Politik Special Issue: Higher Education

Special Issue

the JHU POLITIK May 2015

HIGHER EDUCATION

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JHU POLITIK EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Eliza Schultz MANAGING EDITOR HEAD WRITER Christine Server Julia Allen ASSISTANT EDITORS Katie Botto Dylan Etzel Preston Ge Abigail Sia

POLICY DESK EDITOR Mira Haqqani

CREATIVE DIRECTOR Diana Lee

MARYLAND EDITOR David Hamburger

COPY EDITOR Florence Noorinejad WEBMASTER Ben Lu MARKETING & PUBLICITY Chiara Wright FACULTY ADVISOR Steven R. David

COVER PHOTO COURTESY OF: HOMEWOOD PHOTOGRAPHY, HTTP://HOMEWOODPHOTO.JHU.EDU/GALLERIES/COMMONS/

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CAMPUS EDITOR Juliana Vigorito

STAFF WRITERS Olga Baranoff Dylan Cowit Arpan Ghosh Alexander Grable Rosellen Grant Rebecca Grenham George Gulino Evan Harary Shrenik Jain Shannon Libaw Robert Locke Morley Musick Sathvik Namburar Corey Payne Zachary Schlosberg

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INSIDE THIS ISSUE

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The Human Dynamics of Scientific Mentoring Preston Ge ’17 Interview with Laura Dunn, Victim’s Rights Attorney Callie Plapinger ’16 The Modern Brain Drain Shrenik Jain ’18 The Rising Price Tag on a College Education Sathvik Namburar ’18 Johns Hopkins as an Anchor Institution Juliana Vigorito ’16 Interview with David Rodich of SEIU Local 500 Eliza Schultz ’15 FratPAC and the “Right Standards” for Investigating Campus Rape Morley Musick ’18

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The Human Dynamics of

SCIENTIFIC MENTORING

PHOTO COURTESY OF: SERGEI GOLYSHEV, HTTPS://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/29225114@N08/2803715962

By Preston Ge ’17, Assistant Editor

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cientific research remains one of the few disciplines that operates like the bygone master-apprentice system. Following undergraduate education, most aspiring scientists attend graduate school and eventually become postdoctoral fellows. During this time, they work in the lab of a senior, established researcher (the principal investigator, or PI) who becomes perhaps the single most important figure in the final stage of a young scientist’s education.

But what scientific mentors teach is not molecular pathways or lab techniques, but rather a “way” of doing science. Science, often portrayed as a coolly rational enterprise, is, to the contrary, filled with unabashed exhilaration, dogged persistence, ferocious competition, Nobel Prize-fueled ambitions, and unadulterated envy.

Correspondingly, mentor-student relationships are intense: as often characterized by love and respect as they are by resentment and anger. And when these relationships end, the experiences will have imprinted themselves upon the next generation of scientists.

It is commonly argued that science advances through slow, steady progress: discoveries are the result of dogged determination – plodding through day-to-day experiments keeping the longterm goal in mind – rather than a result of “sparks” of insight.

As Howard Florey, former President of the Royal Society, noted, “Science is rarely advanced by what is known in current jargon as a ‘breakthrough’; rather does our increasing knowledge depend on the activity of thousands of our colleagues throughout the world who add small points to what will eventually become a splendid picture.”

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Yet, Dr. Florey, a Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine for his work on penicillin, would find it hard to deny that some scientists make more significant contributions than other, equally hardworking scientists. They publish more, are cited more, and influence the development of a field more. In fact, an elite 10 percent of scientists publishes 50 percent of papers and wins the lion’s share of coveted prizes. There must be more to success in research for scientific elite than grit and determination alone.

Part of what distinguishes the best scientists is an ability to select the “right” question to study. By picking a routine and easy problem, nothing significant is discovered. Picking one that is deeply fundamental will prove unapproachable with the available equipment and lab techniques. The right question must be asked at the right time: too soon, and it is a dead end; too late, and it becomes obvious to everyone. Highly talented researchers pass down an approach to science to their students, who become star researchers and eventually pass that approach to their students. Harriet Zuckerman, a sociologist at Columbia University, found in her study of American Nobel laureates that more than half had worked in the labs of older Nobel Laureates. So striking was this pattern, Zuckerman generated scientific “lineages” older than the Nobel Prize itself. There are certainly other factors at play: serendipity, interpersonal skills, and political savvy also help determine a scientist’s success. But these attributes differ among individuals; they cannot account for “mentor chains” of scientific excellence that span a century or more.

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The role of the scientific mentor extends beyond the direct mentorstudent relationship. I interviewed Dr. Ted Dawson, Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Institute for Cell Engineering at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who emphasized the role of the PI in creating an exuberant intellectual environment, one that allows “extraordinarily talented people [to feed] off one another.”

It is to this that Dr. Dawson attributes much of his extraordinary success as a young postdoc working in Solomon Snyder’s lab. It is what kept him at Johns Hopkins despite numerous faculty position offerings elsewhere. And it is what he, to this day, tries to create in his lab by bringing in those who “are on board with the idea of creativity and discovering things.”

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“There are few scientists of note who did not have an identifiable sponsor.”

Yet, this way of doing science is not just Dr. Dawson’s. He experienced it from his mentor, Dr. Snyder. Dr. Snyder had, in turn, learned it from his mentor, Julius Axelrod, 1970 Nobel Laureate. And decades before that, Dr. Axelrod learned it from his mentor, Bernard Brodie, recipient of the 1967 Lasker Prize for Basic Medical Research. In the case of Dr. Dawson, cultivating an environment where his students can reach their maximum potential is a time-honored tradition that has been passed from mentor to student, from illustrious scientist to gifted youngster, for decades.

In many ways, this system successfully identifies and cultivates talent. The best and brightest tend to go to better schools, and then apprentice in more productive and innovative labs. There, they learn to do better science, meet with other promising youngsters, and come to the attention of the scientific community. This step in scientific education is crucial for a student to become a fully independent scientist. Daniel Levinson, a psychologist who spent a decade tracing adult development in young men, argued that the mentor is a “transitional figure,” who helps young adults bridge the gap between childhood and adulthood by serving as a “host and guide” to the professional world. Levinson did not have scientific mentoring specifically in mind, but his insights highlight the crucial importance of mentoring in the education of scientists. Scientific research necessitates a mentor who can facilitate writing papers, choosing journals to submit to, forming useful relationships, presenting and networking at conferences, running one’s own lab – the list could go on and on.

