It’s a lonely life, but someone has to do it. Usually, it seems, “someone” is “me.” That’s been as true since I left academe as it was when I was there, teaching undergrads to write. So I was cheered to find I am not alone:

If being a pedant means that you care passionately about the English language, then Bernard welcomes the charge,” says Bernard Lamb’s publicist.

For the past 40 years, Lamb, emeritus reader in genetics at Imperial College London and president of The Queen’s English Society, has been on a quest to improve standards of English among his students and the general population.

His latest book, The Queen’s English: And How to Use It, published this week, explains why good English matters and how to achieve it.

Aside from the crucial fact that “there are thoughts that we cannot consciously have unless we have the right words and an ability to use them in coherent sentences,” Lamb points out that language also matters to employers.

His book cites the head of an online recruitment agency who reports that a third of job applications from graduates with good degrees from good universities are rejected because of poor English in their CVs. Too many people are “far too relaxed” about the issue, he believes.

In the 1970s, Lamb was working with a Sri Lankan research student who politely pointed out that there was room for improvement when it came to his own spelling and grammar. “I started learning the rules of spelling, using a dictionary more, learning about prefixes and suffixes, and playing Scrabble with the student,” he explains.

She won the first 80 games – but the pair ended up as finalists in the national Scrabble championships.

A keen teacher, Lamb then set out to improve his students’ use of English.

“They were making really crucial errors, like writing, ‘Bad diet effects a woman’s pregnancy,’ which means it makes her pregnant, rather than it ‘affects’ her pregnancy. They wrote about ‘complimentary’ genes instead of ‘complementary’ genes.”

One error he particularly enjoyed came from a student who wrote about a cow being fertilized by “seamen.” But he still knocked a mark off: “It is bad science.”

The Queen’s English is peppered with cartoons and humorous examples of student “howlers.”

When Lamb introduced lectures for first-year biology students on how to write scientific English, the students “had a good laugh over the errors,” but then promptly went and made them.

The best policy is for teachers to correct errors “in a kindly, constructive fashion” throughout the education system, he believes.

“If you make it clear to students that bad English leads to bad science, and bad science will be penalized, then they will do something about it. They don’t like losing marks.”

However, most university staff “totally ignore” errors of English, and some are unable to identify them, he fears. At Imperial, he says, “the other staff really weren’t that interested. You don’t get promotions for doing things like that, you get promoted for your research publications. It is no one’s priority at university.”

Correcting also takes time, and teachers “want to be popular.”

“If no one else does the correction, they stand out, and students think they are pedants. It is a matter of trying to change the culture.”

To raise the profile of the issue, Lamb has taken to running surveys of his students’ errors. The results have attracted national publicity, including the headlines “Prof hits at spell shock” and “Tutor to shame students who just can’t spell.”

This got him into trouble with Imperial. “It wasn’t the done thing to have any kind of criticism of our students,” says Lamb, whose other books include How to Write About Biology. “I got into hot water. I made it clear that it isn’t ‘knocking our students,’ it is knocking general standards. I get on very well with my students and always have done,” says Lamb who, with his wife, held a dinner in his home each year for his personal tutees.

While some students have protested that it is “not his job” to correct their English, others have been very grateful, he says.

Lamb, 68, joined The Queen’s English Society in 1981 after seeing a notice in a newspaper. “I thought, ‘A national organization that fights for higher standards of English? I want to be part of it.’”

In his role as president, he lets people in the public eye know when they have made an error, and he has recently written to several national newspaper journalists.

“The more people who are fighting for good English, the better. It is in everyone’s interest,” he says.

I’ve never corrected the grammar of a journalist or public figure–but I’ve sure wished someone would. It’s a jungle out there!

Lamb is right about the abdication of responsibility among teachers–too many who aren’t English teachers don’t think it’s their job to be concerned about whether their students can write. That problem runs from the basics of grammar, spelling, and syntax to the broader challenges of expressing complex ideas, developing arguments, and so on. And the issue isn’t just that it’s time-consuming to comment on student writing. As Lamb notes, there is an awful lot of “the blind leading the blind” going on. I’ve found that’s true even when it comes to English teachers.

It used to take me forever to grade papers. I made students submit them electronically, as Word documents. And then I used the “track changes” function to line edit while also commenting on the macro-issues of expression, logic, flow, and so on. Students were responsible for reviewing the edits, for making sure they understood them, and for not making the same errors and committing the same infelicities in their next paper. If they did, their grades suffered. A 5-7 page paper would take me upwards of thirty or forty minutes to grade, including writing global comments at the end. I’ve always wondered about teachers who say they can blow through student papers in 20 minutes apiece or less. What are they really doing?

