Danish Institute for Advanced Studies Launched

The Rektor of SDU, Jens Oddershede, at the opening ceremony for DIAS

After the American Century       

On Friday September 30, 2011 the Danish Institute for Advanced Studies was officially launched at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU). This ambitious project builds on the international recognition already gained by three Institutes at the University of Southern Denmark, in physics, management, and American Studies. DIAS will foster and reward  excellence. Its three divisions already have forged links with leading universities in the US, UK, and EU. The mission of DIAS is to stimulate intellectual creativity by crossing boundaries between disciplines within:

• natural sciences
• social sciences
• humanities

At the end of 2012 DIAS will move into mew offices occupying one floor of a new building on the main campus of SDU

DIAS consists of:

ONE 

Origins and evolution of the universe at the Centre for Particle Physics Phenomenology – CP³-Origins which has been established by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF) and opened on the 1st of September 2009 at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. CP3-Origins is the leading centre of excellence for theoretical particle physics phenomenology in Denmark. CP3-Origins aims to exploit experimental results, supercomputers and our theoretical expertise to make the next big leap in particle physics: Uncovering the origin of bright and dark matter in the universe. It will also contribute in other equally relevant quests: understanding the phase diagram of strongly interacting theories and their potential impact on understanding the dynamics behind the rapid expansion of the universe soon after the Big-Bang, known as inflation.

TWO

Origins and evolution of the social organization, is identified with the Strategic Organization Design Unit (SOD), which builds on a long research tradition associated with the evolutionary and behavioral program in economics and organizational science. In 2008 SOD was established as the first FSE research unit by The Danish Council for Independent Research in the Social Sciences (FSE), and in 2011 received the status of an elite unit at the Faculty of Social Sciences, SDU. This group of scholars examines how the organization of individual actions jointly generates organizational performance. Progress in this area is essential in order to develop a robust normative theory of organization design - and to understand how decisions regarding organization design shape performance in private and public organizations.

THREE

Origins and evolution of culture, is identified with the Center for American Studies (CAS). It was established as an SDU research unit in 1992, with additional support during its first decade from the Danish-American Fulbright Commission. CAS is the largest center of its kind in the Nordic countries, and the only one in Denmark to offer both the BA and MA degrees in American Studies. The field has always been concerned with the origins and development of culture, both in the sense of a shared (often contested) national culture and in the more specific sense of new racial, ethnic, and regional identity formations. These have come about through immigration, cultural exchange, and innovation, in a dynamic relation with historical events. Fundamental to American Studies is the realization that cultures are in constant ferment and evolution.　

DIAS is inspired by similar institutions at world’s leading universities such as Princeton, Harvard and Stanford and by advanced research centers in the Netherlands and Germany. It shares the recognition that mankind's greatest achievements have come from inner curiosity, giving rise to new ways of thinking and changes in perception. The directors already collaborate with faculty at IAS, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge, Oxford, CERN and MIT.

DIAS is a center for theoretical research. Initially, it unites outstanding research groups that will foster synergy between the sciences and humanities allowing new ideas to emerge. The union and rapid communication of ideas among research groups allows for the construction of a novel fellowship among the DIAS faculty and increases the competitiveness and global recognition of Danish research.

Students Should Worry Less about their Careers

After the American Century

The academic year is beginning again, with more students than ever seeking university education. The immediate lack of jobs and worries about careers have become a constant refrain in the media, which at the same time tell us that there are not enough young people to do all the jobs that will be vacated by retirement.

Logically, the new students should not worry, because the demographics say that there have to be jobs for every one of them. Logically, they should just study what they love, and trust that a good position will be there for them later.

But we do not live in logical times, we live in panicky times, when politicians and economists say many contradictory things. Logically, the young will be desperately needed in the European and American job markets as the baby-boomers retire. But the megaphones, loud speakers and teleprompters belong not to the young but to the middle-aged, supervised by the generation about to retire. These people are worried about both the high rate of unemployment right now and the coming shortage of workers at all levels.

The students are all in a rush to find a practical career and a safe job, as though high unemployment were a permanent situation, as though job security will be difficult to attain in the future. But logically, this should not be the case. Logically, the young should not worry so much, and instead make sure they find a career that they really will enjoy.

When I look back at my own experience, it was just the opposite. I went to college at a time of prosperity and no one worried very much about what our education would be used for. We probably should have been more worried, because we were the baby-boomers, i.e. we were too many. Even so, for the most part it worked out.

Statistically, well over 90% of people with a university education do have jobs, and on average they make good money.  The problem is not getting a job, it is getting one you like.

Academic Freedom of Expression? Not in Copenhagen

After the American Century

In Denmark at the moment academic freedom of expression is an issue. A professor at Copenhagen University criticized a proposed new law that will reestablish intensive border controls. The right-wing party that is pushing for these controls immediately attacked her through the media. The chairman of her department then ordered her to stop making public statements about the matter - or take a "media break" for an unspecified length of time. He also told all members of the department of political science at the university that they should refrain from making any public statements about this controversy to the press unless they first consulted him and the Dean. [update: the proposed law was passed, millions of kroner were spent on instituting more border controls, but they had almost no effect on anything in the real world. After the right-wing coalition that had forced through this change was voted out in the September, 2011 election, the new left-leaning coalition quickly abandoned the policy. Thus a professor was silenced for saying what the majority of politicians now agree was correct.]

This is a pathetic spectacle. The political scientists of all people should not be silenced in public debate on controversial proposals for new laws. In this case the Danish foreign minister is running around Europe trying to reassure governments that the new law will not violate treaty obligations. I am not an expert on EU law, but this is a matter of freedom of speech. If the entire department of political science at the largest Danish university has been silenced by its own administration, then that leadership ought to be removed. They have violated the most fundamental academic values.

Danish politicians and academic leaders will discover that there is a high price to pay for such outrageous cowardice. The best young minds will see the hypocrisy for what it is and seek careers elsewhere, some of them outside the country. The international evaluations of academic quality will undoubtedly hear of such behavior. It will hurt Copenhagen University in the yearly evaluations. Last year, even before these events, the university's rating fell far down the league table. Its fall can only continue in 2011.

