The great divide...

between administrators and academics, from a NYT article on the growth of tuition-paying master's programs (conspicuously centered on Chicago's MAPSS program):

“Sometimes there is unused capacity in graduate classrooms,” Mr. Mehaffy said. “If there are 10 people in a graduate course one year and 15 the next, there is a 50 percent growth but no real drain on the institution.”

Riiight.

(I feel odd either expanding on what's wrong with this, which would seem pointless to those who have taught or taken graduate seminars, or not doing so, which would seem snobbish to those who haven't. Suffice it to say that the number of chairs in the classroom is not the only relevant measure of "capacity.")

The article itself is fine. I used to worry that these programs were purely exploitative of tuition-paying MA students. I then taught enough of them who were able to springboard into better doctoral programs than they otherwise could have done, and enough who were able to discover that grad school in the long term wasn't for them without going through the soul-crushing experience of leaving a doctoral program partway through, to decide that the students often seemed to think they were getting their money's worth.

Now I worry about something oddly unmentioned in the article. Elite undergraduate education has an ocean of financial aid and scholarships supporting it. Doctoral programs pay (meager but still measured in positive numbers) stipends that allow the students to get by, and typically don't charge tuition. To the degree that we arms-race our way into a position where this other credential is needed either for competitiveness in the job market or for competitiveness in doctoral admissions, we've introduced a stage that is wholly dependent on prior resources-- that is, a class-reinforcing rather than a class-mobility stage. This is already at the margins undermining some of the good of the wonderful American system of financial aid for elite undergrad education-- some undergrads are getting to the end of their BA and finding that they think they need a new degree, @ $30,000-$40,000 of tuition p/a for 1-2 years. And it seems likely to accelerate-- as the article notes, the interests of the students who can pay and the interests of the universities getting paid are simpatico here and will spiral. (The competitive value of the credential drives ever-more people to think they need it.)

This is less an indictment than a worry. I don't know how far along this path we are. I don't know how unavailable financial aid for those programs is. But I worry that a new piece is getting put into place in American higher education that works at cross-purposes to some of the existing pieces.

(Disclaimer: MA programs in the liberal arts disciplines such as political science are routine in Canada, and typically needed for admission to PhD programs-- bu tthe financial structure of them is very different, and the dynamics of the whole system are changed by the expectation that everyone will get such an MA. I'm not sure what I think about the Canadian system yet, but any problems with it are different from those described here. No one has to drop $35,000 to get one of our MAs in political science.)

Graduate conference in political theory

Call for Papers

Princeton University
Graduate Conference in Political Theory: April 11-12, 2008

The Committee for the Graduate Conference in Political Theory at Princeton University welcomes papers concerning any period, methodological approach, and/or topic in political theory, political philosophy, and/or the history of political thought. Approximately eight papers will be accepted.

Each session, led by a discussant from Princeton, will be focused exclusively on one paper and will feature an extensive question and answer period with Princeton faculty and students. Papers will be pre-circulated among conference participants.

The keynote address will be given by Professor Alan Ryan (Warden of New College, Oxford).

Please limit your paper submission to 7500 words and format it for
blind review (the file should include your title but also be free of personal and institutional information). Submissions are due by December 15, 2007 via the conference website, https://politicaltheory.princeton.edu/submit.php . Acceptance notices will be sent in January, 2008. Papers will be refereed on a blind basis by current graduate students in the Department of Politics at Princeton.

Assistance for invited participants’ transportation, lodging and meal expenses is available from the committee, which acknowledges the generous support of The Dean of the Graduate School, The University Center for Human Values, The Council of the Humanities, The Department of Classics, The Department of Politics, and The Department of Philosophy.

All papers should be submitted through the online form. Submissions by email or snail mail will not be accepted.

Questions and comments can be directed to: polthry@princeton.edu

For more information, please visit the conference website at: https://politicaltheory.princeton.edu/

It's that time

Friday's high: 92 degrees.

Sunday's low: 46 degrees.

Just sayin.'

Elsewhere

Brad DeLong posts a terrific and fascinating paper on economic history and the history of economic thought and the generations of development economics. Two tastes:

Thus in Marx's view, economic historians and development economists were or ought to be the same. In fact, all economists and economic historians ought to be the same. In fact, everybody ought to be an economic historian: studying the social and industrial history of England, and then applying its lessons everywhere around the globe, was the most important task. Economic historians ought to rule the world, for they held the key to the lock that opened the door behind which was concealed the answer to the riddle of human destiny. There was one qualification. As a secondary task one needed to be a political historian--and not a political historian of England, but of France. As Friedrich Engels said in a revealing moment, "Generally speaking, for the economical development of the bourgeoisie England is here taken as the typical country; for the political development, France." But the politics was added-on superstructure: the economy was fundamental base.

