Ah, France

Fast-food chain Quick triggers an uproar and is accused of acting "contrary to the principles and spirit of the republic" when it makes the business decision to serve only halal beef at some restaurants. (Mind you, it's not as though this means only serving Muslim customers-- Christians and non-believers can eat halal beef without getting cooties.)

Compare, of course, the Quebec sugar shack case.

Contra Fuller

See Eugene Volokh on a proposed Arizona abolition of freedom of contract and choice of law.

Conference: "Le multiculturalisme a-t-il un avenir ?"

Le multiculturalisme a-t-il un avenir ?

26-27 FÉVRIER 2010 : COLLOQUE (UNIVERSITÉ PARIS I - PANTHÉON-SORBONNE)

vendredi 26 février

Salle 1 (Centre Panthéon, 12, place du Panthéon 75005 Paris)

Président de séance : Patrick Savidan (Université de Poitiers)

8h45-9h00 : Catherine Larrère (Université Sorbonne-Paris 1) Mot de bienvenue

9h00-9h40 : Will Kymlicka (Université Queen’s) The Essentialist Critique of Multiculturalism

9h40-10h20 : Cécile Laborde (University College London) Pour un républicanisme critique

10h20-10h50 : Questions

10h50-11h10 : Pause café

11h10-11h50 : Michel Wieviorka (EHESS) Le multiculturalisme : un concept à reconstruire ?

11h50-12h10 : Répondante : Catherine Audard (London School of Economics)

12h10-12h30 : Questions

Après-midi : Deux ateliers en sessions parallèles

Atelier 1 : L’institutionnalisation du multiculturalisme : enjeux juridiques, éthiques et identitaires

Salle 1 (Centre Panthéon, 12, place du Panthéon 75005 Paris)

Président de séance : Vincent Geisser (CNRS)

14h30-14h50 : Serge Guimond (Université Blaise Pascal) Les normes nationales d’intégration au Canada anglais, en France, en Angleterre, en Allemagne et aux USA

14h50-15h10 : Daniel Kofman (Université d’Ottawa) Multiculturalism as a demarcation between rights of majorities and minorities

15h10-15h40 : Questions

15h40-16h00 : Pause café

16h00-16h20 : Pieter Dronkers (Université d’Utrecht) Loyal to the tricolor

16h20-16h40 : Elke Winter (Université d’Ottawa) Nous, les autres et eux : la constitution discursive des identités collectives multiculturelles 16h40-17h00 : Dimitrios Karmis (Université d’Ottawa) Quelle hospitalité pour le multiculturalisme de demain ?

17h00-17h45 : Questions

Atelier 2 : Revisiter le modèle de la tolérance religieuse

Salle 216 (Centre Panthéon, 12, place du Panthéon 75005 Paris)

Président de séance : Christophe Bertossi (IFRI)

14h30-14h50 : François Boucher (Université Queen’s) Le fondement égalitariste des pratiques d’accommodement de la diversité religieuse

14h50-15h10 : Paul May (EHESS et UQAM) La laïcité selon Charles Taylor : une perspective critique

15h10-15h40 : Questions

15h40-16h00 : Pause café

16h00-16h20 : Roberto Merrill (CEHUM, Université de Minho) Minorités illibérales, droits de sortie et neutralité de l’Etat : entre tolérance et autonomie

16h20-16h40 : Laurent de Briey (Université de Namur) Le foulard de la parlementaire. Construction d’une interculturalité ou régression démocratique ?

16h40-17h00 : Denise Helly (INRS, Université de Montréal) Les juges de droit familial et les causes « musulmanes » au Québec et en Ontario

17h00-17h45 : Questions

20h30 : Dîner

Samedi 27 février

Matinée : Deux ateliers en sessions parallèles

Atelier 3 : Le modèle multiculturaliste : réappropriations et résistances

Salle 419B (Centre Panthéon, 12, place du Panthéon 75005 Paris)

Président de séance : Pap Ndiaye (EHESS)

9h00-9h20 : Patrick Imbert (Université d’Ottawa) Une lecture de Charles Taylor, Will Kymlicka et du multiculturalisme canadien par Daniel Bonilla Maldonado en fonction de la Colombie et de La constitucíon multicultural