Cato’s Neal McCluskey explains:

So U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan invited every Education Department employee to attend Rev. Al Sharpton’s Glenn Beck counter-rally. As David Boaz explained in the Examiner, it was a ”highly inappropriate” thing to do, pushing people who are supposed to serve all Americans to support one side of a “political debate.” But that’s just the most obvious problem with Duncan’s weekend doings.

Perhaps just as troubling as his rally-prodding is that Duncan declared education “the civil rights issue of our generation” at Sharpton’s event. This only about a year after helping to kill an education program widely supported by many of the people he and Sharpton insist they want to empower. I’m talking, of course, about Washington, DC’s, Opportunity Scholarship Program, a voucher program that was proven effective. But the heck with success — Duncan and President Obama let the union-hated program die.

I’m a huge fan of the DC OSP — I’ve visited the neighborhoods it affects, met families with kids in the program, talked with the kids themselves, seen the life-changing impact the scholarships are having, and witnessed the despair brought about by Congress’ decision to cease funding–and so kill–the program. The folks who benefit from the program are, demographically, strong Obama supporters. The betrayal they felt when he presided over the decision to pander to the unions is not to be described.

I do appreciate that the Obama administration, led by Duncan, has taken some necessary and controversial steps in the right direction. The stands they have taken for charter schools and merit pay for teachers have flown in the face of the teachers unions’ self-interest–and that was courageous. And say what you will about whether the federal government has any business getting involved in pouring money into states for public education via the Race to the Top competition–that process motivated states to stand up to unions and to commence a much-needed reassessment of whether the K-12 system serves teachers or students. Colorado–which sadly did not get any of the funding–actually passed a bill tying teacher tenure to student performance. That’s major stuff in the world of ed reform.

Still, Duncan should not be politicizing the work of ed reform–he should be working to de-politicize it. And if he’s serious that education is the civil rights issue of our era–and I think he’s right about that–he’s got to start taking seriously the idea that kids in failing schools need alternatives now, and that charter schools alone are not enough. They don’t have time to wait for the system to reform itself–particularly when, in the absence of strong competition, it is not likely to do so.

Camille Paglia on college education, core curriculum, job creation, and mental health:

Vanishing of jobs will plague the rest of this decade and more. Meaningful employment is no longer guaranteed to dutiful, studious members of the middle class in the Western world. College education, which was hugely expanded after World War II and sold as a basic right, is doing a poor job of preparing young people for life outside of a narrow band of the professional class.

Yes, an elite education at stratospheric prices will smooth the way into law or medical school and supply a network of useful future contacts. But what if a student wants a different, less remunerative or status-oriented but more personally fulfilling career? There is little flexibility in American higher education to allow for alternative career tracks.

Jobs, and the preparation of students for them, should be front and center in the thinking of educators. The idea that college is a contemplative realm of humanistic inquiry, removed from vulgar material needs, is nonsense. The humanities have been gutted by four decades of pretentious postmodernist theory and insular identity politics. They bear little relationship to the liberal arts of broad perspective and profound erudition that I was lucky enough to experience in college in the 1960s.

Having taught in art schools for most of my four decades in the classroom, I am used to having students who work with their hands—ceramicists, weavers, woodworkers, metal smiths, jazz drummers. There is a calm, centered, Zen-like engagement with the physical world in their lives. In contrast, I see glib, cynical, neurotic elite-school graduates roiling everywhere in journalism and the media. They have been ill-served by their trendy, word-centered educations.

Jobs, jobs, jobs: We need a sweeping revalorization of the trades. The pressuring of middle-class young people into officebound, paper-pushing jobs is cruelly shortsighted. Concrete manual skills, once gained through the master-apprentice alliance in guilds, build a secure identity. Our present educational system defers credentialing and maturity for too long. When middle-class graduates in their mid-20s are just stepping on the bottom rung of the professional career ladder, many of their working-class peers are already self-supporting and married with young children.

The elite schools, predicated on molding students into mirror images of their professors, seem divorced from any rational consideration of human happiness. In a period of global economic turmoil, with manufacturing jobs migrating overseas and service-sector jobs diminishing in availability and prestige, educators whose salaries are paid by hopeful parents have an obligation to think in practical terms about the destinies of their charges. That may mean a radical stripping down of course offerings, with all teachers responsible for a core curriculum. But every four-year college or university should forge a reciprocal relationship with regional trade schools.