But what happens if one is excluded from these mentor chains? As Jonathan Cole notes in his book Fair Science, “There are few scientists of note who did not have an identifiable sponsor.” Those who appear less talented tend to be shunted to more obscure academic positions or out of academia altogether. Getting an early boost makes it easier to find future opportunities and advantages, leading to

an accumulation of advantages that grow over time. In other words, the scientific rich get richer.

The compounding effects of these advantages can be immense. In 1968, sociologist Robert Merton coined the term “The Matthew Effect” to describe the role of cumulative advantage in science.

Reputation, in particular, seems to play a large role in recognition for discoveries. In collaborations across several labs, for example, the credit for scientific discoveries is often disproportionately attributed to best-known investigator even if he or she played only a marginal role. This reputational effect is institutional as well: young scientists in higher reputation departments have a distinct advantage over those in departments of lesser reputation, and departments known to be impressive acquire even more talent, publicity, and money.

The National Institutes of Health provided $23.2 billion in research grants to 2527 organizations during fiscal year 2014, with the top 100 – fewer than 4 percent of the total – receiving nearly 72 percent of funding (Johns Hopkins, at over $618 million, was number one).

Those mentored by the best scientists tend to be in the best position to make groundbreaking discoveries, obtain coveted faculty positions, and win lucrative grants. Those who find themselves shut out of a mentor chain are inherently disadvantaged and tend to fall further and further behind.

Dr. Dawson, for his part, suggests that science rewards those who are talented: that the “cream always rises to the top.” For example, Dr. Dawson had attended Montana State for his B.S. and University of Utah for his MD/PhD, schools he himself admitted are not among the top research institutions. Yet, he is now among the 400 most influential scientists in the world. Perhaps, Dr. Dawson posits, an initial head start is not as significant a drag on overall career as it has been made out to be. At the same time, while Dr. Dawson’s situation is a clear indication that science is fundamentally meritocratic, it is hard to ignore the evidence that scientific mentoring can sometimes start a cycle of cumulative advantage for those who are fortunate enough to attach themselves to the right mentor. Part of that inequality is due simply to magnification of real differences in talent. But it also rewards those who are simply lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time to be able to take advantage of good mentorship.

The current mentor system is necessary for passing down the accumulated experience of centuries of science and continues to be crucial for developing future generations of scientists. But there might be some steps we can take to mitigate the disproportionate accumulation of recognition to already established scientists. As science is propagated by publishing papers, perhaps the submission, review, and initial publication of papers could be anonymous at first, with the identities of the authors revealed at a later date. Due credit will be given once the merits of a paper have been evaluated based on its content, not on the reputation of the authors. But even still, this system would not prevent the attribution of credit to the senior investigator once the identities of the authors are revealed.

It is an imperfect response to a problem in science to which there is likely no adequate solution. However, even if the mentoring system is too crucial to scientific higher education for us to tinker with, it clearly indicates that science is not the ivory tower we often perceive it to be. All that remains is for us to recognize that, as with all human endeavors, the dynamics of scientific mentoring and recognition are fundamentally ruled by human passions and biases. ■

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Interview with Laura Dunn, VICTIM’S RIGHTS ATTORNEY

By Callie Plapinger ’16, Contributing Writer Laura Dunn is a victim’s rights attorney and the founder of SurvJustice, an organization that assists victims of sexual assault on college campuses. A recent graduate of the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, Dunn has served on the White House Task Force to Protect Students Against Sexual Assault, and as the primary student negotiator on the U.S. Department of Education’s VAWA Rulemaking Committee. Dunn has overseen the Title IX and Clery Act complaints filed against Johns Hopkins University.

Can you tell me a little bit more about the founding of SurvJustice and what your job entails?

SurvJustice was an idea that I had after suffering campus sexual violence as an undergraduate. It was a daydream I had one morning about a place where you could go and get assistance to report, because my experience showed there was no such thing. While an undergraduate on campus, I became known as a survivor, and several people would call me and have me talk to survivors and prepare them on how to report their incidents, what to say, what to be ready for. So I found myself already in this helping role. I ultimately went to law school with the intention of founding this organization, and while in law school, I used it as a student organization to advocate for the Violence Against Women Act. I decided in May 2014 to make it an actual nonprofit and not a student group. I started running it the month I graduated law school. Currently, I’m the primary staff attorney, and I handle all the cases that are coming in. I’m very hopeful to bring on some more full-time staff as soon as this summer.

Since you filed a Title IX Complaint as an undergraduate, what have you observed as some of the more significant and some of the more overlooked changes in sexual assault advocacy?

I’ve seen vast improvements. The 2013 Violence Against Women Act has really been an important milestone; a lot of things from my story were changed by that law. Now, survivors have the right to bring an advisor of choice – whether that is a friend, a parent, a counselor, or even a lawyer – into these hearings. Schools used to be able to prevent you from having legal counsel present. It’s safer for survivors because they have someone to support them, but also to advise them, which is a very challenging process. I think that’s a very important step, not just in hearings, but also in all the meetings. In campus hearings, they’ve given rights for both parties to make sure they have the same opportunity to present witnesses. Now, schools can’t just say there’s insufficient evidence; they must provide it in writing.

Schools also have to list all sanctions that are possible for sexual assault, dating violence, domestic violence, and stalking so student activists have the opportunity to see the policies. This gives activists more of an opportunity to be involved on campuses. It [VAWA] is also revolutionary in requiring detailed prevention education programs, which will be starting next school year. There’s a requirement for incoming students and employees to be educated on sexual assault, dating violence, domestic violence, and stalking,

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and also bystander intervention, prevention of perpetration, and the definition of consent. VAWA is meant to address culture, healthy relationships, and respect for partners. We’re trying to push colleges to be proactive in a way that we never have before. Those are all huge changes, though we don’t know yet how effective they are because they’re going to be enforced as of this summer by the Department of Education. While you can see that there’s new legislation on the horizon, with the Campus Accountability and Safety Act, it may not even be necessary, because a lot of these changes that have already been put in place may significantly affect the way that survivors are being treated on campuses.

