, July 16, Ben Raines, a reporter for Mobile, Alabama’s Press-Register, published a story detailing extensive efforts by BP to employ scientists engaged in (or likely to engage in) research about the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Inside Higher Ed has since conducted independent interviews for its own coverage. The contracts offered by the giant company, according to both sources, restrict the scientists from publishing research results, sharing them with other scientists, or even talking about them for as long as three years, a serious restraint in the midst of an ongoing crisis. . . ."

When a President Fires a General

"WASHINGTON (June 23) -- The deed is done. . . ."

Andrea Stone, "President Obama Gets High Marks for Handling McChrystal Mess," AOL News, 23 June 2010.

Senator, Here's My Book Order for Your Review

The AAUP has commented on a new law in Pennsylvania that would regulate faculty choice of course textbooks:

Academic Freedom in Pennsylvania

The Pennsylvania legislature has taken the first dangerous step in restricting academic freedom in textbook selection. The State Senate has unanimously passed a law (.pdf) requiring faculty members to choose "the least expensive, educationally sound textbooks." This vague and possibly unenforceable standard undermines the right of faculty members to select the best textbook, even if it is more expensive than the alternatives. "Educationally sound" also potentially sets a rather low standard for textbook selection. As a legal requirement, it will have a chilling effect on faculty members' ability to exercise their academic freedom in planning courses of the highest quality. Certainly the legislature has no business deciding what is "educationally sound" in a college classroom. Only faculty members have the capacity to choose the books that best meet their pedagogical aims. If there is a tradeoff to be made between quality and price, only faculty members have the professional competence to make that choice. We urge the legislature to eliminate that provision from the College Textbook Affordability, Accountability and Accessibility Act.

The Pennsylvania legislation is also worrying because it is part of a national trend to regulate textbook selection. Certainly rising textbook prices are a serious matter. Increased availability of electronic versions of textbooks that certainly should prove less expensive is likely an inevitable feature of a changing marketplace. But the main ways to reduce the expense of a college education are to increase state appropriations to public colleges and universities and to eliminate unnecessary administrative positions.

Cary Nelson
AAUP President

see also the story in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Refiguring Mass Communication

Peter Simonson, Refiguring Mass Communication: A History (Urbana, IL:University of Illinois Press, 2010).

from the publisher:

A creative reconsideration of communication history

This unique inquiry into the history and ongoing moral significance of mass communication also represents a defense, extension, and overhaul of the idea and social form of the discipline. Organized around narrative accounts of individuals and their communicative worlds, Refiguring Mass Communication illuminates significant but overlooked rhetorical episodes in history to enable modern-day readers to rehabilitate and reinvigorate their own engagements with mass communication.

Coined in the 1920s as a way to describe radio, motion pictures, wide-circulation magazines, and the press, the term "mass communication" frequently is misused in the era of cable TV, niche marketing, and the Internet. In Refiguring Mass Communication, Peter Simonson compares his own vision of mass communication with distinct views articulated throughout history by Paul of Tarsus, Walt Whitman, Charles Horton Cooley, David Sarnoff, and Robert K. Merton, utilizing a collection of texts and tenets from a variety of time periods and perspectives. Drawing on textual and archival research as well as access to Merton's personal papers, Simonson broadly reconceives a sense of communication theory and what social processes might be considered species of mass communication. Simonson reveals the geographical and social contexts from which these visions have emerged and the religious and moral horizons against which they have taken shape. In a unique perspective, he considers the American county fair as an example of a live gathering and crucial site that is overlooked in contemporary forms of mass communication, urging a reconsideration of how individuals participate in and shape similar forms.

"This book is particularly powerful because, like rhetoric itself, it is not limited to any one discipline. Simonson uses cultural studies and rhetoric as energizing points of departure for rehabilitating and reinforcing the idea and social form of mass communication."--Rosa A. Eberly, author of Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres

Peter Simonson is an associate professor of communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the coeditor of Mass Communication and American Social Thought: Key Texts, 1920-1968.

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Wit's End

Sean Zwagerman, Wit's End: Women's Humor as Rhetorical and Performative Strategy (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010).

from the publisher:

Wit's End is an original perspective on women's use of humor as a performative strategy, seen in works of twentieth-century American literature. Zwagerman argues that women, whose direct, explicit performative speech has been traditionally denied, or not taken seriously, have often turned to humor as a means of communicating with men.