The current crisis further worsens the university's reputation, already tainted by an on-going research scandal in the natural sciences. This "Penkova" case involves scientific fraud, abuse of research funding, and falsification of findings published in international journals. Several published articles have been withdrawn. Since most scientific articles have multiple authors, damage has been done to several individual reputations, as well as to the university as a whole. In that case, the university administration did not want to listen to its faculty, and those who tried to warn them that Penkova's research findings were problematic were ignored, if not silenced.

The vast majority of the faculty are not at fault. They are the victims of right-wing politicians and short-sighted university administrators. The University of Copenhagen has become a demoralized shambles.

Meditations on Borders Bookstore

Good bookstores select their books and know them.

After the American Century

More than three decades ago I spent some time in Ann Arbor while doing some research. I fell in love with a wonderful bookstore that was local. Later was pumped full of steroids, franchised, and made a national chain, and then an international chain. That local store was Borders, and it had a wonderful selection of academic books, and it had clerks who really knew about the books. In the process of becoming a chain, however, the quality of the store deteriorated and it became largely market driven, pushing best-sellers and whatever the New York Times happened to review. 

This process has continued, until now there are some disturbingly bad books on the shelves. Books that are long on attitude and very short on logic, research, or balance. Books that the old Borders of c. 1975 would never have bothered with. In my visit there tonight I could not find a clerk who knew anything about the books. They were so patently not interested in reading that I wondered how they could get hired. Ann Arbor is a university town, and some of the students still must read words bound in paper. 

I asked one fellow if they had any books on the assembly line, and where they might be located. He immediately turned to a computer and started to type, but then stopped and asked me how to spell assembly line. He did not know if the store had a section of books on business, labor, or the history of technology. The upshot was that after an hour of browsing without help from an incompetent staff, I was unable to find anything of interest on the assembly line.

Note that Michigan is the center of American automobile industry, and that the assembly line was invented in Detroit. You cannot get into a cab or sit on a bar stool without running into someone who used to work on an assembly line. One would think that a bookstore in Michigan's largest university town would be able to muster something on the subject. Worse, all the other non-chain bookstores seem to have closed, at least according to what people tell me, and what I can see in walking around.

You can also read in the newspapers that Borders, the chain of bookstores, is losing money and closing many stores. The conventional explanation is that on-line stores have killed the local stores. It seems a little more complex than that. First, the local stores were assaulted by bookstore chains, such as Walden Books, Barnes and Noble, and Borders itself. This was going on in the 1970s and 1980s, before the Internet was a factor.

The bookstores of the United States are fast disappearing. Back when I was here years ago I was told that the best bookstores in Detroit were all in Ann Arbor, i.e. an hour's drive away. Today, is seems possible that the best bookstores in Michigan may be in Chicago, Illinois. 

A good bookstore is a repository of public memory.  Once you lose good local bookstores,  local culture and the distinctive sense of local history begin to fade out.

Follow up note: Since I wrote this piece the entire Borders chain of stores has gone bankrupt.

The Cultural Value of Choirs

After the American Century  

Since I was seven years old I have been singing in choirs. There have been a few gap years, when for one reason or another I was not singing, and that was always a mistake. Because a person gets much more from being in a choir than the music itself, though that is sufficient reward.

Consider the difference between singing in a choir and being an athlete or working in a business. In both of these, the high priorities are winning and advancing.  Individualism is the main value. All too many things in life seem to be about beating the other fellow, coming out ahead, proving that you are better.

Choral singing is not about any of these things. The point is not to stand out, but to blend in. Not to get to the end of a phrase ahead of the others, but to get there at the same time. In a choir, you have to learn to listen to others and make small adjustments in order to create a common sound. All the tenors have to agree not just on the notes, but the dynamics (loud/soft, vibrato? staccato? bright/dark, etc.), the pronunciation of the words, and the phrasing of the lines. Only with such adjustments comes harmony, indeed, sometimes more than harmony: on good days you get overtones and harmonics.

In a choir, your age does not matter, and it really is not important whether you have an impressive job title or not. Pensioners sit alongside students, natives beside immigrants. What brings the group together is the music, and often I do not even know what someone does for a living, even after singing with them for years. It just isn't important.

Choirs teach people how to work with a group; how to blend in; how to compromise; how to listen and harmonize. In a well-functioning choir, the rehearsals are not only fun, they blot out your worries and problems. For a couple of hours a week, at least, you are living in the immediate moment, working to make the sound right and having a good time. There are usually a few laughs, too. 

In a choir, you learn (or re-learn) the pleasures of working together for a common goal. 

Unfortunately, not so many people are having this experience. Choirs seem to be having trouble recruiting new members. For some, karaoke singing to a mechanical accompaniment has taken its place. For others, no doubt, choral singing may just seem old fashioned. I am pleased, however, by the phenomenal success of "Glee" - a TV show which suggests the pleasures of being in a choir. although it mistakenly over-emphasizes the importance of choral competitions. 

The choirs I have been in have occasionally been in musical festivals or other events involving several groups. But the best thing about these occasions is not a competition to be the "best." Every choir has its own style and repertoire. I once heard a Bulgarian choir perform some of their national folk songs that would have been hard for anyone else to do in the same way. Give the same music to that choir and to some Norwegians, and their performances would be quite different. The pleasure is in hearing these differences, especially when choirs from several countries sing for each other. 

Each choir is different precisely because it works to create a common sound. Each choir becomes distinctive because it blends the particular voices it has and the musical traditions that it knows. under the direction of a particular conductor. Good choral singing is not about winning but about learning to value the special sound only you can make together. Echoes and audiences tell you when it is all coming together.

Want to live in the moment? Combine discipline with pleasure? Reduce the tensions of race and social class? Appreciate cultural differences? Shut off your electronic equipment and live in the NOW? And do all that as a secondary result of having a good time? Then go make some music. Join a choir.

PISA test results

After the American Century

The 2009 PISA results can be seen in the table accompanying this article. (For the 2012 results, click here ) Both Europe and the United States must do a better job educating their children if they are to keep up with Asia. On the reading test European countries were not so far apart, and ranged from a low of 483 (Greece and Slovenia) to a high of 508 (Netherlands). That is only a 25 point spread. But the difference between the Netherlands and Shanghai was 48 points, almost twice as much. Well, actually Finland did get 536, far and away the best showing for Europe. The pattern was the same in Science and in Math, where China was by far the best, while the Europeans clustered well behind. The United States was mediocre in all three categories.

