Education – Page 36 – artdiamondblog.com

Trinity College Tries to Renege on Deal with Donor

Gerald Gunderson. Source of photo: http://www.yorktownuniversity.com/faculty/gunderson.html

Gerald Gunderson, highlighted in the story quoted below, gave me some useful comments on my book project Openness to Creative Destruction at the April 2009 meetings of the Association of Private Enterprise Education.
Battles such as the one described below are easier to forgo than to fight. Gunderson has guts.

(p. A1) In one previously undisclosed fight, Trinity College in Connecticut is facing government scrutiny for its plan to spend part of a $9 million endowment from Wall Street investing legend Shelby Cullom Davis.

Trinity’s Davis professor of business, Gerald Gunderson, says he believed the plan, which would have funded scholarships for international students, violated the wishes of the late Mr. Davis. He alerted the Connecticut attorney general’s office. Then, Mr. Gunderson said in notes submitted to the agency, Trinity’s president summoned him to the school’s cavernous Gothic conference room, where he called the professor a “scoundrel” and threatened not to reappoint him.
Trinity said some of Mr. Davis’s family approved of the plan but it is now coming up with a new one, and declined to discuss the meeting.
. . .
(p. A14) The clash over the Davis gift has simmered on Trinity’s quiet campus of 2,200 students. Founded in 1823, the liberal-arts college has Episcopalian roots and Gothic architecture patterned after British universities.
In 1976, the school accepted a $750,000 gift from Mr. Davis, founder of a New York money-management firm who made a $900 million fortune investing in insurance stocks. Mr. Davis was a major benefactor to Wellesley College, Columbia University, Tufts University and his own alma mater, Princeton. But he had a personal connection to Trinity: His son-in-law was a graduate of the school and its campus overlooks downtown Hartford, an insurance hub.
In 1981, Trinity President Theodore D. Lockwood wrote to Mr. Davis that the fund, by then $1.6 million, was big enough to be tapped to create a Shelby Cullom Davis Professorship of American Business and Economic Enterprise. The letter listed several related activities, such as campus visits from business leaders. Mr. Lockwood also sought flexibility to use the money as the school saw fit “as conditions evolved and opportunities arose.”
In a return letter, Mr. Davis approved the professorship and activities Mr. Lockwood specified. But he rejected any other leeway. “It is my wish that the funds and income from the Endowment be used for the various purposes you have described…and for no other purposes.”
Trinity tapped Mr. Gunderson, an economic historian who shared Mr. Davis’s conservative political philosophy, to be the Davis professor.
The Davis fund grew beyond the needs of meeting Mr. Gunderson’s $155,000-a-year salary. By 2007, it reached $13.5 million, or 3% of Trinity’s total endowment, and generated more than $500,000 a year in income. After recent market declines, the fund is now estimated at $9 million.
Mr. Gunderson, 68 years old, says he complained for years that the school was starving the program and had rejected his frequent requests to add another full-time professor and a business-executive-in-residence program. The letter from Mr. Lockwood provides for the creation of a single professorship, but it doesn’t explicitly rule out adding another.
Mr. Gunderson says he suspects that liberal academics at Trinity have blocked these plans and have little interest in Mr. Davis’s vision. Mr. Gunderson, who is treasurer of the free-market nonprofit Yankee Institute, says some professors opposed his position in the 1970s in an economics department whose courses often stressed the downside of capitalism.
. . .
Last April, Trinity’s current president, James F. Jones Jr., sent Mr. Gunderson an email saying he had been looking for ways to use the “enormous” Davis fund to “benefit the College in ways different from merely watching the endowment continue to balloon because of the original strictures.” Mr. Jones said he had approached some Davis family members about using the money for financial aid for foreign students through another program the family had helped fund.
Mr. Gunderson replied that the college had entered into a binding contract with Shelby Cullom Davis, not his family. “Simply wishing things were different or saying that someone thinks it is a good idea is not sufficient and will not stand a legal challenge,” he wrote.
Following that exchange, Kathryn W. Davis, the donor’s 102-year-old widow, signed a document endorsing the use of her husband’s gift for the scholarships. But in an interview, she said the school hadn’t explained the restrictions her husband had outlined in his 1981 letter to the school, and said the endowment “should be used as my husband wished.”
The couple’s son, Shelby M.C. Davis, and grandson, Christopher C. Davis, both successful money managers, signed off on the fund’s use for scholarships.
Diana Davis Spencer, the donor’s daughter, says she only recently heard about the plan from Mr. Gunderson and is angry that Trinity didn’t contact her. Ms. Spencer, whose own philanthropy focuses on entrepreneurship, says her father would have opposed any change to the endowment’s mission. The university is “morally incorrect” and its plan “undermines donors’ confidence,” she says.
Trinity’s Mr. Joyce says the school believed key members of the family had been briefed.
After the April email exchange, Mr. Gunderson’s lawyer contacted the Connecticut attorney general’s office, which began its review. In the fall, Mr. Gunderson looked through financial data that the school had filed with the attorney general and noticed that about $200,000 of endowment money had been used to fund an internship program for college students over the past five years.
Mr. Gunderson says he was concerned in part because the school, facing a budget crunch, had tapped other restricted endowment money in 2004 but returned it after a faculty revolt. Trinity confirms this episode.
Mr. Joyce said Trinity this month reimbursed the Davis endowment for $191,337 spent on the internship program, though he said the original agreement still permits the school to spend a small amount annually on the initiative.
On Oct. 20, Mr. Jones, Trinity’s president, called Mr. Gunderson to the conference-room meeting. According to the professor’s notes, submitted to the attorney general, Mr. Jones called him “a liar and a bully,” threatened not to reappoint him and told him not speak to any other administrators. The notes said the president insisted on approving future spending from the Davis fund “down to a box of paperclips.”
Mr. Joyce, who said Mr. Jones wouldn’t be available for comment, declined to discuss the meeting. Mr. Joyce says he would be “very surprised” if Mr. Gunderson’s contract weren’t renewed when it comes up in July 2010.
In a February letter, the attorney general’s office told Trinity it could find no evidence that Mr. Davis intended the college or his family to have discretion to direct income from the endowment to purposes “other than the study and promotion of the economic theories of the free enterprise system.”
Mr. Joyce says Trinity scuttled its scholarship plan. The school intends to submit a new proposal to the attorney general and the Davis family on how it would spend excess Davis funds.
The attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, says he will consider the proposal. But he cautioned that colleges, despite financial pressures, can’t stray from donors’ intent: “There’s a vastly increasing temptation for schools to fill gaps or even launch new initiatives using money that was meant for another purpose.”