9h20-9h40 : Magali Bessone (Université de Rennes 1) Multiculturalisme et construction nationale : le cas de la Bosnie-Herzégovine

9h40-10h10 : Questions

10h10-10h30 : Pause café

10h30-10h50 : Jessica Franklin et Karen Bird (Université de McMaster) From colour-blindness to recognition : Political paths to new identity practices in Brazil and France

10h50-11h10 : Milena Doytcheva (Université de Lille 3) Lutte contre les discriminations et “promotion de la diversité” : la difficile émergence d’une question minoritaire en France

11h10-11h30 : Sophie Guérard de Latour (Université de Bordeaux 3) La France perd-elle la mémoire ? Républicanisme, histoire nationale et reconnaissance des minorités

11h30-12h15 : Questions

Atelier 4 : Jeunesse et éducation dans les sociétés multiculturelles

Salle 420B (Centre Panthéon, 12, place du Panthéon 75005 Paris)

Présidente de séance : Gabrielle Radica (Université de Picardie)

9h00-9h20 : Tine Brouckaert et Karima Guezzou (Universités de Ghent et de Saint-Etienne) Comment négocier que les enfants de sans papiers, deviennent de futurs citoyens acceptés tout en laissant une place à leurs droits à la différence ?Entre valeurs et construction d’identités à l’école, une comparaison des modèles entre la France et la Belgique.

9h20-9h40 : Laury Bacro (Universités de Montréal et de Poitiers) Quid du multiculturalisme en France ? Le cas des troisièmes générations en France et leur difficulté à formuler leurs demandes de reconnaissance dans le cadre de l’idéologie républicaine

9h40-10h10 : Questions

10h10-10h30 : Pause café

10h30-10h50 : Janie Pélabay (Université du Luxembourg) L’Europe des « valeurs communes » et le recul du multiculturalisme : la diversité supplantée par l’unité ? 10h50-11h10 : Marcello Ostinelli (SUPSI, Locarno) L’éducation à la citoyenneté démocratique entre libéralisme politique et républicanisme critique

11h10-11h30 : Gunther Dietz (Universidad Veracruzana) Multiculturalism and Interculturality in Mexican Public Policy : the discourse and praxis of indigenous rights in a intercultural university

11h30-12h15 : Questions

Après-midi : séance plénière

Amphithéâtre Bachelard (17 rue de la Sorbonne 75005 Paris)

Président de séance : Emmanuel Picavet (Université de Franche-Comté)

14h30-15h10 : Catherine Larrère (Université Sorbonne-Paris 1) Multiculturalisme et protection de la nature

15h10-15h50 : Daniel Weinstock (CREUM, Université de Montréal) Est-ce que le multiculturalisme canadien est en crise ? 15h50-16h20 : Questions

16h20-16h40 : Pause café

16h40-17h20 : João Cardoso Rosas (Université de Minho) From Human Rights to Multiculturalism and Back

17h20-17h40 : Répondante : Justine Lacroix (Université Libre de Bruxelles)

17h40-18h00 : Questions

Institute for Liberal Studies seminar at McGill

On facebook and on the ILS website:

Politics & Society Seminar
(co-hosted with the Montreal Economic Institute and the McGill International Student Network)
March 6, 2010 | 10am - 4pm
McGill University, Location TBA
Join us on Saturday, March 6 at McGill University to hear from leading thinkers about the ideas that shape our society.
Students and faculty from all disciplines are encouraged to attend. Click here to register.
The seminar will begin at 10:00am and conclude at 4:00pm. Each talk will be followed by time for questions and discussion by the participants. The seminar is free for students and faculty, general admission is $20. Lunch will be provided.
The agenda for this seminar is as follows:
10:00am – Registration
10:30am – Welcome
10:45am – Tom Palmer (Atlas Economic Research Foundation) - A Brief, 4,500 Year History of Liberty
12:00pm – Lunch
1:00pm – Jacob Levy (McGill University) - Freedom, Culture and Multiculturalism
2:15pm - Break
2:30pm – Jason Brennan (Brown University) - Civic Virtue Without Politics
3:45pm - Wrap-up and adjournment

Christina Tarnopolsky, Prudes, Perverts, and Tyrants:
Plato's Gorgias and the Politics of Shame

Forthcoming soon from Princeton University Press:

In recent years, most political theorists have agreed that shame shouldn't play any role in democratic politics because it threatens the mutual respect necessary for participation and deliberation. But Christina Tarnopolsky argues that not every kind of shame hurts democracy. In fact, she makes a powerful case that there is a form of shame essential to any critical, moderate, and self-reflexive democratic practice.

