Top Foe of Affirmative Action Leaves California Regents

DEAN E. MURPHY, NY TIMES

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 20 - Ward Connerly, a black Sacramento millionaire who for a decade has led a turbulent crusade against race preferences, is leaving his bully pulpit at the University of California.

Mr. Connerly attended his last meeting here on Thursday as a member of the university's Board of Regents, and was given a resolution of appreciation and a standing ovation from his colleagues. The resolution described him as a "catalyst for change," a reference to a 12-year term that deeply divided the university and the state and thrust the board into the center of a rancorous national debate about affirmative action.

"I am relieved that it has come to an end," the 65-year-old Mr. Connerly said in an interview. "Twelve years is a long time. I've tried to use those years wisely and to pursue the things that I believe in, not to shrink from anything. And as a result of that, it has placed a little bit of added stress on me."

In comments to the Regents, he warned that there would be "great temptation" to revert to previous policies on race.

"For God's sake," he said, "don't do it."

It was Mr. Connerly, a Republican, who led an effort by the Regents in 1995 that banned affirmative action in admissions policies throughout the University of California system. The following year, he championed a successful statewide ballot measure that prohibits state and local governments from using racial and sexual preferences in hiring, contracting and college admissions.

A similar measure later passed in Washington State, and Mr. Connerly is trying to get one on the ballot next year in Michigan. He said he was also considering ballot measures in several other states.

"If you gain some degree of public visibility," he said, "you don't lose that just because you no longer have a title."

His critics agreed.

"It is good news because he'll no longer be able to lower the number of minorities at California's flagship universities," Julian Bond, chairman of the N.A.A.C.P., said of Mr. Connerly's departure. "It is bad news because he'll now have more free time to take his devilry around the country."

Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, who was a founder of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard, said in an e-mail interview that Mr. Connerly's "name recognition rivals that of the past decade's highest state officials" as both "villain and hero."

"He's been both profoundly wrong and phenomenally effective," Professor Edley added, "touching millions of lives not just in California but nationwide."

Former Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican who named Mr. Connerly to the 26-member Board of Regents in 1993, described him as a "rare human being" who was driven to do the right thing but whose legacy with the board "depends entirely upon the ideological holding of the person that you are asking."

"Ward is tough-minded and strong-willed, and what he was doing was a matter of intense conviction," Mr. Wilson said. "He reminds me of the phrase 'One man with courage makes a majority.' "

Mr. Connerly's single 12-year term officially ends on March 1, but the Regents do not meet again before then. He said in the interview that he had not sought reappointment and had not been approached by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger about staying on.

A spokeswoman for the governor would not comment, citing confidentiality of personnel matters. Mr. Wilson, who is closely aligned with Mr. Schwarzenegger, said it was not uncommon for a new governor to seek his own appointments to state boards.

It is also possible that Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, did not relish a confirmation fight in the Democratic-controlled Legislature at a time when he is involved in intense negotiations over his proposed state budget. Mr. Connerly's appointment to a second term would most certainly have raised the ire of his critics, many of whom blame him for the sharp drop in the number of black and Latino students at some University of California campuses, most notably at Berkeley and Los Angeles.

"I think he did a grave disservice to the university," said one frequent foe of Mr. Connerly, Eva Paterson, president of the Equal Justice Society, which favors affirmative action. "I think history will not look kindly on what he did."

Mr. Connerly said that the drop in black and Latino enrollment bothered him but that the responsibility fell on the students, not him.

"I would like to see more of them there," he said, "but that is something for them to achieve, not for the government by fiat to say we are going to move people around."

He said his biggest disappointment was his failing to persuade university officials, and later the state's voters, to stop thepractice of collecting data based on race, ethnicity or national origin. A ballot measure that would have ended that practice was defeated in 2003. Mr. Connerly said that his own ancestry is black, Irish, French and Choctaw but that the "one-drop rule" boils his identity down to black.

"I think with the fullness of time, that too will move forward," he said, "with or without me."

The Assault on Liberal Education

The Contradictions of Cultural Conservatism in the Assault on American Colleges

By DONALD LAZERE

In March the Georgia Senate adopted the Academic Bill of Rights Resolution, modeled on David Horowitz's campaign calling for colleges to promote intellectual diversity and academic freedom on their campuses. In May the American Legislative Exchange Council -- which describes itself as "a clearinghouse of information for 2,400 conservative officeholders in 50 states, almost one-third of the 7,500 state legislators in the country" -- adopted a sample resolution and model statutory language based on Horowitz's bill, and pledged to work toward the statute's passage in the legislature of every state. Meanwhile, according to the Horowitz-affiliated Students for Academic Freedom, Sen. Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican, plans to sponsor a resolution in the Senate in September echoing the language in the "academic bill of rights." Sessions's bill would accompany a similar House resolution introduced last fall by Rep. Jack Kingston, a Georgia Republican.