Student Evaluations

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a story in the Boston Globe on problems colleges are having when they move student evaluation processes online:

Colleges thought they were enhancing efficiency when they moved their course evaluations online, but an unintended consequence of the shift to evaluations not filled out in class is that students started skipping them altogether, The Boston Globe reported today. . . .

the rest of the story is here

Democracy & Rhetoric

Nathan Crick, Democracy & Rhetoric: John Dewey on the Arts of Becoming (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2010).


from the publisher:

An innovative approach to Dewey's view of rhetoric as art, revealing an "ontology of becoming"

In Democracy and Rhetoric, Nathan Crick articulates from John Dewey's body of work a philosophy of rhetoric that reveals the necessity for bringing forth a democratic life infused with the spirit of ethics, a method of inquiry, and a sense of beauty. Crick relies on rhetorical theory as well interdisciplinary insights from philosophy, history, sociology, aesthetics, and political science as he demonstrates that significant engagement with issues of rhetoric and communication are central to Dewey's political philosophy.

In his rhetorical reading of Dewey, Crick examines the sophistical underpinnings of Dewey's philosophy and finds it much informed by notions of radical individuality, aesthetic experience, creative intelligence, and persuasive advocacy as essential to the formation of communities of judgment. Crick illustrates that for Dewey rhetoric is an art situated within a complex and challenging social and natural environment, wielding influence and authority for those well versed in its methods and capable of experimenting with its practice. From this standpoint the unique and necessary function of rhetoric in a democracy is to advance minority views in such a way that they might have the opportunity to transform overarching public opinion through persuasion in an egalitarian public arena. The truest power of rhetoric in a democracy then is the liberty for one to influence the many through free, full, and fluid communication.

Ultimately Crick argues that Dewey's sophistical rhetorical values and techniques form a naturalistic "ontology of becoming" in which discourse is valued for its capacity to guide a self, a public, and a world in flux toward some improved incarnation. Appreciation of this ontology of becoming—of democracy as a communication-driven work in progress—gives greater social breadth and historical scope to Dewey's philosophy while solidifying his lasting contributions to rhetoric in an active and democratic public sphere.

Nathan Crick is an assistant professor of communication studies at Louisiana State University. His research has appeared in College Composition and Communication, Philosophy and Rhetoric, and the Quarterly Journal of Speech.

Reason's Dark Champions

Christopher W. Tindale, Reason's Dark Champions: Constructive Strategies of Sophistic Argument (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2010).

from the publisher:

Recent decades have witnessed a major restoration of the Sophists' reputation, revising the Platonic and Aristotelian "orthodoxies" that have dominated the tradition. Still lacking is a full appraisal of the Sophists' strategies of argumentation. Christopher W. Tindale corrects that omission in Reason's Dark Champions. Viewing the Sophists as a group linked by shared strategies rather than by common epistemological beliefs, Tindale illustrates that the Sophists engaged in a range of argumentative practices in manners wholly different from the principal ways in which Plato and Aristotle employed reason. By examining extant fifth-century texts and the ways in which Sophistic reasoning is mirrored by historians, playwrights, and philosophers of the classical world, Tindale builds a robust understanding of Sophistic argument with relevance to contemporary studies of rhetoric and communication.

Beginning with the reception of the Sophists in their own culture, Tindale explores depictions of the Sophists in Plato's dialogues and the argumentative strategies attributed to them as a means of understanding the threat Sophism posed to Platonic philosophical ambitions of truth seeking. He also considers the nature of the "sophistical refutation" and its place in the tradition of fallacy. Tindale then turns to textual examples of specific argumentative practices, mapping how Sophists employed the argument from likelihood, reversal arguments, arguments on each side of a position, and commonplace reasoning. What emerges is a complex reappraisal of Sophism that reorients criticism of this mode of argumentation, expands understanding of Sophistic contributions to classical rhetoric, and opens avenues for further scholarship.

We Have Been Here Before

I hesitated to post this photo from the Huffington Post -- it is just so sad and frightening. But the country has been here before, in my lifetime, and perhaps it is worth bearing witness to the crazily bigoted and racist fringe that seems to be driving the core of elected Republican politics. This is the opposition to health care reform. The Huffington Post reports,

A staffer for Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) told reporters that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) had been spat on by a protestor. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a hero of the civil rights movement, was called a 'ni--er.' And Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was called a "faggot," as protestors shouted at him with deliberately lisp-y screams. Frank, approached in the halls after the president's speech, shrugged off the incident.

But Clyburn was downright incredulous, saying he had not witnessed such treatment since he was leading civil rights protests in South Carolina in the 1960s.

Perhaps tonight, after the health care bill passes the House of Representatives, which looks increasingly possible, and then later in the week, after President has signed the bill and the Senate passes reconciliation of the House measures, things can cool down or move in a new direction. Let us hope so.