Through a careful study of Plato's Gorgias, Tarnopolsky shows that contemporary conceptions of shame are far too narrow. For Plato, three kinds of shame and shaming practices were possible in democracies, and only one of these is similar to the form condemned by contemporary thinkers. Following Plato, Tarnopolsky develops an account of a different kind of shame, which she calls "respectful shame." This practice involves the painful but beneficial shaming of one's fellow citizens as part of the ongoing process of collective deliberation. And, as Tarnopolsky argues, this type of shame is just as important to contemporary democracy as it was to its ancient form.

Tarnopolsky also challenges the view that the Gorgias inaugurates the problematic oppositions between emotion and reason, and rhetoric and philosophy. Instead, she shows that, for Plato, rationality and emotion belong together, and she argues that political science and democratic theory are impoverished when they relegate the study of emotions such as shame to other disciplines.

An open letter to students

Some space on campus, like your dorm, can be safely assumed to be student-only. Other space, like the library, cannot. The old guy next to you in line at the library cafe just might be, say, a professor. Might even be the professor of the friend whose fraudulent excuse for skipping a scheduled exam you were describing in detail (though in this case wasn't that particular professor); in any case, might be a professor, who won't be entertained by such stories, or by the tales of your own past similar fraudulent feats of derring-do.

Now you know. And knowing is half the battle. (That's an in-joke aimed at other old people; don't worry about it.)

Fair and balanced blogging

I really don't think funny comics with such a pernicious and false message should be allowed. I may form one of those groups like the one that defends hamburgers against Oprah's slander or that tries to get X- ratings on movies that have cigarettes in them.

But since I routinely give the other side of the story, here's the entertaining latest installment of "Multiplex"'s odd anti-caffeine story arc.

Lostblogging

A few thoughts, to be expanded upon as time permits. Spoilers.

I was nervous about the premiere beforehand and very enthusiastic afterward. I don't know why I didn't see the alternate timelines coming-- it's very Abrams, and we've always had parallel narrative tracks on the show. But I didn't, and it perfectly solves the problem I was most nervous about--that neither post-Jughead option could be satisfying.

I was really, really right to think that this season theology would take center stage, crowding out political theory, philosophy of time, free will and causality, and so on. (For that reason, I didn't reprise my "Lost and political theory" talk last night; I have little to say about the theology.) And that's OK. But still...

There were a lot of Jesuses-- Jessuses? Jesi?-- running around last night.

-Sayid, who came out of the baptismal pool in a groan-inducingly-Godspell-like crucification pose, telegraphing the final moment of the episode (which was further telegraphed by Miles' listening to Sayid a few minutes later)

-Christian (ahem) Shepherd (ahem), whose body went missing sometime before they rolled the stone away opened the cargo bay doors.

-Jack Shepherd, who hasn't really done much Christ-standing-in to justify his name up until now, but now seems set to make the crippled walk

-and Jacob, already an established healer, whose power raises Sayid from the dead, who is sacrificed by someone who knew not what he did, who appears to one follower after his death, and whose body (again) disappears.

This isn't really a complaint, but it's a new worry, since all of these seem to be in for long-term Jesussy plotlines. Part of what was so interesting about the political theory and time/ causality references was that different characters and different viewpoints and different symbols were in play for each. I hope they figure out a way to do something similar for this season's theology.

Study at Quebec universities to offer fast-track to Canadian citizenship

The lead story in the Chronicle this afternoon:

Quebec Offers Fast-Tracked Canadian Citizenship to Foreign Students
By Karen Birchard
Quebec is playing the citizenship card in a bid to recruit to Canada foreign students who might otherwise be tempted to study in Australia, Britain, or the United States.

The province's premier, Jean Charest, who is leading a delegation of university heads on a visit to India, told a packed meeting at the University of Mumbai on Monday that, starting on February 14, foreign students who graduated from universities in Quebec would get "a certificate of selection" that would put them on a fast track to Canadian citizenship.