"It's been an incredibly successful week for Students for Academic Freedom," boasts the May 14 announcement by the group's national campus director, Sara Dogan -- and a thoroughly depressing period for the humanities, as this latest conservative assault once again sabotages the very academic values that conservatives claim to champion.

Charges by crusaders like Horowitz that "the universities are totally dominated by the left" tend to focus on elite liberal-arts colleges and some urban public universities, where liberal influences are strongest. But these charges are bizarrely disconnected from the experience of those of us who teach at the vast majority of campuses, such as the half-dozen provincial schools where for some 35 years I have taught introductory English courses, general-education requirements for students in majors mostly outside the humanities.

To begin with, most students at such colleges have, as early as high school, come to regard the only purpose of schooling as vocational or pre professional training. Many consider general-education requirements a tiresome nuisance. Horowitz and earlier culture warriors like William J. Bennett, Lynne Cheney, and the National Association of Scholars huff and puff about upholding humanistic standards, but they do not dare admit that the greatest detriment to humanistic education is the commercial pressure imposed by corporations like those whose foundations pay for their own publicity offensives.

To distract attention from those pressures, conservatives seek scapegoats for the decline of the humanities, like multiculturalism, poststructuralist theory, and the fostering of student self-esteem -- all of which might deserve a share of blame, but a small one compared to commercialism. As Thoreau said in "Life Without Principle," "There is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business."

The primacy of vocational education is hardly a recent phenomenon. In the middle-class public high school I went to in Des Moines in the 1950s, the important courses were driver training, typing, mechanical drawing, and shop for the boys, home economics (i.e., domestic consumerism) for the girls. Academic requirements were skimpy, especially in history and "social studies," where courses were taught, somnabulantly, as a sideline by sports coaches -- a widespread phenomenon now as then and perhaps the most damning symbol of American cultural priorities. Students invariably refer to these courses as "a joke," and American students traveling abroad are embarrassed to find that their peers in other countries know far more than they do about American politics, history, and geography.

The main difference today from when I was in school is the worsening job and pay prospects for young Americans, compounded by skyrocketing college-tuition costs and cuts in government money for colleges and for student aid. Students work virtually full time at jobs while taking an overload of courses to avoid expensive prolongation of college, which further saps their time and energy for either political involvement or courses that will not directly help them get a job.

Conservative culture warriors would have us regard both vocational/preprofessional education and its prime mover, corporate employers, as politically neutral. The obvious facts, however, are that large corporations and their wealthy CEO's and stockholders are predominantly conservative (notwithstanding the occasional exception like George Soros and Ted Turner); that they are the most powerful political players in America, through lobbying and PR, campaign contributions, foundations, think tanks, ownership of media, and influence on them by advertising; and that in all these realms, they strongly favor the conservative wings of both the Republican and Democratic parties.

Champions of the new affirmative action for conservatives coyly evade admitting that all of the branches of universities devoted to serving corporations, the lucrative professions, and the military through job training and research -- which vastly outweigh the humanities -- also indoctrinate students in pro-management, anti-labor, anti-government (but pro-military) ideology. Students' desperation to get and keep jobs in corporations and professions pressures them into compliance with corporate ideology, so that they tend to be impervious to any liberal deviations that they get in humanities courses. As Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor noted, whoever feeds people commands their obedience.

Conservative surveys purporting to show that most faculty members describe themselves as Democrats (which is not necessarily equated with liberals, and certainly not leftists) are skewed by excluding faculties other than those in liberal education. Moreover, the high salaries -- and obedience -- of administrators and trustees, whatever their party affiliation might be, are also fed by the corporate-friendly branches of the university. Universities themselves are major corporate entities, as investors of endowments; owners of real estate; purchasers of private-sector equipment, construction, and services; and as employers of regular and contingent faculty as well as nonacademic workers often paid below a living wage. Their behavior in all these realms is often as conservative as any private business's.