The trades get a bad rap in our culture–and they really shouldn’t. As we press for the college degree as the one-size-fits-all index of job preparedness and global competitiveness (we are led in this by our commander in chief), we dumb that degree down and make it worth less and less. Meanwhile, there are many smart, talented people who are not at home in an academic setting, but can absolutely soar working with their hands, and doing the creative problem-solving and loving craftsmanship that comes with that.

As many of you know, I taught at a boarding school a few years ago. Academically, this school was doing so much that was wrong. But one thing it got really, really right: thanks to a thriving arts program and a twice-weekly “work program,” every kid in the school had the chance to throw pots, paint, sculpt, chop and shift wood, stoke the wood stoves that heated all the buildings, garden, cook, and so on. Kids who got really interested in one thing or another could acquire carpentry skills, or learn to weld, or similar.

The thing about being a plumber or an electrician is your job isn’t going to get exported. And you can see the work you do, and measure its value. An awful lot of people graduate from college–or grad school–with only an ability to manipulate words. And often their abilities in that regard aren’t all that great. That’s dangerously ungrounded stuff — economically unsound, and, for many, personally unsatisfying. We need to expand our definition of what constitutes a respectable career path, and what counts as viable training for the workplace.

The University of Louisiana is voting today on a proposal to make it easier to remove tenured faculty. The reasons are economic–and the reactions, centered on concerns about academic freedom and job security, are anything but:

The University of Louisiana system’s Board of Supervisors plans to vote Friday on a proposal that would make it easier to dismiss tenured professors—a move that has upset faculty members throughout the system’s eight campuses, as well as national faculty organizations.

“This could impact the quality of education offered in the classroom and the ability to recruit qualified people, including at both faculty and administration levels,” said Jordan E. Kurland, associate general secretary for the American Association of University Professors.

System officials say the contemplated changes are driven by a tight budget. The proposals “are solely precipitated by a set of decreasing resources,” said Randy Moffett, the system’s president. “There are no other intentions.” State financing for has been reduced by 17 percent since the 2008 fiscal year, and Mr. Moffett is anticipating another drop of approximately $95.3-million in the middle of 2011 when federal stimulus funds expire.

Still, some professors fear that three parts of the proposal could drastically reshape academic employment.

Under one of those, a “reduction” of a program could become a legitimate cause for terminating tenured faculty members. Currently, tenured positions can be cut only because of financial exigency or the complete discontinuance of a program.

Mr. Moffett said the proposed new language was added to include special circumstances left out in the currrent policy, such as the restructuring or scaling back of specific academic programs.

Lisa Abney, provost at one of the system’s campuses, Northwestern State University, said such a change would provide more flexibility so the university wouldn’t have to eliminate entire programs in response to budget cuts. Her institution has undergone an extensive restructuring to deal with financial constraints—including the merging of three departments and the elimination of seven different majors. Six tenured faculty members were laid off as a result.

But the language worries professors. A tenured professor at a system campus, who did not want to be named for fear of being targeted for a job cut, said the main concern is that the word “reduction” is vague. The professor said that it could be interpreted arbitrarily, especially in universities with tense faculty-administrative relations.

The professor said the proposal has already created a “poisonous atmosphere” at his institution because many colleagues are afraid to speak in opposition, fearing they could be fired if the measure is passed.

And so on. The proposal also includes a measure that would reduce how much notice the university has to give tenured professors that it plans to downsize–from upwards of a year to three months.

This is not the first such standoff we’ve seen, and it won’t be the last. Tenured faculty have been warring with administrators over costs, efficiency, and academic freedom for years. Still, in the present economic climate, these battles are intensifying because the economic pinch is getting tighter. There is an endgame quality to the argument at this point. And while faculty are right to be worried, they polarize the debate and ensure the outcomes they don’t want when they dig in their heels, refuse to take economic reality into account, and persist in taking intransigent positions that look, on the surface, to be noble and idealistic, but are actually, in the end, enormously self-serving. The concern here is not academic quality. If it were, the professoriate would be up in arms about how poor academic quality is these days and would be taking steps to do something about it. Rather, the concern is job security. And while that’s a legitimate concern, it’s also the case that tenure is an exceptional, arguably ineffective, expensive perk that is no longer sustainable at most of our colleges and universities. This is a frightening and worrisome fact, from the faculty perspective, but it is a fact.

