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.

From a Guardian piece about the perils of historical fiction and historical film:

The path a historical novelist has to tread is clearly beset by dangers. There is an inherent tension between trying to do something new and something old at the same time. One cannot have medieval characters using correct period language because no one would find the speech readable. Similarly, an accurate portrayal of a world in which most dutiful and conscientious fathers will regularly beat their sons is likely to alienate readers. If one was to write a novel about the real woman baptised in Dartmouth in 1737 as Constant Sex, it would have all sorts of double entendres and more basic entendres than she herself would have understood (the word “sex” having little or no connection with the sexual act in 1737). In describing the interactions of real individuals, one has to invent reactions or the character is just two-dimensional, and never develops. In creating good historical fiction, it is essential to tell lies.

Subtext: truth is stranger, and often better, than fiction, historical or not.

Author James Forrester goes on to stress that “telling lies” in historical fiction is not the same thing as “making mistakes.” He then enumerates some telling examples of both, from sources as diverse as Braveheart, Shogun, and Ken Follett’s fiction. If you are a stickler for historical detail, and if you are also passionate about historical fiction, and if you are aware of the impasse your stickling and your passions produces, this essay is fun times.

I’ve been in Vermont escaping the world for a few days. Forty miles from the Canadian border, endless cedar waxwings, amazing food, and marble, marble everywhere. On the shores of Lake Champlain, there are marble boulders in white, black, pink, green, and even lavender. You can pick up soft marble stones in the sand, and, if you are ambitious, you can also walk away with a cut slab of it, remnants of the quarries that once made Vermont one of the world’s most productive sources of marble. We were ambitious. We now have a little rectangular slab of white Champlain marble, which we will polish and keep for use as a doorstop or paper weight or weapon, as occasion requires.

While we were gone, a black bear destroyed the beehive. After our raccoon foraging disaster last year, we had approached beekeeping this year with consummate caution. The hive was situated on a base wedged into a concrete foundation. Its three stories–one for brood, created in May when we got our five-frame nuc colony; a second for winter honey stores, added in June, drawn out in comb and filled with honey in less than a month by our amazing bees; and a third, smaller story for our own honey harvest, added in early July and expected to yield by September–were strapped together and attached to the foundation pieces. It was solid, could not be tipped, and the hive bodies alone weighed more than 100 pounds, all of it brood, pollen, and heavy sweet honey. We were succeeding with our girls, and it was good.

Too good. Even I could smell the honey outside the hive. That place was heaven on earth. And a bear got wind of it, and came around in the middle of the night, lifted the entire strapped-together three stories plus foundation pieces, and threw the whole thing down a hill to break it open. Then he had his way with it. He tore out all the honey and comb and ate it. He ate much of the brood as well. So much for our beautiful girls and the amazing experience of helping them thrive.

We moped for a few days. Read a lot about black bears and bees and what to do. Learned about bear proofing hives, and began to move from defeat to determination. Bears are simply a part of the landscape where we live. This one was most likely pushed into a residential area by overpopulation out in the middle of nowhere. Lots of people have been reporting problems with bears coming onto their property this year. You just have to live with it. And so, we are thinking that this doesn’t have to mean we can’t keep bees. It just means that we have to be even more proactive about major pest prevention next year than we were this year. We have plans for how to do that, and will spend the fall putting in a fence to surround the hive area. We’ll start fresh with new bees and a new queen in the spring. And when the bears come around, we’ll be ready.

… as found in this title to a short note in this morning’s Inside Higher Ed: “Female Instructor Barred From Teaching at Muslim University Without Burqa.”

In other news, Inside Higher Ed reports that Kenneth Howell, the University of Illinois religion professor who was fired after sending an email to his class explaining Catholicism’s view of homosexuality, will be returning to the classroom this fall. He’s not off the hook — the investigation of whether the firing was legit continues — but now at least he’s innocent until proven guilty. Meanwhile, the university has discontinued its problematic relationship with the campus Newman Center, an independent Catholic organization that was “nominating” and paying its professors of Catholic thought. This means Howell will be paid by the university itself this fall, which most likely is reeling at the news that it has to match the Center’s pay scale of $10,000 per class. That’s several times what most adjunct professors make.

In academia, anonymity and secrecy are held up as the necessary conditions of responsible peer review at every level — from hiring and promotion to publishing. Reviewers, the thinking goes, will be more honest if there is strict confidentiality. They shouldn’t have to put their names on their assessments of whether your article or book should be published. Nor should you know what they say or write about you when you are up for promotion and tenure. If this looks like an invitation to behave irresponsibly (to be lazy or vindictive) at key moments in other people’s careers, that’s because it is. But the time-honored rationale is that peer reviewers need the freedom from reprisal that lack of transparency gives them to do their work.