Horowitz points to university labor institutes, but how do the handful of those, and their financial backing by unions drastically weakened by globalization, compare with the ubiquitous schools and departments of business and the equally business-friendly studies in engineering, computer science, agriculture, industrial technology, medicine, advertising, public relations, and so on? Shouldn't evenhanded conservatives come to the aid of liberal students and demand an equal voice in those fields for labor, consumer, and environmentalist advocates, or indeed socialists and Marxists? Conservatives reply that students choose to take vocational courses but are captive audiences in required general-education courses. I submit that the very justification for the latter's being required is to provide liberal viewpoints that students are unlikely to get in courses for their majors -- although these viewpoints ought not to be presented in a doctrinaire, one-sided manner, as they sometimes lamentably are.

Vocational pressures toward conservatism are compounded by the myriad ways in which most students have been saturated in corporate ideology and conformity in the wider culturethrough junk food, spectator sports, pop music, movies, TV, talk radio, and fashion. Some pop songs, TV shows, and movies may have ostensibly liberal messages, but their overriding theme is still, "Buy this product of corporations," and their effect is to produce passive, compliant consumers of both commodities and politics, rather than active, critical citizens. Intercollegiate sports and fraternity-sorority life, which serve as training grounds for chamber-of-commerce boosterism, are more central to college life for many students than courses in the humanities, whatever their professors' politics might be.

Moreover, in every class I have ever taught, when anonymously polled, the majority of students have said their family and community backgrounds were conservative. An increasingly large number come from fundamentalist Christian upbringings. In courses they cite the Bible as authority for arguments such as that President Bush's policies on Iraq should be followed unquestioningly because rulers -- Republicans, anyway -- are ordained by God (II Peter 2:13-14). I have rarely had more than one or two black students in a class; nevertheless, conservative white students firmly believe that affirmative action has allowed blacks to get all the breaks.

I am delighted on the rare occasions when students who have some knowledge of intellectual conservative ideas take my courses. I bend over backward to encourage their views and to be more than fair in grading, as course evaluations and many personal testimonies affirm. But for most students, sad to say, their conservatism is in direct proportion to their self-admitted, near-total ignorance of politics, history, geography, economics, and academic modes of reasoning. Few have ever seen The New York Times, let alone The Nation, or read any newspaper or journal of opinion regularly. Many have simply been indoctrinated to parrot the beliefs that America is the freest and most prosperous country in the world (or the only free and prosperous one -- comparisons are invariably with the poorest countries or communist dictatorships, rarely with Western Europe, Canada, or Japan); that everyone in this country is born with equal opportunity to get ahead; that rich people and corporations are virtuous public benefactors; and that our country's elected officials can be trusted to tell the truth in leading us to war (although on other occasions these same students deride, with no sense of Orwellian doublethink, "politicians" and "big government"). When asked what evidence or experience those tenets are based on, or whether the students have ever studied any contrary evidence, they just stare in bewilderment.

They, and more often their parents, expect that higher education should simply reinforce conservative dogmas, which they regard as self-evident truths, not as biases. The notions of skeptical questioning of authority and received opinion, which are the humanistic heritage of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, are utterly alien to such students, as is the whole intellectual liberal tradition of cosmopolitanism and heterodoxy, which is bound to clash with the oversimplified appeals to nationalism, religion, family values, and "free enterprise" that are the stock in trade of conservative propagandists.

Professors justifiably continue this humanistic tradition when they introduce those notions through readings of, say, Plato's "Apology" or Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience"; or when they point out instances throughout history and literature of leaders demagogically manipulating the ethnocentric prejudices of the masses; or (most outrageously of all) when they suggest the legitimacy of applying a similar dose of skeptical scrutiny to President Bush's justifications for war in Iraq.

Many students understandably get upset over the cognitive dissonance between this skeptical questioning of authority and the childishly simplistic platitudes they have been conditioned by and that the Bush administration, like most throughout history, propagates to gain mass compliance -- for example, enemy "evil ones" versus an edenically virtuous United States.

Conservative intellectuals, of course, insist that they are the true defenders of liberal humanism against its abuses by tenured radical and Democratic Party demagogues; Horowitz publishes a magazine titled Heterodoxy. But they are caught in a contradiction between this claim and their complicity with both corporate philistinism, which dumbs down culture to maximize profits, and the Republican Party's time-tested policy of reducing political rhetoric to Manichean sound bites, epitomized by Richard Nixon's advice to his speechwriter William Safire, "We sophisticates can listen to a speech for a half hour, but after 10 minutes, the average guy wants a beer."