That said, I’d like to see what the University of Louisiana is doing to reduce costs and shrink its administration. To take an example drawn from one of its campuses: The University of Louisiana at Lafayette ranked 89th out of 196 surveyed schools in a recent study of administrative bloat. In recent years, the number of admins per 100 students has risen by 43.9 percent, while the number of faculty has only gone up 9 percent. Enrollment, during the same period, has gone down by 1.4 percent. If there’s a need to trim academic programs, surely there’s an even greater need to reduce the bureaucracy? Then there’s athletics. Louisiana-Lafayette heavily subsidizes its sports programs–and has increased those subsidies substantially in recent years. In 2008, more than half of the school’s $11 million athletics budget came from “allocated revenue,” or in-house subsidies.

If Louisiana’s faculty members want to have a productive conversation with the administration, they need to engage with them on the level of economics, budget allocations, administrative spending, and sports subsidies. And there is plenty to discuss there. “Why are you funding football at the expense of academics?” is a much stronger question than “Why won’t you let me keep my tenure when the university is going broke?”

UPDATE: The vote has been postponed.

George Mason law professor Todd Zywicki is a strong critic of the higher ed status quo, and has some skin in the game when it comes to rethinking governance models–several years ago he ran for the Dartmouth board of trustees as a dark horse alumni petition candidate, and he won. The election was much discussed in the higher ed press, and was an important part of a larger power struggle at Dartmouth about who should have a say in how the college is run, and whether entrenched inside interests should carry the day. So he’s a governance reformer, if you will, with an eye to returning our colleges and universities to a form that compels them to focus on their educational missions and their obligation to serve not themselves–but the public good.

A new study has just come out about the mammoth administrative bloat that we’ve seen in higher ed in recent years. It points out, among other things, that from 1993 to 2007, hiring and spending on university admins increased at twice the rate of hiring and spending on faculty. Zywicki notes that this fact has major implications for how we think about higher ed reform, and for how we assign responsibility for the problems we are seeing now:

Many observers believe that the problem with higher education is that universities are basically run by its employees–the faculty–and that the faculty’s interests are not aligned with those of the students who they serve. But what [Jay] Greene’s report hints at is a larger trend at work–more and more universities are run by their bureaucrats, not the faculty, and the incentives of bureaucrats are even more poorly aligned with student interests than the faculty. University organization is so screwy these days, that even though faculty incentives are so poor, governance would probably be improved (at least in the short run) by empowering the faculty against administrators.

That’s a serious claim–the faculty have, as he notes, tended to be the focal point of much of the criticism that has been leveled against colleges and universities for their failure to fulfill their education missions as well as for their failure to maintain the system of peer review with integrity. I’m still thinking that latter is on the faculty–but the former is certainly more complicated.

Zywicki offers some thoughts on where all the money for the bloat came from, and speculates about how we might go about getting unbloated:

Jay focuses on the role of government subsidies in feeding the bloat of academic bureaucracy. That seems plausible to me. The other factor that strikes me as perhaps relevant is that during most of that period university endowments grew at record rates. This essentially gave university presidents and their minions a huge slush fund to play with without actually having to raise new funds from alumni. This created a growth in agency costs for senior university administrators. Finally, this allowed universities to continue giving raises to faculty while expanding the bureaucracy even more. Thus, the growth in bureaucratic spending was not coming out of a zero-sum pot, so that faculty were not monitoring the growth in the bureaucracy as much.

Finally, I suspect this might also reflect the developing model of university president as CEO. As university presidents have come to be more like CEO’s of universities, their entourages have grown as well. Universities have come to take the look of a top-heavy bloated corporation like General Motors, with Vice-Presidents layered one atop the other. In a world of lax budget constraints owing to flush endowments, it is easier to fritter away resources on unproductive bureaucrats and internal empire-building.

The acid test, of course, will be whether the financial downturn will lead to the scaling back of these bureaucratic empires. Ironically, it appears that one of the Obama Administration’s priorities is to funnel more money into higher education–which will reinforce exactly the sorts of pressures that Greene highlights. Higher education almost perfectly converts subsidies (whether direct or aid to students) into higher prices. With no real reason to expect that those subsidies will be used to promote better substantive outputs instead of internal agency costs.

More generally, I think that for some time academic reformers have focused on issues like tenure and other elements of faculty governance in thinking about reforming higher ed. But this growth of administrative bloat is a whole new issue and one that might prove more difficult.

“Might prove more difficult” is an understatement. It’s already demonstrably true that at many schools feeling a pinch, it’s not administrative salaries or positions that are being cut, but faculty ones. I’m reminded of Jonathan Rauch’s devastating book about how, once you create a special-interest bureaucracy, you can never get rid of it, Government’s End.