Sadly, education budgets are being cut in many European countries, which are not investing in new schools or more teachers. Indeed, Denmark has just decided to let the size of classes in elementary school get larger, a serious mistake. Larger classes tend to be harder to keep focused, and they demand far more of teachers, who can scarcely give individual attention to students who need extra help or those who need extra stimuli.

If you take the three test scores and add them together, this is the result (not all nations surveyed are included in this list).

Shanghai               1731
Hong Kong           1637
Finland                  1631
Singapore              1630
Korea                    1623

Japan                      1588
Canada                   1580
New Zealand         1559
Australia                1556
Netherlands           1556
Switzerland           1552

Estonia                  1541
Germany               1530
Belgium                1528

Poland                   1503
Norway                 1501
Britain                   1500
Denmark               1497

Average Score      1492

France                    1491

United States         1489

Ireland                   1489
Sweden                  1486                

If the future belongs to the best educated, then the future belongs to Asia, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Judging by this list, being a wealthy country helps, but it is not the determining factor. Norway has no national debt and a huge public surplus, yet achieved only average results, while Finland, which has less money per capita than Denmark or Norway, was at the top. And the United States, which for decades was the wealthiest large nation in the world, scores below the average.

See also World University Rankings

Move Danish Universities Abroad (following Danish corporations)

After the American Century

This is a thought experiment, making logical deductions from recent actions of the Danish government. If there seems to be anything objectionable (or worthwhile) in this proposal, think about what that government has been doing.

In a globalized world, there is no reason why Danish universities should remain in Denmark, if they can educate their students just as well at a lower price in another place. Just as Danish slaughter houses are moving to Germany and Eastern Europe, just as Danish companies seeking assembly line workers move that part of their activity to Asia, so, too Danish universities should consider the option of moving off-shore.

The advantages of this proposal are obvious.

1. Student SU (grants in aid) will buy more goods and services abroad.

2. Books, clothing, food, and computers will be cheaper, as the faculty and students will not need to pay the 25% Danish VAT.

3. University services can be outsourced more cheaply in other labor markets. There is no reason to pay high Danish wages to cleaners, cooks, and maintenance people, who would be much less costly to hire elsewhere.

4. Careful site selection would place the new Danish universities in mild climates, saving on the cost of heating.

5. Recruitment of non-Danish faculty would not be hindered by the complex and ever more stringent regulations for work permits.

6. In a digitized world, the library resources would be on-line, with no need to build up a physical collection of books and journals.

7. Travel to the new universities need not cost any more than the Danish railways charge to commute from Odense or Aarhus to Copenhagen. Indeed, with the proliferation of budget airlines, it may be cheaper to get to the new universities than to the old ones.

8. Housing will also be less expensive, and at the same time thousands of apartments will be made available in Denmark, solving the housing problems of its cities.

9. Foreign language acquisition will be faster and better, as students will be learning a local language through immersion in another culture, as well as in class.

10. Since Danish business is moving abroad, the Danish students trained overseas will be right where they are needed, and available to work at the lower salaries in the wage markets of those nations.

Since the funds available for university teaching and reseach have declined in real terms for years, this proposal is a rational response to the Danish government's cost-cutting.

Initially the BA programs could be sited off-shore, with the more specialized MA and Ph.D. courses remaining in Denmark for a few years of transition. Logically, the programs in Danish history and Danish language and literature might be left behind to thrive in their native environments, but the natural sciences, much of the humanities, and most of the social sciences would benefit from going off-shore. Indeed, there would be useful synergies with local universities in the host nations that could not be achieved through exchange programs.

By 2030 it should be possible to move most of Danish university education to such places as Ireland, Poland, Southern Spain, Turkey, and Thailand. Those who earlier immigrated into Denmark from these countries would become valuable as translators and bridge builders between the Danes and the host countries.

Once business and the universities have moved abroad, it will be time to think about what else to locate overseas. Quite possibly some hospitals and primary schools also could be moved to the new Danish foreign enclaves.  The eventual result would be to empty Denmark of most university students and many workers, while the number of pensioners abroad would certainly increase as well. They would leave behind a smaller population to operate Denmark as a center for high-tech industries and as a theme park for tourists.

Denmark would thereby become the most completely globalized of all nations. There is no time to delay, as other nations that Denmark likes to compare itself to may be the first movers. The best locations and the biggest savings will go to those who seize the opportunity now.

Danish Law Would Discourage Future Nobel Prize Winners From Seeking Work

After the American Century

The Danish government has proposed rules for admission to the country that would discriminate against the vast majority of the world's PhDs. Notably, the new rules would favor only two of those who received the Nobel Prize in 2010. The restrictive regulations that the right-wing government has proposed would give bonus points to anyone with a degree from one of the world’s top twenty universities, as determined by the London Times annual poll. Restricting the list to just the top 20 schools is a serious mistake. It should include at least the first 200 schools, especially since none of the Danish universities are anywhere near the top twenty. The rather nasty implication is that foreigners  (or the Danes themselves!) with Danish PhDs are not really good enough.

In the London Times, DTU is ranked 122, Aarhus 167, and Copenhagen 177. As a group the Danish universities have fallen in the rankings considerably in recent years.

The danger of excluding Nobel Prize winners is by no means a hypothetical exercise. A few years ago, one of this year's winners, Konstatin Novselov was offered a position at the University Copenhagen, but his admission to the country became so snarled in red tape that he went to get his Ph.D. in Holland, at the University of Nijmegen. Just how many top quality doctoral students and faculty are lost in this way? Some never apply in the first place, because Denmark has become known as a nation whose government creates problems for non-citizens.

The list below includes the universities that the 2010 Nobel Prize winners either attended or now teach in.  I have put in parenthesis each school’s position in the London Times world ranking. Note that seven of the universities associated with this year’s winners are not even in the top 200 universities, much less the top 20.

