The Black Liberation Collective has something that its Sixties predecessors never had

According to a Chronicle of Higher Education article,  the activist group, which ousted a university president in Missouri, is going national thanks to social media.  Want to keep
up with the movement?  Go to #StudentBlackOut on Twitter.  There's also a website.

Meanwhile, 400 protesters, part of a group called Democracy Spring, were arrested outside the Capitol building yesterday.

This election year just keeps getting more and more interesting, as my Sixties flashbacks become increasingly intense.  I can't wait to see what happens when the Democrats bring their flying circus to the Pennsylvania Convention in my hometown  in July.

Meanwhile, I am in awe of what technology can do for a mass movement.  "The collective’s social-media timelines quickly filled with photos taken by activists — including a solidarity pose of students in lab coats at Thomas Jefferson University’s medical school and a long chain of silent students with tape over their mouths at the University of Cincinnati. A photo of a student demonstration in Atlanta appeared on the collective’s Tumblr feed with an inspirational message: 'Tonight we shut the city down. Tonight we were heard. Tonight, regardless of the rain, we stood in solidarity with Mizzou, Yale, and campuses nationwide,'"  goes the Chronicle story.

By contrast, back in the sixties we had the mimeograph machine and the typewriter.  Of course, there was television... and that made all the difference in its heyday.  It brought the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights marches and JFK's funeral into our living rooms, as has often been pointed out.  I wonder how relevant TV is today?  More from the Chronicle piece:

"The revolution might not be televised, but it will be tweeted!" Ms. Bell wrote on Twitter that afternoon. (Those words were a glib reference to the Gil Scott-Heron poem "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and a 2010 New Yorker article by the author Malcolm Gladwell, which appeared under the headline, "Why the revolution won’t be tweeted." He argued that social-media activism was characterized by a system of "weak ties," and that such a strategy "succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice.")

As I've pointed out repeatedly in this space, TV journalism by and large, has been reduced to infotainment.  While Generation "Z" is all about zombies, aka, "The Walking Dead," it appears to me they get their news from the Internet.  That's their second home.  And it seems to be where this mass movement --- if there is to be one ---will gain its cohesiveness and draw its energy.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni aims to shake things up in higher ed

Founded in 1995, the organization's describes itself as "committed to 'high academic standards, academic freedom, and institutional accountability.'" In practice, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the council is often critical of trustees for lax oversight or overly deferential relationships with presidents. The group is also critical of political correctness and the cost of college.

I've recently heard it said that many trustees come on board with the attitude, "I've written my check.  Don't bother me."   My own opinion is that too many trustees, coming out of private enterprise and wealthy enough to make a college their hobby, don't blink at CEO compensation at six and even seven figures.  They tend to rubber stamp what those over-paid presidents want.  They don't do their homework and they don't make the higher administration uncomfortable.

The American Council aims at promoting and encouraging trustees who will be thorns in administrators' sides.  I applaud the effort.  If this sounds like your kind of group, as well as mine, check out the website.

The Smell of Acronyms and the Roar of the Crowd

In my salad days a Broadway hit went by the title "The Roar of Greasepaint and the Smell of the Crowd."  For the entirely unschooled, let me note that the title was a play on "the smell of greasepaint and the roar of the crowds," an old theatre line of foggy origins.

My play upon a play on words refers to George Mason University's hasty name change for its law school:

Too late to avoid going viral in the blogosphere, university big wigs hastily changed the name to the Antonin Scalia Law School.  The crowd is still roaring, despite the rapid edit.

My own institution very recently took up revisions to its university wide student learning outcomes in anticipation of a visit from the Middle States accrediting agency in a couple of years.  The proposal submitted to our leading governance body suggested that the guidelines be dubbed the Rider University Student Learning Outcomes.  That is, until a wag on the policy committee pointed out this transmuted into R U SLO.

My memory leapt back to the 1972 presidential campaign --- a suitable recollection in this election year --- and Tricky Dick Nixon's Committee to Reelect the President:  CREP, which of course soon was transmuted into CREEP.  And, of course, that's just what the man was.

At times I found Justice Scalia to be a little creepy, too.  However, as an Italian-American (father's side at least... not FBI --- Full-Blooded Italian --- how's that for an acronym?), I felt some pride in not one but two Jersey boys of Italian decent serving simultaneously on the Court.

