Showing posts with label higher education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label higher education. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Conference on Workplace Mobbing to convene in July, aims to establish mobbing as discrete field of study

PLEASE JOIN US IN NIAGARA IN JULY,
AND SPREAD THE WORD TO YOUR NETWORKS!

A Conference on Workplace Mobbing will convene July 22-24, 2024, at Niagara University in Niagara, New York, and registration is now open for participation and presentation proposals, in-person and hybrid.

The conference is sponsored by Niagara University and co-sponsored by the Society of Socio-Economists. Additional sponsorships are invited; please contact conference registrar Qingli Meng, in criminology at Niagara University, via the conference website.

Mobbing is a form of group abuse of an individual and has been documented in studies in sociology and related fields for almost half a century. Mobbing is associated particularly with workplaces, where persons act in concert to effect a victim's alienation and exclusion from the community.

Workplace mobbing is especially prevalent in academic institutions. A sociologist and expert on mobbing, Professor Kenneth Westhues has studied the phenomenon and why the academic work environment is especially fertile soil for mobbing behavior. Westhues maintains the website, Workplace Mobbing in Academe.

While forms of interpersonal abuse such as harassment and bullying have found traction in law and become recognized in popular culture as wrongful, mobbing has not yet come fully into its own. Mobbing behaviors are complex, involving multiple perpetrators with variable states of culpability, so mobbing is not always as readily recognizable as a more abrupt infliction, such as bullying. Like harassment and bullying victims, especially before the wrongfulness of those acts were widely acknowledged, mobbing victims tend to self-blame and self-exclusion, so might not bring mobbing behaviors to light.

A purpose of the planned conference, therefore, is to disentangle mobbing from adjacent behaviors, such as bullying, harassment, and ostracism. By recognizing mobbing as a discrete phenomenon and focusing study on mobbing as a cross-cutting scholarly sub-field, fields such as psychology, economics, organizational management, employment law, and criminal law can recognize and respond to the problem of mobbing more effectively, bringing relief to victims and preventing victimization to begin with.

A welcome and invitation at the Conference on Workplace Mobbing website explains the conference mission better than I have here, as resources available through Westhues's website well explain mobbing and its defining characteristics.

I am chairing the Scientific Committee of the Conference on Workplace Mobbing. The interdisciplinary committee also comprises Dr. Meng; Dr. Westhues; Robert Ashford, in law at Syracuse University; Walter S. DeKeseredy, in criminology at West Virginia University; Joseph Donnermeyer, in criminology at Ohio State University; and Tim Ireland, provost at Niagara University.

The conference is grateful for technical and logistical support from Niagara University's Yonghong Tong, PhD; Michael Jeswald, MBA; Valerie Devine, assistant director of support and web development; Michael Ebbole, audio visual systems coordinator, William Stott, audio visual systems specialist; and Chang Huh, PhD.

The Conference on Workplace Mobbing is a project of Conference on Workplace Mobbing Ltd., a New York nonprofit organization.

Thursday, January 18, 2024

It's education and healthcare, stupid

CC0 Pixabay via picryl
Experts are puzzled over American discontent while economic indicators ride high. Yet they consistently fail to recognize what seems to me an obvious factor: the exorbitant cost of education and healthcare.

My feeds have been awash in stories and analyses of the disconnect between economic indicators of a prosperous America and people's simultaneous sourness on their economic prospects. The Atlantic tackles the problem perennially (e.g., Apr. 2022, Oct. 2023, Nov. 2023, Dec. 2023, Jan. 2024). Yesterday I caught up on my podcast backlog with Paddy Hirsch and Darian Woods enumerating five explanations for The Indicator earlier this month.

To be fair, the explanations are multiple, complicated, and interrelated. Almost every writer fairly points to inflation as a capstone problem. As Hirsch put it, Americans care less about mathematical formulae than about strain on the wallet at the gas pump and the grocery checkout. 

Moreover, The Indicator helpfully told me, data show that even if wages are keeping up with inflation on average across the economy, that's not the experience of many, if not most, Americans. Wages in volatile markets, especially for young people who have the economic flexibility to change jobs more readily, are outpacing inflation times over. But wages in career tracks, for middle-aged and older Americans tied to mortgages and other responsibilities, are failing to keep pace with inflation. So yes, we're rightly frustrated when a smiling employer gleefully announces a wage hike, yet we somehow have less money in our pockets at month's end.

At the same time, I have been frustrated repeatedly by writers' and analysts' failure to recognize an elephant in the room: the exorbitant cost of education and healthcare in America. The problem is amplified by inflation, but it's not a byproduct of inflation, and it won't be remedied by any number of interest-rate hikes.

Let me interject that there is an overarching problem as well that analysts often fail to recognize, which is simply that economic indicators are not interchangeable with human happiness. American culture habituates us to equate, mistakenly, economic prosperity with personal joy. Yet ample social science data gathered around the world show that wealth, whether societal or personal, does not necessarily correlate with happiness; much less is it causal. And see Matthew 6:19-24. A productive society by economic measures is not necessarily a society that produces art, that affords opportunity for recreation and leisure, or that values freedom for individual and interpersonal fulfillment.

Even by economic measures, though, healthcare and education are anomalous sectors. As a matter of morality, healthcare cannot be left to the free market—and I say this as an economic conservative—because the essentiality of healthcare for survival makes any bargain inherently unfair, any playing field invariably unlevel.

Similarly, education, at least in part, also must operate extrinsically to the free market for goods and services. Education does not guarantee upward economic mobility. But upward economic mobility is profoundly unlikely without education. And a market has no incentives to provide educational opportunity as long as labor is abundant.

Consider: A society based on slave labor might look marvelous by economic measures: full "employment," efficient resource distribution, pyramid-building productive capacity. Yet there is zero potential for laborers' upward social or economic mobility. In America, we purport to abhor servitude and to prize socioeconomic potential as "the American dream."

Both healthcare and education are therefore imperative in our society; their absence, or unattainability, is hard felt. But the free market will provide neither in adequate supply. Healthcare will be unattainable for those unable to pay the going price. Education is a byproduct of a healthy economy only insofar as it is necessary to ongoing productivity. The economy won't provide for retraining as long as labor is abundant, and upward mobility is not even on the board.