What are the edu-wonks reading during the last lazy (or not so lazy) dog days of summer? National Journal asked the following questions: “What education-related books are you currently reading, or have read, that you would recommend to others? Why? What is the most important education article you have read in the past year? Why?”

As one would expect, most of the responses consist of dutiful lists of non-fiction tomes that have some bearing on some pressing aspect of education. These are well and good. But let’s be honest: Devouring those things is a lot like devouring sawdust a lot of the time. I plough through a fair number of such books myself, and I would have to say that I don’t even regard the activity involved as “reading” per se. Yes, my eyes track all the words. Yes, I follow the argument and make notes and marks in the margins. Yes, I cross-reference and read the footnotes and mine the bibliographies. But it’s professional excavation work, necessary but not fun. (Maybe if I were a born wonk it would be fun — but, as Nixon might have said, I am not a wonk!)

There are a few exceptions, though, and these are the ones that drew my eye. Alexander Russo, who writes for This Week in Education, mentions that he’s reading The Corner, the 1997 non-fiction look at a Baltimore street corner that led authors Ed Burns and David Simon to create the unbelievable HBO series The Wire. I cannot say enough about The Wire, and I agree absolutely that it’s about, among other things, the failure of inner city public schools (that becomes explicit later in the series, with a season devoted specifically to a former cop turned teacher). But The Wire is also about so much more–about the impossible end-game of law enforcement in chaotic, dying cities; about the spontaneous emergence of free-market entrepreneurship in the hood (via the drug trade); about the leviathan-like power of bureaucracy to stifle, deflect, and destroy human creativity and will. If this series is new to you, change that.

Diane Ravitch, whose writing about the history and politics of public education in America is not dry-as-dust, is re-reading Moby Dick. “Watch for the Ahabs among us,” she writes. I’m a big fan of re-reading. Great books grow with you, and are entirely new upon re-reading every few years.

Steve Peha, president of Teaching That Makes Sense, is an animal. He and his Kindle have been tearing it up this summer. Highlights include Stuart Buck’s Acting White (“powerful and provides a reasonably original theory that can be said to at least partly explain the achievement gap”) and David Price’s Love and Hate in Jamestown (“Unlocking the truth about America stimulates something in kids that can rarely be accessed in any other way. As Ms. Ravtich showed us in her stunning book The Language Police, we must get away from textbook-based, state-board-of-education-controlled, bastardized, and bowdlerized US history. To my mind, this means giving up on content standards for history as such tools give states exactly the power no true American would want them to have—the ability to write, re-write, and suppress the very things we so desperately need our children to learn”). I think Ravitch is embracing content standards in the form of a national curriculum — in the wake of her rejection of school choice — but that’s another argument for another day.

Me? Setting aside the ed reading I do for work — I’m vastly enjoying Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I always like to try to solve my murder mysteries, rather than just letting them wash over me. So I sat up late last night reading Leviticus, which is pivotal to the novel’s pattern of serial killings, looking for clues. Didn’t find any — but learned a lot about burnt offerings and ways that pigeons, rams, goats, and more may be used to cleanse away sin.

College tuition is skyrocketing, and measurable learning outcomes are dismal — so much so that the conversation is beginning to include the possibility that a college degree may not be the panacea we’ve long regarded it to be. Employers spend billions every year remediating new hires with meaningless bachelor’s degrees. And with the economy bobbing and weaving, parents and young adults are reluctant to take on debt to finance an education that may not translate into a job capable of repaying the loans.

It sounds like a stalemate and a trap. But it doesn’t have to be. There are still affordable schools out there–and some of them actually offer strong core curricula and reasonable time-to-degree. ACTA has done a ton of heavy lifting to find out where they are — and is sharing what they’ve discovered at WhatWillTheyLearn.com.

In a review of 714 four-year colleges and universities, ACTA found out some interesting things: when it comes to ensuring that students graduate with essential core knowledge and skills, public schools tend to do a better job than private ones. But most schools surveyed — more than 60 percent — fall down on the job when it comes to core graduation requirements.

We’re not talking about majors here. We’re talking about all those other classes you have to take to graduate. Most schools are doing what’s easiest and cheapest for them to do on that front — if they technically require students to fulfill distribution course requirements in math and science and history, the fine print often reveals that you can take just about anything to fulfill those requirements. There is no underlying, solid expectation about what students should know — and because of that, students can graduate without knowing much at all.

Writing at the Washington Post, Kathleen Parker explains:

The study was conducted by the nonprofit American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) to help parents and students determine where they might get the best bang for their buck. It was timed to coincide with the release of U.S. News and World Report’s annual evaluation of the “best” colleges and universities, which is based primarily on various statistical data, reputation and prestige.