Carnegie Mellon University (20)

Edinburgh University (40)

Essex University (not in the first 200)

Hokkaido University (not in the first 200)

Jilin University (China) (not in the first 200)

London School of Economics (86)

Madrid University (not in the first 200)

Manchester University (87)

MIT (3)

Nijmegen University (not in the first 200)

Northwestern University (25)

Peking Normal University (not in the first 200)

Purdue University (106)

Russian Academy of Sciences, Chernogolovka  (not in the first 200)

University of Delaware (159)

University of Tokyo (26)

University of Wales (not in the first 200)

The world’s top 20 Universities according to the London Times

1            Harvard University        USA

2            California Institute of Technology           USA

3            Massachusetts Institute of Technology    USA

4            Stanford University            USA

5            Princeton University            USA

6            University of Cambridge       United Kingdom           

6            University of Oxford             United Kingdom           

8            University of California Berkeley   USA           

9            Imperial College London  United Kingdom           

10          Yale University   USA           

11          University of California Los Angeles    USA

12          University of Chicago       USA           

13          Johns Hopkins University    USA

14          Cornell University            USA

15          Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich Switzerland           

15          University of Michigan            USA           

17          University of Toronto            Canada           

18          Columbia University            USA           

19          University of Pennsylvania            USA

20          Carnegie Mellon University, USA

See also World University Rankings, 2011- 2012, elsewhere on this blog (October, 2011)

Higher Education Pays for itself

After the American Century

The OECD has released a report today that concludes, in part, as follows:

On average across the OECD countries, a man with a tertiary level of education will generate  $119 000 more in income taxes and social contributions over his working life than someone with just an upper secondary level of education. Unhappily, women make somewhat less, due to the continuation of wage inequality and the persistence of the glass ceiling. But women graduates nevertheless do generate more income than it costs to graduate them.

This means that  investment in post-second education more than pays for itself, generating a surplus. The report also found that university graduates have a lower unemployment rate than the population as a whole. "Unemployment rates among people with a tertiary level of education have stayed at or below 4% on average across OECD countries during the recession."

Moreover, the OECD report only tells us how much more university graduates pay in taxes than it costs to educate them. It does not calculate the value of their inventions, for example, or how much their labor contributes to better exports, more appealing tourism, more effective public service, and so forth.

  

Denmark comes out well in the report, which finds it sixth in terms of the percentage of its population getting advanced education. However, it does trail the world's leading country,  Finland, with Iceland number two. Norway, the Netherlands, and Sweden are close behind Denmark at 9, 10, and 11. 

Denmark needs to improve in the vital area of internationalization. Overall, the total number of international students in the world has doubled to 3.3 million from 1995 until 2008. Yet Denmark has a smaller cadre of foreign students than many counties, and it looks particularly weak in the all-important area of advanced degree programs. Fully 84% of Danish advanced degree students are Danes, compared to 54% in the UK, 55% in Switzerland, 60% in France,  61% in Canada or 66% in Austria. (Figures for the US and Germany were not available, but they do have large numbers of foreign students, without question.)

Danish parochialism is most pronounced in the PhD programs in the Humanities, where almost all students are Danes, plus a small number of permanent residents married to Danes. This is not a healthy or competitive situation. Things are better in the sciences and medicine, but not up to the level of nations that the Danes usually compare themselves with.

The United States lags behind in these statistics, with little more than a third of its population receiving tertiary education. Of course, it still has the world's strongest universities that regularly top the league tables, regardless of whether they are complied in Europe, Asia, or the US. Harvard remains number one, with Yale, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Columbia, and all the other great universities that have long been dominant among the top 50. However, if one looks at the population of the US as a whole, its educational level is not rising as rapidly as elsewhere, and the ability of the people as a whole to compete internationally may be expected to suffer accordingly.

Education: Top-Down State Control

After the American Century

Each year at the end of July roughly the same story appears in most European countries. Thousands of applicants for higher education have been denied entrance. There are not enough places to fill demand. In part, this is because many more want to be doctors than any state can afford to educate and because certain trendy subjects attract a crowd - notably journalism and media studies.

But there is a deeper problem, which is that state bureaucrats believe they are wiser than the students or the professors, and think that no education should be offered unless there seems to be certain employment available. The bureaucratic mind does not like uncertainty, creative interpretation, or imagination. The ideal education, from the bureaucratic perspective, is one that teaches a certain skill which fills an obvious social need, such as nursing. Subjects that develop abstract thinking, creativity, and interdisciplinary capabilities are viewed with suspicion. Every year the press obediently repeats, with a sneer, that there is a limit to how many philosophers or literary critics a society needs.

Strictly speaking, it is true that the market for full-time literary critics or philosophers is small. But the need for critical thinking and creativity is great, and the vocational approach to education will not cultivate the mind. Likewise, if we train only carpenters and no architects, then building innovations will be few and far between, and the buildings will be as bad as public housing planned by bureaucrats. But this example is still too vocational. I know a successful comic book artist in New York who received his BA in geology - and he swears that every landscape he draws is geologically feasible, though that is not the main reason he has steady work. A woman I knew in graduate school did not become a historian but opened an excellent restaurant.  A fellow I knew as an undergraduate majored in English but became a successful radio announcer.

In short, the bureaucrats and the newspapers are not thinking ahead. They imagine that the skills we can identify today are all that is needed to solve the problems or seize the possibilities of tomorrow. Isn't it more likely that we cannot fully imagine the future, and the best thing we can offer students is teaching them how to learn, how to create, and how to think critically? People's careers are not all going to be predictable, i.e. one studies nursing and becomes a nurse for 40 years. I know a successful computer programmer who studied English, and a brilliant real estate agent who studied art history. Likewise, the first generation of computer programmers by definition was not trained to do that work, and many pioneers of the Internet emerged from the counter-culture.

Moreover, the rationale for education is not merely vocational. Education is also needed to ensure that citizens are competent to vote intelligently, to debate effectively, and to consume wisely. A narrow, vocational education is not going to produce citizens who can do these things well. 

Why try to force students into careers that they do not want, by creating quotas for non-vocational subjects? Why not show a little humility and flexibility in Ministries of Education? Top-down state control of education is undemocratic and counter-productive. The careers people actually have are far more numerous than the courses of study can ever be, and a vocational approach will only be able to prepare students for a fraction of the jobs of tomorrow. 

Getting Rid of Tenured Professors

After the American Century

The political project in Danish education for many years has apparently been to take as much power away from the faculty as possible. (Every change, of course, is made for the good of the university.)

The latest suggestion along these lines has been made by Malou Aamund, a 41-year old politician who has never had a university appointment and never published. It appears that she does not have an advanced degree. With her credentials, she could not be hired as even an assistant professor. Were she still working at IBM, her views would be of little interest. However she is now the education spokesperson for Venstre, the strongest party in the ruling coalition. She recommends that professors only receive their appointments for 10 years, after which they should be re-evaluated, and given at best five-year extensions.