Now the cup that Marx offered turned out to be a poisoned chalice, and I think there were three reasons for this.

First, as a matter of historical understanding--well, (the mind does boggle at the grafting of France's political history onto England's industrial one. No country, anywhere, anytime has had the political history of France and the industrial history of England. A focus on politics tends to make one anticipate revolutions and seizures of state power and expect state-led economic transformation. But thumb-fingered states are capable of only certain types of economic transformations, and the free society of wealthy and productive associated producers that Marx tried to order was simply not on the menu. Taking France's political and England's economic history leading to mass revolution that produces a left anarchy as the model, and trying to explain every deviation from that as second-order factors imposing transitory disturbances on a dominant tendency--well, that is not an easy task.

[...]

Adam Smith had said, in lecture: "Little else is required to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice." For Rostow much more was required: The traditional economy. The creations of the preconditions for takeoff--an honest government, good market institutions, and commercial and financial sophistication. The "takeoff" itself--a substantial rise in the savings and investment rate made possible by the opportunities in leading sectors opened up by modern technology and financial mobilization, and that would transform the economy from an earth-bound to a sky-free creature. Followed by the drive to maturity, and the age of high mass consumption.

But in the decolonization age of the High Cold War the first priority of the Dulleses and the Rusks was to line up newly-independent countries and the older states of Latin America on the U.S. team for the great tug-of-war. And this required gaining the favor of the new princes who ruled. And as Machiavelli taught us long ago, there is nothing more difficult than being a new prince: all of one's energy must be devoted to state-building so that one does not rapidly become an ex-prince.

State-building requires that you make friends who will be your supporters, which requires that you make people who want to be your friends happy, which often means rich, which requires that you give them some other people's money, which requires that you find some other people with money whose money you can give, which tends not to be great for economic development. Rostow went with Kennedy to Indonesia. Rostow had primed Kennedy to negotiate on how the U.S. could aid Indonesian economic development. But Indonesian dictator Sukarno, stuck between a large rural land redistribution-seeking Communist movement and an army officered by the relatives of local notable landlords, did not think he could take the long view. Kennedy talked about the Peace Corps and aid and technical assistance and economic development and a South Asian Development Bank. Sukarno's response? "Mr. President, development takes too long. Give me West Irian instead"--West Irian being the western half of the island we westerners call New Guinea. Sukarno got West Irian, and the Year of Living Dangerously.

This should not have come as a great surprise. State-building, the pursuit of empire, and political organization always had an uneasy relationship with economic prosperity and growth.

Kerala

A NYT story on the Kerala model, much discussed by Sen and his followers, and the ways in which it is fiscally dependent on cash remittances from emigrants. I'm reminded of recurring discussions chez Will Wilkinson about whether the nation-state is a salient unit of economic analysis. Indian federal states are comparable in size to most nation-states in the world-- but they're not free-standing economies.

Conference announcement: CSPT: "Intellectual Foundings: J.G.A. Pocock and the Cambridge School"

INTELLECTUAL FOUNDINGS: J.G.A. POCOCK AND THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL

September 28, 2007
Columbia University, New York, NY

Co-sponsored by The Heyman Center for the Humanities, The Center for Law and
Philosophy, and The Columbia University Seminar on Political and Social Thought

"Intellectual Foundings" will celebrate and reconsider *The Ancient
Constitution and the Feudal Law*. Published fifty years ago by John Pocock, one of the principal founders of the CSPT, *The Ancient Constitution* launched the late twentieth century revolution in the study of the history of political thought that gave rise to what is widely labeled the "Cambridge School."

This conference will bring together a distinguished collection of
historians, legal thinkers, and political theorists to engage in a concentrated discussion of the intellectual vistas opened up--as well as of those which might have been supplanted or occluded--by this work and a few companion works of the same period.

Speakers will include David Armitage, Mark Bevir, Janelle Greenberg, Sudipta Kaviraj,
Donald Kelley, David Lieberman, Kirstie McClure, Robert Travers, Richard Tuck, and Melinda Zook.