This isn't an abstract problem. This is what Americans feel on the ground.

I went to the ER in the fall.  I was in the hospital for maybe seven hours, out-patient.  I am lucky to have insurance that covered most of the roughly $15,000 cost.  I am blessed with employment that allows me to cover without much strain the roughly 10% of the cost allotted to me. 

But for many Americans, in many instances, medical treatment is unaffordable or entails bankrupting medical debt. People choose to live with pain—not economic pain, but real pain, sometimes a toothache, sometimes terminal illness—because they can't afford healthcare. 

Why would we expect that people suffering with pain and ailments, unable to see doctors, would ever report feeling good about the economy?

My wife and I make decent money (for now). By some measures, our U.S. household ranks as high as the 93rd percentile by income. By tightening our belts for a few years, we mostly managed to put our one child, after public K12, through a bachelor's program. Still, she had to borrow about $50,000, much of it at 6.5%, to close the gap for four-year university. And we co-signed on those loans even while we were still, in our 40s, paying off our own higher-education debt. Neither our education debt nor the mortgage on our modest home discounted our income on the FAFSA that blithely informed us of our ample capacity to pay for college. And again, we're lucky and blessed. We could make it work.

For too many Americans, the cost of higher education is crippling or prohibitive. To my point, the economy doesn't care about education other than an efficient means to an end. The only relevant question is whether the hamster wheel is still turning. There's no need for people to better themselves, their lot. 

Why would we expect that people without hope for a better life for themselves or their children would ever report feeling good about the economy?

Education costs and debts work an enormous strain, financially and emotionally, on Americans. Healthcare costs, sometimes risks, sometimes debts, work an enormous strain, financially, emotionally, and physically, wearing us down, day after day.

And here's what really gets my goat: Things don't have to be this way. My cousins in Canada and Europe don't suffer under these strains. They have affordable healthcare and education. They are free to move about their lives.

My cousins pay more in overall tax burden—but not much more, and maybe less if I factor in my lifetime healthcare and education costs, as well as property taxes. And don't get into it with me over quality. As to education, I teach in Europe, and my students there are, to be frank and on average, better equipped as liberal arts undergrads than my American 1Ls, not for lack of work ethic. As to healthcare, I haven't met my primary care doctor since three primary care doctors ago. The reason I went in the fall to the ER, where I waited for five hours to be seen, was that neither my primary care network nor any area urgent care had a single opening. My "best healthcare plan anywhere in the world" must have been mislaid with my jetpack.

Can you imagine an America in which a university degree or a hospital admission would not have to be followed by years or decades of monthly payments? in which people could retrain for better jobs without incurring crippling debt? in which people could change jobs without sweating the burden of massive debts or the risk of losing access to life-saving medicine for themselves or their families?

That would be a free market. A level playing field. 

That's not what American corporations want. So that's not what Congress wants.

It's ludicrous (ludacris?) to expect that people—consumers—would radiate joy about a rosy economy as long as they're shackled, compelled to run the hamster wheels of a market that's not really free.

Tuesday, December 12, 2023

War protests expose double standards in higher ed

Ted Eytan CC BY-SA 4.0
I've refrained from commenting on the Israel-Hamas war, specifically and especially on the eruption of conflict, mostly, fortunately, non-violent, in higher ed in the United States, in which my own interests in academic freedom and free speech are most immediately implicated.

Despite my reticence—I'm under water with exams and a textbook deadline, though I follow the war closely in the news and remain in contact with friends in Tel Aviv—I read something in The New York Times that hit the nail on the head, so I want to amplify it.

In "Why Campus Speech Is Vexing" for The Morning from the Times, David Leonhardt wrote today:

[U]niversity leaders do face a basic choice. Do they want to expand the list of restricted speech to include more statements that make conservatives, Jewish students and others feel unsafe? Or do they want to shrink the list and tell all students that they will need to feel uncomfortable at times?

What since-resigned UPenn President Liz Magill said to Congress—essentially that the First Amendment protects a call for the genocide of Jews in the political abstract, absent hallmarks of unprotected speech such as incitement to imminent violence, or the severity and pervasiveness that characterize harassment—however socially and politically tone deaf, was technically a correct statement of the law from the former professor of constitutional law and Stanford Law dean.

The problem that Leonhardt recognized is that the First Amendment is not the standard that university administrators and their henchpersons have been applying on campuses for decades. Rather, hate speech codes, anti-discrimination policies, anti-bullying rules, and related prohibitions have proliferated and been enforced vigorously, First Amendment notwithstanding. And the standard has been a double one, because enforcement has been variable based on viewpoint, protecting only favored classes of minority persons or condemning disfavored, read: politically incorrect, viewpoints.

The problem is only compounded for university faculty, who are supposed to be the standard bearers for free expression, but have our livelihood hanging in the balance. At renowned schools where misdoings garner headlines, faculty might have a fighting chance to protect themselves. But what I've seen at the universities where the rest of us work, in the trenches, faculty routinely are intimidated, disciplined, and terminated for not toeing the line. When it happens in flyover country or in the lowest tiers of rankings, no one bats an eye.

When I was accused of stepping out of line years ago at another institution, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education founder Harvey Silverglate gave the local paper a quote condemning me. He apparently responded to the paper's inquiry with the assumption that a typically liberal law prof had gone off the rails. He failed utterly to learn anything about the case before he opined on it. When a mutual friend reached out to tell him that "he got it wrong," FIRE adjusted its public position thenceforth. But Silverglate never retracted his remarks, nor ever said anything apologetic to me.

At the University of Massachusetts Law School, which ranks at #167 in the U.S. News ranking of U.S. law schools, I've been told that University of Massachusetts policy, which requires that all employees show "respect" for all other employees, is violated by calling out misfeasance. So when I see an opportunity through faculty governance to do things better for our students and our community, I keep my mouth shut.

Tenure means nothing in these fights. I wrote many years ago about that paper tiger. Big-name-school academics, who don't have to toil at the hamster-wheel-spinning labor of assessment data collection and interim-strategic-plan-benchmark-attainment reports, don't well understand how faculty governance roles, as distinct from teaching and research responsibilities, are weaponized against faculty in the schools of the trenches.