Ms. Aamund proposes an evaluation that would require at least three other professors to stop their research for the equivalent of several weeks or perhaps a month to serve on a committee and read the publications and grant proposals of a senior scholar. Given academic specialization, it is extremely unlikely that any university will have two professors in precisely the same field. Even if they did, the two people would be so close that it would be best to get outsiders on the committee. It is likely that at least one, quite possibly two, of the members of such a committee would have to come from abroad and they would have to be paid well enough to make it attractive for them to do it, and in fact it might be quite difficult to find suitable people to fill such a committee. Such a review would be time-consuming and expensive.

There is second practical problem with this proposal. During the period just before and during an evaluation, the professor in question will not sit passively by, waiting to be approved. Rather, starting a year or two years before the review, he or she would go on the job market. Worse still, the stronger the professor's networks and credentials, the more likely he or she will be offered a new position abroad, where no such reviews take place. Some of the best people will leave, and at the same time the review system will make Denmark less attractive to top foreign scholars.

Denmark by itself cannot make the rules for the international academic world. Already many excellent Danish scholars are attracted to positions overseas where the research funding is better, the PhD students more plentiful, the libraries better, and political interference less common. Making a professor's job less secure will make an academic career less attractive in Denmark and weaken the nation's competitive position. Denmark does not make the rules. (Venstre ought to have learned that at the Climate Summit.) Getting rid of tenure by definition weakens Danish universities and makes them less attractive.

There is yet another problem. Holding a review after ten years and then every five years will create uncertainty in research groups, and quite possibly interfere with their proper functioning. Instead of assuming that the professor and associate professors are fully committed to the team and to the university, the whole group will suspect that colleagues may be looking for work and that they might take major grants to other institutions. Is such uncertainly, mutual suspicion, and disruption a price worth paying for mandatory reviews?

Ms. Aamund presumably means well. No doubt she wants to shake up the university and make sure there is no dead wood in the ranks. But her proposal is impractical, time-consuming, expensive, and very unlikely to achieve its announced goal. Instead of improving quality, it is likely to drive some of the best senior faculty away, create uncertainty among colleagues, and discourage the young from pursuing a university career.

Ms. Aamund and her counterparts in the Conservative Party (who want to make Associate professor jobs provisional as well) seem not to understand that giving faculty tenure saves society money. Why? Because if the university did not give tenure then it would have to compete in an open market to attract the very brightest people. Academics could just as easily have chosen another profession. They are each bright enough to enter several other fields. No one chooses the university because it pays better than law or insurance or just about anything else demanding a comparable education. Take away the possibility of tenure and few people will be willing to struggle through the uncertain early years of an academic career. Take away job security, in other words, and good academics will be hard to recruit or retain. It will become a more difficult market, and only paying better salaries all along the line will then attract and hold people. Having worked in business, Ms. Aamund should understand that.

One final point. Since I am myself a professor, one might assume these arguments are self-interested. But such is not really the case. I am far along on my career path, and if enacted these changes would not have much effect on me. Furthermore, I rather suspect I would pass any fair review, if it came to that. Instead, for me the proposed new system would likely be a bonanza. Universities can only ask professors to evaluate professors and there would be at least three needed to evaluate each candidate for renewal. If the system of reviews were expanded to the associate professors, then the extra work would really begin to pile up and to pay. In short, the review system in practice would almost certainly give more money to almost every one of the professors. That cannot be Ms. Aamund's intent.

The Ill-Equipped Danish University

After the American Century

I have been teaching full time since 1974. In all those years I have seldom found that the classroom equipment was up-to-date or that it could be counted upon to work. The only exceptions to that statement would be the University of Oviedo, Spain in 1977-78, when there was no classroom equipment of any kind, and Notre Dame University in Indiana in 2003, where everything imaginable was available, everything worked and a staff was on call to help and would arrive within 5 minutes if anything wasn't satisfactory. Between these two extremes, in an unhappy compromise, is my own university, which has badly placed screens, old powerpoint projectors, electrical connections that do not always work, different systems in different rooms, and a staff that can never be found or even spoken to on the phone in an emergency.

No one should labor under the illusion that Danish universities are well equipped with computers and the peripheral equipment to make the most of them. No one should imagine that they are at the level achieved in the US in 2005, for example. The occasion for writing this is that today I have five hours of teaching in a room where the equipment does not work, and clearly has been damaged. Since we are in the midst of a round of cutbacks, the situation will not get better soon.

So today, instead of showing my students nineteenth century American paintings, I will just talk about them. I will try to post the images later on Blackboard, but that, too, has not been working of late. Even when the images do get on line, students will view them alone and without class discussion.

As a historian of technology, I am hardly shocked that these machines do not work. But I am bemused that the Danish politicians still think they can hoodwink the public into believing that they have a world class university system, after systematically cutting it back.

Security is also a serious problem, as universities have inadequate safeguards against theft. Whole corridors are robbed of their computers at night, by thieves who clearly have master keys and entry cards with working codes. Worse yet, weeks after the break-ins, the locks remain unchanged and the computers are not replaced. It took me five weeks to get a new one in the office, which meant that I could not print anything, for example.

Since writing this, the situation has improved, but Denmark still lags.

Obama's Proposed Federal Budget Cuts for Education and Mass Transit

After the American Century

This is the first year that President Obama and his administration can be said to be fully responsible for the budget proposal. Last year they had just started, and there was little time to dig deeply into the details of federal spending. In what follows I want to focus on spending cuts in the area of education, because during the election campaign candidate Obama seemed to understand the need to improve the levels of learning in the United States. The future belongs to the best educated nation, with a workforce that can innovate and redeploy their resources. Or so it was said.

Now the actual spending proposals suggest no more commitment than under the previous administration. Here are some examples of the cutbacks:

Academic competitiveness, smart grants -58%

School improvement: -55%

Education for the Disadvantaged -31.9%

Special education: - 4.7%

Vocational and adult education: -3.7%

International educational exchange programs: - 0.3%

To be fair, there are other education programs that are slated to receive increases, and this is a difficult budget year. Nevertheless. the cutbacks are disheartening.