Horowitz himself, in The Art of Political War (2000), offers advice to conservative politicians that could have come out of Mein Kampf: "When you speak, do not forget that a sound bite is all you have. Whatever you have to say, make sure to say it loud and clear. Keep it simple and keep it short -- a slogan is always better. ... With these audiences, you will never have time for real arguments or proper analyses. Images -- symbols and sound bites -- will always prevail. Therefore, it is absolutely essential to focus your message and repeat it over and over again."

To be sure, there is a more literate level of conservative rhetoric, on the Iraq war and in general, found in reputable scholarly and journalistic sources, such as The Weekly Standard, and I always provide my students with readings and a list of publications at that level to weigh against comparable liberal ones. But many of my students are as baffled by those sources as by The Nation because they have not developed the reading and critical-thinking skills to cope with complex ideas of any ideological variety. So perhaps the major source of cognitive dissonance is not liberal ideas versus conservative ones but complex ideas versus simplistic ones. Students' resulting anxiety can easily translate into their complaining to conservative watchdog organizations about unpatriotic or coercive professors.

Richard, a student from a rural, Republican family in my American-literature sophomore survey course, comes steeped in history according to Rush Limbaugh. (For the past decade I have been amazed to see students, many of whom otherwise admit to never having read a political book -- or any nonfiction book -- carrying well-worn copies of The Way Things Ought to Be and See, I Told You So.) Richard cites a passage from See arguing that the 17th-century American Puritans "studied the Bible and found it prescribes limited, representative government and free enterprise as the best political and economic systems," and that they "established just and equal laws for all members of their community, irrespective of their religious beliefs."

Another passage, about the 18th-century "founding fathers," warns, "Don't believe the conventional wisdom of our day that claims these men were anything but orthodox, Bible-believing Christians." These passages, like a wealth of pronouncements by this model of Christian virtue, have little documentation and the most selective or erroneous evidence, such as a selection early in William Bradford's 17th-century History of Plymouth Plantation that does praise a Puritan experiment in free enterprise but is contradicted by later passages like this about the growth of prosperous farms: "And this I fear will be the ruin of New England, at least of the churches of God there, and will provoke the Lord's displeasure against them."

I praise Richard's initiative in doing outside reading, then cordially ask him and other class members to do some research on these issues. Where, for example, does the Bible prescribe free enterprise or limited, representative government, and where, especially in the New Testament, does it contradict thesefor example, in the above-mentioned II Peter 2? We read John Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity," whose vision of the Puritan community is totally socialistic, and Anne Bradstreet's poems renouncing worldly riches as leading to damnation. I refer them to Perry Miller's The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, which presents ample evidence that the Massachusetts Bay Colony was at the opposite pole from Jeffersonian democracy, with an unlimitedly theocratic government and economy and zero tolerance for dissent from the established denomination.

About the 18th-century founders, I assign encyclopedia definitions of deism, a concept virtually none of the students have heard of, along with anthology readings suggesting that it was more influential among the founders (and in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution) than Christianity -- indeed that Jefferson and Paine rigorously questioned the Bible and Christian doctrine, while Franklin was benignly skeptical toward them.

Richard's response is shocked disbelief, followed by a newfound spirit of skepticism. Who is this Perry Miller, and why is he any more credible than Rush? Mightn't he and the editors of The Norton Anthology just be "bias" (the "-ed" has disappeared from participles in studentspeak), falsifying historical evidence and quotations as Limbaugh's critics claim he does?

Indeed they might, I agree, and the only way for you to find out who is telling the truth is to become a scholar, tracing the authenticity of these claims back to primary sources. "But I don't have time to do that -- I'm an agriculture major," he quite justifiably groans. Besides, he says, his last English professor taught that there is no objective truth and that texts have whatever meaning readers want to find in them. So he's entitled to believe Rush and his parents if he wants, and I'm not entitled to force any contrary evidence on him.

Thus have the chickens of deconstruction and diversity come home to roost!

It hasn't happened yet, but it is probably only a matter of time before a Richard reports me to Students for Academic Freedom or his parents report me to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni for imposing a hostile learning environment and stifling diversity of views.

I have little doubt that, beneath the pious avowals by conservatives of Horowitz's ilk that they are concerned to preserve academic freedom for liberals and conservatives alike, lies the cynical intent to unleash the most ignorant forces of the right in hounding liberal academics to death. I could, of course, be persuaded otherwise by some solid evidence that they are evenhandedly committed to counterbalancing all the massive forces of conservative bias that I have enumerated.

