First we had Campus Watch, the Middle East studies watchdog group, founded by right-wing Zionist and New York Sun columnist Daniel Pipes, that solicits and reports grievances from students and professors who claim their peers or colleagues in the Ivory Towers are misrepresenting or politicizing Middle East issues. 

The organization keeps close watch over any news involving the Middle East--especially Israel and Palestine--documents incidents on their website and chooses whether to recommend them as favorable. (They've documented almost everything I've ever written for my college paper pertaining to the Middle East.) Joining Campus Watch are several other similarly Orwellian groups like the Israel on Campus Coalition and Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.

Add to these groups another set of watchful eyes on campus: the Argus Project. As Inside Higher Ed reports, the Argus Project, started by the National Association of Scholars, will use volunteers placed on campuses across the country "to look into whether [a] college conducts politicized teaching, requires ideological adherence, or sustains slights to conservative students."

Stephen H. Balch, president of the NAS, told IHE that Argus volunteers will not have to identify themselves as members of the project, and allowed that monitors wouldn't be dissuaded from sitting in on classes in which they're not enrolled.

NAS, which describes itself as "higher education’s most vigilant watchdog," purports to be a nonpartisan organization. However, as IHE rightly points out, the organization first recruited volunteers for Argus from Townhall.com, "a conservative Web site whose education section features such articles as 'Evolutionists Fear Academic Freedom,' 'The Liberal’s Agenda — Antichrist or Just Anti-Christ?,' 'Quit Whining and Study,' and 'A Lawsuit a Day Keeps the Leftist at Bay.'"

So what does another academic watchdog group on campus mean? For groups like CampusWatch and NAS, the Argus project is yet another way to ensure balanced (whatever that means) and unpoliticized teaching. It will help report and hopefully prevent fewer professors from peddling their own political positions, which certainly does occur on college campuses.

But critics of such watchdog groups see Argus as another assault on academic and intellectual freedoms--the increasingly unstable foundation on which higher education sits. Saree Makdisi, an English professor at UCLA, wrote in 2007 that "[o]ur campuses are being poisoned by an atmosphere of surveillance and harassment," referring to groups like Campus Watch and Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. Miriam Cooke, a Women's Studies professor at Duke, said Campus Watch "threaten[s] to undermine the very foundations of American education."

So what to make of Argus? A step toward depoliticizing the classroom? Or another loss for academic freedom? 

In Eric Alterman's column over at The Nation, he--like so many others--decries the slow, painful death of the newspaper business, citing the staff cuts, page count decreases, reduction of advertising to editorial ratios and abominable leadership of media companies by men like Illinois real estate magnate Sam Zell.

However, Alterman does present one interesting point in passing, offered to him by Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation, a major non-profit organization in the U.S. Gregorian suggests to Alterman that universities could add a small fee to students' tuition which would pay for the newspaper subscription of their choice.

"This would improve the newspapers' bottom line, give their advertisers access to a coveted demographic and, if successful, would inculcate in the students the habit of newspaper reading as they approach maturity as voting citizens," Alterman writes.

Neither Alterman nor Gregorian specify whether this would be a print subscription or an online one (although many sites allow students free access), but it's an interesting idea nonetheless. 

Now before attacking this idea on the grounds that it only increases students' tuition costs, which I, like everyone else, recognize are at record highs right now, just consider this for its potential to reinvigorate an ailing yet crucial facet of our democracy. If it could help save the newspaper industry, or at least keep it afloat in some incarnation, whether in print or online, wouldn't it be worth it? Isn't the free press (when it is free, of course), a vital component in a functioning democracy and worth paying a bit more for in tuition dollars?

For those who haven't read it yet (and I implore you to do so), Ken Silverstein, the DC Editor for Harper's magazine, recently published a story in the latest issue of Harper's in which he went undercover in an attempt to expose the corrupt, greedy and immoral lobbying firms and companies in Washington. And expose them he did.

Silverstein, while undercover posing as a consultant for an imaginary and seemingly sketchy financial group based out of London, met with several high-profile lobbying firms in DC (namely Cassidy & Associates and APCO) to discuss a plan for improving the image of, generating interest in and rallying support in Washington around one of Silverstein's fake group's clients, being the country of Turkmenistan, one of the world's nastiest and evil dictatorial regimes, right up there with Sudan and North Korea. This is a country whose recently deceased Stalinesque dictator ruled with fear, murdered those against him, oppressed all forms of free speech, and even changed the names of salt, vodka and the month of January to names similar to his own.

And as frightening and ludicrous as that sounds, both firms, as reported in Silverstein's story, jumped at the chance to represent Turkmenistan, and offered to place Op-Eds in nationwide newspapers, generate support among politicians and officials with ties to Cassidy and APCO and even promised to organize Turkmenistan events in Washington so as to improve the American public's image of this awful, fractured country.

Silverstein's article most certainly succeeds in its primary goals: to expose the greed and unethical tactics rife within the lobbying world, and to illustrate the ways in which lobbying firms circumvent or abuse the spirit of the law for their own benefit.

But a new debate has arisen, one brought up by B. Jay Cooper who is the deputy managing director of APCO, centering around the ethics of Silverstein's undercover and admittedly deceitful tactics. In a BRILLIANT discussion on NPR's Talk of the Nation that pitted Cooper and Silverstein against each other, Cooper argued, among other things, that Silverstein's undercover methods were unethical and reflected poorly on Harper's and Silverstein.

And this is where I arrive at my big question, one that I pose to everyone on this forum: Were Silverstein's tactics for obtaining the information needed for his story unethical and should they be frowned upon? Silverstein argued that there was no way in hell these lobbying firms would be open as to their true identities if he had approached them as merely a journalist. And I agree. I believe that the only way to truly expose the greedy and corrupt lobbying world for what it truly is would be to go undercover.

But what do you think? I'm curious to know.

With her latest budget proposal, Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm is attempting to separate Michigan's three largest public universities--U of Michigan, Michigan State, and Wayne State--from the remaining 12 universities in Michigan in terms of state-based funding.

The aspect of Granholm's proposal that I strongly disagree with is that the Big Three (not the failing auto Big Three) are being rewarded with significantly larger amounts of state funding based solely on the economic scope of their research.

As a student at one of the "other twelve" universities, I believe Granholm's proposal not only sends the wrong message to universities, but also rewards only the research element of a university and neglects the educational aspects. And when I say "educational aspects," I mean class sizes, faculty-student interaction (or lack thereof), high graduation rates, all factors playing into the quality of education offered at a university. Yet Granholm ignores these factors, choosing to only highlight the research productivity of Michigan's universities. And for a university like mine, one that will never be able to compete with U of Mich. or Mich. State, it can be discouraging because all efforts to provide the best educational experience possible go unnoticed and unrewarded.

Also, Granholm's proposal that rewards the economic scope of reseearch done at the university-level sends the message to universities that research productivity, not educational quality, merits funding from the state. I can easily forsee many universities taking funding away from educational areas and reapplying it to research causes, so as to possibly get more state-based funding. And this will only result in the deterioration of undergraduate and graduate teaching and education at Michigan's public universities.

I really that hope Granholm will try to incorporate more educationally-oriented statistics in her future higher ed proposals, but I'm certainly not getting get my hopes up.