"Any student who secures a bachelor's, master's, or doctoral degree from any university in Quebec will obtain a certificate of selection to become a citizen of Canada ," said Mr. Charest, according to The Times of India. "We have the right to select our own citizens. We are doing this because we have a shortage of skilled labor."

Mr. Charest said that once foreign students had the certificate, the federal government would then carry out security and health checks before awarding citizenship.

CREUM - 2010-2011 Postdoctoral fellowship program

The University of Montreal’s Centre de recherche en éthique (CREUM) is inviting applications of postdoctoral researchers in ethics, for residential fellowships which can vary in length according to individual circumstances (maximum 27 000 $ CAN). Applicants are expected to have at least a working knowledge of French.

The CREUM will offer to its fellows: a postdoctoral grant of 3 000$ per month, an individual workstation, access to the services of the University of Montreal (libraries, sports center, etc.), and assistance for material organisation of the stay. In return, the fellows are expected to pursue the research project submitted in their application, to participate in the Center's activities (conferences, seminars, lectures), and to present their work in progress in the context of Center's seminars and workshops. Application deadline: April 30th, 2010. For more information, please visit www.creum.umontreal.ca

Graduate Conference in Political Theory - Submission deadline extended to January 18th

Princeton University
9-10 April 2010

The Committee for the Graduate Conference in Political Theory at Princeton University welcomes papers concerning any period, methodological approach or topic in political theory, political philosophy, 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 amongst conference participants.

The keynote address will be given by Professor Sharon Krause, Professor of Political Science at Brown University.

Submissions are due via email to polthry@princeton.edu by Monday, January 18th 2010. Please limit your paper submission to 7500 words and format it for blind review (the text should include your paper's title but be free from other personal and institutional information). Papers will be refereed by current graduate students in the Department of Politics at Princeton. Acceptance notices will be sent in February.

Assistance for invited participants' transportation, lodging, and meal expenses is available from the committee, which acknowledges the generous support of the Department of Politics, the University Center for Human Values, and the Graduate School of Princeton University.

All papers should be submitted by email. Submissions by snail mail will not be accepted.

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

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

Last year’s program is available here: https://politicaltheory.princeton.edu/program.php .

TNR "The Book"

The New Republic has launched an online review section, "The Book."

Thoughts on prorogation, of various levels of seriousness

1) "Plus de 100 intellectuels dénoncent la prorogation". Daniel Weinstock's letter charging Stephen Harper with betraying democratic principles and constitutional norms gains widespread support among legal scholars, philosophers, and political scientists.

2) The silver lining: via the Gazette, a list (scroll to the bottom of the page) of the bills that were in progress during the 2009 session of Parliament that are now scuttled. Prorogation wipes the pending legislation from the last year out, undoing or at least delaying a substantial portion of the government's legislative agenda.

Among the 'losses' are, most importantly, new mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses (C-15), but also a bunch of expansions of police powers (C-19, C-31, C-34, C-46, C-47, C-55) and a bunch of the kind of "cracks down on" and "close criminal loopholes" legislation that I consider guilty until proven innocent (C-27, C-35, C-36, C-42, C-43, C-45, C-52, C-53, C-54, C-58). Anything that sabotages Canada's march toward American-style narcotics policies can't be all bad.

Looks to me like the only serious losses on the list are the FTA with Jordan and the end of Canada Post's monopoly on international first-class mail. On net, a win. After all, "no man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the Legislature is in session" (attr to Mark Twain, but apparently predating him.)

3) Some thoughts from the revolutionary tradition that was rejected by the Loyalist ancestors of many of today's anglophone Canadians.

John Locke:

Sec. 155. It may be demanded here, What if the executive power, being possessed of the force of the common-wealth, shall make use of that force to hinder the meeting and acting of the legislative, when the original constitution, or the public exigencies require it? I say, using force upon the people without authority, and contrary to the trust put in him that does so, is a state of war with the people, who have a right to reinstate their legislative in the exercise of their power: for having erected a legislative, with an intent they should exercise the power of making laws, either at certain set times, or when there is need of it, when they are hindered by any force from what is so necessary to the society, and wherein the safety and preservation of the people consists, the people have a right to remove it by force. In all states and conditions, the true remedy of force without authority, is to oppose force to it. The use of force without authority, always puts him that uses it into a state of war, as the aggressor, and renders him liable to be treated accordingly.