Can you tell me about your experience serving on the White House Task Force to Protect Students Against Sexual Assault? Are you pleased with the outcomes of the Task Force and what more do you think the White House can do to address campus violence?

I was lucky to meet three times with the Task Force. Each meeting offered a different opportunity. In the campus programs meeting with Vice President Biden, I proposed climate surveys. I called them victimization surveys, with the idea that it isn’t just that campuses should know rape is happening, but that they should know the rate and the reality of it, regardless of what’s reported. Unfortunately, the Clery Act only keeps statistics for what’s reported. Through Ed Act Now, an activist group affiliated with Know Your IX, we were confronting the Office for Civil Rights for their lax enforcement of Title IX, and we were asking them to be more proactive and to publish the list of 104 schools. That list is a direct result of the Ed Act Now Campaign. The last meeting focused more on the ongoing issues on campus, despite all the progress. It was a great experience, and the result was the Not Alone Report, which is the first report from the White House Task Force.

Overall, I was fairly satisfied with the content of the White House report. I think it served more as an opportunity to support the schools, but I had been searching for stronger mandates. Survivors are looking for consequences. I think the federal government has bent over backwards to give schools the opportunities to fix their problems. As student organizers and activists, we need to say enough is enough. There needs to be a cost, because until money comes out of the pocket of the school, they won’t understand that this is unacceptable. These aren’t just civil rights violations; oftentimes, there are not only crimes being committed, but also obstruction of justice by schools.

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FOUNDER OF SURVJUSTICE LAURA DUNN / PHOTO COURTESY OF: UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND

You have been involved in Maryland’s movement to enact affirmative consent on college campuses. Can you tell me more about affirmative consent and its major roadblocks?

The idea of affirmative consent is requiring a very clear standard on campus for prevention and enforcement of student conduct.

Affirmative consent makes it very clear that unless someone has agreed to sexual activity, it’s prohibited to engage in. Unless you hear yes, it’s a not. On the flip side, affirmative consent is meant to be the standard for campus hearings. There’s a very clear standard.

There’s no murky area. It helps administrators so much. Having sat through these hearings with SurvJustice as their lawyers, I can’t even tell you how many young men readily admit to not getting consent before engaging in sexual activity, because they don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, which ties back into how bad our prevention education is.

How will affirmative consent affect academic institutions in Maryland? Will it apply to private institutions such as Johns Hopkins?

It should be tied to state funding. Legislation that’s tied to state funding would in fact implicate Hopkins and other private schools.

The goal is to protect every single student in the state of Maryland.

You’ve helped file Title IX complaints at a number of institutions. Did Johns Hopkins present a unique case?

Absolutely. It started with two students who wanted to remain anonymous who indicated that there was a gang rape at the fraternity, which was under investigation, and yet the school had not notified anyone in the campus community. The school had allegedly put the fraternity under social probation, which it never enforced. We had an anonymous survivor speak out in that complaint, and she pointed

out that Dean Susan Boswell had, in particular, been discouraging survivors from reporting to police and even from using the campus process by saying that it wasn’t very helpful for students. We then had another student activist join into the complaints, and since they went public, we’ve had an anonymous tip about a mishandled sexual assault in 1992, again involving Susan Boswell. We’ve had a student come forward who was a victim of stalking, and she ended up leaving campus and losing a Fulbright Scholarship because the campus simply would not remove the stalker, even after the criminal action had been taken. The most troubling case, which was just submitted to the Department of Education in early March, involved five different students reporting the same teaching assistant for abuse and harassment of women. Lastly, we had another student activist provide information about a study that Hopkins had conducted that indicated that there was a hostile environment against women. I’ve never had so many people come forward in one complaint or have it span so many decades, so it is a highly unusual case. I had never seen so much silence in a school. At Hopkins, there is such a fear of retaliation and a loss of academic career, which is totally justified, but the fear is so palpable.

Has the University handled issues of sexual assault better since news of the Title IX and Clery Act complaints broke in May 2014?

People point to the next headline from Hopkins of the other fraternity gang rape, which mirrored what was in the original complaint. Right away, Hopkins issued a timely warning, which is what they should have done in the original situation, so they did show that they had learned. They also suspended the fraternity, which is a stronger action than merely putting them on social probation. As far as the public warning, they indicated a change. Now are survivors being more encouraged if they come in individually to report? That I don’t know. At least on the surface, Hopkins is showing change. How deep that goes really depends on survivors’ willingness to speak out. ■

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ive a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he will happily receive government subsidies for his education before becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen and moving to a New Jersey suburb. This modern rendition of a famous proverb has been on the minds of economists, students, and politicians globally in the last decade. The phenomenon it refers to is the “brain drain,” a term used to describe the systematic migration of highly educated human capital from developing nations to developed ones. It is as a result of this that the United States has grown into the world’s largest employer of college-educated immigrants. Critics claim that this flight of educated individuals has left their home nations in poverty. However, the available evidence suggests that the free movement of individuals can benefit the interests of both the U.S. and the world as a whole.

In developing nations, the term “brain drain” carries a certain stigma.

In India, many lament the departure of countless graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), a set of elite Indian technical universities that is almost completely funded by the government.

Some classes in the 1980s saw more than 75 percent of their graduates leave for foreign soil. In China, the government sent many students abroad with the expectation that they would return to China to share their newly acquired knowledge. Much to the dismay of the Chinese government, as few as 25 percent of students returned home in 2005.