We hope this event will be of interest to scholars of history and theory
from the U.S. west coast to the east, as well as points between, and Professor Pocock
himself has made plans to attend. All members of CSPT and other interested parties are welcome to attend; there is no fee for attendance.

To register for the conference, email Jonah Cardillo at jgc92@columbia.edu
with subject line "CSPT Conference Registration." Please include your name, affiliation, and address.

For more information, please visit the conference website:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/polisci/cspt/2007_conference.html.

We hope to see you there!

Best,

David Johnston and Kirstie McClure, CSPT Co-chairs

PHD

Jorge Cham, creator of the indispensable Piled Higher and Deeper, is coming to town.

Methods in political theory

There's a big discussion at Crooked Timber; there was a big discussion following Andrew Rehfeld's "Offensive Political Theory" at APSA; there was a big discussion at our theorists' group dinner Friday night at APSA; there's a new Piled Higher and Deeper strip that seems to call into question our place in the social sciences. Must be something in the water.

Reading list

Colin Farrelly reviews Vermeule's Judging Under Uncertainty.

A busy fall

Conference announcement: Immigration, Minorities, and Multiculturalism in Democracies, October 25 – 27, 2007,
Fairmont Queen Elizabeth, Montréal.

The complete program is too big to post; go have a look. This is a project of the Major Collaborative Research Initiative on Ethnicity and Democratic Governance.

And don't forget the other conferences earlier this fall: Pluralism, Politics, and God? An International Symposium on Religion and Public Reason, September 13-15; and The Plural States of Recognition, September 27-29.

To read after class:

The NYT has posted a lengthy article-interview of Jack Goldsmith by Jeffrey Rosen, to appear in next week's NYT Magazine.

Now Goldsmith is speaking out. In a new book, “The Terror Presidency,” which will be published later this month, and in a series of conversations I had with him this summer, Goldsmith has recounted how, from his first weeks on the job, he fought vigorously against an expansive view of executive power championed by officials in the White House, including Alberto Gonzales, who was then the White House counsel and who recently resigned as attorney general, and David Addington, who was then Vice President Cheney’s legal adviser and is now his chief of staff. [...]

Goldsmith told me that he has decided to speak publicly about his battles at the Justice Department because he hopes that “future presidents and people inside the executive branch can learn from our mistakes.” In his view, American presidents for the foreseeable future will, like George W. Bush, face enormous pressure to be aggressive and pre-emptive in taking measures to prevent another terrorist attack in the United States. At the same time, Goldsmith notes, everywhere the president looks, critics — as well as his own lawyers — are telling him that pre-emptive actions may violate international law as well as U.S. criminal law. What, exactly, are the legal limits of executive power in the post-9/11 world? How should administration lawyers negotiate the conflict between the fear of attacks and the fear of lawsuits?

In Goldsmith’s view, the Bush administration went about answering these questions in the wrong way. Instead of reaching out to Congress and the courts for support, which would have strengthened its legal hand, the administration asserted what Goldsmith considers an unnecessarily broad, “go-it-alone” view of executive power. As Goldsmith sees it, this strategy has backfired. “They embraced this vision,” he says, “because they wanted to leave the presidency stronger than when they assumed office, but the approach they took achieved exactly the opposite effect. The central irony is that people whose explicit goal was to expand presidential power have diminished it.”

APSA blogging

Larry Solum has posted his copious notes from one of the best events I saw at APSA, the "new originalism" roundtable.

CFP: Montesquieu

The Society for Social and Political Philosophy
(www.sspp.us)
is pleased to issue
a CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS
for a Roundtable on Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws

The Roundtable is to be held at Skidmore College
Saratoga Springs, New York
on March 21-23, 2008.

This Roundtable is designed to explore Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748). We chose this text because our notion of Enlightenment Political Philosophy, and perhaps even Modern Political Philosophy more broadly, has been dominated by the classical theorists of the contract tradition. We need to pay more attention to figures like Montesquieu, who form a counter-tradition in political modernity.

Given the influence of the implicit and explicit norms of the contract tradition on most contemporary political philosophy, the question is not merely of historical value. As a thinker outside of the mainstream tradition of political philosophy, Montesquieu may be a resource for rethinking pressing contemporary questions that have remained stubborn blind spots: especially questions about the passions and political life; about political virtue; about democracy and liberalism. In addition, both Montesquieu and the counter-tradition of political modernity more generally have been significant to post-enlightenment figures in political and continental philosophy like Marx, Deleuze, Schmitt, Negri, Arendt, and Berlin, to name only a few.