Thomas Jefferson:

[among King George III's long train of abuses justifying revolution are that] "He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

"He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within."

The next two weeks in Montreal political theory

Thursday, January 14:

Charles Larmore (Brown)
"Reflection and Morality"
2 pm, Local 422, 2910 boul. Édouard-Montpetit
Universuty of Montreal

Friday, January 15:

conference on "Persuasion, Politics, Law"
Arts 160, McGill University

Coffee, pastries 8:30 – 9:00 am

9:00 am - 10:30 am: Robert Howse, NYU Law School, "On Leo Strauss's Philosophy and Law"

10:45 am - 12:15 pm: Jill Frank, University of South Carolina, "The Power of Persuasion in Plato"

Lunch Break
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm: Nina Valiquette MOREAU, "Musical Persuasion: Rousseau's Platonic Democracy"

3:00 pm - 4:00 pm: Douglas Hanes, "The Problem with One Self: Freedom, Persuasion, and Changing Desires

(Please note: The Afternoon session is also the first GRIPP graduate student workhop of the semester.) Papers will be available in advance. Please contact christina.tarnopolsky@mcgill.ca



Friday, January 22
Nancy Rosenblum, Harvard University
"Partisanship and Independence: The Moral Distinctiveness of 'Party ID'”.
2-4 pm, Arts 160, McGill University

Reposting: ASPLP: "Getting to the rule of law"

Annual Meeting of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy
New Orleans, January 6, 2010
Hilton New Orleans Riverside, 2 Poydras Street, Belle Chasse room, Third Floor.


I. Getting to the Concept of the Rule of Law: 10:30 a.m.-12:15 p.m.

Principal paper (philosophy): Jeremy Waldron, New York University
Commentator (law): Robin West, Georgetown University
Commentator (political science): Corey Brettschneider, Brown University

II. Maintaining or Restoring the Rule of Law after September 11, 2001: 1:30 p.m.-3:15 p.m.
Principal paper (political science): Benjamin Kleinerman, Michigan State University
Commentator (law): Curtis Bradley, Duke University
Commentator (philosophy): Lionel McPherson, Tufts University

III. Building the Rule of Law after Military Interventions: 3:30 p.m. - 5:15 p.m.
Principal paper (law): Jane Stromseth, Georgetown University
Commentator (political science): Tom Ginsburg, University of Chicago
Commentator (philosophy): Larry May, Vanderbilt University

Reception: 6:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m.

--------

In order to join the ASPLP and receive the eventual volume of Nomos on "Getting to the Rule of Law," please e-mail me.

Comments off

I've been under comment spam attack for a week, so I'm going to turn comments off for now. Feel free to e-mail me if you've got things to add to any post here.

Unsettling news on higher education in Quebec

Via Inside Higher Ed, a Globe and Mail poll revealed significant gaps between francophone and anglophone Canadians on the value of higher education:

Canada's two solitudes endure in the value placed on higher education, with English-speaking young adults twice as likely as their francophone peers to see a university degree as the key to success, according to a new national poll.

[...]
The poll, conducted last month for the group by Leger Marketing and released exclusively to The Globe and Mail, asked 1,500 Canadians in all parts of the country if they thought a university degree was now a minimum requirement for success. What it found was a wide gap in views when the respondents' first language was taken into account - a gap that only increased when results of the youngest of those surveyed were broken out.

Fewer than 20 per cent of 18- to 24-year-old French speakers said a university degree was required, compared with 40 per cent of the English group. That difference increased even more when compared with those whose first language is neither English or French - generally first- or second-generation Canadians. More than two-thirds of young people in this group agreed a degree is needed to be successful, a result that is in keeping with the high percentage of new Canadians who go on to higher education.

CFP: Princeton Graduate Conference in Political Theory

Graduate Conference in Political Theory
Princeton University
9-10 April 2010

The Committee for the Graduate Conference in Political Theory at Princeton University welcomes papers concerning any period, methodological approach or topic in political theory, political philosophy, 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 amongst conference participants.
The keynote address will be given by Professor Sharon Krause, Professor of Political Science at Brown University.