Just last week, I completed a survey on academic freedom by the University of Chicago NORC that asked about ideological intimidation of faculty. The check-all-that-apply list of contexts in which intimidation or suppression of viewpoints might happen named a range of research and teaching contexts, but, true to form, University of Chicago, said almost nothing about school and university service roles. I added the response in "Other."

Professor Keith E. Whittington recently published a characteristically compelling paper on faculty "intramural speech" and academic freedom. It doesn't cite my 2010 work, in which I coined the term "penumbral academic freedom." I was working in a flyover state then, so it's like the paper never existed. Or maybe, as an east-coast, Duke Law would-be mentor once gently advised me when I was toiling voicelessly in flyover country, I should accept that my writing just isn't very good.

Well, I digress. My aim here is principally to say: When Magill fell, and as Harvard President Claudine Gay flounders, I'm torn between a head-shaking sorrow for the supposed quintessential marketplace of ideas and a mite more than a modicum of schadenfreude.

Back to work. The provost's dusty bookshelf is crying out for another strategic plan, and these exams aren't going to grade themselves.

Sunday, October 1, 2023

Saturday, September 2, 2023

Wednesday, May 10, 2023

OER saves students money, but printing is too pricey

Markus Büsges (leomaria design)
für Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Open educational resources (OER) are all the rage in higher education, but the cost of hard copies for students remains a problem.

At a panel on OER at a UMass Dartmouth teaching and learning conference in January, I had the privilege of talking about my experience using Tortz, my own textbook for 1L Torts (chapters 1-7 online, remainder in development and coming soon). Ace librarian Emma Wood kindly invited me to co-pontificate with Professor Elisabeth Buck and Dean Shannon Jenkins on a panel, "The Price is Wrong: Lowering Textbook Costs with OER and Other Innovations." Wood is co-author, with law librarian Misty Peltz-Steele (my wife), of Open Your Casebooks Please: Identifying Alternatives to Langdell's Legacy (on this blog).

My campus is pushing for OER, and for good reason. We all know how exorbitant book costs have become for students. And academic authors are hardly beneficiaries of the proceeds. The first book I joined as a co-author in 2006, for 1L Torts, bore a sale price in the neighborhood of $100. I received $1 to $2 per book (and gave to charity the dollars generated by my own students). My students for the last two years have paid nothing for Tortz.  Besides the cost savings, I get to teach from materials I wrote, compiled, and edited, so I know the content and how to use it better than I could anyone else's.

My students' book for 1L Property this past academic year cost $313. It's an excellent book, and I'm not knocking the professor who chose it. Developing my own materials for a foundational course is a labor-intensive project that I felt I could tackle only with the freedom, afforded by tenure, to set my own agenda, and some 20 years' experience teaching torts. At that, I've benefited and borrowed heavily from the pedagogy of a treasured mentor, Professor Marshall Shapo. Without the opportunity to have invested in Tortz, I'd be using a pricey commercial book, too.

A necessary aside: Technically speaking, my book is not OER, because I retain copyright. By definition, I'm told by higher education officials, "OER" must be made available upon a Creative Commons license, or released into the public domain. That's an irrevocable commitment. I'm not willing to do that. In my experience working with higher education institutions around the world, I have found that some out there would seize on freely available intellectual property while profiting handsomely from students desperate for opportunity. In such a case, I would rather negotiate a license and decide myself what to do with any proceeds. I freely licensed Tortz to my own students for the last two years. This is an interesting problem, but for another time.

So Tortz has been working out well. But now I'm looking at a roadblock: hard copies.

For the past two years, I have taught Torts I and II only to small night classes, and I've provided them with hard copies of the text. I made the hard copies on our faculty copiers, and the numbers were small enough not to be of concern for our budget. But beginning in the fall, I'll have two sections of torts, day and night, anticipating 70 or so students. That's too many prints to fold hard copies into the office budget.

I need my students to have hard copies for many reasons. The first issue is comprehension. For me, a reader of a certain age, I still have trouble absorbing content from a screen as well as from a page. When it's important for me to get it, I print a hard copy to read. Many of my law students, of all ages, but especially non-traditional and part-time students, share my preference. When I did a peer teaching observation for my colleague in property law, I saw students using both online and hard-copy versions of the $313 book. A hard-copy user told me that she uses the online version, but still needs to highlight and "engage with the text" to process the content on the first go.

A second issue arises in the exam. I prefer to give my 1L students an open-materials but closed-universe exam. I find that a closed-book exam tests more memorization than analytical skill, while an open-universe exam tests principally resistance to distraction. Regardless, it's my pedagogical choice. The problem is that the exam software we use locks students out of all computer access besides the exam. For any materials they're allowed to have, namely, the book, they need to have an old-fashioned hard copy.

So how to put hard copies in 70 students' hands without re-introducing the cost problem?

As is typical, my university has a contract with a bookstore operator, and book sales are supposed to go through the bookstore. The bookstore uses a contractor for printing. The contractor, XanEdu, after weeks of calculation, priced my book for the fall semester only: a ready-made PDF of 619 pages with basic RGB screen (not photo-quality) color, at $238 per print. That's a non-starter.

Printing at Office Depot would cost just a bit more than that. My university no longer has a print center, but I think its prices when there was one were comparable to retail.

A print-on-demand company, Lulu, was founded by Red Hat tech entrepreneur Bob Young, who became frustrated with the traditional publishing industry when he wanted to tell his own story. Lulu priced out at just $27 per book, which definitely makes one wonder what's going on at XanEdu. Lulu charges about $12 to ship, USPS Priority, but that takes up to 11 business days, which is far too long for students to order only once school starts. Also, it's not clear to me whether I can offer print on demand consistently with the university's bookstore contract. The bookstore has not answered my query as to what the mark-up would be to pre-order copies in bulk from Lulu.

I've kicked the issue upstairs, so to speak, to the law school administration. The associate dean promised to take the question up more stairs, to the university. Budgeting is above my pay grade, after all. I'd like to see the university support OER by volunteering to eat the printing costs. If I'm pleasantly surprised, I'll let you know. It's more likely the university will offer to deduct the costs from my pay.