What about transportation? One hoped to see an Obama Administration promoting mass transit. The proposal, however, is for a 35% cut for railroads, and a 9% cut for mass transit in the discretionary part of the budget. There is mandated spending on railroads that remains unchanged. By far the lion's share of the transportation budget is mandated, and must be spent on highways. Next at the federal feeding frenzy are the airports, which receive much more than the railroads.

In short, the vast economic mess that the Bush Administration left behind has not only made it hard for Obama to move in a new direction, it seems to make it virtually impossible until the economy improves.

Even when it does improve, however, the increased interest on the national debt will eat up the money that once might have been used for education, transportation, and social programs. The interest payments next year will rise by 33% to $251 billion. Just paying the interest on the debt will be greater than the entire budgets for transportation and education combined, with energy thrown in for good measure.

Danish Ministry of Education Fails Again

After the American Century

An independent study that cost 312,000 kroner, has found out what any experienced teacher could have told us for nothing in less than a minute. News flash: Students will cut more classes if they can get away with it. What a revelation!

The 2005 "education reform," brought in against the advice of many teachers, has markedly increased the number of gymnasium students who skip classes. The Danish Ministry of Education should have been able to figure out what would happen if they weakened attendance requirements. It used to be that no student was allowed to miss more than 10% of the classes - which was already a liberal requirement compared to many nations. Now, thanks to the 2005 "reform" there are entire schools where all students on average skip classes more than 10% of the time. Another triumph of the bureaucrats over the teachers!

During the last quarter century the Ministry of Education has repeatedly demonstrated little understanding of students, teachers, teaching, or the academic calendar, much less morale building. Had a foreign foe set out to undermine the educational system, it might have pursued the same policies as the Danish Ministry of Education. If other nations want to know how to sabotage an educational system, here are the main points.

- Drown the teachers in bureaucratic paperwork, so they have less time in the classroom.

- Cut back on the money for short courses and seminars, so that teachers no longer will have as much chance to develop their competence.

- Reward schools not for quality but for quantity, and pay schools only for students who pass. This will encourage teachers to let more students slide through without learning much.

- Should a student be caught for plagiarism, pay the school nothing, but insist on elaborate procedures so that teachers will learn that catching students who cheat is unrewarding, unpaid work. Also, make the punishment for plagiarism mild.

- Eliminate the already relaxed attendance requirements, and let students graduate even if they have missed as much as 35% of all their classes.

- Redesign the grading system, making it less nuanced, and pressure teachers to give higher grades. (At the same time, make the new grading system unlike that in any other nation, so no one outside the country can understand it.)

- As much as possible, let students dictate what subjects the teachers will teach, and at the same time underfund school libraries so there is less likelihood that materials will be available. Cut back on funds to buy new textbooks.

- Let school facilities deteriorate, especially bathrooms, but also more generally, so that the school is not an attractive place to be.

- During years of national budget surpluses make sure teacher salaries increase more slowly than in the private sector, so that the profession becomes less and less attractive. (Indeed, tacitly support national PR campaigns launched to attack the humanities, urging all students to study "practical" subjects.)

- Demand that teachers use the latest computer technologies, but do not put money in the school budgets to buy, install, and maintain the equipment. Also, do not set aside time or sufficient funds to train teachers in how to use the equipment.

Historians will one day wonder why a wealthy nation like Denmark misused its resources and undermined its educational system and demoralized its teachers. They may wonder how the Minister, Bertel Haarder, could have made so many mistakes for so many years without being fired. But they will realize that the Ministry of Education as a whole was a vast, growing, incompetent parasite that ate up resources and may have been beyond the control of anyone. Furthermore, bad as he was, Haarder was by no means the worst minister in the government between 2001 and 2010. Indeed, it is hard to pick a "winner" among so many self-assured incompetents.

Who Should Be Paid for Danish Research?

After the American Century

The Danish universities are moving to what labor historians would call a "piece rate system." That is, money for research will be paid not on the basis of weeks or months devoted to research, but rather on the basis of how many items are produced.

A new form of exploitation may emerge in this system. Exploitation is a strong word, so let me be clear what I mean by it. Workers are exploited if another person or institution is paid for their work. If I build a wall, and someone else, not me, gets paid for my work, that is exploitation.

Is something akin to this happening in Danish universities? Quite possibly. Every university has a number of recent PhDs who have completed their studies and who teach part time. (In many cases they are paid only as teaching assistants, which I think should not be allowed. Once you have a PhD, the proper title and pay scale should be that of external lecturer.) My concern is that these recent PhDs do not have research appointments. They only are paid, and rather badly, for their teaching. Nevertheless, they do their best to publish articles and books, for that is the surest path to full-time employment.

Who gets financial credit for a recent PhD's publications? I have asked around, and it seems that these new PhDs are encouraged to register their work, i.e. put it into each university's database. The system's acronym is, ironically enough, PURE. But there is nothing "pure" about hiring people only for their teaching and then including their research in the university's productivity. Why should the university be paid for publications by people whom it does not employ to do research? How would you feel if, outside your regular job, you painted a picture or renovated a car, and then suddenly your employer was able to send a bill to the government for that work, while you got nothing?

Is this happening? I fear it is. I know for certain that when university departments undergo accreditation reviews, the publications of recent PhDs at times are included in the statistics. Admittedly, this is a gray area, because typically these publications are portions of a PhD thesis, rewritten into articles. And the PhD thesis was written while on a research appointment. Nevertheless, it does not feel entirely right or fair. And for how many years can a university claim the publications of its recent PhDs?

Note too that retired faculty also may continue to publish. Can or should the Danish universities be paid for this work, which again they do not support financially?

There is a simple solution to this problem. Pay the writer for a publication directly unless he or she has a university research contract. This would mean that if a person does not have university employment, they could still be rewarded. Why should the government pay the university for the completion of research it did not support? Why should a scholarly publication by a private individual be worth nothing, if a publication produced by a university employee automatically releases funding?

To see the absurdity, translate this into agricultural terms. Imagine that there are university farmers who are paid for the crops they grow. Imagine that there are private farmers who are paid nothing for their crops. And imagine that university farmers find ways to claim the production of the private farmers, in order to get a completely unearned additional subsidy. Who would think that a fair policy?

The Danish universities do not seem to have quite reached this form of exploitation, but they appear to be headed that way. No one consciously planned this situation, which rather seems to be an unintended outcome. But it has dire consequences. If such a system is allowed to flourish, then universities will profit if they can produce many PhDs, keep them around as poorly paid part-time teachers, and claim credit for the research they do on their own. This is presumably not what the government wanted to do by introducing a piece-rate system.