But it doesn’t have to work that way. Imagine peer reviewed publishing without anonymous readers’ reports and the distortions that come with them–the shoddiness and brevity of response (why write a detailed, thoughtful report when dashing off a short paragraph will do?), the off-baseness and pot-shotting (see climategate), the gamesmanship and ego-mongering (I’ll scratch your manuscript if you’ll scratch mine; your article is unacceptable because it fails to be all about my work; etc). Shakespeare Quarterly is rethinking peer review — and getting great results.

For this year’s fall issue, a special publication devoted to Shakespeare and new media, the journal offered contributors the chance to take part in a partially open peer-review process. Authors could opt to post drafts of their articles online, open them up for anyone to comment on, and then revise accordingly. The editors would make the final call about what to publish (hence the “partially open” label). As far as the editors know, it’s the first time a traditional humanities journal has tried out a version of crowd-sourcing in lieu of double-blind review.

The verdict from several scholars who took part: mostly a thumbs up, with a few cautionary notes and a dollop of “It’s about time” mixed in.

[...]

[The journal] invited about 90 scholars … to comment. Anybody willing to publish thoughts under his or her own name could join in, but the guest editor wanted recognized authorities as part of the field.

[...]

Some of the authors acknowledged doubts going into the experiment. Would open review be rigorous enough? Was it risky to post work in progress? But “the results were terrific,” said Mr. Witmore, who wrote his paper on Shakespearean linguistic analysis with Jonathan Hope, a reader in the English department of the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow. “It’s very different from getting a two-paragraph reader’s report from a journal,” Mr. Witmore said. “In this case, what you get is individual readers from a wide range of subspecialties zooming in on a particular paragraph, saying ‘Tell me more about this’ or ‘Why did you do this?’ It seemed more like a dialogue.”

Another scholar, Alan Galey, submitted an article about Shakespeare and the history of information. An assistant professor on the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, he worried that an article vetted this way might carry less professional weight—a matter of particular concern to a junior professor going for tenure. “It was very much going on faith in a way,” he said.

Mr. Galey’s dean told him to make sure the process would be rigorous and fair. The stature of the journal also helped reassure him on that point. So did Ms. Rowe’s willingness to answer questions and her decision to invite established scholars to join in. Many crowd-sourcing experiments depend on scale, Mr. Galey pointed out, but this relied “on relationships among scholars where you know you can trust somebody. It wasn’t a Wild West by any means. It was as controlled a process as traditional peer review. It was just controlled in a different way.”

Mr. Galey wound up feeling that the experiment paid off. “I got better feedback from this process than I’ve had from any other peer-review process,” he said.

Participants acknowledged that the process was more time-consuming than traditional peer review. But Shakespeare Quarterly felt that the positives far outweighed the drawbacks, and is planning to try the open review process again.

I think there is a lot to be said for people having to put their names to what they do. Academia’s elevation of anonymity as a procedural virtue has always struck me as a way of rationalizing cowardice and ensuring abuse by removing any semblance of accountability. Conversely, as Shakespeare Quarterly is showing, with names attached, people become at once more responsible and more effective peer reviewers. And so the process recovers its original aim–which was, after all, dialogue and debate among peers aimed at refining and advancing the ideas about which they share expertise and interest.

Once upon a time, back in the middle years of this decade, the higher ed news scene lit up with a series of cases in which graduate students were punished and threatened with expulsion for refusing to sign on to the official political belief system of their schools. There was Emily Brooker, a Missouri State social work student who sued after she refused to sign a letter to the state legislature advocating gay adoption. There was Robert Felkner, a social work student at Rhode Island College who was expelled after he refused to write essays and lobby the legislature on behalf of views he did not hold. There was Ed Swan, a Washington State education student who was punished for not having the proper “disposition” of a teacher (Swan believed in gun rights and did not subscribe to his school’s theory of white privilege). That’s not an exhaustive list, but you get the idea.

There was quite an uproar about these cases along about 2005 and 2006. The students got strong backup from FIRE and ACTA. Lawsuits were filed. Hearings were held. Missouri passed a law to protect students from the kinds of First Amendment violations Emily Brooker endured–and, after an external audit, gutted its social work program. The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) revised its standards to clarify that students could not be subjected to ideological litmus tests in the name of “social justice.”

But not everybody got the memo. From the Chronicle of Higher Ed:

A graduate student in school counseling is accusing Augusta State University in federal court of violating her constitutional rights by demanding that she work to change her views opposing homosexuality.