Anyway, I am excited about OER, or freely licensed "OER," as a game changer for me to be more effective in the classroom. I appreciate that my university supports the OER initiative at least in spirit, and I am grateful to have been included in Emma Wood's thought-provoking discussion with Professor Buck and Dean Jenkins.

Monday, February 20, 2023

Judge teaches, supports professional development by encouraging appearance of junior attorneys

In multi-district civil antitrust litigation over turkey prices, a federal magistrate judge in Illinois in the fall issued an unusual order, calling on litigating firms to designate only junior attorneys to argue motions.

Pending before the court at the time were three pretrial matters, a discussion of expert testimony, a motion to preclude a deposition, and a motion to amend a scheduling order. On October 20, 2022, Magistrate Judge Gabriel A. Fuentes wrote:

[T]he Court would like to offer junior counsel an opportunity to speak to the expert discovery issue and to argue the two motions. The Court strikes the [planned telephonic] hearing and resets it to [Nov. 1,] when there will be ample time to address all three issues. If the parties do not indicate that they will permit junior associates to argue the motions, the Court will hold the hearing telephonically on the expert discovery issue only and will decide the two motions on the paper submissions.

The Court kindly requests that the parties confer and notify the courtroom deputy ... whether counsel with less than four years of experience after law school will be permitted to speak and argue; ideally, different counsel would argue the two different motions for the arguing parties. Also, multiple junior counsel could divide a party's arguments on a single motion if it makes logical sense to do so. Senior counsel of course may and should attend in a supervisory role and will be permitted to add or clarify as they see fit.

No inferences should be drawn about the importance of any motion to the Court based on the Court's attempt to create professional development opportunities for junior counsel. Additionally, the status hearing on the expert discovery issue strikes the Court as one that could be addressed by junior counsel.

(Paragraph breaks added.)

Judge Fuentes has served on the bench for almost four years, since May 2019. Before his appointment to the bench, Fuentes was an accomplished lawyer, and before law school, an accomplished journalist.

Fuentes wrote news and sports for local papers as a secondary-school student, and he worked his way up to managing editor of the Daily Northwestern while at the Medill Journalism School. He worked for four years as a reporter for The Los Angeles Times before going back to the Northwestern Pritzker Law School. After six years as an attorney associate, Fuentes made partner at Jenner and Block; left to serve about five years as an assistant U.S. attorney; then returned to Jenner and Block for 13 more years.

While practicing as a litigator in white collar defense, antitrust, and media law, Fuentes maintained a heavy docket of pro bono practice. In 2015, the Chicago Bar Foundation recognized his work "on indigent criminal defense, prisoner rights, the protection of voting rights for minorities, and First Amendment issues." In particular, Fuentes never stayed true to his journalistic roots, for example, once negotiating with counsel for Western University Illinois University on behalf of a student investigative journalist.

Being also a product of journalism and law schools, and likewise having represented student journalists pro bono, I identify with Judge Fuentes's experience. More importantly, as a law professor, I appreciate Fuentes's initiative to help new attorneys in big-law practice to get real forensic experience. 

Much of what is wrong with legal education today can be traced to the bean-counter orientation of administrators, universities, and the American Bar Association as accreditor, all of which are more concerned with bar pass statistics, superficial diversity, and, above all else, revenues, than with whether students actually learn anything worthwhile or grow as moral actors. Yes, law schools do care about making students "practice ready," but that only because the bar, unlike the medical fraternity, has shirked its historic responsibility to teach. The responsibility has devolved wholly on law schools, where practical skills training has all but supplanted the policy, theory, and moral deliberation that are supposed to make law a profession rather than mere occupation.

Fuentes has counseled students at Medill and taught adjunct at Pritzker, so he's kept a hand in the classroom, too. I don't know Fuentes. But to me, his apparent ability to synthesize his career experiences into simultaneous roles of servant and mentor represents the very model of professional identity. His minute order entry of October 20 should be the norm, not a headline.

Judge Fuentes ruled on the motions on November 9, and entered into the record: "The Court extends its thanks to the parties and counsel for allowing junior associates to argue and address these matters, and the associates are commended for an excellent performance."

The underlying case is In re Turkey Antitrust Litigation, No. 1:19-cv-08318 (N.D. Ill. filed Dec. 19, 2019). HT @ Adrian Cruz, Law360.

Sunday, February 19, 2023

Events endeavor to empower student journalists

The Student Press Law Center and partner organizations are sponsoring Student Press Freedom Day on February 23, 2023.

A number of virtual educational events are open to the public:

There also are pre-recorded events on school media policies, op-ed writing, and student press freedom.

Many moons ago, I had the privilege of interning at the Student Press Law Center when I was a law student, and then of representing student journalists pro bono when I was in practice in Maryland. Censors never tire, so there is always opportunity for practicing attorneys to engage with this rewarding and challenging work.

HT @ the Free Expression Legal Network (FELN).

Tuesday, January 24, 2023

Lawyers be a-ballin'?

Canadian lawyers protest legal aid de-funding in 2014
(Sally T. Buck via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
My wife was a legal services attorney after law school.
Her salary could not have paid both law school debt
and even a modest mortgage.

A student loan specialist giving advice on The Takeaway this morning said, "Don't live like a lawyer when you're a student, and you won't live like a student when you're a lawyer."

Betsy Mayotte, founder and president of The Institute of Student Loan Advisors, was repeating an aphorism, she said, as a caution against students borrowing more than they need for higher education. Don't count on any program for loan forgiveness, she warned; rather, assume that you'll have to pay back every dime.*

That's sound, conservative economic advice, especially for an America stretched thin on credit card debt and short on long-term savings. But for anything, I could not work out how the aphorism embodied the message.

What does it mean to "live like a lawyer"?

Mayotte had just cautioned students that they should take the time, however boring the task sounds, to read the whole of their promissory notes. The notes well explain what borrowers are in for, she advised, and "no one told me that" will not later be an excuse to default on debt.

Also good advice. But doesn't living like a lawyer mean being supremely attentive to the fine print and acting conservatively in anticipation of adverse circumstances?

In her informative and insightful book, How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School, Professor Kathryne M. Young related research that successful lawyers are more often natural pessimists, marking a contrast with the successful optimists who have the lead in the other professions, clergy and medicine. That's because a lawyer's job is to prepare for the worst, while clergy and doctors are busy instead coaxing their clients toward a joyful salvation of one kind or another.