Submissions are due via email to polthry@princeton.edu by Monday January 4th 2010. Please limit your paper submission to 7500 words and format it for blind review (the text should include your paper's title but be free from other personal and institutional information). Papers will be refereed by current graduate students in the Department of Politics at Princeton. Acceptance notices will be sent in February.

Assistance for invited participants' transportation, lodging, and meal expenses is available from the committee, which acknowledges the generous support of the Department of Politics, the University Center for Human Values, and the Graduate School of Princeton University.

All papers should be submitted by email. Submissions by 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/

Big news

Brian Leiter reports that Jeremy Waldron has accepted the Chichele Chair in Social and Political Theory at Oxford University on a half-time basis.

Waldron (the first non-Montrealer to hold the chair in more than thirty years!) was widely thought to be the correct and even obvious choice for the preeminent position in the field. Several years worth of puzzlement about how to proceed with a Plan B followed when (or so it is said; all my knowledge here is of the "everyone knows" variety) it seemed that he was not movable from New York. This compromise is an outcome to be welcomed all around-- good for political theory at Oxford, good for the field, and (I hope and trust) good for Waldron.

Elsewhere...

Peter Boettke and Tyler Cowen on primary texts in the history of ideas, and secondary literatures about them. Recommended, and of interest in political theory & philosophy as well as in the history of economic thought that Pete and Tyler mostly have in mind.

Reading recommendation: Ethics and International Affairs symposium on Walzer

The fall 2009issue features

The Moral Standing of States Revisited (p 325-347)
Charles R. Beitz

A Few Words on Mill, Walzer, and Nonintervention (p 349-369)
Michael W. Doyle

Categorizing Groups, Categorizing States: Theorizing Minority Rights in a World of Deep Diversity (p 371-388)
Will Kymlicka

Cohen symposium podcast

The G.A. Cohen symposium at GRIPP a couple of weeks ago can now be listened to online at http://www.creum.umontreal.ca/spip.php?article1133

My own presentation, I realized almost immediately afterward, should have ended with this thought:

If we re-understand the political theory/ political philosophy distinction in the way I describe, rather than the way Cohen suggests in the conservatism essay, then the conservatism essay itself is a terrific first move on Cohen's part into political theory. All the concerns I expressed about Cohen's political philosophy earlier in the talk are inapplicable to that foray into political theory. On the available evidence, I quite like Cohen-as-theorist, and it's a shame that we won't get to see more work from him in that voice.

An actual news story from a real newspaper

Pedagogy a poor second in promotions
10 December 2009
By Rebecca Attwood

Study finds 'hypocritical' sector fails to practise what it preaches. Rebecca Attwood reports

Universities stand accused of hypocrisy this week over their claims to value teaching, after a major study of promotions policy and practice found that many are still failing to reward academics for leadership in pedagogy.

Research by the Higher Education Academy and the University of Leicester's "Genie" Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning examines the promotion policies of 104 UK universities.

It states that the use of teaching criteria is inconsistent, often absent and not always applied even if included.[...]

George MacDonald Ross, senior adviser to the HEA's Philosophical and Religious Studies Subject Centre, said: "Considering how long official inquiries and policy documents have been saying that teaching and research ought to have equal status, it is quite shocking that so many older universities still fail to recognise leadership in teaching for promotion purposes, particularly at the professorial level.

"It is hypocritical for certain universities to say in their mission statements and strategies that they give equal weight to teaching and research, and not to practise this in their promotion procedures."[...]

One academic, speaking anonymously, said that while teaching and learning criteria were included in their university's promotion policies, they were not aware of anyone promoted on that basis.

As I've said once before about a riveting study of higher education: That, surprisingly enough, is not from the Onion's indispensible series of "study finds" articles, such as New Study Finds College Binge Drinking To Be A Blast, Study Finds Link Between Red Wine, Letting Mother Know What You Really Think, and Teen Sex Linked To Drugs And Alcohol, Reports Center For Figuring Out Really Obvious Things.

More on Cobell

First of all, good for the Obama administration for conducting serious settlement talks and not stonewalling in the way the Clinton and Bush administrations did so relentlessly.

Second: the $3.4 billion headline figure for the settlement is misleading.