As I predicted in the Termination of Employment Bulletin that I co-author with two colleagues for Thomson Reuters, Justice Scalia's absence from the high bench is creating some interesting outcomes.  Just last week, a case that everyone expected to sound the death knell of public-employee labor unions in fair-share states resulted in a 4-4 tie at the SCOTUS, leaving the 9th Circuit's pro-union decision intact, at least for the time being.  Here's some of what I say about that in the upcoming May Bulletin:

         As we predicted in last month’s Bulletin, the demise of Justice Scalia is resulting in split decisions, divided predictably along the conservative-liberal fault line that previously produced numerous notable 5-4 decisions, such as the one declaring Obamacare constitutional.  March 29^th witnessed the first such 4-4 outcome in an important labor-law case, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association [2016 WL 1191684], the 4-4 split leaves intact Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association  [2014 WL 10076847], the Ninth Circuits own summary affirmance of the trial court’s ruling.  Consequently, to get a close analysis of the case, we have to go all the way back to the U.S. District Court’s decision....

At the 43^rd annual conference of the National Center for Collective Bargaining in Higher Education, held at the City University of New York on April 3^rd through 5^th,  a panel of experts representing labor and management in public higher education pondered the prospects for Friedrichs proponents in the future. Bulletin author Jim Castagnera attended the session.

          While none of the panelists was prepared to predict who will win the November presidential election, much less who will be the nominee of Justice Scalia’s seat, all agreed that the right-to-work movement will continue to press for elimination of the fair-share requirement from state laws on a state-by-state basis.  In this regard the effort is reminiscent of the Prohibition Movement of the 1920s.  A century ago, the religious right and affiliated organizations achieved prohibition in a majority of the states, before finally pushing an amendment through the Congress and gaining the requisite number of state endorsements. 

        Just as Prohibitionists’ ultimate goal was a revolutionary change in the U.S. Constitution, fair-share opponents’ ultimate objective is to “constitutionalize” the principle that fair-share laws violate the free speech and assembly provisions of the First Amendment.  However, they went on to point out that the public-employee unions may have a constitutional argument of their own in opposition to Friedrichs-style lawsuits.  This defense would take the form of a claim that requiring unions to provide collective bargaining services to free riders amounts to a taking of the unions’ property without due process of law in direct contravention of the 5^th and 14^th Amendments.

       The only certainty at this writing is that, while a battle was lost by fair-share opponents, the war is far from over.

       I serve on the Advisory Board of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at CUNY.  If that name isn't a camel designed by a committee, I don't know what is.  As such, it has been fruitlessly in search of an acronym for more than four decades.  The "new" executive director of three year's tenure, Bill Herbert, has taken to terming it merely "the National Center."

      This in its turn brought another memory to my mind, from the 1970s, when I was Director of University Communication at my alma mater, Case Western Reserve University.  CWRU --- which suggests no 'acronymistic' word in the English language and is hard to say in a single breath --- was the 1967 merger of Case Institute of Technology and Western Reserve University.  People took to calling it "Case Western," which misleadingly suggested a "Case Eastern" somewhere.  We tried encouraging "Case Reserve."  Of course, the obvious solution was simply to call it "Case," but that required the demise, or at least the senility, of the last generation of Western Reserve University alumni.  For awhile in recent years the alumni magazine was in fact called "Case."  But today it's called "THINK."  As an alumnus, I'm all right with that... I think.

      Well, today is the inauguration day for our university's new president.  I am serving as a delegate to the event on behalf of Case.  So I'd best get a bit of work done before the festivities start.

      All I can add here in closing is: TGIF.

The NLRB Region One Director has ruled that Tufts Medical School professors are managers who are not covered by the NLRA

In 1980 a 5-4 Supreme Court decision held that the faculty of Yeshiva University in New York City were managers who therefore were not employees under the protection of the National Labor Relations Act.  This decision effectively called a halt to the robust union organizing in private higher education during the 1970s.  Many universities,whose faculties had unionized during organized labor's halcyon days of the late sixties and seventies, withdrew recognition from those unions.  Boston University comes to mind as a notable example.

It's not that managers in private organizations can't form labor unions.  But without the protections provided by the NLRA, they have no shield against being fired for doing so.  There is no way, short of raw power, that such a union can force the employer to recognize it as the employees' bargaining representative and to negotiate a labor contract.  Consequently, the Yeshiva decision led labor organizations such as the American Association of University Professors to cease organizing efforts in the private sector of higher education all together for a long time.