Applicants need not be experts in Montesquieu or in 18th century political theory. Applicants must, however, have an expertise in some area of social or political philosophy. Applicants must also be interested in teaching one another and in nurturing the ongoing exploration of the history of political thought.

If selected for participation, applicants will deliver a written, roundtable-style presentation on a specific part or theme of the text. Topics can be historical (e.g. influence of The Spirit of the Laws in the 18th century), contemporary (e.g. liberalism and The Spirit of the Laws), figure-driven (e.g. Marx and The Spirit of the Laws) or thematic (e.g. politics of the passions and affects). However, all topics must relate centrally back to some aspect of The Spirit of the Laws.

Prior to composing their applications, applicants are encouraged to review either the French original of The Spirit of the Laws or the 1989 translation from Cambridge University Press by A. Cohler et al. The Cohler is the official English translation, and it will be used by participants reading in English at the roundtable in March.





Roundtable participants must be members of the society in good standing.
You can become a member of the society at http://www.pdcnet.org/member-sspp.html
or by following the membership link at
www.sspp.us

Spaces are limited.

Applicants should send the following materials as email attachments to papers@sspp.us by October 1, 2007:

1. Curriculum Vitae
2. One page statement of interest in the project. (Please include a discussion of topics that you would be willing to explore in a roundtable presentation. Please also include the projected significance of participation for your research or teaching.)

All applicants will be notified about the outcome of the selection process via email on or before November 1, 2007. Participants will then be asked to send a draft, abstract, or outline of their roundtable presentation to papers@sspp.us

by March 1, 2008 so that we can put together a final program.

POLI 433

The syllabus for POLI 433, "History of Political and Social Thought 3: The 17th and 18th centuries," is online.

This is a course in the history of western political and social thought in early modern times—broadly the 17th and 18th centuries. It spans the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the American and French Revolutions, a period that brought most of the political ideas of the west into recognizably modern form. The significant themes in the period include social contract theory as a mode of political justification; the idea of a break with ancient and medieval, Aristotelian and Thomist, thought; the possibility of a shared political life among members of different religious groups; popular consent; the rise of commercial and polished society, and the meaning of progress; the right to revolt; and the idea of a constitution.

First class is in Arts 145, next Tuesday at 1:05 pm. Space is available in the class. Prior coursework in political theory, political philosophy, or intellectual history is required.

Media again

I'll apparently be discussing reasonable accommodation etc at 7:20 am on 940 AM, which can be listened to here.

The current excuse for a flare-up of attention on the topic (not that it's ever far from the news) is that yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the famous Bill 101 in Quebec. And former PQ premier Bernard Landry took the occasion to say that Quebec is neither bilingual (which legally it is) nor multicultural (which sociologically Montreal clearl is). We may be seeing a trial balloon electoral strategy for the PQ, trying to protect itself against the ADQ: try to tie together old Quebec language resentments with standard-issue rural and working class distrust of immigrants and religious pluralism. This needn't be pure laine-- Landry went out of his way to stress that an acculturated Haitian Quebecoise Pequiste is as much a member of Quebec culture as he is-- but it will be unpleasant.

Calvin Normore is coming to McGill

Via Brian Leiter:

Calvin Normore, one of the world's leading scholars of medieval philosophy (who also works in political philosophy and logic) at UCLA, has accepted the Macdonald Chair in Moral Philosophy at McGill University, where he will join the faculty in fall 2008. That's a major hire for McGill, which will solidify its position as a leading center for history of philosophy. (Normore will continue as an Honorary Research Professor in the American summers/Australian winters at the University of Queensland.)

Media

I'm likely to be on CBC radio this afternoon about 5:40, discussing the Taylor-Bouchard commission, the accommodation of immigrant cultures in Quebec, and Quebecois attitudes toward multiculturalism.

Update: False alarm.

A question for APSA old-timers

It seems to me that the switch from the Panel Paper Room to PROceedings online has resulted in a very dramatic reduction in the number of papers being circulated. It seems to me that there was a genuine strong norm in favor of bringing papers to the PPR in the old days-- it was stated as a rule, and while some papers were too drafty to be circulated and some senior people didn't bother, most papers were in there.