Did the aphorism mean to be an optimist when a student, so you don't have to be a student when you're a pessimist?  What does that even mean?

You, dear reader, are no doubt quicker on the draw than I, so you've probably worked it out. It dawned on me an hour or so later:

Don't live like a baller when you're poor, or you'll be poor when you're supposed to be ballin'.

The problem is that "lawyer" doesn't mean rich to me. 

I'm a lawyer. Not rich. My wife's a lawyer. Also not rich. I checked.

The vast majority of my former students work in public service jobs, if they're in JD-required positions at all. And even the few in private practice: not rich. Okay, I can think of one. But I think he was rich already.

Don't get me wrong. We're not struggling. Two JDs put our household income in the 90-something percentiles, according to the DQYDJ calculator, with me in the 90s as an individual and my wife, who has a master's degree, as well as her law degree, in the 70s. 

But income is only one measure of wealth, and, I daresay, not the most important. We both went into serious debt to get those JDs. Our home is mortgaged. We had not paid off our graduate education by the time our only child went to university. And we could not afford to get her through four years without her going into debt, too. 

Neither of us started off loaded. We still buy our clothes at Goodwill and Savers. Habits die hard. I just threw away my wife's socks with holes in them while she was out of the house. She won't do it. But I think she deserves better.

When I left law practice in 1996, I was making $50k, which is about $95k adjusted for inflation. I left that for my first job in academics, where I made $35k—$15k less than the IT guy. "Supply and demand," the dean said.

Now I make more. But after advancing in academics for 25 years, I still make less than the average lawyer in the mid-Atlantic, where I practiced, and just a little more than the nationwide average starting salary for a first-year associate.

The takeaway is that I don't associate being a lawyer with being rich. And it's alarming if people are going to law school with that expectation, or if that's how the public sees lawyers. "Kill all the lawyers" was the suggestion of a butcher.

I just finished some physical therapy for an injured shoulder. The bill for that, to my insurer, was $355 per hour. I saw a podiatry specialist recently. That was billed at $122 for what I think was scheduled as a 15-minute appointment, though it took less than 10.  We'll call it $488 per hour.  I like both those providers, but neither is a superstar gracing the cover of Physicians Weekly.

A very gross number, but the average U.S. lawyer's billable hour now runs about $300. The lawyer has more investment in education than the physical therapist, if a bit less than the doctor. The lawyer is a bargain. Clergy is a better bargain, but that's their thing.

Why isn't the saying, "Don't live like a doctor when you're a student, and you won't live like a student when you're a doctor"?

Well, of course, not everyone in healthcare is rich, either.  My wife had an ER visit and hospital stay, no procedures, last summer that was billed at about $13,000 for two days. At the same time, one of my nieces and one of my brothers work as nurses in hospitals; neither of them is making bank. Where's the money going?

I don't know what the right graduate school investment is to get rich. I didn't make it. Maybe whatever gets you to be a healthcare CEO. Be the owner of the hospital, not a provider in it.

Law and medicine can open the door to opportunity, to improve your lot if you're not living comfortably. I'm not knocking that. But no one should go into educational debt without a plan at least to do better than status quo. And plans should be based on realistic expectations.

The aphorism doesn't fit. Worse, it's dangerously misleading. We've got a problem in America with access to education and upward socioeconomic mobility. Simplifying the narrative to suggest that a professional degree will necessarily afford return on investment is not part of the solution.

* I've been reading about the challenges against the Biden student loan forgiveness order. You can follow the legal story at Reason. I'd love to see the plan go through; my daughter would benefit. I'm sorry to say, though, I think the challengers are right: the President exceeded his authority. The unfortunate political outcome, I predict, is that the Administration will be blamed for breaking a promise, and the Supreme Court will be blamed for enforcing the law, both thereby suffering unwarranted further damage to already embattled credibility. Meanwhile, Congress, which in fact held the key to untie the President's hands, but can't ween itself off addiction to money, and especially Democrats, who passed on a real opportunity to make a difference for access to education and socioeconomic opportunity, will escape accountability.

With regard to the title of this post, you can read more about the circumfix a-/-ing at Wiktionary. Read more about "the habitual be" at Slate.

I've been away from the blog for a while owing to an exhausting, if variably rewarding and challenging December and January. I'm back in the saddle now and look forward to catching up on some matters I'm eager to share. Thank you for your patience, and stay tuned!

Thursday, August 25, 2022

University proctor's scan of student's bedroom before online exam violates Fourth Amendment

Nicholas Todd's Bedroom Workspace (Nicholas Todd CC BY 2.0)

In a case with implications for remote testing in all public universities, Cleveland State University violated a student's constitutional rights by requiring a visual scan of his bedroom before he took an online exam, a federal court ruled Monday.

Plaintiff-student Aaron Ogletree complained about the visual scan of his bedroom before a remote exam in General Chemistry II in spring 2021.  The court described the process of the Cleveland State testing service: 

First, at the outset of a proctored online exam, whether proctored through an electronic application or an actual person, students must “show their ID next to their face so you can clearly see and read the ID and be able to tell that that person is the same person that is on the ID.” Second, either the proctoring application or the proctor prompts the student to conduct a room scan of his environment. Other students taking the remote test can see the room scans of other students.

Live exams were not permitted at the time because of the pandemic. Ogletree, who lived with his mother and two siblings, said "that he 'currently [had] confidential settlement documents in the form of late arriving 1099s scattered about [his] work area and there [was] not enough time to secure them,'" the court reported. "The proctor testified that she did not see any tax documents or medications."  A recording of the exam including the room scan was retained by a Cleveland State contractor.

Cleveland State sought to exempt the case from Fourth Amendment purview by analogizing to home visits by benefit administrators. The court rejected the analogy:

[T]he Sixth Circuit[] ... accurately reads this line of cases as applying to a fairly distinct set of circumstances materially different than those at issue here: making welfare benefits contingent, for all recipients, on a limited and consensual search to confirm expenditure of the funds for the interest of a child. In contrast, ... this case involves the privilege of college admission and attendance and does not involve a benefit made available to all citizens as of right. Additionally, the record here shows a variable policy—enforced, unevenly, in the discretion of a combination of proctors and professors—of using remote scans that make a student’s home visible, including to other students, with uncertain consequences.