Other countries such as Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh are also quick to point at UN studies asserting that these students cost their home countries billions annually. A more specific, yet pressing area of concern is the fact that health workers in the least developed nations of the world, especially those in Africa, oftentimes leave behind their impoverished homes for only marginally more developed neighboring nations.

visas offered. During the same period, 182,000 H1-B applicants were denied, costing the country approximately 14 billion dollars in projected contributions. These talented applicants seldom have the patience or resources to wait for up to a decade for a Green Card. Increases in the quota of these visas issued during the Clinton and Bush administrations were very successful in bringing educated workers to the United States. However, a renewal in protectionist sentiments and active lobbying from American workers fearful of imported cheap labor, compounded the largest economic downturn in recent history, has prevented further increases in the number of visas issued under the Obama Administration. This reluctance to reform the H1-B program harms the U.S. by causing it fall further behind other developed nations in the international contest to attract talent, just as other nations are becoming more attractive destinations to educated migrants.

The United States can capitalize on its current position of influence to secure the talent of tomorrow. While the U.S. remains the top destination for students looking to obtain an education abroad, many foreign universities are creeping up global rankings on quality and prestige, and increased economic opportunities in developing countries mean that regions such as the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia are seeing robust communities of educated foreigners.

Wealthy Chinese families do not hesitate to line the pockets of private American universities, but strict government policies on student visas mean that these students are not given the chance to find employment in the United States even if they wanted to.

The Modern Brain Drain

The nations that have faced the most difficulty in attracting skilled labor are those that attempt to stifle the movement and free speech of educated persons, which lends credence to the idea that education follows democracy. The Indian government has developed programs such as the Non-Resident Indian card, which offers to migrants a form of dual citizenship and allows Indians abroad to invest their money back into their homeland from their new lives in the West. These programs have steadily increased the rate of Indian migrants who return home, and ensured a reliable stream of remittances and investments in property. China, on the other hand, has failed to attract significant numbers of its students back home with promises of just money as students fear the country’s repressive government and highly-regulated research topics.

By Shrenik Jain ’18, Staff Writer

But the free movement of educated personnel also has positive ramifications for developing nations. Workers send significant remittances back to their families, earning wages that would not have been attainable had they remained at home. A Foreign Policy report noted that these remittances strengthen immigrants’ home economies by providing a uniquely counter-cyclical source of cash. Furthermore, a study by the University of Sussex found that migrant students both disseminate the culture of their home nations abroad and generate demand for higher education in their less developed homes. In addition, multiple studies have indicated that the brain drain could spur global demand for democracy down the road.

The United States has benefitted tremendously from the brain drain.

To attract migrants, the government has initiated programs such as the H1-B visa. It has a policy of “dual intent,” which means the holder can work in the U.S. but can still seek permanent residency by means of either a Green Card or naturalization. Foreign students who find work, particularly those fortunate enough to qualify for a H1-B visa, contribute billions to the American economy. An investigation conducted using Congressional Budget Office methodology found that 300,000 H-1B visa holders contributed 23 billion dollars to the United States economy during the economic turmoil of 2008.

However, the U.S. has always harshly regulated the number of

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For the first time in human history, global migrations of talent can shape the human capital of nations. With the rise of open courseware and foreign investments in education abroad, more and more methods of obtaining an education are becoming available to the average person. Allowing the free movement of educated professionals allows for comparative gains for developed and undeveloped nations, as educated individuals realize more of their potential and often send money and encourage democracy back home. The United States, in particular, has always enjoyed an edge over other nations due to its ability to attract immigrants. It must act aggressively if it wishes to maintain this edge in the face of renewed competition from other nations. It would be a shame to ignore so many bright minds on a misguided premise of ethnocentrism and protectionism, which the American government claims to oppose. ■

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The Rising Price Tag on a College Education

By Sathvik Namburar ’18, Staff Writer

n 1965, at the height of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society domestic agenda, 5.9 million Americans attended college. Fifty years later, nearly 18 million Americans are enrolled. At an increase of 300 percent, college enrollment has significantly outweighed U.S. population growth in the last half-century. The Higher Education Act of 1965 established scholarships and low-interest loans for students to attend college and began to make higher education, previously an upper-class privilege, accessible to millions of Americans.

The Higher Education Act of 1965 created the federal Pell Grant program, which in 2011 awarded nearly $36 billion to more than nine million students nationally. In addition, the federal government offers tuition loans to millions of students, and the federal Work-Study program also helps many students afford college. The increase in the number of college students in the last fifty years reveals that federal funding for college tuition, along with more generous financial aid programs from colleges themselves, has opened up higher education to the masses.

And yet, for all of the progress over the past fifty years in making higher education more accessible, the rising costs of college continue to burden many Americans. In 2014, the total student loan debt owed in the United States was over $1.2 trillion owed by some 37 million Americans. These sobering statistics have caught the eyes of federal politicians: in 2014, President Barack Obama opted to extend the Pay as You Earn Program, which helps students pay their federal student loans, to an additional five million Americans. Then, in March 2015, Obama outlined his proposed “Student Aid Bill of Rights,” which is designed to help students repay their student loans under a more equitable and affordable plan.

The increase in students’ debt despite the advent of governmental programs that fund higher education can be traced to the rapidly rising cost of college. According to Bloomberg Business, in 2014, the cost of attending a private college rose 3.7 percent from the previous year, while the price of a public college education rose 2.9 percent, even though inflation increased by only 1.4 percent. Furthermore, 2013 graduates held an average student debt $450 higher than that of their 2009 counterparts. Unfortunately, college graduates are finding themselves in an increasingly difficult job market. With nearly 3.5 million Americans college graduates per year, many have to settle for jobs for which they are overqualified and underpaid.

Still, The Economist unequivocally stated in June 2013 that “higher education is one of the greatest successes of the welfare state.”

While it is true that governmental subsidies for public colleges and universities have significantly decreased the cost of attending an instate school, this claim seems dubious when viewed in light of the growing student debt crisis in America. More Americans can go to college today than could fifty years ago, but have to take on significant debt in order to do so. With many new jobs requiring college degrees, students often have to choose between taking on large student loans in order to fund their education or finding themselves in a low-paying dead-end job.

