The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees, in every object, only the traits which favor that theory.
Thomas Jefferson to Charles Thompson, 1787

—–

My university sits in the socially and politically conservative South, and our students tend toward a conservative political and world view as well. The most powerful student organizations are self-identified as conservative as well as being awash in power and funding, some from outside the university.

One conservative student organization, supported and funded by a network of such organizations spreading throughout campuses across the U.S., has for years dominated the Cultural Life Program of the university, a series of events students must attend as part of graduation requirements.

Several years ago, this organization brought Ann Coulter to campus, and when I mentioned my own concerns about her credibility during class, a student quickly defended Coulter by saying, “But she has footnotes in her book.”

Coulter’s confrontational conservatism speaks to the world views of many of our students and the greater public of SC, and thus seems credible even without footnotes. That student’s defense highlights a key element in the rise of the dogmatic scholar that has its roots in the 1980s, a period identified by Isaac Asimov as “a cult of ignorance” guided by a new ethic, “Don’t trust the experts.”

April of 2013 is the thirty-year anniversary of A Nation at Risk, a political and popular turning point for America’s perception of not only public education but also education reform as well as the discourse surrounding both. John Holton (2003) and Gerald Bracey (2003) have since then detailed that the report was also, in Bracey’s words a decade ago on the cusp of No Child Left Behind, “false”:

It has been 20 years, though, since A Nation at Risk appeared. It is clear that it was false then and is false now. Today, the laments are old and tired – and still false. “Test Scores Lag as School Spending Soars” trumpeted the headline of a 2002 press release from the American Legislative Exchange Council. Ho hum. The various special interest groups in education need an other treatise to rally round. And now they have one. It’s called No Child Left Behind. It’s a weapon of mass destruction, and the target is the public school system. Today, our public schools are truly at risk.

What was “false” about A Nation at Risk?

First, Holton, as an insider, exposed that Ronald Reagan himself directed the commission to insure his agenda for public schools:

We met with President Reagan at the White House, who at first was jovial, charming, and full of funny stories, but then turned serious when he gave us our marching orders. He told us that our report should focus on five fundamental points that would bring excellence to education: Bring God back into the classroom. Encourage tuition tax credits for families using private schools. Support vouchers. Leave the primary responsibility for education to parents. And please abolish that abomination, the Department of Education. Or, at least, don’t ask to waste more federal money on education – ”we have put in more only to wind up with less.” Just discover excellent schools to serve as models for all the others. As we left, I detected no visible dismay in our group. I wondered if we were all equally stunned.

Second, Bracey noted that despite the report depending on research and data, only one trend line out of nine suggested anything negative—and that the commission focused on that one trend line in order to comply with the political pressure aimed at the committee.

And third, A Nation at Risk as a political document parading as scholarship received not only a pass from the media but also a rush to benefit from the bad news by many stakeholders, as Bracey explained:

Alas, nothing else is new and, indeed, we must recognize that good news about public schools serves no one’s reform agenda – even if it does make teachers, students, parents, and administrators feel a little better. Conservatives want vouchers and tuition tax credits; liberals want more resources for schools; free marketers want to privatize the schools and make money; fundamentalists want to teach religion and not worry about the First Amendment; Catholic schools want to stanch their student hemorrhage; home schooling advocates want just that; and various groups no doubt just want to be with “their own kind.” All groups believe that they will improve their chances of getting what they want if they pummel the publics.

A Nation at Risk, the process involved to create the report, the uncritical media endorsement of the report, and the public and academic embracing of the claims represent a seminal moment in the rise of the dogmatic scholar, one foreshadowed by Asimov and personified by Coulter.

Recently, a debate between Diane Ravitch and Patrick Wolf highlights how the dogmatic scholar looks today. Mercedes Schneider examines that debate by first addressing Wolf’s credentials, Endowed Chair in School Choice, Education Reform, University of Arkansas.

Both Schneider and Ravitch raise concerns about the conflict of interests when a scholar holds a chair in a department that is heavily funded by school choice advocates, as Schneider explains about Wolf’s complaint that Ravitch attacked him personally:

Whereas she does not personally attack Wolf, Ravich certainly clearly exposes Wolf’s conflict of interest in evaluating a program obviously supported by his funders.