In the Fourth Amendment reasonableness analysis, Cleveland State pointed to Supreme Court precedents that have been generous to K12 public school officials in searching and drug testing students and their possessions. The court agreed with the plaintiff that an adult attaining a higher education by choice is a different matter from the custodial relationship of a school to a minor child.

The room scan moreover was an ill fit with the aim of exam security. Students were able to access their cell phones and to leave the camera view during exams. And the school could have required papers instead of exam, the court suggested.

Cleveland State is hardly the only university to use room scans. Room scans have been touted as a way of ensuring the security of remote exams. Proctoring contractors might use the technique without a university realizing it. And like other remote services precipitated by the pandemic, remote exams might persist for sake of convenience.

Bar exam authorities typically are public entities, too, subject to the Fourth Amendment. The LSAC that administers the law school admission test (LSAT) is a nonprofit corporation, not a public entity, though there might be Fourth Amendment implications if a public law school requires the LSAT for admission. Either way, it's a bad look for an education gatekeeper to violate privacy.

The LSAC partly averts the privacy problem by requiring test takers to clear their environment of distracting or potentially compromising items. Proctors visually inspect only the test taker's workspace. Despite, or even with, such more limited protocols, law exam administrations in the US and UK have generated ugly headlines about students unable to urinate in privacy. Suffice to say, remote testing security is a work in progress.

The case is Ogletree v. Cleveland State University (N.D. Ohio Aug. 22, 2022), the Honorable J. Philip Calabrese presiding. HT @ Monica Chin for The Verge.

Sunday, July 31, 2022

Oh brings dispute resolution skills to UCLA

Dean Oh selfie in his virtual office
(© Hyun C. Oh, licensed exclusively)
Hyun Cheol Oh, my friend and former student, has joined the higher ed ranks as an assistant dean of students at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), I am immensely proud to report.

Dean Oh is a 2010 alumnus of UCLA, where he earned a bachelor's in international development studies, and of the law school where I work, where he was the founding president of the campus chapter of the Asian Pacific American Law Student Association (APALSA). He also holds a master's in education, culture, and society from the University of Pennsylvania. In his 2014 master's thesis, Multiculturalism in the Republic of Korea, Oh examined approaches to multiculturalism in South Korean civic education.

At UCLA, Oh is putting his legal training to work, specializing in dispute resolution within the offices of the dean of students and of student conduct. Oh lives in Los Angeles with his family, which includes his better half, the profoundly gifted pianist Inhyun Lee.

The Bruins are lucky to have Dean Oh on their team.

Friday, July 29, 2022

Scholars seek to stimulate socio-legal studies in Africa

At the global meeting of the Law and Society Association (LSA) in Lisbon earlier this month, scholars in the collaborative research network dedicated to Africa ("CRN 13") agreed to move forward with an independent Africa Law & Society Network.

Working alongside but apart from CRN 13, the "Africa Law & Society Network" has a web page and for the time being claims a mailing address at the Centre for Law and Society at the University of Cape Town (UCT). The aim, in time, is to build a vibrant organization that is representative of scholars throughout the continent. 

The network thus hopes to stimulate the coordination of socio-legal studies by African scholars in two respects in which previous efforts have floundered: to have African scholars charting their own direction for research, rather than being coordinated by Western-dominated organizations; and to decentralize and diversify leadership, overcoming the tendency to lean exclusively on South African institutions.

CRN 13 leaders at the meeting sported the slogan "#CiteAfricanScholars" on T-shirts. Citation to African scholars often is limited by structural constraints that Western researchers might not even be conscious of, such as the simple availability of the work. With limited institutional resources, African academics cannot always enter their works into the subscription databases on which researchers often over-rely. And academic writers not backed by well known institutions are disproportionately unable to negotiate copyright and access terms with publishers that favor long-term pay walls over open source.

Professor Dee Smythe (LSA, UCT, LinkedIn) addresses the CRN 13 meeting in Lisbon.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

 

Saturday, February 5, 2022

Global summit in business leadership moves online, examines US-India ties in aftermath of pandemic


The annual world summit "INBUSH ERA 2022" will be virtual this year, February 23 to 25, and host Amity University is maximizing the advantage of the digital platform with a truly global program.

This year marks the 22nd installment of the International Business Summit & Research Conference (INBUSH ERA). The year's theme is "Nurturing People, Purpose, Partnerships, Planet & Performances for Creating Sustainable World Class Organizations." Host Amity University is a prominent network of private universities in India, and the conference will be online and hybrid, based at the university's flagship campus at Noida, Uttar Pradesh, near Delhi.

Yesterday I had an organizational call with my colleague Professor Marut Bisht, who is elbow deep in planning academic components of the conference.  I look forward to offering a perspective on transnational communication regulation on a U.S.-focused panel beginning on Thursday, February 24, at 1330 GMT.  The same panel will recognize and welcome remarks from:

  • Prof. Srikant Datar, Dean of the Faculty, Harvard Business School
  • Dr. Sam Pitroda, Indian engineer, business executive and policymaker, and ex-chairman of the National Knowledge Commission
  • Prof. Pradeep K. Khosla, Chancellor of University of California
  • Prof. Andrew D. Hamilton, President of New York University
  • Mr. Sabeer Bhatia, Co-Founder at ShowReel
  • Dr. Punam Anand Keller, Senior Associate Dean Innovation and Growth at Dartmouth College
  • Dr. Jagdish Sheth, Charles H. Kellstadt Professor of Business, Goizueta Business School, Emory University
  • Prof. Supriya Chakrabarti, Director of the Lowell Centre for Space Science and Technology, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
  • Prof. Gurpreet Dhillon, Farrington Professor of IT and Decision Sciences at University of North Texas
  • Prof. Raj Mehta, Vice Provost for International Affairs, Director University Honours Program, Professor of Marketing, Carl H. Lindner College of Business, University of Cincinnati
  • Prof. Yahya R. Kamalipour, Professor of Media and Communication, Department of Journalism & Mass Communication, North Carolina A&T State University
  • Dr. Shailesh Upreti, Chairman iM3NY, New York

INBUSH ERA 2022 also incorporates a "Happiness Conference" with speakers including Ben Smith, head of research and innovation for the Chelsea Football Club.


