terrapinsanity.com

Thus spake the General Assembly, and lo, it was so.

In a frenzy of hand-wringing over the cost of textbooks, and pandering to constituents who demand that gosh, we’ve got to do something, Maryland’s legislature passed a law to require all university instructors affirm they are cognizant of consequences to students when course materials are selected. We have already predicted how this will actually increase costs to students.

We didn’t realize how quickly this would become true.

The first practical edicts to implement this law are rolling out to faculty now. A new web site has been set up at faculty affairs where instructors must sign in, select a semester for which they give their statement, and then click to confirm. [We'll append the text here for those of you who don't have login capability at that site.]

Unfortunately, as you’ll note, the form contains plenty of jargon and undefined terms, so anyone who makes the mistake of trying to give a thoughtful and informed response must make contact with campus legal for explanations. It is also ambiguous as to whether you are supposed to affirm first and then select books, or vice versa. But no matter, most instructors will just click and move on without the soul searching that the legislature presumably wanted to trigger. At the end of it all, we get to make the same selections of materials as before – we just need to have clicked this page somewhere along the way.

So far all that cost doesn’t yet add up to an amount for which the legislature has any regard. Cost? Presuming each of a couple thousand instructors only loses 15 minutes of time for reading memos and reminders, juggling a browser and processing the site, this only adds up to a couple faculty-weeks lost capacity per semester. That pales in comparison to the capacity we all just lost due to furloughs, and legislators obviously don’t give a rip about that.

But does anything else increase costs? Sure. The above figure must be multiplied by a ‘confusion factor’ too. Officially book selection is now something that must only be done by instructors (no more having a secretary do data entry and hence the time hit for a lot of faculty, allowing them opportunity for productive things.) When faculty get to the site where we do entry – a commercial site with which the campus contracts – they’ll find that all the course information for Spring 2010 has been misloaded. Sorry, everyone gets to spend time head-scratching and then come back later since the textbook bureaucrats put in Fall 2009 listings instead.

[Cool feature though: that misload need not necessarily stop all the full professors from performing their new secretarial duties. The bookstore interface lets you add your own course information and there is no check done at all. An enterprising instructor could fill in book selections for all sorts of courses around campus. Surely nobody would think to editorialize by putting Dilbert collections as the textbook of choice for all courses. Stephen Colbert collections perhaps...]

But the truly big costs are still to come. That will be the cost to students when there is no lawful way to get one of the books needed for a course. Looking at the faculty affairs web site on textboooks you find regulations worthy of a bureaucrat from the old Soviet Union. These are the rules that apply not to the faculty, but to the publishers.

Many college materials are not books specifically crafted to be textbooks, they are just books. Scholarly works. Materials published by companies who, until this law, didn’t know they would suddenly have new obligations in order to sell their products in Maryland. But according to the new rules, specific obligations they will have, for listing costs and explaining differences from previous editions. Few from out of state (that would be all of them…) will want to go to federal court for an injunction (there’s that pesky interstate commerce clause in the Constitution, that limits Maryland’s ability to impose its own laws on other states’ companies.) They’ll either ignore the law (showing it the contempt it is due) or simply not do business here. [Comply? Do you think Amazon wants to maintain separate special lists of books based on which are Maryland-legal and which can be sent anyplace else?]

Maryland’s increased costs are a self-inflicted wound, squandering resources that could have gone into promoting excellence on an international scale.

Textbook Affordability Acknowledgement Form

In considering the appropriateness of a textbook and other supplemental materials for my course (content, pedagogy, teaching in my discipline), I acknowledge:

1. I have been informed about the impact that the high cost of college textbooks and supplemental materials has on students.
2. I have been informed of the following obligations of the publisher: that a publisher that sells college textbooks or supplemental material and provides information regarding a college textbook or supplemental material to a faculty member, other adopting entity in charge of selecting course materials, or the administration of an institution of higher education shall disclose the following information, in writing, by paper or electronic means:
1. The price of the college textbook or supplemental material;
2. The title, author, publisher, edition, current and three previous copyright dates, publication date when available, and ISBN of the college textbook and supplemental material, both as bundled and unbundled items;
3. Substantial content revisions made between the current edition of the college textbook or supplemental material and the previous edition of the college textbook or supplemental material;
4. Other available formats for the college textbook or supplemental material such as paperback or unbound; and
5. A list of textbooks that are classified as integrated* textbooks.
3. Before selecting a college textbook or supplemental material and before transmitting the selection to a campus bookstore, providing the selection to any other bookstore or posting the selection on the website of the public institution of higher education, I acknowledge the following:
1. If selecting a different college textbook from a different publisher, the cost of the new selection versus the cost of the previous selection; or If selecting a current edition of a college textbook; I have considered the following:
1. The differences in substantial content between the current edition of the textbook and the previous edition of the textbook as reported by the publisher;
2. That the use of the current edition is appropriate due to a material change in substantial content between the current edition and the previous edition;
3. The difference in price between the current edition of the textbook and the previous edition of the textbook; and
4. That the previous edition of the textbook may be available to students at a lower price via the used book market
2. That an integrated* textbook is not subject to the requirement for a publisher that sells a college textbook and any supplemental material accompanying the college textbook in a bundle shall also make available the college textbook and the supplemental material as separate and unbundled items, each separately priced.
3. That supplemental material included in a bundle is intended for use in the course.