While we still have not truly made higher education accessible to every American, one recent development, if it reaches its full potential, may do so. Massive Open Online Courses, commonly referred to as MOOCs, arose in the late 2000s and allow large numbers of

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students to take courses online for credit. MOOCs have increased tremendously in popularity in the last few years, with websites such as Coursera and edX allowing students to take college courses for free or at very low cost. In 2013, edX had 138,000 people enrolled, and MOOCs are becoming a method for people to quickly learn a skill or to expose themselves to a new field. Since MOOCs can be utilized by thousands of people at a time and cut brick-and-mortar costs, some in the education industry believe that MOOCs represent the future of higher education and will vastly decrease the price of college.

Although some analysts believe that MOOCs will continue to rise and come to redefine the sphere of higher education, others are not so certain. Professor Benjamin Ginsberg of Johns Hopkins University is one of the skeptics. Ginsberg suggested that universities have financial incentives to not further develop MOOCs. Arguing that “administrators view MOOCs the wrong way,” he believes that university administrators have a financial interest in maintaining the status quo and not allowing MOOCs to gain equal standing to a brick-and-mortar institution. According to Ginsberg, it is college administrators themselves who represent the problem. He writes in The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters that instead of focusing on the promise of MOOCs or the shortcomings of grants and loans for higher education, the American public should examine the rise in administrative bureaucracy in colleges in the US. From 1975 to 2005, the number of college administrators has risen by 85 percent and the number of associated professional staff rose 240 percent, while the number of professors only rose 51 percent. Ginsberg believes that between one-third and one-half of the rise in college tuitions is attributable to the rise in college bureaucracies, and he argues that the public should pressure universities to trim the number of administrators they have.

While Ginsberg has elucidated an often-overlooked contributing factor to the rise in higher education costs, stagnating state funding for public universities has also led to increased tuition. A 2013 article in USA Today found that, since 2008, forty-eight states have decreased appropriations for in-state public universities, while the number of students attending these schools has risen sharply. Decreased state funding has forced public universities to increase tuitions to cover costs and admit more out-of-state students who pay higher tuition.

While tuition at public universities is usually much lower than private colleges, in-state public universities are often the most affordable and convenient option for students from the middle and working classes, and any increase in tuition at these institutions is likely to affect these students disproportionately compared to their wealthier peers.

As a result, without continued sustained state funding for public universities, many who cannot afford more expensive private colleges will continue to be hurt by increasing tuition costs at in-state schools.

While we have made significant progress in the past fifty years to make college more affordable to more Americans, the looming student debt crisis and current trends in educational funding and college tuition suggest that higher education is not and will not in the foreseeable future become accessible to all. Without a sustained effort to increase state funding for universities, address administrative bloat, and perhaps promote MOOCs and new technologies, the cost of college will only increase. The reasons for increasing college costs and ideas to decrease tuition have been discussed and analyzed extensively; the only unknown is whether anyone is willing to take action. ■

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Johns Hopkins as an

Anchor Institution

PHOTO COURTESY OF: MARISELA GOMEZ, HTTP://WWW.MARISELABGOMEZ.COM/

By Juliana Vigorito ’16, Campus Editor

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ust over a year ago, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake announced The Baltimore City Anchor Plan. One in a long line of ambitious proposals to redefine our city, the Plan counts in Johns Hopkins as a crucial player for sustainable economic development in the region. Anchor institutions are the large, fixed economic drivers for regions; typically hospitals or universities, anchors provide a modicum of stability, investment, and employment for the surrounding area that usually resists downturn.

The engagement of Hopkins in the Anchor Plan is perhaps more a necessity than an honor; between the eleven University divisions and Johns Hopkins Health System, the Hopkins leviathan is the largest employer in the state of Maryland. Some fifty thousand jobs provide at least a measure of anchoring already, and the Plan’s designation serves mostly to formalize that arrangement and add a degree of flattery to it.

A naysayer, anti-corporate purist might defame the Anchor Plan, saying that Hopkins has hurt Baltimore as much as it has helped it. This negativity is not baseless, but it fails to tell the whole story.

The histories of Johns Hopkins and Baltimore are intertwined inextricably, and so too are their futures. But if Hopkins is the anchor, is Baltimore a sinking ship?

Johns Hopkins University, Hospital, and Health System came from the dream of a bachelor to leave a legacy of education and health for his city. Johns Hopkins did not just value these ideals as a Quaker, however; he specifically and purposefully chose Baltimore as the beneficiary of what was, at the time, the largest endowment left to an American college. These good intentions did not end with Hopkins himself. Daniel Coit Gilman, the first University president, was a civic-minded one, even sitting on the local school board.

Hopkins itself was created to be a university by and for the people of Baltimore City. However, those people looked much different then than they do now. 1876 saw a very different, much whiter and more affluent Baltimore. Today, the racial politics of the city cannot be underestimated, though if Hopkins is guilty of anything, perhaps it is doing just that – the case for racial reparations is strongest in cities like ours.

This underestimation was demonstrated clearly when protests against police brutality broke out in the city in late April of this year; Hopkins, true to form, shuttered campuses and warned affiliates to stay off the streets. Through this, little mention of how

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the University planned to support Baltimore was made. Even as Hopkins students joined up with other college and high schoolers to march on City Hall, administrative response was limited to hosting African American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates for a forum on race. The event, while productive, represents a tendency of the University to create robust academic conversations without sufficient community engagement. Branding even its most progressive events as academic allows Hopkins to carve a safe niche for itself while continuing to ignore its complicity in the larger racial inequality of Baltimore City.

Community distrust has grown from racism and racial tensions incarnated by the Hopkins atmosphere, from its Homewood “bubble” to its clumsy expansionism into East Baltimore. Some of the most visible instances of this enduring problem have been malpractice by Johns Hopkins Hospital and its direct affiliates, the most famous of which is the story of Henrietta Lacks. Her story continues to be illustrative of the two faces presented by Hopkins when faced with its past misdeeds; while the University assigns The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks for freshman reading, the patients’ descendants have still received no meaningful compensation for the dishonesty that brought Hopkins scientists untold prestige.

