Alexander Hamilton Society Event - Can ISIS be defeated? Oct. 9th at 6:00pm

A Career in City Management or Urban Planning?

The Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University is hosting a visit weekend on October 4-5 for students interested in careers in city management, urban planning, sacred & historic landmarks, non-profit organizations, etc. The Levin College has a #2 ranking from U.S. News and World Report for its Master's degree in City Management/Urban Policy and there are a lot of good careers in this area.   For more information, see the invitation below:

Levin College Graduate Visit Weekend

Saturday, October 4th from 1-5pm

Sunday, October 5th from 1-3:30pm

Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University

1717 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44115

We welcome all prospective graduate students, faculty, alumni, family, and friends. This event will include:

• Welcome and comments by Dean Edward (Ned) Hill
• Opportunities to meet Levin faculty, staff, alumni, and students, including Program Directors, Graduate Advisor, Admissions Recruiter, and members of the CSU-APA student organization
• Information on degree programs, graduate assistantships, and scholarships
• Networking with Levin college faculty and alumni
• Levin College and CSU campus tour
• Restaurant and entertainment recommendations following the event (experience Cleveland nightlife!)

The Levin College is among the top schools of Urban Affairs in the nation and has a #2 ranking from U.S. News and World Report for its graduate specialty in City Management and  Urban Policy out of over 250 schools of public affairs. Our graduate students interact with nationally known faculty and research staff recognized for their scholarship and intellectual leadership . The College offers graduate assistantships, internships, and opportunities for applied research with our faculty and research centers. We are a small college that gives personal attention to each of our students. Read more about the college on our website: http://urban.csuohio.edu/

Our graduates work in public, nonprofit, and business organizations in the fields of urban planning, public administration and management, community development, environmental advocacy and policy, social services, health care administration, and real estate development. Levin faculty members and research staff have strong connections to the community and professional organizations, facilitating student engagement and transition to professional practice.

Please contact Lindsey Hobson, College Admissions Recruiter, at 216-687-4506 or email urbanprograms@csuohio.edu with any questions or to obtain more information about this event. All are welcome!

Please RSVP for

Saturday at urban.csuohio.edu/visitday1

Sunday at urban.csuohio.edu/visitday2

We look forward to seeing you in October!

Careers in Arts and Culture

On November 17, the Cleveland Museum of Art is presenting a special one day event on career opportunities in the world of art and culture. Last year, participating organizations included: The Cleveland Orchestra,The Children’s Museum of Cleveland, Center for Arts-Inspired Learning, Shaker Historical Society, Prelude2Cinema, International Women’s Air & Space Museum, Gray’s Auctioneers, Community Partnership for Arts & Culture (CPAC), Esperanza, Inc., James A. Garfield National Historic Site, CBC Magazine/Contempo Communications, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Museum of Contemporary Art – MOCA,Dru Christine Fabrics & Design, Lake Erie Ink, Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens, Salem Communications – Cleveland, Great Lakes Science Center, Brecksville Center for the Arts, Rebecca Adele PR & Events, Wizard of Ahs and Porthouse Theatre.

There are lots of possibilities in these organizations for history and political science majors.  This event is free, but it does require reservations and space is limited.  Contact dfoster2@ashland.edu if you want more information or if you would like be part of an AU group that attended.

The Economic Price of Colleges' Failure

This column by Kevin Carey in the New York Times (9/2/2014) is a good report on the new book, Aspiring Adults Adrift, by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa (authors of the bombshell Academically Adrift from a few years back). Aspiring Adults is a study of what happens to college graduates after they leave college.  One important paragraph on the Collegiate Learning Assessment test of various basic intellectual skills says this:

Even after statistically controlling for students’ sociodemographic characteristics, college majors and college selectivity, those who finished school with high C.L.A. scores were significantly less likely to be unemployed than those who had low C.L.A. scores. The difference was even larger when it came to success in the workplace. Low-C.L.A. graduates were twice as likely as high-C.L.A. graduates to lose their jobs between 2010 and 2011, suggesting that employers can tell who got a good college education and who didn’t. Low-C.L.A. graduates were also 50 percent more likely to end up in an unskilled occupation, and were less likely to be satisfied with their jobs.