Friday, February 4, 2022

Verma, Goodwin take new jobs in higher ed leadership

Two friends and colleagues, Professor Manish Verma and attorney Kristine C. Goodwin, are moving into exciting new positions in higher education.

Dr. Verma has joined the University College of Bahrain as Vice President for Academic Affairs.  The university is a non-profit, English-language institution in the Kingdom of Bahrain, modeled after U.S. and Canadian higher education in the liberal arts tradition.  The university's leading programs are in business administration, information technology, and communications and multimedia.

Prof. Manish Verma
(LinkedIn photo)

An accomplished scholar himself in mass communication, Dr. Verma has been a friend and stellar colleague of mine for many years.  His enthusiasm and determination to collaborate across borders is almost singularly responsible for sparking my enduring interest in communication law and policy on the Indian subcontinent and in the Middle East.  I've been privileged firsthand to witness Manish's intense devotion to his students, and they respond with adoration in kind.  I expect that that teacher's spirit will animate his service in administration, where such spirit is so often sorely needed.
Bahrain, in the Persian Gulf
(map by TUBS CC BY-SA 3.0)

Closer to home, for me, attorney Kristine Goodwin has been named Vice President of Student Affairs at Western New England University.  Located in Springfield, Massachusetts, Western New England is a vital provider of access to higher education in its region.  In addition to the WNE School of Law, led by the talented Dean Sudha N. Setty, the university boasts colleges in arts and sciences, business, engineering, and pharmacy and health sciences.

Kristine Goodwin
(WNE photo)
Attorney Goodwin has more than three decades' experience in higher education.  That career was already well underway when she went to law school, so I cannot quite claim that my Torts I and II classes made all the difference.  It was rather my privilege to have around her magna cum laude appetite for learning.  She was a university administrator in my home state of Rhode Island while she went to law school.  She generously provided me with guidance and resources when I served on a university committee formulating personnel policy.

I hope leaders at University College of Bahrain and Western New England University, and students in Bahrain and Massachusetts, know how lucky they are.

Friday, December 31, 2021

Atlantic's Applebaum adds to reminscences of academic, editorial freedom; mob justice rules now

In an article in the October Atlantic, Anne Applebaum examined the potentially devastating effect of cancel culture on academic and editorial freedom.

With her usual incisive writing, Applebaum compared contemporary cancellation with the summary imposition of the scarlet letter on Hester Prynne and described how today's mob justice is dangerously empowered by social media.

What's missing from Applebaum's tale is recognition that the threat to academic freedom is not new.  Workplace mobbing has been studied since the 1980s ("ganging up"), and, as I have written before, sociologist Kenneth Westhues wrote about the threat to academic freedom in a 2004 book. I know of what I speak (2005-10, 2017-19).

The following lines struck me as most salient in Applebaum's analysis.

A journalist told me that when he was summarily fired, his acquaintances sorted themselves into three groups.  First, the "heroes," very small in number, who "insist on due process before damaging another person's life and who stick by their friends." Second, the "villains," who think you should "immediately lose your livelihood as soon as the allegation is made." .... But the majority were in the third category: "good but useless.  They don't necessarily think the worst of you, and they would like you to get due process, but, you know, they haven't looked into it."

This observation is spot on.  My heroes once were two in number, another time zero.  One of my heroes paid a price for his chronic condition of character.  Villains are rewarded by employers.  But I respect honest villains more than I respect the "good but useless," who are the vast majority of academic colleagues, for their hypocrisy is galling.  That this group is the majority is precisely what makes "ganging up," or "mobbing," possible; the villains, otherwise, are too few in number to get away with it.  Especially in legal education, I have been horrified repeatedly by the selfish indifference to wrongs in their midst borne by people who hold themselves out as champions of civil rights.

Sometimes advocates of the new mob justice claim that these are minor punishments, that the loss of a job is not serious, that people should be able to accept their situation and move on.

Indeed, in my experience, I vividly remember one colleague acknowledging the wrongfulness of the persecution, but advising that I "just wait five years" for people to forget the false allegations.  Never mind the opportunity cost to career, nor providing for my family in the interim, nor the uncertainty that five years would be enough, nor the inference of guilt that would derive from acquiescence.

"I wake up every morning afraid to teach," one academic told me: The university campus that he once loved has become a hazardous jungle, full of traps.

Check.  My classroom students are both my greatest motivation and my greatest fear.  I think of both every single time a class is about to begin.  It is a difficult and stressful dissonance to manage. 

[T]he protagonists of most of these stories tend to be successful....  They were professors who liked to chat or drink with their students, ... people who blurred the lines between social life and institutional life....  [Yale Law Professor Amy Chua:] "I do extra work; I get to know them," she told me. "I write extra-good recommendations." ....

It's not just the hyper-social and the flirtatious who have found themselves victims of the New Puritanism....  Others are high achievers, who in turn set high standards for their colleagues or students.  When those standards are not met, these people say so, and that doesn't go over well.  Some of them like to push boundaries, especially intellectual boundaries, or to question orthodoxies.

First, yes.  Westhues long ago identified jealousy, revenge, and schadenfreude as mob motivators.  Hard work and success make one a target.  Second, also yes.  To be fair, early in my academic career, work probably was too much my life: too much overlap between co-workers and social life.  In my defense, that's not unusual for an ambitious young person, especially after relocating to a new city for a new career.  

I've been disabused of that ethic.  Co-workers willing to sacrifice you to save or glorify themselves are not your friends.  Workplaces and schools design social events with the intent to mislead, imbuing senses of belonging and community that only serve the master's interests.  At today's university, students and faculty rather should be forewarned explicitly that if they find themselves on the wrong side of the groupthink, they will be devoured by the mob.

Workplaces once considered demanding are now described as toxic.  The sort of open criticism, voiced in front of other people, that was once normal in newsrooms and academic seminars is now as unacceptable as chewing gum with your mouth open.

Just so.  The kind of hard-nosed, openly aired editorial critique that was a staple of my education as a journalism student, and which conditioned me to take heat and to be stronger for it, I wouldn't dare administer in today's classroom.  Some of my law students understand the new game and read between the lines, and they'll be OK.  Some will be shocked the first time they are across the table from an adversary or in front of a judge who wasn't schooled to coddle.