Now as I browse through the (terrible) PROceedings site (click "browse," click on the name of the section or division, e.g. Foundations of Political Theory,, you wish to browse through, you get to the list of panel names; click on a panel name, you see the list of papers that have been uploaded, if any; click "back," and instead of returning to the list of Foundations panels, you're returned to the home page-- maddening) it seems to me that the modal number of papers per panel that are actually uploaded is zero. It also seems to me that this wasn't true in the first few years after the switch-- that is, the norm stuck for a little while but is now close to dead.

Explanations? Is it the terrible site, the worry about putting drafts online, some combination? Or am I hallucinating that there's a phenomenon here at all?

Recommended reading on the republican guarantee

Via Solum, Huey Long and the Guarantee Clause: Transformation by Assassination, by Gerard Magliocca. Magliocca's book on Jackson was already high on my to-buy-and-read list. This terrific piece of constitutional history tells me that I should add him to my list of authors whose work I go out of my way to keep track of.

This Article contends that the assassination of Huey P. Long (The Kingfish) of Louisiana was a major turning point in the development of New Deal constitutionalism. Following his election as Governor in 1928, Long built one of the most formidable political machines ever seen in the United States. Indeed, he amassed so much power that contemporary observers routinely called his regime the first dictatorship in our history. For instance, Long abolished minority rights in the legislature, curtailed judicial review, took over the vote counting system, established a State Board of Censors to regulate political speech, and declared martial law against his opponents. Moving rapidly on to the national stage with his election to the Senate – he was Senator and Governor at the same time – Long established a national “Share Our Wealth” movement with the goal of challenging Franklin D. Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination in 1936.

The abuses in Louisiana triggered a broad national debate about whether the State still had a republican form of government as required by the Guarantee Clause of Article Four. Eventually, this outbreak of popular constitutionalism reached the President, who was desperate to find a way to stop Long. Not only did the President discuss the issue in press conferences, but he asked the Justice Department to examine the question in a lengthy memorandum. In August 1935, the House of Representatives took the first step to invoke the Guarantee Clause by forming a Select Committee to examine the question. A few weeks later, however, Long was killed and the inquiry was abandoned.

By cutting this confrontation short, Long's assassin unintentionally laid the foundation for modern judicial supremacy. But for this shocking event, the Special Committee would have almost certainly issued a report defining: (1) which rights being infringed in Louisiana were fundamental; and (2) which institutional practices there were so abusive that they struck at the heart of self-government. Such a report, coming in the midst of the collapse in Lochnerian doctrine, would have been an authoritative act of constitutional interpretation on major issues such as incorporation, voting rights, and the status of political minorities. Instead, the task of filling this vacuum fell entirely to the Supreme Court, which began that effort with the most famous footnote in the law - Footnote Four of United States v. Carolene Products. To a significant extent, Footnote Four's analysis of the conditions under which laws should receive heightened scrutiny was the judicial substitute for a congressional report on Long and the Guarantee Clause.

Accordingly, this Article makes three significant contributions. First, it provides the first detailed treatment (in a law review context) of Huey Long's dictatorship. Second, it documents the last serious effort to use the Guarantee Clause, which disappeared from serious legal discourse after 1935. Third, it provides a window into a fascinating counterfactual world that was only closed off by a highly improbable act.

As I discuss a bit here, the republican guarantee clause was originally thought to be a very important part of the constitutional order-- the central mechanism for central government protection of freedom within states. Indeed I wish I'd had access to this paper when writing mine, since I talk about the republican guarantee in the early era and the Carolene Products jurisprudence arising out of the New Deal era, but had no idea that the two had this kind of bridge between them.

Signs of old age

The annual Beloit College "mindset list," which sadistically helpfully reminds professors just how young the incoming frosh are, is out. Most disturbing this year:

2. Humvees, minus the artillery, have always been available to the public.
23. Wal-Mart has always been a larger retailer than Sears and has always employed more workers than GM.
27. Al Gore has always been running for president or thinking about it.
47. High definition television has always been available.
53. Tiananmen Square is a 2008 Olympics venue, not the scene of a massacre.
55. MTV has never featured music videos.
66. The World Wide Web has been an online tool since they were born.

That last doesn't seem quite right. Average frosh enter at 18; 2007-18= 1989. Lynx and Mosaic weren't launched until 1993, and I'd say that the birth of the browser is the real birth of the WWW. But anyway, HTML was invented in late 1990-- the frosh were babies, but not unborn.