For the full story, see:
JOHN HECHINGER. “New Unrest on Campus as Donors Rebel.” Wall Street Journal (Thurs., April 23, 2009): A1 & A14.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Among Professor Gunderson’s publications is:
Gunderson, Gerald A. Wealth Creators: An Entrepreneurial History of the United States. 1st ed. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1989.

“No Amount of Dancing Will Help You Learn More Algebra”

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) . . . , Mr. Willingham shows how experiments support his claims.

The trendy notion that each person has a unique learning style comes under an especially withering assault. “How should I adjust my teaching for different types of learners?” asks Mr. Willingham’s hypothetical teacher. The disillusioning reply: “No one has found consistent evidence supporting a theory describing such a difference. . . . Children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn.”
It turns out that while education gurus were promoting the uplifting vision of all students being equal in ability but unique in “style,” researchers were testing the theory behind it. In one experiment, they presented vocabulary words to students classified as “auditory learners” and “visual learners.” Half the words came in sound form, half in print. According to the learning-styles theory, the auditory learners should remember the words presented in sound better than the words presented in print, and vice-versa for the visual learners.
But this is not what happened: Each type of learner did just as well with each type of presentation. Why? Because what is being taught in most of the curriculum — at all levels of schooling — is information about meaning, and meaning is independent of form. “Specious,” for instance, means “seemingly logical, but actually fallacious” whether you hear it, see it or feel it out in Braille. Mr. Willingham makes a convincing case that the distinction between visual, auditory and kinesthetic learners (who supposedly learn best when body movement is involved) is a specious one. At some point, no amount of dancing will help you learn more algebra.

For the full review, see:
CHRISTOPHER F. CHABRIS. “Bookshelf; How to Wake Up Slumbering Minds
Will the discoveries of neuroscientists help us to think, learn and remember?.” Wall Street Journal (Mon., APRIL 27, 2009): A13.
(Note: the initial ellipsis was added; the ellipsis internal to the first full paragraph, was in the original.)

The book being reviewed, is:
Willingham, Daniel T. Why Don’t Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009.

The Epistemological Implications of Wikipedia

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

I think the crucial feature of Wikipedia is in its being quick (what “wiki” means in Hawaiian), rather than in its current open source model. Academic knowledge arises in a slow, vetted process. Publication depends on refereeing and revision. On Wikipedia (and the web more generally) knowledge is posted first, and corrected later.
In the actual fact, Wikipedia’s coverage is vast, and its accuracy is high.
I speculate that Wikipedia provides clues to developing new, faster, more efficient knowledge generating institutions.
(Chris Anderson has a nice discussion of Wikipedia in The Long Tail, starting on p. 65.)