Deborah, one of Lacks’ daughters who passed away at age sixty, is famously quoted in the book as bemoaning the lack of access to health care for her family in contrast to her mother’s tremendous contributions to modern medicine. The enduring health disparities in Baltimore City continue to fall along racial lines, with majority African American districts like Southern Park Heights having life expectancies of nearly ten years less than in majority white districts like Mount Washington/Coldspring. Though home to some of the most advanced biomedical research in the world, Baltimore has not successfully leveraged its academic might to save many lives locally.

Quandaries of research ethics would be excusable had they stopped a generation ago, but sadly such is not the case for Hopkins and its affiliates. As late as the 1990s, the Kennedy Krieger Institute began a study that enrolled parents and their young children living in rental properties where lead paint was known to exist. The project subsidized varying levels of lead abatement for the properties, and tested the children’s blood lead levels to determine how sufficient the abatement was. Distressingly, the researchers in many cases did not tell parents of their findings, even when the children’s results showed dangerously high lead exposure; similarly, they did not share known “hot spots,” where lead paint was especially concentrated.

These egregious missteps, whereby majority African American families were steered to treacherous housing by Hopkins-affiliated researchers, have led to class action and individual lawsuits on behalf of the children. Even more critical is the distrust further brokered between Baltimore and the research institutions that call it home.

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Beyond cases where Johns Hopkins has outright victimized Baltimoreans, there are instances where the University serves the city.

Though less publicized, these positive efforts have tangibly benefited the local community and its young people in particular. To learn more about the relationship between Hopkins and local students, I talked to a few of the individuals who live it: Baltimore Scholars, undergraduates who graduated from public high schools in the city.

What they told me was mixed, but included the smart and pointed critiques that articulate a frustration with the school felt by many. The program does provide a free, world-class education to the students fortunate enough to earn it, but there is no distinction between lowincome students who really need the help and wealthier students who happen to meet the public high school criteria. The roughly fifty Scholars on campus at any given time are mostly graduates of a few specialized high schools – Baltimore City College, Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, and to a lesser extent Baltimore School of the Arts – all of which have test-based admissions. These students are, as the Scholars program touts, some of the “best and brightest.”

Still, there must be more qualified students graduating Baltimore City Public Schools each year who are overlooked or not accepted. The capacity of Baltimore Scholars to improve the city will always be constrained by not the talent of the students, but the willingness of the University to seek them out.

A long time director of the Baltimore Scholars program, Professor Emeritus Matthew Crenson still keeps offices in the Political Science department at Homewood. A native of the city, he spent his undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins back when perceptions of the school were less wrought. Its ballooning appetite for real estate, he says, has spurred the growth of town and gown tensions; the problem is hardly helped by the tremendous property tax breaks allowed to the school. East Baltimore Development Inc., or EBDI, is the latest expansionist fiasco for the University.

Under the administration of former Mayor Martin O’Malley, a deal was brokered with Johns Hopkins to clear a portion of the downtrodden Middle East neighborhood and revitalize the area, just north of Johns Hopkins Hospital. This plan was a classic example of non-communication with community stakeholders. Most egregious in this case was the fact that displacement of over seven hundred households was a prerequisite of the plan, and that the news of such was only announced to residents via The Baltimore Sun. The rollout

PHOTO COURTESY OF: MARISELA GOMEZ

of the plan over the past fifteen years has been increasingly clumsy and insulting to local residents. Initial compensation plans for those displaced, whose homes were seized through eminent domain, amounted to the paltry sum of $22,500 per household. After a hardfought advocacy battle, partly led by a Hopkins physician turned community organizer, the amount grew as much as threefold.

Despite slow moves towards a more just version of EBDI, Hopkins continues to find hurdles and lack community approval. The HopkinsHenderson School is its most publicized example of good intentions without smart follow-through. The project, touted as Baltimore City’s first new public school to be built in thirty years, is intended as a saving grace for the neighborhood through the common value of education. Unfortunately, enrollment for the school has been less than equitable. While residents who live directly beside or otherwise close to the school largely assumed they could send their children there, an opaque and clunky application process has hindered community participation. Instead, children of parents employed in the EBDI catchment area were given first priority for attendance; most of them live outside East Baltimore, and likely stand to benefit less from the unique privilege of a top tier public school. Hopkins has largely demurred from criticism on the issue, faintly expressing hopes that the school will diversify over time. Instead of a publicity boon, it has been another point of contention with the community.

Johns Hopkins is fundamental to Baltimore by this point; erase its holdings from the urban landscape and the city would look like a mouth missing teeth. Bringing money, people, and occasional ethical disasters to this once thriving industry town, Hopkins has a responsibility as an anchor institution to steward prosperity as best it can. What we have done so far is a laughable best effort, and must be outdone going forward if community trust and confidence is ever to be won. A new focus on equitable distribution of resources, wellpaying jobs for low skill workers, and interfacing with community groups might be a start. The effort should also expand to campus, stopping the cultivation of fear in students and instead bringing them into the community through courses and service work. Moving away from the concept of anchor institution and towards a goal of true partnership with the city ought be the paradigm for Hopkins; admitting and embracing how Baltimore anchors and provides for the University is the first step. ■

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Interview with David Rodich of SEIU Local 500

By Eliza Schultz ’15, Editor-in-Chief

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avid Rodich serves as the Executive Director of SEIU Local 500, where he has worked for 39 years. Local 500, a chapter of the national labor union, represents service workers in Maryland and Washington, D.C. Recently, Local 500 has overseen the unionization of a number of institutions of higher education, including Georgetown University, Howard University, and MICA. To what do you attribute the growing number of colleges and universities whose graduate students and adjuncts are seeking to unionize?

If you look at what’s been happening in higher education for many years now, there has been a sort of stratification that has happened among those who teach for a living. It used to be that the overwhelming majority of faculty was tenure-track. These jobs were very secure, and faculty were well-compensated and had academic freedom.

Over the years, however, we have seen a move away from that and a significant reduction of the number of full-time, tenure-track faculty.

Instead we see a growing population of faculty who teach with no job security, who are very poorly compensated, and have been marginalized in terms of their ability to make a contribution to the academic community in which they are teaching. So, this movement of adjunct faculty primarily – but non-tenure-time faculty graduate students as well – really predates the involvement of SEIU. It has been happening for a long time, and what the union has become is a vehicle for adjunct faculty and non-tenure track faculty in particular to address these issues.