A few years ago in a decision involving Pacific Lutheran University, the Obama labor board announced a new test for determining if faculty members are in fact managers who are not covered by the NLRA.  Under the Pacific Lutheran test, while authority over academic decisions remains a factor, it is now overshadowed by impact upon the institution's fiscal decisions, an area where faculty typically have far less impact.  In other words, the Democrat-dominated board raised the bar for private universities wishing to avoid unionization of their full-time faculties.  (Of course, this is not even an issue where adjunct faculty units are concerned, and in fact organizing is proceeding apace among part-time contingent faculty across the country.)

Now, the NLRB's Region One Director has released a new decision which holds that the "basic science" faculty of Tufts University's medical school are in fact managers who cannot unionize under the umbrella of the NLRA.  Key facts are as follows:

The Executive Council is the decision-making body of the School of Medicine. Its purpose is to establish and implement policies for the school, primarily through the oversight of various standing committees and the creation of ad hoc committees. It also recommends to the University's Board of Trustees all candidates for degrees offered by the school. The Executive Council is composed of the Dean of the School of Medicine, the chairs of the four basic science departments, the chairs of the 20 clinical departments, the chair of the faculty senate, an academic dean or officer from each of the various teaching hospitals with which the School of Medicine is affiliated, the President and Provost of the University (who do not usually attend Executive Council meetings), the Dean of the Sackler School, one alumnus, and a student representative. The only member of the School of Medicine Executive Council who could possibly be one of the petitioned-for basic science faculty members would be the chair of Faculty Senate, but there is currently no basic science faculty member on the Executive Council. 

       The Faculty Senate, an elected body, represents the faculty of the School of Medicine and advises the Dean and School of Medicine Executive Council on matters of concern to the faculty. It may request information, communicate its positions, be informed at an early stage by the dean of any plans affecting the School of Medicine, and review and request reconsideration of certain actions of the Executive Council and standing and ad hoc committees. It may receive the financial information necessary to evaluate the budget of the School of Medicine and suggest budget priorities. Each 

clinical and basic science department elects one member to the Faculty Senate, and basic science faculty also have some at-large members. Total basic science representation is either seven members or 25 percent of the total Faculty Senate membership, whichever is greater. 

       Apart from the Faculty Senate, the bylaws give the entire faculty of the School of Medicine the right to establish, subject to trustee approval, educational objectives, the content and form of the curriculum, and the requirements for awarding of degrees. The bylaws give faculty the right to recommend promotion and degree certification of students to the Executive Council, to recommend admissions and disciplinary policies for students, to recommend appointments and promotions within the faculty, to elect members to the standing committees, to render advice to and petition the Dean on matters of concern, and to recommend revisions to the bylaws. 

Recalling that fiscal authority is a big stick in the Pacific Lutheran bundle, we can note that in the Tufts opinion the director seems to put heavy emphasis on the fact that newly hired faculty may receive up the $2 million in start-up funds for their research labs and that they are able to allocate these funds without the approval of anyone else.

These same faculty are then expected to fund their research activities by obtaining grants from outside agencies.  Ultimately, claims the board, faculty are expected to fund 60% of their own activities, salaries, etc.

While the director's lengthy decision covers many other factors, these two facts jump out at me as being the most significant, if not controlling.  Of course, this decision likely will be appealed to the Board in Washington, which remains in the hands of Democrats appointed by President Obama, it being customary for the political party occupying the White House to hold three of the five membership slots.  The Democratic majority may very well disagree with the director's interpretation of the Pacific Lutheran test.

Do students' attitudes toward the news media reflect the declining stature of the press?

A new Gallup survey reveals that half of college students polled are willing to restrict press access to protests on campus, if the students don't wish to be covered or would prefer to communicate with the outside world directly via social media.  The survey also shows a student population secure in its own sense of free speech rights.  A majority admittedly feel that a PC climate on their campuses stifles some from speaking their minds.  All the same, in their views about their own generally robust free speech, press and assembly rights, they appear to have more confidence in the First Amendment's continuing vitality than do we older Americans.

As one whose first job was with a now-defunct afternoon daily newspaper way back in 1969, and who has lived to see newspapers give way to TV, which in turn has given way to the internet and social networks as the principal news media, this student attitude is not so very surprising.

Real investigative journalism has become a rarity.  So-called "objective" reporting is now little more than giving two talking heads with opposing viewpoints --- no matter how crackpot one or both might be --- equal time.  And reporting is now mostly infotainment.  As examples I offer the "Today" show and Vanity Fair magazine.  "Today" still covers some real news stories and Matt Lauer still occasionally interviews public figures, just as Vanity Fair still publishes some investigative journalism.  But with two of the last three Vanity Fair covers devoted to female Hollywood stars, it's hard to say the magazine is still dedicated to genuine journalism anymore than is Lauer's program.