The Creative Campus: Who's No. 1?

I have not, nor has anyone as far as I know, ever tried to measure the creative environment of American colleges. At least in terms of direct measures, I remain agnostic on the question of how creative we are within the walls of academe. But I do believe that we need some way to compare where creativity is flourishing and where it is languishing.

Call it a campus "creativity index."

For better or for worse, we live in a scorecard society. We measure the aptitude, intelligence, creativity, and personality of children, students, and workers. Increasingly, we also give out institutional grades to track the performance of public schools, government services, and corporations (for example, ranking businesses by their record on attracting a diverse work force, protecting the environment, or creating family-friendly work spaces). We rank cities, communities, and, yes, colleges. What is the average class size? How prepared are professors in the classroom? How much does the institution promote tolerance? And on and on. However flawed the rankings may be, they are taken seriously by our constituents.

But I can find not a single index that ranks colleges by the extent to which they foster creativity. Is this less important than endowment levels, extracurricular sports, social life, public service, activism, political climate, food, technology, services for disabled students, or any of the other criteria that are used to compare institutions?

It is surprising that creativity has been ignored in college rankings and assessments. The number of books, articles, and case studies that have been produced by business publishers on the topic of creativity is astonishing. Last year, searching the catalog of the Harvard Business School Press since 1990, I found more than 1,365 articles and books written about creativity and innovation (compare that with more-traditional business concerns -- 86 publications on efficiency; 210 on productivity; 386 on quality).

Moreover, many public-school educators and advocates see fostering creativity as a key component in school reform -- look, for instance, at Howard Gardner's Art Education and Human Development (Getty Center for Education in the Arts, 1990) or Ken Robinson's Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative (Capstone, 2001). Scientists like David Bohm and F. David Peat, in their Science, Order, and Creativity (Routledge, second edition, 2000), have discussed the role of creativity in advances in their fields. At Harvard University, several engineering and science faculty members have recently created a center to help engineers and scientists become more creative and entrepreneurial. And, of course, thanks in part to the recent work by Richard L. Florida, an expert on economic development and author of The Rise of the Creative Class (Basic Books, 2002), dozens of cities across the United States (and the globe) are trying to become more creative in order to attract future knowledge workers.

In short, creativity has become the sine qua non of a successful America. Nurturing it is seen as an important public good, not only benefiting individuals, but contributing to the economic health and well-being of the country at large. In spite of that, creativity remains an undervalued policy goal for colleges and universities. If anything, we take it for granted that higher education fosters creativity, without evaluating whether, in fact, our campuses are truly promoting and encouraging creative work (with the exception that universities are increasingly obsessed with protecting their intellectual property and counting the number of patents, copyrights, and trademarks they have secured).

Clearly creativity abounds on campuses. My point is not that universities are no longer great seedbeds of creativity and innovation; rather that, in many cases, creativity flourishes in spite of our policies. Measurement and assessment could be first steps in making the creative campus a priority.

It is worth pausing here to define what I mean by creativity. My broad definition is that creativity reflects those activities that involve the application of intellectual energies to the production of new ways of solving problems (as in science and mathematics) or of expressing ideas (as in art). Creativity is not simply about self-expression. It is about producing something new (or combining old elements in new ways) to advance a particular field or add to the storehouse of knowledge.

The easiest way to measure the creative output of a campus would simply be to count the number of books and articles published by its faculty members, the number of patents and copyrights owned, the number of Nobel prizes or MacArthur fellowships won, the number of major discoveries attributed to its faculty members. However, measuring such products tells us little about the value added by an institution. Those places that produce the most new scholarship and the greatest number of inventions are not necessarily the most creative environments within which to work and study.

Instead of focusing on output measures, it might be more fruitful to examine the context or climate for creativity. Over the past two years, in preparation for a course on the social conditions that foster creativity in science, art, and business, I have trolled the vast literature on creativity. It turns out that sociologists, psychologists, economists, and historians know quite a bit about the conditions that encourage creativity across the disciplines.

Focusing on the structural conditions for creativity, rather than particular teaching and learning styles, we can highlight several features that scholars agree are important. First, many researchers stress the importance of collaboration, demonstrating that creativity thrives within teams and collaborative circles. Creative people feed off the energy of others; they excel when challenged and forced to confront and incorporate other perspectives and approaches; and they depend on the support and encouragement of allies and colleagues when trying out new and often risky ideas.