[For critique of the new bibliometric system itself, see March 21, 2009
The Bureaucratic Dream of Quantifying Research Results

Hiding University Reform inside Tax Reform

After the American Century

The traditional tax problem for Danes is how to reduce the world's highest taxes while keeping the welfare state. A Tax Commission has just proposed 35 billion kroner (a bit less than 7 billion dollars) in income tax reductions, to be financed by changes in the tax structure. I want to focus on just one area, reductions in student grants, because this is far more than it appears to be, amounting to a major reversal of government policy on higher education.

The proposal is that student study grants be reduced so that they cover four years. To people outside Denmark, this still sounds wonderful. Not only do no university students pay tuition, but all students qualify for a scholarship worth about 55,000 kroner ($10,500) each year, after taxes. These grants have made it possible for children of working class parents to make their way into the professions. More than just about any other nation, Denmark has made its education system egalitarian. I have had many students who were the first in their families to attend university, and some of them have gone on to quite distinguished careers.

By comparison, in the United States taxes are considerably lower, but parents start saving early to send their children to college. It can easily cost $150,000 (c. 800,000 kroner) to send just one child to university, when tuition, room, board, transport, health insurance, computers, and books are all taken into account. The hardest economic years for American parents are those when children are in college. In contrast, Danish parents may pay huge taxes, but the year a child begins at university creates no hardship, because of the generous "SU," or student grant. In effect, Danish parents have been forced to save for their child's education, and reap the benefits if a child goes to university. But the Tax Commission in effect wants to steal the money middle-aged couples have saved through taxation for the last twenty years. They have paid in with the expectation that their children will receive student aid. But the Tax Commission will divert that money to income tax reductions, and these parents will have to pay a second time if they want their children to get an advanced education.

In theory, it takes a Dane a minimum of five years to complete a BA and MA. In practice, the average student needs six years or more. Reducing the student grant to 4 years means that it will be impossible to get an MA without taking sizable loans, which supposedly will be made available to all who apply, though one wonders if this will really be so. A great many students will likely stop after the BA degree, because they do not want to saddle themselves with large loans.

The Tax Commission surely understands that Denmark will produce fewer MA students as a result. Indeed, I assume that this is their goal, in this way forcing more people to start working full time at a younger age. When the same political coalition was in power during the 1980s and early 1990s it forced changes in Danish education with the professed goal of making the BA a terminal degree for most students. They also cheapened the BA+MA education by cutting it one full year, from six to five. The notion then was that too many people were getting advanced degrees. The then Minister of Education was Bertel Haarder, and people joked that BA stood for Bertel's Academics.

Students see the BA as a second-rate degree and most of them still want to go on for the MA. Yet that earlier reform did save money by reducing the BA+MA combination to five years. This meant that there was a full year less time to really learn a foreign language such as Russian, and it meant that students were less ready to write an MA thesis. For faculty, students losing a year of education meant a reduction of almost 20% in how many people there were to teach. For the gymnasiums, it meant that new teachers were less educated.

The Tax Commission's proposed reduction in student aid extends this earlier downsizing. Once again, the goal is to get more students to stop after their BA, and to reduce the numbers at the graduate level. Once again, the universities will have fewer to teach and suffer cutbacks in staff. The loss of entire departments may follow in some cases.

It is disingenuous to claim that the government's goal is to reform taxes. The amount spent on the extra year of SU is 750 million kroner a year, or a little more than 2% of the proposed savings on personal income taxes. The real goal is to further reduce graduate programs and eliminate some MA programs. One very real result will be a decline in the number of faculty positions, saving half a million kroner or more per eliminated position.

The Tax Commission ignores these larger consequences because they would be unacceptable to many Danes. Indeed, cutting down graduate studies is the exact opposite of the government's own professed desire to invest more in research, raise the education level, and prepare for a future where a highly-educated workforce is the key to success. But this new tax proposal will shrink the pool of highly qualified graduates, eliminate faculty positions, close some MA programs, and undermine the efforts of Danish universities to remain competitive with other nations. It will further demoralize faculties (especially in the humanities) that have been suffering cutbacks for years already. One likely result could be a brain drain, as many of the very best graduates go to work in better financed universities abroad.

As far as education is concerned, this is not a tax reform but a reversal of the government's supposed program.

American Studies Research Engine

After the American Century

A new search engine is now available for all those interested in the culture, politics, history, and literature of the United States. It is the

American Studies Research Engine

Call it ASRE for short.

You can try it this handy tool immediately, as it is on the top right hand side of this page. Access more than 150 gateway sites that lead to approximately 25,000 web pages. These deal with all aspects of the United States, including collections in the Library of Congress, National Archives, Harvard University Library, Chicago Public Library, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and a great many specialized collections. There must be topics which it does not (yet) cover, but I have not been able to discover them.

This handy gadget is almost entirely free of commercial web sites, and it focuses largely on full texts. So, if you want to read a particular short story by Edgar Allen Poe or see original documents related to the building of Hoover Dam, for example, they are immediately available.

What has been left out of ASRE? All sites that want to sell you something. All sites that deal with other countries, other literatures, and most other subjects. Instead of getting 20,000 or 2 million sites to look over, which is impossible, ASRE provides a high-quality, selected list.

Using ASRE does not replace going into the library, and it does not replace using library data bases that are restricted to regular users, such as J-STOR, MUSE, and most newspaper indexes. In other words, ASRE is designed to cast a wide net that catches only good quality materials that can supplement what is available in library datebases. In many cases, such as finding materials for teaching or writing a short paper, it will be all you require.

I hope that this will be a useful tool for teachers and students and general readers. If anyone has suggestions for sites to include, please write to me at nye.technology@gmail.com

Compared to Biden, Palin Beyond the Pale

After the American Century

Compare Sarah Palin with Joe Biden. He went to the University of Delaware, majoring in history and political science, and then completed a law degree at Syracuse University. He was elected to the Senate when just 29 and now has served there for 35 years. He has been fully vetted by the press, as a result. There is little likelihood that there are any skeletons in his closet.