Decisions, decisions

What panels to attend? APSA panel times for which I seem unable even to reduce the number of options below three, and often seem stuck at four.


Thursday, August 30, 8 am:

Roundtable: Author Meets Critics: Joshua Foa Dienstag, "Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit"

Roundtable: What Do Empirical Political Scientists Need or Want (If Anything) From Normative Political Theory?

Roundtable: Constituting Republican Government

Political Theory Beyond the State


Thursday, August 30, 4:15 pm:

Roundtable: How Should Normative Political Theorists Use Empirical Findings?

Roundtable: Knud Haakonssen's Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith

Moderation and Fanaticism

Friday, August 31, 10:15 am:

Roundtable: Modernity as a Crossdisciplinary and Interdisciplinary Concept

Roundtable: The Political Theory of Bernard Williams

Is Political Theory 'Beyond Political Science'?

Roundtable: Authors Meet Critics: Walter Murphy's Constitutional Democracy: Creating and Maintaining a Just Political Order and Donald Lutz's Principles of Constitutional Design

Friday, August 31, 2 pm:

Contours of Black Political Thought: Panel I

Images of Federalism in Early Modern and Contemporary Europe

The Problem of Political Obligation

Roundtable: Is Federalism Theory Poor or Theory Rich?


Saturday, September 1, 2 pm:

Virtue and the American Founding

Roundtable: Iris Marion Young: Legacies for Feminist Theory

Roundtable: What's New About the New Originalism?

Global Justice

I don't think I'm getting more indecisive in my old age. I think it's just an unusually good program unusually badly clustered...

Visiting Faculty Fellowships

at the new Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto.

PQ wants full immigration control for Quebec

From the Gazette:

Quebec should have total control over its immigration to send a clear message to newcomers that the province is a francophone state, not a bilingual one, Parti Quebecois Leader Pauline Marois said on Tuesday[...]

Marois believes Quebec needs to attract more immigrants, especially to cope with a declining birthrate and employment needs, but she stressed the province has to send a very clear message to those who decide to settle in Quebec.

"Many of them believe that they are settling in a bilingual state. It's not true. Quebec is a francophone state that respects the rights of its anglophone minority. And when you live in Quebec, you live in French," Marois stated.

She pressed Premier Jean Charest to negotiate with the federal government to gain control over the 40 per cent of immigrants to the province that it does not already handle. Under a 1991 agreement, Quebec can choose the immigrants who have money to invest here and decide how it integrates them. But Ottawa keeps dealing with refugees and immigrants coming to reunite with family members.

Marois argued it's fair to ask for that since Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government recognized Quebec as a nation. Having additional powers would allow Quebec to choose immigrants that will more easily blend into Quebec's culture and values, Marois added.

That last bit is a clever if probably-inevitable reverse-judo attempt. Harper defanged the "nation" question by embracing the word; the PQ can't afford to let that be as free of consequences as Harper would like it to be.

Notice that the PQ is not only playing to traditional themes here. It's also trying to recapture the part of its base that it lost to the anti-immigrant ADQ in the last election-- partly by playing on a subtle distancing between Montreal and the rest of Quebec. Montreal is clearly ground zero of bilingualism in the province, as well as being ground zero of the non-francophone new immigration. The ADQ objects to Montreal as a place and the new immigrants as a group, though language isn't its primary issue. If the PQ can pick up on the rural voters' annoyance at immigrant-heavy Montreal, it may not much matter whether the annoyance is cast as a language issue rather than a religion or race issue. This will be a tricky balance for the traditionally Montreal-francophone-elite centered PQ, but is absolutely necessary for them to figure it out.

I had just been thinking...

about what a shame it is that Phi Beta Cons, National Review's blog ostensibly about higher education, is such an embarrassing waste. The idea of a consistent source of conservative commentary on higher education, written by people who can distinguish between good and bad research, and who are invested in and knowledgeable about higher education, is quite appealing. It seems to me like something that's genuinely missing from the world. But, of course, PBC none of these things. It is instead dedicated to arguing that professors have too much vacation time except that they're all busily whittling away at the foundations of western civilization, that the successful firing of a fraud-committing tenured professor shows the importance of abolishing tenure, that standards of excellence are under mortal threat from the multiculturalist left but shouldn't be compared in importance to, say, fraternities and the need to admit football players, and that affirmative action (for blacks who are not football players) is the very worstest yucky thing in the world, ever.