A Regime of Sycophancy

Joseph Litvak, The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

from the publisher:

In a bold rethinking of the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyite America, Joseph Litvak reveals a political regime that did not end with the 1950s or even with the Cold War: a regime of compulsory sycophancy, in which the good citizen is an informer, ready to denounce anyone who will not play the part of the earnest, patriotic American. While many scholars have noted the anti-Semitism underlying the House Un-American Activities Committee's (HUAC's) anti-Communism, Litvak draws on the work of Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Alain Badiou to show how the committee conflated Jewishness with what he calls "comic cosmopolitanism," an intolerably seductive happiness, centered in Hollywood and New York, in show business and intellectual circles. He maintains that HUAC took the comic irreverence of the "uncooperative" witnesses as a crime against an American identity based on self-repudiation and the willingness to "name names." Litvak proposes that sycophancy was (and continues to be) the price exacted for assimilation into mainstream American culture, not just for Jews, but also for homosexuals, immigrants, and other groups deemed threatening to American rectitude.

Litvak traces the outlines of comic cosmopolitanism in a series of performances in film and theater and before HUAC, performances by Jewish artists and intellectuals such as Zero Mostel, Judy Holliday, and Abraham Polonsky. At the same time, through an uncompromising analysis of work by informers including Jerome Robbins, Elia Kazan, and Budd Schulberg, he explains the triumph of a stoolpigeon culture that still thrives in the America of the early twenty-first century.

When Advocates Change Course

An interesting story emerged this week that illustrates some of the difficulties for a public advocate who radically changes course. Diane Ravitch, a darling of the right for two decades, was a leading advocate of charter schools, school choice, and testing, until she decided that the policies she and her colleagues had put in place were destroying public education--as her opponents had argued would happen.

“Nations like Finland and Japan seek out the best college graduates for teaching positions, prepare them well, pay them well and treat them with respect,” she said. “They make sure that all their students study the arts, history, literature, geography, civics, foreign languages, the sciences and other subjects. They do this because this is the way to ensure good education. We’re on the wrong track.”

Sam Dillon, "Leading Scholar's U-Turn on School Reform Shakes up Debate," New York Times, 2 March 2010.

Cosmopolitanism in the Coffee House of the Quirinal Hill in Rome

Monday, March 15, 2010

7:00-8:30 p.m.

Alumni Lounge, Nittany Lion Inn

Penn State, University Park, PA

Salon Evenings

Public Spaces, Private Lives:

Social and Intellectual Life at the End of the Eighteenth Century

The end of the eighteenth century marked a turning point in the social and intellectual life of the great cities of Europe and America. From cafés to public houses, from drawing rooms to the great public parks, men and women enjoyed greater freedoms to socialize and debate the issues of the day. Enjoy food, drink, music, readings, and lively conversation in the spirit of these great salons as Penn State faculty offer informal presentations on a variety of topics focusing on art and culture in the late eighteenth century.

* * * * * * *

"Cosmopolitanism in the Coffee House of the Quirinal Hill in Rome"

Martina Kolb

Assistant Professor of German and

Comparative Literature

Penn State University

Robin Thomas

Assistant Professor of Art History

Penn State University

A Well Regulated Militia

SCOTUS blog reports:

Analysis: 2d Amendment extension likely
McDonald v. Chicago, 08-1521, Argument recap

Lyle Denniston | Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 11:26 am

Analysis

The Supreme Court on Tuesday seemed poised to require state and local governments to obey the Second Amendment guarantee of a personal right to a gun, but with perhaps considerable authority to regulate that right. . . .

"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

Well, that's the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, though there are some alternate versions, with different punctuation.

I don't understand how the far-right, strict constructionist, textualist, original-meaning justices can fix the Second Amendment in the late 18th century as a way of permitting citizens to arm themselves with hi-tech 21st century firearms. How does that work? Why aren't those rights, if they actually exist, limited to 18th-century arms?

Just asking.

Early Local Radio

Alexander Russo, Points on the Dial: Golden Age Radio beyond the Networks (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

from the publisher:

"The golden age of radio is often recalled as a time when the medium unified the nation, when families gathered around the radios in homes across the country to listen to live, commercially sponsored network broadcasts. In Points on the Dial, Alexander Russo revises our understanding of radio’s past by revealing the hidden histories of production, distribution, and reception practices during this era, which extended from the 1920s into the 1950s. Russo brings to light a tiered broadcasting system with intermingling but distinct national, regional, and local programming forms, sponsorship patterns, and methods of program distribution. Examining a wide range of practices, including regional networking, sound-on-disc transcription, the use of station representatives, spot advertising, and programming aimed at homes with several radios, he not only recasts our understanding of the relationship between national networks and local stations but also charts the development of new ways of listening—often distractedly rather than attentively—that set the stage for radio in the second half of the twentieth century."