The Maryland Higher Education Commission (MHEC) has affirmed a ruling that no Marylander should be able to study for a degree in community college administration unless it is done at a historically black college.

Unable to compete in a free and open marketplace of ideas and services, Morgan State University argued civil rights violations in getting MHEC to agree to artificially boost demand for the HBC’s degrees by proscribing UM University College from supplying its own degree to Maryland residents. (See Sun for their reporting on this topic.)

UMUC, with its growing portfolio of on-line degree plans, will perversely be able offer the degree in administration to anyone except Maryland residents, who apparently (at least to MHEC) will be better served by being forced to burn fossil fuel and travel in person to get the degree from Morgan.

As reported widely, the case gets national attention not only because it highlights growing discord between traditional and on-line degree programs, but also because of the important economic considerations specific to this degree area. Forcing prospective students in the field of community college administration to Morgan will have a limiting effect – there is only so far that many students are willing or able to commute. This limitation on supply of grads with such a degree will artificially support in-state demand for community college administrators, and moreover ensure that a greater proportion of people working in that field will have been racially acculturated at an HBC.

In other words, it is all about promoting select views on race at campuses across the state.

And that’s wrong.

Wondering what to do with your time on the increasing number of furlough days?

Look no more! Now you can go fishing!

The money you generously allowed to be taken right out of your paychecks has gone straight to buying another 1,000 acres of swamp land in the state. Yes, Governor Martin O’Malley championed the purchase of these tracts in Dorchester County adjacent to the Fishing Bay Wildlife Management Area.

This purchase will have the extra value of serving as a stimulus package for political donors, err, residents who might otherwise have risked being less rich.

And at $3.1 million, it was a steal!

In case you missed it, the Chancellor at University of Illinois who just had to resign in disgrace was, in his previous job, one of the Deans here at University of Maryland.

So far no criminal charges stemming from Richard Herman’s professional demise, and for that matter, it isn’t much of a demise. After stepping down he will land back in the mathematics department there, pulling down a quarter megabuck per year in salary. Not bad change for teaching a couple calculus classes. Where do we sign up to do that?

The trigger for his resignation was an on-going Illinois mess surrounding revelations that the university gave preferential treatment when admitting family members of state power brokers, ahead of far more qualified applicants. You know, business as usual for corrupt Chicago politicians.

But good golly, what a thought. Preferentially admit unprepared students ahead of academically superior applicants who would have thought that as tax payers in the state they’d get a fair and unbiased shot at entry to the flagship campus? Wonder where Herman learned that trick?

While news of Herman’s fiasco surely created a high pucker factor in Main Admin, officials here are relatively sure we won’t see the Illinois mess replicated here. Our leadership has been careful to quash any attempt to openly and candidly assess the Office of Admissions, and as we saw in the Diamondback today, nobody can get quality data out of our computers anyway.

This morning’s Diamondback reported yet another information processing mess: 600 Freshman Connection students – who are already on campus, having long since had their own orientation not to mention started class in September – were mailed orientation information as if they are expected to start here in spring.

Another needless expense. Another embarrassment. But place blame where it is due: leadership’s willingness to abide inferior, if not incompetent, information processing operations that consistently get in the way of – not enable – our strategic plans.

Main Admin values the Preventors of Information Services because computers that can’t provide reliable data also can’t be used to answer questions Main Admin doesn’t want asked. You know – about how well we are really doing in delivering value to Maryland tax payers. There are some great stories to be told about quality, the theme of this blog. There are also horror stories whose scope Main Admin is just as happy can’t be fully measured.