How has the movement to organize academic labor spread so rapidly?

I’ve seen vast improvements. The 2013 Violence Against Women Act In the Washington, D.C. area, a lot of faculty who have been active in the union through one institution teach in others as well, and there is a strong sense of community among adjunct faculty at different schools. In fact, it has sometimes been faculty at schools reaching out to us, or faculty teaching at one unionized school who want to bring collective bargaining to another.

What degree of solidarity can adjuncts expect from tenure and tenure-track professors?

It varies by location, but as full-time faculty become more familiar with the plight of adjunct faculty and their mission of being meaningful contributors to the academic community, and of our efforts to reverse this stratification within academia, full-time faculty

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are becoming increasingly important partners to us. For some time, tenure-track faculty saw the emergence of adjunct faculty as a longerterm threat to higher education and teaching largely because there was no job security, and there was financial undermining to full-time faculty as well. But as full-time faculty better understand the agenda that part-time faculty are trying to address, this becomes less of an issue. What unites part-time and full-time faculty is that they are all faculty, and it really is about a reversal of the corporatization of colleges and universities, and an emphasis on instructional excellence, which is a concern to all faculty. Part of what contributes to this [threat to instructional excellence] is the perception that colleges and universities often have that part-time faculty see teaching as an avocation, as community service or supplemental income, rather than a vocation. But increasingly, among adjunct faculty, teaching professionals want to make a living by teaching, and so they pick up courses at multiple institutions in order to make what even remotely approaches a livable income.

You have seen a number of victories at colleges and universities, even in the past year. But what have been some of the major roadblocks you have encountered in organizing academic labor at institutions like Goucher College?

In terms of Goucher, whose non-tenure-track faculty, both fulltime and part-time, voted to unionize in January, the administration represents the height of hypocrisy. Goucher is supposed to be an academic environment with freedom of expression and choice, except, apparently, when it comes to the faculty’s right to form a union. The administration challenged a group of faculty members, claiming they were ineligible to vote in the election. These are faculty that Goucher originally put on the eligibility list. As a result of that, those ballots were impounded and not yet counted, while the decision by the Goucher administration is being legally challenged.

Goucher’s argument has been rejected by the Regional Director for the National Labor Relations Board, and so they have appealed their challenge of the ballot to the National Labor Relations Board in D.C. We are awaiting a ruling from them, and our hope is that the Goucher administration will come to its senses and stop denying these faculty their rights to self organization.

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Is the situation at Goucher unique?

Fortunately, in this region it has been pretty rare. Colleges and universities will actively oppose unionization quite often, but in then end, if the majority of the faculty has spoken in favor of collective bargaining, the administration will do the right thing and negotiate with their faculty.

It seems that part-time faculty are the primary players in the movement to organize academic labor. What is the role of graduate students, and how have they grown to have a larger role in this movement? Are they classified as employees or as students?

In terms of the private sector, the National Labor Relations Board has been traditionally divided on whether Graduate students who teach should be considered employees or students. During Democratic administrations, when the appointees to the National Labor Relations Board tend to be more progressive and balanced in their views, they tend to allow graduate students to organize, but, of course, when Republicans are in office, the exact opposite happens.

The other challenge to organizing among graduate students is that there is a high turnover, for obvious reasons.

The Johns Hopkins administration recently approved a plan to cut graduate student enrollment, increase the stipends of new graduate students, and to increase the number of adjuncts. How might this plan affect any efforts to unionize?

I am not personally familiar with the changes the Johns Hopkins proposed, but I am troubled by a lessening of degree-awarding opportunities for students. Regarding the issue of whether non-tenure track faculty at Johns Hopkins wish to join our movement, that is a decision that is theirs to make. What has been really interesting is that for many of our members, the issue on whether to unionize is not

about the institution itself, but rather what is happening to education in general. What we find with a lot of our members is that, often, the faculty feels a strong sense of institutional loyalty. The people who teach at Georgetown love being at Georgetown. I would suspect this is true for many of the faculty at Johns Hopkins. But regarding the question of whether Johns Hopkins part-time faculty will want to become part of this movement: my sense is that if they do, it will be largely about the bigger picture; not necessarily about the conditions at Johns Hopkins specifically, but rather the recognition that these conditions are symptomatic of a larger problem in higher education.

Can you tell me about Local 500’s advocacy work for House Bill 966, and what you think its prospects are in the Maryland General Assembly?

Our union has been very intimately involved with that bill to grant collective bargaining rights to community college employees in Maryland. 966 would have simply extended the same rights to community college employees that are enjoyed by other public sector employees in Maryland, and of course all workers in the private sector. It is the right to vote on whether you want to form the union and engage in collective bargaining. Unfortunately, the bill was blocked by the House leadership and not permitted a vote, so it died for this year when the session ended. That said, we do have statewide adjunct faculty leadership who are deeply committed to winning this right. Many of them have paid with their jobs for their commitment to this cause, because right now they have no protection under state law. We will be back year after year, doing whatever it takes, for however long it takes, to get this done, because this is a very, very basic, fundamental right. And shame on the state of Maryland and the General Assembly for denying this many working people – not just faculty, by the way, but classified staff as well – the right to engage in negotiations, which is the same right that faculty have at any other private school. It’s a huge mistake to me. It is wrong. ■

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FratPAC and the “Right Standards” for Investigating Campus Rape

By Morley Musick ’18, Staff Writer

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PHOTO COURTESY OF: ESPN

n the past months, media commentators have widely denounced The Fraternity and Sorority Political Action Committee (FratPAC), an advocacy group that represents fraternity interests in Congress.

According to one of their earlier agendas, FratPAC lobbyists had hoped to push legislation requiring “that the criminal justice system resolve [sexual assault] cases before universities look into them or hand down punishments.” One FratPAC leader suggested banning campus rape investigations altogether. The organization has since retracted these goals in deference to their critics.

Nonetheless, there is much to learn from FratPAC and its agenda in retrospect. FratPAC has provided Americans with a radical argument against campus rape investigations that demands a radical, informed rebuke. In order to make this rebuke, it is important to understand police statistics, the meaning of federal gender equity law Title IX, and the ongoing debate about what constitutes the right kind of evidence in criminal investigations.