(p. A13) Until just a couple of years ago, the largest reference work ever published was something called the Yongle Encyclopedia. A vast project consisting of thousands of volumes, it brought together the knowledge of some 2,000 scholars and was published, in China, in 1408. Roughly 600 years later, Wikipedia surpassed its size and scope with fewer than 25 employees and no official editor.

In “The Wikipedia Revolution,” Andrew Lih, a new-media academic and former Wikipedia insider, tells the story of how a free, Web-based encyclopedia — edited by its user base and overseen by a small group of dedicated volunteers — came to be so large and so popular, to the point of overshadowing the Encyclopedia Britannica and many other classic reference works. As Mr. Lih makes clear, it wasn’t Wikipedia that finished off print encyclopedias; it was the proliferation of the personal computer itself.
. . .
By 2000, both Britannica and Microsoft had subscription-based online encyclopedias. But by then Jimmy Wales, a former options trader in Chicago, was already at work on what he called “Nupedia” — an “open source, collaborative encyclopedia, using volunteers on the Internet.” Mr. Wales hoped that his project, without subscribers, would generate its revenue by selling advertising. Nupedia was not an immediate success. What turned it around was its conversion from a conventionally edited document into a wiki (Hawaiian for “fast”) — that is, a site that allowed anyone browsing it to edit its pages or contribute to its content. Wikipedia was born.
The site grew quickly. By 2003, according to Mr. Lih, “the English edition had more than 100,000 articles, putting it on par with commercial online encyclopedias. It was clear Wikipedia had joined the big leagues.” Plans to sell advertising, though, fell through: The user community — Wikipedia’s core constituency — objected to the whole idea of the site being used for commercial purposes. Thus Wikipedia came to be run as a not-for-profit foundation, funded through donations.
. . .
It is clear by the end of “The Wikipedia Revolution” that the site, for all its faults, stands as an extraordinary demonstration of the power of the open-source content model and of the supremacy of search traffic. Mr. Lih observes that when “dominant encyclopedias” were still hiding behind “paid fire walls” — and some still are — Wikipedia was freely available and thus easily crawled by search engines. Not surprisingly, more than half of Wikipedia’s traffic comes from Google.

For the full review, see:
JEREMY PHILIPS. “Business Bookshelf; Everybody Knows Everything.” Wall Street Journal (Weds., March 18, 2009): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The book being reviewed, is:
Lih, Andrew. The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia. New York: Hyperion, 2009.

Entrepreneurs Learn “Not in the Classroom Where Old Ways are Taught, But in the Factories and Labs, Where New Ways Are Wrought”

Gilder’s rhyme about the classroom is cute, and maybe mainly true. In an important paper, Baumol has more prosaically (in the literal sense) expressed a similar view.
But there are counterexamples. Gilder himself, in his Microcosm, notes how what was taught in some classrooms was crucial to progress in information technology.

(p. 296) Entrepreneurs can be pompous and vain where it doesn’t count; but in their own enterprise, the first law is to listen. They must be men meek enough–and shrewd enough–to endure the humbling eclipse of self that comes in the process of profound learning from others.
In all the history of enterprise, most of the protagonists of major new products and companies began their education–and (p. 297) discovered the secrets of their later breakthroughs–not in the classroom, where the old ways are taught, but in the factories and labs, where new ways are wrought.

Source:
Gilder, George. Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise: Updated for the 1990s. updated ed. New York: ICS Press, 1992.

The important Baumol paper mentioned above, is:
Baumol, William J. “Education for Innovation: Entrepreneurial Breakthroughs Versus Corporate Incremental Improvements.” In Innovation Policy and the Economy, edited by Adam B. Jaffe, Josh Lerner and Scott Stern, 33-56. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005.

There’s Still Space in Diamond’s Fall Seminar on the Economics of Entrepreneurship at the University of Nebraska at Omaha