When I earned my MA in Journalism at Kent State in the 1970s, newspaper reporting was the area of specialization that attracted the majority of the students.  Today, Communication Departments are teaching their students the multi-media skills necessary to survive in a "journalism" career.  Last year I was interviewed by a reporter from a Philadelphia station.  Immediately after the on-camera interview, he posed me for a picture, which he immediately tweeted.  He candidly informed me of how much he hated his job, which provided absolutely no opportunity for the  in-depth reporting that had attracted him to the profession.  What I see our communication programs primarily producing are grads who can create snappy video clips but who usually have little depth of understanding or interest in public affairs.  'Shallow and glitzy' is the new order of the day.

So why should we be surprised if the new breed of students activists, who seem to be emerging on our campuses, have little respect for the so-called news media and have greater confidence in telling their own stories to the outside world?

The majority of academics are liberals, or so the common wisdom goes. Does this matter? And how does it fit into the role I see for private higher education?

One commentator in the Chronicle of Higher Education asked earlier this week, so what if most academics are liberal? 

I guess that for me it matters, if our mission is to be truth seekers and truth tellers at a time when the news media, by and large, have abrogated their investigative-reporting role in favor of infotainment, and politicians, by and large, have abandoned whatever integrity they ever had in favor of spin.  With public higher education under attack from the conservatives --- witness what has happened to teachers and public-employee collective bargaining in Wisconsin, as well as the limits placed on public employees' First Amendment rights by the Supreme Court's Garcetti decision --- private higher education should be more sensitive to this role than ever before. 

But, despite conservatives being on the wrong side of the Wisconsin and Garcetti examples, conservatives must be active scholars who are heard in higher education, if the "truth seeking and truth telling" mission is to be fulfilled.  That's what the Heterodox Academy contends:

"We are a politically diverse group of social scientists and other scholars who want to improve our academic disciplines. We have all written about a particular problem: the loss or lack of 'viewpoint diversity.' It’s what happens when everyone in a field shares the same political orientation and certain ideas become orthodoxy. We have come together to advocate for a more intellectually diverse and heterodox academy."

I must agree.  

Thankfully, at least one small study seems to suggest that the academy is more politically diverse than the common wisdom believes. I hope these researchers got it right.

The Application Paradox: Applications are way up but enrollments in many private colleges are way down. How can that be?

An incisive article in this morning's Chronicle of Higher Education documents the meteoric rise in applications at many private universities.  But, as the writer explains, increased enrollments often do not follow.  Students and parents are applying to greater numbers of schools than ever before.  The reasons are many: the online common app; waiver of application fees at many colleges; SAT-optional rules at many others; hedging one's bets by applying to some back-up schools and/or applying to a wide number of better schools in hopes of getting at least one "hit".

As Moody's pointed out a couple of years ago, this paradox creates some very real planning nightmares.  Colleges are finding it ever harder to predict the actual enrollments they will have come autumn, making budget planning a bit of a crap shoot.  Some schools have mistakenly planned for much larger freshman classes than they actually got, creating a budget crisis.

To make matters worse, a dean I know recently revealed that many parents now are even willing to make forfeitable deposits to hold seats at back up schools while they continue trying to trade up and/or negotiate a better financial aide package elsewhere.  This adds to the air of unpredictability in which we are operating... a sort of "college bazaar" atmosphere.

My own mind wanders back to 1965, when I was applying to colleges.  The son of blue collar folks in a small Pennsylvania coal town, I came close to not applying at all.  My three best friends enlisted in the Army, Air Force and Coast Guard, respectively, and I gave serious consideration to going off with one or another of them.  My first cousin Tim invited me to visit Franklin and Marshall College, where he was a junior.  I stayed in his fraternity and attended some classes and eventually applied.

My high school counselor, a priest who knew little more about colleges than I did, suggested I should apply to a Catholic school.  Which one, Father?  "Well, I drove by LaSalle once and it looked nice."  (I am NOT making this up.)  On the strength of that resounding recommendation, I applied to LaSalle.

It turned out I was admitted to both schools, got a lot more money from F&M and ended up there.

Quite a contrast, you will agree, to the 8-10 colleges that the university bound high school senior solicits today.