Then I noticed that it was Inside Higher Ed, and not PBC, that was carrying the following news item-- something that would be of interest to a large number of conservatives who are interested in higher education:

Hillsdale College, which for more than 20 years has declined to accept federal funds, said Monday that it would no longer take financial aid money from the state of Michigan either, The Detroit News reported. Hillsdale officials said in a statement that they would relinquish about $670,000 in state tuition aid that about 350 students at the private institution receive annually and replace the money with private scholarship funds.

Not a huge deal-- but since Hillsdale is both a minor cause celebre among American conservatives for its rejection of federal funds and a longtime patron of conservative thought, the people most likely to find it interesting and important would be PBC's likely readership. Instead, the blog is busy with Candace de Russy's response to the (well-known and correct) argument that the humanities and most social sciences are over- and badly-regulated by Institutional Review Boards that inappropriately apply standards derived from biomedical experiments to all research involving "human subjects."

Her response? The rhetorical "But is there too much oversight or too little?" followed by an non-sequiter about inadequate oversight... of three biomedical studies.

Update: Phoebe Maltz suggests that the problem is structural, that there probably couldn't be such a venue for responsible conservative commentary on the academy. I think she's onto something but that it doesn't have to be as bad as PBC...

Inuit reach deal with Quebec

The Montreal Gazette:

ELIZABETH THOMPSON, The Gazette

Quebec's Inuit have reached a landmark agreement in principle with Ottawa and Quebec City to create an Inuit-controlled government covering the northernmost third of the province.

It will be unlike any other level of government in Canada. Answerable to Quebec's National Assembly, the Nunavik Regional Government will encompass not only the functions normally assumed by a municipality but also those of a school board and a health authority.

"It's quite unique," said Jean-François Arteau, chief negotiator for the Inuit-run Makivik Corporation. "We'll have real elected officials taking real decisions for issues regarding Nunavik residents."

Arteau said the deal should be instrumental in helping the Inuit take charge of their own future and find the solutions best adapted to their communities.

For example, when it comes to a problem such as youth protection or suicide prevention, the new government will be able to adopt a comprehensive strategy that encompasses both education and social services, he said.

The regional government will also have the power to allocate resources where it believes they are most needed, he said.

For example, money can be allocated to address the area's housing shortage instead of being locked in to such specific programs as small business creation. "With the same amount of money, they will be able to do better and manage it more efficiently."

[...]

While contained in only 25 pages, the agreement in principle sets out a detailed blueprint for the Nunavik Regional Government, which will govern the territory north of the 55th parallel, even further north than the giant James Bay hydro-electric site.

The existing Kativik Regional Government, the Kativik School Board and the Nunavik Regional Board of Health and Social Services will be amalgamated to create one regional government. It will be run by a Nunavik Assembly, consisting of at least 21 elected members including representatives of each of the territory's 14 communities. An executive council, consisting of five members of the Assembly and headed by the Leader of the Executive Council, will carry out decisions reached by the Assembly.

While the Nunavik Regional Government will have the power to impose property taxes in addition to money it will continue to receive from Quebec and Ottawa, it will not have the authority to collect income or sales taxes. Arteau said the second phase of the agreement, yet to be negotiated, will deal with such issues as royalties for mining in the mineral-rich territory.

Hmm. Good news, but I'm uneasy. There's no mention of any legislative authority, and the reference to municipal powers makes me suspect that legislative authority will be extremely weak and-- more important-- at the ongoing mercy of the Quebec National Assembly. Indigenous self-government can be a powerful force, but there's a constant danger that the indigenous government will become little more than the local branch of social workers and social service administrators controlling the use of funds allocated elsewhere. I'm reminded of the failed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in Australia, and policies there that amounted to self-administration, not self-government.

Development as such doesn't seem to be anybody's priority. (While I don't think that small businesses are best fostered with subsidies, it's a bad sign when that's the only example of something that's not worth spending money on, with no discussion of what the better ways to foster them would be.) And it's worrisome to have resource royalties be punted when that would be one of the chief local sources of revenue.

But I'll provisionally file it under "good news as far as it goes," especially on the basis that a unified level of Inuit government might simply provide a more powerful political voice and focal point for political strength than has existed before. (This is an argument about why even weak and apparently doomed-to-be-unsuccessful indigenous self-government is probably worth having in an essat in Nomos from a couple years ago.)

Update: there's a map in this story.