Ukrainian Memorial to the Millions Starved by Stalin’s Communism

“A memorial to the famine, right, opposite a revered cathedral, was dedicated last November in Kiev. A museum is planned there.” Source of photo and caption: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A6) KIEV, Ukraine — A quarter century ago, a Ukrainian historian named Stanislav Kulchytsky was told by his Soviet overlords to concoct an insidious cover-up. His orders: to depict the famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s as unavoidable, like a natural disaster. Absolve the Communist Party of blame. Uphold the legacy of Stalin.
Professor Kulchytsky, though, would not go along.
The other day, as he stood before a new memorial to the victims of the famine, he recalled his decision as one turning point in a movement lasting decades to unearth the truth about that period. And the memorial itself, shaped like a towering candle with a golden eternal flame, seemed to him in some sense a culmination of this effort.
“It is a sign of our respect for the past,” Professor Kulchytsky said. “Because everyone was silent about the famine for many years. And when it became possible to talk about it, nothing was said. Three generations on.”
. . .
The pro-Western government in Kiev, which came to power after the Orange Revolution of 2004, calls the famine a genocide that Stalin ordered because he wanted to decimate the Ukrainian citizenry and snuff out aspirations for independence from Moscow.
The archives make plain that no other conclusion is possible, said Professor Kulchytsky, who is deputy director of the Institute of Ukrainian History in Kiev.
Professor Kulchytsky is 72, though he looks younger, as if he has somehow withstood the draining effect of so much research into the horrors of that time.
“It is difficult to bear,” he acknowledged. “The documents about cannibalism are especially difficult to read.”
Professor Kulchytsky said it was undeniable that people all over the Soviet Union died from hunger in 1932 and 1933 as the Communists waged war on the peasantry to create farming collectives. But he contended that in Ukraine the authorities went much further, essentially quarantining and starving many villages.
“If in other regions, people were hungry and died from famine, then here people were killed by hunger,” Professor Kulchytsky said. “That is the absolute difference.”

For the full story, see:
CLIFFORD J. LEVY. “Kiev Journal – A New View of a Famine That Killed Millions.” The New York Times (Mon., March 16, 2009): A6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Rhee Offers DC Teachers Higher Pay If They Give Up Tenure

“Michelle Rhee, second from left, with faculty and staff members of Washington schools last month at an awards ceremony.” Source of the caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) WASHINGTON — Michelle Rhee, the hard-charging chancellor of the Washington public schools, thinks teacher tenure may be great for adults, those who go into teaching to get summer vacations and great health insurance, for instance. But it hurts children, she says, by making incompetent instructors harder to fire.

So Ms. Rhee has proposed spectacular raises of as much as $40,000, financed by private foundations, for teachers willing to give up tenure.

Policy makers and educators nationwide are watching to see what happens to Ms. Rhee’s bold proposal. The 4,000-member Washington Teachers’ Union has divided over whether to embrace it, with many union members calling tenure a crucial protection against arbitrary firing.
. . .
Ms. Rhee has not proposed abolishing tenure outright. Under her proposal, each teacher would choose between two compensation plans, one called green and the other red. Pay for teachers in the green plan would rise spectacularly, nearly doubling by 2010. But they would need to give up tenure for a year, after which they would need a principal’s recommendation or face dismissal.

For the full story, see:
SAM DILLON. “A School Chief Takes On Tenure, Stirring a Fight.” The New York Times (Thurs., November 13, 2008): A1 & A19.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Entrepreneurs Are the Main Source of Economic Growth

(p. 144) The reason the system of capitalism without capitalists is failing throughout most of Europe is that it misconceives the essential nature of growth. Poring over huge aggregations of economic data, economists see the rise to wealth as a slow upward climb achieved through the marginal productivity gains of millions of workers, through the slow accumulation of plant and machinery, and through the continued improvement of “human capital” by advances in education, training, and health. But, in fact, all these sources of growth are dwarfed by the role of entrepreneurs launching new companies based on new concepts or technologies. These gains generate the wealth that finances the welfare state, that makes possible the long-term investments in human capital that are often seen as the primary source of growth.

Source:
Gilder, George. The Spirit of Enterprise. 1 ed. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.

Hugh Laurie SNL Protest Song Lyrics

At a “Workshop on Creative Ideas to Teach Principles,” organized by Jim Gwartney at the Stavros Center in Tampa, I presented some brief video clips that I use to make various points in my principles classes. The first was Hugh Laurie’s Protest Song.
After playing the song, I tell my students that to make the world better, you need more than a guitar and good intentions—you also need to know something about how the world works (in particular, you need to know some economics).
After my presentation, one of the participants asked if I knew where he could find the lyrics. In response, I found the lyrics posted online, and re-post them here in case they may be of use to other economic educators.