I agree with Ravitch that this conflict of interest is noteworthy for its undeniable potential in “shaping” study reporting and outcomes.

At the root of this debate is the unmasking of the dogmatic scholar and the concurrent rise of conservative advocacy taking on the appearance of scholarship despite the historical claims among conservatives that pointy-headed intellectuals shouldn’t be trusted (again, read Asimov).

Coulter’s book has footnotes to appear scholarly, and free market think tanks have increasingly embraced a formula that is both deeply deceiving and powerfully effective: (1) Hire fellows with advanced degrees, preferably PhDs, (2) generate reports that include a great deal of data, statistics, and charts/graphs, (3) create scholarly but attractive PDFs of the reports accessible for free through the think tank web sites, (4) aggressively promote the reports through press releases, and (5) circumvent entirely the peer-review process (in fact, conservative think tanks are actively demonizing the peer-review process).

The dogmatic scholar differs from the traditional university-based scholar in a few important ways. The university-based scholar and the promise of academia rest on some basic concepts, including the wall between undue influence and independent thought that tenure affords combined with the self-policing effect of peer-review.

While traditional scholarship, tenure, and peer-review are not without problems, this essential paradigm does allow for (although it cannot guarantee) rich and vibrant knowledge bases to evolve for the sake of knowledge absent the allure of profit or the influence of inexpert authority (tenure stands between university boards of trustees and faculty to insure academic freedom, for example).

As a critical educator and scholar, however, I do reject the traditional view that scholars must be apolitical, must assume some objective stance. In fact, I believe that scholars must be activists.

Therefore, my concern about the rise of the dogmatic scholar is not the activism or advocacy but two key failures found among dogmatic scholarship: (1) masking advocacy as objective (typically behind the use of statistics and charts/graphs), and (2) committing to an ideology despite the weight of evidence to the contrary.

Activist scholars such as Howard Zinn represent the power of taking a public intellectual stance that is both ideologically grounded (social justice) and informed by scholarship, Zinn’s own careful and detailed work as a historian.

Dogmatic scholarship typically found in think tanks but increasingly occurring in externally funded schools, departments, and institutes within universities and colleges (such as Wolf’s role at the University of Arkansas) is represented by a school choice report funded by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI), which is explicitly a free market advocacy think tank.

Fixing the Milwaukee Public Schools: The Limits of Parent-Driven Reform, by David Dodenhoff, PhD, was released by WPRI in 2007 with George Lightbourn, representing the institute, lamenting: “The report you are reading did not yield the results I had hoped for.”

Further, despite the evidence of the research commissioned by WPRI, Lightbourn issued a commentary and explained:

So that there is no misunderstanding, WPRI is unhesitant in supporting school choice.  School choice is working and should be improved and expanded.  School choice is good for Milwaukee’s children.

While Lightbourn’s commentary raises some concerns about the data, the key message is “evidence be damned, WPRI remains committed to school choice!”

The problem, then, with the rise of the dogmatic scholar is that several contradictions lie underneath the movement.

Conservative America has persistently marginalized and demonized the Left as biased while embracing not only the possibility of objectivity but also the necessity for objectivity, especially among educators, scholars, and researchers (consider the uproar over climate change science).

Yet, conservatives are the base of dogmatic scholars and those who embrace dogmatic scholars (or popular versions such as Coulter)—despite dogmatic scholars being themselves advocates masquerading as objective and academic.

Further, the dogmatic scholar is failing in the exact ways some traditional scholarship fails—allowing the influence of funding and profit to skew the pursuit of knowledge. In fact, since dogmatic scholarship is often driven by market ideology, the influence of funding and profit is common.

The impact of dogmatic scholarship on education reform has been staggering, resulting in a common pattern found among researchers and think tanks committed to reviewing educational research such as Bruce Baker, Matthew Di Carlo, and the National Education Policy Center: The reports coming from dogmatic scholars produce impressive data sets but misleading, incomplete, or contradictory claims and recommendations (see, for example, Baker on the highly publicized Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff study).

The reports coming from dogmatic scholars, notably the school choice research, tends to replicate the comments coming from WPRI about Milwaukee school choice: The claims and recommendations are decided before and in spite of the evidence of the data.