$1.4 billion will go to the plaintiffs. I think this is on the low end of conscionability: better than nothing, but nothing to be especially proud of on the government's part. I do think that the Clinton and Bush administrations bequeathed the Obama administration an exhausted plaintiff and plaintiff class, willing to settle for much less than they should have received.

$2 billion will go to a related cause: cleaning up the inalienable fractionated property holdings that plague Indian Country. Those fractionated interests contributed to the Individual Indian Monies accounts problem-- the accounting becomes more of an administrative nightmare with every generation. And buying up the fractionated interests will put some cash into the pockets of many of the people whose IIM accounts were mishandled. But it's not compensation or restitution; it doesn't make whole the past losses.

Third: that repurchase fund is nonetheless a very good thing, and may carry economic benefits for Indian Country far beyond its cost. The insane regime of property law imposed on Indian Country during allotment and its aftermath is extremely inefficient, and makes it very hard to put a lot of land to economically productive use. The costs of the status quo aren't just the administrative costs mentioned by the Times:

For example, one 40-acre parcel today has 439 owners, most of whom receive less than $1 a year in income from it, Mr. Haynes said. The parcel is valued at about $20,000, but it costs the government more than $40,000 a year to administer those trusts.

That system also results in astronomical transaction costs that interfere with anything that anyone might want to do with that land. It can't be developed beyond the resource-extraction that generates a couple of hundred dollars per year in revenue. It can't be built on without the consent of 400+ owners; can't be consolidated into large parcels that are more efficient for farming or ranching; can't be subdivided into smaller parcels that are more efficient for housing. (And, just to emphasize the point: the interests are inalienable. No one owner can buy out the other 438.) It's economically dead land, and the foregone development possibilities are huge.

There's no reason the repurchase of fractionated interests had to be tied to the Cobell settlement, and it shouldn't really count as part of the settlement. But it's well worth doing, and in the long term could pay significant dividends.

Cobell: A look back

I wrote about the Cobell litigation, a tentative settlement for which was announced today, back in my very first piece for The New Republic online, about seven years ago. It's been lost down the archive black hole at TNR, but thanks to this copy at the Wayback Machine I can reproduce it here.

DAILY EXPRESS
Broken Trust
by Jacob T. Levy

Only at TNR Online | Post date 01.29.03

In its dollar magnitude, it's almost certainly the biggest case of financial mismanagement in U.S. history. While a final tally is years away, in part because of suspiciously lost or missing documents, there's good reason to think that the dollar figures will dwarf WorldCom's $9 billion. It's a scandal that crosses partisan lines and reaches into high levels of both the Clinton and the Bush administrations. And it's got nothing to do with Wall Street.

The shameful mishandling by the federal government of the Individual Indian Money (IIM) trust fund--created to manage the proceeds from leases of Indian land--encompasses 300,000 accounts and 56 million acres, spans more than 100 years, and involves amounts of money estimated at between 10 and 100 billion dollars. The class-action lawsuit Indian landowners have filed against the Department of Interior--currently named Cobell v. Norton--has been going on for nearly seven years, though knowledge of trust-fund mismanagement dates back much further than that. Robert Rubin, Bruce Babbitt, and Gale Norton, along with assorted deputies, have all been held in contempt of court by Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. And yet, thanks to a combination of convoluted detail, media bias, and ideological blindness, most Americans have never even heard about it.

In 1887, thanks to the Dawes Act, tribal lands were broken up into individual lots (the policy was known as "allotment") and assigned to individual Indians as property. This was done in a combination of good and bad faith. Since the Founding there had been many in the American government--prominently including Thomas Jefferson--who wanted to encourage Indians to take up individual landownership as a way of increasing Indian agriculture and wealth. But, on the frontier, allotment was chiefly understood as a way to make it easier for outsiders to buy Indian lands at bargain prices.

Having carved up the land, the federal government took the authority to grant resource leases on those new lots--leasing out mining, drilling, and lumbering rights without the consent of the new landowners, who were presumed to be incapable of managing such affairs themselves. (That, and they might have had an inconvenient lack of interest in granting the leases at all.) The royalties from those leases were--and are--collected by the government. They are supposed to be paid into the relevant IIM accounts, and then paid out to individual Indians on a regular basis. The money at stake, in short, isn't government revenue. The government claims to be operating as a trustee, and to be administering a trust fund on behalf of Indian landowners.