Hugh Laurie’s Saturday Night Live Protest Song

[ open on Hugh Laurie standing at Home Base strumming a guitar ]
Hugh Laurie: This is a protest song. [ blows on a harmonica attached to his neck ]
[ singing ]
“Well, the poor keep getting hungry, and the rich keep getting fat
Politicians change, but they’re never gonna change that.
Girl, we got the answer, it’s so easy you won’t believe
All we gotta do is.. [ mumbles incoherently ]
Well, the winds of war are blowin’, and the tide is comin’ in
Don’t you be hopin’ for the good times, because the good times have already been.
But, girl, we got the answer, it’s so easy you won’t believe
All we gotta do is.. [ mumbles incoherently ]
It’s so easy, to see
If only they’d listen, to you and me.
We got to.. [ mumbles incoherently ] as fast as we can
We got to.. [ mumbles incoherently ] every woman, every man
We got to.. [ mumbles incoherently ] time after time
We got to.. [ mumbles incoherently ] vodka and lime.
Well, the world is gettin’ weary, and it wants to go to bed
Everybody’s dyin’, except the ones who are already dead.
Girl, we got the answer, starin’ us right in the face
All we gotta do is
All we gotta do is
All we gotta do is.”
[ pauses, then blows on the harmonica and finishes ]
[ the audience cheers wildly ]
Hugh Laurie: Thank you.

Source of lyrics:
http://snltranscripts.jt.org/06/06dprotest.phtml

UNO Economics Students Embrace Entrepreneurship

“The company was founded with the thought that a recession would happen,” said Grant Stanley, founder of marketing analytics firm Contemporary Analysis.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the Omaha World-Herald article quoted and cited below.

Grant was a student in my Economics of Technology and Economics of Entrepreneurship classes; Tadd was a student in my Honors Colloquium on Creative Destruction; Luis was a student in my Principle of Economics–Micro class. They have chosen an exciting path, and I wish them well!

(p. 1D) Grant Stanley was studying economics at the University of Nebraska at Omaha last year when he identified a business opportunity in the deteriorating economy.

A company making use of econometrics – a field that combines math, statistics and economics – could help small and midsize businesses make decisions in areas such as hiring, and sales and marketing techniques. Econometrics is widely used in education, government and large companies, Stanley said, but usually isn’t applied to smaller businesses.

Stanley thought the need for business forecasting and marketing analytics firms would grow as companies looked for help developing long-term strategies in order to survive an economic downturn.

So Stanley, who was only 20 years old at the time, started Contemporary Analysis, a marketing analytics firm, in March 2008.

“The company was founded with the thought that a recession would happen.”

Stanley courted classmate Tadd Wood, who also was 20 and studying economics, to help start the business, but it wasn’t an easy task. Wood already had a part-time job and was helping out in his family’s business.

“Tadd took months of, ‘Hey, want to hang out?'” before he agreed, Stanley said.

The young men met their third partner – Luis Lopez, 20 – through a friend over the summer, and the trio hit the ground running.

For the full story, see:
STEFANIE MONGE. “Pitching a startup in a downturn.” Omaha World-Herald (Monday, February 2, 2009): 1D & 3D.

“Members of the Contemporary Analysis team at a conference table in the home of Paddy Tarlton. From left are Luis Lopez, Nancy Jimenez, Grant Stanley, Tarlton and Tadd Wood.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the Omaha World-Herald article quoted and cited above.

“Black Parents Favor Vouchers By Larger Majorities than White Parents Do”

Pulitzer-Prize-winning Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page. Source of photo: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~montfell/biographies/o_z/page.html

(p. 7B) The question of vouchers as an alternative to public schools crosses color lines. But it is particularly appropriate for the nation’s first black president.

African-American students disproportionately find themselves in underperforming schools. In fact, opinion polls by think tanks like the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies have found that black parents favor vouchers by larger majorities than white parents do.
Yet teachers unions fight such alternatives, even though studies like a 2004 Thomas B. Fordham Institute report find that big-city public-school teachers are more likely than the general population they serve to have their own children in private schools.
In Obama’s Chicago, for example, 38.7 percent of public-school teachers sent their children to private schools, the Fordham study found, compared with 22.6 percent of the general public.
In Washington, D.C., 26.8 percent of public-school teachers did so, versus 19.8 percent of the public.
. . .
As a parent who reluctantly moved my own child to private school after the fifth grade, I appreciate the value of school choice. But what about the kids left behind in failing schools?
Michelle Obama offered a clue to what her family’s choice will be. She flew to Washington Monday, ahead of her husband, and toured the private Georgetown Day School. Another clue: Their daughters currently attend a private school in Chicago.
Private school also was the choice of Bill and Hillary Clinton for their daughter, Chelsea. The most recent presidential child to attend a D.C. public school was Jimmy Carter’s daughter, Amy, in the late 1970s.

For the full commentary, see:

Page, Clarence. “Vouchers and Obama Daughters.” Omaha World-Herald (Sat., Nov. 15, 2008): 7B.
(Note: ellipsis added.)