In fact, school choice research has revealed a pattern of making a series of ever-changing claims simply to keep the debate alive and thus the choice agenda vibrant. In the popular and enduring evolution debate, for example, Intelligent Design as a faux science endorses “teach the debate” to lend credibility to their claims and to gain equal footing with the scientific process without actually conforming to that process.

Do Ravitch and Wolf, then, have the right to debate? Of course. Their debate is likely a potentially powerful mechanism for examining education reform.

Does Wolf have a right to advocate for school choice? Again, I believe he does.

The problem, however, with both Wolf’s agenda and the debate is that Wolf wants to hide behind a mask of objectivity and has taken a “holier than thou” stance to marginalize Ravitch’s credible concerns about school choice research.

In the end, the dogmatic scholar fails for the same reason dogma does—because neither can be questioned.

All credible scholarship is rendered more valuable by the light of questions so I will end with a simple solution offered by Julian Vasquez Heilig, Ph.D. at Wolf’s complaint:

Dr. Patrick, Please hurry and de-identify the data you used in your papers and provide it to independent researchers. I have the ability to critique the methodological rigor and quality of your actual research. I am very very much looking forward to it.

Among researchers, no claim is any more credible than the data the claim rests on. As long as dogmatic scholars ignore the data and hide the data, their work will be questioned in ways that also include their motives.

The job of the scholar is not to be objective, but to be transparent—admitting evidence-based stances providing context for claims and recommendations. Dogmatic scholars refuse to be transparent, and their weakness is that entrenched dishonesty.

In short, all scholars likely should heed the opening comments from Jefferson.

References

Bracey, G. W. (2003). April foolishness: The 20th anniversary of A Nation at Risk. Phi Delta Kappan, 84(8), 616-621.

Holton, G. (2003, April 25). An insider’s view of “A Nation at Risk” and why it still matters. The Chronicle Review, 49(33), B13.

The list includes some of the more obvious pathogens such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Plasmodium spp., Human immunodeficiency virus, Influenza virus, Escherichia coli, Streptococcus pneumoniae and Staphylococcus aureus.

Less obvious entries are Leptospira spp., Wuchereria bancrofti, and Parvovirus.

Not included in the list are Vibrio spp., Hepatitis C virus, and Rhinovirus.

Source: Case Studies in Infectious Disease (2009) by Peter M Lydyard. It is an excellent basic science/transition to clinical medicine book and a core title in Infectious Diseases: A Curriculum for Self-Guided Learners. A free sample chapter is available here.

by Mark Yoffe MD

[The 40 most burdensome pathogens in the world was originally published in The Medical Media Review on May 7, 2012 and was updated on December 18, 2012. Please read important Disclaimer.]

Dylan Byrne was arrested from his dorm in Hutchinson Hall. Apparently he did all his dastardly child porning from his evil lair somewhere within.

Little did little Dylan Byrne know that his fun was about to come to a crashing halt.

KADOOSH.

“State Police, plant your dick in the floor and pray backwards! You’re under arrest!”

“Aw schucks, the fuzz!  Steve, hide your shrooms, man!”

“Sweet, two for one special!  Looks like you got your prison butt-buddy early, Dylan.”

What the fuck happened to crying while jacking off in a dorm bathroom and drunken misogyny, rioting and being beaten by the URI police at 3AM in your shitting fucking freshman party clothes and cookie-cutter douchebag baseball cap?

What is wrong with America?  Is this what URI freshmen do to get their rocks off nowadays?

This has been quite the month.  First John Holton, now this. Soon we’ll have enough sexual deviants and serious criminal offenders at URI to stage a mural painting of a new Last Supper, with John Holton as Jesus and Dylan Byrne as the Virgin Mary.  We’ll call it Morons Who Got What They Deserved Crying at a Table. 

Fuck you Dylan Byrne. Welcome to the internet, and prison.  Now, get the fuck out of URI.

Since he’ll likely be a registered sexual deviant, here’s all his public info, because I’m nice guy like that.

Byrne, Dylan Padraig - Undergraduate, Physics Department.

42 Lockwood Lane Norwalk, CT 06851 (203) 855-9984

email: dylan_byrne@my.uri.edu , dylanbyrne@optonline.net

Quinn also appointed a raft temporary cabinet appointments.