In a lawsuit filed on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court in Augusta, Ga., the student, Jennifer Keeton, argues that faculty members and administrators at the university have violated her First Amendment rights to free speech and the free exercise of religion by threatening her with expulsion if she does not fulfill requirements contained in a remediation plan intended to get her to change her beliefs.

[...]

Ms. Keeton is being represented by lawyers affiliated with the Alliance Defense Fund, a coalition of Christian lawyers. The group has brought a similar lawsuit on behalf of an Eastern Michigan University graduate student who alleges she was dismissed from a counseling program for her beliefs about homosexuality. In 2006 the group extracted major concessions from Missouri State University in settling a lawsuit filed by a former social-work student who refused to respect a class project’s requirement that she sign a letter to the state legislature in support of homosexual adoption.

In a news release announcing the lawsuit against Augusta State, David French, senior counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, said: “A public-university student shouldn’t be threatened with expulsion for being Christian and refusing to publicly renounce her faith, but that’s exactly what’s happening here. Simply put, the university is imposing thought reform.”

The lawsuit says Ms. Keeton has stated in classroom discussions and written assignments that she believes sexual behavior “is the result of accountable personal choice,” that people are born male or female, and that homosexuality is a lifestyle and not a “state of being.” It says faculty members at Augusta State confronted her about her beliefs based on such statements and on a student’s claim that Ms. Keeton has advocated “conversion therapy” for homosexuals in conversations with her peers—an allegation that Ms. Keeton denies.

The lawsuit says Augusta State faculty members developed a remediation plan specifically for Ms. Keeton and told her she would be expelled from the College of Education’s counselor-education program if she did not fulfill its requirements. The plan calls on Ms. Keeton to attend workshops on serving diverse populations, read articles on counseling gay, lesbian, and bisexual and transgendered people, and write reports to an adviser summarizing what she has learned. It also instructs her to work to increase her exposure to, and interaction with, gay populations, and suggests that she attend the local gay-pride parade. Ms. Keeton has refused to comply.

My favorite part: how the College prescribed conversion therapy to relieve a student of her heinous alleged belief in conversion therapy.

I am reminded of a scene in the classic film Roxanne. Daryl Hannah is walking naked behind a hedge, escorted by Steve Martin, who is averting his eyes.

Roxanne Kowalski: Nobody had a coat?

C.D. Bales: I thought you said you didn’t want a coat…

Roxanne Kowalski: Why would I not want a coat?

C.D. Bales: You said you didn’t want a coat!

Roxanne Kowalski: I was being ironic.

C.D. Bales: Oh, ho, ho, irony! Oh, no, no, we don’t get that here. See, uh, people ski topless here while smoking dope, so irony’s not really a, a high priority. We haven’t had any irony here since about, uh, ‘83, when I was the only practitioner of it. And I stopped because I was tired of being stared at.

Maybe one of these days schools like Augusta State will get tired of being stared at, too.

Pressured into vetting the suspicious story of confirmed academic fraud Michael Bellesiles, the Chronicle of Higher Education has found that the story is indeed false. The Chronicle also blames the student whose “story” Bellesiles told, cutting Bellesiles–and, by extension, themselves–way too much slack. Here’s the editor’s note appended to the bottom of the article:

The Chronicle has looked into questions raised by commenters and bloggers about this article.

We talked to the teaching assistant for the course, who confirmed Mr. Bellesiles’s account of the student’s story. According to the teaching assistant, a Marine veteran, the student told him that his brother had been shot in the head and later died from his injuries.

The Chronicle also spoke with the student called “Ernesto” in the article. The student said the soldier who died was his half-brother, was a member of the U.S. Army, and had died in Afghanistan in November. The student declined to provide further details because of unspecified “issues.”

At The Chronicle’s request, an Army spokesman searched a database of all U.S. military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan using the name the student provided. There were no matches. The Chronicle’s own search of Department of Defense news releases turned up no casualties under any name that matched the student’s description.

Subsequently the student told us that he had fabricated several details in the story he had told Mr. Bellesiles and The Chronicle. The student said he knew a soldier who he believed had died in Afghanistan, but he said the person was not his half-brother. The student had no explanation for why the name was not on the military’s casualty lists.

Asked for a response, Mr. Bellesiles said he was saddened that his student had altered the details of a personal tragedy and that he regretted that he had unknowingly passed on a story that was not accurate. “But I hope that no one mistakes the point of my article in calling for greater sympathy and support in our colleges for veterans and the families of those who have suffered loss in our current wars.”

This poor man. First a flood destroys the data he used in Arming America, causing him to be found guilty of academic fraud, and costing him his job. And now this.