ACTA focused its efforts on requirements as a measure of what an institution actually delivers. Anne Neal, ACTA president, is quick to point out that the grading system doesn’t tell the whole story about an institution but does offer a crucial part that has been missing.

[...]

both public and private universities are failing to ensure that students cover the important subjects, notably economics and U.S. government or history.

Among the reasons for this void in “the basics” is that many professors prefer research to teaching, and course content often reflects that. There’s no paucity of subjects to choose from, which is part of the problem. More courses equals more expense equals higher tuition. The question is whether the offerings are of any value.

At Emory University, for example, to fulfill a “History, Society and Culture” requirement, students may choose from about 600 courses, including “Gynecology in the Ancient World.” At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a “Humanities, Literature and Arts” requirement may be met by taking an introduction to television. Neal, herself a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, doesn’t dispute that these may be excellent classes. “But the question being asked is whether this is the only exposure a student is getting when going to university.”

Students given so many choices aren’t likely to select what’s good for them. Given human nature, they’ll choose what’s fun, easy or cool — and not early in the morning or on Fridays. It’s up to universities to guide them away from the dessert tray to the vegetable courses they need to develop healthy minds. Neal says that colleges have abdicated that responsibility.

“It’s ludicrous to take an 18-year-old and give them hundreds of choices when they don’t have any basis for making a decision.”

ACTA graded the schools it surveyed. More than 60 percent got a C or worse. Only sixteen got an A. They are: Baylor University, City University of New York — Brooklyn College, Texas A&M University (College Station and Corpus Christi), the U.S. Air Force Academy, the U.S. Military Academy, the University of Arkansas, St. Thomas Aquinas, East Tennessee State, Kennesaw State, Lamar University, Midwestern State, St. John’s College (MD and NM), Tennessee State, and the University of Dallas.

I can hear you. You are saying, “WHAT“? Where are Harvard and Yale, Berkeley and Michigan, Williams and Oberlin? They’re there. They just don’t do well under ACTA’s criteria.

We need to start thinking outside the box when it comes to higher education. ACTA’s What Will They Learn? project offers parents and students a way to begin doing that.

Slate compares academia to a restaurant (oh, the horror of the corporate analogy!) in order to highlight the absurdity of tenure:

Imagine you ran a restaurant. A very prestigious, exclusive restaurant. To attract top talent, you guarantee all cooks and waiters job security for life. Not only that, because you value honesty and candor, you allow them to say anything they want about you and your cuisine, publicly and without fear of retribution. The only catch is that all cooks or waiters would have to start out as dishwashers or busboys, for at least 10 years, when none of these protections would apply.

It sounds absurd in the context of the food-service industry—for both you and your staff. But this system has governed academia for decades. Tenure—the ability to teach and conduct research without fear of being fired—is still the holy grail of higher education, to which all junior professors aspire.

I know, odd analogy. Chefs aren’t dealing in ideas — or are they? Anyone who watches Top Chef might disagree. And the analogy between restaurant employees freely criticizing (and implicitly damaging) their employer and academics doing the same may seem far-fetched — until you consider how the courts have been thinking about that very issue in the wake of Garcetti v. Ceballos.

But the analogy does frame in another aspect of the tenure system — one that has for too long not been a central feature of arguments about whether to keep it: That fewer and fewer people actually ever get tenure, and that the whole rationale for the system — always a tenuous one, from my vantage point — has thus disappeared. “The proportion of full-time college professors with tenure has fallen from 57 percent in 1975 to 31 percent in 2007,” the article notes. “The numbers for 2009, soon to be released by the Department of Education, are expected to dip even lower.” As I have argued here many times, there is no point in arguing about whether we should keep or abolish tenure, since tenure has already been abolished. This is something those few who have tenure need to grapple with, as a matter of personal ethics as well as practical institutional governance. They are doing neither. In most cases, if they engage with issues of academic ethics at all, it’s at a distance. They remind me of Mrs. Jellyby, who was obsessed with the welfare of an obscure African tribe while utterly neglecting her children, her husband, and her home. In his descriptions of her “telescopic philanthropy,” Dickens depicts Mrs. Jellyby as wearing a far-sighted squint — one that looks past the filthy rooms, grubby hungry kids, and domestic chaos swirling around her.

