Shameless self-promotion

According to statistics kept by Sage, my recent article (entitled "Eco-Terrorism or Justified Resistance? Radical Environmentalism and the 'War on Terror'") was at #3 on the list of "The 50 Most-Frequently Read Articles" from Politics & Society during August 2005 (behind only Margaret Levi's 2003 essay on fair trade and Sean O Riain's 2000 analysis of the "Celtic Tiger"), and was highest among those from the current issue. And believe it or not, none of the web traffic used to generate those statistics came from me. Of course, a variety of possible explanations may account for this high level of interest (some of them bad), but I nonetheless shamelessly encourage everybody that hasn't yet read the essay to do so, as I may perhaps then retain this lofty perch for September.

Textbook Maintenance Organizations

Commenting upon a GAO study that found that the price of college textbooks has been rising at double the rate of inflation, Ian Ayres compares this phenomenon to the "eerily analogous" inflation of prescription drug prices.

In both cases you have doctors (Ph.D.'s or M.D.'s) prescribing products. In neither case does the doctor pay for the product prescribed - in many cases, he or she doesn't even know what it costs. And the clincher is that in both cases, the manufacturers sell the same product at substantially reduced prices abroad.

His solution, then, is to build price-capping incentives into universities in the same way that HMOs contain costs. Textbooks, he proposes, could be provided to students gratis as part of their tuition package. As he notes: "Of course tuition would have to rise, but for the first time universities would start caring about whether their professors were too extravagant in the selection of class materials." Professors, then, could be put upon a strict budget, and "those who exceeded the budget would have to seek their deans' approval. Some enlightened colleges might even give a share of the savings to professors who don't use up all of their budgets."

As a professor at a state university that has taken its hits from the state budget axe (and seen double digit tuition increases as a result), I'm both intrigued and horrified by his proposal. On one hand, I've always been concerned with the price of books I order for students, and recognize the inflationary tendencies of those prices (which I would attribute to diminished competition and the privatization of the textbook market, as well as to the monopoly pricing of college book stores). On the other hand, though, administration bean-counters "assisting" in text selection decisions on cost criteria alone presents a rather unattractive picture. Often, the high cost of texts in my fields (political science and philosophy) owes in part to the royalties and permissions required to assemble a high-quality anthology or edited volume (though low cost/low quality alternatives abound), and this proposed "textbook maintenance organization" may well end up delivering a significantly lower quality product in line with its slightly (though this is a bit hard to comprehend, given recent tuition increases in Minnesota) lower costs.

A new Ministry of Truth?

From the U.S. State Department's website:

“U.S. engagement in the world and the Department of State's engagement of the American public are indispensable to the conduct of foreign policy. The Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, Karen Hughes, helps ensure that public diplomacy (engaging, informing, and influencing key international audiences) is practiced in harmony with public affairs (outreach to Americans) and traditional diplomacy to advance U.S. interests and security and to provide the moral basis for U.S. leadership in the world.”

While propaganda is a legitimate state function (within limits), the Bush administration's unsuccessful previous effort at corporate-style "branding" U.S. foreign policy is apparently now being replaced by an old school quasi-military psyop campaign. Compare the above mission statement to the following:

"In this war, which was total in every sense of the word, we have seen many great changes in military science. It seems to me that not the least of these was the development of psychological warfare as a specific and effective weapon."
General Dwight D. Eisenhower

"If we do go to war, psychological operations are going to be absolutely a critical, critical part of any campaign that we must get involved in."
General H. Norman Schwarzkopf

I can't help but wonder how this campaign works "in harmony" with "outreach to Americans" and "traditional diplomacy" to provide a "moral basis" for U.S. military hegemony and its rejection of either multilateralism or humanitarianism. Maybe John Bolton would know.

APA protects academic freedom

Another summer vacation come and gone (and too quickly), so here's a short note from the American Philosophical Association website on academic freedom and the so-called "Academic Bill of Rights" legislation about which I've previously posted:

The current campaign to promote "Academic Bill of Rights" legislation in state and national legislatures threatens to injure the practice of academic freedom in teaching and research by university professors. The threat posed to academic freedom, coupled with an increase in reports of philosophers as targets of harassment, has prompted the Committee for the Defense of Professional Rights of Philosophers to compile information and advice on its webpage. The committee urges philosophers to inform themselves about the proposed legislation and to report incidents of which they are aware (the posting of unauthorized "class canceled" signs, public labeling of faculty as "communists" or "terrorist sympathizers," and so on).