Second, creativity flourishes in diverse environments where there are adequate opportunities for cross-cultural exchange. That seems to hold as true for modern businesses as for nations and civilizations. In The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford University Press, 1990), for example, the historian Joel Mokyr contends that European advances outstripped those of China after 1400 primarily because China's emperors closed its border to foreign trade and immigration while European nations and cultures thrived on the cross-cultural commerce in customs and goods. When representatives of the University of Michigan argued in favor of affirmative action in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, they drew on the same fundamental premise -- diversity fosters learning, creativity, and discovery.

Third, creativity is stimulated by interdisciplinary exchange. Many of the most important scientific discoveries in the modern era happened at the borders between disciplines: Chaos theory has been advanced by meteorologists, mathematicians, and physicists; a report published by the National Academies Press in 2000, Bridging Disciplines in the Brain, Behavioral, and Clinical Sciences, argued that interdisciplinary research will be required to solve many of our emerging health problems -- AIDS, Alzheimer's disease, chronic pain, schizophrenia, and more.

Fourth, creative work takes time and resources. Most so-called epiphanies do not happen as the result of divine inspiration or luck. Creative people need time to develop their ideas, test their hypotheses, and prepare themselves to recognize the big idea when it comes.

Fifth, creativity requires an environment that tolerates and even encourages failure.

Those are just a few of the well-known conditions for creative work. How would we know whether universities and colleges were successful at creating those conditions? Let's examine the above in order:

Collaboration. Why not ask the extent to which undergraduates collaborate with faculty members on original research and publications? What fraction of students are co-authors on an article before they graduate? Co-producers of a play? How often do students complete assignments in groups? How often are final course papers the result of collaborative work?

Cross-cultural exchange. Could we examine the diversity of the student body? The percentage of foreign students? The proportion of students who study abroad? The diversity of the faculty?

Interdisciplinary exchange. How many courses are listed across multiple departments? How many research projects involve faculty members and students from different disciplines? What is the average number of courses taken by students outside their major? How many students are double majors? What is the distribution of students across majors? (A university where 50 percent of the students are majors in a single discipline is much less intellectually diverse than one where majors are more evenly spread among all the disciplines.)

Time and resources. How frequently are faculty members awarded leave to work on new research? How many students participate in independent study? Is there an opportunity fund for new research? Are funds available for student performances or student experiments? How many undergraduates receive research assistantships to work with faculty members over the summer? Are resources available for new course development? How many new courses are introduced each semester?

Tolerating failure. This is a more difficult criterion to quantify. Nonetheless, perhaps student surveys could reveal the extent to which professors encourage risk taking. How often do professors review first, second, or third drafts of papers? How often do students have the opportunity to repeat exams or course work without penalty? Do faculty members feel supported in their own departments when they take unconventional approaches in their research and teaching?

Such criteria broadly encompass the conditions for creativity across all fields. Of course, they do not offer a one-size-fits-all assessment. Some might be good for certain types of creativity and not others (collaboration might be more important in the sciences than in the humanities). Some measures are aimed at faculty members, others at students. And it is not clear which conditions (and measures) support which mission of the university (teaching, research, service).

But wouldn't it be exciting to bring together experts in the field of creativity research to debate these issues and to work together to develop a set of reasonable indicators for assessing different aspects of the creative campus? Individual colleges could then apply those metrics, or others, as appropriate, to assess the conditions for creativity and innovation on their own campuses.

In addition to structural conditions that foster creativity, the arts have long been recognized as important catalysts for creative work across domains. In his book, Florida argues that today's knowledge workers share a creative ethos. Whether designing multimedia projects, inventing new data-storage systems, discovering new drugs, or building new businesses, the most talented workers want to live in places that have an abundance of cultural capital -- artists, museums, theaters, and music venues. Such creative places, Florida contends, not only attract the most desirable workers, but they also create a milieu that is generative and inspiring.

Others scholars, like Dean Keith Simonton, a psychologist, in Genius, Creativity, and Leadership: Historiometric Inquiries (Harvard University Press, 1984), have taken a more historical view but arrived at similar conclusions: Creative outbursts throughout history, like the Renaissance in Florence, have clustered in those places where artistic, scientific, and technological advancements thrive side by side, Simonton says. For decades, countless books and articles -- consider the renowned metallurgist Cyril Stanley Smith's 1981 A Search for Structure: Selected Essays on Science, Art, and History (MIT Press) and the 2001 Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and Beauty That Causes Havoc (Basic Books), by Arthur I. Miller -- have demonstrated the interplay between science and art.

