Inside Higher Ed has a good piece on the fiscal crisis (or bump in the road, depending on your politics) affecting the University of California system (HT: Org Theory).

The budget crisis facing the University of California, a 10-campus system serving 225,000 students, is without precedent. According to the latest projections – and these numbers change all the time – the system can expect last year’s $3.61 billion state budget to be reduced by about $813 million or approximately 20 percent.

While California has unique dysfunctions that explain their particular shortfall, the question of financial viability central to the “public” nature of universities across America. Already, many top public universities, including the UC system, draw their funding from non-public sources (fundraising, investments, grants, etc.). The ability of public universities to effectively fund raise and stay viable makes it easier for state governments to cut back on public expenditures for higher education, as they have been doing throughout the 90’s and 00’s.

Universities have a compelling case to make for public funding. They can persuasively argue that their viability is inextricably linked to a state’s global economic competitiveness. However, making this case poses a double edged sword in the political arena. If your reason for being is to produce a quality workforce, what’s the point of taking a class in Hebrew or Renaissance art? Of course, the standard response is that such courses are vital to the development of a well rounded individual. But as UC English professor Jack Miles points out in the article regrading the need to maintain liberal arts courses:

There are always people who call it frills and say ‘Who needs that? Who needs a symphony? Who needs a library?’ Those voices will always be around, and they become more compelling at a time of triage.…

In my own work, I’ve been examining the increased use of a “global competitiveness” frame in promoting diversity efforts at public universities. What gets lost in the discussion about global competitiveness is how framing dictates policy outcomes. If you sell yourself as primarily producing worker for the labor force (albeit highly skilled), then your institutional framework is going to have to adapt accordingly. This framing poses a critical set of questions for academia: how does your research contribute to economic competitiveness? How does your major contribute? How does the way you use your time as a professor contribute? All these questions, of course, beg the question of whether economic competitiveness is what we really should be selling.

I’m doing a lot of reading on the issue of multiculturalism and justice and I came across this piece by Amytra Sen in the Guardian (HT: Notes on Politics, Theory and Philosophy)

The idea of justice demands comparisons of actual lives that people can lead, rather than a remote search for ideal institutions. That is what makes the idea of justice relevant as well as exciting in practical reasoning.

Here, Sen is critiquing universal theories of justice (John Rawls as an example) that seek to prescribe one set of institutions for all persons. This form of justice, extended to all people, represents a “thin” form of multiculturalism which emphasizes our commonalities. The issue with having one form of justice that applies to all is that it ignores contextuality. It disembodies beings from their particular experience. The flip side then of a “thin” multicutluralism is a notion of justice that recognizes and supports difference (Iris Marion Young’s work as an example). This emphasis on individual distinctiveness situates people within their unique contexts by seeking to affirm group rights. This would be a “thicker” notion of multicultural justice. The problem with this approach is that in recognizing difference, “thick” multiculturalism ignores the real need for individuals to make collective decisions.

In the work I’m doing on diversity at public universities, I find that institutions are moving towards a thinner notion of multicultural justice. Court decisions, pressure from regents, donors and the business community all compel institutions to frame diversity in a less controversial language of diversity as a “competence” or a “skill set” that individuals need to be competitive in a global marketplace. This approach suggests that diversity is reducible to a uniform set of tools that can be applied to any context. This idea of “plug and play” diversity (apologies to Richard Florida) ignores the idysyncratic and ad hoc nature of dealing with others. This is what I like so much about Sen’s quote. Instead of teaching students to be deductively “culturally competent,” we should be teaching students to be inductive learners, building up their base of knowledge from experience and opening themselves to the ad-hoc and contingent nature of different interactions. I’m a fan of Charles’ Taylor’s call for “adhockishness” in our interactions with diverse others.

Jessica Lussenhop says our kids are awash in pornography, but for the most part they can handle it, or at least exhibit a nonchalance about it. Shudder inducing quote (for me at least):

“I have 140 gigs of porn on my computer,” one of his buddies says. “I was going to put it all on an external hard drive and pass it to all my friends. And I said this in front of my friend’s parents.”

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, his frankness is astounding. Second, this very nice boy with the 140 gigs of pornography gives his first and last name to include in this article. I’m not going to print it here.

I’ve thought some about this ubiquitous pornography question because we had Naomi Wolf come to our campus a few months back and give a thought provoking talk about how the deluge of porn had the effect of demystifying (rationalizing – although she didn’t use that work) the female body. Channeling Max Weber, She called for bringing courtship and magic back into relationships.

My own view is similar to Weber’s in lamenting that “the romantic mystery ship has failed.” The broarder implications for me as a parent and as a political scientist is the hyper-rationalizing of our youth. Our students, in my view, are evolving into “hyper-processors” who are able to synthesize vast amounts of information. I think, in general, this makes them more goal oriented and focused. The flip side is that they are less reflective. I think my big fear is that our young people are losing an ability to be intentional in their behaviors….i.e. they are too preoccupied by their increasingly complex habitus that they find it increasingly difficult to exhibit the agency necessary to alter their habitus. Not to get all sci-fi, but it would seem like the technology pushes structural change in ways that are not rational or driven by conscious thought.