Students and professors ... all are aware of the kind of society they now inhabit.  That's why they censor themselves, why they steer clear of certain topics, why they avoid discussing anything too sensitive for fear of being mobbed or ostracized or fired without due process.

True.  I have resisted modestly on this front, refusing to purge sensitive content from class materials.  But I do prioritize-down the sensitive, choose materials strategically, and exert tighter control of student discussion.  As usual, this decades-old practice in the academic trenches became a point of public concern only when Yale and Harvard professors started talking about it, as if they discovered the problem. 

If nothing is done, Applebaum concluded,

[u]niversities will no longer be dedicated to the creation and dissemination of knowledge but to the promotion of student comfort and the avoidance of social media attacks.

"[W]ill"?

The article is Anne Applebaum, The New Puritans, The Atlantic, Oct. 2021, at 60.

Sunday, December 26, 2021

Missionaries kidnapped in Haiti reach freedom, but murky U.S. policy generally fails ransomed abductees

Haitian child in 2012 (photo by Feed My Starving Children CC BY 2.0).
News came last week that the last 12 of 17 Christian missionaries abducted for ransom in Haiti in October either escaped or were released, reports vary, and walked miles to freedom. The circumstances of their liberation raise questions about the ongoing apparent lack of any clear U.S. policy on abductions abroad.

Less well reported than the story of the missionaries, Haitian lawyer and university professor Patrice Dérénoncourt was shot and killed on October 31 by the kidnappers who abducted him in October.  Dérénoncourt taught crimonology and constitutional law in the Economic, Social and Political Sciences Department of the Université Notre-Dame d'Haiti.

Dérénoncourt and the missionaries are typical of the some 800 kidnappings in Haiti just this year. Economic desperation and political turmoil have resulted in flourishing gang violence, and kidnappers seeking ransom have targeted aid workers and the education sector, children included.  Struggling to maintain rule of law, the Haitian government has not been able to get a handle on the problem.  Foreign governments seem either habitually disinterested or similarly impotent.

In the Dérénoncourt case, some of the $900,000 ransom demanded had been paid.  It is unclear whether any ransom was paid for the missionaries.  Representatives of the families and, apparently, the U.S. government through the FBI, were involved in negotiation over kidnappers' outrageous demand for $1 million per person.  Whatever reports are accurate, and whether or not a ransom was paid or the pressure simply became untenable, I find it difficult to believe that the last 12 missionaries surmounted a concerted effort by the kidnappers to keep them.

The Biden Administration was understandably tight-lipped about how it was dealing with the kidnapping crisis while it was going on.  Now that the event is over, it's time for an open conversation about what U.S. policy should be, both with regard to kidnappings and to the social and economic catastrophe unfolding less than 700 miles from Miami.

In the broader picture, U.S. policy on abductions for ransom seems at best inconsistent and at worst incoherent.  In late October, families of Americans still detained abroad, in China, Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, called on the Biden Administration to do better.  "When we do meet with ... officials," the families wrote, "we feel we are being kept in the dark about what the U.S. government intends to do to free our loved ones."

The murder of an educator such as Dérénoncourt sets back rule of law in Haiti not by just one mind, but by a generation of students he would have taught.  Persistent instability in Haiti meanwhile is contributing to a burgeoning refugee crisis in the Americas and threatens to destabilize democracy in the Caribbean.  Even an isolationist American administration can ignore Haiti for only so long.

Thursday, September 9, 2021

So now you care about academic mobbing

Angry Mob by Robert Couse-Baker, CC BY 2.0
Princeton politics professor Keith E. Whittington (on the blog) has a wisely worded op-ed, on The Volokh Conspiracy at Reason, on the too often abdicated responsibility of university administrators to push back against viewpoint-based campus mobbing of faculty.

"It is now a familiar pattern," he writes: attack, petition, social media campaign, demand for termination.  Of the university's duty, he writes:

University presidents have a responsibility in such a situation. It should go without saying, but unfortunately it does not, that they have a responsibility to actually live up to their constitutional and contractual responsibilities and refrain from sanctioning the faculty member for saying something that someone finds controversial. They should insist that harassment and threats directed against members of the faculty will not be tolerated. Professors should at least be confident that when the mobs arrive, pitchforks in hand, that university leaders will not flinch and give in to the demands of the mob.

I hope the piece hits the desk of every university president in the land with a thunderclap of j'accuse.

Yet it is fascinating to me to see described today as cliché what was once fringe.  Canadian sociologist Kenneth Westhues, professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo, published his Workplace Mobbing in Academe (2004) seventeen years ago, and that book was built on his earlier Eliminating Professors (1998).

By the time I met Ken in 2009, he was already the world's leading expert on academic mobbing.  He still is.  Westhues's website is still the online clearinghouse on mobbing as a sociological phenomenon. But he's almost never cited, at least in the legal lit.  I find eight references to Westhues on Westlaw's JLR database, and none in the last dozen years.

At a program at the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) in 2010, I accepted the invitation of Westhues and Syracuse University law professor Robert Ashford to speak of my experience.  Ashford perceived a worthwhile connection to his inventive work in socio-economics, and Westhues flattered me with my name as a participle

The splash we made at AALS and in legal academics eleven years ago might be described well as mostly indifferent curiosity.  Mostly modifies indifferent, not curiosity.  

I wrote in the Journal of College and University Law in 2009 about the need for broader academic freedom, beyond published research and into the professorial "penumbra."  I presented at AAUP, besides AALS.  The article was cited once in a 2011 bibliography and once in 2013.  (Thanks, Profs. Benson and Jones.)  And that was that.

Not until cancel culture reached the well known coastal scholars of academia's elite institutions did mobbing hit the mainstream.  Now a lot of important people are wringing their hands over academic freedom and waning tenure.

Too bad they don't seem able to find my article.  Or Westhues's work.  Is there really a wheel until it's invented at a "top" school?

It's nice to see serious people having serious thoughts about academic freedom, at last.  But it's too late to give solace to a generation of victim-scholars.  And it's probably too late to resuscitate intellectual liberty on campus, for at least a generation yet.