Law Enforcement Investigations

and

Sexual

Assault

Elizabeth Nolan Brown offers one common defense of FratPAC’s proposed legislation in an essay for Reason Magazine: “How is taking a serious criminal matter out of the hands of people untrained and unequipped to deal with it and turning it over to people who investigate such matters with regularity a harmful thing?” Her assertion is that the police are better equipped than universities to investigate rapes, and therefore universities should stop altogether.

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But many rapists are repeat offenders, so universities must be able to address their presence quicker than criminal courts will allow.

And even if a rapist never goes on to commit another crime, their very presence creates an unsafe environment for students, which constitutes a violation of Title IX. Additionally, while colleges are largely ill-equipped to deal with campus rape, law enforcement has a similarly abysmal track record.

A large body of literature shows that American law enforcement officials still harbor victimizing beliefs about rape, including the idea that women sometimes deserve rap” for wearing certain clothes, being intoxicated, and having a certain demeanor. There are hundreds of thousands of untested rape-kits scattered across the country, and legal surveys of sexual assault show widespread mishandling in court.

Brown does reveal her awareness of these failures. Without voiding the feeling of her rhetorical question – which leaves the reader with a valid-sounding, but ultimately baseless faith in law enforcement-run rape investigations – she voids its content. She says, “If the problem is that law enforcement doesn’t always deal well with rape cases either, then let’s work on reforming how law enforcement deals with rape cases.” This suggestion is absolutely valid. Law enforcement does need reform.

But saying “we need to reform law-enforcement” does not preclude the need to reform colleges and universities. Both reforms would be broadly beneficial. As such, this defense of FratPAC can be discarded. A different point, offered earlier in her editorial and in an editorial by Ashe Schow, carries more weight.

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Universities and Due Process Brown says that campus rape investigations lack the “presumption of innocence” employed in our legal system and Ashe Schow, in an editorial for The Washington Examiner, claims that campus rape investigations operate in a way that “flies in the face of due process.” Both authors believe that universities presume guilt when investigating rape cases. 28 Harvard Law School professors voiced similar objections when Harvard adopted the government’s suggested standards in their school’s campus rape investigations.

In claiming that campus rape investigations are “presuming guilt,” FratPAC and the Harvard Law School faculty are actually challenging the government’s current interpretations of Title IX. Abolishing campus rape investigations altogether is extremely dangerous, and this suggestion was rightfully renounced. But this other objection, about the way Title IX is interpreted, is much more difficult to evaluate.

How do we apply Title IX? Congress created Title IX of the Education Amendment to prevent gender discrimination in any institution that receives federal funding.

In time, legislators came to understand that any threat of sexual harassment or violence constituted gender discrimination. Thus, according to the White House, colleges and universities must eliminate any threat of sexual harassment and violence in order to comply with Title IX.

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“According to studies conducted by the FBI, false rape accusations account for about 8 percent of all rape accusations.”

In 2011, The Department of Education Office of Civil Rights (OCR) provided a list of suggestions to help universities fulfill their Title IX obligations. One suggestion was that universities adopt the preponderance of the evidence standard in determining guilt for sexual assault cases, in lieu of the beyond a reasonable doubt standard and other higher standards used in determining guilt.

Preponderance of the evidence is used to determine guilt in civil cases, and means that there is more than a 50 percent chance that the accused committed a crime. Beyond a reasonable doubt is used to determine guilt in criminal cases, and requires around a 95 percent level of confidence. These percentages can be tricky, but essentially boil down to evidence. In a pragmatic sense, beyond a reasonable doubt cases require much more evidence to secure a conviction than cases of a preponderance of the evidence.

FratPAC and its defenders claim that a preponderance of the evidence is not enough for colleges to punish (via expulsion, suspension, or other means) an alleged rapist or fraternity system. They believe that such a standard “presumes guilt.” And, to FratPAC’s credit, it does seem strange and perhaps even objectionable to say that colleges should get an exemption from the “beyond a reasonable doubt” rule, which is applied to rape cases in other legal settings.

But because Title IX is a civil rights act, and all Title IX suits are handled in civil court, OCR argues that universities should employ the civil court standard of preponderance of the evidence in evaluating rape. Many scholars, Harvard lawyers among them, disagree with this claim of legal consistency. In fact, FratPAC and others have argued that OCR’s recommendation discriminates on the basis of gender, that it is tipped against the men accused of rape, and thus contradicts Title IX. At this point, it is hard to say whether this is the case, but even if this standard is tipped against the accused, this is likely more just than the alternative, as victims of rape are often unfairly doubted.

False Accusations Versus Unexamined Rape According to studies conducted by the FBI, false rape accusations account for about 8 percent of all rape accusations. By all reliable measures, false rape accusations are rare occurrences, though the myth of their prevalence has done great damage to the treatment of rape survivors across the world. That being said, when false accusations and false punishments happen, someone – sometimes an expelled student – suffers immensely for a crime they did not commit. It is imperative that campus rape investigations fail neither party.

What was so disturbing about FratPAC, then, is that it hoped to end these worthwhile investigations altogether. In suggesting that the police have sole authority over rape investigations, it absolved all of those incapable or uninterested in major police reform – which is far more difficult to achieve than campus reform – of any responsibility to understand campus rapes. “Let the experts handle it,” they said, implying that “such matters should fundamentally not be our concern.” As many critics have said, these matters are our concern.

Universities promise and indeed sometimes provide a firm sense of physical safety, which is meant to confer upon its students and faculty a freedom hard to find elsewhere in the world. The idea is that, with the most basic needs of students taken care of, they may more freely immerse themselves in academic and social matters. FratPAC has every right to criticize the way campus rapes are investigated, and have done so. But in calling for the abolishment of university investigations, this group attempted to break down one vital safeguard in university life, which may have had subtle but degenerative effects on students across America. FratPAC was, in a sense, opposing a university’s right to create a campus, an entity separated from and safer than the police-protected outside world. ■

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