That C.L.A. scores are a significant measure of employment success - both getting jobs and keeping them - is very important for Ashland University, since our graduates do extremely well on the C.L.A. test.  And it is the liberal arts subjects, taught through the AU Core and great departments like History and Political Science that convey the skills C.L.A tests for.   

Here is the whole article: 

Four years ago, the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa dropped a bomb on American higher education. Their groundbreaking book, “Academically Adrift,” found that many students experience “limited or no learning” in college. Today, they released a follow-up study, tracking the same students for two years after graduation, into the workplace, adult relationships and civic life. The results suggest that recent college graduates who are struggling to start careers are being hamstrung by their lack of learning.

“Academically Adrift” studied a sample of students who enrolled at four-year colleges and universities in 2005. As freshmen, they took a test of critical thinking, analytic reasoning and communications skills called the Collegiate Learning Assessment (C.L.A.). Colleges promise to teach these broad intellectual skills to all students, regardless of major. The students took the C.L.A. again at the end of their senior year. On average, they improved less than half of one standard deviation. For many, the results were much worse. One-third improved by less than a single point on a 100-point scale during four years of college.

This wasn’t because some colleges simply enrolled smarter students. The nature of the collegiate academic experience mattered, too. Students who spent more time studying alone learned more, even after controlling for their sociodemographic background, high school grades and entrance exam scores. So did students whose teachers enforced high academic expectations. People who studied the traditional liberal arts and sciences learned more than business, education and communications majors.

Trustees Encouraged to Take More Active Role in Guiding Universities

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has issued a report that looks like it will be very interesting reading.  According to this story from insidehighered.com, the report refers to a "failure of higher education governance" and argues that trustees should play a much more active role in correcting some of the problems now facing higher education. The insidehighered.com story suggests that the report contains a good summary of those problems. One example of interest to this department: there is (says the report) "evidence that self-interest and personal ideologies can drive departmental directions rather than the interest of the students and preparation of citizens. And studies show that there are fields -- such as military history, constitutional history, and diplomatic history -- that are fast disappearing from college curricula." The report calls on trustees to educate themselves and ask questions like this: "Does the history department ... have expertise and offer coursework on the Founders, the American Revolution, and the Constitution?"  Well, we at least could answer that question with a loud "yes!" If , as James Madison suggests, "all governments rest on opinion," the disappearance of courses on the Constitution and related issues does not bode well for republican self-government.

Why Liberal Education is Relevant Even for Professionals

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that some MBA programs are trying to tack on a smattering of liberal education.  Here's an article that explains the idea and why the "tack on" approach can't work.  There is a better way.   Here is Peter Lawler writing on the website, MindingTheCampus.

A Simple Fix For the M.B.A.

By Peter Augustine Lawler

Employers tend to complain that the graduates of American universities are skilled in solving particular problems but "often miss the big picture." This complaint rings true for colleges graduates in general these days, but it's an even larger issue for M.B.A. students, who hope to ultimately ascend to leadership positions in a wide array of businesses. Accordingly, the Wall Street Journal reported last week, M.B.A. programs are beginning to introduce philosophy into their curricula.

One example:  A course in "Nobel Thinking," which exposes students to world-changing ideas generated by members of our cognitive elite.  The course is taught by a professor of economics and discusses transformative economic ideas like "adverse selection." It seems, however, that only an economist could think that an insight into "what happens when buyers and sellers have access to different information" changed the world.   Nobel-winning economists do, in fact, have big-picture abstract thoughts.  But they shouldn't be confused with the thoughts of political or corporate leaders.  Adam Smith and Karl Marx--less technical than political economists--did have thoughts that changed the world.  But they didn't win Nobel Prizes and so don't show up in the course.

