The power of prayer?

So does prayer have a physical effect? Not surprisingly, the results are mixed.

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/18/pray-at-the-pump/#more-2969

College is a waste of time?

Murray, he of Bell Curve fame, has two main points in his new book. First, most people are not really capable of developing the critical faculties necessary to succeed in college and to lead society, so we're spending a lot of effort on higher education that could be better spent elsewhere. Second, since most of higher education is about offering a rough first-screen of student knowledge and ability to employers, we should be focused on certifications instead of bachelor's degrees for most students (those who really shouldn't be going to college anyways) and recreating solid liberal arts education for those who do have college-level capacities.

Here's the short version, from the Wall Stree Journal, of Murray's perspective.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121858688764535107.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

Here are two reviews of this argument, both of which are essentially agreeing with the critique of higher education in the second point while sharply disagreeing with the IQ determinism of the first point.

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/08/21/carey

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/08/21/perry

Bidding for courses?

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/the-coase-theorem-rules-at-nyu-law/

Here's an interesting approach to course registration. Even more interesting to me is that in the response section it is clear a lot of schools have a points/bidding system for courses in which all students start with an equal number of points (that can be increased or decreased by various things such as seniority) which they then use to bid in multiple rounds on the classes they want. That kind of information would potentially tell an administrator like me a lot about which courses, majors, and professors were the most popular. Hmm . . .

Review of "The Chosen"

It's been 25 years or more since I last read The Chosen and maybe 20 years since I watched the movie of that book. What I remember striking me then was how inspirational that story was in terms of my own intellectual development. Here was a way to become a man by developing my mind and soul through intellectual inquiry.

Now that I'm on the other side of the father-son story, what strikes me is the challenge of raising a son to become a man who has both a mind and a soul. Instead of being inspired as I was earlier, however, I'm now more overwhelmed and intimidated by the examples so artistically rendered in this book.

I guess it's the old story of thinking I knew it all and was capable of doing it all when I was young and now being painfully aware of how little I know and how little I can actually achieve now that I'm on the other side of 40.

The passing of Solzhenitsyn

My father is one of the foremost Solzhenitsyn scholars in the world, so I would be remiss if I didn't note Solzhenitsyn's passing and also my father's tribute in the Wall Street Journal to the great man and his work.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121822920626825461.html?mod=hpp_us_inside_today

Review of "P.J. O'Rourke on The Wealth of Nations"

Despite having a philosophy minor and an interest in economics, I just couldn't bring myself to read Wealth of Nations, so I've taken the easy way out and read famed satirist O'Rourke's take on this quintessential text. It was a pleasant read, but I can't say that I got as much out of it for my own purposes as I have from some other recent works, probably because Wealth of Nations focus on macroeconomic issues (why property rights, global free trade, paper money, etc. matter).

A few things, however, did lodge in my brain as possible applications.

1) I wonder at times when I attend conferences whether it's in my institution's best interests for me to present about the wonderful things we are doing. Won't that just help my competition? Smith's answer, I think, would be the "global free trade" argument that if higher education as a whole becomes stronger because we all share "best practices" with each other, then my institution as well will be better off. Plus, if it were all about "knowing" the right information, then the "doing" part wouldn't be so hard.

2) I've been pressing for a lot of "bottom up" innovation at JBU instead of top-down strategic planning. I can't find too many other CAOs who are following this same path, however, so I wonder whether this approach has that much long-term value. My initial experiences have been mixed with a lot of people looking at these requests for innovation proposals as just more paperwork. If much of the "bottom" isn't interested in participating, does that obviate the "bottom up" strategy? Smith would seem to argue when he talks about property rights that over the long-run, the bottom up approach will be much more effective, both because of "buy-in" and also because the changes that do happen are more likely to be ones that will really matter as opposed to something that someone up on top just dreamed up. He's certainly right at the macroeconomic level, but we'll see whether this logic also applies at a small organization like ours.

3) Even great minds such as Smith speak a lot of nonsense. O'Rourke has great fun with some of Smith's oddities and his misfires regarding various political trends. In the immediate wake of Solzhenitsyn's death, I've seen a lot of similar statements about his writing (some eccentric ideas thrown into the mix of his searing and profound truths). It's always a good reminder of our fundamental fallen condition to see that even the great writers are often wrong.

Convergence in American higher education?

After a two-day dean's conference in Conway, I'm back to pondering what appears to me to be the growing convergence, at least in terms of budget models, of public and private 4-year colleges and universities. 50 years ago, public institutions got almost all of their resources from state funding while private schools received their money from tuition and fund-raising. But now what's the situation? Our private schools, with just a few exceptions (Hillsdale, Grove), are very closely tied to government resources (student aid in particular) while public institutions are seeing government aid make up a smaller and smaller percentage of their overall budget. Tuition and fund-raising, what had been the purview of the privates, is making up a bigger and bigger share of the public school pot.

So what happens after another 50 years of these trends? At what point will some of the big state schools with big endowments decide to get out from under the state's thumb and go private? At what point will the privates get so worried about the increasing regulatory burdens that congress has been attaching to its financial aid contributions and follow the Hillsdale model? And if neither of these occur, how will publics and privates handle their increasingly direct competition with each other?

You know, maybe someone should write a book on the subject. Hmm . . . I think I need another sabbatical, maybe this time for a full year?