In the present case, we feel for the folks in Orientation and Office of Extended Studies. They’re at the mercy of whatever mailing lists are generated by the Preventors of Information Services, who have simply never gotten their collective heads around things called data models. Let’s recall the experiences of yesteryear when Freshman Connection students were alternately barred from registering for spring classes or dropped from their fall classes because the computers didn’t recognize their status. The latest snafu is just another example in the continuing saga of data disasters.

You’d think a leadership that promotes a message of quality would have thought to ensure the computers were fixed after the first couple go-rounds.

The new slogan is finally out (thanks, Diamondback): “Unstoppable starts here.”

Doesn’t grab us yet, but at least it is descriptive of Main Admin’s effort to refactor the campus into a recruiting machine: “unstoppable.” Admissions remains a tail that wags the campus dog, and the Provost obediently falls into line.

This news is already great in at least one way: maybe we can start counting the days until “Fear the turtle!” is a thing of the past. It is a great way to recruit scholars …. not. Recruiting directors in the top colleges on campus have gritted their teeth for years at the Admissions staff’s dysfunctional handling of academically talented students. When greeting a prospective with serious intellectual depth who is courted nationwide, Maryland’s crack Admissions crew (the Admissions crew on crack) typically talks campus life and football. “How ’bout them Terps? Fear the Turtle!” Maybe that’s to be able to say something since typically they don’t know specifics of academic programs to which we’d like to attract such talent, but the effect is the same. College Park is trying to build a world class intellectual center with a balloons and terptini Admissions mentality.

Out among the college recruiting staff, the sub rosa phrase is “Eff the Turtle!” The change gives us a chance at a fresh start, but if the new slogan ends up buried by the same old mishandling of scholars by Admissions, then don’t expect much.

With slick campus packaging even if not its imprimatur, the work-product of Ira Berlin’s history class on slavery rolled out Friday, placing President Dan Mote squarely in the spotlight. As reported in the Diamondback (and picked up in wider press) their report of this university’s historical role in slavery (or perhaps slavery’s historical role in this university) was clearly intended to dial up pressure for abject apologies for practices of 150 years ago.

Responding to this isn’t a task we envy Dan. So far he’s responded tastefully in the face of fairly unreasonable demands on his left flank (a narrow space, to be sure.) Now, any time we commend campus for avoiding nervous hand-wringing it is usually followed by a post about the flip … “NOW they’ve done it.” But we hope he hangs tough, thanks students for the report and lets everyone move on. It probably won’t be that easy.

The report itself is worthy of your objective consideration (read it for yourself.) Its base is a workmanlike collection of materials of a modest effort, not a year’s project to be sure, but this is a class and they are coming up to speed, so cut the students some slack.

The wrapper is another matter altogether. The authors – we think “author” – project 21st century sensibilities into the 19th century economy, clearly to promote advocacy positions in today’s world. They seek a “smoking gun” to place slave labor on the campus of the day, knowing this would be red meat for entrepreneurs who feed at the trough of racial angst. The preface states plainly that no such link was found, but that they believe it there anyway. This is “we’ll see it when we know it” research at its worst.

Let’s be clear: Racial politics has made for big business on campus. A lot of employees owe their living to special programs, set-asides and full-time pandering to victimhood. And modern realities threaten that business plan. Our campus sits in the nation’s most prosperous minority-owned county, in a “majority-minority” congressional district and don’t forget what chains of the past were broken by election of President Obama. This places College Park on the cusp, where our unqualified message of excellence can be told without people snickering, and we’re attracting scholars based on this message too.

These scholars are here purely for excellence, and don’t give a damn about color. That’s the problem. Never mind that equality is what some of us fought for back in the 60′s, genuine race-neutral policies threaten the cosy little race-based economic system in some corners of campus.

This dissonance drives the present report’s overtones: Those still living in the past (and making a living from it) need to flog modern scholars into becoming racially conscious. Feel that guilt (if you’re white) and nurture that sense of victimhood (if you’re black.) Don’t let history be history – keep the angst of that era alive today so others can continue to feed off it. Because Good Lord: if we actually got past the Problem, then when someone of color didn’t excel it might actually be about them, not oppression, and a bevy of victimhood counselors might be out of a job.

America’s leaders mouth a message about clean energy and transportation in the future, yet spare no expense to subsidize GM, chaining us to technology and policy of the past so a comparatively small political base can continue to feed at the old trough. In just the same way, some on campus talk the civil rights talk, yet – with demands such as made by Ira Berlin in the present report – chain us to inappropriate race consciousness of the past.