Brooke Hindle, a historian, in Emulation and Invention (NYU Press, 1981) showed that some of America's most important inventors succeeded, in large measure, because of their artistic sensibility. John Seely Brown, formerly chief scientist of the Xerox Corporation, believed so strongly in the catalytic effect of the arts that he launched the well- known Xerox-PARC experiment. By creating an artist-in-residency program within the research and development laboratories at Xerox, Brown helped to seed dozens of new innovations. England's National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, financed by lottery money, is organized around the belief that creative synergy results when artists, inventors, and scientists work together.

That may be why, in part, faculty members and administrators at a number of universities are beginning to realize that the arts attract talented students in every discipline and create a more stimulating place to work and study. "We see the arts, both on campus and in the Nashville community, as key components in making Vanderbilt University one of the most creative and robust intellectual centers in America," E. Gordon Gee, the university's chancellor, has told faculty members. That belief, in part, led Gee to recruit Bill Ivey, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, to Vanderbilt to start the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy.

Recently Columbia University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill created new high-level administrative positions -- something like arts czars -- to ensure that the arts are coordinated across the campus and integrated into the fabric of student and faculty life. In fact, at a recent American Assembly meeting, "The Creative Campus: The Training, Sustaining, and Presenting of the Performing Arts in American Higher Education," several participants -- including leaders from Columbia, Princeton, and Syracuse Universities -- articulated their own visions for how the arts can stimulate creativity in higher education.

There is other evidence that the arts have become a priority for our students, faculty members, and administrators. First, nearly 20 percent of organizations that present the performing arts in the United States are connected to American college campuses. While many of those organizations were founded in the 1960s and 1970s, an estimated 250 new campus-based organizations have formed in the last decade (according to data collected by Mark A. Hager and Thomas H. Pollak at the Urban Institute). Moreover, according to an annual survey of incoming freshmen conducted by scholars at the University of California at Los Angeles, creating and performing art and literature has become increasingly important to students.

If we are to assess the creative campus, therefore, a reasonable place to begin might be to collect information about the level of arts activities taking place on those campuses. How many artistic works have been commissioned by the university? How many performance spaces are there? How many exhibition halls and galleries? How many resident artists? How many members of the faculty are part-time or full-time artists? How many students enroll in art classes? How many declare majors in the arts? How many student performing groups exist? How many world premieres are presented by campus-based arts organizations? How well are the arts integrated into the academic curriculum? What percentage of the students report that creating an original piece of art (music, literature, theater, visual arts) is very important to them in their lives?

To be sure, there are many other ways to evaluate the vitality of the arts on campus or the conditions for creativity more broadly. But until we begin to measure the creative campus, it will be difficult to advocate for and design policies that promote and support creativity to its fullest extent. The measures will be controversial. Rankingsat best imperfect, at worst invidiousare still important tools for advocacy and policy. Institutions pay attention to them and often change their behavior to improve their standing. No business, after all, wants to rank at the bottom of the list of those judged on their environmental record. No mayor wants to score low on the creative-cities index. And, I contend, most colleges would strive to improve their position on an index of campus creativity if such a measure existed.

Why should students have less information available to them about creativity and the arts than they do about beer drinking and sports? Perhaps the time has come to see how we measure up.

Steven J. Tepper is associate director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy and an assistant professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University.

OMG MECHA.

Gizmodo : Toyoto i-foot and i-unit

robots. and stylee-style space suits. and oh-so-futuro-world blue sunglasses. for the space rays. you know.

Apologies Accepted - the world's answer to sorryeverybody.com

First there was Sorry Everybody.

now there's Apologies Accepted - the world's answer to sorryeverybody.com.

The American Conservative

I'm speechless. After four years of some of the worst goverance on record, a president and a party who has done almost nothing right and many, many things wrong has been reelected.

A majority of the American people have decided to place the presidency, the senate, the house of representatives, and by extension, the entire legal system in the hands of the Republican party, which, because it has increasingly swung away from the center, is now almost entirely a conservative party.

Thus 11 states have banned not only gay marriage, but the benefits that might come from domestic partnership. Illegal, you say? Well, that would be up to the courts and the congress, now wouldn't it? And you know full well who thinks they have a mandate from the people from here on out.

I dispair for rational discussion when so many conservative commentators have, their patience exhausted by Bush's poor record, have finally given up and endorced Kerry - only to have Bush reelected and, just as in 2002, his party further strengthened.