Is it a tragedy that tenure is dying? I don’t think so and neither does Slate. Tenure was an experiment born of a particular era; it has a history and a context, and it made sense, as unions once made sense, as a means of protecting a class of professionals from intrusions that interfered with their ability to do work that was essential to our democracy’s well-being. But tenure, like many social experiments, didn’t work. It has produced damaging distortions within the profession it was designed to protect. It has backfired; there have been unintended consequences. It encourages conformity and intellectual parochialism. It destroys career mobility and earning capacity for those who have it. It prevents institutions from responding swiftly and capably to their teaching and research needs. It is paid for on the backs of grossly underpaid untenured faculty who, in doing faculty work for a fraction of faculty pay, undermine the validity of the concept of the faculty itself. And so on. Increasingly, tenure is revealed to be (to have become) an unsustainable system of privilege whose time has passed. When the AAUP and the AFT and others demand the restoration of tenure, they reveal themselves as impractical, anachronistic dinosaurs. Tenure as we have known it is done. There’s no going back. And that is not a bad thing.

Slate sketches out the alternative:

So what’s the alternative model? Renewable contracts. Some suggest seven years. Others say 10. The goal would be to give professors enough security to make them comfortable but not enough to breed complacency and lock the university into a deal that no longer makes sense.

Don’t abolish tenure altogether, says [Cathy] Trower. Just rework it. Create a tenure track that explicitly rewards teaching. Give interdisciplinary centers the authority to produce tenured professors. Allow for breaks in the tenure track if a professor needs to take time off. Offer the option of part-time tenure, a lower-cost alternative for professors who want to hold other jobs. In other words, make tenure flexible rather than a monolithic, in-or-out club.

Some universities have already made the leap. Evergreen State College in Washington implemented renewable contracts back in 1971. Florida Gulf Coast University scrapped tenure when it was established in 1991. Boston University now offers salary premiums to professors who decide not to take tenure. Market forces will drive other universities to follow suit, whether they want to or not. But it wouldn’t hurt to get a head start.

Basically, we’re talking about mini-tenure. We are talking about creating enough job security to enable intellectuals to comfortably take on the long-term teaching and research projects that yield great value for all of us, but can’t be completed, or even adequately tracked, on a year-to-year basis. We’re also talking about not having so much job security that accountability, incentives, and flexibility go out the window. We don’t want an academic employment model that is hostile to serious, important research. But we do need to get real, stop allowing the debate to be centered on a lost unicorn, and start focussing on pragmatic solutions that, if they are done well, will yield a stronger, better academy.

Here’s where the naysayers come in. Who will decide whose contracts get renewed? How will this not be a rubber-stamp process run by faculty and handled as irresponsibly as post-tenure review is at most schools? Alternatively, how will this not empower administrators to exercise McCarthyite levels of control over faculty, and so damage academic freedom? My answer: Academia is accustomed to resisting calls to reform by arguing that no reform can possibly be well implemented, that mistakes will be made. It’s been a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good — and so of justifying heads in sand. Those sorts of deflections don’t work any more. And the whole point of shared governance is that it’s up to academics themselves to work out the how of it all — and to get it right — in order not to have it done for them.

The Lottery is a wonderful film about school reform. Not ideological, very fair-minded and humane, and highly aware of how, when it comes to education, politics is interfering with our ability to fulfill our basic obligations to children. Check out Nick Gillespie’s interview with intrepid director Madeleine Sackler.

Talk of the higher ed bubble is getting louder and louder, and some predict that this will be the next bloated American industry to burst. That talk centers on how tuition has skyrocketed in recent years, far outpacing the rate of inflation, so that schools can maintain spending patterns that are simply not sustainable–particularly in an era when state funding for colleges and universities is shrinking. The talk touches, too, on the devaluation of the college degree–how grade inflation has gone hand in hand with declining educational outcomes and reduced study time; how time to degree is getting longer and longer (we are now talking about six-year graduation rates, as so few manage to finish in four). And it describes how heartlessly schools exploit students’ naivete–and innumeracy–when, for example, they arrange massive loans for them to earn humanities degrees that will never bring in a salary capable of paying off the debt, or, for example, when law schools lure students into a six-figure hole with misleading information about what their earning capacity will be when they graduate. I could go on.

So much of it is about how students have been victimized by the system. And there is a lot of that. But there is also a story to be told about an awful corollary to the above–the almost nihilistic, often dangerous non-seriousness of students themselves. Craig Brandon’s The Five Year Party tells it:

“The Five-Year Party” provides the most vivid portrait of college life since Tom Wolfe’s 2004 novel, “I Am Charlotte Simmons.” The difference is that it isn’t fiction. The alcohol-soaked, sex-saturated, drug-infested campuses that Mr. Brandon writes about are real. His book is a roadmap for parents on how to steer clear of the worst of them.