The federal government--specifically, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) of the Department of Interior--has botched that task hopelessly for decades and admits it can't begin to provide an accurate historical accounting of who has or hasn't been paid what they're owed. It appears that for most of the trust fund's history, there was scarcely even a pretense of running it according to principles of fiduciary responsibility: Some checks came in, some checks went out. Where there should be records, there are none.

So in 1994 Congress passed legislation ordering an overhaul. And two years later, when that effort appeared to be going nowhere, Eloise Cobell of the Blackfeet tribe filed suit. Since then, BIA, Interior, and occasionally Treasury have stalled, dragged their feat, obfuscated, and self-investigated. Judge Lamberth, whose judgments are filled with strikingly sharp criticisms of government conduct and accusations of bad faith, may be drawing close to ordering a remedy. But even if, as the plaintiffs want, the IIM accounts are taken out of BIA's hands and placed into receivership, the Bureau and Interior will have to be involved in the reconstruction of the trust fund's history. That means the judiciary can't solve this problem on its own; either congressional oversight or a deliberate decision by Interior to do the right thing will be necessary.

But mustering the political pressure to make that happen will be nearly impossible. One reason is that Indian landowners and tribal governments--many of which also have lands held in trust, and which control the bulk of Indians' lobbying power--don't have quite the same interests. Individual Indians have no real reason to want any agent of the U.S. government to continue to act as their trustee, or even to continue the mandatory trusteeship at all. Given its shameful record, they certainly have no reason to want the funds managed by any part of Interior.

Tribal governments, by contrast, have an ambivalent but intimate relationship with BIA and Interior, one based on the idea that the government acts as trustee for the tribes, and one that is sure to survive the current litigation. BIA is the conduit for federal funds that go to the tribes for law enforcement, elections, and government operations; and the Bureau is in charge of the process of granting (or withholding) federal recognition of each tribe's existence and self-government rights. More importantly, though, the tribes (unlike IIM account-holders) have the legal authority to take their lands out of the trust system and handle the leases and royalties themselves; several have done so. This combination of circumstances means that the urgency of reforming the system is far lower, and the importance of the relationship with BIA much higher, for tribes than for the individual landowners. Norton tried to take advantage of this divergence of interests last year, by proposing a reform that would combine tribal and individual trust lands in a new bureau outside BIA--a move aimed at weakening tribal support for the lawsuit.

And none of this is helped by the issue's near-invisibility. While The Washington Post and some western dailies have provided pretty extensive coverage, The New York Times has run only a handful of stories since the lawsuit was filed, and broadcast coverage has been almost nonexistent. Beyond one extended piece by Sam Donaldson and one "60 Minutes" segment, there has been only the occasional two-sentence notice that cabinet secretaries were being held in contempt. In a sense the story is too big to cover; a scandal that lasts for a century isn't news. Moreover, Interior has been so slow to release documents, and the suit has dragged on for so long it's rare that there's anything fresh to say about it. And, of course, Interior--especially under Norton--has tried its hardest, with some success, to change the subject from the substance of the landowners' claims to the eye-glazing process of its own self-investigation and bureaucratic reshuffling.

But if nothing else you'd expect the right to be turning out in force on behalf of Indians in this case. Critics of government handouts, reservation governments, and intra-tribal collective ownership of property might have noticed that, this time, it was individual Indian property-owners facing a bureaucracy that was unjustly taking their royalties. Norton once counted herself among the libertarian property-rights crowd; she could have distinguished herself from Babbitt and fit property rights into compassionate conservatism by cooperating, settling the case, and getting Interior out of the money management business it does so badly. She didn't.

Nor do you hear much from the conservative and libertarian advocates of landowners' rights. The standard conservative story about Indian poverty--most recently rehearsed in a John Miller cover story for National Review--is an indictment of reservation governments, of their collective ownership of land, the barriers they put up to business formation, and their sometimes-serious difficulties sustaining an independent judiciary and other components of the rule of law. There's a great deal of truth in this story. But it's also true that, historically, the major alternative strategy to reservation governments and tribal sovereignty was ... allotment and the Dawes Act. With the mess from 1887 still unresolved, Indians have good reason not to want to go down that road again.