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Humanities Indicators from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Thanks to Paul Karoff for sending the following:

Paul Karoff
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
136 Irving Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
www.amacad.org

Humanities Enjoy Strong Student Demand but Declining Conditions for Faculty

New Data Available on College and University Humanities Departments

CAMBRIDGE, MA – The humanities continue to play a core role in higher education and student interest is strong, but to meet the demand, four-year colleges and universities are increasingly relying on a part-time, untenured workforce.

Those are among the findings from the Humanities Departmental Survey, conducted by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a consortium of disciplinary associations. The survey includes data collected from English, foreign language, history, history of science, art history, linguistics, and religion departments at approximately 1,400 colleges and universities. It is the first comprehensive survey to provide general cross-disciplinary data on humanities departments.

The results are available on the Academy’s Humanities Resource Center Online at www.HumanitiesIndicators.org.

According to the Humanities Departmental Survey:

• Across the humanities, but especially in English and combined English/foreign language departments, the professoriate at four-year colleges and universities is evolving into a part-time workforce. During the 2006–2007 academic year, only 38 percent of faculty members in these departments were tenured. English departments had the greatest proportion of non-tenure-track faculty (49 percent).

• When minors are included, undergraduate participation in humanities programs is about 82 percent greater than counting majors alone would suggest. For the 2006-2007 academic year, 122,100 students completed bachelor’s degrees and 100,310 completed minor degrees in the three largest humanities disciplines—English, foreign languages, and history.

• Reflecting the demands of a global economy, student interest in foreign language is strong – during the 2006–2007 academic year, foreign language departments awarded 28,710 baccalaureate degrees and had the largest number of students completing minors (51,670). Yet investment in a stable professoriate to teach and study foreign languages and literatures appears to be declining, with a significant reduction in recruitment of full-time faculty members (39 percent fewer recruitments for full-time positions in 2008-2009 than hires for 2007-2008) and fewer total graduate students than faculty members, the only surveyed discipline for which this was the case.

• Turnover rates among humanities faculty were low (only 2.5 percent of humanities faculty left the profession through departure, retirement, or death during the two academic years preceding the survey). Combined with recently instituted hiring freezes on many campuses, career opportunities for the next generation of scholars (there were approximately 84,000 graduate students in the surveyed fields during the 2006–2007 academic year) are limited.

• Approximately 87 percent of humanities departments reported that their subject was part of the core distribution requirements at their institution.

The survey results provide a snapshot of U.S. humanities departments at the end of the first decade of the 21^st century. The survey covers a broad range of topics, including numbers of departments and faculty members, faculty distributions by discipline, courses taught, tenure activity, undergraduate majors and minors, and graduate students. The data provide new information about each of the disciplines; they also allow comparisons across disciplines. These data are especially important because the U.S. Department of Education has indefinitely suspended the only nationally representative survey providing information about humanities faculty (the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty).

Several national disciplinary societies collaborated with the Academy to develop, field, and interpret data gathered by the Humanities Departmental Survey: the American Academy of Religion; American Historical Association; College Art Association; History of Science Society; Linguistic Society of America; and the Modern Language Association. The American Council of Learned Societies and the American Political Science Association also provided important assistance. The survey was administered by the Statistical Research Center of the American Institute of Physics, which also performed the basic data analysis.

Even though the humanities disciplines represent an essential core of the liberal arts curriculum, they have long been data deprived. The empirical data now available in the survey, along with the rich collection of information already found in the Humanities Indicators, begin to fill that gap and to establish baselines that will allow stakeholders to track trends in the future. The Academy hopes that the Humanities Departmental Survey can be expanded to include additional disciplines and updated regularly, producing trend data that could be incorporated into the Humanities Indicators.

The Humanities Indicators include data covering humanities education from primary school through the graduate level; the humanities workforce; humanities funding and research; and the humanities in civic life. Modeled after the National Science Board’s Science and Engineering Indicators, the Humanities Indicators serve as a resource to help scholars, policymakers, and the public assess the current state of the humanities. Launched in January 2009, the Academy continues to update and expand the Humanities Indicators.

Those who wish to receive announcements of new data and research on the humanities can subscribe to an email alert system at www.HumanitiesIndicators.org.

NOTE: Please use the following citation for data contained in the Humanities Indicators: “American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Humanities Indicators, http://www.HumanitiesIndicators.org”