Many of the schools Mr. Brandon describes are education-free zones, where students’ eternal obligations—do the assigned reading, participate in class, hand in assignments—no longer apply. The book’s title refers to the fact that only 30% of students enrolled in liberal-arts colleges graduate in four years. Roughly 60% take at least six years to get their degrees. That may be fine with many schools, whose administrators see dollar signs in those extra semesters.

In an effort to win applicants, Mr. Brandon says, colleges dumb down the curriculum and inflate grades, prod students to take out loans they cannot afford, and cover up date rape and other undergraduate crime. The members of the faculty go along with the administration’s insistence on lowering standards out of fear of losing their jobs.

As a former education reporter and a former writing instructor at Keene State College in New Hampshire, Mr. Brandon has both an insider’s and an outsider’s perspective on college life. While his focus is on the 10% of America’s 4,431 liberal-arts colleges that he categorizes as “party schools,” he applies many of his criticisms more widely—even to the nation’s top-tier universities.

Mr. Brandon is especially bothered by colleges’ obsession with secrecy and by what he sees as their misuse of the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which Congress passed in 1974. Ferpa made student grade reports off-limits to parents. But many colleges have adopted an expansive view of Ferpa, claiming that the law applies to all student records. Schools are reluctant to give parents any information about their children, even when it concerns academic, disciplinary and health matters that might help mom and dad nip a problem in the bud.

Such policies can have tragic consequences, as was the case with a University of Kansas student who died of alcohol poisoning in 2009 and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology student who committed suicide in 2000. In both instances there were warning signs, but the parents were not notified. Ferpa’s most notorious failure was Seung-Hui Cho, the mentally ill Virginia Tech student who murdered 32 people and wounded 25 others during a daylong rampage in 2007. Cho’s high school did not alert Virginia Tech to Cho’s violent behavior, professors were barred from conferring with one another about Cho, and the university did not inform Cho’s parents about their son’s troubles—all on the basis of an excessively expansive interpretation of Ferpa, Mr. Brandon says. He recommends that parents have their child sign a Ferpa release form before heading off to college.

Full disclosure: I have not yet read the book. But the summary above rings true to my sense of the party culture that exists even on campuses that pride themselves on being serious places. It also meshes with my sense of how drugs and alcohol and casual sex circulate outside a given campus’ party scene. There is a lot of private, quiet drinking and drugging that goes on. Hooking up is the new dating scene, and hardly requires a beer-soaked kegger to sustain its momentum. And kids–for they are kids–are really quite on their own with it all, despite the perfunctory safety nets (counseling services, awareness workshops, etc.) that schools may try to put in place.

One strength of the book–if the review is an accurate picture–is that it makes the connection between schools’ abdication of their educational missions and students’ failure to use their college years in a meaningful, intellectually substantive way. And yet, according to Melanie Kirkpatrick’s review, that doesn’t lead to useful analysis of how the problem should be tackled:

There are several omissions in “The Five-Year Party.” One is the role of college trustees, who share the blame for the failure of the institutions over which they have oversight. Mr. Brandon also gives the faculty a pass. It is hard to believe that professors are as powerless or as cowed as they are portrayed here. The book’s chief villains are a new breed of college administrators, whom Mr. Brandon says have more in common with Gordon Gekko than Aristotle.

Oddest of all is Mr. Brandon’s failure to demand that students take responsibility for their conduct. He depicts them as victims of schools that either coddle them or take advantage of them and of a culture that discourages them from growing up. Mr. Brandon estimates that only 10% of the students at party schools are interested in learning. If that is right, colleges will have little incentive to shape up until their customers—students and parents—demand better.

Most schools, if they tackle the party culture at all, tend to do so without a sense of the wider context in which that culture exists. But the wider view Brandon develops makes it clear that cracking down on under twenty-ones–or, as some college presidents have proposed, just lowering the drinking age to eighteen–is not the answer. The answer is an overhauling of the entire academic enterprise, from top to bottom, demanded by parents and students, led by trustees, and done to ensure that their institutions are fulfilling their obligations to educate–not to pretend to educate, or to play at educating–but to actually educate.

I do think that students rise to the occasion when the standards are high and much is demanded of them. If the cool thing on campus is to be serious and to study, then that is what students will do. And professors can play a very important role in encouraging that. They can each ensure that their own classroom is a place where effort, application, hard work, questioning, and intellectual achievement are valued–and where headgames and nonsense and silliness have no place. They can make it clear that the grades they give are real and must be earned. And they can make it clear that this is where the fun lies in college–that learning is the party.