Jim Larkin will be acting director of the Department of Agriculture: Andrew Stolfi, acting director of the Illinois Department of Insurance; and John Kim will be interim director of the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency.

“Effective government requires leadership by talented and motivated public servants, and I am pleased to announce these qualified individuals to lead critical state agencies,” Quinn said.

Meanwhile, there was no word from Quinn’s office regarding a permanent chief for the Department of Children and Family Services following the departure of Erwin McEwen who resigned last month under a cloud stemming from an ethics investigation.

Jean Ortega-Piron continues as the DCFS interim director.

It’s been a good writing start to 2011. I’ve had a short story published in Ricochet Magazine (edition two) in January, a very short story accepted by Capsule Fiction and a different one awaiting editing at another journal, plus my first post published about reading and writing  as well as a second article accepted about what constitutes good and bad reviews for the Best Damn Creative Writing Blog. Yay me!

Take me out let me breathe 

It’s been good to get back to producing stuff again. I really began to take writing seriously in 2002. And that was after about a decade of ‘maybe I could write something’. From 2002 I studied writing at TAFE, met and was inspired by a whole bunch of people, like John Holton and eventually got a job writing.

I believe there is something wrong

From 2005 it all went to the back-burner. New city, changes in priorities, different job/s new life. Writing was too difficult, inspiration was missing. I was tired and poor. I was distracted and generally down, for a long time.

Somewhere in the middle then

But it’s returning, that thing that says I’m a writer. And since last year it’s been getting better. I’m not there yet, but here with this blog and feedback from places like Shades of Crimson have helped. I’m more of the me I need to be.

Push me back to the start

Yet I can’t say I’m ‘emerged’. Can’t (yet) say I’m earning a living from writing, but I feel like progress is being made. Hoping the part-time post-grad study will help too. It does feel like I’m right at the beginning again but that’s not a bad thing. It’s the start of the upswing of the curve. And yes, I know curve implies a downward glide. But life and work and art are like that.

…tell me please, why it takes so long

Turns out I’m slow – slow learner, slow writer. But it’s not a race. There’s no expiry date on *being published*. Stories take as long as they take – to finish and to be created. A bit like people really, which means I’ll keep plodding along, doing my thing. I don’t have a direction yet,  but I’ll keep singing to myself… we can choose what we choose to believe:)

Thanks to Crowded House for their lyrics. Take inspiration where you can find it I say.

Lots of writers go on about how writing a short story is more difficult than a novel. I think of a short story as an ice dancing performance: minutely choreographed and balanced, lyrical, sometimes breathtakingly beautiful and a thing unto itself, but when it goes wrong, sometimes bloody, terribly off-putting and upsetting.

This collection below I reviewed a few years ago and was published in the TAFE journal the students produced. Liam Davison is a writer deserving of more attention and his writing falls into the lyrical rather than upsetting category. If you manage to find a copy, I hope you enjoy.

Collected Stories by Liam Davison

Liam Davison’s previous publications included the novels The White Lady and most recently The Betrayal. His second novel Soundings won the National Book Council Banjo Award for Fiction in 1993. His books have also been shortlisted for the Australian/Vogel Award, The Age Book of the Year and the Victorian Premier’s Awards[1]. Those familiar with the novels of Liam Davison will recognise these stories from his preoccupations – perhaps obsessions – with water, rural Australia and the ways in which landscape and seascape shape characters and events. But he is also interested in changing family relationships (The Observatory, Lessons in Genealogy, Floundering), as well as memory and history (The Inconspicuous Bike, The Flight Charts of Amelia) and childhood (Heart Stone).

The Collected Stories of Liam Davison are neatly arranged into the chapters and from this the reader can detect some of the afore-mentioned preoccupations of the author. The chapters: The Shipwreck Party, Land Sounds and The Landscape of Fiction.