A liberally educated person thinks here of Socrates's criticism of the sophists, who thought of all education as technical, as ways of acquiring wealth and power.  Socrates argues that no one in a real position of leadership can succeed if he or she thinks that low.  The "utility maximizer" of the sophists and today's economists is really an abstraction.  There's no real person who consistently thinks and acts that way.  Real persons are families, friends, citizens, creatures, and responsible leaders, in addition to being productive individuals.

So the Socratic injunction to know yourself is really about thinking less abstractly and more concretely or personally.  One management professor, seemingly in this spirit, gave her students "a nonstop, 14-day discovery of yourself."  The take-away for the students, however, was the irreducible variety of interpretations and "palpable anxiety" in the face of ambiguity.  They appeared not to have made the progress described by Plato in Socratic dialogues toward discovering "who I am and what I'm supposed to do."  Without such personal progress, the best way to take out the anxiety of ambiguity is to lose oneself in merely technical goals.

It may well take more than 14 days to discover oneself.  And a whirlwind tour of art, fiction, and meditation can't make up for deep deficiencies in one's upbringing and education. That tour seems to leave the impression that we're all detached tourists in a multicultural world that offers no solid moral or intellectual guidance.

Big ideas and self-knowledge can't really be effective add-ons to M.B.A. programs.  But who can deny that leaders who hope to be more than "specialists without spirit" need them?

There's an obvious solution. M.B.A. programs should only accept students who have flourished in excellent and relatively traditional "humanities" majors such as literature, philosophy, or political science.  They should not require that their students have taken any business courses at all.  That technical training is what the M.B.A. is for.

Not only that, M.B.A. programs should do what they can to encourage undergraduate programs to focus on "the leadership virtues" such as generosity, magnanimity, and prudence, as well as "the service virtues" such as charity and compassion.  There is, of course, no substitute for actually doing the leisurely reading in philosophical, religious, and literary masterpieces required to pick up the habits of genuine reflection.

The last presidential campaign was graced by two candidates who spoke eloquently and had an admirable sense of personal responsibility of a leader.  Mitt Romney had an undergraduate literature major, which was an indispensable prelude to his acquisition of the professional M.B.A. and law degrees.  Barack Obama had excellent undergraduate instruction in political philosophy and literature (he knows all about T.S. Eliot!) at Occidental and Columbia as an indispensable prelude to his law degree.

Undergraduate business degrees devote too much time to PowerPoint presentations, collaborative projects, and narrowly technical problem solving. They seem to do everything they can to divert the student from thinking about himself or herself as a particular person.  They're not about cultivating the souls of leaders.  And that lack of cultivation, it's pretty darn clear, can't be remedied "at the M.B.A. level."

There's a simple remedy for the struggle M.B.A. programs have in getting students to think big yet personally and beyond "the bottom line":  a rather old-fashioned undergraduate liberal arts education.  And recovering the proper relationship between liberal and technical education for emerging leaders is one way among many of thinking clearly again about what undergraduate education is for.

 _____________________________

Peter Lawler is Dana Professor of Government and International Studies at Berry College.

Opportunity to Learn (Really Learn) Latin and Greek

For the 2014-2015 academic year, the Academy Vivarium Novum in Rome is offering ten full tuition scholarships  for University students (18-24 years old) of any part of the world. The scholarships will cover all of the costs of room, board, teaching and didactic materials for courses to be held from October 6, 2014 until June 13, 2015 on the grounds of the Academy’s campus at Rome.  The goal of the Academy is to achieve a perfect command of both Latin and Greek through a total immersion in the two languages in order to master without any hindrances the texts and concepts which have been handed down from the ancient times, middle ages, the Renaissance period and modern era, and to cultivate the humanities in a manner similar to the  Renaissance humanists.  All the classes will be conducted in Latin, except for Greek classes which will be conducted in ancient Greek.