College Park’s long term success depends upon getting past race. We must only be about excellence. Top young scholars, upon whom our future rides, won’t come here to be the qualified best in set-aside programs (can we all say “separate but equal”???) nor to be handicapped so those in ‘special’ programs can be seen as competing on equal footing. They will come here only to be the best PERIOD. We should let them.

Hard on the heels of the Diamondback news of a big drop in minority admissions this fall, the crack leadership team in Main Admin has swung into action. Today Millree Williams, Senior Director, Public Affairs Strategy, announces an event for this Friday, to commemorate our black history at Maryland:

Last fall, the University of Maryland, College Park asked students to assemble a group to further explore the University of Maryland’s connection to the institution of slavery. Over two semesters, the students of History 429, led by Ira Berlin, Distinguished University Professor of History, explored this relationship to determine what else could be added to our body of knowledge on the subject. Completed last spring, that research was compiled in a report, Knowing Our History: African American Slavery and the University of Maryland.

On the occasion of the 40th Anniversary of the African American Studies Program, the students of History 429 (Knowing Our History) cordially invite you to attend a brief presentation of those findings, on Friday, October 9, 2009, at 1:00, p.m., in the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora.

Translation: “We didn’t actually know there was a huge drop in black admits this fall until the student newspaper pointed it out, but now we will show how much we really care, by ramping up advertising of the African American Studies anniversary reception and being sure to talk a lot about the history of slavery.”

Yeah. That’ll sure show how much we care!

“Maryland’s public university system is poised to become the first in the country with a policy on student displays of pornographic films,” said article in the Sun this morning.

Never mind just the state, but the country has gone how long without needing government regulation of speech and content on college campuses? Reasonable people have for years learned about how to frame an argument in support a position they hold (whether on behalf of decency or freedom of speech) and articulate it. Gosh, we learn this way.

No more! Champions of big government like Senator Andy Harris will protect us from ourselves! People for whom porn (whatever that turns out to be) isn’t the preferred cup of tea will be protected by new regulation, adopted under his explicit threat of even greater levels of control (as quoted in the article.) No need to think for ourselves and make adult decisions with the likes of these GOP goons around trying to posture for cheap headlines.

Gosh, what will be the next restrictions on content of speech, imagery or thought that Annapolis will levy by tugging on the purse strings?

Yesterday we praised the administration for having a professional response to the report that Admissions attracted fewer black students into this fall’s class of new freshmen. We should have known this would never last.

Today the handwringing begins. The overnight administrative about-face (now they are ‘shocked, we are, just shocked, and we intend to do something!’) is pandering at its worst, and we don’t envy Rob Waters for having to march out and mouth an entirely different party line from the honest one he gave to reporters for yesterday’s story.

The greater embarrassment is to the administration, however. How long have we been saying they’re asleep at the switch?? Here is what we learn from today’s Diamondback article:

• It takes a full news cycle for the administration to go from the point man’s honest reaction to the knee-jerk position articulated today.
• “University officials … said though they were initially caught off-guard, efforts are being set in motion to amp up the recruitment of high-achieving minority students.” Translation: “We screwed up again by listening to Barbara Gill’s reliably-rosy reports of recruiting successes and not investigating further.”
• “Attempts to contact Director of Undergraduate Admissions Shannon Gundy for comment were unsuccessful.” Translation: We may not have known what was going on, but at least one of us knows to keep our yap shut.
• “It’s really the mix of students that make the classes interesting. You need the rowhouse kids, and you need the mansion kids.” Translation: White kids are racists who live in mansions, and black kids are oppressed victims who live in rowhouses. What’s important for a good education is not structured classes where smart kids sit next to smart kids, but class structure where we can reinforce racial stereotypes.

This is an embarrassment for campus, but does set up an interesting prospect for future situation art. Having roused from its self-important slumber, the administration has now promised to get to the bottom of this, yet … Admissions has proven time and again it is the one operation on campus that is utterly impervious to the Strategic Plan’s values of accountability and assessment. What will happen when the irresistible force (racial genuflection and pandering) meets the immovable object (Barbara Gill, director of admissions)? Our bet: they’d declare it’s all the economy’s fault, paper over the Admissions Office screwups and whip the rest of us to pour even more of our scarce resources not into reaching top students (no matter what their color) but to black students (whether or not prepared for the rigors of a flagship campus, or would be well-served to attend here when they’d have a shot at a better-name campus.) Time will tell.