Cornell West, one of the more articulate men I've ever heard speak, claimed that Bush was not a conservative, because he was not guided by a conservative philosophy about which one might have a reasonable discussion. Instead, West preferred the term "gangster."

Well, what do you call it when the gangsters have all three branches of government?

El Duce, we salute you!

The Horserace

So everyone's sick of polls by now. Slate has basically given up, after Florida shifted from Bush to Kerry back to Bush in a matter of hours, and Ohio and Wisconsin basically did the same. They correctly advised, "if you don't like the results, wait an hour."

But as this site is intended to be more than a news filter, I want to point out that, depending on the results tuesday night, we may see a major transformation of the way polling is done and reported based on Sam Wang's work at Princeton on allocating undecided voters. Follow the link for indepth information, but the gist is this: decided voter polls, which is what every media organization currently uses, and which obviously produces a media-feedback effect, has the campaign going strongly for Bush. Here are some numbers:

Median outcome, decided voters: Kerry 252 EV, Bush 286 EV

Popular Meta-Margin among decided voters: Bush leads by 0.9%

Predicted median with undecideds: Kerry 280 EV, Bush 258 EV

Electoral prediction with undecideds and turnout: Kerry 323 EV, Bush 215 EV

Popular vote prediction with undecideds and turnout: Kerry 50%, Bush 48%

So as you can see, and Wang has basically clung to this all along, that because of a statistical observation termed "Cook's Law," the so-called "undecided voters" are not statistically split down the middle, but historically favor the challenger by almost a 3:1 margin. In an election this close, such a seemingly insignificant detail changes the entire landscape. With decided voters only, Bush always wins in a landslide. With undecideds and turnout predictions included, Kerry wins both the popular vote, and in something of an electoral college landslide. Wang personally puts Kerry's odds of winning at 6:1 in favor, and is putting his own money on it.

Because perhaps the most important factor in contemporary politics is the phenomenon of "momentum," it stands to reason that the race would be very, very different if news organizations across the world - with the exception of Fox, of course - were reporting a Kerry landslide on the basis of these numbers. How or whether it would change actual voting depends on your understanding of mass psychology. If voters, on the whole, are more drawn to the fight because it's so close, or because they believe Kerry is losing, then the change might work against Kerry. If, however, you believe as I do, that we have a lot waffling voters who don't like Bush, but are afraid to vote for Kerry - and who are getting psychological reinforcement for this belief on the basis of media predictions that everyone else feels the same way - then bringing in the undecided calculation could work massively in Kerry's favor. Media commentators would all begin to chime in that "the country is moving in a particular direction" - in this case, towards the idea not simply that Bush is bad, which it has already decided, but that Kerry is an acceptable replacement, which it has not.

So after all the results come in on Tuesday night, whether you're elated or angry as hell, or - most likely - that you're gripped to the news listening to all the insanity of multiple law suits and countersuits, check back here and see whether Sam Wang was right or wrong, because it could lead to significant changes in 2008 and beyond. -andrew

eminem

Eminem's get out the vote video, in which he calls for an army to defeat bush.

cheered me up this morning, anyway.

nicked wholesale from william gibson's blog...

William Gibson: "President Bush goes to an elementary school to talk about the war.

After his talk, he offers to answer questions. One little boy puts up his hand and the president asks him his name.

'I'm Billy, sir.'

'And what's your question, Billy?'

'I have three questions, sir. Why did the US invade Iraq without the support of the UN? Why are you President when Al Gore got more votes? And whatever happened to Osama Bin Laden?'

Just then the bell rings for recess. Bush announces that they'll continue after recess.

When they return, Bush asks, 'OK, where were we? Question time! Who has a question?'

Another little boy raises his hand. The president asks his name.

'I'm Steve, sir.'

'And what's your question, Steve?'

'I have five questions, sir. Why did the US invade Iraq without the support of the UN? Why are you President when Al Gore got more votes? Whatever happened to Osama Bin Laden? Why did the recess bell go off twenty minutes early? And what the heck happened to Billy?' "

Gibson's *real* punchline, posted the next day, was that this was, in fact, a very old joke. a soviet joke.

You Must Vote. It's the Law. - Australia requires citizens to vote. Should the U.S.?

You Must Vote. It's the Law. - Australia requires citizens to vote. Should the U.S.? By Eric Weiner

article on slate that looks at the pros and cons of mandatory voting, an idea i've been arguing for lately, infuriated by the lack of voter turnout in the past few elections.