Science is a view from nowhere. (from Thomas Nagel’s 1989 The View from Nowhere) Who among you observe your subjects from nowhere?

I wanted to take up some valuable blog real estate to encourage you to consider submitting a manuscript to a new interdisciplinary journal I’m helping to edit entitled The Journal of Integrated Social Sciences (JISS). The journal is a particularly good fit for manuscripts that are taking a systemic and integrative view of social issues.

JISS attempts to provide a platform that fills the void of a unified approach in the social sciences. Our hope is that students and professionals alike will take advantage of this new outlet for their ideas and quality work, to be shared with others, thereby bridging the isolation that often exists between the various social disciplines. We are therefore particularly interested in interdisciplinary and/or holistically oriented projects and invite you to share such investigations with the rest of the scholarly community.

From the Journal’s Mission Statement:
A major focus point of JISS centers on the concept of “transformations”. We do not see the world as a static, unmoving entity. Rather, social nature is developmental and thus transformative in its characteristics. Hence, we especially encourage authors with a key interest in examining how phenomena transform to submit their research. We are especially interested in those works that share a wide perspective for analysis and synthesis — i.e. on what the nature of the “whole” is. This approach stands in opposition to elementaristic observations that focus on parts, which without their relation to the whole phenomena become artificial and meaningless. We believe that works aimed at capturing the dynamics, fluidity, and synthesis of individual and social phenomena are all too often underrepresented in scholarly journals.

Please consider submitting a manuscript, or encouraging a promising student to submit their work.

The Sociology Division editor is Alan Hansen at Carroll College.

For more information on JISS, visit the website at www.jiss.org.
For information on submitting a manuscript, visit www.jiss.org/submissions

From the Monkey Cage: Charles Blow empirically debunks the cocktail party anecdote that Republicans are more likely to engage in illicit behavior (have affairs, get divorced, watch pornography) than Democrats. At that same time, he reminds us of the perils of ecological inference.

Using GSS data, he finds no statistical relationship between political ideology and divorce or infidelity. What’s more interesting to me is why those of us on the left like to grab on to this narrative. There seems to be a trenchant meme in popular culture about the repressed puritan who longs to “let loose.”

My wife and I recently saw Woody Allen’s Whatever Works. An otherwise funny movie except for the tired stereotype of the repressed Southern evangelicals that get enticed by the “big city’s” charms. In this image, a good Christian woman played by Patricia Clarkson is seduced by a philosophy professor and encouraged to indulge her animal spirits.

We also discover that the upstanding southern father, played by Ed Begley, is a repressed homosexual. He only discovers this in New York, of course.

Don’t get me wrong, we can go on for days about the level of hypocrisy present among the “family values crowd.” Republican politicians are having affairs so often that it’s not even news anymore. But it strikes me as interesting that we on the left so readily accept the narrative of conservatives being more sinful than liberals. It reinforces our sense of rectitude. In the same way, I imagine, that conservatives think all of us in academia are a bunch of un-reflective radicals.

Despite the plethora of podcasts out there, there are few that do a thoughtful, yet entertaining job of addressing issues in the social sciences. I want to draw your attention to one of these podcasts. BBC radio four’s Analysis is a great resource for social scientists. The last two episodes in particular have dealt with the question of how norms, in their various forms, affect behavior. Though Experiments does an amazing job of synthesizing the emerging research in moral psychology and experimental philosophy (how the latter is different from social science, I’m not sure). The episode “doesn’t everyone” does a nice job of discussing the role of institutional norms in affecting behavior. Both are a must have on your Ipod…right next to the Contexts podcast.

Post-election protests in the streets of Tehran.

Lots of fraud allegations going around.  I’m no Persia expert, but it seems that there is enough conservative, religious fundamentalist support (particularly in rural areas) to conclude that Ahmadinejad probably won, but these protests highlight a vexing governance problem.  What to you do when a majority in a country support illiberal regimes and policies?  Should the public be able to vote to curtail fundamental freedoms (speech, worship, assembly, etc.)?  In our country, we say no.  It’s hard to see these young people in the streets and not feel for their struggle.

HT: Richard Florida’s Atlantic.com blog

Draw your own conclusions. Of academic interest to me is how long will it be before an “Obama’s depression” narrative begins to stick. The stabilizing of the stock market and the improved health of the banking sector has allowed him to control the framing of the economy as “on the way up” despite grim unemployment numbers.

Startlingly broad-based support for the POTUS.

Let’s see how much of this support holds with the heavy lifting starts (health care, entitlement reform, etc).

HT: Richard Florida’s Atlantic Blog