Although the title is Collected Stories, the offerings under the heading ‘The Landscape of Fiction’ are ruminative essays on the more obvious influences of place and nature in stories such as The Shipwreck Party (first published 1989). They offer personal insights into aspects of the author’s background and become interesting stories in themselves – in Heart Stone (first published 1995), the narrator discusses the way in which writing The White Woman became an act of love as well as an examination of love and obsession: the ideal and the real. The author also acknowledges that by his account The White Woman is the novel that comes closest to a love story. To do this the narrator uses recollections of his childhood passions. Indeed, memory, time, childhood and place suffuse both the short stories and the purported essays. In the space of a page or two, these essay/stories capture his loves and fears about life, his craft and his family. In The Flight Charts of Amelia (first published 1997), the narrator draws upon his own experiences as a father to his four-year-old daughter Amelia: ‘I will wake in the night perhaps, some years further on, distressed to find her gone and will cling to the unreliable charts of what she was once like.’[2] The narrator links these moments in the life of his relationship to moments in the life of Amelia Earhart (perhaps her namesake) and her mother, based on historical documentation, and private letters.

In the chapter Land Sounds the stories are simple and short (usually about half a page) meditations on aspects of rural life, not only its sounds, but its imagery, the past and future and people’s reaction to it. For instance, in Stringing the Paddocks (first published 1999) a son helps his father create – or mend – a wire fence and also define his family’s relationship with the land, and with the future. These short prose pieces present ordinary rural scenes with clarity and poetry.  They are lyrical odes to worlds almost gone – but not quite forgotten – in Wood (first published 1999) it is the sound of a sawmill with its ‘quiet men – lopped and stumped, wielding brooms waiting each day for the saws to stop.’[3] The short, short stories of this chapter are told with a melancholy joy that at once celebrates and commemorates that which was once everyday: people, buildings and tanks that have become one with the land.

Under the chapter headed ‘The Shipwreck Party’ is collected some of the longer pieces. These stories introduce some of the themes explored later in the text under Land Sounds. For instance, in Floundering the relationship between father and son is altered forever through the boys’ new ability to mistrust ‘the way things looked on the surface.’[4] The bond between man and child that had been established through estuary night fishing is broken forever. The symbol of this destruction is the arrival of the dredging machine, which has disturbed the flounder, introduced string rays and ‘dredged up’ recollections of the father’s childhood to haunt his son. This is perhaps the most evocative short story of the chapter. The short story The Inconspicuous Bike is the story of the search for the narrators’ uncle – and his bike, told with wistful affection for the Uncle, his bikes and the faded photographs that record and also fail to record his history. Floundering and The Inconspicuous Bike are perhaps the most memorable stories of this chapter.

 Davison’s writing is understated, as Marjorie Ward says of The Betrayal: ‘If you are seeking florid writing about action and violence you will not find it in Davison’s work.’[5] Similarly Collected Stories all revolve around quiet but sometimes powerful episodes of awakening - to the truth, to the nature of things, to the sounds of the land and the sea - in a manner that has been characterised as ‘spare and deceptive,’[6] and are, for the most part, a pleasure to ponder.

Liam Davison – Collected Stories is published by Queensland University Press, Australia, 2001.

As its final Principals Forum of 2010, TripleTree has scheduled four distinguished panelists to discuss the opportunities and challenges facing payers, providers, employers, and consumers and how cloud computing will play a major role in fixing our nation’s healthcare system.  Specifically where cloud computing will address issues surrounding cost containment, information transparency and data privacy and the opportunities for improved collaboration.   While other industries have recognized the cost and scalability advantages of cloud computing, its impacts on healthcare are now beginning to materialize.

Ryan Stewart and Scott Donahue of TripleTree will co-facilitate this panel discussion, which will feature the perspectives of:

• Dr. Giovanni Colella, President, CEO & Co-Founder – Castlight Health
• John Holton, President & CEO & Founder – SCI Solutions
• Nancy Brown, Chief Growth Officer – MedVentive, Inc.
• Albert Prast, CIO/CTO – Connextions

“From closing the chasm between cost, quality and outcomes-based reimbursement to optimizing patient-provider communications and access, to enabling a retail-based shift from a B2B to B2C environment, hCloud^® is emerging as a highly germane area of opportunity and debate and we look forward to a collaborative discussion with our most distinguished panel of industry thought leaders who will bring a broad spectrum of perspectives from across the industry,” commented TripleTree’s Ryan Stewart.

The dial-in number for this webinar is (312) 878-0218, access code 506-175-369.  For more information, contact TripleTree at (952) 253-5300 or visit us at http://www.triple-tree.com.