In contrast, Palin's shorter life remains largely undisclosed. Several blogs back I said that she had attended the University of Idaho for her BA. This was what it said on her official website, and I was silly enough to believe it. In fact, she attended four different schools, moving five times in the space of five years.

Hawaii Pacific University fall, 1982, in business administration
North Idaho College spring and fall, 1983, general studies
(whereabouts unclear) spring of 1984
University of Idaho fall 1984, spring 1985, broadcast journalism
Matanuska-Susitna College fall 1985,
University of Idaho spring 1986 to spring 1987, broacast journalism.

It seems difficult to uncover good reasons for all this moving around. In my more than three decades of teaching, I have found that such peripatetic students are rare, and usually there is something wrong. A student who moves that many times cannot build lasting friendships and usually there is something amiss when someone never settles down for long . It can be problems at home, poor grades, a stalker, a death in the family, pregnancy, or any number of things. College students can have a huge range of problems. Palin studied for nine semesters over a space of five years to get a four year degree. So either she failed some courses or some of them were not deemed transferable. There may be good explanations for this moving around, but it would be nice to know what was going on before election day. Even if the explanations are convincing, her education could not have been particularly coherent, being a mishmash of courses from different curricula.

None of the schools Palin attended is an educational powerhouse. They lie on the outer edges of quality. There is some meaning in the ratings of universities put out by various independent organizations, notably Business Week. None of the places Palin attended is in the top 400 institutions of higher learning in the United States. To bounce around in this educational nether world is not encouraging. At the very least, it suggests merely average intelligence and lack of focus. Her record is quite a contrast to Joe Biden's, who completed both his BA and law degree in the minimum time - 7 years - attending just two universities, both of them well-regarded.

Imagine that you have a job to fill. Not something as exalted as Vice President of the United States, but a mid-level position at a fortune 500 company. Imagine that Biden and Palin applied, and imagine that the selection process was blind. All you have to go on is their educational transcripts, with no idea of whether the candidates are male or female, old or young, experienced or not. Which one of these applicants would set alarm bells ringing, and which one would seem a good prospect? Biden alone stands for stability, rapid execution, and quality. Palin stands for uncertainly, instability, slow execution, and mediocrity. Palin just doesn't measure up.

There is a clear connection between having a second-rate, mishmash of an education and many of the policy positions Palin holds. How many well-educated people think that "creationism" is a valid theory that ought to be taught in the schools? She does. How many well-educated people think that global warming is not a problem and that it is not caused by human activities? She does. How many well-educated people would agree with Palin that there is never a good case for abortion, even when the mother's life is threatened or even when she has been raped? She does. Is there any pattern here?

It seems unlikely that Sarah Palin actually has any ideas beyond what she reads on the teleprompter. She merely has opinions that she has received uncritically from others. She is passionate about unexamined notions, and she has the self-righteous certainty of a poorly-furnished mind. Putting her a heartbeat away from the presidency would be the worst mistake the American electorate ever made. (And I make that statement with a full knowledge of some impressive past mistakes.)

Is Denmark a Model for the United States?

Can Americans Learn from Others?

For most of the time during the last 225 years Americans have been convinced that they live in the best country on earth. They have even seen it as exceptional, a nation like no other. But not too many Americans have looked carefully at the alternatives. They are told repeatedly that the American way is the best, and that the rest of the world is just trying to catch up.

So how about a reality check? I have been living in Denmark for long enough to make a knowledgeable comparison. I have written a short book to introduce outsiders to Denmark, but because it is addressed to people from anywhere who might be planning to visit or live there, I avoid making direct comparisons.

But in the next century I hope that Americans will look carefully at what they are not getting from their government. 

Imagine living in a country with universal health care paid for entirely out of taxes. I will not lie to you and say that Denmark has a perfect system, but it is one which supports both basic and applied research and that provides a high level of care. Quite possibly the Swedes have an even better system.

Imagine a country where handguns are illegal, and where the one or two murders that do occur in a week are almost all solved by the police. 

Imagine a country where the unemployment rate is less than 3%, and where those who are unable to get work receive free retraining and can get unemployment benefits for much longer than the six month limit in the United States.

Imagine a country which provides university education free to all citizens, and then, to make absolutely certain no one is left out, gives ALL students a scholarship big enough to cover housing and meals.

Imagine a country where automobiles are not absolutely essential to getting around, and where most families have only one, and middle-class people get along without one. this is possible because the state has made certain that there is a tightly integrated bus and train system. Certain parts of the US have begun to learn this again - they had it in c. 1905.

Imagine a country where the minimum wage is more than $12 an hour! This does make a restaurant meal more expensive, for example, but it is worth paying that, if it means almost no one lives in poverty. There is something deeply absurd about the US system where someone can work full time for the minimum wage and still be at the poverty line. 

How is the Danish system this possible? Taxes are higher, and much less is spent on the military. It is not unusual to pay 50% of your salary in taxes. I used to complain about the high taxes a lot when I first came to Denmark, but gradually I began to see that the quality of life in such a system is worth paying for. Danish parents all know that their children will have the chance to go to university if they graduate from gymnasium (high school). A Dane knows that full medical care will be available, even if one is unemployed. A Dane who does get laid off, can feel pretty confidant that they will get another job, and that in the meantime domestic life will go on without too many disruptions. In short, the Danish system reduces anxiety about the future and provides a basic safety net. 

There is no perfect society, but some are better organized, have better food, protect their citizens better, and so forth. We have all heard that joke about heaven being the place where different nationalities have specific roles. In my ideal world, the French run the restaurants, the Spanish operate the cafes, the Danes make the furniture, build windmills and run the social services, the English make TV detective programs, fill the theaters and organize pomp and circumstance, the Italians build the town squares and provide the opera, the Germans construct and maintain the cars, the Americans innovate, build the bathrooms, provide popular music, and make the pizza, while every country provides its own novels, classical music, and fine art.

Of course, nations do not remain static. They get better or worse. The English have learned to cook somewhat better in the last two decades, for example, even if they still build some quite awful houses decorated in what Danes are certain is terrible taste. But many of the English seem to know this, and to recognize that for them IKEA is a step up. So perhaps my fellow Americans can improve, too. My Christmas wish is that they will look seriously at other societies and see what they might learn from each.

If you want to read more about Denmark, have a look at 

David E. Nye, Denmark and the Danes: A Two Hour briefing

SDU Forlag, 2006 (available through Amazon.com)