Jacob Christensen

I am generally the last person who should advise anybody about parenting but I used to think that it was a good thing that students had children while they were – well, students. Sure, students do not have that much money, but they have a certain degree of flexibility in their lives, and we also know that demographers and doctors yak about Danish women having their children too late in life.

But as a university person, I am now obliged to say to (female) students who announce their pregnancy:

I’m so sorry. As you know, this will delay your studies and we can’t afford this. So on behalf of the Minister of Science and Technology, I must advice you to have an abortion.

Surprising? Well, as part of the drive to turn universities from research and development units into units of production (we don’t educate people in this country – we produce ST?s), the minister has come up with a bonus for each student who finishes his (!) education within the time-norm. And – drum roll – this norm expressively does not allow for parental leave.

It’s not that nobody told the minister or the ministry – they have been made aware of the situation and decided to stick with their original proposal (but then, nobody gets the minister or the ministry to change their minds).¹

And that means that university lecturers and professors must now do their utmost to prevent female students to get pregnant.

Update: The Red-Green Alliance is on the track. Cf. footnote.

1. The minister’s excuse is that it is technically impossible to see if a student has been on parental leave. Yeah, right. This is Denmark where just about everything about everybody gets registered. [↩]

When you’re a professor, the “dream” is “Did I have a lecture later today?”.

1. Political journalism, part 1, part 2 (sign-off: Thanks for spoiling my morning, Henry!)
2. The world in general

From my time in Sweden, I, like my colleagues, had a tendency to view the financing of higher education as counter-cyclical: Basically, a recession would bring more students and more money, a boom fewer students and less money.

In the US, the tendency is the other way round, at least for private universities which now suffer under the financial crisis. And more bad news.

HT: Leiter Reports.

There has been a debate in recent weeks over the increasing use of English at Danish universities and at some point, when I have the time, I might make a comment about that issue. But in the meantime, the BBC adds a fascinating perspective to the apparent victory of English over national languages:

In a meeting with colleagues from around the world, including an Englishman, a Korean and a Brazilian, he noticed that he and the other non-native English speakers were communicating in a form of English that was completely comprehensible to them, but which left the Englishman nonplussed.

He, Jean-Paul Nerriere, could talk to the Korean and the Brazilian in this neo-language, and they could understand each other perfectly.

But the Englishman was left out because his language was too subtle, too full of meaning that could not be grasped by the others.

DN gives us the headline to end all headlines:

Cow-dung used as fuel creates giant brown haze over India

Tasteful, no?

Henry Farrell tells us that political scientists are less un-hot than most other academics:

Second, the above proviso aside, political scientists are pretty damn hot in comparative terms. We rank as number 5, trailing only languages, law, religion and criminal justice. From eyeballing the data, it looks as though there is a minor discontinuity right after political science, where the hotness lurches down a notch, and another, more significant one between psychology (at number 10) and finance (at number 11).

Inspired by this. Daniel Drezner also weighs in. I would assume that in terms of hotness, Salma Hayek would beat any PolSci professor easily, though.

Ooops…

Cool title, huh? Anyway, I’m not going to write anything substantial about it but in case any of the negot (sort of business economics plus languagues) students from SDU in Odense (nope, no more commuting to Copenhagen, at least not for the next nine months) drop by, this is the core of the reading list for the spring semester’s course:

• Johan Fritzell et al, 2001: Nordic Welfare States in the European Context. London: Routledge.
• Christopher Pierson and Francis G. Castles (eds), 2006: The Welfare State Reader, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Articles and additional material to be announced.

Ideen om tid til fordybelse hører industrialderen til. (The idea about time to concentrate in a subject belongs to the industrial age).

Hanne Løngreen. Vice-dean of the Faculty of the Humanities, University of Copenhagen, quoted in the Danish newspaper Politiken about the role of universities.

Sausage factory, anyone?

Update: Surname of the boot camp manager vice-dean corrected. Or is copy-editing also considered so 19th Century by contemporary university managers?

Harry Brighouse about grading and its problems.

I think there is a tendency to think that grades are there to reward, or signal, individual merit, and excellent achievement.

…

I now think that is just a wrongheaded view about what grades are for. For two reasons. First, in nearly 20 years of teaching in research universities I regularly—in just about every class—come across students who are smarter than I am and more promising than I was at their age, but there have only been 4 or 5 students whose work placed them unambiguously well above the rest of the top quarter, and only one whose work stunned me.

…

Second, it is not really true that high achievers are, by virtue of that, meritorious. To the extent that achievement is the product of natural talent, or fortuitious environment, which in most cases is considerable, it is not meritorious, but a matter of brute luck on the part of the achiever. I agree with political theorist Michael Sandel that one of the deep flaws of our social environment is that it sends lots of signals to high achievers that they are somehow meritorious in virtue of their achievement and need not feel humble or an obligation to turn their talents to the service of others less fortunate. Universities already participate in that culture, there is no need for the grading system to further mislead. Anyway, high achievement in a particular class is not always the result of effort in that class. The best predictor of achievement in a class is prior achievement in the subject that class teaches; some students routinely achieve at a lower level than other students because they are more intellectually ambitious, and thus (in my opinion) more academically meritorious.

Much more at Crooked Timber.